Travelogue 625 – June 14
Hode and the Metro

I’m walking toward the Metro. That means leaving the apartment complex and walking among the subdued Sunday morning neighbourhood, between rows of quiet flats by the small playground usually resounding with boisterous shouts. Past the two-storey flats facing each other across a pedestrian walkway, I cross one more silent side street and there is a flight of stairs up to the open-air transit center, where buses swing round their circle of stops to the right, where trams rest at a series of covered stops dead ahead. Beyond that I enter the Metro station.

I’m getting used to this strung out feeling. Baby is six days old. She had a rough night last night, and the three adults of the house spent hours comforting her and discussing high strategy. There’s an awful lot of problem-solving when it comes to babies. And it seems so many problems originate in the stomach. Here my mind inserts the Amharic word for stomach, hode, which carries something more with it than the biology. Witnessing Baby’s struggles makes me wonder about humanity and the hode. The cycles of it come so surely, so quickly, the feeding, the contentment, the troubling stirrings of the digestive system, the varieties of its mild misfirings and bubbling workings, then the respite and rest until the next high tide of hunger. I’m fascinated by the urgency and the relentlessness of this cycle. Freud imagined civilization as what comes after, or even as a product of, the regulation of what is primitive. The primitive would consume all time and attention with a chaotic and unrestrained will if allowed to. But well before instinct is this issue of the hode. How much have we transcended these struggles of infancy? Don’t we all, at some sublimated level, twitch our way through each day, from hunger to stimulation, to digestive distress and remedy, and rather than crying when the heavy doses of coffee turn sour we snap at the spouse, scream on the highway, or botch something at work and irritably blame the system? Or we eagerly accept the label of ‘depressed’ because, of course, in the twenty-first century there will be a pill for it. The result must be a sandpapering of all surfaces into smooth contentment and productivity.

Anyway, the adults in the room came up with some marvellous theories, but none of them seemed to make much difference. Baby fell asleep on her own schedule, and took the secrets of her pain with her into dreamland.

There’s no place as anonymous as a Metro station. In most cases, there lacks the orienting features that nature provides. These are just chambers of concrete, after all, accessed by tunnels that are all dug and lined to uniformity. There’s no sun or city skyline, no paths or line of hills, no street signs. Engineers pal up with practitioners of design of one stripe or another, and they lay tile, pave, paint, and place photos and art pieces, and all this helps to identify the station from inside the train, and to entertain the waiting commuter, but it does little to actually place one inside the belly of the underground beast.

Then one day you discover that you know where you want to stand on the platform. You know where you need to be on the train in order to exit at the most convenient spot. At the destination, you know where the stairs are and where is the old, cranky escalator. You turn at the head of the stairs without having to think. You know where each exit will place you on the street overhead. These are the signs of citizenship.

You know what behaviours to expect from fellow passengers, the rush for the turnstiles, the dead-ahead walk eyes averted, jaws set grimly, the odd and indirect dance on the platform, and then the funny drift forward when the train comes in, strangely competitive, as though we’ve all spotted our door at once and there will be a struggle. This is the way of citizens, each facing the day’s battle with digestive issues as best they can, sharing if possible the sour experience with a stranger.

It’s Sunday, so things are quiet. There are plenty of seats on the Metro. I emerge in the Eendrachtsplein, the square of harmony, where my Rotterdam life seems to have begun, a seedy little brick-lined square, where they board up the glass-lined entries to the Metro on holidays and long weekends, where I often stop in the mornings, pouring the first bitter coffee down my throat and starting the gaseous story of the day.

Travelogue 624 – June 10
Baby

And now she’s here. Two days old. She arrived six days late, and she didn’t come without a struggle. Menna was a hero, bringing her into this world. It was a privilege to be there. As it happens, I was first contact (aside from the very close contact with mommy, of course,) literally catching her as she entered the world.

Waking again, this time at home. It’s 6am. She is stirring. Like she was at 12 and like she was at 2am, and perhaps there were a few other times I slept through. She is making those amazing sounds, like a sweet whimper, sometimes a songbird’s sound, sometimes a sigh, sometimes the mwa, mwa-a-a that comes with a contortion of her face into the mask of tragedy. It makes me laugh every time. These are really the sounds of a siren, irresistible.

Her hands wave like the fronds of an otherworldly plant, the fingers running through an obscure set of positions, like signs from a Hindu dance. Her arms shudder through a long stretch, and she yawns. I stop to watch.

Her face is so expressive, but it’s expression uninformed by society. It communicates, but the messages are secret ones. I can’t know, and she won’t retain them. The feelings behind them are mercurial, passing across the fresh skin of the face, painting quick suggestions and then surrendering to more, messages in sand.

Her dreams seem intense. Her breathing is rapid and shallow. She moans in a high, windy way as she breathes. Her eyelids pulse in a regular rhythm. The eyes even open a crack, but she isn’t seeing. When she’s awake those eyes open and she looks tentatively into the space of the room. There is a wrinkle of befuddlement or concern on her brow. The eyes won’t focus yet. She is capturing only blurred form and movement. None of it can make any sense yet.

But there’s the rub, and there’s the fascination to baby. What sense? Making sense without sense must be a wonder. It all must make perfect sense without parameters for sense.

Baby whimpers as she dreams. Her leg twitches as she dreams. Menna says maybe she’s dreaming of running. I say, how does she know about running?

We wake. The first waking is in the hospital, the four of scattered among makeshift beds, as though we were tossed in with the luggage. The nurse knocks and quickly comes in, voicing a brisk optimism. This is the gebortecentrum, the birth center. Only optimism will make sense among people drunk with sleeplessness and biological success. She must take tests. She talks us through it all, including the policy behind it, even though we are only staring blankly and silently back with exhaustion.

There is something benign and insistent about the Dutch health system’s intervention in parenting. I can’t help admiring and appreciating it, even as I am reminded of recent reading among the works of Foucault, who describes power since the Enlightenment as a process acted out on the body. There is nothing private about biology.

Baby has spent much of her first night in the hospital crib, which is little more than a plastic tub. I’ve taken it off its stand and set it on the bed next to me. Menna needs her sleep. Baby is made content with a finger to suck on. She sleeps fitfully, sighing, waking to look for daddy’s finger, dreaming again about all those shapeless children she hasn’t met yet and running with abandon in the park.

Travelogue 623 – June 4
Summer’s Bridge

I owe this to Batu. We are strolling in bright sunshine. We are strolling across the Erasmus Bridge, over the expansive waters of the Maas, the miraculous waters as they appear to me now, through the eyes of the woman who spent her whole life in Addis Ababa. We stop to watch the huge barges pass underneath us, the huge barges made small. We take photos. In Ethiopian fashion, she is holding an umbrella up as shield against its powers.

We will cross to the Wilhelmina Pier. We will sit for a while among the celebrants of sunshine in the outdoor patio of the New York Hotel. We are there near the tip of the pier, looking out over the river as though from the prow of a great ship. We find a table that is half shaded by the table umbrella, so that I can have the sun on my back and she can continue to hide. She will repeatedly ask what time it is, still marvelling that the sun is this high in the sky on into the evening.

I owe this to Batu. Only a few days ago, we made her go out on a day more common to Holland, blustery and overshadowed by swift clouds, swept with recurring showers. She was miserable. ‘Does it get any colder than this?’ she asked in surprise. It had dipped down into the 50s. Her fingers were hurting, she said.

Menna and Batu had volunteered to watch me run a 10K. I had had misgivings once I saw the weather report, but they insisted. And it seemed like a good chance to see Den Haag, neighbouring town with the cosmopolitan flair to complement Rotterdam’s stolid, business-day vibe.

This was the aristocrat’s town, built around the count’s palace. It has the open-avenue stateliness of a capital. Sometimes you still see the town’s original name here and there, ‘s Gravenhage, meaning something like the Count’s Hedge.

Not far from the central station there is a large park called the Haagse Bos, open meadows and small stands of words with walking trails. This was the peaceful and scenic setting for the 10K set. Unfortunately for spectators, the start and finish were in a rather stark and unromantic spot under a railway overpass.

We arrived late, a family tradition when Menna and I go to races together, and I have had to climb in among the crowd of runners at the back, just as they are counting down for the start. I’d had to abandon Menna and her mother among the wet asphalt lots, hoping they will find a dry spot to wait. Fortunately it was only a 10K, and I would be back relatively quickly.

The race was on. The worst weather for a spectator can be the best for a runner. The summer chill felt perfect. The rain was light. It only enhanced the silence of the park and focussed my attention on the puddles of road and the mud of the park trails. There was only the sound of everyone’s steps and the steady exertion.

Just past the finish line, I saw Menna. She was waving happily, and bid me stop in the runner’s chute for a pose of victory. I was relieved. She seemed fine. We circled back toward the registration tents. We found Batu huddled against a brick wall, shivering under her umbrella, looking shrunken inside her big sweater and her headscarf. I felt so sorry for her. I should never have encouraged them to come along. I led them quickly back toward the train station, new medallion swinging from its ribbon round my neck.

Today we will soak up as much sunshine as it takes to warm poor Batu’s chilled bones. Menna laughs at her. She tells her horror stories about winter here. I wouldn’t know how to say that the mild winters are something I love about this country. I can cycle around town year-round.

The weather is so bad, Menna affirms, as we enjoy the blue skies. Why was everyone always fighting for this place? She’s been learning some history. She has some trouble differentiating the various eras of Dutch history, events crowding each other in a rush through time. William of Orange and Napoleon are temporal neighbours to her, the two-and-more centuries losing all distinction. Even the characteristic costume of each, the ruffles vs. the funny hat, provides no clue to her, raised so far outside the stream of imagery of European culture.

Why fight for little Holland, we ask, gazing over the precious waters heading seaward and glinting with rare sunshine, where just discernible at the far turn of the river are the hundreds of cranes of the port.

Travelogue 622 – May 28
Batu

I hear it again. The clinking of dishes downstairs. It’s Batu, my mother-in-law. She loves that kitchen. And she can’t sit still. Menna is drifting in and out of seep. She has such trouble sleeping these days, for the past month. She habitually spends hours in the middle of the night downstairs in the salon, doing nothing, playing games on her phone. Her stomach hurts. She has heart burn. The baby kicks.

It’s time for me to get up. I resent the kitchen noise, but I’m also grateful. Some mornings, it’s hard to get up. I see outside the window that the clouds have returned. Generally that’s the best measure of how eagerly I will rise from bed in the morning. When Holland is being grey, I will start with melancholy. Is the mind such a simple machine? Sometimes, I’m afraid it is.

Dehnadark, she says with a cheery smile as I come downstairs. Good morning. The smile works; it cheers me a little. I’m facing another day scheduled so heavily that starting feels like leaning into a yoke, feels like I’ll be pushing until bedtime. These days, the sun is shining at bedtime, too.

Menna laughed herself to sleep a night or two ago. I enjoyed that. She was replaying scenes from the day, when we introduced her mother to the city, and to the Metro. First, Batu had to master the transport card. Swipe it and then enter through the gate. The hardest thing with machines is their unforgiving nature. When the gate opens, you must enter. It does not wait; it won’t adapt to the variety of human rhythms. It opens and shuts. Batu was forced to bustle through the narrow gate with a startled look on her face.

Then we had to make it down the escalator. She paused at the top with Menna at her elbow, holding her step in fear, stutter-stepping, clutching onto Menna’s arm, thrusting toes forward and then pulling back, while a line formed behind them. She finally made a short, terrified jump, and she was on the steps. Once she was on, she faced the dismount, and again the machine would not wait. I watched Batu’s face, as she concentrated on the upcoming test. At the bottom, she made another frightened jump, and she was safe on solid ground.

A few of the people held behind her stopped to offer some encouraging words, and Batu smiled without comprehension. The underground train arrived with a rush of wind, and again we were rushing her forward. The doors would not wait. With fresh anxiety, she found herself running. Inside, we breathed again, and we laughed. The train accelerated with a rising hum, and she reached for something to hold onto. She looked at us with wide eyes.

It’s not that transportation in Addis is a picnic. Getting on the mini-buses can be a battle. But it’s a human battle, complete with shouts and elbows. The wayalas shut the van doors themselves, and make sure that everyone and all body parts are inside. There is no impersonal timing mechanism. Here, the people are gentle, and the machines are exacting. It doesn’t matter if only two people are embarking at any stop, that door will shut with the same imperative. The two people will board with the same urgency as fifty.

Batu arrived Monday, after an overnight journey from Addis Ababa. We waited for her in the arrival hall at Schiphol in Amsterdam. And we waited. She called twice, using a phone in baggage claim, the first time to tell us that her baggage was missing, the second time to allow us to talk to an airport staff person. Then we waited again. We drank coffee. We played with the camera. We laughed with a crowd waiting for the parents of a traveller, who were holding up a big, homemade banner and were cheering for everyone who emerged from the baggage claim.

The cheering family were long gone by the time Batu emerged. There was no one left to cheer for her. She emerged wide-eyed, and she pushed a cart piled high with luggage. ‘I found them,’ she said simply. It was time for embraces. We laughed as we walked out of the airport, as she told us the story of being delayed by customs. Habesha travellers regale themselves with stories of what they managed to get through customs. It’s all about the food. Often it’s confiscated. Batu had none taken. She says she looked up at the customs man as he sorted through the contents of her bags, and she said, ‘I’m Ethiopia. We’re a friendly people. We are no trouble.’ She has a sweet smile. She made him laugh.

Now she is already peacefully installed in our little flat. She likes the kitchen. That’s where all her food from Ethiopia is stored. She washes dishes. She puts dishes away. She tidies. Later she will doze in the armchair.

Travelogue 621 – May 14
The Meuse
Part Five

Renting the bicycle was a good idea. A town like Maastricht, a town of medieval proportions, yields itself readily to the tourist on a bike. I’m able to swing around the centrum and catch many sights in the arc of my ride, from the duelling Romanesque basilicas, Sint Servaas and Onze Lieve Vrouw, to the university, to old wall and battlements, and back to the River Meuse.

The rental bike rattles on the cobblestones. I weave along the middle of the lane, looking everywhere but where I’m going, quickly dodging students on their bikes. The lanes curve, and they change all the time, among trees and sudden canals, buildings rising from history, connected by the modern.

I’m back to the river, and I walk the bike up a flight of stairs to the bridge. On the other side there is a complex of modern buildings built around a spacious square. There is an outdoor café there, and I have to stop. The clientele is an international one, from the over-sized blonde Dutch women loudly reviewing paperwork, to the hilarious Australian cyclists who use the f-word with jarring regularity, to the prim Englishman in a suit, who seems proud of his accented Dutch. Across the square comes a line of students pulling suitcases, heading for the bridge. Are they returning from a vacation, enrolling in a summer session? They are so relaxed

I have one more destination. It lies south on this side of the river. I swing onto the bike seat and coast across the square toward the riverside. There is a promenade, and I coast along by the water for a while, until the promenade ends and there is a single narrow walkway still following the river. The city buildings have become progressively more bureaucratic in style, less corporate, and they are growing older, too, by the decade, not by the century. There is an island in the river, a very small one, connected to the riverbank by one slight bridge that I pass underneath. On the island there is a group of brown buildings built in a self-aware style common among international institutions, melding dignity with 80s futurism, high angles to lend scale to small structures.

This is where the Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1992. The treaty created the European Union and the euro. I’m the only tourist here. The European Union is not so popular these days. Elections for the European Parliament send in anti-European members. The re-elected British prime minister is promising to re-negotiate Britain's EU membership in the EU.

It’s amazing to think how quickly things developed in those days. It had only been a few years since the wall had fallen in Berlin. Helmut Kohl was on a union crusade, first uniting Germany and then Europe. Mitterand in France saw his opportunity to anchor the energy of a renewed Germany in a greater Europe. He pushed for an accelerated timeline for the united currency.

We live with the consequences of those heady times, one euro crisis after another, only enhancing the power of the German chancellor over Europe. It’s an interesting dilemma, living with the after-shocks of good intentions.

So I visit this signal place in the history of a new Europe, and I’m alone in contemplating it. Just past the island and its government buildings there is parkland along the riverbank, and a quiet trail leading south through the woods and toward Belgian border. It’s awfully tempting to steer the bike back the way I came earlier this morning, but I have to get back to the train station.

Rotterdam is still a part of the Meuse family of cities, though even the Meuse itself must be defined more loosely the closer it gets to the North sea, where the Rhine and the Scheldt mix in a general rush toward the sea, where rivers unravel like string into thread in the massive delta system. In Rotterdam, the feeling of the calm river valley has given way to the stormy clime of the sea. Green hills have given way to the flat and windy lands of the delta.

Much of the Dutch port of Rotterdam, the biggest in Europe, is called the Europoort, product of a project that predates Mr. Kohl and his union.

Travelogue 620 – May 13
The Meuse
Part Four

There’s a moving carnival set up in the square of St. Servaas. I think I recognize it from Rotterdam, particularly the ride called ‘Das Omen’ set up just below the great basilica of Sint Servaas, the ride’s imposing horror film set façade welcoming children into the ride, the trailer truck behind containing the ride or experience itself, whatever it may be. This is a much more prestigious locale than the one they occupy when they’re in Rotterdam, where they move into an open asphalt lot beside the river near Delfshaven. Every spring they come, and they block my running route by the river. Now we’ve moved into a new flat, I won’t be running by ‘Das Omen’ anymore.

There aren’t too many people around. It’s early. I’m not sure the carnival is open. The weekend is over. I’ve caught the train out of Visé, checking out of the hotel by 7am, standing on the one long platform that serves both directions, waiting with a few early birds for the train to Maastricht. At the train station in Maastricht, I’ve rented a bicycle. I’ve pedalled across the Sint Servaasbrug over the Meuse – this bridge said to be the oldest in the Netherlands -- and into the old center, up the medieval-made-modern street to the Square of Sint Servaas.

There I see the sleeping carnival, set up just under the twin towers and the curving apse Of Sint Servaas. I take a tour around the outside of the church, starting from the accompanying baptistery with a high red tower, called Sint Jan, of course, after the ‘Doper’, or the Baptist. I stare through the protective glass at the famous ‘South Portal’ of the basilica, where the archway features original sculpture from the twelfth century, kings and saints seated in mounting order toward the pointed arch above. I’ve walked along the western wall, the wall become one high brick side of a narrow way, and I’ve emerged on the north side, by the public entrance to the basilica, inside which a booth is set in the cloister and manned by a forlorn lady with a German accent, waiting to collect fees from any visitor. I debate entering, but I have a lot I want to see this morning, including the basilica’s rival church downtown, the Basiliek van Onze Lieve Vrouw, or Notre Dame if they were to speak French here, like they do only a few kilometers away. But they don’t.

They speak Dutch here, and so I feel that little bit more comfortable ordering at the cafe around the corner. I sit outside, facing the square, the square littered with carnival. It’s still a pretty square, in a pretty town.

Maastricht is a small town, but it bears itself with an imperial sauciness. It became Roman with Caesar. The city’s first bridge was a Roman project from Augustus’s time, and they say there are still a few bricks from the original in the old Servaasbrug. Much later it was an imperial city in the heart of the empire of Charlemagne and his heirs. As such, it breathes Holy Roman air, and did for a long time, even as the Middle Ages waned and its power with them. The city thrived in the fluid days of the high medieval, when cities and church, landed aristocracy and kings all played each other in a fantastically complex game of authority, before the religious wars tore the system apart and nationalism marched in. This is the time of Jan van Eyck, the painter, who was born near Maastricht, the time when artists travelled the roads between the various imperial cities, studying and vying for commissions and for court favour.

Cities like Maastricht and Bruges can still boast a lot of flair passed on from that era, when art and architecture were like plumage for the leaders of society. We still enjoy it at our leisure, in these days of cappuccinos and corporate stoicism. We look for the signs of it behind the banners of the carnival.

Travelogue 619 – May 12
The Meuse
Part Three

It’s only fifteen minutes or so on the train to Liège. I’m going to go just long enough to see more of the countryside, and to stroll around the city. It’s Sunday. I don’t expect to see much going on.

It’s a beautiful afternoon, but it is spring in a wet country and clouds are never far. As I wait on the train platform, we are beset by a quick sun shower, clouds piled up in one corner of the sky and shedding their light rains while still the sun shines. By the time the train comes the shower has passed.

The ride south alongside the Meuse is pretty as expected, but the character of the valley changes as we go. The bluffs beside the train, on the left, the eastern side, grow and crowd the track. They stand over houses that seem also to grow in stature, as though there may have once been good reason for the rich to live here. The bluffs advance, and then they recede, having spent their aggression. They ease away, and there appear brick villages that remind me again of the Upper Midwest. There’s something of the same working bourgeois sturdiness to them. The villages that pop up seem crafted in an age of industry.

And indeed, I have entered what is called the Sillon Industriel, Belgium’s historic industrial zone, the first in continental Europe, concentrated along the river valleys of the Meuse and the Ourthe, where steel and coal reigned through much of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

The name of the city Liège evolved somehow from the Latin Vicus Leudicus, which seems to mean something like Village of the People. It’s a city with an upstart history of rebellion, starting with an uprising against the bishop Engelbert in the fourteenth century, and the rise of a unique guild system of governance. And history carried the People on into many causes for rebellion, through the idealism of the French Revolution, the rebellion against the Dutch, resistance against the German, and finally into the era of strikes, which the French-speaking Europeans do love so tenderly. Liège came to be known, somewhere along the line, as la cité ardente.

The city is quiet today, as the train follows the Meuse into town, following the nearly ninety-degree turn toward the west that provides a panoramic introduction to the city that is pocketed in that corner of the river, among the bluffs along the east bank that form a kind of stadium effect. The train station stands there below the highest bluffs, a dramatic new construction for the modern city, high white arch and capping brim that rises over an expansive plaza fronting the station. I stroll slowly across the plaza, enjoying the open space and the view it affords of the city among the hills of the river valley.

I dive in among the narrow streets. I don’t find much. La cité ardente seems something less than ardente on this Sunday. I just stroll among its quiet avenues, looking for a sense of who it might be. I don’t get too far. It feels like a variety of other cities, like Antwerp for a minute, and like Köln for another. But decidedly French-speaking. The whole region is. The border just south of Maastricht is a real border, run across it as we may in the course of a weekend jog. It’s a border, and quite suddenly, one hears French everywhere.

I find these passages uncanny. There’s a ruthless species of beauty at play here, the concentration of language. We call borders natural. Then we call them necessary. And then there is simply the gauge of the blade that divides people. One might imagine a soft linguistic blur across such a mellow landscape, but I suppose the people have sorted themselves centuries ago. Step left here, speak Dutch. Step right, speak French. It’s funny.

The sunlight is still strong as I board the train for Visé. We’re beginning to enjoy the long days of summer. I sit by the window to watch the river go by again. Three young students of international law take the seats around mine. They have an interview coming up, it seems. They study in Masstricht. They speak in English, though none are native-born English speakers. One seems French, another Eastern European. They seem absurdly young to be interviewing to be lawyers. They discuss wardrobe. They discuss upcoming tests, how many times they have been through the text entire, studying and studying. The River Meuse slips by.

Travelogue 618 – May 11
The Meuse
Part Two

Visé is so close to the Dutch border we could run there. We do run there. In the course of our half marathon, we are able to slip across that invisible barrier and back again. There’s even a remainder of race distance to allow us to pass back through Visé and head south toward Liège. And so we get a luxurious tour of this rural section of the peaceful Meuse.

I’ve seen somewhere this river described as one of the oldest rivers in the world. That’s a rather mysterious designation, old river, prehistoric river; and a mysterious operation behind it, attaching a sticky note of time to the moving water. How does one do that? One studies the geological features of the river’s course, I suppose, and proves that water has run just this way for many, many years.

If age makes for peace and wisdom, then I might see some corroborating signs in the general amiableness of the Meuse. It makes for an unusually pleasant journey. The river valley is pretty in that gentle way that gets under your skin, proves disarming, endearing. At first, it seems not so different from the Mississippi River valley in southern Minnesota, in summer, friendly meadows stretching over low-lying hills, humble farmlands, and the occasional small town that seems both bland and inviting. But there is something unique here.

After the race, I indulge in a Belgian beer at a brasserie on the Rue College. I’m reading a book, something I just picked up a charity shop, but it’s a leisurely attempt to read, achieving no more than ten pages in an hour. Instead, I’m people watching. I think it’s only fair, since I’m being watched with such acute attention by the locals. It’s a small town, and quite evidently not used to large events in their town yet. They attach curious and assessing gazes on the strangers. When I step inside and ask the awkward young waiter if he speaks English, it inspires no few snickers from the ageing couples sitting just inside the door with their drinks. The young waiter blushes, though he does make a serious go of communicating with me. Later, when I come back to settle up, someone croaks, ‘Do you speak English?’ with a cackle, to make the young man blush again.

It’s a Sunday, and it’s a beautiful afternoon. The town is on promenade. I have sat next to a very popular old man, it seems. He waves at just about every passer-by, and they wave back. Cars slow; the drivers wave. He doesn’t miss a beat in his conversation with his plump wife. The two of them speak French. On the other side of me, two couples visit with each other, chatting effortlessly in two languages. They switch from French to Dutch with such easy fluidity that I have a hard time tracking each. That seems odd, given how different the languages are, but the Flemish variety of Dutch can have a slushier quality to it.

Friends meet, and they exchange kisses on the cheek. And that goes for men meeting men, as well. They seem genuinely content. They continue non to do some window shopping along the Rue College. I stay where I am. I study the onion dome of the building across the central square, covered in the slate grey shingles of the area. The exotic dome sits atop a building very Flemish in character, red brick framed in white stone quoins corners.

Strolling away from the brasserie, and its street of cheerful Sunday commotion, I decide I have time for a short sight-seeing trip. I head toward the small train station.

Travelogue 617 – May 10
The Meuse
Part One

By the vineyards, by the orchards. It’s noontime, and the air is thick with moisture. Not a breath to be had.

I’m nearly halfway through the distance. I’m making good time. Maybe it’s the heat. I feel a flutter in my breast, and I am having trouble accessing catching my breath. I drop the pace, just for a moment. But it’s enough. Enough both to regain my breath and also to break the rhythm I’d built toward my best time.

Maybe it’s the heat, maybe it’s just the leeftijd. Don’t forget your age, the body says. You don’t escape that, despite the exhilaration of the race. Each moment of life comes tagged with time and context, like hidden code. Yes, the body says, you have done well in adapting these muscles to the sport. And yet, there is the ageing heart. There are the lungs made tired from years of pollution in Addis Ababa, years of recurring asthmas and bronchitis.

I’m a long-distance runner. (We weave our sub-plots. We rebel against the imperatives of narrative. Diverting as they are, there is no escape.)

My readers will pardon my use of the Dutch word for age above. The mind wants to produce the funnest word for the moment. And Dutch provides many fun words, if only for the ringing sound of them, like cute, hearth-side innovations. It’s a perfect little word for age, leeftijd, a time of life. The Dutch have assembled words this way, well before the first local grammarians could have frowned at the practice, and so it is that in the twenty-first century we still communicate with words conceived from an almost childlike instinct. So it is you can listen to everyday language like a song, in any tongue, closing your eyes, setting aside all the signals of the cynicism of the age, and you hear the vestiges of a heart-breaking innocence.

So the leeftijd has its say, and I say that’s fair enough. Running is such a mental sport, I forget once in a while that the body has its part, has its price to pay for the activity. I chop up the steps, slow it down, recover equilibrium, and then resume as best I can.

By the garden, over the cobblestone. We are going to cross the river again. I can see the bobbing coloured running jerseys on the bridge ahead.

The river is the Meuse. The River Meuse runs placidly along through this pretty country, made so green by the spring. It flows placidly through the little town of Visé in Belgium. It’s a town of less than twenty thousand, small jewel of Wallonia, a place with two little avenues running parallel to the river for a mile or two, the Rue College set with quaint brick and chain retail outlets, set with bistros and brasseries. At the southern end of the rue stands the modern reconstruction of the very old church of Saint Hadelin, built first, according to tradition, from a benefice granted by a daughter of Charlemagne. Saint Hadelin had been one of a corps of missionaries converting the Belgians, not much earlier than old Charlemagne himself.

The crowd of runners is thinning out. We form a trail along the country road, leading by small orchards and past the small houses of the families who tend them. We share the road with cyclists, easing by, and with nervous motorists. We are heading north toward the Dutch border.

Travelogue 616 – May 1
West

Just one kilometre can make the difference. We’re further from the centrum now, and I suddenly there is more drag on the bicycle. I get up in the morning, and I don’t feel the energy to ride in as far as the central station for my first coffee. I do like starting early, and I like starting with some exercise, travelling to my espresso. But how far?

Today I try going further west, toward Schiedam, instead of east into town. Schiedam is a satellite town, the first of a series that follows the Maas toward the sea, toward the Hoek van Holland, or the Corner of Holland, that jutting lip of land that identifies the coast of South Holland.

I had never thought much of Schiedam. It’s a train stop on the way to Delft and Den Haag. But now it’s so close. It’s really only a smooth and straight ride along one bike path beside one road, passing the endless ports on the left, and quiet little blocks of flats on the other. Suddenly I’m in Schiedam Central.

It’s early, and only a few wall-eyed pubs are open, a few dazed men sitting out front with coffee. I stay on the bike, and wander among the alleyways of the town. I discover that it’s not the blank suburb I assumed it was. It has history and character, founded around the same time as Rotterdam.

I take a turn along a curving alley, laid in cobblestone and describing an arc circling around to the station, running parallel to a pretty canal. It passes church and museum, old city hall and eventually the basilica. All of these are signs of venerable age, signs of Schiedam’s success over the centuries as port on the dammed Schie, and later as center of production of sacred genever, gin of the Dutch. It becomes known as place of high windmills, only because men must build high to clear the genever distilleries and warehouses.

Still, circling all the way back to where I started, I don’t see a café. I enter the ‘Passage’, a shabby indoor mall, furnished with all manner of convenient shops. There’s a bakery but the bakery has no tables or chairs. I end up having breakfast in the cafeteria of the Hema store. Hema is a chain of department stores, perhaps analogous to Target in the U.S. My breakfast costs one euro seventy-five, and I listen to the store mix of inoffensive music, interspersed with their advertisements, always preceded by their little whistling jingle, an insidiously invasive sample that corrodes thought with surprising efficiency. I sit at one table among many, nearly all occupied at this hour, by elderly locals and working moms with their kids.

Back in my own neighbourhood, I stop at an Arab bakery. I’ve become fairly knowledgeable, and fairly quickly, about the map of these bakeries in the area. Menna and I have developed a taste for baklava, and there are many varieties to try. The Turks and Arabs are thick on the ground in Rotterdam West, and there are plenty of options to choose from. There are blocks whole and long sections of road that sound and smell like the Middle East. I stand in line with men just leaving the mosque, bearded and robed and chatting happily in some language far from Dutch. I point to my choices behind the display case so the woman in her dark head scarf can package them up for me. I will put them delicately in the backpack for transport back to the house. We’ll have a snack tonight.

Travelogue 615 – April 27
King’s Day

‘Happy Holiday!’ I bid Jelle the barista. The café staff is overwhelmed by a mid-morning rush, and Jelle is looking grouchy. ‘Happy?’ he replies. ‘Are you happy?’

I tell him I am. I tell him I’m happy because my wife is happy. There is a King’s Day tradition called vrijmarkt, which allows the good citizens of the city to set up stalls to sell their second-hand goods in squares throughout town. We’ve been shopping early. We’ve found a few nice chachkas for the new flat. I’m happy because the rise of a bitter wind cut short our shopping expedition.

‘It’s too happy,’ Jelle complains about the holiday. He apparently finds it a bit galling. Too sentimental. Or maybe he just resents the intensity of the traffic at the café counter.

But it is a happy holiday, after all. The city center is bustling with smiling families. Many are wearing orange, carrying orange balloons, sporting orange cowboy hats and blown-up orange crowns and over-sized, plastic orange sunglasses.

The Dutch Republic, one of the earliest republics in Europe, celebrates its king. It’s an odd story, the story of the republic that chose to become a monarchy, and that in the aftermath of a long occupation by the Emperor of the French.

But the house of Oranje had always cast a long shadow over Holland, since William the Silent led the old provinces into revolt against Spain in the sixteenth century. A special place was crafted for his descendants, adapted from a medieval feudal role, called the stadtholder, and this became a sort of monarchy.

James Madison had a few words to say about the odd republic built around this collection of rebellious provinces that made up the Low Countries, held in uneasy union by the Stadtholder. It took a drunken boy on the train to remind me that the American Madison had written about Holland. But, however the drunken boy remembered Madison’s words, they weren’t approving. In his Federalist Paper No. 20, Madison described a state mired in ‘discord among the provinces,’ and even ‘imbecility in the Government’.

But it’s often forgotten that, by Madison’s writing, and pre-dating France’s spectacular revolution, the Dutch had already begun a rebellion of their own against the stale rule of the Stadtholder. This rebellion became known as the Batavian Revolution, and the rebels as the Patriots. The struggle was only resolved by the French, who marched in in 1795, and helped to declare the Batavian Republic.

The House of Oranje waited out the storm in London. When the new European order was put in place, two hundred years ago this year, the son of the old Stadtholder became the new king, Willem I, direct antecedent to the present king, Willem-Alexander.

‘Too happy,’ grouses the busy barista. Yes, it does seem as though those two hundred years have eased some of the ‘discord among the provinces’. The children wear orange and proudly they march around the café, shouting their acclaim for the republic and its king.

Travelogue 614 – April 23
What the Medicine Says

‘Read your medicine!’ he insists as he stands to exit. He has been sitting across from me since the Den Haag station, focusing his innocent blue eyes on the stranger. The drunken boy has become innocent again in his revels.

I’m returning home on the train from an evening in Den Haag, and it’s late. The trains in Holland become rather like a moving carnival, people weaving about and singing, shouting to each other in sudden camaraderie.

There are three of them, and they occupy the three seats around me with a rush of boozy air. ‘How are you, sir? Where are you from?’

I fold the newspaper and stow it. ‘Minnesota,’ I reply, and I let them struggle with that for a minute or two. They resolve this mystery in each their different way. Blue eyes just nods and repeats. The hefty boy next to me tells me he loves New York. And the third stares, and finally returns to his demand that I love Feyenoord. I tell him I’m for Sparta. I don’t tell them it’s because my new house is a few blocks from the Sparta stadium. Whatever my reason, they cheer.

‘Where are you from?’ I ask. None of them are from Rotterdam. They are from Arnhem, Breda, and Leiden. ‘Arnhem?’ I’m going to challenge the leader of the pack, the one with the innocent blue eyes. ‘That’s not even Holland. You’re German.’

‘No!’ he protests. The others laugh at him. ‘And you,’ I continue, ‘from Breda. You’re just a Belgian!’ He is the farthest gone of the three, the one who was shouting for Feyenoord. He stares at me with wide eyes that he is having trouble focusing. He will compose sputtering denials for me when he pulls himself together.

‘And here is the true Nederlander,’ I say, smacking the back of the young man from Leiden. He’s the quiet one, sitting beside me. He’s the one looking like a thug, in contrast to the others’ choir-boy-gone-bad style. Suddenly he’s soft-spoken, almost urbane. He starts to explain how his accent is so different from that of the other boys, a rather arcane claim for heritage, but I’ll listen.

Leiden is quickly drowned out by the others. No, I say, trying to shush Breda, you don’t get to root for Feyenoord. You’re closer to Eindhoven, where the local team, PSV, is in any case outperforming Feyenoord. ‘No, no, no!’ he shouts. What’s so bad about PSV? ‘I don’t like them. They’re arrogant,’ he replies. It’s what they have already said about Ajax, Amsterdam’s team. All the good teams are arrogant.

Blue eyes is going to defend Arnhem. But they have run out of time. They are getting off the train in Delft. Delft is a big university town, but somehow I don’t think this is an academic visit. Blue eyes makes one point as he goes. ‘Read medicine!’ he insists. ‘Read medicine!’

‘Medicine?’

‘Your father. Your founder.’

‘Oh, Madison. My father, James Madison. …Really?’

‘He wrote about Arnhem. He loved the republic.’ And the boys are gone.

The republic of Arnhem? I’m stunned, and intrigued. How mysterious the mind of drunken college boys. I try to follow this lead, to read my medicine, but the only reference I’m able to find at this short notice is a relatively uncomplimentary essay about the Dutch republic among the Federalist Papers, written in 1787, written on the eve of the revolution in France that would destroy the republic. And no mention is made in the essay to Arnhem at all.

Well, so it goes with fathers. We cling to their spare words, exaggerating the hint of praise inside them, making them in our memory into personal encomia to share with strangers on the train.

Cheers, boys. And long live the Republic!

Travelogue 613 – April 17
The Strength of Suns

The afternoon verges on evening, and the Locus Publicus is positioned fortunately on the Oostzeedijk, its streetside window turned just the perfect degree west, so that while I sit at my table I feel its touch on my shoulder. Sometimes it seems like this might be the real narrative to my life, the thread that connects moments in the sun.

Jamie and I are talking about suns, but just for a moment. We never talk about anything for more than a moment. To do so would be a disservice to the seriousness of God’s creation. We have been discussing movies, and the films for the moment are ‘Interstellar’ and ‘Sunshine’. We have been analysing the physics in each story, the terrible power of gravity in suns dead and alive. In Interstellar, the hero must survive a descent into a black hole. In Sunshine, setting a bomb off inside the sun should save it. Each movie tries to evoke a sort of mysticism from the experience of deep space. ‘Sunshine’ was probably the more successful, weaving a scary spell around the light of the sun and gravity at close quarters.

With surprising perspicacity, Jamie and I demonstrate that the science in the films is faulty. How much more impressive is this show of intellect, I’m thinking, when neither of us has studied physics.

We move on to the coming premiere of the new Avengers film. Though we must speak about it with some reverence, Jamie does feel he must set the record straight on how the characterizations diverge from those in the comic books. And I must make sure that the pub realizes that, though the Avengers movies are fine creations, they will never measure up to anything by Christopher Nolan.

These pressing matters settled, we are free to open the beer apps on our phones, and log our choices. I have chosen British beers for the night, perhaps in tribute to Jamie, who hails from Bath, one of my favourite places on this sunny globe. Sadly, I have to assign poor marks to tonight’s choices. While I like British ales and American IPAs, it would seem that British IPAs are not going to be the right compromise.

The Locus Publicus is a bar proud of its beer selection, in the hundreds. Last time, I devoted myself to Belgian blondes and triples, and I was well pleased. The pub is small enough that they could probably line the walls with the menu in bottles. Instead, we are presented with a variety of blackboards, beers listed in a baffling sort of order that began as alphabetical, muddled by erasures and additions, new As and Bs appearing among the Ms.

Above the working area of the bar, there are scenes in ceramic tile that are very Dutch, farmyard scenes painted in a cheerful, glossy style onto large panels made of palm-sized square tiles.

The beer app has stalled, as it so often does. Jamie’s does, as well, and he tosses the phone onto the table. We are left with only the real beers. Last time we were able use the apps to research the beers, find provenance and family, find recommendations for the next round.

Sandra and Wouter show up just as we are resorting to ‘Game of Thrones’ for conversation, talk of the Imp, and so forth. Wouter is Dutch and Sandra is French, and they conduct their relationship in English. I find that amazing, and certainly a sign of the times. I’m sure that would never have been the case before, even thirty years ago. The thought of this language play makes me recommit to my language study. All sorts of wonderful things are possible in this world, all sorts of wonderful ways to misunderstand one another, and all in the name of culture. The two are a study in stereotype, Wouter laconic and literal-minded, Sandra vibrant and laughing.

Sandra tells how their first fight was over a night out, and the misconstrued meaning of ‘night out’. He took her to a pub, and she didn’t talk to him for a week.

We play guess the baby’s name. Sandra will not give up, after I have told them that we have chosen a French name. There are a lot of French names, we realize, and most of them have English cognates, which we have to explore. Finally I have to go, mystery unsolved. I won’t tell them; it feels like a jinx.

It takes longer to cycle home from city center than it used to. The sun is still up, though angling for its exit, radiant just above the horizon. I am heading more or less west, following the long curve of the River Maas, past my old neighbourhood, Delfhaven, and out toward Schiedam, aiming for the three square buildings that standing alone as road signs toward Marconiplein, the western edge of Rotterdam, where our apartment complex stands. I’m speeding along with great enthusiasm. It’s a perfect spring evening.

Travelogue 612 – April 12
A Song of Comfort

The little angel is dressed in white. Still he doesn’t mind lying full-length on the floor. He’s searching for his car under the sofa.

The little angel is dressed all in white because today is Easter in the Orthodox calendar. It’s traditional garb, silky little shirt with sash and straight-legged slacks. He somehow keeps it all clean, despite slithering across the floor. It’s a testament to his mother, no doubt, pregnant with an angel’s brother and still industrious.

His name is Rufael. He’s named after an angel. Angels are made to work, and he has a lot to accomplish today. He needs to stamp in place for a while, watching his bare feet strike the panelling of the floor. He needs to run up and down the passage outdoors and watch his shadow as he’s running. He needs to explain to guests exactly who Dusty the airplane is and what he can do. He’s got to fish the red car out from beneath the sofa.

It’s a special day. He’s in his whites. His mother has put on traditional dress, and she makes coffee for guests. People are stopping by. There is doro wot, the holiday dish in Ethiopian homes.

This is how the holiday goes. I have seen a few more than Rufael has. I know the drill. We will gather in front of the television, where Ethiopian music videos are looping. Conversation spirals round a few familiar topics: where to shop and how much to pay. There are a few new topics, such as how to treat the aches and pains of pregnancy, and what the big day, the day of delivery, will look like. Rufael is expecting a brother about the time that we are expecting our little girl. He tries to look up his mommy’s dress when they talk about his brother. Then he lifts her hair and searches into her ear. Where is he?

This little family communicates in three languages, blending them continuously, shifting mid-sentence, one language feeding the right word when the others fail. ‘Opstaan, Rufi. Na. Come here.’

All this I’m used to. The kaleidoscope of languages, the chatter, and the food. I’m used to the full and over-full feeling after the huge meal, and the sleepiness. I’m used to the collapse into sofa cushions while the coffee is being prepared. On TV, well-fed Ethiopians dance on American streets. ‘This one,’ daddy tells me. ‘He is famous now.’ This dancer and his colleagues have already appeared in a few videos this afternoon, videos for very different singers, singers from diverging styles and different generations. But there they are again, lined up and smiling on sunny American lawns. The famous one is sincerely happy. He moves with perfect assurance, sinuous and muscular. And he smiles as if he sees you. ‘Have a good holiday,’ he says with a wink.

We share a secret, don’t we, famous one? The secret must emerge cathartically, during the meal. ‘Things are getting worse.’ I have to nod in affirmation. I’ve seen it myself. Things are becoming even harder for their countrymen back home, for the countrymen of Rufael’s family, for the countrymen of the dancers. I see it more often than they do.

Daddy attempts to draw a picture of it, how, emerging from a restaurant where altogether your bill amounts to over a thousand birr, emerging after a long meal and many beers, you are confronted by a gauntlet of boys begging, boys who have not ten birr between them, boys who sleep in the streets. He tells us emphatically, urging its truth. There is a horror to it, a sentiment alloyed with shame and fear. Are we not here, a shudder of panic, are we not here at this Easter table? Touch wood. Steady oneself at the table.

Rufael doesn’t find any of this frightening. This is his home. And Rufael is his name. He will bear the name of his angel. He will carry it forward through a lifetime of stamping on floorboards, laughing about it.

Travelogue 611 – April 10
An Easter Song

From a distance, the map of the apartment compound seems to spell ‘HE’ in merged block letters. The map is printed on little tin plaques that are hung on the yellow brick walls at several corners, and in the stairwells.

We moved into a new apartment this week. It’s been a lot of work. We have no car. Until the day a friend shows up with a van, I’m carrying duffel bags on my bicycle. It’s not too far from the old place, thankfully. We have no furniture, so the great shopping spree begins. Menna is having fun.

Everything becomes the move. It’s an occupation. Other things sink into a haze of weary confusion.

I call to Ethiopia this morning. I’m talking business with Yenebeb, even though I hear the baby in the background. He says, in his mild way, ‘Okay, okay.’ And then, ‘You know today is a holiday, right?’ Oh, is that right? I had retained in a vague and detached way that Orthodox Easter was this weekend. But then there are the extras. There is Good Friday. ‘I’m sorry, Yenebeb. I can’t keep track of all these Christian … things. I’ll talk to you Tuesday.’

I’m locking the apartment door, and I’m turning to walk along the outdoor walkway encircling our courtyard. I spot the sign across the enclosed space, on the wall opposite. ‘HE.’

It’s a beautiful day for a remembered crucifixion. Spring has arrived in a glorious way, the sun breaking through and lighting the past two days as though he were thinking of summer in Spain. Spirits are high in the streets.

We love the new flat, four rooms in the top two floors of the four-storey complex. The building is a renovated beauty from 1922, a complex built as worker’s quarters. It’s a solid, modestly art deco complex of yellow brick, set with quiet squares inside with lawns and places to sit.

Ours is a sunny flat, big windows allowing sunlight in one side in the morning and in the other in the afternoon. There’s a big window in the bathroom that lights my face as I stand at the mirror. I am suddenly confronted with all that was hidden in the former flat, which was lower to the ground and full of shadows. I see the fine wrinkles that have spread across my face. I see the grey that has spread among my hair. And these are only the most flattering developments in the intervening years at old Buytewechstraat.

It occurs to me that Jesus never had this pleasure, the very refined torture applied by Time, the experience of watching oneself decay. What must it be to be whole in the moment of death? Does one protest? ‘But I am beautiful. I am strong.’

Having served some years past my prime, I wonder what a person is, what a biography is, without the losses.

But it’s a time for celebration. It’s spring, and we have moved into a new place. I turn from the mirror. I massage the muscles that ache from the continual, domestic labours, supervised by the woman of the house. She has surprising stores of energy for this undertaking, carrying baby and willing to carry more. ‘Put that down,’ I say, and then it’s on me.

Travelogue 610 – April 5
Spring Song

There’s a boy standing in the doorway of the flat. The doorway opens directly onto the pavement, some three meters of flagstone to the bike path. I’m passing on my bicycle. The sound is surprising, like a wheezing engine, like a carnival. The boy is blowing on his harmonica.

The two of turn to look, two men on bikes. The other has just started out from his own flat. He is wobbling along the flagstones. As he brings the old bikes thumping over the kerb and into the bike path, he’s laughing. He’s delivering exclamations to me. He’s telling me his father used to play harmonica. I know enough language to understand that.

It’s a day to make songs on a harmonica. The sky is clear blue, and the sun warm. This is the outcome of a blustery week with winds gusting so powerfully they stop you as you turn the corner. It was a week of dramatic clouds racing, patches of sunlight sweeping by, tantalizing in their hints of warmth.

There is no need to chase the sunlight today. It is abundant; it is free. We celebrate with our songs. A boy stands in his doorway playing chords on his harmonica. The man on his bike is laughing. He’s riding beside me now.

‘Sorry, I don’t speak much Nederlands.’ I tell him

‘Where you from, mate?’ He hunches over his handlebars. He has a raffish look to him, tousled ginger hair and his eyes a cloudy blue harbouring racing thoughts. He assures me he has been to America. ‘And I’ve lived in England for three years.’ In Plymouth, he says.

He smiles with yellow, neglected teeth, and I do think of England. ‘I worked on the Rotterdam-America line for years, mate. I’m a cook.’ He announces the latter with much pride. I admit that it sounds like fun, cooking on the trans-Atlantic cruise ship.

The bicycle is too small for him. His knees, clothed in corduroy, swing to the sides. He hangs over the handlebars. He wears a puffy jacket in colours of combat green. He pushes the pedals with flat soiled sneakers. He makes the pose look like repose, even as he pushed the reluctant little vehicle forward, in sidling lines never straight, but like the line left by slackened rope.

‘Where you from, mate?’ he may well ask. I’m not from here. What’s more, there is no here that I’m from. There was once, but I don’t feel it. Does he say ‘mate’ because he fancies himself a sailor, or because he fancies all English-speakers as portside Brits, or all of us Aussies? I do somewhere inside me bear a pocket of blood from the British Isles, but much more of me is descended from the landlocked middle of Europe and from landlocked American tribes far from the sea.

We part ways after we cross the bridge, he heading forward on the Binnenweg, and I turning to follow the Schie a ways. I have no purpose for the moment. I left the house only to cool off from a busy day. I’m cycling north, staying with the river, staying with the light.

Travelogue 609 – March 15
Sounds of Soddo
Part Seven

Outside the hotel bar window, the pitch of blue in the sky has deepened suddenly, and the day is coming to a close. The gold tint to the air has been turned. There is something crisp there instead. The goatherd looks aside. He stirs. He snaps the switch in his hand. The goat leaps. It leaves the grass behind to leap onto the macadam of the city road.

I’ve become fascinated by the science that makes roads. One sees so much of it in Ethiopia. In Kembata-Tembaro, road-making is a matter left to ghosts. In Addis, the procedure seems to require one Chinese man at every site standing idle in a straw conical hat. Is that culture, or is it science?

I’ve become fascinated with science of many stripes lately. It’s because I’ve begun returning to academic reading, curious about research in my field of work, and also curious about history again, reading for example about the men of the French Revolution who believed that culture was a matter of reason, or could be, that it should be.

Levis-Strauss seems to know better, writing a century and a half later, as a scholar well acquainted with Freud, writing about his travels during the early years of World War II, that final and perverse indulgence in forces released by the French Revolution. He might be forgiven for saying, ‘Travel and travelers are two things I loathe,’ when travel in this instance is forced on him. This is no happy adventure. It yields no shamanic power of discovery through displacement. It’s a demeaning escape from persecution. He will make his way to study and teach in America while French Jews are deported and killed. Earnest modern, he will not abandon the tradition, the grand enterprise that begins among the excited gestures of the Enlightenment. He will write.

Interestingly, very much as though there were an artist behind things, as though there were a tableau to complete on that boat, the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle, there are a few other hot-blooded moderns escaping France, one André Breton, father of surrealism, and one Russian revolutionary and journalist named Victor Serge. One wonders about the playfulness of the eagle-eyed destinies.

I’m becoming a believer in science again, in my own way. It could be said that I have to be, as a child of the space age. It’s my culture. I know it’s my culture because I found it so boring for so long. I’m taking another look.

What motivated the moderns was a belief in the tradition, the literature that accumulates over centuries, that evolves, and that changes reality. I am a child of the space age. I am a witness to reality changed. I have watched the Chinese man with the straw hat, standing at the side of the road construction site in Ethiopia. I am a witness.

What motivated the moderns was a faith in the religion of betterment. Underneath it was the scientific method, a scripture that post-moderns feel arbitrary. Like cartoon characters upset by three dimensions, the post-moderns protest the power of text.

Levi-Strauss stands at the stern of the ship, resolving to write, even as his prospect extends to the last frontiers of modernism, where the philosophers of relativity and psychoanalysis collude to question philosophy itself. He writes anyway, standing against the shamans and the cynics, declaiming for straight paths even as he admits that no way is straight.

The shamans don’t write rebuttals.

I think of Kevin. I think of his crazy road around the planet. I met him almost exactly ten years ago. He had travelled eight months of every year of his adult life. He had seen 120 countries or so. His eyes glittered with a kind of manic alertness made of the alienation gathered and inverted over twenty years. Unlike me or Levi-Strauss, Kevin had resolved never to write. And so he was the witch doctor without a village. There’s an integrity to that silence that seems a kind of bookend to Levi-Strauss’s.

I write Kevin’s name among the romping goats on my page. We are in Dire Dawa together, in the east of Ethiopia. We have travelled there from Harar in the back of an Isuzu flatbed. We are going to celebrate his birthday at the old Mekonnen Hotel, a beauty of neo and post and decrepit colonial architecture on the main square, where the ancient French train station stands, a little yellow dream of a building from a time of brutal elegance. We are sitting on my room’s balcony above the square, as the sun goes down. We are eating goat mat and drinking Harar beer, and we are talking about scimitars and about hyenas and about Ethiopian women. The next day, I will say farewell as he boards the train to Djibouti. He doesn’t board the passenger car. He slips in among the burlap bags in a freight car. He will cross the desert here, napping and dreaming among the grains and the coffee.

These are the days of the goat paths. Levi-Strauss knew that, standing at the stern of the good Capitaine Paul-Lemerle, noting every stage and every detail of the dramatic sunsets over the Atlantic, notating them among the text of Enlightenment. It’s a kind of admission, gentle poetry in the work of a young scientist. Even in the ocean there are goat paths. Even in war there are the moments of beauty. Even in science there are moments made for the priest.

Travelogue 608 – March 14
Sounds of Soddo
Part Six

These sorts of pauses are the stuff of travel, the hours in the van covering miles across the yellow hills of Ethiopia, Levi-Strauss’s sunsets over the Atlantic, and then the more prosaic moments, the hotels and the airports.

I’m tired. I could have stayed horizontal in the hotel room, but the mattress is hard. The sheets are rough. My skin is irritated by dust. There was no water to wash. I may as well sit in the hotel bar, where I can drink something and stare at something besides the blank TV screen.

I feel like I’ve been tired a long time. At least I can share it with someone, with the strangers in the bar. We share the thin light. We share the ambient dust. We share the flies. What I share with the notebook is a kind of lateral and parallel sketch of the day’s journey, drawings from a distorted mirror. Reassemble a picture from the surviving fragments of detail.

We are on our way to see the rural literacy site on the magical hilltop, when we are stopped by a crowd in the road. They are gathered around a figure face down in the road, some of them advancing on the helpless man, and then retreating. They are throwing stones. The driver rolls down the window to ask what’s going on. They say he has been eating human flesh. ‘Ah.’ He rolls the window back up, and we edge slowly through the crowd. The Ethiopians in the car, city people all of them, seem stunned.

Does one read it as fact? Did the man eat human flesh? Did the people in the road even believe it? Or were most of them indulging in the excitement of the moment? I tell my urban Ethiopians about Belai the cannibal, saint portrayed in medieval church paintings in northern Ethiopia. At first they deny it. No, there’s no such saint. I repeat the story a few times, remembering more details of it as I go. There is the shadow of merciful Mary, adding just enough weight to the right side of the scale to save the cannibal’s soul. Now Ijigu remembers a piece of the story. There were seventy-seven victims. The rest nod somberly. There was a Saint Belai, after all. It appears to make them sad ‘But that was in Jerusalem,’ Ijigu asserts. ‘He wasn’t Ethiopian.’

Does one record the event in the road as a cultural artefact? In Kembata-Tembaro, I’m reporting breathlessly, cannibals are punished by stoning in the middle of the road. It would make an exciting passage. Maybe accuracy was never as important as amusement. Maybe it’s enough that the story is a diversion from the mundane. The crowd in the road may say the same. It’s something to do, they might say with a shrug. ‘But what about Belai here?’ I ask the crowd. ‘Do we leave him here in the road?’ They laugh.

The road Belai lies in is unfinished, perpetually unfinished. Here it is only a winding way cut into the stubborn hills of southern Ethiopia, wide dirt highway, with deep gutters along each side. This road has earned a certain fame as the never-finished road. There are anonymous detours marked with signs saying, ‘Men Working,’ set in a wondrous silence, a silence of deep irony. The cars crawl along rocky and deeply rutted country detours in silence, spotting through the trees heavy machinery idle, abandoned on the never-finished road. All is empty. These detours are moved from time to time, as though by playful spirits.

There is something totemic about the asphalt road here in Ethiopia. It means a lot. And it’s a labour never quite done. Do we admit in Europe or America how fragile our foundations are? Even as we are diverted time after time by work crews in our lush cities, can we admit how fragile the network of beautiful macadam really is?

Travelogue 607 – March 13
Sounds of Soddo
Part Five

I am ready for dinner, though I can’t say I approach it with much anticipation. The menu at the Soddo hotel is limited. There is meat, and there is spaghetti with meat sauce. The meat was tough last night. The atmosphere will be spare. These rooms lose their only charm as the sun sets. There is a corollary to Ethiopian culture that light must be found suspect. Homes and inside spaces shall be dim. Lamps shall be fitted with the lowest wattage. The TV must outshine lamps. The foreign psychology bows under this pressure, becoming either sleepy or depressed. All instincts toward life are suppressed. My companions will be tired from the day’s travels. We will chew our tough meat in silence.

Still, that will come later. There is some lingering light in the skies. The heat of the day has built behind these high windows. The flies are indulging in a final bacchanal before the darkness that must comprise a significant spell of mourning in their short lives. They buzz with quiet and desperate abandon. I place the dry half lime over the opening of my bottle of tonic.

Levi-Strauss mocks the travel writer of his day for peddling false tonics, distillations of heightened experience, appealing to domestic audiences who seek a scent of wisdom come from the wilds of the borderlands, where civilization falls off the edge of the world, like the map did in Columbus’s day. Psychological monsters peer over the edge at us. For several centuries after the discovery of the New World, writers churned out stories about the bizarre monsters found there, the wild tribes, the paradises and the infernos.

Levi-Strauss doesn’t seem to question the existence of the monsters, just the motives of the hunters. He simply impugns the quest for thrills. He prefers the pursuit of real knowledge, travel for purposes of science. Writers for thrills tend to distort, he says. They reflect the common naiveté of travellers. They see, they discover for themselves, of course, and personal discovery is authentic as far as it goes. It’s when they draw general rule from personal discovery that they get into trouble. Everything observed is offered as a first; every sign of culture offered as ancient and unchanging.

I am recording ‘awesome’. We’re riding up the mountain on the back of motorcycles, each one of us riding behind one driver, as we assault the dirt trails winding up the slopes, riding over stones, swinging wildly to catch a dirt groove on the side of the trail, inches from the drop down a steep hillside. At one point, I turn to see a young, tan bull galloping after us, its horns only a couple feet from my back. I’m not sure how scared to be. The bull is persistent, but could be following, playing, fearful, as much as attacking. I’m more alarmed later, as we whip round another bull, black and stubborn, lowering his head to swing his horns. There are six of us on six bikes. Senayit is quite at ease on the back of her bike. She’s turning to take photos of us, while she’s talking on her mobile.

We arrive just below our intended rural literacy site. We have to abandon our bikes to cross a narrow river on the backs of stones. This river, we discover, empties into a waterfall a few meters on, a waterfall so high we can’t see the bottom. Our trail leads up the slope opposite, so that we emerge on a small summit that overlooks the ravine of the waterfall, so that we see the ribbon of it against the rock, still never seeing the bottom, even when we climb down to the edge of the ravine. We gather at the bare summit of the hill, while the teacher points out the villages on adjacent hills, villages whose children will participate in our mobile literacy program.

We ride back down the hill, and one of the foreign guests says, ‘That was awesome.’ I write it in the notebook. I know what made it awesome was the motor bikes. It was indeed fun.

The dust of the road still clogs my nose, still makes everything gritty. I know from long experience that it will be days before I’m rid of it. I accept it. It’s just a kind of duty paid on the travel.

The goats bleat on the notebook page, and I must write some response to them. This is what humans find awesome on their journeys out of the yard, I write. They find dust. They find grass. They find wild trails. I must talk to the goats on the page in their language. It’s a kind of hunger, I say. ‘Awesome’ is like coming on ripe fruit on the ground. It’s like Changeable Nature loves you just then.

The goatherd stands blankly by the side of the road outside the hotel. His several animals stumble over each other among the spare grasses on the blunt hillside. I can tell by the quality of the light that the sun is readying to set.

Levi-Strauss interrupts his account of weightier matters to describe in several pages of lyrical language the sunsets over the Atlantic. This he writes largely from notebooks and from memory. This is the process of thought. He is unashamed of that, always a traveller, even for science.

Travelogue 606 – March 12
Sounds of Soddo
Part Four

I had to buy this notebook on the run. I mislaid my last one. This is a new habit of mine, manufacturing the missing item, usually something important, the list of critical tasks I had laboured over for days, or the paper I had printed so I would always have it handy. I’m missing the latest notebook, with all its lists, so I stopped by the corner mudabbir by my house, local stand stocked with an amazing variety of household goods inside its narrow walls. I asked the boy at the counter for a dubter, and his hand reached instinctively to the stack beneath his counter. These are the small, ruled booklets for primary school students, about 4X6, with always some new fanciful design on the cover. That day’s was ‘Dream Car’, words stencilled in blue outline over pink and blue splotches and yellow lines. In the center there was an orange cartoon of a sports car, the kind in which doors slide up in the fashion of wings.

I’m spoiling another page, drawing goats in ink. I’m sketching out schemata for false ideas. The hotel bar in Soddo is awash in a soft yellow glow of late afternoon. It resonates softly with the cheers of football crowds in England. The flies make no noise as they circle. They are fond of their circuits. I wonder about them, why they want so badly to land where they landed last. Even as I chased them off, did they still have time to leave some trace of themselves, some smack of fly scent, some invisible beacon?

We know about place. We circle, too, in our way. We call the pathways ‘culture’. Humans return to their fires. They built their early fires according to patterns that became ritual. The stories they told at the fires became religion. The masks for characters became worship. So on. It all speaks to me about harsh lives spent in a harsh world, where knowledge is impossibly fragile.

It’s a new age. The fires have proliferated. Bored with the routines of safety, we turn away from ours. We discover other fires, other people circled around their own boredom. We seek difference, and we settle for the immediate signs of it, vaguely disappointed to discover underneath them the same organization around boredom, the same construct of ego fighting instinct with civilization. Difference becomes an enthusiasm for aesthetics. We study cuisine. We study architecture. We study language. Travellers’ discussions become text for footnotes.

Sometimes I wonder what it is that still strikes the senses, strikes them with something more than the cool touch of intellect. I’ve got the notebook open. I’m reviewing the events of this trip. There might be insight.

First, I’ll record ‘unique’. I heard the word one time among the foreign visitors during the trip. I’ve invited RJ on a run into the mountains with some members of the team. We’re running the fiel menged, the goat path through the chaka, or the forest. This is the way the athletes train, following each other single file through the trees, weave and dodge and climb. I have missed it. RJ bravely, stubbornly stays with us. I’m second in line behind Fikre. I’m focussing on enjoying the run, every moment, the liberation inside this style of running, in which every moment is a challenge and a departure from the steadiness that defines city running, from the lulling, from the same and sustained, from the breath held and the eye on the horizon. A glimpse of the sunlight flashing among the leaves above, and then one must concentrate quickly on the root below, the stone, and then right into the pain of the steep, scrambling ascent.

‘Unique,’ he says. I make a note of that.

At the end of the run, as we re-enter the village on top of the mountain, as we emerge from a rocky trail between rows of houses, emerging into the open, dusty lot in front of old Maryam church, I try to find the strength for a final kick. We’ve run for an hour, but I still have something left. The athletes are re-engaged by this, roused by a spark of native competitiveness to sprint with each other to the end. We laugh, and we all shake hands, a kind of ritual.

This ‘village green’ on the mountaintop is a timeless place. I like being here, lingering briefly after the run. Small children gather and mimic our stretching exercises. The beggar, the ascetic, sits on his blanket, and he eyes us. Women guide their school-age children by, and they laugh. The men sit by the road, waiting for work, waiting for taxis, waiting for the afternoon and then the evening. They are making jokes about us. They wave when we wave. Their smiles are both genuine and mocking. I love that sincerity in Ethiopia, the accommodation of all sentiments simultaneously.

Maryam might be the oldest church in Addis Ababa. The emperor Menelik was crowned here in 1882. RJ and I enter the grounds and walk around the octagonal church, austere grey in the walls, encircled by a wooden portico painted in light blue and Ethiopian colours. It’s peaceful. I meditate on the century of worship here, fervent and focussed, its ancient words lifted above the mountain, above the hum of the capital city, where the nation tries every day to write history.

We turn back toward the van. It was the run that was unique. I’ve written it on the goat’s page.

Travelogue 605 – March 11
Sounds of Soddo
Part Three

A blank notebook page is a wonderful thing, a source of hope. We might write many silly words in a row. We may draw pictures. It’s a delusive sort of hope, luring men and women into committing to paper all sorts of follies. We say fatuous things when we’re lulled by hope. And we are proud of them, even knowing they are fatuous. And we know intuitively that for most of us it’s the freedom of the page that counts, more than the value in dried ink. It must be a game to be really worth the time.

We follow the fiel menged. The Amharic comes with an image. We’re running in the mountains above Addis. Ijigu can’t help himself. He cannot run along the dirt road. He must break away and dash through the forests and brush, weaving, climbing and falling among the rocks and roots of the hillside. This is the fiel menged, the goat path. I tease him with this, until I discover the fun of the fiel menged for myself. I’ve been conditioned by years of city running to think of straight lines and destinations. The goat’s way is much more fun, and, finally, meaningful.

I’m watching the goats now, out the window of the hotel bar in Soddo, three of them making their herky jerky way along the side of the road, under the lazy watch of their keeper. They nibble. They lift their heads on long necks, craning, staring through those odd eyes, distorted pupils. Goats never become graceful. They are perpetually knock-kneed kids.

I draw in my notebook a goat with an elephant’s howdah on his back. The man inside is not hunting or leading armies. He’s a man of science with a mortarboard cap and a smile of discovery. He hauls some verbiage behind the filthy goat tail, like a haul of trash, leaving tracks in the dust that has settled on the notebook. I’ve outlined my meditations on the term ‘monoculture’, used by Levi-Strauss in his Tristes Tropiques.

The first tenet, I say, is that the only monoculture is the one that stands inside boredom. As long as we find something charming – goats on the road, the coffee ceremony – we have not entered the monoculture. We are observing it. And it is not an element of culture until the persons performing it perform it absent-mindedly, with that critical attitude of boredom.

Secondly, the elements of said culture of boredom are utilitarian. If the ingredients or order vary from place to place, it is only a recipe of chance among the several mundane ingredients of survival.

We want ‘culture’ to be the coffee ceremony and we want it to be the group of people gathered around it. This equation never resolves. People are not single quantities. They are amalgams of content and motion that only appear as unities. If this is true of individuals, so much more should it be true of groups. More interesting than identities is why we want them so badly.

So, a third law, perhaps: as tempting as it is to extend ‘culture’ to identity, it will always be problematic. Even self-identification, ‘I am the people of the coffee ceremony.’ It is messy. We find it easy to cede the fact of change in our own time, while insisting on a nostalgia for ‘traditional’ cultures as stable, as bedrock. But societies were always fluid and unstable. Classical Greece was a chance and ephemeral amalgam of various local brands with Persian and Egyptian, and others hard to count. Imperial Rome was strata upon strata of cultural artefacts, some enforced, some local, some international, some perverse and signs of rebellion.

But back to monoculture, centred in its ring of boredom. One turns inward and sees little. One turns outward and perceives the event horizon. That rouses curiosity, excitement. This thrill is what fuels the ritual ordeal that Levi-Strauss references. Approaching the event horizon, one suddenly sees the objects of one’s monoculture. One begins to dress them, paint them with designs, create cults from culture. At the horizon, the blood races. One has visions. And then one escapes. One sees a galaxy of monoculture systems, like circles of people with their hands to the fire.

The TV in the bar has begun airing a Premiership game. All eyes fix on the fixture. It’s a passion here. I know any one of these guys could recite names and results with keen accuracy. More important are the loyalties. Hazard is dangerous, and the fan smiles with real enjoyment of the Belgian’s game, and with a feeling that the star plays for him.

I turn back to my game with the flies, protecting my drink with lazy swats. On average, it takes three repetitions to discourage the fly from coming back. I could write a new theology, sprung from the contest with flies. ‘Wave thrice, place one palm over the chalice.’ The flies like my backpack. I debate internally the health hazard of flies on my backpack. Shall I double my efforts, expanding my territory to the adjacent chair, where the backpack sits?

The goat returns to its flock. It has pursued its vision along the hillside abutting the road, following erratic paths. It has found its meagre clump of grass. It awkwardly runs behind, the joints of its legs seeming strung only loosely with string. It falls into formation, its head bobbing, one eye set alertly, inscrutably out toward the street. I return to my drawing, and I play around with the pupil of the eye, such an odd aperture into that box of angles, the goat’s head.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that humankind saw the globe of earth. We still marvel at the sight, at least I hope we do. It features in so many movies, I notice, as a kind of revelatory image. Journalists have tried to attach text, but wisdom from beyond the event horizon isn’t convenient that way. Text doesn’t attach. We see stuff. We know something more, but only in the value-neutral way of true knowledge.

Pour the coffee. It doesn’t speak. One grows bored listening.

Travelogue 604 – March 10
Sounds of Soddo
Part Two

It’s a hot afternoon in Soddo, and I’m trying to read. I’m doing my best to read while also monitoring the flies. I’m sitting by the window, watching the street through the gauzy white drapes. There is a reassuring familiarity to the sounds of the Ethiopian street, the nasal voices crying out, the horns of the cars and rumble of the trucks. The traffic surges with familiar urgency, cars swerving around the three-wheeled bajaj, around the goats. Boys in sky-blue school uniforms are horsing around, shouting, while lanky elders in windbreakers and baseball caps leisurely climb the slope.

Soddo is a town of slopes, arrayed against the side of one green range of hills rising above the surrounding countryside. It’s a pretty setting. It had been Jon’s idea to make Soddo the base for our trip, instead of Hosanna, a city to the north of our school sites, in the Hadiya zone. It was a good idea. There’s an element of peace to Soddo completely lacking in Hosanna, where the streets are madness in dust. The one faranji-friendly hotel in Hosanna, the Lemma, stands like a fortress on a hill. Outside the gates of the Lemma, the van wades through jeering crowds.

I return to the text. Between the erratic attacks of the flies and the senseless slaughter of random words by the e-reader, I find it slow going. The poetic rhythm to Levi-Strauss’s prose is all but lost. I push forward.

With what seems like notable prescience in someone writing in 1955, Levi-Strauss develops a quiet, recurring argument that the boom in population will rob the world of particularity, that, in his words, ‘… humanity has taken to monoculture, once and for all, and is preparing to produce civilization in bulk, as if it were sugar-beet.’

It’s not a difficult argument to digest in our times, something we say ourselves with the ease of familiarity, a Time Magazine lament – though I think Time editors might hesitate at the big dose of salt there in that word ‘civilization’.

Myself, I hesitate over the word ‘monoculture’. I begin to wonder how the word should be deployed. I might easily set the concept on its head.

There are few places that can strike someone from my culture as more different and perhaps alienating, maybe disturbing, certainly discomfiting, than Ethiopia. One can thrill at the differences, or one may despair. But ultimately, submerged in the culture for a while, one can hardly avoid the real experience of tedium and boredom. For all the chatter about diversity, as an endangered quantity, as something to celebrate, there is little discussion about how monotonous culture is from the inside, no matter how challenging the entry into it. So which way is the indicator, this term ‘monoculture’, pointing? Or to put it another way, what exactly is the diversity we fret over?

Isn’t it possible that the discipline of anthropology has become as much a relic as the items in its cabinets? Isn’t there something to it, some key ingredient in the mix that makes up its foundation that could only have germinated in the colonial era and blossomed in the twentieth century, a conception of ‘cultures’ as tectonic plates, contemporaneous sets of manners and habits rubbing against one another.as they slowly shift? The researcher creates a taxonomy, and then he worries about the fragility of the species he has charted, a sort of solipsistic method, calling his snapshot the measure, building an institution to preserve it.

Mr. Levi-Strauss makes much in his book about the path in his youth that led to anthropology, how it fit him so perfectly, young man fascinated by geology, history, and psycho-analysis. It was in the youthful science of anthropology that he found the perfect fusion of his interests. But I think I see something in his nature that bridles against the codifying instincts of his discipline. I’ve seen there is a playfulness to the man. He teases and challenges. Theory is the pick-up game after school, rather than theological councils in debate. This is the man, after all, who composed structuralist theory around the trickster figure in mythology, long before hordes of fantasy and sci-fi authors made cotton candy out of Jungian thought.

Dust motes settle among afternoon’s golden light, a sort of African summer shower upon the wings of the flies settled on the edge of my table, and I am drawing spider webs around the word ‘monoculture’, the nib of my pen catching on dust, and I’m sketching out theories of culture in my notebook. I’ve made a drawing of a goat, and on his back balances my contribution to science, a new theory, the boredom index to culture.

Travelogue 603 – March 9
Sounds of Soddo
Part One

I’m in Soddo. The city is the head of the Wolaita region of the Southern Nations, Ethiopia. This is one of the best hotels of the city, but still I’m fighting off the flies. There’s been no water. We’ve been out all day, visiting two schools in the Kembata-Tembaro region. I would have loved a shower. I’ve only been able to wash out of buckets for days now, even in Addis Ababa. Now they have taken the bucket away so, returning from a day driving among the dusts of our roads, I have no water whatsoever.

The sun beats in the window of the ‘bar’, which is a bare room with plain tables that looks exactly like the ‘restaurant’ across the lobby. The flies are relentless. I’m drinking bottled water. Mercifully, they have limes to add flavour, and to cleanse the palette. This much water I can have. I may have to splash down with bottled water later.

I’m re-reading ‘Tristes Tropiques’ by Claude Levi-Strauss. The book had come up in conversation recently at my café in Rotterdam, brought up by the philosopher barista there, the philosopher and professional football player. It seems like a good read while travelling. Claude Levi-Strauss famously opens his book by saying, ‘Travel and travelers are two things I loathe ….’

I’m having trouble focusing on the book. It’s been a long day among the dusts of Kembata-Tembaro, and I’m tired. It doesn’t help that my version of the book, adapted for the e-reader, is rather garbled. I have to interpret nonsense text mid-sentence. Often, it’s a matter of squinting my eyes and seeing if some resemblance to a real word emerges. Sometimes it’s context. If it’s a name, I assume it will pop up again somewhere. The names are challenging, anyway. He’s writing about his anthropological work in Brazil during his youth, in the 1930s. The book was published in 1955. It’s a memoir looking back twenty years, and he writes as though it is a time lost in the distant past. It must have seemed so, separated from him by the war and asylum in the States. But reading the book now adds another, longer angle of perspective, if the reader knows that Levi-Strauss died only recently, in 2009, having lived to be over a hundred.

‘Travel and travelers are two things I loathe ….’ I’ve been meaning to write a rebuttal to this, though I’m not sure what arguments I could marshal. He spends a good amount of time early in the book criticizing travel writers in particular, and I’m trying to self-publish this travel memoir about Ethiopia, with Troy’s help. I might be a little sensitive. Obviously he makes his case somewhat ironically, embedded as it is in a travel memoir.

He hypothesizes rather broadly that the popularity of the travel story (with real colour photos, in 1955!) is related to the ritual ordeals among certain native North American tribes, in which young people achieved wisdom and power by submitting themselves in solitude to extreme situations outside the norms of their societies. Ordeal scenarios were often contests with elements traditionally seen as alien and hostile to the culture; i.e., wild beasts and cruel nature. The ordeals had to involve suffering, of course, and extreme alienation.

I wonder if the preponderance of flies in this bar will qualify as ordeal. I am suffering a good deal of annoyance. And when I blow my nose, I am still finding dust and blood. I am hoping there is some wisdom for me in this, as reward for my suffering.

Travelogue 602 – March 2
Making the Rounds

Ijigu and Frehiwot are hanging back. I’m leading a small group of white guys down the rocky slope of the dirt road, down toward the stink of the wenz, or river, below, and apparently into danger. ‘You know,’ Ken says, ‘your own staff is saying we shouldn’t go down there.’

I had wanted to take the group as far as the wenz. It stands well below high banks overgrown in sickly brush. You can’t see it, but you can smell it. Like most streams through the city, it is treated as latrine, wash basin, trash dump, and bath for both human and animal, and it is horribly filthy. I remember the wenz from earlier visits to families, stepping with some trepidation into dilapidated shacks of corrugated iron that teetered on the edge of the bank.

We don’t make it that far. I see the brush atop the banks, past the point that our road disintegrates into an abandoned plot of dust and trash. The road was once laid with stones. They form now a broken mosaic of disuse in monochromatic tan tones of summer dust. There is no one around, not even the children begging attention. But there lurks some risk there in the shadowless terrain, I am being warned, and since I must be responsible for the safety of the guests I turn us back, commit us to the sweaty climb back up to the asphalt, where the van can pick us up.

I’m disappointed. I want the foreign guests to see where our students come from. I can’t say why, really. No one in this group funded the Mercato project. But I wish they could see those families the way I have. Maybe it’s a certain loneliness inside my history.

So yes, I am completing the work on a memoir about the first years in Ethiopia. Writing does strange things to my brain. I see double; I see triple. The day merges with other days. Last week I was writing about Ethiopia. This week I’m here. The two Ethiopias aren’t lining up quite right.

It could be that you write your story, and afterward you realize that not all of it is true. That’s not to say any of it was a lie or a fantasy. But a memory is one step from truth, and writing is another step. You’ve said something about a place, and the place denies it. You’ve said something about the Self, and the Self denies it.

We’re visiting the first location of the school. It looks the same to me, standing quietly amidst the chaos of the Mercato, warehouses on one side and on the other the hillside that descends through kilometres of shantytown.

Last year we had to close the Mercato school. It was a sad experience. Two years ago we were forced out of this location by a restless landlord, hungry for commercial projects. We moved into a second house, not too distant from the first but across a line dividing administrative districts. The officials in the new district refused to re-license, stringing us along with ever new sets of conditions.

We stand outside the gate of the first location, and there is nothing different. There is no G+ under construction. There is no banner above the gate advertising grand enterprise. There is no commotion, no trucks moving merchandise, no ring of cash registers. All is silent.

So we tramp back toward the melee that is the Mercato, where all is relentless motion, and into it. We walk single-file among the crowds, past the warehouses, past the trucks, past the streams of people who seem so intent, as though intention has lost its purpose, become the purpose. People push against each other and against us, past the open stalls of merchandise, displayed in piles and stacks, sacks of grain, plastic flowers, and rows of shoes; alleyway of bras, jamboree of carpets, carnival of plastic and aluminium pots.