Travelogue 243, September 30
Evoluting Man

We’ve been around a while, and I have proof. Not proof in hand, held by opposable thumb, but proof in the brain – passing the reptiles in the left lane, gaining on mammalian and monkey – proof in the lobe of the brain that preserves pretty pictures in grey amber.

7.17 They stand silently and humbly in a green plain, a decaying circle suspended in Big Time, where the solstices ring like hours. We the creators can’t hear Big Time.

Mark and I have taken the train west out of London. We’re visiting a teacher in Salisbury. Her husband has the day off because of a strike, and he takes us for a drive, speeding down curving lanes that can barely accommodate two European-size cars. Whenever a car appears coming the other way, we have to swerve under the trees, half onto the shoulder. But it doesn’t mean Gareth slows down.

We arrive at the place suddenly. The old priests are not very tall. They don’t dominate the landscape – even a landscape as bare as this one. It’s an odd little site. Humans have built the road, a major thoroughfare, right next to it. And they have enclosed the old ones in chain link fences, encircling them with little footpaths. They charge visitors to enter. Gareth refuses for all of us. He’s correct in saying that we can see the stones almost as well from outside the compound and save ourselves some dosh. Gareth is tall, so he takes a few shots for me over the barrier. Then he demonstrates how to shoot through the diamond-shaped spaces of the fence.

It’s a holy site. We’ll never know why, except that some pious pagan families started burying their dead there. But there are no distinguishing characteristics to the spot. Is that the very logic that led our hirsute ancestors to haul massive stones across miles of western England – just to liven up this bland bit of green space? Or maybe the henge commemorates the unique degree of unremarkability. Either way, they did it, adding ditches and blocks of bluestone or sarsen for over a thousand years, the last touches put in place a good 1,500 years before Lord Caesar ever set foot in Britain.

Now we can stop in storefronts for God. No lights or shadows line up at the solstices but maybe that’s more comfortable anyway. Our gods don’t need to show off.

A quick poll of my Ethiopian staff reveals that most of them do not believe in evolution. ‘We come from God,’ they say, wrinkling their noses at the idea that we come from monkeys. How can Westerners buy that guff?

OK, but what about Lucy? Humans first stood on two legs in Ethiopia. Shouldn’t Ethiopians be the preeminent advocates for evolution? Lucy’s not a monkey, they’ll point out. She’s three foot tall and hairy, I retort. There’s more than a family resemblance here. Chimps are genetically 99% human. No, my staff says. They can be family, but not mom and dad.

Maybe the Ethiopes are closer to Big Time than Westerners. Shades of distinction don’t register. Life is a few major keys that resonate across the centuries. Before the big notes were sounded lurks a lot of matter that doesn’t matter.

Then again ... somehow Johnny Cash comes up in one of my Minnesota classes, and about half of my students said, ‘Who?’ and I was crushed. It’s one thing to dismiss a few bands of unusually smart apes in the Rift Valley some fifty thousand years ago, but the Man in Black?

I’m explaining fiction and stories. I want examples of movies that everyone can relate to. The movie shouted out almost universally is ‘Lion King’. (Big pause …) ‘Okay. Lion King. Who’s the protagonist?’ Simba. Right. And the setting? Picture yourself wandering the wild savanna….

Travelogue 242, September 21
Notes for a Season

Those flighty calendar numbers trip along forward: it’s autumn. The sun was out all week; everyone was in shirtsleeves. The cicadas are still singing. I logged lots of miles on the bicycle, until I got a flat in back. It’s time to take my soul mate in for an overhaul, true the wheels, spice up the brakes. She’ll be ready for some sweet city sailing for the last few pleasant weekends.

Yesterday I got to fly over the new bridge. It opened up mid-week, and I’ve been eye-balling it from other bridges. It’s white and sleek, and the cars coast across it like marbles along a gentle, curving track. I’ve had occasion to bike over the highway that feeds it. Seeing the cars stream by was comforting in a life-goes-on kind of way. Rather a silly reaction to one more day’s mass commute and the restoration of concrete, but there you go. I drive over it smiling, recalling lots of other days compacted into one blurry picture: swing over toward the University exit while stealing glimpses of the Mississippi, the foliage of its banks, and the mute old structures of Academe.

9.13 I’m so tired it’s painful. The body and mind are aching. I must keep moving. This morning, I’m invited into special places. I’m going to the University Club in St. Paul. That’s the beautiful and historic building that commands the eastern end of Summit Avenue, an avenue that functions like a museum of St. Paul’s nineteenth-century aristocracy. It stands on a bluff that overlooks the cathedral and downtown.

At midnight the night before, the lights are on all over the house. Luis is working on the plumbing. I’ve been up late every night this week, and I want to be awake for the University Club brunch. But Luis is working on some ganglion of pipes located beneath my room. It takes nearly until two in the morning to bang something into place.

Some critical conduit has escaped its punishment. At 7am, there’s no hot water. There’s only a trickle of cold water in the tub. I’m alone in the house and disoriented. Am I in America? No matter: I revert to Ethiopian methods. I crouch down in the tub to gather water in my hands like early man in a porcelain jungle. I splash cold water over my head.

Outdoors is more watery refreshment in the form of a chilly rain. The streets of St. Paul are desolate. I stop at a health-foods chain and have healthy espresso with healthy yogurt. I cling to the waking state, so similar this morning to an ebbing state of shock.

The brunch at the University Club celebrates twenty years for Books for Africa, a large St. Paul charity. Standing in line for the buffet and sitting together at round tables in the beautiful gallery are about one hundred local worthies, donors and board members, representatives from partner agencies, and visitors from Botswana, Tanzania, Togo, and Senegal. At my table is the ambassador to the U.S. from Tanzania. An alarming number of people at my table have climbed Kilimanjaro. They compare figures in the hundreds of thousands of dollars that they raised for charity by arranging junkets to the famous mountain. I don’t say a word.

I’m introduced to a group just back from Malawi. Much praise of Malawi is tossed among new acquaintances, and I can’t be sure but I think I’m witness to a school being born there during a two-minute exchange among strangers.

The mayor of St. Paul addresses us, a tall and amiable man, fresh from hosting the Republican Convention, and looking no worse for wear. He speaks simply, sincerely, and well, without notes. The founder of Books for Africa speaks, an ageing Brit with wild hair and a bow tie. He accepts a check for ninety thousand from a guy in sandals who was standing quietly among the Malawi crew earlier. He could be the bass man in a surfer band. Instead he raises thousands of dollars re-selling college textbooks for charity, and he travels the world. Next at the podium is the ambassador, speaking with gratitude and a gentle humility that is as refreshing as an evening on the savanna.

I survive the morning, and what’s more, I have enough residual consciousness to register pleasure. ‘What nice people’, I muse as I doze off on the highway home.

Travelogue 241, September 17
For Hannah

A breach of blog conduct, I suppose, to publish a poem, but my students tell me that poetry is the language of emotion. They can’t cite a reason for that, no matter how I browbeat them. In the end, I just have to give in.

Here’s a poem for Hannah:

She’s seven when she dies.
At the school we are shocked to silence.
Her mother hadn’t told a soul

while the girl lay helpless
in the one room, on the one bed,
sweating out a life into the mattress,
sodden straw underneath the soiled sheet,

her last sight spent on mud
walls and floor one window
only dimly illuminates,
no moment’s eye allowed
for lasts, for friends, for farewells.

She features on the head of a penny
now, settling through one sleepy stratum
of water into another, sight bleeding
into the green of blindness.

And also tossed, mels spinning a copper
shade of fertile clay, she spies a barren crystal
distance, she spies with delighted eyes.
She drifts unseen, flown alone too far.

Imaye! Mother: the egg-white tenderness
of sight won’t see. It’s a furious blindness
That notes only the yellow hills.
Children are skipping ghosts,
late for the harvest.

Two hues converge in grey,
and sorry to have lost them both,
long as living we look and we look.

A child has died.

Travelogue 240, September 11
Inconclusions

Happy Ethiopian New Year! Perhaps the relentless prattle about the Millennium will ebb in Ethiopia, like it eventually did here, … leaving what? A residue that chafes like Sarah Palin’s voice, like the nasal whinging of tall, unblinking birds tied to microphones? Is that the new millennium? Maybe the year 2000 wasn’t so bad.

Let’s call him Jim. He lingers after class today. This is my first session of the day for three days a week. The students are a good bunch, if a bit sleepy. My pedagogic strategy is simply to overwhelm them with good cheer. I know that’s not strictly fair, but what is fair in love and war is doubly so within the precincts of schoolhouses. The students blink at my bright smile painfully as if they share the same brown hangover. They glare at me with grim skepticism.

Jim lingers by my side, and he turns his face away from the few other students who are still packing up their backpacks as he murmurs, ‘Can you help me?’ Jim is a young white kid with close-cropped hair, a round ruddy face, and a big, sarcastic grin. He’s one of those guys who gather in twos in threes in class, issuing comments like breath, comments that are actually funny. They leave class and work on cars, watch violent movies, and plan the next kegger. They scare novice teachers, but a glance at their work shows they’re doing just fine. Banter is class participation.

It seems Jim isn’t too comfortable on computers yet. Can I show him how to use email? I sense his embarrassment: Minnesota boy, descendent of farmers, maybe very recently, born to an age in which it must be excruciatingly isolating to not understand the hum and sizzle of our type-and-talk boxes.

It’s a teacher’s moment, the time to turn squarely toward the student and drop the role. It’s human to human, and what teaching is all about. Of course I’ll help, but I have two more classes right after this one. We can meet after the last class or any day this week. He shyly says he’ll stop by my office. I hate to let him go. He’ll drift out and into the day of every day deferrals. People who can help say some day, and that’s the way of the world. That’s what his resigned steps say.

We’ve seen another movie. It’s a vehicle for Nicholas Cage, and that’s what it is. There’s a passable story. The production is attractive, if a bit blue. Blue like someone forgot to take off the ‘moonlight’ lens. Maybe it was just the print. Many shots are beautiful. The lead character, a moody assassin, is suitably haunted and solitary. Romance has been loaded into its chamber. But we slam into that ‘vehicle’ problem before the weapon is out of its holster. The actor’s posing is the preeminent motif, swallowing whole the character. The film swallows its own romance and dies heart-sick, much as the character is doomed to fail in an anticlimactic (no matter how explosive) way. Why do so many movies leave one with this taste? Good idea, good start….

There’s another boy’s face in my mind’s eye. That’s Abiyu. His features are teenage lopsided. He’s tall, and his feet and hands are outsized, as is his nose. His hair is untrimmed. He wears the same old flannel shirt against the cold of rainy season. His feet look to never have felt the embrace of shoes. He has a sunny, unpredictable smile. His deer’s eyes are deep and unflinching and friendly. But often they are turned away focused on nothing, sight abandoned in favor of long daydreams. I wonder what the dreams are.

8.5 Menna and I arrive in Bahir Dar on graduation day, and there are no hotel rooms available. We hire a bajaj to drive us from hotel to pension to hotel. At one stop, we are mobbed by boys, from small and scruffy to tall and unshaven. What they share is their calling to the noble occupation of hospitality. They hang off the sides of the bajaj as the driver yells at them and tries to pull away. That’s how badly they want to serve.

We ask Abiyu to come along and help us find a room. Eventually we do find one, and we hire Abiyu for more errands. Over the next few days, he proves to be a big help. We have a lot to get done. He comes with us out to Gobame.

‘What do you think of Gobame, Abiyu? What do you think of the school?’ He shrugs. He’s not a boy of many words. Only one time he’s chatty. He tells us Bahir Dar is tenth in Africa. Tenth what I don’t know. He says Bahir Dar’s famous Lake T’ana is 83,000 feet deep. He loves his region. He wants to know where I’m from, and he guesses England right away because I speak English. He never comes up with America because he doesn’t know what language Americans speak.

Abiyu is proud to be graduating high school next year. We want to help him. We offer to pay tuition if he wants to study in Bahir Dar, but he loves his little village of Debre Tabol. He says everyone there is so clever. Some farmers have tractors. We tell him we want him to work for us some day. He doesn’t even seem to hear. He’s daydreaming about Debre Tabol.

Travelogue 239, August 31
Off the Shoulder of Orion

8.29 Back on the home planet, midday is a descent into chaos. The week of arrival has accelerated to this point, where days are choked with detail and sleep is a weightless stone skipping along the surface of a shallow lake. Email has been a terror, visiting regular reversals on me from abroad, sudden knots in every thread, negotiations breaking down, feckless changes of heart, money appearing in the wrong accounts. Then I leave an expensive textbook and a surprisingly complete compendium of important papers in a lavatory at the college, hours before the holiday weekend begins.

This is my break from the break-down: I go for a bike ride. Cycling has always been my meditation, my peace. It’s one of two sure ways to shut off the mind.

The day’s going to end. It's too bad she won't live. But then again, who does? Say that in the voice of Edward James Olmos and pedal for the river. Pedal as though time doesn’t matter. You recall that most of the Washington Avenue Bridge’s pedestrian level has been closed off – an effect of last year’s bridge collapse – so you veer off toward the university’s other pedestrian bridge. It’s a high and delicate structure, one of those leftovers from the railroad era. It’s painted maroon, one of the U’s colors, and its entrances are hidden away, accessible only off minor roads.

I coast along the span alone. I’m taken into the embrace of beauty, and I feel like I’m gliding. There’s a distinct and remarkable scent of lavender in the air. I can’t imagine how it wafts this high above the river. The several clouds in the west are lit in the hue of lavender. Their reflections hover vaguely on the peaceful waters of the river. Ripples on the surface capture last light in gold sparks. Windows downtown capture streams of the same light, but hold them more successfully, glowing with their heat.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe, says Hauer in the murderer’s tenderest way. Suddenly, the world is a place made of beauty. It’s the purpose. The disasters melt away. The old cliché blossoms like a tiny margarita in the heart, saying all the irritations along the road are worth arrivals like this. (How many times have I rejected that homily? Pain pays for another moment? Pain, the thing that consumes all else? Mathematically, it must be impossible to defend that happy notion.)

The other sure route to sanity is through movies, and I’ve seen quite a few already since my arrival back on the home planet. We took in the latest Woody Allen, a piece much concerned with beauty, as most Allen bits are: the beauty of sex and love nurtured in hothouses of unexplained wealth. We go to Spain; we drift through garden-like Barcelona; we are witnesses to very good actors being pressed to elucidate Passion with every sultry and every fiery move in their repertoires. I come very close to inspiration.

Real inspiration has to wait.
8.31 Crises lose their momentum, borne down by their iron masks of gravity. Still, I can’t manage the Herculean task of sleep. The string of erratic minutes stretches on. I’m counting these rough and lumpy beads with calloused fingers, this rosary of tiredness – as ugly as my clashing string of metaphors.

A few vodkas at Andre’s and I’m soaring. But it’s the movie that does it. Inspiration takes flight. It’s the director’s cut, and it’s everything right about movies. The script is tight. The images, tinted by the haunting soundtrack, are revolutionary in their dark glamour. They’re revolutionary for the time, anyway, and still poignant, though some of the effects have aged in the wrong way, like Lucas wine.

All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. The movie, like the span of the elegant bridge, like the fire of vodka awakening tired nerves, finds its ending. Sean Young is hustled off to the best-not-mentioned rest of her fictional life, or the even-better-not-mentioned rest of her career. And still I can’t sleep. Instead I celebrate: abandoned to my dusty, silent room at the edges of twenty-first century Minneapolis, forgotten by beauty – I can still celebrate beauty. Maybe it will shine a beam in the direction of android dreams.

Travelogue 238, August 28
Oh Zion

8.8 The gari ride up to Giorgis is a bit rough. It’s on a hill, as churches often are, and the last quarter mile is a tough slog through mud and over dispiriting bumps and rocks. Gari horses in Mojo are underfed and scarred from the crude twine whips and the continual chafing labor, and ours looks especially mistreated. A few hundred meters short of the goal, he comes to a halt in a stew of mud and, tossing his head, he takes a few steps backward, resigning to the weight of the gari. Rather than submit the poor beast to more cruel snaps of the whip, Menna and I get out and walk the rest of the way, joining Malaku and Salam at the church gate.

The head priest is fasting and is confined to the church yard for sixteen days, so we have to go to him in order to continue negotiations. We’re ready to sign an extended lease for the property on which we operate our school, property owned by the church. Last week, I visited the school and saw huge potential where now there is a trampled dirt and grass field and a short row of shabby mud-walled rooms. There’s space. There’s need. All the project needs is time and work.

We start negotiations right away. The scene last week is a pleasant afternoon at the empty school, the sun straining through clouds. We’ve brought a table and chairs out onto the narrow, raised concrete platform in front of the classrooms. Malaku, Menna and I sit on one side of the table, and the church committee on the other. Two of them do most of the talking, sitting with their backs to the wall and gazing thoughtfully over the schoolyard. First is Ato Dagu, a shrewd old man with an amiable smile and a calculating eye. He used to be a school director himself, and he’s a lay member of the church committee. He mediates in this discussion, slipping into rudimentary English from time to time. He compensates for the head priest’s stubbornness and lack of business sense.

The head priest is also an old man, and he is a hard man, as most Orthodox priests are in this country where brimstone sells the most candles and where most priests are dirt poor. He’s lean, and his eyes are flinty. He wants to argue, persistently posing fiscal riddles that defy logic or sums. But he backs down under the influence of Ato Dagu’s gentle reason.

The old men play weary, but as the strong Mojo sun descends into the top leaves of the eucalyptus behind their little schoolhouse, it’s clear that they could debate until midnight.

Today, we enter the square churchyard, square church at its center and squat family mausoleums lining the interior walls, turning their lugubrious faces toward God’s house. The head priest emerges from a dark doorway. His dark eyes focus on no one. He holds up his large, flat bronze cross and everyone but me kisses three corners of it in the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition. We sit on an unanchored concrete bench under a small eucalyptus. The bench rocks if you lean forward, and when I get bored I distract everyone by rocking forward.

The talk goes on for a while, as Malaku and Menna guide the priest through the contract – consisting only of ideas we’ve already discussed – and chase after the priest’s every fly ball into far left field. They dispute and the priest listens impassively.

I take a walk around the church. I pause before the fresco on one wall of St George slaying the dragon. I try to read the inscriptions in Geez or Amharic around the central figure. I can decipher some of it. I find ‘Tsion Tserah’, the name of our school, written above. A diminutive Satan rides the dragon’s tail. ‘Satan’ is written next to him in Geez script, in case the red skin, fangs, and horns aren’t tip-off enough.

It’s mid-afternoon. Children are entering the schoolyard by twos and threes, staring at the faranj with their priest. They play for a while, running up and down the stairs of the bell tower. Then they settle in a circle not far away. Girls in the lead, they begin to sing traditional church songs, some of them in surprisingly strong and confident voices. They sway with their hands open in their laps in supplication. They often look toward us to make sure someone is watching.

The leading girls whisper. One runs off to a room across the churchyard. She emerges with a drum as tall as she is. Now the girls take turns slinging the massive drum over their shoulders and pounding in time to the church songs. Their frequent glances back at me make me laugh. I make sure to pay them my best and most appreciative attention.

Finally, the priest agrees with the barest of nods and barest of shrugs. We all rise, and trade gestures of respect and farewell. He ambles toward the girls, a suggestion of gentle affection in his spare and hard frame. For a moment I like him. The garis are waiting for us, and we bounce on back down the hill. The warm Mojo sun is hanging over the winter green hills that lie in the direction of Debre Zeit.

Events prove the visit to church to have been futile: Ato Dagu eventually backs out, just as signatures are due. He’s uncomfortable talking about anything as distant as five years away. God knows is what we all say when we find out.

Travelogue 237, August 25
Mad Heroics, Part Two

6.10 So there I am in my guest’s couch bed in Brooklyn, my notebook in my lap, and my eyes are wide circles of surprise, pupils dilated in shock, while adrenaline flushes all peace from my delicate system. It’s nine o’clock, and I have just discovered that my much-anticipated and much cherished appointment at the New York UNICEF offices is one hour away, roughly 25 hours earlier than I’d expected when I opened the notebook. Consulting the notebook was supposed to be nothing more than a ritual to dispel shadows of anxiety, so that I could return to the uncompromised sunlight of my flying dream.

I leap out of bed and stand at its side, quickly outlining a strategy: make the bed, wash up, dress – ten minutes; run to Eastern Parkway – five minutes; hail a taxi – one minute; bite my nails in New York traffic – half an hour? I mobilize.

I’m at Eastern Parkway. I’m stalled. I do not see a taxi anywhere. I consult with the two cops guarding Yahweh. They smirk, and they say, ‘You’re out of luck, pal.’ What am I going to do? ‘Call and say you’re late.’ Right. I pace for two precious minutes at the head of the subway stairs, knowing that network coverage dies a few yards down. I craft my plan.

Down I go. I stand at the platform edge anxiously for ten minutes. I ride for ten more, counting the station stops. At Bowling Green, the first stop in Manhattan, I leap from my seat and bound up the stairs to daylight. Streetside, I dial the UN, holding up my hand to hail a taxi. ‘Just crossing the Brooklyn Bridge’, I say. ‘Traffic is awful.’ Ah, traffic, the handy bugaboo of modern life. It’s a worldwide excuse. It even works in Ethiopia. As a boss there, I hear it all the time. Fourteen dollars and eighteen minutes later, I’m stepping onto the curb in midtown, underneath my favorite green monolith, the one with that wonderful forties’ swoop to the roof of the lower front building. I breathe deeply of the wonderful, sooty city.

The meeting is forgettable, predictably. But hey, I had an appointment at UN HQ. I stood on hallowed ground, below the collected flags of our crazy race. For a split-second, I was gathered into the dizzying, delusional, and beautiful solution to a world’s strife and pain; and then I was released, cipher again, onto the dirty streets of Great Gotham. I wandered happily toward Central Park.

8.25 Where’s the cape? In which box did I pack that little item? I have to dust it off, and swing it over my shoulders, the cape of superhero solace and comfort. The cape that will cover some of the wrinkles in my clothing from a prior life, that will mask the musk of man without bathing.

Re-entry into my personal Gotham has not been smooth. I return from my apprenticeship abroad to find things have changed at Wayne Enterprises, I mean the college. There are new faces. There are new buildings. The syllabi are not familiar. There are new books, new campus programs, and lots of technology built into courses. Catching up will be a lot of work. In the meantime, I have seven classes to launch.

Roxana has located the bat cave for me. There’s a house in Columbia Heights. It stands above all the tract housing on a steep hill, lowering from behind thick brush, looking much like the Bates Hotel. It’s a recent purchase by a young Peruvian couple. The husband is very handy, and that’s fortunate. I rent a room among the sawdust. At night I rock myself to sleep on the unique futon-couch combination that Roxana has discovered. It doesn’t unfold all the way, so when you roll over you tip the bed six inches. When you roll back, you tip it back. It’s very soothing. Outside the undraped window is a tall, whispering poplar. It’s watching me with bemusement. So are the squirrels and the stars. How does this represent evolution, they wonder. It’s a dusty, dioramic koan.

I’m back in Minnesota for two days, and it’s the first day of classes. Early in the morning, I shuffle through the sawdust to the bathroom, where I wash in cold water. I have body memories of Ethiopia. I dress in clothes that have been in storage for years. They itch. I climb into Todd’s car and back down the steep drive. All the way to Brooklyn Park, I wonder what I’ll say to my students. I’m eager as a little boy to hear the first words I come up with. They’re sure to be amusing.

It’s a sunny day for our first day of classes, and there are a lot of smiles on campus. There’s nothing like the first day of fall semester. It would be difficult to find purer distillations of optimism, unless perhaps one were to collect the lightning flashes of Obama-frenzy occurring around the world, chasing furtive sparks among shy liberals. I’m immediately fortified for my mission. The students’ faces provide the light and the fresh air of hope. They are fuel and inspiration. The first words come, and they are every bit as absurd as I could have hoped. Life is good.

Travelogue 236, July 25
Mad Heroics, Part One

I’m back in Ethiopia for three days when this urgent matter arises. At the end of a late afternoon meeting, Menna makes the call. I look over her shoulder as she scribbles a name and a number. ‘What?’ She quietly nods confirmation. I can’t believe it. There’s no time to waste. We grab jackets and we’re out the door.

‘This can’t be,’ I’m mumbling. ‘It only opened in London a few days ago.’ I’m warning Menna that it’s got to be a Hong Kong bootleg. She disagrees, saying things have changed in Addis.

We have a half hour to make it across Bole, and we can’t find a taxi. We’re desperately debating whether the regular taxis will get us there on time. I’m in a cold sweat already. We spot a contract taxi going the other way and flag it down. The driver is a young Rasta guy and we urge him to hurry. It’s an emergency.

He swerves down the narrow lanes of a short cut, spraying the rainy season’s mud among pedestrians, and emerging on busy Bole Road; hunching over the wheel and pushing the tiny Lada to its limit, weaving among the tight and fleeting spaces between shuddering blue taxi vans. ‘Onward, onward!’ I shout.

We arrive. Crowds are buying tickets. Crowds emerge from the dark hall. The smells from concessions are right. The correct poster hangs on the wall beside other recent releases. We take our seats amid the usual mayhem, mayhem resisted by one beleaguered employee with a flashlight that seats us in our assigned places. She barks orders for tickets while laughing crowds stream around her. This blithe stream continues on through previews and ten minutes into the show.

The previews are in grainy digital format, and I become very tense. It’s going to be a bootleg, I’m sure. But then the wide screen blossoms in vivid and crisp blue clouds of destruction. It’s the real thing, Bale and Ledger in Nolan-vision, acting out violent morality plays against the backdrop of end-time Gotham: barbarians-at-the-gates, rotten-to-the-core Western Empire ready to fall, the Western Emperor a child governed by overweight and conniving eunuchs, the imperial currency reduced to status of wallpaper in the provinces – certainly in Ethiopia. (Okay, I’m editorializing.) These are times to try a superhero’s virtue. The first thing we see our warped hero do is bare-handedly bend the barrel of a shotgun leveled at an underworld sort by a hero-impostor. Three evils won’t make it straight again.

Now I’ll digress.
6.10 It’s my second night in Gotham. I see a movie. I meet two old friends at a theater on 14th Street in Manhattan, and we see Zohan together: Adam Sandler heroically attempting to juggle dick jokes and a message of world peace. We enjoy it, indulging a taste for ten year-old boy humor that we have preserved and even cultivated for thirty-odd years. Afterward, we eat New York Italian in a suitably intimate grotto. I’m back at Grace’s late.

In the morning there are five isolated, blurry minutes when Grace leaves for work. A couple hours later, my mobile wrenches me from a dream of flying. It’s Lisa calling. Lisa is a New York writer who has visited our schools and wants to author a story about them. We agree on a meeting.

I lie back to doze in the roomy couch bed in Grace’s living room. I’m completely relaxed and content. I try to draw back the dream. My mind lazily wanders to my schedule. Tomorrow will be the highlight of the trip, my visit to the UN. I have a 60s schoolboy crush on that crusty old symbol of postwar hope. How many times, when I lived in New York, did I gaze up at the aquarium green glass above the East River mid-town and feel the lump of sentimental internationalism rise in my throat? My time has come: I meet with UNICEFers in the compound. Not THE UN building, but across the street.

I reach for the notebook in my bag. This is the audit. I have to double-check my schedule and make sure I am free this morning. ... Yep, you guessed it.

Travelogue 235 – July 12
Don’t Forget Don’t

6.8 Approaching Prospect Park in Brooklyn, memories awaken. Why are old places like this, like black holes at the edges of the psyche? In their silence, they preserve secrets. And why do we keep secrets from ourselves? Mr. Freud, any comment? Right: he’s retreated into his own gravity well.

Crossing the event horizon, visions unfold. There’s the Brooklyn Museum, in the sober style of Gilded Age monuments, planetarium-like dome on top, stolid building brightened a bit by the new windows in front that offer glimpses of the current exhibit, art that looks like Willie Wonka meets Hello Kitty. Pass the library, leaping ahead a few decades in architecture, (art-deco prepares for Sputnik), and then back in time to Grand Army Plaza, that Napoleonic celebration of Civil War victory, noble arch commanding an unkempt traffic circle.

All this comes back from earlier days in the mysterious way of memory, like dipping one’s head below the surface of water and opening one’s eyes. I enter the park, and I know where I am. I know I’ll discover Park Slope to the right of the park. I explore: in the next few days, I’ll spend a lot of time wandering those brownstone blocks. This was my neighbourhood for a while during my New York years, living with Hillary in two rooms near the F line.

Yesterday we held an event to remember Leeza. It’s been five years. What does that mean? I hold her close to me to keep her in the light. I fight against advancing night, my own and the world’s.

The evening before the event, I’m putting together a power point of photos. I want these photos to reflect the big trajectory of five years, from Leeza to Ethiopia and Somalia, from Leeza to the children. I’m stuck on one image. We’ve discovered a forgotten photo of Leeza from the Tesfa archives.

Not long after someone dies, you have your stock of her images burned into your mind. The image becomes so familiar that returning to the physical version of it becomes like looking in the mirror. But then a forgotten image of her surfaces, and it’s like the silence immediately after an earthquake. There’s a tender leaf tremor to the world. And then it rains.

I’m lost that day, listening to old CDs from the era before I left for Ethiopia and rustling among the loose papers of the mind. I think I’m taking a break when I turn to another task: looking over the texts for classes I’ll teach this fall. It’s been five years since I’ve taught these classes. I expect something fresh, but I’m staring at pages that are familiar in a dusty way. It’s like entering a two-dimensional picture, expecting a fairy-tale unfurling of space, but instead becoming two-dimensional yourself. It’s all right. I know teaching is not about the books but about the moment-to-moment among people. I was just looking for something else.

That evening I find out that someone has died in a motorcycle accident. He’s a character from my east coast days, someone less than a friend, more than an acquaintance, one of those people who pop up in your life from time to time. The last time I’d seen him, he had survived some medical disaster that I can’t quite remember now. I think it was a heart attack. He survived to re-marry. She has survived him, though just barely, serving time in a hospital. The work of memory goes on.

There is this challenge in ageing, a kind of vertigo that comes of being one of the survivors. You become a thing with wings, gliding too high, watching the wind currents below, layers of them, spiralling and gusting, vanishing, rising again, colliding in vapours and agonies. You’re poised in a precarious moment, at the mercy of all that movement.

The next day is the event. People come together. They want to hear about the children. This has become something else, something bigger than me or Leeza, and that’s how it should be, one kind twist among the tireless currents of the air.

Travelogue 234 – July 8
Apple Hard Core

6.7 It’s off to New York, kids. Pack up the tender but unvanquished Shirt, which has a few notches on its silky sleeve now, meetings to showcase its winning charisma. Crank the AC, and let’s make our way to the New Jersey turnpike. Our goal is Exit 13, from which we wend our merry way to the towering Verrazano Bridge that links Staten Island to Brooklyn. But not before that long trek through Jersey, during which I discover that Phillie has the best classic rock station in the east. And not before we indulge in some Popeye’s chicken at a Jersey rest stop. Step out of the car into the furnace blast of east coast summer. Stare with everyone else at one of the TV screens, each one featuring Hillary as she concedes to Barack. (My vote is held in the balance, by the way, by that ‘c’ in his name.)

Thank God we have AC, kids, because we will spend one hour of the journey on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in traffic. But arrive we do, because arriving is what we do. Grace lives in one of the fun neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Crown Heights. Here, Hasids have settled in for the first coming. Bearded men in black suits and broad-brimmed, black felt hats take to the streets with women in long skirts and kerchiefs over their hair, pushing squadrons of strollers. Posters proclaim ‘Welcome’ to the Mossiach, and they don’t mean that silly boy Yeshu. Their speculative pictures show a pudgy man with a grey beard – Santa in a fedora.

And on the streets of New York they mingle with people of all other races. They mingle with the denizens of that other Crown Heights, the one centered a few blocks east, the one that’s slightly darker, on the average, in skin color. I don’t detect much love among these communities. The vigilance of the Hasid community patrols and the presence of cops permanently stationed outside synagogues tell a story of tension. But they live side by side, as they have for decades. That’s the charm of New York, after all, this rancorous peace among tribes.

That’s the charm – that’s the Herculean labor of New Yorkers. There’s a sense in this town of a monumental work being chiselled from rough human matter, and I mean WORK, in all its sweaty visuals. We will live together, they say, with gritted teeth.

The heat wave is cresting, and I take a run up to Prospect Park. I foolishly undertake a full circuit of the park. By the end of my loop, I’m weak and dizzy, drenched in sweat. But it’s such a beautiful and spacious city park, I couldn’t stop. People are everywhere: strong New Yorkers, on bikes or jogging, uber-menschen of a glorious (if earnest) future, gritting their teeth and saying, we will live together.

Riding the subway is a joy, despite – no, BECAUSE – of the dank smell of New York’s tunnels. There’s no other metro system that smells the same. I revert to old habits: I look for mice running among the rails. People are everywhere, brushing against each other, pushing, pushing with their shoulders and their voices, strong citizens of the future, setting their jaws as they say we will live together.

Barack with a ‘c’ made his famous speech about ‘A More Perfect Union’. “I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.…It is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts - that out of many, we are truly one.” I picture muscular New York standing in Times Square in its multitudes, grimly nodding yes, clenching their fists in time, murmuring we will live together.

And what have I done recently to celebrate this nearly perfect union? I was back in Minnesota for July 4, and I’m happy to say I took advantage of all the noise to sleep soundly. I thoroughly enjoyed the city’s long weekend, as I do every year when the hordes of sun-crazed families hit the highways to crowd the quiet corners of the state.

Lazily coasting on my bike through Dinkytown, the college sub-town in southeast Minneapolis, I’m persecuted and perplexed by one sole mosquito. It never lands. It hovers in one spot, radiating a sinister hum. Yes, I recall, today is the day, isn’t it? Today the wunder-engineers will be rejoining the two banks of the Mississippi, uniting the two strands of the new Highway 35 bridge in the midsummer air over the nearby river. And that growling beast of the air is here to record our moment. The bridge that fell only last year will stand again. We grit our teeth, and we say, we will have it so.

Travelogue 233 – July 5
Oh Say

6.5 Jonathan is messing with me, and I don’t realize it until I’m miles along, steaming on down the hill beside the turbid, rocky stream. He’s at work. He’s been there for hours by the time I stir in the morning. I awaken again as the fifth roommate makes his way into the kitchen above my head. I’m sleeping on the thin mattress of the antique couch-bed that, unfolded, takes up most of this basement room. I regard the bikes that stand around the bed like railings around a crib.

I arrived in Baltimore last night after another harrowing east coast drive, this time through a black night lashed with rain and punctured by blurry ranks of headlights guided by salesmen and teamsters of the undead.

Somehow I found the house and was comforted at the kitchen table by Jonathan’s many roommates and retainers. I’m handed a local beer, and everything is all right. It’s an incredibly charming group of young people, suitable to Charm City.

The morning is bright and free of the night’s rain. I take Jonathan’s suggestion. The best way to see Baltimore is on bike. The house is only a few miles from downtown. So I crack open the basement door that accesses the back yard, and wrestle his bike out past the bed and the basement sink and the other bikes. I’ve got my laptop on my back. I pedal in the direction I know must lead to downtown.

The first part of Jonathan’s joke becomes apparent as I pedal, knees rising above my waist and churning in futility. I don’t know how Jonathan, who’s got four inches on me, makes this thing go. Fortunately, my road is downhill for a while. No, it’s more than a while. And that’s the punch line. Downtown is more than a few miles, but I barely pedal at all. Rather, riding this way is riding the brake, alongside the tumbling creek to one of a million slick estuaries in this town, under monumental iron bridges, through some lost blocks of dust and blank brownstones, and on to brick Charles Street and its glorious New World banks, with the harbour gleaming below.

Baltimore’s harbour is a big playground. It’s a calm expanse of water, surrounded by the city. Of course, it leads out through a series of larger bays until you, in your mighty clipper ship, arrive in the real bay, the vast Chesapeake, and eventually the ocean. This watery prelude is Baltimore’s funland, built up now with boardwalks and bars and museums. Moored underneath the commercial highrises that climb the steep hill of downtown is a relic of the Civil War, the USS Constellation, ready for service. And across the harbour is Federal Hill, green hill that was once a Civil War fort. Not too far away on the peninsula that makes up that side of Baltimore’s harbour is Fort McHenry, from which Baltimoreans rained down defeat on British invaders nearly two hundred years ago. This city was hell for the Brits, as of course we acknowledge at the start of every ballgame.

I’m stranded at sea level on my little cruiser, and I call Jonathan so he can get a laugh. He didn’t think I’d really do it. Thank God for the famous Baltimore light rail system – famous in Minneapolis, anyway, since it served as one model for our new system. An unlikely model, I find: nothing like our sleek and speedy service that’s quite fun to ride. This one is a chain of silver old box cars that sleeps at stations and at every stop light along its one route. But I’m happy to watch the hills melt away while midday turns up the heat.

Hampden is Jonathan’s neighborhood. I’m told it was also John Waters’ back in the day. Citizens seem to have taken that heritage seriously. Down on the Avenue, as they call it, is the Hon Bar and Hon Café, which, by the way, I can highly recommend for breakfast or lunch. And only a week after I’m due to depart, the neighbourhood will host the Hon Fest. Do I need to explain what ‘hon’ is? Hint: the logo for both café and fest is a cartoon lady in a beehive and horn-rimmed glasses.

It’s a pleasant place, and a very relaxing visit. I sit with the gang on the tight and tilting second-floor balcony. We drink beers and count the meth-heads. I learn how to pick them out. Watch for scrawny skinheads with sores on their heads or faces. It’s good sport. I try to exchange greetings with a couple of them one day. They’re sitting on their front step. They stare right through me, chatting in an incomprehensible southern accent.

A few doors down is another salute to whatever it is that Waters stands for: clusters of pink flamingos in the yard and plastic, pink roses in boxes outside every window. The director supposedly lives up the hill from Hampden, above Johns Hopkins, off Roland Avenue. I run through that posh area a few days in a row, taking advantage of the profound humidity to sweat in a truly miserable way.

Note: Baltimore’s Washington Monument is way cooler, and older, than DC’s. The first Thursday of every month, there’s a free concert in the park underneath the monument. This event is to be recommended. It’s a classy neighbourhood, called Mount Vernon, by the way. It boasts, among other items of interest, a Methodist church that, in its Gothic beauty of green, brown and red stone, is worthy of Maryland’s proud Catholic roots.

Travelogue 232 – June 30
Capital Weather

6.4 Here’s where I awaken, rolling over in a hotel bed, emerging from a dream about a tortured and doomed relationship in fourth-century Rome. She was lovely. She was debauched.

I return to the balcony and its prospect of parking lots and chain foods, and the clouds of dense and dreaming tree life beyond. I took a run out there last night, starting down that road, the one that curves pointlessly and offers no sidewalks, the one that connects neighbourhood grilles and gas stations and jogs in a relative parallel to the busy state highway.

I gave up on that road quickly, dashing across the highway, and down another pointless road that dead-ends in a spooky corporate park, spooky after business hours, spooky like a cult complex. A trail leads behind the new buildings to a lake with swans, where a spooky cult café patio overlooks immaculate lawns. Keep going and you come across a trail into the woods, closed to traffic by a chain waist-high. I’m exhilarated for about two hundred meters, before the path, in true east coast fashion, dead-ends in a pile of trash among thick weeds.

The Shirt is loaded safely into the car. I’m ready to zoom on into Washington DC, heading down the 95 to Baltimore, and then onto a hectic expressway into our nation’s capital. The expressway should be 45 minutes of peace, driving amid luxurious greenery, but it’s a familiar battle of nerves with frustrated cubicle stars and lobbyists who would like to shave the paint off my vehicle.

This entry into Washington isn’t to be recommended. The cold sweat expressway dumps you onto a shabby avenue of half-star hotels and gas stations. DC is not a huge place, but this street mysteriously goes on and on. Eventually, you catch a glimpse of the capital dome to the left. You veer among the streets that seem to operate on two overlaid grids, one a standard criss-cross, and the other composed of spokes from the hub of Georgie’s playhouse.

There are sultry blocks of the bottom-tooth variety, small houses propped up by broom handles, and then suddenly you’re in a modern downtown, jockeying for each square inch underneath high, happy structures of glass or carved stone.

The east coast is officially in the grips of a heat wave. I have a few hours before my meeting on the fifth floor of a lettered street. I undertake a quick tour of American pomp, but I don’t get too far. I make it to the plaza in front of the White House. I’m pleasantly surprised. I’ll give it to our men in blue, (or black, or camouflage, as the case may be): one doesn’t feel stifled by military presence. As always the famous house is right there, behind the same open fence and across a short lawn.

I walk around the house. Behind it, one sees the mall and our national obelisk. I look hard across the many yards of grass, interrupted by two crowded avenues and by some heavy roadwork surrounded by lots of that appealing orange tape. Through the thick air, fairly pulsing with heat, the national obelisk beckons. I say no. Instead, I sit and sweat on the steps of a monument to vets of the First World War. Tourists are taking pictures of me.

My appointment approaches. The kind parking lot attendants allow me underground, where I say a quick prayer before I don the Shirt. There are saints that protect against wrinkles and others that protect against the odors attending healthy sweat. Unfortunately, they are moody old drunks, and I can’t rely on them.

I try to cool off in a nearby high-rent Caribou. This is a bustling place. Every table is taken, and it seems every conversation is policy. Ahead of me, two Asian women discuss in perfect mall accents how desperate is the plight of Asian-American women. Behind me is a young white threesome. The two guys are in suits and speak with cultivation and relentless sarcasm about various associates. They come up with scandal about a rich congressman and his wife. When the topic is meetings and policy, they drop into murmurs. Their table-mate is a loud woman from Colorado, no less abusive with common acquaintances, but much less sophisticated. What she lacks in wit, she makes up for in gesticulation and horse laughs.

With a crack of thunder, the sky suddenly lets loose with heavy rain. The clock ticks on neutrally, and my moment arrives, drenched to its hapless core. I dash from awning to awning under the black heavens, mourning for the Shirt and all that might have been. When I reach a receptionist, she takes it all in with a glance and smirks. Oh, those bitter old winos in the sky!

Travelogue 231 – June 25
East of Aiden

6.3 It’s the east coast in summer. It’s a land of memories, some of the oldest and most chaotic I’ve got, kicking around a basement closet from my 20s. They’re like loose puzzle pieces in a cardboard box that only holds together because it’s never opened.

I’ve arrived at Phillie mid-afternoon. I wait in the thick heat for the Budget bus, find my little car, and throw my things in the back seat – though I do make sure to unpack the Shirt. This is the suave, black, short-sleeve shirt from Target that is the lucky talisman for this trip. After five years of living the way I do, I have nothing presentable to wear. I purchase the Shirt as a nod to east coast formality and a modicum of dignity. I drape it carefully over the passenger seat. I head right for highway 95.

Half an hour later, I’m in a different state, watery little Delaware, the first state in this bogey union. The capital of DE is Wilmington. Downtown is a grid of finance and history on a hilltop. There’s a park one block square, watched over by Caesar Rodney, signer of the Declaration of Independence and only President of Delaware. It has a sunken plaza where kids describe lazy arcs on their clacking skateboards. Old black men play chess despite the angry rants right behind them of antall, addled homeless man.

There’s a café with wireless a few blocks away, down by the big Y, where you can check email while you have a chicken pesto sandwich and watch tennis on the big domino screen hung just above your table, the only one near an electrical outlet.

Afterward, head down the hill, south on a street that narrows and decays. The houses shrivel and crowd together for strength until they are rows of jagged teeth, made of brick and then of white clapboard. On the front porches sit black men who are counting the days. You approach the old 95 for re-entry.

The afternoon has advanced along. The highway is packed. The woods around us are dense and bright green. You might think we have left cities and towns far behind, but I know how the east coast is. The land isn’t wild, but it’s penetrated by wild quark-style squiggles of road that curl in on themselves and go nowhere.

I spot a hotel, but I miss the exit. I have to wait for miles for the next exit, on the other side of a long construction zone, past an earth’s radius of east-coast spaghetti roads. I take that exit, knowing I’ll get lost. I end up in the parking lot of a half-abandoned mall. There is only one way in or out of the mall. I find my way back to the highway. At the next exit, there’s no way underneath the highway. East and west are sealed from each other.

I do make it to the hotel. I hang the Shirt. I stand on the balcony and look past the chain restaurants toward the beckoning woods and taunting corkscrew roads. I’m going to take a run in the last light.

6.18 It’s a week since I’ve returned to Minnesota. Aiden is laughing uproariously. He’s throwing a panda at me, and then a bunny. He’s bouncing across the surfaces of two made hotel beds. He’s the picture of innocent joy. He’s a terror. I’ve known him for mere minutes, and I’m his best and most intimate playmate. He can’t stop. He’s bouncing. He’s running. He’s laughing. He’s throwing. He’s swinging the bunny at my crotch.

Aiden is moving to the east coast, stopping in Minneapolis along the way. His daddy is one of those puzzle pieces of ancient east coast history. We met in Connecticut. He had hair like Peter Frampton; he had a crush on the woman who would become my girlfriend and then my wife. He went on to follow other women to the west coast and back again. We spent several aimless years in San Francisco along the way. He finally followed the image of a woman across the seas. He came back with Aiden. Now he has no hair.

Aiden has lots of hair, semi-dreaded and free. He’s a picture of joy. His big sister Aoi is a picture of grace. She’s lithe and bright and pretty. But Aiden doesn’t care about all that. She’s just part of the game, hurling stuffed animals at the new uncle.

Travelogue 230 – May 19
Grand Rapids, Part Two
The Open Hand

There are a couple things I can say about Michigan now. First, people do say hello. You pass them, running in the park or strolling downtown, and they nod, say hello, and open their hands in friendly benediction. That feels good. I remember hello’s from my childhood in California, remember them through a soft-hued mist that must be similar to the feeling around soda fountains for my parents’ generation.

Michiganers open their palms for another purpose, a habit they share with only one other people on earth that I’ve ever seen: Wisconsinites. ‘This is Michigan,’ they say, holding their hand up. You may have noticed that both Wisconsin and lower Michigan have little thumbs of land that extend from mitten-like mainlands. ‘Here we are,’ they say, jabbing the fleshy map. Grand Rapids is in the beefy heel of the palm.

We’re about a cell or two north of downtown at Stephanie’s house. There’s a bike path by the Grand River that we can follow to get downtown. Pass the historic iron trestle bridge. Pass the shallow, straight, manmade falls where the river is widest. Pass the locals fishing just underneath the falls. Pass under the highway, where homeless souls flit like shadows among the concrete rubble.

Now you enter the downtown of DeVos, Van Andel, and Ford. The first two are families made rich by the Amway empire, patrons of arts and architecture, religion and conservative politics. The riverfront downtown is a very nice tribute to their largesse, well worth an afternoon’s stroll.

When I say Ford, I refer of course to our recently deceased thirty-eighth president, who was raised in Grand Rapids. Across the river from the heart of downtown, you’ll see the Gerald R Ford Museum, surrounded by great swaths of lawn – tribute to the perennial backdrop during those years, the golf course? – lawns oddly interrupted by a solitary space suit, arms lifted toward infinity.

It’s a nice city, but I have trouble locating the gold paving stones and trees dripping with manna. This is Michigan isn’t it? I’m a little disappointed. An old friend from Michigan made it clear to me that his home state was heaven. Gold and manna were staples among his vivid imagery. There were brotherly love and lions lying with lambs, too, I believe. But that was a while ago: the summer of ’96.

I never knew his real name, this Michiganer. He insisted on being called Spooky Nimbus and would respond to no other moniker. I ended up rooming with Spooky after I returned to Minneapolis from Kuwait. Spooky was a real inspiration to me. I had to rebuild a life in the Twin Cities, and he was my model. He wasn’t working at the time, and neither was I. He was mooching off his brother, and so was I. Spooky’s brother believed he was a member in good standing of the Kennedy family, and styled himself Joseph P., after the ambassador.

Spooky at the time was engaged in a rather time-consuming project. He had only the duration of that summer to master the complete script of ‘Dumb and Dumber’. Spooky was earnest about this project. It wasn’t just a matter of memorizing lines. There was the entire spirit and genius that Jim Carrey brought to his role – gestures, faces, nuance of voicing and movement. I was uplifted by his commitment. I believe I owe something of my subsequent achievements to this mentorship

In between study sessions, Spooky talked wistfully of Michigan. ‘It’s not just a place,’ he would say. ‘I mean, yes, it’s on the map. But it’s not just a place on the map. It’s actually a real place. So much more than ink on paper. There are people there. They walk around and talk. You’ll never see that on a map.’ Imagery like that made me hunger to see Michigan, but I was broke.

Anyway, that was a grand old summer. Spooky often said in later days that that was the high point of his life, a life that has had no dearth of drama. I’m honoured to have been a part of it. I wonder what ever happened to ol’ Spooky Nimbus. Wherever he is, I open up my palm to him and say, ‘This is Michigan.’

I never locate the unicorns or a Kennedy or even Jim Carrey, but I do see lots of people who walk and talk, and they say hello to me. And I would have to say that Stephanie’s house, and the wonderful event she stages for the schools are about as close to heaven as I have any reason to expect. Grand Rapids is a sweet little town, and I feel a little sad getting back on the 196 heading south – particularly as I anticipate the asphalt hell along the southern shore of Lake Michigan that guards Shangri-La. I hear Spooky’s voice urging me on: ‘Forge on, soldier. It’s only a map. Well, not really.’

Travelogue 229 – May 13
Grand Rapids, Part One
Sweats and Chill

I coast across the finish line, driving into Grand Rapids, Michigan, still rattled by big city driving, though soothed by the wooded hills of south-western Michigan.

I started the day at the Wisconsin-Illinois border, speeding past flat and expansive farmland. Cruising into Chicago was pleasant at first. Who doesn’t have a song in his heart at the first sight of the skyline of the Midwest’s dynamo, speeding forward through the brick neighbourhoods of the Windy City? Jazz emerges from the braying spaces of highway radio. Downtown towers rise, casting reassuring shadows on the world. Cars crowd. The cymbal tempos and skipping piano from the radio merge with the driving, describing the increasingly frenetic highway. I’m alert. My heart’s racing.

Downtown falls away. The lanes narrow, and the local train joins us, humming down the center of the highway. We pass station after station, citizens idling and watching us zoom and sweat. The road outpaces the jazz. Highways 80, 90, and 94 pour all their transcontinental traffic onto the pitted lanes. On one side you have your wall, wide as the state, of groaning behemoths travelling just under the speed limit. On the other, you have your shuddering, swaying, and swerving candidates for road smear, trying to add thirty percent to the generous speed limit. We enact dog’s rituals, prancing side to side and sniffing each other’s bottoms. The highway secretions are savory for road dogs: aggression, adrenaline, and damp panics.

At Portage Indiana, the highways untangle. I pull off to breathe through my fear of death and to raise comforting caffeine to my lips with a shaking hand. I’m a long way from Addis Ababa. Death on the road is just as final there as far as I know, but it comes in a serendipitous manner. It’s not attended by the black masks of rage that Americans bring to the road.

I coast across the finish line. I’m in Grand Rapids, Michigan, green and peaceful and friendly. To get to Stephanie’s house you pass by downtown. It’s a blink of the eye, a snapshot of ten blocks by ten with half a dozen stubby skyscrapers, streets looking clean and inviting. Stephanie lives up northside, a few blocks from the Grand River. And grand it is, about as wide as the Mississippi in Minneapolis, managing to appear a little darker and wilder than our tame river, suggesting primeval northern roots.

Stephanie’s neighbourhood inspires a culture flinch in me, my first impression being rolling phalanxes of small, ageing clapboard houses, American flags above oil-spotted driveways, garage mouths agape in weekend war cries, bristling with lawn and auto equipment. There’s no break in the houses in any direction, not even for shops. Places like that scare me. Something about this kind of archetypal American landscape, suggesting infinite anonymity, suggests bottomless melancholy.

But nothing is anonymous for long. Inside, Stephanie’s house is unique as she is, painted in vibrant colors and full of art, both hers and others’. I recognize some Ethiopian wood sculpture. Off the scary street, she has a spacious and green backyard, shaded by a huge maple, and decorated with gardens getting their spring start.

She’s about a quarter-mile from the river, and from a luxurious riverside park. So, yes, I change immediately into running gear and stomp down the street. The park is broad expanses of grass, broken by small lakes where guys are actually wading in and fishing. I cross little golf-course arched bridges over creeks. Young people are playing frisbee golf! This is a bit Edenic to believe, but I carry on for a few miles, turning around only when I come to the end of a dirt path under a canoply of maple trees that glows in late afternoon sunshine a bright spring green. For the first time since Gary, I’m happy I made the trip.

Travelogue 228 – May 12
Road Trip

The waters of the Rock River are high with record Wisconsin snows. They are fast and swirling and spotted with foam from the hydroelectric dam a couple of hundred meters upstream. They run flush with the grassy banks.

I’m putting in three miles as best I can after a day’s driving and a pint of beer, miserably plodding forward under beautiful skies that suggest Midwestern summer on the way: a few high and stately white frigates accumulating above the southern horizon. The air I’m gasping for is redolent of cut grass and trees blossoming in the riverside park.

I’ve driven the length of Wisconsin today. I’m headed to Michigan for Stephanie’s fundraiser. I’ve been on the road for six hours. Now, if Ethiopia had good highways, the same amount of time would take me from Addis to Bahir Dar in the north or Harar in the east. I would cross any number of frontiers, historical, religious, ethnic, and what I’ll call time-leap frontiers – those patchwork zones in which people inhabit one or another of the various centuries between Christ and ourselves.

But six hours across Wisconsin doesn’t present much more variety than the difference of a dozen meters among hills and trading woods for fields or trading needles for leaves. There are red barns and silos and healthy cows: that’s fun. There are cheese shaped erasers in the gas stops. The measure of time is the frequency of highway signs for fast food.

The radio tells me that we’re aborting ourselves into extinction. One out of three Christian babies is murdered, while the Muslim population of the world explodes. There’s a time, the reasonable voice avers, when we must choose between tolerance and human rights. Helpless before the delicacy of this nuance, I change channels.

There’s bland country and bland pop and tired rock. Passing Madison, I have a half hour of radio joy, but the signal is weak and dissolves into static. The speakers in Roxana’s car are set somewhere between the taillights, so I have to shut the windows and submit to spring sun striving to be summer, beaming through weak-spirited mucous haze, shreds of winter that want to be friends now, beaming into my lap and warming my gut. Trucks roll by, like moving walls, like city blocks sliding by with amplified sighs like weightlifters.

Six hours behind the wheel and I don’t feel like I’ve travelled. I’ve submitted myself to Wendy’s fries and Denny’s sausage. My bottom is sore, and so is my gas pedal ankle. But I’m cheated of the sense of travel.

Set on the border with Illinois and on the banks of the Rock River is the small college town of Beloit. This is where I stop for the day. I have an appointment with some college staff at the Café Belwah. We’re on a roll this year with colleges. A number of them seem interested in our programs in Ethiopia.

I arrive early. The sun’s out. Downtown there are parks by the river. Across the water there’s a huge, failed foundry that has been converted into something more fun. (see photo) The walls facing the water have become galleries for art. Many are portrayals of the decades of sepia-toned labor that took place inside. I stop at a café. Outside, an ageing hippie is reading Neil Gaimon. He smiles wistfully as I sit down with a small, steaming cup in hand. He recalls his first espresso in California in ‘84; he didn’t like it. We contemplate that while we admire the sunshine.

It’s still sunny after my meeting. I take my painful run, and I head back to the hotel. There I stop in the bar to eat and watch baseball. On two sets are the two teams wrestling for the soul of southern Wisconsinites, the Cubs and the Brewers. Both are winning. There’s no smoking ban here. The bartender is pregnant and slow. Her husband is playing video slots. Her two year-old is watching me wide-eyed from behind the bar as I chew my patty melt. This is travel.

Travelogue 227 – May 5
Desert Interlude, or
Escape, the Epilogue

1.16 Did I mention that the ch’at flight out of Bosaso was headed neither toward Addis Ababa, nor back to Djibouti, which was my original departure point for Somalia? No, this flight flies daily in and out of Dire Dawa in eastern Ethiopia.

We arrive in time for a thunderstorm, and we make a dash for the terminal from the landing strip. I tag along with the weary Khyrgistanis through passport control and then out to their van. They have offered me a ride into town. We sit in the parking lot as one of the green-tooths from Somalia argues with the Ethiopian driver about money. After fifteen minutes, I bid them all farewell and run for a private taxi.

The taxi ride provides me with one final spooky moment for the trip. Exiting the airport, the driver slows to shout out to another driver in passing, gesturing back at me: ‘Sidistenya!’ There are five regular crew for the flight. Sidistenya means ‘the sixth’. It’s an odd sort of notoriety.

I immediately check into the old Mekonnen Hotel, across the circle from the train station. It’s been three years since Kevin and I sat on the balcony of my room in that hotel, drinking Harar beer and eating goat meat, watching the crowds below. Sadly, that room is taken, but the room I do rent is a comparable beauty: vast square box painted avocado, lazy fan above the vast bed, and nothing else: all for about $4 per night. The bathroom is a shared one down the hall, but I do have a balcony, and when night comes I raise a Harar beer to great Kevin, wherever in the world he may be this year. Working on country #150?

Before the beer, I have a busy afternoon. First, there’s the airline office. I discover that flights to Addis are fully booked for the next week. See me heave a monumental sigh at that news. All rightie, how about stand-by?

I check email. I do some work. I catch a little three-wheel taxi to ‘Taiwan’. This is what they call the new market in Dire Dawa. It’s a covered marketplace with rows of stalls hawking electronics and shoes and cosmetics. I’m here to change money. Hush-hush, now: that’s black market activity. This Taiwan might as well be where the other one floats for all it resembles the old market in town. Merchants wear jeans and smirks and slouches as confidently as any proud barista in downtown Minneapolis.

The contrast lies one three-wheeler ride across town. It’s called Kefira, the old market. When you go, be sure to enter the market through the arches of the old city wall, erected in the style of the medieval emirate. Inside is one of the great markets of Ethiopia. You enter meandering dirt alleyways under the shade of sagging plastic and burlap roofs hung on crooked poles, tight zig-zag alleyways among small individual stalls where women sit close to the ground among piles of vegetables, fruit, and spices.

In back, Kefira wanders among simple houses at the base of a desert hill. Keep going until you are deposited in the great river bed. Walk upstream in the sand. There’s no water at all, but the width of the channel encourages some meditations on the power of nature. This was the path of the raging waters that swept through Dire Dawa in 2006 and killed hundreds. For most of the year it’s dry. Paths cross it, as do garis, and the sand and rocks are strewn with galaxies of plastic ch’at bags.

To your left, a steep hill descends to the ‘river’s’ edge. Squat houses and primitive mosques tumble downhill in another medieval scene, shoulder-width paths barely discernable among them. In half a mile you’re leaving town.

You notice on your left that the big hill has a side layered in slanting slabs of rock, very tempting for an afternoon climb. It’s a hike worth its gallon of sweat, (though Pete informs me later that there are leopards lurking in them hills.) The view of the region is reward enough, but it’s the other way that you’ll find the richest rewards, descending the other side of the hill back into town.

It’s an accelerated (and perhaps appropriately downhill) tour of history. On top of the hill are Somali-style huts, planted randomly on the open, rocky slope. Next come low, parallel rock walls built to terrace the hill but acting as impromptu zoning among the itinerant housing. Paths follow the walls or cross them where they crumble.

The slope becomes steeper. The walls break; the paths become well-worn and continuous. Houses of stone and plaster appear. Houses crowd and the paths become alleys that slide down the hill at a slant. You reach corners where dirt paths meet stone-paved ones. Houses have crude steps. They have multiple rooms and paint on their walls. Shops appear. Some roads end in courtyards. You reach a road paved with cement. Buildings feature clean lines and ornamentation.

And then, quite suddenly, in a quantum evolutionary leap, you’re dumped onto asphalt among taxis and radios and electronics shops. Welcome to the moment!

Travelogue 226 – April 27
Wintry Interlude

Hey, by the way, I’ve been back in Minnesota almost a month now. It would be hard to imagine a place less like Somalia. (Though there are plenty of Somalis walking the streets of this burg.)

While I’ve been sitting in the café this Sunday morning, the sky has become white again, that stifling shade of white misery, the all-embracing midwestern mucous membrane called weather, gathering us into chill depressions.

How could I have guessed, as my transatlantic jet shuddered down through swirling snow, as I watched the fleet of snow ploughs clearing landing strips, as I glimpsed the familiar downtown towers through the sinister flurries and the familiar lakes covered with films of white, how could I have guessed the evil potency of this omen?

April has seen about three separate visitations of the shivering ghost of winter phlegm, leaving shallow layers of its crystalline litter. The world’s white; the world melts; the world’s a dark and persecuted green; the clouds gather and one eyes them with dread. The timid grasses visibly cringe. Just yesterday morning, there was snow on the ground. It’s the end of April!

I’m exactly where the photo places me. The photo is a good portrait of my life these days. That’s my little work station there. That’s the sturdy Think Pad donated to me and Tesfa. In four weeks, I’ve made a serious dent in its reserves of memory. It houses just about everything Tesfa that doesn’t reside inside human tissue, and I pray daily to the capricious genii of memory chips that the mysterious box will not crash – much as I pray to the cryptic dairy skies for mercy.

The backdrop is one in my circuit of work cafes. This one is Java J’s on Washington Avenue in the warehouse district of downtown. The theme is blue. The theme is dogs allowed. There is a steady stream of cable TV to distract me. They serve wine and beer at night, but I’m never here at night.

The clientele is grown-up hipsters. They have careers and money now. The neighbourhood is long rows of old Chicago-style brick that twenty years ago was decrepit and now is distinguished. It’s a zone heavy with condos, expensive restaurants and design firms.

What I like is that I can walk a few short blocks to the river. That’s the Mississippi River, congenial father of waters, cold and swift. I walk from the Plymouth Bridge down to Hennepin and cross to walk back. This side of the river is all park, and it’s pleasant on cold days. On spring days, kamikaze joggers quickly blossom, requiring all but the trees to make way for their unsightly labours.

Just before the Hennepin Bridge, you can stop for a moment’s mediation at the railway bridge where some mournful soul scribed, ‘Just this, from birth to death ….” It’s a message that appeals to large fowl, I’ve noticed. There’s always a Canada goose or two paddling nearby and gazing sadly at the words.

Anyway, I’m still enjoying the sensation of safe and solitary strolls. Things haven’t disintegrated quite so far in Bush’s America that I need escorts with guns. Not yet. But now I’ll return to the final chapter of the Somali journey.

Travelogue 225 – April 20
Escape, Part Two

Yet more about my Somali lifetime:
1.15 I’ve moved from the sterile Village, where the reptilian, two-toed ostrich struts in the yard and stares at me with its demented Daisy Duck eyes; I’ve moved downtown into Abdurashid’s hotel, the Muna Hotel. I have three beds for about half the price of the Village. The only drawback is the tight little alleyway behind my room where all the children of the neighbourhood gather for screaming relays in the evening.

The gunfire has diminished. The street battles between police and the kidnapping clans had revived by the time we returned to town, but now it’s quiet. Our guards are bored. They sip tea in the lobby watching Somali music videos on the high TV: self-conscious guys with mikes in front of patriotic slide shows.

The hotel isn’t far from the sea. One day we drive the several blocks, supplied with plenty of guns. Arriving at the city’s beach, I discover that the Somalis are subject to the same bizarre logic that drives Ethiopes out of the beautiful mountains and into the drab plain below. Who resides on this choice real estate beside the sea? Refugees in their makeshift tents. In the eyes of pastoral Somalis, dependent for millennia on their herds and the scrub grass of the interior, the seaside is fundamentally uninteresting. Item: the apathy about pirates and foreign fleets stealing millions of profit along their coastline.

In the early evening we sit outside in a pleasant alcove on the second floor, just high enough to see the horizon of the sea. We enjoy a gentle breeze and the sunset colors while the Somalis indulge in their favourite activity, talk. There is never a break in the chatter, even as the soft night becomes deep, black, and quiet as the sea.

We have a companion in the chatter and in the evening breezes. That’s lovely Hodan from Kenya. She’s in Bosaso working a stint with the UNHCR here. She’s more soft-spoken than the Somali-born folk. I’m tutored in the bias against Kenyan Somalis. They’re seen as stuck up. They’re seen as having given up on their heritage and values. Indeed, the ones I’ve met are mellow and relatively sophisticated. They have Christian friends in Nairobi and confess to going out without covering their hair!

Well it is that I’m comfortable in the Muna Hotel because I’m there for a number of days while the airline roulette wheel spins and spins. With every passing day, Abdurashid looks more tired. He begins to despise Bosaso. ‘They’re different, the people here. I don’t know.’ He shakes his head mournfully.

I’m seriously considering the goat boat to Yemen, shivering on an open deck for 24 hours, when the moment arrives: escape. It begins like one of our routine trips to the airport, but when it ends I’m dazed at tens of thousands of feet above the craggy coastal landscape of Somalia. Escape!

It seems that the usual ch’at plane has broken down. They’re bringing in another plane for the rest of the week while the original gets fixed. This substitute has seats and can be classified by the powers that may or may not be as a passenger flight.

I’m rushed into a tiny office. Jama sits behind a desk, and I sit squeezed among five fat guys from Khyrgistan. Jama launches into a florid speech and introduction, consoling the ch’at plane’s crew for their misfortune and expressing confidence that they’ll fix the plane in no time. Introducing me is the occasion of more tsk-tsking about Americans, a cross for all other nations to bear, our blindness, our blunders, this being a perfect case in point, though heart of gold I may house in my wretched breast, coming all this way to help his people, and so on. The Khyrgistanis sit stony-faced.

With Jama’s blessing, we are all crammed into a van and rushed out to the airstrip, where I stand in the sun while the crew tinkers around the wounded plane. They are men of few words, though nice enough. They’re Khyrgistani by post-Soviet nationality, but Russian by blood and language. I find out a little of their story from the youngest of them, who speaks English. They man this flight daily for seven months at a stretch and then go home for four. He smokes a cigarette and stares wearily out into the dry brown distances.

About an hour later, I discern salvation’s buzz in the sky. Among rippling waves of overheated air above the desert ridges, there it is, the sweet little dragonfly that will take me away. It lands among plumes of dust. While the ch’at is unloaded, I’m discreetly guided in through a back door. The ancient chairs are loaded up with bags of Ethiopian narcotics. Some is left onboard for our stop in Somaliland.

The crew climbs in, settles into various open seats around the plane. Several green-toothed old Somalis sit up front and commence the shouting banter that they will maintain for the whole journey. Everyone lights up cigarettes. I can report that cigarettes in ancient prop planes that sway like a dhow at sea and offer no barf bags are a true test of character. I passed, but not without some cold sweats.

Below, the land is brown and dry and carved with severe gullies severely dry except for a few short and rash seasons of the year. For a while, we’re in sight of the bright sea stretching into dreamy hazes, but eventually the coastline veers away from us. I’m sad to see it go.

There’s one stop along the way, Endayo in Somaliland. From the air, you see the oasis of iron roofs among angry rock. Cruising in for a landing, we see the SUVs and their trails of dust as they race us to the airport. We touch down abruptly on the rocky airstrip. The young Khyrgistani suggests dryly that I stay inside the plane, and I don’t argue. The mad ritual of unloading breaks upon us like a storm. The Russians stand outside smoking, quietly and utterly indifferent.

Travelogue 224 – April 13
Escape, Part One

And more of the Somali saga:
1.14 Every day we drive to the Bosaso airport, hoping I will board a plane. The airline that sold me a round-trip ticket in Djibouti has quietly discontinued its flights to Bosaso. Fortunately, Abdurashid has had a little chat with the man who runs the airline’s office (an active little office for one with zero services) and extracted a promise to refund the ticket. It’s a typical Somali encounter. We come to a sudden halt and Abdurashid jumps out of the car. His friend follows. They’ve spotted the man in question at a café. The discussion appears like any other: lots of smiles, hand on interlocutor’s elbow. But I know how direct these conversations can be. Ten minutes later, we’re on our way again.

I should add something about driving in Somalia. Steering wheels may come on either side. Most often they appear on the right. Since general practice on the road is driving on the right side, Somalia becomes the only country I know of where drivers are positioned by the road’s edge, away from oncoming traffic. It’s odd. The reason seems to be a Japanese marketing policy, the discontinuation of right-side models and dumping them cheap in the land without regulation.

Another important encounter is arranged. His name is Jama. He’s a large man, and the first time I see him he’s wearing a purple suit with broad, square shoulders. He towers over the minions on all sides as he strolls down the street. An open-back jeep creeps along behind him, two men manning the machine gun installed there.

They say Jama will run for president of Puntland next year. He has the physique and the aura for it. It’s hard to say whether his withering sarcasm will be a help or a hindrance in Somalia. I’m introduced a few times. The first time he has to cut our discussion short because he has a bad tummy. The second time he’s himself again, indulging in a long eulogy to his guest, delivered with a smirk and sketched out in rambling and satirically hyperbolic periods. Westerners are clearly the favourite objects for his double-edged accolades. In recommending me to the mercies of some Europeans who are travelling out of Somalia, he describes me in very sympathetic terms, while reminding his audience in loving embellishments how terribly greedy, sloppy, and inept Americans are.

In some undefined way, Jama has sway over airport authorities and airline representatives. He promises us to help. But even Jama has little power over the last minute bump once the crowd gathers for the flight, when family and friends of the rich and powerful show up for emergency seating. I’m left stranded a few times.

But it’s by virtue of these cold abandonments that I’m witness to the wild ritual of the daily ch’at delivery. Somalis will tell you that, in a manner very telling about their national character, there are three things you can always count on in Somalia: mobile service, internet service, and the daily delivery of ch’at, that universally beloved narcotic of the Horn of Africa.

Every day, as near clockwork as anything human in this desert, the little prop plane appears like a buzzing fly in the great blue firmament. It bobs above the western ridge beyond the airport like a spider on a heavenly thread. It arrives, kicking up dust along the earthen landing strip. Before the props have stilled, the crazed feeding begins.

About half a dozen beat trucks and vans have been held back by airport police. Now they roar into action, spreading dust and screeching to a halt at the back end of the plane, as a cargo door is lowered down. The bags are thrown down and shouting men swarm, cramming their vehicles full. Within ten minutes the first trucks are full and they scream into drive again, describing skidding turns in the dust while men sway precariously in the back on high piles of ch’at bags. Within the hour, delivery boys in white station wagons will be roaring around town with impunity.

It’s on one of these airport runs, as the dust settles from ch’at trucks that I meet the finance minister of Puntland. He’s caught a ride on the ch’at flight. Abdurashid pushes us to the fore of a small crowd greeting him. The minister seems a sophisticated man. He’s dressed well, and has a soft voice and a pleasant accent. I shake his hand as Abdurashid explains who I am. A TV cameraman records the event. Ch’at trucks rumble past. The moment passes in its own cloud of pollution, and we’re on our way back to the hotel.