Travelogue 652 – October 6
Bill Retires

I’m running beside the water of Teatown Lake, blue waters thick with lily pads, blue waters reflecting the clear and the dark blue skies, autumnal Atlantic skies of the Hudson River Valley. There are touches of red among the leaves of the trees.

Now I’m running on the water. There’s a stretch of floating boardwalk, and as I run, it creaks and it bangs section against section. Just above the nearest bank is the road. There are houses. A few neighbours are watching me. At the far end of the boardwalk, the trail dives back into hilly woods, and the lakeshore recedes. I have to watch my feet here, the trail leaping over roots as thick as heavy nautical rope left uncoiled, and leaping over ridges of exposed grey stone.

It’s been a good workout. I’ve done two circuits around the lake, supplemented by long digressions down woodland trails. This run has certainly worked the ankles. Every step has to be carefully placed, and none was the same as the last. It’s exhilarating. It keeps you alert. I’ve missed the trails in Ethiopia. The dance within the run keeps the body and mind young.

And it’s peace. The water stares skyward in an attitude of waiting. I’ve been lucky this trip, finding opportunities with nature. In Minneapolis I returned to Fort Snelling State Park and run the trails by the river. Now this at Teatown. I’ve missed that America. The sky quietly returns its blue to the water of the lake.

After the run I look for peace again, this time in Rick’s back yard. I rest my aching joints and muscles in the hammock in Rick’s yard. I’m looking up through the encircling branches, some oak, some fir. I’m listening to the birdsong. I’m awake but I would like to be drowsing. The jet lag has made sleep uneasy.

I’m allowing the busy circles of the previous weeks to echo and spend themselves among my thoughts. I would need weeks in the hammock to allow the time to unravel, trivial scenes rising like bubbles in their solution, ready each to burst with their small load of tension. Last week was Minnesota and the annual rituals of business.

I’m waiting for my number in the surprisingly comfortable DMV office downtown in the Hennepin County courthouse, Minnesota. The receptionist is a friendly man, quick to help. I’m there to renew my driver’s license. He produces a number. The chairs are upholstered comfortably in soothing colours. There is a play area for children in one corner. A Hispanic dad lifts his little daughter onto the plastic play set there. The whole space is designed to calm. I watch the screen for my number, and my thoughts bubble and pop. As the minutes pass, and I am forced to stay put, I feel my body relax. By the time my time approaches, I’m regretting having to move. I withdraw my new glasses from their case. The last time I was here, I barely passed the vision test. I remember the kind elderly woman behind the counter, how she let me try again. I place the glasses on the bridge of my nose, and I wait to be called. I’ll be next.

Another morning dawns in Westchester County. I’ve returned to the Starbucks in Chappaqua where I can wait for the appearance of Bill and Hillary. The windows are fogged. The streets of little Chappaqua are wet. Inside it’s cosy, almost absurdly so. I’m watching the people coming in, and I’m wondering about them. Are they all children of privilege? What are the signs of it? I’m not sure what I should be looking for. They do seem cheerful. Is that a bad sign? Chappaqua was a town founded by the Quakers. Has the philosophy of peace suffused the place, becoming a part of the green landscape? Is that what has drawn all the optimists?

Taking a minute to glance at the headlines of the New York Times, I see Mr. Putin is misbehaving again, charging into the china shop in Syria just because he can.

They say Peter the Great attended Quaker services when he visited in England, but did he take any home with him? Did he invest them with any colonies to build into outposts of affluence for future generations, places where retired kings may share a coffee with the common man? The sect was built upon the notion, after all, of a priesthood of believers. In peaceful Chappaqua, you could still believe we are chosen, ‘an holy nation, a peculiar people’. If only Mr. Putin had such a legacy, maybe he wouldn’t be afraid to retire. He might trust that there was a hammock in the yard even for the old czar.

Travelogue 651 – October 5
Arborvitae

We’re sitting by the pool. I’m asking Rick about the trees around his yard, the trees we can see surrounding us in his expansive back yard. I’m thinking I’m seeing fir and pine, maple and oak. He confirms, and he tells me more. There are ash. There are some cedars. He says this used to be a white cedar swamp. He points one white cedar out to me, but I don’t see anything distinct about it. Rick dreams of planting more and resurrecting the natural habitat, but he fears the zoning restrictions. Rick knows nature. He used to manage nature centers in New England.

I’m visiting Westchester County, New York. We’re sitting outdoors on a sunny afternoon. We’re relaxing in the sunshine out by his pool, even as the squirrels cavort among the highest branches of the oaks above us, raining down upon us a regular bombardment of heavy acorns. They strike the cement of the patio with a thud. They bounce a man’s height. They plunk into the pool.

I’m learning that the white cedar is also called ‘arborvitae’, tree of life, because of its purported medicinal qualities. I’m trying to imagine these hills in their virginal state, something Rick can picture quite readily. The woods and swamps would be nearly impassable. I wonder at the labour expended by those hardy colonizers of the seventeenth century.

Yes, I’m back in New England, where America has real history. I mean a history that is palpable, lives cohabitant in our space. I’ll include Westchester County in New England, since we’re only a few miles from the Connecticut border. I hope they don’t mind. The roads are certainly New England style, narrow and winding precariously among the wooded hills. Rick is commenting on the roads as we drive them, noting which follow trading routes dating back to the colonial days. Some routes are over three hundred years old. It’s true, some are clearly in need of repair. But still, how does one summon the powers of imagination to see this for what it once was, a Sleepy Hollow wilderness with mere trails for passage?

Even as they are, the roads seem hardly passable. At the least I can say they are unnerving. I see everything through a runner’s eyes, and I see myself perishing on the crumbling shoulder of any one of these curves.

Rick is the prefect host. He drives me to a state park for one day’s long run. I’m not sure that it isn’t a practical joke. Kim is along for the ride. He warns me that the trails may be hard on the ankles. I boast that I’ve run trails in the mountains of Ethiopia. Of course, only two hundred meters down the first trail I twist my ankle, and not lightly. I push through the pain, as I’ve learned well – yes, on the trails in Ethiopia, -- so that I don’t allow the ankle to swell. But I slow down, reminded now that I am in New England, and the earth is hard and gnarled as the roots of the dense trees.

This is Teatown Lake Reservation, where the forests and wildlife are protected, and where children learn about nature. There is a pack of them there to witness my fall from grace. I’m thinking as I run that this must be a New England hazing ritual for visitors. The trail is faint, barely discernible in places. Fortunately the routes are well-marked by coloured reflectors. The leaves have fallen over the rocks and roots, so one must be vigilant in protection of one’s ankles. I am led through thorns and over hunch-backed boulders, deposited onto asphalt roads at intervals, where I have to search for the trail on the other side. I run through marshy spots, where the trail is a series of boards laid in disjointed lines. I am led up one relentless hillside, slick with fallen leaves. There is no view from the summit, the trees being too thick. Eventually I make it back to the central lake. It’s a humble body of water. It is small, its placid waters distributed among a few fingers. It looks cold already, dark blue against the heavy green of the forests.

Travelogue 650 – September 30
Dreams Made Real

My first book event was a small event. It was little more than sitting at my friends’ dining room table holding the book in my hands, talking to a group of half a dozen. It’s my book. I touched it for the first time yesterday. It’s an object. It has weight. There are so many pages. I feel writer’s block just looking at it. How did I come up with all that to say? I feel a quick sense of panic, as though I have to say it again.

And then I’m holding it in my hands, talking to a circle of friends. It’s Westchester County. It’s been raining. We can hear the waves of rain against the roof.

In some sense, I haven‘t arrived yet. I’ve been in the States for a week. I wake at four every morning. Four in Minnesota. Here in New York, that’s five in the morning. I sit up in bed, and I talk to Menna on Viber. It’s midday for her. I listen to Baby attaching sounds to her first thoughts. Outside, the sun is shedding its first light.

The rule is, the dream never looks the same, beginning to end. I’ve had the good fortune in this life to shepherd a few toward realization, and they never look on earth the way they did in heaven.

Making a book is such a long process, one can be forgiven for forgetting what the original thought was. I hold the book in my hands. The slight weight of it, the texture of the cover, the name on the front cover, the features of it are still new to me. It operates as an object of magic.

The event is an informal occasion. We are gathered around the dining room table. I have a few minutes to frame the topic. Yes, I did this, and it’s a source of wonder to me. I’m telling you about it as though it were someone else’s story. Friends are asking questions about Ethiopia and the work. ‘I don’t know what NGO means,’ David says. A few others jump in helpfully. I laugh to hear the definitions.

Ultimately we must talk about grief, and the nature of those events that change lives. Most everyone has something to say. The stories branch. I still hold the book, fascinated by the feel of it.

Our journeys are long ones. Still everything is sudden. Sometimes it seems like the vocation of the species is recovery from the shock of transitions. I’m getting sleepy. I’m still exhausted by the travel. Later we’ll drink in celebration; then we’ll sleep. I’m alone on the floor of the vast living room. The windows are black. The rain doesn’t let up.

In the morning, I’m writing all this down at the Chappaqua Starbucks. The place is cosy in green, trademark fashion. Irritating and cosy. The people streaming by my table are alert, their chatter like birdsong. The windows are fogged from the abating storm. A few locals are commenting about power outages. It’s just another day in a rich small town, where quiet streets wind among wooded hills. Houses have New England pillars. Up the ascending street opposite the Starbucks entrance is the house of old Horace Greeley. Horace ran for president against Ulysses in 1872. Ulysses won.

I’m scanning the quiet streets outside for signs of Bill or Hillary. Chelsea is due to speak at the town library tonight.

I have these vigils in life, posts beside the trails of history. I hope to witness something. I know I won’t see Bill; I won’t see Horace. But it’s the setting, a pedagogical form of its own. History happens in places, and the places impart a knowledge, a sense of the imminent.

I’m reading the New York Times. Putin has decided to intervene in Syria. Obama meets with him, and he has put on a darkly stern expression. Obama looks like this a lot lately, during his final years in office. Would he run again? Does the White House look like it did in 2008? What stories will he tell in retirement? What would Bill say if I saw him this morning?

Travelogue 649 – September 18
Rules of the Road

I’m at Schiphol Airport, ready to fly to Minnesota. For a few weeks, I’m on the road again. The rules change, as soon as I enter the airport. I’ll pay €3.75 for a bottle of water. I’ll pace bright hallways in search of latrines. I’ll find bookstores. I’ll browse news shops. I’ll map the places to sit. I’ll make my way through an entire newspaper. I’ll be topically informed again, versed in the surface news of the day.

I had my brush with history the other day. I wasn’t travelling, but I was passing through the central train station. I wanted to replenish my travel card. There was a policemen at the entry way saying there were no trains. I shrugged him off and entered anyway. Only later did I notice all the police around the station. Only then did I question why there were no trains.

As it happens, there was a man who had to be dragged out of one the train’s latrine. Shutting down all train traffic through Rotterdam seems like a strong reaction, but this is only weeks after a man pulled out guns and knives on a Thalys train to Paris. Police are jumpy.

I’m reading a headlines in Dutch lately, with dictionary at my side. I never get too far that way, but I get the idea. The front pages have been dominated for what seems like all summer with news of the vluchtelingen, the refuges from the Middle East and Africa and the Balkans assaulting the borders of Europe. It’s been surreal, the reading thereof in a foreign language. It’s a ready reminder that I don’t belong here any more than they do. I’m a legal immigrant, but the building resentment against the outsider in Europe makes my status feel little more secure than the status of these refugees,

Earlier this month, the government in Hungary shut down the train station in Budapest, while tension mounted among the thousands of refugees encamped there. Hundreds of them decided to walk the hundred miles or so to Austria. I don’t know what happened to them, don’t know whether they made it. I imagine many ended up in one or another of the receiving camps being hastily erected around frontline countries.

I have time for an espresso in one of the cafés next to the train station. There are two on other side of the station. Menna and I call them Azedebo and Fundame, after two school projects in Ethiopia. I’m in Fundame, and at the next table are a young couple. They are from somewhere else. Are they Romany? They are clearly disoriented. The woman walks outside to consult with a taxi driver, and apparently without satisfaction.

When she walks, it’s with a curious, cautious shuffle, taking very small steps and leaning backward. She fixes her wide eyes on her target and she shuffles forward. She leans into the taxi window, and it’s no quick consultation. It takes a while, but when she shuffles back it’s only to sit again in silence.

A policemen visits Fundame for a coffee. The Romany woman fixes him with her wide brown eyes. She stands and she shuffles, and she accosts him with a long list of questions, delivered in a soft but deliberate voice.

In contrast, the policeman has a strong Dutch voice. ‘What are looking for?’ She whispers. He takes them outside, and points. They enter, and the woman hovers close to him, fixing his face with her wide-eyed gaze. She asks again.

The policeman says, ‘Bring you? No, I’m not a taxi service. You have to do it yourself.’

He is enunciating for them Dutch philosophy in its several words. All are equal. The rules are for equals. There are no exceptions. One wins no concessions with charm or money in Holland. Romany’s big eyes melt with confusion and hurt feelings.

He softens his stance only so far as to say, ‘It’s easy.’ ‘Come,’ he says, and he takes them outside again, pointing as though he could brush a line of colour down the sidewalk and onward for five kilometres ahead.

The policeman leaves. The Romany couple stands outside. They light cigarettes, and they discuss strategies. They look longingly down the road, along the route painted with the policeman’s eyes. They pull on their cigarettes slowly and thoughtfully, staring together.

Travelogue 648 – September 10
Meet Brad

Home in the evening, tired from the trip to Tilburg, we sit to eat and listlessly we watch TV. There’s a film on tonight, a classic from 1998. It stars a young and sultry Brad Pitt, cast opposite Anthony Hopkins. ‘Meet Joe Black’ it’s called. Joe Black is Death in disguise. He looks like Brad Pitt. Anthony Hopkins negotiates for a few more days, and Death uses this opportunity for a vacation among the mortals.

I’m wondering about the persisting trope in human thinking that makes humanity a destination for deities and supernaturals, who are drawn to visit for sentimental reasons. ‘You’re a fascinating species,’ they will say. And then they incinerate us.

I’ve always liked Brad Pitt, but here he’s too young to have been matched with Anthony Hopkins. The result is happy one for humanity, in that the human is by far the more interesting study. It could have been Milton’s Satan again, the alien more sympathetic than the people, liberated from convention and fear to be playfully, excessively and attractively human.

But Brad, perhaps at the bidding of an uninspired director, reaches only as far as the deadpan alien, a kind of mildly amused Vulcan on reconnaissance, settling for the occasional cheap laugh in a clumsy naivete. He loves peanut butter. There’s a bit of Chauncey-Gardiner-style truth-telling thrown in, casting Death in a light of innocence, an angle that has a spark of potential to it, but is wasted in the cheapest effect.

So we’re going to be disappointed. The whole premise has such great potential for perversity. I can’t help thinking that the later Brad Pitt would have had much more fun with it, smirking through it all with a provocative chill and detachment.

Instead, he is outclassed by Hopkins, for whom the highest compliment is going to be that everything he does makes sense. In a plot that challenges logic, and allows itself a few too many turns toward the silly, his choices are consistent and absolutely correct. He’s going to die, and what is more, he’s trapped in a sort of cat-and-mouse game with Death himself, whose behaviour is wildly erratic. The man is mourning. His life is being trashed by this visitor. He struggles to maintain dignity. He is finally forced into standing up to this terrifying entity. The potential here for great narrative and cinematic moments is untapped. One senses that the writers and director have grabbed an idea by the tail and been unequal to the project.

Along the way we are treated to one more unbelievable movie romance. The actress works very hard to play against her lifeless partner. She forces this hasty love in the best way she can, and we are disappointed for her. She deserves better. She deserves real evil before this listless affair. Pitt the Elder would have proven game, would have charmed her, with all the worst intentions.

Hopkins plays a man of honour. But he has made a deal with Death for a few more days. That Death then wreaks havoc should be a morality tale. We should be allowed to watch in horror as the life of the good man is trampled underfoot. At the end Death will shrug and take him away, the man’s last view of life is the prospect of ruin, everything he had worked so hard for laid waste, even his beloved daughter poisoned by agency of his one weak moment.

Or even more fun would have been to free the scenario into the chaos beyond our consciousness, which can only appear evil at first contact. The divine, or the god-like, must be fearsome and terrible. It was something the ancients understood better than we have, as delicate as we have become. We’re more afraid of each other than of the powers in the shadows.

Paint a scenario. ‘Why me?’ asks Hopkins’s character. Pitt the Elder replies simply, ‘I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me.’ Could be good. Instead we struggle through the attempt at a happy ending and turn off the TV, feeling restless.

Travelogue 647 – September 9
The Tilburg Ten
Part Three

I’m slipping back through memories. It’s a wonder we don’t lose track as we get older and collect more memories, lose track of the directions on the compass. It’s sometimes like boarding a train at an unfamiliar station and having to guess which direction the train will go. There are seats facing both ways. I’ve noticed how much people hate to face backward. I wonder why. Others don’t care. They’ll be staring at their phones the whole way, anyway.

There’s lots of time to think when you’re with family. Baby needs feeding. I’m sitting across from family at our booth at the pub in Tilburg. I’m staring out the window, studying with half my attention the light post across the street, pointedly experimental, artistic in its design, with a thick base panelled in light wood, tapering toward a pointed top and set with three huge, flaring spot lights. The wood, I notice, set against the rose-coloured brick of the building behind is perfect in colour tone. Dutch design, a product of Brabant.

I get some precious time to space out. I’m rewinding through the race, and more, through the training that fed the race. I see, as though out the train window, my long training routes, where I’ve put in hundreds of miles, up along the Schie toward Delft, along the city’s northern canal, along park paths, through the Zestienhoven Park, though the Roel Langerakpark, through the Vroesenpark, past the city zoo, past Sparta stadium. Some days have been long and slow, in summer’s humidity and some days in light, misty rains. Some days, I’ve added sections of speed, pushing.

I tell myself I could have done better.

It’s the curse of once having been young. I can still remember how easy it used to be. The memory train skips a blur of years, and another ten-mile race comes into view. I’m attending university. That was Santa Barbara. The course followed the beach. The race was a lark. I hadn’t trained very intensively.

When I first came to the university as a freshman, I had tried out for the cross country team. I’d been accepted, but I was far from qualifying for varsity. Ultimately I wasn’t serious enough, something the university coach made clear in the few disparaging remarks I earned. And then I sprained my ankle in a weekend basketball game. The coach had shrugged. That was the end of it, my career as a competitive runner.

The detail isn’t sharp as I remember the race. I don’t remember the streets. I don’t remember the water stations or mile markers. I don’t remember the finish. I don’t remember the time exactly, though I remember it was good. What I do recall is the feeling, the ease. I feel the pace, fluid and strong and natural. The miles melted away. It was exhilarating.

When I tell myself, years later, that I have to push harder, it’s this dream I’m chasing, There’s no record I need to beat. Race times are arbitrary markers in time, they are tools for training. But the emotion is there, in the exultation in the body liberated for a while from its mundane function to express free spirit, running without purpose. Racing.

I pause in my memories to taste the Belgian beer. It’s been a long time since running felt like that. I still enjoy it, but it never ceases to be work at my age. I’m never free of some drag, some fatigue, some aching joint. I do it for fun, but it’s a different sort of fun. It’s a chance to breathe the autumnal air, redolent these days with lavender, and find nature’s restless kind of peace, the sound of the wind.

But when I tell myself to push harder I’m confusing my motivations. As one ages, I suppose he must cure himself of living in multiple moments.

There are things at any age that come easily, that have the flow of a liberating mastery. I must appreciate those experiences. Maybe it’s simply the grace with which I taste and measure this beer. Maybe it’s the ease with which I admire my family.

We walk slowly back to the train station, strolling down the humble street in the humble town. My legs are sore, pleasantly sore with achievement. We find our track, climb the steps to the platform, and as we emerge we hear applause. It’s coming from across the tracks, from the platform for the train going the opposite way. There is a group of runners wearing the same medallion as I am. They are saluting me. I wave. I hold up the medallion.

I’ll be back in Brabant next month. My next race will be in Eindhoven, city of genius, for my second run of the Eindhoven Half.

Travelogue 646 – September 8
The Tilburg Ten
Part Two

After the race we walk slowly along a quiet brick street, away from the station. We’re pushing the buggy with sleeping Baby. We’re only a mile or two away from the race, on the other side of the station, and the streets are sleeping. The occasional cyclist clatters by. If we see others, they are wearing the same medallion I’m wearing around my neck.

Places like this are calming for me, the brick modesty of northern European streets. There’s history, but a humble sort of history. Beauty, and a humble sort of beauty, accommodating the budgets of aspiring bourgeois merchants and bankers and tradesmen and civil servants in the bourgeois centuries before Hitler. There is just the right pitch of variety inside the uniformity. Every construction has individuality, but the sort that doesn’t clamour for attention.

We discover an intersection, five brick roads in five directions, where a few pubs have taken over the brick sidewalks with outdoor seating. We park the buggy and find a booth inside. Baby needs feeding. Daddy needs a beer. Menna is going to teach Batu how to play Connect Four. I found the Connect Four game for one euro in a discount store. It brings back memories of Ethiopia, afternoons with the athletes as they play the game over and over, or sitting by the lake in Debre Zeit with Mark. Batu looks at the game with the same face she brings to anything new, an expression of distaste. She shakes her head in a vigorous negative. Menna insists, and they play.

I’m staring out the bar’s window. I’m thinking about the race. I did get some momentum going, despite the cold start. I held a constant pace throughout, an enjoyable pace, the kind made three-quarters of push and one of cruising. I was passing people the whole way, which is only a measure of how far back I started.

September is nearly perfect for running, the sun magnificent when it’s out, and it’s out intermittently now, after having hidden from us all morning.

The streets of Tilburg were narrow enough that I was never quite free of the crowd. Even in the final miles, we were piling up in places, channelled through bottlenecks made tighter by the cheering crowds. The people have been my favourite part of races in Brabant, the warm welcome. There’s a section in the last mile of the Tilburg Ten that leads between two banks of bars and every outdoor seat is filled with smiling patrons, and more are crowding in and cheering like we were the Tour de France. It’s hard to resist feeling exhilarated.

Friendly Brabant, all peace now. More or less an improvised district during the heady days of great Carolus, and a minor jewel in the ill-fated Middle Francia, it went on to reprise the role contrived for it in its birth, always a middle and middling place to be traded among larger powers, but still somehow retaining its first identity, Brabant, the marshy place. It becomes a duchy, and rises to prominence and wealth in the High Middle Ages. It becomes an acquisition for the Burgundians, the Hapsburgs, the Bourbons and the revolutionaries. It becomes a battleground. The most defining conflict is between the Dutch and the Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Little Brabant is unable to be saved. Like the throwaway character in disaster movies, she can’t maintain her grip, and she drops back into the sea that is despotic Spain. Spanish Flanders and Brabant don’t get a chance at independence until the great realignment after Napoleon, and even then the new nation of Belgium can only accommodate half of Brabant.

Baby needs feeding. The game is set aside. Still Papa gets some space-out time. I’m enjoying the uneventful big window. I’m enjoying the taste of the Belgian beer. Beer and frites, two of the signal contributions of the region to the world. I’m happy to be doing my part in carrying on the tradition.

Travelogue 645 – September 7
The Tilburg Ten
Part One

We miss the first train. We miss the second train. Travel with family is something I’m still getting used to. On my own, I’m ready in fifteen minutes; I arrive at the race early so I can warm up. Now I have family. I do want them there. So I become accustomed to joining in the mob of runners even as they’re surging toward the starting line, tugging off my sweats as I go. My warm-up is the first five kilometres of the race.

This is the first time Baby gets to watch her daddy run. All in all she seems underwhelmed. Riding in the buggy is soothing. She sleeps. When she wakes, she has all kinds of interesting things to look at. Sweaty daddy is the least of them.

The second train we miss by a matter of minutes, rushing into Central Station three minutes too late, just as a light rain starts to fall. We are rushing, though I know we’ve already missed the train and have a half hour. It’s the energy of the terminal hall, people crossing the cavernous space in dedicated lines. Travellers are unyielding. They are concentrated. Inside the terminal we slow, and we drift. The big hall is made dim by the showers outside. The flagstones inside the sliding doors are dark with wet tracks. We stop and we evaluate. There is a café at the top of the escalators. We have just enough time for a quick snack, though I’m wondering how much I dare burden my digestive tract. Just an apple juice, please. Okay, one small espresso, too.

The train is quiet. The journey is pleasant. Baby is dozing. Tilburg is only three stops. Past Dordrecht, the landscape is open and green. Batu enjoys watching the fields as we pass. She tells us, ‘Yamaral.’ It’s pretty. She deserves the peaceful distraction. Next week she goes into surgery.

The race is underway, and I’m assessing systems. Out of the station, we had to quickly look around for signs to the course’s starting area. We had to follow other runners. I’m among my comrades again, the congregation of weekend endurance athletes, gathered in a communion of exertion. We crowd into the pen for starters, all facing the same direction, though we can’t even see the start. Everyone is bouncing on the balls of their feet, stretching, checking watches. Very slowly, the crowd begins to move. The inflated archway over the starting line appears. The crowd is walking faster. We cross the mats where the timing system records our each chip passing over, and there is room to start jogging. I’m assessing systems, points of resistance, points of pain. I set a pace that is moderate enough to allow the body’s kinks to work themselves out and fast enough to keep me within reach of a decent finishing time.

Tilburg is a nice town. It’s quiet, quiet as a university town can be. It was once one of those centers of wool trade and craft so dear to northern Europe. But there is nothing remarkable about it. I just find myself drawn to the smaller cities lately. There is a feeling of refuge. Even the big cities in the Netherlands feel so much more peaceful than major American cities. Maybe it’s Baby’s influence. I want safe spaces.

This is the province of North Brabant, this peaceful countryside that Batu contemplates from the train, the green fields stretching between calm towns. The peace belies its stormy past. Brabant appears in history during times of empire, when the heirs of Great Carolus, Charlemagne, negotiate ways to divide lands among them. The sliver of ‘marshy land’, Pagus Bracbantensis, becomes a bargaining chip, becomes a part of the failed Middle Francia. Within a few more centuries, it will be elevated to a duchy.

Travelogue 644 – August 24
Vinyl in the Desert
Part Three

Menna and I have taken a bike ride. We have ridden into nearby Schiedam. We are resting now at the nameless bar I’ve inducted into my circle of watering holes. It’s a nice summer spot, with a terrace outside, nestled in a small sloping plaza among the buildings of old Schiedam. At the top of the slope is a narrow shopping street, dreary in its iteration of storefront windows, reminiscent of scenes in England, where streets run on in two-storey monotony. This little space opens up suddenly to one side of the shopping street, and once upon a time it was just a sweeping brick slope down to the curving alleyways below, where small houses squeeze together, shoulder to shoulder. I’ve seen photos from a hundred years ago, people standing awkwardly, the way they did for those old pictures, standing among the same buildings. There is no terrace, but an open and undeveloped space.

One of those houses is now the bar, and the slope has been excavated for the terrace. The patio sits on its disc of concrete balanced in between, a few steps up to the road, a few steps down to the bar. There are placed there the standard European outdoor table sets, with umbrellas and the fake cane chairs. Sitting there, I can see the roof and spire of Town Hall rising above the steepled roofs of the houses on their way down the slope. When I face that direction, the used bookstore is behind me. The shop occupies the bottom floor of a nice little art deco construction with curving face in yellow brick. The bookshop owner sits among his piles of books, looking uncertain. He asks what it is you’re looking for, gestures an invitation to browse. He parks carts of old paperbacks against the railing overlooking the terrace. Across the plaza from the bookstore is a nice old building, straddling the juncture of the shopping street above and the alleyways down below. There’s a drop of almost two meters from storefront on the shopping street down to the other street below. I like to study the building from the side, figuring out how they solved the drop in altitude. There’s not quite enough of a drop to add another complete floor. It’s clear that there must be a break between levels front and back, and I try to imagine where that happens. There are no telling lines among the brick of the exterior, tracing floors or stairs. It’s hard to tell from the placement of the windows on the side and the back, which seem placed rather by whimsy than by plan, small and staggered on the side, long and low in the back, making it look like a shady student flat on the alley. It’s an odd complement to the tidy children’s clothing shop in front.

I start to tell Menna about my encounter with the 70s in the morning, and by proxy, with my brother and his family in their youth. This one song, I say, it makes me think of that time. She doesn’t know the music I’m referencing. She assumes I’m frustrated by that. But I find it refreshing that someone doesn’t have the same song catalogue in her head. ‘Imagine taking a long trip, but everywhere you travel you hear Amharic. You’re in a hotel in Peru, and a man from China is speaking Amharic with the German woman. Then you notice they’re playing Aster in the hotel bar. How would you feel?’ But that’s something totally different, she says. That’s true. There is no very effective analogy to be made.

There are seats and tables placed just before the entrance of the bar. This is apparently where the regulars prefer to hang out. There are two guys passing a guitar back and forth, trading off on picking familiar rock riffs. They are both over fifty, and looking like they were once the town’s aspiring rock stars. One is tattooed and bug-eyed, glancing around conspiratorially, grinning sarcastically. He wears flared bell-bottoms with flaps sewn in in the colours of the Union Jack. The other looks like a long-haired Bill Nighy after years on Skid Row. He has the slightest soul patch, and one thin line for a moustache. He might just have woken. They start quietly spending as much time smoking and staring as they do playing the guitar. They strum quietly, without finishing more than a phrase.

The bar crowd doesn’t mind, and beer emboldens the two. They sing a few lines. A few regulars respond, adding voices. The songs are recognizable. Everyone knows at least a few of the words. Everyone but Menna. She’s enjoying, while also uncomfortable. It’s hard to say what makes her more uncomfortable, everyone singing snatches of songs she doesn’t know or the increasing volume. It’s not surprising that Menna finds white Dutch culture intimidating. They are loud and abrupt. It’s a culture of big, clumsy uncles.

‘My baby, she’s got it. I’m your Venus ….’ They’re laughing, and the guitar changes hands. The young bartender wants to showcase his opening to ‘Stairway to Heaven’. The old rock stars are supportive, give him some quiet applause, take back the guitar.

They play a familiar riff. ‘Ground control to Major Tom,’ one sings, and people are turning from the terrace to sing along. Another haunting song from the 70s. We’re lost in space, and alone.

I’m thinking again of the morning’s encounter with the 70s, time collapsing, the old hopes and sentiments discovered so close at hand. The line between two points in biography doesn’t always pass through the events separating them, but through space. Nothing has been done, no progress charted. One senses the long time again, uncompromised.

‘Here am I sitting in a tin can,’ one intrepid bar fly continues, and he gets a laugh for his efforts. Everyone knows a line or two. I’m marvelling again how unifying are the small tokens of Anglo-American pop culture. It’s wonderful. And then it’s disappointing. Sometimes I’d rather truly be set adrift in space. Maybe it’s what I wanted to say to Menna, that being American is to occasionally feel cheated of the sensation of being lost. It’s a great privilege for the traveller.

Travelogue 643 – August 23
Vinyl in the Desert
Part Two

The café is in a 70s mood this summer. It’s nice for me. I came of age among these songs. I believe the 70s are a classic period for pop music. The forms birthed in the 60s find full expression in the 70s. And what entirely new form have we seen since? All the tired formats of 2015 were fresh in the 70s, from rap to R&B to punk to metal. I can’t imagine what the pretty young toughs next door experience when they hear stuff from the 70s. I’m sure they nod their heads in a form of recognition. Kids have always been tempted to boast of their encyclopaedic knowledge of pop music. But what is the aesthetic experience for them? They clearly prefer their Hello Kitty dance beats. What kind of evolution of aesthetics does that represent? Trace it back to granddaddy Barry Gibb? I don’t know.

It’s nice for me that the 70s is popular in Holland. Different cultures have their own music. Different cultures have their tastes in Western music. In Ethiopia, there’s an appetite for R&B and reggae. In Holland, tastes run more toward old rock and soul.

Now it’s Elton John offering his 1972 hit, ‘Rocket Man’, a song that never fails to trigger sentiment in me. The summer I connected with that song lives in me through the song. It was not 1972, but it was still the same decade. I was visiting my brother in Tacoma, Washington, where he was based while he was happily flying big planes through the sky, maybe for the Air Force, maybe for American Airlines. I forget which it was now.

I was running amid the lush green of Washington State, already a marathoner at heart, never lacking the energy to attack long roads. I was young, in the middle of high school, and even younger than my years, daring to entertain phantoms of optimism. I had a job untangling hope from sadness. My childhood had been a dance with tragedy, Daddy something of a brute, and Mom beaten into long, lingering apathy and sadness.

Washington had forests! That was novelty for me, having grown up in dry Southern California. It was so green, and the green was everywhere. I loved it. I was charting my miles during the summer. I wanted to be a champion during the coming school year. I was a teenager. I was learning how to want things fiercely. Desire is an easy lesson. Still ahead was the long road learning to manage desire, to live with it. I’m building my endurance, day by day.

At my brother’s house, I listen to ‘Rocket Man’ with a kind of studious intensity. There’s an open-handed guitar chord and then the rising synthetic tone like lift-off. The refrain starts again, ‘And I think it’s going to be a long, long time.’

There’s a poignancy to the statement, even standing alone. There’s a longing inside it, and my marathoner mind senses it’s the long time itself that the space man longs for. This is the romance of the road being birthed in my young mind.

The moment survives for me. I can still picture the salon of my brother’s house, the shag carpets, the stereo system. The windows opening to views of green trees. There are vestiges of thoughts in the memory, like ghost forms. I’m already thinking about writing. There’s a plot for a novel buzzing around my head, set during the American Revolution, something heroic, something set among green East Coast forests, looking like Washington forests. The story must feature Native Americans, must follow them into the shadows of the trees.

I sense the boy’s ambitions, the anticipations. I’m thinking about new school year. I’m thinking about the cross country season. I’m thinking about girls. My brother and his wife are starting their lives. A baby is on the way. All this is a mystery. How does one arrive at a place like this in life? I have no idea.

I’ll play the song one more time. The music is composed to open out open space when the refrain begins, ‘I think it’s going to be a long, long time.’ It captures a sensation so perfectly, a sense of surmounting a long plateau and the sky opening out before me. It’s as though I were created to travel a long ways. There’s no way to understand that.

Travelogue 642 – August 22
Vinyl in the Desert
Part One

It seems as though there’s a lot of 70s going on at my café lately. Is it a summer flavour? I’m hearing songs reminding me of my childhood. It stops me, evokes something, memories and their feelings.

As I get older, I realize just how universal music is not. I can write this after a night of listening involuntarily to the tunes of today’s youth. My young neighbours have a taste for a sound that I can find no sympathy for whatsoever. It sounds to me like synthetic dance beats for pre-teens, looping with vapid insistence. ‘So fun, so fun,’ the songs posit with a kind of Hello Kitty creepy charm. My head spins with it. Outside the neighbours’ apartment are an assortment of young men dressed in thuggish themes, nodding their heads with sleepy eyes, so self-consciously tough they can barely move. And this is the music they play tough to. I find it baffling, an image that has so far overshot comic that it becomes a kind of Zen riddle. In this brave new world, Sartre is the old country bishop, his notions of the Absurd quaint.

My father says, ‘It all sounds the same.’ The same beat, the same guitar noise. The same boyish, undeveloped voices. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ he parodies the Beatles, not even aware how dated his mocking reference is. My eldest brother has hair to his shoulder. He dances in his room to rock and roll. Vinyl is the new flag.

At home we’re forced to listen to Dad’s music, the happy swagger and Italian voicings of the Rat Pack and their ilk, the gruff, atonal musings of Johnny Cash, the excesses of Tijuana Brass. At this distance, his music has gained a prestige he would have appreciated. I don’t remember disliking any of it. But it was suspect, being Dad’s music. I didn’t understand my brother’s music. I was too young. His passion about it was also suspect. I would have to re-discover music in my own time.

The music Dad despised and my brother loved now forms a canon, surviving the mixed feelings about the generation that produced it, surviving even the tide of forgetfulness. Kids sing along to protest songs without one complete notion about Vietnam, unable to pick out Nixon from a line-up, as likely as not to believe your stories of how Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King shook hands once at the Chicago Democratic Convention. They hear the opening harmonics in ‘For What It's Worth’ by Buffalo Springfield, and they start in right away with the words. I sense that the 60s has been distilled to a dozen images in most minds, blurred images like old colour TV, images that reference hippies and civil rights and protesters holding up the peace sign. But all images serve the music. In the popular imagination, the 60s is music. Vinyl was currency.

Music makes me think of the soul. It has the same characteristics, being insubstantial and being fleeting. It leads one to religious ideas. A good song passes too quickly, leaves an idea, makes one wonder about a God that allows so much beauty to pass.

I live too much in Time, a place like a sandy desert, where all trace of passage is blown clean in short order. I find a beautiful melody to be a challenge to the state of nature. It’s like a crystal suspended in mid-air for just a moment. When it vanishes it does so with a question. Why?

Is there really a deity so free with Creation, running through Time like a maenad, throwing blossoms in every direction, and running on while the blossoms wilt? How many songs have been forgotten? How many things of beauty burned?

Travelogue 641 – August 8
But They Built the Pyramids
Part Two

‘How about that beer?’ The three of us reclaim our bikes, Oscar labouring over the locks with intensity.

The beer is only a kilometre from our last stop, where we admired the heavy waters of the river that made Rotterdam king of commerce. We turn wobbly wheels toward the west, riding along the tram tracks of the Number Seven toward the yacht harbour and Het Park, until we reach the old bar and eetcafe, the Loos. We settle in at a table by the window, and we study the menu. Carolina loves England; we’ll order fish and chips.

I’m just back from Ethiopia, and I hear from Zuzana that her husband Oscar and her daughter Carolina are touring Holland and Belgium. The two have escaped from the annual trip to Oscar’s and Zuzana’s native Slovakia in order to see more of Europe. I tell her they have to call me. They have to stop in Rotterdam.

Before Amsterdam, they travelled to London. That was Carolina’s favourite. She says she will leave Canada at first opportunity. She will live in London. She will enjoy the fog and clouds. She will study somewhere where intellect is appreciated.

‘Carolina, can you check on the bikes?’ She stands, but I tell her I’m just joking. I’m indulging in new parent humour. Get-rid-of-the-kids humour. Not that I mind having Carolina around. In fact she is enjoyable company, making fun of her classmates in Canada, mimicking their broad and vapid American accents. She’s too smart. They’ve had to move her from the Catholic school, where the students used up most class time openly jeering their teachers.

Now she does her imitation of a British accent. She tells us the difference between Japanese and Korean pop music. She tells us the difference between Swedish and Norwegian. Oscar does an impression of a Russian bad guy in the movies.

Several rounds of excellent Belgian beers later, we succeed in convincing Carolina the bikes need checking on. We join her outside, and Oscar sets himself to the task of unlocking the cycles. He is studying each step of the process as though he were going to write a technical manual.

Our last stop on the tour is the Museum Park, where we coast in easy circles around the huge, paved skate park where Menna learned how to ride a bicycle. The sun has set and the dusk is settling over the buildings that surround the park. It’s a big sky, and looking up into it, I lean into long and free turns in the open space. I chase Carolina, and, listening to the bad counsel of the Belgian beer, I turn too sharply and make her fall. That was bad parenting. She’s fine, and Oscar shrugs. I lead away from the park, and back onto busy streets.

We’re returning the rental bikes at the Central Station. The man working the rentals was a Navy man. He travelled extensively in his youth. He’s seen Egypt and Peru and the Antilles.

‘We have nothing to complain about in Holland,’ he says. ‘But we complain.’ We smile. That’s life.

‘I’ve seen places where life is really hard,’ he says. ‘You see families in Peru. They have nothing. They live in shacks. But they smile. Here, well, we have everything, and we ….’ He puts on an exaggerated frown.

‘Egypt,’ he declares. ‘Have you seen the pyramids? Egypt was a great civilization. The center of the world. You should see it now.’

‘I have,’ I say.

‘You’ve never seen such poverty.’ He shakes his head. ‘How does that happen?’ He hands me the receipt.

‘We have nothing to complain about in Holland,’ he says. ‘Just the weather.’

It was beautiful today, though.

Travelogue 641 – August 7
But They Built the Pyramids
Part One

The man was in the Dutch navy when he was young. He travelled. He remarked when I knew my passport number by heart, didn’t need to pull the passport out in order to fill in his form. He knows what it’s like to be a traveller.

Now the old man works at the bicycle rental shop in the central train station. He is cheerful, and for a few minutes I envy him his job. ‘You need hand brakes or pedal brakes?’ He pantomimes the difference, in case his English isn’t hitting home.

I’m taking Oscar and his fourteen year-old girl out on a tour of Rotterdam. I knew Oscar and his wife back in my days in Slovakia, twenty years ago. The family is visiting Slovakia for the summer, but dad and daughter are breaking away, leaving mom and youngest daughter in Trencin.

It’s Holland. I insist we have to tour on bikes. Oscar is offering every excuse not to. ‘There’s plenty of public transit,’ he says. When the old man says there is a deposit required on each bike, Oscar shrugs his surrender, but I offer the cash. I have an ally in young Carolina. It sounds fun to her. They live in Canada now. There’s no time for anything but the auto there.

We push the bikes up the moving walkway to the open plaza in front of Central Station, and we’re ready. With a sigh, Oscar swings a leg over the bike.

It’s slow going. They pedal as though there were mountains to climb. They wobble a bit; they weave. They get in the way of other cyclists. But they are enjoying.

We make four stops on our lengthy circuit around Rotterdam. The first is to peek into the new Market Hall in the Blaak. The Blaak is the massive central square in old Rotterdam, where stand the famous cube houses, each positioned as though standing on one corner, windows tilted toward the ground or toward the sky.

The Blaak became the center of rebuilding the bombed city after the war, became a place to experiment with new architectural forms. In that spirit, a new building opened just last year across the plaza from the cube houses, the new Market Hall, a unique looking building, eleven storeys in the shape of a long archway, hollow inside and the interior filled with market stalls. The entire inside of the arch is painted with a very vivid mural of fruits and vegetables and flowers.

We take a lot of pictures, but it seems like the primary pleasure for Oscar is being off the bicycle. He also has fun figuring out the bike’s locks. There’s one lock mechanism governing two systems, one that closes a loop through the spokes at the top of the rear wheel, and the second a chain that locks with the same key. Oscar lavishes quite a bit of attention to locking the bicycle. It’s a puzzle. He is muttering, ‘We cannot lose this bicycle. Our friend has paid a deposit.’

Inside the Market Hall, he asks, ‘Is it time for that beer?’ I’ve promised him a beer stop. Not yet.

First we have to stop by the Maas, of course, where Carolina can take pictures beside the monument to the merchant marines fighting in WWII, the monument called the Bow for its grand design, the cutting edge of a ship’s bow breaking the waves; where we can admire the big Erasmus Bridge; where we can search among the flags along Boompjes Boulevard for Slovakia and Canada, reminding me of the way Tati and Menna searched for theirs a few weeks ago. It’s odd how flags awaken a sudden urge to identify oneself. There we are! Us. Canada. America. Ethiopia.

We look back over the waters of the big river. ‘Pretty.’ We nod. ‘Nice place.’ It is. ‘How about that beer?’

‘It’s not too bad, is it, old Rotterdam?’ the old man shrugs as he accepts our bicycles back. ‘Holland is not such a bad place. Nothing to complain about. Nothing but the weather.’ He smiles. ‘Just the weather.’

Travelogue 640 – August 6
Looking Up
Part Three

It’s a wonderfully entertaining view from the third-floor balcony of the Addis Ababa office, an absorbing diversity of detail, lively window onto the variegated particularity of things. The hills of Kebena and Arat Kilo offer multiple tree-lined horizons, buildings new and old struggling to rise into view. Prominent among them is the dome of the Kidhane Meheret Catholic Church in Kebena. Dotting the nearest hill are the tin roofs of the houses of our districts good citizens, their flimsy gates, made of the same tin as the roofs, open onto the curving dirt road directly below, the quirky little road that you only find by driving through to the back of the Oil Libya gas station. The road is often empty. When it’s not, when our neighbours walk by, their voices rise all the way to the top floor. The staff pause to listen and laugh. Every so often, our meetings are interrupted by the abrupt call of a guard dog or the perplexing call of some bizarre bird or the whining summons of the pedlars selling their mops and brooms or garlic and eggs. I can see down into the neighbouring yard. If there is a women there, she is doing laundry. If it’s a man, he’s doing an odd assortment of energetic exercises, shirtless and earnest.

I return into the third-floor conference room, and I’m greeted by the project staff, working out their seat arrangements, some carrying in more chairs, some sitting with eyes down and notebooks open in front of them. They are still laughing, but they will settle down. I’m enjoying the laughter.

I know this routine. We all do. This staff and I have worked together for several years now, some longer than others, some for five years and more. It’s a strange form of intimacy, the sharing of ritual formality inside a broader context of something that isn’t friendship, but is not too, too far from it. They become silent, and we start. The formality is painful for me. Questions go unanswered. I have to prompt over and over to get discussion. Suddenly everyone is shy. Voices drop to a whisper.

This is culture again, inserting itself into every context. Speech is governed by it. Translation can bridge the gaps in language, but can’t bridge cultures. Two cultures meet in something like a ritualized stage play. Everything about communication is governed by culture, volume, gesture, eye contact, indicators of emotion, routes to a topic and through it. The only moderating influence is compassion.

I want to return to the balcony. I feel like I haven’t looked enough. I always feel that way. I’m hungry. I want to see more, spend more time watching. And I want to look into the sky. I want to drink it in. Watching it all day, I would understand nothing of it. Some insightful person invented the word ‘sublime’ for this purpose.

There’s a kindness to their nature. Are the Ethiopes more civilized? I would say they are, in certain ways. We in the developed world have conflated civilization with prosperity for so long, it is little wonder we are so cynical. We applaud the gangsters, spiritual and temporal. They’re entertaining.

Codified behaviours are aesthetic choices, ultimately. They are broad aesthetic choices formed more or less democratically, even across generations, and then enforced by the aristoi, the betters in society, for the good of all. It saves time when we have some things already decided. It comes packaged as culture. It’s a comfort. When we encounter other cultures, we celebrate our own.

After the meeting, I’ll stand on the balcony, drinking in the light. What is sublime transcends culture.

Baby likes to look at the light. She will smile laughingly while staring at the orange light spilling from the top of the bedroom lamp onto the wall, as though there were a spirit cavorting there, making silly faces just for her.

On the day before my Ethiopian trip, Menna and her mother have left me outside with Baby while they enter the Metro station to re-charge their transport cards.

There are three women walking by, three middle-aged Latinas, who have disembarked from one tram or other and are on their way home. They walk in a loose formation, barely together, shouting to each other. They remark on the daddy with her girl. They follow Baby’s gaze up into the sky, as I have been doing.

One calls out to me, ‘Meisje?’ Is she a girl? Yes, I say, and the woman nods as though vindicated in some long debate.

Another of the women follows Baby’s gaze up and she says, ‘El cielo’, the sky. She makes a gesture that says, behold. And one of her friends says, ‘Los angelitos.’ Baby sees the angels in the sky. The three women split here at the stairs and walk off in three directions.

Mother and daughter are returning, walking across the plaza, crossing the tram tracks. ‘Look, here comes mommy,’ I say to Baby. But she’s still studying the sky.

Travelogue 639 – August 5
Looking Up
Part Two

The day starts in Ethiopia, and I stand in the courtyard of my house. I look for the doves who have been calling. There is one perched above, atop the telephone pole. She watches the neighbourhood with a twitching concern. There is enough sunlight, on a clear morning during rainy season, to highlight the iridescence among her feathers. She looks noble. She examines every corner of the neighbourhood from her perch on top of the splintering pole. I salute her. I thank her and her cohort of angels for the good weather on my first morning in Ethiopia.

Holland is another place where one has to be grateful for sunshine. The sun is shining on the morning before I leave for Ethiopia. My little family is travelling into town. We pause at the top of the stairs leading to the tram station. Batu and Menna need to add money to their transport cards. So they walk together toward the Metro station, and I’m left with the baby in the plaza.

Baby likes to look at light. She finds the lamp in the room, or the nearest window, and she studies it for long spells. Now she is looking up into the sky.

I follow her serious gaze. At northern latitudes, the sky is higher, as though we were closer to that field of blue at the equators and then the globe pulls away as it curves. It’s a child’s way of thinking.

I have a vague memory from my days as a baby, the curious sensations of near and far, like separating the two for the first time, weighing the difference. It’s like a dream. How babies puzzle all this out, I cannot say. There’s this feeling in my recollection of being taught. At some fundamental level, the conclusion is unavoidable, teaching and learning are coded into the experience of life. Maybe it’s a pedagogist’s way of seeing the universe, and somewhat facile. But how the notion of it leads into such vast spaces. While we chatter about Donald Trump’s latest gaffe, millions of babies are deciphering colour, sound, dimension, light and shadow.

And the sky. Do we ever decipher that? Do we settle for a metaphor? Even as we look into it every day, it defies codification, interpretation, quantification, or packaging as a concept. It’s not empty; it’s not full. It’s infinite. One looks into infinity that direction. One meditates the sky like one might the unconscious. The picture doesn’t resolve.

The dove takes flight, dropping toward the wall of the compound and then flapping noisily to escape gravity, to dart over the roofs of the neighbouring houses.

I have to get ready for work. I will retreat from the sky, from the unconscious into the confinement of the office and the duties of the conscious. We adults take on modest projects, comprised of the modest single tasks, lined up one after the other. Who will make this call? Who will collect this subset of numbers? Who will buy the pencils?

I call a meeting. The Ethiopes are gracious. They are slow. It takes a while for them to make their way to the conference room on the top floor. Fortunately there is a balcony there, beyond a sliding glass door. I can stand there, above the small courtyard in front of the building, where the children attending our library can play. I can look out over our street, a mere bend in the dirt road. Two young women walk slowly by, in traditional skirts topped by modern jackets, their hair pinned up so it makes their scarves point toward the sky. They are laughing with each other. They never look up, so they never see me watching them. One by one, my staff drifts in behind me, taking seats at the big table.

Travelogue 638 – August 4
Looking Up
Part One

It’s rainy season. The old house in Shiro Meda is damp and chilly. I stay in bed for a while after I wake. I went to bed so early that I’m awake long before I need to be. The light through the curtains is dim still, slowly gathering strength.

I spent the night before last on an airliner – taking off at very last light in Germany and landing in the first light of day in Ethiopia. I rested a few hours at home and spent the balance of the day at the office.

I lie in bed, and I listen to the sounds of the neighbourhood, the greetings of neighbours in the street outside, the calls of the doves in the yard. It’s rainy season, and the damp has insinuated itself into everything. You don’t readily escape it. Even the sheets feel a little damp when I move.

I’m up. When I pull back the curtain, I see that the skies are clear. That’s a nice surprise. I love the mornings in Ethiopia, the field of equatorial sky, an essence of peace.

When Mimi and I emerged from the airport terminal yesterday, the ground was wet from recent rain. The clouds were breaking apart. We were safe from rain until afternoon. Mimi is my sister-in-law. She is the one to meet me at the airport these days. We walk across the parking lot, among travellers ad taxi men, and I thank her for meeting me so early in the morning. It’s no problem, she insists. The graciousness of the Ethiopians is so refined, so natural, I could believe it: coming to the airport at dawn on a work day is no inconvenience at all.

(The play has many acts and many costume changes. The scenes trade locations indulgently, and there are too many characters to track. There are all sorts of themes to the script, but the words all seem to return, almost monotonously, to the one called ‘culture’. What is culture? Why are human societies so insistent on it? The audience might become weary of it.)

‘How is work, Mimi?’ Mimi is such a hard worker. She is always working, and she is always working in the most thankless positions. In her last job, she spent years standing between corrupt management and her ravaged budget. All that that earned her was abuse. The new job was going so well, but her boss quit suddenly, and she’s working overtime again. I was reading recently a glib piece about the curse of competence, and I was thinking of Mimi as I read it.

Mimi and I walk through the parking lot, and the taxi drivers ask if we need a taxi. She says no. She has already called Shimeles. He meets us at the entrance to the parking lot. I recognize him among a hundred other taxis, in his boxy blue little pug of a Lada, stickers in the windows, advertising Jesus and Chelsea, and the white tube-like fittings along the sides.

Language prevents us from trading lengthy greetings, but we enjoy seeing each other again. It’s been a long time. I’ve been in Europe seeing to Baby and Menna. Shimeles asks after Baby, and I am a shamelessly happy daddy. ‘She is beautiful.’

We drop Mimi off at her place of work, place of misery. We arrive at my house, splashing through puddles in the cobblestone and the mud. I walk down the temperamental slope toward my house, down the road paved with neither asphalt nor cobblestone still. Some of the boys recognize me. The key to the gate becomes stuck in the lock. The gate rattles as I wrestle with it. The dogs inside bark. I am home again. Another scene.

Travelogue 637 – July 31
Summer Reading

‘Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier, …’

It’s the last day of July. I have to remind myself it’s summer. It feels as though autumn began weeks ago. But no, it’s summer by the calendar.

The calendar says it’s Menna’s birthday. Baby seems to know. She’s in a good mood. She gets all limbs pumping, and she’s laughing. She’s making new sounds, a kind of gurgling dialogue. She looks at us, and she says. ‘Aaa-ooo.’ Since she’s half Ethiopian, we can call that her first word. ‘Ow’ is Yes in Amharic.

I’m leaving in a few days for Ethiopia. It will be my first trip away from Baby. I’m feeling the heartache of separation already.

I think instead about which books to pack. My summer reading has been diverse, from the frivolous to the serious, from mysteries to Hunter S. Thompson to biography. I’ve been reading about great politicians of the nineteenth century. That’s my idea of summer fun. First there was Bismarck. Now I’m reading about Gladstone and Disraeli, duelling British prime ministers in mid and late nineteenth century.

For the sake of expediency, I’ve chosen biographies written more for popular consumption, the kind in which authors veer suddenly away from the defining work of their subjects in favour of family gossip, Victorian celebrities, Victorian lifestyles, or Victorian sex. I learn more about their summer houses than their policies. I’d rather read about the policy. Perhaps that only reveals how sedate I’ve become. The drama I want is the parliamentary kind. Of course, Parliament in the nineteenth century was no placid tea party. Debates were fierce.

I’m coasting downhill on my bike, down the far side of the big bridge over the little River Schie, and I’m feeling the sting of the early morning chill. The calendar says summer, so I stubbornly dress in shorts. The weather of the day is written across the sky, a scrolling in vast circles of condensation, written in a generous looping hand, sets inside sets of clouds rolling across the sky still blue behind. The wind is in my face at once, at my back next. Seagulls are calling. It’s their kind of weather.

My backpack has all sorts of work inside. The important piece of cargo is, of course, the little computer, indispensable index of personal knowledge. I’ll set it up at the café, and I’ll devote a few of the day’s first hours to work. I also have space for the odd book and notebook. I have my dictionary, Nederlands-Engels. I will set ten minutes aside to browse the day’s paper, deciphering bits of text in the language of my hosts. It’s a good practice, good for the heart.

I wonder whether it’s all the fault of the authors that policy seems so shadowy and elusive. I realize how full career perspectives of the great politicians can be confusing. It seems the game is a steady renegotiation of position. The great coup of a parliamentary politician may consist of nothing more than choosing the right moment to surrender … and making a great speech about it.

Still, one theme does emerge. Parliament is battling over free trade. The nineteenth century sees the broad transition from economies based on ownership of land and protectionism to industry and trade. The great ministerial proponents of free trade, Robert Peel and William Gladstone, between them an influence on most of the period between Waterloo and the First World War, were both sons of the new order. Peel’s father was a textile manufacturer, and Gladstone’s a wealthy merchant and slave trader. They set an agenda that should be familiar to us in these days of austerity: cut taxes, cut budgets, cut tariffs.

Among those scarce strong oaks of policy, the politics sway like reeds in the wind. Members of Parliament reluctantly debate the ‘Eastern Question’, the insoluble issues of the grasping Russian Empire, the decaying Turkish one, and the Balkans in between; the nagging ‘Eastern Question’ that would ultimately drag the whole nineteenth century system down, like a tangling string caught in the machine and eventually choking it. In response to every crisis, the politicians improvise. Sometimes it’s treaties; sometimes it’s war. The solutions conform to the policy fashions of the moment, and are forwarded as bargaining chips in larger debates. I will trade you one punitive expedition against the Russians for one …

I’ve had my coffee. I trade the computer for the newspaper. One the cover is a story about Russia. It takes some labour, but the sentences do pull together. Dutch syntax is absurdly obscure, but there is a logic to it. And that’s the wonderful things about language. It has logic quite independently from the content of its sentences.

The Russian delegate to the U.N. rather dully votes Nay. The press captures his image. The story can describe but it can’t explain.

‘Ow,’ says Baby when I return home. And ‘Ow,’ I reply. It’s always Yes with my baby if it wins me a little smile.

Travelogue 636 – July 30
Summer Politics

‘How now, spirit! whither wander you?’ says Puck.

The headlines this morning in Holland are all about Russia. One paper has the photo of the Russian delegate voting in the U.N., raising his hand to say ‘Nyet’. Despite convincing evidence that pro-Russian troops in the Ukraine shot down a passenger flight over the Ukraine last summer, the Russians vote against renewing the investigation. The flight originated in Amsterdam, and many Dutch nationals died in the crash. The Russians say a UN tribunal would be ‘premature’ and ‘counter-productive’. Mr. Putin has never had the lightest touch.

It is still midsummer, though it can be hard to tell here in Holland. It’s become a summer of caprice. In the morning, the clouds are high and dramatic. Temperatures are below fifteen C, and the air is autumn fresh. Some time mid-morning, the winds pick up. There is a dark shower, sweeping in quickly, tapering off. The rains clouds are cleared out quickly by the gusting winds. The rest of the day is uncertain. You look to the sky a lot, always gauging. You are sure to get wet if you’re outside, but it is impossible to predict when. If your mood responds to the weather, then the day is a bit of a carousel.

Politics is a funny merry-go-round. It’s timing over substance. I imagine one gets into politics for the substance, and then becomes hypnotized by the complex dance of opportunity. Everyone manoeuvring for a moment’s primacy. One dreams up long sequences of cause and effect, all to catalyse the cherished moment. One imagines the intense satisfaction.

The Russians blame the Ukrainians, laying it at their door like a threat. The families of nearly three hundred mourn. Who takes aim at a passenger plane, one wonders?

Every so often, the clouds capture my complete attention. I stop and turn, to take in the whole sky. The clouds are an inspiration. They say to me there are bigger things in Nature. When we enter the sky, the daily affairs of humanity become small, shrink away, like the landing strip when we take off.

I want to write a story for Baby. The sky has everything in it. It has rain for the green things and sun for the lizards. It has wind for the birds, and it has clouds for the dreamers. There is lightning for people who need kings. And at night, there’s the bright moon for Baby, like a mirror. Every day is a show.

Travelogue 635 – July 20
Midsummer Dream

So we’ve taken a seat at the prow of the ship, the ship that is the Wilhelmina Pier in Rotterdam, where the jetty juts out into the river in the direction that the sun, still high, will eventually set. We sit on the patio of the New York Hotel, once headquarters to a shipping company, and gaze out over the afternoon light playing on the river waters. I have brought my group of Ethiopians here, even the half-Ethiopian who sleeps in her buggy, peacefully sleeps, her arms thrown back in her preferred position for abandoned sleep. Baby abandons herself to sleep. With what other spirit can a baby face the new world? It all must be arms outstretched.

Tati has introduced the city to her mother as ‘real Europe’. We quietly contemplate that now. We are tired from the day’s long tour. All around us is water. The buildings of downtown stand across the river, symbols of modernity. They might be abandoned. What else could we do in the light of our new world?

It’s a bright day, weather perfect. I’m reminded of a previous visit to the New York Hotel, in which I so briefly sketched out the history of Holland for the ladies. Napoleon joined arms with Willem the Silent, and they marched forward, leading toward the future with gestures high over their heads.

The blue of the sky seems almost miraculous. Sunny days in this part of the world are absurdly cheerful. They stimulate some lobe of the human brain to a giddiness like a flavour in Belgian ales. My Ethiopians are immune. They turn away from the sun, facing into all the European faces turned toward it. In southern climes, the sun is something different, power and majesty. Could we imagine a Belgian Moses, a Solomon born in Elsinore? Conversely, how do you explain ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ to a classroom of undergraduates in Ethiopia?

Baby is rarely silent. Even while she sleeps she emits a sighing song with her breath. Sometimes she smiles with a dream. Sometimes she moves her lips, mouthing a bit of dialogue. We are all just ‘mechanicals’, she says, meeting in the woods to rehearse. ‘We will meet;’ says Bottom, ‘and there we may rehearse most obscenely and courageously. Take pains; be perfect: adieu.’

I’m feeling a right Bottom myself this summer. ‘Let me play the lion too: I will roar!’ I try it all, with summer giddiness, and like the fool of the play, I fail but fail in delightful ways.

The smoke alarm in our apartment needs a new battery. It trills with a double tones every few minutes, and it has been doing that for days. It sounds alarum, and we let it go. We become used to it. It becomes a part of our thoughts. ‘Beep-beep,’ say the fairies in Baby’s dreams. ‘Beep-beep.’ She chuckles, and she tries to whisper a spell. The fairies form a circle in the moonlight.

I’ve been thinking that there is a shadow of medievalism persisting in the psyche of the northern Europeans. The Romantics believed it. The Nazis did, too. They play with Masonic signs, they leave bread crumbs for fairies. When summer approaches there are still the May pole rituals. The best things come in fits of madness.

The time has come for Tati and her mother to make their way back to the Central Station, catch the train home. It’s with some regret that I pay up and get ready to leave. The sun over the river is too sweet a vision. It’s like a view into wordless revelation. It imparts evaporating wisdom, and makes us thirsty.

We say good-bye to the Ethiopians. It’s supposed to rain this week.

Travelogue 634 – July 19
The Real Thing

‘This is the real Europe,’ she keeps saying. Tati’s mother leaves home for Ethiopia next week. She takes her mother on one more little trip before she has to go. She brings her to Rotterdam to visit us for a day. She wants her mother to see ‘real Europe’, and apparently we have a piece of it here.

Tati’s mother is very nice. She is gracious. And she has adapted well to Europe, judging by her breezy summer clothing. I don’t see the usual Ethiopian reserve in clothing. She is comfortable in the loose fitting summer pastels. I ask her how she’s enjoying her trip as we take the tram toward the house, but she doesn’t speak English. She smiles and waits for the translation.

Tati points out the architecture of Rotterdam. She wants her mother to see the highest buildings. This is Europe. I’m not sure what her agenda is. I would have framed it all quite the opposite, if, for example, I were taking one of my compatriots to her town, Antwerpen in Belgium. Here you see the real Europe, I might have said, gesturing generously toward the architecture, King Leopold’s legacy along the avenues near the classic train station, and to the medieval houses gathered around the cathedral and the beautiful Stadhius.

How do our needs diverge, as we look for a frame of reference? We are two alien residents in Europe, coming from far away. She needs to show visitors a place rich and modern. I need to show visitors a place old and still living with its long history. Is it as simple as the contrast between Ethiopia in its rush toward the future and America, suffering from its own long, mad rush toward the future? Future as hope, future as product?

Ethiopia is an ‘emerging’ culture, ‘emerging’ market in just about every sense. The Ethiopians ‘emerge’ everywhere in the world, wonder and hope in their faces. And at home, growth and opportunity are bywords. Politically, the forces at play seem simple enough, essentialist in nature, repression versus democracy, freedom versus authority.

I accommodate Tati’s agenda. After some coffee at home, served in the ancient jebena, we set out to find a real Europe; that is, a city of gleaming, high buildings, a city of business. But there’s no reason we can’t see it from a pretty angle. I take everyone down to the riverfront. We start at Blaak, where the reconstruction of Rotterdam began, renewal embodied in those block houses that have become a symbol of the town. We walked over the canals of the Wijnhaven and to the River Maas. For the stretch of half a kilometre or so we get the face of a successful city, high buildings and the promenade. The flags of the world line the avenue by the river, and we look for Ethiopia’s. Across the river is the Noordereiland, long and narrow island presenting the faces of a more historical town, a line of traditional Dutch house and shop fronts.

We’re crossing the Erasmus Bridge together, and it’s one of those summer days again, in which the sky seems to aspire to something beautiful. The sun is generous host to clean clouds. The wind off the sea is mild. The river is wide and sparkling. We stop for many photos. On the other side is the Wilhelmina pier, site of vital burst of city renewal. Our destination is at the end of the pier, the piece of history among signs of Tati’s ‘real Europe,’ hundred year-old vestige of the cargo and cruise shipping line to America.

Tati is entranced by the KPN Tower on the other side of the bridge, a high building with one side leaning forward like a book cover and held in place by one support that is little more than a blank pole. This side of the building is divided into a grid that could be a game board. There are knobs there that are also lights.

Batu, my mother-in-law, seems unmoved by the architecture. She is having fun, if only because of the company of Ethiopians. She stops for photos. Batu has aged well; she is till pretty. She isn’t so easy with new fashions as Tati’s mother. She is dressed well, but dressed in the mould of most ‘modern’ Ethiopian women her age, meaning she has graduated from traditional Ethiopian cotton gabis, but not ventured much beyond the conservative sense of half a century ago.

Our destination is the New York Hotel, of course. Menna and Batu enjoy this spot at the end of the pier, where one feels as though one might be at the prow of a ship facing into the river, moving toward the sea.

Travelogue 633 – July 11
Twelve Years

It’s Zaterdag, and the weather is nice enough. But the day seems flattened. The cause is anxiety. Today I have yet another operation scheduled for my mouth. I have to get another root canal. I’m keenly aware of the Dutch macho sensibility about matters of medicine. Don’t hide from the pain. And this is what anxiety does to the weather. It places one big, flat palm against each end of each dimension, and it squeezes. Three dimensions squished. There’s no room to breathe. The colours of the world are condensed and robbed of value.

Despair and depression do the same thing. I recall the days after Leeza died. The world was like a slab of cloudy glass. The sky was pressing against my shoulders. The pavement kept rising toward me. Every direction was uphill. This state lasted a long time.

It’s twelve years today since Leeza passed away, meeting up with her event, the fatal accident, the event that god-sized hands pass back and forth, fingers turning it as though to decode. One clean dozen years, a round and decodable number, since the innocent met her Fate and met circumstance, one clean incidence of violence. She was gone.

I have been left to wonder where she went. I have been left to wonder what my role was in the event. I helped her choose that car, the space in which she died. As she drove, I waited at her destination. I am a part of the magnetic field, destination to departure. Was I the unstable pole in that field? Was I the malignant influence?

A dozen years later, Baby stirs. It’s time to eat. You can see that hunger is a sensation that dawns on her like a fresh discovery each time. She is lying on her back, on a blanket on top of the bed. I am enjoying some time with her, just watching her, mercurial Baby. The moments overtake her, one by one, each with its restless energy and restless mood.

She has been looking, the way she does, into some fascinating space, toward the window or just up into a corner of the ceiling. She occasionally kicks, swings an arm around. She works her mouth, mood after mood. Then a shadow crosses her face. She starts to fret. Her feet kick with more urgency. She pumps her fists above her. She opens her mouth to bawl. She looks up into my eyes in mounting distress.

This is the way the future moves for her. It is upon her, and it is urgent. Anxiety has no dexterity in the fingers yet. The past gathers, a drop at a time, like dark coffee, dark and undecipherable. We don’t know what kind of impurities are gathering there, among the grounds of coffee, like particles of indigestible sand.

There’s nothing to be done. I must meet up with that event. I must show up at the dentist’s office at my appointed hour. He is prompt, this grim-faced man with overgrown grey eyebrows. He slouches inside his ill-fitting white uniform. His eyes meet mine in that unflinching way of the Dutch that seems calculated, impertinent, but is a variety of friendliness.

My fears are justified. The dentist says little, dives in. He cracks my jaw open like the recalcitrant rind of a melon, and he jabs my gums viciously with shots of novocaine. He counts off no beats to allow the shots to take effect; he reaches directly for the drill. I am kicking. My hands grip the armrests. All told, the root canal is accomplished in fifteen minutes. I am led out of the operating room before the tears are dry, and led to the payment line. I have to sit a while in the waiting room to recover. I am overcome with pain, more pain than I walked in with.

I was never completely sold on the diagnosis. It was another dentist who made the call on my last visit. He was a young guy, full fashion beard and eyes that questioned while they declared. He pointed to the shadows on the x-ray, saying there was a big hole there, see? And it was too close to the nerve. It’s time the dying nerve must go. We will excavate that nerve, shut it down forever. All right then, let’s set your appointment.

I have little choice, in the end, but to accede to the will of the experts, spokesmen for Necessity. This is the pain that I must commit to.

I’ve taken my pain pills. I can make it to the tram now, make it home. The sunny day is beset by weather of another sort. The substance of the day contracts, drawing everything closer. The tenderness registers everything.

Travelogue 632 – July 6
The Tour de France
Part Two

I expected more people – and indeed, I hear later that roughly a third of the Dutch population ventured out to see the passing Tour, -- but I suppose that’s the beauty of a three-thousand-kilometer course: there will always be plenty of room for spectators. There is a crowd strung along both sides of the road, but no one has to fight to get to the kerb. We are checking our watches. We are dealing with professionals here: they will be right on time, machines in human form, fighting the winds, the heat, the wearying dance of thousands of fans.

I’m surprised to discover that the entourage may be one of the funnest aspects of the Tour. They start flying by a good ten minutes before the cyclists arrive, press vans and motorcycles, police and black cars marked ‘Gendarmerie’, and the fleet team cars with stacks of bikes on top, all racing by with an urgency that is comic and exciting, a kind of celebration. They sounds their horns. We cheer. The most entertaining of the lot are the press cameramen, riding in pairs on their motorcycles. They are like circus clowns, speeding, weaving, circling the peloton, watching for the space to insinuate themselves into the action.

And then the cyclists are upon us. There is one alone. Then there are three together. These have broken away from the peloton, pursuing some obscure team strategy. We all roar for them. There’s a pause, and then the great peloton is upon us, like a Dutch wind unto itself, almost two hundred riders in one tight formation streaming by. I had placed myself among the spectators on the inside curve of the road, thinking there would be an advantage. I might see them coming, with a good view of a half mile of road. But the crowd obscures any preview, and when they are upon us, I realize my mistake, stepping back quickly. The cyclists will use every square centimetre of asphalt, and they are leaning into the curve. We have to make way or get hit.

And they are gone. The crowd stands stunned a few moments, more team cars passing, more police. And they we disperse, cheered by this show of bravura, our lethargy expiated by their intensity. There is a rain coming. I’m actually feeling chilled as I bike away among the many others. Hobby cyclists have gathered by the hundred, in their gaudy gear. They shout to each other and laugh, and they set off with some arcane purpose in mind. They will celebrate with some kilometers of their own, I suspect, heartened by their heroes.

Myself, I am inspired to order an ale at the British pub by the station where an intrepid crowd of non-athletes has gathered to watch the balance of the stage. The cameras of our boys on their motorbikes are now blurred by rain. Above, the press copters take panoramic shots of the flat countryside and we see the sheets of summer rain falling at a slant across the countryside. The green and yellow terrain is divided into farms. There is a thin ribbon of road crossing it at an angle. The camera zooms and we see the brave convoy. We see the small dark masses that are cars and vans. We see the hunched little bees that are out boys on motorbikes, buzzing forward and back. And there, the delicate outlines of the bicycles, strung out in diagonals in their wind formations, wheels and frames just filigree in a finely etched landscape, and in the distance the pewter stretches of the sea, quiet from such a height, but still overwhelming in its surfeit of space and perspective. The copter cam zooms; we sense the movement now, the velocity that was lost among the hectares of land.

With only twenty kilometres or so left, the cameras struggle suddenly with an access of sunlight. The pictures wash into white, and the press men adjust their lenses on the run. The cyclists come into focus again. The puddles in the road flash with summer light. The racers show no sign they notice the caprice of Nature. They pass through small seaside towns, swinging around either side of traffic circles and pushing on, individuals trading positions inside the several attenuated pelotons, creating as they do a kind of whimsical rotation among themselves, stringing colours as though in one long banner snapping in the wind, changing as it flies.

The boys on their motorbikes train their sights on the famous athletes, following them with intensity, even as the athletes themselves have sunk deeply into their concentration, having tuned out the carnival around them, always new crowds shouting by the side of the road, always the hornet-like persistence of the motorcycles, flying forward, falling back, dodging each other and the cars with unflagging enthusiasm.

At the end, in the final stretches of road, as the long bridge that carries them toward the tiny manmade island, whimsical in itself, as they pass over the churning waters that join the sea, the day’s leaders, the specialists in speed, will break into a crazed sprint, manhandling the bikes, swinging them left and right in a push for consummation. Silently, the finish line has appeared, giving us no warning, and all we see is the frenzied dash. Four of them are vying for the day’s glory, and they cross the line together, their places determined by a difference of only centimeters. The rest coast across the line in their groups, showing remarkable tranquillity and cordiality as they roll en masse across the line. There’s an element of philosophy to the Tour, I suppose, because the team interests balance the individual, because everyone has their day – the sprinters, the climbers, the indefatigable endurance runners.

I’ve turned in a fair performance at the bar, putting away a full pint of expensive British ale. I’m satisfied I’ve done my part. Tomorrow the boys will be back at it, attacking the roads of Belgium. I’ll have to leave them to it, following when I can online. The sun will return. Batu will pace. Summer will resume, stirring summer ambitions. People will rediscover each their own contests when they wake. The Greeks and the Germans will shout. Doubtless there will be an excuse for a bomb somewhere in the world. And I’ll get on my bike, if the rain allows, to log a few more slow miles going somewhere important.

Travelogue 631 – July 5
The Tour de France
Part One

The restless ambition of humanity continues apace, despite the summer heat. Baby howls, while Batu paces back and forth, murmuring, ‘Mukat, mukat.’ It’s hot, it’s hot, she says, over and over, as though in a weary trance. I try to taint her. You’re from Africa. How can you complain about the heat? But suddenly her English is at the ready. ‘No, Ethiopia is moderate in climate,’ she chides me. ‘Oh,’ she groans, and she returns to pacing, ‘Mukat, mukat.’

The day reveals its ambitions. I may struggle just to swing my legs out of bed, will wilted in the heat of the early morning; I may have trouble attaching one word to another in my thoughts – they drift like the lily pads in the sun-blasted canals; -- but in Greece, the people are taking to the blistering streets to campaign against austerity and the oppressive regime of the euro. They are ready to thumb their noses at Merkel and her coterie of bankers, no matter the amplitude of the Greek sun.

And in nearby Utrecht, a few hundred athletes start into one of the more gruelling of athletic contests of the year, the Tour de France. They begin with time trials, some sprints to warm up for the three weeks and the three and a half thousand kilometers of territory they will be covering on their little metal steeds, crowding each other the whole way. It has become custom recently for the Tour to start outside of France, and this year, they have chosen cycling-crazy Netherlands. Today, they will set out from Utrecht and cycle all the way to Zeeland on the North Sea.

It’s afternoon. Unexpectedly the day has turned, the accumulated heat collapsing in on itself. There is a sudden wind, and the clouds gather. The riders have set out from Utrecht already. They are on their way to Rotterdam. I have set up in a café not far from their route through town, in case I felt the stirrings of an ambition to move my heavy limbs. I would like to show my support.

I’ve been sweating through my portfolio of Sunday work, sedentary myself but making my little computer burn. Then the winds start. I think of the cyclists wending their way toward us across the flat terrain of old Holland, suddenly set upon by these winds. The Dutch windmills turn, and the pedals turn faster. I decide then – assisted by the quickly falling temperatures – that the boys need me. I start packing up.

The second stage of the Tour leads the cyclists right through the city center, leading them into town by the Erasmus University campus and directly to the side of the River Maas. They will race alongside the river to the middle of town, and then they will be diverted for a quick sprint by the Stadhuis and around the fountain at the Hofplein. Then back to the river, and across it on the pretty Erasmus Bridge. From there, they occupy themselves with escaping Rotterdam and heading for the sea. They will finish about an hour and a half later, on a small island in the middle of one of the windblown deltas that eat away at the southeastern corner of the country.

I’ve been hanging out on the eastern side of the city center. I only have to ride my bike a few blocks south to arrive at the river, and at the route of the Tour.

Travelogue 630 – July 2
The Velocipede

I wake, and it seems like the air has not moved all night. The sun has risen above the apartment buildings outside our eastern windows, and it lays a heavy hand on my bare back. Every movement requires an effort. The muscles in my legs and arms feel as though they have liquefied. It’s not even 6:30 yet.

I roll out of bed, and I start collecting the parts of myself, the bits of the workaday self. The clock ticks. I am desperate to get to the front door, if only to access fresh air. Outside, the sky is clear. There is just enough of a temperature differential to fuel the momentum, get me downstairs.

The bicycle is a blessing. With a few lazy turns of the pedals, I have a breeze. I am in no hurry. I make the slowest of starts, setting out along the narrow brick lane outside the building’s gates. The lane runs alongside a small canal with verges of grass. The ducks know better than to stir. They rest among their families in the grass.

When Baby is sick in the tummy, they say we can help her with some gentle bicycle motion. Take her little feet, and turn them slowly. She seems to like it. The machine that is less than two hundred years old was already in our bodies.

I’ve joined the big road that crosses the Schie by Sparta Stadium. There is more traffic here. People are awake, alert, and moving. I’m surprised by the ambition with which some cyclists are attacking the long incline toward the bridge. Where do they find this energy?

The first bicycles were called velocipedes. It was the nineteenth century, and technical innovations were like parlour tricks. Behold the velocipede. It sounds to me like a creature from Jurassic Park, maybe something with many rows of legs rather than only two wheels. But the name was catchy enough to eclipse the more prosaic term ‘bicycle’ for decades. Perhaps it’s right that the precursor to the velocipede was the ‘dandy horse’. The latter contraption looked more like a modern bicycle than the typical velocipede, two wheels of equal size, bar across the top, etc. The velocipede evolved toward the elegant but awkward beast with oversized front wheel. The dandy horse was little more than a sit-down push scooter, which you propelled by running.

Interestingly the dandy horse was dreamed up two hundred years ago next year by a German baron and inventor, who came up with the machine as a response to a crop failure that was starving his horses. Later, Mr. Drais also invented the first typewriter with a keyboard. Later still, he had his title stripped from him because he had declared himself ‘Citizen Drais’ during the excitement of the revolutionary days of 1848. He died penniless a few years later. So much for the ambition of the first cyclist.

I’m over the high point of the bridge and coasting downhill. It feels great, one of the joys of two wheels in the open air. This kind of easy speed is why I will always stick to skinny tires.

It didn’t take too long after chain and pedals were added to the machine before people wanted to race. The Tour de France was launched in 1903 as an innovation to sell newspapers. It was only an innovation in scale. Races had been popular for decades. The ploy was successful, sold a lot of papers. But it was a logistical nightmare and an absolute danger to its participants. The newspaper’s editor wanted to give it up after the second year.

This year, the Tour begins in the Netherlands, starting in Utrecht, and riding through Rotterdam on its second day, on Sunday. Still coasting on the bike, milking every bit of momentum, I can’t imagine the ambition. In this heat, even getting up and out to watch the race seems a challenge. But I will try.