What Beer Has to Teach Us About Saving the Environment

9 May 2007

Up the James River, near Norfolk, Virginia, lie several hundred ships that make up the bulk of the US National Defense Reserve Fleet. Like giant maritime mummies, the mothballed vessels float quietly along the river banks, waiting for the next emergency when they will be called back into service. Within 90 to 120 days from that call, the fleet can be made ready for sea.

Some of the vessels in the Reserve Fleet are pretty old, the battleship ‘Iowa’ has been in and out of mothballs numerous times and she was commissioned in 1943. Recently though, a relatively young ship was withdrawn from the Reserve Fleet. Last year the Maritime Administration authorized the decommissioning process of the ‘NS Savannah’. ‘NS’ stands for ‘Nuclear Ship’. Christened by Mamie Eisenhower in 1962, the ‘Savannah’ was a showpiece of the ‘Atoms for Peace’ programme. In January of this year, she was tied up to pier 23 at Newport News. From pier 23 the ‘Savannah’ will go someplace, as yet unidentified, for removal of nuclear components and, eventually, a new life as a historic relic, floating alongside a pier somewhere. A historical curiosity, the ‘Savannah’ is/was the world’s first nuclear powered merchant/passenger ship. I wonder if there will be another.

The ‘Savannah’ is a beautiful, sleek vessel; to me she’s the sea going equivalent of the 727 or the Concorde, the last beautiful commercial aircraft – if you anthropomorphized them, it was easy to imagine that flying was a joy for them. In the same way, the ‘Savannah’ looks like it could fly, across the waves.

This piece is about the environment and flying so stick with me. I recently finished George Monbiot’s ‘Heat’. Monbiot proposes alternatives to current economic practices, each designed to help us achieve a truly radical reduction in carbon output. Flying, though, stumps him, he doesn’t have an alternative. No one has come up with an acceptable substitute for kerosene powered turbines (okay, I know that an old-fashioned propeller driven aircraft is less damaging to the environment but it’s only relatively less damaging, the fact is that there is nothing right now that can make flying carbon neutral).

I was talking about this conundrum recently – I’m about to take the family on a visit to relatives in Taiwan and we’re feeling pretty guilty. You see, air travel really does ruin lives but not immediately the lives of the consumers of air travel (at least not yet). Mostly airplanes ruin the lives of people on the economic margin, people in developing countries. It can be hard to summon up real compassion for folks in Ethiopia that are nearly invisible to us and who have no voice that I’ve heard. We’re all generous and caring people but it’s hard to make the link between sitting down in seat 37A and flying to Singapore with a degree increase in average temperature that will mean the difference between growing enough to eat and desertification.

The fact is that we’re not really economically rational beings. If we had macroeconomic sense and took a longer view of things, we’d recognize that slow travel, like slow food, is good for us. We’d take a lot fewer flights, we’d vacation closer to home, if we had a second residence, it would be that cabin in the woods an hours drive away (in our electrically powered vehicle).

Nowadays, though, people fly long, thoughtless distances. They fly to New York for a show and some shopping. They fly to the Canaries for a weekend of sun in the middle of the winter. They fly to a second home in Tuscany. We are simply flying too often and too far. When you include the whole cost of the flight, adding in the price of damage to the environment (which may, in fact, be nearly infinite if the damage takes us past a tipping point beyond which we cannot reverse a process), the amount we pay for the ticket is obscenely and irrationally low.

So the burden of your fundamentally valueless flight is borne by those who are most helpless to do anything about it, desperately poor human beings in places like Ethiopia or rural India. There is, as well, a huge irony in all this because nearly everyone who is suffering because of your flight will never fly themselves.

But it’s not morally black and white; there is another point of view about flying and this has to do with its role as a force for peace. As terrible as it may be for the environment, it may be like the EU, whatever it costs, it’s better than the environmental and human cost of another war. We will never be able to go back, the world is interconnected, when you know someone, it’s a lot harder to kill them and flying lets you get to know more people, quicker.

But, I digress. This is not the place for me to contradict myself or I’ll entirely lose the thread which, if I recall correctly, is about the ‘NS Savannah’, the environment, slow travel and saving the planet.

‘Savannah’ was designed for show. Her gracious lines, thirty staterooms, 100 person dining room, library, verandah and pool were more important than whether she was easy to load or had much cargo capacity. The ship was, simply, a political statement, she was built to be a floating example of the ‘Atoms for Peace’ programme, a demonstration that atomic power could be put to practical and peaceful purposes. But, because there was only one of her, the support logistics for the ‘Savannah’ were prohibitively expensive. Also, against conventional freighters that were purpose built to carry the maximum amount of cargo efficiently and with fuel at $20 a ton, the 1972 decision to decommission the ‘Savannah’ made economic sense. Two years later, in the midst of the first oil crisis, with fuel at $80 a ton, the ‘Savannah’ was competitive. At about $280 a ton today, game over!

I don’t know what to do with used nuclear fuel and I don’t know how you decommission a reactor so I can’t put together a convincing argument about why we should consider nuclear powered passenger liners as a slow travel substitute for air travel or nuclear powered cargo ships as a substitute for vessels that burn sulphur rich bunker C oil. If you could figure out what to do with the spent fuel, knew what to do about decommissioning and provide for their physical security, nuclear powered sea transportation makes a lot of sense.

1. Their fuel economy is unsurpassed. Nuclear fuel costs 10% or so of what conventional fuel costs.
2. They have zero operating emissions. Imagine moving thousands of tons of cargo across the Atlantic with a zero carbon footprint!
3. They can go very fast. Imagine going from London to New York comfortably in three days. You’d leave on Friday afternoon by train for Southampton (electrically powered of course), catch your nuclear powered liner from Southampton and be in New York, mid-morning, on Monday.

If we could create a culture of ‘slow travel’, if we could learn to prioritise just a bit differently, can you imagine how pleasant a world it would be to arrive in New York aboard a ship, without jet lag, at a civilised hour. Can you imagine boarding an electrically powered bullet train to run over to Chicago in, say, four hours (probably less total travel time than doing it by plane today)?

Of course, there’s no doubt that it would ultimately mean that we traveled less and that we took longer to do it but, managed properly, not that much longer and the positive benefits would far outweigh the negatives: the impact on the planet would be far, far less, and the positive impact on our health – no jet lag – would be good.

Now consider the European habit of taking one, longer holiday a year – and traditionally that was to somewhere easily accessible – versus the British middle-class culture of three or four holidays a year, each one via cheap flight to some haven in the sun, perhaps the Caribbean or the Indian Ocean.

Take our trip to Taiwan. At Waterloo we would board the Eurostar to Paris – two hours from London. We would then shift to our compartment – with toilet and shower – aboard the new Orient Express, an electrically powered bullet train from Paris to Hong Kong – traveling at about 300 mph across Europe and Asia, it would arrive at Hong Kong in two days – an average traveling speed of about 150 mph to allow for stops and so on. From Hong Kong to Taipei via nuclear powered ferry taking a few hours and, presto, we’ve crossed the world within a few days, including stops and at virtually no carbon cost to our poor, sick planet. Australia would be the same – a nuclear powered vessel from Hong Kong that arrived at Sydney in two days. Total travel time from London: an efficient and healthy five days.

Yes, we’d still have planes for those trips that required us to move quickly, for diplomacy, to make peace, for health emergencies and so on. Technology will catch up anyway, one day we’ll even be able to fly en masse again if we want. But, maybe clean, efficient slow travel will become so popular that the people will not want to go back into the air in such numbers.

Remember what the brewers tried to do to real beer in England? They tried to impose lager on the country and to do completely away with traditionally brewed, natural beers. But the people resisted, a real beer movement was launched and it was hugely successful and now, on summer days, all over the island, you will find friendly, crowded, country pubs holding beer festivals with vast numbers of natural, locally made, interesting tipples. What if we did the same thing about flying? What if we opted for something that achieved its objective (getting us somewhere) but gave greater pleasure whilst doing so?

So, cheers!

Lake Haiku - Wulai, mountain Taiwan

From the balcony of a restaurant overlooking the river ...

White bird wheeling,
River of jade quiet flows,
Evening light fades.

Haiku - Wulai, Mountain Taiwan ...

Walking alone along a mountain path, I encountered three pleasant women, taking a break,

Smiling as I pass,
The women offer to share
Some guavas they brought.

Travelogue ...

I'm in the midst of putting together a serious piece on nuclear-powered, civilian-use ships. I believe this may be worth considering as a way to reduce CO2 emissions.


Meantime, however, the wife, daughter and I are on a brief family holiday -- we wrestled with the guilt of plane travel but felt that the time with family was important enough to justify the carbon cost. So, herewith a few photos of the trip.










Coffee is a critical part of the start-up ritual. Many travellers, bereft of coffee, have no idea where they've been, where they're going or where they are! As you can see, I'm very centred.










You probably recognise us having a cup of centring coffee at a sidewalk place on Paternoster Square at St. Paul's. This is one of the world's great structures!













Tapas at one of Harrod's myriad (and expensive!) restaurants. The coffee was not as burnt as typcial Spanish coffee (I think the term is 'torrefacto').





There are other photos to share, many from locales you might consider more exotic. Consider this one, from the mysterious Orient:











Visiting family is always a pleasure. Here we're doing what so many Orientals do: talk about the next meal. Though there was no coffee, the tea was nice and packed a surprising caffeine punch!

All the news that fits?

26 March 2007

Tamil terrorists have attacked Colombo’s airport. What does this mean for tourism to the island once called ‘Serendip’? Over the past decade and more, virtually regardless of how vicious the Sri Lankan civil war has turned, tourists, particularly Europeans, Brits and Germans mainly, have continued to visit the island, staying away from Tamil Eelam territories but otherwise seemingly oblivious to the deadly war that has continued in the rebel areas, lying there on the white sand, sipping tropical things with those tiny paper umbrellas or, more sophisticated, little straws. The cease fire is honoured only in the breach.

And, meanwhile, in Iraq, four more American soldiers were killed today by a roadside bomb, one of the infamous IEDs. The number of innocent Iraqis who have been killed over the past 24 hours beggars the imagination. We have committed a crime in that country. The answer is not withdrawal -- at least not now. The only honourable way forward is a troop surge, a serious one. John McCain is the only candidate who has taken a morally defensible stance on the issue. Obama and Clinton are hypocrites who are led by the polls, they do not have the guts to lead themselves. By inclination I am a democrat, a left-wing one, but in this case I am with McCain. I may end up entirely in his camp, particularly if his environmental policies are anywhere near as courageous as his stance on Iraq.

Fifteen British sailors and marines, one a woman, are in Iranian custody. British diplomats and politicians are all scurrying around wringing their hands and demanding that the ‘hostages’ be released. ‘Hostages’ is what they are. The Iranians are throwing sand into diplomatic eyes, trying to mask their nuclear activities. Ahmedinejad got his visa to visit the UN in New York but some of his travelling party were denied permission or didn’t get cleared in time. Somehow it all seems connected.

There’s been another earthquake in Japan, only 1 dead at last count. Earthquake design really does help. At least, as far as I can tell, this disaster is not related to climate change.

God knows what disasters have befallen Africa over the past 24 hours. The absence of coverage in the media only means that the outrages have not been of sufficient magnitude to merit any substantial attention. You see, crimes against humanity in Africa must be much larger and bloodier than those on other continents to be worthy of attention. Even now, on the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the British Empire, black people are still not equal to whites. I don’t even know if it’s race or economic value, maybe a combination of the two, but genocide, starvation, disease and even simple war in Africa generally don’t get the attention that their equivalents do in the West. These horrors must be an order of magnitude worse than anything Europe can serve up before we hear much about it here on planet Indifferent.

And out here in rural Worcestershire the sun is rising and you can hear the sheep vocalising, their morning bleats telling us they’ve started another day of feasting in the rich, green fields. It always amazes me how we lead out our lives in parallel, each one pursuing atomistic objectives, only intersecting with others at random points. Weird world, no? Terry Wogan is droning in the background. I prefer Radio 4 most of the time but I don’t think I could stand John Humphrys trying to start a fight with anyone this morning.

And so it goes …

What I've been reading ... a few minutes in the library

I’ve just started Fred Pearce’s, ‘The Last Generation’. Climate change, dramatic, horrific, abrupt and cataclysmic, is Pearce’s focus. He’s a respected journalist, someone who has been chronicling the environment and what we’re doing to it for about 20 years. Frightening stuff.

George Monbiot wrote ‘Heat’ intending, firstly, to frighten us and then suggest a carbon diet that would be palatable to our modern, industrial society. What he offers would have a palliative effect and there’s even a chance that we might even be able to make things some better. Monbiot is a terrific writer and his argument is balanced which makes it all the scarier. I’ve got an alternative thought about flying, which he rightly condemns and for which he can find no alternative – I think our world desperately needs continued face-to-face contact, even at some cost to the environment, if we’re to avoid another potential disaster: blowing each other up. More about this one later.

Meantime, I’ve been reading a new translation of the ‘Quixote’, by Edith Grossman. It’s hugely compelling, as would be expected from one of the great books in our Western canon. Obviously we’ve come a long way since Cervantes wrote the book, not as human beings, for there are no characters one half as human and attractive as the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance and Sancho, but as writers, tellers of tales, we have learned to entertain, matching our product, in this day of the internet and television, to an audience that demands instant gratification; you have to be in a mood, willing to contemplate the world, not just be impacted by it, to read a work like this with any profit. This time through – always before I’ve simply picked at the work – the themes that stand out most for me are the notion of battling hopelessly, with scant or no chance of success and a prevailing sense of sadness. ‘Quixote’ is a tragedy; it is farce only insofar as Don Quixote crafts his life into a mockery of mankind’s foibles.

And now for something completely different: Carl Hiassen’s ‘Nature Girl’. He is an engaging, broad, comic writer. The plots are predictable and only the bad guys – always exceedingly ugly – get done in. The heroes and the heroines are all quirky with slightly tainted pasts but they are all decent, attractive folk. Hiassen’s writing has an offended, environmental undertone – he is worried about what has been done to Florida. Rightly so! ‘Nature Girl’ is pablum with a conscience, a sit-com you read. There is no conflict between his values and those things an adult might pray about on going to bed at night.

And then there was William Boyd’s ‘A Good Man in Africa’: a modern picaresque novel set in a fictional West African country where the very flawed hero’s most important and enduring relationship is with a rapidly rotting corpse. It’s funny in a slightly nauseous way. Somehow I think Boyd got started with this one and then lost his way but the irony of the ending is enough to provide me a good week’s worth of that value.

Inspiration -- how my foot reflects my changed life!

This is me, working on my blog. I'm in a contemplative mood. The inspiration for this work of art was Current TV. Terrific fun, I'm learning a lot of new stuff, much of it useless but, equally, most of it fascinating! The young: Keep your mind open to them, try new things. You may be embarassed and you certainly will lose your dignity but you might, just might, learn something about yourself.

Don't expect to keep your gravitas intact.

I recently went through what was, for me, a life-changing experience. I'm not going to write about it without more reflection but this silly little posting is one consequence: go in new directions, try new things. If something comes out that has even the smallest positive impact, the effort will have been worthwhile; the algorithm works because it's also fun for the writer and the algebraic relationship between fun and effort has never been equal. If the output is positive, the input is justified. There's even a universal balancing mechanism. If the effort begins to make the fun problematic, there's generally an automatic break mechanism and you point the energy in another direction.

This one is serious -- racism!

My wife and I recently underwent an episode of attempted bullying, driven by racism. For her it must be more aggravating and aggrieving than for me, she’s Asian and the perpetrators share my race (sadly).

What is so wrong about the whole thing is that it began over almost nothing (well, a seven pound Shih-tsu who doesn’t bark and for whom we were seeking to find a home). Pets are now allowed in the 'court' where we live without permission. When we returned from America last summer, we wrote a very polite letter to our neighbours requesting that our dog be allowed to live with us on a probationary basis, if he did anything unacceptable, out he'd go. Two neighbours in particular were vehemently against the idea and rude in expressing their opposition. Rather than take the matter to the directors (of which I am one) and risk an unpleasant outcome (whichever way it went there would be bad feelings), my wife and I elected to give the dog away. We then transgressed because the first volunteer to adopt the animal was, in the end, unable to take him and so we had to have him resident for a few days until we found him a second home. It was against the covenants, we knew, but we were actively and energetically seeking to reverse the situation.

The depth and harshness of the feelings against us from two of our seven neighbours were puzzling at first. I could not understand why something that rational people would simply resolve with a few quiet words had prompted such strong and unreasonable reaction. After all, we live in England, a place renowned for both tolerance and civility. Those two values are to be cherished and the way to do that is to treat the expressions of tolerance and civility that you do encounter with great respect, particularly when they may also be the vehicle for a difference of opinion. By this mutuality is a great nation judged.

We did encounter great tolerance and civility and, more, genuine sympathy, from several true friends. For this we are and will remain grateful. From these quiet heroes we also felt something even more important than understanding for our position; they recognised in a civilised and just Britain that the feelings and motivations behind the behaviour of the ringleaders against us were intolerable and unacceptable; they were contrary to the fundamental values that inform this modern, liberal and tolerant society. These friends saw that they had to make a choice. I applaud their wisdom, their humanity and, more, their moral courage.

From the people who were at the epicentre of feelings against us, we expect nothing more than what we encountered. When I understood that the expressions of opposition were being couched in terms of ‘cultural differences’, I recognised the supposedly modern and acceptable face of racism. In fact, what was behind the vehemence of feelings against us over a minor matter was born of immaturity and ignorance. On both counts I’m sad but resigned – those people have to live with that evil in their souls.

There were other ‘friends’ about whom I’m more ambivalent. Although they formed part of the silent majority of people on this island who would be tolerant and civil and patient whilst, in good faith, my wife and I worked to resolve the matter, their failure to actively condemn the means and form of opposition to our behaviour worries me. In a minor way it’s a form of collaborationism or appeasement which is morally weak.

I’m reminded that in New York the twenty year trend of crime to increase was finally reversed – and dramatically so – by the imposition of a zero tolerance policy. New York police, encouraged by the government and supported by the courts, inaugurated a policy of fines, arrests and prosecution for even petty crimes, public urination, defacement of private property, petty theft and so on. The turn-around was dramatic. Within a year or two, reports of all types of crime, minor and major, were falling. New York rapidly became a safer, more civil, more tolerant and, above all, happier place.

The parallel I’m trying to draw here is fairly obvious – when the sort of bullying, racist behaviour that my wife and I just encountered from ignorant and immature people is not immediately challenged, by everyone, the bullies and the racists will simply be encouraged to do it again.

My own dilemma is how to deliver this message to those friends who have failed us in the matter. As a member of a civil, liberal society, it’s incumbent on me to make the point but I want to do it in such a way that I prevent further division and, instead, promote the solidarity, tolerance and, ultimately, the happiness that I’m so anxious to foster.

We've sold our home. In normal circumstances we would be sad to leave such a beautiful home but not this time, we're relieved. We're leaving two racist couples behind who have to live with themselves. Sadly, at least two other neighbours are seriously thinking of leaving as well because of the poisoned atmosphere. Who wants to live around the sort of creepy, ill-mannered bigotry that has surfaced here in idyllic rural Worcestershire?

By the way, we kept the dog. When things got ugly, we boarded him in a nearby kennel where he slept each night. My wife picked him up each morning. He spent the day with her, staying in the car in the garage when my wife wasn't outside with him; we never allowed him in the house (heavens knows what would have happened had we brought him in!). Needless to say, our new home welcomes dogs!

The Ghost at Besford Court ...

1 January 2007
Besford

As our time at Besford draws to a close, I’m minded to share the tale of my sightings (???) of the Besford ghost, one with which I am intimately familiar, a spectre that inhabits the netherworld whose marches rub against those of our apartment, specifically our bedroom.

I know this ghost, we have shared the intersection between her world (she is, indeed, female) and mine. We have shared this connexion in the magical hours between midnight and dawn but we have also shared space in the early evening, in the morning and as we retire.

This existence of this ghost, if her ‘being’ depends on the acknowledgement of her occasional presence, is due to my belief and no one else’s. My wife steadfastly refuses to ‘believe’ or, perhaps more likely, chooses to deny that she crosses or touches the world of living humans in our bedchamber. Indeed, her steadfast refusal to even acknowledge or discuss the possibility of a ghost where we sleep is firm and unshakeable!

Inevitably there are, as is the case with virtually any long inhabited place in England, tales of ghosts associated with Besford. Although the main court is still just shy of a century old, there were residences, messuages and defences, perhaps even a moat (well, it sure looks as if there might have been a moat to me), that antedated by centuries the more recent stone structure where we reside. A lot of life has trod this ground – not all of it can have been happy and we’re told that unhappiness is the midwife of phantasms.

Whatever the story, and no one can substantiate (nor, equally, has anyone ever denied) the existence of the ghost in our home, I have ineluctable and undeniable evidence of her passages into or across our world. This evidence is as plain as the nose on your face.

And what is that evidence? Simple, smell. That’s right, my ghost has a scent. It’s a wonderful, old-world, sweet, slightly heavy perfume. The sort that my great aunts used, the sort that my Mother favoured in the 1950’s or, before we were introduced through the medium of my birth, what I imagine my Mom favoured in the 1940’s; a ‘Shalimar’ type fragrance, flowery, lingering, just airy enough to be wafted along by even a faint breeze.

I’m lying in the bed, it’s, say, 9 PM. I’m reading, it’s late autumn and outside the night is well and truly established. My wife and daughter are not here, they are visiting relatives in Switzerland. It’s quiet and calm, I am settling nicely when an almost imperceptible hint of a breeze passes across the bed. It is a movement that I would most probably never even notice but for its cargo, a perfume from another age.

Funnily, I have never been afraid of our ghost. To me she is a benign presence, entering our bedroom, not from the hall or any adjacent room but from one of a myriad of dimensions that touches ours. She comes in, so softly, so gently that the only perceptible sign of her presence is the sweet, comforting perfume that washes over the covers and quietly soothes me with its presence.

But our ghost never stays long. Her scent washes over us and then passes on. Sometimes she flickers in, her scent leaves and then returns, like the calm waves of the Mediterranean or the Caribbean. Eventually, though, after a minute or, sometimes, even two, she passes on, heading, I suppose, through a shimmering barrier between one world and another. I wonder which one is her home …

And that, my friends, is what I know of our Ghost. Once, before I learned that to mention her was to invite trouble, my wife brought out a couple of scented candles that we keep in the room. Demanding that I sniff them, I did and, to placate her, I agreed that the smell of one was precisely the smell of my Ghost. Of course, we never light that candle and, don’t tell the wife, its perfume is not much like that of my Spectre, she favours a much sweeter and more lingering fragrance.

Toilet Entertainment (cave lector)

31 December 2006
Besford

For my money, the very best places for food, drink and recreational urination are those in which the staff – clearly concerned about ensuring that whether the customer is there to ingurgitate or gormandize, every part of the ‘experience’ should be enjoyable – has placed a large block of ice into each urinal just before the dinner rush. When required to make a visit to the facility, the user is entertained by the prospect of trying to help melt the block of ice. Sometimes it’s clearly too large a task for one man to accomplish in one visit. In those cases there appears to be some unspoken male bonding thing that persuades the previous user to see if he can at least split the block into more manageable pieces so that those who come after him can carry on the work.

I’ve run into these frozen urinals in various places. Most recently I encountered one in Spain.

On a commercial basis, especially for bars, they make sense, there is something addictive about trying to melt a small iceberg that encourages the purchase of more beer.

Happy New Year!

A corner of the mind's topography ...

25 December 2006
Langoria

Atop the mountains the view eastwards was of a desolated high desert valley of scrub and sterile earth. To describe it required a palette of browns and tans. There were dry ravines and sandy, sere riverbeds that flowed only occasionally when the rains spilled between the frigid peaks and the ridge beyond which lay Langoria.

North and south of the saddle that formed the only entry to the desert and, ultimately, into Langoria, the peaks curved, ever higher, until they reached the sea, trapping both the desert and Langoria in a giant horseshoe shaped promontory.

To reach the ridge required a descent, at times nearly vertical, down the rock mountainside. Once at the base, the high desert spread out for three days, rough and scarred and permanently parched.

Only near the sharp edge which defined the top of the ridge and marked the border of Langoria did the earth become gentler and more giving. Behind lay the hot, killing world of the desert.

From the ridge Langoria spread out below towards the sea. The land dropped through a mix of oak and pine and then through fields of oats, barley, hops and wheat, separated by orderly rows of apple, pear and peach trees. Still lower there were grape vines spreading their low green canopies, ripening in the dry sun and the cool air, thickening the fruit until it produced a deep, rich purple wine which the people drank before fires on cold winter nights. Scattered amongst the wineries were groves of olives.

From the wine country the land sloped further towards sea where the altitude and the weather combined to create an unvarying cool, misty world of grazing sheep, peat bogs and windswept shores. The small harbour of Langoria, the eponymous capital of the country, had been formed by the laborious placement of riprap rocks to convert a gentle indentation along the coastline into a small, safe-haven where coasters and fishing boats were moored.

For miles both north and south of the capital there was little in the way of variation to the coastline. It formed an even line between land and sea; sometimes the boundary varied a bit, from sandy, straight beach to cliffs where green fields simply terminated and the land tumbled precipitously a hundred or more feet into the sea.

Eventually the coastal strip that marked Langoria narrowed and terminated where the mountains reached the water, marked by towering precipices, shelves that stretched to the north and south nearly a hundred miles, an impassable, unconquerable barrier between tiny Langoria and the hostile lands beyond those impenetrable mountains.

And so Langoria slept. It was a gentle land. Far from the rest of the world and its conflicts, the tiny country prospered in its own way, leading a national life that was in harmony with the gifts given it by the earth: a temperate climate, a beautiful, rolling terrain and a variety of foods, from land and sea, from vine and field, that gave Langorians long lives, even temperaments and a capacity for calm reflection and tolerance that scarce occurs in more heated climes, whatever the temperature.

French Fries on the Playa de Cortes

9 December 2006
Besford

The road from Hermosillo to Kino eventually thinned out after Buck Ibarra’s place. Buck was some sort of renegade, part Basque, part Indian and pretty much wholly a rascal. With half a dozen kids from an equal number of mothers, several happily residing together out there in his compound of huts and rusted travel trailers, he was just another of Dad’s curious friends. Many of them had criminal records – some pretty serious. I can vaguely recall that it wasn’t long after we first moved to Sonora that Dad became friends with a gringo staying out at one lonely ranch (God knows how Dad ever met these guys – he’d frequently just show up at dinner time, trailing some shy 'down and outer' who’d fascinate me and slightly disgust my Mom; every one had an interest in mining, many were genuine prospectors of the burro persuasion, for some adventure had become a habit they couldn't break; I never figured out whether they were souls lost or souls with purpose and direction, marching to their own rhythm). This fellow at the ranch, I think it was called Escondido ('hidden' – pretty appropriate, huh?) had already been out there the best part of 7 years when we arrived, never once having travelled the 20 miles or so into town. It was only after the statue of limitations had well and truly expired that he ventured into the city – I'm sure that one of his first stops had to be one of the bars that made up the front rooms of the houses in the ‘Zona’. Even at six I knew the Zona, one afternoon I'd dropped in and had a soda pop with the proprietress of one of the nicer houses but, that’s a story for another time.

Until they began to irrigate the backlands between the river valleys and coast in the 1960’s, the space between Hermosillo, the capital on the river, and Kino, a beach settlement on the Sea of Cortes, didn’t appear to have much to offer man or animal. There were a few scampering desert mammals, Gila monsters, plenty of snakes and some coyotes but not much else. In summer it got so hot so quickly that the trip was only healthy if you left around 7 AM to get there and started back around 6 or 7 PM.

The beach at Kino was very white and very big. The water was clear but you didn’t swim unless you could spot the fins of porpoises in the Bay. The Sea of Cortes has as many tiburones ('sharks') as anywhere in the world. You were only sure that it was safe to swim with the porpoises, otherwise it was build a sand castle.

At one end of the beach there was a point called Black Rock (imaginatively named because of it’s dominant colour) and some ex-fisherman ran a café there. Most of the place was actually jammed back into a cave that had been carved out by thousands of years of waves. You'd give the proprietor whatever fish you’d caught and he’d clean and fry them. His beer was cold (said my Dad) but to me the key thing was that he made papas fritas (‘chips’ or French fries) like I'd never had. He didn’t peel the potatoes, just cut them into wedges and tossed them into a pan swimming in pork fat! There they'd float until they turned a perfect golden brown, flecked with black. Wow! Strange that in the 1950’s, fat wasn’t so bad for you as it is now.

Dad was a hobbyist fisherman – he loved it. He could fish equally in a lake, a stream or the ocean; he even knew how to tie trout flies. Mom fished to keep him company. I mostly played on the rocks or the beach, the only fascination I found in fish was watching them jerk spasmodically as their lives drained away when they were tossed onto the rock. When Dad pulled one in, he would remove his hook and then bang the fish on the head with the blunt end of his pocket knife. When Dad was too far to take care of whatever she'd caught, Mom would just toss the fish onto the rocks, she was too squeamish to bop them. I'd then watch them struggle for breath. Most died in what must have been terrible agony but some managed to bounce themselves back into the sea, determined never to pick at anything dangling at the end of a line, no matter how appetising it looked. Before you go condemning me for my morbid voyeurism, remember that this was the 1950’s. We weren’t as sensitive then and I was only 5 or 6 so I’m not sure that I truly understood what I was watching.

In that decade, I believe that not only weren't we as sensitive as we are now, I’m pretty convinced the fish didn't have much feeling either. Whatever future punishment I let myself in for by witnessing these scenes, though, the memory of the papas fritas is still with me today, half a century later!

Sonora Morning ...1950's

6 December 2006
Besford

Only when the rains came, around San Juan day, did the arroyo ever feel riverine. This morning the wan December sun floated through the dry and dusty bottom as men stretched, scratched and spit, rustling up muddy coffee, warming their tortillas on rocks set around the fire, forming them into pockets and filling them with frijoles refritos scooped from an old frying pan.

The plates, pans and cups all matched, blue enamelled metal with white spots, a design that was common up and down the Sonora and a half dozen other rivers. Washing up consisted of wiping them with river sand, water was too precious to waste on unnecessary hygiene.

Some men were still stiff from the overnight cold. It had been clear the night before, nothing unusual in that, but the wind had blown in a ‘norther’ and the mercury had dropped to single digits before midnight. Although the wind then dropped off, the temperature had continued to descend and this morning it was below zero.

Few words were exchanged, the men’s voices were low and quiet, scratchy from the cold, dry air, from cigarettes and tequila. The black, sugary coffee lubricated their voices only enough for instructions to be passed around.

The order that informed their preparations was not immediately visible. Men appeared to be acting independently, without reference to each other. Suddenly, however, the group set off; how they were organised was not immediately apparent but by the discipline that marked their departure from the campsite, fire damped and waste cleaned, was unmistakable.

All of the men, save one, were mounted on horseback. The exception was, however, clearly the leader, he rode a burro. The men treated him with an easy familiarity, they joked and gossiped with him but they also watched him, learning to interpret his moods, to read his body language. There was no fun made of his refusal to ride a horse. He was convinced that a burro was smarter and he would neither go where a burro would not nor go farther in a day than a burro wanted. His selection of camping spots, idiosyncratic but compellingly logical, was based entirely on the whim of his burro, when the burro stopped and would go no more, it was time to camp.

The paraphernalia of camping life - tents, army cots, kerosene lanterns, canned goods, utensils and cooking gear - was all loaded into heavy, waterproof rocket boxes. Surplus from the Second World War, the rocket boxes were heavy gauge aluminium. Fully loaded, each one must have weighed 100 pounds and at about 5 feet long, two of them made a formidable load for the burros that were unfortunate enough not to have been selected to carry the leader. It was, however a close call for the leader's weight verged on 200 pounds, not nearly as well distributed as the gear in the rocket boxes.

The camp was cleared and the party ready to move forward within an hour of waking. The last of the coffee was gulped down and unfiltered Mexican Raleighs lit up. A wispy haze of bluish cigarette smoke marked the trail of the group as it wended its way on up the river bed.

Memories of Parsley Manor

3 December 2006
Besford

This is my first full day out of the hospital – Parsley Manor Leg Care. I’m trying to think about what I miss the most. There was, of course, the food; truly indescribable, mostly inedible, a discredit to the ‘cook’ (how I hurt to use that term for this psychopath!) but, saving grace (??!!), completely unforgettable. I will remember the meals at the hospital long after I’ve forgotten culinary gems at bistros in London, country pubs with ambitious, creative but rationale young chefs and even ready-made, heat in the oven meals from Marks & Spencer and Waitrose. There is something about one bad recommendation only being equalled by ten good ones (or, more crudely, ten ‘atta boys’ required to counterbalance one ‘oh shit’).

Eventually I sorted things out and had porridge for breakfast – that English for oatmeal – an omelette for lunch and, for variety, an omelette for dinner. The vegetables were so overcooked that I remain convinced they actually sucked food value out of your body rather than put any in so my steadfast refusal to ingest any of them was fully justified.

I dreaded the thought of coffee at Parsley Manor, a most substantial memorial to a Britain before fusion cooking. The British consume more total instant coffee than any other nation on earth. That’s not on a per capita basis, that’s ‘total’. There are now something over 300 million Americans, many with no judgement at all but even a country whose taste buds are so completely jaded as the US cannot match the brown swilling efforts of 50 million or so island dwellers here in the North Sea! You can imagine how I cringed every time one of the pleasant tea trolley ladies asked me if I wanted a coffee, love?

There is a slightly positive codicil to the coffee story, the last day I couldn’t stand it anymore. My desperate efforts to secure a cup of strong black coffee had even been thwarted by my wife. She’d promised me a Starbucks; we have the beans, grinder and advanced, pricey, button-girded machinery to produce a thick, rich, aromatic cup of caffeine strong enough for me to imitate Fred Astaire dancing on the walls without the fancy camera work! So I awoke in eager anticipation, hours before she was due to arrive, my first cup of coffee since surgery, something like 3 days!

Come the moment (picture it!), the wife comes in, a thermos tucked under her arm and smiling comfortingly, a glance filled with matrimonial love. She pours me a cup and hands it over, I sip gently, wanting to truly savour the first taste. But, what is this? Something is wrong! This stuff tastes both mealy and watery, it’s horrible! My beloved smiles at me, ‘I forgot to put in a filter but the grounds seem to have settled so I thought why bother doing another pot, it would just be a waste.’

Caffeine addiction is a strong and dangerous habit. It is best not to try to thwart the caffeine addict when he needs that morning fix or the late afternoon recharger. To do so is to risk a severe and completely unreasonable tongue lashing. My wife had probably chosen the one moment in our life that she could fail to feed my addiction without serious danger to herself and because I depended on her for the papers, books and a link to a world beyond the corridors of Parsley Manor Leg Care Hospital, I managed a grimace that she innocently or, this may be more likely as she knows me well, deviously chose to interpret as a grin of gratitude.

But that last morning the young nurse on the night shift went and pressed the espresso button three times on the coffee machine, bringing me a cup of bitter, brown, treacly stuff that kept me from violence and allowed me to get safely home to my beloved coffee maker.

This whole coffee thing has so distracted me from talking about what I miss most from Parsley Manor that I will have to recline a while, sip a cup of Starbucks best Italian Roast and see if I can put together my scattered and random thoughts into something coherent. For now, this sad tale of coffee callousness will have to do.

I'm genuinely sorry that my ancestors had anything to do with slavery!

26 November 2006
Sunday

Tony Blair has stopped short of apologising for Britain’s role in the slave trade. I believe that the United States has also failed to apologise.

It seems to me that this is all nonsense. Why not apologise? What would be the implication? If the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom says he’s sorry – and, indeed, he says he’s sorry on behalf of the nation – that Britons sanctioned, participated in and profited from the slave trade – there’s nothing wrong with that. It seems to me it’s the right thing to do. There’s something of an irony in the fact there’s a controversy in one action that’s moral and healing in the tawdry history of an unprecedented crime against humanity.

Personally, I’m sorry that so much of the history of the United Sates is built on the blood of unknown and unrecognised men and women held as slaves. The whole concept, if you stop and think about it even for a moment, is so revolting and unimaginable, that you cannot conceive of any reasonable objection to a national and personal apology for it.

Consider: If your grandparents had been kidnapped from their homes, survived a hellish voyage in chains across the ocean and sold into involuntary servitude, would that not be sufficient crime against your ancestors for you to ask for an apology from the inheritors of the culture that committed that heinous crime? And it was even worse, you not only had to survive, you frequently had to survive completely alone, with strangers, fellow-slaves, who did not speak your language and worshipped different gods. Then, having survived these challenges, having been renamed, forced to worship the white man’s god and forced to labour at the whim and sole direction of the ‘master’, imagine the hopeless sense that there was no alternative to this existence, neither for you nor for your descendants (frequently products of a pairing in which you had no choice). It sure doesn’t seem to me that both personal and national apologies are out of order!

The argument may be about where you stop. Are the descendants of the victims entitled to reparations? Should money be given to the societies from which these people were taken? Well, probably not; I think our economies – made up of both former slaves and former ‘masters’ – would be stretched too far to pay for it. What we can do is ensure that we have created a fair and just society for the descendants of those people who suffered this enormous crime.

Bush in New Delhi

Bush is probably wrong on this one. Do we really need to put geopolitics before nuclear non-proliferation? Are we building an alliance against the Chinese for the next 50 years? Why not build an alliance with the Chinese and use that to dominate the entire globe? The US would dominate Latin America, China would dominate Asia. Africa may not count for much for another century -- blame Europe! Meantime, Europe sits in the middle, prosperous but ineffective. India becomes an industrious non-entity.

India is prickly. Their reaction to many international issues is always reminiscent of some sort of national inferiority complex; reminds me a bit of the instinctive anti-Americanism of the Filipinos. For the subcontinent, of course, it's born of 200 years of domination by the British rather than centuries under the Spanish followed by five decades under the Almighty Dollar (the case of the Philippines).

So, by the terms of this new agreement, the international non-proliferation treaty is gutted but India opens up two-thirds of its reactors for inspection by the IAEA, imports US nuclear fuels, freeing up more of its own production to be diverted to mulitply its nuclear weapons production. This makes US conservatives happy because India's weapons then balance China's.

It gets ever more complicated. I don't want another nuclear power but India already is. So, this will just make them stronger? Does that make China relatively weaker? Do I worry more about China or India?

Charity the Wal-Mart Way!

Well, it’s a step in the right direction! Wal-Mart, the developed world’s most egregious profiteer whose senior executives are not either indicted, on trial or in jail, has announced that it will make some health insurance available to the 50% of their employees who are not currently eligible (that’s right, half of their work-force, around 650,000 people are currently out in the cold!). Of course, you’ve got to wonder how the workers are going to pay for this benefit with average wages under $20,000 per year.

This is not going to get me into Wal-Mart. I still go to Costco! Their average wage is 70% higher than Wal-Mart’s and their Chief Executive actually has a pay packet that bears scrutiny. You can look at what Costco’s top guys are paid without getting a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach.

How does the senior executive corps at Wal-Mart manage to sleep? I’m not sure what innovations they’ve introduced that really make our lives better. Bill Gates’ wealth doesn’t bother me, he’s driven innovation and productivity and his charitable impulses are admirable. Wal-Mart? Well, let’s see, they’ve destroyed communities, nearly bankrupted some of their suppliers, exploit their workers and build giant, ugly boxes around the country to which people drive miles and miles, persuaded to do so only by what I can characterize as a mass psychosis and an ephemeral hope of savings. And, by the way, I do wonder how much additional oil we use every year in this country just to get to Wal-Mart for those savings? I bet it’s significant!

Shooting at the Arab company that bought the UK company that has a port operation contract and has, so far, not, itself, shot anyone at the ranch!

Bush was wrong when he ignored the secret court set up to authorise eavesdropping in the interest of national security. If the court was too slow, he should have asked for the court to be given either greater authority or more resources.

On the other hand, Bush was/is right to defend the granting of port operation contracts to a company owned by the Government of the UAE. If they won and they were fully vetted by various US Government bodies, they deserve to have the contract.

Those politicians who are trying to capitalise on this issue are wrong and self-serving. Only John McCain has shown any character on this matter -- he has, at least, said that we ought to give the process the benefit of the doubt.

I am not against a review of the process but any arbitrary cancellation will reflect badly on us as a nation of laws.

Actually, I'm convinced that all of this brouhaha over the port contract was concocted by Cheney's staff to distract attention from his culpability over the shooting of a lawyer during a hunting weekend at the Armstrong Ranch in Texas. Too bad, this, because Cheney demonstrated how dangerous guns are. He should lose his license but, wait, I forgot, there are no licenses for gun operation in the US. Any idiot, Dick Cheney included, is allowed to tote around a weapon that could end human life. That's reasonable, isn't it?

First Blizzard - Thanksgiving 2005

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.

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.

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.

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.

Besford Court - Worcestershire, England 

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.

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.

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 …

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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.