Alecto's Ophelia

Hatteras photo blog

Random, not so random... This is from the back of the ferry on the way home from Ocracoke. There isn't much to see on Ocracoke but a few small sacred spots which has us make the trip most years although each year I think, this must be my last.

I posted a photo of Edgar's headstone last year but here he is again. Someday I may take a picture of the children's graves because that's who I really go to visit but I've yet to bring myself to overstep those boundaries. What I like about this island and about Hatteras is that people still bury their own dead. I read in a book this last week that we have sanitized death to the point where we no longer know how to grieve. There is this house on Hatteras Island that I ride my bike by and stop to read the headstones in the front yard. I sort of know these families in as much as I'll let myself trespass and I'm beginning to recognize names which makes me sad even though I am happy to see them kept at home. The thing about the babies I visit on Ocracoke is that eight died from the same family one year at a time until I had to wonder if there were any left. Tiny foot stones back to back.

This is back on Hatteras Island from the deck at sunset.

Here are four kids and a nanny in the hot tub on the deck overlooking the ocean.

We all climbed the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse together this year. It was the first time Little Girl was big enough. The winds were too high to step outside but we looked through the windows and door. This lighthouse was moved some time ago and before then no one could climb because it wasn't safe. When I was eight and it was still open I climbed 252 steps (I think) with my grandfather.

Yes, seaoats and that family snapshot that we never seem to take except this year we did and I suspect we'll be thankful for it.

Oh these are called Ass Antlers and I still have mine. I think it will leave a strange tan line when it finally washes off.

Self Portrait. I like this one a lot. I can recognize the shape of me and it makes me feel grounded somehow.

The very lovely Cletus.

I am watching all those kids from behind the seaoats on the dune line but it's too hot even with flip flops to squat that way for very long.

If I was less random this would have been at the top with Edgar. Here are the not so wild wild ponies penned at Ocracoke. They look awfully well groomed and fed to me. I can't tell anymore what they mean by wild; I think it's more of a cultivated sanctuary but I'm just guessing.

Here is the ferry line to come home from Ocracoke. It seems surreal the way the photograph came out.

And here is that egregious machine that transported seven of us over 1200 miles and for some absurd reason appeared to average 17 mpg. I'm not sure how that is possible but I'll accept it. It was a very difficult thing to maneuver if you're used to tiny or mid sized cars and on the second to last day there was a bit of an accident and we've had to address rental auto insurance for the first time ever.

And finally, the same as it ever is and when I lie face down in the wet sand and I can feel the sun burning up the ozone no matter how much sunblock I'm wearing I can close my eyes and shut out almost everything.

Finger tips

I got up nervous on Saturday morning, showered Little Girl, woke up Cletus and started packing food and making breakfast all at the same time. By the time I finished packing up the picnic there was a good 10 pounds of lunch and dinner for just the two of them all combined not counting the water and juice bottles and Cletus has got to carry this plus two duffel bags full of boots and clothing (they're wearing their flip flops and crocs) and her back pack which happens to have six books, four DVDs and a computer before I even thought of stuffing it with the juice bottles. Little Girl will carry her own back pack which is really a diaper pack with her name on it which is not the best idea in the world and it's full of ninety bazillion books and forty thousand crayons and a coloring book. My heart palpitations were going into over drive and we left the house precisely on time and I'm pretty sure I only snapped at Cletus twice and not at all at Nomans (he may correct me on that count) or Little Girl.

We arrived, as planned, good and early to the station I walk through twice a day. Today it was a different station full of non commuters and I've only been upstairs in the waiting room once in the last fifteen years and that was just last week to collect the Amtrak tickets. We sat in seats overlooking the tracks and I put Little Girl on my lap because she was starting to get antsy and worried. We went to the bathroom and she did OK right until we came back to the seats and her eyes welled up and she asked Nomans for some water so that she could 'calm myself down'. And she did. We talked about the trains and the number of cars and the engineers and the engines and which way is which and where is track 1 anyway? (it appears to be missing) And then she finally dropped the other shoe and said, 'Mommy, I'd be a lot happier if you came with me. At which point I asked if she'd done the math and considered I'd have to be on the train a total of sixteen hours each time just to do that. She knew. And still.

We sat upstairs until the train was announced on Track 4 and started for the stairs. I held her hand and on about step four she started to hyperventilate. She did this, making these heart breaking little gasping sounds, all the way the stairs and onto the platform and onto the train and oh crap! There don't appear to be any double seats left together and I'm going to be forced to make somebody move possibly by tormenting them with a wailing seven year old which is not fair to the girl, now is it? I spy a four seater with no leg room at all and one Au Pairish looking girl asleep with her feet on the seat across and I drop my girls and their bundles and apologize but she knows and picks up her feet.

Little girl is on the inside seat where there just happens to be no window and I am sorry about this. The Au Pairish looking thing has the window. Little Girl has tears rolling down her cheeks and I mustn't, mustn't mustn't cry under any circumstances because she deserves more of me than that just now. I stroke her hand and remind her that she's got Cletus (who I made pick her up and comfort her on the train platform just to give them both the right idea while I was still there) and that this is all perfectly all right. It is time to get the hell off this train before we're all stuck until New Haven and the last thing I feel as I turn to go are the tips of her little girl fingers. They tremble and let go.

We leave the train and I stand at the window, through which I can barely see, and wave with my brave face to my girls until the train pulls away from the platform and I bury my face in my husband's chest and howl until the howling has taken the breath right out of me.

(it was a really great weekend and lots of amazing things occurred, of which I have taken good pictures, but this deserves a post of it's own)

Trains

I stand on the platform, just so, to get in the right car at the right time and have half a chance at a window seat facing the highway and being in a car with doors that will open on my platform, which is small.

Thirty seconds before my train comes I step forward so that I am twelve inches from the edge of the platform and I look down and think about that man last year who jumped down to the tracks and saved another man's life and I wonder what I would do if I fell in just now. But I don't and I won't. That would be what six inches or four or two or my toes on the edge might mean, like those boys at the other end with their over sized Coronas and Newport Lights and Machismo that races through the very young and very old alike.

I stand here because I want to feel the train.

The train comes rumbling through the station and every metaphor that's ever been used rushes through my mind and it's still not enough to describe what I feel in my bones and muscle and connective tissue and the way my spine vibrates right into the cement so that I am a conduit that all the world runs through and up out the top of my head and into the sky.

The woman across the way lights a cigarette and proceeds to cough cough cough and I recognize that disease with the acronym you see on TeeVee now like it's curable and I know damn well it's not and she inhales and coughs out and inhales and coughs out and I know she's dying and she knows she's dying and I'm just damn glad that's not me and I wonder how many days months years she has left before the oxygen tanks. Or worse.

Sometimes I am in too much of a hurry and I don't back up and am run over by the rush of mad New York workers who want only to return to the false sanctity of their Connecticut homes; this is me, newly raw, bowled over by men and women who look just like I looked four months ago.

I get on the train and find a seat. I want to read my book but I am watching the highway not move and I am not on it and this is so new that it still makes me very, very happy. I press my face against the dirty glass and realize I am forgetting to be grown up and clean and professional and then I think, oh screw it, I'm wearing running shoes with my skirt and nobody does that anymore. And I have a red back pack that I wear over both shoulders so that my back doesn't go out of alignment and I look like the biggest dork in the world but I do not really care at all. As it turns out.

I race the shuttle. I race it from the train to the office and from the office to the train. Most of the time I win. Does anyone besides me find this disturbing? The walk/run is .9 miles and there are a lot of lights and some serious traffic and I walk jog along with my 15 pound pack and work up a sweat that I'll more or less be OK with as long as nobody's getting too close.

I am absorbed in the rhythm of the train and I stand between two cars where you're not supposed to stand and watch what can only be described as bucolic country side skating by. I have one foot in each car. I love this. No one has made me stop yet but I do get some funny looks.

I live on the Danbury Line. Stamford, Noroton Heights, Darien, Rowayton, South Norwalk, Merritt 7, Wilton, Cannondale... I get off... Branchville, Redding, Bethel, Danbury and back again.

Stamford passengers have your tickets ready.

Climbing the Great Bridge

This is for Madeline, because she's down under right now.

My brother married an Australian by way of Detroit and County Kerry, Ireland. Basically, she's as Irish as they come but the family is in Australia and that's where she finished growing up so that's where they got married. This was November, 2001, right after 911 when airport security was all over the place and nobody wanted to travel. Except us.

I left my husband and eleven month old last baby and two older kids at home and traveled on my mother's airline points because she just wouldn't go. I flew to San Francisco, spent a day at the office visiting with the trainers I'd just tormented within an inch of their collective lives a month prior and then marched myself off to the international terminal of the San Francisco airport.

And I entered the first class lounge because I had first class points giving me a first class seat and there I sat, looking around at the excess, wondering what to do with myself. You know what I did? I drank fourteen cups of free first class lounge cappuccino, that's what I did. Ever see that Beavis and Butthead movie where Beavis drinks too much cappuccino, pulls his shirt up over his head and announces to all and sundry that "I AM CORNHOLIO AND YOU WILL WORSHIP MY BUNGHOLE!!!!' or something like that.

Yeah. Pretty much, I turned into a slightly tuned down Cornholio. It's true.

So I got on the plane and entered the first class compartment of an overseas flight for the first and only time in my life and settled myself into my bunk in the nose of the plane. I was freaking DELIGHTED. I proceeded to chew up fifteen packs of nicotine gum, suck down probably three bottles of wine on my own and sleep NOT ONE BLEEDING SECOND. I annoyed the flight attendants, pissed off my fellow rightfully placed first class passengers and spent the entire fourteen hours watching our plane's path across the Pacific. Bloody fascinating, I tell you.

When I staggered off the plane, collected my luggage that contained one ball gown in one very large and padded suitcase and made my way through customs without a thorough strip search, I found my brother but promptly lost him again and was left with his old sky diving buddy, Rambo, who sounds exactly as you'd expect.

Rambo and I got in his rented BMW (WHY???) with a Hertz map and a vague idea about the City Center and the hotel at which we had reservations. While Rambo discovered driving on the wrong side of the road (sky diver candy, I assure you), I attempted to read an upside down Hertz map and not throw up on my feet. I couldn't quite figure out if I was more drunk or caffeined out of my mind.

Strangely enough, we found the hotel. Sober, I'm not so sure it would have happened. We checked in, I unpacked my ball gown, strappy shoes and underpants in my three room suite (HOW? HOW? HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?) and then I went downstairs and met up with the bridal party because we had a date with a bridge.

Have I mentioned that my brother's wife is also a world class sky diver? And all of her hard core girlfriends as well? Her sisters, now they were marginally normal and sane. No, not sane, just not sky divers. Also, they are all disturbingly beautiful no matter what which is enough to make a girl like me crawl under a rock in the best of circumstances. The cappuccino and alcohol worked wonders.

Somehow we got to the base of the Great Bridge in Sydney. We paid some money and put on some jumpsuits that required taking off all of one's clothing first. I don't carry enough on top to merit the use of Lady's under garments for anything other than an accessory. Therefore I wasn't wearing one. I may or may not have been wearing much more than a thong. At that point in my life I didn't believe much in the added effort of under garments of any kind because who the hell was going to see me without my pants on in the first place?

Somehow I got into this jumpsuit and there may not have been a lot of people in the building at the time and we marched out onto the lower deck of the bridge. We stepped up on the platform and began the ascent.

The first thing that happened was I looked down. This was a very bad idea. Vertigo and me, not so good. I chose not to vomit in public and kept my eyes glued to the girl in front of me. At some point in time we were harnessed to a cable to keep us from falling or more likely escaping and throwing ourselves over the bridge. During this ascent there was some conversation about an illegal ascent sans any kind of roping the night before by at least two of them which resulted in a climb all the way to the top of one of the poles and back down again. Apparently no arrests were made.

Through this climb our guide delightfully detailed the building of said bridge and the 300 foot fall of one of the builders that resulted in no death because apparently he dropped a wrench or something just in front and it broke the tension of the water where he entered.

At the peak they took our picture and I have it somewhere but I remember looking out over the harbor and having a feeling very similar to the first time I looked into the abyss of the Grand Canyon at Mather's Point and lost every sense of myself.

The descent was easier for some reason. Probably because my fatigue had reached the point of no return and I was bucking for the crash of the century. When we returned to the great room I found I could not remove the harness and had to be undressed by the other girls. At one point I realized I was in the middle of a very large and multi leveled common room in nothing but my underpants, whatever they may or may not have been covering.

I got my clothes on and got out. I did not go to the bar with the girls. I looked at my hotel on the sky line and made a general bee line in that direction. I got as far as a highway overpass and stood there flummoxed. I began to climb the damn thing, probably got a good fifteen or twenty feet off the deck and then realized that if I actually got to the top I'd have to cross six high speed lanes and then descend the other side (I'm OK climbing up, not so much climbing down). I got myself down from that place and somehow made my way around the City Center and into the lobby of my hotel.

I remember ordering oysters and not being able to understand what actually got delivered to my door. There's a big difference between what grows there and what I eat out of the Northeast Atlantic. In the end I managed to choke down half the strangeness and pass out fully dressed on some form of furniture, not the bed.

I slept a full fourteen hours. Exactly the length of my flight from San Francisco to Sydney. I took a little grief for not going out with the crew the night before but I wasn't arrested, run over or dropped into the drink.

The Great Bridge? I highly recommend the climb.

Rage Against the Machine

Rage is not new.

I caused some extra carbon this weekend by driving to Vermont.  It was really beautiful.  Along the way I noticed the effects of Global Warming. Leaf season should have been over in Vermont. Instead it was at peak.  This is either a fluke or we've moved the season up two solid weeks. Just noticing.

It was a difficult weekend in that we didn't manage to stay where we usually stay, because we waited so long to make a decision because life is just like that sometimes, and neither of us deal well with a shift from the expected if we're stretched too far for too long.  And we have been.  It's been a difficult six months. We were out of sorts and not liking much the near asphyxiation from a gas fireplace that hadn't been serviced in, oh, I'm guessing three years, maybe four, since this inn changed hands as the inn-keepers looked genuinely stunned that there might be some maintenance involved.

Add that to the general decompression involved in removing oneself from the hotbed quite abruptly and you've got the ingredients for colossal meltdown given the right combination of stimuli. I almost wish the meltdown had occurred because then I might actually feel better and be able to think more clearly, as opposed to the bottled up container of thermal gas I'm currently choking myself on. That made sense, right?

On the way out of town we stopped in Brattleboro because that's what we always do. We're creatures of habit, he and I.  We parked where we always park in this lot at the top of the main street heading back toward 91. We parked next to an aging vehicle with brightly colored plastic letters glued all over the outside.  That vehicle said some very interesting things. The first thing I read was enough, the rest of it just wouldn't process. There on the drivers side of the car read: (and I paraphrase because I might have gotten this just slightly wrong)

'Maybe the planet would be better off if none of us were here'.

And inside the car, amid the clutter and trash, on the passenger seat within easy reach of the driver, was a hard pack of Marlborough Reds.

The top of my head blew off and I just about shouted the response,

Well all righty then!  We'll start with you! Although I see you're well on your way to doing that to self and others with a pack of smokes, ya bloody screamin' hypocrite! What's next, pipe bombs in the bakery?

I recognize this is inappropriate and unacceptable and not even remotely forwarding behavior. I recognize that my bloody done button has popped and I also recognize that very little of it stems from free radicals, that's just how it landed in the moment.

I'm starting to understand how people get to this place.

In the seventies we got all up in the face of conservation. We payed a great price economically by refusing to buy American Gas Guzzlers but we saved on fossil fuel and helped invent the global economy. We had little stickers that went on all the light switches that reminded people to turn out the lights! At my house we kept the thermostat first at 62 and then finally at 56.  I hate my father for that to this day. I lived in my coat. In the mean time we continued to exploit third world countries.  Does anybody honestly think this is a new development?

Then the eighties came, the recession lifted and returned and lifted again. Alan Greenspan held our heads as we vomited up the last of our supply side fears and consumed, consumed, consumed. We even managed to disgust ourselves. The Stay At Home Mom was reinvented as a SAHM. This makes me giggle to no end because we all know, lets face it folks, that the SAHM was invented during the industrial revolution. Now its a sanctimonious validation of personal lifestyle choices.  I say sanctimonious because that's what I hear.  I try real hard not to judge the SAHM but I rarely experience the same respect of personal choices.

Seems to me we've become a nation of ranters.  I need to defend my choices by making you wrong.  No matter what you do, as long as it's not exactly what I'm doing, I'm going to make you wrong because I just cannot live with the idea that my choices, radical as they may or may not be, might not be right! Or I might not like the prices I've paid. Or I might not be doing it right.  Or I might be waking up to find out I've raised a lunatic who can't or won't contribute to society even though I bloody well followed the dotted line. (this embarrassment of offspring began at the dawn of time, it's not just you)

Makes me wonder why the hell we bother?

I was sitting in the forty year old auditorium which is about to be made over by the Madams of Conspicuous Consumption to the tune of 1.8 million dollars (you read that right) of Weston high school listening to my daughter's choir make the most beautiful sounds and I was caught crying by the concert director.  I wanted to tell him, it's OK, I always cry at these events. I even get up and sing when asked too, even though I'm really embarrassed by it all.

There were two slide shows projecting through out the concert.  On the left were the current statistics on global warming. On the right was the program as we came to each piece.  This was to avoid printing programs because we've gone green, whatever the hell that means. At the end of each slide on the left was a list of things that could be done by each consumer to reduce the personal carbon foot print. They were small and little things.  Things so small and meaningless that we just shouldn't bother.  Things that would have the radicals tell us to just kill ourselves now we suck so bad.

And they were things that honest to God make a huge impact when they add up.

So I kind of wonder as the radicals scream at me from all angles that I suck beyond belief and ought to just take the hose already, if they're screaming to be right or if they're screaming because they want change?

It takes a lot to change the direction of a moving barge or battleship. It does not turn on a dime. So what I'm curious about is why would we expect it to? Or do we just want to yell a little bit more?

I can be pissed off about the Madams of Conspicuous Consumption or I can start by reducing my vehicle consumption by 15 miles per week, changing my light bulbs, putting those sticky things back on the switch plates, dropping the house temp to 66, insulating my windows and doors, growing my own veggies and buying local.

I won't be stop the new theater from being built but I might get their attention in other ways.

Maybe. 

And maybe this planet would be better off without any of us. But is that the point? Or does it just piss us all off like a bunch of over crowded rats that turn canibal?

The Birth of a Tourist

Do any of you know what this is? I didn't take this picture but I might as well have.  The first time I stood on the other side of the wall and gazed down on what kind of looks like a mound of dirt, it was covered in flowers just like this. I stumbled onto this location on April 11, 2004. I was in the Old City part of Rome where NoMans and I went to turn 40 together because we could not go to the beach as originally planned because Isabel ate it in October 2003 and it was still a mess six months later. So there we were, in Rome, as in Italy, for four days and completely unprepared.

A business traveler carries almost nothing with him (or her). A business traveler has a brief case with notebook computer, a blackberry, a cell phone and a small bag of clothing (no fluids). A business traveler goes from point A to point Z with blinders on.  It's the only way to get through it, over and over again. And here is what happened to two business travelers when they decided to take a little vacation, still being the two business travelers that they were.

Two business travelers booked two last minute coach tickets to whatever airport is just outside Rome (I'm pretty sure it's DaVinci) using a combination cash and points. A hotel reservation was made over the internet using all points. They wanted a lot of points. To this traveler points is points and I don't much care. Two business travelers flew into DaVinci on a Friday morning, staggered gummy eyed through Customs with our carry-on and meandered over to the taxi queue reminding each other that we didn't need to hurry because there wasn't a meeting waiting for us. Nothing to present, nothing to see or hear, nothing to do. Sigh.

Two business travelers got into the back of a taxi cab and said

adfwe%ADFA9aaaddbbarekkiwis, please?

and the taxi driver said

adfdfaKUOUOUsrwereereae!

We tried again, no use.  We handed him our itinerary and he more or less worked it out. We arrived at our hotel.

If this was a story about a hotel I could use a lot of words to describe an environment different from anything I've ever seen and a level of service that can only be described as, well, European.  Go figure.  Sadly, this is not a story about a hotel.  It is a story about a rock with flowers on it and two business travelers who already know what to do in nice hotels. Have something to eat and drink, examine the bedroom and bathroom and go to bed.  Which we did, for a little while. Later we got up as if it was morning and ordered eggs Benedict in bed.  It was decadent and yummy.  After that we made ourselves leave the hotel and figure out how to be tourists.

Overall we didn't do badly because it was a nice enough hotel to have an English speaking concierge with a good grasp of local tourism and a map. Remember, I love, love, love a good map. I knew nothing about Rome except that there was a place called Vatican City, something referred to as the Spanish Steps and a really good restaurant right around the corner and to the left down an alley from the Spanish Steps.

I did not know the steps were real.  I did not know about Bernini and his sculptures and fountains and Piazzas all over the city. I did not know about the Villa Borghese filled to the brim with statuary and ornate bathtubs with lids (they might have been tombs) and paintings like an over stuffed attic or garage. I did not know any of these things.

We wandered the city at will eating bad tourist food and drinking bad tourist wine.  This is no reflection on Rome, just us. We had no clue. It took us until our second trip to the same hotel to discover that the building right next door was a bone museum! Someday I'm going in there too, I loves me some bones!

On third day we found the old city by the Coliseum. I'm not actually sure how we found the Coliseum, all I know is that we looked up from examining the ruins of what appeared to be a temple and there it was, big as life, right down the street.

Down the street we went. Later I may or may not admit to not going into the Coliseum because we felt unworthy and couldn't work out how to actually get in. We climbed over some big ass stones instead and went into the old city. We had no idea what we were looking at.  We wandered around, up and down, in and out of doorways and down little lanes. We scratched our heads and looked at some really cool old stairs that turned out to be the Senate.  THE Senate. We didn't know that then, we only found out later.

Eventually we learned to follow crowds and listen to English speaking tour guides on the periphery just to get a relative clue, or something. At some point we found ourselves staring into the cinder block grotto that held the pile of petrified mud all covered in wilting flowers.  And I looked up at my husband, and without thinking to mask my stupidity, I said, 'what do you suppose THAT's all about?'

The English speaking gentlemen with the big fat juicy guide book off my left elbow said:

"That, is Caesar's tomb."

Me:  "THE Caesar?  As in Julius G?  As in the Ides of March and all that?  And 'Et tu, Brute?'"

Him:  "Yes, that's the one."

Me:  "And the flowers?"

Him: (reading from his big fat juicy well thumbed guide book) "Apparently they start throwing flowers around the fifteenth of March and keep at it until they run out of steam."

Me:  "Every year?"

Him:  "Yup, every year."

Me:  "Good thing we ran into you, thanks."

And now I want some gelato.  I saw some in a street cart and I want it. I bet I could grunt and point and hand over some Euros and I could get it too. Later on we found an actual restaurant where they serve actual food to actual Italians and other non-obnoxious tourists.  I ate Octopus that must have been eight inches in diameter and was sliced thin as paper and pickled in something. I could see all the smaller circles of tentacle muscle inside the bigger circle and my husband wanted to gag but restrained himself. The wine was excellent. It didn't cost very many Euros either.

The next day we rented a car and drove to Pompeii.  I was forty years old and learning about dead people who didn't just get up and go when they were supposed to. I learned that Italian drivers don't see lines on the road if it's inconvenient and will make five lanes out of three if they need to.  I learned that the left lane is not a travel lane; it's a pass and move the hell out of the way lane. I learned that in other countries soldiers walk around with machine guns and nobody notices. I learned that in some countries and cultures people will still remember your birthday or the day you died 2000 years later if you made that much of an impact and that politically correct or otherwise, they will still dump flowers on your grave in a very personal display of love.

Who knew?

Traversing the Palouse

Sometime in April, 2003 my mother's baby brother died in his sleep at the tender age of 54. If I remember correctly, it was a massive stroke or something like that. His best friend found him.  They were in the field doing geologist things and he must have died in his hotel bed. My mother was very close to this brother.  Not so much the other.

My mother and I went to this funeral alone. I don't know why we do this but we seem to be minimalists.  No extra baggage like husbands or children or even siblings; just get on the plane and show up already. She sent me flight and hotel information and I booked my trip.  I flew into Spokane, pronounced Spoke-Ann, not Spo-Cane, and because I was early I drove the rental car around the city looking for a Dennys to take my mother to when she got in the mood, which was bound to happen eventually.

I never did find a Denny's but I found something in close enough proximity and a few other things. Later, no matter how hard I tried, I could not find the adult book/toy/video grocery style store I passed without processing until it was too late and I'd gotten myself turned around.  There were shopping carts in the parking lot.  Big ones. Spokane is an old city, it's built big and sprawling and felt empty. I wish that I had spent more time in Spokane.  It felt funny and I never did have the opportunity to work out why.

We stayed at a traditional little motel with two double beds in the room and a window overlooking a spectacular view.  We were both still smokers and I think we must have smoked that room up something fierce.  We sat in the bar of a local dive and talked about estates and planning and things I really didn't want to know about. She said things she needed to say that she held onto for years and hoped were not true. I assured her that both my brother and I had grown up substantially but that we were all human in the end anyway and you do the best with what you've got.

In the morning we left for Potlatch, Idaho, which meant nothing to me at the time other than we were going there. I do remember that it was too late in the year for snow in the Northeast but it was snowing big fat flakes all over the place. It might even have been early May.

My mother drove out to Potlatch because she said I would drive off the road looking at Idaho. It's true, I would have. To be honest, I didn't even know about the Palouse. I must have slept through that part of American Geography.  Or something.  All I knew about Idaho was that they grow potatoes the neo nazis hide in the hills.  That's the rumor, anyway. Maybe the potatoes are a myth. I didn't have any idea about Peas on the Palouse.  I didn't know about rolling hills so steep the farm equipment is gimbaled to keep it from tipping over.  I didn't know about green so even and unrelenting even Ireland can take a step back. And I sure didn't know about Potlatch.

Potlatch looks like a factory town. Boss Houses on the right with big wrap around porches and gingerbread trim. Worker Houses on the left on 40 x 60 foot lots. You never saw so many tiny houses stacked right up against each other. I think they make pot latches in this town because my mother told me that. I realize that my mother is bound and determined to give me the most bizarre possible answers because she likes the stories that way. Has no bearing on reality and I should know that by now. I googled Potlatch though and found out they were a logging town once.  Now they are full of geologists congregating.

My mother and I dressed for the funeral in standard issue black suits and white blouses; the cut of the jackets and the length of the skirts might as well have been identical. It's just how we do it. We looked like Women in Black with our sun glasses on against the glare. We looked ridiculous in Potlatch, Idaho. Our first clue would have been my somewhat mannish Aunt in jeans and a flannel shirt. Because she's got more testosterone and naturally occurring facial hair than my father I didn't think anything of it and it would have been rude to pass comment anyway, she comes to all the family funerals like that. When we got to the cinderblock community center it became patently obvious that she lived in this community for a reason. Nothing but denim, fleece and flannel covered geologists.  OK, maybe a few pea farmers as well. Cool.  It was cool.

We sat down at rectangular fold out tables and somebody got up to speak.  He may or may not have been ordained and I don't recall that it mattered.  He said a few simple words about my uncle and they were all true. Then some other people got up and said things.  Nothing long, nothing fluffy, nothing but true. I stood up and told about a memory from way early childhood of the sunlight reflecting off his glasses when he lifted me high above his head and I probably drooled on him. I stood there and cried silently for a moment and then I sat down.  There was the same easy hush between my speaking and the next and when we were done, we were done.

I had to fly all the way across the country to find out who my uncle really was.  I had to traverse the Palouse to find my mother in all this.  When were done and it was time to go home I used my last four free hours to drive to Coeur D'Alene (Core Da Lane) and sit in the forest above the lake. I picked no less than eight varieties of wild flower from a ten square foot patch of ground. I took them home and pressed them in a book.

I hear the lines from Randy Newman's song My Country and I feel whole and complete.

This is my country,
these are my people.
This is the world I understand.
This is my country,
these are my people.
And I know 'em like the back of my own hand.
I know 'em like the back of my own hand.

Dun Aengus

The boat ride to Inis Mor was wet and rocky. It was a smallish ferry boat, too small I thought for rough seas but nobody else seemed to mind. We were very cold. On the island we bought Aron Sweaters and wore them for the next two weeks. I haven't needed anything that bulky and waterproof since then.  It sits in my closet and waits.

Inis Mor is the largest of the three Aron Islands and often referred to as the Isle of Rock, because, well, it is. I've never seen so much rock. And they farm this stuff too, amazing. There are seven churches on Inis Mor and not all of them still have a roof. They do all still have active cemeteries. Nothing fancy here, just a large slab covering the ground with names dating as far back as you can read to, um, current.  I wonder what it takes to lift the slab and I wonder what's under it and I didn't have it in me to ask.  They speak Gaelic on this island.  I don't know if that's because it's really not dead yet or they resurrected it for the tourist trade. In any event, it is spoken and for awhile, like in Greece, I could read it. Now I see the consonants all run together like that and try to actually pronounce them as if I was reading English. There's a word for that kind of arrogance.

I was tired of looking at too new thatched roofing and yellow and red buildings and we wandered away from the crowds and up the gradual slope over rocky ground vomited up into the air by some angry god however many thousands of years ago and still lacking any obvious sign of topsoil. They farm this stuff.  They graze their cattle on it. It is an often brutal survival.

The fuscia were frightening. In America they are house plants hanging in baskets dropping deep pink blossoms on the ground to be popped by small children. On Inis Mor they are big as small houses. The Rhododendrons are like that too. It's never warm here but never really cold either. It's funny to think of a climate so far North as tropical, but parts of it are.  They're just never actually warm. Except for maybe two days in July or August.

The farmers build stone walls all over the island because something has to be done with the stone to get to some form of soil. They wander short and haphazardly, no city planning required. Up and up we go looking for the fort called Dun Aengus and we are upon it before we are even really sure.

I am afraid of Dun Aengus because it ends in an abrupt drop to the ocean, 300 feet below. There is no warning, you are suddenly there at the precipice and I suffer terrible vertigo. We are counting the concentric circles trying to figure out and I have this very American belief that there will be warning signs and chain link fences and maybe even a guard or something but there is not.

We have passed into the final circle and are twelve feet from the edge before I realize what has happened.  I drop on my ass immediately, blink, and then stretch out on my belly, hugging the cold, damp ground. I am hyperventilating and I think I'm going to be sick. I want to get up and run like hell for the other side but I'm too scared to move. Instead I lay there and concentrate on air.  Just air.

In a little while I look up and out at the horizon.  Ireland is astonishing. The winds feel as if they'll knock you off your feet and the views are sudden and overwhelming. I had only been in the country a handful of days and had not adjusted.  I felt sandblasted and water logged.

Slowly, inch by inch like a bad comedy routine, I moved forward to the cliff edge, my companion asking if I had taken complete leave of my senses.  I said yes and kept going.  I got to the very edge and looked down.

Now listen, I hate to interrupt this but I have knowingly exited the body of a perfectly good airplane at least seventy times.  There was, in comparison, nothing to it.  So you've got to understand just how monumental was the creeping to the edge of the cliff.

I looked down and asked my companion, 'how old did the book say this was?' He said bronze age.  Like as in 1000 BC or something like that. OK, 3000 years ago, who was attacking the west coast of the largest island off the west coast of Ireland? No idea, says he. They really do not know. How can that be?  How can we not know who did this and why?  We just don't.

Over the next two weeks I stood in farmers fields that were plowed around the passage tombs with open access allowed from the road. These things remain, like the Poverty Houses, locked in the past out of reverence or superstition or some form of both. There are really no museums until you come around the circle and head South again toward Dublin.  The rest of it is just sitting there, being. What kind of power does it take to hold an Island hostage?  Who was there, what did they do? What was lost and gained before history began?  The Celtic Tiger came awhile ago. Ireland thrives, expands and breathes new and different life into itself.

But for now, the old gods remain in the midst of it all.  Holding court, not even remotely asleep, and biding their time.

Going to see the Oracle

By the time we got to Greece a couple of things had happened.  The first thing was that we'd more or less learned to be tourists.  You know, buy a couple of guide books, read them on the plane and in the hotel or more importantly, buy a transliteration guide so that you can at least read street signs and maps. We were working it out.

Athens was a shock after Rome. Rome is relatively clean and you feel mostly safe in the city center at night and certainly all right during the day. Rome has restored itself, reinvented and retold it's story. Rome has found it's place in the 21st century, for better or for worse.

Greece is still elsewhere, especially Athens. Athens struggles with the stark reality of it's ancestral wreckage and current circumstances. It moves fast and slick with a poof of refuse and graffiti in it's wake.  Athens scared the shit out of me but captured my heart in ways Rome, Dublin, Belfast, Paris, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Munich could not.  Piraeus, the port city, was more direct in its squalor and I recognized and morphed into the necessary street persona without missing a beat. Athens, though, that was something else all together.

I have written at length about the Temple of the Dogs, the wanderings through the Lost City (which really is lost) and the climb up Greece's equivalent to the Temple Mount - the Acropolis.  What I haven't talked much about at all is the surreal trip to see the Oracle at Delphi.

I wanted to see the Oracle.  Don't ask me why other than I'm a Matrix nut and I want to be a cross between Neo and Trinity and I want to see the freaking Oracle already. I want to.  It's got to be there. We don't really make this shit up, people, we just retell it.  It's been made up for multiple millennium.  I want to get to it's source and I want to know what the hell this is all about. I wanted to see the damn Oracle.

Getting an answer out of anybody in Greece, and seriously in Athens, is like pulling teeth.  Greece is squishy.  Ask a question and you will get the front half of an answer from one thing, the middle from another and an end you won't really understand until you get there, if, indeed, you do.

We rented a car and tried to get directions.  We didn't even manage, world travelers that we are, to get a decent map. We took said unreasonable map and took said unreasonable directions - turn right turn left get on the highway drive two hours turn left and there you are - and headed into the great unknown.  Here is what happened.

I got out my transliteration guide and learned to read street and highway signs in Greek pretty damn fast. Hey, people, this is no mean feat.  It's a different alphabet and we were moving at 70 kph. I worked it out. An hour into the drive, not even sure we were on the right highway (lacking a compass and all) we stopped at a roadside gas station to ask directions.

Anybody out there ever been to Greece?  Feel free to roll about laughing now as the not entirely ugly but damned ignorant Americans drove into the great unknown with no other language than English.  Pretty funny, huh?  They don't speak anything other than Greek in the hills of Greece.  Go figure. He was a nice man though and for 10 Euros he sold NoMans the map to end all maps.  All of Greece in minute detail.  I nearly creamed my jeans. I do so love maps. Turns out we weren't so far off and neither were our original directions. The guy in the hotel wasn't kidding. The only thing I want to know is how does he know how fast we drive?  I guess it's not relevant, it's Greece.  There you go.

We stopped in a town called Arachova with the most incredible view of the mountains.  We heard people skied in these mountains but it was lost on us because they just went straight up; not skiable stuff and I'm from the land of rock and ice. Best I could tell, you drive and drive and drive until your ears can pop no more and then you park your car and ski the upper most reaches.  That's my story and until somebody tells me otherwise, I'm sticking to it. We stopped here, at what appeared to be a tourist destination of some sort and had lunch. Lunch was stunning.  It was some lamb thing in lemon and it tasted like nothing I've had in my life.  If that's lamb I don't think it's met it's American or even New Zealand cousins. We were getting used to pointing and grunting for food and bathroom. We spent a good amount of time in that village and I'm sorry we didn't buy something.  It wasn't made in China.

Unfortunately we stayed too late. The Oracle in Delphi closes at 3 PM.  No shit. She does. We were talked into the museum instead, which I will tell you was down right astonishing.  I'll stop talking about art now but, damn! What I am sorry for is that I didn't pay my 11 Euros and run into the park, or whatever it was, to be in the Navel of the World for all of fifteen minutes.  I was trusting my gut though, and the old man at the ticket booth really did not want me in there.

Makes me wonder though, what would have happened if I'd situated myself in that unassuming grove and gazed into the seemingly bottomless navel of the world? What firings of which synapses might have altered everything? Doesn't matter, I moved on. Or I didn't and it happened anyway and I don't have the recall to bring it back. I wonder though, will I smell cookies?  I'm not being flip.  We don't really make this stuff up anymore.

On the way out we got home.  I'm not sure how we got home other than I read the map and he drove. If I had to read that map today I could not.  Unless I had my transliteration guide and was in a crunch.  And then you bet I could, in a heart beat.

Several things occurred on the way home:

1. We saw multiple small shrines along the roadside. I still have no idea what they signify other than they looked like little Jesus, Mary and Joseph holy tableaus but had the overwhelming scent of purely pagan. We never got an answer and I suspect we never will.
2. Drivers were polite. If you came up behind someone on a two line road, the driver in front pulled over to the shoulder and let you go by.  Without hesitation.  We learned to do the same very quickly.
3. Cotton grows everywhere.  I brought a hank home with me.  Forgive me, USDA for I have sinned through Customs, and gave it to my brother in law who marveled at it. 
4. If you drive too quickly through a village center you are more than likely to run into a funeral procession and have to stop quickly.  No one will be offended.  Everyone will be on foot. The corpse will be in full view and you will lose yourself in the moment of life and death.  The tour bus that just happened to be along at the right or wrong time will be following at a respectful distance. So will you.

The smog over the city produced a sunset unlike anything I've seen outside the Arizona valley. Our visit was almost over and I was just getting settled.  Settled enough to begin to perceive the scent of a culture so ancient we cannot begin to fathom.

I don't know how many years are left before Greece buries itself beneath a fine patina of sanctified dust and gloss but for now, it is still there. Go. Go now.  Go the Temple of the Dogs and the mount that is Acropolis. Go to Delphi (pronounced Delfee) and see the Oracle if you dare. 

Gaze into the navel of the world and find the bottom of the world looking back.

The Road to Etna

I used to schedule my travel as tightly as possible so as to avoid being away from home one extra minute or, if I'm going to be honest, to avoid having to absorb one single piece of information or stimuli that wasn't relevant to my life. In a word, I freaking hated it and went unbelievably out of my way to make sure I saw nothing but my own inverted unclean navel.

I spent a good amount of time traversing the lower 48 without so much as looking out my hotel window. When I had to leave for the client or the airport I averted my eyes and rushed in and out and back home again to my perfect world in my perfect house or apartment with my perfect room and my perfect cat and my perfect books and my maybe not so perfect current significant other. I saw my kids too. As much as humanly possible.

There was a point in time when I flew out of Phoenix on Fridays on the 1 PM, arrived late into LaGuardia, drove 80 miles home and went to sleep. I would get up in the morning, take my suitcase to the cleaners, dump it out in one rectangular brick, remove the shoes, cosmetics, travel iron, travel coffee maker, hair brush and toiletries and pack the entire contents of last week's drop off, re-including shoes et al, back into the carry on. I figured out that dry cleaning under pants and panty hose was a serious waste of money and just started disposing of them. I'm pretty sure I went a couple years dispensing with under pants all together. It was just too much work. When I lived alone in an apartment I kept my laundry in the oven. It's amazing I never lit it on fire.

On Sundays I would leave for the airport a little after 2 and be on the 6 PM back to Phoenix.  Or where ever. It sucked.

So I stopped looking. One time I woke up in the middle of the night and had no bloody idea where I was. All Marriots look like Sheratons and Hyatts and Westons and Ws and Hiltons.  It's a matter of fact. I looked outside. Parking lot.  Pine trees. Cars. Gentleman's Club a quarter mile down the way. Other hotels. Crap.  I could be anywhere. I got out my itinerary. Charlotte, NC. Oh Good!  I like Charlotte! Been there lots of times, never seen it. I went back to bed peacefully and slept unencumbered.

Here's another bizarre tidbit which is still the same to this day.  If I am alone in a hotel bed I do not move. I do not roll over, I do not pull the covers, I sleep on either my right or left side depending on the layout of the room and when I get up the bed is still mostly made. I just have to straighten the edge and the pillow.

I also never turn on the television. I eat my meals in my room and read and read and read.  I never called home.  Home is at home and hotel is at hotel.  I lived in a bubble and the bubble was me. That is all.

I lived and traveled like that quite happily right up until Malta.

Just about five years ago my boss told me I was going to the EMEA Services Conference in Malta in January. Oh goody, I thought, another opportunity to accumulate massive frequent flier points I refuse to recycle and use anyway. Apparently we were all going to Malta, en masse, the entire senior management group and a handful of trainers.

I booked my trip and forgot about it. At the last minute I put my presentation together. I suffered through Christmas and New Years. NoMan's mother died (this was before NoMans and I were anything other than very good friends and peers). Things continued to disintegrate in my department and tensions were stratospheric. NoMans and I were flying together. I don't know at which point we discovered we had the dates wrong. We were flying in the day of our presentations instead of the day before and we were therefore flying out one day later than anticipated.

I made it, lost luggage and all, to my presentation, road weary and jet lagged and said something about custom training and process documentation to a group of EMEA trainers and writers and then staggered off to bed. I made it to dinner, got drunk on two glasses of wine and then went shopping with my entire department. In the morning when I woke up and looked at what I'd purchased to replace my lost luggage I nearly peed myself and crawled under the bed. Note to self and others:  Do not get drunk and go shopping for replacement business wear with your colleagues.  Nothing good can come of it.  I wish I had a picture.  I'm glad I don't.

Due to our gross mismanagement of personal and business time, NoMans and I were left with one extra day at the end of the trip. Lots of people do this, by the way. Just not me.  I get back on the freaking plane and go home. As fast as possible. But I had a day.  Had it been any other day I would have spent the day barricaded in my hotel room with a book.  I would not have come out except maybe for some food, and it wouldn't even have been good food. It just would have kept me from falling down.  Maybe.

It was not any other day.  I was with NoMans and I was deeply, terribly, passionately, and horribly in love with this man.  It was awful. It was unacceptable. It was not going to happen. We decided to go to Sicily.

Who does that?  Who decides to get up at 4:30 AM after staying up all night (don't ask, it was out of character) and go to Sicily for the day?  Apparently he does and therefore so did I. We went with a tour group full of old people because that was easiest.  Or the only way, or something. We were picked up by a shuttle at 5 AM. We were driven all over Malta picking up other passengers from every other hotel on the island. We were driven to the ferry launch where we boarded a high speed ferry (who knew?) Sicily bound.

NoMans cried on the way over.  He cried about his mother and his father and his family and our jobs and everything that was awful and strange and unsettling.  I put on my compassion hat. We slept. When we woke, we were in another country and it shocked the shit out of us.

We were buffered by the bus and its multi-national passengers and it's tour guide who said wing-ed instead of winged but that didn't change much. We stopped for pastries and coffee and didn't speak a word of any common language. I think we might have had some money that worked.  Malta still had Lira.  I think Sicily had Euros. We bought sticky buns and espresso. We ate in the damp, noisy cold that was the cafe. We got back on the bus.

We stopped in a town with many churches, all of them Catholic and most of them rather pagan looking. There were a lot of statues and tiles and glass. In the churches the confessionals were right out in the open. In villages this size everybody knows your business anyway, you might as well get it over with and apologize publicly. And then I suppose they can decide whether to stone you or let you go.  Just like that, back to your seat or out to the square. I don't mean to sound flip, I think that might have been the truth at one time.  Or maybe even now. We were standing on the steps of one church with many statues and he, the New Jersey Jew said, lets kiss, we're in a church.  And we did.  In public and everything.  I liked it.

The tour guide talked a lot. Mostly I could tell what she said. We went to the top of Mt Etna.  I understood the words 'we will leave without you if you are not back on time'. We got off the bus and started walking. Etna is and was active. Etna rumbled.  I was scared and I picked up rocks and put them in my backpack.  Maybe I meant to throw them at the rushing lava if it came at me.  I don't know. We ate in the cafeteria where money was exchanged and it felt like a ski lodge.  I think I had some kind of pasta with red sauce and a glass of wine.  Wine was everywhere. It was ubiquitous.  You just drank it because it was. I didn't feel funny or drunk or anything.

In the end we stopped at one last town. I think it was Messina.  It was an old town, thousands of years old.  Stop.  Stop. I wrote Thousands. I did not write Hundreds.  I wrote Thousands. In the streets they sold designer things (what do I know about these European labels?) and the village was built into the side of the hills, mountains, rocky crags, and you walked up these stone steps that were thousands of years old and had the foot prints of much smaller people worn into them and looked inside the uncurtained homes with the multitudes of crystal chandeliers juxtaposed against the remnants of empty apartments, abandoned living spaces, built into the stone and falling down unlived in since before electricity came to the hills.

I bought a pair of pants for my daughter that would never fit her.

We got on the bus and went back to the boat which took us back to the shuttle which took us back to the hotel and had dinner in the same hotel restaurant I got drunk in the first night.  Only this time it was just he and I eating sushi that came out of the sea hours before consumption (not what we eat here today), dirty, wind blown, minds opened up by the giant can opener called culture clash married to sleep deprivation and I was hooked. I was hooked on him and I was hooked on travel for the sole purpose of travel. Because I want to see. I want to know.  I want to understand at a molecular level that we are not alone.