Travelogue 693 – April 22
Cry for Change
Part Three

I’m not entirely awake. The first wind in my eyes bring tears. I pedal very slowly as I get going, so early. The first stretch as I pedal away from home is the canal that curves beside the old train track, describing an arc from our block of flats over to the Sparta Stadion. At the stadium I have to abandon the peace of the canal and its grassy verges, its birdsong, in order to join the busy road and cross over the little Schie on its big bridge.

I realized with some sadness, as I awoke, that the blackbird who had been serenading us at sunrise had moved. That little bird had been the spirit of early spring. I would see him as I left the house. He would be perched in the tree in the first quadrangle of the complex. Or he would stand on the roof just where the brick road passes underneath a bridging section of the building.

It feels like a sad morning for other reasons. Yesterday’s sun has given way to clouds. The temperatures are supposed to drop again in the coming days. Maybe the sensation of spring’s first days will attract the blackbird back.

Yesterday Prince died. Why do we feel the loss of celebrities personally? Clearly they represent our younger selves, reflecting back to us the memories of youth. Musicians captured the spirit of one age or another in our precious lives. The experiences and feelings ‘shared’ with them make for personal feelings. But then, suddenly we care. He died so young. He had his own story.

I remember my impressions of the boy who made ‘Purple Rain’. He seemed the plucky boy from Minneapolis, the weird boy so sure of himself he never wavered. He forced you to acknowledge his talent. And he knew he had it.

The talent was the beginning and the end. Prince was all music. The rest of the show, the tauntings with madness and perversity, that was fun, but it could only enhance or elaborate the music.

But weren’t we examining the history of the American demagogue? It’s a proud and strange history. Whereas in Prince’s case the message was the music and the rest was florid show, in the demagogue’s case the message was relative, and it was made to serve the madness and the perversity.

In the case of Lewis Charles Levin, the madness overtook him. He died younger than Prince, leaving this life in 1860 while housed in the Philadelphia Hospital for the Insane. It was his second stay there. The first was after a collapse during 1856 presidential campaign. He had delivered a frantic speech, attacking John C. Frémont, the first Republican, and he had been pulled from the stage by Frémont partisans. Soon afterward he was committed to the hospital’s care.

This was only the final manifestation of a career in madness. It really gets going in May, 1844, when he was the prime mover in a series of riots in Philadelphia that left people murdered and whole neighbourhoods burned to the ground. By the end of the same year, he had been elected to Congress. He was to serve three futile terms, a marginalized figure in the House, harping continuously on his one issue, never taken seriously by his colleagues.

Levin had found his one great idea. The Pope was orchestrating an attack on American democracy, and the Irish immigrants were the Pope’s foot soldiers. Most delusions have a few facts to prop them up, and it is true that Levin had been frustrated by the party machinery that dominated politics in his day, that shut the door to the many of the young and ambitious. And it was true that immigrants were a pawn in the political game. The Democrats were especially adept at herding fresh immigrants into the polls during critical elections.

The disaffected young Turks of the 1830s and 40s turned to working through the penny press, newly popular and growing powerful in the U.S. Levin made the Daily Sun into his vehicle for relentless nativist rant. And the topic of the moment was the Bible.

The Catholics of the city didn’t object to Bible study in the schools. They just wanted the freedom to read from the Catholic Bible rather than the King James. Our stalwart Jewish Puritan led the charge against this impertinence. He painted the Catholic protest as somehow anti-Bible. He organised rallies and he practiced his oratorical flourishes. He led expeditions into Catholic neighbourhoods, and reported on the carnage afterward in his paper, defending the nativist against all charges of aggression. It was always self-defense. It was always indicative of the vulgar character of the immigrant.

Over the summer of 1844 this turned into a campaign for office.

Travelogue 692 – April 20
Cry for Change
Part Two

My nose is sore. It feels as though there may have been a brush fire run through my lungs. But I still rise to face the day. I know I am recovering. The skies aren’t as promising as they were. There are more clouds, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not raining. At this hour, the clouds are tinged with rose. It’s warmer.

When it’s spring, people pull their bikes out of storage. I have more traffic to contend with. As I take the traffic circle by St. Willibrord’s on Beukelsdijk, I have to be careful not to run into a mom and her baby. The baby looks to be one year-old. He is merrily riding behind mom, talking to himself. Mom is keeping up a very good pace. I let them pass.

I take a minute to admire St. Willibrord’s again. It’s one of my favourites. There’s something old world about it, even though it only dates back to the 1920s. The dark brick and patinaed spire invite a sensation of another time. These days the church seems to have been adopted by the Polish community in town.

Settled in at my café, I review the news quickly. Yesterday was the New York primary. Mr. Trump won the Republican primary, and I see that he found it a great ‘honour’ to vote for himself. His analysis of the contest with Mr. Cruz over New York State: ‘I’ve pretty much knocked the hell out of him.’ Yesterday I read that Mr. Trump was being sued for libel. He called a fellow Republican a ‘dummy’. They say this is America’s demagogue of the moment. I wonder if he realizes the great tradition he is heir to.

‘I confess that I am an agitator,’ said Lewis Charles Levin about himself. ‘What storms are to the atmosphere - what tempests to the ocean - the agitator is to the political world.’

By the end of the 1830s, Mr. Levin had settled in Philadelphia. Like many young and ambitious lawyers, he started his long crusade for prominence with writing, speaking, and ‘agitating’. He was to repeat often in later life that all great achievements originated from one idea. He was to have a few of those in his public life.

His first great idea was temperance, the fight against booze. Liquor was the most dangerous vice in the young republic, corrupter of democracy. Interestingly, Mr. Levin extended the crusade to the theatre. Theatre inflamed the passions and corrupted youth. He had become the protector of America’s Puritan tradition.

He did discover a wonderfully nineteenth century angle to a seventeenth century morality. People were driven to drink by poverty, he said, and he ranted against the wealthy capitalist class. ‘The oppressions of avarice lead to intemperance as a refuge from avarice,’ he wrote.

Ultimately, it should seem no surprise that he found the party system culpable, and particularly those who were holding power. They were invested in the system, and they were invested in drink. Political offices were filled by candidates chosen in the back rooms of ‘groggeries’, as he called them. Mr. Levin was to set his sights higher.

When he moved to Philadelphia, Mr. Levin had given up law. He had bought out a small newspaper, the Temperance Advocate, and made it his voice and his issue. After only a few years, he sold that paper and bought the Daily Sun. The rhetoric took a new turn, became more ambitious. The issue became nativism. There was a plot afoot, a plot originating in Rome.

Travelogue 691 – April 18
Cry for Change
Part One

It’s spring. I’m sick. I’ve spent the weekend dragging myself out of bed because there were things to do, and then retreating to bed once I have given an honest and failed effort. I cough up quantities of yellow stuff. I feel cold all the time.

Outdoors, my favourite type of weather has taken over the skies, light winds and high clouds breaking up bright fields of blue. The air is fresh. There is just a remnant of winter chill. The clouds release the occasional misty shower, even when the sun is shining. It’s nearly impossible for me to stay still and rest in bed.

I’m on the mend, but exhausted. I’ve made it out of the house early. As I cycled into the city centre, the sun was a bright orange ball of light just risen above the horizon, perfectly framed by the buildings ahead. I enjoy the ride thoroughly. I believe life is worth living. And I arrive in no real shape to work. I’m going to push myself, anyway, though my body aches and shivers.

Glancing through Facebook first, I see that we need to be demanding change again. In the final weeks of primary season we must be strident. Everybody loves Bernie’s ideas, but Hillary folks question his ability to lead. Bernie supporters respond with the cry for change. Don’t compromise. Make change.

It’s hard to keep up with. I suppose as I get older, four years doesn’t seem that long a time. And the urgent calls for change every four years are taxing. We know the only constant is change and all that, but it’s sobering to be reminded every four years how far we’ve fallen, how radical any healing will have to be. According to Ted Cruz, we have to wipe out whole branches of government, including the IRS, switch to the gold standard, build more fences against the scary people out there. Bernie seems like a milquetoast compared to the Republican front-runners.

Well, who is going to miss the IRS? We all still hurt from the April 15th bleedings. It is a pleasant fantasy, imagining all the nasty tax men packing up the stuff from their desks, adjusting their glasses, trying to exit the building with dignity. But then the street lamps start going out, one by one, and no one is picking up the garbage. The dead start walking.

While studying the Know Nothing movement of the mid-nineteenth century, I realized the party was like a training camp for young orators. During the period between the passing of the Revolutionary generation and the Civil War, America was a laboratory for democracy. (See de Tocqueville.) It was a golden age of oratory. Its best exemplars might be Webster, Lincoln and Douglas. But of course there were hundreds of others, struggling to capture the attention of the crowd.

This fertile soil produced some odd blooms. One interesting character was the virulent anti-immigrant campaigner who became the first Jewish member of Congress.

Lewis Charles Levin was a native of Charleston. His path almost crossed that of young John C. Frémont, who started college in Charleston just as Levin was graduating from college in Columbia, South Carolina. But the young firebrand Levin moved on to teach in Mississippi, where he was quickly ejected for participating in a duel. Legend has it that Jefferson Davis was his second. Levin practiced law in Maryland and Kentucky, and eventually came to ground in Philadelphia. Here he started building his reputation as an orator. His first issue, interestingly, was not nativism.

Travelogue 690 – April 8
To Be an Immigrant

I’m meeting with Jan early in the morning. He has an idea that I would benefit from some office space. It seems as though he’s always in the market for a better deal. The eye for the deal is a part of the Dutch character, they say. Jan keeps a finger on the pulse of real estate in this town. He wants to show me a space that has come recently available in my neighbourhood. He thinks I could share it with a friend of his, Rene.

It turns out the space is in one of the three landmark towers in Marconiplein. These three blocks of white stone with square black windows mark my neighbourhood in the west of Rotterdam for kilometres in all directions. They were built in 1975, designed by a Chicago firm.

The realtor leads us into the first tower. It’s eerily empty. I had no idea that it had been emptied recently. This tower used to be the home of some gemeente, or city government, offices. Now the building is gutted. The realtors are filling the place floor by floor, so we’re only shown offices on the first floor. Jan is thorough. He asks many questions, walking the circuit of the floor imperiously, peeking in every corner. The windows are dusty. They look out over dusty roofs of the ground floor foyer. Jan sniffs at this. He says it’s worth waiting until they’re renting on higher floors, where there is a real view.

He’s been talking to the realtor in Dutch, of course. I listen. My Dutch is equal to following about half of the chatter.

I’ve lived overseas for over twelve years now. The day to day in another language is fun, and then it’s tiring. What it never is, is easy. Especially for someone coming to it in mid-life. You never move lazily through the day, drifting through conversations as though they were pleasant scents in the marketplace. Dialogue is work. You listen with concentration. Speaking is like vigorous exercise. It can be exhilarating, if the mind is clicking. But when the mind is slow, the work of speech is painful.

This is how life as an expat ticks along. I’m no refugee. I didn’t row any rafts to get here. I’m escaping no persecution worse than the hectoring despair that speaks in Donald Trump’s voice. I’m rescued from nothing worse than the grim pranks that America business plays on its workers.

And yet, as I watch Europe struggle with its bad immigration dreams, and fitfully act out against the strangers among her children, I can’t help but feel targeted. I am an immigrant, after all. I fight for my right to be here, a battle fought with lots of paperwork. And it costs, even in the fees levied when I misread a tax notice. We receive many mysterious letters from the city, and often they are delivering one unexpected expense or another. And sometimes you’re too tired for the effort of deciphering.

After meeting with Jan, I have to stop by our daycare. There has been a glitch with the paperwork. The administrator there wants to explain in Dutch. I encourage her to. I drop one word then another. She sees the strain in my eyes, and she begins to switch gradually to English, first with English words in Dutch sentences, and finally all English words in Dutch order. I don’t fight it. I know how hard it is to slow down in your own language. It took me years as a teacher and an expat to learn how to speak English for the foreigner, the basic syntax, the simplified vocabulary, the rounded enunciation, giving every vowel it due and making sure my words don’t slur together. It’s asking a lot for people to tailor their mother tongue for the visitor from far away.

So this is the life of the immigrant. It has is rewards. It is rarely dull. But sometimes you long for a dull day.

The Dutch voted against the Ukraine the other day, in a test of a new referendum system. Collect enough signatures, and you can call a popular vote. You can be sure that no one has the charisma to collect four hundred thousand signatures over an obscure economic treaty with a minor European power like the Ukraine. It was a referendum about the E.U., another measure of the water temperature as Brussels sinks into the sea, abandoned by all high-minded principle. It stands accused of heavy-handed bureaucracy. It stands accused by proxy for all the problems that have discomfited Europeans at home, economic crisis and austerity, civil war in Syria, the unrelenting ill will of Mr. Putin, and a long list of other things that have required patience and a charitable spirit for one or two too many years. And so we say no to Ukraine, and in doing so, strangely, aligning with Mr. Putin’s will.

Travelogue 689 – April 2
After the War

Carrying on, following the Republican Party through its early days, through the war that they had provoked and they had won, we do come to the third presidential candidate, only the third, though it feels like the difference of a century since the party could be led by the freewheeling mountain man and gold-rush privateer, John C. Frémont. There had been much blood spilt, a long war persecuted brutally, leaving half the country broken and burnt. The bitter and the vanquished were to be re-integrated into the union. Poor Mr. Lincoln had to be sacrificed. There was a pall like smoke over the capital.

The years that produced the first candidate, Mr. Frémont, were dust. The years that made him were the optimistic 1840s, the years of Manifest Destiny and the Mexican-American War. Our third candidate was also formed by those years. He fought bravely in Mexico. But notably he was to say many years later that the Mexican-American War was ‘one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.’ He opined that this war was a land grab in order to expand American slavery. The Civil War was a natural consequence.

That’s a surprising variety of honesty from a political man. And surprisingly specific. We’ve come a long way.

After Lincoln, there was to be one last Democratic president of the pre-war mould. He was an accident, the product of Lincoln’s desire to create a National Union government. Andrew Johnson was the only Southern senator to stand with the North, and he was rewarded by a last-minute inclusion on the ticket in 1864. A month after becoming vice-president, he was president.

Mr. Johnson didn’t do so well. He was stubborn. He was sympathetic toward Southern leadership. He was against civil rights for the freed slaves. And he had a few fatal flaws competing for primacy, his drunkenness, his rages, his inability to pull off a coherent speech. His inaugural speech, delivered just before Lincoln’s in 1864, was such a shocking failure that he hid from public view for weeks.

When half a million people die in civil war, not in a war against dangerous foreigners, there needs to be more than healing afterward. There needs to be some reason for it. There needs to be an effect achieved by the fighting, or there needs to be change. Johnson was all for the healing, and not so active in seeking change. He obstructed the Republicans, and they responded with impeachment. They didn’t succeed in ousting him. Mr. Johnson stayed in office for the duration of his term, to delay with petty dog-fights, to tour the country making outrageous speeches. The Democrats passed him over in 1868.

It could be that Mr. Johnson sealed the fate of the Democrats in presidential politics for a while. With exception of Grover Cleveland, the Republicans were to own the White House until Woodrow Wilson’s election. More accurately, until Franklin Roosevelt was able to redefine the party system. In 1868, it was going to be Ulysses S. Grant.

Jumping to the today’s Republican Party, I see that Mr Trump is falling from grace. And it was never going to be his ‘Know-Nothing’ comments against immigrants. It was going to be his misogyny. He publishes insinuations about his opponent’s wife. He says abortions should be punished. There are a few more women than Arab terrorists, and they vote. The candidate grumbles that he’s being persecuted.

We’ve come a long way since 1868.

Travelogue 688 – March 28
It Ain’t Easy Being a Know-Nothing
Part Three

The election of 1856 was as messy, and as nonsensical, as any of them. The slogan for the new Republican Party was ‘Free Speech, Free Press, Free Soil, Free Men, Frémont and Victory!’ Free Man was the operative concept there, I guess, the party being anti-slavery, but really there’s just something that rings in the word ‘free’.

Words do get tired. I read recently that polls suggest democracy is losing popularity among ‘millennials’. (I’m not sure which I find more frightening, that we call people millennials, or that we treat democracy as a brand name, subject to focus groups.) It’s a word. It’s a slogan. Kids rebel. But the same article points out how very savvy the same generation is when it comes to the mechanisms of democracy, or whatever we want to call it in the re-branding. The youngsters campaign as vigorously as their granddads when it comes to Bernie.

In 1856 the Democrats accused Frémont of being a Catholic (because of his French-Canadian roots). If the Democrats played the Catholic card, what were the anti-immigrant Know Nothings saying? Did Mr. Fillmore talk about walls and internment camps, registers for Catholics (all ideas from the high-minded 2016 campaign, referring to Catholic Mexicans and all Muslims)? It’s doubtful he did. For one thing, candidates didn’t tour and didn’t make speeches in those days. They stayed quietly in the background, a practice Mr. Trump might resurrect with some success. For another, Mr. Fillmore didn’t actually buy into his party’s agenda. He was more interested in preserving the Union, and using the new party as a platform.

I imagine it’s hard to run on such a tight agenda, anyway. How much can one say about those nasty immigrants and how they gotta go? It ain’t easy being a Know Nothing.

So the first Republican Party candidate for president was not the calm and deliberate and melancholy Lincoln, the great compromiser. Instead, it was the visionary and hot-tempered John C. Frémont, illegitimate son of a Quebecois fugitive. Maybe a Catholic!

By 1842 John C. Frémont was making his name exploring the Rockies, with Kit Carson at his side, and writing accounts for the newspapers. He was destined to lead five expeditions west, looking to forge viable routes to the west coast. In the 1840s he settled in California. He continued to be the populist voice of the Western pioneer. He gave the name Golden Gate to the watery stretch between San Francisco and Marin County, where the famous bridge would be built. He quickly became one of the state’s first two senators, and then its first presidential candidate, (becoming first among four Republican presidential candidates from California, followed by Hoover, Nixon, and Reagan).

Frémont would have said he was also the state’s first governor. During the Mexican-American War, he was briefly appointed military governor. When it turned out someone else had also been appointed at the same time, and by someone with more authority, Frémont would not stand down. This led to disciplinary action.

There was another unfortunate incident during the war, in which Frémont ordered the murder of three innocent Mexicans, telling Kit Carson they had no room for prisoners. His troubled war record became an issue during the election of 1856. It presaged his Civil War troubles.

But Frémont bounced back. Drummed out of the Army, he invested in land in California, discovered gold, and became a rich man. By 1856, he seems to have become the obvious man to lead the anti-slavery coalition. Two other fringe anti-slavery parties nominated him before the Republicans did.

Later, during the Civil War, he served the new Republican administration as command of the Army’s Department of the West. It became clear that securing the whole Mississippi River was going to be the core objective for the Department of the West. And first came Missouri. Frémont made two big decisions early on. He decided to test an officer whose reputation was less than sterling, a drunk and a taciturn man named Ulysses. He saw in Ulysses a strength of will that he saw this war would require. Ulysses went on to become the Union hero of the war, and afterward the third Republican candidate for president.

Frémont also rashly declared martial law in Missouri, and issued an emancipation proclamation. Slaves of rebels would be freed. Lincoln asked him to rescind the order, fearful it would tip the balance of sentiment against the North. Frémont refused. His wife, Jessie, went to Washington to argue with Lincoln. It didn’t help. Frémont was relieved of command, and the order was overturned. Two years later, Lincoln issued his own version of the order, applied to all the southern states.

And so it goes. Frémont still had a few battles left in him in 1862. He ran against Lincoln in 1864, representing the more radical abolitionists. In the late ‘70s, he served as governor of Arizona for President Rutherford B. Hayes. But his fortunes were in decline. He had invested in the railroads in the 60s, and had lost a lot of money. He and Jessie moved to New York City, and the man who made his name writing about the West died in New York City in 1890, poor and nearly forgotten. The party he led in its first presidential race had dominated the country for thirty years by then. It called itself the party of Lincoln.

Travelogue 687 – March 27
It Ain’t Easy Being a Know-Nothing
Part Two

There were three candidates for president in the general election of 1856. Two were to become candidates for ‘worst president ever’.

The Know Nothings bring their message of Popish conspiracy to the presidential race in 1856, nominating former president Millard Fillmore to take them to the White House. Fillmore was nominated while he was out of the country, and he wasn’t particularly anti-immigrant. His daughter had attended a Catholic school. He was against slavery, but was willing to compromise. The wrenching debate over the Compromise of 1850 occurred during his previous presidency, the debate to decide whether slavery would expand into territories won during the Mexican-American War, including California and Texas.

It was always going to be the issue of slavery that shaped the election of 1856, not the evils of immigration. And immigration wasn’t Fillmore’s reason for running. The Democrats had become too much the party of the South. And the new Republicans were a party of the North. Fillmore saw the Know Nothings’ American Party as an opportunity to build a truly national platform.

The Democrats make a national run, but in full knowledge that the upstart anti-slavery party, the Republicans, were probably going to take the North. It would be a race for electoral votes. And the upstart new anti-immigration party, the Know Nothings, would run interference.

Being the only party running that existed in 1852, the Democrats should have done better in 1856. The two upstart, one-issue parties took a total together of 54% of the popular vote.

The real story here is, of course, the third party, the Republicans, and the third candidate, one John C. Frémont.

Frémont is rarely cited as the first face of the Republican Party. It’s nice to be able to hold Lincoln up as your party standard. But Lincoln wasn’t even among the final candidates for nomination in 1856.

Frémont was something of a celebrity in his day, a charismatic man, a success story who made his fame in the Wild West as explorer and military man. He was a shrewd man, without doubt strong, and impetuous. He’s a figure who pops up in rather a surprising number of contexts in our nation’s story, mid-nineteenth century.

Mr. Frémont was born in Georgia, born out of wedlock to parents who had created some scandal with their union. His father was Quebecois. He had escaped from a British prison and had headed south. He died before young John was grown. A benefactor helped John to study at college. There the boy studied mathematics and natural sciences, but he was too impetuous to finish college. He dropped out to tutor math on a Navy sloop. Later he became second lieutenant in the Corps of Topographical Engineers, started up with surveying teams in the west, popping up with Joseph Nicollet in Minnesota in 1838 and 1839.

In 1841, he married Jessie, daughter to a powerful senator from Missouri, who was a strong advocate of Manifest Destiny, America’s right to settle the whole continent. Frémont’s destiny was to become wrapped up in this crusade. His explorations in the West in the coming years were to be motivated by the hope of finding a route across the Rockies for the railroads.

Jessie was to become a formidable politico in her own right. During the Civil War, when Frémont earned a reprimand from the president, freeing slaves in Missouri, it was Jessie who traveled to Washington and took up her husband’s case. She was a committed abolitionist, and she wasn’t about to see her husband disciplined by a Republican president for freeing slaves. In later years, Jessie became a popular author, writing volumes about their experiences in the American West.

Travelogue 686 – March 26
It Ain’t Easy Being a Know-Nothing
Part One

When I was in Minnesota, the memory of Trump’s silly pronouncements about Muslims and Mexicans was still fresh, so of course there were some rote references in the press to the Know Nothing movement of the nineteenth century.

Yes, even in the 1840s and 1850s there were angry Americans. Big changes were afoot. Andrew Jackson had shut down the national bank, and fanned the flames of distrust between east and west, north and south. The economy was volatile. The two-party system had collapsed, and the nation had yet to find a viable opposition to Jackson’s populist Democratic Party.

Angry people are happiest when there is someone to blame. Then, as now, immigrants were easy targets. At that time, the undesirables were the Irish and the Germans. There was a special place in bigots’ hearts for the Catholics. There was talk of a world conspiracy led by the Pope, analogous to the more recent theories of secret Jewish hegemony.

Sadly, the name ‘Know Nothings’ was no triumph of an imaginative critic, no casual insult from Mark Twain or Daniel Webster. The party’s roots were in secret societies, and new recruits were instructed to say, ‘I know nothing,’ when asked about the party. I can’t help thinking of Sergeant Schultz in ‘Hogan’s Heroes. Sorry.

The Know Nothings grew powerful enough to gain control of the Massachusetts legislature, and to field a candidate for president in the fateful year of 1856. Their candidate was former president Millard Fillmore. He was nominated while he was traveling overseas, recovering from the death of his wife in 1853 and his daughter in 1854.

Fillmore had already been president. He had inherited the office in 1850, as vice president under Zachary Taylor, he of delicate stomach, who died only a year after assuming office. Fillmore has since been ranked as one of the worst presidents in our history by committees of historians. His party, the Whigs, passed him over in 1852.

Fillmore returned from Europe in 1856, and he accepted the nomination, joining in one of the most interesting elections in our history. He came in third, carrying 21.6% of the popular vote and winning Maryland.

The winner in the election was James Buchanan, destined to join Fillmore among the ranks of worst presidents ever. Buchanan won with no majority, with only 45% of the popular vote, but carrying 19 states out of 31.

The president elected in 1856 was going to deal with the divisions over slavery. This conflict had already become violent Kansas. The Supreme Court was due to deliver its opinion on whether the federal government could prohibit slavery in new territories.

It might have seemed that the Democrats, with their generation-long tradition of compromise with southerners, and Buchanan, in particular, known as a ‘doughface’, a northerner with southern sympathies, would have been well-placed to solve the problem. He wasn’t.

Buchanan was a meticulous lawyer, and he believed that the spirit of the Constitution was a spirit of restraint. He recognized severe limits to the power of the federal government. While he believed it was illegal for states to secede, he believed the federal government had no right to prevent it. He wanted the slavery issue to be decided by the Court. The Dred Scott decision was delivered days after his inauguration, and he thought the matter settled. Congress had no right to prohibit slavery in new territories.

As his term in office ended in 1861, seven states had seceded, and Fort Sumter was awaiting reinforcements. At first Buchanan opposed reinforcements, and then he found Congress unwilling to grant him power to act. He gave up. He welcomed Lincoln to the White House with a much quoted expression of relief.

It was probably Fillmore’s entry into the race that allowed Buchanan’s election. Without his candidacy, the US might have seen its first Republican president four years earlier than it did, and that man would not have been Abraham Lincoln.

Travelogue 685 – March 19
The Primaries

Baby is happy to see me. She usually is. She smiles at me when I come in, first with open joy, and then in a bashful way. I pick her up, and I lift her up over my head, and she opens her mouth in a big unvoiced laugh. She spreads her arms like she’s flying.

Her excitement lasts only a few minutes. She’s right back into her life. Her life now seems to centre around finding creative ways to bump her head. She wears her mother out twisting and turning, and with her new-found ability to crawl. She has a nice and wide play area, free of most perils, but Baby always wants to crawl under the coffee table, her head centimetres from the underside of the table. We carry her back to the open play area, and then she pulls herself into a standing position at the window sill. If we don’t watch carefully, she’ll topple over. We sit her down, and she crawls toward the table. She likes the sound the wooden tiles on the floor make when she slaps them.

Baby requires novelty. Her toy today is the black plastic clip I wear around my pants leg when I cycle. It makes a funny clacking noise when you tap it and the ends clap together. She waves it around, and she smacks it against the floor. She brings it to her mouth. She wants to chew on it, and slobber on it, and I’m forced to take it away. She gets ready to cry. When I make a show of taking a big drink from my water bottle, and really enjoying it, I know she’ll demand to have it.

I reflect a lot on the innocence of babies, how readily they accept being picked up, dressed and bathed and moved around. I reflect on how Baby will grow to rebel against these ministrations. This same innocence grows into independence and contrariness. That’s the human machine.

While I was in Minnesota, I caught up with the progress of the party primaries in this election year. Every time I went to the gym, the ubiquitous TVs were broadcasting ‘analysis’.

It seemed as though the outrage about Trump was cresting. Mitt Romney denounced him. Every discussion about politics began and ended with him, Trump as cautionary tale, Trump as omen, Trump as impending disaster.

I was surprised to discover how detached I had become. American politics used to inspire hope and fury in me, increasingly the latter. I had no defences against the circus. I left America during the Bush II era, and I was so relieved. I was ready to hear another set of news.

Friends in Minnesota were ranting about the Trump phenomenon. They were upset. They were citing items of evidence that things were extreme. Protesters were being beat up at Trump rallies. He was free with bigoted and angry utterances, and to everyone’s astonishment, he didn’t correct in the face of press criticism. His base stayed firm. His appeal grew.

I shrugged, and I wondered. I thought we had all become accustomed to this, the uncompromising hunger for authoritarianism among quite a lot of Americans. It’s like the temptation of vertigo, the feeling you might jump when you stand at the edge of a great height. This movement has more and more appeal every decade, crowds gathering in their longing for brutal simplicity, gathering to cry out for the dictator who will restore democracy. The shock manifested by liberals seems as much an expression of American exceptionalism as the bland flag-waving of the right. It couldn’t happen here.

What has been most engaging for me is the strange characters these crowds turn up. They have an endearing soft spot for the buffoons. They gravitate to the likes of Reagan, Quayle, Bush Junior, Ventura, Palin, and Trump. Who can’t appreciate the aesthetics? I’ve long maintained that Palin is a national treasure. Her endorsement speech for Trump was pure gold. What other nation has a public figure like Sarah? What a wonderful mass sublimation. Trump himself, I can take or leave. He’s a bit too vulgar, too ready a reflection of the hairy beast in the soul of his followers. The ugliness overtakes the clownishness, and maybe that’s our sign that it’s time for a know-nothing win. Hard to say.

We’re always fascinated by the spectre of Hitler and his perverse cabal. But isn’t the more interesting image that of the crowds, the innocence in their eyes, the child-like belief in the greatness of their nation? This boisterous service to history must trump all other concerns, all the matters that establishment types drone on about, this annoying complexity they moralize about. The crowd at the Nazi rally believes they can shout down complexity.

Wouldn’t it be nice? Sometimes it feels good to be angry. The world does seem simpler for a moment. The problems might be dissolved in righteousness. It’s too bad that history doesn’t offer too many examples of it working. Even angry actions have consequences. And then someone wants to bicker, something about details. He or she has another opinion. How annoying. The baby always grows up.

Travelogue 684 – March 13
Hour Off

Tomorrow I fly back to Europe. I’m thinking I’ll miss my early morning ritual at Peace Coffee. The opening baristas this morning are a pair of familiar faces. She has been working for years. She has an endearingly haughty manner. Her voice is radio perfect. She assumes a formal register, and she doesn’t look at me. When chatting with her colleagues she laughs. And her laugh also seems made for radio.

The other barista is outside setting up tables when I arrive. He says the time change has thrown him. He says he’s tired. He says he didn’t see the sun when he got up. He tells me this was Ben Franklin’s idea, Daylight Savings Time. It’s true. The old diplomat was ever the pragmatic. He measured the advantage in longer evenings by the candles that would be saved. But it took the era of mass war and rationing to adopt the strategy. We struggling nation would save electricity.

I’m a morning person, but I do enjoy the longer evenings. Winter feels like a host who is eager for you to leave. Spring is a welcoming back into life. You can stretch your legs a little, and enjoy. As often as not, I’m I bed before the light has left the sky. That makes for a sense of hope.

So I lose an hour overnight. At least this time I had some warning. Often, I am unaware it’s coming and find out during the following day of skewed schedules. Lately it seems I’m on the road when these time changes happen, compounding the jetlag. It becomes an additional variable in the continuous calculus of international travel. Most of my clocks are still on Dutch time, anyway. I don’t bother to change them They allow me to track the time in Holland, and tune into my wife’s and baby’s lives.

Since Europe doesn’t change for a few more weeks, I have in a sense already started my journey home. I’m one hour closer.

The male barista follows me indoors, and he is the one who serves my espresso. He serves it with a glass of sparkling water. And he says the water is fresh. It’s bubbling just fine today, he tells me with some pride. It’s a European tradition, he tells me. It’s the contrast that makes it work, the clean and crisp taste that washes the palate, standing against the rich and dark flavours of the coffee.

This barista tells me lots of things. He tells me about his musical selections in the morning. He’s a fan of the various screeching and crunching types of metal. He starts one day with a German a capella metal band. I’m amused.

He amuses everyone who comes in. He never stops talking during the hours I spend in the café. He tells stories and he jokes and he engages with the children, offering them stickers printed with the coffee shop brand. He tells the house all about his new bicycle. He tells us about the days he was a crane operator. He explores mythology with the old-timers. I’m admiring his energy, his good cheer.

I’m getting on a plane tomorrow. I will amuse myself with movies and podcasts, wishing I could sleep. Even though it will be night, I will watch out the window for Greenland. It’s a place made for meditation. I’ll wonder again how the poets did without having seen what I see out these windows. But still I won’t sleep. We will have abandoned the sun, casting ourselves over the eastern horizon. Still I won’t sleep.

Travelogue 683 – March 5
Dupont and Emerson

It’s been a blur of a week here in old Minnesota, devoted to work, and then to sleep. It’s one of those seasons in old Minnesota, longer than in other places, long weeks while the land lingers in between winter and spring, stepping carefully forward through slush. It’s a kind of twilight, a time of special light, a waiting.

I’m working, and I’m sleeping. When I work, the day starts before sunrise at Peace Coffee. I am watching sleepy people lining up for coffee from the vantage of my table at the back. The windows face east, and I am watching light creep into the Minnesota sky, making blue spaces between the branches of the bare trees. Espresso makes the computer screen flicker.

It’s midday in the office in Uptown, in the basement level one-room office with windows opening onto the asphalt of the parking lot in back of the building. The lights are fluorescent. We are solving puzzles. We are writing answers on chart paper. We are consulting computer screens. We are answering telephones. We make the hallway, dead carpet and windowless, resound with our voices.

Before the tired winter sun is done with the day, I’m already thinking about sleep. My body is still trying to shed my fever from last week, and it’s trying to shed the hours on the airplane, and the most mundane of daily tasks is feeling like a heavy weight.

I’m sleeping in Uptown, not so many blocks away from the office. I’m reliving my youth. AirBNB matched me with this house only half a block from an apartment from my past, where I spent three years sleeping on a futon in my tiny room in a shared two-bedroom place, a modest place stripped bare of adornment, furnished with necessity plus a TV. This was where I lived, writing my first play. This was where I lived when I started dating Leeza.

The house I’m staying in now is very characteristic of Uptown. As much as the district has changed along its main avenues, looking like a zoning attempt at carefree wealth, clean condos above bars that look like they were built to plans borrowed from South Beach, it all looks much the same on the side streets, Colfax, Dupont, Emerson, Fremont. The clapboard houses are as humble as they ever were. Inside, students and artists camp in dim lighting. I’m housed in a room in the front of one of these houses. The floorboards creak. The false ceilings are stained. The paint is peeling. The upstairs neighbours are cheerful young guys who stomp and laugh in the evenings. The room is simple enough, bare but for the idiosyncratic tiled fireplace, and the ancient carpet laid over the floorboards. The bed is extraordinarily comfortable. I happily retreat into its warmth to read as long as I can, while upstairs the cheerful boys tell jokes.

I’m awake at three. The house is silent. I creep to the bathroom, trying without success to be quiet. The substance of the building responds to its occupants, murmuring when they move, groaning under their weight.

The frost of the season lies undisturbed outside, touching things with its lingering chill. It has hours before sunlight. Nothing moves once I have stopped. The house rests again. Sleep is slow as time. I’m abandoned to daydreams in the cold night.

Travelogue 682 – March 1
Craters

I’m looking out the window on the flight over the Atlantic. We’re midway to America. I’m curious as ever about the bizarre landscape of Greenland. It’s so hard to put any human scale to it. I see glaciers, blue at their wrinkled edges. I see formations of rock like craters, like round heads of volcanoes, but buried shoulder-high in snow. There are a number of them, and many of them are broken open on one side, as though to allow a doorway. They look like natural amphitheatres. I imagine myself standing in the circle of stone, with walls of rock rising round me. How many hours to walk side to side of the crater?

Bob Dylan is singing in my earphones. He assures me there will be shelter from the storm. It’s a world of steel-eyed death, etc. ‘Come in, she said, I’ll give ya,’ and I’m examining worlds of ice. They are strangely inviting from this height. When I imagine it, I don’t account for the cold. I don’t account for the anxiety of true solitude.

I’ll give you shelter from the storm, I’m hearing, and I’m very moved. ‘Thank you,’ I whisper, fogging up the airliner window.

There was a time when I was first introduced to Bob Dylan. That would have been when I visited my brother during his time at university. I was just a kid, raised on my father’s Tin Pan Alley. I wondered why this Dylan man would record an album when he clearly couldn’t sing. My brother laughed. He insisted I keep listening, and I did come to appreciate the songs.

Now the music is so much a part of me that I wonder how it could be otherwise. How could it be that this one song wouldn’t move everyone? I find it more challenging to imagine the person who isn’t moved by Dylan than it is to imagine crossing the crater in Greenland.

Maybe it’s the fever from the weekend doing my thinking. If they all could be me, at just this moment, they would feel it, too. If they could remember those days when I was ten, and remember the reverence for vinyl in those days. If they could have gone to the beach with my brother and walked the boardwalk.

It occurs to me that I’ve just drawn a circle around the story of the 60s. If only they understood. If only they heard our music, they would find shelter from the storm.

But it didn’t happen. The bold idealism should have been rewarded. With all that energy, they should have broken through, discovered peace and love. But it’s still a world of steel-eyed death.

For kids who grew up in the shadow of the 60s, it seemed the stuff of classical tragedy. In history, they were just one more wave of idealists who were broken under the wheel of human failings. But we don’t live in history. They were my brothers. They were my heroes. Their songs were plugged into our emotions.

Bob was in the news recently. At age 74, he’s sold six thousand items from his own history to the University of Tulsa, notes and lyrics and poems, artwork and photos. His archive will be neighbour to a museum dedicated to his own hero, Woodie Guthrie, also in Tulsa.

With Bowie’s passing, we awaken again to the passage of time. We’ve been watching the parents of the Boomers go for some time now, those tough veterans of the Depression and of world war. But now must we brace for this, the passing of the ‘kids’ of the 60s?

Bob Dylan sings at the close of the film, and the film is another brilliant production on the part of Danny Boyle This one is about a Baby Boomer named Steve Jobs. The film is structured like a play, a tragedy worthy of Greek stylings, a story revolving around the tragic flaw of the hero.

Much has been made of this man Jobs, the stark merging in his character of vision and implacable ambition. He has become myth, and it’s right that he is paired with Dylan here. It’s a pairing that captures much about the riddle of the Boomer generation. Dylan made his mark before Jobs was ten. There is a call and response to their dreams and achievements.

Will it be Jobs who is the final measure of the generation, when history has had its say? The song of the 60s led somehow inevitably to this, the vision epitomized by Jobs, the system that would link minds around the world, the system that would change everything. Steel-eyed death still stalks, but it advertises by phone to children in Osaka and Milwaukee and Addis Ababa.

My eyes are on Greenland. My eyes are on the foggy ocean. My eyes are now on the Hudson Bay. The ice on the bay is cracked in patterns that look like roads. The white ice goes on for miles and miles, and I still see no people. I stare so long the bright white colour of the ice loses its value. Without its colour, is ice still ice? I’m sleepy, and many miles of it are hypnotizing. I could once again be over Arabia, flat as broken ice, approaching Dubai. I have been this way before.

Travelogue 681 – February 25
The Queen’s Dog

I’m feverish and trying to sleep, despite the headache and the alternating sweats and chills. My back hurts from lying down for too many hours. When I do sleep, my dreams are horrible. I’m reliving nightmarish work scenarios over and over. I cannot rid myself of the dreams.

Outside, I hear a dog bark. It strikes me: as much as the Dutch like their dogs, it’s rare I hear them barking at night. It’s a sound I grew up with. There were the dogs next door. There were crickets. It always took me a long time to get to sleep. I seem to have followed a different line of sleep evolution to the majority. The middle-aged man to that sleepless child who listened to the dogs now generally drops off without effort. When there’s no fever.

There was a window above my bed, as I recall, and that was the direction of the dogs. The neighbours had a pack of German shepherds. They were unruly. We had a brick wall separating us, but that didn’t stop them from getting at one of our dogs and killing her.

My mother had a fondness for corgis. I was too young to enjoy the camp of it. My mother was an unashamed Anglophile. The queen’s breed is so silly looking, but so cute. These two dogs were very good-natured. I have an image surviving, my mother walking down the driveway weeping for the lost corgi. Either she or my father was carrying the bloodied body. I can’t remember which. Oddly enough, my mind can produce both images, my mother’s arms at her side, hanging empty in despair, and the dog’s body draped across her arms. For all I know now, I may have invented the memory entire.

There were also windows to the left of my bed, high ones, with a door in them. They led out onto a terrace overlooking a steep decline covered in ivy, divided by a staircase, and, at the bottom a stretch of brown grasses that we owned. The house was a patch of peace in the L.A. basin. The house was a temporary monument to the success of the family, lasting only five or six years, until the divorce. There were fruit trees on the grounds. There was a haystack with an archery target for my athletic older brother. There was a spot where my father set up a tent in a futile effort to cultivate an outdoorsy instinct in me, his youngest.

Just outside the window above my head was a sort of backyard that appealed more to my sensibilities. It was not a lawn. It was more like a sheltered little clearing in a wood, bare ground shaded by high trees, bordered on one side by the brick wall and on the other by the house. Here I whiled away a lot of lonely hours. My brothers had headed off to college. I was left to weather the tough seas of my parents’ final years together.

We were left with one little corgi, an affectionate little boy with red hair and no tail. He waddled around the house. He followed us and nipped at our heels. I would take him to the backyard and I would try to train him. He was very eager to please, and he licked my hand. When I wasn’t happy, he lowered his ears in shame.

I had a boy’s fascination for the circus. I read histories of the American circus I pictured the romance of the life on the road. I imagined the two of us could be an act together. We were friends and conspirators. He could sit and lie on command. He could sit up, and that’s a funny sight in a corgi. I tied a couple lengths of rope tight, parallel and about one meter above the ground, and I forced the poor pup to venture out on the ropes. He took it well. He had such a good disposition. He crossed the length of the ropes. We were ready for the circus.

But I never booked the audition. It was a dream. Instead I carried on with school in the day, and I listened to those dogs next door into the night, trying to interpret the message in their feverish barking. There was something I had to understand, a barren darkness over the wall. And I wasn’t going to be able to dream.

Among the streets of Rotterdam, the bark echoes, like an ink blot folded on itself and making a pretty aural design, and then it’s gone. That was it. There is no more to it. The fever twists the needle in my temple, and I roll over. I’m facing away from the window. I’ll slip into the foam of those dreams again, wondering while I do why the ones closest to the surface are the most troubled. I would drink from deeper in the well if I could. The darkest waters would be cool and refreshing.

Travelogue 680 – February 18
Bedtime Stories
Part Two

The nights are long. We sit around the fire, and we call upon the poet to entertain us. The clan has its poet. Every age has its poet, the one who captures Truth with words.

‘If … I say, “That train arrives here at 7 o'clock,” I mean something like this: “The pointing of the small hand of my watch to 7 and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events.”’

And so begins one of the most memorable of modern bedtime stories. It was published in 1905. The story has an unlikely title. It’s called, ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.’ There is no smiting and there are no bloody executions. The enemies are a no-show, so there’s little need for puissance or valour.

Much of it is written in a language that isn’t accessible to the masses. I can’t read it. It looks like this:

It’s a kind of music. It’s lyre and pan pipes. One can only listen. This is the language of modern cosmology. When the ancient poets told us about Zeus and his escapades, we could picture them. But when these poets tell us stories we have a hard time visualizing. They see the universe as textiles woven of these threads of formulae, maybe like computer programmers stringing lines of obscure text together, knowing it results in the web pages we see on the screen.

It started with Newton. We could picture the apple. It led to Einstein, and now we have to picture curving space. No, you’re not seeing it.

Einstein was in the news recently. Scientists had confirmed another of his theories. They confirmed the existence of gravity waves. (The latter translates into another fun tongue-twister in Dutch, by the way: zwaartekrachtsgolven.) The Guardian, offered some interpretation, calling it a triumph of the local. Waves are subject to Einstein’s rule that nothing travels faster than light. Newton himself had been troubled by the implication in his theory that gravity was a force that would be felt instantaneously everywhere, even if in weakening proportion. Einstein added the speed bumps.

So, like all good story-telling, Einstein’s tales offer us explanations of the universe, creation stories, and even a kind of morality. The world coheres according to law. We are guided by the golden rule, c, the speed of light. And there is a good inside the search for universality. If stories require conflict, then maybe, lurking in the shadows, there is in fact a satyr, a trickster, in the guise of one Max Planck, Einstein’s mentor and father of quantum theory. It’s only there, among those quirky quanta, that the morals and the universals seem to break down.

Merrily our modernist poets wove their tales, reciting in their esoteric language, until their time began to wane. The modern world was passing, giving way to the medievalism of the post-modern era. Abstraction in art became suspect. Form returned to poetry. Religion surged. Evolution was under attack, a theory one had little problem visualizing. Those who were busy curving space and pursuing ghosts inside the atom found themselves isolated. The university was a fortress again. Outside, there were marauders.

Yes, the poets have rediscovered the power of waves. They obey the golden rule of c. They travel out; they come back. Their lives are waves. Their times are waves. They pick up old tools. It may be time to smite again.

Travelogue 679 – February 17
Bedtime Stories
Part One

The nights are long. Light the fires. Call upon the poet to entertain us. Every clan has one, the man or the woman with words. Tell us stories.

“Once upon a time,’ they say.

‘Andra moi ennepe, Mousa,’ they say. ‘Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many ways …’

‘In the beginning was the Word,’ they say because they’ve learned something of their power. The clans have built altars and pulpits.

‘Certainly Jesu Christ is only very God,’ was the story Valentinus told the Roman emperor. ‘And if thou believe in him, verily thy soul shall be saved, thy realm shall multiply, and he shall give to thee alway victory of thine enemies.’ That seems very persuasive. What emperor doesn’t want victory over his enemies? According to the Aurea Legenda, Claudius Gothicus was persuaded. He said, ‘Hear ye how wisely and reasonably this man speaketh?’ But his evil counsellors talked him down.

The saint should have just said, ‘Be my Valentine.’ But if he had, and if the emperor had chuckled and let Valentinus go, as too cute to have bludgeoned to death, there would have been no reason for the Archbishop of Genoa to have written about him a thousand years later.

The archbishop, one Jacobus de Voragine, has an interesting rhetorical technique. He interprets the names of the saints. ‘Valentine,’ he says, ‘is as much to say as containing valour that is perseverant in great holiness. Valentine is said also as a valiant knight, for he was a right noble knight of God, and the knight is said valiant that fleeth not, and smiteth and defendeth valiantly and overcometh much puissantly. And so Saint Valentine withdrew him not from his martyrdom in fleeing, he smote in destroying the idols, he defended the faith, he overcame in suffering.’

I’m not sure what or how Valentinus overcame in this story. Best to say the poet overcomes. His words survive. He himself becomes a word. ‘You are my Valentine.’

He chose his poetry, and the emperor wasn’t convinced. The poem was sedition. The voice had to be eradicated. The emperor has the poet beaten outside the city gates.

There’s something careless about Valentinus’s martyrdom, a kind of casual cruelty. The stories of martyrdom invite speculation. How serious was the old soldier Claudius Gothicus -- called Gothicus because of his slaughter of many Goths, -- how serious was he about this execution? It seems like an act of casual cruelty, a sort of theatre of flippant power.

Valentinus was no symbol of romantic love at that time. That came about more than a thousand years later, even later than Jacobus de Voragine. (Strange to contemplate that kind of time in the span of one’s reputation.) If he were the saint of chocolates and flowers, cupids and kisses, of fickle love, then the capriciousness and the cruelty might have been apt.

Instead, Valentinus just seems like an annoyingly earnest priest. Why not allow him a poetic exit, his walk up Calvary, his solemn moment before the axe or blade? But execution is theatre, and I suppose power is best demonstrated by contempt. I think of the violent dispatch of tourists and journalists and aid workers by warlords and jihadists around the world.

‘Certainly Jesu Christ is only very God,’ the poet says, and he describes the world. The jihadists perform their spoken word on video and they defy the world. They turn the technology on its head, reviling the science that made it. It’s funny to contemplate this assault on the children of the positivist, anti-clerical theologies that created the modern world, an attack clothed in the words of atavistic religionists. Funny.

They smiteth and defendeth valiantly and overcometh much puissantly. Their realm shall multiply, and Allah shall give to them alway victory of their enemies.

Travelogue 678 – February 16
The Day After

Romance looks a little different this year. For one thing, we’re a day late in celebrating Valentine’s Day. The weaker link in this marriage has left his planning for the last minute. He has asked for a delay.

And it’s been cold. Strange that lovers choose winter to celebrate themselves. Is it the cosy hearth, the warmth of the blankets, that make this date seem the natural day?

Did Saint Valentine remark upon the cold as he was led to execution? How cold was it in Rome that day? Was he thinking about love? One legend has it he married many Christian couples. Was the memory of their happiness warming him on his last walk?

Was he regretting his decision to preach to the emperor? They say Claudius Gothicus had taken a liking to the saint, until he had started trying to convert him. This emperor was a hard man, a soldier. He performed as a wrestler in his youth. This was a man rumoured to have taken out a horse’s teeth with one punch.

Saint Valentine was led outside the Flaminian Gate, and there he was beaten with clubs and stones. When that didn’t kill him, they took off his head. This was an ignominious end to the man. He leaves off as man; he becomes a martyr. And something survives in the violent end.

Interestingly, the Piazza del Popolo, just inside the Flaminian Gate survived as a spot for execution into the nineteenth century. There are always two sides to the survival.

Today, on the day after the day after, the cold is particularly acute. The sun is out, and usually that is enough to inspire me to cycle into town. But there is frost on the grass. There is ice in the street. I am convinced to walk up to the Metro Station. I contemplate the passing of Saint Valentine. He has died again, and the cold reminds us that winter still has power to overcome the warmth of red hearts and the shadow of groundhogs alike.

They buried Valentine hastily in a shallow grave outside the gates. The ground must have been hard. His followers dug up his remains, and returned them home to Terni.

I found a very nice selection of flowers available yesterday. That is one advantage to being tardy. I was eager to reward my patient wife. I presented flowers. I cooked. We lit candles, and the four of us shared a cosy moment of romance.

Baby stares at us when we kiss. My mother-in-law just looks the other way, usually finding some excuse to start shuffling noisily around the apartment again. She tidies. She wipes down counters. She piles dishes, and then she re-arranges them. She shuffles back to check on Baby. She tosses out a useless question. ‘Is she poopy?’ (And it doesn’t sound much better in Amharic.) She shuffles back with a sigh. My wife and I smile and we kiss again. Baby stares. She seems shocked. She considers crying, but we smile and we laugh and we gather her up in our arms. It’s Valentine’s Day, Baby.

And really it isn’t. Valentine’s ghost has flown, flown away to its home in heaven. It has flown like a turtle dove. In the Middle Ages, people believed that birds mated in February. That is such a lovely little caution of hope, a story like that. I will tell Baby that one day in February, when we are tired of winter. Listen to their songs, sweetheart.

Travelogue 677 – February 8
Expressions

Baby shivers with excitement. She sits in her high chair, her throne of white plastic and still regal, and she throws her arms wide. She holds her hands out, and she waves them with enthusiasm. She has these expressions of joy.

Each day seems like something different. She is growing so fast. She discovers new moods every day. There are days she devotes to whining. There are days she is content. She can sit on her mat in the living room, absorbed happily in the tag on one of her stuffed animals. She looks up. She bounces on her butt, and she talks. She looks for some new object to grab hold of. She reaches across the low coffee table. I’ve set a vitamin bottle there. It sounds like a rattle. She can shake it. She can scratch at the ridges along the cap’s edge.

There are days of joy. She claps, and she squeals. She coos and she waves. She gives Daddy a smile when he gets home that erases all troubles. She watches him take his coat off, drop his heavy backpack. She reaches up for him to pick her up. And with his help, she turns in the air.

Daddy’s coming and going. Lots of opportunities for homecoming, lots of flights around the living room.

It’s a season for starting projects. I’m launching into training for my spring race. I’m conducting auditions for my play. We have a lot of new recruits for the amateur theatre group. The actors are volunteers who speak English and enjoy theatre as a hobby. Many are teachers or students. We rehearse at the college. I’ve offered up one of my old one-acts for production, and I’ve written another one to accompany the first. The first is tragedy, the second a farce. They should make for an entertaining evening.

The evening start with warm-up exercises, led by one of the directors. He has them shake their feet, shake their hands. He has them make funny noises. I always sit these things out. I’m no actor, and I don’t have the stamina for this kind of fun-making. They are walking briskly around the classroom space, tracing random lines with their steps, turning around each other, stopping when the director claps, eyes closed and telling us what they have observed, or freezing in spontaneous poses at the director’s command. Show me revenge, he shouts. Show me grief. Show me love.

I’m struck by the poses for love. The contrast is startling. The men show us sad-eyed longing, even pining. The girls show joy and pleasure. It’s a young crowd, and so there’s something right about this pantomime. The picture is occasionally worth a thousand words.

The director claps and love is abandoned for the next drama. Walk. Shake the puzzle pieces and see where they land. Theatre is a beautiful vision, a state of nature.

Travelogue 676 – February 6
Winds in the Port City

Baby stayed up late last night. We were celebrating having her home. She started daycare this week, and we all suffered. We took her three mornings this week for ‘wenen’, which means getting used to it, to the place, the people, and the routine.

The first morning, she cried desperately when we placed her in the arms of the minder. I was rooted to the spot. I could not make myself walk away. This was heart break again. A feeling I didn’t expect on a day like this.

This is what days this week have looked like. Bike under clouds, the winds gathering under bridges and rushing between buildings downtown. Central Station stands as buttress against depression, steady and suggesting light in its silver panelling. While there isn’t much light to reflect this winter, the station glows with what it may.

People cross the open plein in front of the station. Their gait suggests hope, no matter what their individual moods might be. They assume a city pace reflexively, and the effect is contagious. We have places to go!

Baby will one day stride across some city square, absorbed in thought. Thoughts will churn through her young mind. She’ll be in a hurry, and she will understand urgency. There is only today’s clock. Someone watches her. Suddenly all is silent. There is only motion. The engine is sealed inside. One doesn’t hear the pistons of insistent thought.

From this distance, it appears she’s leaning to one side as she walks. She tilts into some wind. She makes her way across the square

I’m afraid it’s a moment I won’t forget, the first moment of abandonment. I can’t amend that. Even morally. This world requires the testing of innocence, the strain against trust. It’s an unexpected burden. I’m made to enforce the ways of a world that I don’t entirely believe in.

Bike under clouds, and the cold wind gathers under bridges. When it comes, it teases the nerves and awakens imminence. Depression pools in the high portals of the train station. The people lay down their footsteps, quick rhythms toward the turnstiles. There’s a massive screen above the terminal and it exhibits looping video of daily business in Europe’s biggest port.

I guess it’s all about the turnstiles.

Travelogue 675 – January 20
Land of Opportunity

He’s Afghani. He’s taking me to the airport. It’s 530am, and there are people strolling the streets like it’s an afternoon in spring. I remark to him, and he nods. This is a city that never sleeps, he says.

You like it here in Dubai, I say to him. Of course, I do. Everyone does. There is work. There is money. It’s safe. People have a nice time. They work hard and then they enjoy. He doesn’t come up with the words, ‘Land of Opportunity,’ but they hang there in the cab’s stale air. This is Dubai. People are flooding in from all over the world for a chance at Sheikh Mohammed’s dream.

And how do they get along, these people from all the hot-headed races of the planet? It’s safe, he insists. No one acts out because the rule of law is strong here. Do anything, you’re caught, and you’re fined. There are people from all nations here, but they never fight. Try to start a fight, he challenges, looking at me in the mirror. See what happens. No, no, I demur. I believe you.

Despite his call to arms, he’s a mild man. He’s polite. He’s bearded, well-groomed. He seems content. He drives like there might be a tomorrow, which is refreshing. We will arrive at the airport in peace.

And what about the heat? Oh, it’s not so bad. In summer, forty, forty-five. He shrugs. That sounds pretty bad to me. He smiles. You don’t feel it, he says.

It is an international city. You see that right away. If you squint and cover the Arab script with one hand, if you turn away from the flashy skyline, if you ignore the occasional Arab in full garb, strolling by like a happy overlord, if you judge only by the people on the street, you wouldn’t know quite where you were in the world. The residents are remarkably diverse.

People follow money, and there is plenty of money here. I’ve seen some of it during my sightseeing, seen the money congealing into high buildings around the Marina, buildings shaped by fun innovation and ambition. Two of them feature storeys-high portraits of Sheikh Mohammed and some other bearded luminary.

I’ve taken the ferry from Bur Dubai, spending an hour on the waters of the Gulf, peering out the shaded windows. We pass the artificial shores of the Sheikh’s islands, the World Islands, and then the Pearl. These latter lie just off the Marina, long and curved islands shaped like the fronds of a palm, and surrounded by a circular breakwater. We pass the spreads of several luxurious resorts and behind them rows of posh houses. At the furthest point from shore, you see the five-star Atlantis Hotel, a pink Aladdin’s dream, two wings separated by an enormous arch, a suggestion of unseemly wealth.

About sixty thousand people live on the Pearl Islands. It was projected to house double that number, but apparently the engineers have irritated Mother Nature by stirring the muddy depths of the gulf. The waters trapped among the islands have become fetid. Property values are sinking into the silt.

The ferry enters the tame waters of the Marina, and we are encircled by the clean buildings among their sunny walkways and fringes of grass. I’m thinking healthy lawns in this desert city are like Persian carpets, expensive and rare beauties. They are expertly manicured, lushly green.

I am happily quit of the ferry. I walk the streets of this Arabian Bel Air, back in the sunshine and the fresh air. I so enjoyed the morning’s tour of old Dubai that I am eager to see the new one. Ultimately I am disappointed. It seems as though I am often let down by the deployment of wealth. I expect something more. There is a surprising genericism to the sensibility of the rich. I expect more. Something more challenging than innovations on the skyscraper, more exciting than the many variations on lounge and finger food, something more than pretty women smirking at pretty men in pretty cars, everyone showcasing brands and tame body art as though they were born to advertise.

I make it to the beach. This one is behind the Hilton. It’s a narrow ribbon of sand, with a view of the gulf that is compromised by more construction on more islands and by the hazy prospect of the decadent Pearl Islands. The waves are small and lazy. There is a camel offered for rides. There are so many bodies, they seem like litter. A beautiful woman in a blue bikini turns in a slow circle, recording video with her phone. I’m in long sleeves and baggy pants. I turn away when the lens comes my way. I feel no interest in turning back. I stroll through the sensuous Hilton back to the street that parallels the shore. I’m looking for somewhere to eat. I seek out a patio above the street, within sight of the gulf, where whole families are indulging in shisha together. I eat humble humus. I look only at the water.

I go home by way of the Metro. It’s a long ride back to Deira on the east side of the city. Much of the way the Metro is on an elevated track, and I can watch the city roll by. Between the districts of the Marina and the Burj Khalifa lie miles of flat city blocks, something like the real city, developed but subdued. This probably represents the experience of most people here, the simple houses among the mundane round of errands. It’s a comfort to them that the rich are out there, like a promise, lacking all imagination but spending prolifically. They embody the opportunity.

Travelogue 674 – January 19
Tangent About Rome

People complain about the cold, and still there’s a skip to their step. Northerners like the cold. Batu doesn’t. She seems stunned and slow. We disembark from the tram at Central Station. She asks, ‘Is this it?’ in a small voice, though she’s been this way dozens of times. I’m concerned that she never seems to retain anything. Maybe it’s just a lack of confidence that makes her ask. We’re here to put her on a train. Twice now, she has missed her stop when travelling alone, on the same trip. Her station is the third stop. They announce the stations. She’s equipped with the time of arrival. Still she gets disoriented.

We walk from the tram stop to the train station. She shuffles slowly and unsteadily. Her eyes peer out from between coat collar, coat’s hood, and scarf. She follows me into the great hall of the station. I guide her through to her platform, and I wait with her. I remind her of her stop, her schedule. She listens vaguely, proudly. I watch her board and make her distracted way down the aisle until she finds her seat.

With the help of a friend of ours, she has been investigating affordable treatment options in Belgium. It’s a long shot. Is this the ‘medical tourism’ we hear about? If so, it’s rather more than a euphemism, really a romantic term for something degrading.

It would have been easier if she had been undocumented and seeking asylum. Medical care would not have been refused. As it is, they say she has to go home for treatment, forcing an honest family to break their rules. No one will send a family member home if treatment there is risky.

There is in this a sort of keynote to the refugee crisis in Europe. Problem-solving begins and ends with national citizenship. Citizenship becomes something like Willy Wonka’s golden ticket. It occurs to me that the Roman Empire is still alive. Of course we all want to be Roman, I mean German. And how precisely did this become the solution to the long algebraic problem that starts in, say, the Arab Spring? If only you would become me …

But they don’t. Most sink under prejudice and dejection, and commit their families to several generations of marginalization. No one is shocked by this eventuality in 2016. And many think the refugees deserve it. It is an odd chain of logic.

The chain of events started in crisis. Do we have reason to think this will be the last crisis? Are war, famine, disease, and environmental crisis endangered species now? We don’t prepare for them. We just whip out the golden tickets once a generation and despise the recipients of the tickets. It is a bizarre response.

If we accepted crisis as part of the human condition, and if we believed in world citizenship, would we imagine different solutions? Would we properly fund world-wide response systems? Maybe refugees would not have to walk thousands of miles in pursuit of a chance to be gardeners for Roman patricians?

Some American politicians seem to have caught the Roman imperial fever, forgetting the roots of the country’s identity and vitality.

I have to travel to an unlikely harbour of hope to be reminded of that pioneer spirit. It’s a taxi driver in Dubai who voices the closest thing I’ve heard in years to the old spirit one might have expected in New York, (if not in Berlin).

Travelogue 673 – January 18
Persia’s Out There

Finally we have some ice on the ground. It’s refreshing to see. And at first, the sub-zero C temperatures are refreshing. Batu’s train leaves early. We’re starting hours before the sun rises. I’m used to that. Batu reels when the cold wind hits her. She pulls the kerchief tightly over her mouth and nose. We walk to the tram station. I tell her I like the cold. The air is crisp. The night is clear; we can see stars. She isn’t convinced. I’m not sure I am, either. Secretly, I’m relieved that this mission, delivering my mother-in-law to the train station, saves me the early morning trial of cycling into town. This morning’s ride would have been painful. I wouldn’t have thought to bring a scarf. I put too much faith in first impressions. When I first leave the flat, I quite enjoy the brisk air of winter. But after twenty minutes in it, battling North Sea winds in my thin windbreaker and fingerless gloves, I come to my weary senses. And then I resolve to be smart. The next day I forget, and I resolve again. It doesn’t seem like I get to decide to be smart.

Batu is on her way to Antwerp. Our very good friend Chuchu lives there. He is helping Batu navigate the strangely obscure medical systems of the Benelux. She has been circling around hospitals and aid agencies, trying to finish her treatments. It would have all been so much easier if she were an asylum-seeker. There are no rewards for honesty in this milieu. So be it. We work harder.

I’ve been back in winter for a week. It wasn’t so long ago I was tasting of the resort life in Dubai, strolling beachside in the bright sun. I’ve been travelling too much; there’s nothing jarring or unnatural about beach sands one day and ice the next.

The beach sands come at the end of my free day in Dubai. In the morning, I have toured the Bur Dubal Market. I have broken the heart of an innocent young cashmere salesman. I have seen something of old Arabia. Deira and Bur Dubai are what is left of historical Dubai, straddling the Creek, as the sniggering Brits have called it, the River Zara as the Greeks once called it. This area now comprises the north-eastern extremity of the city. Growth has extended miles west along the Gulf. And near the westernmost extremity is the posh Marina area.

I have left the market, and I have ventured farther north along the Creek. There’s a Metro station, and there’s another dock for tourist boats. There’s a big one anchored there. It is seaworthy. This one will travel down the coast and take me to the Marina. The ferry will chug up to the mouth of the creek and out into the Persian Gulf. (My hosts in Dubai would rather I call it the Arabian Gulf.)

We navigate up the winding Creek. passing the long breakwaters made of piled rocks and concrete blocks shaped like cones and anchors. On the right we’re passing the huge plot of new land being developed for city expansion. It feels like Holland here, with chunks of land being reclaimed all the time.

Once we make it to the Gulf – arriving into the big waters with a rocking motion that makes many of us find our seats, -- we will pass by several of these ambitious polders. First there are the ‘World’ islands, islands dredged up out of the sands below, buttressed by rock, arranged in a rough shape of the world map. Of course, from water level it only looks like another shore to starboard. On the port side we have been passing by the glamourous city proper. The majority of the passengers have piled out of the cabin to take pictures of the Burj Khalifa, spire dedicated to Arabia’s new ascendance.

I don’t blame them for wanting to get out of the cabin. The seats are comfortable, but the windows are polka dotted with a sort of protection from the sun, making it hard to see out. Strange dilemma on a tour boat, wishing for an unobstructed view. The open deck aft is tiny. People are forced to crowd together for a breath of fresh air to calm their tummies.

More than the sights of the city I’m enjoying the view of the water. This is why I paid the ticket price, to see the Gulf. I love bodies of water. I enjoy the open space, the simplicity of only air and water.

I’ve seen the Gulf years ago from the northern shore, in Kuwait. I’m not so disingenuous as to say I can tell one body of water from another. Maybe a sailor could. So why does it matter which one I visit? Maybe it’s enough to believe that places do have unique qualities. Maybe it’s my ongoing naïve belief in history. This water washes up on the shore of Persia. Alexander marched alongside it. (Or was that the Gulf of Oman?) Maybe I enjoy playing with subtle impressions I know better than to trust. I say, the Gulf is gentler than the Mediterranean. The colours are lighter. Maybe I say, the Persian Gulf is big brother to the others in the region. Maybe I say, the Red Sea is darker, leaves an impression of wine, has a primitive taste.

Travelogue 672 – January 11
Cashmere and Abras

‘Come see, come see,’ they call as you pass. You stroll the length of the narrow, shaded concourse, the market, lined with nearly identical shops the entire length, and the whole way you are accosted by salesmen. They hold out scarves and drape them over your shoulder or over your head as you pass. If you pause, they count you as sold, and there will be a struggle to disentangle yourself. ‘I have something to show you,’

I remember this pleasure from days in Istanbul many years ago. Westerners always walk briskly, aggressively through, with sour expressions. They hate this sort of assertiveness. I find it entertaining. I find a kind of honesty in the brazenness, even as the sale is a gambit and a lie at heart.

While I was in Istanbul. I devoted a day or two to the carpet shops, spending hours haggling over cups of tea. It was enjoyable, the cycles of hospitality and chit-chat, punctuated by vigorous argument over the value of pieces of great craft. He’s angry; he’s insulted. I am unmoved. We settle into more mild conversation. It’s a relationship.

I don’t have the time on this trip, though I stop to haggle over some cashmere pieces, anyway. In half an hour I talk the salesman down more than half. Judging by how readily he gives in, I see that I could have gone farther. It just isn’t worth it unless you have the time to discover rock bottom, and properly that should be an investment of hours.

I tell him I have to go. He begs. He wheedles. He seems genuinely broken-hearted that I would leave. He has told me how he loves America, offered it without hesitation or blush, though I know it for double speak. He means it; he lies. For my sake, he loves America. I apologize. I walk away. He’s watching me and pining.

This is the Bur Dubai Souk in Dubai, set right on the Creek. It’s worth the visit, picturesque in its several hundred metres of historical architectural styling, the narrow alleys among squat buildings of stone, alleys trellised above and fluid with crowds below. You can bargain for cashmere or traditional lamps. You can stroll the quaint little alleyways in meditation over what old Arabia might have been like.

You even have an opportunity to daydream about old India, pushing through the impossibly constricted alleyways of the Hindu Market, where people pass singles file and sideways between the severe walls of buildings, and where shops are sudden doorways leading into crowded warrens lined with the bright colours of Indian foods and Indian brands, rammed into displays, hanging from the walls.

You can sit creekside at the outdoor tables of the sunny café. You watch the abras and the dhows drift by. The Creek is crowded with traffic. There is every manner of trading vessel navigating the Creek, and every one of them unique, all of them wooden and all outfitted with eccentric cabins on deck. The abra is the tiny passenger craft with peaked awning. People cram in side by side, sitting around the edge of a central platform, and everyone pays one dirham. When the boat is full it departs, motoring across the Creek from Deira side to Bur Dubai. This was the highlight of my day, riding out on the water. No doubt it was the Brits, so fond of the slighting misnomer, who dubbed this the Creek. Where the abras cross, it’s nearly as wide as the Maas in Rotterdam.

I make an industrious day of it, walking and walking around this city on the Persian Gulf. Maybe I want to work out the grief at disappointing the cashmere salesman. I’m haunted by the look in his eye when I told him I had to leave. Even tourism is tragic.

Travelogue 671 – January 10
When Christmas Never Passes

Temporarily the sky is clear. I ready myself quickly, and run out to the bicycle. It’s a perfect Sunday morning for a ride. The ground is wet, like it will never dry, but up above behind the clearing clouds is an early dawn sky glowing with a dark and hospitable blue. It’s already past 7:30am, but the day is only now dawning.

It’s not even a full twenty-four hours that I’m back in Rotterdam, and I can’t resist getting out to pedal the bike paths, where the remnants of rain glistens ahead of me. I remember I must switch on my little white headlamp. It’s the law here. I see no police out. Only a few cars, slow and tentative as though they are lost.

In Ethiopia the sun is full and blazing by now. In Ethiopia, it’s the Sunday after Christmas. I realize that I’m allowing a Christmas song to roll through my head. I’ve had to endure two Christmas seasons this year, one in Europe and one in Ethiopia. That meant a second round of Christmas music everywhere I went. Even Shimeles had them looping in his taxi.

My experience of Christmas Day in Ethiopia itself is detached. I’m travelling that day. I’m hoping for a good night’s rest before travel, but holidays in Ethiopia start early. My first impression is actually of the dogs whining. It’s 6:30am and the dogs are making those high-pitched sounds that are impossible to sleep through. Those are the sounds they make when there is someone friendly in the yard. It’s a steady appeal for food and attention. I’m awake.

When I look out into the yard, I see that indeed members of the landlord’s family have begun the preparation for the holiday. Surprisingly, the sheep that spent the night tied to s stake in the garden, plaintively bleating has already seen its violent end. Its rumpled brown hide has been tossed aside in one corner of the yard. A selection of its guts are piled beside the dogs’ cages, along with its bloody lower jaw. No wonder the dogs are whimpering hungrily. Whole berbere peppers have been spread on a tarp in the yard to dry in the sun. Fortunately, that is the aroma that predominates, rather than the sheep blood. I could wish I had time to stay and enjoy the holiday. I have invitations to several houses for Christmas dinner.

Instead, I finish my packing and I’m riding in Shimeles’s taxi toward the airport, listening to the Christmas sound track. In the streets, people are walking leisurely toward families’ and friends’ houses, walking hand in hand and smiling, many dressed in traditional gear. I’m suddenly envious and wishing for another Christmas, after all. What has happened to me?

I’ve arrived at Central Station, where I park the bicycle downstairs among the thousands of others in the cavernous hall. I turn off the little headlamp. I turn the key in the bike lock and very carefully withdraw it again. It’s the last key for this lock, I remember. One day too cavalierly I unlocked it, left the key in the lock while swinging the chain around and into position, and sent the key flying across the hall. Lose another key and I forfeit the bike, I think. The fastidious attendants would ask for proof of ownership before cutting the chain. I haven’t licensed or registered the bike. I always manage to be an outlaw here.

In the café, there is a selection of Elvis playing. A few days ago, I was overlooking the Persian Gulf and sitting among whole families smoking shisha together. Now I’m listening to Elvis Presley in a Dutch café. But I’ve transcended culture shock, or maybe sunk beneath it, like a seedling under a tractor tire. Maybe it’s more like that. In either case, I’m not feeling much. I’ve been back and forth to Africa three times in the last three months. One music, two suns, three seas, four planes, five fingers counting one sun, two seas, three planes, four singers …

Travelogue 670 – January 6
Above the Stadium

There is that striking view of Addis from the road that passes below the Prime Minister’s compound. The compound occupies the top of a hill, separated from the city by a stone and iron fence dating back to the Emperor’s day. Through the fence one sees nothing through the trees. But the road sweeps along beside the fence, turning as though to circle the hill, and the view out the other car window takes in much of the centre of town, from the high mountains behind us to the near, irregular summit of Piassa and down through the shantytown of Irib’kuntu then to the high buildings around the train station and the stadium. and the ancient Ambassador Hotel.

It’s down there in the district called Stadium where they built a new office building that houses, among other happy government offices, the Charities and Societies Agency (CSA) that regulates all NGOs in Ethiopia.

The air is so clear this morning. It’s chilly. Shimeles the taxi driver has donned his heavy leather jacket and scarf. Often, the view over the city is obscured by morning mists or by a brown fug of morning fires. Today the view there is refreshing, lending everything a tint of morning blue or pink. There’s a brand new building going up with an arch in the highest roofline of metallic tiles that reflect golden in the morning sunlight.

It happens that the CSA’s building is almost next door to the high, arched one. They occupy a building that is also new, but that is more prosaic. The first floors are dedicated to a shopping mall. Because Ethiopian Christmas approaches, they’ve hauled some man-sized speakers out front and are blasting Ethio pop that doesn’t strike me as particularly seasonal. Vendors have lined up in the entryway to sell jewellery and kitchenware and shoes from their tables. Once you’ve cleared the guards, you have to squeeze through all the product and the customers to reach the elevators. Back here you feel the truer nature of the building, new, cold concrete rising in harsh angles. Once you’ve reached the seventh floor, the building becomes colder yet. It’s been furnished with rickety wooden partitions that look like they were moved from their last residence, and moved with special care unless they disintegrate from age in their hands. The chairs and desks are definitely vintage. They have made the new building look already beat.

Once past the Prime Minister’s estate, you turn right and cruise down the long hill toward Meskel Square on a wide street divided in the middle by attractive parkland, fenced off with gates locked most of the time. This is some of the most pleasant real estate in Addis, the big tree-lined boulevard, passing the staid Foreign Ministry, the stately old Hilton, Selasse’s palace with stone gate pillars carved with representations of his warriors and of noble lions.

Halfway down this long slope, a busy road crosses. Turning right, you will pass alongside the palace and roll downhill toward the historic hot springs. There you’ll find that sweet old bar and restaurant, the Finfine Adarash, where so many memories from the Tesfa Foundation era have been absorbed into the abundant woodwork, absorbed like the pungent odours of fine cigars shared in imagined triumph. On the weekend, I treated a few staff members to kitfo and tibs in gratitude for work well done. A few had never been inside, and marvelled at the preserved atmosphere of old Ethiopia.

Walk past the Finfine and past the stadium, and you will also arrive at the CSA Office. Today, Yenebeb and I will have to revisit the CSA offices. Stopping by this office has been a daily task. We sit at the desk of our team leader, and he scowls at us. He sits in the corner of an office with four others. The others are looking on with some sympathy. Yesterday, the team leader was in meetings and while we waited, the others in the office commiserated with us. ‘I admire you,’ one of them says. We are persistent.

I stand at the window of the miserable office. They have a nice view of the stadium. You can see half the pitch. I can see players in red practicing down there. I have tried to engage our team leader with talk about football. I say we’ll watch a game up here some time. He is able to smile, but he does seem to derive more pleasure from his esoteric interpretations of the NGO Proclamation and the rules of NGO law. Who am I to begrudge him this satisfaction? He was meant for theology. His recitations have the air of improvisation, and there’s a perverse beauty to them. I wouldn’t have the heart to interrupt. There is too much soul in his persecution of us.

And so we continue to compile documents. We will send staff hither and yon on senseless missions, delivering documents and inspecting library furniture for the proper seal. We will torment the U.S. board for more and more paperwork that requires the stamp of state officials and ambassadors and John Kerry himself. And our team leader will weigh each sheet of paper against the feather of his logic, and he will pronounce learned judgements. We are his captives, his acolytes.

Travelogue 669 – January 4
Dry Solidarity

I slept through the change of years. I was in my bed in Addis Ababa. My compound was quiet. Menna has reported to me about the horrors of New Year’s in Rotterdam, where the youth take their celebratory duties very seriously. They ignite explosives in the streets all night. Baby jumps at noise, and I can imagine how scary it might have been. I feel for her.

Baby’s daddy slept soundly, meanwhile, so soundly that when he awoke he didn’t know where he was. It’s winter. Opening one’s eyes on the persistent darkness has become routine. I glance around among the shadows of the tiny bedroom and try to place myself. I can just about hear the clicking of the mind’s computer as it processes. Maybe a more appropriate metaphor would be the sound of a lonely night clerk in the mind shuffling through files, trying to find a match. The file containing rooms where I’ve slept is extensive. It takes the poor clerk a while to find a match. ‘I’m in Addis!’

Why is morning starting so late here, I wonder? I was, after all, looking forward to full days again, sunlight for the right amount of hours. I glance at the phone’s clock. It’s after six, and it’s still dark. Not night time dark, but the gloomy blue of sunlight’s very slow advance. The sun hasn’t risen yet over the ridge of mountains to the east.

I know I should get up and check the water. I need to take any opportunity for a shower. But I know the odds are slim that there is water, and I don’t want to face the chilly morning air.

I think about the dry sink in my bathroom. I think about the whining hiss my tap makes as it reaches for water, unsuccessfully, the violent clunking in the pipes. I sigh, and I stay where I am.

I think about the millions of Ethiopians suffering the effects of drought even now. There are communities in the north of the country where all the animals have died, and even children have succumbed. There is no water. Without water, there is little food. Government and aid agencies are scrambling to help. We have been contacted by concerned donors. They can’t be sure that communities they care about are being reached by the broad federal and international efforts.

I have discussed with staff what we can do. The advantage we small agencies have is that we can focus on specific communities. We can help with immediate relief, while also trying to create capacity that will alleviate future crisis, making sure schools have tanks for water, for example. I need to make clear this only supplements the large-scale efforts by the experts. I may enjoy bashing the ‘big boys’ in international aid from time to time, but we could not do without them.

And so I master the morning’s trivial struggle. I force myself out of bed. I check the tap. With a terrific clank, it does deliver water. The stream is weak. I quickly fill my little, blue plastic pour-jug. I flush the toilet with the first of the precious water. I fill the jug again and leave it by the sink for washing hands, and then I try the shower. As I suspected, water power is too weak for a comfortable shower. The stream is just strong enough to trigger the water heater, but ironically, it’s by varying the flow that one adjusts the temperature. With only enough to start the heat, it comes out too hot. I’m left with too cold or too hot. As I deliberate, the stream slows and dies. The decision is made for me. I’ll be dry and dirty today. My consolation is a few more minutes under the covers.