Geese wheeled and circled and ducks rose off the pond near our house in Santa Fe on the morning that the snow lay thick in the early sun this past week. We were the first people to walk out that day, alongside the fairways. The only life that preceded us had left tracks across the path: coyotes, bunnies, hares and others we didn’t recognize.
A day later we left in early afternoon and drove across Northeastern New Mexico and across the pass into Trinidad. We slept that night in Colorado Springs and the next morning awoke to news of a blizzard screaming across the northern plains, cutting our normal route back to Kansas City.
We considered and chose a southern route, roughly tracking the original Santa Fe Trail for part of the way. We passed near Bent’s Fort, historic trading post. Along the way there were high winds and swirling, light snows. Garden City was bleak and cold. Dodge City seemed lonely and barren. The small towns between there and Wichita were all unremarkable.
We drank hot chocolate and ate baked apple pies at McDonald’s. I would have preferred an espresso and a panini but there was no choice.
The wind continued to blow. The southern route we took was longer and slower than the northern freeway we normally drove but it was drier – a relative term – and open. It was almost 12 hours from Colorado Springs to Kansas City and the whole trip, over the two days, covered a thousand miles.
30 November 2005
24 November 2005
Thanksgiving -- Making Yourself
How does someone become what they are? How do you measure if a person has made the most of the combination of circumstance and natural gifts that they have been given?
Blue eyed, angular and taciturn, my father’s first cousin was a life-long farmer. He only left the little town in northwest Missouri where he was born, grew up and made his life when he went off to World War II. He put on the uniform, played his role dutifully – he was a battlefield MP – he fell in love, with a French girl who wouldn’t come home to a farm in the rural Midwest. When he got home, he put his uniform in the attic and took up farming.
He never married. It wasn’t that there weren’t other women; there were; there were stories told. I never figured out why he didn’t just settle with one but he didn’t.
Once a family Bible salesman came up to the door and wanted to sell him one of those huge, illustrated Bibles with room in the front to track the family through the generations. The farmer, dry and sinewy, looked at the salesman and asked why he would need a Bible like that. The answer was in the form of a question, ‘Don’t you have any children?’ Clearly the assumption was that he did and surely he’d want to leave it to them.
The farmer looked directly into the eyes of the salesman, ‘I'm not sure!', he answered.
The salesman quietly picked up his wares and made his way out to his car and drove off.
That farmer's name was John D. I don’t think the ‘D’ stood for anything, at least no one ever told me if it did. He had beautiful, clear, intelligent eyes. Maybe he could have been a lawyer or a statesman or a professor of philosophy. Circumstance made him into a farmer. I think he wasn’t much more than mediocre at that but he did take care of his Dad and people thought well of him. He died without enemies. I was with him only a little while, perhaps three or four visits, during my youth. I liked him, he seemed good and gentle and decent, wholly admirable. I admire him still, now many years dead.
Blue eyed, angular and taciturn, my father’s first cousin was a life-long farmer. He only left the little town in northwest Missouri where he was born, grew up and made his life when he went off to World War II. He put on the uniform, played his role dutifully – he was a battlefield MP – he fell in love, with a French girl who wouldn’t come home to a farm in the rural Midwest. When he got home, he put his uniform in the attic and took up farming.
He never married. It wasn’t that there weren’t other women; there were; there were stories told. I never figured out why he didn’t just settle with one but he didn’t.
Once a family Bible salesman came up to the door and wanted to sell him one of those huge, illustrated Bibles with room in the front to track the family through the generations. The farmer, dry and sinewy, looked at the salesman and asked why he would need a Bible like that. The answer was in the form of a question, ‘Don’t you have any children?’ Clearly the assumption was that he did and surely he’d want to leave it to them.
The farmer looked directly into the eyes of the salesman, ‘I'm not sure!', he answered.
The salesman quietly picked up his wares and made his way out to his car and drove off.
That farmer's name was John D. I don’t think the ‘D’ stood for anything, at least no one ever told me if it did. He had beautiful, clear, intelligent eyes. Maybe he could have been a lawyer or a statesman or a professor of philosophy. Circumstance made him into a farmer. I think he wasn’t much more than mediocre at that but he did take care of his Dad and people thought well of him. He died without enemies. I was with him only a little while, perhaps three or four visits, during my youth. I liked him, he seemed good and gentle and decent, wholly admirable. I admire him still, now many years dead.
15 November 2005
Full Circle -- completing the circuit
I tracked down one of my cousins yesterday. We’re not what you’d call a close family. The last time I saw him was about 20 years ago. Apart from being related, we still don’t have much in common. For a brief time I lived in the town he’s called home for about 30 or 40 years.
I didn’t have his telephone number but I googled him and up popped his name, and those of his two boys, as owners of a race track! This was remarkable. Even in college my cousin loved fast cars. I remember that he owned a Jaguar XKE in the 1960s, probably one of the first in that part of the Midwest. He was a handsome, curly headed college guy with a fast car; very cool, especially to a kid of about 12 or 13.
When for that brief space of a few months we lived in the same town, he spent his weekends driving a race car, it was a Corvette I think with a huge engine, maybe 500 horsepower. I remember that he let me steer it into the pit after a race I attended (confusing affair, the cars sped around the track without any apparent objective except to finish without mishap and ahead of the others, only thing being they didn’t really go anywhere). You had to climb in through the window (which had no glass) and the seat was pretty much bolted to the floor and there was no radio. Anyway, I think it was very kind of him to let me steer it into the pit (did I mention the engine was not running?).
In those days he worked for an agricultural chemicals company. I am so pleased that he figured out how to make a living begin around what he loves: race tracks, fast cars and so on. And, he’s doing it with both of his sons. That’s pretty cool, that’s success. I’m happy for him.
I didn’t have his telephone number but I googled him and up popped his name, and those of his two boys, as owners of a race track! This was remarkable. Even in college my cousin loved fast cars. I remember that he owned a Jaguar XKE in the 1960s, probably one of the first in that part of the Midwest. He was a handsome, curly headed college guy with a fast car; very cool, especially to a kid of about 12 or 13.
When for that brief space of a few months we lived in the same town, he spent his weekends driving a race car, it was a Corvette I think with a huge engine, maybe 500 horsepower. I remember that he let me steer it into the pit after a race I attended (confusing affair, the cars sped around the track without any apparent objective except to finish without mishap and ahead of the others, only thing being they didn’t really go anywhere). You had to climb in through the window (which had no glass) and the seat was pretty much bolted to the floor and there was no radio. Anyway, I think it was very kind of him to let me steer it into the pit (did I mention the engine was not running?).
In those days he worked for an agricultural chemicals company. I am so pleased that he figured out how to make a living begin around what he loves: race tracks, fast cars and so on. And, he’s doing it with both of his sons. That’s pretty cool, that’s success. I’m happy for him.
27 October 2005
My father-in-law nearly marries a rich woman ….
My father-in-law tells a sad story. As a young man in Taiwan his family were poor. His prospects were not good; he was not a student. He was, though, strong, hard-working, virile. As a teenager he had served in a support role for the Imperial Japanese Navy. The loss of those precious years in futile support of an aggressive military that held him in institutional disrespect simply because he was Chinese and a resident of an island held in colonial thrall, removed any opportunity of further education and fixed his future path: his strong back was going to be the foundation of his life.
But there was, possibly, an alternative future for my father-in-law in those tumultuous years. World War II may have ended but the Chinese Civil War rumbled on until the end of the 1940’s when the remnants of Chiang Kai Shek’s legions fled the mainland with their treasures. The choice that was offered my father-in-law was one sometimes available to poor families with too many sons; one might have to be ‘married out’. In Taiwan in those days, and even recently, wealthy families with a single girl child might arrange a marriage for a daughter (mostly those less attractive) with a presentable but ‘economically challenged’ young man who would agree to marry the daughter and take on her family name, thus ensuring that property stayed in the name of the girl’s family. It served the purposes of the wife’s family but for the young man it meant a loss of face; it was a humiliation.
Pride was more important to him than riches so my father-in-law ran away from home. He left without a single penny, took a train to Taipei and wandered the streets for three days, without a place to sleep, with no food, only water.
By the end of the third day, his pride was no longer the most important ingredient in his character: remorse, loneliness and, especially, hunger had moved to the front of the line. My father-in-law decided to return to the south of the island and face the music. Sadly, the southern train run was not as loosely policed as the northern and the father of my wife was apprehended and taken to the railway police office before the train ever left Taipei station. This time, however, luck, even just a little bit, favored him. The duty officer took a look at him and asked, kindly, if he was hungry. In answer, my father-in-law could only nod. He wolfed down the bowl of cheap noodles that the duty officer ordered one of him men to bring. Afterwards, he led him to the next train south and put him on it; even ticketless, which he remained, he was now certain to get back home without more incident; it was clear to everyone that my father-in-law was traveling under the protection of the duty officer of the railway police and no one would dare interfere with his will!
By the time he did get back home, tempers had abated and my future father-in-law was welcomed home, given more food and no more was ever said about him ‘marrying out’. I think it worked out – I ended up with the woman I love but for him, for my father-in-law, I’ve never been sure whether any marriage at all suited him. Perhaps he should have stayed on the train, riding up and down, across the island from North to South.
But there was, possibly, an alternative future for my father-in-law in those tumultuous years. World War II may have ended but the Chinese Civil War rumbled on until the end of the 1940’s when the remnants of Chiang Kai Shek’s legions fled the mainland with their treasures. The choice that was offered my father-in-law was one sometimes available to poor families with too many sons; one might have to be ‘married out’. In Taiwan in those days, and even recently, wealthy families with a single girl child might arrange a marriage for a daughter (mostly those less attractive) with a presentable but ‘economically challenged’ young man who would agree to marry the daughter and take on her family name, thus ensuring that property stayed in the name of the girl’s family. It served the purposes of the wife’s family but for the young man it meant a loss of face; it was a humiliation.
Pride was more important to him than riches so my father-in-law ran away from home. He left without a single penny, took a train to Taipei and wandered the streets for three days, without a place to sleep, with no food, only water.
By the end of the third day, his pride was no longer the most important ingredient in his character: remorse, loneliness and, especially, hunger had moved to the front of the line. My father-in-law decided to return to the south of the island and face the music. Sadly, the southern train run was not as loosely policed as the northern and the father of my wife was apprehended and taken to the railway police office before the train ever left Taipei station. This time, however, luck, even just a little bit, favored him. The duty officer took a look at him and asked, kindly, if he was hungry. In answer, my father-in-law could only nod. He wolfed down the bowl of cheap noodles that the duty officer ordered one of him men to bring. Afterwards, he led him to the next train south and put him on it; even ticketless, which he remained, he was now certain to get back home without more incident; it was clear to everyone that my father-in-law was traveling under the protection of the duty officer of the railway police and no one would dare interfere with his will!
By the time he did get back home, tempers had abated and my future father-in-law was welcomed home, given more food and no more was ever said about him ‘marrying out’. I think it worked out – I ended up with the woman I love but for him, for my father-in-law, I’ve never been sure whether any marriage at all suited him. Perhaps he should have stayed on the train, riding up and down, across the island from North to South.
11 October 2005
09 September 2005
Back to school ...
Kansas City, 8 September 2005
It was parents’ night at our daughter’s school. Pembroke is a private school. It is not religious, just selective and focused on providing a strong education. Her teachers impressed us, they are enthusiastic and dedicated. Equally impressive, though, were the parents – mostly not divorced and all concerned and serious about the education their children receive. There is more: there is a quiet conspiracy amongst the parents. This conspiracy is unspoken and it is naturally occurring – we are all dedicated to spying on our offspring. We know that they are growing up in a world so different from our own that the two are mutually exclusive; what we experienced is as different from what they could experience as what we went through in the 1950’s and early 1960’s was different from what our ancestors went through a hundred years before that. Time has so accelerated that the only way we can manage what is happening or what could happen to our children is by simply spying on them.
The espionage we practice is benevolent in intent. We aim to know enough about the lives of our children that we can help them navigate through waters rougher, deeper and more unpredictable than we could have imagined.
There is some diversity at Pembroke – there are a few Jews, some blacks, scattered Asians – but mostly it is white and very mid-Western. I don’t think that’s wrong, however, I admire the self-conscious attempt at diversity and the inbred civility of these people here. The values that my Eurasian daughter will absorb in this place are good.
So, Alex, very much a fourteen year-old – with everything that implies – is now a high school student in this most mid-Western of places. After schooling in Hong Kong, in Manila, in Singapore, in Spain, in England and in Arizona, she has lit here (her father has been blown from place to place like that feather in ‘Forrest Gump’). Again, I think this is good.
It was parents’ night at our daughter’s school. Pembroke is a private school. It is not religious, just selective and focused on providing a strong education. Her teachers impressed us, they are enthusiastic and dedicated. Equally impressive, though, were the parents – mostly not divorced and all concerned and serious about the education their children receive. There is more: there is a quiet conspiracy amongst the parents. This conspiracy is unspoken and it is naturally occurring – we are all dedicated to spying on our offspring. We know that they are growing up in a world so different from our own that the two are mutually exclusive; what we experienced is as different from what they could experience as what we went through in the 1950’s and early 1960’s was different from what our ancestors went through a hundred years before that. Time has so accelerated that the only way we can manage what is happening or what could happen to our children is by simply spying on them.
The espionage we practice is benevolent in intent. We aim to know enough about the lives of our children that we can help them navigate through waters rougher, deeper and more unpredictable than we could have imagined.
There is some diversity at Pembroke – there are a few Jews, some blacks, scattered Asians – but mostly it is white and very mid-Western. I don’t think that’s wrong, however, I admire the self-conscious attempt at diversity and the inbred civility of these people here. The values that my Eurasian daughter will absorb in this place are good.
So, Alex, very much a fourteen year-old – with everything that implies – is now a high school student in this most mid-Western of places. After schooling in Hong Kong, in Manila, in Singapore, in Spain, in England and in Arizona, she has lit here (her father has been blown from place to place like that feather in ‘Forrest Gump’). Again, I think this is good.
06 September 2005
Summer -- Swan Song
Kansas City, 5 September 2005
It’s fading, summer is slowly moving on. The mornings are brighter, cool. We walked around Loose Park this evening, two laps, the second in the dark, the paths lit by the old fashioned lights and a sliver of a crescent moon.
It’s Labor Day. My daughter and a bunch of friends cadged rides from a couple of parents to Worlds of Fun. There were boys in the group. My wife and I picked four of the girls up and dropped them off at their homes afterwards. The park closed at 6 PM today. It was not full.
It’s fading, summer is slowly moving on. The mornings are brighter, cool. We walked around Loose Park this evening, two laps, the second in the dark, the paths lit by the old fashioned lights and a sliver of a crescent moon.
It’s Labor Day. My daughter and a bunch of friends cadged rides from a couple of parents to Worlds of Fun. There were boys in the group. My wife and I picked four of the girls up and dropped them off at their homes afterwards. The park closed at 6 PM today. It was not full.
04 September 2005
Sudden floods in the Huachucas ...
4 September 2005
In those days the Huachuca’s and some of the other mountains along the border, both sides of it actually, were still sprinkled with a few characters from earlier, freer times.
Most of those folks were independent minded and most of them were eccentric; we’d probably call them weird today. In those simpler times we didn’t even really notice the eccentricity, at least not my family. You see, Dad was one of those old-fashioned mining engineers, the type who scratched at the rocks, wherever they were, always looking for that vein, the high grade one. Those others, the loners and losers who picked around the lonely desert and mountains were members of the fraternity, maybe not educated as engineers or geologists, but co-owners of the dream. Some of my earliest memories are of Sunday morning visits by old men, every one with a story, driving battered pick-ups, inevitably with sample boxes rattling around their rusty beds. Dad and his visitors would poke around among the rocks, Dad occasionally stopping and pulling out his pocket lens to look more closely at bits that glinted, that might be a clue of what they all looked for, Dad and his brother searchers.
But up there in the Huachucas it was Mrs. Meeker, widow of an old rock-dog. She lived among a settlement of abandoned buildings, atop abandoned underground workings. Dad got to know her, did a bit of poking around down there, under the dirt, in dark and, to me, scary old tunnels of rock with rotted timbering. Sometimes I went up there with him but I don’t recall ever climbing down the ladder into the darkness.
One evening we were up there into the late afternoon when the thunderclouds popped up, white, towering cumulonimbus clouds, heavy and full of water that then emptied themselves across the mountain slopes and then moved on.
The water accumulated and rushed down the creeks, too narrow for the load, and cut the roads.
We parked on the edge. Dad watched it for a while and then first tested whether our old Plymouth station wagon could make it across by wading it. I was scared but he did it, the water raced along but it only rose to his knees. When Dad got back to the side where we had the car parked, he got in, put it in gear and we inched safely across and then drove down the mountain and home. Dad always said the best way to drive through flooded streets was slowly so as not to flood the engine.
I can’t remember ever seeing Mrs. Meeker again. I guess that Dad’s way of driving is out of date now; certainly you wouldn’t be able to get through the streets of New Orleans these days driving slowly so as not to flood the engine. Lots of things are changed, I think that you might have been able to drive through New Orleans in a flood slowly and carefully in those long ago days when the city was smaller and richer and the waters didn’t rise as high nor stay as long. I miss those days, wish we could bring them back …
In those days the Huachuca’s and some of the other mountains along the border, both sides of it actually, were still sprinkled with a few characters from earlier, freer times.
Most of those folks were independent minded and most of them were eccentric; we’d probably call them weird today. In those simpler times we didn’t even really notice the eccentricity, at least not my family. You see, Dad was one of those old-fashioned mining engineers, the type who scratched at the rocks, wherever they were, always looking for that vein, the high grade one. Those others, the loners and losers who picked around the lonely desert and mountains were members of the fraternity, maybe not educated as engineers or geologists, but co-owners of the dream. Some of my earliest memories are of Sunday morning visits by old men, every one with a story, driving battered pick-ups, inevitably with sample boxes rattling around their rusty beds. Dad and his visitors would poke around among the rocks, Dad occasionally stopping and pulling out his pocket lens to look more closely at bits that glinted, that might be a clue of what they all looked for, Dad and his brother searchers.
But up there in the Huachucas it was Mrs. Meeker, widow of an old rock-dog. She lived among a settlement of abandoned buildings, atop abandoned underground workings. Dad got to know her, did a bit of poking around down there, under the dirt, in dark and, to me, scary old tunnels of rock with rotted timbering. Sometimes I went up there with him but I don’t recall ever climbing down the ladder into the darkness.
One evening we were up there into the late afternoon when the thunderclouds popped up, white, towering cumulonimbus clouds, heavy and full of water that then emptied themselves across the mountain slopes and then moved on.
The water accumulated and rushed down the creeks, too narrow for the load, and cut the roads.
We parked on the edge. Dad watched it for a while and then first tested whether our old Plymouth station wagon could make it across by wading it. I was scared but he did it, the water raced along but it only rose to his knees. When Dad got back to the side where we had the car parked, he got in, put it in gear and we inched safely across and then drove down the mountain and home. Dad always said the best way to drive through flooded streets was slowly so as not to flood the engine.
I can’t remember ever seeing Mrs. Meeker again. I guess that Dad’s way of driving is out of date now; certainly you wouldn’t be able to get through the streets of New Orleans these days driving slowly so as not to flood the engine. Lots of things are changed, I think that you might have been able to drive through New Orleans in a flood slowly and carefully in those long ago days when the city was smaller and richer and the waters didn’t rise as high nor stay as long. I miss those days, wish we could bring them back …
01 September 2005
Is New Orleans Manila?
31 August 2005
Kansas City
So, a tornado, about 100 miles wide, blew into the Gulf Coast. It didn’t just damage, hurt New Orleans, though, it moved it, much farther than you’d think. I’ve been watching the coverage of this enormous tragedy and I’m convinced that New Orleans has been blown to the Philippines and has replaced Manila. It’s the worst of that city on the bay, guarded by Corregidor. There are places in Manila where the people scratch a miserable life above stagnant water, their lives foreshortened by disease and poverty, byproducts of human hubris, the decision, perhaps borne of necessity, to form the clay of their lives in a place that was never meant to host our biped race. Now, the pictures of the sad remnant of the Big Easy’s population, wandering dazedly in filthy, knee- or chest-high water towards I-10 and the Super Dome, make my chest hurt; they are so reminiscent of the misery I’ve witnessed in Manila that I feel I’m a decade younger and, yet, a hundred years older while I watch and empathize.
New Orleans existed, oblivious of the arrogance of lives lived in the shadows of the levees and it danced to the music of Bourbon Street, cheered on by the rich, by the oil companies, by the notion that we had tamed nature. But, we haven’t done that; nature is still our master. Will this city come back? Will we know and sooner than we may want to know.
I am amazed by what I’ve seen; is this still my wonderful, generous, developed country, the source of succor and comfort for the world? Who will care for the care-giver?
Kansas City
So, a tornado, about 100 miles wide, blew into the Gulf Coast. It didn’t just damage, hurt New Orleans, though, it moved it, much farther than you’d think. I’ve been watching the coverage of this enormous tragedy and I’m convinced that New Orleans has been blown to the Philippines and has replaced Manila. It’s the worst of that city on the bay, guarded by Corregidor. There are places in Manila where the people scratch a miserable life above stagnant water, their lives foreshortened by disease and poverty, byproducts of human hubris, the decision, perhaps borne of necessity, to form the clay of their lives in a place that was never meant to host our biped race. Now, the pictures of the sad remnant of the Big Easy’s population, wandering dazedly in filthy, knee- or chest-high water towards I-10 and the Super Dome, make my chest hurt; they are so reminiscent of the misery I’ve witnessed in Manila that I feel I’m a decade younger and, yet, a hundred years older while I watch and empathize.
New Orleans existed, oblivious of the arrogance of lives lived in the shadows of the levees and it danced to the music of Bourbon Street, cheered on by the rich, by the oil companies, by the notion that we had tamed nature. But, we haven’t done that; nature is still our master. Will this city come back? Will we know and sooner than we may want to know.
I am amazed by what I’ve seen; is this still my wonderful, generous, developed country, the source of succor and comfort for the world? Who will care for the care-giver?
28 August 2005
Weather/Whether
25 August 2005
en route: Kansas City to Los Angeles
Another flight, half-way across the continent, a little bumpiness as we rose through the morning rains across eastern Kansas and, now, smoother air as we glide through clear skies across the Great Plains and the Front Range of the Rockies.
Just a few days ago we drove back to Kansas City after a week’s holiday in Santa Fe. Over two days we climbed up past Taos on US 64, across the alpine valley at the foot of Angel Fire and down through Cimarron to Raton. We turned north, following the railway pass between Trinidad and Raton. In the former we gassed up and I chatted with a couple of older ladies at the Welcome Center. I had heard Trinidad’s winter weather described as bitterly cold but was informed that was wrong – there were days when the temperature did hit zero (Fahrenheit) but it wasn’t that cold, not like, say, Leadville where one of them had grown up. Summers had been tough in recent years; there were several days when the mercury passed 100. Leadville, on the other hand, was terrific in summer; only rarely was it as hot as 80.
We slept at Colorado Springs where the air was as clear as I can ever recall. The evening was bright and bracing and my blood ran faster. The next morning we rose feeling strong and hungry.
Why does weather so fascinate me? It’s been something that I’ve followed as avidly as some people do a sports team. On my home page I first look at the weather for key locations: Kansas City, Santa Fe, Worcester (England) and more exotic locales (Antantarivo, General Santos, Istanbul, Dacca). My real search has always been for places away from heat. I grew up in Sonora where the summers were dreadful and not much better when we moved to Arizona. I know, it’s a dry heat but at 110 degrees, it doesn’t much matter, it’s simply hot!
Later I suffered through humid, dreadful summers in Florida and sweated it out on the North Carolina coast. I was a Fulbright scholar in India and bore up under scorching hot seasons and worse monsoons (when the rain passed, the heat was some of the most oppressive I’ve ever experienced).
I recall, as a Boy Scout, the incredible feeling of cool air on summer camp outs in the Arizona Mountains. I remember traveling up into the Chiracahua Mountains one Easter, leaving the warmth of the Sulphur Springs Valley below to climb up into the meadows of Barfoot Park at about 8000 feet where paper thin ice lay over the slow trickle of water from an alpine spring, even covering the furry leaves of the rabbit tobacco and the smoother ones of the bitter skunk cabbage. We were alone up there that morning – I cooked eggs and bacon on a limp gas fire, the eggs ran and the bacon was, I’m being kind, ‘rare’. I can still feel the cold, crisp air of that morning.
So, I check the weather of places where there is relief from heat; mostly they are high, perched over the baking lowlands: Taif in the western mountains of Saudi Arabia, Navada Cerrada above Madrid in mid-summer, the central highlands of Madagascar, Mount Lemmon above Tucson and anywhere in the Italian or Swiss Alps while Milan bakes from mid July to late August.
Even where the escape is not by climbing but towards the sea, I am fascinated. The Freemantle Doctor mesmerized me, the wind reversing each afternoon, dropping its heat over the waves of the Indian Ocean and making Perth afternoons bearable, and there is a drop of as much as 30 degrees or more on many summer days between the Valley and thin coast littoral at Redondo Beach.
Weather is another way to travel. I escaped the Gangetic Plain some 30 years ago by climbing up to Rani Khet, rimmed by the Himalayas. We stayed at the Westview Hotel where the Manager typed up the menu each morning (we were the only guests) and where we sipped at our bed tea while we waited for the wood fired boiler to heat the water for our morning baths. Another summer I tasted forbidden love at a cabin on a golf course just outside Simla. I reveled in the slight cooling that January brings to Manila and Bangladesh. Another time, again in the Philippines, Baguio provided surcease from the broiling lowlands: damp, heavy air and the deeper green of the rain-belt mountains. We drove through the shuttered remnants of Camp John Hay, weird relics of the American presence where the sailors and airmen of Subic and Clark (and their dependents) would recreate a semblance of an Appalachian or Rocky Mountain holiday.
My love and I stayed on the slopes of Ali Shan in central Taiwan and there we watched the ‘qi’ rise from below where it hid the lower world. We rose at dawn and went with other tourists to the top of the mountain to watch the sunrise. The next day we crossed a high pass (Hohuan Shan), bought peaches at a roadside stand in one high valley and slept above Taichung at Kukuan next to a cold stream in a hotel where the hot water was piped directly from the volcanic spring. As strong as these mystical memories is that of me showing off and losing my glasses in the river when I tried to fling an apple core across the water and, later, on the bus into town when she bought dried squid and had to jump off at the first stop to visit the nearest facility, a whiffy spot that I think I can still smell. That night, glasses restored, we rode back up, fetched the car and drove back to Taichung where we amused ourselves at a hotel where our room featured a round bed and a mirror on the ceiling.
en route: Kansas City to Los Angeles
Another flight, half-way across the continent, a little bumpiness as we rose through the morning rains across eastern Kansas and, now, smoother air as we glide through clear skies across the Great Plains and the Front Range of the Rockies.
Just a few days ago we drove back to Kansas City after a week’s holiday in Santa Fe. Over two days we climbed up past Taos on US 64, across the alpine valley at the foot of Angel Fire and down through Cimarron to Raton. We turned north, following the railway pass between Trinidad and Raton. In the former we gassed up and I chatted with a couple of older ladies at the Welcome Center. I had heard Trinidad’s winter weather described as bitterly cold but was informed that was wrong – there were days when the temperature did hit zero (Fahrenheit) but it wasn’t that cold, not like, say, Leadville where one of them had grown up. Summers had been tough in recent years; there were several days when the mercury passed 100. Leadville, on the other hand, was terrific in summer; only rarely was it as hot as 80.
We slept at Colorado Springs where the air was as clear as I can ever recall. The evening was bright and bracing and my blood ran faster. The next morning we rose feeling strong and hungry.
Why does weather so fascinate me? It’s been something that I’ve followed as avidly as some people do a sports team. On my home page I first look at the weather for key locations: Kansas City, Santa Fe, Worcester (England) and more exotic locales (Antantarivo, General Santos, Istanbul, Dacca). My real search has always been for places away from heat. I grew up in Sonora where the summers were dreadful and not much better when we moved to Arizona. I know, it’s a dry heat but at 110 degrees, it doesn’t much matter, it’s simply hot!
Later I suffered through humid, dreadful summers in Florida and sweated it out on the North Carolina coast. I was a Fulbright scholar in India and bore up under scorching hot seasons and worse monsoons (when the rain passed, the heat was some of the most oppressive I’ve ever experienced).
I recall, as a Boy Scout, the incredible feeling of cool air on summer camp outs in the Arizona Mountains. I remember traveling up into the Chiracahua Mountains one Easter, leaving the warmth of the Sulphur Springs Valley below to climb up into the meadows of Barfoot Park at about 8000 feet where paper thin ice lay over the slow trickle of water from an alpine spring, even covering the furry leaves of the rabbit tobacco and the smoother ones of the bitter skunk cabbage. We were alone up there that morning – I cooked eggs and bacon on a limp gas fire, the eggs ran and the bacon was, I’m being kind, ‘rare’. I can still feel the cold, crisp air of that morning.
So, I check the weather of places where there is relief from heat; mostly they are high, perched over the baking lowlands: Taif in the western mountains of Saudi Arabia, Navada Cerrada above Madrid in mid-summer, the central highlands of Madagascar, Mount Lemmon above Tucson and anywhere in the Italian or Swiss Alps while Milan bakes from mid July to late August.
Even where the escape is not by climbing but towards the sea, I am fascinated. The Freemantle Doctor mesmerized me, the wind reversing each afternoon, dropping its heat over the waves of the Indian Ocean and making Perth afternoons bearable, and there is a drop of as much as 30 degrees or more on many summer days between the Valley and thin coast littoral at Redondo Beach.
Weather is another way to travel. I escaped the Gangetic Plain some 30 years ago by climbing up to Rani Khet, rimmed by the Himalayas. We stayed at the Westview Hotel where the Manager typed up the menu each morning (we were the only guests) and where we sipped at our bed tea while we waited for the wood fired boiler to heat the water for our morning baths. Another summer I tasted forbidden love at a cabin on a golf course just outside Simla. I reveled in the slight cooling that January brings to Manila and Bangladesh. Another time, again in the Philippines, Baguio provided surcease from the broiling lowlands: damp, heavy air and the deeper green of the rain-belt mountains. We drove through the shuttered remnants of Camp John Hay, weird relics of the American presence where the sailors and airmen of Subic and Clark (and their dependents) would recreate a semblance of an Appalachian or Rocky Mountain holiday.
My love and I stayed on the slopes of Ali Shan in central Taiwan and there we watched the ‘qi’ rise from below where it hid the lower world. We rose at dawn and went with other tourists to the top of the mountain to watch the sunrise. The next day we crossed a high pass (Hohuan Shan), bought peaches at a roadside stand in one high valley and slept above Taichung at Kukuan next to a cold stream in a hotel where the hot water was piped directly from the volcanic spring. As strong as these mystical memories is that of me showing off and losing my glasses in the river when I tried to fling an apple core across the water and, later, on the bus into town when she bought dried squid and had to jump off at the first stop to visit the nearest facility, a whiffy spot that I think I can still smell. That night, glasses restored, we rode back up, fetched the car and drove back to Taichung where we amused ourselves at a hotel where our room featured a round bed and a mirror on the ceiling.
28 June 2005
We are the United State of America, aren't we?
It can't be the United States of Petroleum Interests, can it? Is this what I want to be associated with? Is this what I want the land of my fathers to be?
What's happened to compassion, a sense of service, sharing?
We will rebuild this country and the values that matter but I guess we're going to have to do it -- as my partner says -- a block at a time! How sad!
Kansas City is a bit of light in this dark room. A tradition of giving and a sense of public spaces and their value!
What's happened to compassion, a sense of service, sharing?
We will rebuild this country and the values that matter but I guess we're going to have to do it -- as my partner says -- a block at a time! How sad!
Kansas City is a bit of light in this dark room. A tradition of giving and a sense of public spaces and their value!
26 May 2005
24 May 2005, on a plane from Albuquerque to Los Angeles
Not a perfect world, but a better one …
In the better world, belief would be honored but not sacrosanct. Religion would be seen for the good that it does, the positive values it imparts and the discipline it teaches, the paths that it opens for people to live out constructive, contributive lives. Religion would be respected but not sacrosanct because of the emotional element it introduces into all consideration of the human condition. In the better world we would recognize particularly that the faiths born in the Middle East – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – all promote a level of emotionalism that is frequently irrational and often dangerous. Intolerance and ignorance mixed with injustice perceived (or suffered) can make people fly airplanes into buildings. It can make people immolate themselves in religious communes in Waco, Texas and it stops dialogue and honest inquiry. In some faiths the religious canon is open ended and can, therefore, change and adapt to different times, places and cultures. It’s difficult to think how a considered position on a contemporary issue can be derived from a closed canon that is a thousand or more years old. We can’t necessarily rely on ancient emotional diatribes to determine how we ought to run our governments, whether we ought to emancipate our women or what we ought to teach our children about how the universe was made and how we got here. Too often canons are dissected to serve emotion but, equally, apologists often strain to contextualize passages that are, in fact, nothing but antediluvian intolerance. Religious values that support the better world should be honored and there is nothing wrong with them but those that work against it ought to be shunned. Religion in the better world is personal and familial, it is not social – don’t be ashamed of it but don’t push it, be humble and diligent and focused and, if they want, they will come. Don’t support the broadcast rantings of a con man who is taking up valuable air time that could be better used by letting us follow the progress of our favorite baseball team or a rebroadcast of ‘The Wizard of Oz’.
You know, it’s interesting that I cannot recall ever having read of a war declared in the name of Buddha and certainly ‘Aristotle’ has not been a rallying cry for warriors going into battle. Even the memory of Socrates’ death stirs not the emotions but regret in the face of intolerance and a determination to work for a better world where honest, penetrating inquiry about all aspects of the human condition is not only accepted, it is encouraged. Debate must be honest, respectful and positive.
But a better world does not mean that we do not recognize that certain affirming values are superior. If we don’t do that, we end up wearing Birkenstocks, unwashed and marginalized. I’ve seen that and, no thanks, no more! Equally, I’m not going to honor the person who eats all processed food, feeds their children Coca Cola, spends Sunday waving their arms and speaking in tongues, believes, without rational thought, that the Government is a left-wing conspiracy and, in ten years, hasn’t read a book whose cover didn’t feature a ripped bodice. I believe in the great middle, somewhere therein lies the basis of the better world.
In the better world, belief would be honored but not sacrosanct. Religion would be seen for the good that it does, the positive values it imparts and the discipline it teaches, the paths that it opens for people to live out constructive, contributive lives. Religion would be respected but not sacrosanct because of the emotional element it introduces into all consideration of the human condition. In the better world we would recognize particularly that the faiths born in the Middle East – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – all promote a level of emotionalism that is frequently irrational and often dangerous. Intolerance and ignorance mixed with injustice perceived (or suffered) can make people fly airplanes into buildings. It can make people immolate themselves in religious communes in Waco, Texas and it stops dialogue and honest inquiry. In some faiths the religious canon is open ended and can, therefore, change and adapt to different times, places and cultures. It’s difficult to think how a considered position on a contemporary issue can be derived from a closed canon that is a thousand or more years old. We can’t necessarily rely on ancient emotional diatribes to determine how we ought to run our governments, whether we ought to emancipate our women or what we ought to teach our children about how the universe was made and how we got here. Too often canons are dissected to serve emotion but, equally, apologists often strain to contextualize passages that are, in fact, nothing but antediluvian intolerance. Religious values that support the better world should be honored and there is nothing wrong with them but those that work against it ought to be shunned. Religion in the better world is personal and familial, it is not social – don’t be ashamed of it but don’t push it, be humble and diligent and focused and, if they want, they will come. Don’t support the broadcast rantings of a con man who is taking up valuable air time that could be better used by letting us follow the progress of our favorite baseball team or a rebroadcast of ‘The Wizard of Oz’.
You know, it’s interesting that I cannot recall ever having read of a war declared in the name of Buddha and certainly ‘Aristotle’ has not been a rallying cry for warriors going into battle. Even the memory of Socrates’ death stirs not the emotions but regret in the face of intolerance and a determination to work for a better world where honest, penetrating inquiry about all aspects of the human condition is not only accepted, it is encouraged. Debate must be honest, respectful and positive.
But a better world does not mean that we do not recognize that certain affirming values are superior. If we don’t do that, we end up wearing Birkenstocks, unwashed and marginalized. I’ve seen that and, no thanks, no more! Equally, I’m not going to honor the person who eats all processed food, feeds their children Coca Cola, spends Sunday waving their arms and speaking in tongues, believes, without rational thought, that the Government is a left-wing conspiracy and, in ten years, hasn’t read a book whose cover didn’t feature a ripped bodice. I believe in the great middle, somewhere therein lies the basis of the better world.
23 May 2005
Santa Fe, New Mexico, 22 May 2005
Sunday evening. It’s 8:30 PM, daylight savings time. There are grayish clouds, nearly stationary, against a pale blue evening sky. If the sky clears later, there will be a full moon visible. The high desert is quiet. A jackrabbit scurries and hops down a dirt track just below the northern portal of our house. The swallows have turned quiet and bedded down somewhere, they have given up protesting at our presence on the portal where they’ve built a daub nest between a log beam support and the roof.
I’m sipping at a California Cabernet. It’s full taste is somehow right at this hour.
There are still the remnants of winter on the peaks of the Sangre de Cristos. This year we had more snow than in the memory of many young skiers. Just six weeks ago we climbed partway up the mountain and drank dark German beer next to a fire in a bar patronized, apart from ourselves, exclusively by skiers.
This morning we parked near the Plaza and bought heavy, rich almond croissants from a bakery run by French renegades. We carried them – and coffees – to the park near the cathedral and sat on benches, in the shade, cooled by the green grass that grows so richly there.
A few days ago I heard from a former boss who was at some port in the Caribbean where he had sailed. He and his wife were having a wine at day’s end. His e-mail ended with the phrase, ‘life is good’.
It's nearly full dark now, there's only a receding splash of light to the West.
I’m sipping at a California Cabernet. It’s full taste is somehow right at this hour.
There are still the remnants of winter on the peaks of the Sangre de Cristos. This year we had more snow than in the memory of many young skiers. Just six weeks ago we climbed partway up the mountain and drank dark German beer next to a fire in a bar patronized, apart from ourselves, exclusively by skiers.
This morning we parked near the Plaza and bought heavy, rich almond croissants from a bakery run by French renegades. We carried them – and coffees – to the park near the cathedral and sat on benches, in the shade, cooled by the green grass that grows so richly there.
A few days ago I heard from a former boss who was at some port in the Caribbean where he had sailed. He and his wife were having a wine at day’s end. His e-mail ended with the phrase, ‘life is good’.
It's nearly full dark now, there's only a receding splash of light to the West.
28 April 2005
Outrageous!
28 April 2005
Tucson
How do some people sleep? Jack Nasser – who did a mediocre job of running Ford – and some cohorts have, apparently, ‘earned’ ten of millions of dollars in fees as Polaroid emerges from bankruptcy and is sold to a company in Minneapolis. Some 6000 retirees of the company who lost health benefits and their company retirement benefits each received $47.00. That’s right, $47.00. Let me write it out: forty-seven dollars.
What is going on here? What sort of a country do we live in when this kind of injustice is permitted? I saw an interview with one of the Polaroid retirees the other day, a gentleman of about 70. He was an electrical engineer. He retired with about $250,000 of his savings in Polaroid shares. His plan had been to play golf and, as he put it, have some fun. The value of the shares after the bankruptcy was nearly nothing.
He goes to the golf course every day now but, not to play; he has a job there, driving a mower. I hope that the golf course provides its employees health insurance but I doubt it!
Tucson
How do some people sleep? Jack Nasser – who did a mediocre job of running Ford – and some cohorts have, apparently, ‘earned’ ten of millions of dollars in fees as Polaroid emerges from bankruptcy and is sold to a company in Minneapolis. Some 6000 retirees of the company who lost health benefits and their company retirement benefits each received $47.00. That’s right, $47.00. Let me write it out: forty-seven dollars.
What is going on here? What sort of a country do we live in when this kind of injustice is permitted? I saw an interview with one of the Polaroid retirees the other day, a gentleman of about 70. He was an electrical engineer. He retired with about $250,000 of his savings in Polaroid shares. His plan had been to play golf and, as he put it, have some fun. The value of the shares after the bankruptcy was nearly nothing.
He goes to the golf course every day now but, not to play; he has a job there, driving a mower. I hope that the golf course provides its employees health insurance but I doubt it!
11 April 2005
10 April 2005 ...Haiku?
I.
There at the cove end,
Dreams rise, drift on smoke
A man sits idly
II.
Rusted, latched door
Corrugated metal wall
Grass grows on the stoop
III.
Air moves, leaf stirs
Thinly blossomed, buds break
Winter walks away.
In some woods near Lake of the Ozarks, I saw this nondescript corrugated metal building without a sign to indicate what it was for. On one end there was a door, infrequently used from the rust and grass that grew around it. A log lay just opposite the doorway. It was the sort of place that I'd have gone for a break to smoke, when I was a young man. I'd have sat there and puffed and reflected.
When I saw that door to that unmarked building today, it stirred the memory in me of working mornings in the south when my break would be a reflective smoke somewhere in a quiet piece of shade. I don't smoke any more and sometimes I wonder if I also don't do less of those other two things, sitting and thinking.
The memory gave birth to these three connected Haikus. Of course, I had to call my 14 year-old a couple of times with help on syllables and lines. She becomes a sort of co-author but is not responsible (and had better never even think about this sort of crutch for sitting and reflecting).
There at the cove end,
Dreams rise, drift on smoke
A man sits idly
II.
Rusted, latched door
Corrugated metal wall
Grass grows on the stoop
III.
Air moves, leaf stirs
Thinly blossomed, buds break
Winter walks away.
In some woods near Lake of the Ozarks, I saw this nondescript corrugated metal building without a sign to indicate what it was for. On one end there was a door, infrequently used from the rust and grass that grew around it. A log lay just opposite the doorway. It was the sort of place that I'd have gone for a break to smoke, when I was a young man. I'd have sat there and puffed and reflected.
When I saw that door to that unmarked building today, it stirred the memory in me of working mornings in the south when my break would be a reflective smoke somewhere in a quiet piece of shade. I don't smoke any more and sometimes I wonder if I also don't do less of those other two things, sitting and thinking.
The memory gave birth to these three connected Haikus. Of course, I had to call my 14 year-old a couple of times with help on syllables and lines. She becomes a sort of co-author but is not responsible (and had better never even think about this sort of crutch for sitting and reflecting).
10 April 2005 Sunday, Lake of the Ozarks
I’ve been reading this weird novel called ‘Dance Dance Dance’ by Haruki Murakami. Post modernist, I guess. Strangely imagined. He’s in such a hurry to spill it out that there are lapses. One of the reviews said that he takes risks. I think so. I also think his translator doesn’t quite do him justice but, then, what do I know? I can’t read the original. For me, I can only imagine what that’s about; maybe the original and the book I’m reading have no connection whatsoever? I once heard ‘translation’ described as ‘transcreation’ -- apt.
The book is about a lost character, a hack writer who shovels ‘cultural snow’, writes restaurant reviews; anything, really, that he can get. Wanders around, searching for a lost lover, meets a grade school buddy who has become a movie star and may, or may not, have murdered his lost lover. Falls in love with a hotel receptionist who has stumbled into his parallel world where a being dressed in a sheepskin head costume lives in a tawdry room at the end of a pitch black corridor and waits for our hero to drop in and have strange, Delphic conversations. Meantime, the hack writer meets a 13 year old girl, just moving onto the edges of womanhood, who has a sort of second sight, a huge amount of resentment towards the world and a fragile ego. They become friends, sharing a love of music and a need for companionship. It goes on. Like selecting the ‘visualizer’ for your computer’s music player, you get a set of images you can’t understand, that aren’t of anything but that draw you into them. I’m truly enjoying the contrast between the lapping waters of the morning lake, the rising sun, the heron that I startled when I first stepped onto the balcony, the squirrels bobbing up and down the oaks and this urban novel about a world where it is now evening. Did I mention that there’s also a minor character, a one-armed Vietnam veteran, fluent Japanese, writes poetry and is killed by a bus when he steps onto a road after going grocery shopping and looks the wrong way? Right book for this place, don’t know why.
And, now, I’ve finished it. Time to go for a walk – the morning sun is bright and the air is clear, later they say there is a chance of thunderstorms.
The book is about a lost character, a hack writer who shovels ‘cultural snow’, writes restaurant reviews; anything, really, that he can get. Wanders around, searching for a lost lover, meets a grade school buddy who has become a movie star and may, or may not, have murdered his lost lover. Falls in love with a hotel receptionist who has stumbled into his parallel world where a being dressed in a sheepskin head costume lives in a tawdry room at the end of a pitch black corridor and waits for our hero to drop in and have strange, Delphic conversations. Meantime, the hack writer meets a 13 year old girl, just moving onto the edges of womanhood, who has a sort of second sight, a huge amount of resentment towards the world and a fragile ego. They become friends, sharing a love of music and a need for companionship. It goes on. Like selecting the ‘visualizer’ for your computer’s music player, you get a set of images you can’t understand, that aren’t of anything but that draw you into them. I’m truly enjoying the contrast between the lapping waters of the morning lake, the rising sun, the heron that I startled when I first stepped onto the balcony, the squirrels bobbing up and down the oaks and this urban novel about a world where it is now evening. Did I mention that there’s also a minor character, a one-armed Vietnam veteran, fluent Japanese, writes poetry and is killed by a bus when he steps onto a road after going grocery shopping and looks the wrong way? Right book for this place, don’t know why.
And, now, I’ve finished it. Time to go for a walk – the morning sun is bright and the air is clear, later they say there is a chance of thunderstorms.
30 March 2005
I’m thinking back about 20 or 25 years now. Thailand.
This is not an anecdote about bar girls or the war. I was first there in Bangkok in the 1970’s, passing through on Pan Am 1 or 2 (whichever one it was that ran West from San Francisco and, so, actually ran from East to West, weird that!). The driver of the taxi-van into town bought some jasmine flowers from a kid at an intersection and gave them to the girl I was with. It was very late, Pan Am had a schedule that must have taken some time to develop. They managed to land at ungodly hours everywhere between Europe and Hong Kong. In a strange way I actually liked this: first meeting a new city at dawn. It’s always been a bit of a mess, Bangkok, but it makes progress and it’s people remain mostly graceful and tolerant, even through those sweaty nights and amidst those rank canals and polluted air and over-crowded streets,
Years later I was trying to manage a project to provide a flare for a distillery about 100 kilometers outside of Bangkok. I say I was ‘trying’ to manage it because I really didn’t have much of an idea about what we were really trying to do. You see, I’d never actually built what the customer wanted. In fact, I’d never really built anything. I was a Duke graduate with a degree in history, some foreign language fluency and a facility for bullshit. I was particularly adept at the latter because I had the capacity to believe my own bullshit. Years later I saw this talent at its most refined in former President Clinton – he simply believed completely in the ‘truth’ of what he was telling you at the moment he said it, even if it contradicted what he’d just said a few minutes before. I don’t think I ever got that good, perhaps if I had, I’d be in a different place.
Most of the time I stayed in Bangkok, the customer’s main offices were in the city as were those of the engineering company I hired to do the actual work of the installation. Also, my technical failings seemed less apparent – at least to me – the farther I actually was from the equipment we were supposed to be installing.
Sometimes I went out to the site. It was a liquor plant, about 60 miles away. There was a nearby town, small but, in the way of Asian towns, it probably had a population of 100,000.
I stayed at a hotel in the town. It was very cheap – about $12 for a room. Mine was air-conditioned. The bathroom was as big as the bedroom. It was only fitted with a shower; there was no curtain. After you washed you simply opened the door to the bedroom and let the cooler, less humid air-conditioning flow into dry the bathroom.
The first time I stayed there I dried myself with a large cotton towel I found folded on the bed. Later that evening, when I got back from a roadside dinner of rice, prawn curry and beer, I learned that the towel was actually the bed cover. There was only a bottom sheet. You were supposed to use the towel if you needed a cover. Hell, the place only cost $12 so you couldn’t complain.
About 7 next day I wandered around the early morning streets, me and the monks with begging bowls. I found a stall that was selling coffee that was sticky with sweetened, condensed milk. By clever use of sign languages I persuaded them to make me a black coffee – not much better, it was instant, but good enough. They had multiple uses for the condensed milk. Some of the thick, syrupy stuff was put onto a slice of bread and handed to me. I liked it and had two more. That was breakfast.
The Thais who worked on the project with me – I was the only foreigner – were exceedingly polite and discrete. It was clear to everyone very early on that I didn’t have the foggiest notion what we should be doing. I’d never built a flare in my life; certainly couldn’t recall a single of the many humanities and economics courses I’d taken at Duke that ever even mentioned flares or combustion. Still, with good will, smiles and patience, we got something erected. I would read the instructions that were sent with various technical pieces from our factory in Tulsa. The Thais would ask me to explain some of the words, I felt useful. They never got around to making fun of my ignorance. They just worked around me to get the job done. Neat.
One evening we finished the job and it was time to see if the flare worked. The role of the thing was clear, even to me. Some special bugs had been introduced into several tanks of mash (grain, sugar, other stuff). They little guys farted pretty frequently and a lot of methane gas was produced. The gas was piped from the tanks of mash to fire various burners that fueled the distilling process. When there was no need to fire the burners and there was too much methane to store, the excess was piped over to the flare, which was supposed to burn it off. Simple.
I have no idea what persuaded me to arrogate unto myself the honor of firing off the flare – which was to be done manually the first time. I guess I thought I should demonstrate some responsibility for the technology; I’ve thought about it and, whatever the reasons, they are buried in the mists of time. Anyway, it was early evening. The moon was already out. I went over to the ignition button at the base of the stack. Five or six of my Thai friends were crowded around me. I grabbed the wheel to open the valve that let gas into the stack. I opened it and, staring intently at the igniter about 3 or 4 feet below the top lip of the flare, began a quick countdown from the number 10.
I pressed the button, there was a tremendous, scary whoosh and then a beautiful, pure blue flame bloomed out of the top of the stack. Satisfied that I’d done something to restore myself in the eyes of the Thais, I turned around with a smile. There was no one there. As soon as I began the countdown, every faithless one of them had silently sprinted a safe distance away. And there they were, grinning and waving at me from about a hundred yards.
We had prawn curry, rice and way too much beer for dinner that night.
This is not an anecdote about bar girls or the war. I was first there in Bangkok in the 1970’s, passing through on Pan Am 1 or 2 (whichever one it was that ran West from San Francisco and, so, actually ran from East to West, weird that!). The driver of the taxi-van into town bought some jasmine flowers from a kid at an intersection and gave them to the girl I was with. It was very late, Pan Am had a schedule that must have taken some time to develop. They managed to land at ungodly hours everywhere between Europe and Hong Kong. In a strange way I actually liked this: first meeting a new city at dawn. It’s always been a bit of a mess, Bangkok, but it makes progress and it’s people remain mostly graceful and tolerant, even through those sweaty nights and amidst those rank canals and polluted air and over-crowded streets,
Years later I was trying to manage a project to provide a flare for a distillery about 100 kilometers outside of Bangkok. I say I was ‘trying’ to manage it because I really didn’t have much of an idea about what we were really trying to do. You see, I’d never actually built what the customer wanted. In fact, I’d never really built anything. I was a Duke graduate with a degree in history, some foreign language fluency and a facility for bullshit. I was particularly adept at the latter because I had the capacity to believe my own bullshit. Years later I saw this talent at its most refined in former President Clinton – he simply believed completely in the ‘truth’ of what he was telling you at the moment he said it, even if it contradicted what he’d just said a few minutes before. I don’t think I ever got that good, perhaps if I had, I’d be in a different place.
Most of the time I stayed in Bangkok, the customer’s main offices were in the city as were those of the engineering company I hired to do the actual work of the installation. Also, my technical failings seemed less apparent – at least to me – the farther I actually was from the equipment we were supposed to be installing.
Sometimes I went out to the site. It was a liquor plant, about 60 miles away. There was a nearby town, small but, in the way of Asian towns, it probably had a population of 100,000.
I stayed at a hotel in the town. It was very cheap – about $12 for a room. Mine was air-conditioned. The bathroom was as big as the bedroom. It was only fitted with a shower; there was no curtain. After you washed you simply opened the door to the bedroom and let the cooler, less humid air-conditioning flow into dry the bathroom.
The first time I stayed there I dried myself with a large cotton towel I found folded on the bed. Later that evening, when I got back from a roadside dinner of rice, prawn curry and beer, I learned that the towel was actually the bed cover. There was only a bottom sheet. You were supposed to use the towel if you needed a cover. Hell, the place only cost $12 so you couldn’t complain.
About 7 next day I wandered around the early morning streets, me and the monks with begging bowls. I found a stall that was selling coffee that was sticky with sweetened, condensed milk. By clever use of sign languages I persuaded them to make me a black coffee – not much better, it was instant, but good enough. They had multiple uses for the condensed milk. Some of the thick, syrupy stuff was put onto a slice of bread and handed to me. I liked it and had two more. That was breakfast.
The Thais who worked on the project with me – I was the only foreigner – were exceedingly polite and discrete. It was clear to everyone very early on that I didn’t have the foggiest notion what we should be doing. I’d never built a flare in my life; certainly couldn’t recall a single of the many humanities and economics courses I’d taken at Duke that ever even mentioned flares or combustion. Still, with good will, smiles and patience, we got something erected. I would read the instructions that were sent with various technical pieces from our factory in Tulsa. The Thais would ask me to explain some of the words, I felt useful. They never got around to making fun of my ignorance. They just worked around me to get the job done. Neat.
One evening we finished the job and it was time to see if the flare worked. The role of the thing was clear, even to me. Some special bugs had been introduced into several tanks of mash (grain, sugar, other stuff). They little guys farted pretty frequently and a lot of methane gas was produced. The gas was piped from the tanks of mash to fire various burners that fueled the distilling process. When there was no need to fire the burners and there was too much methane to store, the excess was piped over to the flare, which was supposed to burn it off. Simple.
I have no idea what persuaded me to arrogate unto myself the honor of firing off the flare – which was to be done manually the first time. I guess I thought I should demonstrate some responsibility for the technology; I’ve thought about it and, whatever the reasons, they are buried in the mists of time. Anyway, it was early evening. The moon was already out. I went over to the ignition button at the base of the stack. Five or six of my Thai friends were crowded around me. I grabbed the wheel to open the valve that let gas into the stack. I opened it and, staring intently at the igniter about 3 or 4 feet below the top lip of the flare, began a quick countdown from the number 10.
I pressed the button, there was a tremendous, scary whoosh and then a beautiful, pure blue flame bloomed out of the top of the stack. Satisfied that I’d done something to restore myself in the eyes of the Thais, I turned around with a smile. There was no one there. As soon as I began the countdown, every faithless one of them had silently sprinted a safe distance away. And there they were, grinning and waving at me from about a hundred yards.
We had prawn curry, rice and way too much beer for dinner that night.
27 March 2005
Small epiphany: Retracing my Dad’s path …
Up there, along the Missouri River, north of St. Joe, the farmsteads these days appear wealthy, they occupy a different economic and social space from the little towns that grew up along the river and are now mostly sad and poor. Forest City, where Dad grew up, is a place I remembered as clean and prosperous. Maybe the future was clear to people older than me in the 1960’s when I last visited, but I thought then that the rhythms of its life were settled and constant. They weren’t.
My Grandma lived in a little clapboard place one street over from the Methodist Church, just down the hill a bit from ‘old Doc’ somebody’s place, the largest house in the town. (The good Doc must have been a source of much wisdom for my Dad because he told a lot of stories about him. Dad took a particular liking to Doc’s aphorism about drinking: you were a ‘damn fool’ if you took a drink before you were forty and a ‘damn fool’ is you didn’t after. The saying has more truth for me now that I’m well past forty; it was popular with Dad too in his later years.)
I couldn’t find Grandma’s house when I drove up from Kansas City two weeks ago. The Methodist Church was still there but it seemed smaller than I remembered.
About two streets further along, parallel to Grandma’s, lived my Aunt and Uncle. They were both teachers but my Uncle quit teaching to become the butcher and run the family grocery store that had been started by my Grandfather sometime in the 1920’s after Grandma and he decided a grocery store would be a better paying proposition than the bakery they first had in that space. And, hard at it was, the grocery store was a hell of a lot less work.
In summer my Aunt worked in the grocery store. They understood the concept of a vacation and I believe they took one or two over the years but mostly they worked. I think that for a lot of the folk up there, life and work were indistinguishable. This is an attitude that makes life more of a single piece – not a bad thing.
On of my most vivid memories of Aunt Margaret’s and Uncle Ross’s place was that the TV played in the morning; they watched the ‘Today’ show as they got ready. To me this was exciting. In our house we just didn’t play the TV until evening. Our mornings were a serious time, we got ready for work or school, we ate, we left, our individual tasks performed without background noise that I can remember.
But there was something more about the glowing TV in their living room; to me it was evidence of my Aunt and Uncle’s connectedness to life beyond Forest City and Holt County. It was a testimony to some of the values that they held to: Education was important, you needed to know something about the world. They chose to live there, rooted in the land but the blaring television was their acknowledgement of the wider world.
I had come to Forest City, that summer that is now many years faded, with a sense that I was traveling back in time. My head was full of Mark Twain and fantasies about life in Missouri river towns. Some of that expectation was met by the pace of life along the little lanes where my relatives lived. I walked out in the early, humid mornings, the air still cool, and poked down among the vines and brush that lined the creek in front of Grandma’s place. It always seemed that there was a lot of time available to me. But, I think I must also have been reassured that I still had an umbilical to the life of my nuclear family, carried out in a much more urban and seemingly ‘sophisticated’ place, far away, by the link that the TV in my Aunt and Uncle’s living room made between their world then, in a little river town, and the place I lived with my parents and sister.
That day as I drove around the frayed town, now a couple of weeks past, I couldn’t find my Aunt and Uncle’s house either. Later, at the café, I ate lunch. The food was no better than I remembered, more notable for its ability to take the edge off your hunger than any capacity to satisfy an esthetic. The owner, a man of about my age, had known my family and he remembered our name. Yeah, the farmhouse had been torn down some years before – I’d already figured that, so this information only depressed me a little bit more. On the other hand, the news that the building that had housed the grocery store was gone depressed me profoundly. It was just another blow. Where it stood in a row of connected brick shop fronts, was now only an empty and somewhat forlorn lot of uncut grass and weeds. What was the value of doing this?
Dad had inherited half of the store but gave it to my Uncle – who he really did love – for all the cigarettes he could smoke whenever he made one of his rare visits to Forest City. He quit later but I don’t recall what was substituted for the cigarettes.
Uncle Ross died of lung cancer some years before Dad died of the same evil disease. His passing shook Dad deeply. Ross’ death swept away the last props of the sense of permanency that Forest City gave to Dad’s peripatetic life. You see, my nuclear family moved a lot. That Forest City was there and populated with relatives and things that Dad remembered from his youth was important, it gave us some underpinnings, some stability that made our gypsy life easier. Dad and Mom met in Peru after the War. I was born in California but we moved to Mexico almost as soon as I could walk and had lived there for a number of years until Dad’s mining business failed. Later we lived in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and Alabama, finally returning to Arizona where Dad lived out his last years. He called himself a ‘tramp engineer’.
The loss of tradition was sad but, thinking it deeper, it seems that maybe I’ve got an opportunity here; just as the ancestor whose family name I bear first left his roots behind – somewhere in Tennessee and, before that, in Virginia and England – to take up and own land that had never been owned before in Missouri (the concept being quite alien to the Indians who occupied it before us), I can put down new roots somewhere else, build something that more bears my imprint, that is more the result of an act more freely chosen by me and less dictated by people long dead. Maybe this little journey was a small epiphany?
-Santa Fe, 26 March 2005
My Grandma lived in a little clapboard place one street over from the Methodist Church, just down the hill a bit from ‘old Doc’ somebody’s place, the largest house in the town. (The good Doc must have been a source of much wisdom for my Dad because he told a lot of stories about him. Dad took a particular liking to Doc’s aphorism about drinking: you were a ‘damn fool’ if you took a drink before you were forty and a ‘damn fool’ is you didn’t after. The saying has more truth for me now that I’m well past forty; it was popular with Dad too in his later years.)
I couldn’t find Grandma’s house when I drove up from Kansas City two weeks ago. The Methodist Church was still there but it seemed smaller than I remembered.
About two streets further along, parallel to Grandma’s, lived my Aunt and Uncle. They were both teachers but my Uncle quit teaching to become the butcher and run the family grocery store that had been started by my Grandfather sometime in the 1920’s after Grandma and he decided a grocery store would be a better paying proposition than the bakery they first had in that space. And, hard at it was, the grocery store was a hell of a lot less work.
In summer my Aunt worked in the grocery store. They understood the concept of a vacation and I believe they took one or two over the years but mostly they worked. I think that for a lot of the folk up there, life and work were indistinguishable. This is an attitude that makes life more of a single piece – not a bad thing.
On of my most vivid memories of Aunt Margaret’s and Uncle Ross’s place was that the TV played in the morning; they watched the ‘Today’ show as they got ready. To me this was exciting. In our house we just didn’t play the TV until evening. Our mornings were a serious time, we got ready for work or school, we ate, we left, our individual tasks performed without background noise that I can remember.
But there was something more about the glowing TV in their living room; to me it was evidence of my Aunt and Uncle’s connectedness to life beyond Forest City and Holt County. It was a testimony to some of the values that they held to: Education was important, you needed to know something about the world. They chose to live there, rooted in the land but the blaring television was their acknowledgement of the wider world.
I had come to Forest City, that summer that is now many years faded, with a sense that I was traveling back in time. My head was full of Mark Twain and fantasies about life in Missouri river towns. Some of that expectation was met by the pace of life along the little lanes where my relatives lived. I walked out in the early, humid mornings, the air still cool, and poked down among the vines and brush that lined the creek in front of Grandma’s place. It always seemed that there was a lot of time available to me. But, I think I must also have been reassured that I still had an umbilical to the life of my nuclear family, carried out in a much more urban and seemingly ‘sophisticated’ place, far away, by the link that the TV in my Aunt and Uncle’s living room made between their world then, in a little river town, and the place I lived with my parents and sister.
That day as I drove around the frayed town, now a couple of weeks past, I couldn’t find my Aunt and Uncle’s house either. Later, at the café, I ate lunch. The food was no better than I remembered, more notable for its ability to take the edge off your hunger than any capacity to satisfy an esthetic. The owner, a man of about my age, had known my family and he remembered our name. Yeah, the farmhouse had been torn down some years before – I’d already figured that, so this information only depressed me a little bit more. On the other hand, the news that the building that had housed the grocery store was gone depressed me profoundly. It was just another blow. Where it stood in a row of connected brick shop fronts, was now only an empty and somewhat forlorn lot of uncut grass and weeds. What was the value of doing this?
Dad had inherited half of the store but gave it to my Uncle – who he really did love – for all the cigarettes he could smoke whenever he made one of his rare visits to Forest City. He quit later but I don’t recall what was substituted for the cigarettes.
Uncle Ross died of lung cancer some years before Dad died of the same evil disease. His passing shook Dad deeply. Ross’ death swept away the last props of the sense of permanency that Forest City gave to Dad’s peripatetic life. You see, my nuclear family moved a lot. That Forest City was there and populated with relatives and things that Dad remembered from his youth was important, it gave us some underpinnings, some stability that made our gypsy life easier. Dad and Mom met in Peru after the War. I was born in California but we moved to Mexico almost as soon as I could walk and had lived there for a number of years until Dad’s mining business failed. Later we lived in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and Alabama, finally returning to Arizona where Dad lived out his last years. He called himself a ‘tramp engineer’.
The loss of tradition was sad but, thinking it deeper, it seems that maybe I’ve got an opportunity here; just as the ancestor whose family name I bear first left his roots behind – somewhere in Tennessee and, before that, in Virginia and England – to take up and own land that had never been owned before in Missouri (the concept being quite alien to the Indians who occupied it before us), I can put down new roots somewhere else, build something that more bears my imprint, that is more the result of an act more freely chosen by me and less dictated by people long dead. Maybe this little journey was a small epiphany?
-Santa Fe, 26 March 2005
13 March 2005
Missouri Memories …. 12 March 2005
Saturday the weather was clear and the temperature rose into the upper 50’s. I’ve never been in Missouri at this time of year. It was beautiful; I couldn’t see buds on trees but, I imagined them. I needed to get out of town after a week in the office. My father came from Holt County in the Northwest corner of the state. It’s about 80 miles from Kansas City. It was time to get in touch with my roots. I drove north on I-29 across the waving countryside; the world was shades of lingering winter dust and yellow, fallow fields.
I found only the traces of ghosts, faint echoes; without remembrance, they will soon disappear entirely.
The last time I was in Forest City, Dad’s hometown, I was 14, Kennedy was dead, Vietnam was getting worse. We lived in Florida in those days. That summer I was to spend about six weeks visiting family.
Getting there took pretty much 24 hours. I went by train, there was an airline strike. It must have been just about the end of the era of private passenger trains. At St. Louis I changed for Kansas City. This was not planned, the train was to have run directly to Kansas City. The connection time was long, six hours or so; the airline strike must have strained the railroads and there were disruptions.
I don’t know why that world has gone; we were well into the 1960’s but in places the ‘50’s hung on. My family was as protective as any yet in those days I could take a train trip as a fourteen year-old – it was an adventure, not a risk. In the event, nothing much happened. During the wait in St. Louis for my connection to Kansas City some traveling soldiers took me under their wing and I ate with them at a coffee shop and we played pool. They were country boys and had been drafted. It was cool to hang out with guys in uniform (I think it was the first time I ever played pool). I guess they probably ended up in Southeast Asia. My Dad made me call him every hour while we waited for the train. Years later when I thought about it, it dawned on me how worried he had been.
I found only the traces of ghosts, faint echoes; without remembrance, they will soon disappear entirely.
The last time I was in Forest City, Dad’s hometown, I was 14, Kennedy was dead, Vietnam was getting worse. We lived in Florida in those days. That summer I was to spend about six weeks visiting family.
Getting there took pretty much 24 hours. I went by train, there was an airline strike. It must have been just about the end of the era of private passenger trains. At St. Louis I changed for Kansas City. This was not planned, the train was to have run directly to Kansas City. The connection time was long, six hours or so; the airline strike must have strained the railroads and there were disruptions.
I don’t know why that world has gone; we were well into the 1960’s but in places the ‘50’s hung on. My family was as protective as any yet in those days I could take a train trip as a fourteen year-old – it was an adventure, not a risk. In the event, nothing much happened. During the wait in St. Louis for my connection to Kansas City some traveling soldiers took me under their wing and I ate with them at a coffee shop and we played pool. They were country boys and had been drafted. It was cool to hang out with guys in uniform (I think it was the first time I ever played pool). I guess they probably ended up in Southeast Asia. My Dad made me call him every hour while we waited for the train. Years later when I thought about it, it dawned on me how worried he had been.
02 March 2005
Tucson, 27 February 2005: Sunday drive …
Both Arthur Miller and Hunter Thompson have died recently – one essentially of old age and the other, because of it (age that is), by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Their deaths, apparently, impacted me but lightly.
Today I arose early – it’s a Sunday, my wife slept into the mid-morning and my daughter and her friend, who was spending the night, didn’t go to bed until the wee hours so they were comatose. I tiptoed around anyway, quietly making coffee, checking the e-mail and showering. Eventually I took possession of the car keys, kissed my wife on the cheek and left for an early morning drive.
I took a thermal mug full of Starbucks with me and stopped at a grocery with a bakery to buy a couple of butter croissants (is there any other type?).
It’s funny how most of those who are about on a Sunday morning – churchgoers, bicyclers, hikers, bird-watchers – are generally a wholesome group. They were everywhere I drove. I pointed the car aimlessly and ended up near Gates Pass on the far western side of Tucson, passing birders, cyclists and hikers. Over the years the city has grown up along the Catalina foothills and east up to the swell of the Saguaro National Monument along the edge of the Rincons. Now houses are popping up along the low hills that presage the Santa Margaritas and they’ve also invaded the black, rocky heights of the Tucson Mountains to the west of the city.
The Tucson Mountains are anything but lofty. They are squat but their summits are ragged and look unscale-able. As you climb them, even in a car, you notice the ground is bare and rocky. The prevailing color is a burnt brown, a desert singed by the heat of summers that out there, on the western littoral of settlement, are fiercer than on the more settled eastern side of the city.
I listened to a piece on NPR about the way that the British had taken Hunter Thompson’s death to heart. I never read anything he wrote – still unlikely, the notion of reading the political commentary of a drug-addled egomaniac doesn’t appeal. Instead I pointed the car toward East Lawn, a cemetery on the east side.
I hadn’t been within the boundaries of East Lawn for more than a decade. It was cool, bird song was prominent. The trees that were scattered around seemed to have grown thicker and more rooted than the last time. I parked the car on one of the roadways. There was almost no one around. I wandered across the grass; it was a pleasant morning.
The grave markers at East Lawn are flat on the earth. Each one faces up to the sky. The mowers simply pass over them.
I randomly read out the distillations of lives that the stones offered. Many were poignant, especially when the interred was a child; some of those for the dead, full of years, were simple, unaffected and noble.
For more than half an hour I wandered around. What I was looking for was near one of those now matured trees but there were more of them than I remembered and the cemetery itself was far bigger than I recalled.
I finally found it, my father’s grave. He rests near a tree, still proximate an edge of the cemetery. From the angle of repose, you can still see out towards the mountains, where the Catalinas and the Rincons nearly intersect. More, though, there is some comfort that Dad still rests near the boundary of the occupied parts of the cemetery. He would have wanted it that way; he belonged to that desert, even when it’s condensed down to a scrubby plot adjacent to the manicured rows of flat stones celebrating unremarked lives like his.
The profound sadness I felt was not so much at his passing; I miss him still, probably more now than ever but the bittersweet memories, as a friend whose child was murdered once told me, grows more sweet than bitter with the passing of years. What I felt sad about was that the sheer humanity of my Dad’s story, at least that part that I’d been part of, remains untold.
I cannot let this pass; I must tell Dad’s story, at least that part which I shared.
Today I arose early – it’s a Sunday, my wife slept into the mid-morning and my daughter and her friend, who was spending the night, didn’t go to bed until the wee hours so they were comatose. I tiptoed around anyway, quietly making coffee, checking the e-mail and showering. Eventually I took possession of the car keys, kissed my wife on the cheek and left for an early morning drive.
I took a thermal mug full of Starbucks with me and stopped at a grocery with a bakery to buy a couple of butter croissants (is there any other type?).
It’s funny how most of those who are about on a Sunday morning – churchgoers, bicyclers, hikers, bird-watchers – are generally a wholesome group. They were everywhere I drove. I pointed the car aimlessly and ended up near Gates Pass on the far western side of Tucson, passing birders, cyclists and hikers. Over the years the city has grown up along the Catalina foothills and east up to the swell of the Saguaro National Monument along the edge of the Rincons. Now houses are popping up along the low hills that presage the Santa Margaritas and they’ve also invaded the black, rocky heights of the Tucson Mountains to the west of the city.
The Tucson Mountains are anything but lofty. They are squat but their summits are ragged and look unscale-able. As you climb them, even in a car, you notice the ground is bare and rocky. The prevailing color is a burnt brown, a desert singed by the heat of summers that out there, on the western littoral of settlement, are fiercer than on the more settled eastern side of the city.
I listened to a piece on NPR about the way that the British had taken Hunter Thompson’s death to heart. I never read anything he wrote – still unlikely, the notion of reading the political commentary of a drug-addled egomaniac doesn’t appeal. Instead I pointed the car toward East Lawn, a cemetery on the east side.
I hadn’t been within the boundaries of East Lawn for more than a decade. It was cool, bird song was prominent. The trees that were scattered around seemed to have grown thicker and more rooted than the last time. I parked the car on one of the roadways. There was almost no one around. I wandered across the grass; it was a pleasant morning.
The grave markers at East Lawn are flat on the earth. Each one faces up to the sky. The mowers simply pass over them.
I randomly read out the distillations of lives that the stones offered. Many were poignant, especially when the interred was a child; some of those for the dead, full of years, were simple, unaffected and noble.
For more than half an hour I wandered around. What I was looking for was near one of those now matured trees but there were more of them than I remembered and the cemetery itself was far bigger than I recalled.
I finally found it, my father’s grave. He rests near a tree, still proximate an edge of the cemetery. From the angle of repose, you can still see out towards the mountains, where the Catalinas and the Rincons nearly intersect. More, though, there is some comfort that Dad still rests near the boundary of the occupied parts of the cemetery. He would have wanted it that way; he belonged to that desert, even when it’s condensed down to a scrubby plot adjacent to the manicured rows of flat stones celebrating unremarked lives like his.
The profound sadness I felt was not so much at his passing; I miss him still, probably more now than ever but the bittersweet memories, as a friend whose child was murdered once told me, grows more sweet than bitter with the passing of years. What I felt sad about was that the sheer humanity of my Dad’s story, at least that part that I’d been part of, remains untold.
I cannot let this pass; I must tell Dad’s story, at least that part which I shared.
04 February 2005
Mumbai ... 4 February 2005
There’s a raga playing in my head. Memories bubble up: faces, parts of names, weird evenings, smells (some of the strongest memories are triggered by odors), noises and, always, a sheet of dust, evening dust, even in winter.
This trip began in what they call Kolkata now. Strange change that, to replace the name of a city with that of a village. Job Charnock probably never spelled much of anything the same way twice but he is the person who founded Calcutta, the place that became the second city of a great empire. I don’t believe he used very many ‘k’s’ in what he wrote and I wonder if the ground around his grave, there in Bengal, is stirred from the rotations he’s recently been performing.
Still, what’s in a name, a rose is still a rose and Calcutta at 3 in the morning just after you’ve been unceremoniously dumped into a rank cab (not a cab rank but a rank cab, there is a distinction) retains much of the character, and much of the fug, that it had when last I visited nearly 30 years ago.
The street cars are still there, older and more worn but trundling along at about the same speed. The slums go on, maybe slightly less horrible than before but still seemingly endless.
There is surely more wealth. There are new buildings, some fly-overs, an improved airport and, hidden, serious new information infrastructure. The hotel I stayed at was slightly charmless, a vast, modern palace, luxurious and lost. Always, out the window, there is still India.
I remember just a few years before and not far from Calcutta (sorry, Kolkata comes slowly to me) I stayed at a slightly frowzier hotel in Dacca where we overlooked a slum superimposed on an urban, human wetland. Always, out the window, there is where you are unless the window is simply an image and the room, air-locked and sterile and nameless, is your atomistic reality.
Bengalis have always been charming, intelligent, subtle, wise and well-read. Not all of them, of course, but a significant enough minority of those one comes in contact with to develop what is probably an entirely incorrect generalization about national character that differs them from people of other parts of India.
Then we had a dinner at a restaurant – Oh Calcutta – that claimed to reproduce cuisines that reflected the city’s history – something Portuguese, something French, some Mughlai, a bit of Bengali and, of course, something tasteless and British. It’s clear why the best restaurants in Europe are in Britain; in even the smallest town there are places for curry, kebabs, Chinese and Continental; in their newfound, post-Thatcher prosperity the British rediscovered their taste buds and they’ve been indulging them ever since; even pasties have gotten better and the Waitrose is undoubtedly the best grocery store chain in Europe.
Perhaps the discovery that most surprised me was that India now has wines that are drinkable. Three decades ago something was produced somewhere along this Western Coast – I’m in Bombay (sorry, Mumbai) as I write this – that passed for wine but was mostly made of seawater. Things do change! In Calcutta we were given a merlot from near Pune (I like that one, it’s the easy, clear version of Poona). It was big and red and full – like a Chilean, born and beaten under a hot, bright sun. There may be other wines that are as good, a bunch are on offer, but I’m sticking with this, I like it!
The flight to Mumbai was fine, the airline was good, my seat was too small and the legroom was miserable; I thought I was back on Southwest.
Bombay now has 17 million people. It sticks out into the Arabian Sea like a huge, booming, fetid finger. Unlike Calcutta, prosperity and change is not hard to spot, it’s there, in your face. The city is transforming itself nearly as rapidly as Shanghai did. In a few years this will no doubt be a rival to the Chinese city. Meantime, its economy is leaping ahead, driven by comparative advantage in language and education. The information infrastructure is more advanced than that of Calcutta, my hotel has wireless everywhere (even poolside!). Sure, there are slums but you get the impression that these aren’t temporary structures that have become permanent but genuinely momentary dwellings that will be abandoned soon; the change will be from cardboard, sticks and other urban jetsam to poorly made concrete but the change will be an improvement. Some few, too few still, will even go farther, to block houses or small homes in high-rise apartments that march, like HG Well’s enormous Martian invaders, across the flat coastal plain.
It’s been nice to be back. I think I’m too long gone and too set in my ways to easily re-adapt but my younger doppelganger, wherever and whoever he is, will certainly find it even more exciting than I did in the bad old days. More than anything physical, India has changed its mind and that’s great!
This trip began in what they call Kolkata now. Strange change that, to replace the name of a city with that of a village. Job Charnock probably never spelled much of anything the same way twice but he is the person who founded Calcutta, the place that became the second city of a great empire. I don’t believe he used very many ‘k’s’ in what he wrote and I wonder if the ground around his grave, there in Bengal, is stirred from the rotations he’s recently been performing.
Still, what’s in a name, a rose is still a rose and Calcutta at 3 in the morning just after you’ve been unceremoniously dumped into a rank cab (not a cab rank but a rank cab, there is a distinction) retains much of the character, and much of the fug, that it had when last I visited nearly 30 years ago.
The street cars are still there, older and more worn but trundling along at about the same speed. The slums go on, maybe slightly less horrible than before but still seemingly endless.
There is surely more wealth. There are new buildings, some fly-overs, an improved airport and, hidden, serious new information infrastructure. The hotel I stayed at was slightly charmless, a vast, modern palace, luxurious and lost. Always, out the window, there is still India.
I remember just a few years before and not far from Calcutta (sorry, Kolkata comes slowly to me) I stayed at a slightly frowzier hotel in Dacca where we overlooked a slum superimposed on an urban, human wetland. Always, out the window, there is where you are unless the window is simply an image and the room, air-locked and sterile and nameless, is your atomistic reality.
Bengalis have always been charming, intelligent, subtle, wise and well-read. Not all of them, of course, but a significant enough minority of those one comes in contact with to develop what is probably an entirely incorrect generalization about national character that differs them from people of other parts of India.
Then we had a dinner at a restaurant – Oh Calcutta – that claimed to reproduce cuisines that reflected the city’s history – something Portuguese, something French, some Mughlai, a bit of Bengali and, of course, something tasteless and British. It’s clear why the best restaurants in Europe are in Britain; in even the smallest town there are places for curry, kebabs, Chinese and Continental; in their newfound, post-Thatcher prosperity the British rediscovered their taste buds and they’ve been indulging them ever since; even pasties have gotten better and the Waitrose is undoubtedly the best grocery store chain in Europe.
Perhaps the discovery that most surprised me was that India now has wines that are drinkable. Three decades ago something was produced somewhere along this Western Coast – I’m in Bombay (sorry, Mumbai) as I write this – that passed for wine but was mostly made of seawater. Things do change! In Calcutta we were given a merlot from near Pune (I like that one, it’s the easy, clear version of Poona). It was big and red and full – like a Chilean, born and beaten under a hot, bright sun. There may be other wines that are as good, a bunch are on offer, but I’m sticking with this, I like it!
The flight to Mumbai was fine, the airline was good, my seat was too small and the legroom was miserable; I thought I was back on Southwest.
Bombay now has 17 million people. It sticks out into the Arabian Sea like a huge, booming, fetid finger. Unlike Calcutta, prosperity and change is not hard to spot, it’s there, in your face. The city is transforming itself nearly as rapidly as Shanghai did. In a few years this will no doubt be a rival to the Chinese city. Meantime, its economy is leaping ahead, driven by comparative advantage in language and education. The information infrastructure is more advanced than that of Calcutta, my hotel has wireless everywhere (even poolside!). Sure, there are slums but you get the impression that these aren’t temporary structures that have become permanent but genuinely momentary dwellings that will be abandoned soon; the change will be from cardboard, sticks and other urban jetsam to poorly made concrete but the change will be an improvement. Some few, too few still, will even go farther, to block houses or small homes in high-rise apartments that march, like HG Well’s enormous Martian invaders, across the flat coastal plain.
It’s been nice to be back. I think I’m too long gone and too set in my ways to easily re-adapt but my younger doppelganger, wherever and whoever he is, will certainly find it even more exciting than I did in the bad old days. More than anything physical, India has changed its mind and that’s great!
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