Travelogue 670 – January 6
Above the Stadium

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 669 – January 4
Dry Solidarity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 668 – December 21
Another Monday

Christmas is forever approaching, never arriving. The cafes have already abandoned the Christmas music, so faithfully presented every morning last week, two weeks ago.

I imagine future historians evaluating the evidence, what we broadcast and what we print, and determining we were gluttons for holidays. We couldn’t get enough. I feel helpless in being judged this way. No one consulted me. I am targeted rather than consulted. In the public sphere, holidays are a strategy of assault. I am forced into compromises with the insistent sentiment and ritual. How will the historian evaluate the private experience of holidays? I have none. If it weren’t for the jarring shift in music and the sudden closure of my cafes, I might coast safely through these ceremonies, barely registering them.

I’m thinking this will change once Baby gets older. And she is growing alarmingly quickly. She has personality. She knows what she likes. She likes grabbing things, and usually the things you would rather she didn’t grab, the TV remote, the salt shaker, the full glass, the phone you’re speaking into. She rolls forward reaching for one thing or another. You set her right, and she starts reaching again. I’m distressed. I thought these stages came later. Maybe when she was sixteen?

Baby enjoys jumping up and down. Daddy holds her upright, and she starts jumping up and down and laughing until Daddy’s arms are sore. And then she wants more, crying if she doesn’t get to jump. Daddy calls for Mommy.

Baby enjoys jabbering. She has something in her hands. She is kneading it, pulling at it, scratching it, and then she looks up and she starts telling you about it. ‘Da-da-da,’ she says, looking you right in the eye. ‘Yes, Baby.’ The she starts a long series of raspberries.

Just around the corner is a petting zoo. We walk there on the weekend with Baby on my back, set snugly into the contraption we inherited from Jan. The straps dig into my clavicle. Baby seems to enjoy it. She laughs. She stares at cars. She sleeps.

It’s Baby’s first time to see animals. There’s a cow in the barn, chewing on hay. There’s an alarmingly big pig in the yard. Menna doesn’t believe that it’s a pig. ‘Are you sure that’s not a cow?’ There are a few smaller pigs, but ugly ones, with hair on their snouts. There are cute goats and round sheep. There are chickens and turkeys. The animals are taciturn today, so we make their sounds for them. Baby doesn’t listen. She just quietly stares.

I never quite know what Baby is going to do. Tease her one minute, and she laughs. The next time she just stares back. She plays quietly, and then suddenly she shouts. She cries with no warning and no build-up. Then she smiles. The animals were fascinating at some level for her. They held her attention. But I can’t say what she took away from the encounter. It all goes somewhere in the new brain. God knows where.

And today, it’s just another Monday. The baristas have given up on Christmas. I was done with it before I started. I’m working. I’m coughing up green spittle. I’ve been sick since the last trip. Next week, I head off again. I’ll spend New Year’s in Addis Ababa, where it is celebrated as a faranji holiday, a luxury, a frivolity. The Ethiopians celebrated their New Year’s more than three months ago. That sort of ambiguity I appreciate. Any holy day should have only the most tenuous grip on the soul. Shall I treat it as something special? Is it fireworks or is it prayer? Is it quiet? Shall I laugh, or shall I stare?

Travelogue 667 – December 13
Puddles

My favour with the sun gods was short-lived. I have little time for the attentions that gods require. I’ve spent too many years watching the rain come and go. Stubborn caprice is the way of things, whether ruled by gods or by physics.

The rain has returned. The days are short and they lack light. Grey streets reflect grey skies. Puddles reappear and spread. Grass soaks in the waters, turns a somber dark green, squishes underfoot, often hiding marshy pools just below the level of their blade tips. Where the water has topped the grass, its black surface lies quietly, disturbed only by the fussy birds, disturbed only by the reflections, bright despite the dim winter light, reflections of what passes in the world above, cars and drifting apartment buildings, and incidental skies. The bricks in the parks take on a sheen of mossy green. Carpets of leaves lay at the margins of things, blown there weeks ago, and now congealed into brown layers of slime.

The texture of all things outside is cold and wet, their colours darkened by the damp. You expect your fingers to come away wet from any surface. You keep your hands in your pockets. People duck instinctively, heads down, shoulders hunched. They hurry toward shelter. The Dutch bred of generations of Dutch take on an aspect of grim and pleased determination, knowing this was what has defined their race. They lean into it; setting shoulders against it. They make a point to mount their bicycles and pedal across town against the wind, a trip they might breezily have made by car or tram in the summer.

My Dutch teacher launches into a mini-lecture about Dutch emigration, how they left by the thousands in the previous century, looking for better weather. We enjoy these lectures because we enjoy Job. He’s a cheerful and also caring sort. He has the booming voice and clear elocution of a long-time teacher. He likes to pause and tell his stories. His command of history is approximate but I appreciate the spirit.

We meet at the small Volks Universiteit on the Heemraadsingel, the canal in western Rotterdam that was once centrepiece of a cosy neighbourhood for the well-to-do. Alongside this canal run strips of green park, and then rows of pretty houses built by the prospering classes before the Great War. The school occupies two of these beauties. Our teacher points out vestiges of Jugendstil ornamentation, in the windows, in the doors and frames. It doesn’t seem like many individual or families are left to inhabit these houses. The houses have been taken over by law firms and design firms. Have the captains of industry all moved to Arizona?

Is there a note of disdain perhaps, when the Dutchman remembers the ones who have left? He can commemorate and admit the complaints in such a way as suggests that endurance is the nobler path. It’s a venerable European trope, suffering reified, made abstract and virtuous.

I insist on getting around on my bicycle. I am not necessarily bred for it, but I must imitate my mentors. I’m Dutch by choice, and so it’s incumbent on me to imitate their virtues. The old bike has seen a few years of service in all weather. The back tire is worn; it slips on the wet brick. I’ve had to replace the lock. The links in the chain were rusted. The lock mechanism was getting cranky. The seat is leather. In this kind of weather, it is more or less permanently soaked through. I have to carry a plastic bag with me to slip over the seat. I take the bag indoors and where possible, slip it behind the radiator to dry.

I sit by tall windows to watch the tides of weather as I work. The day of Sol Invictus approaches, the day that daylight begins its long resurgence. I’ll stand in the rain watching for signs of it dawning.

Travelogue 666 – December 8
Sun’s Out, Let’s Go to the Mall

The mention of the sun gods in my last essay has bought me some favourable attention. The shy solar disc has shown his face more than usual in Holland. True he sleeps in, painting the never absent northern clouds with pink tints of promise no earlier than 8:30, or half nine, to calculate time the way the Dutch do. But he shows his face. I feel his warm hand on my shoulder as I cycle across town.

For this, I owe one of the sun gods an offering. I’m squeamish about sacrifices. Maybe just a prayer, or a thumbs-up. My favourites among solar deities are Helios and Shamash, Greek and Sumerian. I like the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli for his fun name, but he seems too violent to be a peaceful sun god.

I won’t go as far as renouncing any of the storm gods so popular in the last few millennia, particularly Yahweh and Allah. Their followers are too volatile. As followers of a storm god should be. Moreover, in solar systems of divinity, there’s need for exclusivity. Storm gods are welcome at the Olympian feast.

Only a week ago I’m in sunny Dubai. I’m daring an excursion on my sick day. I’m emerging from the metro among crowds of tourists and shoppers heading in the same direction as I am. There is an air-conditioned, elevated walkway from the metro station to the massive mall that adjoins the Burj Khalifa, gleaming spire in central Dubai, the tallest building in the world. I elect to rediscover the sun and avoid the crowds, so, rather than follow the crowd into the tunnel of windows, I take a right turn out of the metro station

I emerge into the humid heat and stare about in a confused manner, like a sick person. I identify the magic spire, and I start walking toward it. I am nearly alone on the street. I pass a few construction workers looking to go indoors for snacks and air-conditioning. I pass a few tourists as misguided as I am. One intrepid soul passes on a bicycle.

It turns out there is more purpose than only comfort for the elevated walkway. Much of the distance to the tower is dedicated to construction of one sort or another. Dubai is reminding me of Addis Ababa, with its forests of cranes, its taste of cement dust. I cross new streets where there is no sidewalk left for pedestrians, only dividers with shrubbery and the high placards that wall off construction sites.

Eventually, I emerge into the sweeping plaza that describes a luxurious arc underneath the Burj Khalifa and, at its farther end, deposits the enterprising tourist at the base of the ambitious mall. Along the way, that tourist will follow the course of an artificial waterway that has the colour and purity of a Bel Air swimming pool. It trips along underneath palm trees, over a few gentle falls and into a neat little lake surrounded by new developments. Individuals scream as they glide by overhead, riding a wire strung between high-rises on either side of the lake. Families stop to take photos with the skyscraper behind them.

I’m sweaty. My lungs are burning. I haven’t eaten. Reluctantly I resign myself to the stream of humanity indoors. Inside the mall, I’m treated to another bizarre dislocation. There is something so alienating to walking the length of a mall in another country. Alienating in its sudden familiarity, invigorating and depressing in the same moment. One recognizes humanity in its universal attitude of comfort, families in slow procession, babies crying, dad in sneakers, hair down. Yes, some hair down even in this Muslim country.

I choose the French bistro at the food court. It’s quieter than the other fast food places. There are salads. Aside from the predictable images of the Eiffel Tower, the décor isn’t busy signing, signing, signing in the glib manner of Dubai. British women come in together, carrying bags, spirits buoyed by the shopping experience. They signal wealth with brand names and manicures and jewellery. There’s a studied ease to them, a demanding self-consciousness that I sense like an aura.

The food hasn’t revived me. I feel overwhelmingly sleepy. I pay and I leave, and I wander lost through the mall in a daze. I end up in a massive book store built in a circling space, turning around some secret, maybe an elevator shaft leading to the top of the magical spire. The shelves curve, and I seem lost in the self-help and business sections, that seem to have merged. The titles tell me I can be richer, I can be smarter, I can be effective, I can be wise, I can be good, I can find myself.

Travelogue 665 – December 4
The Women’s Car

The sun is a revelation. I understand clearly why many of our earliest cultures worshipped the sun.

The sun has risen over Holland, unimpeded by winter clouds, for the first time in weeks. There’s a glory to the sight of blue skies, even chilled as they are. I am moved to ride my bicycle into the center, a morning exercise I haven’t had the heart for in a long time. On the way, I pass among a group of young children being led by their teachers upon some expedition or another. They part for the cyclists, and I pick my way carefully through their ranks as they smile and joke and chatter.

I’m coughing as I go. My nose is running, stimulated by the exercise and the chill, and I’m spitting up horrible substances. It’s rush hour, and busy commuters are vigorously pedalling past me. I’m happy to extend my time under the sky, rather than speed it up, and so I turn the wheels in leisurely rhythm.

Was it only days ago I was sweating under the Arabian sun? Sick then, too, and coughing, but recovering something in the sun, like my solar battery had been run low. I am dazed from lack of sleep. I drift down the street, regretting the long sleeves. It’s humid. There is a sweet scent to the air. It’s shisha. The streets are a jumble, broken frequently by driveways leading into alleys and leading into parking lots. The storefronts are a relentless miscellany. Arab cities are like extended shopping malls, open air markets brought indoors, into concrete stalls. The streets chatter and bark with prolific, unsentimental commerce. One sees it in the Arab quarters in Europe, the hard rows of shops packed to the rafters with randomized goods.

I’ve decided to be adventurous. I’m going to take the subway. The boys at reception have offered me the vaguest directions to the nearest station, clothed in many words and gestures. Outside the hotel there is a white pedestrian bridge over the busy road. There are no steps. You walk three levels up a zig-zagging ramp and three levels down on the other side. Then you wander along narrow streets broken repeatedly by driveways and ramps, with all space between occupied by tiny ‘supermarkets’, tiny appliance shops, tiny outlets to serve all smart and mobile phone needs, tiny shisha cafes. And there are tiny hotels. It could be my imagination, compromised by illness, but it seems like everyone coming out of these ad hoc hotels is Russian. They are burly Russian men travelling in threes cackling like they have mischief in mind.

I finally find the metro station on the next busy avenue, the entrance hidden in a shining conch-like metal shell. At the bottom of a long escalator is a spacious, modern and gleaming new metro station. I buy the day’s ticket and I pass through the turnstile. I descend to the platform for the Red Line toward Jebel Ali. Everything still feels new. Dubai opened its first metro line in 2009. The cars are automated, driverless. There is air-conditioning. There are doors on the platform, like I’ve seen only in a few stations in London. One doesn’t stand exposed on the platform edge as the train approaches.

I rush onto the train with the crowd. I find I’m in a first class car, plush seats and room to slouch. I make my way back to the next car. We are underground. I stand and watch the tunnel shadows fly by, spacing out, surrendering to the sway of the underground train. But some thought is nagging, trying to break through. I awaken, and I begin to scan the faces of my companions in the metro car. Lots are Asian. Lots are women. Aha! The alarm breaks through into consciousness. Women in Arab countries -- danger. I look around with closer attention. There are no men. The alarm grows. I see the sign on the panels above the doors, ‘women and children only’. There is a fine for being male here, one hundred dirhams. And that is actually calming. One hundred dirhams is not exactly Sharia law. I was momentarily picturing something much messier.

I make my way further back in the train. I stop at the edges of the crowd that includes males of the species. There isn’t much space left. My destination is farther than I expected. There are half a dozen more stops.

The train runs on an elevated track. I watch the white and yellow sun-splashed neighbourhoods go by, fortunes locked up in thousands of tons of cement – I think of the proliferation of cement factories in the countryside of Ethiopia. Red roads and grey roads cross underneath the train tracks, and run the other direction toward the gulf, a blue line in the distance. It’s a big city.

Travelogue 664 – December 1
Night Cough

I’m home now in Rotterdam, home a day already and still coughing. I’ve returned to my family. I’ve returned to the same clouds I left. The same rain come and goes, and everything is always damp. When I leave the house in the morning, it is night. I’ve come from light, from desert light, to darkness.

This was my experiment, flying Emirates to Addis Ababa, taking long layovers in Dubai. I have to be at the Dubai airport at 5am. It’s 3am, and I haven’t slept because of a persistent cough. I picked this up in Addis. My throat is raw; my chest hurts. I haven’t slept in days. One ear is still plugged from the last flight.

If I were flying home, I could rest. But I’m flying to London, arriving midday, and I’m scheduled for meetings into the evening. I can’t do it.

At 3am, I go down to the lobby. The elevator is glass and faces out into the open interior of the hotel, and so I can turn and count the elliptical balconies as I descend, watching the carpeted lobby rise. The lobby is still alive at 3am. There are hotel guests returning from their revels, but there are also people strolling through the lobby and its little mall, window-shopping as though it were a Saturday morning. At 3am, I’m asking the young men at reception to help me change my reservation.

The boys at the desk are busy tonight. There are three of them even this late, behind the black marble desk in their tidy uniforms. They seem to be south Asian. I start with one whose accent is so heavy, I’m struggling. He is helping me while he has a phone receiver pressed against one ear. He earnestly stares at me through thick glasses, and asks me questions I don’t understand. He pulls up my reservation at the hotel. No, please don’t mess with that, I say. I need help with an airline reservation. A colleague comes to help. He dials a number on speaker phone, and we navigate the automated menu together until I’m put on hold. He clicks off the speaker phone and hands me the receiver. I stare back at the first young man, mirror image frowning with the phone receiver pasted to my head.

I’m done. I’m back in my room and still I can’t sleep. The cough comes back to me in timed charges, going off whenever I might be dozing. I get up, and I pace. I run in place to move the blood, move the mucus. I setup the computer again, and I work.

I crack the composition book I bought in Minnesota. Inside is page after page of lists. I find the latest, and I start tapping wrathfully on the laptop keyboard, tapping out the words required, the words like Dutch rain, pooling into lines and paragraphs, feeding the greedy soil of perennial work. The screen light burns me. I glare at my hateful work. When the cough starts, I stand and I pace and I run in angry exorcism, summoning all the disease to show itself. I spit.

Exhaustion eventually beats even pain. It falls like night, falls late but inexorably, falling over me like suffocating wool, falling even as the first hints of light are rising in the warm air outside, rising like clouds of sparks from a new fire. Even the cough can’t resist it, steadily robbed of its vitality until it’s only a spike of pain remaining like a pulse inside a restless dream.

It’s midday. I’m moving. It’s not like being awake. There’s an unreal quality to the sunshine. Outside my window, I can see the city’s famous skyline, dominated by the Burj Khalifa, the once (and still?) tallest building on the world, where once Tom Cruise hung his crafted body out the window like a handkerchief to wave for the fans. I must go down there, I’m thinking.

The sun seems almost to stand between us.

Travelogue 663 – November 24
By the Gulf

I’ve been called back to Addis suddenly. Impatient government officials are asserting their prerogatives. I’ve decided to try a new airline.

I laugh to write here about airlines. I’ve observed how much expats love to talk about airlines, at least in Ethiopia. The travel choice is an interesting calculation, balancing price with comfort with timing. One rarely gets everything. Some time ago, KLM cancelled their direct flights to Addis, and I’ve never quite settled back into any happy routine. My default choice has been Lufthansa. But it’s an uncomfortable compromise. I could recite a few complaints, but the biggest one is that I’m stuck with overnight flights. My body can’t take it.

Bole Airport in Addis late at night is bleak. It has become Purgatory. It is crowded. Hundreds of Chinese men spill out of the smoking area. The hallway smells. The lights are dim and sickly yellow. I will wear mourning the next time.

I’ve decided to try Emirates. I’ve heard goods things. If I spend the night in Dubai, I can fly in daylight.

I’m standing at the window just as the sun rises over the buildings in the east. The sky is yellow. Behind me in the room, the décor is simple, everything yellow and brown, like the painting above the bed, a brilliant piece of Arab kitsch, in which elders sit around the ancient divan in the days before oil, old fishermen and traders in long gowns and high turbans singing along as one of them plays a lyre-like instrument.

The scene out the window is instantly familiar. Years ago I worked in Kuwait. The buildings seem the same, the close clusters of stacked concrete, flat roofs to the sky. It’s the same Gulf sun, seeming to rise at full power. I can see the street below. There aren’t too many people out, a few men walking to work.

The Dubai airport is like a cavernous temple to celebrate the city as a kind of miracle state, to celebrate commerce, and of course to celebrate the Sheikh Mohammed, Emir of Dubai, the author of all this success. The lobby is a good half kilometre of slick open tile under high pillars covered with reflecting silver. Once you pass through passport control, a surprisingly relaxed procedure, you enter the real palace, multiple high-ceilinged storeys accessed by an open escalator surrounded by glass and light, revealing all storeys at once. On the third floor, there is a long gallery of duty free shops. I stop at a Costa Coffee, a chain I associate with London, and I watch the waves of people.

I’m reminded how truly diverse the populations are in the Gulf. Their terms of engagement are complex, of course. I doubt the U.A.E. is paradise for the workers from south Asia or Africa. But I’m a visitor. The world walks the gaudy halls of the airport in sunlight. I’m escaping the grim paranoia in Europe, experiencing peace and diversity in the Middle East.

I’ve missed the cultures that believe in courtesy. It’s refreshing. My cultures seem allergic to anything that might be taken as corny or sentimental. To this sort of adolescent mind set, the courtesies of older cultures seem naïve. But they are ancient and have evolved for a purpose, even if only aesthetic. I’m sure it’s more.

Travelogue 662 – November 16
Lacking Enemies

On Monday morning the wind is blowing. Our clothes on the line outside are in disarray. My running shirt has fallen to the ground. The wind screeches suddenly as it finds a crack in window or door.

It’s dark when I get up now. I leave the house while the wind is blowing, while the clouds in the night sky pick up the lights of the waking city and reflect them back in colours like war.

The bad boys from Brussels have done their work. There are calls for war now. France is closing their borders. One questions in both cases, ‘against whom?’ My job has made a project manager out of me, and I can’t help asking for detail.

It was easier for the boys from Brussels. Their objectives were very concrete. We will kill and cause mayhem, they said over their martyr’s whisky. That was a manageable project. It had become somewhat divorced from its originating principle. Just as France’s principle has the most tenuous connection to task.

It seems to me that history has become like an untethered balloon in the winds above my city, buffeted wildly among the clouds. The dark winter sky obscures.

There is plenty of war in our world, and yet it’s a beast without purpose. Since World War II, it’s awfully hard to craft rational narratives for our myriad wars. They surge and they halt, and they run rampant, and the witnesses wonder at the psychology of the beast. Was it religion? Then why is it so bloodthirsty? Was it a political program, a ‘freedom’, a ‘democracy’? Then why the strange gleam in the eye, the relish, and the lapse into chaos when the wall is down?

Dare we say that the terrorist program is already bankrupt? Was it conceived to scare the governments of the West into withdrawing from the Middle East? Are the terrorists encouraged by some sign that the rest of us have missed? They terrorize the people but can they terrorize the governments? In fear, the people support government’s security measures and the calls for war. Just as the people were tired of the expense and the cynical grind of foreign wars, the terrorists show up to provide new fuel.

Little wonder that conspiracy theorists think the terrorists are inventions of the victim governments. Unwitting tools, maybe. I’ve always been sceptical about the drunken shouts of ‘genius’ when talking about boys with box-cutters or about the desperate boys with clogged arteries in Washington.

And so the animal with horns reels this way and that, yielding to the martyr’s whisky and the seduction of wild action. It feels so much like purpose.

Pity the rest of us, whose lives are so much less romantic. Lacking enemies we have only families. Lacking glory we have only the ride into work of a morning. I read the stories about boys and their glory while I read the Metro into town. I have the bilingual dictionary in my lap. I do this every morning. I read and I study. It’s something to do when you have no one to kill.

Travelogue 661 – November 5
Style

I pull the car door shut behind me. ‘Shimeles! Indemen adark? Good morning.’ The day starts. Shimeles pulls away from the kerb and into the wide sweep of asphalt that, at this hour, serves almost exclusively the taxi vans roaring downhill from the communities on the Entoto Road. Shimeles doesn’t need to ask where I’m going. I’ve been following the same routine every morning, a routine dictated by dependence on reliable internet. I have to put in a few hours of work on the computer before I show up at the office in the Kebena district. I’m going to the Radisson in Kasanchis.

The Radisson is located on one of those streets in Addis blessed by a sudden chic, where the hotels and the construction cranes suddenly soar, where traffic suddenly clogs, where money seems to pool and eddy in its wild course across the city. Shimeles curses as he maneuvers among the slow streams of traffic. He pulls over and glances back with an anxious look. The traffic is stopped behind him, and one of the hotel guards is already on his way over. I know to get out as fast as I can. Shimeles is moving as the door shuts behind me.

Inside, the guards salute and smile. Two of them stand inside the sentry post set in the barrier separating the hotel from the street. They run my backpack through the x-ray machine, and one sweeps my body with his little beeper. This is standard in the new Addis. The hostesses in the lounge greet me. They know to place my order for English cake and espresso, for the largest bottle of water they have and the limes to go with it. The lobby is something modern. We’ve emerged from a quick succession of styles signifying luxury, from the Hilton era, luxury as inherited from the late Selasse era, 70s California, through the flashy Arab period, and through the explosion of Ethiopian kitsch, to this, the understated and anonymous. I might be in Europe. The floors are marble tiling and brown carpet. The arm chairs are solid and comfortable. The tasteful black-and-white photography on the wall is Ethiopian in theme, but only if you look closely. The big screen placed at one end of the room is pointedly not tuned to Ethiopian TV, but instead to an international swim meet in Qatar.

My seat is closest to one corner, furthest from the TV, closest to an electrical plug. The waitress brings me the day’s internet code, and I am ready to go.

In Hawassa my destination is the Haile Resort by the lake, and my ride is the three-legged bajaj. From my new hotel, the place of echoes, I have to walk half a kilometre down one of those extravagant new city roads one sees all around Ethiopia these days, wide enough for three lanes each way and divided by a high-kerbed meridian, where often there are only bajaj drivers and horse carts to sparsely populate the macadam.

It seems as though there has been some unionization among the bajaj drivers. They don’t want to negotiate anymore, and the prices are relatively uniform. I try to haggle, just for nostalgia’s sake, but I pay the driver’s first price, and I swing myself into the back seat. He revs the buzzing little engine, and away we go, cruising at bajaj speed (something less than lightning) across town.

I’m not always so lucky with internet at the Haile. But I can’t imagine it’s better elsewhere in town. When the connection is working, it’s quick, and I can catch up on a lot of work. When it’s not, I fiddle with some documents, and I look around the vast lobby. The ceilings and the windows look to soar some twenty meters above us. It’s sparsely furnished to emphasize this feeling of space. Outside is a garden and the lake. You can see the whole lake. The opposite shore is indistinct in the morning mist.

It’s Yenebeb who says it best. The place seems to reflect Haile’s character, or what we think we know of it, the perfectionism, the dedication to excellence. So many luxury hotels have been built in recent years, one might think the craze accounts for all the new construction in Ethiopia, every crane in downtown Addis lifting new shower stalls to the sixth storey. But the standards are questionable. The fashionable hotels one year are very often the fading beauties the very next year, dirty, chipped and peeling, those beautiful showers malfunctioning. But there seems to be a pride in the workmanship here at the Haile, some substance and durability. Even the garden is still neat and ordered. There is sculpture. There is an interesting variety to the plants and trees.

I step outside, and I descend the garden steps toward the lakeside. There are fishermen among the reeds just off shore. They are standing, and it appears for the moment as though there must be a shoal underneath the reeds, but the fishermen are standing on small bamboo rafts.

There are still morning colours in the water. There are boys swimming in the water, off the plot of land next to the resort’s. They are shouting and splashing. Some are washing. At this hour, the outdoor tables are deserted. I sit and watch the waters. A Chinese man appears and slowly crosses my field of vision. He is stalking a heron. He’s holding forward an expensive camera.

A young couple arrives, clearly Diaspora, both in sporty hats, his a fedora and hers a huge sun hat. They are laughing and leaning into each other. They pause at lakeside for some posed, pouting pictures. Tourist photos are supposed to look like sly jokes these days. They stroll off, back toward the hotel, holding hands and still giggling, while I check my watch. It’s nearly time to go.

Travelogue 660 – November 4
Under Construction

The sun is up in Addis Ababa. Shimeles and I are travelling down the hill into town. Even this early, the lines have started for taxis in Arat Kilo. It’s only in the past few years you see these lines. There are too many people, too few taxis. They stand patiently beside the side of the busy road, thirty or more people deep. Even as there are more cars in Ethiopia, travel around town becomes more difficult. Even as the city launches the babur, the light rail, transport in the city is stalled. If anything the light rail did more to stop the town during its construction than to get people moving.

The light rail project has changed the landscape of Addis. Mexico Square has disappeared down a circular well of dirt among remodelled roads and the elevated railway. An elevated line bursts even into the solemn space of Meskel Square at the center of town. This particular line isn’t running yet, so the pillars of this strange viaduct stand silently, casting shadows over sections of town, feeling like an accusation. You make us do this to you.

Change is the norm in Addis now. There are streets wholly dedicated to progress, districts ordained a fashion by new asphalt, where rows of hulking buildings stand unfinished, fitted with eucalyptus scaffolding and covered with torn shrouds of grey tarp that make them look like creatures from Harry Potter.

One day I’m lost among a legion of these monsters searching for an old haunt, the quiet café called Kabu. It has vanished, and vanished so completely that I have to pace back and forth along the whole stretch of road to find clues to where it had once stood. Eventually I do identify the monster that swallowed my café. I survey the row of them, effectively just slabs of concrete stacked on bare supports like toothpicks.

Hawassa in southern Ethiopia is another city under construction, suffering the shocks of hasty development. I’m staying at a hotel that used to be a standard of class in the parochial old town. Even at this late date, Masresha, Hawassa native and man about town, suggests meeting in the restaurant of my hotel, which at one time was clearly the best. After only a few minutes, just as we’re getting comfortable at our table, the lights go out. They are gone for the rest of the evening. The waiters express surprise, assure us the lights will be back. But their movement in the dark is rote. Candles are brought to select tables, where somber men in suits are being served, and the waiters are suspiciously adept at serving while holding their mobile phones in their mouths, flashlights forward.

The food arrives. We enjoy the evening, even with the lights out, sitting outside in the balmy air of Hawassa, air aromatic with the flowers below in the terrace, humid from the nearby lake, and full of the chatter from the street.

The next morning I awake to an alarming racket. It sounds like glass being ground under foot and raked across concrete, screeching with bell-like tones. At the end of the hall, they’re renovating a room, tearing up the tile and sweeping it together.

At the end of the day I return, and my room door is open. They’ve ripped the room apart. The concrete floor is bare. The floor tile has been removed and the pieces gathered in one corner. In another corner, the furniture is piled in a mass, partially covered by a tarp. Everything is abandoned to dust and dejected silence. No one is around. No other room has been touched, though I don’t remember seeing any other guests.

It takes us an hour to locate my things and to negotiate a refund. And then we are forced to search town for another room. We settle on the Enjory, which at least has the benefit of electricity through the evening. But it’s a hotel cast in the usual mould, concrete chambers set around a square courtyard in an architecture that an acoustical engineer could do well studying, inside which the most trivial sound is preserved and amplified to all corners.

The hotel guards and the cleaners have a nice relationship. They chat until midnight, clinking and thumping through their final duties. All the room doors are closed, they reason, so the place is deserted. They are free. Finally, they carry their laughter to the street, where they join the rest of the celebrants. We are in Hawassa, they say. We are the lucky ones.

Travelogue 659 – November 3
She’s in Russia Now

Maybe it’s my night time reading. Maybe it’s Le Carré and his 60s narratives triggering memories. I awake in the morning from a dream about my mother. She’s in some foreign place. She’s unrecognizable, and apparently I am as well. It has been so long. Still, we do see each other, and we talk.

I’m awake at five. I realize this is my best chance at a shower, so I drag myself out of bed. It’s chilly, and it’s pitch black in my little flat. Outside the churches have begun their songs. I turn on the light in the bathroom, interrupting the night-long party of the roaches and spiders. ‘Sorry, boys. Morning always comes too soon.’

I’m more than a week into my Ethiopia trip. I feel the fatigue throughout. I’ve just returned from a four-day trip to the south of Ethiopia, to Hawassa. The ache of van travel on rough roads lingers. Hawassa is about five hours from Addis. Some will say less, but they haven’t ridden with trusty Tamrat. I encourage his relaxed style and pace. Even if he is tempted to speed, his vehicle won’t allow it. The old 4x4 will start shuddering sickeningly.

Road time is helped enormously by the new expressway from Addis to Mojo (and beyond). It’s a toll road bypassing the horrible old Debre Zeit road, and the asphalt is new and smooth and wide, and we drift along it in a kind of dream. Could this be Ethiopia? After lunch in Mojo at the old Daema Hotel -- unexpectedly the best fish of the trip, even though we spend four days by Hawassa’s lake, -- we rediscover the familiar Ethiopia, the road south broken and pitted. One really benefits from the seasoned driver who knows the road intimately. He swerves with an uncanny prescience around chains of nasty potholes, predicting the behaviour of erratic drivers oncoming, the rash youngsters ferrying travellers in battered vans, the screaming Isuzu flatbeds, the middle class frivolous on holiday. The high-speed daydream of American road trips is not the norm here. Very rare is the stretch of uniform speed. One brakes for crossing herds of cattle. One slows to pass horse carts using the highway.

The last span of road into Hawassa we undertake at night. I’ve done this before, so I know what to expect but it’s still unnerving, the sudden silhouettes of families on their horse carts in the headlights, the boy standing with the reins in his hands, the family serenely occupying their portion of the narrow road, even while cars converge from both directions. It pays to have the calm hand of Tamrat on the wheel.

It’s 5am in Addis Ababa. There is water. I submit to the warmth of it. I stand without moving, hoping for some renewal, hoping to coax the fatigue out of me, into the streams going down the drain. It’s unwise to wait too long; the water may waver.

I wonder what my mother and I had to say to each other. I don’t remember much. The encounter had the feel of a chance meeting of old barflies in an obscure watering hole overseas. I dream often of Russia, a country I’ve never seen, a landscape drawn for me by Dostoevsky, I suppose, in ethereal code for depression. I carry a fantastical miniature of nineteenth-century St. Petersburg with me, a geography of abandonment. Mom slouches at the bar, her head shaved in gulag style. She has a companion, a kind of Nick Nolte dishevelment with no real definition. They cackle in the way of drunks, needing no humour. When I talk to her, she is sober and someone else, a third, not my mother nor the barfly, and we talk about books.

Shimeles, my regular taxi man, will be at the top of the hill at seven. I was up before dawn to catch the water. Now I lie back again on the bed. I won’t sleep, but I can rest, watching the colour in the curtains slowly change, glow with new born daylight.

Travelogue 658 – October 28
The Second Half
Part Three

Baby usually wakes late. She has had a feeding time very early, and then she sleeps again. Once she wakes, she is in a good mood. It’s her best time of day. She lies in bed, and she smiles sweetly. We make her laugh. Today I have to listen to her laugh over the phone.

This morning, she is far away. She is back where the days are constricting, where winter is coming. Here the daylight is still strong. It comes on at nearly the same time as it always does. The birds have begun with song. The priests and the imams have joined in with their song. I was blessed with water, and I have had the privilege of a hot shower.

By the time Baby wakes, and by the time her mommy is tickling her and kissing her, I’ve already been up and busy. I’ve closed the gate to my old house just as the guy across the dirt road does. His house is set only a meter or less behind the crooked and battered fence of corrugated iron. He wears the same shiny grey suit today as he will tomorrow. He carries in one hand the worn, black briefcase. In his other hand is the phone. He speaks into it with a grave urgency. ‘Where are you?’ he asks in Amharic. It’s 7am.

Addis is a city of business. The buildings keep rising all over town, rising among sea of neighbourhoods like ours, among the mud and tin and stone villages that make up the aggregate city. I’ve walked up the neighbourhood hill to the asphalt road, from village to city, where I am to meet Shimeles, my driver. A couple of young men up there are cautioning everyone, there are electrical cables down. They lie across the sidewalk and across half the road. A speeding taxi van screeches to a halt in front of the cable, which is only visible at the last minute.

Last night I read about Europe, about post-war West Germany. Le Carré has created the story about an Embassy man gone missing. The story is a pretext for Le Carré to explore a bit of obscure history, the history of post-war Germany. It’s a fascinating time, but one that has gone dark. We prefer the history of the war to the history of the reconstruction. Reconstruction doesn’t have the adrenalin appeal. It’s hard and steady work during times of deprivation. There are nameless, hungry mobs of displaced persons, and refugees are unpopular these days. They gather at the borders and they selfishly ask for jobs. Reconstruction is a time for quiet civil servants who problem-solve, and we hate those sorts, too.

We can say that the saving grace of the period is the Cold War, at least in terms of entertainment value. It’s a time of spies, people who work in the shadows to keep things stable. There’s something psychologically appealing about the concept of the spy. The tightly bound energy of the Cold War seems best expressed by that gritty image: the person who works in the shadows. Little matter that most spies spent their careers pushing paper.

I’m only halfway through the book, and enjoying it more than I’m likely to later. The mystery is at its most tantalizing. There is no urgency to move the plot along. There is room for speculation and for exploration.

The downed electrical cables have fallen just where I usually meet Shimeles. I circle round the danger, and walk down the hill. I walk a while, passing the neighbourhood shops, the sidewalk cafes, the meat shop, the tiny hair salon. There is a steady train of people on their way down the hill with me. Every morning this is the course they walk. It occurs to Shimeles isn’t coming. I start watching for other taxi drivers.

He doesn’t speak much English, but he’s eager to talk. He wants to know where I’m from. He wants to know what I’m doing here. I answer, and he needs a few minutes to formulate his next question. He’s enjoying it. We speed along the roads toward the busy center of Addis, where on every side rise bare concrete supports overhead. It’s a city experiencing new youth.

Travelogue 657 – October 27
The Second Half
Part Two

I’m getting used to seeing only the first halves of movies. After that, the distractions at home are too much. I can catch bits and pieces of second halves. I manage to get to know the characters, understand the set-up and the premise for the plot, the conflict and where things must go. And then I have to piece together the rest from fragments. Or I leave it unresolved.

The conclusions generated in Hollywood are rarely satisfying, anyway. Sometimes I think the movie industry is in the business of sabotaging good ideas. One sees a genius in the parts and a failure in the sum. I imagine it’s the amount of money involved in making a major film. It discourages risk-taking. The writer takes risks, on his or her own, before any major investment has been made. Then the studio takes charge. First halves show the original innovation. The second halves show the estimation of the market.

We’re watching ‘The Tailor of Panama’. The plot has opened up into the middle game. The tailor has told fabulous stories to the ruthless intelligence agent. The agent has parlayed them into riches. There will be hell to pay. First to pay will be the tailor’s friends and family.

Baby is inconsolable. She stands in my arms and she cries. She looks in my eyes in distress, with such trust in me, as though I could make everything all right. And I would, at that moment, fix the world if I could. I tell her she just wants to sleep. The tailor will be fine.

It’s a story about story-tellers and the trouble they cause. Stories can be blunt instruments when wielded by the literal-minded. The tailor makes up stories, because that’s what he does, and Pierce Brosnan sells them to the highest bidders. The stories are wound tightly around their purpose. Before they can unravel, the rogue agent escapes with the money.

I hold Baby just under her arms. Her legs are strong enough to stand, her feet planted on my legs. She is making a pouting face and looking at me. It will be all right, sweetheart. You’re going to sleep soon. We’ll put you in the crib. While you’re sleeping, you’ll grow some more. One day you’ll stand on your own. You’re going to walk. The story gets better and better.

And now I’m waking in Addis Ababa. I’m awake at four. That seems my default time for waking when I travel. The city is silent, except for the waves of barking from the dogs, moving across the neighbourhoods, moving toward the mountains.

I’m listening for the birds. They are just getting started. I’ve been here so many times. I first slept in this tiny room in Addis six years ago. I awoke, and I listened for the morning birds. It’s always been a sign of hope.

Today I’m hoping for water, and I’m building resolve to go and check. It’s usually my best chance at a shower, before the sun has risen. I’ll listen a few more minutes. The first human sound is usually the calls to prayer, Muslim and then Christian, voices amplified to rise above the valleys of the city.

Travelogue 656 – October 26
The Second Half
Part One

I wake from a deep sleep with the impression that I’ve been sleeping on a train. I don’t know where I am. It comes back slowly. I’m in my house in Addis Ababa. The night is dark; I see outlines among my small bedroom space, the edges of the bed, the cabinet, and the door. I lie back again. I listen to the dogs barking in the distance.

I’ve been in Addis only one day. It’s been one day overshadowed by fatigue. I didn’t sleep at all on the overnight slight. The sun, once it was out, was hot. I sat in a hotel courtyard much of the afternoon, doing my best to concentrate on a set of documents I have to read through. I’m not doing very well with them.

I miss Baby terribly. When I think of her, I realize I suffer from a real poverty of imagination. I cannot get the measure of her, what she is, so suddenly, in my life. What she is, in sum or at length, even as she grows so quickly, escapes me, and therefore it has escaped me what it is to be human. Something terribly fleeting.

I’m reading. Before sleep I’m reading Le Carré. I like his early stuff, the suffocating accounts of human folly, his shrewd eye for detail. This one is set in Bonn, the old capital of West Germany, fog-bound and small, now a center of international intrigue. Old Germany and new are circling each other here. It’s a time of student rebellions, and a time of reaction against the West. A staff person from the British Embassy has disappeared.

Le Carré is a good story-teller. A few of his stories have made it into a film. One is on the TV in Holland one night before I leave for Addis. We have a habit in our house, surviving from times before Baby, of watching the 8:30 movie before bed. It’s an empty ritual now. The TV is on, but Baby requires attention. There is something in her that fights sleep. I find that intriguing, having reached an age myself when I hunger for sleep almost always, some days from the time I wake.

Baby is a light sleeper. She lies on the sofa next to Mommy, and she holds her blue ball with both hands. She tries to bite the ball. She tries to stuff it into her mouth, but it’s almost as big as her head. It’s a hollow ball, made of a kind of web of durable plastic so she can hang on to it. She’s frustrated she can’t bite her toy. She starts up with a low-grade whine. She is sleepy.

The film is ‘The Tailor of Panama’. Geoffrey Rush plays the tailor, a caring and loyal old man who happens to be a compulsive fraud. It’s a fortunate compulsion for a tailor. He’s entertaining, and he’s gracious. He has created a comforting back-story, as a London tailor trained on Savile Row. In truth he learned his trade in prison. But the fiction works for everyone, and his suits are the best in the city.

The story opens, characters and premise are introduced. Conflict is introduced, and with that the arc of the plot. In a two-hour movie, there is only time to open up all the possibilities, hold the tension for the duration of a few scenes, and then quickly spin toward resolution.

The conflict comes quickly, with the arrival of Pierce Brosnan, playing the new British intelligence agent in town, looking for dirt. He wants some juicy intelligence, and he wants it fast. He’s a rogue, assigned to Panama as a kind of demotion after scandal. He needs something good. Who better a source of dirt than the tailor to the rich and powerful? He applies pressure. The tailor, always eager to please, begins telling stories.

Travelogue 655 – October 14
The Glow
Part Three

So poor old Gerard Philips cuts no dashing figure, but his idea is the foundation of a corporate empire, and the organising principle for the story of a city.

In 1891, this Gerard Philips set up a factory for light bulbs in Eindhoven, financed by his father, Frederik, who was a banker. When eventually they brought in Gerard’s bright young brother, Anton, the company prospered, became Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken, and expanded into many other electrical products.

By mid-century, Philips was an innovator, having pioneered electric razors, radios in the 20s, and later television, audio tape and CDs. It was led by Philips family until 1971.

The Philips family was very loyal to the town that gave them their start. The company did more than provide jobs. They built and they donated.

In 1913, Gerard and his brother Anton founded the Philips Sport Vereniging, PSV, the football club that would become a force in Dutch football, and even, during select periods, European football. I ask the taxi driver about Memphis. That’s the name of a PSV star who became famous during the World Cup with a few key strikes. He is currently on loan to Manchester United, and I’ve watched him in a few games playing well in tandem with Rooney. The taxi man says Memphis has let his fame go to his head. He tells a story of Memphis balling up a parking ticket and throwing it on the ground. He shakes his head, and I’m thinking that among American athletes this looks like good citizenship.

Yes, suddenly there’s Anton. Gerard did have a younger brother. And Anton may be the reason Gerard gets so little press. The fact is, Philips under Gerard’s leadership was a failing enterprise. A decade after the company’s founding, Anton is invited in, and things start looking up. Gerard is good for one idea, or rather for the one critical task that made all subsequent history possible, convincing Daddy that investment in light is a smart move. Sadly, Daddy’s gone by the time Anton starts making it a thriving business, but I’m sure he didn’t regret the indulgence. (Is it important, or just weird, that Daddy’s first cousin is none other than Karl Marx?)

Anton’s son, Frits becomes something of a folk hero. When his elders fled to America ahead of Hitler’s advance, Meneer Frits stayed behind to run the factory. He was held in a concentration camp during 1943 because of a work shut-down in the factory. He protected the lives of 382 Jews who worked in the factory.

Frits became president of the company in time, and became Meneer Frits to the town. They loved him. He didn’t hold himself aloof. He mixed with his factory workers, attended football games regularly, sitting with the crowd rather than in the business lounge. Though he stepped down from leadership of the company in 1971, he survived to see his hundredth birthday celebrated by the whole city.

On the way to our hotel, we pass the Evoluon. Built in 1966 according to a sketch by Meneer Frits on a cocktail napkin, it looks like a landed UFO. It was meant to be an educational center for science and technology, and for a while it was. Now it functions as a conference center. They’ve embraced the weird place, taking it as symbol of their brainy city.

Menna has taken a liking to this town. It’s smaller, seems friendlier than Rotterdam. She’s taken a liking to the Market Square in central Eindhoven, host to a tall bronze statue of Meneer Frits. It’s a likeable square, combining elements of the historical with the urgency of modern commercialism. This weekend it’s the scene of considerable drinking, a line of bars there filling all their outdoor tables with runners and family and friends. There were already quite a few full marathoners celebrating during the half marathon. The course passed through the square during the last two kilometers, and it narrowed to a tight channel delineated by ad hoc barriers holding back the crowds of weekender fans, surging forward in tottering, bellowing support while we, the suffering few, elbowed each other for space in fevered and impatient anticipation of the finish line.

I had to remind myself that this was the race of the many false finishes. I’m judging my progress solely by my watch. Every quarter kilometre or so, there is another balloon arch, and a few optimistic souls surge forward, only to pull to the side in winded disappointment when the colourful display offers no finish. I make it to the finish, completely spent. That’s a good feeling, only because it means I did my best.

A few hundred meters on, I see Batu standing with the baby carriage amid the swirling crowd, looking somehow perfectly composed among the chaos. Menna is somewhere trying to take a picture of me. I laugh. I lean over sweet Baby. I make her laugh, lightly pinching her cheek. ‘What do you think, Baby? What do you think of the town that light bulbs built?’

Travelogue 654 – October 13
The Glow
Part Two

Authorities can agree that the light bulb was not invented in Eindhoven in North Brabant in the Netherlands. But beyond that it becomes hard to say much with authority. It’s one of those stories in history we’re getting used to, qualified by so many asterisks that one wonders if anyone ever gets an idea alone.

I’m guessing we have to settle for the simple answer, no. No one person could have invented the light bulb. Things technical require a series of ideas. Even something small like the mundane light bulb. Or the gloeilamp. Even if one person came up with the idea complete, there is no context. The light bulb requires an electrical network. The light bulb in all its glory requires apparatus to support it. It requires a commercial process to make it economically viable. And what sense is something like the light bulb if it can’t be sold in the market? Before that could happen, dozens of minds had to fiddle with the details, the vacuum inside the bulb, and which kind of filament to light up.

The inventors of the early nineteenth century were tinkerers, in the tradition of the eighteenth-century gentleman scientist. There was one Humphry Davy, cast in just that mould, chemist and tinkerer and mad scientist, born in Cornwall and apprenticed to a doctor and apothecary. Inquisitive and irrepressible boy and man, he never stopped playing with chemicals, and he seemed charmed in his chain of acquaintance, quickly making impressions on the likes of Watt and Coleridge, Southey, and Priestley, graduating to sharing nitrous oxide with this group of worthies. He became lab supervisor at the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, graduated to the Royal Institution in London, and then to the Royal Society. He became a famous lecturer, known for sensational demonstrations of chemistry in action. Among his incessant experimentation, he managed to discover a number of elements, most notably sodium and potassium.

In 1802, Davy exhibited a burning filament of platinum in the Royal Institution. This was probably intended more as a demonstration of the power of his homemade battery, the most powerful in the world at the time. Light didn’t seem a primary preoccupation of his set. They preferred the sizzle of funny compounds in the lab. And yet, here stands Mr. Davy as an early milestone in our story of the light bulb. He did go on, in 1806, to demonstrate an arc light between two charcoal rods. But after that, he left it to another generation to continue the work.

Stories like the light bulb’s need their celebrities like Davy and Edison. And then there are the grey soldiers in between, whose parts are limited, due to either misfortune or lack of ambition. Brilliance doesn’t presuppose natural star power or ruthless intent.

There are the walk-ons, like one John Starr from Cincinnati who filed the first U.S. patent for an incandescent lamp, in 1844. He travelled to Europe to market his idea, and he contracted tuberculosis and died. He had the ambition, but he had no luck. Before him, there was one Scotsman, James Bowman Lindsay demonstrating a constant incandescent light for a group in Dundee in 1835. But he didn’t follow up, being more interested in pursuing his ideas around wireless telegraphy. He apparently had a number of ideas well ahead of his time, but little of the drive that would have cemented his achievements in the public mind. He had his own priorities. He poured years into compiling a dictionary of fifty-three languages, and he never finished. He turned down a post at the British Museum in order to care for his ageing mother. And history passed him by.

And so it is that, after the flashy achievements of Edison and Swan and Tesla, that there comes along another flavourless character, one Gerard Philips, who convinces his dad the banker, that there is a future in mass producing light bulbs. Though he seems singularly uninspiring – it’s hard to find more than a few paragraphs of biography about him, -- his little company went on to be the biggest producer of light in the world. And he started it in a factory building in little Eindhoven – not even a decade after Vincent Van Gogh lived in nearby Neunen and painted some of his early masterpieces.

Travelogue 653 – October 12
The Glow
Part One

Last year when we went to Eindhoven, Troy and I took a bike ride out toward Neunen in search of the glow trail laid in honour of Vincent Van Gogh. We only found the turned up earth where we guessed the bike trail would be laid. We did also find the watermolen, the old mill, that Vincent painted in 1884.

I suppose it’s in remembrance of that great expedition that the psyche presented me with a dream last night. Troy and I were performing in a band at an art fair. Troy was calling himself Pez, and he was center stage. He was on guitar, and I was playing bass. The composition was a good one, the bass melodic and the guitar providing metallic abstractions. No one was listening because it was an art fair, of course, but the music was impressive.

We’ve returned to Eindhoven, but without Troy this year. The Eindhoven half marathon is the close to my annual cycle of road races.

Menna likes Eindhoven. It’s a city that feels like a small town. That’s precisely what the taxi driver says about Eindhoven. We’re asking him what it’s like. ‘It’s like a village. You leave your house in the morning, you see people you know on the street. It’s nice.’

The city is small enough that Troy and I were able to ride our clunky rental bicycle from the center of town out past the city limits, out into the countryside and all the way to the edges of the town of Neunen. The flat fields, lit by yellow rapeseed, were still modelling for nineteenth-century painters. The broken clouds were flying low over the horizon, and the autumn sunlight seemed attenuated.

Menna and I, Batu and Baby are staying in a hotel outside the center. It’s far enough out that we can see some fields, though only a fifteen-minute city bus ride from the center. It stands on the opposite side of town than Neunen; otherwise I would be tempted to rent a cycle and try again. Maybe the glow trail has been laid. What would Vincent have thought, coming across a glowing path by his rustic water mill?

The race itself almost defeats me before I’ve begun. Roads are blocked all over town, and the buses are diverted. And I only piece that together on the morning of the race. I have to call a taxi and hope for the best. We arrive as the race is starting, the driver pulling up as close as he can. I’m pulling sweats off in the front seat, then pinning my number to my chest. I’m out of the car and running toward the back of the pack up ahead. Once I reach them, it’s ten minutes before our section passes the starting line. It’s a big crowd. I spend almost the whole race surging through the mob, trying to find my place among runners at my pace.

The taxi driver is proud of his town. He says it’s a city that feels like a village. But it’s got a lot that a village doesn’t. There are many big businesses centered here. It’s a center of tech and design. He says there is a huge international school. Menna likes that.

I’m enjoying his civic pride. We discuss PSV, the Eindhoven football team, the best in Holland. He tells us about Meneer Frits.

Eindhoven is a corporate town, and it must be one of the oldest corporate towns there is. It’s with genuine sadness that the taxi driver tells us that Philips has been in the process of moving out for some time. Philips was founded here over a hundred years ago and the company has given the history of this town definition.

And the story begins with the light bulb, that strange little invention with such impact on the life of the species, glass bulb filled with gas, tiny carbon filament set in the middle and super-heated until it glows. In Dutch, it’s called a gloeilamp, a glow lamp.

Travelogue 652 – October 6
Bill Retires

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 651 – October 5
Arborvitae

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

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

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

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

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

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

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