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. 

Sarajevo, in photos

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.

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.

The come-up.

"If this were a Movietone News item... and you were in a darkened movie palace of the thirties awaiting the feature, you'd see ropes being thrown off, gangplanks being lowered, steamer trunks being unloaded, and passengers starting gaily to stream off. They'd bring up the sound track- something stirring, to suggest the march of time." - Paul Hendrickson

The scene starts before the first note, before the eighty minutes the band keeps the bar'crowd waiting under low light and lower ceiling. It starts before a catfish dinner next door and the bottles of Abita served by a bartender named Kiss, resident of New Orleans by way of Brooklyn, to a traveler named Joshua, resident of Brooklyn, by way of Los Angeles and a sliver of the world. The true iris-in starts before anyone reading this was born, and before their grandparents' grandparents, but it's been shown in bars throughout this city and this country, and in this particular dive on Tuesdays for twenty years.

That eighty minutes of anticipation dissipates the instant the first notes leap out of the armada of brass packing the stage, the firing squad unmuzzled. The dead time comes alive with the sound of the New Orleans big brass band, all horns and jazz'told'fast. An American artform played at our national volume and speed. Tempos of weathervanes outpacing clocks.

They're telling our story like we always do, through tall tales turned gospel. Our American flamenco.

In bars in Sevilla and the East Village I'd heard plucked guitars and metal kissing wood convey the éxodo migration of Moors out of the Middle East through North Africa and into the South of Spain, coming to rest in the Andalusian peninsula but recalling the struggle, those caravan centuries, in every shuffle'heel'stamp'clap with tornadoing wrists and flourishing skirts of silken fire, wailing tones of Arabic like weeping muezzins.

The same story grown more profound for its congruency, wandering lines remaining parallel, sociology transcending mathematics, geography. The tale of history from below reaching the surface. That People's One of the United States. Yeah yeah the same story told instrumental but unequivocally American in this overpack'd room where sound and energy can't escape. The stage pregnant with ten wailing musicians. A near dozen historians blowing out biography with brass. Their notes competing like generations for legacy, harmonizing like neighborhoods to weave communities, districts forming cities. 50 equaling 1.

Ten'minute jams of the same notes, the same two'steps coming back and back again with little subtleties added to their nature to make the progress each generation's own echoed victory. Orville Wright becoming Neil Armstrong. J. Fenimore Cooper to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Crane to Cormac. Homer Plessy to Rosa Parks, and Jackie Robinson to Barack Obama. Every tragedy our own scars worn with somber defiance. Or just defiance. Remember the Maine to Never Forget. The Twin Towers to One World Trade. Enduring the Great Depression, and the lesser ones of jilted hearts and corporate layoffs. Down the years history comes fast like machine-gun ratatats and tambourine jangles. Hurricane Betsy. Andrew. Katrina. Sandy. 
And then we reply.

The scene always starts in utero, before we realize we're actors, authors, autobiographers, but it's the story of America in every note. In every two-syllable chant as the audience proclaims the band's name in incantation. Shouted constantly, hoarsely, fiercely. As mantra, as battlecry, as promise, as the myth each generation galvanizes into reality.

"RE-BIRTH."

Shine on, you crazy diamond.

Down at the end of old Bourbon Street is a place you're not supposed to go, where everybody's been. The locals will swear you away from the area before making you promise to visit.

Isolated just a bit from the noise and the neon is the lingering point to an exclamation,

is the spent ash at the end of a burning cigarette.

Past the hand grenades and hurricanes and Kentucky sorority girls lies a little speck of darkness.

Sits a little den of contradiction. 

Where they're shouting in frenzy to wire and ivory and bachelor parties have moments of sincerity. Where sleeping songs by Mr. Waits get resurrected once the patrons and piano 

have been drinking.

Leave "Sweet Caroline" and the grenadine to Pat O'Brien's; we're drinking whiskey and

calling out for Young rather than Diamond. 

Trying to avoid seeing our faces in those of the worn elders while we're glancing at tattooed ivy snaking around arms, 

past breast implants, and into toffee hair.

For longer than we've been a nation, these walls have been seeping alcohol into conversation.
The oldest bar in America. Hideout to the pirate Lafitte, 

and lesser criminals along the way.

You can visit in daylight. 
All sunshine and discordance. 
The tourist horsecarts will stop out front and a waiter will run out to drop off a voodoo daiquiri while you snap a photo with your iPhone and post it to Facebook. The bartender, 
with her ivy arms, 
will make your daughter fruit juice and call it a virgin hurricane.
But the piano will be silent,
and the 
corners will be bare. 
Or you can come by night. When the girls are lighting 
cigarettes off candles, 
when the boys are warning 
that's bad luck for sailors. 
Shoes settling into brick canoed down by the centuries of impatience, and boredom, and 
insecurities, 
and determination renewed 
by spirits.

When the years feel palpable. In the bar and the drinkers and the sing-a-long psalms.  When the line "Old man, look my life. I'm a lot like you were" finds its proper mark. They'll tell you it's haunted and it has to be true. 

In this city 

we keep coughing up ghosts.

They fill the wood

and the brick

and the off-key shouts, the claps in missed tempo.

And here at the end of old Bourbon Street,

we'll keep coming.

Past the hurricanes,

and the hand grenades,

and the sorority girls borrowed from wherever,

We'll know we always have a place to visit.

A hideout.

 Somewhere to
die by the minute.
Drawn forward to the darkness, we
martyrs to filthier causes.

Nine ward, two houses. (i and the village.)

"Advanced framing actually replaces lumber with insulation material to maximize the wall area that’s insulated..."  - makeitright.org/what-we-know/library/article/advanced-framing/

"They ask for everyone to take off their shoes, so just leave 'em here on the porch. They'll be fine."

My beaten Toms went at the end of a row of Asics and hiking shoes; apparently I was the only one who chose to bike 11 miles without socks. My bare feet pressed onto the post-industrial wood fiber floor of the visitor's center of Make It Right, the charity spearheaded by Brad Pitt to rebuild New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward with ecologically-innovative housing.

I stepped around the plexiglass donation column immediately in front of the narrow entrance and settled next to the GREEN DAT! shirts for sale, a forced pun more in-keeping with a California punk band than the "Who Dat?" catchphrase of NOLA's sports lifeblood, the Saints. After urged, I filled in a line of the sign-in sheet, leaving the checkboxes at the end of the row, for "donation," "shirt purchased," and "poster purchased" unmarked. The visitor center was the charity's model home showcasing the ones being built around the Lower Ninth Ward, at a partially-subsidized cost of one-hundred thirty thousand dollars. Post-modern in environmental function and architecture, all the scalene angles and cacophonous pigments of a Chagall. An experimental home far more natural in the suburbs of Norway than those of New Orleans.

The early 20s Make It Right hostess looked blankly at us five bike tourists, roting off the specs of the houses' green technologies in the droning monotone accent specific to hipsters rather than regions. The one full of cocktail intelligence sourced piecemeal from NPR and New York mag. Complete with flapper haircut and ironic floral leggings. I'd gone all the way to the Lower Ninth and found myself back at the Lorimer stop.

45 minutes later, our tour guide wheeled Mr. Lewis out onto his back deck, his 93-year-old legs pacing the steps along gently in his fresh red Nikes. He raved about the Saints blowout win the afternoon before, their 180 of a season following Bountygate and Goodell crackdowns and their early game stumbles. "And that SEC boy... BCS playoff already exists... it's called the SEC. Only real teams out there. You think Notre Dame is gonna whupp 'Bama or Georgia? Come onnn." His lack of teeth didn't shy away his constant smile, or the wisdom that came when words paused it. He talked LSU as we sat eating shrimp po'boys and fried fish platters, ravenously replenishing after the bike ride there from the Marigny. He only stopped smiling when he brought up Katrina.  

"The hurricane hurt us. The national media hurt us more. Calling us refugees, like we barely human. We ain't refugees, man, we're Americans. Ain't no different than you.... Wasn't right to call us that."

The middle-aged couple from White Plains brought up the Make It Right houses, the one we'd just been in. "They build houses in our home and don't bother asking our opinion. What we might want 'em to look like. They hold a contest for designs by people who never been here and then move on to the next thing. They bring in people to build them, people from I don't know where, all over." Mr. Lewis pointed to one of the workmen just across a cinder-block fence in his backyard. The house being renovated, now that the owner had decided to return; seven years after Katrina, now deciding to reassert claim to his home. "That man there's an electrician. Known him 20 years. Been one all his life. Ninth Ward's got craftsmen, tradesmen. People from this community that need the work and do it well but they ain't good enough for them to build they own neighbors' house, I guess."

I knew the argument. It's one I'd made frequently, for thoughtful liberalism, one with a small "l." One distant from the crusades against Happy Meal toys and bans on soda size. The Toms I set aside earlier were bought for style, not out of the misguided belief that their purchase makes some difference when their means of production is outsourced to China rather than employing the parents and cousins and older sisters and brothers of the children they claim to be helping in rural Africa. The argument that handouts are confining, and doomed to failure, without being accompanied by an equally aggressive support infrastructure. A means of climbing the economic ladder permanently rather than waiting for the next check in the mail.

For that half hour we had Mr. Lewis to ourselves, with the occasional shouted aside comments to the neighboring team of builders, before we went inside his makeshift trailer museum, the House of Dance and Feathers. One part personal trophy case, one part Katrina museum, and three parts presentation of second line, the steppers in elaborate costume following the brass bands that make up a parade's main line. Every inch of formica lined with beautifully garish blooms of feet-wide chiffon ribbon, meticulous beadwork, masks and feathers inspired from a culture that snaked down the generations, diluting out only slightly the voodoo influences. A woman in her 50s and her 7 year old grandson joined us in the trailer to speak with Mr. Lewis. More old friends, she didn't hesitate when asked to point out accents for one of the costumes that came with the title she had held since she was 16, Queen of the White Angels, one of dozens of local New Orleans second line troupes. As she did, I was drawn into conversation with another frequent visitor, Brian from Mobile, Alabama. "And yourself?"

"They're from California and White Plains. I'm from Brooklyn."

He nodded solemnly. Four days into my New Orleans trip, I already knew the basics of what he was about to say, but couldn't have guessed at the emotion behind it.

"When you go back, please tell the people of New Jersey and New York there are people here in New Orleans who feel for them and know what they're going through. And in Mississippi and Alabama. Sincerely, our hearts understand. We wish it wouldn't have to happen to anyone else.... Isn't really in our hands. But you're all in our hearts."

Brian and I shook hands in time for me to hear the latest proud proclamation by Mr. Lewis, the one about the pictorial book he compiled chronicling the history of second line.

"My book is in the White House. Yes, sir. Mr. Obama signed that," indicating a framed Thank You card. "Michelle too."

Brian squeezed by the rest of us to tell Mr. Lewis goodbye, for now, with a kiss on the cheek. Mr. Lewis' hand clasping the back of his craned-down neck.

"Brian's a good man. Reminds me of my grand-nephew. That boy got a tattoo the other day, came to show it to me, all up his arm. Says 'Ambitious.' " Mr Lewis rubbed his spread hand down his entire forearm. "I like it. Thinking about getting one myself. Might have to change it though. I made it through Hurricane Betsy in '65. Katrina in '05. Heart attack and a double-bypass just now on September the Twelfth." Mr. Lewis smiled, with his full eyes and empty mouth. Uncontrollably, I did the same. "Think I'm gonna have mine say 'Survivor.' "

The hipster girl in the floral tights and cigarette'ash-shaded skirt and hoodie spooned powdered Coffemate into an empty mug, followed by Sweet & Low, and finally poured in French press coffee. If not for her slight resemblance to Shannyn Sossamon I would have forgotten her face along with her name and everything else she said to us, except for her one obligatory attempt at conversation. "Where else are you going on the tour today?"

The middle-school teacher from Dana Point ventured first. "Umm... Just around the Ward. Went to a cemetery... St. Roch's?"

"About to go to a small museum." I took up the silence. "The House of... Feathers..."

"The House of Dance and Feathers," she finished knowingly. "Yeah. I've never actually been there." And then she stopped talking to sip from her mug of powdered substitutes and lukewarm coffee.

Red, red, red.

"Each voyage taught great lessons about life that connected us in an ephemeral but unforgettable way to the life of the towns we passed through, and many of us became forever caught up in their destinies." - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"It's coming back around again,
This is for the people for the sun." - Rage Against the Machine

We’ll always own July.

You can say it’s the nature of being American. Our national celebration exploding near the month’s beginning, its resonance shimmering and trailing for the remaining weeks. A flag of exceptionalism and defiance planted where you can’t miss it. At the very start. Unavoidable. Inevitable and indomitable as the summer heat. Schools out, complexions the healthy pigment of abundant vitamin D, nature cooperating to provide our excursions with photogenic backgrounds. A nation of day baseball, gingham, Ferris wheels, lobster rolls, Sperrys, sand castles, cookouts, nautical stripes, Wayfarers, worn paperbacks, seersucker, funnel cake, sunburned shoulders and kisses beneath fireworks. 

And still some of us weren’t content. We turned to farther horizons. When everyone else was relaxing, we chose to run.

"Then we crossed a wide plain, and there was a big river off on the right shining in the sun from between the line of trees, and away off you could see the plateau of Pamplona rising out of the plain, and the walls of the city, and the great brown cathedral, and the broken skyline of the other churches. In back of the plateau were the mountains, and every way you looked there were other mountains, and ahead the road stretched out white across the plain going toward Pamplona."

....words I reread as our train approached the city that Sunday afternoon. I closed The Sun Also Rises and put the swollen book in my lap and joined the carriage full of turning heads, mouths charmed open by conversation and anticipatory smiles. Mark, Corey, and Nicole found me to share anecdotes and insights on the San Fermin Festival that they'd garnered in the 3 hour ride from Madrid. Derek sat in conversation 2 cars behind us, Parker, Sandev, Nick, and Damian joining later that night. Together our slow paths traced back to America's farthest reaches. New York, Florida, California, Alaska. Children of the conquered frontiers, in Spain to surmount something more familiar. More personal.

We met the city in the afternoon, on the eve of the explosion. The Basque shopkeepers dressed in their starkest whites, the red bandannas of earlier fiestas knotted around their necks. Townspeople showcasing an annual pride that would soon too become ours. We arrived as tabula rasa, but it was in Pamplona we would gain our reds. Purchased with a few Euros; earned during our three-minute encierro.

It was a village of Christmas Eve, each of us tilting slightly toward the future. We would return to these streets in the morning to stand in front of the town hall for the firing of the chupinazo rocket, tens of thousands celebrating the official start of San Fermin. But for the five of us the Festival began that first afternoon, when we heard the drums. A percussion troupe marching throughout the streets, stopping in a small area behind the Plaza Mayor. A dozen men pounding kettles as dozens more of us gathered around, spilling out of surrounding restaurants and bars, called by their rhythm. It could be adopted instantly for its simplicity, its intrinsic familiarity. Their hands and sticks giving voice to our heartbeats. We had known it before we ever heard it.

On Monday the Festival was born screaming, in showers of sangria that bathed us purple. Parker was held aloft on Derek's and my shoulders in a moment captured by an Associated Press photographer, picked up by newspapers in Spain, Australia, the San Francisco Chronicle, and later one of the Wall Street Journal Photos of the Year. An image that would come to summarize the ultimate bacchanal and its emotions. A god of wine and his unleashed followers. A microsecond to exist outside of mortality. The revelry continued well into the next night as we celebrated our successful encierro with shameless dancing and massive bottles of beer in the Plaza Mayor, beneath dandelions of fire blooming in the sky above.

The sun's rise would chase us from Pamplona, as we would carry the rays of San Fermin to Barcelona, Granada, Sevilla, San Sebastian, and later back to America. In the year that followed, we would recall the Festival in different ways. We'd captured it through photographs, footage of the chupinazo and our run, journals and words written here earlier, in cravings for tapas or shouts of "Muy limpia!," or me hours ago, watching news footage at work of this morning's running, on the one year anniversary of ours. Damian purchased the official poster from our year and reprints of past Festivals, perhaps framing the design from the same fiestas that Hemingway attended, or my father's encierro in the 1950's. All our adopted ways of proving tangibly what we already know deeper than words. That even in absence, we are forever there. If not as residents, then as revenants. For every year we have left to live, July 6 and 7 will bring us back to these moments. Focused softly by memory and filtered romantically by nostalgia, but always, always Pamplona.

We did not stay long enough for Pobre de Mi, the candlelit end of the Festival on midnight of the final day. Even when I find myself there again in some undetermined year in the future, wearing fresh whites and old reds, I don't know that I could ever bring myself to watch it close. For me, and for my friends, for anyone who has ever run with the bulls at San Fermin, the fiesta is eternal. It sleeps but never dies. Our 9-day blood red summer sun.