Angels in America

Within our midst, ever cheerful, is the American saint. Not the soft-voiced shuffling monks and nuns residing in isolated valleys and snowy caverns and hushed high rock. She whirls quickly past you, carafes of coffee sailing and sloshing over your head. Diminutive in size, but a commanding presence, she is ever attentive. You know her hairdo, timeless. Mention of her can be found in fragments from the Biblical era to the Bible-belt. Depending on the climates of translation, she is variously known as "Waitress of the American Diner" but you know her by Flo, or in our case here in Atlanta, Rhia. We've been in Georgia a few days for an International schools job fair, and found The White House diner, the real deal, unflashy, been here 60 years and hasn't changed a day. Why is Rhia and her bevy anointed with sainthood? For the simple but essential act: she's there with coffee refills before you have to flag a skinny airhead down to ask. Rhia was born at 55 years old and has remained and will remain to please and accommodate and call you "sweetie" long after you and I settle in soil and mingle with leaves and gnarled plums for a worm's banquet. Photos of presidents lined the walls of this venerable diner. After we sat down and immediately had coffee served, I lunged from the booth to find us a newspaper. A southern trucker with the Saturday edition piled on his table spied me searching. "Looking for a newspaper?" Scanning inside and out, I said yes. "You can have this one." You sure? "Yeah I'm done with it. Let me just check my horoscope..."

Blurbs O Burbs - Unexpected Exotic Travel!

The making of coffee in the early morning is a ritual for ordering your world. Sleep is Chaos: dreams and nightmares swoop down into our souls we know not whence (frighteningly, those nocturnal imaginings our fevered minds create, but the reason why that new guy in Payroll was flying over the backyard silver maple as your Junior High science teacher looks on, while you pile a wall of bricks around your ex-wife’s wedding dress simply escapes you). When we wake crawling into consciousness we immediately desire to reestablish control. I relish all the measured steps to build that first cup: grinding fresh beans into fine powder, the spit, hiss, and gurgle of brewing, and the machine’s final steaming exhaling to signal coffee is ready. You know, traveling to exotic places is worth writing about. But sometimes those places aren’t traditionally exotic. At present, sleep’s fantasia has evaporated, and I am sitting in a comfortable porch bench in a gated community called Rancho Murieta in the Sierra foothills of California, having arrived the day before to visit my brother and wife and two nephews. Some quiet reading time before the nephews stir (“Uncle Tim, you want to play catch with these darts?”) in the carefully tended neighborhood before the terrible heat of the day. Brother and family live on a cul de sac, and it’s not unpleasant sitting here, but I know if I lived here I would surely die. It occurs to me that the garish realism of Desperate Housewives and The Truman Show is less digital effects than documentary: my god, look at this place. Every trim and trimming is planned to adhere to a model of what a perfect neighborhood should look like. Each address is a small isolated complete minor kingdom, the homeowners strung together with shared understanding of the need to upkeep one’s own province while respecting the sovereignty of other kingdoms. From my vantage on the porch (and I must say on every visit I’ve never seen anyone else ever sitting on their porches) I’m pleased to see great oaks towering into the pale blue that the community planners blessedly allowed to remain, and the homes built around them. Beyond that small grace, the unruly spread of original wild nature is checked, and instead the august spirit of perfectibility that sustains the dream of the suburbs reigns—or I guess this is technically the exburbs, and I suppose what differentiates the original town from the frontier’s outlaying exburbs is the degree to which a center does or does not exist, a localized gathering area where all citizens come together (creatively, economically, politically, socially). I think my kingdom metaphor is not misplaced: nothing escapes royal attention to order. Like palace grounds, lawns are sculpted, carefully edged. Gardens are designed to rise and fall and flow as though natural, but instead appear obsessively tended. But I’ve never seen anyone gardening. The color you paint your house is ordered from a narrow spectrum, grays, beiges, milky salmons, ash blues. Ironically, though a kingdom in your own right, you are not to stand out. Conformity is the rule (and here’s the weirdest observation: every golf cart that hums by in this community is driven by guys that look dead-on like my brother, or my brother looks like them: it’s the stocky build, the close-cropped hair, the blank face of driving, the golf shirt, the sporty baseball hat…everyone the same)(and don’t get me started on the shiny muscle trucks these guys parade around in: the Dodge Rams, the Ford 1500s or whatever, you ride around on your bike and every other driveway has a behemoth stretching to the sidewalk, because, yeah, they need a huge truck to haul a carton of milk four blocks away, or they need to make sure we use up the available fossil fuels as quickly and inefficiently as possible, thereby ushering in all the quicker the Armageddon I suppose in their born-again hearts they thirst for). I don’t know this, but it wouldn’t surprise me if lawns were required, as model neighborhoods advertise them (irrelevant that they are unnatural, water-intensive, and require fertilizers which drain off into the environment). You couldn’t grow high stalks of corn in your front yard, say. And front yards are not given to use, it seems. These are family homes designed for Family in the strict cultural and politically specific sense of the term, but I rarely see actual families on their lawns. Growing up in the suburbs of Sacramento, on a summer morning like this with school out, we’d be outside running around, tossing footballs around, scrimmaging, over one lawn and across another. I look around: where are the children and their wild imaginations? We created great assemblies of adventures on summer mornings and evenings, but it seems these yards are for presentation, not play. And this sprawling rosemary bush to my left: does anyone clip a few stems to season their own tomato sauce? Not if Costco has a 25-lb. of dried rosemary on sale (it’s out in the garage on the shelf below the gallon jug on Mama Walmart’s “Homemade” tomato sauce). But wait! My quiet is disturbed: across the street a king has emerged. He’s wearing gray shorts, white socks, sandals, a T-shirt culturally referred to as “wife-beater”, and he is pushing a lawnmower. The grass seems to have grown overnight, and his Highness has come to quell the rebellion before the unrest spreads. I notice, as the mowing commences, that the homeowner chooses the outside-borders-first style, rather than the consecutive straight rows style. Halfway through his lawn, he turns off the engine to empty the trimmings. Just then I hear someone scream inside a house down the block. But like birds startled make for the sky then immediately float gently back down, the neighborhood returns to ordered silence. What goes on within each kingdom is the king’s business. Mowing accomplished, all is quiet, and I return to reading. Suddenly, a voice! The king speaks! He says good morning to his neighbor who has emerged. What ensues is the perfunctory exchange we all carry on. First, the weather is noted, and the king says he wanted to get the yard done before it got too hot. “Yes,” the other king replies, “the days are getting just too hot.” “Well, it’s all about enjoying life,” retorts the first king (I have to pause, but I guess he means enjoying life after work is done). “Oh yeah,” says the second king, “you gotta enjoy life." "What are your plans for the Fourth?” “Oh, you know, we’ll walk down to the parade (walk? Not drive his Dodge Ram the torturous three blocks?), then there’s a barbeque, then you know, we’ll have some friends over and then, yeah, we’ll go see the fireworks." “Hey that’s great,” says first king: “I notice you have a lot of flags in your yard there.” “Oh yeah, you know, it’s patriotic and kind of…fun…you coming to the barbeque?” (Here the first king pats his round belly) “Well, too much eating!” (In his defense, the second king pats his own belly, though he looks pretty fit) “Hey, none of us need to eat more!” (It’s worth noting here that through this whole exchange neither king has moved any closer to the other. Banal formalities occur across distant lawns, and not even kings would dare tread upon their own lawns let alone trespass on another’s) First king brings up the block party, says he might drop by for a drink. The second king pauses, then with mild enthusiasm encourages, “Oh yeah, come by for a drink, there’s gonna be LOTS of food” (Was the first king only formally included in the invitations? Was he not expected to show?). The first king acknowledges the abundance of food, pats his belly to demure. Sitting here, I’m getting uncomfortable, for the hot yellow foothills sun has found me, and I’m slowly warming, but I feel locked in place, the foreign observer. A column has blocked my whereabouts, and my presence if noticed might alarm them. Conversation is winding down. As we all experience, these exchanges have no natural end. Limping from one generalization to the other, finally someone offers a “Well, don’t work too hard!” which receives the easy forced laugh and the “Oh, I won’t!” The ceremony is now officially finished, and the kings withdraw. “Have a good day, Louis,” the second king offers. Louis! How perfect is that?

A Memory of Sri Lanka

A rambling rocky train ride to Hikkaduwa, Sri Lanka, a week before Christmas 2009, passing shanties tottering amidst ruins left by the 2004 tsunami, remnants of prior ruins, it seems, foundations of earlier shanties whose residents either moved on or were swept inland on great foaming currents. Same dogs, different day. Embarrassing to scratch prose while children fumble in the earth. 

Perfumed paradise is Sri Lanka’s beach resort, a gem glittering in dust shadowing the breath and laughter of poverty. Shacks nestled against one another, spilling into rain blue Indian Ocean. Our hotel smiles upon the beach: delicately arranged deck chairs, tables of flowers, white tablecloth. Sea winds dance. A thin, hatted dark man approaches shouldering a baby monkey. The narrow leash whips as monkey leaps and scales the nearest wide-eyed blinking tourist. Jumps shoulder to shoulder, scurries around your neck, amused and kindly nibbling your flesh with tiny rubbery teeth, harmless. The man asks to pause for a photo shoot. “It’s my job, sir” he pleads as you demure, withdrawing your eyes. 

Looking over the railing, I watch a man and woman lying on their stomachs on the sand, propped up on their elbows, murmuring to one another as the gentle ocean ascends their legs, then shyly retreats. From the woman’s tanned neck dangles a crucifix. With little effort my eyes drift over her shoulder to alight on her magnificently sculpted posterior, bikinied. I shift in my chair, then consider again the couple: they wile away the time like children in quiet tropical bliss, how reduced are our intentions. Vacations gild long empty hours, fulfillment attained just snuggling on coastline. If the breeze sweeping off the ocean is cool, you slowly bake until brown. If the winds cease, you overheat. The equilibrium is upset: you rise and dunk your body in the water…. 

Travel is strange. It’s imagined and anticipated to be stopping daily grind, stepping into a wondrously alternate universe. Familiar patterns are suspended midlife, and the journey begins: the world alights with magic. Contours are tinged with starry glow. You can cross through a large bustling city like Columbo clogged with traffic, dulled commuters, sneering shopkeepers, beggars’ outstretched dirty palms, but in your born again glee the city bursts with vibrancy. Your unforgettable experience is their daily grind. But travel isn’t passive: you have to do things and see things and pay money to visit things to insure your experience is meaningful, and the more exotic, the more memorable. To completely fulfill your travels you must experience anything and everything a city has to offer, you think. 

These words originally were penned in a notebook at six in the evening at an open window of our hotel in the village of Kegalla adjacent to the Pinnawela Elephant Orphanage. Carrie naps behind me. Directly below my window drifts a shallow brown river. Boulders span its width like submerged mountain ranges, gentle rapids swirling around them. The opposite bank is peopled with coconut palms, banana trees, mounds of thick lush grasses. Running dark green hills beyond are heavy with trees and darken as the sun quietly sails west across a damp sky. I move to our balcony where earlier in the day a gentle stampede of elephants rolled through the narrow street by our hotel. Crowds had gathered at the restaurant porch above where packs waddle into the river from the orphanage at the other end of the village. We had leaned over the railing and watched them saunter into the currents, and with lumbering grace the elephants submerge in the cool waters. Initially, the herds tightened, stand knee deep milling around. Their rhythms are measured like puffed astronauts strolling the moon. Then they relax, flap their ears gingerly, contentedly. 

At one point a small contingent of elephants, after deliberating a few minutes, breaks off and ventures toward the far steep muddy bank. Murmurs of concern rumble through the remaining herd, a mix of censure and admiration for these renegades. The breakaways rush the far shore with the spirit of Luther with hammer in hand. Ashore, each finds loose dirt to scoop up and spray the sky like orange rain, or they just plop and roll gloriously in muck. They’ve returned to the wild, coated in war-paint, and the rest of the herd knows it. A complete breakdown of order ensues: new converts, trumpets blowing, storm across. The original rebels parade victoriously across the far shore in shades of rich golden mother earth. Ears flap happily the same way I imagine the ears of Crusaders did returning from Jerusalem. But the second and third fronts go beyond: they’re up there rustling the tall grasses and carrying out surveys of jungle terrain. Most of the original herd has joined the new congregation, and only a few old stalwarts carry on the old faith by remaining in a deeper pool and shower and bathe. I glance down the river. A woman wading near shore slaps her laundry on boulders. One family of elephants, including a very small one, after finishing necessary explorations, make for the river. The rest of the family bounce down from the high bank through a gully cut out of the side. But the young one missed the exit. He frets back and forth along the high bank. Most of us closely follow the developing story, cautiously sipping our beer. The young one runs wildly, he can’t get down. Concerned, an older midsized elephant trots toward the high bank, catches the young one’s attention, then with a signal head nod sprints back toward the river, glancing back to see if the young one took the hint. The young one begins to worry, and so do we. He keeps rushing back and forth. So the older one again goes through the same ritual, head nod, jump turn and race for the river. Finally, the young one finds the gully, and rushes to join his family. Cheers erupt all around. 

As the afternoon wanes the handlers call out to the community to return home. Pleas are ignored. One large bull elephant is on the other side committed to ripping bark samples from a banana tree. Finally, resigned, the families begin booming up the path as we wave a fond farewell…. 

As I said, travel is strange. There’s something both welcome and troubling when the afternoon winds down, as these words are penned. You may or may not have slept well, may or may not have drank festively the night before, and so the giddy energy of coffee and new adventures pumped into your recovery starts to slump. Nap beckons. One thought is that this downtime is wasted; travel’s exotic spell dissolves under a dull grinding sun, but you aren’t doing anything, and you’re supposed to be (paying for) doing something. Nevertheless, if you nap, seeping into your rest is the gnawing suspicion that you’re not getting your money’s worth. You leap off the bed, grab the Lonely Planet, determined to find something to do which you wouldn’t ordinarily do back home, however mundane. So a crowded, muggy, smelly 40-minute bus ride later you’re buying a guided tour through a factory for handcrafted shoelaces made from dried coconut palms.... 

Isn’t it odd getting to a town, dropping your bags at the hotel, then wandering toward the center of whatever it is you expect to experience in the town? Like the “essence” of a city, for instance. Walking and walking believing that at some magical moment a flash of memorable experience will seal your commitment, time, and money’s worth. You head for the main square, say, and the beautiful architecture and cathedrals and outside café tables and people ring your soul’s bell. But still, it’s never the essence, whatever that may mean. I suppose it’s like walking into the center of a forest. After walking in awhile, you begin walking out the other side. Life is like this. I suppose death and the afterlife are too. Back on the river in Sri Lanka, standing at the railing with glasses of wine in hand, Carrie and I welcome the soft warm evening. There’s something strange upriver. We peer and wait. Thousands of dark large bats are fording the river. They spread across the twilight sky and swoop over our hotel for a solid fifteen minutes, silently. Cut out of night's black veil, they quietly sing the end of day. And the desert blue stars blink, recording their song.

Toilet Bowl Blues - Leaving Sri Lanka

Is there a respectable way to solve the horrific problem of a backed-up toilet in a hotel room? Last few hours in Colombo, frenetic and dreary capital of Sri Lanka, tail end of Christmas holiday. My wife, Carrie, was—newsflash—shopping. We chose as our last night in Sri Lanka the Gulle Face Hotel (re the name: don’t ask—I have no idea), which is a square U-shaped old hotel opened onto the Indian Ocean. Dark wood interiors, 19th century colonial detailed exterior painted proudly British white. Everybody’d stayed here, illustrious guests’ names inscribed on a plaque in the lobby—that kind of place. I remained during the morning at the hotel, preferring to read and sit in the shade and listen to the gentle Indian surf. But of course before relaxation gets underway one must relax the tension in one’s bowels: morning achievements, shall we say. I’d finished, folded up my New Yorker, flushed and…the gurgle and filling, the swirling and chilling. My question: is there any respectable way of dealing with this in a hotel? Meaning of course your backed up toilet in your room. What you first must establish at all costs in your own mind and also the world’s is that the back up is absolutely not your fault. You give to the toilet, the toilet receives and spirits away. But once in a while that reciprocal agreement is broken. Enthroned, you fulfill your end, so to speak, often exceeding expectations, wipe clean, flush and rise (or visa versa). But instead of sucking and swirling down, the terrible waters rise, wayward contents nudge each other lethargically, the waters continue rising to floodstage, the murky currents anticipating a joyful overflowing as they glimpse the bowl’s rim and break into song at only sky beyond, while you and any other mortal and even the very gods could only gaze on helplessly while holding your pants at the swirling happy waters hoping to rage onto the tile. If that strumpet Fortune kindly glances your way at that moment, the waters cease their rise; the murky swirling slows thank goodness but remains at floodstage. As you’re left wincing, biting your lip, you hear the toilet audaciously refilling itself to await the next appointment. And you realize you’re on your own now. The toilet actually believes it’s fulfilled its obligation and turns away unsmiling like your flight attendance at a hotel bar whom you begin chatting up because she seemed so nice on the flight over. Besides being alone, so very alone, you’re stuck: you don’t dare flush again, for the toilet possesses now twice normal capacity, though best of Irish luck getting the toilet to acknowledge this, let alone remedy the critical imbalance; let’s not mince words: the toilet doesn’t give a rat’s arse. So, there isn’t a plunger in the room, unfortunately. The gallant hotel staff is paid to serve you, cater to your whims, redress the tiniest grievance. But you do not want the hotel staff to fix this. You do not want the hotel staff to help. You do not want the staff or anyone else on the planet to know. Why? Because the floating shit, the drowned toilet paper, the fetid flotsam and jetsam of the morning and night before all reflect somehow on you. Inexplicably, it just does. Like a great artist his epic mural, you made this shit. A sudden vision of Hell crosses your mind: you need to remove the apocalyptic logs. But how? In the name of all that pukes and writhes, how? Quickly you realize the action would only compound the problem, and create dreadfully new ones. If you had committed any other heinous act in your hotel room, you wouldn’t hesitate to alert the hotel staff. Perhaps you very deliberately sailed an empty champagne bottle through your beautiful glass window overlooking a Spring meadow dancing with wildflowers: No problem, sir, we will replace the window and the champagne…will a 1998 Brut suffice? You may have slept with one of the bridesmaids at a co-workers wedding, and the next morning she’s dead: No problem sir, we will take care of the body. Ah, tis a pity when such a lovely young girl dies, isn’t it? But leave shit floating in your toilet and have the staff discover it? I shudder to think. I deliberated in my hotel room 105 (see, this “you” wasn’t hypothetical) whether to be present after I’d called the front desk and explained the dire situation. Instead, I decided to flee to the anonymity of the poolside lounge, floppy safari hat lowered over my face, reading until the coast was clear, hoping the staff never pasted a room number to a face. If I had remained in the room, I imagined the worst: the lowly cleaning guy would peer into the flooded bathroom, flinched, then slowly turn to fix a disgusted stare: “My god man [sneering with horror and pity]. You were so kind to when I greeted you in the hallway yesterday evening. You looked me in the eye, and I felt in your gaze acknowledgment of our common humanity. My heart swelled, and I was uplifted. And now…this. How could you…” He turns away embittered, bewildered. My imagination then flew to the front desk. Word would have reached the entire staff. We go through a cold ceremony of paying the bill in silence. The manager—someone tipped her off that “he” was checking out—would then flatly announce that, speaking for the entire hotel industry and all of Sri Lanka, I am no longer welcome. I then lose it. “But it was your toilet!” Unmoved, her growl measured and severe, “But it was your shit!” As though hit with mallet, I’d stumble a few steps back, turn and flee before the first tear quivers on eyelid. Yeah well nothing like that happened. I should hasten to add that when I did return after a few hours the problem was not solved; in fact, the bathroom floor was flooded! Detritus, toilet paper, a fetid film of water spreading. And perched dead, legs in the air, on the back rim of the toilet, was a cockroach. At first I wasn’t surprised. I mean, it’s like going to see an Elton John concert: with the lightshow and music and stage antics, you’re also paying for the tacky Dr. Seuss glasses. So there’s the cockroach. And I realized that earlier when I’d been sitting there calmly reading, I’d felt a tickling in my undergroin, and my initial response was that I was leaking somehow. I looked down and saw nothing, realizing, well, of course you’re not leaking. Now I know the tickling was the fated cockroach scaling the varied cliffs to escape. Ironically, the flood propelled him up, up, up and away. And now he lay, perished, upon the rim of the bowl, free at last.

Hiking Czech Republic Again

If in a fit of youthful enthusiasm you decide to backpack for three days straight, have a spa town at the end of the trail. This wasn’t quite how it worked out for us in the Czech Republic last summer, but we managed to find Marianske Lazne in West Bohemia eventually. When we awoke that morning in that small town on the Vltata River (where the last blog paused), we were southeast of Prague by about forty or fifty miles, having taken a train to Revnice and then hiked the day. Over beers the previous night (not those bunch of beers, another bunch of beers earlier in the evening) we’d spread our Czech map on the table and sort of traced a route. Oh how romance and idealism takes over when you’re gazing comfortably at a map. A finger glides easily upon the glossy surface: “Okay, we can hike down to here, cut over that range [!?] then head down to there for the first night…” “Yes, and from there we can just kind of swing east over to here [!!??] and stay the night near that river…” You would think we were generals sending our forces across Afghanistan for a spring offensive. A finger swoop across the map covered eight to ten inches. What were we thinking? But for three days we hefted our backpacks and made the journey as far as we could. As mentioned before, the trails spanned the country; some were hiking trails that turned into fire roads that poured into paved streets that dwindled into meadow paths. At the end of each day our feet really hurt, and progressively so such that after the third day we knew we didn’t have it in us to—oh, I don’t know—hike across the entire damn country! But flashing in memory are snapshots: a wheat field billowing lightly as the late afternoon sun fans the shadows, a small village tucked into a distant mountain; peering down from a cliff onto another village set against a forest; narrow country roads through apple and pear orchards; undulating hills across the landscape wherever we traveled; stopping along a fire road to pick plump blackberries; and the deep, profound delight taken at the sweaty finish on a patio at a beer garden, the crisp Czech pilsners like frosty nectar. Man, we worked for those beers. But it felt good knowing we could carry what we needed on our backs and hike a long sometimes burning hot day. Flowers danced in grasses all along the way. But it was at Novy Knin that we realized the end: through forest, meadow, crossing streams, orchards, villages, roads, trails, that our feet needed a long rest. But we realized from this small village there were no direct or even indirect trains to our destination. Eyes lowered in shame, we took a bus back to Prague to catch a train to the spa town of Marianske Lazne. This beautiful town is set in the Slavkov Forest in a protected region, and runs a long valley between mountains. Architecture boasts neoclassical and Art Nouveau and the buildings form an elegant horseshoe with lush parkland in its heart. There are thirty-nine springs, and you can shove your Nalgene in a fountain and fill up. We spent three days recovering, lounging, feasting, and we may have sipped more beer. The highlight was a two to three hour visit to a grand hotel spa. We paid fifteen dollars for hours of sauna, mineral spring floating in a beautifully blue tiled pool, clear cold mineral water waterfall splashes, warm mineral foot baths, around and around again. Love the body, and it will return your love. … We stayed the nights at a lovely hotel with views of rooftops of the town. Before we leave West Bohemia, a diversion: come with me for breakfast that first morning in Marianske Lazne. The hotel breakfast experience. That hesitant, slightly uncomfortably self-conscious way we shuffle into breakfasts at hotels or, God help us all, B&Bs. We drift into the banquet-square rooms like the infirm or mildly retarded. It’s not our kitchen. We don’t know where anything is. We are blindly fumbling for the handholds of their routine, the ones who run the establishment. And the infernal deliberations forced upon you before coffee: do I make eye contact with other fellow travelers? Do we nod at each other acknowledging our shared fate? “So, you slept here too?” I actually enjoy the B&B experience, as I fancy I’m indulging in the illusion of free breakfasts, and the food is usually plentiful and good. You’re not sentenced to the evil “Continental Breakfasts” of cellophane cardboard pastry and watery coffee. Regardless, the hotel breakfast is a dance you’re expected to know but you’ve forgotten the music. You try your best to move naturally, gracefully, conscious that the guy behind you wants to dig into the vat of scrambled eggs and you’re standing in front of it transfixed because you can’t choose between the little sausages and the undercooked bacon in the vats to your right. Everyone at a hotel breakfast eyes everyone else suspiciously. We all transgress on everyone else’s private morning routine (I mean, come on, think how you act around your spouse, and it’s just you two; the hotel breakfast experience is thirty people crammed into tables in your dining room). When you finally get your plate piled high with food, curtains close around you, and you’re blessedly alone. But getting there is slightly nerve-wracking. At any eatery, it’s best to waltz in with friends or loved ones simply mired in scintillating conversation, the kind where the person following the hostess to the table is throwing her lively and pointed remarks over her shoulder. The vibe you and your friends emit is one brimming with life; you are deigning to divert the stream of your erudite and witty moving salon into this chosen eatery, so, waiter, make it snappy, make it good. Of course, you are ever gracious with the wait staff, for you and company are neither above nor beneath them. But when the sultry university student pirouettes at your table with pen at the ready, nightly specials bubbling from her lips, you are not sitting there with your backs against the chairs looking wide-eyed at your place settings with blank smile awaiting the restaurant’s blessedness to wash over you. No. Each of you is leaning chest into the table nearly all talking at once, your conversation so germane to whatever cultural beast is currently spreading its wings downtown that week. This is, yes, next to impossible to achieve at a hotel breakfast. But if the hotel knows its game, it will provide your table with a thermos or silver carafe full of hot coffee. No dull-faced staff is going to want to return to your table seventeen times to refill your stumpy white coffee mug: just set the whole pot down, sweetie. I know people who despise the B&B experience: too much intimacy in too small a space with strange people too early in the morning. But I’ve elicited wondrous tips and travel insights from folks munching at adjoining tables. B&B patrons do seem a cut above the rest. They’re not weird. After a few hot slugs of coffee, spirit brightening, you might find yourself turning to the young couple at the next table and singing “So, where’re you folks from?”
From spa town Marianske Lazne we headed south to the Sumava Forest for a backpacking experience. It wasn’t really to be. As mentioned, I don’t think Czechs backpack as much as drive to a spot, set up camp, and start drinking. Furthermore, there really is no wilderness per se in the the border with Germany, and during the Communist era was off-limits; you could and people did get shot trying to flee across borders. So much of this corner is relatively untouched. Long inclines through dark and sunlight dappled woods, across grasses to come upon sloping countryside sprinkled with wildflowers—look in the distance and see thick forests running up hills. The most beautiful trails were trod were grassy ones: natural, gentle, animal and human feet seemed to tread with care. At the end of the day we always found ourselves searching for that auto-camp on the map; it always seemed right outside of town—and it was, by car. But after a day of hiking three kilometers is a brutal push. “Have we gone three kilometers? We must have by now.” “This sucks. Do you realize we’re the only backpackers?” “Where the hell is it?” “Let’s just go back to town and get a beer.” “I want to put this crap down first, I’m tired.” “Is this even the right road?” “Where’s the map?” “I just gave it to you!” “Don’t yell! I was just—“ “I WASN’T YELLING.” “Does that truck see us?” “Wait, what’s that sign say?” “I need a beer.” “It doesn’t say that—ooh, look at that flower.” “No, I’M saying that…” and so on. After a night at the camp outside of a nameless little village, we hiked the asphalt road out to a bus stop, sat at an outside table for lunch, had the waitress take a photo of sweaty us lifting frosty mugs of pilsner with forest and mountains in the background. Next stop, the city of Brno.

Trekking the Czech Republic - Part 1

Ramadan is well underway, a time for Muslims to remember the less fortunate by fasting from morning till night, then gorging on two or three separate feasts into the wee hours of sultry mornings; the fast is broken by the call to prayer around 7:00pm accompanied by the booming of cannons firing (for more on the Ramadan experience, see earlier blog, but this I have to share: during the half hour before the fast is broken, you’ll hear on average but every night half a dozen tires screeching in the distance. You wait for the thundering boom of metal against metal, but it never comes. As mentioned in earlier blog, folks here fasting are crazed with hunger, strung out with no cigarettes, whatever). There is something communally festive about all of Islam ending the fast together. Last night we heard the cannon and call, then clinked wine glasses. School is underway as well, but a frothy pint’s worth of our souls is till wandering the hallowed cobblestones of Prague’s glorious squares, towering cathedrals, and beer gardens. We spent one month traveling through the Czech Republic. You’ll probably want to hear about our sleeping over stables on a horse ranch outside of Mikulov; floating in the mineral-springs pools in the West Bohemian spa town of Marianske Lazne, backpacking through forests and passing girls wearing bonnets collecting wild mushrooms in baskets; learning about defenestration at Prague Castle (my new favorite word: it means the political act of throwing someone out the window); wandering narrow roads between villages and picking delicious apples and plums right off the tree; being given a personal tour in Brno of the home now museum of the great Czech composer, Janacek, by a lovely woman in a long flowing dress and hoop earrings who’s studied the composer all her life…. Yes, all this and more will I reveal with scintillating wit de rigueur, pausing only to reign in my galloping prose to harness for another day, but there’s an important issue I simply must address forthwith: camping and beer. The Czechs have figured it out. Carrie and I spent our first month of summer vacation in the States, both coasts, had an amazing time, saw wonderful friends and family, and then flew back to Aleppo, stayed two days, lugged our backpacks out of storage, filled them up, took a bus to Damascus and flew to Prague. At our hotel in Prague we spread the map out and traced a general route through the country, at least our first leg of the trip. The Czech Republic (like many countries in Europe) has an amazing and well-marked circuitry of trails. The blue trail, red trail, yellow trail, green trail, crisscrossing and interconnecting and spanning the countryside, through cities, along rivers. You can get anywhere and everywhere either walking or biking. So at the end of one long day hiking some 15-18 kilometers, we stumble into an auto-camp. I don’t think many Czechs backpack much, but many do the citified wilderness thing much like their American counterparts: load up the RV with creature comforts and park on a grassy steppe overlooking a river. A strange way of vacationing: it’s like setting up camp in your backyard. We never saw the mammoth rolling mansion motor homes that bulge and fart their way through America’s heartland to gather at holy sites (what Mecca is to Muslims, Wall Drug is to retired Midwesterners), but Czechs still made the weedy patches their home. RVs now sport front porches. Kids have bikes. Volleyball nets are strung, soccer balls booted about. Young couples sometimes play cards. But if your experience is anything like mine, you know what happens: you drive around looking for a “spot” in this cluttered neighborhood of RVs and trailers, agree on one that’s not in the glare of a bathroom but in proximity to one nevertheless, get even more excited if the spot has a surrounding wall of bushes that gives your spot a “private” feel, one of you gets out the ice chest and dumps it one the picnic table to claim the spot as yours, register with the olive green hat guy in the booth, return to your site and set up the tent, lay out sleeping bags, decide on where exactly the ice chest will be for ready use, if you have camp chairs you unfold them, sit, exhale, look around at the trees towering above, smile as relaxation slowly melts into your soul, and then…well, and then you…. What now? You and spouse decide to “have a look around”, so you wander the circling roads, snickering at latecomers driving cautiously with peering eyes and open mouths at the remaining scrap sites left to forage, then return to your camp chairs no more enlightened about your adventure. Let’s face it: it’s pretty much like sitting in your backyard. You can’t experience the majesty of backpacking in the wilderness (and anyone who’s done it knows those sacred days, so no more needs to be said). The Czechs have a different way of camping. I think they’ve figure out that it never lives up to the hype. So all the auto-camps we stumbled into had beer gardens and restaurants. What do you do after you set up camp? Drink! If you didn’t already know, the Czechs are known for their beer: they drink more per capita than any other country. Furthermore, their beers are damn good, and the beers in the auto-camps were on tap. So imagine our delight after a long day of hiking; we throw down our backpacks, set up the tent, then head for the beer garden to hold a frosty half-liter glass of cold and delicious Pilsner Urquell in trembling hands. I think the Czechs just tossed out the illusion of a “wilderness experience” like a soiled cocktail napkin. Carrie and I were carrying everything we needed for a month away from home on our backs. I suppose we could have dropped an ice chest full of beer into a wagon and dragged that behind us. Instead, at the end of each day we’d read a little, write in our journals, and then join the other campers for a few coldies. And no matter how remote or small the auto-camp was, a restaurant and beer garden/patio stood proudly greeting us as we sweated our way into their open arms…. Prague is a shitstorm. This is how it was described to us by Carrie’s friend, Akemi, who’s traveled. Indeed it was, but what a glorious congestion. All we did was wander and gaze upon the architecture, the culture reverberating beneath the streets, and bless the West that women weren’t covered in burkas. Hail to mortal flesh! To sun dresses hefting proud Slavic bosoms! To men and women just hanging out together! We also worried out loud about how we’d make it through hot Aleppo days without a tall cold pilsner right around one or two o’clock (and one or two at four o’clock, etc.). It’s just what Czechs do here. During a particular long and sweaty trek we came upon the small village of Novy Knin three or four days after we left Prague. All roads led up to the church—that’s how they designed towns back in the day—and we got a hotel room for the night. Next morning waiting for the bus to take us I don’t know where, we saw two elderly women waiting for a café to open. When the doors opened at 10:00, Carrie dropped her backpack to bounce in and get us a couple espressos. She comes back smiling. She told me she saw the two elderly women in the café. One had a latte, the other a tall cold pilsner. This is a Sunday. Which proves what I’ve argued all along: for morning beverages, beer and coffee are interchangeable. But of the trek: it felt good to know we could still load up a backpack and heft it across the countryside for days at a time like we were young. The trail systems simply made use of existing paths, roads, bikepaths. The memories are magical; it seems amazing that we did it. I remember us sitting down to rest on an old log, then turning to find we were surrounded by bushes of wild blueberry. Hiking through forests to come into long green meadows of wildflowers. Crisscrossing streams. Our first day hiking, we left the train station at Revnice and trekked the whole day. I have a picture in my mind of walking a long dirt path through billowing wheat fields, small villages holding on to sloping distant hillsides, late afternoon sun washing over the world, slugging mouthfuls of water while a hawk sails overhead, and thinking: yes, this is the Europe I’ve wanted. That picture in mind, culled from books or films, of a place where life just seems good. We hiked down a steep hill to a small town on the Vltava River. We were tired down to our bones, and it began to rain. The auto-camp on the map was nowhere in sight, so we booked a hotel room, changed out of our sweaty clothes, and—what do you know—ordered beers at the restaurant. After dinner we walked across a bridge and wandered a narrow road. A few small dwellings dotted the hillside. We passed a restaurant that looked empty, then further on came up a broken down looking cinderblock structure with an ancient bicycle parked against it. Weeds raced around the lot. But we thought we heard singing. Carrie and I looked at each other. Should we investigate? It was one of those moments when you felt you’d be better off just moving on. But this whole trip was meant to be an adventure. We agreed: if we don’t check it out, we’ll always regret it. So we ducked our heads in. About ten middle-aged folks were sitting around a table, huge glasses of beer proudly hailing, and two guys with guitars. They waved us in. They were all locals, disheveled looking. One of the men was turning this old barn-like structure into a pub. It was half finished. But this, they told us, is what Czechs do: they gather together in the evenings and sing. So Carrie and I spent the next few hours listening to Czech folk songs, drinking up the endless pilsners supplied by a young teenager (so that’s what teenagers are for), petting the dog ambling between chairs. I offered up Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” which they welcomed with warm applause. We drifted back through the dark, thanking the heavens we chose to intrude.

Home, Wherever It Is

A few breaths before afternoon drizzles into twilight, that hushed interval where a blue patina softens the surfaces of the world, October sunlight slants like a shimmering cold knife through the trees in my big backyard in Sacramento and across backyards and housetops beyond. I would open the family room’s sliding glass door and wander outside and simply stand in the day. Never welcoming the night rising in the east, a closing of light, a return to a house where the TV seemed always on, I remember always looking west—to San Francisco, the coast, the Pacific Ocean, years to come; I felt somehow drawn west. October remains the blessed month for this memory, as it was for Kerouac (October for me stands for that autumnal air, the way the day feels). Summer in its blazing glory threw the sun high overhead and winter dragged it bumping low around the sky, but October freed the light to pulse and pierce the air. I wore a light sweater against early cold and waited for the afternoon’s mystery to rise and linger. Was I waiting for something to happen? Waiting for a question unasked to reveal an answer, like a stone statue blinking dust and turning into a princess? I never knew, and still can’t hold it in my palm. The air was still, the sunlight sharp, and I stood westward as the earth rolled away. You only recognize beauty when it begins to disappear is the last line of a Mark Eitzel song during his time with the American Music Club. The day was disappearing, October disappearing, another year disappearing, and so goes life. That’s precisely what was happening, exactly the answer. And a month or so after having left home in Sacramento for life in the Bay Area (San Francisco, the coast, the ocean), perhaps feeling poor and lonely and distant, I drove home to Sacramento, walked through the family room and sliding glass door to wander again the backyard and linger in the waning afternoon light (March-April can offer similar experiences; perhaps its the changing you feel). I had left home, but the ghosts remained and waved a kind welcome, the memories imbued in the grass mowed and the silver maple climbed into telephone wires and gnarled plum tree leaning and cracking the cement porch and the pale weathered wooden fence trying to hold the restless dogs within. This backyard was home; it is no longer home, although I feel at home anytime I’m standing in the line of cold sunlight sliding through creaking trees. I have driven by the old house, my mother and father long dead, and once I met the new owners, a young family, their first home. I introduced myself to the lady of the house, and she was overjoyed to meet, anxious to show what she’s done in the house and yard. The yard had changed a bit: I think I spotted a lawn ornament, a fairytale fawn or ceramic bonneted lass gathering invisible berries. The grass appeared designer mowed, as if you’d be scolded for running scrimmage. Growing up I remember proud clumps of weeks, the edges a little unkempt. There is something sinister in the nervous demand for the manicured yard, the ever-renewed battle (waged either by you or immigrants) against wild growth; wanting a lawn that doesn’t offend or require interpretation, but pleases easily like a Christmas with Kenny G album. We had lawns growing up, but we ran and tackled and rolled upon them like dogs. I remember surprises hidden in weeds, whole societies busy with work. Oh where are the frogs of yesterday? Extinct through chemicals, those wreckers of ecological balance. But standing in the backyard no longer my own, the plum tree filled the sky, the loquat held fruit, and the rosemary towered. The lady seemed happy with the yard. She confided in me that often she felt Barbara’s spirit in the house, often thought of her, eagerly hoping my mother approved what she’d done. With tears welling up in her eyes, she received my assurance that my mother would indeed be pleased (for the most part). Here’s another line from a song, Luther Vandross singing the version I heard: a house is not a home. He meant, I believe, his digs felt lonely without his woman. But home is also not a house. When I was standing in my backyard reminiscing with the new owner, I failed to hear the lingering ghosts. They’d packed up and caught the last train for…the coast. Home disappears when the beautiful ghosts stop speaking to you. So I feel little nostalgia for that suburb in South Sac. The house is not a home. Yes, the structure is not the dwelling within. A life is not a body, but the pulsing soul bubbling in the veins and nuzzling the rib cage and rising against muscle and dancing behind the face. Where is home now? We asked ourselves this on our summer flight from Syria to California via Istanbul and New York. Possible answers: Home is where you live, your current address. Home is where you grew up. Home is what is familiar, where you feel welcome. We sit back satisfied when we are “at home.” I’m trying to get at the meaning. I first felt a strange tug of home in New York’s JFK airport during the layover for our flight to San Francisco. Carry-on luggage bouncing and flipping behind us, I’m leading the charge to the nearest bar like a linebacker on a blitz. Old ladies are shoved out of my path like wiry rookie tight ends. I don’t care how many CDs I had on rotation, only one was spinning: get a good beer that’s not a goddamn mass-produced lager, the only thing available where we live (Heineken is about the best…for what it’s worth). A micro-brew, Brooklyn’s Brewing Company’s Amber Ale, was on tap. Our waitress dully asked if I wanted a tall one. After recovering from a laughing fit that had my eyes bulging tears and dry mouth a-foaming, I picked myself up off the hardwood floor, rearranged the surrounding tables and chairs in polite order, recovered the knife and fork from the potted plant near Gate 17 where I had flung them after upending our table, and answered yes please. Of course, what you miss is home, but is home simply what you miss? (My ugly god, I’m writing like Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City). Flying into the Bay Area, California felt like home because our haunts remained humming and getting along fine. We missed bopping down for beers at Jupiter in Berkeley or Cato’s Ale House in Oakland, taking our travel mugs and getting a Peet’s coffee and then pastries at Arizmendi’s on Lakeshore, seeing women walking and talking freely of all ages and ethnicities without the black shroud of invisibility covering them, buying a slice—two!—of Arinell’s NY-style thin slice pizza offa Shattuck near University, taking a walk in the Oakland Hills of bay laurel, redwood, patches of sun like stars splashing upon leaves, wading through Moe’s and Shakespeare and Co. books on Telegraph, and damn did we miss our CA friends. But in the middle of our joy I realized we were experiencing the giddiness of the initial. We were on vacation; we didn’t have to go to work. If we wanted to wake on a Wednesday morning and drive to Ocean Beach, walking along the sandy shore with the joggers and dogs, then hit the Beach Chalet overlooking the Pacific for beer and onion rings, well, we’ll just do that. If we want to meet my old musician friends for beers at Jupiter, sit in Adirondack chairs in the sun in the open air patio, passing guitar back and forth and plucking out tunes for one another like back in the dizay, then bid our farewells because we have to make happy hour at Sea Salt on San Pablo for Tomales Bay oysters on the half shell and fruity drinks, again, we’d manage. But we’re wallowing in all we’d missed: does that make the Bay Area home? We don’t own a house there. The four walls in a prison cell are familiar to an inmate: is it home? A charitable guard can pull strings and tie up a hammock in the inmate’s cell. In it, he can be comfortable: it is home? Paroled, he can return to the prison years later and revisit his old cellblock, which is now filled with producers of Reality TV shows, and the damp and cold dust and whiff of steel urine will trigger memories familiar, but he is far from home, and not comfortable, I’d wager. My long lost friend and old roommate in Santa Cruz, Helen, told me once she went home for the holidays, where she grew up on the East Coast. Sisters and brothers she had, cousins, Mom and Dad. All were there together to celebrate, but she felt dismayed at how little her family appreciated the great effort she’d made getting out there. A single woman, beat reporter for a small weekly newspaper in Santa Cruz, and it was a financial struggle to get back East to join the family (who all lived within twenty miles of each other; no hike for them at all). Though she was home, she felt less at home than a stranger, a tolerated guest. Her heart, where home is supposed to be, wasn’t in it. I’m scraping for a meaning. The notion of home does, of course, include the familiar, the comfortable. I suppose I want to loosen and set adrift the traditional notion, tear it away from the tyranny of home as finally settling down, the shiny gleaming ranch-style with two-car garage of cherishing the fixed. Home is where you land, end up. If that’s the case, then let me show you a bit of real estate Hamlet calls “the undiscovered country, from whose borne no man returns,” very spacious but no views. This is your final resting place. And it’s free. Only a nihilist calls this home. We are semi-nomadic, Carrie and I, for the time. But Syria is our home, in some ways, in a narrow but essential sense, inasmuch as we cut and paste the paper maché scraps of our life in this strange new land. But rain floating from a redwood forest canopy is home when you wander underneath. The wild, free and fertile stillness that rises when the captain cuts the boat engine and you drift where the Pacific’s continental shelf drops off, hushed breathing, where whales swirl and sound, this felt like home to me one afternoon about thirty miles off San Francisco. I feel at home in all kinds of water. Icy cold granite-bowled alpine lakes, mineral rich seaweed rolling Pacific tidal waters that sparkle hues of bronze and blue, rumbling and splashing Idaho mountain rivers, clear cool Lake George whose wind-nudged waves are lapping behind me at this writing, the warm salt waters off Turkey’s coast—it’s all good. Same goes for the day. If the Weather Channel and news meteorologists depended on the likes of me to sustain their livelihoods, they’d be slouching to the poorhouse in droves. "What’s the weather going to be like today?" I don’t know, peek your head outside. Get thee hence and whoop, dance and sing under whatever skies surround you. I think the only time I wanted to check the weather forecast was when planning a backpacking trip. But even then, rain happens. Thoreau should be our guide and savior in these matters. Don’t huddle and turn against snowstorms; go out and inspect them! I feel blessed I’m at home in whatever weather heaven choreographs. “Oh, it’s a crappy day out there” you hear radio voices lament if rain is coming down and replenishing the earth and its depleted groundwater sources. This is “crappy”? Hell, you’d think they were announcing the latest round of firing squad penalties being carried out. I take the weather the way I take music: a sunny afternoon is bluegrass; rainy mornings, Joni Mitchell; overcast noons, Coltrane; whipping and raging storms, Mahler. I think I’ll manage to carve out a dwelling any hemisphere I plunk down my bags. In Syria we have our rhymes and rituals, our daily bread of dreams, we hose and squeegee the dust from the patio and pull up the outdoor furniture, check if there’s ice in the trays, tune my guitar, welcome friends and uncork champagne purchased on a run to the Turkish border. Home is less a place or predicament than dwelling emboldened by the mysterious art of living. Home is sanctuary, enclosed only to safeguard the opening to mystery of being alive. This is why holy places feel like coming home, be they stone cathedrals or Sequoia canopies or Pacific Ocean depths above which you respectfully drift, knowing life shudders underneath. Only the truly mysterious possesses the power to draw, to welcome. Arrange your fixtures and furnishings with the delicate touch handling a bouquet of flowers, vines and leaves. Wait for the feather brush of wind, and then call things that truly matter to you into presence, let them enclose you, allowing a droplet to fall into your soul like the twirl and snap of a cold October sun, the moist heart pumping in a clump of moss, the murmur in the burrowing warm dark hole that furry critters call home.