jarvistravels

2012-02-03T05:23:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 434 – February 3
Selt It, and Selt it Cheep

It seems the Knicks are to be my team this trip. I'm watching them keep a salty upper hand over the Celtics – pronounced like, 'I like selt it, I selt my soul last night'.

The ubu storm moved in last night, making a mess of Denver. I stayed at 'home' and watched the world come to an end from my fourth floor window. The apocalypse had been the day's story. It's a-coming, folks, it's a-coming. I tease everyone I get a chance to about it, but they only nod with goosebumps and strange smiles of apprehension. I get a lecture at the mall: strangers had best stay home. 'If you don't know how to drive in this, you'll only get yourself in trouble.' I acquiesce solemnly.

I stay home and watch the flakes start their swirling fall from the heavens. I have a lovely prospect from my window of two interstates meeting and coiling around each other in angry intimacy. As the snow finds us, the rush hour traffic slows. The headlights slow and take their places in long queues.

The TV hangs at the height of the bartender's head, and my monitoring of the game is only intermittent, punctuated by drink orders, punctuated by bartender's banter. They take the role seriously here, something I generally appreciate.

The ubu storm continues through the next day. I obey the mall boy for the entire morning, but then I cannot contain myself. I venture out to my blue steed, abandoned to the snow drifts in the parking lot. I lift my chin to the skies, accepting the apocalypse, so gentle on my cheeks, melting against me, frustrated in its multitudinous assault on the doomed earth. I enter the steed, turn the ignition, and wallow in my sin, my irresponsibility – driving when I was warned.

The roads don't look markedly different from hundreds of winter roads I've driven in Minnesota, but I'm prepared for the Colorado surprise. Nothing about snow driving is fun, especially behind the wheel of a front-wheel drive compact. 'Do not worry, my trusty one,' I murmur to the steed, stroking its clean dash. We spin wheels and pull a few swimming skids, but otherwise the trek into town is uneventful, slow and wet. Though the feathery darts still rain down upon the sinful, man's friend Apollo asserts himself from beyond the clouds, warming the atmosphere to a degree friendly to life, and the streets are awash with melt-off.

The Tattered Cover has survived the snow assault. I work for several hours in the bookstore's cafe quite comfortably. I'm encouraged by my defiance of avenging weather. I drive downtown. I'm thinking film. I'm thinking Jazz Age entertainment.

And it must be said that the pre-film bar, Marlowe's, has an old-world style to it. The bartender slicks back his hair. He has perfected his patter. Some of his customers are regrettably twenty-first century. Next to me is a rich man in a windbreaker who is buying drinks and 'squares' for all the lingering off-duty staff. 'Squares' are part of some barroom lottery, and they cost fifty dollars each. His wife slouches in her sweat suit. Her spring-flower nails are perfect. She cackles rather than laughs.

The Knicks are winning. To judge by air time, the winners are advertisers. They're certainly self-assured, buoyant. Life is good. Life is suspension in a solution of style. I'm reminded again of America's great contribution to culture, the unadulterated, winning image. There was electricity; there was the atom bomb; there was frame of film. American science distilled the image into transcendental experience, and has proven to everyone's satisfaction that the snapshot means more than the scene, the scene more than the chapter, the chapter more than the long, tiring day.

And Rimbaud, what would he say? I had the pleasure of being reminded of him recently, reading an article, an article about Patti Smith! It happens I have also been writing about my first visit to Harar, a place that takes pride in its association with the sour arms-runner, ex-poet, proud enough to fabricate a few he-slept-here locales.

What would the poet say – the boy who changed an art form, the boy who understood a thing or two about distilled images and distilled sensation, the rare poet who knew exactly how quickly he had outlived his own image? How long can one play stringy-haired and starry-eyed adolescent? The antidote: stringy-haired and gruff merchant in the deserts of East Africa. Beautiful.

Standing up, I set in motion a series of actions rarely allowed to characters in film: I pay my bar bill; I walk the entire way across the street; I climb every step of a three-floor staircase; I stand in line for three uninterrupted minutes. And my reward is to reenter that bath of warm-water imagery. Life has meaning. I mean, it has poetry. I mean, same thing.

2012-01-27T07:39:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 433 – January 27
Death, the Entertainer

Now it's basketball. And again New York stands in as the villain, challenging the everyman LeBron. I'm sitting behind a bar of burnished steel and watching the action on a screen bigger than my bed. I'm sitting by myself, but I'm not alone. Next to me are a couple young men being funny for each other and declaring in breathy syllables their admiration when the men on the court achieve some miracle. A man in white lobs the ball high over the heads of players rushing toward the basket. LeBron is already high in the air to catch and stuff in one fluid motion. As he charges, a man in blue swings the ball in a high arc from one hand to the other, over the head of the defender, and then up to the basket. 'Ho-o-o-o,' exclaim the boys at the bar. To me, basketball looks like first-graders at play. The guys are so big now, and the shiny court hasn't grown with them.

My job is less kinetic. I sit by myself in the office – I have an office while I'm in Denver – and I review lists that fill me with foreboding. Sometimes I'll pace, if I'm on the phone or on Skype. At other times, I gaze out at the city through the parted shutters of my blinds. The sky is often blue over the mild hills tapering off toward the flat east. But this morning, there was snow, descending at forty-five degrees in the wind, drawing a veil over the town. There was only the street below, and people in heavy coats struggling against the weather.

When I walk to the gym, I see the mountains. They haven't moved an inch during the night. They are noble creations, aren't they, standing somber guard over their valleys, keeping secrets sacred until they're forgotten?

Basketball and the 'Angus Burger' are the preludes to my night out, a film next door at the multiplex. The bar is a mammoth affair, with rooms full of video games for the kids, and several types of venues for adults, leather couches for some, square Fifties bar for others, and the anonymous sports bar.

I hear someone say 'Newcastle', and I eagerly look up at the screen, forgetting where I am. I'm expecting to see the boys in black and white taking to the pitch. But it's an order for beer. I'm in America. At the gym today, I walk past a trainer and his client. The trainer has an accent. 'Where are you from?' asks the client. I'm from England. The client says, 'Where?' England, the trainer pronounces slowly, and he's struggling to keep his professional smile from breaking into a laugh. 'Ah,' the client replies, 'and hence the accent.' Yes.

For those of us not completely lost to cynicism, poetry is a fan sport. One wants the poet to succeed. But poetry is a tough game, and few poems are slam dunks. It's something of a bitter disappointment when a poem comes close and fails. It's too much like life, like poring over one's formidable lists at the office and catching the first whiff of failure. Most of us are destined by our own ambitions to be mediocre. One could hardly be blamed for hoping for more from poets and point guards.

The film is about a boy whose father has died in the nine-eleven attacks. He is a neurotic and brilliant boy, portrayed by a fragile and brilliant waif, surrounded and nurtured by a guard of box-office superstars. The direction is compelling, the story sweet and implausible. It's an undisguised attempt at poetry, and it falls just short. One senses that in Hollywood, the first sense to rot is the gauge of sentimentality. One of the trailers shows Drew, long-time Hollywooder, crying over whales. Cry, humanity, please do cry! But don't leave it to Hollywood to demonstrate how. They have forgotten how real people cry.

On the radio is a man talking about death. He is doing so intelligently, but I have to turn the radio off, and rest in silence. I can't take it any more.

As I slowly compile my anemic and stumbling little memoir, I shape a realization around our dear companion, death. Troy said something to me after Leeza had died and after some time had passed. I wish I could remember the words exactly, but he said something to the effect that Leeza's death had been a crisis for me. The message wasn't in the words but in the tone, a tone that suggested a kind of wonder. It was something about her death in particular that triggered an odd chemical reaction, a rash, a latent psychological train wreck. Really? I thought. Are there measures for sane grief? Wouldn't that be the most inhuman of creations, an index for grief, the small iron weight one puts in the balances to set against one human life?

But it's true that Leeza was the final resounding note in a crescendo of death in my life, running through friend, aunt, mother, and wife within a compact eight years. The first shock came for me when I was sixteen, when my father died – more precisely, when I discovered his corpse. With Leeza, the last moorings came free. There's an eternity preserved for me in that moment, in which I scream. I will never stop.

And when I get into the car after the film, after the poet has assayed his tender sensibility against the cold in the attic, after the poet has stood uncertainly before his failure, assessed his fair complexion in the attic's mirror and then has turned away, when I get into the car I am alone. I am sleeping in the house of strangers.

2012-01-22T06:10:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 432 – January 22
Scrimmage

I'm watching football in Denver. It's a tied game at the moment. The crowd at the bar is excited. Most of them are rooting for the Niners. That's not surprising: I'm in the West. New York will not inspire much loyalty.

Not even half the seats in the bar are full, and it's a small place. It's a Sunday night. The place is long and narrow, showing off some weathered brick behind the bar. The walls are adorned the standard chaotic selection of visuals. There is a poster of Hendrix. There are swirls of paint on canvas executed by locals. There are posters and cards made from vintage advertisements, which I've noticed are items that tug with peculiar force upon American sentiment.

After a long stretch of current TV ads – all of which suggest a world designed by professional wrestlers, full of earth-shaking grandeur, everything outsized and narrated in basso melodrama like a circus – the boys are back on the field. They rumble out in their tights, and they take positions. It's a sweaty ballet, excess meat jiggling for the multiple cameras that sweep the field. Everything suffers symptoms of excess: from the tattoos and hair attachments to the ads, to the equipment and Dr. Strangelove intensity of the coaches, to the sheer number of camera angles. It is sport become farce. So serious, it is drained of human interest. I leave before the tie is resolved.

I'm staying with Rich and his family. It's an anonymous residential area, and even after a week, I have to watch the street signs and the house numbers or become lost among the samenesses. It's a nice location. I can drove my shiny blue rental car only ten minutes to the office. In fifteen minutes I can run to Cheery Creek. I run along the creek toward downtown, out and back.

Or I can run to the cemetery. Evelyn suggests it. I hadn't run in that direction yet, and hadn't seen it. But it's only two blocks away. Fairmount is a vast swath of land, and she's right that I can run among the dead, along peaceful asphalt lanes for a good long time. The mile-high sky is indeed high, blue and sharp in blue clarity. The mountains stand in silent formation in the west, and do not flinch as heavy clouds, etched in fine detail, gather about their heads.

I'm struggling with my run today. I've been on the road for almost two weeks, and I've been running every day, logging miles on three continents. My body is protesting by now. The muscles are tired; my gait is clumsy and slow. The dead make no comment. They keep their counsel, hiding beneath slabs of marble, behind columns. Some of them share sumptuous pavilions with their families. Some have only the frozen earth beneath sturdy leaves of grass that hold on through winter like faded specters of their summer green.

I give it up after a while and turn back. I have an appointment. I will sit among a circle of folks in a dim and subdued chamber of a Denver church. The carpet has died. The plush chairs cling to life, determined to support us with stoic devotion to duty. A frail voice has descended. It wants to tell about a life-changing experience in 1962. All eyes in the circle are fixed in a forward position. I try to follow the voice, turning my head slowly and with reverence. The eyes are blue as a Colorado sky.

2012-01-15T07:40:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 431 – January 15
Tracking

Blink. And who am I today?

It's been more than a year since I was back in the US. I arrived in Minnesota yesterday, and the home state welcomes me with flurries. Flying in, we don't break through the heavy cloud cover until the last few miles. The unraveling ground below is a patchwork of grasses and brown, bare trees and white. The winter has been unseasonably warm.

Usually these returns are emotional. I study the terrain of the Twin Cities from the plane's portal and I locate downtown. I spot familiar highways, familiar lakes. I study the neat geometries of my town, and they seem so safe. I feel relief. I anticipate the sensation of my routines.

This time I don't feel much. My heart reflects the cold of the winter air. I wonder about that. I have no answer to it.

Sometimes one's story is overpowering; it's a shadow you can't shake. History stalks every thought, and life is coherent. At other times, the story drops away precipitately. Myself, I understand those occasional white-outs. You blink at the scene out the airplane finestrino, and nothing is yours.

The lady at passport control is not impressed. I breeze through and pick up my bag. My first interaction outside the gate is with an Amharic speaker. What is it with Ethiopes and airports? Lost your bearings? Visit the airport and buy a coffee. Say, 'selam naw?' And you will be reassured with a beautiful African smile: all is at peace. You may return to your life.

Sitting with my coffee, a man enters from the among the swirling snow outside. He is trailing a bag on wheels behind him. He is staring in an abstracted way. He looks at me without registering anything, He stares at my bag. He shuffles forward and on behind the great pillar there, hiding the baggage carousel from view.

Very shortly afterward, a policeman enters with a dog on a leash. He looks concerned. He passes beyond the great pillar there. He returns; he asks if I speak Spanish. and I shrug. He moves on. I follow his steps, crane to look beyond the pillar. The staring man's legs stretch horizontally on the ground. They are twitching. The man has had a seizure. A few more policemen come by. They stand aside and look down on him, speaking occasionally in their radios. They are waiting for the paramedics.

I'm back, and I'm lost. I'm home and I'm lost. There's a story … the staring man enters from outside. Swirling snow follows in his steps. Cold wind follows him in. The door slides shut. I'm staring at his bag, but I'm not thinking about it. I'm stepping forward because it's the direction I had assumed. I have a bag in tow. The fluorescent lights are flickering on the dull blue carpet. My feet are cold. I feel as though I'm falling.

Selam naw?

2012-01-12T02:07:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 430 – January 12
The Lack of Light

From the bed to the desk is about a meter and a half. From either station to the bathroom is about two. I awake at 6 and switch on the little Al Gore bulb above the bed. I turn down the very efficient radiator, which has very effectively vaporized every free molecule of H2O in the atmosphere hours ago. I open the window a moment to shake the lethargy of too much heat and too much sleep. The street below is silent. There are no lights on any windows of the high and narrow brick houses up and down the block.

I sit at the little desk, rearranging hotel accessories to make way for my netbook: the bulky digital alarm clock, the tea kettle, the remote. I turn on the sturdy machine that has seen me through an entire year on the road. I will put in a few hours work before the sun comes up. Until the sun rises, I haven't the heart to go outside.

I think Amsterdam has become the second most northern spot on the globe that I've ever visited, since my race in Grimsthorpe in England last summer. But that would be a difference of only a fraction of a degree of latitude, and I'm sure Grimsthorpe has very little edge in damp darkness over Amsterdam this week. I arrived in the Netherlands yesterday at 7am. Schiphol airport's high windows revealed no sign of daylight. I took a seat in the terminal lobby and stared through those high windows. Citizens and travelers bustled across the vast floor of the place, and all their passion stirred nary a photon.

My netbook may be sturdy and it may be loyal, but it is maddeningly slow to boot up. I slouch in front of its deliberating screen, going over scrolling lists of work in my mind. My body is meditating on other things. Like a sad and lost child, it wonders where the glorious Ethiopian sun has gone and when it will come back. It wonders over a variety of aches and pains, some engendered by the near-sleepless night on the plane, some engendered by the long run yesterday, accomplished on no sleep.

The flight wasn't so bad. The worst of it was the little old man next to me, who may have appeared harmless but had elbows of steel. Somehow his seat was not enough to contain his tiny frame. He spread inexorably, like a bag of settling stones, overflowing the armrest and digging into my pampered Western flesh. I was already suffering from an overdose of melatonin, which only managed to reduce me to plant-level consciousness still able to suffer from sleeplessness and my neighbor's refined tortures but unable to register any higher mind function.

It was in this state that I sat slumped on a bench in the Schiphol terminal, waiting, nearly in tears, for any sign of redeeming sunlight. I had to abandon my vigil, still in darkness, and board a shuttle for the hotel.

The trusty netbook has found itself once again, a miracle of steady-handed science, and I click on the usual round of icons, opening my documents, discovering today's wireless link to the world. Today that is the hotel's server, access to which I had to pay ten euros for. The mouse having done its work, the screen winks reassuringly at me with a small and slowly spinning dial. Everything's under control, it says.

Airports are funny places, full to their lofty ceilings with static tension. The human psyche, developed over millennia in dull and dry savannas where there was very little to do, nevertheless hates waiting. If one has the power to dissociate, it's amusing to observe. There's very little more reliable in this world than the airline ticket. Once purchased, there is little to stand in the way of its consummation. They will hold planes packed with hundreds of impatient souls in order to announce your name across the airport. Please board now, they will beg. We desperately want to redeem your ticket and get you where you want to go. And yet, people waiting to board will still behave as a mob, straining forward against each other as though at the head of the line were the last five new iPhones. They cannot sit still in the gate area, putting in a mighty struggle with the final moments before travel under the horrid fluorescent sky. They bite their nails; they pace; they bicker; they violently rifle through their bags. All in all, it feels more like a hospital ward or a welfare office than a place where vacations begin.

My travel has deposited me in this room with no open space more than a square meter wide, and I'm setting fingertips to the surface of work, shivering against the supernaturally long night. One brighter note: behind that bathroom door is a fully functioning shower with hot water at any hour. Blessings abound.

2011-12-30T10:55:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 429 – December 30
The Good Bad Life

'This place makes me nervous,' Daniel from the Peace Corps says. He's speaking about Addis Ababa. He's speaking about the Hilton. Meeting here was my idea because I want to sit in the sun in the patio area. The weather in Addis has been spectacular, and I'm all too conscious of the approaching trip to Europe and America in mid-winter.

'I'm not used to being around so many white people,' he says. I remember saying that during my first years in Ethiopia. I spent months at a time exclusively among Ethiopes in those early days, as my much-anticipated memoir, due out in June of 2024, will illustrate and illuminate. These days such things don't make much of an impression on me. I have to think about it: 'was this a faranji day or an Abasha day?' Hmm.

The Hilton is a rare respite. The afternoon sun drops speckles of playful light across my shirt and across my face, peeking through the leaves of trees along the border of the compound, and I can allow business to vanish into the brilliance for one instant, then another.

I don't mind the luxury too much, the clean spaciousness, the posh lobby and bar, the magazines,
the cricket on the TV. I have made my peace with luxury. In case I overwhelm a valid point with my irony, let me emphasize that this is a common sore spot among green aid expats in Ethiopia. They are working and often living among the poor. A four or five-star hotel can stand like an eyesore, an insult, on the cityscape. It is personally offensive.

I still have those moments, especially when I meet with quick-stop types who haven't registered the cruel contrast. But the months unfurl, and I am one moment among my rag-tag neighbors in Shiro Meda, the next among my well-fed neighbors in Bath; I'm scanning the contents of rows of tiny souks in Addis, made of corrugated iron, then I'm passing perfume racks in duty-free that are as big as each of those souks; and then I'm skinning prawn at harbour-side in Cape Town.

Cape Town: We're in John's van again. We're driving among the mountains of the Western Cape. Clouds have overtaken us; they creep over the mountaintops. We are winding up a curving road, and pull suddenly into a long drive. It leads to a parking lot, and from this platform of asphalt we take in a serene prospect of attenuated little valleys hosting long green patches of grape vines.

We turn toward the building, walking beside lush gardens, spotted with slick modernist bronzes. We enter the complex through a doorway twice our height, doors all made of expensive, polished wood. We pass a vast room sealed off by glass in which rows and rows of casks rest upon their supports, storing their red gold for the day its taste is perfected. We are led to plush couches, and glasses are set before us. It's our turn.

This is the Delaire Graff Estate, one of 200+ wine estates in the Stellenbosch region of the Western Cape. In the foyer is a facsimile of a square yellow diamond about two fingers in width and in breadth. In the tasting room are as many glasses of premium South African as you want for ten rand a pop. We splurge for five each, two white and two red. Amazingly for a man with a wooden tongue, I choose the red that the hostess subtly suggests is the one most 'wine people' choose, suggesting it with a shrug of non-alliance. The shrug works, and I rave about it at length while John rolls his eyes. We even buy a bottle to order to celebrate our arrival among our own people, the people in the know.

Afterward, we return to the town of Stellenbosch. You couldn't ask for a prettier setting, set among wine estates and mountains. It is also a college town, boasting one of South Africa's premier universities. It's an Afrikaaner university, though, and English is the second language. We sit in a cafe and eavesdrop on heavy-set men conversing in this strange, flattened version of Dutch.

Menna begins to fidget again, and I know she's struggling with the alienation of being in an all-white environment. She's been convinced that everyone in South Africa is staring with disapproving scowls. I have to admit to my own discomforts with race relations in the Cape. They've achieved marvelous things in this country, under Nelson's benign, god-like smile. But there's an unshakeable sense of tension. Menna's light skin and her features that obviously divert from those of ethnicities indigenous to southern Africa draw second glances everywhere we go. Under apartheid, I think she would have been classified as 'coloured'.

I am divided between concern for her and a desire to needle her and say, 'See what it feels like?' But I just keep my counsel and add more caffeine into my wine-soaked blood stream. We will drive back toward the ocean now.

2011-12-09T09:08:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 428 – December 9
The Cape

Today we are in hot pursuit of Vasco da Gama. We will discover the Cape of Good Hope. Of course, that will be in the comfort of John's clean and modern minibus. For da Gama, it was the creaking, smelly mass of the São Gabriel, along with 170 men in his and three other ships, cresting wave after cold wave along the entire coast of Africa. Four months at close quarters with nutritionally challenged sailors.

But our comfort and ease does not detract from the enormity of our mission. We will discover the southernmost point of my life's explorations to date. We will watch oceans collide from the vantage of one of the world's most famous stands of rock. We will gaze south toward Antarctica with nothing to obstruct us … except for thousands of miles of water.

Actually it was not Vasco who discovered the Cape. I could be there were a few Africans there first. And then there was Bartolomeu Dias, the European credited with discovery some ten years earlier – knight in the service of King John II of Portugal. But Dias had no sense of poetry, first naming our promontory the Cape of Storms, descriptive but offering no sense of the moment, Europe poised on the threshold of exploration and empire. It took the king, John II to name it Cabo da Boa Esperança.

It took the Portuguese royals, the House of Aviz, to turn eyes west and south, inspired by Henry the Navigator in the mid-15th century. John II – the Perfect Prince they called him – picked up Henry's legacy in the 1480s, and pushed the boundaries all the way to India, eager to steal Venice's fire, the spice trade to the east – a trade already suffering from the fall of Constantinople a generation earlier. It should be noted here that it was the Perfect Prince who sent explorers to Ethiopia, leaving behind the first bridges over the Blue Nile and a lingering distaste for Catholics.

Our modern day exploration follows the course of a well-paved asphalt road down the Cape promontory. The first stop is Hout Bay, a cute little town tucked away below high bluffs and protected from the ocean by one arm of the bay. We park by the arts and crafts fair, and we browse among the wood carvings and jewelry until a place opens up on a tour boat. We pay our fees and board. The motors rev and we are set upon the waters, heading toward the open seas. We round the jutting northern escarpment guarding the bay and we slow to approach one stand of rock just off the shore. This they call 'Seal Island', and with good reason. There are hundreds of seals cavorting on and around the rocks. Cavort is a word made for seals. They are having tremendous fun, rolling in the water, jumping, waving their flippers in the air, and sliding off the rocks into the water.

We arrive at the cape itself after a drive among treeless hills, featuring many fine examples of South Africa's national flower, the protea. We meet up with some wild ostriches, who are standing by the road staring at tourists indignantly. And then we run out of land.

The cape itself is stunning. You can take your picture by the sign announcing 'The Cape of Good Hope', gaze upon the waters, where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans are said to meet, (though in fact they don't until further east,) and then turn around for home. But so much better to commit to the climb above the parking lot. It's a long and steep one, but at the top you find yourself perched high above the oceans, catching your breath at the edge of a dizzying drop down to the boulders and crashing waves below. Follow the cliffs a bit and you'll see the real cape about a half mile to the east, one finger of high stone reaching a few hundred meters further south and hosting the lighthouse, set not on top but down the cliffside in order to delay the sighting of the beacon by ships rounding the cape.

Returning to Cape Town, we drive up the east side of the promontory, reaching Simon's Town just as the shadows are getting long. Past Simon's Town is a little cove where one can commune with the African penguin. You walk among the grassy dunes on raised wooden walkways, and all around you penguins waddle and raise their beaks to the sky with a squeaky howl. They're cute, but they lack the merriment and bright-eyed wit of our seals. They trundle along like indigents looking for aluminum cans, stopping in their tracks for a brief nap. One stands placidly in place while a friend sprays him with sand as he digs his nest. Irritably the first shakes his scanty fur but never thinks to move.

We return to the city via the Old Cape Road, crossing the Cape Flats in the shadow of Devil's Peak and Table Mountain. The journey of discovery done, we settle in for some sea food and South African wine, reviewing our trip in the screen of our digital camera, much as Da Gama and his boys must have done so many years ago.

2011-12-06T03:02:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 427 – December 6
Mother

It takes two hours to cross the country by plane. The terrain starts out east-coast mellow, green and cultivated, but continental desiccation sets in quickly, and the terrain becomes red desert. It is a long time before there is much else to see. Gradually, the land rebels, bucking and rising into sharp-toothed mountains. They subside and they swell as we approach the western ocean. In between, we see the appearance of golden grasslands, and then dark green squares of rich farmland, many of these devoted to wine, my bacchanalian sense tells me. And then, faintly glowing on the afternoon horizon is the ocean.

The captain of our vessel begins to speak to us through the static of the speakers. 'We will be flying right out to Robben Island and then turning toward the airport. Out the left-hand windows you will see …' And I gaze out my right-hand window. I'm sitting in the absolute last row of the airliner, sharing that row with exactly three children under the age of five and their moms. Only one mom and her baby share my side of the aisle. She sits with her chubby-cheeked boy on her lap, and she coos and whispers and tickles and bounces him all the way. I give her credit for keeping the purring little creature relatively quiet.

'Welcome to the Mother City,' announces the captain, and clear as day I heard the mom whisper to her baby, 'God says hi.' I glance at the athletic blonde madonna and her red-headed child. No, it can't be. Can I already be reaching that age, when decrepitude and religion conspire behind the blood-red curtain of the unconscious? Have I been flying too much, looking at too many clouds?

The Mother City is, of course, Cape Town. It's the oldest and presumably sweetest city in South Africa. Its lovely location was discovered and settled by Jan van Riebeeck and cronies from the Dutch East India Company. The town and the bay became base for the burgeoning Cape Colony, and until the relatively recent boom of feral Johannesburg, Cape Town was the biggest in South Africa. It is still the Mother City.

The historical town is set in the bowl between the bay and the three striking peaks that form its backdrop, Devil's Peak, Signal Hill, and Table Mountain. The most striking is Table Mountain, rising like a stone wall behind the town. Table Mountain is currently in the running to be one of the 'New 7' wonders of nature. The Bishop has been spokesman for the old geographic anomaly, (while also making time for the great spiritual anomaly, the Dalai Lama, who was recently denied a visa to South Africa. The Bishop marched in the streets, challenging his own dear ANC, saying it is worse than apartheid. He really wanted Dalai to attend his 80th birthday party. China frowned.)

But China's power does not yet extend to Table Mountain, which has withstood six million years of erosion and kept a level head. Up top, it hosts the richest, yet smallest floral kingdom on earth with over 1,470 floral species. And, not even the Dalai Lama can boast a constellation named after him, at least in his current incarnation. It so happens that Table Mountain had another cleric in its corner, the Abbe and astronomer Nicholas Lacaille, who named 'Mensa' after the mountain that served as a site for his observations of southern stars.

I arrive at the end of the day, and about all I have time to do is admire this immortalized mountain. I've heard so many horror stories about crime in South Africa, I don't wander too far from my hotel. But I do wander far enough to discover one of the very few neighborhood cafes in this area, the Narona, and I feel immediately welcome. The staff is international, Croats working alongside the native Xhosa, but the spirit is transcendentally hip, mini-skirts and scratchy alternative music, and there is Jameson's behind the bar, providing an immediate signature taste of life outside of Ethiopia.

The next day, my conference begins, if only barely. It's check-in; it's schmoozing; it's speeches. And then we're released upon the city. I get a bizarre take on Cape Town right away. The conference takes place in a five-star hotel in a strange section of the area called Century City. It's a development that wants to be an exclusive green-lawn suburb for families with some money to spend. It features domino-blocks of condos overlooking a canal lined with parks and crossed by cute bridges, everything feeling a bit abandoned. And in the middle of the complex is a massive indoor mall that wants to be the biggest in Africa. Inside, the noise, the proliferation of brand-name stores, and the food courts upon food courts all impinge on the senses the way a good mall should. But the cumulative effect of Century City is hollow. I'm happy to jump into John's van and head back to the town center.

John is a private tour guide operator in Cape Town. He partners with my hotel. He drives me to and from the conference this week in his van. He is an older white citizen of Cape Town, born in Germany but raised here. He has a wonderful, schooled accent in English. The accent of English-speakers sounds to this American ear more Australian than British, with slight Germanic overtones, but John's reaches for Oxford -- not quite arriving, but still pleasant.

I must see the ocean. John agrees to drive me to Sea Point, one of the seaside districts of Cape Town. It lies on the other side of one of those city-defining mountains, Signal Hill. This hill is also called Lion's Head. According to the lively local imagination, the shape of the hill, with its one high peak, swooping back, and round rise of rump, resembles a lion in repose. The district on the lion's right side is narrow and long, squeezed between the lion's flanks and the ocean. The view over the waves is from a promenade along the top of a cliff. Several miles of seaside are devoted to a green park with a meandering brick walkway. I have John wait for me while I clock an hour's training.

The Atlantic is wild; the breakers are dramatic. Blustery winds rarely cease to blow in from across the wide stretches of sea water. I run up past the small, candy-striped lighthouse, past Green Point and the stadium where Spain beat Cape Town's colonial founders last year. I run out of coast and have to run city streets toward the lion's backside in order to complete my mileage, passing through another of the town's many chic little neighborhoods, by restaurants and guest houses and backpacker hostels, until I reach quiet streets that host sedate little Riviera-style homes that tell me -- in concert with my straining lungs -- that I'm gaining altitude. I turn around.

2011-12-05T23:57:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 426 – December 5
Misty

The cloth is drawn over the table. The day's light is damp and uncertain. The sounds from the street are subdued. The cloth is hundreds of meters. It wants to spill over the table and gather on the floor of the basin beneath.

I'm in my running clothes when the view out the window bleaches into a blank mist. Nothing survives in much more than outline. Where once was a view that extended as far as the bay, now there are only the abandoned heavens above and the scurry of startled ghosts below.

The wind picks up, and the window rattles. Below, at the ceiling level of the parking ramp, I can see waves of rain leaving their mark among the puddles. I watch, hoping to see something like a quick twist in the story of the storm. Nothing varies, and I mull over other stories, work stories. I write lots of them now, stories for people with money. That's what they told me yesterday in the conference workshop: tell us the story of the girls. It's the best thing I can do for them.

Suddenly I discern a change in the light. The mist hasn't varied, but it glows with a higher degree of intensity. The puddles in the parking lot have grown calm. I take my cue.

Gusts blow past me, over me, carrying needles of mist. I am undeterred. I head uphill. There is a whole lot of uphill ahead of me. My shoes and socks are wet before half a mile is accomplished. My jersey is wet. My cap is soaked.

The higher reaches of the town's roads become exclusive. I'm jogging past houses worthy of the Hollywood Hills. Everything money in this city could be West LA, sedate in a dream of the 60s.

I climb and climb, and at length I achieve the highest reaches of quiet, winding roads. I find myself on a cul-de-sac that offers a stairway at its blunt end. I spend the last of my muscle on those steps, and I emerge onto the highway over the pass.

After another quarter mile or so, I arrive at the crest, where the road passes humbly beneath the gaze of two formidable giants, the lion's head of Signal Hill and one impassive stone corner of Table Mountain. I bargain my path among the obdurate automobiles who are negotiating their four-point courses over the ridge.

On the other side lies the cold ocean, source of the sobering weather, roiling under the fracturing mass of cloud that was the storm, the storm that wove the interminable cloth for Table Mountain. The sea strikes land at Camps Bay, and there it finds kindness, it finds color, accepting tender greens into its palette as it discovers the rare shore. It rolls into the hospitable bay with a roar, after thousands of miles of storms, and it foams, but it surrenders.

The rain has ceased. I follow the highway down the mountain slope. The first vision is striking, the roofs of the town clustered beside the bay, the bay a crescent of white beach and white foam, those gentle greens filling the half-moon bowl.

The rain tapers and leaves off. I follow the highway down the slope, keeping to the narrow strip of asphalt that serves as margin and sidewalk. Cars whip past. Above the crags of the twelve apostles stand watch, jutting their chins into the wind. I make it down into the town, though not to the bay. I turn around to return over the pass.

2011-12-01T00:36:00.001-08:00

Travelogue 425 – December 1
The Will

Sometimes you're tired. Sometimes your muscles ache. Sometimes your motivation flags; or perhaps its the memory of your motivation that flags. You awake with a faraway feeling, and it's difficult to tell whether it's you that's faraway or the land under your bed or the land you were dreaming of.

Maybe it's the whiskey from last night. You sat in the high throne at the Finfine bar, nestled among the dark rotting wood of the ancient place, relishing your habitual spot at the circular bar. Daniel is overflowing from the throne next to you. You are drinking a toast to his and Cien's great progress in the southern village of Kololo. Foundations are in place. Framework goes up next week.

Maybe you are sad that the conversation has been so diverting. It's true that occasionally he is polite. But it's his American accent that counts; it's the clumsy-cool diction that is only American. You realize it's approaching three months in Ethiopia this time. The emotions are becoming unsteady.

You find yourself among small things. You remembered to shave this morning; that's kind of exciting. Walking down the stone-paved road from your house, you realize you're looking at things you never noticed before. There's a bougainvillea with small, purple blossoms growing over the wall of that compound. A gate is open; you see the soapy water gathered at the base of stone steps.

Yesterday: Fikre is there; she vanishes. I'm slapped in the face; I'm drenched in a sudden shower. Fikre is there; she's not. I crash through the foliage, and I'm sprayed with dew. Fikre pushes on. Last winter, we called this 'Fikre's forest', and it was a joke: this entire hillside was cleared and eucalyptus saplings were rising from every stump. Back then, they were knee-high. You saw for miles. Now the trees are higher than our heads. Their leaves still exhibit a tender green of youth, and the shape of each tree is nearly round. Their trunks have attained no height, some branches touch the ground as some reach for the sun. We crash between the trees, and we release a spray of dew.

I've never been much of a morning athlete, but my schedule demands it. I tell myself it's healthy. The sun rising over the mountains is inspiring. I'm growing stronger. I imagine the next race while I train. I try to count how many more races I have. I picture Fikre's forest next year. I admire the trees full-grown on the day before the saws return.

2011-11-29T02:44:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 424 – November 29
Saba

Every so often a call arises, like a lonely cry in the fog, a call in defense of poor Saba. A traveler returns to England and drops a line to the UK board. Stephanie gets vicious messages via Facebook.

It's like a grainy voice message from a missing person, a few words one can almost make out. And then the line is cut. But in fact, it's just Saba, who lives across town, whom I've seen just once in two years.

For years, Saba was a single blurred image on Leeza's counter, her little half-sister who she would never see again. Saba was standing in a garden somewhere, an awkward adolescent. Leeza worried about her, missed her, cried about her.

Saba was the slight figure in black who met me at the airport when I first arrived in Ethiopia. She was so thin, all angles. The face that peered out from under the black scarf featured high cheek bones and hollow-eyes. She spoke no English. She didn't speak much at all in those days. She silently worked around the tiny, one-room house, taking care of her grieving mother and errant younger brother.

She blossomed in the early days of the foundation, demonstrating a canny grasp of things, iron determination, street smarts, and a tough hand with employees. Between her and Chuchu, the first school got off to a strong start.

There is something about charity that touches a nerve. It affects people deeply, sometimes too deeply. Is it a feeling of helplessness in other spheres? A loss of identification with the state, with God, with bowling leagues? People invest something of their souls in their charity choices. They donate; they volunteer. And they want the emotional payoff for that investment. Woe to any project manager that can't produce magic.

Saba was never much good with the children. She would show up less and less to the school, and when she did, it was to sit in the chair behind the desk in the office, issue orders, glance over the numbers, chew out the teacher or janitor or guard. She would smile distantly at the children during holiday activities, laugh at their antics, but was otherwise cold to their charms.

When it seemed she had reached the limit of her interest, when she began to fade from view, I was forced to hire more people. I wanted more from the schools. I wanted to talk to someone about quality of instruction. I wanted to talk about ways to reach more children, about ways to help the parents. For Saba, the job was done. She was impatient with discussions like these. She resented the new people.

Mixing family and business is dangerous in any culture, but seems to produce special blends of poison in Ethiopia. There's a sense here, it seems to me, that one endures any extreme at the hands of family, but one never walks away. One would think that honor calls upon family test all limits of endurance.

That was the mortal sin: I walked away. When Saba became hostile, shutting the school to visitors and refusing to provide any budgets or photos or progress reports; when she began making accusations to the police, hounding my staff, and telling officials we were stealing money; when she demanded more and more money without any accountability, I did it. After two years of protecting her from the anger of my boards and donors. I turned by back. I let the school close.

After all, poor Saba failed to understand the central principle of our work. Our good works are forever at the mercy of the good feelings of people far away, often faceless. They believe; we work. Shout and stamp your feet, and the big family of humanity will turn away.

But Ethiopian family doesn't give up. I was family once. She will hound me till the end of my days. She hardly thinks about what she shouts. She just shouts. She shouts to the world that she didn't know we were cutting her funding until the last minute, despite cyber-reams of internet scroll devoted to delicate negotiations with her, negotiations conducted by various board members and donors.

At the end of the day, a school is closed. We offered to help her find other funding; we offered to fund her in registering a charity of her own. But it was the black-veil principle that enveloped her heart. And as long as she is Ethiopian and I am not, her word will carry across the valleys, will drown out my white whisper. Someone will always hear and will tingle with the sense of injury, lending another voice to the great shout.

I wish her well. It's only just that I am followed by cries of her Furies. There is no good without bad. It would be an eerie world without her malignancy.

2011-11-21T03:11:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 423 – November 21
Coach is Dancing Again

I have earned a Sunday apart from my computer. It's been weeks since we have been separated, and I am very anxious about it. Duty calls. I must witness some human achievement today, That's my task.

My first stop is Jan Meda. This is the name of an open field preserved from Selasse's term in the heart of the Sidist Kilo area, and now used as informal athletic fields for the north-side, and particularly for runners. Every year this 'meda', or field, is the site for two big events in the lives of Ethiopia's amateur runners: the city and the national club championships in cross country, Sunday is the city competition.

I arrive after eight in the morning, and races should have been underway. They're not. Athletes are everywhere, warming up, sitting on the grass together. It's a bright morning and already hot, but the athletes are in long-sleeved warmup suits. About the only time you'll see athletes in shorts is during a race. Is it sensitivity to the residual chill of the night? Is it shyness? Some of both, though shyness must be sacrificed to exigencies. Just before every race, everyone has to change into uniform in the field, among the crowd of athletes, men and women. They pin their numbers onto each other. They run in place, kicking their butts; they head off jogging toward the start in single file.

The first race today is the women's 6K. We wish our group well, and away they go. The race officials lecture them at the start. They make the athletes stand around for ten minutes. And suddenly they're off, a group already attenuating along the stretch of grass underneath the crisp blue of the sky, underneath the nearby range of wooded mountains.

The crowds are smaller this year than I remember. The Federation has instituted new rules, a prerogative they enjoy exercising. Only twenty-nine of the city's clubs were able to met the last-minute call for data like bank account info, office address, etc. I believe we were the last to submit our information.

So the women run their races. They come around three times as they run the course. The race leaders come by in a tight group. Two of our women are together behind the leaders' group. With each succeeding lap, the chain of runners is stretched further and finer. The leaders are impressive specimens, running for the first division teams, like Bank and the Defense Ministry. Our 6K team brings in a trophy as the best among the second division. I congratulate the coach, and he crushes my hand in his, issuing a booming laugh.

Fikre has been sick. She runs in the next race, everyone's prediction for second among our team. Chaltu is the women's star. But she's even sicker, drops out after the first lap. Fikre plugs away inside that compact, indefatigable gait of hers that I'm so familiar with. Fikre is my coach. I run with her in the mountains. She's first for our team, 42nd overall.

It's afternoon; I stop by Ijigu's house. I had the opportunity yesterday, coincidentally, to write about Ijigu, pursuing my very slow memoir project. 'And then I'm at Hanna's. The manager of the cafe is a young man with an embarrassing penchant for short shorts and tight white sweat-tops. It will take a while until I get to know him. Getting to know him will be a game-changer. His name is Ijigu, and he's a runner.'

Ijigu was the anchor for my team project, the first Ethiopian runner I got to know. He introduced us to Coach Berhanu, our gentle giant and guide for the team since its inception, the giant who is now making Ijigu's house shake with his thunderous dance step. We are celebrating the baptism of Ijigu's tiny daughter. A majority of the guests are Oromo villagers from Ekodaga, where Ijigu's wife Konjit hails from. Those Oromo like to dance.

You can't spend any time in Ethiopia without learning more than the average person ever wanted to know about traditional dance. It takes a week at most to learn that every tribe in Ethiopia has its distinctive style of dance. The Oromo style is on display tonight in great glory, a kind of horse-like stamping in rows, chicken-like pumping of the neck, organized in a kind of call-and-response challenge that leads to peals of laughter when someone screws up. There is no music beyond the chant-like traditional songs and a persistent drumming on an old jerry can.

We are sitting in the bedroom, separated from the salon and the dancing only by a wide and blank doorway tentatively veiled over by a bit of cloth hung by wire, an innovation done in rather early on by a clumsy dancer. The baby lies in Menna's lap, alternately dozing and then gasping and staring up at the strangers. She wraps her tiny fingers around one of mine and makes bubbles between her lips.

Coach is carrying an old wine bottle aloft as he thumps amidst the group, shaking primeval dust from the ceiling with every footfall. Someone else is holding up a woven platter heavy with the massive holiday loaf of bread. I suppose this is a a kind of thanks for the good things of life.

Before we can leave, they sit us down among the group and the elders pronounce a blessing. It starts in Oromifa, is translated into Amharic by the coach, and then into English for my benefit. I'm given a nod as Ijigu's benefactor. I can only nod back. Life is bigger than that.

2011-11-17T00:21:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 422 – November 17
Meat

One of the enduring challenges of my life in Ethiopia is finding and managing reading materials. I always beg visitors to bring me a pile of magazines. And if this inspires any of my readers to collect, to ship, to carry me monthlies in their luggage, remember: New Yorker, Atlantic, and Harper's. And I don't mean Bazaar.

I've been making my way through a New Yorker's from May, a magazine that Cien kindly carried over a few moths ago. I'm reading an article called 'Test Tube Burgers' about research on growing meat in labs. I'm not a vegetarian, though I'm as prone to the meat-industry gross-out as anyone. Sordid data numbering in the billions of tons of meat eaten every year, chickens and pigs raised in hat boxes, the waste, the methane, the drugs, the cancers and diseases. It's a comforting tale.

There are virtues to life in a place like Ethiopia. One lives close to one's meals. Your meat crosses the road in front of your taxi, making you late for appointments. That animal has been spared hat boxes and expensive drug treatments to protect and fatten. It has been allowed some of life's little pleasures, like holding me up while it crosses the road. I remember city life back home, dashing into the climate-controlled supermarket for my groceries, never thinking of the animal that contributed to the substance encased in plastic.

I don't see myself responding to this article any more than others. My moral sense is not so refined. I've never forgotten that we are animals. Do vegetarians reach higher than this? Do futurist meat scientists?Are we imagining a day when we can that radically change the order of things? When we have risen above the chain of cruelty that defines the animal kingdom? We want to become a new species, one that isn't soiled by our roots branching deeply in the mud of evolution.

I have not recorded every story about the Mudula visit. It's the morning after my desperate fight with food poisoning. The sun is just rising, but powerfully so, gilding the hills with light like healing, like promise. It's my first sight of the these hills. We arrived at night. They are lush with growth, and they surround the town silently and jealously. It's a beautiful spot. I pull a chair into the yard and sit with my face in the sun. My stomach is sore, and I'm weak, but I feel the first signs of restored health. I'll be fine. I just need to sit in the sun for a while.

The morning rituals are well under way, the bustling, the washing, the rattling of utensils that inform any proper start to the day. Two young guys lead two sheep to a corner of the yard, some twenty meters from my seat in the sun. Slowly and methodically, they lay each on its side, beside the gutter, and they slit its throat. They make sure to saw most of the way through, so the head lolls backward at a strange angle. The beast kicks a little; one boy holds it down while they chat, while the blood drains into the gutter. Once that is more or less complete, the boy tosses the carcass aside. The bodies still kick occasionally while the boys set up for gutting and skinning. This is about the time, as they sink the knives in, that the van is ready and I summon the energy to lift out of my chair, facing the sun, summoning good things, summoning life over death, and some morsel of hope for all of us, doomed as we are to meet with one knife or another, to give our blood back to the hills.

2011-11-11T01:07:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 421 – November 11
Defiance

Culture defies us. One never knows what endures. Van Gogh dies in obscurity. Wealthy singers in Abba outlive their pickled personae. Elvis was a god … until he wasn't. Clapton was a god until he survived.

I'm in the Red Bean cafe in Haya Houlet, the uber-hip district of Addis, where chubby middle class high-schoolers mimicking hip-hop sensibilities sit next to the cosmopolitan Abasha man in pinstripes who eyes the youth with benevolent sentiment; where the rough-hewn Oromo gentleman with a dent in his head, clothed in K-Mart 80s leisurewear, shouting into his mobile with half-comprehending irritably indulges in European-style coffee at a table next to a gaggle of bubble-gum girls adolescent before their time and clothed in a disturbingly discordant pastiche of music video style.

And all of them, all types and shades, nod their heads to 'Country Road' by John Denver. What will survive of the American century? John Denver.

And maybe a host of R&B cantors whose names I will never recall. I sound like my father in declaring smugly that it all sounds the same. I do remember Mariah, but probably best for her cameo in Adam Sandler's movie. In any case, this rot makes Cien go soft, and immediately transports Menna. There's no use talking once the soundtrack starts.

Ethiopians love it. Going out at night means listening to R&B and soft-focus hip-hop all evening. Last night, we encounter a live version of it. A local band does an admirable job reproducing these questionable hits. Two healthy Ethiopian women, barely out of high school, are belting out radio sounds with all their heart, and I want to believe. The rest of the audience certainly does.

Back at the cafe I find myself, in a lapse of consciousness and dignity, singing a few words of 'Country Road'. The dapper gentleman in the middle of the room winks at me. There's mischief in his eye. Perhaps he notices the flicker of horror that crosses my countenance as I realize what I've done. There is something subversive in his wink.

Do Ethiopians – or, for that matter, the citizens of any nation that feeds on our overflow of sap – country, rap, heartthrob pop – do they wink at it as they sing to it? Do they know its real value? Do they see us wince?

There is something subversive in culture. There's an element of 'I like what I like' to any cultural stance or creation. One generation mocks and loves the previous generation. It produces a frightening mutation that feeds on the carcass of the elder. That's evolution. In cultural biology, there is no line separating defiance and love, satire and homage.

2011-10-24T21:59:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 420 – October 24
On the Shoulders
Part Four

We have made it one whole mile. Now we stand in the noon sun beside our packed 4X4 while the driver and his brother examine the tire and something in the engine; I'm not understanding the mechanical problem, but I'm registering the sad deja vu.

We should have left for Kololo bright and early, but I was up all night with stomach pains. So instead we're loading up the car at eleven. And standing beside the road at 12:30. The car is sagging under a load of furniture and supplies for Cien in Kololo.

We hail a bajaj, and head for lunch.

It's night. Our headlights pick up nothing but the trees along the side of the road, and the occasional local walking home. It's been miles since we saw the lights of any town. We're wondering about these nocturnal hikers. Sometimes we come across two or three standing on the shoulder of the road conversing in the pitch black night like it were noon in the town square. Like there were no hyenas around.

It's a rough dirt road; there's only so fast we can go, but we've been driving with seven people in the car all afternoon and evening. We want to arrive somewhere. The stars are magnificent. The Milky Way is out, but there is no light on the earth.

Mudula seems like a city of the dead when we arrive, a confluence of rugged dirt roads negotiating rugged hills, like an old logging town. The hotel is a compound that smells powerfully of t'ela, the traditional beer. Behind the loud bar is a row of spartan guest rooms on the right and functional rooms to the left. We try to go to immediately to sleep, but are back out in the compound within minutes. Menna has welts on her face. The beds are infested with bed bugs.

Several of us try to sleep in the car in the middle of the compound, while the bar pumps out music and waiters run by yelling orders. But Shewa has forgotten about a fish he bought in Awasa. He's left it in the hot car all day. After twenty minutes, I'm crouching beside the car puking my guts out. Biniam has pulled the mattress off his bed and allows me to crash on the floor of his room while he sleeps on the bare wood of the bed frame.

The next morning, the sun reveals the beautiful hills around Mudula, and my four hours' sleep has somehow restored me. I feel fine. The day is scheduled for Kololo, a village we passed in the night, among all those blank hills, a village in which we will build a school and library.

Kololo is about a mile down a dirt track off the road, some twenty kilometers from Mudula. It consist of a set of huts among green hills, among small crops of ginger and teff, bananas and coffee. Ginger seems to be the cash crop in these parts, that and religion. The area is so hilly that no hut neighbors another, but each is placed upon its own tentative perch. The crops are carved little terraces. The view is gorgeous. Walk a few hundred meters further from the road, and you come to a series of waterfalls.

Molore is an old man who tells us in Tembaregna that he's forty. He doesn't bat an eye when he tells us a few minutes later that his eldest is thirty-five. We're sitting in the hut he built for his family. He sits beside four of the youngest of his brood of sixteen children. His second wife, mother of the last nine is off at the noisy evangelical church up the hill, up by Cien's house, where he'll be living with Ijigu for the next three or four months. Immediately outside his circular hut, with is adorned with a band of painted geometrical designs and roofed with heavy straw, are his crops. Central to them are the short and bright green ginger plants, their spiky leaves reaching toward the powerful sun of this region. He stands with a proud look over his plants, his hands on the shoulders of one of his boys, a boy who will attend our school, a boy who will speak Amharic and read English.

2011-10-22T22:02:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 419 – October 22
On the Shoulders
Part Three

Dawn is quick and tidy, always around six this near the equator. The air is efficiently recharged with the sun's white energy. The heat is gathering.

I'm at my usual table at the Time Cafe, inside in order to protect the computer from dust, but by a key window so I can oversee the start of the day.

Awasa awakens, Ethiopia's new city on the hill, capital and mecca of the southern nations. The SNNPR, 'Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region ', is one of Ethiopia's nine administrative regions, and is Ethiopia's hothouse of diversity. It is roughly half the size of Minnesota in area, almost three times Minnesota in population, and hosts nearly fifty distinct ethnicities, languages, or 'nations'.

Awasa, arriviste, is finding itself. It is a town only fifty years-old, booming now, hosting every tribe and every international aid agency that works in Ethiopia. It is a town of trade, a town of SUVs and fine restaurants. It is a town that hosts conferences every week of the calendar.

The city has finally unveiled its signature piece of public art, a tiled sculpture that stands at the center of the traffic circle in front of Gabriel Church. For as long as I've known this town, this has been a monster of scaffolding and plastic dominating the town with its blue tarp ugliness, like a hyena panting over its kill. Now it's a spiral of color standing before the gold domes of the church. The sculpture is a curling juice straw, with the sharp end pointing at the sky. Along its scrolls are mosaics proclaiming a civic pride in the national diversity that made the town what it is.

I think I see a new pride in the eyes of the citizens, like a reflection off the tile of the monument, as though the posture of their fictional ancestors portrayed in the mosaics has straightened their own spines. I watch them now attacking the streets of a new day.

The road south out of Awasa passes between a pair of strange hills, guarding the land of sacred tribes like the Pillars of Hercules, standing abruptly on a dry plain. Behind the small, rocky hill there supposedly lies a healing spring. In front of it is the scar of a mine. The other hill is a mammoth grassy hump, rising like the back of a hippo from the water.

Ten kilometers or so beyond the Pillars is the town / suburb of Tulla. The US military has a Civil Affairs group stationed in Awasa. They have a charitable mission here, and they have taken an interest in this muddy little town, home to a cluster of failing schools.

The lead school is only a quarter mile from the big southern road, behind the sordid 'downtown' of Tulla, an intersection of dirt roads and lines of squat mud rooms devoted to commerce. The school serves nearly four thousand children in two shifts. The Civil Affairs crew is suited up like military, and the kids go wild, gathering and running and laughing around us. We stroll among the long rows of classrooms, the campus looking like army barracks, cinder block and mud, roofed with corrugated metal. We stop in on the chaos of a library. The school director translates from Menna's Amharic to Sidama. He is a young guy with shifty eyes.

I suggest visiting the homes of a few typical students. The school director chooses a teenage girl. I choose a boy of about ten. The girl lives in the town, only a few hundred meters away. The director knows the way well. We enter the dark dwelling, and the large central room is furnished with tables and chairs like a cafe or bar. I'm immediately on alert. The men of the neighborhood see the military group enter, and they crowd around the doorway. There are only women at home. The mother is truculent. The older sister translates. Steadily, the men push forward, entering and surrounding us. The pretty sixteen year-old, now in fourth grade, has grown up in a brothel. That much is clear to me right away. To confirm, I ask in a naïve foreigner's way to see more of the house. As intrusive as this sounds, most Ethiopians would not hesitate. This family refuses. We wade through the mob of men out front and back to the cars.

The boy's house is far. His family farms a plot of land a good half hours' walk into the green hills above Tulla. The dirt road gets rougher and narrower. Children run after us yelling, 'Car! Car!'. The roads are bone dry, but for one series of puddles. Our lead car becomes stuck. The driver rocks it, races the engine, digs himself a neat and inescapable hole. We have to leave half the crew to dig while we continue walking. We wind among fields of corn and coffee, ch'at and inset, bypassing thatched-roof huts with babies and dogs and roosters milling around their doorways.

The boy's family owns two rooms with mud walls and a square patch of grass out front where the cow grazes, among high walls of false banana trees, corn and coffee. On the walls is one of the intriguing primitive murals by a 'famous local artist', as the farmer says. This one portrays a vicious-looking man in camouflage hunting a lion and a cheetah with an AK-47. In another work nearby that I've noticed, a similar terrorista looks to be sacrificing a bull with a curved knife, while another man is tied up nearby.

We sit on the porch and contemplate our long walk among the farmsteads, vividly green and fertile. The youngest stares at us with a finger in his mouth, flies gathering at the corners of his eyes. The father, a spare man with rough-hewn features, leans back in his chair and watches his wife swat the cow's behind with a switch and tells us proudly that three of his brood are in school. They walk far, he says. It's hard for them. He shrugs. The ten year-old boy leans over the wooden banister of the porch and smiles shyly at us.

2011-10-19T22:30:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 418 – October 19
On the Shoulders
Part Two

We're standing in the dust by the side of the road, trying to flag down taxis. The morning sun is already dazzling. We have sparse company, just a few fellow travelers from the same flight and some local farmers loitering in the shadow of a road sign and gossiping. We are waiting beside a traffic circle that is warped by the hard land underneath, like vinyl in the sun. The occasional bus or truck passes by too closely, grinding its tire in the dirt at our feet. The circle sends you toward Mekele in one direction, toward the village of Quiha in the other. In between is the turnoff for the airport, a quiet stretch of asphalt about a quarter of a mile long that we just hiked with our luggage.

Tigray is the northernmost region of Ethiopia. It is dry and rocky, a perfect set for injera westerns. It feels like the Wild West anyway, without the rodeos. This has been the landscape for two of Ethiopia's recent wars, the civil war through the 80s and the Eritrean War ten years ago. The people are proud. They cherish their guns as much as any Confederate. They commemorate their victory in the 90s with every ounce of identity they can muster. Young men wear their hair long in honor of their grandfathers who fought in the hills.

History reaches deep here. Tigray is also the setting for much of Ethiopia's ancient glory, home of the Axumite Empire and the previous, mysterious Yeha civilization. Their language is eldest son to the Ge'ez language, native tongue of the Axumites and later the language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church – still the language of Bible and priests.

I have traveled in Tigray before, with dear Saba, who would as happily perform ritual sacrifice on my dry carcass as look at me now. We were friends then. She took me with her to meet her old grandfather in the hills outside Adigrat, a moving experience. I'm rediscovering how that trip affected me.

We stay at the Milano, a decrepit mansion that aspires to pink decadence. The owner is specimen of eccentricity; having spent his youth in Italia, he resurrects it in his heart by sporting expensive jeans and a blonde wig capped by sunglasses like a diadem. He sits in the lobby every evening hosting Mekele's somebodies at his table. He drinks only bottled water. The suit-and-tie nobility overlook his unsettling appearance.

It's only after a few days at the Milano that I remember that I stayed here years ago. Something stirs in the slumbering unconscious, and an image is released: I had sat in that very lobby late into one evening, watching the procession of Tigray's finest, drinking myself into a haze. I was waiting for Saba to arrive in Mekele.

After that, the rest of the city begins to emerge from the dust of my deteriorated memory. I took many walks those several days of waiting for Saba. What had just been a new place became, circuit by circuit, a familiar one.

There's the circle in front of the Emperor Yohannes's castle. There are the neglected gardens at the Castle Hotel on the other side of town. There are the long, arid ridges to the north, and oh yes, I remember the bus climbing up that ridge on its way to Adigrat. There is the cafe hidden among trees on that side street, where the Catholic church is. That's the street that for several blocks could be an Axumite alley, all cobblestone and walls of hewn stone.

Ephrem's house is made of stone. Ephrem lives outside the village of Quiha, among the dusty hills that have played wary host to the generations of hungry farmers. Ephrem's house is a small beehive of stone. Inside, the cone-shaped abode is coated with plaster and whitewash. It takes a few minutes to become accustomed to the darkness. One sits on a bench jutting from the wall. One takes in the charcoal stove, the hanging baskets, the niche midway up one wall that houses the family's bed. Ephrem is ten. Only his grandmother is home when we visit. She is bent and grizzled. There is innocence and uncertainty in her eyes; she is unflinchingly hospitable.

Sitting across the compound outside is a very old man who speaks a few words of Italian. The traditional cross carved in his third eye has sunken into his skull as age has shriveled him. This custom of skin carving is prevalent. One often sees these crosses between the eyes or trenches dug into the skin beside the eyes. One taxi driver has carved a dollar sign into forehead.

The old man lists in his seat. He speaks Amharic with a heavy accent. He keeps asking over and over who I am.

2011-10-16T05:02:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 417 – October 16
On the Shoulders
Part One

There is one quality that determines one's relationship with Ethiopia. One may enjoy the culture, love the people, thrill at the landscapes, but these do not a relationship make.

I awake in the bare hotel room, a room that seems as though it were stripped clean during the night. Through the mist of the mosquito netting, through the blear of shallow, nervous sleep, I examine the place, feeling lost. The walls are a bare, faded mustard yellow. The cockroaches from last night have retreated. There is a TV screen suspended just below the ceiling by the wall. There is a small plywood box of a bedside table with drawers. I have set only my water bottle there. These little furnishings are treacherous, one learns quickly; they are usually infested with cockroaches. Avoid rooms with lots of wood. Invest in concrete boxes.

There is carpet, the kind would rather not have, less than a centimeter in depth, rough, and grimy. The color is dead ocean. It absorbs the cockroach casualties like an ocean would; they are sped to their ignominy by the one three-watt bulb in the ambiguous light fixture overhead. One walks gingerly over this water, even in the plastic flip-flops always provided by hotels, counting one's steps to the bathroom. This latter chamber is better lit, and might remind one of his/her time in prison in the 40s. It's a tile box with a shower, toilet and sink, all stripped to minimalist function, the shower a pipe with a head, the toilet sans seat, the sink tiny and indestructible.

I wash my face, wash it again. I would like to wash my ears out, perhaps my mind. It's Sunday. We're mighty close to the Gabriel church, Awasa's cathedral, and the chants have rung through the night, shaking all my dreams to their roots. The melancholy strains continue on into the morning.

The room serves. It was not mine to choose. Samri, Cien's girlfriend, had to arrange rooms for us last night. We were arriving after midnight, and Awasa is full to overflowing because of some conference or other.

The van roars along the highway under a moon just past full. A long shoal of clouds outlined in moonlight obscures the stars that the moon hasn't washed out of the sky. One the right is the high bluff that stands guard over the valley of Lake Awasa, announcing one's blessed descent from the plateau of unhappy Shashemene. The bluff is a dark mass over the fields tinted silver by the moon. A caravan of horse-drawn flatbed carts emerges suddenly from the night, bathed in the harsh light of the van's headlights. Boys stand with legs spread on the cart beds with reins in their hands. Other figures huddle in blankets and hang their legs from the sides. The night yields the quickest snapshot of their wide eyes, and then the train is swallowed up in obscurity again. The driver is pushing our van to its limit along this straight road.

Pull back: it's mid-afternoon, some indeterminate hour. The time has lost significance by now. We've been sitting by the side of the highway for hours – if not at this spot then a spot ten kilometers back, or at another spot ten kilometers before that. Several rubber hoses carrying coolant to the radiator have been chewed up by the engine fan. The driver is applying electrical tape. Someone is looking for water.

Cien is moving to Kololo. He and Ijigu will be supervising the build on Number Eight, a school and library project deep in the countryside of the Kambata region of the Southern Nations. He has furnishings and food. He has three stools. We sit in the dust of the generous margin of the highway, providing theatre for a group of shy children. We are not the most amusing of entertainments, slouching in dejection while the driver leans like over the engine, applying electrical tape as delicately as surgical gauze. The kids don't mind. Every so often, I give chase to a few. They stand in a barefoot group together, their tender faces, their heavily calloused feet, and their layers of ragged clothing all coated with the dust of the open land. Here, the landscape is dry and gentle and prone to the full weight of the African sky. The children tend a few stubborn sheep and one befuddled old cow, all of which harbor an acute death wish, making a dash for the dangerous highway every chance they get. One of the youngsters trips along after the miscreants yelling and waving a stick.

The highway is a theatre of its own, a theatre of terror. Rules of the road are few and flexible. Two lanes stretch from horizon to horizon, and the traffic using them is not constant, but it is intense. The road can be silent for minutes on end, and then a truck roars by, vans crowding it, beeping and flashing lights, trying to pass, while from behind comes a rich man's or rich NGO's SUV blazing past both of them. Once in a while, someone screeches to a halt before a forlorn, bleating member of the local livestock, sending the tailgater into a fishtailing panic. Even the deadliest of road warriors has a split second to taunt the stranded faranjis with a thumb's-up.

I have to leave off chasing children. One of the littlest ones is genuinely terrified of me. She bawls in terror as her big sister and friends laugh at her. They retreat, all holding hands, through a small gap in the straight hedges of prickly half-cactus something-or-other that surround the homesteads here.

Forward: Barcelona is practicing their graceful art against some unfortunate compadres in La Liga. They have accumulated 80+% possession and three unanswered goals. Messi is in fine form, dodging defenders like cones on a drill course he's memorized. We are alone in a drab little grotto in Ziway, but for the listless waiters and the occasional locals that don't seem to have the patience for an entire game of football, who stop cold in wonder at the sight of us.

We wait under the tortured glare of bad fluorescence off baby blue paint, mesmerized both by the magic of football's best team and by our incredible misfortune, numbed by a day wasted in waiting on electrical tape and rubber hoses, and now waiting on the replacement van. It's nine and we're still waiting, having clocked thirteen hours to cover three hours' distance.

And forward: blinking on the balcony outside my hotel room, overlooking calm and sunny Awasa, We made it. One earns everything in Ethiopia, paying for the blankest sunny moment with the coin of futility. One labors through it all, and that is the blood of the system: incommensurate and nonsensical labor. There is, after all, one quality that determines one's relationship with Ethiopia. That quality is stamina.

Two trips in two weeks, and I feel the bone-weariness of Ethiopian love. Last week it was Mekele. This week, Awasa. I will do my best to catch my loyal readers up on both. First there must be sleep.

2011-10-03T02:21:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 416 – October 3
High Spirits

Spirits are high now that the sun has returned. You walk the streets and you perceive it. It doesn't take very refined senses. People are beaming. The children you pass are rowdy. They lean out of third-floor classroom windows to shout, 'What is your name?'

On the day after Meskel, I receive adey flowers twice, first from a stranger on the road, handing me a single yellow daisy bloom on a broken stem; the second a gift of the staff of my regular cafe, a full bouquet. The adey blossom is the symbol of the new year here.

Among the duryes, the party boys on the street, it manifests as an even higher degree of mouthiness. They have delight in their eyes and sarcasm on their lips, an unfortunate excrescence of joy, like a hearty belch after a great meal. The faranj runs the gauntlet.

Nature runs riot, too. Up in the mountains, calves roll in the grass, the bright new shoots of grass that have grown higher than all the livestock together can clip. The woods resound with screaming cicadas, a powerful cousin of our cicadas, making one think of an air-raid siren with a dying battery.

The bugs are cheerful. They rush my place in conga lines once the sun sets. The spiders set up shop in the corners. The silverfish make dashes across the walls. Ants send out search parties for the bar. Sow bugs in Shriner hats gather on my ceiling. Killing them only fuels the party. Dead bugs plastered on the walls become buffet tables. Fortunately nobody invited the mosquitoes.

Speaking of nefarious insects, even government officials are showing a frisky side these days. I catch one or two in an illicit smile. They playfully red-line our proposals and wish us luck.

We have sent the teens in our Gorumsa project to a primary school in Shiro Meda. Their job is to dig a drainage ditch around the library building in order to stop the decay of one wall. And they will break down one internal wall to expand the library space.

The boys cheerfully dig deeply into the deluvian muds left by the rains, working under the supervision of the team men. The children of the school stand and watch. They taunt the visiting faranjis. The unearthed sow bugs race half-dressed into the grasses.

Officials visit. They stand with hands behind their backs and scowl. But the season gets the better of them. They approach the faranjis and show manifest delight. You have come yourselves, they say. You don't wait; you do the work yourselves. They shake our hands. Exhausted by their magnanimity, they loiter uncertainly and then skulk off, embarrassed by their display of emotion.

The boys stand ankle-high in mud, and they joke. It's a time of stolen joys.

2011-09-29T00:02:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 415 – September 29
The Big Day

I'm fortunate enough to be sitting outside the morning after. Ethiopian sunshine – the genuine stuff – lays a stripe of heat across my table. Blue sky among the leaves of the sheltering trees heralds the arrival of baga, the dry season.

Local wisdom holds true to the letter this year. The dry season arrives with Meskel. This holiday celebrates the discovery of the True Cross, (meskel meaning cross). It is one of the two most colorful of Ethiopian Christian holidays, along with January's Temket. What makes the holiday fun is the bonfires on the night before, called Demera.

Demera is a memory chain reaching pretty far for me: four and five year-old boys running around the fire built taller than they are in the school yard. They're singing; teachers are clapping; all quite sanguine about kindergarteners playing with fire. Earlier in the day will have been my birthday party, always following a precise formula: the song while children sit in their chairs, the ceremonial cutting of the cake, photos and kisses. Those were birthdays to remember.

It's late at night, well after most of the bonfires have subsided into ash, when we stumble upon one more, tended by young toughs who would normally be harassing us. Now they are skipping around the fire on the sidewalk like they were boys again, each carrying a brand of twigs intertwined and reciting traditional chants and songs.

This occurs not too long after my birth-minute, and I'm choosing it as the sign of my wonderful new cycle. It's a big birthday, a round number and all. We have come from the calm old Finfine, where we sat in our throne-like seats at the round bar and talked like old comrades. That had to give way to either sleep or to nonsense. That is how we ended up on Wacky Street again.

Wacky Street is a short street with rows of tiny, shabby grottoes devoted entirely to nonsense. Getting out of the cab, we step directly into the scene of the young bullies tending their sentimental fires. We stop to watch and to honor the auguries. Then we enter the den.

You don't go to Wacky Street except for special occasions. You must devote the night to Wacky Street. You wedge yourself in among the dozens of debauching Ethiopes, rammed into one room, who are jumping up randomly to dance to the lunacy of the asmari players. The tireless dancers / singers circle the place, provoking the audience, dancing and cajoling, joking and demanding money. The waitresses are rotund wizards, appearing with drinks you only wished for and tabulating false bills with savant-like acumen.

Somehow the hours pass in laughter and idiocy. The place is a Lynch-like dream that turns like a carousel and never abates, and then arbitrarily spits you out in the early morning into the arms of an unscrupulous taxi driver.

So the big day is done. I'm staring up into a glittering sky. I have spotted Orion for the first time this season, shining alongside the Seven Sisters and the Bull. I'm captivated.

The day started innocently enough, dull errands becoming intent computer time becoming afternoon showers. When the latter had spent themselves, I was escorted to my work party, a harking back to history. Some grads from that first school were there, twelve years-old now. Team athletes were there, as were the teens, as was the team coach. Co-workers managed the event: the birthday song, the ceremonial cutting of the cake, the photos and the kisses. But this time, we had music, and we danced in the courtyard, the twelve year-olds being silly, the teens giggling, the coach stomping in country style. We carried on until sunset, sun setting on rainy season.

The big day comes, the big day goes, as they always do – blithely, sailing by under the power of Kundera's lightness of being. The vessel is manned by acrobats and dancers and gnome-like waitresses. Downstream the lazy river widens into dissolution. What do you call it?

2011-09-21T23:06:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 414 – September 21
Home on the Range

I'm back to ten thousand feet above sea level. Things look different. The sky is crystal blue this morning. The fields on top of Entoto are replete with high, dewy grass in vivid green, dotted with tiny purple flowers. Abeba is the word for flower; and as often as I am forced to pronounce this word, it does not come easy. I practice with Tesfahun, my trainer. A schwa surrounded by strong Latin A's. It does not roll off the Western tongue.

The abebas are out. It's a new year. It's 2004 in Ethiopia. The symbol of the new year is the adey flower, a yellow daisy that blooms at the end of the rainy season. It's tempting to call it spring, though we are still in the northern hemisphere, descending into shorter days and autumn, just like chilly Bath, England; just like Minneapolis, Minnesota, soon to be an icebox.

Here, New Year's is a joyous time, as much to celebrate the change in weather and release from 'winter' as to celebrate Time's conquest of our hearts.

But rainy season isn't vanquished overnight. We still get the occasional showers. The clouds haven't freed us entirely. This morning it might seem, looking up at the brilliant skies, that one will never see a cloud again. But once one starts running, once one's eyes settle on the mud underfoot, one realizes that baga, the long, dry season, hasn't quite taken command yet.

Fikre leads the running today, in honor of her tenth-place finish in the recent seven-kilometer race. Our team's women claimed fourth, tenth, and fourteenth, a very good sign for the coming cross country season. She leads with an easy lope: I've asked for a kind pace, something gentle for the old man returning to Ethiopia's highlands from damp, sea-bound England.

I can be spared the pace, but not the dangers of the chaka. The slopes are compacted, slick mud. I'm running with hands out for balance. I'm grabbing the trunks of saplings in passing to steady myself. We run along patches of thick moss where we can, like running on cushions. When we break out of the trees, the scene is striking – the green of the grasses, the clean air, the crisp lines of the mountains.

Yesterday was the high slopes and the chaka. Today it's the daget, the hill up from Kusquam to Entoto, twenty-five minutes of intensely steep incline on a dirt-and-rock road. Twenty-five minutes today, which is surprising, given the way I feel, something like the old man I see sometimes here whose rapid, shaking, stooped steps forward have to be measured in centimeters. His tottering advance is about a block every half hour.

It's a grueling run. Tesfahun leads today, and his step is light and playful. He has to pull back sometimes, just so he doesn't drift ahead too far. I'm gasping like an fish out of water and straining for every shuffling step. And yet, somehow, I manage my second best time up the hill. I can't say whether that's a sign of residual glory from past training or a measure of exactly how pathetic my condition has always been.

Either way I'm happy. We emerge at the top of the hill among the sordid commerce by Maryam church. And we jog toward the brilliant fields, refreshed and awakening to the sunlight of a new year.

2011-09-11T00:48:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 413 – September 11
Is it a Country?

Today's the day of history, the only one we're allowed this century, it would seem. Even in the United Kingdom, we commemorate all week, secretly sighing over our poverty of occasions of moment. Analysis is little more than repeated phrasings of 'decline of the west'.

My mind is occupied with smaller quandaries. 'Is this a country,' I wonder. A lot hangs on this question. Just about every year among the last ten, I've managed to make it to one new country. This year's quota hinges on the identity of this little corner of the world. Only in Europe could one be faced with this riddle.

Here's the evidence: They have their own flag. They have their own language, printed prominently on bilingual signage. I strain my ears for a hint of it being spoken, but have no luck. They have their own team in the playoffs for the Euro Cup. They have their own team in the Rugby World Cup. They have a national assembly. They spend their own money, by and large. Crossing the border, one notices a difference in manicure of the landscape (for the worse, I might say).

My last two days in the United Kingdom are spent in another country. Only an hour from Bath, across the River Severn, lies a land, discrete and autonomous, a strange and mountainous land named Wales, or Cymru in their own, odd language, made up of improbably groupings of consonants.

The genesis of this trip lies in my profoundly mediocre showing in the half marathon last month. I do a quick search for 10Ks in the region and find one in Cardiff on my last day in the UK. I sign up. Coincidentally, Mark has just taken a job in Cardiff. I figure it's an opportunity to visit him, tally up another country, and test myself as a runner one last time this year. I can't allow all those months of training to have only one lackluster time to speak for them.

The train emerges from the Severn Tunnel. Immediately, yards and fields are unkempt and shabby. What towns I see are fairly grim. Cardiff is no exception. It seems to me gritty and hard as Nick Nolte at an AA meeting. There are bits of the center that are nice enough, but pointedly so, as though putting on a brave face. The River Taff winds through downtown, by the castle and the pleasant downtown park made of its grounds, by the Millennium Stadium, by the old Brains Brewery, by a few nondescript housing blocks, and out to Cardiff Bay, where a few other blank millennial builds try to offset the industry of the port. The High Street could be Main Street in South Dakota, with its squat, nineteenth-century, stone commercial buildings, elegant in their way, but erected with sober purpose. But it could never be South Dakota because High Street is laid with brick and no cars are allowed.

At one end of the High Street is the old castle, the town's first reason to exist. This is the site of a Roman fort in late imperial days. William the Conqueror first began the work that would make a castle from a Roman ruin. And successive lords have done their part, in particular a fanciful Victorian master, to make the castle a tourist sight, a classic of Gothic revival. Kind of fun is the Animal Wall, nineteenth century sculptures of fifteen animals climbing over the walls of the castle grounds.

Old Caerdydd ends up being a charming stop, the grimness probably a product of my own dread of the work that faces me at the other end of my journey, in Ethiopia. Travel is always colored by the destination. I am ready to be indulgent. The Romans believed in it. So did Owen Glendower, who makes an appearance in Shakespeare's Henry IV. And let's not forget that Old Caerdydd has only been capital since 1955 of this … country. It takes a while to grow into one's glory.

2011-09-06T08:06:00.001-07:00

Travelogue 412 – September 6
Hey Ho

'With a hey ho, the wind and the rain,' I'm singing as I walk down the hill. It's the second day of rain here in Bath, and this morning it is dark and steady. The winds are a-trilling as well, bending branches and setting up a considerable noise among the woods on Beechen Cliff.

This song has always made me fond of Twelfth Night. It's such an odd way, so whimsical and dark, to end a comedy. Perfect, really, as there are ways in which tragedy cannot match the darkness of comedy in theatre or in poetry. The tragedian must use the language of a believer.

'When that I was and a little tiny boy,' I can sing, and testing out a variety of Pseudo-British accents. The only thing I cannot do is settle on a melody. I know there are versions of the 'song' put to music out there, but we can never know what tune was wafting through dear Will's bright mind, can we? I'm trying to fit it to 'Don't Worry, Be Happy'.

'For the rain it raineth every day.' There is sweet religion there. As I wend my way down my hill, just one of those that ring the town, young boys are laboring their glum way up. They have started school again this week. It's autumn, and the lord headmaster will have us know it.

'But when I came to man’s estate,' I come to commerce; I arrive in town. It's time to leave the elements to their song. Inside, I set up the infernal machine of work, the winking screen that shapes my hours. These windows allow no rain, allow no sun. They browse and process, and they calculate. But there's no third dimension to a pixel.

'A great while ago the world begun, with hey, ho, the wind and the rain.' My Somerset story has run its course. I arrived in summer and will leave under the shadow of fall. Today will be my last day's work. There are meetings in London. There is my last race of the year in Wales. There is a plane to board toward Ethiopia. It's been a wonderful interlude, a scent of lavender by the Avon.

'But that’s all one, our play is done.' At night, I'll shake the rain off me cap, won't I? and set it tenderly aside. With any luck it will be dry for tomorrow.

2011-08-30T03:49:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 411 – August 30
The Summation

The only thing on one small table in my room is the paper written over in Amharic, a simple document, with a letterhead and one paragraph of text, and the all-important agency stamp. One piece of paper, it's a heavy sheet, a burden. Sometimes I stare at it, measuring it with my eyes.

As much as any paper could, this one captures a human life within its weave and its ink. This is the certificate of a race time issued by the Athletics Federation, passed to me by Mekonnen, athlete and former member of our team. It's his best time yet, summation of a young life's achievement.

He ran so well for Team Tesfa that several years ago he was courted by organizers of what was then the new 'Tirunesh' camp, a government-run facility for young athletes with Olympic chances. Several of our runners left for the camp. Only Mekonnen has stayed the course there. The camp is far from Addis, in the countryside. They provide food and some education … and day after day of intense training.

For years now, running has formed the entire substance of his life. He wants nothing else. The day before I left Ethiopia, he came to the office with this piece of paper and his diffident smile. As important as the paper is, it has already become crumpled in the transport. Ethiopians can be a bit clumsy with paperwork that way. It's as though the thin shreds of chatter aren't completely real for them yet; good for them.

Mekonnen is not allowed to compete in Ethiopia, unless it's a camp event. But we can represent him to run internationally. He pursues me out of the office as I leave to pack, and he asks me for my phone number. I smile; 'I'll be in England, Mekonnen.' He continues to smile, though he's not sure what to do with that information. He's a very sweet guy. He came to us straight away once he was let go for summer break, telling us he still misses everybody, and offering a hand if we need him. He has his motives, of course, but they are so mild, and so submerged in genuine sentiment, that I can't help wanting to help.

If my life could be summed up in a page, it might just now be a spreadsheet. I play with numbers. I calculate; I review; I project. I've begun seeing the spreadsheet as a form of poem, heightened language, condensed meaning. So much of significance gets stripped down, captured in digits, poured into the columns and rows of the spreadsheet. One document becomes a powerful statement about a group of people. It's philosophy. It's an aesthetic work of symmetry.

The balloons are up this morning, drifting up above the fringes of western Bath and above the fields and the vales between here and Bristol, seeming halfway to the ceiling of rippled clouds. I'm surprised to see them today, on the business day after the last bank holiday of the summer.

They rise regularly from some hill or other and lazily drift over town. One sees the occasional glow of the fire inside the base of the balloon. The balloons are silent, nearly still. I can watch them and feel something like meditation. I am lifted from the spreadsheets. And what do I see? The fields and the vales, and the days left to me in England. They aren't many.

2011-08-22T02:26:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 410 – August 22
The Schools
Part Two

Stunning are the edifices we inherit from the inspired Cambridge intellectuals, high halls and Gothic chapels and elaborate gateways that are every bit as somber and earnest, playful and smirking as college students, set among their sweetly restrained gardens and the subdued skies of Britain.

While you're in Cambridge, be sure to spend some minutes on the King's Parade, dramatic piazza before the gates of King's College. There you have your first breathtaking view of King's College Chapel, high Gothic at its most striking, built by Henrys VI-VIII, boasting the largest fan vault ceiling in the world. This grand church has survived housing Cromwell's troops, who busted all the original stained glass. It will survive our irreligious gawking. Be sure to spend some minutes sighing over the Bridge of Sighs in St. John's College, a Gothic (though 19th century) covered bridge over the peaceful River Cam, looking as romantic as the name, particularly standing close over the boats being punted underneath in summer.

As it happens, Oxford gets a second chance with me only a week later. I have a meeting there. I'm happy to make the meeting, not so happy to re-visit dreaded Oxford. But Life often forces me to reconsider. That's the kind of relationship Life and I have.

As I say, Oxford has provided me my education: I bow my head disembarking from the train, refusing Oxford its malign 1209 shadow over my naïve trust. This time it's summer. The day opens as it advances, the morning's chill dispersing into astonishingly blue skies. My meeting wraps up in late afternoon, and I am released into the accursed city at a blessed moment.

I decide to allow Oxford an hour to win me. And this time I find a side to the town I hadn't the fortune to see the first time. Granted, I didn't try too hard, caving to disillusionment rather quickly. This time, I see the wonderful Bodleian Library, set against Radcliffe Square, the Radcliffe Camera and the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, the university's official church, and a beautiful one at that, The Radcliffe Camera is an eighteenth-century round, domed building, originally a separate science library, but finally consumed by the Bodleian.

Next door is the Sheldonian Theatre, built in the seventeenth century according to a design by Christopher Wren, built expressly to take the secular ritual of graduations ceremonies out of the university church. Over the years, it has served as a lecture and music hall – Handle made his appearances there – but never as a dramatic theatre – even though it's design was in part inspired by the ancient Roman Theatre of Marcellus. What makes the place fun are the goofy stone heads that adorn the railing around the theatre, grimaces and smiles borrowing from the dramatic tradition, regardless of the use put to the building.

Keep walking south, and you encounter the Christ Church Meadow, wide fields devoted to grazing, to sport, and to summer picnics. These fields extend as far as the Thames, where the punters and rowers are again active in numbers. Oxford is nothing without its arcane traditions: this part of the Thames is traditionally known as the Isis. It seems as though everything must have several names here and, of course, a collection of associated apocryphal tales. Sadly, all the medieval code seems finally to be fading, unable to compete with bland modernism, the sarcasm of post-modernism, and the apathy of international students. Such is life.

I end my tour at the 'Head of the River' pub, which stands by the Folly Bridge across the Thames. It has a terrace beside the river, a perfect spot to watch the boat traffic and the antics of some of the student expeditions on the river. I sit in the sun, I reconsider my previous judgement of Oxford. Harsh, really, don't you think? I take a taste of bitter, and I contemplate. Yes, quite. Maybe we all deserve a second chance. Cheers.

2011-08-21T03:13:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 409 – August 21
The Schools
Part One

Influenced as much by the vagaries of British transport – there seems no easy way to get to Lincoln in Lincolnshire – I've determined that my tourist stop after Grimsthorpe will be Cambridge, a quick train trip south from Peterborough.

I visited Oxford last spring, and that was a thoroughly disappointing experience, particularly for a frustrated academic who has romanticized the grand old European universities for a lifetime. The town seemed trashy and noisy. The colleges seemed locked behind walls, which themselves were obscured by the mobs of flippant French high-schoolers and Japanese chain-gang tourists.

I've learned my lesson. Exiting the train station in Cambridge, I duck my eyes well below the bill of my cap and withhold all judgement, like holding my breath, until I've passed through the city districts adjoining the station. I should know better, university towns in the U.S. are the same, attracting all sorts of experimental and tentative personalities, all those who are stalled out in life, stalled in fortune or dallying in adolescence. There is a ring of blessed compassion around universities, similar to what may have surrounded the medieval churches that they sprung from, an atmosphere that attracts afflicted souls.

The mile-long gauntlet run, beautiful Cambridge opens up to me. I might have felt like the first refugees from Oxford who came to Cambridge in 1209, fleeing persecution in the ugly first university town, and setting up shop along the banks of the kind River Cam, or River Granta, as it was apparently called in earlier days.

Trusty old Roger of Wendover, high medieval gossip, tells us that an Oxford student killed a woman in that fateful year of 1209, and townspeople rose in a mob against the school population, hanging several students. The good King John seemed to applaud this turn of events, being excommunicated at the moment because of a dispute with the Pope over a clerical appointment. Anything smacking of church was receiving no protection from the king. The university closed down for a while, and scholars went in search of greener pastures.

There are plenty of green pastures in Cambridge, even to this day. While in Cambridge, make a point of strolling among the lawns of 'the Backs', which are across the River Cam from the colleges. They provide peace and privileged views of the beautiful medieval college complexes.

The first of the surviving colleges to be founded was Peterhouse, founded in 1280. It's now one of the smallest of the colleges, and the southernmost among the chain of schools along the river. You can take in all the colleges in a short walk from Peterhouse up to Magdalen College, (founded in 1458), near the curve in the river that constitutes the approximate site of the original, ancient settlement that became Cambridge.

So why the breakdown between 'colleges' and 'universities', and what was it that our 1209 refugees fled to, if the first college was founded 71 years later? It seems, if I'm understanding the history of European universities correctly, that higher education was the province of church men, but in a kind of free enterprise method, in which schools were set up as independent enterprises with church sanction in order to train bright candidates for clerical service.

As Roger's harrowing tale demonstrates, life as a pious college scholar was no guarantee of protection from the rough and tumble of life in medieval England. So it is that the scholars, shameless liberals even then, organized collectively in associations called universities.

So when Roger's exiles fled to Cambridge, it was because there were already schools in place there, as there were in a few other owns around southern England. It was apparently the entrance of this wave of new blood that gave Cambridge the impetus to grow into the number two spot.

2011-08-15T02:27:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 408 – August 15
There's Best and Best

I've turned in my athletic performance for the summer. It was the best I could do, and I use that phrase fairly literally. There are best and there are bests. In this case, I was working at my limit throughout the race. I have the aches and pains on display on the day after to more than prove my case. I feel a wreck.

I'm not so much of a wreck that, when I awake and see the sun shining, I hesitate to place my grieving arse on that instrument of terror, Sheila's bicycle, and with a great groan launch toward Bourne for my last morning of touring in Lincolnshire.

Thinking about the race as I cycle – my knees wouldn't let me forget – I'm thinking that I accomplished what I meant to. I ran that race with everything I had. That the result was less than dazzling is immaterial. I did my best. And in doing my best, I was blessed by near-perfect conditions. I have to be grateful – so seldom does Nature bother supporting us in our small endeavors, and so seldom are we grateful when it does. I had the weather with me; I had health; and I had a course that fairly well matched the conditions of my training in Ethiopia. There were hills and more dirt track than asphalt. I can't say much was lacking for a good result.

And that result? On paper, one minute faster than my last race, where I wanted ten, and NOT my personal best. But somewhere among the top twenty-five finishers, I'd say. Ironically, I was defeated by the terrain, the very terrain that I felt would be one of my strengths in this race. One would have to be phenomenally fit to make this course provide a great time. A few grim hills hit you just when you're struggling; there are stretches on uneven grass; there was a persistent headwind that miraculously seemed to find us at every turn. Given a flat course on asphalt, what would my training have yielded? We'll have to wait for the sequel, a race in the Arizona desert I'm looking at for winter.

In the meantime, it's the day after. It's the time for relief and celebration. I'm built for anxiety and 'what's next', but I have a strong ally in authentic relaxation, and that is the sun. My friendly relations with the universe seem to have extended beyond the race. I was astonished to pull back the blinds this morning and see a ravishing blue sky this morning. I gasped – though as much because of the pain rippling up my calves, thighs and through my bruised backside as in response to the sunshine – and couldn't help a big, celebratory grin. I gulped down my muesli as quickly as I could in order to get out into the day. What with rainy season in Ethiopia and Britain being Britain, it feels like a long time since I've seen a pristine blue sky like this one.

Shall I craft a moral to the story? I kind of feel like it, so please bear with me, in solemn respect for my hard-earned aches and pains, or skip this paragraph if you must. The moral: if you love something, go out and do your best, making no excuses. How's that? It 's an easy moral to digest. And yet, it doesn't quite capture it. No, here's the real moral: exercise integrity. Know when Nature has done you a good turn. Acknowledge when you've been handed the chance to do your best unimpeded. THEN apply moral #1. I think it must be one of the supreme pleasures in life to receive a bit of circumstantial joy in an adverse world.

I'm coasting down the country lane. All is still, and as long as I'm still on the seat, my aching muscles don't persecute me. The fields expand peacefully toward the horizon. Behind me somewhere are the castle grounds where the race started and finished yesterday. I somehow feel their calm and restfulness, and it's a comfort. Why do humans invent with dangerous playthings like bests? Behold the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they ache.

2011-08-13T01:46:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 407 – August 13
Lincolnshire

I'm in Lincolnshire. I've arrived for my race a few days early, to rest up and to get to know the area.

This is an area that gets a bum rap. You receive this impression immediately. The residents make apologies. It's boring, it's flat, they say with a shrug. But they love it. If flat landscape is a communal character flaw, what will they think of Minnesotans? They should fund a citizens' booster field trip to the American Midwest.

In actual fact, the landscape is lovely. And not flat at all. Undulating is the perfect descriptor for it, with low rolling hills stretching for mile after mile. At this time of year, the fields are golden, divided from each other by dark green copses. The skies are low, gathering in amiable humidity as the day passes mid-morning, shredded by vague clouds that bestow only tender occasional drizzles.

The journey here from Bath was long and tedious, six hours train to subway to train to bus. That much only gets you to anonymous little Bourne, where all lines seem to stop. The final leg ends up being a taxi. There are five miles and ten pounds left to reach the village and castle of Grimsthorpe.

I'm staying at the Black Horse Inn, one of a handful of roadside buildings on the busy road northwest from Bourne that comprise the healthy village of Grimsthorpe. If you happen down this stretch of road, I can recommend the inn. It's set just across the road from the castle grounds. It's comfortable. The inn has its own pub that serves great food. Richard and Sheila are the latest to own and operate the inn, latest in a chain stretching back to the eighteenth century, so they say. They are exceedingly welcoming and kind.

Richard and Sheila are puzzled by the sudden influx of runners. There have been a few ultra racers stopping in already. In addition to Sunday's half marathon, there are a 70- and 100-miler on Friday. Apparently, the Grimsthorpe running events are kept very low-key, as none of the locals know much about them.

I have a chance to meet a few of the event organizers yesterday, on that ultra Friday. They are nothing if not low-key, young guys with runner's bodies and diffident British manners. I have a few questions about the Sunday race, and they are met with that disconcerting British deadpan, a kind of embarrassed regret for your rash approach, with averted look and coy and curt half-answer. 'Will there be mile markers on Sunday?' I ask, amiably. There follows the long pause in which the interloper must reflect on his boldness. 'There might be,' comes the answer, delivered with a mordant smile and a tone that matches shyness with defiance. I think I'm supposed to be abashed, but I don't abash too easily. Rather, I'm left wondering what it is about mile markers that strikes this poor sod as so terribly private.

Once I'm out at the Black Horse, I realize that I'm somewhat stranded. Going anywhere will be ten pounds a pop. Richard and Sheila come to the rescue, dragging out Sheila's old mountain bike. I'm ecstatic. I haven't been on a bike all year. Of course, this one requires a painful bend of the leg to operate. And the seat seems designed to torture. After a mile, my backside is in agonies. But it's a bike.

The first thing I do is take a tour of the race course. I manage to squeeze a map of the ultra course from the Spartans in the HQ tent, and I head out on my little torture machine. It's a beautiful day, and it's a beautiful course, by turns winding through woods on a dirt track and then jogging alongside fields of ripe wheat. The half will be a challenge: there is precious little asphalt and precious few flat stretches. It's not a course for time. But it's a pretty one.

The next day, I get to explore. I take the bike out on the country roads. My goal is to make it to the town of Bourne, my nearest source of espresso and wireless. Richard draws out a course by which I can avoid the main road. British roads are frightening: too narrow, curving wildly, and populated by confident locals in speeding, swerving little cars careening inches from the margin.

My course is peaceful and scenic. I am as happy as I've been in months, pedaling along the country lanes, first through Elsthorpe, then over the ridge toward Hanthorpe, and then down a lovely dirt track to Cawthorpe, with always a view of miles of farmland. At the other end of Cawthorpe, I catch the highway that aims north toward Lincoln, but heading south into Bourne. I park my bike across from the Costa Coffee and discreetly massage my bottom for a while before I can walk normally.

2011-08-10T08:48:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 406 – August 10
Bolingbroke

The evening toys with us, giving us neither contentment nor grief. It's another equivocal sky over Bath, England, the clouds absorbing light and heat but leaving the ground dry. I don't mind. There's a kind of beauty to be found in neither here nor there.

If the skies of England take no sides, the people certainly seem to. There is turmoil in the streets. It has provided a steady warlike drumbeat to the background of my English travel, starting up pretty much on the evening I arrived.

There's a lot of strangely effete soul-searching in the papers about it. Who's doing this? What does this say about our times, about our Britain? These are great and somber questions somehow made frivolous by the unmistakable whine in the tone of the press. Or perhaps it's a kind of dead ritual. 'How could this happen? How do we interpret this?' They might have cut and paste from articles about the recent economic set-backs, perhaps from the Sport page.

The attempts at philosophy are somewhat undermined by the news photos occasioned by the troubles, I must say. Some convey the necessary gravitas, cops in riot gear, cars on fire, etc. But most are rather banal portraits of trashy teens carting off consumer goods. Many haven't bothered with camouflage, and look like they happened upon the action after a day in the park.

With this as my dramatic backdrop, I can report a milestone: the first time I've seen Shakespeare performed in England. In all these years, I haven't had the opportunity, oddly enough. But strolling by the Theatre Royal on my very first day in Bath, I couldn't help but catch the promotion for my favorite of Shakespeare's plays, Henry IV, Part One. I could not believe my eyes. Timidly, I ventured into the box office to inquire and discovered that I had exactly one performance available to me before the show packed up and moved on to other stages.

The performance was an afternoon show. (Part Two plays this evening.) Afterward, I walked out of the theatre into Bath's compromised sunshine, feeling completely exhilarated. The sunlight appeared to me as crystalline as Ethiopia's in October. The town seemed blessed. Citizens and even tourists spoke in verse.

Henry IV is, of course, one of Wm's history plays, depicting fragments of the troubled reign of Bolingbroke, a character last seen in 'Richard II' as the conniving usurper, plotting against one of Shakespeare's most sensitive and poetic of characters. A PR challenge from the start. Truthfully, old Bolingbroke just never achieves that sine qua non of modern American politics, 'likability', though his grim carcass is paraded through three distinct history plays, and though Wm seems to try his level best to at least dress him up as respectable, (part of the job description of a playwright popular at court – any crowned monarch must be legit). But Wm opts rather for the theatrical tactic of making the heir apparent – future conqueror and hero – the beguiling one. Blood still counts.

And dear old Falstaff. This is where Sir Jack is born, inside this play, to become one of the great creations in literary history. The actor, a certain Desmond Barrit, was up to the challenge and the joy. But I'm afraid the director succumbs to the temptation of all directors of Shakespeare, the temptation of putting his stamp on the play, the play a thing that somehow manifests longer life and more vitality than the sum of any director or troupe that assays it.

Poor Wm, who really was one of the first to approach characters with a psychologist's eye. His work will always be accepted as an invitation to analysis by lesser mortals. The best practitioners of theatre will simply stand out of the way. Do not impose. That Prince Hal is divided about his friendship with Falstaff becomes obvious. That is how brilliant writing works. No need for awkward blocking.

Fortunately, with a company of this caliber errors in judgment stand alone among long streams of pleasure. Okay, I see no need for Hotspur to fairly jump around in tempers. We get it. And I would paint Prince Harry as more calculating and less colic in his interview with Daddy. But I suppose this is just the temper of our times, when anyone who would be politically relevant in Britain must smash a window or two on High Street and hoist new trainers for the news photographer with a cocky scowl lifted from one rap star or other.

The theatre itself is a delight, well worth a stop in while you're in Bath. It became the first royal theatre outside London in 1768. And though both waves of construction exhibited within the current edifice are nineteenth century, it retains its eighteenth century feel.

The skies continue to withhold comment. And the spirit of Richard II rhapsodizes on death and honor, as does poor old Falstaff. I'll head home now, before unequivocal night falls, spreading its share of either silence or mayhem across England.

2011-08-04T03:53:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 405 – August 4
De Pijp

I'm feeling like I'm in heaven today. The sun has shone steadily since five or so. The temperature is nearly perfect. There's a slight breeze to move the dense, sea-level air, air that is redolent, humid and full of the suggestions of sea and flowers and clean, modern cities.

The experience of travel has already receded in my wonderfully resilient corpore so nearly sano, though it must be said that I barely 'experienced' the flight out of Addis at all. The travel was a species of void, a taste of non-existence, particularly after the acute pain of the passport and security lines. I spent nearly two hours in that mess before the long stroll down the suspended tunnel that feeds one into the throat of the flying beast.

KLM offers an overnight to Amsterdam and a day-flight back to Addis. For the overnight, I decided to splurge on a minor upgrade, a seat they shamelessly market as comfort, abandoning any pretense that comfort is a right with any ticket. Settling into my few extra centimeters, I dig out my supply of melatonin and down a few in a desperate attempt at speedy unconsciousness. Even so, I make it through two movies – vaguely imprinting Brody and Gyllenhaal in my diminished mind. I remember something of Greece, islands outlined in the night in the feeble lights of civilization. I recall meals sealed in impossible little boxes and plastic containers. But sustained awareness is only awakened again at Schiphol, in the halls of which I wandering wake, bag recovered, and so is daylight.

The daylight isn't much to inspire adventure. In fact, it is hard to register any change at all in location judging by the weather. The temperature is the same as Addis; rain is streaming steadily down on Gomorrah. I remain at Schiphol for hours, settling in at a cafe, studying nothing at all but the shadow play of modern life in the forms of rushing people pale and intent.

Today is a new matter. I have drunk deeply of sleep and of daylight. I went to bed before the sun had finally set, and I was up this morning well after old boy had come back around. And this time, he battles with very little atmospheric condensation. He shines benevolently on my shoulders as I stroll toward my new neighborhood.

You see, this time I've had to reserve a room in a different hotel. The internet usually offers up my old standard, the HEM Hotel, among the top choices. But summer tourism throws a wrench into all good works, and I found myself in an entirely new price range. Hence the hideous green highrise, the Novotel. Fortunately, the hotel's forbidding outside belies a different standard inside, and I am shamelessly enjoying the luxury that summer and the internet forced on me.

And I get to explore a new neighborhood. The immediate environs of the Novotel are unpromising. Except for the pretty and expansive park across the busy street, it's like being dropped into the worst combination of corporate park and convention center wasteland. But if one is intrepid, and one walks north, toward the center, one finds happier pastures. In point of fact, one enters de Pijp. Pijp is the name of a district of the city, just outside the rings of canals that define the historic centrum. (What is it about this town that lends itself to adolescent, slightly sad, puns on its reputation? A district named Pipe, the school named after Saint John the Doper...)

As far as I can tell, De Pijp is the most nearly authentic Bohemia in a city full of counterfeits. But does the fabled Bohemia still exist in our comfy Western cities? I'd call it a dubious proposition. Some of the accepted symptoms are in evidence: independent book sellers and neighborhood cafes; immigrants African and Middle Eastern; art galleries and disheveled young wannabes. And yet there is an underlying prosperity in the Netherlands that is hard to escape, and the accompanying sense of well-being that turns any counterculture into a pose.

So I stroll through the Edenic Bohemia in my sleepy mood. I find a book that I can stand, and I buy it. I find a cafe owned by extraordinarily loud West Africans. I drink very good coffee, and I contemplate the sunshine on sidewalks. The mild humidity envelops me and gives me comfort.

2011-07-31T02:15:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 404 – July 31
Dank and Anonymous

Things are improving quickly in Addis, but it's still true that indoor spaces in Ethiopia are not cheerful environments. Lights are dim, and there is no heat. The ratio of window to decrepit plaster is discouragingly low. And personal space comes much more dearly than in the West.

All this makes rainy season even more miserable than it needs to be. One escapes only the precipitation by going indoors. The rest – cold, damp, and lack of light – remains with you, like gaunt beggar children at your elbow.

Last night, as Arsenal gave up a two-point lead to the Boca Juniors in dispiriting fashion, we struggled to make the most of the dark and cold bar. The place was crowded, as anywhere will be that broadcasts either Arsenal or Manchester United games, so chairs are lined up right beside our table.

Trendy bars in Addis tend to mimic rather banal elements of US bars or restaurants, and package them as chic. This bar has adopted the sports bar motif, with half a dozen TV screens vying for patrons' attention. The result tonight is that the avid Arsenal fans beside us are staring past our profiles toward the big screen across the room, while we watch the game on a smaller screen hanging from the square pillar in front of us. In a country in which dead-pan staring is an ancient art form, it creates an unnerving effect.

By the end of the first half, my eyes are hurting from the close blast of intense light from the TV in the dark room. I'll have vivid football ghosts on my eyelids all night. So what do I do? I turn on the netbook and check email. And I fry my eyes with internet for a while.

The neighborhood is Tele Medhane Alem, one of the new, instant entertainment districts in Addis. When I first came to Addis, this area was open plots and dirt roads, with the massive new church at its center still being constructed. The church became the kernel around which the neighborhood grew. It wasn't until the new asphalt roads went in, connecting it with Bole and with the center of town, that the boom started. Now the place is teeming with hotels, restaurants, and night spots. And still going. Walking these streets you feel like you need a hard hat: most of the structures around you are unfinished, layers of concrete slabs rising into the sky.

Another of our spots here is Guramyle. I like this place, it feels like the most humble and yet coolest of Addis grottoes. On Monday nights, they host a jazz band that I like, a quartet with a small rotation of pretty good musicians. Sometimes it is fronted by two Scandinavian guys on sax and guitar. They are wonderfully self-conscious and proficient. On other occasions, the band is fronted by Ethiopians, two guys freer and equally proficient. The Ethiopian guitarist is impressive. His music is clearly the wilder side of him. Clean cut and dressed like a good college boy, he slouches on his stool and blandly checks out the women in the audience. It's rainy season, so the band is all Ethiopian now.

We stand at one of the high tables in back and watch the band. The crowd is a rare mix of Ethiopian and foreigner. I look around the place. I love the atmosphere, and yet have to admit it's a kind of anti-atmosphere. There is little to define the place. Windows here have been reduced in size and function to expressionist décor, black boxes that say most by saying nothing. The walls are each painted a different shade, somehow both both grim and bright. There's one huge poster over the stage, a photo of the Scandinavian version of the band, Olaf captured in a pose that self-consciously portrays abandon. I reflect that it's often in the most anonymous places that one feels one's location most. Here, I'm really in Addis Ababa for a moment. Keenly I feel faraway from home, in a strange land, a sensation I rarely feel in one of those traditional venues that try so hard.

In a few days, I'm off to Europe. Stay tuned.

2011-07-17T00:18:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 403 – July 17
Harry Potter in Ethiopia

The movie makes it to Ethiopia, and I make sure that we're there to see it. I've been following young Potter since about the third of the series. Despite growing reservations, I have been a steady consumer.

Opening night at the Edna Mall theaters is usually a sell-out, but there are plenty of seats available for Potter. It makes me curious about what the Ethiopian experience of Potter might be. I noticed that the afternoon show was a sell-out, but not the evening show. In Africa, perhaps Harry Potter is still children's fare.

To give an idea what sells here among English language films, 'Fast Five' lingered for a month, drawing crowds the whole time. America's comic book hero movies usually come and go pretty quickly. This peculiar brand of American infantilism doesn't export with the same power as muscle cars and guns.

I can't measure the Ethiopian response to Potter, especially the latest version of him, so prim, so grim, so stalwart. The theater is silent. A third of the crowd gets up to go as soon as Voldemort has been vanquished. This is standard Ethiopian practice – they don't seem to have the patience for our sappy wrap-ups. Good for them.

And my own response to the boy wizard's story, become so grandiose. I don't know. Wasn't it all more fun when the world wasn't at stake? Heroes and villains sell; but must Potter be made to serve as Savior?

It occurs to me that I'm not familiar with any epic traditions in Ethiopian culture, though I'm admittedly no expert. There are plenty of historical heroes, but no tragic and larger-than-life heroes, mythical giants, or demi-gods that I'm aware of, unless one counts the rather baroque medieval saint's tales. Did Joseph Campbell dig among Ethiopian archetypes? I don't recall. Doesn't it seem as though the great hero mythologies are northern in origin? Weren't even the great Greek heroes imports from the northern Doric traditions? Ethiopian audiences aren't plugging into the same psychological legacy as they watch Harry Potter become something operatic over time.

Particularly galling for me was the ghost scene, in which all Potter's dead family and comrades emerge from the trees. This is after Harry has found out he is destined to die. The ghosts are all very solicitous and caring. They say all the right things, like death doesn't hurt and that they will always be with him. It felt like Rowling was suddenly roused from her blood lust and thought she might do well to comfort some of the dazed little kiddies.

It doesn't help that I have recently survived another anniversary of Leeza's death, and dismally so. The day was grim and dispiriting, sunk in a sense of futility. No ghosts came shimmering to my aid. But then I am no wizard. And no noseless conquering demon has taken an erotic interest in me. I languish in the shadows of the mundane, in which Muggles muddle without solace, earning a day's bread and quietly missing their dearly departed ones.

2011-07-08T04:15:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 402 – July 8
Rainy Day

Rainy season is called kerempt here. It has become entrenched in Addis Ababa. It has entered into us, permeated our pores, mixed with our blood. We tremble when we look at the sky. We walk differently; the surfaces of our world have become treacherous. Everywhere is mud. The concrete courtyard is slimy with condensation and moss.

The fields in the mountains are already turning an Irish green. I'm traveling up into the mountains every day or every other day. I am ambitious – and it takes kerempt to vividly illustrate the perversity in ambition. I am ambitious about my August race in England, and somehow my ambition survives every ugly challenge thrown down by the weather.

Twice now, we've driven up the mountain, and the sun has been shining. All auguries pointed toward a sweet run in the woods. I'm at the peak of my race training, so I have to keep going for well over an hour, sometimes for two hours. Some time near the first-hour mark, invariably the thunder begins. We carry on, but shrinking into ourselves, bracing. The rain begins, and we condole each other, 'Ayzu!' Within five more minutes, the rain is coming hard and cold. I've dressed in a cotton T, which is quickly soaked. Not long after, the denuded earth has had its fill, and water is running everywhere, collecting among the few grasses, rushing down gullies and pathways, We are splashing along, and slipping in the mud. And then the hail starts.

Today, the portent of bad times was a disoriented hyena. As close as it was – no more than fifty meters – Fikre and I might have missed it if Altaye hadn't pointed it out in his usual subtle way, stopping and shouting and pointing out the deadly creature. To be fair, this one didn't put on too deadly a demeanor. It was small, probably young, and it gazed dimly around in a fashion that suggested blindness. They say that hyenas don't see too well in the daylight. Fikre saw no need to evaluate alert levels. She immediately picked up a stone and threw it. We heard it crack against a tree trunk. The hyena was unfazed. Neither was it inspired to aggression It stood its unsteady ground, searching the gloomy forest with the air of a lost pup.

We reached the boundary between this little wood and a meadow, and a mother and boy stood fearfully there with the small packet of tree branches they had managed to collect. They shouted at us to be careful; there was a hyena on the loose. We thanked them for the warning and continued forward toward our destiny.

Destiny arrived shortly, announcing itself with the thunder's sound of doom. And then the hiss of rain. We were cold; we were soaked through. Our footsteps splashed, accents to the chorus of water. Altaye is filling in for Tesfahun for a week as member of my training team. He's leading the group of three today. He's a strong runner and a sweet, oafish man who is always willing to please. But he is not well-endowed with common sense. I had to stop the group and explain to him that water runs downhill. He has led us continually downward as the power of the storm has grown, as though hurrying to escape the onslaught, until we were sliding down steep slopes of near-liquid mud and wading through tremendous streams of runoff. I yelled at him through the din of wild waters, 'Up! Daget! For the love of God!'

We struggled upward, across myriad hopeless inclines and distressed woods, until we finally reach the korocunch road along the ridge. Even there, the ground is covered in a film of sudden waters. The rain began to diminish. We splashed along forlornly, weary, cold, and splattered with mud, out into the open meadows of the summits. We seemed so small against the elements. The race that survives with such force in my imagination now appeared as far as the dismal sun away. I can't say we were defeated. We finished the term of our training, sadly climbing back into our taxi, where the driver had been cozily snoozing in our absence. He laughed at our misery, and muttered, 'Kerempt'

2011-07-01T23:15:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 401 – July 1
Langano

I see a distance in rainy blue. I see Lake Langano refreshing itself in the light rain. The hills on the far side of the lake are tinted in the palest blue, barely distinguishable from the cloudy sky. Immediately before me is the sad brown summit of the bluff that stands above the lake's beach. I see twenty meters of dry earth before the steep decline. There is a circle of concrete there, supporting chairs, supporting the crude shelter. I see just before me a lone, thorny acacia standing in its bed of sandy dirt, spiky clumps of green grass steadily encroaching. I see a fly struggling against the glass of the window of the resort's restaurant. I see two bright yellow weavers foraging under a table inside.

We have returned to the dry regions of Ethiopia, though the weather tries to mask it. The earth seems obdurately dusty even when the rain should be tamping it down. The acacias seem to sigh with millennial patience. The scarce, scrawny livestock hangs its head. The shepherd children stare quietly.

I've had the good fortune to see two of Ethiopia's prime resorts in one week. Just two days ago, we were in lush Yirgalem, staying at the Aregash Lodge. I can recommend this stop for anyone. You stay in clean and comfortable bungalows built in traditional style from bamboo. You overlook a green valley populated by the occasional huts of the villagers and filled with the sound of a narrow, rushing river called Goë. The people are darker-skinned and happier. They speak Sidama, a southern, vowel-packed language that adds a final flourish to the feeling that you have arrived in 'Africa'. In the late afternoon, the staff sets up a circle of chairs in the grass and brews coffee. The staff throw meat out on the slope below to draw the red-coated hyenas from the woods. The hyenas vie with the buzzards for the food. At dinner, the resort owner and his wife join you. He is half-Greek and she is half-Italian. He is in his 70s, but still proudly supervises every aspect of the operation.

The Sabana Lodge on Lake Langano suffers in comparison, but mostly because of the sudden die-off of the extravagant southern greenery. The staff is also less personable. But the accommodations are very comfortable. The view of the lake is pleasant. It is a bigger place; one listens to Italian and German conversations in the large restaurant.

The route of my run yesterday afternoon is flat and dusty. I take off on barely discernible pathways among the dry fields. I'm alone for most of the run in a large landscape. Sometimes there are huts in the distance, and the paths lead close to them. I come across an old women squatting in the dirt watching a toddler as it plays. I pass lone shepherd children. One girl runs after me, shouting something in Oromifa, but when she comes alongside me, she is shy and can only stop to stare. Once I've run on, she begins to shout again, single words in a sharp and pleading tone.

2011-06-27T07:15:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 400 – June 27
Awasa Again

The day begins. It seems as though the children own the streets of Awasa in the early morning. There are the girls with the wining smiles standing by their scale, saying 'Fifty centime, fifty centime,' the cost of getting one's weight. There are the shoeshine boys sitting behind their kits telling me my shoes are dirty. This much is true, but in my world one doesn't shine and polish old trainers. There is the group of boys, looking to be about seven years-old, just being awoken by one of their number. They're sleeping in a tight group in the dirt beside the avenue. Their friend is swatting them on the head.

I haven't seen Awasa with its rainy season face on before. There is no sun, which robs me of some of the joy of the Time Cafe, with its wide patio facing east. Instead, the sky overhead is a dim grey, a plain of clouds.

To review, Awasa is the capital of the southern nations, south of Addis five hours by weaving bus. We have been blessed with a bit of luxury this time because we're with a delegation of some dozen faranjis on a mission, riding in a high-ceilinged bus with generous windows and, much more importantly, some solid suspension underneath us. The driver is a professional, a man who is not power-mad with his brakes and steering wheel, no frenzied Ahab who has forgotten the other passengers in his queasy pursuit of glory on the highway. We arrive in Awasa stomachs intact, every organ intact but the ears. There always has to be one visceral price to pay in Ethiopia for any pleasure. In this case, the curse is the tour guide, a man outfitted – to my mystification and misery – with a microphone. He has an uncertain command of English and an unforgiving confidence in himself. His facts have the air of improvisation; he repeats the discoveries that particularly please him. 'Yes, these trees are the acacia. They are strong trees. Yes, strong. That means, strong, the smell is strong. In England, in America … in England, the pronunciation can be different. There is acacia, and there is acazia. And the spelling … the spelling is A-C-A-S-Z-A. Acazia. In America, you can say acacia.'

The real Ethiopia unfolds for us in the picture windows, the dry plains of central Ethiopia, individual ACASZA trees rising from the packed earth. A cluster of huts stands by the highway, children playing in the puddles from our last rain. There are graves nearby, two or three somber rectangular stones with primitive paintings of horsemen on them.

In Awasa, the vast yard of the Haik Primary School is quiet. School is out, and where two thousand-plus children would normally be squalling and running with abandon, there is nothing but the dust and the tired grass of flat earth trampled into submission, cringing before its next blow. There is only the tiny old guard, blind in one eye, to administer any blows to rebellious life.

The library is the scene of the only activity at Haik Primary. Twenty sets of Ethiopian eyes are focused forward; they follow me to the front of the class. This is training day. The eyes are serious, thoughtful and curious; they are lit with an eagerness to learn. These are school directors and school librarians from north and south along that long southern highway. Some are from the city of Awasa. Some are from remote country schools. They are linked by libraries. I stand in front of them now only to make introductions. There are visiting experts from the States. I wish I had something to offer thesem myself, something rich as their expectations. Some have traveled five hours on rough roads to make it here.

I have stood in the library of each of them, during last month's southern tour. I have stood in the small school library in Dila Afrara while children gathered at every window to look at me. I have stood at the window in Leku, part of the backstage set of a school play performed for hundreds of children sitting on the ground and gathered many rows deep, older boys hanging on the back fence of the school. I have listened to the testimonies of children in the library in Dumerso, outside Yirgacheffe, telling us what books mean. They read physics; they read stories. They want to be doctors and engineers. They want more books. They want more chairs. The older kids advocate for the young children. The schools are so large, the libraries so small, that only the high grades get library time.

I sit with the class and I can feel the hunger for learning. I envy them. There is love and optimism in the hunger for learning. It is only in this sense that I would want to be young again.

2011-06-10T00:20:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 399 – June 10
High Hopes

The jungle has followed us home to Addis with its damp terrors. The skies over the mountains are leaden and heavy with an expectation of rain. The air resounds with the gunshot cracks of the shepherd boys up the hill playing with their whips. I've seen them at their sport, making the heavy whips writhe in the air, cocky expressions on their young faces. This is the aspiration of the moment, wetting the whips and creating the loudest report.

What does a shepherd boy hope for? To make the perfect snap of his whip? Does he dream about getting off the mountain, going to school and working on computers? Does he dream about the next bounty earned with his animals? Does he wait for nighttime TV, fantasize about girls, picture himself beating on the village bully? All I know is that I've known these boys to crack their whips repeatedly for hours at a time. My mind wanders to the Arcadian visions of pastoral poets and Enlightenment painters, the shepherd boys playing their pipes on picturesque hillsides. I've come across something similar, boys with their flutes, in remote areas of Ethiopia. Around Addis, it's the whip.

The dreams of runners are somewhat tamer, and yet more arrogant. It seems that way in every nation, runners are understated and vain, the bass players of athletics. They are naturally mellow and unshakably sure of themselves. I've tried the 'but-what-if' debate with athletes here: what if you AREN'T the next Kenenisa Bekele or Tirunesh Debebe? They shrug off the question with a knowing smile.

I toy with the theory that hopes and aspirations are among the last things one understands in crossing cultures. The Ethiopian kindergartener from a destitute family says she wants to be a doctor. 'I will be a famous runner,' declares a young Ethiopian athlete. The foreigner either smiles in bland encouragement or shakes his/her head in sad negation. We listen to the words and read them as we would at home. But what do we know about what the Ethiopian feels or pictures when he/she makes such a statement? Might the athlete simply be saying that he has a right to be great? Is that why he will not allow another to question his greatness? Is the feeling behind the vision of greatness something we would consider tepid and passing; a rather thin film to throw over the present, an after-thought? Or perhaps greatness is just something less grand – and stressful – than it is in the developed world. What does it mean to 'make it' in the two cultures? I would venture that extreme success in our world is very complex and intimidating. The scale of wealth and self-indulgence in the minds of ambitious young Westerners might boggle the minds of Ethiopian athletes. Here, they might picture extreme success as a car and a house and banquets for their families. In the West, anything short of paparazzi, fleets of sports cars, limos and champagne, cameos in movies, meetings with investment bankers on the hundredth floor, showcase rehab sessions, etc., would be second-best.

One of the most fascinating aspects of aspirations is the way experience refines them. There is a natural humbling process to experience – not 'humiliating'. One finds one's level. In Ethiopia, athletes don't have as many blessed opportunities to get tested as Americans. So ambition can remain somewhat unsophisticated.

I remember discovering my talent as a runner. The skies opened, and I saw myself at the Olympics. Every practice just affirmed my powers. Then I encountered other teams and other talents. Then I encountered more of them at championships. The field grew and grew. The complexity of the sport expanded exponentially, and the Olympics withdrew from me like the horizon, the higher one I climbed. Very disappointing, but a much more satisfying world to inhabit, in the long run. Upon any reflection at all, wouldn't one prefer the larger world to the smaller?

2011-06-08T22:45:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 398 – June 8
The Shiner

I walk the streets of Addis with a swagger these days. I got a a black eye, and I'm feeling rather cool about it. I don't think I've ever had a black eye before. The people in my neighborhood have looked at me somewhat dubiously, even before the injury. I'm friendly with the little kids, but otherwise I mind my own business. I live in Shiro Meda, in a poor neighborhood where there aren't many faranjis hanging around. The locals can't decide whether I'm a durye, a white party boy, or a stuck-up NGO type. Now they pass me with startled looks, or with sneers of judgement.

I don't volunteer information about how I got the black eye. My language skills aren't up to it, and I wouldn't get any James Dean value out of it. The truth is, I took another bad fall while running. It was a speed day. We were wrapping up the run, taking the downhill korocunch (dirt and rock) road fast, and I took a tumble. I took a lot of scrapes on arms and legs, and it appears that I smacked my face against a rock very near the eye. I lay on the ground laughing afterward, while Fikre and Tesfahun hovered above with anxious faces. Then I got up, and I made the group finish the run. The exercise made my blood flow, and I emerged onto the asphalt road a bloody mess. It looked like I had a biker tattoo, a long red tear from the corner of my eye. 'Ayzu,' said one of the street boys who would normally mock me.

Now I walk to work every day like a gangsta. If being a faranji on the streets of Addis feels like being a zoo specimen on a normal day, now the lion's out of its cage.

Lions are what we long to see when we are in Arba Minch. It seems like the rain might stop us in our mission. But we lie in wait for our goal, like a good predator should, and we strike after lunch on the first day. We have been told repeatedly that early morning is the best time for stalking wild animals, but the rain has denied us one morning, and nothing says that we won't be denied again. We return to the gate of Nech Saar park after lunch, and we await pronouncement from the sphinx-like ranger sitting behind the window. It takes some coaxing, apparently, but eventually we get the melancholy nod and we dash into our vehicle to make the most of the afternoon.

Park regulations require that we take a guide with us. He's a solemn young man who cradles a rifle and makes occasional comments about the park. He names the dik-dik when we see him, a delicate little critter that looks like a cross between a rabbit and a tiny deer. He names the warthogs. He names the baboons. He is our Adam. He names the river that has overflowed its banks and claimed the road. Binyam, our driver is nervous, but the guide assures him every stretch of water is navigable.

It's a long and bone-rattling ride. We have to traverse the bridge of land that separates the two vast lakes here, the Abaya and the Chamo, and there is no part of this dirt road that is level, that isn't pitted and broken by rock. We grind along up one hill and down another, overlooking one lake, then twenty minutes later pitching along a steep stretch that overlooks the other lake. The vegetation is thick and thorny. It gets drier as we move east.

Well over an hour later, we emerge into some high, grassy areas east of the lakes. Beyond the fleet-looted dik-diks and the occasional warthogs, we haven't seen much wildlife. But suddenly, we have some space to scan, and we are quickly rewarded. All on the same wide grassland, we spot herds of zebras and gazelles and kudus. Menna and I get out of the car and stalk the indifferent zebra, stepping softly like camera-cheetahs, pouncing every ten feet or so. The zebras lift their ears at us occasionally but find nothing alarming about these tourists and return to grazing. Finally, Altaye comes stomping out to us, shouting as he does. The zebra begrudgingly trot away.

We never do see any lions. The guide and Binyam reveal to us, well after the hunt is wrapped up, that lions are very rare. Only the most patient of nature photographers, camping in the park and sitting motionless under acacias for hours on end, get the prize. By then, we are satisfied with our catch. We end the journey out at the head of a grand vista of Lake Chamo. Altaye begs the guide to pose for our cameras with his gun, and any spell that the majesty of nature had over us is broken. Soon, Menna is swinging the rifle over her shoulder in a frightening way and demanding a picture. It's time to head back to town.

2011-06-05T02:02:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 397 – June 5
The Rain, the Animals

Waiting for my coffee, I'm watching the flies. There are a prodigious number of them, leaping from tabletops and careening about. The patterns they cut in the morning air are impressive expressions of chaos, inscribing continual lines across the scene, like the lines in stained glass, drawing and erasing spontaneously.

I'm restless myself, perpetually stretching and working my over-strained body. My race is threatening to enter the two-month zone. I'm feeling invaded; Time is particularly pushy lately. Yesterday, sunny and breezy on the mountain, was a reward for good behavior, the kind of good behavior that runs long distances though I shouldn't, broken and old and masquerading as a younger and fitter member of the species. It was a lovely day. The ninety minutes flew, even if I didn't.

Yes, flown like morning flies are the melancholy runs on damp days, stamping one's foot on the move in order to shake loose the mud, catching alarming glimpses of what appear to be hyena tracks in the waterlogged red earth of crisscrossing paths in the woods.

I'm reminded of Arba Minch. It rains the entire first night we are there. Manic shows of lightning wake me at odd hours. The electricity is out, as it is our entire stay in that hotel on the hill. When we arise in the morning, the world is gripped in mud.

The entrance to the wildlife park is a quagmire. The 'rangers' shake their weary heads. There's no way we would make it the twenty-plus kilometers to our appointment with the animals. We bury our disappointment and head back toward trusty asphalt.

Fortunately there are alternatives. There is the crocodile farm outside town. We still have to traverse some mud – mud is simply a question of degree here – but we make it to the obscure address, just a ramshackle gate off a nowhere road. We pull in and have our first sighting of living wildlife: a couple of warthogs happily rooting around in the ur-element of the south, the mud.

A guide walks us down a long – yes, mud – road. He points out some ominous, large tracks: hyena and hippo. Eventually we reach a small complex in concrete set against a dramatic vista, lush marsh set against a backdrop of green mountain. We reach the crocs by a series of planks crossing the bog. What we encounter are a few concrete pools surrounded by fences. We pass over them on a dividing wall. Here are the babies, little four footers by the dozens, sunning themselves on the cement or on each other, except where the team of cleaners has arrived. These people have no trepidation. They spray the crocs with water to get them to move off the concrete and into the pools. The reptiles open their mouths in a strange kind of passive threat. Then they move. The cleaners then wash down the concrete.

In another pool lie the fat elders, twenty-five years and still young by the measure of crocodile life spans; so says the guide. They are bloated; their exteriors are heavy plates of impenetrable material. Their crude teeth and nails grow at crazy angles. The guide clocks one of them on the head, and the beast opens his mouth. Later, the driver angles a long pole into the gaping maw, and it snaps shut with a resounding crack. The guide reprimands the driver, saying that the jaws of these crocs are so powerful that they can bust their own teeth.

We return along the hippo trail. The sun is beginning to exert its power. The mud is hardening. After a leisurely lunch in town, we head back to the park. This time, we are more successful.

2011-05-31T08:16:00.001-07:00

Travelogue 396 – May 31
Welcome to the Jungle

One invents excuses to dash out into isolated moments of sunshine. I'll run to the office. I'll work outdoors at the cafe. There are already dark clouds gathering to the east and along the ridge of the mountains. There is barely time to make it down the hill from home to the office, slow and limping because I've aggravated my foot in the latest long run. The roads are oddly deserted. Citizens of this waterlogged city don't feel the urgency I do for warmth and heat.

The walk: four boys in pink school uniforms match my debilitated pace. They wave soiled and bent worksheets as they walk.. With wide smiles, they want to say hello, ask where I'm from, ask if I've seen Lalibela. A man sitting on a stool in an alley with ch'at-chewing friends yells, 'Hey hey!' When I look he kisses his fingertips and grins ambiguously. A pseudo-Rasta boy stares at me with malice. A toothless old lady approaches with a foolish open grin and an open hand. The walk is a half-mile and always eventful.

By the time I reach the cafe, the day is very dark and fat raindrops are beginning to fall. The cafe is crowded with everyone that had dared to commune with the sun at outdoors tables. I have to content myself with a small round table in the middle of the room, where everyone stares at me at leisure, just as the rain begins in earnest. The electricity is out, so the room is dark. There is no music above the loud chatter. And there is no coffee, which I was thirsting for.

And still this isn't the jungle. Were the sun to shine for a full day, the earth would resume its red and dry contours. The meadows at the summits of Entoto would have shed the days of rain almost immediately, the runoff unhindered by the forests of eucalyptus.

It was only a week or so ago I was driving among the damper regions of Ethiopia, areas that might be called jungle. One enters Arba Minch along the 'highway' south from Soddo. It winds quietly among increasingly green lands, between Lake Abaya a few miles off to the right and vividly green mountains to the right, the ones that remind me of Peru. It winds among abandoned construction zones, evidence that someone had the idea this should be a real highway once upon a time. We drive on the dirt margins while boys with curved knives in their belts walk the asphalt.

At one point, we find a zendo on the road, its head crushed and its entrails squished out of him. A zendo is an anaconda. This one appears to be a baby, only six feet long or so.

The further south we go, the more I think of the zendo and watch for his brethren among the trees. I've long held to a playful theory that people and culture evolve in ways that mirror the animal life around them. Arabic sounds like camels talking, and northern Ethiopians dance like chickens. Now, approaching Arba Minch, where the marsh spreads boldly inland from lakeside, where the greenery grows more and more densely, where you find the gateway to the Nech Saar wildlife park, I see something more fierce in the eyes of the people. These are the tribes of the south. Their faces are rounder; their skin is darker. They walk in droves along the sides of the highway, for miles leading into Arba Minch. They grin at us with something like feral mischief. I wonder if Menna, with her northern features and lighter skin, feels as intimidated as I do.

We arrive. It's a town that climbs a mountain, almost every road mud. Our hotel is at the top. It overlooks the vast wildlife park. The park is why we came. Menna wants to see animals. From the hotel terrace, we can both lakes, Chamo and Abaya. There's a strip of hilly land between them. There are steep islands near to shore. Beyond the lakes are another range of low mountains. Everything we see is a part of the park. Tomorrow, we will drive in.

2011-05-24T07:44:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 395 – May 24
Hotel Ethiopia

It's 8:30am. The cafe crowd is lively already. The boys from the university are sitting inside because of the damp and the cold. Here in Addis, rainy season has started a month early. Driving home from my trip south a few days ago, I could tell where Addis was on the horizon by the rain clouds and grey sheets of precipitation.

Suddenly the cafe speakers buzz with the sad strains of 'Hotel California', placed eerily among a set of Ethio-pop, trapped somewhere it doesn't belong. That quickly, my morning mood is tainted by a powerful mix of home-sickness and nostalgia, geography and time both under assault. My life becomes unrecognizable. Where am I?

Right: that spot on the horizon, among the brown peaks, that concentration of grey. Binyam is driving. We hired Binyam in Awasa, and have covered a number of miles since then. Binyam is a genial, heavy-set guy of about 30, with the brown teeth of the south. He is a safe driver, sometimes maddeningly so. If you engage him in conversation, he slows to a crawl. And Binyam does like conversation. He's a story-teller. He tells about the days he worked for the Chinese. He tells about his encounters among the various tribes and ethnicities of Ethiopia. Hearing we are planning a build in Kambata, he shares a derogatory saying about the Kambata people in sing-song Amharic. 'K'sira metfo, armata; k'libs metfo, putanta; k'zer metfo, Kambata.' If you're offended, let me say there's probably one of these for every tribe.

One tribe Binyam seems to have special relations with is the Dorze. This is a small tribe in the mountains above Arba Minch. Looking up at the peaks from the highway north out of Arba Minch – sorry, but I have to use the word 'highway' for lack of a better word. In fact, this is a narrow strip of rutted asphalt, interrupted frequently with dirt stretches all the way to Soddo. But it's the only route linking north and south. I say, looking up at the peaks from the Ethiopian superhighway, one could be forgiven for thinking of Peru. The slopes incline steeply away from the flats, where bananas and mangoes are grown among the marshy grounds beside Lake Abaya, up into misty clouds that hide the summits. It's the color of the slopes that reminds me of the Sacred Valley, the bright shade of green.

We drive an hour on dirt roads up those slopes, into the mists, into the valleys. I keep hoping to glimpse the summit, see the other side, but mountain ranges are stubborn. They unfold themselves at their leisure, revealing only more of themselves, more bone, more sinew, reluctant to show us their limits when they can show their power.

There's a village where the steep inclines seem to abate for the moment. This is a Dorze village. Identity has taken firm root. As it will even in the remotest corners of the globe in our times, identity markets itself with admirable tenacity. This is not the Arba Minch superhighway. This is an obscure branch off the well-traveled road, all mud and peace. But entering the village, one passes the stands of local tradition for sale, bright articles of clothing. One also passes a steady representation of the tribe, walking up the hill it took us an hour to climb in a car. One has the feeling this is a regular ritual, the full-day trip to the market in Arba Minch. One old lady we pass twice because of a bathroom stop. Each time, she nods with dignity and announces solemnly, 'Hello.'

There's a tourist stop in this little village, a communal village within a village, run by a shrewd young Rastafarian named Mekonnen. He has thick dreds, a soft voice, a steady eye. Binyam has obviously struck up a friendship and business relationship some time ago.

For 200 birr, Mekonnen gives us the tour of his little commune. The huts are built along traditional lines, high and open inside, shaped to remind one of the now-vanished elephants once indigenous to this area, two lidded vents near the top acting as sleepy eyes, and a protrusion over the entrance that runs the height of the hut and reminds one of the elephant's nose.

We get to see how k'ojo is made, the traditional bread made of the meat of the false banana tree trunk. There are a lot of things made from this ubiquitous tree. Fibers from the leaves go into all sorts of weaving. The leaves also contribute to the skin of the huts.

We are led to the shelter in back, where commune members sell their wares at tourist prices. We are fed some of the k'ojo with local honey and local spices. It's very tasty. Mekonnen offers us local areke, the potent spirit made from ginger and garlic and a host of other local produce that I don't recall. I'm sure the false banana must make a vaporous appearance in there, as well. For a spirit of this proof, there's actually a flavor to it. Mekonnen drains the whole glass and slams it on the locally carved table.

We could stay and watch some local dance, drink some more areke. But it's getting late in the day. Binyam selflessly offers to drives down the hill in the darkness of night, but we decide to go. Powerful mountain areke coursing through our blood, we embark on the steep journey home, with dusk already descending. It's light enough to still see the remarkable view outside the village, encompassing both of the huge lakes here, Abaya and Chamo. We cut back and forth through the forests. Villagers are still climbing along the margins of the road, all the way down. Small children stand in the middle of the muddy road, dancing for us in an appeal for our water bottles. These are the mountains of the south.

2011-05-09T01:02:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 394 – May 9
Aysamam?

As the bus approaches Ziway, we see clouds of dust being raised in long lines, along the furrows of small farms, along dirt paths that lead away from the highway.

Ziway is located among the open spaces south of Addis, golden with heat, dotted sparsely with acacias, gentle, dry land that hosts small, dusty villages. Along the southern highway are strung the towns of the region, bustling unappealing market towns of small crumbling mud structures, crowded, loud, and devoted to extreme micro-commerce. The road swarms with vans passing through, and with bajajes, the three-wheel buggies driven by motorcycle engines that tirelessly convey people locally. Ethiopia is all motion. Everywhere has somewhere to go. One would be forgiven for assuming that the entire population is out shopping, gauging by the myriad of shops and markets and street vendors that make up the towns, like the building blocks without which the town would subside back into the dust. Ethiopia is all commerce.

One might also be forgiven by assuming that all the commotion is simply desperate social activity. If the streets are strung like beads with shop after shop, the air of the town is a net of human noise. Voices rise to the skies endlessly, emissions from the soul, choking the atmosphere daily since bipeds first discovered the delights of gossip. Boys quarrel in the streets, old ladies exchange elaborate greetings, men in suits bow and flatter. The conversations cycle with suffocating persistence. Whatever structure is not a shop has a good chance of being a cafe, where talk spirals in the air, redolent and toxic as cigar smoke. Everyone who has no partner in the flesh is screaming into a mobile. 'Hello? Hello? Aysamam? (Can't you hear me?)'

The van itself is a little society, weaving at high speeds along the ribbon of asphalt, squeezed almost comically into its bubble of steel, a tiny ephemeral community collected from the society at large: farmers, old ladies, proud businessman, flip taxi boys, wondering children, and the foreigner. Swirling around the interior of the van are varieties of the bodiless beast, Talk. Even the pulsing Ethio-pop is declaiming to all and sundry, about love, about culture. Regularly someone picks up his little talk machine: 'Hello! Hello! Aysamam?'

The winds are bearing down on Ziway. Menna and I quickly debate whether or not to stop. We remember the winds off the lake during our last visit in the fall. It mars the idyll somewhat. It might be why Lake Ziway seems the least popular of the Rift Valley Lakes. But we like this dumpy little town, and the modest lake.

We check in to the hotel, and we head immediately to the lakeside. There is no resort here, just a humble attempt at a menafesha, or park. But the scene doesn't need to be restructured for either appeal or for recreation. The pale blue waters roll in from the horizon, meeting our shore among dense reeds. The far line of the water is broken by what appears to be an island or two, shadowed in blue as though they would be mountains. Just south of the park entrance the reeds make way for a small, rocky bulwark against the waters. Here an assortment of locals has gathered. Most seem to be middle school kids hanging out and practicing the fine arts of talk and giggle. Among the lakeside rocks are boys of various ages bathing and swimming.

We three sit on an outcrop of stone and talk about the trip's business. It doesn't take long for me to notice a presence close and inquisitive on my right side. There's a boy standing beside me staring intently. That I look back doesn't faze him. I like that. What's your name? 'My name is Wendu.' Wendu means 'the boy'. Intelligence and curiosity shine in Wendu's eyes. I ask about school. He's in eighth grade, near the top of his class. He says he speaks English, but he still needs what I say to be translated. It only takes a few minutes to exhaust all avenues of conversation. And it takes even less to register how tough it is to be a bright boy in a small town in Ethiopia. He is drawn to us as something to study. We are like messengers from a more stimulating world.

We take Wendu out for some cake and juice, and our reward is being introduced to the best cafe in Ziway. I had no idea how deeply Addis-style cafe culture had penetrated into the countryside. Suddenly there is decent cake in Ziway. Look for the Right Cafe next time you make a stop in the windy city. They also have good fish for dinner, and cheap.

2011-04-30T05:51:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 393 – April 30
Zaf K'Hona

Yosef is chewing on healthy chunk of sugar cane. He's gazing intently out the window. 'Yosef!' I try, 'Yosef, indet new?' Yosef doesn't answer. He stares out the window at the passing trees. He sits on the edge of the seat so that he's almost wedged into the gap between the window and his father's seat in front of him. His father laughs. 'Yosi!' he shouts. 'Min new?' Yosef is three. He likes his sugar cane. His father is Shimeles, my regular taxi driver. Next to Yosef is Fikre, athlete and trainer.

I wake to rain today. My head is fuzzy from a small but concentrated amount of vodka ingested last night at the night club. My head is fuzzy from lack of sleep. The rain is the first thing to register in my waking mind. It is a sound. It's unmistakable, peaceful. Maybe it's a blessing, as I've made the foolish decision to train at 9:30am today.

By 8:30 I can't hide under my pillow anymore. I peek out the window. The rain is subsiding. There are brighter patches among the clouds. By training time, it will be muddy but fine. I start stretching. The only way I will survive one mile is to jump-start my poor, beleaguered lungs. It's been a hard few weeks for those tired organs of breath and life, beginning with the cold and continuing on into the asthma. I stretch and cough and wheeze.

'Yosef,' I say, 'please tell these crazy people that I am in no shape for training.' My head throbs. My chest is tight and uncomfortable. Tesfahun speaks English. 'What's wrong?' he asks, and he squints the way he always does when I try English on him. 'No training today, comrade,' I say. 'Fun today.' He squints some more, and then he smiles dismissively. Training is not for fun.

By the time we reach the summit, the clouds are breaking. A cool breeze is riffling the grass, and moving sheets of sunshine are lighting them spring green. I have convinced my ruthless trainers to give me an easy day. We set out at a pace that allows me to breathe. It is going to be a great run.

I'm in a buoyant mood suddenly. My lungs are turning over the oxygen merrily. The morning has become decidedly beautiful. I goad Tesfahun into some trail tourism. I want to see the northern slopes again, where one can look out over the hills and the highway away from Addis, winding among the forests of the mountainside and then across a long brown plain, passing through the town of Selulta and off toward the low hills of Chancho.

'YeFikre chaka,' I demand. Let's go to Fikre's forest, which is on that northern slope. As a means of explaining myself, though in an entirely obscure way, I say, 'YeFikre chaka zaf yellum.' And I point to the bare slopes north of us, bright with sun through the trees ahead of us.

Fikre's forest has been wholly harvested during the last few months. What remains are rows of tree trunks left to sprout new life for a future harvest. Eucalyptus grows remarkably fast, and the trunks look like rows of knee-high shrubs already. We jog through the carpet of dead leaves, and I repeat, 'YeFikre chaka zaf yellum. Ayzush.'

I'm saying in pigeon Amharic, 'Fikre's forest has no trees.' and consoling her. I'm teasing her. But I like the phrase so much, I repeat it to myself in my mind as we take a long incline in the sun among the budding stumps. It feels poetic, in the magical sense that Maugham disparages in his 'Summing Up'. 'Some writers who do not think clearly are inclined to suppose that their thoughts have a significance greater than at first sight appears,' he says. 'From this there is only a little way to go to fall into the habit of setting down one's impressions in all their original vagueness. Fools can always be found to discover a hidden sense in them.'

I've been that writer – in my youth because of lack of self-awareness, and in my non-youth because of irony and contrariness. Yes, I like the phrase and I stand by it. There's a meaning in it that awaits the perfect fool. This forest has no trees.

Meanwhile, we've arrived at the scenic view. 'That's Ethiopia', I inform Fikre, taking in miles of countryside with a gesture. I insist we carry on toward Shinkurt Mikael. That's a church that serves a quiet little bowl of a valley behind Faransae. The actual name is Shinkoro Mikael, the meaning of which I don't know, but I call it Shinkurt Mikael, which means 'Onion Michael', just to joke around. My Ethiopian trainers never seem to find that funny. The valley is pretty. The church is a circular roof of patina green among a grove of trees.

And back we go into the chaka. I'm having fun. All my unpleasant symptoms have retreated. I even have enough breath for a short conversation with Tesfahun about Mourinho. Just enough. If my relative breathlessness doesn't keep it simple, my knowledge base certainly does. Fortunately, I do more listening than speaking.

Eighty minutes flies by, and well before I expect it, we're passing by the final fields where the boys are screaming over their soccer game. Someone has just scored. I pump my fists in the air for the victor, and they screech some more. At Maryam, our point of origin, Yosef is playing with some of the local boys. Wide-eyed he bids them farewell.

2011-04-27T03:56:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 392 – April 27
Carnage and Drizzle

The moisture doesn't help the stink. If anything, it makes it worse. This year, some jaded young sky god has threaded together the 'small rains' of spring with Fasika, the day Christ rose from the grave. Easter being a holiday of unusual savagery and the rains in Ethiopia being a time of low skies, dense atmospherics and mud, the combination is unfortunate. The carnage has still not passed. There are animal parts strewn by the side of the road. Sheep skins are piled here and there, often with a sleeping head set on top, homage to the peace of death, a challenge to the Son of Man, who would intrude upon that slumber.

I walk to the end of my road, where I catch a taxi to the cafe where I work. It's a road made of dirt and rocks that would seem ill-suited for a road. Many of them turn sharp edges up toward our feet and toward the tires of our occasional motor vehicles. I pass a few shrines to the Lamb, piles of skins and hoofs and skulls. The indolent boy in the sky gives us only the scorn of his indecision. Light showers start and stop. The dirt road is slimy mud from previous rainfall. There is a rot in the air, legacy of the soul's salvation.

I always seem to get out of the house during the morning rush hour. There are no taxi vans at the asphalt road. There are dozens of people milling about at the intersection, most waiting for the next taxi. I know the routine; when a taxi does show up, the people run for it and crowd around it as though this were the blessed ferry to salvation. There is little courtesy for the meek or the foreign at the door of a taxi van.

I slip the second strap of my heavy backpack over the second shoulder, readying for the hike downhill. I pick up my pace, weaving among the crowds walking to work or school. The planter's tinnitus in my left heel is aching me, but I push on, knowing that exercise tends to loosen it up, attenuate the pain.

Later in the day, I will head up into the mountains for a workout. Shimeles will take us all the way to the top, since the small rains are attended by a chill in the air that comes as a relief to small automotive engines. As we three athletes, insignificant in the eyes of the snide young sky god, will pile into the car by my house, we will be soaked by a sudden blast of rain. We will eye the skies anxiously as we climb the mountain. We will see breaks in the clouds above the summit. The rain will be concentrated below, in the city. As we run, the ground beneath us will be a little slick, slightly treacherous. Light sprays of rain will come and go. I will pull on my runner's jacket as I run, only to shake it off again a few minutes later. This will be an experiment; this will be the first time I run in the rain in Ethiopia. I will be rewarded at the end of the run by a full rainbow over the mountain meadows. In Amharic, rainbows are called kapto demena, the cloud's belt.

I've been fighting off a slight cold that wants to invite in its evil associate, asthma. I don't mind the long walk first thing in the morning, because it seems that my best ally against this plague is exercise. The remedy is counter-intuitive. I want to make myself breathe hard, though breath comes with difficulty and with pain. Giving in to it, though, especially in Ethiopia, is only to surrender to very long convalescence, and probably to other bugs that prey on the weak.

I time each segment of the walk: seven minutes down to Medhane Alem; four more to the university gates; five to get to the other side of the Sidist Kilo roundabout; five more to my cafe. Not bad.

I salute the guard in forest green at the gate to the cafe compound. Everyone knows me here. I say hello to the city parking attendant, who has worked here as long as I remember. He is small and bent; he does his job on crutches. The waitress asks me, 'the usual?' Yes: zebib cake and Italian espresso. Above, the effete boy flicks a finger and rain beats a new pulse on the iron roof.

2011-04-23T02:49:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 391 – April 23
The March

The days of 2011 march by. The days of every year have their own pace, I suppose. Some years stroll by, some dash, some skip. These are the days of the forced march. There's some small element of joy missing. We're taking the plains, taking the towns.

The days march. First there was Hosanna, Ethiopia Palm Sunday. Men and boys wear homemade hats and rings made of slim palm fronds. It seems as though someone in every house has the knack of folding palm fronds into neat little square temples that rest above the knuckle or in the center of the forehead. Christ has entered the city. We celebrate his entry.

Shimeles's taxi won't make it up the steep incline of Entoto anymore. A few weeks ago, we had to start training halfway up the mountain, at a place called Kusquam. So we lose the gentle slopes, the high meadows, the soft, mossy forest floors. In exchange, we have rugged hills, brambles, gullies, rocks, and roots. The hills turn into hikes instead of runs. We are running at midday, and this is the hottest season. My phantom disease, plantar tinnitus, flares up again.

Yes, the days have none of the light spontaneity of the chaka, where one runs with cool ease in cool shadows, joyfully weaving among the tall trunks of doomed eucalyptus.

Yesterday, Jesus paid his debt to God and man. To celebrate, we met up with Cien and Chris at the Chicken Shack, a new place in Bole that serves BBQ chicken wings and curly fries. The place is owned and run by a big guy who played football in America. The flavor is somewhat dampened by the din of ESPN. Onscreen, there is a southern football coach informing a young athlete with a smirk that if he plays in France, he will have to learn another language. The young man nods earnestly and takes note of that in his spiral pad.

Menna and I flee the crash and boom of sports television to the relative calm of the Ethiopian multiplex, where Helen Mirren continues her streak of reprisals of classic male roles. And of course she pulls it off with heartbreaking dignity and grace.

No, the role isn't Prospero; this is Hobson. The movie is a remake of a personal favorite as a hard-drinking college boy: 'Arthur'. If it weren't for the profound distraction at the core of the project, the riddle of how the the lead female was chosen, a woman who would be lucky to reach as high as 'leaden' in her performance, someone as unlikely to excite the romantic interest of someone like Russell Brand as a lamppost, a woman who compares so unfavorably beside the sophistication of Helen Mirren as to make the audience avert their eyes; if it weren't for this flat Hollywood mystery dumped in our laps, the movie is a fair go as a light comedy. Brand as Moore works out well. Cuing pathos comes easily to him. And his toxic buffoonery is suitably cute and unthreatening.

There's a not entirely convincing moral at the center of this Arthurian tale, that joy is the measure of life. This is most explicitly unpacked for us in a monologue in which our hero asks the question, who becomes a systems analyst? the pretext being, of course, that the spoiled billionaire now has to get a job. Well, okay. I suppose the point needs to be made once in a while, even if it's by a fantastical, pretty-boy alcoholic who lives and breathes within ninety minutes of chaos and then unaccountably falls for the blandest blonde in Queens. It's an ancient prerogative, joy.

Today Christ lies in dormancy. The men in Shiro Meda have donned their palm headbands again. The sky is a stew of clouds and hazy blue. The sunshine touches us once in a while, but most of each hour is grey. Tomorrow He rises. We will share in the Father's joy. We'll all eat lamb.

2011-04-02T22:44:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 390 – April 2
Daguma

I would have to say, if pressed to say anything about philosophies of life, that a pretty good one is finding the moments that impart perspective – those moments that inspire wonder and put one in proper relationship with the big, wide world. I don't think humility is something you cultivate by righteous thought. I think it comes about through a challenging dialogue with the world. The challenge is as often a pleasure.

We have arrived at the airport. It's late in the evening. The four of us have been entertaining ourselves at a nearby hotel. That means sitting in plastic patio chairs under the night sky under tall, sheltering trees, listening to Ethio-pop, listening to the horrible karaoke next door. We have had an argument with the waiter because he brought the women in the group bad wine. He insists it's all right. Then he suggests adding Coke. Oh well. We enjoy the evening air.

We have timed our evening travels well, we get to the airport just as the arriving children are waiting for their baggage. We can see them from outside the departure gate. Bole International stands tall and bright as ever, the vast and antiseptic white hall glimmering with cheap lighting. We mill around outside the gate, sleepy and cheerful. We catch glimpses of Daguma in the baggage hall. He waves his long, adolescent arms. The Tesfa crew wave back. We're his family tonight. He lives with only with his mother in the village of Ekodaga, and she hasn't come to Addis.

We're standing with some of the families. They are all country folk. You can tell by the sturdy brown suits of the fathers and the traditional gabis of the mothers. Their faces give them away, too, a weathered and dazed look to them. Some of the mothers have tears in their eyes. They have started with a sing-song muttering that seems to be half prayer and half monologue of thanks and amazement.

The children emerge. Dr Hodes is standing inside the rope that creates a corridor for emerging passengers. He greets them first. The doctor is one who has arranged all this. He has saved countless children with back and heart issues, referring them on to specialists who donate their services once or twice a year, fundraising year-round for the airfare and costs of travel and operations.

Daguma is about thirteen. He grew up with an severe case of scoliosis that bent him forward, gave him a hunchback, and threatened to crush his lungs before he ever reached adulthood. In spite of his disfiguring disability, Daguma has a great spirit. He walked to Chancho every day for school. He was always first in his class. When construction began on the school in Ekodaga, Daguma was on-site, ready to work every day. He hefted huge rocks when the site had to be cleared. He pushed the wheelbarrow when dirt was moved away, or mud was needed for the walls. He was tireless, and always in good cheer.

He's in good cheer at the airport, too. We all hug him – delicately. We stare: he's unbent and taller. I don't understand the particulars about the operation, but I think it's something like taking the distorted bit of spine out and replacing it with a friendly bit of metal. In any case, it's changed him. He looks like a regular gangly early teen now. There are some bumps and bulges in his torso that shouldn't be there, and maybe he will always carry some as mementos. But he stands erect, and he breathes.

Daguma's beaming. How was Ghana? we ask. It was okay. 'They don't speak American English,' he says in Amharic. How was the food? He didn't like it. He's emphatic about that. He can't wait to get some ferfer and wot. He's taken away for photos with the group. Cien stands in for family when each kid gets a family shot. Then the sleepy families start to drift away. The doctor tells us Daguma can't travel by car for a few weeks, especially to Ekodaga, where he would have to cross some rough terrain. He will stay with the doctor. In a few days we'll bring Daguma's mother down to Addis.

We bid the boy good night. He waves as he walks off. We all watch him and admire.

2011-03-23T23:16:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 389 – March 23
Itinerary
Part Two

It's fun to drive on the highways of Holland with an American. Kim is talking and weaving among the springtime construction on the roads. It could be anywhere. But it's not. It's the Netherlands, flat and green. The highways are tidy, like everything else Dutch. When we pull off, there is no city. There are no distinguishing features at all to mark this locale off from the surrounding farmland.

This is the village of Wassenaar. A village with no village, that I can tell. Not far from the highway is the American School. This is an international school for children of diplomats and industrialists stationed in Holland temporarily. This is a phenomenon of the post-war era. (I feel like I give away my age when I use the phrase 'post-war'. Won't the current young adults scratch their heads at that? Which war?) The international schools are colonialism meets post-colonial educational standardization. Most capitals have a few of them, an American brand, a British one. A third of the schools will be well-to-do locals, the rest itinerant sorts from all over the world. The education is usually top-notch, the children bright and interesting.

We have a few student guests at my presentation, and yes, they are bright and interesting. The boy, probably 16 or so, has already been to Ethiopia and volunteered for a local charity there. The young woman is an athlete, so she wants to hear about my team of runners.

The school itself is huge and well-appointed. I tour the library and the various wings of classrooms. I see through the eyes of the Ethiopians and marvel. The place is huge and appointed with every convenience and improvement. The children act like young professionals on their way to meetings, except for the two teens chewing on each other's faces, whom Kim has to break up. 'Disgusting!' she pronounces.

Nicole, another teacher, drives me back to Amsterdam. Both teachers have been in Holland for years. One married a Dutchman; the other came with her American husband for the job. They have adopted from Ethiopia. Like many adoptive parents, they are very committed to the culture and people of her children.

For the moment, the brief and passing moment, I am committed to my Dutch city. On Sunday night, I decided to suspend judgement on the decadent old centrum of Amsterdam, and to go exploring. I wanted to see the Jordaan district.

I needed reminding that Amsterdam is a big city. It looks small on maps, particularly the centrum, contained as it is within the circles of canals. But there is lots of room for those high and narrow little buildings. I climb off the tram at the Centraal Station, and head west just a block or two from the Ij River. The blocks go on and on. In the distance, beyond the centrum, you see the vast machinery of industry. I pass through a variety of micro-hoods, suddenly besieged by cheery cyclists and strolling among ad hoc pub patios, tables set up for customers to drink their beers and enjoy the spring sunshine. And then, just as suddenly, I'm alone on quiet residential blocks, mum households stretching off toward the next canal.

I wander until I'm in the Dam district again, the hub of old Amsterdam, the hub of the new, more decadent Amsterdam, too. I arrive from an unaccustomed angle, and quite unexpectedly, there it is! There is the university building in which I took classes so many years ago. I don't know where I had stored it on internal maps, but I had no idea it was so close to the Dam. It's one of those moments where you feel a tingling realignment happen inside you, sweeping through you from head to toe. I walk around the building. Unfortunately it's closed for the weekend, and I can't enter. But I solemnly reflect on the past as I study the old building. I remembered it slightly differently. The building is not Dutch traditional; it's Euro modular, looking like it was put together by earnest children from plastic tubing, perhaps a kind of plastic rendering of Gothic aesthetics. Now it's older, seems streaked by the soot of age.

I walked all around the building, sinking into reminiscences of a dark sort. That trip was decisive in many ways. I had developed a quick and ardent love for things European and Dutch, and yet I left early, lacking the character to commit.

I sat at a hotel bar nearby and stared into the mirror behind the bar, overcome by regret. There is no defense against oneself and one's narrative. That's the only psychological advantage to youth, freedom from the condemning past.

I walked around the Dam, and finally settled in at the Beer Temple, with its list of international beers that takes up a wall. I got the bartender to admit that the Americans were the kings of the specialty brews. I indulged in a Colorado IPA, not thinking I needed to check alcohol content until too late: 8%! Oofta. I pried myself from the bar stool and went in unsteady search of the Number Two tram home.

2011-03-22T05:24:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 388 – March 22
Itinerary
Part One

I'm back at Schiphol, neither the most nor the least comfortable of airports. I'm paying top dollar to sit in the brasserie on the second floor of this terminal. It's either that or crammed in among orange plastic chairs, chewing on dry pan au raisin and sipping coffee from plastic. In an hour, I'll be boarding the KLM flight to Khartoum and Addis Ababa.

I took the bus in this morning, the ol' 197 that I catch at the dreary bus hub by the humble medieval church of St Anne off Amstelveenseweg. I have to get up early for the privilege, calculating in the last-minute packing and final glance through emails for life-or-death messages.

I'm not always so virtuous. When I arrive in Amsterdam from Addis, it's often after an overnight. I'm wrecked. I walk straight to the taxi stand.

But today, I'm virtuous. I awake at 6:30. I clean up and pack and clean up, and I set out for the bus stop on a virtuous spring morning in tender-hearted old Nederland. I contemplate my long visit to Europe. It was a fun time. It was a busy time.

My last day in Holland was certainly a busy one. I had to hit the road, due at a meeting in The Hague. No, it was not an appearance before the World Court. That would be something to write about! Imagine committing a crime worthy of the World Court. My mission is something less grandiose: I'm meeting with some teachers at an American international school. And actually, it's not even in the Hague, but in a village outside. So, instead of alighting on the Hague's train platform to be escorted by uniformed policemen, I alight in Leiden to be met by a teacher in jeans.

I arrive early. I want to put in some rushed tourism. I had visited Leiden years ago, but remembered nothing about it. It remained in my memory as an insubstantial name suggesting beauty. The reality now unfolds itself in the hour I have to tour: a pretty town, a ghost town, an anomaly.

Emerging from the station, you see high-rise business buildings all around. It seems like it should be a bustling town. I'm meeting my teacher friend at noon. It's 11am now. I aim toward the church steeples, intuiting that I'll find the historic town center there. I pass a large, traditional windmill on a small green sward by a canal. I find cobblestone; I find canals lined with the typical Dutch houses, everything pink with ancient brick, the water in the canals green and silent.

The further I go into town, the less people there are. I check my watch again. Yes, it's after 11am on a Monday. Some cafes are just opening. Many shops are closed.

Again, my memory of Leiden is just a feeling, that it had been a destination when I studied in Holland years ago. Now I recognize nothing. I turn every corner anticipating the Dutch Golden Age splendor that drew me. Nothing like that appears. It's a cute town, though. And it occurs to me, prompted by the sparse morning population, that it might be a notable party town on the circuit. Otherwise, cute and quaint is as high as the meter goes. Though I would recommend the Hooglandse Kerk, one of the furthest sites available to you if you have an hour to tour from the train station. The bulk of this church is medieval Gothic, and very pretty.

I return to the station, and there meet Kim, the teacher from the American school. We jump in her car and head toward the Hague.

2011-03-15T10:54:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 387 – March 15
Sunset in Salisbury

The title of this entry is the title of my magnificent portrait of the Wiltshire town, and I'm hoping I have the presence of mind to post the brilliant photo with the text.

I'm navigating my final days in England, and I must say, navigating them without much poise. I feel for the commuters of the world. In six business days, I've made two day trips to London, packed with meetings, one to Oxford, and one to Salisbury. My brain is not well. Thinking in the aftermath feels like collecting debris from a tsunami – an insensitive metaphor if there ever was one, but there you go.

I'll digress now, digressing all the way to hazy sunshine on green hills. It was warm enough for short sleeves today, for the first time during my England trip! And I responded to the weather's call, emerging from my house in a new, white T-shirt, a shirt which I quickly stained with sweat. I was also wearing shorts and running shoes.

Running has become my method for exploration of town and country. The chaka revolution works on me still and always, the revolution that makes me think of training as a measure of time spent wandering, and work time spent most enjoyably. The ancien régime, when training was Point A to Point B with grim determination, has passed forever. And especially as I recover from my near fatal plantar something-or-other, I am driven by tender concern for body parts and their recovery.

Just the other day, I made my way by zigs and zags to an incredibly cute town just south of Bath, called Southstoke. Well worth the footsteps, I must say. Don't be fooled; travel never stopped being work. Arbitrarily, I'll distinguish between travel and tourism here. Tourism is blinking at packaged sights; travel is discovering sights in more or less a natural state. The little village of Southstoke, set among farmers' fields, is just such a pleasant sight, with its barnacled old church in Gothic-minor.

Today's run, since it's likely to be my last British excursion of the season, has been preserved for the final frontier: the top of the hill opposite our valley, Lansdowne Park above Bath proper. I weave down from my hill, employing recently patented shortcuts, crossing the River Avon a little west of town center, running alongside Royal Victoria Park, and then up and up and up the hill behind, passing through neighborhoods in which the houses have names, passing two aristocratic academies housed in sprawling stone mansions that must date from the Tudors or the Stuarts, and eventually reaching the crest of the high, wooded hill, (near the site of a famous Civil War battle in the Civil Wars, by the way). What a glorious run!

But I have digressed rather far. Let's return to Salisbury, shall we, outside of which is a village called Downtown, where a tiny church primary school has maintained a long connection with our Mercato school in Addis Ababa. It's my first visit in three years. The children in second year who hosted me last time are now in fifth year. They still remember me. First, I get a tour of the school from three girls from the second year. We visit classrooms and gardens, peek into cupboards and cloak rooms, and catch some of the older kids singing and giggling. I visit two classrooms to answer questions about Ethiopia. I am guest of honor in the school 'worship', or assembly. The children are so gracious and so smart, the day is great fun.

And now, tuckered out from the visit, tired out from weeks of business and travel, I'm watching a clear, blue sunset out the window of an ancient pub. Fortunate Salisbury has plenty of history still standing in shadow of the famous cathedral, neglected as the town was by the Nazi bombers. Lots of the buildings present in classic Tudor style, leaning over the street with their jutting first stories, tarred beams, and Coke bottle windows. This pub is an old one, inhabited sparsely by old specimens of the species, who tell creaking stories and jokes, make frequent trips to the bar, and otherwise slouch and stare.

You'll notice the mastery of the composition of this photo, capturing today and yesterday in perfect balance, glass and Gothic, deep dusk and the flash of the camera's light. Notice the warped supports of the window. Everything Tudor twists, striving for straight lines and marvelously failing, and then, often as not, covering errors of the plane with the carving of a quirky human face, made to jut into the room like curious wood sprites.

The sun sets successfully – it so seldom botches the job – and I'm left to negotiate the evening's journey back to Bath. It's a three-car train, traveling through quiet valleys, stopping at Warminster, Westbury, Trowbridge, stopping at Bath Spa. There aren't too many lights aglow as I walk home from the train station.

2011-03-09T01:48:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 386 – March 6
Go, Green Man!

It's chilly this morning. The sun is lingering behind a set of surly clouds, due to peek out later. He has been doing so for days now, making feeble impressions of Good Spring.

Oh, this is not just any morning, my good reader. This is the morning that will witness the Bath Half Marathon. I have very publicly made a commitment NOT to run in this venerable event, this long-standing personal tradition, dating back all of one year. This was to be my second run of the Bath Half, during which I was to crush my already astounding PR (personal record) of 1:38.

Alas, it was not to be. Instead, at the peak of my prodigious powers, I incurred a grievous injury. It's a plague of the heel common to runners, called plantar something or other, that feels like you're tearing the muscles that run the length of your sole.

So, as many of you, my devoted fans, know I regrettably announced my retirement from the field of the Bath Half. … Can you see where this story is going?

I'm running the race. I charted a slight improvement in the heel, and I took that as the nod from God and Body to run.

I put on shorts and shirt. I review the map for the rather complex staging areas for the start of the race. They have to accommodate 11,000 people, after all, and Bath was not a city built for 11,000 people to do anything in one place. I study the chart for attaching my time chip to my shoe. I have coffee with the family I'm lodging with. They think it's hilarious that I'm running. They even commit to coming down the hill to cheer me on. I climb the stairs to take my last pee and put on the last layers. It's 10:45. The race starts in 15 minutes. I curse.

I have to jog down to the start, and by the time I find my place among the masses, the starter's gun has already fired and I'm sweaty. I'm aided by the five minutes it takes the crowd to cross the starting line after the official start. We start at a creep. I'm already warmed up; I'm resenting this pace. I start the bob-and-weave that big races invariably become for at least the first two miles.

About one mile on, I hear the roar of my landlord, shouting out my name. I wave and step on a young lady's heel. Onward! There's very little pain in my heel. Once again God – very concerned about events like this – has shone his favour upon me.

Except … just as happened last year, by the third or fourth mile I've involuntarily become attached to one of the folk heroes of the race. This year, it's Green Man, a runner completely encased in a green body suit of some sort. And I mean completely. His shoes are inside. There are no eye-holes. He runs with a strange, grasping lope, elbowing and kicking people as he goes.

He's terribly popular. Again, I run the race inside a rolling bubble of laughter and cheering. It's not for me. No one is shouting, 'Go Normal Guy with Plantar!' They're shouting, 'Go Green Man!”

I try to shake him, but we're too evenly matched. And if it's no fun running next to Green Man – he might elbow you – it's not very pleasant running behind him, either. People in body suits rarely think ahead about the effects of thirteen miles of sweat. It accumulates at the base of the spine, just above the hard-working buttocks, and from there it spreads its unappealing stain up the channel of the spine.

Green Man and I complete the entire course. I arrive to raves and shouts and wild applause … all for Green Man. For my part, I've wilted quite appreciably in the final miles, but not so much that I don't perk up at the sight of the grand video screen showing us all rounding the last corner.

Good job, Green Man. I smack him on the shoulder on the other side of the finish. He's unveiling himself, but all I have time to see is the back of his shaved head. I want to get my hard-earned medallion and start the hike home before the heel starts complaining in earnest. I did it!

2011-02-25T11:07:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 385 – February 25
Picnic Parties

I have a free day! Or I should say I have an expensive free day. I've committed to coming into London at least once a week for foundation business. This week, it's been twice. And that during 'half-term', when all the children of England are on leave from school, and train tickets prices nearly double. And since all appointments but one have fallen through for the day, I've spent a good deal of money for a free day in London.

I can't say I mind too much. The price has been paid, and I don't get many free days anymore. I leave Paddington Station by the front door and stand blinking in a neighborhood I've never seen before. I have arrived often enough at Paddington, but have always headed from the train straight to the Tube.

I hadn't quite realized before how close the station was to Hyde Park. I meander around the park for a while. I feel obliged: the sun is making a sincere effort, after all. The park is crowded. I return to the streets by Speaker's Corner (where once again free speech is a dead letter) and Marble Arch, and I veer around busy May Fair.

My evening meeting is in Marylebone, so that's where I head. I've taken the long route from Paddington. And it's fortunate I did because I encounter some old friends at Manchester Square. Some of them I ran into just a few weeks ago in Amsterdam. These are an elite set of friends, I must say. Not just anyone gets to see them. One has to know where they hang out – or to be as lucky as I am.

Rembrandt isn't looking his usual stunning self, but Frans Hals is convivial as ever. His 'Laughing Cavalier' captures some of his finest spirit, the roguish underside of the old, black-clad Dutch imperial soul, captures the sarcasm without which a Nederlander would be a German.

This is the Wallace Collection, a very fine museum in this city of museums, and one I hadn't heard of before. Well worth the visit, though: the booty of five generations of aristocratic collectors lodged in the urban palace they called home, replete with all manner of knick-knacks. There's exquisite eighteenth-century furniture and porcelain, old armour and weapons, sculpture bronze and marble, snuff boxes, and just a few paintings. Beside my Dutch friends, there are lots of Boucher and Watteau, Rubens and Reynolds, Van Dyck and Canaletto.

My loves of the day were Van Dyck and Watteau. Anthony Van Dyck shows up with a half dozen or so tall portraits, my favorite being that of Philippe Le Roy, savvy illegitimate son of some savvy merchant in Antwerp. He's obviously done well for himself, securing his place among the great portraits of the day, scratching the head of his hunting dog and looking generally contented with himself, and well he should, being drawn so well. He's beautiful.

I'll pause before applauding Watteau, just to tip my (brimless) hat to Monsieur Fragonard, who produced 'The Swing', one of the funner pieces of the exhibit, showing two languid gentlemen pushing a lady on a swing in one of those idealized little Rococo woods dotted with classical ruins. The lady condescends to make a kick just above one smiling gentleman, opening a view up her voluminous skirts. Her look is one of scientific detachment and pity, really – his, one of simple rapture.

But on to Jean-Antoine Watteau, our trickster of the day, the originator of the genre that Fragonard has had such fun with. Moving along the museum wall, from one piece of Watteau to another, is to advance through a veritable forgotten decade of parties, debauched aristocrats making merry in dozens of idyllic parks and woods, furnished with the detritus of a thousand years of classical architecture and statuary. There are music men in ruffles, and lounging men and lounging women, sniffing dogs, and all under the shade of fair trees, Midsummer Night's Dream for the Gallic leisure classes, Arcadia by Versailles. And what's funny is how the woods predominate over the diminutive partiers, making the paintings fantastical landscapes as much as anything, studies in mortality as much as studies of revelry. Placing them in bizarre classical theme parks just makes them appear all the more fragile to my mind, whereas I think the point was to glorify humanity a la Mirandola.

There's an interesting set of portraits on one wall, three takes by three of the most prominent British painters of the eighteenth century, all of a young lady nicknamed Perdita. Perdita is one of those British actresses that rose to heights near legend in the centuries after Shakespeare had created roles like … Perdita. It was playing that particular role that she – sadly – caught the eye of the raunchy young Prince of Wales, the future King George IV. The affair made her and destroyed her. These portraits caught her in that all-too-brief shining moment between the two. And the portraits are remarkably consistent, preserving the eyes of brilliant mordancy, the beauty poised at its passing fullest phase.

2011-02-24T04:36:00.000-08:00

Death and the Art of Lying
by Jarvis Lawrence Mundi III
Phase One, in Which Doris Gets Her Oats
February 24

You know, Mr. Ishiguro, the question the artist must ask him or herself at all times is, 'When is it ruined?' The 'it' here is undefined, as, of course, most art is. Let's frame it in the broadest sense: when is life ruined? Or, better: when is a human being ruined?

It's odd that one of the previews before the screening of your film would be the new Herzog film that claims to take us to the roots of art, to the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc cave in southern France, where human kind's earliest paintings are preserved, some 30,000 years-old. Oh, dear old Werner.

Mr. Ishiguro, do you know what the paintings portray? Animals.

It was the last night your film would be showing at Bath's precious 'Little Theatre'. It's been here since I arrived, and I gave you my word I would see it, didn't I? You didn't tell me that you yourself would be introducing the film at this very venue on Sunday night, which will in fact be the last showing.

I had two dubious reasons for wanting to view the film. The first is that I read your novel, the basis for the film. The novel was heart-wrenching, quietly bizarre and affecting. My second reason can be found in the promotional poster, an entrancing shot of Keira Knightley. She is so clearly looking at me every time I walk by, and trying to tell me something. It might be something erotic. More than likely, it's something mournful. It's a sad thought that hasn't occurred to me yet in all these years of morbid thoughts.

The author has produced the film adaptation. The author has claimed his stake in the hieratic line of homo delectus, the creature that lavishes hours on his portrait of water buffalo on submerged stone walls.

I've seen a lot of you lately, Kazuo, among the shreds of newsprint left on cafe tables. You have posed for photographic studies of Zen sensation, chilly celebrity. You render studied spoken-word paragraphs about the wonder of new parenthood. You speak about life. Your countenance, subdued as it is, by artifice, speaks of life.

The animals portrayed are alive. Blood flows through their veins.

There's something amiss in your film rendering, Kazuo. I don't mean to offend, but I read in your meditative news photos a willingness to hear. The actors are great. In fact, in the manner of many art-house films these days, the acting is the show. It's on display, much like certain mixes of gunpowder on the Fourth of July. One might just lose the trail of the story in admiration of the acting. And then, one awakens to the discrepancy between film and book. One remembers how one was moved.

Oh, Kazuo, I'm so tired of death. The old man with the sickle has been standing by for so many years now, I'm weary of him. He has the breath of a decrepit dog, or maybe of decaying autumn leaves lying too long in wait of a late winter. I wake at night and detect that stench. I know he's been warming himself at my feet, reading Dostoevsky, puffing a cold Meerschaum. I recall a dream in which I'm crying hopelessly.

When is it the milk has spoiled, Kazuo? 'Read the date,' he replies. When is a man ruined?

Watching your film, I'm enchanted by Keira. I'm even more enchanted by Carey Mulligan. But all it takes is a moment, like the careless step of the artisan in the marketplace, when he loses control of the fragile silver mirror, and it shatters. We all stand over it, and we privately mourn. Very privately. One moment I'm admiring lovely Carey, and in the next, I see only Leeza.

That's when the tear comes. One tear comes. It demands something of me. It's all good and well to indulge in the abundant talents of actors while safely indoors. But outside, the storm makes its demands.

I have to confess, my dear friend, that in that moment I know you're a fraud. You love beauty too much.

Do you think the artist of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc painted the water buffalo because he thought it was beautiful? Don't be fatuous, Kazuo. We might think his painting is beautiful; that is a very different matter.

I'm so tired of Death. I feel the weariness in my bones, like a debilitating flu. It aches in me. It pulls me down at night with insidious, gentle force. And the old man sucks in a chilly breath in delight when he reads about Ivan Karamazov. 'My, my,' he whispers just below the level of hearing, 'such beauty!' I awaken just then from another dream about Leeza. She is still beautiful.

Do you think that Leeza was beautiful because she loved beauty? That sweet soul? You offend me, friend. You really do. I dream about her. She is still beautiful. And every time I awaken, I must give her back to dust.

Who is the real heir to the artist of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc? Think about that late at night.

2011-02-19T04:45:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 383 – February 19
My Space
Part Two

I've learned a few key things about myself living in Bath. I've learned that my average walking speed is between two and three miles per hour. I know that because I pass the bus station every evening on the way home. As I walk beside the ramp for buses, a sign flashes a message at me in red: Slow Down! And it gives me a reading for speed. When I'm cheery, it's three miles per hour; when I'm down it's two. Most times, it alternates between the two as I pass.

And there are the more disappointing things I've learned about myself. I'm staying in the loft room of a rather nice home on the rooftop of Bath, at the top of Beechen Cliff. This is Pey's neighborhood, of course, and one I'm very familiar with, and still infatuated with. I look out one window and see, well, Pey's house. I look out another and I see a panorama of the hills south of Bath. Looking right, I also see the green fields stretching toward Bristol. I am fond of that prospect. One day a few weeks ago, I set out to run to Bristol, and I passed among those very hills and fields. The run itself was something of a disaster; it did wonders for my now infamous injuries. And I wasn't even able to finish the entire course, only reaching the outskirts of downtown Bristol before I stopped at the sight of a supermarket, into which I staggered, insulting and shoving aside a pregnant woman who stood in front of the juices. A pint of orange juice dispatched, I grumpily boarded a local bus to the train station.

Anyway, my house in owned by Becky, and occupied by her and her two pre-teens. One day, I'm stalled in the middle of changing for my daily run when I get a phone call, and simultaneously there's a knock on my bedroom door. I vaguely say, 'Yeah?' and the door begins to swing inward. It's the boy of the family inviting me downstairs for lunch. But I don't know who is coming in, so I retreat, mid-sentence on the phone, behind the corner by my bed. The boy takes no clues and follows me, staring at my bare chest. 'Right. No, thanks there, James,' I reply politely, standing in the dark corner of my room, feeling only silly embarrassment.

One imagines there must be a submerged and, hopefully, an adequately repressed thrill in occurrences like this, (at least if 'one' is a post-Lolita urban Westerner). But I'm here to report, there is no joy in standing nearly naked before a pre-teen. What's left of the artist in me is disappointed. What's a good bohemian without indecent, illicit, thrills?

More disappointments: I'm learning again that I'm horrible at accents, and this is really one of the great tragedies of my life. I have always loved the company of those who can do accents. They have my permission to indulge in accents all night with me, and I'll delight like an idiot the whole time. After a few days in Bath, my internal voice speaks in a Bath accent. It's a very fun one. In any case, I am incapable of translating that voice into the external world. My attempts are embarrassing. What makes it all the worse is the teasing I receive at the hands of said pre-teens. They would naturally find the American accent amusing. When I try to mimic theirs, I just get laughs.

I'm learning that I don't mind the rain so much. I have made a great point in the past of my general opposition to the concept and experience of rain. I have taken care to differentiate between rain and snow, as a good Minnesotan should. Dry precipitation is quite acceptable in my book. For best effect, don't start the storm until it's well under freezing. The only exception to my rule about snow is if I have to drive. But I have equally strong objections to the concept and experience of driving, so that by rights falls under a different subtitle. (And driving in Great Britain merits another entire diatribe.)

But rain in England is simply … appropriate, isn't it? I prepped myself psychologically while in sunny Ethiopia. I know northern Europe far too well. What's more, while I was still a runner – oh, those glorious days … only last week – while I was a runner, I found clouds and drizzle pleasant. 'Clouds and drizzle' just about covers it. That's ninety percent of the weather here. I harbor entirely different emotions for a gentle drizzle than I do for rain. It's meditative; it's melancholy. It doesn't ruin your clothes. It doesn't ruin your hairstyle. The latter is all the more important now that I can't afford a visit to the barber.

I wake in the mornings. I assess the day's variation on clouds and drizzle. I watch the impacts of the precipitation on the skylight, against the weak and grey northern light of the sky. If I can count the raindrops, it's nice enough to go out. And that's most of the time. The air outside is fragrant of lush growth and mold, fresh with the rain.

2011-02-18T03:51:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 382 – February 18
My Space
Part One

It's Friday night, and I've allowed myself to work too late. The consequences are unique to England. I should back up and set the scene. I'm just about two weeks into a working vacation in Bath, England. I'm renting a bedroom up the hill in Pey's lovely neighborhood on top of the steep hill above and south of town center.

I keep the work going. Work never stops, no matter what the locale. In Bath, my day is divided into three shifts, Sunday to Saturday. The morning shift is all about Ethiopia. I walk down the hill and enter the precincts of lovely, centuries-old Bath stone, looking for my work station. I spend loads of time in front of the netbook. And then my second shift begins. That entails the first of many hikes back up the intimidating hill, back home. After some tidying up of the morning's work, I'm off to train. I'm training for the Bath Half, March 6. I'm only achieving mixed results at best with that work, dealing as I am with a host of old-man maladies and injuries.

The third shift is generally writing. That has to happen in a pub. The English pub is a wonderfully inspiring work space. It follows a nearly invariable pattern, in its décor and in its hours. Since I'm fond of early evenings and early bedtimes, I like to get right to work after training, ordering my first pint by five. The earlier the better. There are practical reasons for that. The after-work crowd comes in soon afterward. And on a Friday night, the crowd is unruly.

I'm working ar Molloy's tonight. At six, the boys enter. They start in with me right away. The lads are not from Bath; their accents are broad and hard to follow. One of them seems to want to tell me about how fit he and his mates are. Another is very curious whether I'm up to business or to porn. 'Are you a businessman, are you?' No, I'm …. Another one seems to want to know about my digestion, or possibly my bum. All of it is delivered in a rapid-fire, drug-accelerated patois that I only partially understand.

Glenn takes a special interest in me, and the boys have a good laugh while he chats me up. He could be from a movie, possibly from a cartoon, he's so street-Brit skinhead. He's small and wiry, and looks perennially ready for a brawl. His eyes are piercing and mocking He wants to know who I am, where I'm from, and what I'm doing. Magically, the only thing I have to do in order to avoid a thrashing is to talk with him.

See, Glenn is from Swindon, a larger and more working class city not far from Bath to the east, on the way to London. In Bath, he says, leaning into me in his muscular and confidential manner, the people don't reply when you say hello. They're just blank, he says. 'It doesn't cost much, does it? Just to say hello? Some people, it makes their day, doesn't it? Just a friendly hello.' I cannot disagree. I ask about Swindon folk. He informs me they are 'skatty'. 'You know, they come out with the most random comments. 'They might say, “Good morning, ma'am. How are you this morning, and could you please tell me how are your sausages are getting on?” You know, something like that.'

Glenn and I are quickly mates. The blokes wander off, bored with teasing Glenn, who takes no notice. He's having a good chat with his new mate, Dan. (That's me.) There are so many things he wants to tell me about. He wants to tell me about raves. He tells me about the biggest of them all in Stratford-on-Avon. He fishes for the phone in his deep trouser pockets. The screensaver on the phone is photo of a young lady with a very fine figure and unblemished skin. She's showing lots of that skin, her legs spread. Glenn starts scrolling through photo files until he finds several videos, informing me as he does about the size and craziness of this rave. The video is less than crazy. There are people meandering among tents. 'You like bass and drums?' He demands, and he shows me the drum and bass tent. There are bobbing heads and a stage far off. 'Wow,' I say.

Glenn wants to tell me about doing the bungee jump at the rave, all 'pilled up'. His accent is getting the better of me, and I nod. It seems the line for the bungee event is a long one, and he combats his boredom with another set of pills, borrowing a bottle of water from his neighbor in line. (This last detail involves a story of its own, several minutes long, that slides right by me. Glenn weaves in the seat next to me, continually swinging back toward me, nearly butting heads and never letting his gaze waver.) 'Can you see it, mate? Bungee jumping on pills (on pi-ws)? How crazy is that?' I never find out what the pills were, and I wouldn't be shocked to find out that he never knew himself.

The lads have moved on. The boy who is 'fit' comes back. 'How are we doing, laddies?' It occurs to Glenn that this is his time to exit. He rises, and he makes several attempts at an exit, returning with vital observations. And then Glenn is gone. I could work, but my computer is packed away. I'm done for the day.

And that's the challenge of working in English pubs. The people are very friendly. On one of my first nights in Bath, I'm working at the Bear, a local pub up on the hill. Suddenly it's quiz night. People are flooding in. Tables are reserved. Richard invites me to join his group. Richard is another chatty bloke. He, his mate, his girfriend, and I form a quiz team. I tell them about Ethiopia. They tell me about their business – selling sex toys via the internet. I'm sure they're yanking my chain, but they earnestly insist. Richard backs it up by naming a sex shop in Minneapolis that he had heard about in … trade magazines (?), a place he remembers because it is owned by 'serious lesbians'.

For the record, our team does fairly well. There are six rounds, and my biggest contribution is during the round about dictators. Go figure. We lose it in the last round, the subject of which is British soap operas. It's worth losing to see the pub denizens creasing brows and slapping knees over who was so-and-so's fourth wife, the one who subsequently rose from the dead to exact vengeance.

Oh, fortitude, lend me fortitude, my Muse, as I try to craft a brief life and a brief book in old Bath Spa, so unresponsive to the hellos of Swindon lads but so overflowing with brotherly feelings for the writer from bloody America.

My readers will be relieved, it occurs to me, that I was able to catch the match between Arsenal and Barcelona the night before last, against all odds … but that's a tale for next time, innit? Cheers.

2011-02-03T03:53:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 381 – February 3
Some Miles

My second day in Amsterdam is gorgeous! Even before I left Ethiopia, I resigned myself to clouds and cold for the whole of my European sojourn, but here it is, my second day in the gloomy north, and the sun is proudly shining. The sky is boldly blue. I rise from bed astonished and fortified by abundant daylight. It's exactly what I needed on a day set aside for loads of work and many miles training for the half marathon. The sun gives me strength.

Living at the HEM Hotel gives me access to two of the largest of Amsterdam's city parks, the Vondelpark and Rembrantspark. I set out in the afternoon, after a morning of work in the cafe on my netbook, after my breakfast of egg and bagel has digested. I throw on the battered running shoes that double as walking shoes on this trip, shoes breaking through in the toes and with arches that gave up the ghost long ago. I set out from the HEM, chasing the geese along the first canal, crossing over on the concrete bridge and heading north until the canal takes a ninety-degree turn. Carrying on in that direction, I eventually reach the Vondelpark.

The Vondelpark was opened in the mid-nineteenth century, one of those grand city parks so much the rage in the flush of the industrial age. It is reminiscent of New York's Central Park in its narrow shape, acting as a sort of bridge among some of the city's most traveled districts. I run the park's length along one side of the connected ponds in the middle of the park, running all the way to the garish casino that stands opposite the park's grand entrance at the first of the centrum's canals. And I run back again along the other side of the ponds, exiting the park toward the north.

I feel my way along the streets north of my neighborhood, guided by the google map in my head, eventually finding the Rembrandtpark, another sizable rectangle of meadows and paths squeezed among the dense blocks of Amsterdam. This park is more modern, dating only to the middle of the last century, partaking of the bleakness of post-industrialism, feeling more like a place of our times, 'urban' in the ugly way of our belated age. Poor old Rembrandtpark can't help that it was assigned some more down-and-out districts of the city to serve. It spans a few miles of the north-south axis of the city, vs. Vondelpark's posh east-west section of the town. By the time the park reaches its northern terminus, all pretense has been dropped. Precious city park acreage is devoted to a drive-through KFC. I jog by the scarce locals, the hookers, and the punks … twice. In order to get my mileage, I have the run the circuit of Rembrantpark two times, and then go back and circle Vondelpark one and a half times.

The next day, I'm sore and tired. The sky seems just as used up. Ignominious clouds have crept back. The HEM locks me out of my room while I'm out for coffee. The elevators don't work, so I walk up and down to the third floor three times trying each new key they give me, until finally a cleaning woman lectures me about check-out time and unlocks my door with Teutonic authority. I'm kicked out forthwith, and have to wander the dim streets until my evening flight.

Since I have the time, I figure out the bus route from Oud Zuid to Schiphol – that's the 197 for anyone interested – and then stare into some canals, stare into some coffees, stare into my computer screen. I'm tempted to check out another museum, but find I just don't have the energy.

Evening inches forward. It's been coming on since the first glow among the clouds. As the light fails, I find my bus stop. Amsterdam recedes into the night, strange rows of high rises removed from the centrum like corporate colonies. Half the people disembarking from the Schiphol bus are fast food and hotel and baggage employees, sulking teens and tired ghetto moms. Airports: where the jaded and the bone-weary meet to exchange soiled bank notes. Airports: monumental fluorescent-lit halls where the sleepless wander – the closest thing to a zombie movie you'll find in the real world.

2011-02-02T01:36:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 380 – February 2
The Neighborhood

I've adopted a neighborhood again. That's what I do. In Rome, it's Colli Albani. In Addis, it's Shiro Meda and Amist Kilo – the north side. There's no compelling logic to my choices. They're often led haphazardly by the first contact, the proximity of my first hotel or a friend's place.

Neighborhoods suit me. Neighborhoods are how people live. My patience for historic / touristic town centers is wearing thin. I like the day to day. And mundane doesn't mean uninteresting. People live with history. History lives through people. 'Regular' districts of major cities can offer some surprising discoveries.

My neighborhood in Amsterdam straddles Slotervaart and Oud Zuid, as near as I can tell. There are always fine distinctions among neighborhood names that a non-native won't catch. My home base is the HEM Hotel, a rather nondescript place dropped in a small bit of nowhere. On the next block is a school named 'St. Jan de Doper'. Only Amsterdam would honor a Saint John the Doper with a primary school. Price is the only thing to recommend this hotel. One can almost always find a cheap room here online. But the place loves its rules, and it makes up for low room rates with the innumerable charges for extras. Breakfast is about $20. Early check-in costs ten euros per hour. Late check-out costs twenty euros per hour. Etc.

It takes only a block or two's stroll to discover the virtues of the HEM's location. Two blocks north is the #2 tram, which runs frequently and reaches the centrum in 10-15 minutes. Walk two blocks east to the canal, taking note of the enormous white geese, noisy but harmless. Cross the canal and walk a few more blocks to the next canal. Then turn left and walk up to the main road, the street that hosts the tram. What you'll notice, besides the geese, are the pleasant brick residential buildings, the scores of people on their bicycles, the peacefulness, and the many little shops and pubs along the sidewalks and bike paths.

On the tram street, across the canal, you'll find my breakfast place, the 'Bagels and Beans'. Everything there is good, coffee, sandwiches, and yes, bagels. Having crossed that second canal, you'll find that the eastward walk becomes by degrees more fun, more posh. It's a few miles until you reach the centrum, and frankly the centrum is where things get seedy again. Stick to Oud Zuid, I say. North of the tram road are loads of little shops and eateries, and several of the larger city parks. My favorite meals this time are at the Gent aan de Schinkel. Gent is 'on the Schinkel', another canal. To make the name most fun, you have to pronounce Schinkel properly, making your 'ch' rise from the throat in a deep 'h' sound. Dinner on the Schinkel is heavenly, lamb with apricot and hazelnut, venison with lentils, complemented best by a few pints of LaChouffe. I'm very happy walking back to the hotel, stopping at the used book store where the elderly proprietress recognizes me. She turns on the light in the back room, where she keeps the shelves of English language books. It's interesting to see which authors pop up in different international locales. In Amsterdam, it would seem that among the most popular authors in English are Graham Greene (true everywhere,) Jerzy Kosinski (!), Len Deighton, and Virginia Woolf. Okay.

I arrived in Amsterdam at 7am. The HEM kindly offered to let me check in at 11am, for an early charge of only thirty euros. I declined, shouldered my pack, and headed for the tram. The sun still hadn't risen, and it wasn't easy to tell even when it did because of the thick fog. The day was never more than dim, and the wind was sharp and cold. It was a good day for a museum.

I haven't been to the Rijksmuseum for many years. For half the price of checking in to the HEM early, I bought the privilege of a few hours with the Dutch artists of the Golden Age. There was Frans Hals, happy-go-lucky portraitist with the light touch and loose hand, fond of painting debauching bourgeoisie. There was Rembrandt, early and late, profoundly sensitive to the emotion in a face, as demonstrated in his famous portrait of Jan Six, and profoundly attuned to the power of light, and to the power of one daub of paint, in an eye, on a button. I took in the famous 'Night Watch', his repackaging of the tradition of group portraits of the Dutch militia, refreshing it with action and depth. It blows the mind to think that a later generation would slice off pieces from either end in order to make it fit on their chosen wall.

But the piece that captured my heart was one by my perennial favorite, Vermeer. The piece is the called 'The Milkmaid'. She is in the kitchen, pouring milk from a pitcher into a bowl. On the table are a basket of bread and another pitcher. She stands before a window. Hanging on the wall is a wicker basket. Behind her on the tile floor is a little charcoal stove. Along the bottom of the wall, you see typical Dutch blue tile. Simple.

So what is it about Mr. Vermeer? I can't really say, in any final and all-encompassing way. But I can say he has a vibrant shade of blue that's all his own. I can say that there are details that jump out at you as amazingly sharp and convincing: the basket, the bread, the stove and the floor it stands on. Even the plain wall behind her is almost bizarrely convincing, including nail holes, chinks, and indentations, including the irregularities in the plaster, including the uneven impact of light and shadow on its surface. But a good painting isn't just about verisimilitude. It's a painting. The face is an impression of a face, a beautiful impression. If Mr. Vermeer had lived in the time of photography, would he have tried to match the accuracy? I tend to think not. However astonishing the detail in the wicker basket, it's the lovely face that everything else complements.

2011-01-23T02:46:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 379 – January 23
Lessons of the Chaka
Part Two

We're about forty minutes into our hundred-minute run. I can feel the time in my body. I'm right behind Tesfahun, following with a kind of Stockholm fervency. Fikre is behind me, I can hear her footsteps. Tesfahun's favorite course begins in the chaka (forest) at the head of the meadow above the church of Entoto Maryam. Tesfahun likes a rough course, and this chaka is especially uneven. He takes many a sharp turn, and heads suddenly up steep hillsides, among treacherous roots and rocks. He squeezes between the closest trunks and dodges under low-hanging branches. I'm swatted in the face by swinging eucalyptus leaves and I'm clutched at by nettles.

I confess that I particularly like these sections of the run, the most like dance. I was holding forth last time on the five-fold path of the chaka. The dance was the first sacred principle: watch how you move, and enjoy it. I notice how clumsy I am while I turn to fit between tree trunks. I can feel all the extra weight I carry these days. I feel it as I lumber down a steep slope, rock to rock, landing with every step, rather than moving forward with light transfers of weight. I stay aware of all movement.

We're approaching halfway. I can see the wide dirt road that traverses the ridge. Across the road is a field where all the trees have been harvested, leaving only trunks and a bed of branches and leaves. This is another slick tactic of Tesfahun's, high-stepping among these fallen branches, each step falling among the leaves on uncertain ground. We're in full sunlight now. I feel my energy dipping.

Principle Number Two: managing one's resources. A long distance run is like an ephemeral little economy. One has limited resources – some of us more limited than others – and one must spend them wisely. So the dials require close monitoring, dials roughly corresponding to water, fuel, ready energy and latent energy. One monitors muscle fatigue, and body heat, and some of us monitor their portfolios of injuries, recovering at their various slow rates.

My despairing ankles and knees survive Tesfahun's minefields. We re-enter the chaka, this time on the other, the northern side of the range. The woods here are confined to a relatively narrow bit of land above a steep drop. One catches glimpses of the many miles of golden hills rolling northward, toward Selulta and Chancho and Fiche.

It's early afternoon and the sun is at its strongest. The play of shadow and light among the leaves and stones at my feet can be dazzling and distracting. Because I'm the faranj, I'm always second in line, which means that my field of vision is very reduced. I see the terrain ahead only a few feet at a time, practically as my feet discover it. Principle Number Three: one must stay alert. Aside from immediate distractions, such as the dazzling light, there are many temptations to draw one away from the present moment: the soothing views of golden fields and distant hills and whole hillsides of eucalyptus; the business of the day, crawling back ignominiously to nestle among the brain waves; daydreams about the glory of the race, or even the pain of running itself. Monitoring pain and thinking about it are two different things. The latter eventually creates its own problems.

Pain comes darn close to being a principle of its own, very salient to the athlete, or even to the dilettante-athlete such as myself. What saves pain from being a principle is that it is an experience. Among world-class philosophers of pseudo-sport, this is a vital point. Pain is real as a tree trunk, purer than thought. To the chaka runner, pain becomes more, becomes a familiar,becomes the witch's cat, the pirate's parrot, the Athenian's daemon, whispering in the ear. To an amateur, pain says, 'Stop!' To the chaka runner, pain whispers sweet promises.

In a roundabout way, this leads right into Principle Number Four, which is Focus. Running is an achievement of the mind. Alchemy bubbles in the brain cells. Pain becomes promise, and distances telescope. Eyesight dulled by computer work becomes acute. Muscle movement made dull by mundane routine becomes precise. Where jogging up a flight of ten stairs in the city feels like a fatal punch in the gut, half a mile up a rough mountainside is controlled, ecstatic agony.

We head back toward home. I can feel it before I realize it. Eventually we emerge from the chaka into the fields of dry grass where we started. Tesfahun usually wants to finish with five minutes or so in these broad fields, which are pretty but which very effectively undermine my confidence. This is when I am most tempted to hate Tesfahun with all my heart. The fields are discouraging for several reasons. First, we have an audience. Families are washing clothes or collecting water in the spring. Invariably, this means catcalls and jeering from all and sundry, just when I'm most tired. For another thing, I find the stimulation of the close woods stimulating. Emerging into open space where one sees the full distance one must conquer, and lacking the somewhat artificial sense of speed afforded by dense woods, robs one's sails of considerable wind. Lastly, these fields are set at a steep slant. Invariably, Tesfahun is taken over by Satan and arranges for a steep uphill climb to cap the long run.

Test now the Fifth Principle of chaka training: measure and check your reactions. Emotional and mental fatigue are more potent than physical fatigue. You can work with physical fatigue. Pull in your resources. Rather than slumping forward and giving in to a desperate and sloppy forward stride, pull it in. Straighten your back, measure and regularize your pace, and place each footfall precisely. There are always cycles to strength and energy. Pulling in is like laying a new base for the next cycle. Power returns, and your resilience will surprise you. But not until you regain some precision and economy of movement.

The final stretch is down the original dirt road, hard as asphalt in places, dodging donkeys and children and emerging into the dirt piazza in front of the church, Entoto Maryam. There our fan club gathers around us, a ragtag bunch of little boys who mimic our stretches and laugh. Shimeles backs his taxi out of the shadow of the church's wall. Once we've warmed down, we set out for the city. Addis Ababa lies spreading below us, reaching for Debre Zeit across valleys full of yellow teff.

2011-01-22T06:06:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 378 – January 22
Lessons of the Chaka
Part One

I'm feeling aggrieved because I have to rush to my biggest training run to date, straight from long, back-to-back meetings. I'm out of breath and five minutes late, jogging up the hill from my place to the asphalt road where I meet my taxi driver and my trainers, Tesfahun and Fikre. In fact, I'm a feeling a little macho about how brave I am, … until I hear from Fikre that she's coming straight from the stadium, where she just placed third in a race of 10,000 meters. I'm chastened. I ask her to see her medallion. It's a big wafer of metal with the Pepsi symbol on one side and a simple picture embossed on the other of female runners encircled by spare Amharic script.

We start the drive up Entoto mountain in Shimeles's old Lada, a vehicle that takes the incline so slowly that I get plenty of rest before the big run. We tease each other, asking chubby Shimeles when he's going to join us, taunting quiet and diffident Fikre about how difficult she is. I get teased about how much I suffer on these runs. Today we do 100 minutes in the chaka. I'm running out of training time in Ethiopia. Next week, we'll do the run from Entoto to Kotebe, something of a tradition now while I'm in training. I rent a minibus and invite a good crew from the team, and then I treat them all to lunch afterward. Kotebe is roughly half a marathon's distance from Entoto along a rocky dirt road that follows the ridge of the mountains. It features a few monster hills, but winds downhill for its second half, nearly breaking my morale with its relentless stones, gullies, and switchbacks. But that's the kind of thing runners think is fun.

We arrive and we stretch. I'm watching Fikre. She's so thin. She says she's seventeen, which is patently untrue. That has to be at least five years off the mark. Athletes here habitually lie about their age. She lives on her own and works as a housekeeper part-time. Her hands are over-sized and tough, a sign of the manual work she has always done to survive. Tesfahun tells me she was leading during the whole race today but wasn't able to hold onto the lead at the end. She has no kick. I'm no expert, but it seems clear to me why: she has no muscle. I'm pretty sure she gets nowhere near the protein she needs. I'll take her out for a celebratory feast tonight.

We start. I've admonished them to take it easy on me today. I'm comforted that Tesfahun is leading. Fikre unconsciously accelerates when she leads. The sun is strong today. Though we're in the shade most of the time, the dazzling light and the heat get to me early. I'm feeling light-headed. My breath is uneven. Past Entoto we're over 10,000 feet, according to Cien's mountain-man watch readings. I find that I never totally adapt to the altitude. I have moments of short breath and dizziness no matter how long I've been in Ethiopia.

But as I've mentioned before, one must stay alert and nimble in chaka training. One can't let one's feet drag; one can't lose concentration. Chaka training has become a kind of zen practice and yoga for me. One hundred minutes of pinpoint meditation and body awareness.

Shall I share? Here, in a nutshell, is the five-fold path of chaka training:

1. Since returning to running a few years ago, I've discovered that age may not bring wisdom, but it certainly forces one to look for it. When I ran as a boy, the body didn't resist. There were few dues to pay. Getting relatively serious about it at this age, I found myself battling injury after injury. Thus began the path of posture. After some perfunctory research, I decided that posture accounted for most of my injuries. I was fortunate in that my subsequent experiments were successful.

I got into the habit of monitoring my body as I ran. I checked in with feet, with back, with knees. I adjusted as I ran, straightening up, pulling in my stride, making sure my feet were underneath me, making sure I was rolling off the whole foot evenly. One injury would fade, and another would appear with another lesson.

In the chaka, I find myself even more aware of body mechanics. Maybe it's because of the variety of terrain, making for more variety of movement. It's a fascinating study, and profitable in the pursuit of fluid running.

2011-01-14T04:23:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 377 – January 14
The Chaka

We're about halfway through the dry season. Since the small rains a few weeks ago, the sun has been steady and hot. The skies are glaring. The grass on the hillside is golden. It crunches under our feet. The three of us are passing single file across a broad sloping meadow underneath Entoto's peak. Nearby mountains spread their own gentle slopes to the east, yellow meadows and patches of eucalyptus. Below us are several families sitting among the grasses, washing clothes, watching livestock.

We are heading toward the woods for some training. I'm behind in my conditioning for the half marathon in March. I've been battling bronchitis for weeks. I've got to get some distance in. We enter the stands of orderly eucalyptus and begin the sixty-minute workout.

This is the most characteristic of Ethiopian training: chaka training. Chaka means forest. We dive right in among the trees and begin circling among the thin trunks of eucalyptus. Athletes might count themselves among the only beneficiaries of deforestation in Ethiopia. The entire range of mountains here have succumbed to the Australian invasion. The eucalyptus grows fast and is harvested fast. It is planted in tidy rows. Underneath is only bare red earth or moss.

Fikre is leader today. She is one of our top female athletes; she came in 26th in her distance in the recent cross country championships. She's tiny and very thin. She has a bright smile, and a certain innocence in her round eyes, in her girlish laugh. Behind me is Tesfahun, one of the short distance guys. He's in college and speaks English well. They are both extremely kind and patient. Running at my pace is trying, there can be no doubt.

Ahead of me, Fikre flinches when she hears me stumble or snap a stick in two. Chaka running takes intense concentration, which is one of the reasons I love it. We wind among the trees in tight formation, weaving among close trunks of trees, sailing over rocks and limbs, dancing down through gullies, down steep slopes and back up. You have to be very alert, and you can't let fatigue slow your reflexes or drag down your stride. During my first few runs, I experience a few severe 'benders', ankle twists that could have stopped me cold. But my ankles are pretty tough after years of running, and I force myself to keep going. If one stops, the ankle swells too much to run on. On my second run, I let my feet drag and tumble over a root. I roll down a slope and gather a few good scrapes, but again, I force myself up and running, though limping for a good five minutes. This is why Fikre flinches when she hears me being clumsy.

We run sixty, seventy, or eighty minutes. I need to boost this to one hundred soon. It's funny, because in eighty minutes, you literally never stray further than a few miles from your launch point, knitting complex patterns among the woods. At first, I struggle with that. My linear nature wants to cover some ground. I want to go from here to there. But after the first run, I'm hooked. The compensation is the connection among the runners. Chaka running becomes hypnotic. After the first ten minutes or so, you feel like you're all attached invisibly, and the leader's movements are your own. You are pulled forward by the leader and sustained by the one behind. The hypnotism of open-road running is the pace. Here it's somehow the opposite: the choppiness and variability of the terrain and pace induce a kind of hyper-awareness that a more pleasant trance than the lulling rhythm of street-running.

The dry woods are pretty. Once in a while we pass a crudely tilled field, a lazy horse or lying sheep. Every so often we see the wood-collectors in the distance, stout women who will bundle branches on their backs and walk down the mountain. Occasionally, there's a ragged man with callouses gripping an axe, showing us a startled face. The sunshine glows brightly in skipping spots along the forest floor. Light breezes hiss among the long leaves of the eucalyptus. Fikre winces at another clumsy step.

2010-12-30T21:33:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 376 – December 30
The Small Rain

The clouds have gathered in recent days, taking nothing away from the beautiful daylight hours, adding nothing more than spells of shadow and cool mornings. Suddenly last night, they piled up above the mountains, black and flashing with lightning, and they released torrents of rain. Fortunately we were down in Bole, the city's furthest district from the mountains. We watched the light show for an hour before the rain reached as far south as we were.

It's still raining this morning, mildly, steadily, like a mood almost spent. It's still raining when Derartu and Altaye arrive. They come by the house every other morning. Derartu and Altaye are athletes on my team, a young woman and young man with talent in the short-distances, the 800 and 1500. MWF they run speed drills written out by one of the U of M athletes, and TTS they do strength training with Cien. Sometimes it's weight training, and sometimes it's drills borrowed from a video that Cien brought with him, lunges and jumps and twists to driving music.

Kerempt, the rainy season, is a long way off. The autumn is usually all blue skies. The winter and spring months will see occasional 'small rains'. We're getting an early one. We are lulled during the night with the patter of the rain against our metal roofs.

I'm exiled to my bedroom during training. I have work to do. I set up the netbook on my bed and I type to the beat of Cien's southern rock. Occasionally I join the clan in the living room just for a laugh. Being top-notch athletes does not guarantee grace and poise. Many of the movements required are beyond them. This kind of thing is alien. They didn't grow up with PE classes, gymnastic, or ballet. One day they decided to run. That particular motion they've mastered. But the finer distinctions among forward and sideways lunges, bounces and sidesteps, wide arm movements while balancing, all escape them. It makes for comical workouts. When Ijigu is around, he tends to simply jump from side to side no matter what the video exercise.

This starts with Altaye. He's a boy blessed and cursed with talent. He grew up with a contemptuous father in tough country. Somehow he escaped to the city and has survived with virtually no skill, knowledge or talent beyond his running. He can't read. He needs his instructions delivered three times over. He cuts corners like a boy half his age. But he has a winning smile and raw talent as a runner. He requires strict supervision. He needs some muscle, and he needs some specialized training. There is no body fat on him, but he can't do ten push-ups. He can sprint around the track with the best in Ethiopia, but he's unfamiliar with spikes and blocks. Before we got hold of him, he had run on a real track a few times per year. Now he's prancing around the courtyard with Cien, a little mystified but in good spirits.

I'm inside staring at the computer again. For some reason, Januarys have been our most hectic months, even more so than Septembers, when the school year gets going. I can't say why, but it seems the prime month for visitors. Next month does more than prove the pattern; it pushes it further. We have far more going on than I have hours in my planning day, week, or month to take care of. Advances are made before there is the structure to support it. That's where I come in as trouble-shooter, and keep coming in, year after year. These are the growing pains; these are the small rains.

Derartu doesn't need much supervision. She is eighteen. She has run with our team since she was sixteen. But when it's time to train she is the adult in the room. While Altaye wears his goofy grin and cuddles up to Cien, Derartu attacks every movement with a creased brow, clean movement, and blunt muscle. When we take Derartu out for the occasional meal – a good dose of protein, she stares straight ahead silently. The rare smile is beautiful, but she is not here to smile. She is paying her dues.

2010-12-28T21:00:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 375 – December 13
Amsterdam, Part Two

It's so hard to get up early in northern Europe. It's dark, and then it's dark some more. I eventually climb out of bed. Outside, the sunrise tints the clouds pink. It's 8:30.

I'm going to walk into the centrum. The canals have a film of ice on them. Seagulls stand on the ice as though they are dazed by the slow dawn.

The trams are humming by. Loads of people are cruising around on bikes. There's bustle, but there's never chaos in Amsterdam. It's the happiest town for A-type stoners. Bike paths accompany every street. Intersections are governed by intricate electronic choreography, and everyone obeys. Everything is tiny and cute. Only the detail and individuality of age saves the town from feeling like a model train set.

It's early enough, and I'm having little enough luck finding a place wide enough for a comfortable work session, so I commit to the walk into the centrum. I do make one stop before I make it there, a plush brasserie, where a diminutive machiatto costs three euro, where sheer white drapes hang beside ceiling-high mirrors. Some of the clientele could be TV stars. The men talk like producers. They wear bold ties. Their hair is Netherlands shag.

I continue my walk, along the Number Two tram line. I eventually arrive at the imposing Rijksmuseum. Passing that building and the Van Gogh Museum, I arrive in the centrum, crossing the first of the inner rings of canals. From here, everything just gets smaller, more squeezed, and more precious.

I stop at the Kandinsky Coffeehouse among the inner rings. It's Amsterdam cramped, all up and no width, off the beaten path, and exhibiting only a modicum of the charm of the classical facades around it. It has a counter downstairs and a few seats. Upstairs consists of four tables on poles set before a ragged L of a cushioned bench along the balcony, divan-style. The tables are barely big enough for my netbook. The music is made of bleeps and chants and hip-hop rhythms in water drops and bubble-gum pops. The downstairs has just enough space for several predictable murals featuring Oriental pleasures.

The barista is a tired-looking eighteen year-old blonde, who is eager to please, which means she is ready with a preemptive show of angry irony. 'Hello,' she drones, her tone saying she has my measure. 'Yes, you can sit upstairs but you have to order downstairs.' Oh? 'You can try to order upstairs ….' I think her English fails her here. Biting wit requires too much agility in a second language. I'd like to see the prices for coffee, but the menu only features hashish and 'Dutch Grass'. They have what seems like a nice variety of these items, several pages worth, anyway, and they're rated by 'stone'. Hmm. You know, I'd just like a coffee. She bucks her head dismissively. 'What kind?' I'm apologetic. I'm missing the tinsel celebs of the brasserie.

2010-12-12T05:59:00.001-08:00

Travelogue 374 – December 12
Amsterdam, Part One

It's the truth. I find it odd to be back in this old city again, find it strange and stirring. I've had a pass-through or two in the time since the halcyon days when I lived here, but those isolated snapshots are yellowing themselves, in their way more perishable than the impossibly distant autumn of my residence.

It was the fall. I was a student. It was the season, by chance, that witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall – an event that I'm afraid rings as old these days as the moon shot, as Civil Rights, as the Civil War. But some of us walking the earth have held pieces of the Wall in their hands, gripping them like crystals, and wondering at the sensation of history, at the Right-Here-Right-Nowness of it.

That was my first extended trip to Europe. It was my first chance to experience the contrast between Europe the Romance and Europe the Reality. I was settled into student buildings stacked like blocks of cement among dozens of others of its kind in the outer rings of the city, reached by humming trams. The rooms were square and sterile, functional in a way that I found intriguing, appealing. The Dutch are indeed urban planners. They have centuries of practice squeezing dense populations into precious small space, all reclaimed from the North Sea. I remember feeling the sea, present though out of sight, grey and cold. Once you're outside the centrum, Holland asserts itself. One might think the high narrow houses, all with their hooks, characterize Holland, but instead I think of the flat, green fields, the narrowness of the land itself, the sprawl of flavorless buildings in neat blocks that halt abruptly along a line that the eternally thoughtful planners have scratched across a map.

I remember the light, Flemish skies expanding into expressive banks of cloud. Lying below those over-ripe impressions was the blunt fact of our latitude: the skies grew dim as the solstice approached. Frost gathered in the lengthening shadows and never melted. The omniscient concrete melded into the season's light.

I remember the Dutch, smart and sarcastic, the men with their stubborn blonde shags that were already dated. I remember their quiet domesticity. I remember the ruthlessly egalitarian spirit of the Dutch, tiring in its stridency. I remember being the only American in my language class. I fell for my teacher, young and fiercely intelligent, who not only didn't speak English – an oddity among the Dutch – but made a point of it. I remember American classmates from other classes, and drinking with them into the wee hours of the deep northern night. I amused them with ball-point portraits of their beer-numbed features. I remember Napoleon, my Colombian classmate, who entranced me with his uncanny salsa.

What I don't remember very well are red lights, canals, and 'coffee houses'. These pictures reside at the core of most modern tourists' impression. Amsterdam has become one of Europe's party cities. Book a short flight and commence drinking; make great shows of carousing; take photos with prostitutes; that sort of thing. I confess that, with the exception of Vegas in my teens, I've never conformed well to that mass mandate of travel. I've certainly 'partied', but I've never felt the need of a pack or a sanctioned city in order to do it.

Amsterdam in image is 'cool' in that mysteriously hypnotic way of our time. Age does much to strip away the mystique, and suddenly 'cool' evaporates and leaves something amazingly banal. What is more common, in fact, than intoxication and the jaded, self-aware merchandising of sex? Is this how it was in high school? Did we all swoon before mediocrity, just because we were entranced by its self-confidence? 'Cool' metastasizes into philosophy the way a drunk's ramblings on a bar napkin become art, in a sort of bold sleight-of-hand that consists of nothing but boldness. To the extent that the Dutch call their libertinism 'culture', the more they trivialize themselves. Fortunately, history preserves for them a better place.

2010-12-11T00:33:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 373 – December 11
Christmas in Bath

The Kennet and Avon Canal has chunks of ice in it. The Bath area has emerged from a bitter cold spell just in time for my visit. I'm thankful. I need a long run, and I don't have cold weather gear. The towpath is very sloppy, offering either puddles or orange mud to the runner's careful foot. I choose the mud.

It isn't by any means warm out, nor is the afternoon terribly inviting for nature walks, glowering with clouds and already gloaming at 3pm. But there are still a good number of hardy Brits out still, unsteady on their old bikes or hunched inside their long jackets, their dogs by their sides.

The countryside still offers its charms, even in winter. The hillsides are green, lined in a very few fields with traces of snow. The trees are bare and brooding. Everything seems more damp than usual in the frustrated light of near-solstice. There are places slick with frost that never goes away. The sun rarely hits the ground in the northern shadow of tall hills.

The city offers a contrast to the vanquished silence of the hills. Today is Saturday, and Christmas is two weeks away. Bath is the shopping town for the region. The shopping streets downtown are jammed with milling people, and people remarkably cheery for what strikes me as a season of anxiety. Everyone is with family, window-shopping, gobbling sweets at cafes, carrying bags in every available hand. They're smiling, greeting, and chattering. Musicians are playing at corners. There's a group of high school girls standing before music stands and marching through carols with flutes and African drums.

I'm meeting a new friend at the Jika Jika cafe. It's a little restaurant and cafe at the top of the main shopping avenue. Word is it was opened by a rugby player who was drummed out of the sport because of his drug habit – and I'm not referencing steroid use here. The cafe is narrow and deep in layout, as to be expected in old Bath. The fare and service are that curious blend between hippie and posh, organic and refined, that caters to the conflicted appetites of modern urban types. The furniture seems rough-hewn, like sitting at picnic tables. Families loudly consume, while on the walls above them are displayed sophisticated photographic nudes.

I eat very little, and very simply. I have a plan to run soon after lunch. And I'm trying to be careful. Everyone in Pey's house has a cold at some stage of development. The smallest, Bea, has it the worst. She's been confined at home for several days, looking dejected and emitting hollow, regular little coughs. I'm being very careful to avoid the germ.

I limit the distance of my run because of the imminent, gathering dusk, settling down over the valley like the sad illness I'm trying to avoid. I know that stars will be out before five. But arriving home, I want a long warm-down. I pass the house and jog the extra several hundred meters to the top of their hill. There's a park there, and a little circuit around the hilltop that amounts to a third of a mile. I do some slow laps. From this vantage, you see a lot of the town, opening up below you, like scenes from a play, and then repeating. The scenery is very pleasant, but the action is far away and muted. The darkness deepens, and I realize I haven't learned much from the play. Scaling the heights doesn't give you the town.

2010-11-26T10:56:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 372 – November 26
Palmer's and the Future of the Republic

I'm back at Palmer's. One never strays too far from Palmer's, once one has been to Palmer's. Palmer's is the quintessential dive bar. It stands -- or leans, more properly speaking -- on Cedar Avenue in the West Bank neighborhood of Minneapolis, a scrappy wedge of blocks abutting the university on one side, and the knot of highways I've mentioned in previous blogs, the spaghetti buffet of asphalt that chops up this side of the city. It's rather a seedy district, only flattered by the adjective 'ugly', somewhat more insulted by 'charming'.

There's a band crammed onto the high stage in the tiny nook fit into the prow of this oddly shaped building. The building has no definable shape. The angled walls that I'm describing as the 'prow' never quite meet in a point. There is a blunt wall on the outside, adorned with the locally famous wooden relief of a tall and attenuated gentleman in a derby leaning against an invisible bar. In the back of this building is a mosque.

The band is the Liquor Pigs. Craig and I catch a show or two of theirs every year -- for the last ten years or so. They used to play at the Vike, a West Bank bar now closed, a place with even a worse a reputation than Palmer's. The Liquor Pigs are a quartet of over-skilled, middle-aged musicians who swing whimsically through long sets of country and folk, with touches of bluegrass. Especially fun is the fiddle man stomping his foot and sawing through dizzy solos.

Look around Palmer's; peer through the dim light of it. Make an inventory of the faces. This place is the picture of American diversity. 'Diversity': the latest word to be eviscerated by rhetoricians.

Someone is shouting for their check. The old black gentleman in a beret replies that he's Russian, and actually gets a laugh. Among the crowded tables, Eritreans argue with Ethiopians, old drunks trade jokes with young drunks, each so padded with dirty winter gear that race is lost, and a pretty Hindu boy strums his guitar while he teases his blonde girlfriend. All of us are listening to old-time country. Civility reigns.

Why is it so easy in Palmer's, while right there on the tiny color screen suspended in the corner, our mixed-race president struggles awkwardly with his words and with his nation? You can almost see the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune surrounding him, the poison darts spit at him by right-wingers, left-wingers, wing-tippers, ultra-right-wingers, wing-nuts, tea-baggers, and neo-hate-wingers. The failure of Mr. Obama, to my mind, is the last chapter in a sad story, the painfully slow sinking of the ship we call American political discourse into the sea of babbling irrelevance. The rest of us wait on shore, expecting a very important message. But in fact, we will have to carry on without them somehow, nodding sadly as Ms. Palin shrieks that we must stand by our North Korean allies, and turning away, going back to work in our various retail outlets.

I'm reading 'Idiot America', by Charles P. Pierce, a light-hearted polemic about this very capsizing of intelligence and leadership in America. It's a fun read, but it does little beyond confirming the obvious. When we can't admit that not everyone's judgement is equal; when democracy becomes reality TV; when emotional stimulation trumps sober (and boring) thought; when shouting and insults are simply more fun than civility; when philosophy and religion are products, validated by marketing numbers; when values are fashions; then republics founder. That's it.

Turn away from the turbulent seas. Take a seat at Palmer's. Enjoy the show that is governed by reason. Some music still requires skill. Practice human virtues. Remind yourself how easy it is to get along with people. History is built of such things.

2010-11-25T09:27:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 371 – November 25
Tea Time

They say there is no more evocative trigger for memory than aroma.

It's Thanksgiving, and I'm on strike. I've received a few kind invitations from friends to Thanksgiving dinner, but Thanksgiving is a holiday for families. I have no family. What's more, I just don't like the holiday. So I won't go through the motions.

This morning, temperatures in Minneapolis are in the single digits Fahrenheit. There is new snow on the ground from a storm yesterday, but the sun is shining brightly. I'm going to go for a walk. My route toward any cafe is west, into the wind. I have no scarf, and by the time I've covered six blocks or so, my face and neck are raw.

It's a fortunate coincidence that my favorite cafe is the closest one. I'm praying that it's open. My prayers are answered. I spend quite a lot of Thanksgiving morning thawing and watching the sun smite snow crystals among tree branches and on the roofs of houses in the neighborhood.

I've ordered a cup of the cafe's amazing coffee. I've finished it. I'm lazily poking around my email accounts, assessing the pileup of work without having any resolve to tackle it. A scent comes to me. It's familiar but also seems to come to me from a distant past. The scent is jasmine. I immediately go to the counter and place my order for green jasmine tea.

For one extended moment, there's nothing in the world but that aroma. Some happy scents, at the moment of their first impact, overrun all other sensory input. Myriad doors open, and the moment stands alone, gathering into its sphere a world of pleasurable evocation.

There was a time when I indulged in jasmine tea the way I do good coffee now. My memory flatters those days. This is what is summoned to mind by the tea: long, trash-talking bouts of chess in the cafe, sun brilliant in the windows; daily afternoon walks in Loring Park between shifts of work, with an hour to allow my mind to wander. Those were days when poetry was meaningful. I studied ancient Greek for fun. I ordered jasmine tea. I let it steep until it was dark and stinky. My life smelled of jasmine.

It was on one of those afternoons that I first set eyes on Leeza. Alas, I don't remember the exact occasion, but I know it happened in my regular cafe. Maybe I was conjugating Greek verbs. Maybe I was teasing a few lines of words into iambics. Maybe I was cornering Rob's king. It's a safe bet that she was meeting Eman.

She enters shyly, backpack over her shoulder, brown Ethiopian angel's eyes searching the cafe, her glorious, curly black hair captured in a loose bun. She spots Eman and heads for her table quickly, her characteristic smile opening in a laugh already. I watch her with a teacup in my hand, steam rising, scent of the day insistent. I take a taste.

2010-11-23T09:53:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 370 – November 23
Fire and Ice

My only exposure to television is in bars. That comes with one distinct advantage: there is no sound. There is a break in the sports news, during which a distressed couple stands at a drug store counter, insipidly and earnestly asking the counter help about condoms, holding up a package with the brand name 'Fire and Ice'. This sad advertisement supplements its case with blue and red arrows spiraling like comforting cartoon breezes. Arguably something to the advertisers' credit is the lack of any note of eroticism whatsoever. If there was any message about sex at all, it was that coitus is an irksome task, probably not worth the anxiety it produces. 'Fire and Ice' might be a brand sponsored by the Vatican.

It's all ice and little fire in Minnesota now. There was a big snow weeks ago, and the white stuff has never completely melted away since. Yesterday, we awoke to ice. The skies were taken over by slate clouds and lines of sleet. I stepped out to test the viability of biking or even walking outside. I immediately lost my footing and fell down the stairs. I ducked back inside for the rest of the morning, nursing my shoulder, and staring outside at the glistening surface of everything -- the asphalt of the parking lot, the tree branches, the parked cars, the broken piles of frozen snow.

Today, the ice has abated just enough to allow us outdoors again. I take the bike out for a spin. Temperatures are below 20F, but temps like that in daylight are very different than the same at night. There's no science to that. It just feels warmer with the fire in the sky, no matter how attenuated. I'm fine for fifteen, twenty minutes at a time on the bike in these temps. The trick is being alert enough to all the winter hazards -- patches of ice, Somali drivers, streets narrowed by the snow plows, Somali drivers, sudden winds, slick bridges, Somali drivers, and such like.

There's a coffee shop inside the Freewheel bike shop on the Greenway in Minneapolis. It's not too far from home. It's a fun place to get some work done on wifi, watch the bike wonks, and browse the gear. There's a core of cyclists that will not stop for any weather. I enjoy their good-humored determination. There's a new bike on display in the shop, called the 'Pugsley'. It has huge hairy tires about four inches wide. The handlebars are outfitted with 'bar mitts

I simply can't sit indoors for very long. In the afternoon, I go for a run. I spend almost as much time dressing for the run as executing it. That's the biggest adjustment that winter demands, isn't it? Winter is time-consuming. Everything is slow. Dressing takes twice as long. Transit time slows down. And the running slows, too. You have to watch for ice, and you also don't want to strain muscles and joints that are already being tested by the cold.

Winter requires commitment. Winter is a child that you don't yell at. You just slow everything down. You take Winter's hand, and you look both ways before you cross the road. You don't step out until the way is entirely clear.

The winter run can be tricky to plan. You have to be careful about the route, never committing to a course that takes you too far away from home. You continually gauge the damage being done to skin and joints. The most vulnerable places are hands, face and ears, toes, and knees. A nice winter run is exhilarating, but the fun degenerates very quickly once the body ha had enough. Be as close to home when that transition happens as possible.

My farthest point today is the river. Ice is gathering already in the slow margins of the watercourse. But the chilled black water still surges south. There's another runner on the path ahead of me. She has that heavy winter tread going, slow and steady. Vaporous breath escapes from her. Her cheeks are bright red. We share a smile of something unique shared.

2010-11-15T09:15:00.000-08:00

Travelogue 369 – November 15
Manassas

Sweet Lethe. It makes the onerous duties of humanity so much easier to bear.

In July, 1861, some 35,000 Union recruits marched out of Washington to great fanfare. Three months previously the Confederates had attacked Fort Sumter in Charleston. Armies were amassing to protect the two capitals, Washington and Richmond. And now it was time to discipline those unruly southern states.

'Old Fuss and Feathers', Winfield Scott, Lincoln's first commanding general, (already an officer in the War of 1812, nearly fifty years earlier!) a military genius weighing in at over 300 pounds, had had to bow to popular pressure. No matter how much his prodigious experience, supported by his prodigious physical presence, had argued against rash action, the northern states needed a battle. He sent off General McDowell to take Richmond.

In between the neighboring capitals, there was a critical railroad junction in Manassas, Virginia, near a little river called Bull Run. Here the boys met their first Confederate army, 22,000 boys guarding the fords of the river.

These young Union men had signed up as ninety-day volunteers. This was going to be a short campaign. So sure was the DC crowd that the native peoples of Richmond, Virginia would shower them with flowers, grateful for liberating them from the tyranny of slave-owning aristocrats, that a number of gentlemen and ladies packed lunches and followed in the wake of the army in order to watch the show. They ended up being hurdles for the retreating troops, who only survived because the Confederates boys were just as green, just as exhausted.

Doughboys and GIs whistling their way to the ships that would convey them to carnage; GW's liberators limbering up for the quick march to Baghdad; cheery young jihadists packing their underwear with explosives that will project them straight into the welcoming arms of their virgins in heaven: what is it about war that arouses an almost criminal naivete?

We've kicked off a few wars in my lifetime. The only time I remember a general impression of sobriety and caution about deployment was when we signed up for Gulf War Number One -- the one time that we achieved our dream conquest, a few months in and out. (Let's not talk about Iraqi casualties, shall we?) There was certainly lots of sober talk about Vietnam. But maybe I just missed the carnival.

Just over one year later, the boys were back at it in the same fields of Manassas. This time, they were battle-hardened. And this time, the battle raged three days, claiming three times as many casualties. Lincoln still hadn't found his winning generals. The South had been far more successful putting talent in place. It was at Manassas that Thomas Jackson earned his moniker 'Stonewall' -- by being unmovable, in case the metaphor escapes you. The Union was no more successful the second time, and the loss set up Robert E. Lee to make his first incursions into Northern territory.

The overlapping battlefields now comprise a national park, a large tract of fields and forests that feature a network of walking and horse paths. My hotel is close to the park, just across the DC commuter highway 66.

The fields are beautiful. When I left Minnesota, the first snow had just fallen and temperatures were plummeting. Here, it's autumn. The leaves have turned but haven't all fallen. The hills are afire with color, and among the red copses, the famous fields. I stand under Stonewall's equestrian statue looking out over pretty landscape. There is a line of cannons ahead of me, facing the northern horizon. Across rolling fields, across a shallow valley, in a corresponding high field near the horizon, you can just make out another line of cannons facing south. The scope of events suggested by the landscape boggles the mind: battles that raged across many square miles of hilly, wooded terrain. It's very difficult to picture. We've seen the movies: men in Union suits running, each with a gun, en masse among stands of trees, the ambient boom of cannon behind them. But how does one incorporate the whole of the action into one's imagination? How does one plot it against peaceful countryside?

In two days' running of the trails, I'm able to cover most of the territory of the two battlefields. I'm watching for melancholy ghosts who can explain. Instead I pass an intrepid doe, who stands firm though I pass within several yards of her. She twitches her nose at me. She tenses as though she might bolt. But she maintains her position, and I'm in retreat.

I survived the battle, though I nearly twisted an ankle running through fallen leaves. I've survived to see a country united and free of slavery, made free for peace and commerce. Back at Route 66, the heirs of Civil War veterans speed recklessly by in their automobiles (an invention of the Civil War generation, even if most of the work was German,) stopping for fast food or for their share of the quarter-of-a-trillion gallons of gasoline burned annually. I think the noise and adrenaline of the modern highway might have presented a challenge for even old Stonewall.

2010-11-06T11:09:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 368 – November 6
Running the Old Creek

I'm in Colorado. I see the Rockies through my windshield, through the window of my new hotel, and through the gaps among the buildings of the avenues. It's an image that retrieves sentiments from far down the well of memory.

Both my parents were born and raised in Colorado. By the time I came along they had evolved to Los Angeles, but often we visited my aunts, uncles, and cousins. Colorado was an odd paradise, one furnished by real mountains for climbing, real forests for hiking, and real farms. The pleasures were tainted: I had to find out that real nature was kind of dirty, that there were bugs and poison ivy, and that mountain streams were way too cold. This paradise was populated by bullying small-town cousins, and also by virginal cousins who inspired the first mysterious movements of romance.

There's a bar in the Wash Park area of Denver called the Candlelight Tavern. It sounds like a place for delicate sensibilities, where sweet romance might bud among cousins. But in fact it's a bar for rougher sensibilities. Actually, let's just leave sensibilities out of it. It's a place to crowd in with other drinkers, order a Man Beer (it's a brand!) and a fist-sized burger with fries in a basket, watch football, and wait for the advent of the scrapper crowd after eleven.

Tonight, the Candlelight is calm. I'm there well ahead of the scrappers. I sit at the bar and hunch down, hoping my big city-liberal credentials don't show. I order my Man Beer, and I watch hockey – an incomprehensible game to me, but so important to men in Minnesota and Colorado. Should I be trying to follow the puck? Should I be watching for a fight? Should I be enjoying the footwork of big men on skates? I'm afraid I don't get it.

Scott has grown into a big boy. He is broad of shoulder and broad of girth. The buzz cut under his cap is grizzled. He has the laid back charm that makes for a good bartender. Everyone seems to know him. A pair of inordinately buxom college women are leaning over the bar to call him over with flirty smiles. I worry him by my staring. It's his fault, though. Why is he wearing a shirt with the name 'Matt' sewn into it?

I call him over, and ask him where he grew up. He shoots me a warning glance, but plays along. I lead him through our town, our high school, and still he doesn't recognize me. 'Did you play sports?' I asked. Yeah, cross country. I'm smiling. And it finally dawns on him. After all that, he tries to tell me I look exactly the same, and I just laugh. He's certainly changed a lot, but his smile is the same.

Scott has and had an infectious smile. It's the thing you would remember about him. He was always joking around in high school, always in an amiable way. It was rare then, and seems rare now, to see him troubled or anxious.

He and I traded off as Number One on our high school cross country team. He charted very steady progress during his years of training, roughly parallel to his startling physical growth in junior and senior years, and eventually became the more dependable athlete. When we first met, we were both skinny kids. By the time we graduated, I was the skinny kid. He was tall and broad-shouldered. He was strong and steady. I was more of the prodigy unrealized. I held the course records, but was unpredictable.

I'm the one still running, these many years later. Scott just laughs when I invite him to train with me. The weather in Denver couldn't be better: blue skies and approaching eighty degrees by afternoon. My second hotel is close to Cherry Creek, so that's the route I choose, northwest alongside the creek, toward downtown. Most of the way, the creek is buffered from the city by its own green park. The creek itself is a pleasure. Its rocky course and the red, sandy banks are everything Southwestern, triggering all kinds of fond memories of both California and Colorado. It's with a heavy heart that I give in to the heat and to the pains in my knees, and I finally turn back after about four miles up the creek. I'm wishing I could lope all the way to the mountains on the horizon.

2010-11-05T15:30:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 367 – November 5
The Lone Prairie

Denver's airport is a circus tent in the lone prairie. It's a white, spiky circus tent pitched in the golden prairie grasses of Colorado. The landing strips are temporary strips of asphalt purchased from the elements. From a few miles away, the place seems preternaturally quiet. It makes one realize that zombie and end-of-the-world movies are a creation of the western mind, cultivated among landscapes that mocks the hubris of bipedals.

(Having just come from Ethiopia, this seems like an interesting riddle. Anthropos evolved among open grasslands in East Africa – in large part because of the exigencies of survival among the unconscious savanna. You'd think we would feel right at home in the prairie. But I think homo americanus is anxious in the plains, is much more comfortable among the trees of Minnesota.)

The rental car counter-person talks me out of more money than I had promised on Expedia. The penetrating sunshine persuades me that it's all right. Chris and I jump into my blue Focus and slip onto the broad boulevard that eventually feeds into I-70. It's a straight avenue among unvarying grassland. The sky is a bright field of blue. The line of mountains ahead might be twenty minutes away; they might be hours.

I'm reminded of manic cross-country trips in my youth, coast to coast. I've crossed the plains on the old I-70, straight ahead for hours among the tawny monotony, through the anomalies of prairie cities, through Limon, across more wind-blown, glaring tabletop land. And then there's the miracle of the Rockies.

Today, I've flown right over it all, from the prairie's eastern edges in Minnesota to the base of the Rockies. The sun has shown all the way, and I've watched the subtle changes in the landscape, checkerboard Midwestern farmland gradually disrupted by rough patches of dry land, by stubborn gullies. The checkerboard gives way to green circles among miles of dust and wiry grass. Finally, grass wins, bending like surf toward the west.

In the morning I awaken as the sun is rising over I-70. I'm on the fifth floor and my window looks east. The highway is a line of blurring headlights emerging from the incipient sunrise. The brown horizon is flat and featureless. It's an abstraction; it's an etude.

Since my return to the States, I've been rising before the sun, engaging with the last darkness of the night. I work; I watch the approach of light. It's strangely comfortable. Today the sun is unimpeded by trees. It rolls over the lip of Earth. It lights the grass on fire.

2010-10-28T04:50:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 366 – October 28
Hounslow

For the duration of this stopover in England, I'm a resident of Hounslow. Hounslow is a township in southwestern Greater London. It gives its name to the borough, which is one of thirty-three that make up the same 'Greater London', a relatively recent creation. The town is linked in history with the heath of the same name. This town used to stand, quietly independent of the great capital, along the Great Western Road. The town is linked in contemporary blog history with the vast airport (roomy enough to swallow a few Houslows) to the west. Hounslow Central is three Tube stops from Terminal Four, which is where Delta patrons heading to America embark.

It's one of those London suburbs that has forged a unique relationship with the horizon. There might be a few multi-story business buildings in the center, but they are surrounded and suffocated by miles of streets of one- and two-story brick, tiled roofs, and square chimneys. Each dwelling looks to be a few strides wide. The cars in front seem rivals in comfort. The narrow streets go on and on, and the world seems a small place.

My time in Hounslow is a happy one. My guest house serves a good, free breakfast. And only a few blocks away, housed in one of the several high-rises, is a gym that charges a daily rate of only £5. A few blocks in the other direction is a spacious park, spacious enough for a run of a few miles in the morning, (a morning that comes appallingly late – I'm feeling very weird when it's still dark at seven a.m.). And nearby is a high street with lots of shops with cheap conveniences, and a Costa Coffee, too.

There are a lot of guys wearing turbans in Hounslow. To turn that around, it must be said that there are very few white faces in Hounslow. I didn't really notice or care on the first day. But it became clear to me that everyone else noticed. I acquired a foreboding sense that there are race problems round these parts.

The Asian faces are grim. I encounter them on my morning walk in the park. Most are middle-aged and set in disapproval when they pass me. The bodies accompanying the faces are garbed in middle class workout gear. The walks are brisk constitutionals that seem to become slightly martial in the presence of a white man. The old men in turbans sneer.

The gym is dominated by toned Indian and Pakistani youth. They glance at me with a mix of curiosity and hostility. The latter fades when I smile and when they hear my accent. They return to their workouts, workouts that have a disturbing intentionality to them. I'm sure that can be said of most men at the gym, including myself. It's probably the rare male that doesn't radiate a bit of I'll-show-him/her/them at the gym.

Lest I risk being unfair or insensitive, I should make mention of the Somalis. There they are, strolling the high street. The teenage Somalis sport distinctly British cuts. I'm not sure what's behind the prevalence of this faux-Mohawk that's so popular in Britain, the line of longer, greased hair along the center of the scalp. I'm certainly no one to speak about style, but the odd attachment of Europe to 80s hairstyles has long been a matter of concern for me. These are the people we would like to see as full partners in world governance, after all. That said, I confess that I have yet to see a true mullet in London.

And what is description of British life without reference to the ubiquitous Wetherspoon's chain? There is one in Hounslow center. I stop there for fish and chips one afternoon. I'll admit to one bitter. Maybe it's the taste of alcohol that moved me to ask about football. The friendly bartender gave me recommendations of venues to view the Arsenal match. There were two choices, the pub on the high street that will charge me. Or the pub that advertises both English and Indian food and is situated on the road that leads to my guest house. The bartender tells me that they have a beautiful big screen, but ruefully is moved to warn me that things often get contentious there, due to the crowd being of a split personality, 'a split reflected in the town population at large, I'm afraid.' Enough said, mate.

O Hounslow, must you succumb to the contentious spirit of the age, You, my idyllic town of gym and cheap electronics, of brick one-family bliss, of shaded park pathways beneath the above-ground Piccadilly line? Embrace those of turban and beard, make them your own, the boons of empire. Share together a Costa latte, put disputes to rest, and discover your bright future together, together in the shadows of the estimable airliners roaring above, O Hounslow, dear Hounslow.

2010-10-26T07:18:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 365 – October 26
Scots, Teens, and Vamps

I fly Ethiopia Air back to London. My way in from the US was two night flights broken up by one dose of daylight in Britain. My way out is two daytime flights. I'm happy.

Menna and I arrive at the airport by seven. My flight is at ten. I'm driven to check in obsessively early because Ethiopia Air doesn't allow seat selection online. The prospect of nine hours on a flight brings out all manner of anxiety in me: I must do everything possible to secure a window seat.

Menna and I have coffee and cake in the vast airport lobby, and we go over some last-minute planning. There's a tottering, wide-eyed Scotsman wandering the lobby cafe, stinking of prodigious quantities of liquor. Though he's smiling with a kind of diffuse glee, he has the grey and crumpled look of exhaustion. He's a young man prematurely dry and creased. None of that matters to him now. He's discovered an American, and he circles me with merry fascination. He asks where we're from. 'O-o-o-oh,' he replies with impish delight. I ask where he's going. He's he was on his way home, but seems to have missed his flight. He tells me I have lovely eyes.

I ask if he'll be all right. Does he have a plan to get home? After a bright-eyed pause, he tells us what his mother said. ' “Martin,” me mum says to me, “Martin, when you're in the shit,” she says to me, “Martin, are you … Martin!” she says to me, “are you in the shit? Look at me, and tell me, are you in the shit?” '

I nod with a pretense of comprehension and with real compassion. I reiterate that I hope he'll be all right. It occurs to dear Martin that he needs a cigarette. He teeters off toward the counter.

It's time for me to go. We pay up, I pack up the notebook, and we're on our way to departures when Martin intercepts us. 'O-o-o-oh, you're off then?' He gives us each a lingering hug, and a withering breath in the face. 'Remember this,' he says. 'My grandmother once said, “Martin!” she says, “Remember what I tell ye! It's better for a man to stand one full day in the sun than, than … Martin!” she says, “than to (and here he demonstrates) spend a lifetime on his knees.” Ha!' He struggles to his feet as I contemplate this indecipherable aphorism. He grabs me again nd plants a bristling kiss on my cheek. He offers the same to Menna, who declines, giggling uncontrollably. 'Bye, bye, now.'

The flight is not quite full, allowing Will, the British geologist, and I to share a set of three seats. Will spends most of the flight bent over a fat thriller, spectacles a few inches from the page. Everyone within half a dozen rows either way shares the aural zone with a chubby Somali girl of three or so, one seat behind us but mercifully across the aisle. The girl has a mother and a brother, both of them playmates, neither of them a curb to the screeching. Fortunately, my earplugs muffle the noise just enough to bring it below adrenaline levels. I envy the geologist his intense engagement in what appears to be a substandard paperback. I'm reading some vintage Chandler, stories dating back to the 30s. They're fun, but I'm distracted, distracted by the lack of distraction. Ethiopia Air provides one film for the entire flight, on tiny screens every third row or so. I slip in and out of a light dozing, punctuated by the Somali girl's most penetrating screams.

The one movie today, which I've awaited with much anticipation, turns out to be 'Eclipse', one of the Twilight series about teenage vampires. It seems that our world is just a chessboard for warring packs of wistful, tan-eyed vampires and awkward wolfmen, embarrassingly fond of their physiques while human and unconvincingly digital as wolves.

While the prospect of a girl forever trapped in pre-pubescence in 'Let the Right One In', (the Swedish version, than you very much) is haunting and sublime, the spectacle of a circle of forever-eighteens is shockingly bathetic. Don't you all recall (with a blush) the days you could talk all night about relationships without a blush? Imagine eternity in that state! In a sense, the makers of these movies have reinvented horror as a genre. The next step would be inventing a society frozen in the 80s. Wait ….

I wonder what the teens in the section up front thought of all this. There's a pack of twenty or more British high-schoolers who seem to be returning from a field trip to … Ethiopia! They seem curiously unaffected by the experience, far more interested really in the airline meals and the vagaries of trans-time-zone travel than in the lessons of the developing world. Fortunately, their eyes come in a variety of colors. As self-consciously as a circle of vampires, they spend every moment of the flight together, gathering in the aisle, sitting on the armrests, smiling with brave irony as they tease each other.

The teens are accompanied by a smaller pack of teachers, all strangely uncommitted to being adults. One is a wide-shouldered man proud of his looks, flirting with the young females of the species, and mirroring those self-conscious smiles of youth. Another is a blowsy woman with admirable hips and admirable cleavage, who bestows fond gazes on the young males of the species. Another, more sexually neutral, still feels inclined to reveal a disturbing amount of chest hair. His sense of style is admirably modern, replete with tats and piercings and tight clothing.

The flight does reach its destination. Neither time nor ageing have been brought to a stop. We emerge from the plane nine hours older, though no wiser, and no one has needed a transfusion, not even the study little Somali, who has exercised her tiny lungs all day with nary a pause. My boon on this flight: nearly everyone on the plane was a UK citizen. I rush to the head of the 'All Others' passport control line at Heathrow. Every cloud has its silver bullet ….

2010-10-18T00:42:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 364 – October 18
Lush

I've been back in Addis for six days, and I haven't had a shower since Ziway. The water has utterly evaporated from the Shiro Meda neighborhood, and several others in a swath across the northern districts of the city. Beti brings me buckets every day; from where I'm not even sure. From the neighbors while they still had some in their tank. Now from down the street. Early on, I would find that there was water at 3am, but was too sleepy to jump in the shower. After so many days now, I wouldn't take the time to shake off my clothes. But I'm stuck with washing out of buckets for now. I never quite feel clean. My technique in bucket baths is very undeveloped, though I've had lots of practice in Ethiopia. It doesn't come naturally.

Naive Westerner, slave to the Greeks, I see it all in terms of politics. How can thousands of households in the capital city be cut off from plumbing indefinitely without a word from the government? What's behind it? To the locals, it's a matter to be shrugged off, and I'm sure that goes for the officials 'behind' the problem. Services come; services go. Everyone adapts and carries on. The smiles don't falter.

Oh, Addis, capital city, where luxuries gather like beads of water spiraling down the walls of jungle leaves, toward the base, toward the roots, there is still so little comfort. You can find chocolate here, and you can find dental floss for afterward. There are ATMs! There are Time magazines. But, poor old one-legged city, you can't always find electricity or water. One breathes in burning plastic and diesel fumes while waiting for overcrowded transit. One wades through the trash and animal bones on the city's dirt roads, and leap over pools of oil. Oh, Addis.

Better the sticks. I'm already waxing nostalgic over Awasa and Yirgacheffe in the south, as though it were months since I was there. I never went without electricity or water there. Even in dusty Ziway on the way back.

No fan of rain, I even entertain fond memories of the southern showers, like the one that overtook us at the noon hour in lush Yirgacheffe. We had spent most of the morning covering the hundred kilometers or so from Awasa, and by the time we arrived, the clouds were accumulating. Yirgacheffe lies among mountains reminiscent of those above Addis, except they are closer and encircling. And the landscape is green and lush, palms and papaya crowding the alien eucalyptus. And underneath, everywhere, is the buna plant: coffee!

We disembark from the crowded bus at the first sight of a hotel – as it turns out the only faranji-friendly hotel in the small town. I want to taste the coffee. I don't really expected anything different than the usual, pungent Ethiopian brew but I want to be able to say I've sipped some java in Yirgacheffe. When the steaming, dark berry juice appears, and I've tasted it, I'm amazed. It really is phenomenal. The flavor is absolutely unique and wonderful. I don't know enough about coffee to explain, but it is delicious. I rush into the center of town, and make my entourage stop at a small, local place. Same thing! I'm a convert.

The town itself has little else to offer. We stroll the main strip, a bustling stretch of asphalt that could be anywhere in Ethiopia. We hide from the cloudburst and taste more buna. We stroll through the market.

Awasa is our base for the southern trip. It's the capital city for the southern nations, so there are city comforts and faranji-friendly services for all the NGOs based here. (Oddly enough, we rarely see any faranjis.) Unlike Addis, the terrain is flat and the air is clear. The city is situated on Lake Awasa, one of Ethiopia's southernmost Rift Valley lakes. And the surrounding hills are greener, more welcoming. Vegetation is dense. The squat false banana trees are everywhere. The area is famous for its bird life. We see parrots and big-billed bullies with frog voices. We see kingfishers, cormorants, colorful finches and, of course, the tall and hideous storks.

And there are the monkeys. You'll see two varieties: the playful, long-tailed vervets and the much larger gurezas. The latter are the long-haired, black and white monkeys that locals call the priest monkeys. I don't remember their Latin or English names. Gureza is Amharic, I think.

We see the birds and the monkeys on our breaks at the Wube Shebele hotel on the lake shore. We bring a cheap soccer ball and play volleyball in the high grass, out in the strong sun. We rest in chairs lined up lakeside and order Mirindas. The vervets run up and watch for chances to steal our soft drinks. Sometimes we let them. They are adept at turning the bottles over with their black-nailed hands so that they can lap up the pop from the puddles they create. The gurezas stay further away, leaping among branches of the massive warqa trees, and occasionally onto the roof of the hotel, making great thumps as they do. This lake is a calm one, the waters quiet and green. On the other side are the green hills separating Awasa from Shashemene.

2010-10-12T00:41:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 363 – October 12
Ziway

The streets of Ziway are wide and dusty. Everything in Ziway has a coat of dust. It's like seeing the world through a tinted lens; everything is tawny and gritty. There's a steady wind from the lake, so nothing is still. The roads themselves squirm with it. The dust rises and turns. It gallops.

The lake is restless. The wind won't leave it alone. The water protests with wave after wave. They reach the shore with their complaints, growling and slapping the mud ceaselessly. It looks as thought the waters have risen sometime recently. Enormous trees stand on islands of grass, enduring the assault of the waters. High grass sways with each wave, describing a new, miniature bay with their green extent into the lake.

It's a large lake. You can't see the other side. There's a wooded island within easy reach of a rowing fisherman. Otherwise, it's the troubled aqua-white surface to the horizon. The wind has no impediment for miles. But it carries no weather. The skies are clear. The temperatures are perfect.

There's a resort of sorts beside the lake. It's a modest place for a modest town – nothing like the quasi-grand establishments on some of the other Rift Valley lakes. One of the lateral avenues finds its vague terminus in a clearing among grass. Beyond, one must choose between the private restaurant on the right, and the public mezananya, or park, on the left, both facing the lake.

We are dropped in the unassuming clearing by our bajaj. A bajaj is one of those three-wheeled covered buggies buzzing around on a motorcycle engine, its rounded carapace painted the baby blue that says 'taxi' in Ethiopia. On foot, we veer right and are immediately set upon by a barefoot fellow and his accomplice. Thy have a dogeared receipt book and want to charge fifteen birr to enter. Enter what isn't clear. We back away quickly and try the opposite direction.

The park has a well-marked gateway, where we are charged two birr each. Inside are small and simple gazebos with cement benches extending from the wall. Behind, there is a row of unfinished concrete bungalows for future honeymooners, currently suggesting Normandy before Nice. The grass descends into the anxious waters, rising quickly around the roots of the spreading warqa tree and then advancing somnolently into the rocking shallows of the lake. There's a fisherman astride his papyrus boat among the reeds, inspecting his white net, strand by strand, link by link.

For our part, we sit silently, all contemplating the line of the horizon. There isn't much happening out there. The line has remained very steady for a long, long time. We are not able to discern any change. And it's exactly that that requires long and sincere contemplation. We're wrapping up a week of hard work. The horizon performs its task admirably. It is still.

2010-10-04T22:57:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 362 – October 4
The Den

It's 5am in Addis. It's dark out, of course, but there are signs of life. A few priests have begun their morning chants, broadcasting from the great bullhorn speakers attached to their bell towers. The sweet singsong seems to wax and wane with the early morning breezes.

There are dogs barking. If you have spent a night in Addis, that will come as no surprise. 'Who can sleep?' complains every visitor from abroad. Who can sleep, indeed.

It's 5am, and I'm wide awake. I've been awake since 3am. I've resigned myself to it and gotten up to do some work. My netbook blazes like a blue signal fire in the night.

Is it jet lag, or is it anxiety? I've observed that 3am is the witching hour for international travelers. It's common to find oneself awake at that hour, as little sense as that makes for the American traveler, who would normally be having dinner at about that time. Is any routine enough to ring alarms? 3am doesn't seem to register in Cien's dream life. He's in the next room, sleeping soundly, though he arrived a day later than I. Is it the slumber of the innocent?

Is it stress then? There is plenty to stress about. I'm reciting the exhaustive list of objectives for my one month in Ethiopia. One objective is a paradox: restoring order to staff and operations while mobilizing them for the rest of the objectives. I've been away for more than four months, and things here seem habitually to decay after three months. So when I do sleep, I'm bailing buckets of entropy from my slim, green yellow and red canoe.

One discovers one's age inside insomnia, I think. The consciousness is a complex of dim caves. Inside each chamber resound the songs of one's times. They collect with the years, of course. They ferment and sweeten. Their resonances become like hauntings. The music swells during the course of long insomnia, and one becomes a ghost in one's own time.

When a generation dies off, so does the music. For some reason, John Lennon comes to visit me singing, 'Oh Yoko'. What could that song possibly mean to someone who didn't hear it during Lennon's lifetime? My entire experience of Lennon is of a living artist – even after he died, he was someone who was alive to me. What does the music become to those who come after? What am I experiencing when I listen to Mozart? It must be a cold thing compared to what his contemporaries experienced. I don't know.

Eventually the soul emerges from its den, finding the 'real', either in dreams or in morning light. The shadows one has entertained dissipate. One collects a few more songs.

2010-10-03T18:01:00.001-07:00

Travelogue 361 – October 3
The Summit

The sun has just risen as our airliner approaches Addis Ababa. I'm watching out the window as we clear the banks of clouds that seem to have western Ethiopia firmly in their grasp. The clouds are my amusement for nearly the full final hour of a flight that is desperately short of amusement. There was one movie, an acceptable piece, despite Demi Moore's unforgiving facial work. I've read off and on. I've shut my eyes in vain attempts at sleep. The best I'm able to manage on a plane is a vertiginous state just short of dozing, in which the mind disengages from its imagery and tiny, nonsensical narratives rise like sparks. Then it's done, and I'm delicately maneuvering from beneath the heavy elbow of the fat man next to me.

The drama of the clouds is complex and fascinating. The story of the clouds is in their variety and their mixture. There are the clouds like high fogs, contiguous and gloomy. There are the happier, billowing variety, the ones that reveal themselves in detailed relief in the dawning day's light. There are the clouds that drift lightly, like shredded cotton, and soak in the roseate glow of the rising sun. They all mix in the wide sky, seeming even to be driven by different winds. The light changes every minute, adding golds and slow stains of blue.

When the clouds break, the ground revealed is remarkably green and I'm reminded that I haven't been to Ethiopia during the fall for three years now. Fall, when the long rainy season finally ends. The land below is dark with lingering night. The gentle hills are broken into irregular, small shapes of family agriculture. We are not far from Addis Ababa, as it turns out. The clouds slowly dissipate, the fields capture the new sunlight among their emerald crops. Extensive ridges and river valleys unfurl themselves for us. Then the mountains become familiar. I watch them gather momentum, and then with a start I recognize them. I'm looking down on the dirt roads that I and my team habitually run, along the ridge just north of the capital city. The morning is now glorious and clear. The roads run east down below, and I'm following them and naming the places. Beyond are the hazy buildings of the city. It's a fun way to re-enter. The plane swings south just past Kotebe and begins to circle toward the airport.

Now it's a different day. The morning unfolds much like the morning of the flight. The sun detaches from the rugged eastern horizon and rises to cast slanted light among the woods. I'm running those trails I've sighted from the plane, running with Dirige, Alaye, Cien, and Derartu. The three Ethiopians are from my team, among the most talented. And for the moment, strictly confining their talent in order to run with the faranjis.

I'm feeling some trepidation as we ride in a taxi up to the summit of Entoto. The first run in Ethiopia is usually excruciating. Jet lag tugs like extra gravity at aching muscles. My sleep cycles haven't adjusted yet. The altitude grips your lungs and makes you a little dizzy.

But today, everything feels fine. I set off cautiously, but the steps follow one another fluidly. I'm mentally checking in on muscles and oxygen. Everything's functioning. I surrender to the rhythm of running. Soon we're hitting that summit behind Entoto and higher than Entoto, running uphill toward the radio tower at the top. The miniature terrain of the dirt road adds complication to the exertion of climbing. Jutting up from the earth is a soft, pale stone that wrinkles like brain matter. You have to watch every step. Running these roads takes full attention. Beyond the summit, the wide road eases into a gentle decline among dense woods, where the danger of hyenas is greatest. The brain stone has disappeared but in its place are legions of grey, sharp ankle-breakers. I enjoy the concentration that this type of running demands.

We round the final bend before we turn back on this initial run. We turn into the heat of the sun. The light that has been coyly playing among the eucalyptus leaves is now in our faces. It's a good day on the summit.

2010-09-30T06:30:00.001-07:00

Travelogue 360 – September 30
It's Thursday in Feltham

It's Thursday in Feltham. It's noon, and the old men are at it already, a few pints into their day. I'm at Wetherspoon's in Feltham Centre. Wetherspoon's is a blessing and curse to 21st century England, a homegrown chain of pubs that has a tradition of taking over old banks or other large commercial spaces and transforming them into massive, high-ceilinged arcades of kitsch. They provide comfy dining and drinking according to very detailed blueprints and menus. The fare is affordable and bland.

I make it into the restaurant just before noon, just in time to order breakfast. My meal takes some time to find me, so I have plenty of time to look around. The middle tables are occupied by locals and their pints. Locals also stand at the bar, quietly ordering more. No one is playing the slots yet. I take a dark booth along the wall. It happens, as often happens among self-consciously unwieldy franchises, that the décor features historic photos of the township. The one in my booth depicts the town green in 1908, little more than muddy fields by a pond and rows of wooden houses some fifty meters back. Boys of various ages pose in their caps and coats, soberly, uncertainly. Morbidly, I reflect that only seven years later, some of these boys would be fighting in France.

Fortified with eggs and beans, I explore the town. The centre is now occupied by severely modern shopping and condominiums. Wetherspoon's is not the only chain to have discovered forlorn Feltham, once known for its peas, and later for providing the world with half of the band Queen. Only the older shops along rougher lanes stand in shabby opposition to the incursion of Lord Franchise. Among these is the charmingly dark and greasy 'Tennessee Fried Chicken'.

I discover the green, matured a deal since 1908. The pond is well-contained, the green itself circumscribed by sidewalks, and the whole surrounded by well-trafficked avenues, shopping, churches, and stolid mid-century homes. Moms meander with strollers while Canada geese squawk and waddle toward refuge. Men in suits take up one bench, teens in hoods another. There is a monument to the fallen of two world wars, standing tall and neglected beside the main avenue. There are about 150 names inscribed here, men lost in World War I. I can't help wondering if any of the boys in the restaurant photo are named here.

It's Thursday in Feltham. With only a day between night flights, I've chosen not to stray too far from Heathrow in the far western reaches of Greater London. Feltham is only a few miles south of the airport. Just follow Fagg's Road or Hounslow Road down from Houslow or from the eastern end of the airport, traveling south from the Piccadilly Line. Don't be distracted by the lack of distinguishing features out here, the banal repetition of block after block. There is life

And for today, there is no rain. I'm happy. I return to the mall and take a table at Costa Coffee, another self-conscious chain that covers itself with photos from Italy. I tap into the wireless from some local pub. I talk to Minnesotans before they've woken, tuning out the day's chatter of Feltham housewives.

2010-09-21T11:58:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 359 – September 21
The Age of Big, Part Two

The view out my apartment window unfolds like a lesson in American history. Draw a line from my twenty-first-century computer, through the glass of the window, and across the late twentieth-century asphalt of the alley, buckling and cracked, through the links of the 70s chain link and into the parking lot of the Social Security office. This parking lot fills up by nine, and people are lined up outside every business morning, ready to enter. Here, people seem eager enough to participate in socialism, the welfare state, big government.

Before Ike, there was FDR, just as before the Second World War there was the Great Depression. There weren't too many boys marching in France who weren't followed by the gaunt specter of deprivation. Dad as inoffensive ghost is nodding again. He was man of the house at an early age, his father incapacitated by the previous war, made man of an impoverished Colorado household, within a family still tainted by not-so-recent immigration and their continuing status as laborers. Not even twenty, he shipped off for Europe.

And so, first must come Franklin Delano. Even Ike called him boss. In August, 1935, FDR signed into law the Social Security Act,, centerpiece to his New Deal, demon and savior to every American since. The New Deal might rank up there with the Civil War and the Revolution in impact upon the American identity and psyche.

The building is bland enough, brick without the charm of age or ornament. I've never been inside. If a Tea Partisan strayed into this neighborhood, would he or she sneer at this squat, flavorless structure and pronounce everyone inside enemies? Would he or she fantasize about McVeigh moments? Perhaps I exaggerate? I hope.

Glide on by the New Deal, advancing in time again into post-war America. Beyond more chain link, you slide into the trough of the interstate. As I've said, this is Ike's dream manifest, though it wasn't until the 60s that the great paving project reached Minneapolis. The first section of I-94 was laid between Jamestown and Valley City, North Dakota, 13 miles of road completed in 1958.

In the 60s and 70s, the Twin Cities came under siege. Neighborhoods were torn asunder. Swaths of concrete and asphalt were laid over the raw earth, all connected into unbroken miles of communication strung across the continent. The system boasts 46,876 miles, almost twice around the planet if laid in one line. But what fun would that be?

Why are highways on my mind? It's difficult to be man on a bicycle in this neighborhood without spending serious time contemplating the sweeping, unavoidable stretches of bone that slice across the landscape, ruthlessly X-cutting this town into hermetic quadrants. Gazing at downtown from my window means sending my attentions across one raging river of traffic. A few blocks to the west, I-35W feeds into into the mighty 94, only to depart for the north a mile or two to the east. A mile or so to the east, the 55 merges in from the south. Downtown is across the 94; Uptown is across the 35W; the university is across either the 94 or the 55, or across both. Effectively, I live on a narrow promontory, and any of my daily commutes involves a choice of bridges. And one of the grand ganglions of the state is just a mile or two away, a howling no-man's-land miles square.

At night, I listen to the highway. Its hum is almost comforting. Once in a while, a truck emits a scream as it passes, and I wonder if the driver is aware of the signature he leaves behind in city neighborhoods, the cold cry of commerce, the hyena's laugh of history, the dinosaur's love song?

Note: my place is at the bottom of the photo, a little left of center ...

2010-09-20T09:43:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 358 – September 20
The Age of Big, Part One

A fog has settled in last night. It's so thick that I can't see downtown from my windows. There's only the indeterminate form of one high-rise, lines of grey windows dissolving in grey. The view from my place usually takes in all of downtown, Nicollet Avenue progressing north to the Mississippi like a narrow tributary among the walls of the valley it has carved, the stone pillars of Minneapolis, its luxury hotels, the IDS tower, the Foshay, Ameriprise and other bastions of finance.

My vantage is removed; I see it but I'm not part of it. My abode sits among the outcasts from downtown, among one of the many stands of brick-clad buildings wrenched from town center by the discerning hand of Eisenhower.

Eisenhower: #34, George Washington reborn as an apple carving, founding father, paterfamilias to DiMaggio, Presley, and Keruouac. Weren't the days of Eisenhower's presidency the best ones? The ghost of my father is nodding. But Dad didn't live to see the Reagan years. I think the 80s would have made him kick his heels. What do you make of Sarah Palin, Dad? Oops, I've lost him. One mustn't push a ghost too far past the logic of his time … though, really, as for that … the logic of Sarah … well, anyway ... the mists encroach.

Fog has wiped the slate clean, a grey silence overtaking time. The screen is black and white again. The post-war waves of real estate giddiness that shaped downtown have never happened. Dad, do you remember Minneapolis in 1954? Do you remember the Foshay, the tapering and tawny erection that defined the 'skyline' for decades in mid-century? He's nodding happily again. But there were no Twins, no Vikings. Did my parents have a little silver-screened box that gave them grainy shots of Joltin' Joe and the Yankees? News from the Kremlin, still reeling from the sudden death of Uncle Joe?

For my Dad's generation, everything proceeds from the war, everything rising smoke from that fire. Cities rose from the ashes. Nations, industries, philosophies, leaders, a generation of babies all were the progeny and reply to the war. What Dwight brought back from the war were vivid memories of his travels across Europe. Dwight was a finicky traveler. He required a large entourage, hundreds of thousands of armed men, to be specific, men in tanks and planes, men with guns and grenades.

Ah, those madcap mid-century years: it was a time defined by mass mobilization, mad for huge numbers of human bodies, whether it was Ford and his assembly lines, parties and movements, or war. These days war is a dozen demented and unshaven fools who hijack airliners. Obama's efforts in Afghanistan seem strained, quaint, messy. We've lost that epic feeling.

The thing about mass efforts, they demand Herculean accomplishments in organization. Ike was the consummate organization man. Logistics over bullets. He was impressed by the German autobahn. His civilization-bending romp across western Europe would have been impossible without the extensive infrastructure realized by mass-menschen hungry for war. Global war in the bag, he turned an analytical eye on our vast North American spaces.

And so it is we inherit the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, begun in the 50s. Any coincidence that the road emerges as a theme in literature and movies in the 50s and 60s? Can we in 2010 imagine this nation without its highways? I can't. I grew up within a few miles of one of the classic routes, Highway 10, California to Florida.

Now I live one block from another one of them, the 94, Michigan to Montana. In the fog, traffic is slow. I can see the tops of the semis creeping along beyond the chain link fence. It's always the westbound traffic that is backed up. We're still manifesting destiny, it would seem, with Daddy Dwight's blessing.

2010-09-12T14:12:00.001-07:00

Travelogue 357 – September 12
Commemorate

Leeza lived long enough to experience Nine-Eleven. What does that mean? What part of us is made of the things we witness? The small rooms we call our life stories resound from time to time with the roar of passing trains or the shouts of passing mobs. History intrudes in its disturbing way, insisting that time – OUR time, we think – will now be marked in long memories by this capricious turn of events. Our stories have suddenly been hijacked by a dozen jihadists and a nasty Washington cabal of vigilantes. It's done.

Ethiopians don't see their lives as small, isolated rooms, I would dare say. Few of them could identify with a metaphor they haven't experienced: it's a rare man or woman over there who has had a room to him/herself. Life, rather, is the souk, the market, where all stories are wound together inextricably. The story is hijacked every day, they might shrug. Nine-Eleven? Do you think you're special?

In her last years, Leeza witnessed a few things that made her cry: Wellstone's death, Nine-Eleven, and variously cruelties up close and personal. She said she couldn't bring children into this world. Is that why she was exterminated?

Some freakish clergyman announces he's fit to judge the Quran. The press obliges him with a sustained blast of attention. Thousands of Afghanis march to protest the words of a freak. A midsummer night's circle of dancing fools link hands across the globe to perpetrate 'news'. They seek to define our day; they envision headlines becoming chapter subtitles in Kansas history books. Does progress mean that next year cable shows will broadcast a straight-jacketed mental patient shouting that the Chinese race was seeded by aliens? Will thousands of Chinese will take to the streets to condemn the West? Will it will be a fortune teller in Venice Beach declaring that Ahmadinejad is the Antichrist? Will advertisers unite to declare World War III?

Leeza's story is over. Is Leeza's story over? She takes her headlines to the grave. The rest of us carry them in our bags of banners. Nine-Eleven is one of the big ones. We drag it out once a year and scratch our heads over it. We ask, why is this a part of my story? Some of us are suspicious of the intrusion. It would make more sense if we could expand it into evil on a scale that would be worthy of a good shot of adrenaline. This is not the work of a few bizarre bands of over-excited frauds. It's the clash of empires, fighting to the death.

To those of us who need Star Wars to make sense of life, let me say this: you do not understand tragedy. You are afraid to feel it. Tragedy is almost always the result of trivial human stupidity. It makes the losses unbearable. The survivors of tragedy live on, crippled by it, trying to make sense of it. We wonder how the story could be taken so lightly by the gods.

2010-08-28T09:53:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 356 – August 28
The State Fair

I'm sitting next to a grandfather on the bus. He doesn't look like a grandfather particularly, though he obviously has trouble turning his neck. He's got all his spiky hair. He's short and sturdy. The legs jutting out of his shorts are stout and healthy. But he introduces me to his grandson, sitting in the seat ahead of us with the boy's mother, the grandfather's daughter.

Grandpa comes from a town 150 miles to the west, a town of 400 people. He comes to the State Fair every year. He has since he was five, he says. He tells me about when they used to have tractor square dancing. He's slow with his words. He's a country gentleman. He offers his seat to a young lady, but she's too city too understand.

The Minnesota State Fair is one of the biggest in the country, bringing in millions of people. It's been going since the 1850s, offering summer-end entertainment for Minnesotans for as long as the state has existed. This year, I'm one of the featured livestock. I'm manning a table for the foundation, graciously offered a spot by Peace Coffee, a local fair trade roaster, who wants to show off its partners in coffee-growing countries.

In all my years in this fair state, I can't say I've made many visits to the Fair. My memory of previous visits feeds me blurred images of crowds and cheese curds and … more crowds. This time, I rather enjoy it. Seems like age has tempered my critical faculties. It's just for fun, Mr. Travels.

The table is set inside an old brick fairgrounds building devoted this year to the 'Eco Experience.' Outside there is a single blade from a wind turbine on display, rising higher than the building. There's a Tesla car on display inside. Peace is serving free coffee. Next to us is a cooking class, stressing the 'eat local' theme. I get to taste the results of their demonstrations.

On my break, I eat a brat. I watch some teens dancing hip-hop for the kiddies. I pass the John Deere display, wondering at all the machinery. I examine the inside of a tank at the Marines' stall. I watch a small parade that includes a high school marching band and a unicycle club. There are a couple teenage boys in the club who can do jumps and bounce around on the unicycles and twirl them underneath them. I walk down streets lined with fast food: pizza on a stick, foot-longs, taffy, cookies. I watch the toddlers on the little rides made just for them, a slow carousel, or bumblebees cars in the air. Some of the kids are mystified. Some know they should be having fun. I pass the big kid rides, and laugh at the chorus of girls' screams.

Back at the table, I continue to be amazed at the hardiness of the visitors, who shuffle by in lines, making sure to check out every display in this over-heated building, always in good spirits. Everyone is generous with feigned or genuine interest; everyone smiles and says hello. They call the State Fair the Great Minnesota Get-Together. A dated and unsophisticated slogan, but it seems to apply.

Biking back to Minneapolis, I relish the beautiful day, another in a long chain of them. I wonder how these meticulously scheduled and highly scripted events manage to lift some load from people's shoulders; how such events, hard-wired into the calendar, can create a moment of timelessness.

2010-08-24T08:46:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 355 – August 24
Leo's Lament

There's a sudden, if subtle, change in the tempo and the light. I have to keep referring to a mental calendar. What's happening? For one thing, I honestly sense that the summer light has undergone a shift. Midday sunlight seems dimmer. Clouds have been cavorting overhead lately, dropping bits of rain, but generally maintaining a jovial tone. But when one of them crosses the sun, I shiver. Is it an eclipse? There's a degree of light gone missing. It's still warm; its still humid, but the light! I think this is when there is a new and unconscious bounce to the step of Minnesotans. They feel the slight shift toward darkness and cold. But me, a native Californian, I shiver.

Secondly, who are all these people? Oh yes, these new bodies in the coffee shops, these new yowls downtown at night, these new cars on the road, these are students! I consult the inward calendar. Yes, colleges are warming their engines. Whole villages within the metro re-populate.

The place is called the Segue Coffee Shop. It just opened. It has opened in the place once inhabited by a cafe I wrote about two years ago, when I was discovering Elliott Park. Back then this space was managed by community activists and hippies. The place was an eclectic match of tables and chairs. It had a stage for the rare performance of local talent. It had a TV exhibiting non-local talent.

The new Segue Cafe has little of the bohemian charms of its predecessor. There is lots of very clean hardwood floor. There are scarce and very tidy items of furniture, a cozy set of armchairs and a few shiny little tables. In the entire room, there are probably seats for a dozen.

I'm not comfortable with cafes that try too hard to be comfortable. I prefer big, drafty rooms packed with rows of small, scarred tables and solid wooden chairs. Tall windows, tall blank walls are great. Add some art if you must, but please apply some critical judgement.

In any case, the Segue Coffee Shop is staffed by, and largely serves, students from the nearby Bible college that is rapidly re-populating. They are a polite bunch. It must be one of those commandments I keep hearing about. Politeness while one shares caffeinated beverages was a virtue valued highly among nomadic peoples of the Formerly Fertile Crescent. They say Abraham was a man with highly polished manners, as much as his tortured son may have complained.

Bible students flood the streets of Elliott Park, saying, 'Thank you.' The sun sets earlier every day, drawing out the non-Biblical types, prowling Hennepin with impolite intentions.

O sad, embattled August! Proud month of lions, named for emperors; month that embarks like gilded warships on a summer campaign; month of strongest sun; lament! Lament that your final week should be yield to foreboding autumnal winds, shuddering indecision, and ill-mannered tribes that have eyes only for coy September. Lament that your days should end among such distractions! Look to next year for greater glory.

2010-08-21T16:06:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 354 – August 21
Noir, Fade to Cream

I remember the Cold War. Why does it seem so long ago? Where's the nostalgia for Communism? Who wouldn't prefer crusty old Brezhnev to Bin Laden? Bin Laden has no stock of fine vodka and Cuban cigars in his cave, I assure you. He's got no Sputniks; he's got no grandstand Politboros, no May Day parades. Frankly, Osama is an unfortunate symbol of our times, all gleaming eyes and humorless mission. There's no clownish Yeltsin in the wings for Afghanistan. Such impoverished, such earnest times.

I've been reading spy novels again. It's an indulgence. The spy novel is a Cold War art form, and for greatest enjoyment, one must return to the Cold War authors. These days I'm revisiting an old favorite, Len Deighton. The book is one of his originals, written in '64 or so. It's set in occupied Berlin. We follow the chain-smoking, wise-cracking spy (is there any other kind?). This spy is British. He's a spy with no name, a true spook. By the way, it's an interesting fact that namlessness is a great devise for getting to know a character. Somehow it submerges one further inside the narrator's POV. No one hears his own name. 'Jarvis is leaving home. Jarvis is walking right out that door. Jarvis turns and puts the key in the lock. Jarvis is out.'

The novel's cast of characters is suitably dark, savvy, and indirect. 'Indirect' is understatement by several orders. It would seem that spies dialogues with one another in adolescent-style wink-and-a-smile dialects delivered with fair proportions of pose and bluff. And a good spy keeps a gun ready for the bizarrely sudden moments of violence – nothing like current movie violence, which washes against one like waves from a passing speedboat, along with the boat radio's blast of unsympathetic music. And above all, there must be a whiskey-soaked world-weariness about it.

The key descriptor is dark. That's the era of purest noir, isn't it? These days we play at noir, but our noir amounts to little more than the narcissistic perversity of spoiled rich kids. It's Holden Caufield kicking a can. The Cold War generation earned its noir, a few world wars and the Depression in their knapsacks. The midnight swagger, ciggie between the lips, sharp suits and demure glances, it's all a bit of a show, don't you think? A pantomime by the disillusioned who have staggered into peace and prosperity, their souls in shreds, and should be enjoying life a lot more. It's cool because it's a put-on. It's Vladimir and Estragon acting out War and Peace. These are matters of life and death, one intones, sprawled across the park bench. Wipe that bloody smirk off your face. Am I smirking really? In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo. Oh dear, wrong war.

I wander my own little post-war post-city, lost in my own time. I realize that guys only ten or fifteen years older than me did NOT fight in World War II. A part of me remains frozen in youth, when men who looked grizzled were WWII veterans. No, these are veterans of the 60s, (a totally different satchel of post-traumatic stress conditions that I'll unpack in another essay.) Some day a man will realize that the grizzled men lined up at the bar have NO memories of the 60s, like the elders of his childhood did. What will have been lost?

What would be the opposite of noir? It might just be Scott Pilgrim, a perky blanc that I swished and spat last night. What do we learn from Scott Pilgrim? Can it stand in as a glimpse into the soul of America, August, 2010? If so it will the most fleeting of glimpses, the revelation after a third shot of espresso. Pilgrim's world weariness goes only so far as impatience with what's on the radio. His poses are manifestly awkward, his rebuttals stubbornly dumb in the manner of pre-teens. His morality pokes about leisurely on a plane of rare and expansive airs. If Pilgrim's grand and great grandparents may not have understood the humor, they might have appreciated the flattering comfort behind it. Didn't they murmur to themselves through gritted teeth that they were fighting for their kids? Their kids would have it all. They would get to make flippant movies. Their kids would get to frown over guitar riffs. Their kids would get to argue over hairstyles. How wonderful.

Maybe there is after all an historical or genetic helix linking Bogart's sad eyes with the vacuous ones of young Cera. Maybe the links in that helix are strong and right. The young blank-eyed hero meanders in his own time toward the pillow-soft truths. It's a funny film. Why not?

2010-08-14T15:47:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 353 – August 14
Ada Abides

A delicate dragonfly gets trapped inside Stephanie's water glass. It struggles against the circular walls of its confinement and then drops into the water. Such simple things confound the things that live and breathe on Planet Earth. Stephanie quickly pours the unfortunate out with her water into the garden. The dragonfly crawls away.

We sit high above the River Thornapple. Our piece of river gently curves below a steep decline populated by towering pines and low brush that, despite their green numbers, still don't seem to check the erosion. The water is peaceful and green. It doesn't appear so greedy as to feed on Stephanie and Marc's land, but it does year by year, centimeter by centimeter.

The hawks and herons still trust the high-wire pine branches. The hillside still supports visiting deer. Hummingbirds hover inquisitively over the back patio. The flowering brush entices butterflies and dragonflies, grasshoppers and crickets. At night they join forces to send forth a symphony of survival. Geology hardly intrudes, hardly seems violent today.

I'm in Michigan for my summer visit. Stephanie has put together another lovely event in her house, guests filling the spacious house, spilling out onto the dangerous patio, teetering on the precipice of Earth's hungry science. Little do they realize that they stand suspended high above the river's future expanded course. They drink Stephanie's wine and laugh; they view rows of art created by children in Africa.

The nearest town is Ada, a quaint little town founded in 1821 by a man named Rix. Fortunately, the sage town fathers saw fit to skip over that bit of history, and to name the town after the first postmaster's daughter. So forward she skips, cute little Ada in pigtails, hand in hand with the resident genial giant, Amway. The giant does well staying out of sight, out on hissing, multi-lane Fulton.Street, Route 21.

On my runs through Ada, I make sure to cross the historic covered bridge, constructed just after the Civil War. It's one of only nine still standing in Michigan. It's always cool inside and smells of old timber. There's a green baseball diamond adjacent to the bridge, and the vignette is enough to remind an urban tramp he's in America. Beyond the bridge, I run through the quiet blocks of tiny Ada, where none of the shops seem to open with any regularity.

One night, Marc and I convince Stephanie and friends to watch 'The Big Lebowski'. I haven't seen it in years, and the Dude has been on my mind. (I won't analyze that.) But it's a fine ride, despite the sober and baffled silence among the other guests. Just the 'arc' (popular word among script and screenplay writers) the arc of Mr. Bridges's facial expressions is enough to keep one delighted throughout. Plot has always been a secondary concern to our beloved Minnesotan brothers, the Coens. Old fans understand. Meaning lies among the slow creases of well-chosen actors' faces, among the ridiculous solipsisms in the dialogue, and among the lurid visions of camera and director. The characters here really shine. Yes, the dude abides.

2010-08-10T11:01:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 352 – August 10
Flutes and Buckets

We're sitting in a hotel lobby sipping champagne when the rain comes. We are celebrating. The Hotel Ivy is only a few blocks from the Westminster Church downtown, where we staged the event. This hotel is where Miluska is staying.

Miluska quoted Emerson in her short speech, so I'm happy with her. I didn't quote anybody, and I had three times as much time in the program as Miluska did. I could have quoted Nelson Mandela or Haile Selasse or one of my brilliant children in Ethiopia, but the only one I quoted was myself. I think the highlight of my talk was when Richard's three year-old girl wanted my opinion on 'pooping her pants'. I was commendably broad-minded, remaining scrupulously neutral. It's been a while since I've had anything intelligent to saying about pooping one's pants.

Miluska also introduced us to the new Hotel Ivy, a spare but comfortable beauty downtown. The building is an historic structure, actually built to serve as a complex for the Church of Christ Scientist in the 20s. It was built in what is referred to as 'Ziggurat style', I suppose to appeal to the dramatic aesthetic of Christian Scientists. Perhaps they feel were hoping to channel those feeble healing energies from above. In any case, they never got a chance to try. By 1930, the church had given up on the project, an initiative that could not be healed by prayer.

Perhaps the funnest thing about the hotel is the diminutive, ancient tower that the developers of the hotel gobbled up as part of the package. It still stands whole, but connected to the hotel and converted into rooms and a restaurant. It's a funny little structure, looking like a clay model that was rolled in a box of sand and pebbles while still wet. Now its Flintstone windows look complacently out on Second Avenue with the dressings of style.

We can't open our bottle of champagne in the church, so we follow Miluska back to her hotel. We rearrange some tables in the lobby. Someone scares up some glasses, and we toast our success. Events for small non-profits are always successes. It's a matter of fragile morale.

If I need solace, I can find it in my dress. Roxana and her sister made sure I would not embarrass them with my traveling-guy's Target wardrobe. I'm all in tight black, looking like a mid-level narcotraficante. It might not fit the mold of earnest charity guy, but I'm enjoying myself.

We had rented a large and attractive room at the church, and we managed to keep it from appearing too empty. Roxana arranged for great Mexican food. The program was short and sweet: history of our work, Astrid's reverie about poopy pants, Richard showing off the new website, and the push for help and donations. Afterward, as the storm clouds gathered over Minneapolis, a good hour of chatter.

Roxana has boxes of stuff from the event in the back of her car. After our stop at the Ivy, we go to her workplace to unload. The storm is in full gale now. We back up to the door of the building, as close as we can get, but the eave still ends right above the back door. Every time I bend over to pull stuff from the car, streams of cold water pour onto my back. My class ensemble is soaked.

We retreat into a nearby bar. Running from the parking lot, we are soaked to the bone. The AC is on high, a common phenomenon in Minnesota, where people become anxious without a comforting sense of chill. We shiver and toast again a job well done.

2010-08-05T08:47:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 351 – August 5
Weird Creatures of the Mind

There's a new art show at the Caffetto coffeehouse. The artist draws in the style of manga. One painting portrays a cute blob of a mouse against an orange background. The mouse is shooting black gas from his forepaws. He also seems to be blowing a blue bubble from the top of his head. A smaller drawing depicts a ravenous raccoon chewing on the head of a little girl. In another painting, the mouse seems to be wearing a boa and his mouth is foaming. He has bull horns now. He holds a small bunny by the ears, and the bunny seems to be dissolving, one eyeball hanging from his melting face. In a small, multimedia piece, a pretty little frame is mounted by a stuffed version of our mouse, sticking his tongue out. His head rises out of what would appear to be layers of red felt gore. Inside the frame is a xeroxed drawing of a girl's face held in place with a pin. Dripping down from beneath the paper girl is a trail of red paint, that even overflows the lower lip of the frame.

This morning, the musical selection at the cafe is violins and accordion surmounted by a robust woman's voice saying nothing much. I notice that much of the music played at Caffetto features folksy sounds and non-lyrics,a kind of iteration of nonsense or saccharin bromides repeated like mantras. Somehow it matches the weirdly bloody manga.

I'm meeting Richard here. We're working on the foundation website. I've been working non-stop on this little project. It's something of a fantastical creature in itself, like a cute, carnivorous mouse with horns. It's would be trite to affirm only what everyone knows, that the internet doesn't really exist; it's 'virtual'; and yet so many real things draw life and blood and substance from the ethers, just being plugging in. To think, this tappety-tap over a cup of coffee affects the lives of children in Africa, my little laptop becoming like a chunk of iron tossed into one tray of Rhadamanthus's scales, weighing against the terrible judgement of poverty. It's disorienting. I walk outside, into the thick August heat. I stare at the SuperAmerica across the street. SUV, Prius, Corolla, SUV … Coke, Mountain Dew, Red Bull ...

What does it feel like to live so much of my life in conversation with a ten-inch screen of light while outside the very real month of August has settled in? Isn't there something very distinct and very palpable to the sweaty, quiet month of August? For Minneapolitans, the month arrives with much fanfare, several major art fairs and the Fringe Festival kicking off just as August moves in. But somehow, even these monstrous events get swallowed up in the humid contentedness of ripe August, with its big hazy skies and cicadas. Stand outside Caffetto and watch the beehive clouds drift slowly, as slowly as your anesthetized thoughts. Far below the majesty of the troposphere, Bob shoves the nozzle into his gas tank, clicks it into action, stares through his shades at the numbers tripping.

Let's see. Somewhere across the world.

Four year-olds are playing. They get an hour on playground toys they've never seen before. Mothers sit patiently. One mother sits nervously in the office chair while she's interviewed. Heart-breaking anxiety in her posture. The only kindergarten. A four year-old stares into Menna's camera, intrigued by the machine. Her magnificent eyes probe through the lens. The image travels across the world. Her eyes are examining all of us.

I have to get back to work.

2010-07-30T08:55:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 350 – July 30
Spooky

A gentle front has blown in, shushing the town, softening its summer colors into Oregon greys, shedding barely perceptible mists over the streets. Biking around Minneapolis has been spooky this week, even before the fog blew in. It seems so empty. It's late July, heading into sleepy August. The skies are dense with heat and moisture, shimmering with white premonitions when the sun is out and hosting great pile-ups of thunderclouds on many an afternoon. The city population seems to have lapsed into a long Mississippi nap. I bike the streets downtown nearly alone, coasting lazily, pedaling only to keep in motion. Today is just a little more morose than the sunny days, the city somehow even more abandoned.

My errands lead me in circles around downtown and adjoining neighborhoods. The foundation has an event coming up. Perhaps that's a bad bit of calendar Feng Shui, trying to fan currents of enthusiasm among the dead heat of mid-summer. My job today is to solicit gifts from local merchants for our fortunate event guests. I'm making sales calls, mounting the bike again to coast toward the next, casting a slow eye along the store fronts for new ideas. 'Would you like to donate?'

I stop by a tattoo place, thinking that a gift certificate from a tat parlor would be solidly cool. It's on the second floor of a small building, up above a Dunn Brothers, and I think I must take a wrong turn because I push through an unlabeled door and find myself in dim and nearly empty quarters. I've never been in a tattoo parlor – yes, my hide is pristine and unadorned – so I don't know what such a place should look like. In one room is a couch, looking like something for massage or something out of a clinic. There's nothing else in the four or five rooms, except the dark-haired woman sitting at a desk in the back of the furthest room. She circles the desk and shuffles out to meet me. She has broad shoulders; there's a menacing sort of physicality to her. She has dark jaded eyes, encircled with tired shadows. She scowls when I make my pitch.

'Too late,' she says, and turns away. 'I'm going back to California.' She makes her slouching way back to her lonely post. 'Oh, yeah? I'm from California,' I try to make conversation. 'Where are you from?' This doesn't go far. She pauses over her seat, black irony flashing in her eyes. I'm suddenly ill at ease alone with her in these empty rooms.

I'm reading a novel that I can recommend. It's called 'Sharp Teeth', and it's a noir written in free verse about werewolves in LA. Thank you: an author with a sense of fun! And it actually works – though it does appear that with free verse Barlow, the author, feels an awkward imperative to cap each scene with a poignant flourish. That becomes tiring in a long format. But I forgive. I mean, where else will you delight in scenes of werewolves playing in bridge tournaments against cheating blue hairs? He even has the audacity to make his main character a dogcatcher. Come on!

It's most often a sin to burden authors with creaking loads of metaphor. But that won't stop me from piling a few on the werewolf. As I hurry down the stairs away from the dark lady's chambers with a shiver in my spine, I think that the pertinent metaphor is one of secrecy. Every so often, one stumbles upon an unknown hallway in a familiar building, inhabited by shadowy people, and the world seems strange. The imagination responds with dreams of parallel universes and secret monsters.

The modern world is almost impossibly complex. Every year the conspiracies run deeper and deeper. Super heroes rise from our unconscious, fertile as the primeval Nile, and still we can't keep up. The wolves invade our bridge parlors. They move in above Dunn Brothers.

I'm back on my bicycle, an innocent on the empty streets. Where is everyone?

2010-07-24T06:51:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 349 – July 24
Caffetto

It's a lovely summer day outside that big picture window. I'm not looking at the work on my computer screen. I'm looking at the sunshine on the grass in the yard across the street. I'm looking at the young couple at the outdoor table. I'm watching the man at the table just inside the window as he fishes for something in his coffee with the earpiece of his eyeglasses. He's very intent. He has a big belly inside his yellow Old Navy T. He wears high-water jeans that are light blue. He has long fingers to apply to his task. His mild smile never varies. What he extracts from his coffee, he gently places on one wrist. It's a moth. He returns to typing on his computer while the moth climbs up his hand and onto a finger. The man nudges the visitor onto his other arm, and the moth goes the opposite way this time, hiking up a hairy arm, a sleeve, and onto his host's shoulder, all while the man juts his chin toward the laptop screen, maintaining his sweet smile.

This is Caffetto, the cafe that has emerged as my favorite this summer. It's a bit of history for me. Wes and I were regulars at Caffetto in the early 90s. It occupied the same location – a rather prosaic setting, across from a gas station, off a particularly drab section of Lyndale – but it was only one room then. It was owned by Ali the Turk and featured a dazzling payroll of colorful young ladies.

Today it has expanded to two rooms, (with two basement rooms below where you can play ping-pong or very old video games). It's owned by a good-looking young couple, who also do most of the barista work. And now it's the task of the rooms themselves to be colorful. One ceiling is aqua, another is brick red. One wall is gold, one is yellow-green, one is red ochre. One wall is patched plaster, another is exposed cinder block, another is eroded concrete. The first room, where the coffee bar and display cases are, is an explosion of kitsch and clutter. One of the couple is a fan of ships apparently, because there are many silly representations of clipper ships and sailboats, from dusty mantelpiece paintings to string art. One wall is devoted to small kitsch pieces, including puppies, sad clowns and big-eyed little ballerinas. In the second room, there are plants and piles of books, small couches and diner booths, lamps with shades, and shelves with board games. There's some local's exhibit of paintings up. There's a painting of a floating gorilla with cavorting starfish. There's a red and black piece with headless people meditating. There's another of a ghoulish bunny on fire.

When I came in this morning, Tammy was behind the counter on all fours. The electricity had apparently blown. The place was eerily dark and silent. I ordered a muffin, but had to wait for my coffee. A gaunt, unshaven local was assiduously working at one of the outlets. Tammy is apologetic but smiling sweetly as ever. If this cafe is a museum, she is the display of sunny temperament, never wavering in her almost unnerving good cheer.

The whole house is now absorbed in their computer screens. The moth has flown, but the man with yellow rounded shoulders does not seem to miss her. He smiles at his laptop and presumably the laptop smiles back. Tammy smiles at every customer, and they can rarely resist smiling back. The ships sail off into gilded seas, and the clown sheds another tear. I must get back to work.

2010-07-13T17:51:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 348 – July 13
Enduring

Sometimes we prove ourselves stronger than we think, and sometimes it's the reverse. For example, I've been running like a pro this week, against all odds, against the weather. It's been a warm one. I step outside in the mid-afternoon into the blast of sunshine, heat and humidity, and I tell myself I'm doing a quick three-miler; that's it. I set out; my pacing is steady; my breathing is steady. At three miles I make it five. At five I make it eight. I finish on a hill, and I pour it on – meaning both the power and the sweat. Not all weeks go like that, but training is a joy when they do.

Yesterday was the anniversary of Leeza's passing. I felt no dread of the day as it approached. No waves of despair that an anniversary can send back and forth in time. When the day came, I thought that I might be off the hook. I felt fine.

Only later did I realize that I'd been acting out some old routines. A week or two before the date, I had spontaneously picked up my memoir project again. I started writing about Leeza, writing about grief. When the day is over, I find that, without thinking about it, I've checked in with all the friends that were by my side then. Some called me, remembering the date. Others I called, and I thought it was on a whim. Put that in one paragraph and it seems unlikely, but accusing details from the unconscious can hide inside a full day. It's all true: I wasn't aware.

The day passed, and I thought I might be off the hook. Then came the 12th. I had anticipated a full day of work, but the day never seemed to get going. By mid-morning, I was losing altitude quickly. I wandered around town lost on my bike, venturing out and then back on ghostly errands, forgetting what I was about, and losing focus. Before I knew it, the day had dissolved, and I was deep in it.

What's interesting is the delay. Why the day after? Maybe it signifies a shift in the pain. The crux of this year's sadness isn't in the death but in the dubious rebirth. The day after is la vita nuova, the day of vocation, the day the work begins. I feel it; I feel all the work of seven years.

Is it a coincidence that I'm writing about the first days after she died? The wake, the first discussions about the school, the funeral. The return to work at the college. The work, the head-shaking wonder & dread of the things we take on in life.

2010-07-06T09:09:00.000-07:00

Travelogue 347 – July 6
Kicks are for Kids

This was the weekend of kids' power. Escaping the heat, escaping the drunk and the reckless, escaping fools who shouldn't be handling gunpowder, one retreats indoors to the theaters. The tradition of July Fourth blockbusters seems watered down this year, but a summer move is a summer movie is a …

The first show we see is adapted from a comic book, which is nothing unusual these days. Going into this weekend, the director had exactly one last chance with me. Shamalamadingdong has created a long series of increasingly awful productions, the last being a horror sham in which the plants of the world are killing us off.

This one is the story of the Avatar – no, that's no reference to James Cameron's glow-in-the-dark world of blue cat-people. This one is the savior of a world made up of tribes dedicated to each of the elements. This Avatar is a child of the Air tribe, as are all Avatars, should you need informing on fine points of hierarchy on the world of …element people.

Wait! Before you read on, before you take your seat at the theater, let me impart one revelation that turns the experience of the film on its head: It's a children's film! That's a detail that apparently preview editors find too trivial to impart. It took me a full minute to figure it out, and then … actually I was quite happy with it. Once you've achieved that little mental transition, you might really enjoy the movie. I did, and I can say that Shamalamadingdong has earned a reprieve.

The greatest gift Mr. Shama brings to the world of film is his eye. The film is a gorgeous object to look at and admire. I think that's Mr. Lama's priority. The 'actors' were clearly chosen not for their ability to deliver lines, but for their ability to dance. Sticklers will argue with my use of the term 'dance'. That is martial arts, the sticklers will say. Look, any movement executed primarily for aesthetic purposes is dance to me. And there is some beautiful movement in this film. Mr, Ringer, the star of the show, formerly a preteen nobody Texas blackbelt in Taekwondo, is a real joy to watch.

And watch is what you do; that's your job as audience member here. There is little else for the intellect to engage in, and just so, Mr. Dingdong. I'm happy that you brought in the star of 'Slumdog', and a few other Bollywood celebs. This is one more step in the dialectic between East and West, between the natural and the choreographed. Movement fan that I am, I'm rooting for the Bolly touch.

Just so, Mr. Miyagi. The art of movement on the screen is a venerable tradition, is it not? And while there is not much singing in the rain imprinted on film anymore, there is plenty of kicking butt. Mr. Miyagi does not believe in kicking butt for its own sake. And, truly, it's worth contemplating: butt-kicking on screen or stage is not really butt-whooping, but movement for aesthetic pleasure. Right?

Then why is the pleasure in the Smith-Pinkett production seem so compromised? These are twelve year-old dancers, not fighters. But the blows are not very playful, and the Chinese villain-kids are frighteningly effective warriors. Are we paying the price here for the ambitions of a pair of high-power parents who can't wait a few years to release their kick-ass little creation on the world? Need we judge by the many pointless stills of mommy and daddy in the credits?

Or is there an aesthetic to scrawny twelve year-olds whacking each other in the head and kissing shy Chinese girls? If there is, I'm not sure whether it's an aesthetic that harmonizes most with comic books – the sort of green room reading appropriate for young Jaden – or with other types of paper-bag magazines.

Perhaps the real issue is with the screen mommy. The premise follows, after all, from mommy's unexplained transfer from Detroit to Beijing. (??) I admit that part of me got stuck right there. Mommy does a better job integrating culturally than her twelve year-old. In fact, she does so well that while little Dre gets mauled in the kung fu ring, she cheers like any proud Little League parent. It's all a little odd.

As Smith and Pinkett send their child into battle, how are we being asked to respond? As you applaud the victory, think about whether you're applauding the battle.