Travelogue 444– April 29
An Aside, an Homage

These are the dangers of food and of drink. I will speak first of the danger of ground salt. I am having a late breakfast at the dive down the street from the hotel. It's a tasty combination of eggs and ham. And that should be that; another breakfast in Puerto Rico. But I guess I tempt fate with my voluptuousness. I add salt, the kind you grind in the dispenser. You shake it out in large grains. It crunches when you chew. It crunches your tooth.

It's night. I've been drinking rum again. This time my motivation is escape, escape from pain. There a piece of my molar that slides back and forth, like the door to a secret chamber, one filled with nerve endings.

I'm browsing on You Tube, something I only do in emergencies. I am somehow, according to the whimsical logic of the internet, led to Ricky Gervais. He's a smart fellow. He's controversial. He thanks God he's an atheist. He has to answer for that in a serious TV interview. And he does.

Atheism leads me into options for Christopher Hitchens, who, for better or worse, positions himself among the front lines of the atheism debates. Is he an advocate? Apologist might be a better term. He's not playing recruiter. He says he wishes he could believe.

In defense of atheism, Hitchens says that at least there is no resort to wishful thinking. It's a point that I find pleasure in. It's true, and in my book, an honorable position. But it cannot stand as proof. Which is kind of my standing objection to atheism: lack of proof does not constitute proof in itself. That we cannot prove God's existence does not logically prove his non-existence Even Mr. Hitchens says so, preferring the term antitheist, which implies a dispute with the concept of deity.

Given the range of intellectual debates, I find the one about God's existence unengaging. On the one side, it's an examination of nothingness -- a favorite topic of the twentieth century, and one I find a little short on nutrition. The other side argues with passion for an abstraction. My passions tend to require more substance. If there were a polytheism club, I might join in. Seems like polytheism might have more logic to it, and certainly more fun.

Fortunately, there is much more to our friend, Mr. Hitchens, than his passion for nothingness. I followed him casually for years and years, greedily reading any essay and review I came across. I always had time for him, and I suppose this is as good a moment as any to say au revoir -- or not, I guess he would insist. He had intellect; he had courage. That some found him pompous doesn't surprise me and doesn't sway me. That some wrote him off because of his political convictions in later life does not surprise me, not does it sway me. I grew up with enough idiot political dogma, left and right, to discount politics as a measure of anything but one's intolerance and lack of humor.

Small minds latch on to conclusions rather than acknowledge the thought that leads to them. I didn't always agree with Hitchens, but I always enjoyed hearing him out. Intelligence is a pleasure, and such a scarce pleasure among the American Right these days, among a political movement that openly distrusts intellect. One can be forgiven for accepting that conservative positions are by definition anti-rational.

In fact, the human mind looks for and wants something to respect in one's opposition, and this is one of the sorest deprivations in the American political scene now. It bleeds us all of dignity and self-respect.

In one of the videos -- and I have to paraphrase because I don't log in to You Tube sober -- an interviewer tells him that so-and-so says he's just a loud-mouth, fat ass drunkard. Hitchens, who has already lost considerable weight and hair in his battle with cancer. 'Well, and what's wrong with that?' he replies, a wonderful, parting ambiguity. Indeed.

Travelogue 443– April 27
Encanto

Take a right at the Burger King.

I've had to stop in a panaderia to ask directions. It's too hot out to wander and discover. Take a right, she says, at the Burger King. The panaderia has an open tile floor and glass cases along two walls. Along the third are some barren shelves. Along the third is the dusty window. Inside the cases are Latin cookies and cakes.

I return to the dense midday air. I find the Burger King, just past Popeye Motors, where the owner is standing outside operating a sound system, shouting at passers-by and playing salsa. He has a big blow-up Homer Simpson swaying in the sea breezes.

The city of Ponce is named after the great grandson of Ponce de Leon. Young Ponce was the leader of those who settled the current site of the city in the seventeenth century. His illustrious ancestor -- member of Columbus's second expedition and explorer of the Sunshine State, which he named Florida -- old Castilian for refuge-for-those-with-bad-taste -- was the first Spanish governor of the island. It seems only fair that the island's second city should be named after his family. The first city was named for John the Baptist, and I'm sure he felt that that was fair, all things considered. Originally Columbus had named the entire island -- Boriquen to native peoples -- after old Saint John, but subsequent travelers became accustomed to calling it the Rich Port, and the moniker stuck, demoting the austere saint to capital city.

I've set aside a day to see more of the island. The conference has confined me to San Juan. I decide on Ponce as my destination because I happen to see an article about an exhibit from the Prado at the Museo de Arte in Ponce. It's on the southern, Caribbean coast of Puerto Rico, whereas San Juan is situated on the northern, Atlantic shore. I've rented a car for the drive.

There is a haze over the morning, a gentle threat of rain. I sit out the early traffic, inching forward along several highways across downtown while listening to salsa music and compulsively adjusting the air conditioning. Then I reach the incline leading out of the city. The traffic quickens. The buildings disperse, and I'm over the ridge.

The interior is shadowed by the clouds. It's mountainous. It's tropical, but not in any cinematic way -- no skyless, Avatar jungles where you must wield the machete. This jungle belongs to a low-lying, seascape category of tropical, serious in its verdant fertility, carpeting the rugged hills, but showing a certain amiability and lack of ambition.

The landscape of Puerto Rico seems to unfurl in fast forward. You've studied the maps; the names come too fast. This is a small island. I've left the oceanside bowl that San Juan occupies. Already I'm descending into Caguas, a town that appears on the maps to be almost midway across the isla. There's only one more major valley and its major town inland. Beyond the lip of that second bowl, I spy the blue Caribbean horizon.

Before I search for the Museo, I tour the town center. The sun has banished the threat of storms. I stop in the wonderfully named Plaza Las Delicias, ornamented by a fountain with goofy lions spitting water, with statues of civic leaders of old; with the cathedral; and with a red- and black-striped nineteenth-century firehouse -- the first built in Puerto Rico; with old-timers sitting on benches in their sweaty shirts and bantering.

I'm fortunate to park one block from the notably pleasant Cafe Cafe. Anyone visiting Ponce must stop in. The walls are covered in local art; the tables are local art, painted over by a local, tattooed boy who signs as 'ManWe'. In this festive atmosphere, taking respite from the heat under the slow ceiling fans, I have the best food and coffee of the trip. I'm reluctant to venture out again, but I must in the name of art.

Take a right at the Burger King. In this humidity, the street past the Burger King is torture, featuring the interminable facades and grounds of public buildings that in extreme climates can only be seen as instruments of torture. Why did I walk?

The exhibit from the Prado is dominated by El Greco and Goya, neither of whom are favorites -- a fact I can confirm after another viewing, the former weird in all the wrong ways, and the latter completely unremarkable in my eyes. Mois, reductionist?

I'm in a mood. I stroll the air-conditioned halls, and I dismiss pieces I would usually marvel over: I'm a sucker for Renaissance and Baroque classicism on any other day. Today, I'm drawn to the Museo's prized permanent collection of Pre-Raphaelite art. There I find the usual red-headed beauties dwelling in worlds of intense detail and glittering color. The sheen, the romanticism, the weeping symbolism is usually too much for me. Maybe the Latin milieu suits this art well. I'm drawn in and ready to shed a tear for beauty and truth -- though I don't, quite.

Inspired, I will now make my way back to the car, and I will drive to the sea. I set out, pushing through the thick air, past the blank-eyed civic halls and past Homer and back to the Cafe Cafe for a quick shot of caffeinated fortitude. The center of Ponce is fascinating, a kind of funny art installation of its own, fragile stands of plaster and brick set like game pieces in the glaring sun. So many buildings have become empty shells, some leaving only free-standing bricks facades with windows looking in on high grass and wild flowers. The blocks are short; the streets are alleys; one walks them much as one might the halls of the precious museo.

I stand at the edge of the Caribbean sea. It's a blustery day. The winds are kicking up whitecaps all the way out. As I look south toward South America, I have to hold my cap on. To the guy on the other side of the Caribbean, it must look like I'm saluting.

Travelogue 442– April 22
Rum Diaries

The crabs move gingerly across the sand. They are pink, and it's as though they are tender from sun burn, returning from the beach as the sun hangs low over the condos and hotels to the west, as the first tones of crab pink creep into the ocean air. They are heading for safety underneath the planks of the deck. They seem to see me, watching them from a god-like height. They hesitate; they scuttle to the side. They dig among the sand and leaves beneath the broad-leafed trees. My gaze returns to the horizon. It is a straight line. It is blue. Everything resounds with the rolling of gentle waves.

The Pakistani has delivered me safely into the hands of the next stewards of travel, to the diligent airline employees and vigilant mavens of airport security, and to the pilots who tell stories to each other in the cockpit to stay awake. And I have logged my hours above the earth, flying toward the west, aiding the sun in turning the day toward conclusion.

I didn't sleep well during the night, so as soon as I'm seated on the plane, as soon as we're on our way, I nod off. My head swings from side to side across my chest. I wake and see the cities. I wake and see valleys under benign clouds. And then I wake and there is only the ocean. And again it's ocean. I am not able to stay awake, though the view becomes miraculous, and I sense that the order of dreams and waking has been upset.

The ocean is glowing. There are patches that are a bright aquamarine, a color almost green, and glowing as though there are lights just below the surface. Small islands appear with curious shapes, boasting strands of white sand and lagoons of dull green, and surrounding them is that glowing aquamarine. There are clouds that are pure white and big as cities, layered and high and molded into all types of detail. There are faces in them, somber civil servants from centuries past. They leave shadows on the surface of the ocean, detached and lost as ghosts. And then we're approaching for landing, descending over windblown waves.

Now the crabs are abandoning the beach. So are the people. The day is done. The sun is leaving the sky to cool. Above, a sliver of moon brightens. Along the straight road of the horizon, purple clouds are forming in a line, like priests in robes, progressing silently forward on pilgrimage. The waitress arrives with my rum. She returns to the long patio bar, where ice is dished into plastic cups, echoing like the work of bulldozers miles away. On the beach, sharp lights from mobile phones bob like fireflies.

Travelogue 441– April 21
Via Brevis

My appointment is at 6am.

I am waiting on Hoyne Avenue. Hoyne Avenue is not much of an avenue. Two cars could not pass between the parked ones. The buildings are humble. The avenue dead-ends just south, and Mary mentions there's a Target on the other side of the dead end. She repeats it several times, and suddenly Target is a landmark of some significance.

Right at 6am, the taxi arrives. The driver lets me in, and we set off. He asks about my home, my trip. He looks more closely at me over his shoulder, with the casual intensity of a pro. He's been driving for five years now.

I'm in Chicago, just for one night. Stephanie and Mark have driven me there from Michigan, and we all have stayed the night at Mary's on Hoyne Avenue. Past the Target and not too far away is the center of Lincoln Square. Mary says it's quaint. I haven't got my big city glasses on yet; I am able to discern only the slightest variation among the blocks of two- and three-story brick. There is a kind of main street happening. There is a string of small restaurants, which include our Mexican place. It's tiny, of course, packed carefully with tables and with suggestive decor, and there is a small crowd waiting to sit. We join them, standing awkwardly at the entrance, holding our bottles. It seems that very few restaurants in Chicago can manage a liquor license, and patrons are encouraged to bring their own. We've brought a bottle of wine and a plastic thermos of margaritas. Mary found a bottle of tequila and a bottle of mix that dated back to her housewarming party. We figure it's worth the chance.

I'm fascinated by the lives of big city taxi drivers and so I step right into this one's trap. I ask how the day or the night is going. Long, he says. He's been driving twenty-one hours. He says it's almost impossible to stay awake after twenty-one hours of driving. I nod compassionately, and glance at the road. He tells me it's good to have someone to talk to. 'After this many hours, nothing else works,' he says. 'Coffee.' He shakes his head. 'Food.' He shakes his head. "It takes a good, intense dialogue with someone. You know?' And so, for twenty minutes, my life depends on my conversation.

The time difference should work in my favor, but the margaritas and the late night, the futon bed and the anxieties of travel have worked on me. Last night I lay in bed thinking of next stops and next stops. This morning I'm dizzy with it all.

He asks about my work. I tell him about Ethiopia. He asks, 'Is it true that all NGOs are agents of American policy?' I cautiously say no, I don't think so. He says he gets a lot of mercenaries in his taxi, guys with military gear saying they work for NGOs, heading off to international locales. He sizes me up again in a long glance and a sly smile. 'Are you sure you're not military? I could see you with a sniper rifle.' I say, thank you, I'm flattered, but I've never even held a gun.

This is a suspicion that tails me like a spook. Short hair, long hair, grubby clothes or neat, it doesn't matter, people are always thinking I'm CIA. I'm sure it follows most international travelers in the choking modern atmosphere of conspiracy theory. I usually find humor in the idea of the CIA being super villains behind thousands of perfectly orchestrated mishaps around the globe every day, knowing how hard it is for most human beings simply to get out the door on time in the morning with matching socks. But there you go.

No, sorry, friend. I'm sadly trapped inside the very persona I present to you. His persona is far more interesting, He's half Pakistani. He sports the kind of long, frizzy beard that triggers odd muscle twitches in Middle America. He has a broad grin furnished with even, white teeth. He's big-boned and leans far back in his seat. His diction is educated.

'There's no freedom of press anywhere in the world like freedom of the press in Pakistan,' he declares. He paints a picture of innumerable factions writing continuous streams of abuse about generals and presidents alike. Karachi comes alive through his words, a sprawling megalopolis ready to skip to the head of the line. Did I know that before Bangladesh broke away, Pakistan was the third largest nation on Earth -- in population, of course?

We make it safely to O'Hare. He takes a last cunning look. 'And you're sure ...?' I'm sure. Are you going back, I ask him. 'Next summer, insh'Allah. That's why I'm pulling these crazy shifts.' Ah, well, may you find steady conversation. And the same for your pilot.

Travelogue 440– April 19
Pax Brevis

There's something like peace here. The sun hasn't risen yet, but he's throwing forward the fire in his soul, tinting the clouds red, his ruddy fingers thrusting forth in silent and exuberant mastery. This is my world. Every day this is my world.

I've been up since before the stirring of light. I lay on my back, waiting for the undefined moment when I think I can stir. In the meantime, I gather up fragments of the previous day.

The back porch sits high above the Thornapple River. We overlook not the other side of the river but an island. There are houses in there, but it appears to be uninterrupted woods. At riverside, there's a small, attenuated meadow. Half a dozen deer are chasing each other playfully. There's a flash of white, a bald eagle rising to his perch.

Entertainment is throwing the ball for dog, a bull-necked little guy named Chompers. He demonstrates great joy for us in his devotion to the ball. It's with undiminished and always new enthusiasm that he growls and chews on the durable plastic, tosses it at our feet.

My readers have been clamoring for a renewal of the blog. Clamoring! I sort through hundreds of emails every day: there's one from that young man who insists on calling himself 'Snooger', and who insists he hails from Michigan, the hallowed ground in which I awaken today. Snooger clamors.

And so I dress, and I stumble down the unlit stairs of the house to begin another day. I stumble into the unlit garage. I put on the clumsy shoes made for the beautiful Cannondale bicycle. I push the bike toward the door, but stop when I see there is a ladybug on the threshold. Gingerly I step over her, lifting the light-as-air bike frame.

I put on my gloves, though I discover that it's warm. The sky is neither a night sky nor a day sky. Between the web of tree branches, the color is a sober and muted blue. I mount the cycle and click the shoes into place. I set off down the first steep hill, coasting among the high trees, away from the river.

Almost two weeks I've been here. In a few days, I set off for more exotic places. Peace has been welcome. Peace is always timely.

Minnesota was her usual placid self, but her quiet hid deadly snares: like the break-in perpetrated on my innocent rental car, and the loss of my entire traveling self, stowed away as it was in that wonderfully durable bag from Target. All gone. A few weeks later, my hip rebels against the training schedule. I watch from shore as my aspirations for the May half marathon tank, sinking into metaphorical depths stained the bruised colors of a sunset very like advancing age. I leave for Michigan.

In the tiny township of Ada, there is a cafe that opens early enough for me. It opens early enough for a twittering covey of high school girls. They commandeer the next table and giggle about boys. It's true! I would never conjure such a bland image, but they literally giggle about boys. There's a new boy at school. I went on a date last night. Ooh!

I step out to admire the reach of fiery Helios. He smites the clouds with rare shouts of hope, so all-encompassing one doesn't sense a thing. But they enclose the skies. They embrace the earth.

Travelogue 439– March 13
My Town

In the real Amsterdam – not the right British variety – the houses are hundreds of years old and they lean and bulge like crooked teeth, brick the color of clay, the color of decrepit rose, they lean over narrow alleys of buckling brick. I'm walking through history, climbing the steep little inclines of merry bridges over placid canals, bridges that describe tight arcs like jokes.

I'm entering his neighborhood, a tiny made-up district – yes, made up – like a fairy tale, except dirtier, pulled up from the waters of the Ij. It's an island, a creation of land-hungry burgomasters creating a set for the Golden Age. It's a district that has a future as a home to thousands of Eastern European Jews. So many that his street is destined to change from Breestraat to Jodenbreestraat.

I can hear his voice. Although he grew up in the provincial town of Leiden, and didn't move to Amsterdam until his mid-twenties, when he was already gaining a name, he's saying, 'This is my town.' He adopts a sensual swagger as he takes to the streets, swaying in his characteristic gown and floppy cap, and he claims everyone there as his own. He has the cannibalistic appetite of those in his profession.

'The beggars are mine,' he says. 'The street musicians, the street walkers, the street vendors are mine. I know their bodies, misshapen and asymmetrical. I recognize the marks of the years and gravity on the flesh. I know their smiles, teeth missing like gaps that sudden fires make along the street. I know which leg takes his weight; I know which side she lies on. I see their shadows. I know the color of the light in their dens.' And there is no sneer with his claims. They come with a smile of satisfied desire.

His house still stands, now renovated and clean, now standing on a busy boulevard. This is the house of his pride and his shame. He bought it, and almost twenty years later, he lost it to bankruptcy. How does a master go bankrupt? How does a success become a failure in an age known to be Golden? The talent is still there; the money is there.

In his studio, he studies the mirror. He reaches in and strokes the whiskered cheek, reading the texture there by touch. He paces the studio. He stops to pick up a coin, an discovers his apprentices have painted it there as a joke. He admires his extraordinary collections, of prints by his favored masters, Lucas van Leyden, Durer, and others. He admires his collections of armor, armament, spears statuary, and fabrics.

All of this he loses in the bankruptcy. After he loses his wife. It's odd how no reports of rage reach me across the centuries. He adapts; he continues. And maybe it's because he understands the laws of trade so well, citizen of the first republic, citizen of the first modern middle class state, a society founded on commerce.

His wife dies, he starts a long affair with his wife's nurse, a thing that turns to bitter public acrimony. And then the years with his maid, Hendrickje. The church was eventually forced to charge her with 'the acts of a whore,' producing a child out of wedlock as she does, and to ban her from communion. They can't touch him because he is member of no church.

Where there is no royalty, there is respectability. I buy your work, I buy you, the burgomasters say. Am I going to commission for my dear family's portrait? What will the church say? What will they say at Town Hall?

Tourists and students stream by. We have to squeeze by each other on the narrow streets. The tiny world of the centrum makes for intense work for the senses. It's all so close, so concentrated, and so finely detailed by the first and last artist, Time. The cobblestones themselves assert a sort of bourgeois individuality, jostling each other and enforcing sharp attention on the pedestrian. Tourists stumble. They don't want to be distracted by watching their step. They are looking hungrily, claiming the city brick by brick with their eyes. They will bring it home in their cameras. They will own it.

Travelogue 438– March 6
Not Like Any Other
Part Two

As predicted, the day of the race dawns with rain. I can see its tiny, fleeting craters on the pavement from the seventh floor of my hotel. The scene is utterly silent. I have plenty of time to watch the hypnotizing pattern of its falling. The race isn't until half ten.

My warmup will be a brisk walk in my street clothes, gathering rain on my cap and on my shoulders as I search for anywhere open in Milton Keynes on a Sunday morning. There isn't any. It's a half nine opening for everyone, and by then I need to be stretching and suiting up. I stand outside the Starbucks watching the barista bustling behind the counter. Starbucks stands as a miniature free-standing shop in glass under the high, curving ceiling of the town center's super-mall. Here, the space is like a stadium, circular and open-air. The dome stands above the neighboring rooftops and admits plenty of cold air beneath its eaves. It's actually colder inside than out, the clammy cold of dead concrete.

I find the scene of a street market, where south Asian men are running here and there to set up their shops. I find a collection of jackets and walk quickly among the racks looking for something cheap and light to wear for the race. Finding nothing suitable, I decide I'm going to have to rough it.

Back in my room, I find the old cotton sweatshirt I packed for training in the cold. This will be the best I can do. I jog to the starting line on the other side of town, timing my arrival perfectly, climbing over the barriers and in among the runners a minute before the gunshot. My competitors stand around shifting from foot to foot cracking jokes, as Brits will. 'I hear the course is all downhill,' one says wryly. 'It is,' says another. 'Except the bits that are uphill.'

We're off. I set a comfortable pace right away, thinking of last year's races, in which I started too fast and paid for it. People are passing me for the first several miles, but I hold steady. After two miles the sweatshirt is soaked. I peel it off and throw it beside the road.

The rain in England is quiet and diffident. It falls gently, and seems to calm the spirit. The hills glow with a warmer green. I have rarely found it to be much of a hindrance to life here. But the British rain is imperious; it will not suffer its reign to be questioned. One accepts it, but one doesn't defy it. The damp penetrates, and pulls one to earth.

I've never had to run a race in England in the rain. In three races encompassing a year and a half, I've had pleasant weather. I'm thinking how bad can it be?

Every race has a story, especially the long ones. I start at a pace I think can hold. I find out at the second and third miles that I'm behind my best pace. A decision has to made. I speed up. I'm able to hold it. Mile Six is particularly successful. I start passing people. I start matching my best time.

Then, just as I approach Mile Nine, and just as I'm telling myself that the next two miles will determine the race, something happens. The weather turns. It's the temperature. Suddenly there's a head wind, and it carries a chill. This rain is on the verge of turning into snow. And I've tossed away the long-sleeves. By the end of Mile Nine, the skin on arms and legs is numb. By Mile Eleven, I'm cramping up suddenly and stumbling.

We're running through villages that are little more than crossroads, stone outposts of age-old comforts, inns and pubs and churches. The residents are standing by the road in the freezing rain, clapping and yelling out support. It's hard not to be encouraged by that.

We have run by lakes; we have run alongside canals. By Mile Twelve, we are heading back toward the city. We find a sheltered half mile, where the arctic winds don't blow, and I find a second or third wind of my own. I find it in me to finish, even pushing my stiff limbs into a burst of speed.

It is the stretch past the finishing line that is most challenging. Now that I have stopped, even for only a few moments, all the muscles are screaming in outrage against the madness of running again, even at a jog, back to the hotel. But the rain is set to turn to snow, and I have to get indoors. This half a mile is the most painful of the months of training. Once indoors, I find my fingers are locked in position; I can't get them to grip anything. Slowly, clumsily, I peel off the clothes. The touch of lukewarm water on the fingers is excruciating.

And today, in London, as I reach the postage stamp beauty at the end of Devonshire Street, both bags across my shoulder, my legs are stiff and sore. It's a day suited to a stroll, more made for a race than yesterday – as was the day before the race, as well. That's the luck of the draw.

I take a working break in a natural foods shop. On the second floor, there is a cafe where I can set up my cafe and have killer carrot cake. The clientele is nothing less than posh, earning every accented phoneme of that loaded word. They sit in style and state, and they glance around the room. As I watch them, I can't help looking over my shoulder with a shiver, sensing the imminent appearance of Angelina Jolie in an evening gown, like a haunting. But no one ever appears, except the waiter with my cake, and a much more welcome sight is he.

Marlyebone turns into a stamp again and recedes, and I walk painfully back to Euston Station, under the gaze of the strangely past-futuristic BT tower, odd spoke to my odd kingdom.

Travelogue 437– March 5
Not Like Any Other
Part One

There's a picture ahead, where the street ends. It could be Amsterdam, with its high, narrow house fronts of brick, its rounded gables. And yet it's clearly not. As I approach it, and as the picture opens with unfolding perspective into reality, it becomes unmistakeably British. The brick is too red. The street too tidy, the scene too distinct.

I'm taking a stroll, if a 'stroll' can be burdened by two bags over the shoulder. I have a break between two meetings in the Euston Square area. And I know it's not too terribly far to my current favorite among London neighborhoods, the heart of which beckons to me through that postage stamp vision between buildings at the end of the street.

One of London's attractions is the way it unfolds, one intriguing district after another, each with its frank of beauty and history. I've forgotten exactly where Marylebone is in relation to Euston Square. Graham has to point me in the right direction. It takes me a half hour to walk there, with luggage on my back and carrying in my muscles the lactic memory of yesterday's arduous half marathon.

In each direction, I catch suggestive glimpses of neighboring areas of the city, University College, Regents Park, Oxford Circus, Portland Place and its embassies, Baker Street. Each image resonates with personal memory and with a feeling for the variety of the city.

I'm just back from a venture into another corner of this country. In the early years of my acquaintance with England, there was only London and Bath. The diversity within London was enough to nourish me for a long time. But other locations called, and I'm discovering a crazy patchwork to this tiny bit of map.

My running habit is, of course, one way I explore. Just over a week ago was my first race of the season, 'season' being defined as one of my two annual excursions outside Ethiopia. This race was a 10K that I found online. I didn't have to travel at all for this, the race being located in Bath. And yet, funny England will present variety in constancy.

What does not communicate itself well across the internet is the British fetish for roughing it. This was not a road race. And I knew that much already, as the website made clear there were hills and trails. What it doesn't mention is that the race is a cross country race, and cross country in the true spirit in which the Brits first conceived of the sport. By the second mile, we are stumbling through deep mud on a trail that itself barely maintains its hold on a steep and wooded hillside. Each runner churns the mess a bit more; some resign to a puffing march instead of any pretense to running; some – like me – plunge forward, sliding into tree trunks and courting disaster. It's a two-lap course, and I quickly figure out that the rougher patches are where I excel, conditioned by the mountain running in Ethiopia. Here's where I pass people – the same people who pass me right back on any grassy flats.

A week later, I'm en route to a town named Milton Keynes, and not named after any iconic economists. No, the name – perhaps more suggestive of a droll and obscure author and surely a drunken intimate of Peter O'Toole's in the day – the name has a long and logical and very British history, deriving from a certain Middleton located in the lands of the Norman Cahaines family.

The town stands separately from the village, however, and represents something very unique in my English travels. See, the town of Milton Keynes was implemented in the 60s as a 'New City', an experiment in urban planning toward creating suburban space for a burgeoning population of London.

The town is about forty minutes by train northwest out of London Euston. There is some open farming country on the way, rolling hills trimmed by hedges, roamed by round sheep, cut by tidy country roads. One of the last villages before MK is Bletchley, now a suburb of the suburb, a dot on the map with an august name. During the Second World War, Bletchley was home to Alan Turing and to the Government Code and Cypher School, where German codes were cracked like walnuts, some by 'Colossus', one of the first computers constructed to torment humanity.

Then there appears the 'New City' on its hill, a collection of 60s architectural gems and some of the only grid-organized streets you'll find in Britain. Like most human projections of paradise onto the innocent world, Milton Keynes is a bit spooky. The wide avenues cross the land that once harbored three organic English villages, crossing the ancient farmland with a certain desolate authority, offering more austerity than promise, lined with dull-blue glass beauties that Haile Selassie would have found the acme of sophistication. What vitality that still clings to the place, creeps indoors along the bleak corridors of extensive malls, short, square tunnels featuring a limited and repetitive menu of chain outlets.

Never mind. I'm here to run.

Travelogue 436 – February 23
Roll

well past the midway point of this our life,

don't i now find myself again confounded by the sure,

by the sylvan darknesses of dead-eye probity?

In another wry display of synchronicity, I'm presented with a photo of myself from 2005, suddenly displayed alongside an interview. I'm baffled by the appearance of this photo, until I check google images. What the architects of days may have found amusing is that I'm working on the very moment that produced that photo in my shabby little memoir.

It's July and I have returned to the US in time to enjoy a blessed Minnesota summer, when events conspire to spell 'success' for us in the sand. Carolyn has made the connection that leads to the wealthy family behind a large American trust. One young scion of that house is traveling in Africa. Friends have whispered in his mother's ear, and he has consented to a visit to our first school. I am forced to board a plane for Ethiopia, now well into rainy season.

The photo is official, a product of the visit. It captures me in my disheveled glory in the early days of the Ethiopian enterprise, the expression on my face a fair representation of my uncertainty, even my dread and regret. I have a question for lenses. Am I doing the right thing?

The visit to the school went well, and the generous young man from the wealthy family funded our next two projects. My fate was sealed, and after the visitors had dried their eyes and left, after the children had gone home to their unlit huts, I sat on the doorstep alone, under damp skies, and I watched all content drain from my mind. I watched the highest leaves in the eucalyptus sway in the mild breezes. This was to be home, now, it would seem.

It's not 2005 anymore, in case any of my readers have lost track. It has not been for some years. I'm not in Addis Ababa. I'm taking a run along the towpath beside a canal that itself is older than Addis Ababa, carved from the British landscape by enterprising men during the youth of empire.

The ground is winter hard, studded by rocks. The sky above is both half-full and half-empty of clouds, a meteorological stew for all seasons. And in between the resolute earth and fickle sky is me, winning my battles while losing the war against Time. And beside me, surrounding me in fact, is landscape in somber green. The hills, as revealed by winter's bare trees, are pre-occupied by silences and meditations, probably meditations on spring. Faced with the responsibility of springtime, how will they fare? What concatenation of stone, what divinity dressed in mud, decreed this weary cycle of things? Once spring has blossomed, it will feel very like joy, they know.

I've come out today to share the solitude and silence of the hills. According to my rigorous schedule preparing for the approaching half marathon, I should have dropped in on the gym for a light routine. But the hills required my company. And the world of music video and sweaty triumph seem altogether too bright for me.

One mile is like another, but for the exquisite subtlety of unfolding countryside along the course of the Avon. Sometimes the bluffs climb in protest against the smug propositions of peace, and then they gently surrender. The prospect opens. The fat sheep graze, blessed in their ignorance of opportunity. The grass is always green in Britain.

If only Britain were mine. But Motion is dictat; it rules the very molecules in my tender knees. The landscapes must each be abandoned to their terrible musings. And the life of jarvis retains for life the title of 'jarvis travels'.

There is a ripple being sent across the surface of the green water of the canal. It is a slight shiver, a faint and passing register of the chill. It arrives at the hull of a sleeping house boat. There the movement stops. Smoke curls from the chimney pipe above the narrow boat. Someone might be reading inside, warm underneath the blanket that warmed him yesterday. He might be pausing, just as I pass, to dream about the next place. When he does move, he will stand on the deck of the boat, towering above the roof of his abode, steering clear of the stone walls of the canal. He will advance at the pace of a walk. He will tie to his new moorings. He will return to his blankets. There was no need to pack them.

Travelogue 435 – February 15
The Goose Abides

The ice is breaking up in the canals. In the small canals, it has cracked into clear-edged little sheets. The fat white geese step gingerly across the tilting islands, skating slightly with each step. The ducks bathe where the yellowing ice has sunk below the surface. In the larger canals, the ice has retreated to the sides.

Europe's deep freeze of last week has subsided. Temperatures are solidly above freezing. The skies have resumed a kind of formal grey brooding, shedding intermittent drizzles throughout the day.

I've gotten a late start, so by the time I arrive at the Bagel and Bean, just off the Schinkel Canal, the place is crowded. I still score one of the round, green tables by the window. The place is intimate. The place has been staffed by he same few for several years. They serve me a bowl of yogurt accompanied with tiny dishes of stuff to add, tasty and healthy, raisins, granola, wheat germ, honey, lecithin, bananas. I'm happy. The computer winks; I am summoned.

I slept almost to nine. After a month made up mostly of 5am starts, this feels luxurious. Especially since I was in bed by seven. Amsterdam is a short respite on a crazy trip. I knew even as I boarded my first plane that this trip would be crazy. It would be immersion.

There's a joy to work. There's abandon. I dare say there's amnesia built into the hardest regimens. And I can't say, strolling beside the quiet canal, what it is I've accomplished in a month's craziness. Checking items off a list has as its end abolishing the list. They're all gone.

But I'll retain the image of the fat white geese sliding along their bobbing slabs of ice, the overarching unconsciousness in their eyes, as though their own blessed plumpness were the law that held water and ice in their thrall. They step and they slide; they peek at the sky. They put another ice sheet behind them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 433 – January 27
Death, the Entertainer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 432 – January 22
Scrimmage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 431 – January 15
Tracking

Blink. And who am I today?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Selam naw?

Travelogue 430 – January 12
The Lack of Light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 429 – December 30
The Good Bad Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 428 – December 9
The Cape

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 427 – December 6
Mother

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 426 – December 5
Misty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 425 – December 1
The Will

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 424 – November 29
Saba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 423 – November 21
Coach is Dancing Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 422 – November 17
Meat

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 421 – November 11
Defiance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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