Travelogue 456– July 28
Innocence

She can't get over it. She keeps looking back at the television screen with something between wonder and horror playing across her face. She doesn't think of this as the Olympics. The Olympics are all about the runners, maybe some football.

Meseret has stopped by while we're having dinner. Menna and I are eating out at a favorite restaurant, one with two essentials, good food and sports broadcasts. Meseret's visit is a work trip: She has been entrusted with a document that needs a stamp, and Menna is holder of the agency seal.

Meseret, some of you may recall, is one of our original teen athletes. She still works with us in the office, and with the Team, though her teen years have slipped away a while ago. There is something wonderfully innocent about her still, or perhaps it is the resilience of her innocence that is wonderful, more than the quality of it. It's as though she just arrived in Addis from the countryside.

We share our dinners with her. Whenever we see athletes, we give them food. They ask for money; we give them food. As athletes, it's their most urgent need. None of them eat properly, running twice a day on one meal of bread and thin sauce. If they have money to spend on food, they opt for the quick calories -- for pasta and bread. The only healthy craving they have is for fruit juices. But protein is something they have only the vaguest understanding of. They will insist that pasta has protein.

On screen today at the restaurant are women weight-lifters. Some are surprisingly petite; some are not. Some of them jump off stage after their performance into the arms of their coaches, allowing themselves a girlish moment. None of them are girlish with bar and weights in front of them. They snarl and grunt. They gasp and grimace. They shout in triumph and toss the bar down to bounce resoundingly off the floor, and then they stalk off like gangsters.

Meseret watches with round eyes. She clearly doesn't even know how to form an opinion about these women. She's speechless. 'Meseret, we're going to start training you for 2016.' I point at the television. She stares at me, her eyes growing even rounder. There is that delightful naivete again. Menna has to tell her I am joking. She was set to cry.

Not so naive are the street boys outside the restaurant. In this part of town, they are a nuisance and menace. One shoves his homemade tray full of cigarettes and gum in your face while another reaches into your pockets. They are sharp, smooth, and chillingly cynical, pulling grotesque faces of mourning and whining about their dead parents until they see you dismiss them, and then they are instantly at play again, dancing and mocking. I like their spirit, though I prefer to admire fro a distance.

On the way to the restaurant, I pass a faranj headed the opposite direction. One of the street boys is standing beside us as our paths cross. For less than a second, the mask falls. A wave of anxiety ripples across the boy's face. A decision must be made, which white guy to follow. He chooses the other. I wonder for a few minutes why. There is a body language specific to tourists, of course. My head is down; his is up and swinging left and right to take in the sights. There is also a language to one's dress. The other man is wearing orange shorts. He has new sneakers. His hair is dyed. My look is a little more ... broken in, shall we say?

I turn to watch the boy, riding close beside the faranji, who is looking down at the boy with interest and concern. The boy made the right decision.

The streets are wet. Rains sweep across the city in regular waves. I get caught in one shower. I'm walking to the restaurant, and I have about half a mile to go when the rain starts up. I give it up, ducking under the overhanging roof of a small clothing shop. I was going to arrive at the restaurant early anyway. I stand outside the shop as the rain gains force. The traffic hisses as it passes, one small blue Lada taxi, and another. Faces peer out at me from the tiny cabin.

From where I'm standing, I can see a map of the storm across the sky. These rains start up against the mountains and move south, through Bole, and then out of the city. I can see the clouds breaking to the north. The mountains are getting some dusky sunshine. That strip of light is expanding, and soon the rain will diminish down here.

One of the store clerks invites me to come into the store and keep dry. But I'm fine outside. I'm enjoying myself. For a moment, I think there might be something to like about kerempt, about rainy season. I am grateful for the excuse to take a break and watch the world go by.

Travelogue 455– July 26
Intercession

Today is Gabriel, so the roads are clogged in the vicinity of the Gabriel church next to Meles's palace. We have to take a detour to the cafe today. At the cafe, they have set up candles and incense and traditional gear for the coffee ceremony.

As I've reported before, some of the superstars among saints and archangels of the Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity get days of the month designated for their worship. On Mary's day, for example, all the Maryam churches attract crowds, not only of worshipers, but of merchants. The roads are taken over by a fairly cynical trade in everything from church tallows to shoes and wallets. Then, there are the mega-days: some of these superstars get an even more special day once a year. Gabriel belongs to that rank.

They say Meles is back from his hospital stay in Belgium. Maybe this will put a stop to the apocalyptic talk around town. Maybe Meles himself has stopped into Gabriel church to pay his thanks to the capricious Fates. Maybe his brush with death has sobered him. Maybe he has penciled contrition into his calendar; maybe some soul-searching and moral inventory. Maybe he has seen a light.

Me, I could certainly use a change of pace. Maybe I need the intercession of some colorful saint or archangel. Don't we all merit one divine visitation once in a lifetime? Right now, the only ones providing intercessions in my life are dentists and policemen.

Not that I have particular reason to dislike either Dr, Micky or 'Sajin', the cop. 'Sajin' they call him in a corrupted version, I suppose, of 'sergeant'. Dr. Micky has stood by me, and by my fragile teeth, for many years now. I somewhat enjoy his Spartan manner, listening in silence, slouching forward in his chair, heavily-lidded eyes on me as I list my complaints. His answers are always curt and resound with of-course common sense, delivered in his rich Armenian-Ethiopian accent. And then he points at the chair, and I am thrilled by both solace and horror at once.

The last visit pushed me over the top, however. It has been the fourth or fifth time in this short summer visit to Ethiopia. Two teeth had started misfiring the previous week, one so badly that it kept me up at night with earaches. Dr. Micky casually points at the x-ray, with the slightest of sardonic smiles on his face. I know what's coming: this will be my second root canal this month. But what I didn't expect was the ominous wave toward the chair. 'Today? Right now?'

It's an upper tooth, so the drill feels like it's going straight into my skull. I experience the sound of it like something private, a malignant thought become possession. And because it is harder to see and to reach, the good doctor and his assistants wrestle with my jaw as though they want to crack it like a wishbone. I rerun in my head a scene from the recent 'King Kong' that I just caught on the television in Dr Micky's reception area, in which Kong battles with a T-Rex, killing it by gripping the lizard's jaws and tearing them apart. At some point, my spirit caves, and I just resign to it. I've had too much tooth pain in recent months. I can't respond to it anymore. I sit sullenly through Dr. Micky's debrief, and I mope through the rest of my achy blur of a day.

Then this morning, Sajin stops by, and my entire morning is sacrificed to more aimless questioning about the robbery. Sajin is a nice enough young man, more or less sincere. Taking in his clean-shaven face, his grown boy's eyes, his vague and passive method, I can't help sensing the humanity in his position. Good cop, bad cop, the person with the badge encounters people at their most vulnerable and essential. Movie-makers jumped on that long ago, but debarked for lands of wild caricature, leaving life in its common hues to the rest of us.

Sajin has such a guileless way about him. He shakes his head at our mystery. He calls in the landlord, whose brother has just bought a new car. He guides her with soft-spoken and simple questions. She talks a lot and with feeling. After she goes, Sajin just shakes his head. She sounds so sincere. This was how it was with our housekeeper. She says she didn't do it. He shakes his head. How could this be?

Menna and I suggest a few strategies, maybe talking to the boys who sit just outside our compound gate, maybe bringing in the housekeeper's boyfriend, maybe sending someone at night when the landlord's whole family will be home. He nods quietly. He hesitates meaningfully when it's time to leave. A gift might fortify him, fuel the flagging investigation. But the moment passes.

When we spoke to the commander at the police station weeks ago, he had complained that there were no eyewitness. Their hands were tied. I reflected on the courteous boundaries that thieves and cops observe here. It all happens with gentle voices and wide-eyed simplicity. No one seems to have done anything.

Finally free of Sajin, I strike out for the day's delayed work. Delay is the rule, I say to myself. Work is delayed; life is delayed, like a line of cars waiting at the railway crossing, waiting for Illness and Corruption, dressed as Laurel and Hardy, to pass on a handcar.

A light rain is falling outside, and the sky is an ambiguous cross-hatching of condensation and light. It makes one hesitates in the doorway, unsure which way the weather will turn.

Travelogue 454– July 22
Things That Go Bump in the Night

The hyenas like kerempt, or rainy season. The light matches their standards for good times, the clouds making for a continuous gloaming. There are jib (hyena) sightings during the daytime. Last year, we saw a few in the mountains. Runners are edgy in this season; scanning in all directions with sharp eyes as they train in the woods.

Fikre, one of my athletes, says that someone was telling her about the growing problem with yesew jib. These are the Ethiopian equivalent of werewolves, but men who become hyenas. Apparently they've been coming out of the mountains in such numbers that the police were forced to make a deal with them, that they should be allowed to raid graveyards, as long as they leave the living alone.

She tells us this story on our taxi ride up the mountain to train. Tesfahun replies facetiously that this is a good deal. Fikre moans aloud, in fear, or in disgust. I tell her Ethiopian has a population problem. Why not let them grab a few drunks, or babies? Fikre laughs, but grudgingly and with a shudder.

Kerempt is no time to train for speed. One has to watch one's footing with more concentration. One's footfalls are on mud, sometimes packed and slick, sometimes new and several inches deep. It's the former that are dangerous. I have no extra attention for the jib-watch. I'm relying on my coaches.

I'm asking a lot of my coaches this summer. I've never been in this bad of shape. In my defense, I've never juggled so many ails and aches and ills. I'm understanding ageing better every week. I can claim that much emotional progress in life. Some philosophy enters even the most obtuse of minds, forced in by Great Nature, unbidden, inexorable. We admit to wisdom at last: I have limits; I will become weak.

A few days ago, we strike out into the woods of Entoto. I'm feeling unusually strong. We climb the slope, dancing among tree roots, mud slicks, and patches of moss, zig-zagging across the hillside, under the dense trees.

But today the run follows a dentist's appointment, my second root canal this month. The pain in my jaw fades, but what doesn't is the sleeplessness. Eventually my muscles begin to ache. Every time we turn uphill, I feel the burn. Appearing almost as a salve, a gentle rain comes, falling with a hush over the forest, bringing with it a cool breeze. For a sweet interlude, there is nothing but the hiss of the rain, among the leaves overhead, gathering in small, trickling streams. After ten minutes, the clouds darken further, and thunder resounds overhead. We turn back early, just as the rain gains in force.

At night, you can hear the hyenas. They have a peculiar call, a kind of dipping huff and yip. It's a sound that inspires a pall of silence among the neighborhoods. Their calls are quickly followed by rounds of frantic barking among hundreds of dogs for miles around.

We're home early. Dropping us off, Shimeles says he's going home though it's the weekend. He usually works nearly all night on Saturday, making as much cash as he can. But it's another night of disturbances in the Mercato district. Muslims are rioting, storming and blockading the main mosque, throwing stones and screaming. The police are not allowed to enter the mosques, but they are busting as many heads as they can outside, hauling dozens of young men to jail.

Apparently, many Muslims object to the government's intervention in their affairs, appointing national religious leaders, promoting a peaceful, homegrown doctrine known as Al Ahbash . Most Christian Ethiopians I talk to dismiss the whole situation with a belittling suggestion that the Muslims here just want to make-believe they're in Egypt and play at revolution.

Rumors are running the streets like mad hyena-men. Meles, the prime minister, is in the hospital in Europe. Everyone seems ready to assume he is dying. Everyone foresees chaos.

In the morning, both the hyenas and the Muslims have retreated. I leave the house, locking the compound gate behind me. The rains have passed for the moment. The sun never comes back with all its force. We content ourselves with a few hours of warm haziness. My street is a quiet one, made of stones laid in the ground. A mother passes hand in hand with her small girl. The girl smiles and wave and sing out, 'China!' With every passing year, all foreigners merge further into one homogenous, Chinese identity.

By the gutter, a man of about fifty stands taking a pee. He smiles at me and waves with his unoccupied hand. 'Hello, my friend! Where are you go?' I'm headed this a-way, sir. Carry on.

Travelogue 453– July 11
The Remote

I have some time after work. I walk to a familiar place, just missing an approaching downpour -- a savage attack on the sun, clouds spreading like ink across the tissue of sky, drops just beginning to gain momentum. The drops strike the earth with force. It might be music -- the strokes of hammers on the pianoforte -- to judge by the spirited response on the streets. Boys run. People smile, and they duck under awnings and under umbrellas cheerfully, awkwardly.

I walk to a familiar place. This place doubles as a sports bar. The manager makes periodic circuits around the restaurant with remotes in hand, changing screens willy-nilly, without a thought for anyone watching. I find myself watching a basketball game. The teams are Nigeria and the Dominican Republic. The athletes don't look much different than U.S. stars, but they play differently, sending a noticeably higher percentage of shots into oblivion and botching passes. But they're massive; they scowl the right way; the tattoos look correct. They labor in hope. The Nigerian coaches watch impassively, exhibiting that mud-and-stone patience that marks them as African.

The game takes me back some five or six months. I'm watching basketball in Denver. The games are part of some dramatic stretch in the interminable season, maybe one of the long, long stages in the months and months of playoffs. Boys are strutting. Analysts are rhapsodizing. Now, those games form a kind of motif in the mind, one tempo making up the background of a strange time -- combining with the colors of stained wood, the taste of beer, the crisp winter air, and the sense of exile. Denver, last winter.

Memory is such a tedious companion. How is it we so seldom tire of its ministrations? It flashes its mirrors, discovers many fascinating angles upon our unremarkable faces. We delight in these images. That the exercise is so fragmented and incomplete becomes part of its appeal, but it is also the application of the scourge. Indulging memory is a shallow entertainment. It is false.

Today is a day for memory. It's the ninth anniversary of Leeza's passing. Remarking it is betrayal. It strips the occasion of anything but its repetition. It emphasizes a false uniformity, year by year. It implies that emotion is raw, and that memory is as changeless as the fact of the event. We can smile at our evolving perception of birthdays, but there aren't words for the tragedy of a memorial diminishing into lack of substance, like the slow dying of a musical note. The hammer strikes the string and the string finds stillness again. Emotion is inconstant, made of perishable human substance.

The chairman of the remote passes, and the view changes from live and obscure to huge and rebroadcast. Football season has adjourned and the Olympics are still just a dark premonition, Super Sport has been airing Euro Cup games over and over. Tonight, it's Germany and Italia, the game that put my prediction of Teutonic triumph to bed. The Germans are suddenly ineffectual, listless. The Italians are charged and relentless

I was in Addis for that game. We watched it at the Tsion Hotel, another signature in the score of memory. That place rings back a long way, to days when I lived in the Addis Gebiya neighborhood, to drunks with the Brits, to the first days of my friendship with Stephanie. The room is dark with faux wood. The waiters are as careless as ever, the hotel as shady and suspect. The TV hangs high. The athletes are dots of color. Memory says things were still fresh then, closer to the beginning. Menna was a new acquaintance. Leeza was around.

Sometimes the pattern trumps the action. The Italians labor in hope; they find their way safely to the final minute, with the same result. The rains have gone. The evening advances. I've got to go.

Travelogue 452– July 7
Almaz

It turns out she's a more interesting study than we ever knew. Always a supercilious grin and tumbling words about the weather. Always late, always cheerful. Lean and stooped frame, strong hands with the manner of a child. Beti has been a part of my household for three years.

She has a little boy, kindergarten age. She lives somewhere up in Shiro Meda, above us, up the hill. She has an impetuous side, maybe wild, maybe romantic. This we know from the desperate love letters to Cien. That doesn't make her terribly unique; Cien has an extensive archive. But there was a surprising urgency in her words.

The police find her tough. 'Dereq', they say and shake their heads. One or two stand with us in the small veranda at the Menen neighborhood police station. The station is located on one of those tedious roads, ribbons of asphalt among the hills, narrow enough without the crowded procession of pedestrians along the sides. You enter the gate in the walls, and, after being searched, you climb up a steep and muddy incline to the station itself, once long ago a household, the building a loose interpretation of Italian colonial. Your last bit of fun is negotiating the tiny steps up the last slope, laid with small square blocks as stairs. Then you're inside.

The design, the landscaping, the floor plan seem perfect for Ethiopian officialdom. The lawn is ragged. A mouldy log bench is dedicated to the day's cadre of criminals, waiting for the day's petty judgement. They are called in; they are sent out to the bench. Hours pass in an idyll of discomfort and fear.

And so it goes with Beti, and with us, all day long. Beti is summoned in from the bleak lawn. Then we are summoned in from the wooden bench on the veranda. Shimeles sits with us a while. We are dismissed for lunch for an hour.

'Dereq,' they say, shaking their heads, gazing beyond the mud, beyond the sullen crowds on the street, gazing into a world where lions lie with the lambs. Beti won't confess, and that confounds the hapless policemen. They grind small mysteries between their teeth, spitting out splinters of it, picking at it. Chewing some more. Life is a shard of toothpick, a labor for the jaw -- who walked off with our money? What are the policemen chewing?

And that is Ethiopia: shaking one's head with sad wonder and murmuring, 'aschagari'. It's all so hard, so tough. And one holds the hardship to one's breast so tenderly. It is life. The way honor might have been to the ancient Greeks, undeserved suffering is to the Ethiopes. There is something so deeply satisfying about even the recounting of suffering that one might say there's a hunger for the next bad news.

Beti's real name is Almaz, the police inform us. She emerges from the darkness within, unsteady, the back of her hand applied to her nose and lip. She walks silently down to the disheveled lawn of outlaws. She sits there and stares up at us, round-eyed.

The policemen asks again if we're sure we didn't misplace the money. Well, I say, if we had misplaced it right out of the abandoned envelope, and then carefully stuffed the envelope with empty plastic bags afterward, why then, yes it's quite possible. Is that the way you misplace things to home? The policeman nods thoughtfully.

Did poor Beti, or devious Almaz, find herself maneuvered into this, we wonder. Did she conceive an ill-fated passion for young Atomsa, the young relative of the landlords, the boy who does the family's wash and cleans the dog's cages and trims the invalid uncle's toenails? Was this a lovers' plot, or a lover's plot? Were they dreaming of running away to some fondly-remembered village, where they would ... buy a cow? Or perhaps the family engineered the romance and the plot entire, using innocent Atomsa's untested sexuality for communal gain, perhaps even planning for Beti's sacrifice to the law's need for a working-class perp? It's a fine intrigue at play here, something to raise goosebumps among a TV audience.

Beti is summoned again. She doesn't hesitate. Only her bowed head might suggest trepidation. She re-enters that building so perfectly designed for it purpose. The interior hall was never wired for electric bulbs. To get inside to the offices, you feel your way ten meters down a tight, unlit hall, and stumble to the left, and left again, into the long station office, stark and dim and furnished only with policemen's desks. You've essentially doubled back, and you sit only a few meters from where you entered, from where we sit on our victims' bench, separated from the offices by only a thin wall of plywood. There is no insulation from justice. We can hear the shouting. We hear the blows.

In wonderment, the officers return. "Dereq,' they mutter with an ancient resignation. This is such a hard case. We sink into silence, each in our place, like the act of theft holds us now, condemns us. The crime is a spot on all our souls.

Travelogue 451– June 23
Abraham on the Mountain

I just saw a ridiculous film, made well. It seems horror must be ridiculous. Only a cross can redeem serious horror. Outside the exorcist's chamber, credibility lies in humor. What this says is, our fears are laughable. Or it says we are comic when we are afraid. Both true, I suppose.

The film has another message. It says we find our history inscrutable. That is a healthy admission, I think. It's got to be a good thing when we laugh about our mysteries. It's the most humble way to deal with frustration. Better for everyone if Americans find healthy channels for frustration, as, say, the last fifty years might demonstrate.

Its funny. I just finished re-reading Gore Vidal's fine book about Father Abraham. Vidal's portrait has mystery at its center. What motivated the great man? Just what was his devotion to the Union?

The horror film 'solves' the mystery. Obviously, vampires were leading the rebellion, and wanted a nation of their own. Abraham kills vampires as avocation. His mother was bitten: sacred territory is the virginal throat of one's mother. Sacred as the innocence and tenderness of a young nation encircled by red-eyed predators.

Vidal lays it out well, the wonderful ambiguity and fragility of history. Because history is made of finished business, we tend to see it as a train on its one iron track. But Vidal finds the feeder tracks, the tenuous zigs and zags: the president's selective readings of the Constitution, and his vague and shifting positions on slavery, for example. Moreover, Vidal takes a measure of the astonishing power that this one man exerts, almost passively, on the historical moment, becoming something like the eye of the needle. Astonishing most of all to his contemporaries, as Vidal so well portrays.

But there are no final answers. History may be finished business, but much of its course is cloaked in obscurity. We don't like that. Father Abraham's portrait on the penny is etched in very clear lines. That is how truth should be.

So persecuted vampires want a nation of their own. (A reference to Israel? Jews as blood-sucking racists? Israelis in Confederate uniforms?) Papa Vampire meets with Jefferson Davis in a vine-clad mansion in New Orleans. And Lincoln's Union is code for the struggle against monsters who move in darkness. Sure. Why not?

The mysteries are bundled conveniently for us. And it's so much more fun than the usual conspiracy theory. Was Lincoln a Mason? An Illuminati? Was he secretly married to Mary Magdalene and taking orders from Pontius Rothschild?

Meanwhile, rest in peace, Father Abraham. Yuu took your child to the mountain under threat of death, only to have him reborn. Isaac lives on, and you are the sacrifice. Isaac is the new corporate party and the new corporate state, child of the Fourteenth Amendment, harbinger of qualified equality to all: banks, railroads, and ... slaves.

And the monsters? They are returned to their natural state, that of vaudeville. They lurk and they hope. And they write history.

Travelogue 450– June 20
Sick on the Mountain

It creeps up on me during the Awasa trip, a dull pain radiating through my lower jaw after the first bites of a meal. It grows into a horrible earache. Twice a day, I'm immobilized. There is a gland underneath the jawline that gets triggered by the pain, swells into a constant menace.

Mauro has his own problems. He is an Italian hippie. He is sick. He is cramped in the back seat of Shimeles's taxi, and he is sick. But not as sick as his wife.

Mauro is middle-aged and grizzled. He has been in Ethiopia for five years. He farms down south, in Arba Minch. He speaks only in pigeon Amharic. He doesn't know English. He won't speak Italian, rebutting with a simple and intriguing sort of disavowal: 'I'm Veneziano.' His wife speaks Amharic. I can't say whether she's learned any of the Venetian dialect.

Me, I'm thinking I can still train. I get up early and stretch. I leave home, and I walk up the road, laid with stones, up to the asphalt, where Shimeles and the runners are waiting. I ease myself into the car. 'Kusquam,' I say: our destination for today. The place is code for short run. Kusquam is the closer of my training areas. It's halfway up the mountain. The terrain is very rocky. It's not made for long runs.

Mauro says that everyone has weba down in Arba Minch. Weba is malaria. I think of our trip down that way last year. It's a wet and fertile land. The fruit there is amazing. So are the crocs. And the mosquitoes. He has weba. His wife has weba. The minute you're not strong, he says, it gets you.

My training partners and I set out on the run. The first half mile or so is uphill, up a rough dirt road, through what used to be forest. The road is even rougher now. They've been logging in our chaka, our forest. The trucks have been chugging up and down my road, churning up the mud. The trees are missing along the southern side of the road, exposing hazy Addis below. We will have to follow the trails off the road for a while to get back into full chaka.

I don't make it that far. My jaw is throbbing. I am tired to the bones. I can't sleep at night for the pain. There's an infection raging along the root nerves of one molar. I make it a few hundred meters, and I have to stop. I have deep muscle fatigue. I can feel it all the way through my body. We walk back down to the asphalt. But Shimeles is not there. The car is gone.

Mauro's girlfriend is dark-skinned Ethiopian, from the south. She is very sick. She is rocking in her seat, moaning, 'Weny, weny,' an Amharic cry of pain or despair, meaning something like, 'Why me?' We have to stop halfway down the mountain, while she retches, leaning out the door and into the street. We sit in silence for five minutes while she is sick.

Shimeles keeps a roll of plastic bags in his glove box. He passes back a bag. She leans over it for a second round. Mauro holds her gently, says, 'Ayzush.' Shimeles starts the car, and we start drifting down the mountainside again.

After I have given up on the run, we walk back down the hill. Shimeles's taxi is not there. And everyone's mobile phone is in the taxi. Tesfahun is resourceful. He manages to beg a few coins from a store-owner. When I ask why, I'm astounded to see that there's actually a working pay phone up here, at this hiccup in the climb to sacred Entoto.

Shimeles tells us he got a fare while we were gone. He's on his way back down from Entoto. We wait. Little boys with mud on their faces play soccer around us. This is a way station for the van taxis, so there's a good cohort of the mordant boys that make up this trade. They are among the world's great satirists. I'm years beyond minding as they make quick work of me in my bright running gear.

When Shimeles arrives, there is a faranj in the back seat, a faranj with his Ethiopian wife. The faranj is middle-ages and long-haired. His skin is bronzed from years in the fields of the south, so that it takes a second glance to determine that he is faranj. He is slouched forward and leaning into his wife. He is preoccupied.

They need to be taken to a clinic. I climb in front. My runners will now have to take a van taxi down the hill. They are gracious about it. We set off, and I reach back to shake his hand. He introduces himself as Mauro. His teeth are dark from tobacco. 'Miste amowatal,' he says. My wife is sick.

Travelogue 449– June 17
Steady and Moving
Part Two

And then there's Bekoji, small town accreted from mud and from humbler skies than Awasa's. One visit informs of its unchanging qualities. A new asphalt highway winds through the town center, and the residents turn away from it, turning toward the bold hills to east and west. There are no taxis; residents amble along the highway, stopping in the middle of the road for conversation.

The hills feel newly risen from the high plain. That has everything to do with the drive. From Awasa, one passes through shabby Shashemene and turns east. From there, due east, are mild hills, mild farms, and the rough-hewn, staring towns common to Oromiya. The mellow pastoral and the harsh angles of the farmers slip into one's unconscious as dream-like symbols, and one seems to doze until the van reaches the juncture with the northern road.

There the land opens up, until the traveler is speeding through a most unusual feature in this part of the country, flat spaces. The towns become scarce. The farmland pours into spacious tracts. One passes a tractor on the road, a most unique animal.

After a while, the hills return with a sort of primeval pungency, and one enters Bekoji. Unknown Bekoji, famous Bekoji. It's an odd town. The people mill about on the highway. Horse-drawn carts stop on the muddy shoulder. There is a sense of imminence. We arrive at the town hall just as rain starts. Town hall is an assembly of mud walls among high grass. Everyone is out for lunch. We sit in the van, listening to the thrum of rain on the roof.

Once people arrive, we splash through puddles to the office. We sit together without lights. The talk is formal. Around the walls are posters in English and Amharic, each hailing a hero from Bekoji. They comprise an impressive list. Coach Sintayehu shows us the over-sized ledger that records all his Project kids during the past decade. Recorded among the first pages are Tirunesh Dibaba and Kenenisa. The Project: in Ethiopia, this is the term for kebele-sponsored athletic programs for youth. The running Project in Bekoji is legendary.

The best hotel in Bekoji is owned by a runner, an alum of the amazing talent factory that is this town. It conforms to the standards of 'good hotel' in small town Ethiopia: single-level concrete structures, two long rows of rooms. The doors and the locks work. The TV works. There is hot water. The restaurant is clean, and the food is not bad at all. ...There is a mosquito net.

The following morning is clear and chilly. We are invited to a training session. Just off the still highway is a curving dirt road that ends above a grove of eucalyptus that occupies a sharply defined bowl in the landscape. On one wide but shallow, grassy slope, between a local's wooden fence and the declivity, they gather, small and quiet groups occasionally appearing from north and south, some emerging from the woods in the bowl. They stand and sit in an informal crescent of expectation. The coach is a short man with greying hair. He smiles benignly and talks little. He wears a baseball cap and sneakers. He strolls among the athletes, and along the edges of the accumulating crowd. By 7am, there are more than a hundred there, and more coming, all waiting for orders.

He stands before them, only a few minutes behind schedule -- a miracle of discipline in itself in Ethiopia -- and he mildly spells out the morning regimen in a few short sentences. The crowd of youngsters starts off, streaming to the right, around the fence, and down a well-trod mud path. The coach describes the workout vaguely, gesturing in sweeping waves of his arm: twenty minutes of warm-up, and then speed drills among the trees below.

The morning is a glorious one. The sky is blue, the air fresh. We wander among the eucalyptus. After their warm-up, the young athletes start passing in groups, thundering by in full stride. The groups are organized by their distances. First are several clusters of the core 'middle' distances, five and ten kilometers. Then the short distance people, looking tall and muscular. Then the long distance runners, with set faces and measured pace. Everyone waits for them at the end. They have may more repeats than anyone else. Each distance has its male groups and female.

The circuit they run is obviously programmed into their blood. They run alongside the eucalyptus grove and up the mud path between fences. Five minutes later, they're running down through the trees to the bottom of the hill, where they circle back and attack the incline, dropping steps perfectly among the networks of roots marbling the earth. Repeat, repeat. Tesfahun and Ijigu from Team Tesfa have traveled with us. They have risen to the challenge, changed clothes and joined in.

Menna and I are happy to enjoy the brisk morning and the peace of the trees. The area is beautiful. The work we're witnessing is also beautiful. I can't say why exactly. It's funny how Bekoji is the meeting of archetypes: the first is ancient Ethiopia and the second is new Ethiopia. There is hope in every stride of the runners. And that becomes strength and freedom. I know the feeling inside that tenth lap, if one is healthy. This is life, pinpointed in the pace, all focus on this path through the woods. Even strolling alongside of them, we feel it. This is the first place, the original place. We didn't arrive. We'll never leave. The marathoners roll by, and one is singing with joy.

Travelogue 448– June 16
Steady and Moving
Part One

In town, the hotels decay quickly. Electrical sockets short out; door locks jam; bathrooms develop permanent puddles; the showers have no hot water; TVs malfunction; anything wooden becomes infested; beds sag; ceilings stain; toilets don't flush, become dark nests for mosquitoes; bedsheets become grey and frayed. The prices reflect no depreciation. They climb, and are simply surpassed by the latest facility in a town that never ceases to grow: Awasa, capital of the southern nations.

Politics are funny at the moment. This town, founded only fifty years ago, has found a handy heritage and history. As capital of a region that consists of more than fifty nationalities, this city is a day-long procession of ethnicity. The federal government would like to declare it a federal city and administer it directly. The Sidama people protest. The arbitrary site of Awasa lies in Sidama territory. Suddenly Awasa is their historic capital. Many are on strike today. Many meet illicitly. Peaceful Awasa streets host sinister riot vehicles from Addis.

The tender skies of the region register no change, beyond that of the season. Gentle humidity sustains us. Sun warms us in the morning: we take an outdoor table at the Time Cafe. Just after midday, clouds quietly gather. By five, there will be rain. But they will be smiling showers, short in duration and little more than an inconvenience, stark contrast to the fierce deluges in Addis, already beginning to claim our afternoons. As rainy season gathers momentum in Addis, during July and August, they will consume whole days in their violence.

The current kings in the Awasa hotel market are the two resorts on the lake. One is owned by athlete Haile Gebreselasse. The architecture is square, slick, monolithic. It turns inward, around the vast restaurant / bar that echoes like an airport terminal. A piano man in a tux plays nursery rhymes. Several high TV screens regale visitors in their plush couches. American military shout their conversation, Sudanese businessmen slip lower and lower into their chairs, issuing nonsense drunken witticisms in accented English and giggling.

This is where we go in the evenings to watch the first games of the Euro Cup. After a few nights, we've made friends with the manager, one of Haile's team of business managers in what amounts to an impressive empire in his native country. The man is sharp, and sharp about more than selling cars and hospitality. He calls the subs in the Netherlands game perfectly during the half. They will need Huntelaar and Van Der Vaart, he says. The coach obliges.

Traveling first-class Haile, our destinations in the evening are Poland and the Ukraine, rowdy host peoples of the cup, hosts always on the verge of smoke bombs and racist chants. We watch Germany in its cool march toward the finals; Croatia in its impetuous rush for advancement; Ronaldo pouting and Ribery scowling and Bendtner as hapless white knight.

During the day our destinations are more prosaic: dim and sleepy government offices, painted a mild mustard yellow, and holiday quiet -- Sidama-protest holiday. We wait for officials, as always, but it's a benign interval, so unlike Addis government offices, where hope dies alone and in agonies every minute of the day.

We emerge into the broad dirt road, into the mellow afternoon sun. We turn toward Piassa, the center of town, and stroll lazily forward together, past the variegated shuffle of Ethiopia's intense diversity, proud ethnicities lost until found, boys driving standing their flat horse-drawn carts, women to and from markets, to and from markets, teens roaming with humor and without will, small staring children lost until found.

In good time, we flag down a bajaj, the three-wheelers always good for a laugh. I can measure my age, racing and retrograde, by how easily I can slide into these little blue buggies. Today, I lose my cap backing in and bow to my clumsiness, picking it up. The driver has an eye cocked back and down, watching my shoe. The minute it lifts from the ground, he twists the accelerator and we buzz forth, bound for Wraclow.

Travelogue 447– May 31
Ants Twenty

May is quiet. May is hot. Harmless summer clouds pause over Addis Ababa, like a gentle pause in the calendar before the darkening mood of June. A smoky haze and occasional stiff breezes presage the rains of summer. But May is made for idyll.

Mark insists on a trip to Debre Zeit during the weekend that breaks up the faranjis' training trip. We oblige him. On a previous trip, Mark has found a 'lodge' by Lake Babogaya, where rows of mosquito-infested huts sit among pleasant gardens. The owner has captured some guinea fowl, and put them in a pen with dikdiks, There is a formidable old turkey that roams the grounds free, chasing guests who get too near. There is a tired nag that gives rides to the children. There are campfires and tasty grilled fish at night.

May hangs over Lake Babogaya like a smoked-glass mirror set over the bowl of surrounding hills, gathering the gold of the grasses and the blue of the lake. The waters lap against the concrete foundation of the lakeside terrace. I've stolen away from the huts to the new, mosquito-free Babogaya Resort, where I can sit next to the lake, watching the calming motion of the waters, listen to the stilted monologue of the member of the Ethiopian parliament next to me, where I can read my book in a desultory way until the rest of the party joins me. They have gone for a hike in the dry hills. I spend an hour battling with the internet connection inside, and finally give up to enjoy the terrace.

Yes, it's Gunboat. That's the Amharic name for May. Ethiopians don't particularly like this idyllic miniature summer, between the April showers and the deluges of rainy season. The heat oppresses them. I tell them I love Gunboat. I also love playing with their language -- since I have so little facility with it in seriousness. By some silly association, I called the big holiday of this month 'Gundan Haya'. It's supposed to be 'Gunboat Haya', or May 20, a rather prosaic name for a big holiday, the day the Derg regime was ousted by the present one. I find holidays like this faintly ridiculous, with the uniforms and the marching bands and all the police. So the accidental name 'Ants Twenty' makes comic sense. The Abashas laugh guiltily.

I am not so smooth on another day, when I have the honor to meet the grandson of Haile Selasse. His name is unfortunately close to a bad word, and I fall into the linguistic trap. So I am shaking his hand, and essentially I am saying, 'It's such a pleasure to meet you, Mister F**ker. How are you today, Mister F**ker?' His coterie of friends are horrified, but he takes it stride. He is a friendly and accessible man, with big, doe-like brown eyes. He is unaffected, and I would not have picked him out as a prince.

We meet a second time in the Wabe Shebelle Hotel down in what I call the Haile Selasse side of Addis, where the architecture of the grand period remains preserved in benign neglect. The Wabe Shebelle was the happening place in its day, they tell me. I've always liked the place because of its cool, 60s cosmopolitan look. In its heyday, all the legendary singers of Ethiopia's first pop period sang here. I can just see it, suits and ties and cigarettes, while outside the night closes in on the thousands and thousands of shacks in candlelight.

In any case, let's leave the young couples of the imperial era to dance the night away; let's give Prince F**ker some respite from clumsy faranjis; and let's return to Lake Babogaya, while the sun still shines. We sit in deck chairs beside the water, drinking beer, and we play Connect Four. Gelila always loses; Menna always wins. The sun is high in the sky. All is just.

Travelogue 446– May 15
The One Constant

I'm disoriented. It will take me a while to adjust. After more than eight years, I have changed blog sites, and I am overcome with melancholy thoughts about the transience of life. What forms our foundations, our touchstones, in a world where blogger sites can be shuffled like college residencies? I have to re-assess all that is jarvis, all that formed the bedrock of the jarvis world.

I stand outside Bole International, and I reflect: if a website can be so ephemeral, so vulnerable to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, then are there any real anchors in life? Will the Ethiopian sun rise in the west? Will the aroma of Ethiopia fade or change? Does it give itself away a degree every year, while I don't even notice? The first joy in every arrival -- from the moment I pass through the door of the airliner -- is this very comfort, this balm among the hardships of travel, that earthy scent in the air of this place, made of charcoal and berbere, onion and red earth, coffee and eucalyptus. It is arrival.

One thing slavishly obedient to the principle of change is the dispensation of people and cars, baggage and taxis at the airport -- just about any thing or system moveable in the complex. The entries and exits change. The cafes change. Today, there is no entry at all into the terminal for visitors. And no cars are allowed to drive up to the terminal. Now one enters the empty terminal from baggage claim, and then makes one's way through the parking lot, full of milling crowds, to the far end of the asphalt, where police are allowing cars through in a narrow, choked stream. It's mayhem.

It takes me half an hour to find Shimeles. He has made a major change himself, having finally saved enough to buy his own car. Most drivers pay commissions for use of a regular car. Now he owns his own. This car looks much like the last, small, square, and taxi blue. He has a few more sporty lights now; he has a few more Christian bumper stickers in Amharic or Ge'ez inside and out. And he is proud.

My cozy little place is no longer my own, of course. The walls show new colors; The floor space has contracted. Menna has used my long absence to do some work, closing up with plaster the many portals from the insect universe into our own. There are frilly things on the bed and over the windows. The bathroom hosts rows of mysterious bottles. We have a television. I contentedly part the pretty new sheets, and I find the profound sleep of the pilgrim.

I have meetings immediately, first thing in the morning. They do not take place in our Spartan old office, where four people share two desks, and Yemisrach sits behind a child-sized writing table; where we meet in the center, sitting on plastic stools, sharing a knee-high table that allows only a few notebooks and coffee cups from the cafe downstairs; where closing the shades over our one window in the afternoon, when the sun glares in, involves climbing halfway onto our short book cases. No, today we meet in our spacious new digs, where either of our two new rooms could swallow the old office whole. Even adding in the new furniture to the old, the first room echoes with unused space. The second is still empty.

In the staff meeting, we review the year. Both the program year and school year are coming to a close. It has been a year of successes and growth. When we break, staff disperses to the far corners of our office. I stand in the center, arms akimbo, the lost captain of a well-appointed and well-directed ship.

Travelogue 445– May 11
Bless the Waters

Note: Dear Readers, as I face the prospect of blogger blackout in my once and future destination, I am forced to diversify in order to protect the continual and, indeed, survival of this vital account. Please, therefore, after this entry, visit my new site for further entries once I have crossed into Africa. Once I am back in America or Europe, I will update this site. Thank you for your indulgence.

My place of transition is green and flat. Everything about the land is sculpted by man, even the waters. Near my hotel is the Sloterplas, a lake on the site of a lake, a refashioning of water. The ancient lake was a messy affair, waxing and waning with the seasons, unpredictable. And ultimately, in the way. More land was needed for tilling. The magicians of the prosperous new Nederland drained the old lake, and for centuries it was peaceful farmland.

In the twentieth century, land for housing became more necessary than land for farming. But houses require foundations and terra firma. And so a lake was reborn, made in the likeness of nature, made from the pit left by excavation for sand to raise surrounding lands. Now, there are homes and streets and parks. And when I go for a jog, I run around this very pleasant, domesticated plot of water, There are lawns and trails and fine-looking geese. There is even a fountain some thirty meters off shore.

Amsterdam is nothing if not a pleasant city. Despite the international image of mayhem and licentiousness, I've always found this to be a preternaturally calm and orderly people and place. It would seem to be designed for greatest comfort. It is, after all, the first and most constant instance of European bourgeoisie.

This is the Osdorp district out here, on the other side of the Sloterplas. It might be considered something of an immigrant slum by some. Every race is represented, but all others are outnumbered by the Turks and Arabs. People are poor. The kids do their best to look menacing. But the tough teens have it hard here. How does project danger while loitering on green lawns beside scenic canals, feeding the water fowl? I feel for them. They do their best. They don shiny puff jackets, and shave parts of their heads; they slouch and drag their feet and smoke, and somehow it all just floats down the canal like a smile.

I share the walkways with them, the wide pavements through peaceful parks. We share those with veiled mothers pushing carriages. We gather at the tram stop. Public transport runs frequently and efficiently. We file into the car in an ordered manner. There are seats for everyone. We head toward the city center. One sits in an attitude of defiance, but it is hard to direct one's rebellion. Maybe it's the skies one resents, the source of scarcely relenting fog or drizzle. These are some of life's challenges around the North Sea.

Travelogue 444– April 29
An Aside, an Homage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 443– April 27
Encanto

Take a right at the Burger King.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 442– April 22
Rum Diaries

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 441– April 21
Via Brevis

My appointment is at 6am.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 440– April 19
Pax Brevis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 439– March 13
My Town

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 438– March 6
Not Like Any Other
Part Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 437– March 5
Not Like Any Other
Part One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never mind. I'm here to run.