Adventure | Now it's a waiting game

November 15, 2024November 16, 2024

Pearl at Butchart Gardens

At the age of ninety-three, her now sparse hair had been dyed metallic-red by accident. Pearl was bent but not broken. Her memory was true only for the years of her childhood and youth in Brooklyn. Everything else came and went like fireflies floating through her mind. But my mother was happy.

She was teaching French to one of the nursing assistants at the Residence. She had the Ph.D. she had never completed and became part of her identity when introduced. “I’m Pearl. I have a PhD. Where did you study? ” The other residents were old, not like here, and had no real intellectual interests. But the staff loved her.

Her mind had slowed and took no more of the flights that had occupied it for so many years. She came to live in the present, without that constant worry of what might come to pass at any moment with the people in her circle of love. She laughed often, a heart-felt gusty laugh that sometimes brought tears to her eyes (and mine). We laughed together like high school friends.

She’d flown three thousand miles across the country with me three years before so I could have her near me. After it had become clear she could no longer live alone in her big house, it was sold and I moved her into the Assisted Living in her town, the place where she had planned to go to be with the people she’d know for over fifty years. But she was no longer capable of living as independently as her younger friends and quickly became isolated and depressed. There were emergency calls to me on the other coast when she became stranded in the Emergency Room or when she wouldn’t believe that she had already been given her medications. I felt powerless to help her.

So I found a place near me where professors and their spouses went when they became too old to manage. They were from another culture than Pearl’s, more nordic than ashkenazic, but I thought she might find like-minded intellectuals. When we walked in the front door of the residence after she’d stayed at our house for the night, she grabbed my arm and tried to forcibly turn me back, whispering loudly, “I can’t stay here! These people are all so old!”

But, they were nice to her there and I could go and visit her often since she was near the office where I went every weekday. I could go catch her when she left the residence on one of her walks “Across town to 42nd Street”. She’d forgotten entirely the middle sixty years of her life and oriented solely to Brooklyn and “The City” where she’d lived for the first thirty odd years of her long life.

Saturdays became “Pearl Day”. In the summer, when we had a market stall selling our vegetables, I’d help my partner set up and start the day. Then I’d hop in my car and drive over to the next town where she lived and we’d spend a few hours together. I took her on little excursions to see the mountains or walk by Puget Sound. She loved the novelty of the Pacific Northwest. “The water! The mountains! We don’t have mountains in Brooklyn!” We’d have a nice lunch in a restaurant or a picnic in good weather.

But it wasn’t enough for her. She needed more real company, more stimulation. I talked to her about hiring someone to take her on outings. She wouldn’t have it. It was too artificial and too expensive.

Then I had a brain storm. I found a lovely woman who had a business providing services to the elderly. She was charming and smart and funny. I told her about my mother and she was game to work it out. I told her about my little subterfuge.

The next day, I called my mother and told her that I’d found a lovely, recently retired woman who was a bit lonely and wanted to have someone to do things with. It even so happened that she wanted to learn French and was excited when she heard my mother was a former French teacher. My mother consented to meet with her and see if they got along.

They got along famously. Her name was Lyle. Even though I continued to pay her for her time as agreed, they became fast friends. They went to the local museums and events. They could be seen walking arm in arm repeating French phrases together, chatting up museum docents and random people they came across on their slow walks and giggling over the antics of children on the boardwalk by the water,

Her memory was increasingly misty. Much of the time, she thought I was her sister. It became more and more difficult for the staff to manage her medication since she couldn’t remember having been given it just a few minutes before. She insisted she had never traveled and became obsessed by making her first trip to Paris (where she had been two or three times before). She began calling travel agents in town, trying to book tickets. We talked about the difficulties of a long, long plane trip at her age. “But my mind is clear! I feel good. I feel young!” “Yes,” was my response, “but your body is ninety-three years old. It’s a bit fragile.” I had to go to all the travel agents and ask them, please, not to sell tickets to Pearl. They laughed and agreed. She continued to try.

To assuage her, I told her it might be possible for us to go together if she consented to hire a wheelchair once we were there. She categorically refused on grounds of humiliation. I insisted. She insisted.”Okay, I said. Let’s take a trial trip. We’ll go visit Victoria in British Columbia because I know it well. We’ll stay at a B&B I know and we’ll go to Butchart Gardens”. She consented. LIttle did I know what was in store.

I booked the ground floor room at the B&B where I’d stayed several times with my partner. It was in a lovely old house in a quiet part of town. The hostess had become a friend.

We drove up to Tsawwassen Ferry Landing in British Columbia and had a wonderful ferry trip to Victoria. She was entranced by the beauty of the islands we passed and by being on a ship on the water.

Once we arrived in Victoria, we had a half hour car trip to the B&B. She was tired and chafed at the seat belt, practically crying like a small child. When we arrived, she was charmed by the owner and we settled into the room. We went out to a nice restaurant and returned for an early bedtime. I was exhausted and after I’d gotten her settled for the night I lay down in my own bed and fell asleep immediately.

I was awoken soon after by the noise of my mother getting out of bed, thinking it was morning. I tucked her back in and told her she needed to sleep. A half an hour later, she was up again. Once again, back to bed.

I fell into a deep sleep only to be woken again by some strange sense and a silence from her bed. I called her name. No response. I checked the toilet. No. I went out into the hall. No. But then I saw a light from under the kitchen door and a sound of a dish being put down on the table. Since it was only two thirty in the morning, I knew it wasn’t Lorraine starting to prepare breakfast.

I ran to open the door and there was my mother, raiding the refrigerator. The kitchen was off limits to guests, the private kitchen of the household. Horrified, I told my mother, “I’m sorry. You can’t be here. This isn’t our kitchen. Lorraine would be very upset.” I put the things away carefully, making sure to wipe up any evidence and lead my mother back to bed.

Now, truly exhausted, I put her back to bed and told her sternly to stay there until I told her it was time to wake up. I didn’t dare to sleep soundly, so I heard her get up again twenty minutes later and, drowsy, by the time I’d gotten myself out of bed, she was already headed for the kitchen.

I caught up with her and guided her back to bed. “But I’m hungry,” she said. “It’s time to get up.” “No. it’s three thirty in the morning. We’ll wake the whole household. You have to stay in your bed.”

I tucked her back in and gave her one of the cookies I’d brought. FIve minutes later she was pulling back the covers to get up. Oh God, I thought, No! Like the desperate mother of a naughty three year old, I said,

“If you get up again, I’ll have to spank you.” “You won’t!”, she said. “Oh yes!” I said. “I will!”

Three minutes later, she was up. I pulled back the covers, strode across the room andI smacked her on the bottom.

“No! Stay in bed!” A bit tearful, she got back under the covers.

Shaken by my audacity, I went back to bed and slept fitfully, attentive to any sound. She rolled over and over, but didn’t get up again till 6:30. I helped her dress and took her to the front room to watch the news on the tv while I snoozed on the sofa.

We had a lovely breakfast when Lorraine got up. The other guests at the table were charmed by this woman past ninety who was knew how to engage them in conversation. It was a lovely fall day. Time for our excursion to Butchart Gardens.

I had been there twice before and knew the layout. It would be much too far for her to walk but they had handy wheelchairs. When we arrived at the parking lot I said “Wait here while I go get a wheelchair for you. It will be a lovely ride through the gardens but too far to walk.” “No wheelchair”, she said. “Okay. We’ll do something else today then”, I replied.

She finally consented. Under duress. We started out on our journey around the gardens where the constant explosions of color and pattern leave you in a state of all-consuming awe. We got to a part of the garden that was quieter and more subdued, a park with a path through. She suddenly said, “You shouldn’t be the one pushing me around. I should be pushing you. “ I laughed and said “Thank you. But I’m fine.” She insisted. She got out of the wheelchair, all fragile ninety pounds, five foot six of her compared to my five foot eleven. I got her to sit again for a few feet, but she started to drag her feet so I couldn’t push. “See. It’s too hard “ she said.

“Okay.” I said. “You can push me.” We changed places on the momentarily deserted path. She tried to push. “You’re dragging your feet!” she said. I lifted my feet so she could see. “Nope.” She tried again and it wouldn’t budge. Just as a father and his little girl came up the path, she started to cry. Oh no! I thought. That father must be thinking, “Right! Elder abuse!” like a good Canadian.

I leaped out of the chair, grabbing the handles so she wouldn’t fall over. I put my other arm around her and said “It’s okay. I understand.’

“I feel so guilty” she said, “that you have to push me. I should take care of you.” I reassured her that this was the way of nature, that the younger eventually have to take care of the older. “But you’re the younger one!” she said. She was still crying softly as I got her back in the chair.

We went to sit on a nearby bench in front of a fountain. I needed to do something to redeem the moment. Her head was hanging in shame.

I said, “You know, I think we can do something together. You feel guilty a lot. More and more. Let’s embrace the guilt! Let’s hug it! Let’s tell it it’s loved. Let’s practice Jewish Buddhism. We replace love with guilt! We’ll start a new religion together! “

I hugged myself. “Oh guilt! I love you! Be big for me! Grow strong!” She looked at me and started to laugh.
“Do it!” I said. And she did.

We both hugged ourselves, kissing the air. “ Oh beautiful guilt! We love you” we chanted. We were both laughing. “More!” I said. We did, more and more, laughing harder and harder until we both had tears streaming down our faces.

We hugged. She got back into the wheelchair. “Where next?” she said, wiping her tears with the back of her hand.

August 22, 2019August 23, 2019

The Body

There comes a time when, in the life of anyone who writes anything, it is the moment to write about becoming old. My time has come. The telling begins in small pieces, travelling around in the infinite spaces. It begins with the body.

Interesting now to stand back in the vastness of my mind and view this body I have both loved and contested for so many years. I have never liked to view it as if from the outside in photos or in mirrors. I can look at it only from far away in the shop windows in cities or as a ghost in my train window as the whole huge machine passes through the darkness. Only then does it appear as the spector it must be.

I “see” it mostly from the inside, my view of my hands, my legs, my feet the indicators of its boundaries. I feel the periodic and rhythmic surging of something in the middle of the space I seem to occupy. I sense tinglings and aches that seem to come from different points in that small bubble.

Ever since this bubble first floated to the surface of this particular world, I have spent most of the time being only that bubble, aware only of what it contained and how it bounced up against furniture, other bubbles, breezes, heavy winds, always trying to float up and away but finding that some force kept it trapped.

It is a body that has piloted my awareness and allowed me to experience the great joy of the senses. It has done miraculous things like master the coordination of nerve impulses necessary to walk, to swim, to ride a bicycle, to dance with abandon, to play a flute with some proficiency– at some point even to run.

It has never been able to coordinate with any brilliance the impulses from this brain with its movement of sinews and muscles, lungs and heartbeats, but it has done well enough to move me through a brilliant array of encounters with the life all around it.

In the past few months, it has become increasingly obvious that it no longer has the resilience I have counted on since the “I” of it began. As appendages appear in view, it is clear that the strange stuff that covers them is drying out. There are strange discolorations. The molecules of the muscles, sinews, ligaments and bone are no longer fresh and flaccid, vibrant with life.

Despite all the lovely vegetables this stomach receives from our garden and converts into humming nutrients, all the little spheres and globules, the pulsating atoms of this bubble are slowing.

All their infinities of activity have brought me here to a place far away from their habitual rounds–to a place where the very air they draw in vibrates with the lives of so many humans. The place is thick with the stories they left in their wake like lines of forgotten poetry covering the floor. For aeons, these other bodies trod over these paths through these hills, drank this water, listened to other generations of the same birds, spoke words, sang songs, loved and died in every way imaginable. Although it knows it will likely be floating around in this environment for some time to come, drinking it all in, t

his bubble that I have called “me” has begun to sense it is joining this coming in and going out, that it too will burst, leaving drops of an essence that perfumes the wind. Begun to accept.

May 14, 2019May 17, 2019

Paris

Paris. A city. A city with the ills of big cities. A city like all cities with a million individual worlds swirling around in its boundaries. A city with such flavor that the whole world holds it in the heart of its imaginings like some living treasure.

We went to Paris from our new home in the countryside of the Ariege in the foothills of the Pyrenees, from the fresh winds of the south to the stinking air of the Metros and wide streets filled with cars and buses spewing carbon monoxide. from the work in the garden and the planning for the work on the house to the city that is so richly imagined. Walter had never been. I had never been there with him, only told him stories of the Paris I had loved in its days after the student revolt. We had just three nights in Paris.

We went to some of the usual places. We walked past the badly wounded Cathedral of Notre Dame where the smell of charred wood still lingers and tourists stand at the barriers clicking their tongues and discussing various theories they’ve read about the cause of the conflagration.

We spent a day wandering in the Louvre until our knees ached.

We wandered in the streets around the Sorbonne and the Pantheon in a thunderstorm and bought little music boxes in a wonderful toy store that we happened on in the downpour. We poked through the book stalls on the quays and browsed the books in front of Shakespeare and Co. We ate in bistros and sipped Armagnac in cafes while we made up stories about the people passing by. We walked under grey skies in the Jardins de Luxembourg and the Tuileries. We took the Metro to the Champs Elysee and bought a Paris umbrella to walk in the rain through rivers of water where the old cafes and the elegance are now lost to the visual noise of Mac Donald’s and Starbucks and arcades. We saw the Tour Eiffel looming as we went by the glamorous buildings of its neighborhood on the elevated tracks of the Metro. We spent hours in the Musee D’Orsay and the Orangerie. And I wandered in the neighborhood of Butte de Calle around our hotel, sampling the boulangeries, tabacs and epiceries while Walter rested—our usual routine.

And there we were, our first day, wandering in the evening near the Boul’Mich to see what had changed, pausing at the intersection at the corner near the Musée de Cluny, idly reading the affiche about the history of the place. Curious about the little ruin I could see through a gate, I popped in to take a closer look while Walter read. There, surrounded by the higher walls around the Cluny, in an obscure little place with a temporary-seeming fence in front of the stone ruins of the Roman bath, the sound and smell of the traffic faded suddenly and trees grew. A man of some middle age with an impulse similar to mine had walked in behind me and had gone to stand at the fence a small distance away. As we stood there quietly, wondering about the piles of stones, a bird began to sing, hidden in the greenery above.

Listening for a moment to its clear notes, a song that seemed not to repeat, going here, going there, lilting pure, I realized it might be a nightingale, the bird I have been waiting to hear for so long, a bird not heard in America. Impulsively, excited, I turned to the stranger there in the enclosure just off the busy thoroughfare of Boulevard Saint Germain, this man with a round sympathetic face, greying hair, unfashionable glasses and said, “Vous croyez que c’est un rossignol qui chant comme ca?” He listened a moment, head tilting up, and said, a bit uncertainly, “Oui, je crois que oui! C’est pas sur mais quatre-vingt-dix pourcent.” He turned to me and smiled a small smile. “Ici,” I said, “au milieu de cette grande ville?” He paused as we listened to the song still sprinkling down from one of the trees over the ruin and, nodding, said, “Oui, c’est ca, Oui. Je pense que oui.” and smiled again his small smile, turning only partly toward me in his deference towards a stranger. We listened for another brief moment, each smiling but not to each other, until the song ended and the characteristic sound of a Paris police car in the distance blended in to the sounds of the traffic going by outside the wall. We looked at each other briefly, smiled down at the ground, wishing not to look too directly at such a moment of fleeting intimacy and, saying our Au revoir, he walked through the gate of the enclosure into the street in one direction and I in the other to rejoin Walter on the corner.

And then, our last evening in Paris, after a lovely romantic dinner near the Place D’Italie where we shared a bottle of red Corbieres from our neighboring region of the Aude and ate duck and perfectly cooked steak (a rarity in France), we were walking back to our hotel when we noticed a man filling a bottle at a big metal spigot in a chrome structure in the middle of a small square. In our village in the Ariege, there is such a place where, although the water is not monitored by the city, it is gathered in bottles by the locals in the same way- from a metal spigot in a stone basin under a sign stating Eau non-contrôlée. Coming down the hillside above it, spring water untreated and uncontaminated by livestock is preferred by the locals to the village water. Watching the man filling a bottle from a spigot set in a public place, it was hard to believe we were seeing a source of spring water here in the middle of Paris, here in a tiny park off the Rue Bobillot in the Place de Paul Verlaine two minutes walk from the big indoor mall at Place D’Italie. Looking at each other to confirm we were thinking the same thing, we walked towards the man still filling a bottle under the spigot.

He seemed neither young nor very old, bent there with his water bottle. Saying hello, stumbling over French vocabulary, I asked whether this water was actually potable. He was immediately animated as if waking from a dream to find us, and, saying, yes, it was good water, held out his bottle to offer us each a taste. We each drank, knowing the other had quickly considered and rejected the notion to decline a drink from a stranger’s bottle. It was good– fresh, cold and slightly sweet. He told us that yes, in fact, it was from a deep artesian well that had been drilled in the nineteenth century, still used by locals.

Reading about it later, I discovered the well is near the Bievre River, where it dumps its overflow in times of heavy rain. The river, still flowing into the Seine, was covered over a century ago and now was somewhere under our feet as we walked. In the lovely old yellow and orange brick building on the park marked Piscine, an old pool draws on the water from the well. The man leaned on a pole to talk with us, saying he had grown up in a nearby neighborhood with a French father and Japanese mother. He had lived abroad for years and worked in environmental engineering. Now had come back to his native Paris where he felt he belonged. We talked more about our farm in the States, our move to France, our shared interest in the environment and water. Each invigorated by the encounter, we said our goodbyes, exchanged compliments and went our ways. As we walked away to go back to our room for our last night, still a bit drunk on wine and happenstance, we talked about water, always so precious to humans, the element around which they gather, how it flows through our village just as it does through Paris, still seeping up in this neighborhood of Butte de Caille, fresh water now more rare than ever.

Here in France where the Neanderthal evolved and lived skilfully till gradually overpowered by the modern humans with their complexities of language, we have gathered around water, rivers and coasts, lakes, springs and streams. We learned long ago to build systems to distribute the water and irrigate crops. But the water that comes directly from the source is the most precious of all. There it is, flowing pure in the midst of the sewers and roads and endless buildings of Paris like the improbable song of the nightingale and the small smile of a stranger with a round face. How we may come to count on such quiet knowledge of the essentials of life, stored by communities against all odds.

March 24, 2019April 3, 2019

We Move (With Stars) to Fougax-et-Barrineuf

When in the midst of danger, it is necessary to clear the mind of fear.

As I look out into the clearing sky, clouds drifting through blue in a silent etheric wind, clarity is all there is. Even the grey of a floating cloud disturbs the mind for only a brief moment in its passage through the window frame.

In the middle of the night, a memory of a possible mistake the day before jolted me awake, its voltage striking out from the world of dreams. At first a gaseous cloud of foreboding, the lights switching on one by one in the rooms of my mind quickly gave it form and color. Consciousness, fully activated, was pulled, as if by some magnetic force, to circling thoughts of all the catastrophes this one mistake would generate. I had no doubt I was doomed. From that small rotten seed, rot spread out in larger and larger circles until the whole world was nothing but rot, crumbling away into nothingness. “No”! I almost called out. Not wanting to wake my sleeping partner, I called silently on all the forces I know, the forces of beauty, the forces of comfort and tenderness “Absorb this!”, I called out in silence, “I’m only one tiny atom in the ocean of life. Let this rot disappear in that endless sea!”

Just then, a flash of light in the black sky through the window. Just at the meeting of dark hill and dark sky, a comet had burned in the atmosphere. Just there. Just at that moment, it’s particular light had reached my particular eyes. It’s just like this that things burn away as they rub against the molecules of air. “There,” I told it silently. “Take all that mess! Take it!” In true comic book fashion, the explosion of light that had happened in some flash in some moment long past blasted the mass of rot to smithereens- “POW!”. Then, reciting to myself all I knew of the basic childhood lessons of falling stars and luck and wishes, I let myself be comforted. I passed back through that hazy boundary, never remarking the passage. I floated into sleep in this still strange house, in this still strange village, in this still strange region of a still strange country.

The cloud of grey anxiety still floats around me like a swarm of gnats. As I did with the ringing in my ears, I have taught myself through long practice to use the immense space inside me to push that fear out beyond the curves of the infinite The “it” of it then exists no more. There is only empty space. I hear only silence. The sounds that penetrate through the delicate bones of my ear dissolve with more than imperceptible immediacy in that vast quiet. They existed but never did.

Then another night arrives and I’m awake in the middle of it, looking out once more at the dark curve of that same hill, stars bright above it in the frame of the bedroom window. The long-handled triangle of Cassiopeia is balanced on two vertices just above the horizon of the hill, the line between the two piercing points of light perfectly parallel to the gentle curve of rising earth. In drowsy relaxation, I watch as the whole delicate edifice of the constellation settles ever so slowly onto the hill. As I drift and wake, I see those two stars are vanishing like bits of smoke into the dark mass of the hill. The whole spaceship of the beautiful queen is sinking imperceptibly into the earth. I shiver, smiling, and pull the covers around my chin, feeling the wind of the earth speeding on its axis.

I’m walking now through the village, exploring, probing. I try not to look like some overly curious tourist, poking into places where I will never return, but it’s useless–the force of my curiosity draws me everywhere. I walk the path by the river and then along the length of the long main street of the village. On my way back to the house, I realize with a kind of sudden ecstasy that the sound of water is everywhere, in the streets of the village and all around this place nestled in hills and gorges, a place where people have settled for millennia—the reason they have been here. The river, the little canals dug to divert the water from place to place, the small stone basins with spigots still running with public water, the open faucets of the laveries where women gathered to wash the family clothes in huge stone basins, the mill races, still running around stone buildings where their water pushed wheels and ground grain, little waterfalls, big waterfalls—all running, playing the infinite musics of water. There are few spots in this settlement, spreading from a central street and a church, where the notes of running water can’t be heard. It’s a flowing village.

The snow-covered peaks of late winter will soon send their melt down as they have forever and the river behind the house will sing with even more excitement. This winter brought snow, late and lighter but enough. We can only look for the rhythms to continue somehow in some new form. We can only encourage them with our planting, our tending of the fruit trees, our preparation, our connection. That’s what we’re doing here, after all.

September 27, 2018November 10, 2018

Settle to Malham and Back Again

When I’m walking I’m happy. Even if I’m feeling miserable, I can feel the misery full on, I can have a talk with it. It can do its real work.

This morning in Garsdale it was clear enough to hang out the wash. By one o’clock the rain had returned and the laundry had to be brought in to finish drying by the heater. But even with the rain coming down, the weather is much more tame than yesterday’s when we were walking across the fells from the village of Malham near Settle, winds of sixty miles an hour or so driving rain and hail across the moors, sheep standing in depressions near the drystone walls to ride it out.

The walk to Malham the day before had been wonderful. Despite predictions of rain all day, the rain came in bits and the sun came in and out, the wind gentle, driving the clouds in their various forms and shades of grey, cloud shadows running across the spectacular vistas of hills and dales with their craggy limestone cliffs and outcroppings, over miles of vast green squares marked off by miles of drystone fences, white and grey and brownish. The rain pants we’d bought that morning kept us dry in the wet spells. Some of the territory was familiar from a walk a week before from Settle–satisfying to recognize a tree, a style, a stretch of re-forested land, a lane, a farm, a turning.

dav

Just before reaching Malham, as we made the choice to take the footpath rather than the Pennine Bridleway, my spirits were high, my heart particularly open. We had just spotted the beautiful oval shape of the water of the Malham Tarn, as lovely as any lake, I’m sure, that I haven’t yet had a chance to see in the Lake District. The sight of it had lifted me further.

Checking the map together, a bit tired, we had a bristly moment of interaction. On the trek down the hill to the village hidden by trees in the bottom of the cup of the wide valley, I had the time to walk with the dis-ease that had suddenly surged up in me, feeling it molded by the effort required to find footfalls through rocks and mud on our downhill climb, softened by the vast beauty of the surrounding hills and cliffs.

This is the beauty of walking. It took a while to make out the actual buildings of Malham, nestled as they are in the greenery by the stream of the Malham Beck. By the time we were close enough to recognize the charm of its setting, the beauty of the stone houses with flowered gardens, the trees bending over the trickling water, I had digested the pain of the emotion enough to understand its origin. We would soon be leaving this countryside, this place where we had come to feel settled for a time. We would be leaving Europe and returning to the US to grapple with the difficulties of immigration, both technical and emotional. Upheaval. Like the motion of the tectonic plates creating the landscape. Ah, yes… My old friend that rumples me, always.

Thirsting for a British beer, one of our last, we headed directly for the inn overlooking the beck, the one over the stone bridge where a willow leans over the bank. It was warm enough to sit outside by the stream, drinking Bitter (which is actually creamy and smooth), feeling luxurious, enjoying the hum of our bodies after their exertions, drinking in the beauty all around us, surprised by the sight of tourists gathered in this isolated spot. The distress that still smoldered was cooling, no longer needing to sear to do its work.

After we checked into the hostel down the road and had a rest in our bunks, we came back for a lovely dinner at the same inn by the water. Checking our weather apps, we discovered that severe weather was predicted for the next day, our walk back to Settle. A big storm Ali, the first of the season, was blowing across the northern part of the islands from the tropics. Eighty-mile-an-hour winds were forecast. Big rain. No one in the village seemed the least concerned.

We went to bed and slept well, dreaming the many dreams as we do every night here in the quiet and calm of the Yorkshire Dales. We agreed to wake up and decide then whether to continue our walk or take the one bus a day from the village to the train station at Skipton. We figured we’d walk if the morning looked at all decent.

It dawned warmish, breezy, grey and dry. We had our breakfast and picked up the packed lunch we’d asked for and set out on the “top” part of the circle walk back to Settle through Malham Cove. Why not try it. As we started out, I had no conception of the beauty we would see in the walk through the cove, nor the wildness of making our way over the high moors in high weather. We watched as a large group of walkers started out over the first part of their walk, evidently prepared, as we were, for anything.

The walk away from the village gives a deeper sense of why it has settled into its nest there in the cup. There it is protected by the trees gathered around the water, sheltered by cliffs and hills at the edges of the bowl. Having had a life there for so long, raising its sheep and cows, mining its limestone, it has blended into its landscape with the sigh of a weary body sinking into a cosy bed.

So nearby, less than a mile of walking over the Pennine Way through lanes and then fields, the limestone cliffs that surround Malham Cove begin to rise up. Just there, dwarfed as you feel, you can see how the little river flows directly into the parting of the rocks. Around the cove, the land becomes a park of green grass, oak and rowan trees, dotted with limestone rocks of all sizes, looking tended yet wild.

For awhile we explored the deep canyon and the waterfalls seeping between the feet of the high limestone cliffs. Eventually, we found the bridge of field stone slabs that takes you over the swollen stream to start the climb up the huge rocks of the other side of the cove. The way is made easier by a seemingly unending flight of huge limestone steps that wind their way along the side of the rocks, their scale like something made for a race of primordial giants, each turning presenting yet more shifting pictures of the widely winding valleys and softly rising hills. Winded, we paused several times to breathe it in.

And then, unanticipated, not indicated on our map, one or two last turnings before the true top of the fells, we came upon the stretch of enormous, flat limestone rocks called a Limestone Floor. Protected from the wind and rain and foraging sheep, rare plants grow in the narrow crevices between these gigantic slabs. The sheer expanse and flatness of it, spreading towards the cliff edges and the horizon, gives a sense of the infinite. We walked from rock to rock for a bit to see more of what lay ahead, but the going was precarious enough to better be left for younger legs.

dav

The weather was holding as we climbed over one rise after another and came to the turnoff to Malham Tarn around a limestone outcropping. A couple whose path had converged with ours turned that way in the building wind. We kept on across the fields to follow the Pennine Way back to Settle, saving the trip to the lake for another day. So much of what we do now contains the piquant sense of a last experience of the place, greeting and parting at once. With places like these, I at least like to pretend I will return. There is so much more.

As we took the left and began crossing the next field to the gate over a road, the rain began. After climbing the first hill up to the high plateau of the moors, the wind was beginning to push the rain it in its characteristic gusts across the fields. Time to stop and put on rain pants before we got truly wet.

We took off sweaty shirts and put on a couple of warm layers. The best would have been wool next to the skin but I at least had a good mohair sweater to put on top of a dry shirt and Walter a fleece. As we tightened our boots and pulled on our wool hats, the wind was beginning to gust with real strength and the rain had started in earnest. The sheep, most positioned now against high dry stone fences or in the gullies, looked at us as we passed, ready to run if we tried to join them, seeming to wonder what we were doing here in such wind. Four miles to Settle.

Here the moors stretched out on either side with little variation. Distant bluffs were hidden in rain and fog. Since I often like to walk faster than Walter, we had a bit of distance between us, a solitary yet linked experience of the walk. At first, still dry and exhilarated from the beauties of the first three miles, the pushing wind had little effect. As the rain began to really pelt and the wind to exert its true strength, the going got a bit harder. But leaning into the wind and crouching down a bit in the most powerful gusts, overcoming a brief moment of a kind of panic, I even welcomed the hail that came next.

We each sang our own songs, the sound of the other’s voice drifting in and out softly, as we put one foot in front of another, the going much slower than before. My feet were wet from stepping into a bog near the last stream and my sweater had soaked up some water through a pocket hole I’d forgotten to zip, my hat was wet, but the wind was not cold. For all its power to push as if to lift you away over the fences and the hill’s edge, it felt like a wind that carried just a tinge of warmth from the place it was born. We trudged on in our singular ways, knowing the other was enjoying the challenge, anxious just enough for the other’s safety to stay close.

Hungry and a bit tired from struggling against the wind, we rounded the corner of a hill the other side of Jubilee Cave, a place in the limestone outcroppings we’d picnicked a week or so before in nicer weather. Then we had sat on the grassy, mossy hummocks with our backs to the cave, enjoying the warmth of intermittent sun and the grand sweeping view of dales to the left and outcroppings to the right. Today, we scrambled into the rocky opening as humans clearly have done for millennia, climbing over pools of water to some dry rocks at the back. Here in the last recess, there was no wind. The quiet was a relief. We were warm and sheltered. We took off wet socks and replaced them with dry ones and shared the sandwich from the hostel. Nothing like it.

Dry and renewed, we climbed out into the still powerful wind that tried to push us back up the hill and wound our way down to the walkway of the Pennine Trail that here goes straight for a way between rows of dry stone walls. The rain had stopped for a bit and the walls gave some protection from the wind. We felt a renewed sense of happiness, a buoyancy. The Dales had given us a chance with a different dimension of their beauty, the power of their wildness.

As we approached the gate where the other path comes down from the larger Victoria Cave, three young women with a couple of small dogs were organizing themselves as they came through a field gate, looking at a map. We asked if they needed help. They were dressed fairly lightly with no hats and seemed unconcerned about the weather. I suddenly felt overdressed and a bit fuddy-duddy.

“Oh, no,” said the one without a dog on a leash. “We’ve just come out to do the circle but on the way up we were attacked by some cows in a field. They were running after us and kicking at us and the dogs. We’ve never seen anything like it! We had to run for the gate. Fortunately, it was close enough to get away and put a barrier between us. Unfortunately, we can’t go back up through that field again to do the circle so we’re trying to figure out whether we want to go up the other way.”

We confirmed that it was, indeed, a very unusual event for cows to attack, especially if they had no calves.

“Maybe it was the wind that disturbed them,” we agreed.

Evidently deciding to call it a day, they trotted off merrily ahead of us in the direction of Settle.

“Hmm,” I said to Walter. “Hearty English!”

As the rain cleared off, the wind dropped and the blue patches of sky began to appear, our jubilant mood spread itself out over the whole landscape. The path down to Settle is beautiful and now felt familiar. You can see the towers of the old textile mill at Langcliff as you turn down to the left along the hills. The limestone cliffs on the hills over the town loom to the left after a quarter of a mile or so and the whole town stretches to your right in its bed in the valley, limestone quarries guarding its flanks.

The green of the fields around you and the misty colors of the distant fells and dales is such a satisfying background to a walk that you feel you could just go on that way forever, thinking of nothing and then thinking of something for a bit, tossing it around, following it in its several directions and then releasing it into the fresh air–being captivated by some form, some color, some particular grace of motion, some particular beauty of light while all else disappears.

I am happy when I walk, even when I’m not happy.

dav

April 23, 2018April 24, 2018

The Going Out

Now it’s a rush of wings, a flight towards an open door. The farm is sold, all but the signing on the dotted line. The airline tickets are bought and paid for. The objects that remain must be dealt with, each held in the hand and a decision made—in the trash, to a friend, in one of the few boxes for a small storage space, in the small suitcase. Overwhelming.

But soon everything will be done. The things designated or sold will have to be dispersed within days, the eyes looked into so many times looked into again, deeply for a moment, and the body that somehow contains that world held close and then released, the ache of longing coming to take up residence in my heart.

We will be homeless for now. All that we retain must be needed either for the journey of a few months or for the time when we will send a few boxes across a continent and an ocean to a place where we will settle again, perhaps grow some vegetables, plant some fruit trees and live for however many days we have.

Just as when we leave this body, we must discover what is important to retain, what is most precious. What we hold on to is not what we think we might possibly need someday, the insurance against some contingency, but what clings most adamantly to our essence. Over these past few weeks when things have come in a flood, wiping away every moment of space in the time of my days, it is my writing that I have yearned for from waking to sleeping. It has become an essential element of life, as necessary as the act of participation, the absorption of all that beauty in whatever combinations of elements await me in that time between the opening of my eyes from the world of dreaming and when they close at night.

One type of waiting may be over, but another more encompassing period of waiting remains. That waiting before the going out, that waiting each day for the closing of the eyes, the dreams, the deep quiet, the encompassing silence, the loss of all objects that cling, all thoughts that stick to the space of the mind, all emotions that swim in our waters. Gone. Gone. Letting it go.

February 22, 2018April 9, 2018

A Window in Time (Part 5): Greece, The Arrival

There is a purpose to this exercise. It is an exploration of that interior space where imagination and memory meld their etheric essence. It is a practice, a meditation.

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We were gliding. It was a big boat, full of people but, although they must have rocked us gently, the waves meant nothing. Once we were away from the busy harbor with its sandstone and buff-painted buildings shining along the shores, it was only the presence of dark blue sea and islands, first in a kind of mist on the horizon and then in the bright glare of the full day’s southern sun, gliding past like mythic backdrops. Lovers leaned against each other on the benches on deck. Children ran with a parent in their wake. I was already entranced.

The four of us claimed two benches linked back to back by spreading out our meager gear, sitting near a young man carrying a guitar without a case. We sat together or walked when we felt the urge, our Greek friend chatting with other passengers from time to time, interpreting for the rest of us in mixtures of French and English. As the sun set and the night sky thick with stars emerged, the sea around us became infinite, pricks of pure white light in swaths poking through the black ink.

All the other visions of that journey are lost in that spreading well of night. When consciousness returns, we have made our way from Patras to Athens, most likely on a bus that went for hours through the night. My fresh, sharp senses were filled with the incredibly sweet fragrances of the countryside of Greece—the smell of grapes and jasmine mingled with the scents of roasting lamb and garlic and rosemary. It was a revelation that awakened something deeply joyful in the middle of my chest and spread a wash of light in my head. And then we were there, in Athens, Syntagma Square in August of 1969.

We naively had waltzed, as young Americans could, into a country that, with the tacit approval of the CIA and the American government, had been under the rule of a right-wing military junta since 1967. The huge photos of its appointed Prime Minister, Papadopoulos, dominated the square and were present everywhere. Back at home, concentrated on the war in Vietnam, finishing our high-school years, we had no awareness of the iron rule of military law in this country rarely discussed in the news, the torture going on its jails, the exile of countless journalists and politicians and the repression of civil rights. Now it was jarring, somehow inexplicable in the context of this city both modern and ancient.

In Athens itself, what evidence existed of this horror was behind closed doors. The atmosphere in the streets seemed flowing and free. It was not until we travelled with our Greek friend to his hometown south of Athens that we began to feel the palpable pressure of repression.

In the heat of the full day, our friend led us through the huge square to one of the spreading streets leading away from the vast open space into the wide avenues of the city. On the ferry, he had told us of his plan to stay a couple of nights at–of all places–the YMCA of Athens. the safest and cleanest cheap place to stay. He asked us to join him. He had stayed there many times before on his way from the ferry to his family home in Glyfada.

He navigated us down the sidewalks of Stadiou Avenue, lined with tall white business buildings, and into another street that began to feel more contained–first-floor shop doors opening one after another into small groceries, restaurants, clothing shops, cafes partially filled with people. It was not a city of crowds, but yet had a sense of a vibrant humming of human life. We were tired and hungry. It was almost unbearably hot, well over a hundred degrees. The pavement oozed with the smells of concrete and asphalt and piss, the beautiful smell of roasting meat and garlic wafting from somewhere on the sides on every block.

One more turn and down the street. In front of us gleamed, in the hot sun of the late afternoon, a three or four story building with many windows, modern, lined at street level with white pillars–the Y. We checked in at a desk on the first floor and paid for four beds, two in a women’s room and two in a men’s.

My blond friend and I climbed the white wide stairs up to the big room where several beds were made up with simple coverlets and pillows. We seemed to have the place to ourselves. It was stifling hot, with a ceiling fan turning slowly and big windows facing out onto the air above the street, open on their sashes as far as they could go. Everything seemed to be white and spacious, the heat, the walls, the beds, the sounds of traffic and occasional shouting voices in the streets, horns, the pulsing ambulance sound of European cities. It felt like swimming in waves of heat, wanting badly to come up for air. We lay down on two of the small beds near a window in this sauna of white light and sweated into a drowsy state and then sleep.

We may have slept on and off until a hot morning light seeped into our confused washed-out heat dreams. We dressed and went downstairs to the cavernous cafeteria. Our two friends were already sitting at a table with bowls and plates of food spread in front of them. Our curly headed Greek/English friend, Ion, playing host in this country of half of his DNA, came over to show us how to order. There were ceramic pots of white yogurt with a skim of yellowish cream on top, figs, grapes, white bread in hefty slices, pats of butter, honey in a pot to drizzle by the spoonful on the warm bread, and cups of hot Turkish coffee. The yogurt was the creamiest, smoothest, most deliciously tangy sweetness I have tasted in this life. We ate well, enjoying the bounty of cheap fresh food, chatting about plans.

We were only there for a day and another night. We chose to go directly to the Parthenon.

As we walked out the front door onto the street, the force of the heat hit with all its weight. Though still fairly early in the day, the newspaper vendor where Ion stopped for a copy of the English language newspaper told him that the thermometer had already hit 43 degrees Celsius. As we had travelled across Southern France and then Italy, I had begun to shift my sense of the relative temperature scale and now could gage that anything over 32 was really uncomfortable. This was already orders of magnitude above that tipping point.

We walked along wide avenues and then down more winding streets, older, more packed-in, the huge rock of the Acropolis topped by the graceful columns of the Parthenon always within view, always a presence, the orientation point of the universe of this strange jumble of a city, messier and more complex as it approached that nexus.

We wandered, stopping to look at vendors’ stalls, talking as we walked about our trip to Ion’s hometown on the coast the next day. I was young. I remember little of the heat’s oppression, but I do see the steps up the side of the huge rock cliffs as we began our climb to the Acropolis, the height stretching upwards, Ion translating the remarks of a Greek family, also climbing, that the thermometer had reached 120 degrees Fahrenheit. On another day, a climb that would have meant little to bodies still unaccustomed to limits now felt almost insurmountable under the burden of the sun’s fire.

But here we were at last at the feet of the Parthenon. Breathless with the climb, we stopped for long moments to adjust our senses to the vastness of this spreading plaza, seemingly littered with huge boulders, broken columns and monumental marble buildings, partially in ruins. The sense of ancient beauty, ancient poetry, was like a fragrance of light incense over everything, wafting up and disappearing in a miasma in the burning heat. The etheric beauty of yesterday’s trip over the deep blues of the sea, the islands purple as we watched them glide by, still present like a refreshing taste on the tongue, offset the heat and the enormity of the climb upwards, even in its subtlety.

It seems to me that the same self that I can touch now was stirring deep inside, gathering itself still, soaking in through skin dripping with sweat the experiences swirling around it, rather astonished as always to be there, as to be anywhere on earth.

As we had climbed, the image of the Parthenon floating somewhere behind my eyes was a presence well before we emerged at the top of the hill, a plane of rocks, columns and carved human forms. As we took the last steps, it felt as if we were emerging from a dark sea into the air above. That climb, that emerging from a place of rough, heated rocks and sweaty effort to a level place with stretching vista has echoed in my dreams, transforming over time.

And then there it was, huge, spreading in the near distance before us, a perfect rectangle somehow still despite what had fallen or crumbled from its remains. A symmetry of suggested space, looming there against the bright blue sky, it existed in a place in time and space that was mysteriously part of a continuity of the universe within, vast, containing now the turquoise sea, the fragrances of jasmine and grape, the sounds of waves, the smells of a classroom now in some time past, the call of the voices of strangers, the pricks of light in the ink of night.

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January 31, 2018March 9, 2018

A Window in Time (Part 4): Race Across Italy

We moved up the road a bit to be out of the crowd of people trying to find a ride over the border into Italy. The weather I remember was that perfect temperature of the Mediterranean at the height of summer, the light the perfect light of the coast, bright yet full of contrast. We were content to just lean against a guardrail and wait. I was the one to stick out my thumb at the roadside, a young blond woman in shorts.

It may have been hours. It may have been minutes. A medium sized truck stopped and motioned for us to climb in. We gathered our things quickly and jumped into the back which was all packed with sacks. As we started through the border, I could see the Italian Carabinieri standing in groups on the other side with their high brimmed hats, dark blue uniforms and white bandoliers across their chests. They looked distinctly threatening, like holdovers from Fascist times. I braced for barks of authority as we reached the customs booth. But all went well. We jumped down off the end of the truck and presented our passports. They were duly stamped by officials who smiled and said “American, ha!” as they looked from my face to the passport. We climbed back in, Michel waving to a group of Carabinieri as we passed. They smiled. He said, “They actually look friendly!” “We’ll see.” I said.

The next two or three days are a blur in my mind’s eye. We must have taken the faster autoroute, the A-10 up away from the coast, bypassing around mountain towns. I remember only miles and miles of hills full of dark trees, small fields up against grape vineyards, and small towns with red-tiled-roofed houses in what must have been Liguria. And then into the region of olive groves, through to Bologna. Somewhere along the way that first day we got a ride with a truck carrying local table grapes to market. The drivers let us sit in back with the roll-up door open and motioned with hand gestures for us to eat all we wanted. We sat with our backs braced on crates of grapes, comfortably watching the scenery unwind behind us, eating grapes and throwing stems out the open back. I remember the fragrance of the grapes and washing our sticky hands with water from a big plastic bottle but nothing more.

We must have gotten stuck in Bologna for awhile, waiting for a ride on the outskirts of town. We never went into any of the cities we passed. There was no time. We had to make our rendezvous for the ferry in Bari in two more days. We ate what we had in our packs and snacks bought at wherever our rides happened to stop. There were long periods of waiting by the road. It is all a blur except for one night spent in a grape vineyard.

It must have been late evening when we stopped travelling, dropped off by the last ride of the day. We looked around in our darkening surroundings and saw we were on the edge of a large vineyard. The soil under the vines was smooth and inviting. The ground felt cool after the heat of the day. Tired out, we walked back into the rows out of sight of the road and spread our woollen bags under the vines.

The soil was soft and fluffy, a perfect place to stretch out in relative comfort. We had no consciousness of the probable toxic herbicides and fungicides we were breathing in the dust. Lulled to sleep by the surrounding silence and the new fragrance of ripening grapes, we slept soundly until morning light.

There is nothing else I remember of our journey across Italy, although there must have been some difficulties. Maybe it was just problems getting rides that stretched out the time, but we were late for our rendezvous in Bari. The day must have arrived when we were still at some distance down the A14. We must have been worried. Our friends might have bought tickets already for the ferry, counting on us to arrive as planned. If we were late, would they leave? I’m sure we doubted that, yet there would always have been some tiny element of uncertainty. Our mode of transportation meant we had no control over the speed of travel. I faintly remember some irritability between us as we stood by the side of the road for hours with cars passing us.

When we finally arrived in Bari, we were twelve hours late. My memory is filled only with the large concrete buildings around the ferry dock, large boats in the harbor. It was morning when we finally got out of our final ride, the morning after the departure of the ferry we’d planned to take. We found our friends rather quickly in the waiting area for the ferry. As soon as we spotted them, we ran across the hall calling to them and hugging as we met. There were apologies and stories of the days we’d spent apart. They were clearly also road-weary eyes, anxious glances, hair a bit uncombed. It must have seemed to all of us, standing there together, that we were looking into some strange mirror. When they had finally realized we were not arriving for the ferry the night before, they knew they must spend the night in Bari, but by that time there were no hotel rooms available. They had managed to stay in the small apartment of an odd man from Romania they’d met at the ferry terminal. They’d had been glad to make it safely through the night and out early in the morning. As part of the tumbling stories, they told us that the next ferry for Greece wouldn’t leave for another few days. We would have to travel down the coast to Brindisi where a ferry left the next day for our destination, Patras, on the other side of the Adriatic Sea.

Michel, now torn with the prospect of going to Greece, decided he did, in fact, need to get back to Strasbourg and see his family for the rest of the summer. He had promised. He left us that day on a bus, hoping to see us once more in Paris at the end of our trip. It was never to be. That was the last we ever saw of him, waving goodbye from the window of the bus, standing in the aisle, tanned but with tired eyes, crouched over a woman in the seat.

Now it was just the three of us, standing there suddenly feeling a bit shy of each other, strangest for me to be alone with my friend and this man I had know for only a day or two. I remember the run into the ferry terminal from our last ride, bags flapping around our shoulders, the wait on the line of people boarding with bags of grapes, bottles of wine and suitcases, duffles and backpacks—families with several children, couples old and young, young Greek men returning home from some job abroad, jovial and rowdy, a few young Greek women with a grandmotherly looking figure with a shawl, a group of tourists, shepherded by a young woman speaking English—a whole crowd all flowing up onto the three deck ferry, heading out across the wine dark sea.

The wine-dark sea. The peace that passeth understanding. The passage to the land of myth, the land of heroes would be a long one. We wandered with the crowd looking for a place to sit and spread out our gear. There was a quick consensus that the top deck was the best place to be. From there we would see the sea and the islands as we steamed along and feel the fresh air in the possibly bumpy waters of the Ionian. We found a bench next to a big metal box full of life jackets and settled down as the huge ferry pulled away from the dock. From where we sat, we watched as the multicolored two and three-story stucco buildings moved by us, gleaming from the shore and we passed through the wakes of the tall-sailed blue, red and green yachts in the harbor out into the more open turquoise water.

January 6, 2018January 14, 2018

The Rocks

We climbed towards the enormous red sandstone arches feeling the blood of our bodies pulsing in the warm light of late afternoon, the cold air pushing and pulling with its rushes of strength, the blackbrush and sage shrubs leaning this way then that in the gusts.

Feeling the weight of my feet, dragged more by the force of gravity than I remember, grateful to reach the platform of rock under the unimaginable grace of rock arching over, I stopped to watch some children running up and down the sloping red rock above me.

A young father, slim and bearded, sat at the top of the slope beside the opening of the arch, an arm around his young daughter, who, not much more than two, plump legged, yellow-haired, pacifier dangling on a cord from her neck, rested only for a few moments in the ease of his protection. She watched her sister for a while with great attention, a lithe girl of six or seven, barefoot, long blond hair tossing behind her, running up and down the steep rock slope, chasing her two also barefooted younger brothers who then turned and chased her, up the slope, down the slope, full of the bursting energy of the first bloom of youth. The littlest girl then quickly squirmed out from the arch of her father’s arm, turning backwards, finding footholds to climb down the rock. The father climbed down next to her, arms relaxed, attentive but calm.

Further down, near me, the mother called to her littlest boy to see if he was ready to come down with her. He shook his head vigorously, no, ducking into a small rock crevice and out the other side, swooping up the jagged rocks again after his brother. The mother called up to her husband, “I’m going down. I’m a bit tired.” He called back acknowledgement as he walked, hand in hand, with his tiny daughter, across the top of the slope beneath the grand arch.

As I climbed up further, I watched as the young man showed the tiny girl where to put her feet on the rock wall leading up to the opening of the arch. He helped her kick off her boots so her feet could more easily find the places where rock would hold them. She climbed easily, finding footholds, her father beside her on the rock, not too close, letting her feel her balance outside the sphere of his protection.

An older man was beginning his descent from the opening of the arch where he had been sitting. I had seen him there from the back, sitting still for a long interlude, absorbed by the wide view beyond. Now the man was awkward and hesitant, a counterpoint to the tiny blond girl, uncertain where to put a foot, how to find a firm way down. Leaving the baby on the wall for a moment, the young man moved over to help guide the older man’s faltering feet on the rock. The little girl continued her climb on her own, close in to the rock, easily finding the next place to put a foot. Her father, relaxed, returned to climb up next to her.

The two finished their climb, side by side, reaching, at last, the rock platform stretching under the arch. He held her hand lightly as she climbed up to the narrow shelf whose delicate breadth I could not judge adequately from below. He sat down beside her, an arm draped loosely around her once again. I watched as her small blond head relaxed against his side. They sat that way for some time, the father pointing from time to time at some feature in a distance certainly full of the glowing light of the coming evening.

The older man, humble in his anxiety, made his way down to the more level ground, grateful to have safely found a way. Soon, the father and daughter made their way back down, he coming first, reaching up and holding the tiny girl gently around her waist as she found her first footing, then descending alongside. The older children had not yet slowed in their running, climbing, hiding and chasing, the mother calling for them to start their way back.

As we all started down the path as the early sun was already beginning to make its orange way down to the horizon, I turned to the mother.

“We’ve been admiring how nimble your children are. I wish l was so agile.”

She said “Oh god yes! Me too. I have to just let them go. I can’t hold them back–they have so much energy to burn.”

As I walked down behind the group, children running ahead, barefoot still on the cold rocks, I thought about my own children and now grandchildren. My fear of the harm that might come to them in the immediate moment, has it prevented them from learning things that will keep them from the real dangers of being a human alive in these times? Did the culture that surrounded me shape my teaching to prepare them for a world that is fast changing into something more dangerous, more challenging?

In that magnificent rocky land where people have lived for millennia, finding water and growing and hunting food where there seems to be none, surviving amidst the beauty, it is easy to become absorbed in imagining the lives of these ancient relations. Over the years and years that we live in parallel tracks in time as children and parents, as overlapping generations, as beings becoming ancestors, we go back and forth in this balancing, finding the edge between survival and annihilation where the skills to survive are born.

My children grew up in a time when some of us had begun to see the limits to the comforts of our culture. But they and their children are still embedded in a culture that seems to see only some endless present of limitless energy, of technological fixes. It will be up to them to find the skills to survive without the comfort and protection all this excess of energy has provided. It will be up to them to find the footholds in a new terrain. I hope the love of those of us rapidly becoming ancestors has guided them well enough. I hope they can draw on its nourishment as they climb away, over the rocky ridge, out of our site.

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November 26, 2017February 22, 2018

A Window in Time (Part 3): Through the Countryside of France

Diving into memory trusts that the image you see in the puddle by the roadside really contains the world you see there, clear and distinct at first, then fading in the depths to hazy sky and treetops.

I plunge and swim in the worlds deep in my mind, following some dreamlike trace of story, some images bright and distinct, others misty from the decay of their cellular traces. The story continues.

We slept for awhile, piled on the bed behind the driver in the cab of the big trailer truck, dozing through a stop in Marseille to load something more into the truck, waking finally with hunger pangs. We were somewhere along the Cote D’Azur in the afternoon, the sun brilliant, the air coming through the open windows, hot, with vistas of the turquoise blue sea. Do I see the same sea that I saw then, or is it the sea of the southern coast of the Mediterranean along the shores of Northern Algeria, the way I saw it so many years later, the color of that view of that sea taking the place of all others. The Mediterranean viewed from both sides, as in some ancient journey, blends its colors.

Stopping somewhere by the road so the men could eat their lunch, we bought some cheese and a baguette at a little store around the bend and a watermelon from a truck by the road and made our own meal. The driver showed us how to cut the round melon with one swack of a big knife, splitting apart the sphere with strong hands, revealing the bright red within. We gave them each a chunk, wiped our mouths on a dirty towel he threw us from the cab and climbed back in for the rest of the trip to Cannes.

They dropped us off with friendly waves on the main street before turning off to the road to the produce market. Hot and dirty, but excited to be in this famous spot, we decided to take a swim in the Mediterranean.

We crossed the thin traffic of the main thoroughfare, lazy in the height of the afternoon, and climbed down some stairs to the narrow beach where people strolled in couples and small groups. No one was swimming. Swimming beaches, it seemed, must be somewhere else. With the day passing there was no time to search. We would have to get well out of Cannes to find a place to sleep.

We walked along the sand until we came to a place where the rock wall provided a little shelter from the view of the street. Feeling rather furtive, we stripped to our underwear and waded in until it was deep enough to swim.

The water was deliciously warm and clear. We laughed and splashed each other, feeling the dirt and sweat of the road dissolving away in the gentle salty waves. The bottom was rocky, clearly not meant for swimming, but it suited us fine, but we were quick about it. We didn’t really care for the idea of some police spotting us and deciding it was a good afternoon’s joke to haul us in for breaking some city rule. We hurried to dry ourselves with whatever we had and put on some less recently used clothes.

Finding our way back up a flight of stone steps, over the bottom road and to the main street where lovely sleek women and men passed in and out of the entrances of grand hotels, we walked along the sweeping arch of the bay, feeling talkative and gay, refreshed.

When we came again to a spot to stand on the side of the street, we stuck out our thumbs. I think it wasn’t long until a small older car pulled up with a young man driving. He motioned us to get in quickly since the cars were piling around him. We jumped in with Michel in the front and slammed the flimsy metal doors.

He, too, was in a talkative mood, a student happy to find young people from America to tell him new things. He was on his way back to Nice at the end of his day and was eager for us to meet his wife. He would ask her, but he thought it would be no problem for us to stay with them at their apartment for the night. They were going to a street festival in the old part of Nice that evening and would be delighted if we would come with them.

The beauty of moments, one after another, of freedom from care, somehow protected and guided by sheer, sparkling joy, is what remains to me of memory from that drive along the Cote D’Azur, with the dazzling bright blue of the sea always present, even when obscured by the grand buildings and hills. We had so little to weigh us down–money, responsibilities, physical pains, none of it of any weight at all. Few desires even pulled us from the beautiful light of the afternoon.

There was a small place in some neighborhood of Nice where a door opened and husband and wife kissed and we were introduced, but only little shreds of those memories remain. What I can recall in its vivid colors in the warm, soft air of a Mediterranean evening is the small square paved with ancient stones where, later, we all went together, nestled somewhere back away from the lights of the seaside, tucked away in the spreading streets of the old parts of this pre-Roman town, hidden to all but those who live there.

How memory holds these experiences, almost complete in all the dimensions of the senses, held there somehow in the chemistry of the synapses, shimmering, deep somewhere in the vast dark light of the mind—unfathomable.

The square was strung with colored lights. A hum of anticipation in the twilight. An appetite for music and dance was clearly growing as people began to flow into the square to eat together, energy building, chattering in that lilting flow of French. Families and friends split off one after another into one of the restaurants grouped around this warm center. These restaurants seemed to have no distinct boundaries, flowing into each other, tables in alcoves and courtyards, most built in the same stone with deep, framed windows. We had somehow come upon a Spanish festival here in this southern French town. Cultures merged. There would be Spanish music, Spanish food, Spanish dancing.

Our new friends motioned us towards their favorite restaurant. The owner ushered us to a table in an alcove opening out onto the square. There was a kind of perfection in the spot, both intimate and part of the activity of the whole. Our hosts ordered a paella which would take some time to arrivenand a big bowl of Sangria with slices of the fresh fruits of the Mediterranean floating on the top. Our hearts and guts warmed quickly with the wine. Talk began to flow easily. With the strange candor of the French, our hosts gently pried out some of our most secret desires, unknown even to our friends whose eyes widened from time to time during as they listened to the answers the tellers barely knew themselves.

The paella arrived in a huge steaming iron pot somewhere into our second bowl of Sangria. The fish was fresh. There were langoustines from the sea, succulent, supremely delicious. We dipped big ladles from the pot into our bowls and devoured it with chunks pulled from loaves of warm bread.

Our friends told us the cook here was Spanish and had helped initiate this festival some years before on the day of some obscure holiday. He revelled in the fact that he could, for once, serve as much of his treasured paella as he could cook.

We ate and went to dance together in the crowd in the square. Then we ate some more. There was teasing about who would dance with Michel the longest and some complications of emotions in the gay, drunken whirl, but, somewhere in the early, early morning, we were all back at our friends’ apartment where bedding and mattresses were pulled from somewhere. We all fell down on them and slept the sleep of the dead.

The pictures deep in my mind of the next day were lost in some darkness, but I have been reminded that sometime late the next morning, heads still fuzzy, our new friends drove us to the Italian border, where, in those days, passports were checked and decisions made about who would be turned away. There was evidently a crowd of people waiting to cross the frontier into Italy with a large presence of the Carabinieri which I remember distinctly, with their tall leather boots and uptilting hats making them look like models of the idea of Mussolini fascism.

Our friends dropped us off with kisses on each cheek, pressing us close, and got back in their car and drove off, back towards Nice. We shouldered our packs and walked up along the road towards the frontier.

As we waited our turn to have our passports checked and to answer the questions, we talked with other young people on the scattered line. Just before we crossed over to Italy, a young man with the profile of a Greek statue and the tight curls of the head of a Greek hero approached us. He was curious about our little group of three and wondered where we were going. We said we thought we would go to Greece.

He told us his name was Ion. He had dual Greek and British citizenship and was headed for his annual summer trip to his mother’s hometown of Glyfada, a seaside town north of Athens. As we went through customs, we continued to chat.

On the other side, a crowd of people were gathered, many looking road weary, dusty and tired. Some held signs saying they had been waiting days for a ride. There were young and old with various luggage and with thumbs extended. We sat with Ion by the side of the road, sharing food from our packs, assessing the situation.

He said that in August it was particularly difficult to hitch a ride since so many people were headed to Italy for vacation. It would be particularly hard to get a ride for three. He suggested we split into two couples and hitch independently to the town of Bari along the Italian coast where we could catch a ferry to Athens. From there he would take us to visit his family. We settled on a date and a time for a rendezvous at the ferry dock.

My heart was suddenly heavy with anxiety. It was clear from the language of their bodies that I would be alone with Michel for the first time in our friendship. I was afraid for my friend who would travel with a stranger, no matter how friendly and trustworthy. And then afraid for myself, travelling alone with Michel who clearly I could trust from experience to keep us safe but whose last boundary of intimacy I was very hesitant to cross. I feared both the crossing of it and the possible rejection of that crossing, all at once. I had assumed his attraction for my friend. But somehow we were now stuck with each other. I was stymied, face to face with something an hour earlier I had not even anticipated.

My friend and Ion walked down the road a bit. She stuck out her thumb while he sat back on the metal guardrail next to the road. I, too, put out my thumb, Michel behind me, both standing in our position just within their sight.

We were off to Greece.

Category: Adventure