Monday, December 23, 2013

Strange pilgrims.


"It was as if God [...] was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay."  - Gabriel García Marquez 


"Oh.... ¿Hotel del gringo?"
"Sí, sí... hotel del gringo."

It's by that name, not its official one, nor the detailed address I repeatedly give that the other mototaxi owner knows where I'm asking to go. He then instructs the confused younger driver, the one I'm behind on the moto, and after the simple directions we're back off again. Two more turns and it's still my visitor's eyes that spot it first. Hand-painted yellow butterflies around the English words "Gypsy Residence." Like my "sí, sí," my confirmation of "Esta aqui" is muffled through a mouth shield. I take off the motorcycle helmet and pay him an inflated tourist fare, the crumpled green and red pesos equivalent to $3 US instead of $1.50, and I approach the gated door of the man I already know as Tim Buendia.

It's a decision I had to explain away two dozen times. Why instead of the Caribbean beaches, hammocks, and huts of Tayrona, I chose a meandering trip inland to a city of about 25,000. A sharp two-day detour away from Northern Colombia's worn backpacker circuit to a town with one hostel and no hotels. An odd pilgrimage during my first trip to South America to the hometown of the author whose liquid words brought the continent texture to me and made it an imbued land rather than an empty box to check. The too'aged writer who melted the houses of Aracataca into the ethereal atmosphere of Macondo- Gabriel García Marquez. I came to the streets that inspired him so that I could see something of what he saw. And while he long ago abandoned Colombia for Mexico, the nostalgia of Cataca for the labyrinths of a more northern modernity, something of what existed then still echoes. The pedestrian miracles that made his realism a magic one, biographies imbued with the impossible.

Tim is the town's only hostel owner as well as its only English-speaking tour guide. He came in 2008, opening his Gypsy Residence two years later, at a previous location on the farther outskirts of town. At some point, he abandoned his Dutch last name for the more surreal surname Buendia- that of the lineage woven in García Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. And while I don't remember where I first read the article that mentioned a hostel had opened up in the small hometown of García Marquez, or Gabo as he is lovingly known, I knew immediately what it symbolized to me- the coming end of the South America's solitude. The creeping'in of the Twenty-First Century, a second coming of the Banana Company's arrival that changed the lives of those generations a century ago, when international interests entered the grove villages of this removed continent with the new imperialism of unrestrained capitalism. One that brought a barely-concealed slavery and pillaging of both land and culture, flooding broom'swept casas with payment in the form of vouchers for kitchen appliances rather than a living wage. Massacres of still undetermined numbers when the machine guns held by white hands spit metal into brown skin by the thousands, for the galling crime of demanding a day off and pay above the poverty line. The United Fruit Company left long ago, both the Macondo of Gabo's stories and its inspiration of Aracataca; I saw its buildings decaying from behind a fence that kept myself and generations of the town's true residents out. But with South America hosting both the World Cup and Summer Olympics in the coming 3 years, with airline routes expanding and Europe growing increasingly domesticated and homogeneous with every passing EU session, there's no doubt the world will turn increasingly to South America for a rush of the unfamiliar and brave. An influx of visitors that will make English more prevalent and will for the first time divorce the unfathomable from the everyday.

But as of this December those crowds have not yet arrived. And for the two nights I'm staying in the town's only guest lodging, I'm also its only customer, the only foreign tourist walking its streets. And while I can communicate basics and rudimentary conversation spoken in a constant present-tense, my three years on Bs in Spanish lessons aren't enough to keep away the solitude of my foreign tongue. So the night before I take the day-long tour with Tim, he is considerate enough to take me out for a drink with his wife and eight-month old son. Like me, she grew up in a suburban town in Southern California, so while I can speak semi-passable Spanish to the tienda owners of La Hojarasca, a cafe named after one of Gabo's early novellas that's located next to the house where he was born, it's first-language English I'm getting to know Cynthia with, along with Tim's Western European fluency. We drink fresh fruit nectars more refreshing than beers as their infant son laughs with his impossibly innocent smile, which spreads to the nearby abuelas. The couple's love is a beautiful one to witness, absent of Gabo's darker recurrent themes; without the solitude of the true Buendias or the melancholy of Amaranta's shrouded hand. It's also out of place with the subtle but present misogyny of modern Aracataca- the images of bikinied import models airbrushed onto seats of the motos that snake around the carreras and their hungry dirt. Or like the recently-deceased resident, Perro Negro, an oak of man that fathered 39 children before dying, my guess is from exhaustion. From this stagnancy of gender and antiquated mores, something of their love stands apart. And if such disconcordance is obvious to me in the first few hours, I think surely it's been noticed by them as well. A rift that only amplifies their expatriate solitude. 

The next morning Tim and I set out and turn the circle of focus on the Aracataca I'm coming to know so that Macondo can appear. He's wearing his typical ensemble- a straw hat and an ankle-length sarong, while sporting a walking stick. A wardrobe that makes him "feel like a character in a Nobel Prize winning novel" as he says repeatedly. He urges that I also take one of the dozens of straw hats to shade from the aggressive sun. And while I grant him that, I decline the offer to also carry a walking stick. The first 20 minutes is more a tour of Tim's life than Gabo's, as we stop again and again to chat with townspeople Tim has befriended during his half-decade in Cataca. But it's equally enjoyable as the advertised itinerary, for in that way I meet the town, like the 95 year-old man, ten years older than García Marquez, who used to visit the ice factory by the river to see the workers cut the large blocks of ice into manageable portions. The venue that inspired the iconic opening line of One Hundred Years of Solitude

The tour takes us through scenes from Gabo's life and his novels. The train station, his grandparent's home with the workshop for the hand'hammered golden fish, like those of Colonel Aureliano Buendia, the Cataca river that germinated both the town and its name. To a horse'drawn cart that Gabo rode in in 2007, as he was slow'paraded around the streets of Cataca in what will almost surely be his final visit to the place of his birth. It now sits rotting in the "forest of magic realism," another of Tim's charmingly grandiose go-to lines. And the more we walk through Aracataca, the more of Macondo that seeps through. Our meandering pace through dirt streets is slowed even further by the darting of roosters being raised for cockfights, past blue'eyed dogs and stray pigs foraging through weeds and Caribbean shrubs. Walking with the soundtrack of a looped radio commercial shilling for a clothing sale ahead of the coming holy day. Through minute cups of lemongrass tea at dusk with a parrot inspecting the mismatching china from shoulder. Our strides trickle lazy like the brushstrokes of the residents who are repainting their houses, as they traditionally do every December in anticipation of the New Year- a tradition in Aracataca and the hundreds of small villages like it throughout Colombia. Tim and I eventually walk through the mostly waist-deep river, its soft sand forming to my beaten soles still sore from my trek to Ciudad Perdida. With school on holiday, children are spread along the banks and in the stream. A group of five boys huddle as one of their number preps a future meal, gutting and skinning a dead animal we eventually recognize to be a large iguana. Like almost everyone else does, the boys stop to look at us, we two bearded gringos in straw hats walking in tandem- a John, a Jesus, and a River Jordan. The lead boy gestures to his chest with the knife that simultaneously magnifies and dwarfs him and puffingly proclaims, "Soy macho." The boyhood need for masculinity more dear than the life of the endangered reptile he's beheaded. But we smirk and walk on, because we're neither native to this land, nor its moral judgments. And because to our left, two other boys are sprinting along the top of the water, their soles turning the liquid to solid and back again with each frenetic step, racing ethereal in the afternoon. There must be hidden sand just below the surface, but these are the children of Macondo, and so I'll never truly be sure.

Given such abundant magic, visible even to a brief visitor like myself, it's difficult to comprehend why the crowds are not already here. With so much of Marquez's inspiration prevalent, why for now its only pilgrims are strange. Only those that dream the very deepest. Those longing to indulge in and exercise their solitude. Aracataca has weathered the occupation and abandonment of the banana company without growing callous and modern, neither from internal industry nor external influx of tourism. But several times during our walk, Tim and I stop to purchase tiny bags of water. Little overstuffed clear tubes the size of a lone enchilada with corners we bite and tear to puncture. This is the only thing I can drink out of, as well as what I must brush my teeth with at night. The river we walked in, which somewhere along the line holds the discarded heads of iguanas, and torn bicycle tires, and forgotten t-shirts I can somewhat read through the opaque brown liquid- this is the town's water supply. Which is either untreated or so minimally it's effectively useless. Years of corrupt politicians skimming money and broken campaign promises have anchored the mundane to the magical, married the tedious to the divine. It's failed to bring the basic necessities to its citizens by not creating an effective water treatment plant. And it's also kept that money away from the dusty sites of García Marquez, choking the nascent tourism it claims to desire. It's a large reason that Tim's Gypsy Residence is the only hostel in the city, and why when he closes it in February, in less than three months, leaving Aracatca so his wife can pursue opportunities in California (a more northern modernity not unlike Gabo's Mexican expatriation), Macondo will once again be accessible to the outsider only in the pages of books.

Tim tells me that his move away temporary and I want to believe that is true. While I'm wary of a South America flooded with outsiders watering down its cultures, I still don't want to be one of the last Gabo-loving gringos to walk the sand beds of the Cataca or to stand in the cemetery atop crude but honest'built crypts at sunset, seemingly at eye-level with more African palms. I'm rooting for a middle-ground, a preservation of the balance that exists now; not because it's perfect, maybe simply because it's what I'm used to. Tim has an optimism that the town will grow, that the needed tourism infrastructure will be laid, and that at that point he will return to Aracataca and be able to showcase Macondo once again. New Gypsy Residence and all. I support his decision to leave completely. Not only because I want his son to have the comparative luxuries of a California childhood, or for his wife to be back near her roots, but because I want to read the book Tim plans to write about his time in Aracataca. For him to develop fully for readers the city that I can only begin to hint at here. And because I know from my experience of thirty years and forty countries that when there's a chance for our burden of solitude to be lifted, we must take it. If genuine, such authenticity can keep away our otherwise suffocating and melancholy reality.

My last night in Aracataca, I sit reading One Hundred Years of Solitude on a wicker bench in the Gypsy Residence. A few hours earlier I'd walked the museum grounds of Gabo's childhood home that also served as his birthplace, as the spore from which Macondo would later spring. Passages from his novels and his memoir that begins in the very house I'd stood were affixed to walls in large acrylic letters. Not many, but some of these individualized letters were fallen, missing, a small hint that kept bothering me for what it symbolized. That still'sandy infrastructure that had also allowed a regal cart to rot in an African palm forest a few miles away. From twenty feet in front of me Tim calls out "We've lost one of the great leaders of our time. Nelson Mandela." After taking time to think of his legacy and life, I inevitably returned to the lens of Gabo. The eighty-six year old author who is now living in Mexico, with the ruin of dementia feasting harder, his writing career most assuredly over. I thought about the future day when I'll make a similar proclamation about him. Is that what it will take for Aracataca to become a more popular destination? Death what is needed for proper recognition? Am I a pilgrim in the days before a flood? Or one decades after it's already crashed..... Given the poorly-planned infrastructure, the semi-corrupt government, the apparent declining importance of literature in younger American and British and world generations, the inescapable breath of solitude this city exhales, I come to accept that this city may never become the destination that either Tim or myself believe it should be. That though South America will surely come in from the obscure, the distanced, not every city will come along with it. That the life of García Marquez and the city that cradled him may pass undeciphered to dust like Melquíades' scrolls.

Shortly after we walk that afternoon through the ancient former ice factory we meander towards one of the central monuments the town has built to García Marquez. Like most of the tour that 95+ degree day, we aim for shade when we can, squeezing onto narrow sidewalks and crouching our 6'4" frames beneath overhangs of green life. Tim shows off his resident knowledge while he still can. It's depressing to think how few more people will receive a such a passport into Macondo.

"You know what kind of tree this is? Look at the fruit." I silently evaluate the tiny green baubles of potential until he finally helps me out. "Mango."
"Mango? That's surprising- mangos are a heavy fruit and those are very thin branches."
"Yes. Not many mangos survive."

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Blood sugar trek magic.


If you notice them at all, first you notice the leaves. Tiny green confetti conveyoring across the jungle floor, crossing the narrow ambiguous path that leads me to and from the terraced ruins of the lost city. It's the surrealism that grabs your attention, the leaves marching along on their own, at a stutter pace like frames are missing from the projection, until you bend carefully down to see the cluster swirl of fire ants, little burning clouds along the ground as they transport the leaves seemingly without end. An internal existence of motion and burden that appears charmingly impossible when viewed from the outside.  

Even though I knew it was a projected construct of my own, just the harmonious nuance of nature when viewed in detail, I couldn't bring myself to step on them, again and again and again. Actively avoiding what to most others would be a total afterthought. And so they became another reason for constant awareness. The unending vigilance that is the trek to and from Ciudad Perdida, the Eighth Century lost city in Colombia's Sierra Nevada mountains that I wanted to be my first experience on the South American continent. Something primal that few areas on earth could offer and a chance to experience a continent chronologically. To examine its roots before exploring the myriad paths they've stretched. 

In addition to stepping over the ants I was stepping carefully around muleshit, horseshit, through caked clay mud that hasn't solidified for over two months during the constant downpour in the rainy season that just ended. This while stepping on rocks slick with streamwater and destabilized from the steps of other hikers. But for the first three days, these were afterthoughts. Far more of my focus was on the impossible vistas, the mountains upon mountains and falling curtains of tree tops in the distance. And also on the spaces far closer to me, the overhangs of kudzu vines strung like permanent lightning above our frequent swimming spots. The god'stature leaves the size of canoes dwarfing us further. Reaffirming our existence as transitory in comparison to the unbroken eras of barely'touched life we plunge through. It wasn't until late on the first day that difficulties arrived with the fabled afternoon rains and rather than firm steps we slide through an orange muck, fellow hikers around me falling constantly. My footing miraculously holds, at least on that first day, even though I'm taking leaping strides and windmilling arms for balance, drawing some wry looks from another of the American trekkers.

"Sorry.... I'm having far more fun than I should be."

We reach our first camp by the last few minutes of daylight and spend the dark hours with cold cans of cerveza Aguila, colder showers, and tightly-packed hammocks that rock uncontrollably in the freezing night. We wake before the sunlight does and set off only as it's beginning to reveal the land around us. In our views of that second morning, dozens of pockets of sunken clouds lay attached to the earth, like dew on a grandiose scale, and their reluctant release takes most of the day before it finally occurs. This ten mile leg includes the most vertical stretch of the path and coincides with the most intense heat of the entire four day journey. The tangerines we stop for raise our blood sugar enough to keep us fueled, the dusty powder leaving the orange flesh as it's peeled just as reluctantly as the morning clouds. It's on the second day that we see the first of the indigenous peoples, beginning with a cherubic set of children in rough ponchos. We're told by our guide Nicolas that our presence as tourists is viewed by them as a necessary evil. While part of our fee for the hike goes towards government programs for their health care, we're bringing our modernized ways to a place still sacred to them. Deciding what Instagram filter best suits the site where eighty of their shaman are currently gathered in prayer and discussion. We see a cluster of their straw huts, an infrequently used village occupied during various ceremonies they hold. While the Irish and American girls try to coax the java'eyed children into photographs, I'm distracted by the coca shrub Nicolas has pointed out, growing conveniently on the fringes of the ceremonial huts. Because while technology and culture divides us irreparably, narcosis bridges, as it always does. And as I slowly chew a small handful of the leaves, that familiar numbness warms the bottom of my face and for the next several minutes, the greens and blues around us race to my eyes more sharply. 

The next I see of the indigenous is in the afternoon, a group of three women with their hands clasped in either prayer or revulsion as they stare shock'faced at the blood pouring down my shin. Whatever luck I had earlier in the mud I used up because when I finally do fall late in the second day it's from my poor footing on a narrow ridge of rocks. The speed and height of the fall, along with the weight of my backpack, allows me to turn a full revolution sideways in midair, before my left knee cracks audibly on another line of rocks, leaving a rapidly swelling bump and six scratches along my leg. When we reach the second camp about 90 minutes later and I clean the wound I see that one is particularly deep, an instant scar. Enough so that if I were back in New York or even the coastal city of Santa Marta, I'd go in for stitches. But since I'm a 2-day trip into the jungle removed from anything close to a triage, I rely on borrowed antiseptic and naked hope to avoid infection. So along with the mud of the too'troden path, the loads of shit from the pack animals that make the same trek as us to carry food, the omnipresent mosquitos (one girl in our group finished the trek with 80-some bites) and my constant lines of ants, the second half of the trek has the added burden of a limping knee. To those, toes that hammer in with every step as we walk back down, stopping my weighted momentum in every footstep. Add ankles that turn constantly after they've turned just once, as they swell to the size of my calves, purple and yellow with more blood pooling beneath the surface of my skin.

Our four day path is far more arduous than my cocky self-assuredness was anticipating. Given its remote location and the effort involved in reaching it, my surprise isn't in that Ciudad Perdida lay hidden until 1971; it's that it was discovered again at all. It was grave-robbers fueled by legends of buried gold that found it, three centuries after it was abandoned and some one-thousand three hundred-years after it was initially settled. Our group once again recrossed a river to reach it, this time up to most people's waists, before ascending nearly two-thousand stone steps to the terraces of green'furred stones. The site itself is fascinating, if simple. This is not Angkor, nor Machu Picchu. The terrace stone foundations are all that remain, the straw and mud huts that sat upon them eaten long ago by time. A military encampment with twenty or so soldiers overlooks the site. And while the uniformed teenagers and with their massive rifles do not want to be photographed, a few of of them eagerly take ours when asked politely. After our descent and recrossing the river yet again, beginning our boomerang path back the way we came, the first thing I encounter is a butterfly swarm. A dozen tornado'round in front of me, like García Marquez's Mauricio Babilonia is walking among us. The Colombian jungle foreshadowing the next journey to follow my current one.

What the butterflies failed to signal was the difficulties ahead. To the list of physical burdens is the mental one that comes with the idea of retreat and covering retrodden ground. Of staring down at my feet for footing in descent rather than the stunning panoramas enveloping us. Add to it as well the burden of guilt we feel when passing our last set of indigenous people. A boy and girl, both younger than eight, they stand in one of the few flatlands of the journey. They boy looks at me sternly. I haven't seen my reflection in 4 days, so I'm not sure what it is he sees, if anything beyond my white skin. As I near he barks "Dulce?" in the tone of interrogation. He remains silently unimpressed after my reply of "No tengo." We all stop just 2 minutes later for more tangerines and small bananas and breathlessly an exhausted voice addresses the group.

"Did any of you give that boy candy?" It's the Irish girl, the one who eagerly coaxed the ponchoed toddler into a few photographs in her first encounter with a native. "I gave him my Oreos and he just stared at me. He wouldn't say thank you; he didn't even smile at all." I stay silent as well, thinking tiredly of the narrow line between touch and contamination. Of how Nicolas also said there are some tribes in these mountains that have never been contacted by the modern world. Their only external interaction is with a very small number of the shaman of the other indigenous tribes, and even then on extremely rare occasions. I finish my banana half and wonder which of the two interactions will resonate with the Irish girl longer.


After the pause to further refuel, we take up our backpacks again and continue the wending path down the mountains. As usual, I hang toward the back of the bunch, not out of lacking physical ability but my recurrent casual meditation. Savoring the last few painful kilometers of my first excursion in South America, in the form of photographs taken and views appreciated as I breathe slowly. We bunch back up towards the end and again my eyes look down to find the proper footing, seeing another swirl of the interminable population of ants, their leaves turning sharply like green kabuki fans. In their lifetime they'll only meet an infinitesimal fraction of those with whom they share a fate. From the others they are geographically unconnected but burdened by the same instinct. They live, doing what comes naturally to them, one of the only activities they know how to do properly. All throughout the jungle floor of the Sierra Nevadas, the ants march along, their weighted burdens poised above them, as the line of trekkers walks above them carrying their hiking packs through the mountain path.



Sunday, November 3, 2013

Hollywood way.


The drive starts at El Coyote on Beverly where I'd eaten lunch with my mother two decades earlier, though this time it's a Sunday dinner to close the weekend with an often'missed friend and a few others, a surreal turnout so utterly Los Angeles with introductions of names followed by the soap opera they're currently on but I have to leave early for my red'eye flight out of Bob Hope Airport and after one Pacifico and chips with heated salsa I walk out the door of the storied Mexican restaurant that's down the street from my old apartment on Curson with the view of the Hollywood sign from my rooftop and the piece of curb down below where I'd said my last goodbye to my first love, and now I'm now navigating these known streets with a different car, a red Corolla rental rather than my black Prius, up Highland where on my first trip to California my mother bought me my first two comic books at a newsstand, issues of The Punisher and a reprint of Spider-Man's first appearance, outside the Ripley's Museum I went to with my father on our first ever father/son outing and in which he got self'conscious after weighing himself on a giant scale, a solid 260 pounds of vulnerability, and the rental climbs across Cahuenga by the Hollywood Bowl where I first saw Radiohead play back when they were my favorite band and I make a right turn onto Barham Boulevard and pass the Oakwood Apartments that were my first home in California, when I was an eight year'old addition to the swarms of child would'be actors playing in the complex's pools as our mothers laid in deckchairs comparing audition tallies and Disney casting calls, the lettered buildings so close to the Warner Brothers Studios and their massive vertical billboards rotating with the latest movies and syndicated shows and it's after those that Barham which is now Olive veers right before my quick turn left to drive up Hollywood Way where the first street I pass is Riverside which means a left turn would take me to my old apartment, my favorite one growing up, that one I wish we hadn't left, and a right turn would eventually take me past the okay one we lived at after, during high school at Providence which is just two blocks closer along that same street, but tonight I'm not veering, no tonight I'm running out of time and I have to go straight, and it's straight up Hollywood so I can rush back to New York City away from the friends that gave me the best weekend I can remember and one that dwindled too fast and I think for the first time about what it would be like not to go back and never have to say my "I'll be back in a few months" that I cling to like a mantra and this shit usually gets easier if I turn up music but on the radio KROQ is in commercial, so I'm listening to something unfamiliar on Star and thinking of two nights earlier while driving on the 10 when it was my great friend Nicole's voice along the airwaves telling her listeners across the Southland she was going to play Chvrches for her friend Josh who's visiting from New York and ten minutes later announcing "This one's for you, J2" before Lauren Mayberry oh'ed us into "The Mother We Share" as my welcome home but here tonight it's both a band and a DJ's voice I don't know who isn't greeting me but instead letting me know I'm listening to a local showcase called Close To Home and that the time left in the show is awkward because it's not enough for a full song but too long to just talk and ramble so he plays another one by the band I just heard because the short ones, the quick ones, they're their specialty, and I see the lights of the airport already which I don't want to accept because even with everything familiar already behind me I don't want this to ever end and I try prolong it but I realize that it must and that no matter what I can't.

Friday, October 25, 2013

Story of a city on the evening of a war.


At first the Dempsey jersey draws some double-takes. Some palpable disbelief. A few smirks and tongue-in-cheek nods, like I'm playing with fire. Hope you know what you're in for.

In Bosnia, football is deeper than religion. It's identity. Sarajevo has only a little of what could be called street art, but it's filled with graffiti. Ugly scrawls like prison tattoos mainly marking territory, name'dropping for what in England would be called firms, or in America simply gangs, dedicated to football teams, with larger clubs having several competing ones. In many cases identifying with the team is secondary to your supporter affiliation, your barra brava. In Mostar I thought the "Red Army" tags I saw everywhere were holdovers from the Croatian War, or the Serbian forces from the onslaught of the early Nineties. War'cries still audible from decades ago. The truth is the same basic idea, but wrong timeframe. The Red Army is the supporters group for FK Velež, one of Mostar's two football teams. I know this because I met one of its footsoldiers. My hostel owner's nephew who drove a small group of us around Herzegovina explained that FK Velež is the club for Mostar's Bosnian supporters, traditionally unapologetically left-wing (he openly expressed his deep love for General Tito, the Communist leader of Yugoslavia who died a good decade before he was born). Velež is the bloody rival of HŠK Zrinjski, Mostar's other football team- this one supported by Croats and the extreme right-wing. A city's people divided by loyalties only ostensibly about the football on the field, but more'so a way to suggest the War is more dormant than truly completed, aggression merely sleeping. The frequent riots and clashes between the two groups, the fact that he changed out of his Velež shirt when crossing into a Croat and Zrinjski neighborhood to avoid instigating a fight, pretty much supports this.

Everywhere I go in Sarajevo, I see Vedran Puljić. His image is stenciled all throughout the city like an obscure Che Guevara. In the Baščaršija, on buildings across from the cathedrals, south of the Miljacka River, and sprayed huge on a heartfelt if artistically-lacking mural upon the city's Olympic stadium. He's dead, of course; no living person stirs such genuine loyalty or iconography in a free society. He was a supporter of FK Sarajevo, 24 when he was killed, apparently by police, during massive hooligan rioting between two firms in 2009. Couple that allegiance with the implied open rebellion against police authority, a romanticized subversiveness, and you not only spawn a dangerous legend, but announce to the observant visitor what it is the people around you hold dear.

So yeah. I knew what I was in for. Maybe not the same as traveling to an away game at Azteca (no bags of urine raining down from above) but every second I had on a US soccer jersey on the day they were playing the Bosnian national team, I was, by definition, the enemy. Because empty name aside, there's no such thing as a friendly. 

Game day was my fifth and planned final day in Bosnia, a country I've been strangely protective towards since it came into existence in the early Nineties, and that I'd only come to love more when actually visiting it. The elderly hostel owner had taken to me immediately, playfully chiding me for Americanizing how I pronounce my last name, away from the traditional Polish inflection. I was welcomed back from an overnight trip to Mostar like a prodigal son, with kisses on my cheek and a proud announcement she'd not only kept my same bed reserved but made sure my other four dormmates were now women. "Like a harem. Just for you." The city's bars were simple but absurdly fun. Tall tables set out along the sidewalk, even on the opposite one across from the actual bar, people huddling around with an open sky above and the city around, a palpable enjoyment of summer and the optimism such heat brings. On my second night out I met 3 members of the US team I'd be watching in a few days who had just arrived in Sarajevo from their various European clubs. I wished them luck in the game before giving them advice on bars around the city. An hour later, we then met Bosnia's star player, Edin Džeko, and watched as cars double-parked abruptly in the narrow street so kids could run out from the passenger seats for a picture with him. The food, the scenery, the breathtaking women, everything a perfect payoff for the twenty years of anticipation toward finally coming to Sarajevo. So it was difficult for this city, filled with everything I'd come to love so quickly, to be against me, even if it was just for the evening.

The cab never shows so the four of us walk the mile and a quarter uphill to the stadium. The American, British, and German girls with me all adopted Bosnian gear, my lone US shirt lost in surrounding royal blue and yellow, rivers of Džeko jerseys weaving through the bullet'ridden streets stronger and faster than the Miljacka. We arrive at the overflowing stadium shortly before kickoff, but still with time to pregame at one of the two adjacent bars, since we recognize our hostel owner's son at one of the tables. As we got closer to the stadium, to gametime, the novelty factor of the Dempsey jersey wore off and rather than smirks from the occasional passerby, it was stares from packs of scalp'shaven men, whispers and neck'cranes and more whispers. We finish our bottles of Sarajevsko and start off toward the stands, saying goodbye to the dorm owner's son and to an older man in full yellow and blue gear who'd been speaking to me exclusively in Bosnian and laughing at jokes I could guess at but not comprehend. I offer my hand with an "I think you'll win 3-1... We'll at least get one... Good luck," and he returns the shake with a smiling "See you after the game" and when I try to pull my hand away he won't allow it and then repeats, this time minus the smile "See you after the game." I nod a deadpan goodbye and enter the stadium with the girls, and we take some of the only remaining seats which are the rows to the front, less'valued because of the ambulances and sideline boards obscuring the view. Not to mention you're that much closer to the giant metal fences of chainlink diamonds, the old pens banned decades ago in England after 96 supporters were crushed to death at Hillsborough. Walking down to the front, my back is to the Bosnian crowd behind me, my DEMPSEY nameplate drawing even further attention as the only American supporter in our entire fenced'in quarter, one of only about 20 or 30 in the entire stadium of twenty'four thousand. 

When the Bosnian team takes the field there are flares, and chants like penned'thunder from throughout the ground after each of their two opening goals. The Bosnian fans, and yes my accompanying German, English, and American contingent, stand to drum on the plastic seats in celebration. I just grin the appreciative smirk of the outsider, my loyalties too rooted to join in or to be pleased with the scoreline, but seeing the people of a city I love so happy is an acceptable consolation. At halftime a number of fans go to the section's concession table which is two men pouring paper cups of Pepsi from a 2'liter. When the US scores a harmless goal ten minutes later ("We'll at least get one") there's little distraction from the continued buzz of Bosnian domination. But the second US goal that comes just 4 minutes later is met with anger and immediate looks towards me from the fans around. I don't celebrate externally, I'm reckless but not an idiot. It stays at two'all for almost half an hour, which seems like the perfect scoreline, everyone leaving with at least an exciting game, but then Jozy Altidore scores two more American goals within three minutes, the first an absolutely filthy free kick, and the final consolation goal by Džeko doesn't lighten any moods or make my walk home any safer. It ends 4-3 to the US and despite taking my jersey off after the fourth goal to salvage a little anonymity on the walk back down the hill to the city center, I still get a few "Have a good night Dempsey"s from disappointed Bosnian fans. But thankfully far less stares and pointing mumbles.

I manage to find some of those other elusive American supporters afterward and my celebration goes too long. I miss both my alarm and early morning flight, making it to the check-in counter 15 minutes too late, but just in time to see a contingent of the US team checking-in beside me to redisperse back across Europe. The conversation with my cab driver back to my hostel starts with the game, but quickly shifts topics to the city, the women, the film festival that's about to start and the round'the'clock parties it brings with it. He recommends I stay to experience it and the only thing holding me back from doing that is reality, not emotion. Because I no longer feel an outsider, not the enemy of last night's expired conflict. Still an American and still my Sarajevo and in my last few hours in the city before my overdue departure, these two designations find a proud harmony.

Friday, October 11, 2013

For rebecca.


"To my friends in New York, I say 'Hello,'
My friends in L.A., they don't know
Where I been for the past few years or so,
Paris to China to Colorado..." - One Republic


I was turning around to leave again just eighteen hours after arriving, so that's why I was in the small car. My backpack accompanying me to make for a quicker goodbye. That was the logical decision made in the morning by Miran, the forty-something owner of the eponymous hostel in Mostar that I'd stayed at for a brief night made briefer by the unreliability of Eastern European trains. The ones delayed by the extensive border checks between fledgling countries that loathe one another. 

I took a train rather than a bus from Sarajevo to Mostar because of Rebecca West. Her six-week journey through then-Yugoslavia on the eve of the Second Great War is retold in the extensive and impossibly-dense Black Lamb and Grey Falcon; it's the essential book for any serious traveler to the Balkans, despite now being eighty years old. Reading it in modern day means you're doing so for its philosophy, its musings on how life once was before the contamination of the contemporary reached the villages comprising her trip. It means reading with the cruel hindsight of history she, for all her wisdom, lacks. As a travelogue, it has little use; in its twelve-hundred pages of minute descriptions, what quaint civilization wasn't razed by modernity was devoured by warfare. That of the '40s, the '90s, or our newest century- take your pick. But I rightly assumed one experience of hers would hold pretty true from her era to mine. I chose the train rather than the far more frequent bus because of Rebecca, and because there are only so many paths a train can take out of a valley. Only so many ways out of the holes we dig ourselves in. Eighty years can pass, but the train tracks in impoverished countries pretty much stay in place. 129 kilometers of travel at the speed of honey, letting her and I both centipede past the same massive earthen sharkfins rising out of jade rivers. Through nature stunning but unstrategic, in the World War she knew would surely come and the civil war she didn't.

Still, because of its earlier delay at the Croatian/Bosnian border, the train is two hours late in getting to Sarajevo and it carries me into Mostar past eleven at night instead of just after nine. Past the point when the hostel's social circles are pretty much solidified, or at least when there are no longer empty chairs left around the table to sit with the large group on the patio. Which was fine aside from the twinge of jealousy that the cute blonde backpacker also staying there was already flanked by other eager guy travelers. Another road fling never to be. So instead of conversation with the blonde, or any of the others, I chose to wander the city by night. Walking on Mostar's shined'by'wear cobblestones convexing streetlight back at my eyes, as I followed a many'folded map from Hostel Miran to the Old Bridge that spans the Neretva River. Stone leaping above the water as it has for almost six-hundred years, save the decade following its arbitrary destruction in 1993 during the Bosnian war, and prior to its replacement in 2004.

I wake in the early of the morning and it's back to the Bridge again, while it's still mine with minimal sharing. Mainly an old Italian couple and a local man walking his dog to have in my photographic foreground. I'm on the banks of the trickling Neretva before the arrival of tourists and the preening teenage boys goading money out of them, promising to dive the 30 meters off the Old Bridge to the water once the collection reaches 25 Euro. I get back to the hostel for their semi-famous day tour, the reason I chose to stay there in the first place. Before we head to a Dervish monastery perched above a river, or to a hilltop Ottoman fortress, or to Herzegovinian waterfalls, Miran splits our group of 15, me and the fourteen occupied seats from the night before, into two groups. And that's when I'm assigned into the small car with the other 2 backpackers who will also be taking the evening train back to Sarajevo. Two early 20s Brits, a redhead named Aidan and his friend that looks like the offspring of Eric Bana and Frank Turner. Along with Miran's also early 20s nephew, and an Argentinian backpacker, our tiny red car keeps pace with the larger van. Sitting in the smaller car means I'm missing out on more commentary from the absurdly colorful Miran, so rather than anti-establishment anecdotes and the more-than-occasional tactless sexism, the five of us talk football. Of Villa and Fulham, of the Bosnian star Edin Džeko, underutilized striker for Manchester City and current god of Sarajevo, who I'd met while out drinking a few nights before. Of how Džeko donates constantly to Sarajevo children's programs and hospitals, as he too vividly remembers being a small child during the city's Siege. Our young Bosnian driver is also an ultra- think English hooligan without the beer drinking. Just the fighting and flare'lighting, and the confession about how he has to change his shirt between stops because we're entering a mostly-Croatian part of the region where his team's colors and badge could easily provoke violence. Football loyalty being the proxy form of freshly'remembered war. In addition to football, Miran's nephew is also a huge basketball fan, and when he finds out I'm from New York he eagerly asks me about what seeing a game in Brooklyn is like, in the house that Jay built. Of how Barclay's compares to the Garden or to Staples Center in LA. 

For us five the words and jokes all come pretty easy and in between the sights that were advertised is an experience less tangible that wasn't, and a realization I miss one more thing I never realized I lost between LA and New York. It's the simple act of riding in a car with friends. Windows down, sunshine in a heatwave summer, and a soundtrack subtle in the moment that turns Pavlovian the next time you hear it. It was Dre 2001 back in senior year, usually in Vince's 80s Bronco, grabbing breakfast burritos from Corner Cottage or weaving around the Burbank hills. On almost monthly college trips out to Vegas, the year that followed Irwin and I turning 21, it was The Killers' Hot Fuss, cranking "Midnight Show" when we hit the top of the ridge on the 15 when the glowing promise of the city reveals itself and we would hurtle down to the dwarfing Strip with unrestrained smiles. In this Herzegovina summer it's OneRepublic that I don't realize is on until the five of us are caught in a moment of quietude, each looking out the windows with our eyes rather than our camera lenses. A silence not from boredom, or awkwardness, but a communal if subconscious recognition of contentment. Something so basic and ubiquitous that the top 40 song with its rudimentary lyrics is actually the perfect accompaniment. It's a moment we can all understand and we can all appreciate. Its very accessibility is what makes it beautiful. Our five cultures, biographies, and languages all overlapping for just these few car rides and hours but each easily understanding and agreeing. Our Venn being the football and the car ride, the attraction to Bosnia, and the words we take in while also meditating them out, our communal present and our individual futures....

Oh this has gotta be the good life,
This has gotta be the good life, 
This could really be a good life,
A good, good life...

After the song and hours at the Kravice waterfalls, more silent reflection of simple happiness as a particular cerulean dragonfly kept returning to perch unafraid on my knee, it was back to Mostar. The two Brits were also on my evening train back to Sarajevo, the one with far more daylight to see the Bosnian countryside Rebecca had urged me towards. We didn't talk past the casual goodbyes on the Sarajevo platform that mirrored the farewells to our Argentinian and Bosnian brief friends back in Mostar. More afternoon friendships where further communication or contact info traded would only muddy harmonious memories. The discs in the Venn were already slipping apart, towards future cities and soundtracks, but now with another song to bring a vivid moment back. At least for me, hopefully for the other four, and maybe for another traveler in the future. One who is in a car because of a train because of words that don't stop speaking even when the author and her world have long disappeared.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Another bloody loveletter.


"You travel somewhere not for museums and sunsets, but for ruins, bombed-out terrain, for the moss-grown memory of torture and war." - Don DeLillo


"I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood."  - Rebecca West


"Was that a bomb?" choruses around the room in English accented from Britain, Sweden, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands. My brain whispers the same in my American inflection, but I already know it's untrue. The explosion is too small to be a bomb of any significance, and the human commotion that followed was shouting rather than screams. But the sound also lacked the treble to be a gunshot and so the dozen of us backpackers race to the windows overlooking the bar in the alley below. We hear glasses shattering and see packs of people fleeing the standing tables they inhabited seconds before, and I start heading for the stairwell to make it to the street, to whatever phrase is Bosnian for "crime scene." All of this happens before the tear gas hits Matt's eyes and questions are replaced by a percussion of coughing. And then "tear gas" choruses around the room in English crippled by choking. And as the chemicals find my throat, my tear ducts as I'm shuttering the windows on that floor and up in my dorm room on the one above, I already know with bloodshooting eyes that this is exactly what I've always wanted.



xxxxxxx

I learned about war from Professors Talley and Slayton. From two-hour lectures at 7am three times a week from Killer Miller. From the would'be fathers drowning in mud in The First Day on the Somme and the baskets of severed heads filmed in "Night and Fog." I studied it as a concept in college, in poetic treatises like War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning or immediately before this trip, in My War Gone By, I Miss It So, a memoir dedicated to its intoxicating proximity. But before all this, back when I was nine years old, it was Sarajevo that was my first introduction to war as reality.

Two years earlier I'd seen the night'glow green pulsing across a Baghdad sky. The initial images of the nascent First Gulf War. But that was warfare as abstract. A removed modernity sanitized for primetime audiences. We saw not the cities blooming with bone and meal of the bombs' aftermath on the ground, but the video game visuals of their launch from a desert nothingness. In Eighty'Eight the Wall was breached, then floodgated in Berlin and tanks crawled through Tiananmen the following year, and I watched them both from a brown carpet in the Rust Belt, years before coming to California. They were groundbreaking, flashbulb memories of history, even for a kindergartner, but not war. War came in Ninety'Two, with the fleeing residents of Sarajevo running through Sniper Alley. My first time seeing its true face without relent. Removed by layers of journalism and censorship, but still the images of people sprinting haplessly, chased by trails of their own blood and blossoming bulletholes. Mortars exploding, chunking off concrete and flesh. The idea that cities, and all the implied advancement they stood for, could plunge into total chaos. Could fail so completely its residents need revert back to the terrifyingly basic task of trying to remain alive. This was the first time I had seen this. My first time trying to digest conflict beyond its existence as a theoretical or the was of history. Blood and pavement, a contrast meaning war still existed, and not as tanks in the desert, but assault rifles laying waste to the urban, to the urbane. Shredding all that noble subtlety of the soft j. 

At eight, or even at twelve when the Siege of Sarajevo ended, I didn't understand the complexities involved in what was happening. I grasped it only as a fairy tale for the apocalyptic. Milošević as evil, Bosnia as victim, the grandiose scale of murder as the way to remind the world the barbaric will never leave us. It will just get faster and easier to obtain. Additionally, I was grasping then at the idea that there was no longer any such thing as Yugoslavia. That countries could simply cease to exist. This comprehension would also come later, that nations are constructs of the mind that we buy into without probing. That borders, while often mapped via massacre, are ultimately ethereal, arbitrary if not for the faith we put into them. And that they can fail when enough people cease to play along. When the thousand years of religious and cultural differences anchor heavier than a sixty year old banner. Fractures bandaged in flags are still fractures.

This is how deeply Sarajevo and the exotic poetry of its very syllables has been embedded within me for twenty-one years. A city I was drawn to for all the wrong reasons, even at so young an age. A moving-picture show of the grotesque that indirectly wove me through other points first. To Treblinka and Tuol Sleng. A map's journey traced and sewn through with vein and sinew, finally leading me here. When I felt I was finally ready. 

Most all of its buildings are still besieged, like I witnessed them then. The bullet hole constellations are usually brightest on the south sides of the buildings, the ones facing the former strongholds of Serbian gunmen in the surrounding hills. In decline are the Sarajevo Roses, the sidewalk indentations made from mortar shells and their fragmented blast debris, later filled with red resin as dotted memorials throughout the city center. How little chance those on the ground stood is articulated in the expansive spread of their death petals. That spin'art pattern of violence draped all along the city's main street, Zmaja od Bosne, the Sniper Alley I'd watched people die in nineteen years before. A pair of Roses fade outside the new glass Parliament Building, which replaced the one ignited and gutted by tank'fire during the Siege. Above the dead red petals, a cluster of crisp blue and yellow Bosnian flags snap in the breeze. Maybe not enough to heal fractures, but seeming to work on amputees. On an adolescent country relieved to be separated from the older one it knew. Just down and across from Parliament is the Holiday Inn, the historic headquarters for the journalists covering the Siege on the city. Every news report I watched then, and most of the words I've read on it more recently, were relayed by people camped inside. Its conditions more hovel than hotel as the blockade and the fighting drew on. They stayed doubled, tripled up in rooms on the north side of the building, empty ones to the south shielding them from the brunt of the Serbian onslaught. As it stands today, the distinctive outside was repaired but never remodeled, still trapped in a timewarp to the more optimistic Seventies. A banana yellow topped by an uneven brown the color of carpets in the Rust Belt fading from memory.

That optimism of the late Seventies, of the early Eighties, was seemingly well'placed, as is most optimism without the benefit of hindsight. Eight years before the Siege started and Sarajevo was the capital of the fracturing world, it was center of something more hopeful. The Winter Olympic Games of 1984. The first Olympics of my life, even if at six months I was totally unaware of their existence. Which is what makes Sarajevo more than unfortunate, but impressively tragic. Its fall Shakespearean. In order to drown it, one first had to reach above to grasp it from a pedestal. Our abstractions and exaltations are just as mortal as were are too.

Twenty-nine years after Olympians sped down the bobsled track on Trebević Mountain on their way to various medals, I walked down it with six other backpackers, pushing thin branches of heavy overgrowth aside. Most of the track is bombed out, in both the graffiti and warfare senses of the phrase. On the turns, where the track clamshells over to keep the riders from flying off course, the largest works are displayed. The traditional term is masterpieces, but they're aesthetically not, just chunky letters in backgrounds of six or seven colors. They're usually sprayed in the hope for some sort of immortality, but if that's the intent this isn't a very promising venue for it. In the time between the bobsleds and the spray cans was of course the guns. Because those clamshell turns have a better use than canvas, at least to snipers. Facing north, back towards Sarajevo, back towards Sniper Alley and the too many other vulnerable areas of that Bosnian valley, the assassins here could focus and fire through holes in the track with total protection. That's what became of the first Olympics of my lifetime.

And back down in the east of the city, near the Baščaršija, the old bazaar echoing the Mediterranean markets of centuries more Ottoman, is a stone undamaged by fighting. It was masoned there after the Siege, replacing an older one inscribed solely in ruby Cyrillic. That initial plaque was cemented above another one indented with the assassin's footprints, mock-ups of where Gavrilo Princip stood facing the procession along the Miljacka River that marched the Archduke closer. The red'writ one then, and the bilingual greyscale one now, state the rudimentary basics of that June night in 1914. A simple pronouncement of the deaths of Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, while omitting the editorial that they certainly had it coming. The diminutive assassin was nineteen, the Miljacka and the Latin Bridge spanning it both equally tiny. In front of the stone, on that bank, the reflective visitor is awed by history, not only its gravitas but its cruelty, in allowing such negligible components to catalyze a World War that would kill over sixteen million people. Because eighty years before Sarajevo would introduce me to warfare, it would do the same to the once-optimistic modern world.


xxxxxxx

The tear gas canister was the second to hit the same bar that summer, according to the girl from Colorado who'd been staying at our hostel for two months. Some personal dispute with the owner was the rumor going around. The effects on me were minimal past the first ten or twenty seconds, briefer even than the communal confusion of those first instants. Shorter still was the surprise, which here in the Sarajevo I remembered and the one I was finally coming to know, was never really there at all. 



Sunday, September 15, 2013

Rathaus.


"NO NAZIS" is sprayed in a black tag that anchors the already enveloping grey of the Dresden afternoon. The blue abstraction the words tramp upon has the four curving legs of what could be a swastika unmoored in zero gravity, but without the seven letters to force adjacency I can't imagine anyone making that connection, nor that that was the intent, given that the spore is simply part of a larger modern piece. The words themselves are not street art, just a quickly'scrawled reminder, or apology, or threat, depending on who's reading it.

r.

It's a reminder to the casual visitor. The ones that think any mention of Germany is a welcome segue to the cringe-inducing attempts at jokes. The raised straight arm, a brusque "Heil!" Maybe fingers just beneath the nose to feign that silly little mustache. The people unfamiliar with Germany, or history, or good taste enough to not understand that German is not a synonym for Nazi. It actually never was a synonym for Nazi, in the same way American isn't a synonym for Obama supporter or Tea Party conservative. There's a dangerous laziness to paint history in generalities, assume everything was homogenous in societies far more complex than can possibly be captured in surviving writings or photographs. Far too many Germans then, but certainly not all and in some cities less than half, were members of the Nazi political party for anyone's liking and there still exist some today. Not because the country or its citizens haven't learned anything or want to continue the horrendous actions of the past, but because a small fraction of people in life are just festering, abhorrent creatures. The same reason the Westboro Baptist Church exists, or Al Qaeda, or Rush Limbaugh, or that some people's focus immediately after Sandy Hook wasn't on the victims and their families but on how twenty murdered children could potentially affect their lifestyle. Some people exist simply to be pieces of shit. The more people begin to understand that, the more their grotesque aberrant opinions can be ostracized, and the less we'll need reminders of our own distance from them.

a.

It's an apology to those affected and offended, which is to say essentially everyone. But it's a catharsis I've already had at many stops and studies along the way. To read this message, to hear this apology, isn't why I came to Dresden. The guilt of the Nazi party or of any of the mid-Twentieth Century German people isn't what I think of when I think of this rebuilt city. Rather my mind is on one of the rare but disgusting sins of the Allies. The guilt of our American grandfathers... their peers or their commanders. I came to Dresden to reconcile my American heritage with the fact that in February 1945 we firebombed a city into nothingness for no strategic advantage. That we did it out of spite. Killed twenty-three thousand non-combatants and leveled one of the most gorgeous cities in the world just as an elaborate Fuck You.

Leveled is a euphemism. The scrawled possible apology I'm looking at is in the Neustadt, which translates to "new town" despite it now being the older part of the city. The part that was relatively untouched as British and American bombs turned the more storied cultural center into shards. It wasn't on fire. It was fire. While it raged, the firebombing changed the temperature of the town to up to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit. That's eight times hotter than the closest planet to the sun. From the photos I've seen, there wasn't a lot of blood, because there wasn't much moisture left of any kind. Just the hungry vacuum of incineration. 

The Allies would win the war, as they had to, but not because they destroyed Dresden. They'd left the few industrial complexes near the town untouched. It was the buildings like churches, the Semperoper opera house, the traditional royal mansions, that would need to be jigsawed together again from what remained. They went on to win the last Good War assuming it was the Perfect War, ignorant to lessons from Dresden that they should have learned. Which means they were repeated in Royan and My Lai. And so it was their grandchildren who would return on their behalf to the rebuilt Frauenkirche, to the lawns and fountains at Zwinger, to witness the pathetic danse macabre come to an end, and join their German counterparts in carrying the sobering weight of inherited apologies.

t.

The smallest group it speaks to is the most disturbing. The threat to the subject named within. Neo-Nazis do persist in modern Germany, as they do in Orange County, California, the American South, far too many other corners of the world. But Dresden is a notable center for their contemporary movement, and among the many other spray-paint stencils on walls throughout the Neustadt I saw one of theirs. An advertisement to a rally protesting police that would have occurred back in June. For decades they've chosen Dresden as their focal point because of the firebombing. Their flagship rallies, including the largest since the height of World War Two, are typically held on its anniversary, hoping the mourning may be galvanized into anger. Which is the exact problem with unwarranted destruction, lapses in morality on such a grandiose scale. When you kill, you create. And a phoenix is a hateful fucking creature.

They'd exist nonetheless, without Dresdens or Abu Ghraibs to fuel recruitment. But we still shouldn't help buttress their propaganda with obvious transgressions. We should never create more destinations for the more somber of our American grandchildren to have to visit in the future.

The wall in Dresden says NO NAZIS. But the ones in Richmond, Virginia could easily say NO SLAVEHOLDERS. NO KLANSMEN in Montgomery and Sumner. NO MANIFEST DESTINY throughout the nation entire. They should be read as reminders, speak self-aware apologies as long as the buildings stand to serve as canvas. And if they're read as threats let them be strong ones, until those seeing them are too afraid to come around these streets anymore.





Sunday, August 25, 2013

Retox.


"It was good to take up one's courage again, which had been laid aside so long, and feel how comfortably it fitted into the hand." - Rebecca West


There's no way for me to change the channel and so I'm forced to watch my own addiction, though I don't realize that's what it is right away. 


The only thing the screen has shown since I boarded the plane is the four-inch image of a vehicle parked in a concrete cube. It's not until the aircraft backs into reverse and the little vehicle shrinks from four inches to three, and more of the surrounding loading dock comes into view that my hunch is confirmed, along with the location of the camera. I've watched tarmacs roll by from window seats, walked on them while exiting jets at smaller airports like John Wayne, Long Beach, Kiev, driven on them in shuttle buses, but never seen them from above. I've never had a little camera mounted to the bottom of my airplane to watch the runway digest away in realtime during takeoff. Which means I've never inspected what they truly look like up'close beyond the rosier, rounded-up view of the big picture. Past the broader concept of travel and international airports, the runways themselves are bruised rivers of pavement, pock'marked with the weight of the unrelenting.

Early on in the taxiing process I notice the stray twin tire tracks. The outliers. Spaced out enough to think those were just rough landings. Ill-trained or overworked pilots bringing in their planes too fast, too abruptly. But as the craft picks up speed, so comes the realization. That just about every flight leaves its mark on the ground below. And as we hurtle forward, the unruined grey is swallowed into a lake of blackened damage so complete that the unscarred pavement is no longer visible. Every flight that has ever landed at JFK, etched in burned and cooled rubber atop the tarmac. A tangible personification of every trip taking its toll. And as I search the ground for any hint of the before picture, looking past the puncture wounds for a fresh vein, we pull up and aloft and I remember I'm in one. 

Somewhere in the cargo hold just above the camera is the also-fading grey and black of my REI backpack. In my pocket is my passport, which quickly remembered the contours of my leg that it's been forever molded to fit. They're back with me for my first backpacking trip in almost two full years. The sacrifice of adulthood and career responsibilities was treading lightly on requests for time-off. Several California weddings, discovering my love for New Orleans, but all brief vacations without earning visas. Only fainter echoes of my chosen intoxication. The time away allowed me to understand that this is an addiction. Even in absence, it was a constant topic of conversation, an unavoidable influence in my daily life. Eight months of 3am conversations at work with my favorite editor, a forty-something former Israeli Defense Force'r who traveled for a year following his service in the late Eighties. Listening like fairy tales about a time before guidebooks and Hostelworld.com, of crossing unmarked rivers in Bolivia by looking for the freshest set of ascending tire-tracks climbing the opposite bank. Twenty months of planning for this trip, of imagining myself scaling the abandoned steps of Buzludzha only to discover that now the backpacker graffiti was being erased, the monument interior being rebirthed and renovated- robbing it of all allure it held. Sealing off the potential for narcosis. Any bored hours at work, waiting for an assignment or killing time when I was finished but still on call, was spent clicking through slide shows, making a list for future trips scaling lava to San Juan Parangaricutiro or rowing in Tam Coc. Borrowed minutes from the future, like patches of slow nicotine getting me by. An addiction with lessened vices. I'm not looking for rehabilitation, just further revelation.

Plenty of drugs improve your life in the short-term, in the moment the chemicals hold total sway. It's when the timeline is drawn out that the cons grow ultimately heavier. Traveling is one of the few addictions that earns respect, that exudes worldliness that can't be gained from leaves crumbled into a bowl or powder railed onto a mirror. But let's not shit ourselves. When it's tallied up, I'm really not that different. I'm chasing a fix, same as those others. And maybe among those that travel I'm in the minority. People who buy postcards by the dozens, who stay at the Hiltons or Courtyards by Marriott, who are replicating America pocket by pocket in foreign capitals- for them the departure lounge isn't a gateway to dependency. But I can also tell you, we're consuming different levels of potency. The purer experience you tap, the more you need it again. 

My addiction, this sea change in my personality that came from travel, or was at least awakened forever by it, is what made New York City eternally more appealing than Los Angeles or San Francisco. Because a home here, in this sprinting city, would mean a constant low-level state of that intoxication, the same sensation of being abroad. A life forever lived on the balls of the feet. Leaning forward, shoulders tensed. "On to the Next One." The necessity of this constant fix is what would keep me from enjoying the mellow lifestyle of the West Coast. Because I remember too vividly what happens to sharks that don't stay in motion. 

These are my thoughts when I leave America. Seventeen days abroad at the expense of so many other experiences that this money and vacation time could have bought. The missed weddings of friends, the foregone concerts to save money, seeing my immediate family in Pennsylvania and my friends in California only two weekends a year. All those burned tire'tracks stacked atop one another. More instances of the compass needle and the damage done. The decisions I make that leave me vulnerable to being called a bad friend, a disappointing grandson. But I can live with the names, those damning designations, because they're conscious decisions. I've thought carefully about them, weighed the alternatives. And I really do believe that this is a drug that makes me better in the long run.

The hours pass on the plane and the tiny screen is commandeered again, the channel arrows rendered useless. The addict turned self-voyeur. The approaching tarmac comes into view below and more constellations of scars come nearer and nearer. The wheels impact the concrete, presumably adding another set of permanent bruises to the countless already compiled. My eyes hug closed and I take a conscious breath and slip back into the familiar warmth of the unknown.