Travelogue 471 – October 20
Rot

Jan is standing by the door of the building as my cab pulls up. It looks as though he has just walked up, and I'm relieved to see him. Our appointment was a tentative if-I'm-not-able-to-call kind of appointment, proposed in a final email from Ethiopia.

I've just arrived from Schiphol and taken a train through Amsterdam Centraal and onward. Outside the train station of my destination, I show the cabbie my address, and off we go, with nary a word. The cabbie is Arab, so I'm thinking I'll enjoy some good conversation about the town on the way, but he's not having it. Maybe it's the relatively early hour on a Saturday. I sit in the back, and watch the blocks swim by.

My street is Saturday-morning quiet. Everything is made of brick, including the street itself. Cars are silently crowded into every available space along the kerbs, on one side parallel to the street, on the other squeezed together side by side. Between the cars and the pavement is a pink bike path, the only strip actually paved in asphalt. The street is unremarkable. It could be anywhere in northern Europe, bland and square contiguous housing stacked uniformly three storeys high, unbroken from street to street. But just around the corner is a pretty canal, something most everyone in Holland can say, it would seem.

Jan says hello uncertainly. He is Dutch tall and blonde, and Dutch reserved, though he bears the appearance of once having been a hippie of sorts, his hair still disheveled and his attire tired youthful, tired gallant, much as his face has the markings of European early middle age, something haggard, a look like the North Sea winds.

Jan leads me up the Dutch staircase to the flat, a stairway almost comically long and dim and narrow, each step barely a toehold. Upstairs is something more inviting and cozy, two spacious rooms with generous windows, furnished adequately, comfortably.

We settle up and return to the street together. Standing on the flagstones under the grim northern sky, Jan is telling me about the neighborhood, pointing vaguely left and then right. He is interrupted by a thought. You know, he says, he has an extra bicycle, if I'd like to use it. Of course I do. He invites me back to his place to pick up said vehicle. He unlocks his bike, swings one leg over, and he pats the little luggage rack on the back. I climb on.

We pass over one canal and then another. We pass historic Delfshaven, a narrow alley lined with small gabled roofs, a cobblestone road that heads toward the river. We roll along the bike path on Nieuwe Binnenweg, past 'coffee shops', and sex shops, and corner shops with African flavor, and corner shops with Arab products, and with Turkish, and my behind is beginning to ache.

Jan lives with his wife and three children up an even more precipitous flight of stairs in a hundred year-old building across the street from a neighborhood park. The children stand behind the art deco wrought iron railing that encloses their balcony, and they yell down at their dad. He smiles, an unguarded and unreserved smile, something I may never have seen without the kids.

My bicycle is an old grey monster with deflated tires, but I think she's beautiful. Jan gives me the key to its lock. I delicately push up the old kickstand, and I wobble off toward home. Climbing the precarious stairs to my flat, I sing, 'Welkom in Rotterdam'.

Travelogue 470 – October 16
Fin

This is the bar at the Finfine Adarash. The adarash is a government-owned meeting place in the center of town, where the earth's tumble from the mountains pauses in a kind of pastoral bowl before rolling mildly on toward the brown valleys of Debre Zeit, and the long vistas of the Rift Valley Lake district. The adarash is where families meet for weddings, where businessmen come in suits to sulk or joke over alcohol, and where middle-class families dress in their best traditional clothes and gather around the mosob for a special occasion. The wedding parties take place in the outdoor space behind the bar, a cement-paved area as many square meters as the indoor space, broken up by small geometrical patterns of earth cultivated with bright flowers and shade trees, centered around a concrete gazebo-and-stage. During wedding parties, this gazebo is where the DJ stands at his equipment. The middle class families enter and climb the stairs indoors, gathering many stools and chairs and mosob – the traditional wicker stands topped with round serving platforms just the size and shape of injera. And after ten minutes, the middle-class children start screaming and running circles around the second floor, which is built as a mezzanine, looking down on the bar. And those moaning businessmen, they gravitate to that bar.

The esteemed reader should be able to make out a piece of the circular bar in my photo. This is the location of many an important work discussion among our set, in which philosophies are presented and dissected; projects designed, dismantled, and banged together again; the under-privileged are gathered in the finest nets of kindness, and Addis society is analyzed under the finest blades.

Setting lends its colors to debate. That's why location is so important to policy; the gravest issues need the gladdest settings. The Finfine has just the charm for serious matters. Every obstacle is wood. The ceilings were painted back in Solomon's day with patterns suggestive of the garden of love. The bar is dark wood suspended in beds of varnish. It describes a circle around two clumsy pillars and the prosaic, tiled work space of the bartenders. The bar is furnished with stools like thrones, seats covered in goat skin.

Most of the bartenders know us. They know us as a group. Tonight it's only Cien and I. They ask after Menna. The bar is staffed today by one of the stout women and one of the thin men with crooked faces, dressed in those perennial lime-skin green uniforms. The woman won't speak to us, glancing at us with terror. We smile and she smiles back, but the language barrier is too much for her. The man, by contrast, revels in our (exaggerated) Amharic facility. 'Ooh,' he shakes his head, 'bedemp you speak Amaregna!'

The waiters lean against the railings of the second floor level and watch TV. I know from bitter experience how difficult it is to get their attention. At some point, all the TVs in the place will get turned up to 'blast' for the waiters' pleasure, and switched to the deadly dull Ethiopian government channel. The monotonous narration of government meetings and meetings of farmers and meetings of Parliament will rise in volume in counterpoise to the customers' conversation. But that game only starts after nine or so. For now, the businessmen are still in tickled mourning.

This is one of my last nights in Addis. Cien and I have much business to discuss. Our success depends on how fast the Chivas goes down. And the Metas. The astute reader will just discern to the right of the photo a bottle of the Meta, though this particular bottle contains the despised 'Premium'. We order only the original recipe, which comes in the stubby bottles printed with white brand identification. There are no glued labels. When you stop in an Ethiopian bar, ask for Meta acheru , the short one, if you want the authentic experience.

There will be critical subject matter forgotten among countless digressions and stories, the business eventually succumbing to the alcohol and the banter. But that's the beauty and the tragedy of the Finfine Adarash, lacunae woven intimately among its triumphs. One walks out of the bar feeling fulfilled in any case, walking down the long pavement, between narrow gardens and, behind them, the two wings that house the baths. This little geographic bowl provides something like the spiritual center of Addis Ababa, once a tiny Oromo village named, Finfine: the hot springs. The rooms in these two wings feature baths, family-size and … more intimate. I have yet to see them. I come here only for business.

Travelogue 469 – October 8
The Priests

This is the gun that guards the monks. The man is guard and tour guide. He is currently leading our group up the hill above the Debre Libanos monastery, to the famous cave where the saint Tekle Haimenot prayed standing (meaning, standing continuously) for almost thirty years, for so long that one of his legs purportedly fell off. He is traditionally depicted with a detached leg nicely wrapped for him off in one corner.

The cave is a long crevice cut horizontally into the bottom of a cliff. Water drips from the ceiling continuously, the saint's tears. Pilgrims climb the steep steps, nothing more than stones set along a narrow trail, hundreds of them climbing every day in order to bask in the saint's glory. Just outside the gate at the top of the steps, the gate that accesses the small dirt courtyard outside the cave, there is a square shack made of corrugated iron. From inside the shack come the music of splashing water and the crazed, shrieking screams of someone possessed. 'Enough! Enough! I'm burning!' she cries.

Debre Libanos is off the northern road, about two hours or so from Addis. Confession: our first objective is wildlife. I have never driven up to this monastery without a sighting of the Gelada baboon, native only to Ethiopia. They like to hang out in the fields above the canyon near to the road to the monastery. That's just a kilometer or so off the northern highway. You know you're approaching the turnoff when you see the roadside vendors of crosses carved in pink stone.

You'll see the baboons fairly soon after you turn off the highway; they'll be grazing in the fields where some local farmer has built crude boxes on legs for bee hives. The baboons leisurely pick among the grasses, and pick among each other's hides, paying no mind to the sheep or the nearby traffic. But they will mind the humans shouting at them and throwing stones. These local humans will very often wait until you've patiently worked your way to within ten meters of a big, wild-maned father, or a mom with its infant on her back, to run up and start delivering a proud, touristic lecture about the apes in braying voices. Nearby, a farmer will practice his aim with a slingshot on the Geladas. Even that will only motivate the baboons to turn lazily away and migrate to another part of the field.

The monastery is set among dramatic scenery, below high cliffs, and overlooking a broad, hazy gorge that meanders away to the west. The church was rebuilt around 1960 by order of the Emperor. Tekle Haimenot is a saint to be reckoned with. The church is a solid construction of well-worked stone, with a steep dome of silver. It is very pretty against the high bluffs behind it. At this time of year, so soon after rainy season, there are waterfalls to be spotted among those heights.

There are hundreds of pilgrims, even on a weekday. They climb up to the cave. They pray in the church. The monks greet all and sundry with holy boredom. The guard brusquely pushes us toward the office, so we can pay for tickets. One priest in a rose-colored robe asks the ladies if they have had sex recently, assuming, perhaps, in the way of celibate men, that the men in the party had little to do with it. He charges foreigners in the party double the ticket price, and I protest. He just rolls his eyes. I call him a racist. He sighs and gives his nails a glance-over.

The tour begins. Desultorily, the priest gestures toward the church. Some from our party enter. The rest sit in the sun by God' well-provisioned lawns and gardens. Then the priest leads us through the museum, narrating in a nasal tone of disapproval, while a colleague sits at the entrance entertaining himself noisily on his iPhone. The displays are interesting enough, though I've seen many like them across Ethiopia, medieval manuscripts, silver processional crosses, priest's robes, and the knick-knacks of a monk's life before the iPhone came along.

We are led to the beginning of the path up to the cave. The trees obscure the route. The priest passes us off to the guard, an old man with an unsteady gait and a gun. He waves us on in an abbreviated welcome and hello and let's go. He swings the old rifle up over his shoulders, and wrists over each end, shuffling forward in this posture, a traditional Ethiopian long-and-weary-road posture, and we are on our way.

This is the day-to-day of religion now, I guess. It's a tough business the priest and guard might say, a rough and tumble with tedium and dust, brushes with the sins of pilgrims and saints, and the shoe sole sacrifice of miles along the museum pavement and the ancient rocks of penance and prayer. But someone must follow in the big, stationary footsteps of the saint, and they are just the corps to do it.

Travelogue 468 – October 4
The Things That Signify

This design has penetrated into my psyche fairly deeply. I stare at it almost daily when I'm in Ethiopia. I see pictures in it, busts and blossoms, integers and fountains. The familiar and then something new. It's a quasi-paisley wallpaper in the brain.

This is the design in the glass in my salon window at home. It's a big fat window, floor to ceiling, and across the whole front of the room. It allows in light and heat -- especially heat in the afternoon, when the sun shines on it directly – but doesn't allow prying eyes access.

You'll see the shadow of a bar behind the glass. I live behind bars, just like Wheezer the dog. The difference is, I have keys and opposable thumbs. I can get out. But there is security everywhere, bars in all windows and doors. The wall around the compound has broken glass embedded in the cement on top. Above that are rolls of barbed wire.

During the summer, during my last stay in Ethiopia, I slammed the door and shattered the glass. For a few days, the top panel of our door was wide open. The bars remained, to discourage the thieves that might have made it over the barbed wire and shards of glass, but the eyes were free to roam, as were the cold winds of rainy season. The door panel displayed a new design, kind of like the cartoon of a TNT blast, jagged lightning edges around the frame.

Ijigu buys us a new panel of glass and places it back in the door frame. He has found the same quasi-paisley design – I have the feeling there are too many other choices in the market – and I am comforted.

I have one ritual particularly tied to that pattern, and that is my daily workout. When I'm not running up in the mountains, when I need an exercise fix that doesn't require driving, I work out in the salon. There are reasons I don't use the compound's courtyard. The family that owns the property is often making use of the space, hanging laundry, sweeping up, gardening, or just passing through. There is an old man, victim of a stroke and confined to a wheelchair, who is daily wheeled out to take in the sun. Atomsa sits on the low wall containing the garden and holds an old transistor radio to his ear. Wheezer chuffs, and his companion whines.

I've had frequent occasion to comment on staring on this blog. It is a fact of life in Ethiopia, the psychological weight of which is probably hard to imagine for those of my devoted readership comfortably settled in home territory, in European cultures. Life in Addis is very public; so much of it occurs on the street. There are no private spaces. And so, public spaces are continuous, colorful, and commingling dialogue. Everyone is visible, commentary flows freely. It is fun; it is admirable; it is exhausting for people used to privacy cultures.

So I bring the workout indoors. And whatever the activity, I have my face turned toward the sunlight, toward the window. I fix my eyes on a piece of the pattern, a brick in the wall, and the mind goes blank. Blank minds are the most receptive.

I wonder about the symbols that are internalized during lives defined by coincidence and chance, shaped by odd furnishings. How often do we see our nation's flag – artificial symbol of something we think has powerful significance – compared to, say, a red traffic light, or the lines dividing lanes in our asphalt streets? Which symbols sink most deeply in among the equipment of the brain, silently and permanently? And which signs are more arbitrary, which are unique to our age? How many generations can claim whole life spans under the gaze of those red and green and yellow lights?

I sit at the kitchen table and I adopt the attitude of a man looking out his window upon a beautiful day. I am oriented toward the daylight, toward the radiation of the sun filtering into the house, but I see nothing; I'm just contemplating the patterns of the brain, the swoosh, the arc, the curve, the turning of time on its axis.

Travelogue 467– October 2
Tiny Homes

This is Wheezer. Wheezer is a dog. He's a big mutt, orange in general color, like most dogs in Ethiopia. There are many specimens like Wheezer running the streets. He's got more muscle than most of his street cousins, and his hair is thick and matted. I don't know dog science well enough to say why the street dogs have healthier coats. Maybe it's because they get to roll in the dirt and in the grass. Wheezer only has concrete walls and the concrete floor. As far as I know, he has never had a life outside his cage. This is where Wheezer lives, day after day.

Wheezer is one of a pair. There are two cages, and two dogs. His companion is older, but looks a lot like Wheezer. They look enough alike that I've wondered if they are family. Maybe it's Wheezer's father. The two never get to play together or sniff each other up. They only see each other through bars, when one gets a minute to run outside the cage.

Once or twice a week, Atomsa cleans the cage. He comes in the morning, stretching the hose across the courtyard of the compound. He turns the water on, and then he lets one dog out, making sure that none of the human family is outside. The dog gallops around the courtyard, stopping to sniff and to raise his leg. Both dogs have gotten used to my smell. If I'm around, I'll play with them, chasing them from one side of the yard to the other.

Atomsa hoses the cage clean, and then he calls the dog back in. Once the dog is inside, Atomsa hoses him down. Then the other dog gets a minute outside. I've noticed that Wheezer is not as fun-loving as his older companion. He is more athletic, and he bounds around the yard with more gusto. But he's not as interested in playing with anyone. He would rather get a good smell of everything.

Wheezer has one job in life, one job with one duty, and that is to bark. That is the job description of most domestic dogs. Someone rattles the compound gate, he barks. A stranger comes in, he barks. He takes his job seriously. He practices all night, when the city comes alive with sound, when dogs everywhere raise their song, and one hears a chorus of hundreds. Wheezer enjoys the nighttime chorals.

Wheezer has a sharp bark, but it's his companion who barks more and longer. Wheezer is a technician; he prefers to make his bark mean something. He will wait until someone is less than a meter away, and then he'll stand and shout. And Wheezer has a broader repertoire than his companion. He has a growl. He puts us all on notice sometimes. If I swat a mosquito, smacking the wall of my little house, he starts the growl. I say, 'Growl, Wheezer, growl.' That sometimes makes him stop, with a snort, more out of contempt than from familiarity.

Our little abode faces the dog cages. If I sit on the front steps of our little house, I stare at Wheezer and he stares back. I tell him, 'our little house isn't much bigger than yours. We are two people and we have two rooms, too. Okay, we have a bathroom, too. That would be nice, wouldn't it, Wheezer? Do you wish you had a bathroom?' Wheezer listens to me, leaning his face against the bars, rolling his eyes to look at me. His eyes look sad. He's thinking about that bathroom. What would that be like, he wonders.

I ask Wheezer if he would like his coat shaved. 'You might feel cooler.' It must be healthier, too, I think to myself. Wheezer shrugs. He's indifferent to comfort. He rests up for his next barking assignment. He dreams about the night, and his wide network of friend around the city. I ask Atomsa if we can give Wheezer a shave. Atomsa shrugs, says Wheezer will bite. Who will hold him? I sit on my front steps and think about that. Wheezer watches me with a mocking look.

Travelogue 466– September 20
The Runners

And I travel into sunny Cambridge (picking up the thread of narrative from three blogs back) not to relish its ever-budding youthfulness inside a city of stern history, not to beat futilely upon the castle door of New England's exclusive internet, but to participate in another fundraising event. Participate means here speak and shake hands. This is far less demanding than extreme sports.

So, once I give up on Harvard Square's internet, I return to the Red Line and ride it toward Boston, disembarking at Kendall Square. This is the exit for Boston's other academic heavyweight, M.I.T. It's also the neighborhood of the Kendall Square Theater, an independent cinema. I will be presenting there after the showing of 'Town of Runners', a British documentary about the Ethiopian town of Bekoji. This is the small town made famous by its runners, also made famous by this blog in the summer of this year.

I visited Bekoji in order to assess for a prospective library project, to be partially funded by the makers of 'Town of Runners'. After visiting and filming for four years, the filmmakers have committed themselves to helping the community and the athletes. That's where we come in.

Above ground, Kendall Square looks very different than Harvard Square. I've traveled from quaint and old world ivy league to a tight grid of modern streets. I catch a glimpse of M.I.T., and it looks more like the headquarters of a pharmaceutical company than a university campus, certainly nothing like the bit of old England that is Harvard.

I stop in at a bookshop, nothing like the cozy basement shop in Harvard Square, instead huge and anonymous, housed behind glass in the ground floor of a high rise. I stop in a Chipotle, as antiseptic as the bookstore. And I stop for a pint in an Irish pub, which is set in a clean-brick block of shops and condos. The pub manages, with a concentrated effort at décor, to leave the clinical geometry outside. If anything, it overcompensates, with the predictable cute phrases carved in wood, and the etchings of Irish authors, etc., but I'm grateful.

Outside the pub window, the high-tech working class are lining up in the bike lane, streamlined cycling helmets on, yellow shirts, and spiky shoes. One stops too suddenly and nearly topples over trying to get out of the toe clip. Inside, the bartender maintains a ceaseless patter in his broad Boston accent. When I ask the way to the theater, he stares at me and suddenly shouts, 'The-ater! The-ater!' in a caricatured British voice. I'm not sure what the joke is; perhaps the word rings wrong in this neck of the woods, or maybe the spark in his brain was born of no reasoning. I'm not even sure I should laugh, so I just say, 'Yes.' He's disappointed. He leans back against his counter and pulls his chin into his neck. He continues to stare. 'All right,' he says, resuming his natural flat Boston tone, 'see the stairs?' The stezz. Yes, there are shallow steps outside leading to a cleanly paved path between the condos. 'Follow that path to the next block and take a left. It's right there.' He looks away in boredom.

This is the first time I see the film in its entirety. It's a poignant account of a story very familiar to me, the struggle of young Ethiopian athletes to make it – a parable about anyone with a dream in a context of poverty. They might grow up in this special town, supported by Coach Sintayehu; supported by town's tradition of running; supported by the hundreds of other kids with the same dream. But that doesn't solve the hunger or the lack of gear – even shoes. That doesn't remove the intransigent and blind bureaucracy. The beauty is in seeing them, year after year, season after season, returning to the trails and to the decrepit dirt track. It's a story of hope. The anchoring image in the film is the camera tracking Hawi as she runs along the side of the highway, recording her breath and her determination, like a fire of faith.

My contribution afterward is basically, 'Yep, that's how it is.' But I can add a little update, as I've met some of the stars of the film – the cheerful and stubborn coach, Hawi still running, and Biruk tall and calm and now a college boy. It's all real, and life does persist in its fragile and tenacious and spirited way. Thousands of young Biruks still stare out the windows of their family souks watching the passing donkeys in the dirt roads of home. And I realize I can't remember what it's like not to know the highlands and the grasses and the crazy people who inhabit them.

Travelogue 465– September 19
To The Beach
Part Two

Van life is a blur. We in the van follow each runner, stopping every few miles in order to offer water to the penitent, and cheer her on. There are two vans per team, by the way, and the runners in the second van are off resting or wringing their hands somewhere, waiting for six hours or so until their set of relay legs begin. We don't see much of them during the whole event.

At the end of each leg, the runner meets his or her successor in an improvised chute made of ribbons and passes off the 'baton', which in this race is simply a plastic arm band. The next runner heads off down the road to strained and exhausted cheers from the parched throats of increasingly weary teammates.

My first shift is the longest of the entire course, just about nine miles, and the arm band is passed to me just as the sun finds its power. Beautiful weather has followed me to every destination on this trip outside Ethiopia, from Holland into Michigan and Minnesota, and now into New Hampshire, where we have been blessed with blue skies. But dogging my steps has also been the heat. By the time I'm a mile into my nine-mile run, I realize that I am committed to a broad strip of asphalt with no shade. The sun is blazing down on all the second shift runners. I settle into a hot weather pace, and mentally shrug: the weeks of training in sharp sun will pay off now. And I do make it, though I'm a bit woozy by the time I pass the baton off again.

All runners in this show have been assigned three legs, all corresponding to their place in the lineup. As second in the rotation, I apparently have been given the most difficult of the assignments. A few others have individual legs that are more difficult than any of mine, but mine in aggregate are the toughest, which means the longest and the most hilly. I've been training regularly; that alone qualifies me, in the eyes of the captains of this team, for second shift. Most of the others have followed the 'when and if' training regimen, when and if there is time and inclination. That said, I was pretty impressed with everyone's performance.

The Granite State goes far toward comforting us in those early stages, offering up beautiful landscape. We stop during leg #5 or 6 to wade into a small, cold lake underneath a high bluff that is a patchwork of greenery and exposed rock. This is the perfect tonic.

The day advances. The race legs get hotter and hotter. I pity Number Six, who runs mid-afternoon, and has a leg nearly as long as mine. Her face is bright red with exertion; her effort inspires sympathetic pain. But she finishes, and Van Two takes over. We're off for a few hours. We go for dinner and for a nap. The nap occurs in the lawns behind the school where Van Two will finish off their round, and where we will start over. Liz pulls tarp and sleeping bags from the boot of the van, and we set up in the grass closest to the parking lot. The mosquitoes immediately join the party, circling over the grass. As dusk settles into night, the grass becomes dewy. The sleeping bags become damp.

I take a walk. Inside the school building, local charities have set up tables of carb-rich foods. Runners are lounging in school cafeteria chairs. I do my best to read. There are two students of the school, probably ten years-old or so, charged with hanging out in the hall and directing runners back toward the food tables. One boy aspires to be a carnival barker: 'Right this way! High five! How are you doing? Step right this way to a delicious meal of your choice. Thank you very much!'

And all too soon, we're back into it. My second leg is seven and a half, and it's a night shift. We are required by race regulations to wear an assortment of night gear: reflective vests, blinking lights, and headlamps. I figure out I've put on the headlamp upside down, because it is banging against my forehead. Once sorted, I find the pace. It is eerie running a race at night. My cohort of runners appear only as bobbing and scarce blinking red lights ahead. Cars continue to pass; it's only a two-lane road now, and each of us is reduced to hoping that the drivers see us. It's a misty night, and as we dip into shallow valleys along the way, we run through a light fog. The headlamp projects a shining circle around my vision. It is hypnotizing. The lull between cars is very sweet: silent and redolent with night in the forest. The leg passes quickly. It may be muggy, but the air is cool – a nice contract to the daytime heat.

In the morning, we drive to the next transfer point between vans. The more intrepid of the group head to a field where tents have been set up for runners. Half of us stay in the van. I sleep curled up on the back bench, my refuge and my exile, managing a few hours free of consciousness.

The second day takes on that attenuated and brittle quality of sleep-deprivation, light grating and sound tinny, either too close or too far. Leg Number Three is every bit as painful as expected, running in the morning's gathering heat, taking on a half-mile incline right at the end of my six and a half. And then I'm done. The rest is riding in the van and handing out water to exhausted runners.

The end of a race of this sort has to be surreal, a complement to the start. One is reminded of that sense of placelessness. What does it mean? And how does it relate to that first place, where the mountains were so quiet? Here, one stands in the sands at the verge of the Atlantic Ocean, among a crowd of runners and supporters – among a much dwindled crowd if you are one of the contenders for last place, as we are – and one waits for a solitary figure to appear at the far end of the strand, a figure who must finish his last leg running a quarter or mile or so in sand, in the meantime restoring one's exhausted senses with the sound of the waves, the mellow summer colors of the sea. Today is another one lit with glorious sunshine.

There he is, hobbling forward against the force of the sands. We line up ahead of the finishing chute, cheering him on. As he passes, we all join in behind him, crossing the line in a group, making a ruckus for the last photos and video. And stop, reeling from the struggle across ten meters of sands after having rested. It's over.

One hundred meters further is the event's beer tent. We wade through the crowds eagerly. Plastic pint cups secured for everyone, we drift toward the picnic tables, testing our first war stories, and relishing the equivocal triumph. The whole team gets a chance to get to know each other. The sun seems to hold for while, just above the western horizon, looking back wistfully, hanging among red mists just over Vermont, perhaps, smiling on us through the tent flaps, smiling at the antics of children.

Travelogue 464– September 18
To The Beach
Part One

But I have come east not to reminisce, but to run. Massachusetts grows older at many times the pace I do. But I am headed north, to the relative innocence of New Hampshire. (How innocent, if it claims to be the first state to rebel against the Empire? No matter; the forests glow with youthfulness to my eyes, a buoyancy to the yellow-green of its mountain forests that doesn't admit to the brooding of Massachusetts shadows. No matter.)

So the plane wheels in around the city. Logan International occupies its own peninsula, island-like in its isolation. The plane cruises in along the northern coast, dotted with inlets, marshes, and stands of rock rising from the surf, even unto the eastern horizon. The sun glints off the distant downtown buildings, which, again, seem belittled by the bay, by the history, rather than enhanced by it.

I arrive at Logan International, and I am immediately out again, riding in a rental car agency van on a narrow and deteriorating highway, the 1A. We're heading north, and it occurs to me in my sleep-deprived state that the driver may be taking me to New Hampshire himself. By the time we reach the agency, it does seem as though we have covered half my ride. I thank him and shake his hand.

I am going to New Hampshire to participate in a 200-mile relay. Participate means run. There are twelve of us, and, yes, we are running a 200-mile relay, from the mountains to the ocean. This is the state I'm reduced to as charity guy. I have to join in the American craze for everything 'extreme', in order to make the kids a buck. If it doesn't hurt, it's not worth watching, let alone donating to. Doing it for charity relieves us from taking the 'race' seriously, of course, and our mantra driving up to the race starting point is, 'It'll be fun'. Indeed, the bits I remember were fun. But speaking abstractly for the moment, there is something disturbing about my people's concentrated push into realms that are hard to distinguish from mass sadomasochism. But hey, what doesn't kill us turns us on, right?

I aim the rental north and pass over the state line, into the far north. It's night by the time I make it to Hampton. This is where the race ends, and where I'm meeting up with the team in the morning. I rush into my hotel room and desperately try to force myself to sleep, to no avail, and 4am arrives to roust me out of bed before I've had as many as four hours of real sleep. I weave through the beach town, still under pall of deep night, and I discover the team already loaded into their vans. There are the awkward hellos among strangers who all have regrets, and we are off. We have two hours to drive up north, further up the long state. We will have to make it to the top Franconia State Park. most of the way from Hampton to Canada.

We greet the sun at our destination as it sheds first light on the surrounding mountains, mountains still blue with night. It feels as though we are lost among them; the mission of running across the map somehow draining the place of location, the location of place: it's neither north nor south. We're on a sloping field in the middle of gentle mountains that relate to nowhere else on the map, but in some magical way, we will start running and we will end up back at a place with a name.

There are dozens of vans parked in the lot. We are lectured about dangers and procedures; we are registered; we are photographed; and suddenly our first runner is released out the chute, jogging across the grass toward oblivion. I'm second in the rotation, so watching her head off has particular poignancy. I change into my running gear, and we launch the long trek of the vans.

There are two vans, which means that six people are living in each van for the next thirty-six hours. I am the only man in this van, which brings with it a certain smelly shame; let's not forget that this comes at the end of a vagabond trip of nearly four weeks. But it also means that I am billeting with a mellower sort of human, further mellowed by physical exhaustion. They are kind. I settle in the back bench with proper deference. There are piles of stuff on every bench, and the state of disorder will only grow with the passing hours.

Travelogue 463– September 17
Random Access Memory

I have a time on my hands, just when I don't want it. New England is playing chess with me, and I am just about stalemated. My mobile network does not seem welcome in this region – providing me yet another run-in with America's nonsensical phone systems that punish mobile phone users who are mobile. There is a method to being a business traveler in a country of business travelers that has eluded me. I have no mobile network, and I have no internet connection. Today I've traveled from Acton into Cambridge, expressly to access better networks. But apparently even Harvard students must be confounded with signal issues, providing them a lab for dealing with the real world frustration of getting ahead in this one-legged free-style called America. 'Look ma, no infrastructure!'

Today I have traveled from Acton into Cambridge. I have parked the car -- dare I say it? -- in Harvard Yard. Not true. I parked the car at a ramp down the Red Line and taken the subway in … to Harvard Yard. Maybe my esteemed reader doesn't understand the joke referenced here, but it's a good-natured jab at the edgy Boston accent, an accent that I've been enjoying for days now. Like any accent, it's most fun when you hear it from the mouths of children. To my ear the accent is flat and metallic, and so suggestive of noiresque grit and sarcasms that the children of Massachusetts seem weirdly sophisticated ordering candy at the corner store.

I have time on my hands, and it's a beautiful day in Cambridge. I gaze out the window helplessly, waiting for my computer to negotiate with the surly spirits of the internet. I will soon take a walk among the lawns and venerable halls of Harvard Yard. But I must first turn in a modicum of work.

Enough time has passed that I hardly feel as though I'm back. But that was indeed the same life as this one. Flying over the length of Massachusetts on a spectacularly sunny day, seemingly all the old state's hills and forests laid out below me, I am reminded: I used to live here. We pass over a river that I'm pretty sure is the Connecticut River, nestled in its broad and green valley that I remember by the innocuous name of Pleasant Valley.

Hillary attended the notorious Hampshire College, while I gathered non-transferable credits at the post-graduate academies of Unemployment and Aimlessness. I did manage to squeeze in stints in slacker jobs that I will never forget. One was as parking ticket clerk for the town of Amherst. I had a desk at Town Hall, and recorded by hand the occasions of man's malfeasance in a great ledger. I loved the old castle of Town Hall, set among the green and serene lanes of Amherst, town of Dickinson and Frost. My other memorable gig was at the radio station in Northampton. Though merely a clerk, I was allowed to play in the studio, learning a few tricks of the DJ trade, now no doubt obsolete.

My years there merge into a handful of tableaux: the timeless prospect of green hills on gorgeous summer days; the feeling of claustrophobia for a California boy among all those trees; the year on the second floor of the old Bay State Hotel in Northampton, living above the bar and rehearsing Jonny's songs; running across the snow with Hillary and feeling winter's bite for the first time, being scared by it.

We pass overhead in the plane. We pass over the twin stretches of water that are the Quabbin Reservoir, and on into the midland hills around Worcester, the province of our friend Doug, with his impish grin and guitar, his accent hard as diamond. And we pass over the darker forests that surround and presage dark Boston, repository of so much history, a history and a city seemingly denied by the times, by the country that was essentially born here.

The city emerges where forests meet the ocean. It seems to occupy the center of a natural circle, described by the bay and its islands, North America, made of trees and more trees, pouring into the amphitheatre to attend the tragedy. The clusters of buildings are modest, fleeting ornaments to the enduring bedrock of Massachusetts.

The computer is new, and keenly embarrassed that Massachusetts is its first theatre of operation. It struggles valiantly with the connection, and does manage to complete a few tasks, slipping a few emails past the embargo to let the world know I'm safe and still engaged in the good fight. It is time for a show of mercy. I relieve the computer and cross the street to stroll through Harvard Yard, heart of another profound tradition. Young students are leading tours today. They walk backward, orating in sing-song strains about the obscure rooms and the mundane rituals of higher education. This is how it goes, year after year, they say.

Travelogue 462– September 10
Touch of Season

The asphalt is dry. The grass in the park looks wan and unloved. The lakes themselves seem tired. The Midwest has been through a drought. Even the Mississippi looks depleted, shrinking from its banks, flowing only quietly.

I swing past the bottom of Lake of the Isles on Saturday morning, and the dry road is peaceful. I continue on into Kenwood. We have a board meeting scheduled at the community center. Across the street, some neighbors are at work setting up for some festival. It's already becoming a beautiful day, the kind that Minnesotans will not waste. All day there will be a ruckus over there, children running mad and grills smoking.

The community center is closed. There has been some misunderstanding with the center manager. We gather in front, sitting on benches inside a semi-circle of cold concrete. The sun hasn't touched this little plaza yet. And my rousing welcome speech is met with shivers.

And so it is that, even at the tail end of an overheated summer, on the morning of another sunny day, the board greets the organization's new home with the site's most appropriate body response. This is Minnesota, one must shiver.

The same phenomenon follows us, even into the dinner break. While outside the afternoon hums with residue heat, the Chatterbox is resolute in its climate control, blasting us deep into autumn with its AC. We huddle together around the table anxiously. I don't have anything to wear with long sleeves.

Jon works in the restaurant business, and that means in the management of a prosperous chain, not as a busboy. He measures the place up in a glance or two. The Chatterbox is a favorite of mine. It's an anomaly, and somehow so Minnesotan in its quirks. Unassuming outside, and comfortable inside, the bar manages to stand out in pleasant ways. It has two rooms, one a typical Midwestern barroom, stools at the long bar, booths with plush seats, and one room a restaurant with high table tops and stools. The restaurant is supplied with a variety of games, board and video. There is a TV devoted to video games, ringed by couches. The food is the surprise, at least for Jon, who sums up, 'Upscale menu, downscale decor.' The beers are their own microbrew, and the food is bar food-plus. My favorite is the 'Build Your Own Mac and Cheese'. There's something about Jon's verdict that seems to capture Minnesota for me.

We may be cold, but TK warms us up with political debate, teasing the liberals at the table with a full menu of neo-con invective, spliced with a Catholic critique. Obama is a well-meaning failure. Carter did nothing. Clinton: well, TK will just pray for us. TK is Ethiopian-American. He says he asks his friends of African origin who are all enamored of Obama if they can think of one good African leader. Just one. So why is an American leader with African ancestry hailed as a great man? We liberals, laugh and try to change the subject.

The Mississippi has lost much of its mass, but none of its charm. Cien, Louie and I stand on its banks. We've been running. I should say, Cien and Louie have been running, and I've been jogging. Louie continues to run after Cien and I have stopped, jumping in the river's waters and sniffing up the two other dogs on the beach. We stand underneath the bluffs of Fort Snelling, beside the meeting of waters, of various waters, from Minnehaha Creek to myriad small streams, emptying in shallow deltas across the light sand here. A few miles downriver, it will be the Minnesota River that adds its considerable volume to the grand old watercourse.

Here the park surrounds us, with its high banks and woods deep with summer green, even in a dry season green. We breathe gratefully of the season, our lungs fresh,emptied, scoured by the miles among the trees. We inhabit the moment, moment like a still life, like a snapshot of golden summer. Humble Minnesota teaches gratitude.

Travelogue 461– September 1
Mitt and the Tigers

On a Saturday morning, there will be men in waders standing in the middle of the Grand River, casting their line. And this is downtown.

I'll be riding Stephanie's bicycle down the sidewalk set three meters above the river. The water will be calm. One of the men will be smoking a cigarette. The buildings of downtown Grand Rapids will stand quietly beside us, providing something like testament to the peace of the scene.

I will ride by the Gerald R. Ford Museum, among its expansive lawns on the other side of the river. That's about where I will turn, to the left, away from Gerald's memorial and into downtown proper. I will make my way to the Madcap Coffeehouse, there to work at my little computer for hours while sipping macchiatos.

I will worry about America. I visit this country infrequently. Generally I see that as a blessing. My country makes me nervous. I don't understand it.

One night, I'll be eating chicken wings and trying to watch the Tigers. The Tigers will be holding onto second place in the division in which the Twins are dead last. They will be losing to the Royals. I'll be sitting at the bar drinking Mad Hatter, trying to ignore the carnival that is this establishment. Grand Rapids will not seem to have much selection in bars, either offering seedy depression or overripe fun-fun-fun.

My peaceful baseball vigil will be threatened by politics, the neighboring television screen suddenly glaring with a live broadcast from the Republican convention. Mitt will be smiling and shaking hands on his approach to the podium. There will be something to this man's manner that approximates the natural in a curious way, making for an interesting aesthetic. The spectacle makes watching my game difficult, and I prepare to go.

This will seem the crux of my anxiety, and ultimately the salve, this glimpse of a new aesthetic. America worries me. Will it not seem that there were moments, like a brief moment after Prohibition and through the Second World War, like the 60s, -- even as the government chose to play Byzantium to Russia's Khan, -- when America might have chosen a European path, a style and a sensibility gentle and cosmopolitan?

Will it not seem tragic to someone like me that America didn't? I like Europe. Their policies and their people seem moderate and measured. They have many more centuries of grief to draw from as wisdom.

But will we not resign ourselves to the American aesthetic after all? The unforgiving slide into conservatism -- lasting my entire adult life -- masks an assertion of identity in the face of history. The country's violent and passionate re-entry into European history in the twentieth century awakened things in the national soul, longings and then the reaction to those longings. And now we drift away again, into determined Americana, part self-conscious myth and part nature. And the tonic to despair is love of the aesthetic.

That same night, Mitt's night, will feature preseason football. The crowd in the carnival wings bar will be all about the football. Mitt and the Tigers will only be sideshows. 'Grab your foam finger,' the television will scream. There will be a table of loud men who seem to be 'playing' fantasy football. They will have pasted a diagram on the wall charting their fantasies, their triumphs.

That night will pass. I will remark on the beauty of the morning, the placid waters, the gentle late-summer skies. The city will be so quiet at this hour. The fishermen will seem so contented. I will remark how near the center they are, how shallow the river.

Travelogue 460– August 22
Banking

I'm at Schiphol when I hear about Meles dying. I'm waiting to board my flight to Michigan. Something on Facebook catches my eye., something that has the ring of reality. There have been rumors among the expat Ethiopian communities for months, stuff always sounds like conspiracy theory. Meles has died a myriad of times in a myriad of ways in diasporic gossip this summer. But the post I see is just a brief note of condolence. I do two things immediately. I look up BBC News. And I call Menna.

BBC doesn't have much to say, just confirmation that Meles has been in and out of European hospitals all summer. Apparently the end came suddenly, after he'd been convalescing just fine. But actual cause of death: no comment. We'll probably never know.

My first reaction, like that of many others, is concern for people back home. Menna says everything is calm. People are sad, she says, a state that the state is dedicated to milking for weeks. The government media has already started its 24-hour-a-day vigil and 'coverage', which means retrospectives and teary interviews ad infinitum. After only a few days, the country has re-imagined their much-reviled, diminutive leader as a giant and a saint among men.

Meanwhile, we all brace ourselves. Ethiopia has seen exactly three supreme leaders since the 1920s. And there has never been a peaceful transition of power since the modern state came into being. Ethnic tensions have built steadily year by year. And it was only a few weeks ago that the Mercato district in Addis was the scene of rioting over religion.

It's been comforting to see that the first response has been peaceful. Though 'shock' might be the correct diagnosis. I'm not optimistic. In 2005, the worst uprisings were a full six months after the election.

It's time to board, and I obediently follow the crowd onto the plane -- though I'm ill at ease, and irrationally I feel like I should abandon my plans. Everything, including the work, is thrown into a tenuous sort of no man's land by this development. In the end, one has no choice but to carry on until events themselves provide the final judgement on your planning. I board.

The skies over the Atlantic are wonderfully clear. We pass over Greenland in thaw, and we can see every crevice and every retreating glacier. We can see the sun glinting off metal roofs in what appear to be tiny, isolated vales with the slightest hints of green. Otherwise, the landscape is white or craggy brown. The imagination boggles at the sight of those villages.

It's only as we approach Detroit in the late afternoon that the skies change. The pilot warns us it will, and we begin our descent through piles of clouds. The plane starts bucking, and people are gasping and laughing. I'm watching the distinctly Midwestern masses of condensation out the window. The Nederlander next to me is nervous. 'We don't get storms like this,' he says. I nod; I like that about both places.

As we bank one way and then the other, the view out the windows changes dramatically. Facing one direction, the sun is blotted out by ominous storms, clouds nearly black and suspended in a sickly yellow light. The plane circles, and looking the other direction the clouds disperse and we see promising blue skies over the horizon. It seems that the pilots have circled around this violent storm, and the landing is quiet and uneventful. I sense the Nederlander's wonder that a storm of that intensity could be simply skirted, like an iceberg in a calm sea.

But there you go. One more twilight, one more dizzying tilt of the ship, one more arrival.

Travelogue 459– August 16
Waters and Harbours

From summer at its worst to summer at its best, from Ethiopia to Nederland. Much as I might miss my family for a few weeks, I am happy for the trade. Nederland is showing me all its finest colors. Blue skies hold the clouds at bay. The temperatures hold on the pleasant side of hot, under yellow, benign sun. The parks are green, here a color of love, life flourishing under the sweet attentions of the season.

Sights and sounds are healing. I walk along lines of poplars, the wind whispering among the leaves, the leaves shimmering above. They play with sunlight. The water plays with the sunlight, catching it and dispersing it with a mischievous sense of generosity. The ducks have their games, self-satisfied and lazy, clucking and diving.

Here at the Hotel of the Gods (see my last entry) I am located next to the Rembrandt Park and a ten-minute jog from the Slotermeer, that man-made lake where once there was a God-made lake (see entry from last winter some time).

There is water in the air. It is not the falling sort, as in Addis, accompanied by damp chill and echoes of thunder. This is a floating moisture, shattered and thrown into the sky to hang there, refracting and intensifying the sunlight. It is so bright out as I run toward the open sky above the Slotermeer.

I can be forgiven for being happy. This last trip to Addis was bruising. I was led forward by the days like a mongrel, with a fist gripping me by the hair. I was sick most of the time, and plagued by Ethiopian bureaucracies at their worst. The streets and the mountains were coated with mud.

This seems like paradise. There are children in little kayaks on the Slotermeer, shouting and laughing, overseen by young people with kind voices. Pairs and groups of people are strolling on serene paths, people of all ages and races. No one says anything to me -- one wouldn't know how blissful that can be without spending long periods in a place like Ethiopia. There is only the breeze among the leaves above. They are the only voices I could want to listen to.

Paradise moves me to get out before I should. I run every day -- even the day I arrive after a sleepless, overnight flight. I'm running like I'm learning about legs again, I'm so tired, so slow. But the pain in my joints is soothed by the hand of the sun on my back. It feels glorious. I will pay for this run, I think, and I don't mind And, in fact, I never do pay. I run the next day.

The last streets running before I reach the Hotel of the Gods are dedicated to Dutch artists. I have half a mile on the street for Mondriaan. His unspeaking presence seems just right for Amsterdam, whose buildings seem fitted to his designs, whose language and whose pleasures seem woven from his color schemes. It all feels oddly safe.

And maybe, when all is said and done, that is Amsterdam's sin. It is the performer in stripes pantomiming 'Safe' in an unsafe world, signaling 'Calm' by stormy seas, singing 'Stable' while ships are capsizing. It is an idyll among protected woods, a picnic on the bluff above an ugly battle. A joy to visit, a delusion to stay.

Well, a few more days with the high poplars and the peace of amicable skies. I will be forgiven.

Travelogue 458– August 15
Meeting of Divines

I'm staying in the Ramada in Amsterdam this trip. It's not just the Ramada, but the Ramada Apollo. I found the hotel on booking.com. When I search for a hotel, my leading variable is price. My second is comfort. Every so often, the twain shall meet, and it looks like they do in this listing, the Ramada Apollo.

It is difficult to pronounce the name of this hotel properly in my mind. It has been the holy month of Ramadan, as anyone watching the Olympics should know. The British press has made much of it, Muslim athletes having to compete on empty stomachs, and so on, anything Muslim getting that weirdly indulgent-while-hostile treatment in the Western press. But in Ethiopia, it's just another fast. The Orthodox are fasting as well, it being one of their odd long stretches in honor of God's extensive family.

Today is the Dormition of the Theotokos, by the way, the falling asleep of the god-bearer, or Assumption in the Catholic calendar. Mary gets her pass to heaven. Looking over the Orthodox calendar, I notice an interesting commemoration coming up on the 29th, that of the beheading of John the Baptist. I'm not sure how one celebrates that one. Maybe with a special dance. In any case, fasting is much less complicated for the Muslims. One month every year, and one needn't recall which fallen saint to honor.

So I pronounce Ramada with those heavy consonant sounds and a misplaced accent, and I confuse myself. Especially combining it with Apollo. The mythologies are clashing. I picture Gabriel and Apollo meeting at sunrise on a plateau overlooking a dusty plain, the trumpeter meeting Phoebus on a day outside history. What will they say to each other?

Gabriel is dressed in linen. He's lit up with purpose, eyes afire. Apollo is partial to nudity, but has thrown a stretch of cloth around his middle for the sake of the Abrahamic demi. While Apollo is clean-shaven and has a glow of youth about him, Gabriel is severe and venerable, however his visage may have resisted the years.

Gabriel asks after Zeus's health. Apollo shrugs like a teenager. 'And how's YHWH?' Allah, Gabriel corrects him, but Apollo's bland smile does not fade or vary. Gabriel relents, and with a strained smile says only, 'ineffable.'

Gabriel eyes the sun, just breaking free if the horizon, and commends Apollo on another job well-done. 'Another day,' he says with a hint of ecstasy. Apollo glances languorously over his shoulder. 'Thank you.' Oops. His slight robe has slipped. Gabriel looks away, curling his lip in disgust.

'And what will it be for you, today, Archangel?' Apollo asks as he adjusts his cloth. 'More souls saved? More saviors to thrust upon the poor creatures?' 'As God wills,' Gabriel pronounces, and he bows deferentially. He is endearingly earnest, Apollo reflects, a quality sorely lacking on Mount Olympus. He will bring it up at the next family congress. It might be an enlightening exercise. Can we just try it? He will refer everyone to his sister Artemis's dour expression, and say, 'It kind of looks like that, but ... imagine that it feels good. Imagine that you know that ... that everything will turn out all right.' Oh, they'll just laugh at him. He sighs.

'You know I was once a savior.' Apollo says brightly. Gabriel nods. 'Hard to believe, but yes, I do remember.' Apollo smiles with a winning innocence. He starts dreaming about old glories. Gabriel fidgets. The trumpeter clears his throat. 'And what's it to be for you today, Phoebus?' 'Oh, I'm a man of simple pleasures, Archangel. I have my lyre. I have my bow. These things make me happy.'

Gabriel purses his lips. 'And what is it you give?' Apollo doesn't respond. He only smiles, and slowly he tilts his head, allowing the sun behind him to glare into Gabriel's eye. Gabriel squints and shifts to catch the god's shadow. He thinks that Apollo doesn't understand. He tries again, 'I mean, don't you feel a sense of duty? You are divine. Do you have a gift, a blessing, to bestow upon the mortals?' Apollo tilts his head again; looking up into the sky, as if in thought, and again Gabriel has to duck from the sharp light in his eye. Apollo speaks, 'I think I will build a hotel.'

And it's not a bad hotel. It's some seventeen stories of solid construction, rising above the Rembrandt Park. The park is familiar to me, a generous, if shabby, tract of grass broken with small lakes, set on the west part of town, a frequent setting for my running while I'm in Amsterdam. It's bordered on the west by corporate parks, on the south by gentrified neighborhoods, and on the north by neighborhoods begging for gentrification, as poor as this side of Amsterdam gets. The teens from the north drift into the park as the day ages, many of them kids of Muslim immigrants, certainly not fasting from cigarettes or other stimulants. Gabriel watches them with a stern eye. Apollo's hotel is an incursion into their side of town. I watch them with a wary eye.

On the side of the hotel is a banner announcing, 'Open Augustus 2012'. And that is why price meets comfort this once. While I check in, there are still guys with tool belts and hand drills roaming the lobby, applying themselves to various touch ups. There are extension cords snaking across the floor. The place smells like paint and sawdust. Everything is shiny and untested, including the smiles and greetings of the myriad new employees. The room is nice, seven floors up and facing south, quiet and comfortable. I will be thanking Apollo for his graciousness. Though my best hotel experience in Amsterdam will still remain the Novotel on the south side of town, one of those rare internet deals that landed me in luxury. And secular: no gods to taketh away as they giveth. Ahem! All hail Aegletes.

Travelogue 457– August 7
Gelana

It has become a lovely afternoon -- for rainy season. A satisfying suggestion of diffuse sunlight has penetrated the cloud cover. I yearn to be outside. This is true for me whenever I see sunshine: my mood responds immediately, and my body wants to soak it in, breathe sun-infused fresh air. But today I have to stay indoors. I am at Menna's family's house. Menna's sister invited us for a lunch party. In true Ethiopian fashion, Menna will be late -- a few hours late -- so I'm there on my own, among family and family friends.

There is food on the table, a good variety of dishes, including kitfo, the raw ground beef with local butter that is so good and so dangerous. We line up for food and return to the couches, where I have little to do beyond smile and nod and eat. Conversation swirls around the room. Children are dashing back and forth between moms and the long windows in the door, where they plant their hands and stare out at the dog, Jackie. They make the floorboards resound with their running.

I find I'm one of a line of abandoned men, sitting along one wall. At my right is the TV. We conspire to get the set switched on. The Olympics are on, and it happens that we tune in during the women's marathon. They're about eight kilometers into the race. The streets are wet. Recaps of the race start show it was raining. The streets are wet, and they are lined with people, densely along the entire route. I recognize locales. They're in the City, running by banks. They're following the Thames. There's Embankment. They pass the Parliament building and Big Ben.

When we first tune in, an Italian woman is leading. I sense something is wrong. There are far too many white faces in the leading pack. But it doesn't last. With in a few more miles, the Kenyans and Ethiopians move smoothly to the front. They form a block of six, trading places according to some long and seemingly effortless plan. They lead a small coterie of white hangers-on. One is a tiny, stubborn Russian woman, who is destined to take a surprise bronze.

Along the route are rows of tables with little square flags above them. These are water tables, and they play their part in the rhythm of the race. The Ethiopians pick up their bottles and fall a pace or two behind as they refresh themselves. Then the Kenyans pick up their provisions and drop back. It all seems strangely relaxed. The endless crowd along the route is unceasingly pleasant and enthusiastic. The athletes lack no moral support today.

I finish my meal, and my silent alarm tells me it's time to get back to work. I say my good-byes. Menna hasn't shown, and the family makes me promise to come back with her. The weather has only improved in the last hour, improved from an already fine start. The rainy season has been so mild this year.

I'm working at home when I hear the cheer go up around the neighborhood. I know which country has won the marathon. I find out later it's Tiki, the one least favored among those in the know about Ethiopian athletes. And what's more, she has set a record. Then came a Kenyan. ... And then that tenacious little Russian.

This has been the year of white encroachment. One of my personal heroes of the Olympics is Galen Rupp, Oregonian who takes the silver in the men's ten-thousand, the first white guy to place in that event since 1988, the first American to place since the 60s. He trains with Mo Farah, the British wunderkind this year, trains with him under Alberto Salazar, the distance great from the 80s, when America had its last heyday in long-distance running.

Fourth in that race is the great Kenenisa, one of the very small club of men who have won golds in both the five thousand and ten. Ethiopia is in shock. The great one has been performing erratically lately, and irritably rebuffing any questions about it. Now the nation stands amazed. His brother, Tariku, takes the bronze. To tease my athlete friends -- and celebrating the return of the faranjis, embodied by young Rupp, -- whenever Kenenisa comes up in conversation, I say, 'Oh, you mean Ato Aratenya?' You mean, Mr. Fourth?

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.