Gots to write something.

My mind has been racing; jumping; not sure what.

Keep having these notions about time.  Is it linear?  Maleable?  Foldable?

When I write stuff it’s like a photograph.  I capture a moment—well a bunch of moments that unfolded in a linear fashion.

My most fallible mind compressed the stream and discarded the extraneous to leave me with the nugget.

Yet when I put the nugget between my fingers and move it about it unfolds again.  It gives back a lot of the extraneous.  Not all of it by a long shot, but a good bit.

So is there a nugget for this particular exercise?

Let’s start with a boat ride.

I’ve been on innumerable boat rides.  Sail boat rides, motor boat rides and even a large coal ship-ship-ride.

Let’s toss in green.

Green water?  Green trees?  A green boat?

Green trees, yes, green trees.

This particular boat ride lasted about three hours at about forty miles an hour.  We passed (two boats with about twenty people) what can only be described as a barge, moving very slowly relative to us.  As we moved from our debarkation point we passed a small freighter that was heeled over on a sandbar as it waited for the river to rise again.

The Amazon.

That’s the river, the body of water we are on.  Debris is everywhere.  Sticks, logs, stripped ones, bushy ones.

As we left our debarkation point we left a human island and made our way away from people.  Maybe five minutes, maybe a little longer and people are gone.  Another couple of barges the only evidence that we aren’t alone.

It’s been about twelve hours of travel time since we left DC to this point and about two days of in between to get to this point.

Not long ago it would have taken us a couple of weeks to get to this point.  Well, you know, without airplanes.

Yet here we are with the distinctive sound of two Merc outboards shoving us farther away from people than I’ve ever been.  That distinctive oil-mixture smell mixing with the ozone.  A pleasant aroma from my childhood.

Smell, aromas, those weird scents that seem to sooth with their collection of memories stored in aerosol form.  And, yes, manure is one of those soothing smells for me.  Ranchers, pastures, 4-H steers, and fresh chicken.

But I wander.

Three hours later we are there.  There where we will be for two weeks.  After that it will be back to Lima and then off to Machu Picchu where time has stood still and where we will be for several days.

Again I wander.

We arrive to a spot in the jungle that is elevated on stilts.  A spot that is elevated from a continuously dropping river—it won’t start to come back up for another couple of months.  It will drop another six feet while we’re there.

Dugouts line the bank beside our two fiberglass anomalies.  I didn’t take a dugout ride, don’t know why.

So fifteen hours of travel and we are in a primordial forest with strange noises, geckoes, tarantulas, army ants, and lots of green leafy stuff.  For anyone that’s been on the jungle ride at Disneyland, well you are there.

Shaman.  There was a shaman there.  A very nice guy.  Excellent English with an excellent eye roll for those that thought he was beyond mystical.

He was also an excellent soccer player.  Played with him and several others.  Forgetting my cleats, I played in bare feet.  Our shaman arrived in full soccer duds.  Red and white and cleats.

Our field was hacked out of the jungle.

The jungle towered over us allowing the sun to dapple us here and there.  The first ball I retrieved focused my reality.  I was in the middle of nowhere, miles, hours and days away from what I knew.

There were no neatly sited suburban houses surrounding our playing field—just miles of jungle.  And me in bare feet.

I had played soccer in an English prison years before and there was something oddly similar to the two.  In the jungle it was distance that closed you in; in the prison it was time that closed you in.

Army ants.  I mentioned them earlier.  One week into our stay the entire jungle began to rustle, and rustle some more.

“Lift your feet,” we were warned.

As we did thousands, millions, trillions, lots, of ants made their way through the lodge eating anything in their way.  When they left the lodge was spotless.

Now here’s the conundrum—do they move in a straight line and just keep going until they, well, vanish.  Or do they move in a loop and continuously move while birthing, living and dying relieved by family or strangers?

They rustled through in less than ten minutes.

We rustled through in two weeks. We got on the motor boats back to Iquitos and in three hours we were back.

Back onto one of Boeings original 737s, over the Andes to Lima.  Onto an Airbus for Miami and finally a DC-9 into DC.  Back to the order of the American cosmopolitan, to our own water and trees.

So there you have it—a nugget minded from the depths of my memory interspersed with odd little details from the trip and odd little details pulled from the odd little details of the trip.

So is time linear?

You tell me.

My fascination with the Soviet Union goes back so far that I don’t have any recollection of what or when it all began.

My passionate cover to cover reading of Aviation Week and Proceedings may have had something to do with it, but beyond that I can’t even generate a decent list of maybes I’m so unsure of it.  Suffice to say that I did.

It would be this passion that ultimately led to an interview with the CIA at the Roslyn Marriott overlooking the Potomac with Burl Ives and Wally Peeples.  I’m serious; the interviewers looked like Burl Ives and Wally Peeples.  Burl Ives was the jolly one, jovial, congenial, put you at ease sort of guy, while Wally was very buttoned up and impassive.  No doubt he was there to do the psychological profile.

Initially I couldn’t quite take the interview seriously because of the way they looked, but a few minutes into the interview a key turned in the door.   The jingle of the keys danced on the other side of the door and Wally moved quickly–much faster than the real Wally would have moved–for the door, while Burl used his girth to shield me from the door.  It turned out to be a maid, but these guys even in the interview stage, weren’t going to compromise me.  They were serious.

The interview was more like a test than an interview.  A few months before the interview I had been given a reading list of twenty books.  All to be read for the interview and I dutifully read them.  I was quizzed on what I had read and corrected several times on the difference between an agent and an operative.

Having cleared that hurdle I was asked what area of the world I would like to serve in.  Eastern Europe I said, the Soviet Union in particular.

“That being the case, what do think of the Afghanistan situation?” asked Mr. Ives.

Up to this point Burl and Wally had been intent on me.  Burl pulling it out and Wally examining it.

“Well, I think the Soviets have made a grave error.  They have underestimated the Afghanis and denied hundreds of years of history that has seen one conqueror, invader, or empire builder defeated.  This is their Vietnam.”  I paraphrase my response mostly because I can’t remember the particulars and it was much longer than what I report here, but that was the gist of it.

Burl and Wally exchanged glances, looked at me and then exchanged glances again.  This was the early eighties, the Soviets had invaded in 1979, Carter had boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, and the Soviet Army had been laying waste to the Afghan countryside.   There were no signs that the Afghanis had a chance at the time, just that it was one more domino, thus my answer made them blink.

The interview went on for another few minutes.  Questions about drug use (some), hobbies (yes), language skills (I lied here, said I had a flair for languages–I have none), and thank you for your time.

Like many of my blogs before, I’ve skipped ahead–this is a travel story after all.

So let’s go back a couple years before this interview.  The year is 1978.

II Getting There

London.

I’d been there several times but never to stay.  I was always in transit and the first leg of our journey to Leningrad would be no different.

Mark and I left Carmarthen for Cardiff where we would pick up the HST for London late in the afternoon the day before we were to leave on an Aeroflot flight out of Gatwick.  It was early evening when we arrived at Paddington Station.  We would leave from Victoria Station early the next morning for Gatwick.

Ever on a budget, Mark and I needed to find a hotel as close to Victoria Station as possible for as little money as possible.  Like many cities London has travel bureaus that are there to help wayward travelers like us find accommodations and we found one soon enough.

We waited briefly in a short queue for our turn.  We related our needs to a very officious young man who looked down at us along a very long nose.  He seemed very well turned out for his position, very trim, very starched and his movements were so austere that his body seemed to float inside his clothes.  Not a wrinkle to hint at his presence.

He drew a deep breath, far too much air to add, “A moment, please.”

He turned and picked up a phone.

“Mmm.  Yes.  Quite.  Yes.  Cheers.”

He turned back to us.

“Twelve blocks east, The Georgian, 10 pounds for the night—-each.”

The poor man’s going rate for a B&B at the time was three pounds a night, so we drew a deep breath where our officious friend had left off.

“OK, thanks, ta,” we both mumbled, not quite in sync.

We made our way for the door past a queue that had grown quite dramatically while we had taken our turn.  As we passed out the door and it sighed itself shut, Mark turned and said dramatically,

“Follow my lead,” and he turned back through the door into the travel bureau, me in tow repeating a mantra I would use later to more desperate use, “Oh God, Oh God,” as we passed the ever growing queue.

I did my best to look confident and to follow Mark’s lead.  And, as I was looking at his back, I had no idea what that lead might be.  We came to an abrupt halt at the counter we had just left and Mark slammed his fist on that counter.

“I didn’t want to do this.  I wanted to be like everyone else, just another traveler in need of assistance, but now I must insist.  Our parents are with the State Department and we are to be in Leningrad tomorrow afternoon.  If we were to miss our flight from Gatwick, because someone couldn’t get us near enough the station to comfortably catch our train for the airport, that someone would be in serious trouble!”

That’s the lead.  Oh God, we’re dead in the water.  No one would buy that and what could the American State Department do about it anyway?

Our officious friend wrinkled.  He didn’t know which way to turn and his eyes blinked at an incredible rate.

“Why didn’t you say so?  I am so sorry, please, another moment,” his voice had gone up an octave and his cadence picked up speed and I think his accent went a bit Cockney.

To the phone again; “George?  Any rooms?  How much? No, George.  No, George.  That’ll do George.  Ta, George.”

Putting his accent back in place and a bit of his composure he said, “You’ll be a block from the station at the very pristine rate of four pound for the night….each,” he added triumphantly as he regained a bit of his composure.

III The Flight

My mother told me years ago that my first airline flight was on a DC-6 to Washington DC.  I don’t remember where it originated.  It could have been from any number or places since my Dad was in the Navy and we moved around quite a bit.  I was an infant and, needless to say, I probably made some other air traveler miserable.

The first flights I do remember were cross country flights out of LAX to Dulles and vice versa.  Those were in the early seventies when the major carriers still flew 747s, DC-10s and, my personal favorite, the L-1011 on cross country flights.  They were big and usually half empty.  Air travel at that time was still a minor luxury, so we always dressed up and we were always on our best behavior.

When we boarded we were greeted and made to feel welcome by the stewardesses (yes they were stewardesses not flight attendants) who had to be within a pound or two of an ideal weight and rarely much into their twenties.  To my teenage eyes they were all beautiful. We were also handed a menu for the in flight meal and we weren’t even in first class.

My first overseas flight was to Britain on a miserably overcrowded 747 into Heathrow and I think it was the first time I heard the term “cattle-class”.  The seats were cramped, the seat back trays were ill fitting and turbulence would set any number of them into the laps of unsuspecting passengers.

I was cramped yes, but I was also excited, nervous and scared for the coming year abroad.  At eighteen I was quite confident that my American English would serve me just fine on the other side of the pond.

In any case as Mark and I made our way by train to Gatwick for our flight to Leningrad I felt I was a seasoned air traveler.  We would be flying on an Aeroflot Il-62.

This would be my second time on this type aircraft.  The first time it had sat on the tarmac at the Paris Air Show in 1965 as shiny as a new penny.  My brother, mother and I were working our way through Europe following my father’s ASW carrier, the Randolph, around the Med.  I was six, my brother just five.  Like early memories this one is spotty.  Easily the most memorable part of the trip was getting back and forth to Europe on an Italian coal ship, the Simonetta.  It took two weeks out of Norfolk to Genoa and then back again.

The other highlight that sticks out is the Paris Air Show.  In particular were the Soviet aircraft.  Not that they were any more shiny or special than anything else that was there, but the Soviet crews were by far the friendliest when it came to children.  Other countries were very uptight about children and made sure you enjoyed at a distance.  The Soviets literally grabbed you off the tarmac, up the stair and into the cockpit.  Push this, pull that, all the time gabbing away in Russian and very good English.  The Il-62 was one of them.

For the longest time I had a pin of that plane that the crew gave me.  The Soviets are pathological about pins and medals.  If it didn’t have a pin or medal, well, it might as well have never happened.  When Mark and I finally arrived in the Soviet Union there were street kiosks with nothing but medals and pins.

So for the second time, this time at Gatwick, I ascended a rolling stair onto an Aeroflot Il-62.  This one was as new as the one in Paris.  The pilot and crew were just as gregarious and welcomed us all onto our flight.  I managed to end up in the first class cabin, but this flight didn’t have any such distinction of service, it was just my place in line when I got on.

For anyone remotely familiar with the Soviet Union it will come as no surprise that anyone trained as a pilot is a military one.  As we rolled on the taxi way for our turn for take-off it was a very brisk and precise pace.  Take-off was throttles toward Military max and then straight up–slight exaggeration but not by much.  Our turns at the front and backend of the flight were, again, precise and fast.  No casual, terrain gobbling, one-g turn, nope, butts stuck on the seat and steep.  It was fun.

The in flight service was, well, let’s say it was precise and fast as well.  The head stewardess made announcements in a variety of languages.  She then pulled back the curtain and there stood one very thick and sturdy Bolshevik.  Her Aeroflot issued, light blue, pill box hat sat firmly, but precariously on top of her very large head.  Her shoes were sensible.

She made her way down the aisle, while several others, less massive, but no less sensible stewardesses made their way down the aisles as well.   Caviar and Vodka–that was it and no seconds.  Service over, the curtain pulled and they were gone.  No in flight magazines, no peanuts, no pillow fluffing, just your own thoughts that would begin their first descent into paranoia.  Are they listening?  Are they watching?  Are my hands in view doing innocent things?

I’m not kidding.  So, please, buckle your seat belt as we make our final approach into Leningrad.  Welcome to the Soviet Union.

IV Leningrad

We were warned that the Soviets take their red-tape (no pun intended) very seriously, so like making your way through a line to make an order from the soup-Nazi you were silent and only spoke when absolutely necessary.

First stop was a passport check.  Passport handed over to a baby faced, but very stern, man behind a counter.  He stared impassively and immobile, except for his eyes, that darted back and forth across a screen.  It seemed to take forever and then in one swift motion he stamped my passport.  Just as quickly he handed it to me.

Next stop was customs, the bag check.  They were very thorough as they made their way through my bag.  I hoped they wouldn’t recognize my Levi 501s for the contraband that they were to be.  We all had trade goods as our professor had warned us that much of what we took for granted was very valuable to the average Russian.  Levis, particularly 501s, was one such trinket.

My bag made it with no worries, but the man behind me was not so lucky.  The customs lady quickly found his stash of Bibles.  He was literally walked back out onto the tarmac and onto a plane that was taking on passengers.

And finally to the money changer.  The Soviet system at the time was a closed economy so you changed your money at the door so to speak.  One hundred dollars for what passed for that in Rubles and Kopeks, Lenin’s profile defiantly with his nose in the air, defying any five year plan to fail.  When we left we could exchange what we had left, but in no case for more than we came with.  Just in case it was all put in a very large and impressive ledger.

When we finally left customs and headed for our hotel–the Rossiya–it was dark but there was a glow in the air.   Like any hotel it was lit up, each window another lantern on a relatively dark urban landscape.  The cruiser Aurora sat quietly on the Neva its importance to the Revolution proudly emblazoned in several languages on a placard.  “The shot heard around the world!”, well at least for Marxism, the other at Lexington a hundred and fifty odd years before.

When we finally went in it felt as if we had entered the set of a James Bond film.  An early-sixties modern space complete with a banquet table full of inebriated Russians, some in uniform, others in the ignominious ill fitting suites wrapped around their barrel chests, with sweaty faces topping it all off.  Medal upon medal was pinned to uniform and suite while one after another they each proposed a toast.  Vodka shot after vodka shot.  I would never know what they were toasting, but they were having a wonderful time.

The Russians could take down a lot of Vodka and still stand straight and tall.  The hotels’ other guests were Finns and they could not hold their liquor at all.  Finland being a dry country, these Finns traveled to the Rossiya for one reason and that was to drink.  At any time of the day you could find a Finn slumped in a couch, a Finn passed out at a table, and the relatively mobile Finns would be crumpled in an elevator, riding up and down until they either crawled out or were hauled out.

A fairly lucid Finn regaled us with tale of a disco on the tenth floor where American disco music blared, Screwdrivers were served and the women were loose.  This had not been mentioned in our Intourist pack of places to see and go.  Well for that matter hordes of inebriated Finns had not been mentioned either, so we set off on the elevator for the “Disco”.

Sure enough, as the elevator doors parted we were greeted by Donna Summer, cigarette smoke, and apparently the entire population of the hotel.  It was packed and bodies moved at different skill levels, based on talent and alcohol.   We ducked, dodged, bobbed and weaved our way to the bar where we used our broken Russian to say “Screwdriver, tovarish!”

We had already tasted Russian Vodka on the plane to Leningrad so we knew that it was smooth beyond measure.  Yet we were still astounded to see our bartender pull out highball glasses, fill them near the top with Vodka and then a splash of orange juice for color–a Screwdriver.  What was even more remarkable was that the only thing you could taste was the orange juice.  We would later find out that orange juice was difficult to get in the Soviet Union and very expensive, thus the splash.

From there it was onto the dance floor where we showed our less than adequate dance skills.  Tried to make time with anything remotely female; failed at every turn to make a connection; then back to the bar where one of our compatriots had discovered that the bar had an extensive collection of Georgian wines.

Set us up!  We continued to drink and commiserate with one another that these women, mostly Finns, showed a lack of international cooperation and warmth toward we fine American men.  Well in retrospect what they saw were nineteen year old, googly eyed boys that were probably sloppy drunk and not worth the crooked smiles smeared on our faces.

We finally made our way back to our rooms hugging nothing more than our throbbing heads and gurgling stomachs.  The room was a narrow thing with two single beds attached to the wall and head to head.  Above each bed was a wall mounted light with an odd dangling ball with an on/off button on its lower end.

As I settled my head into a very thin, gulag-worthy pillow my head swirled as the bed spun.  My tried and true toss of one leg over the side of the bed stopped the tossing sea.  As my head slowed to a stop and my eyes refocused on the on/off dangly ball that stared at me like a Cyclops.  I continued my aforementioned descent into paranoia.  Are they listening?  Are they watching?  Are my hands in view doing innocent things?

Well I’ll fix their wagon.  I dove into a comparative analysis of our two systems speaking directly into the on/off dangly ball.  Never mind that the Soviets were probably a little slicker than that, the dangly ball looked like a microphone.  And I rambled on touching on everything from Khrushchev’s Secret Speech at the Communist Party’s Twentieth Congress in 1956 denouncing Stalin to the current state of the SALT Talks.  Well if they were listening I hope they at least blinked.

I woke up the next morning with the dangly ball still firmly in my hand and a surprising lack of a headache or stomach ache for that matter.  Good thing because this day would prove much more sobering than any other day I spent in the Soviet Union.

V The Great Patriotic War

I enjoy reading history–interpretive, re-interpretive, Oliver Stone-ish and the ultimate in “history”, Immanuel Velikovsky’s “Worlds in Collision”.  I’ll read just about anything to get a sense of history, what might have been, and the quirky stuff that leads you down paths you might not have thought about and are probably re-interpretive dead ends.  Such is history.

I also like to visit history–visit in the sense of visiting sights where history happened.

I visited the motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot.  For such a watershed moment the motel and the surrounding area are unexceptional and ordinary.  You realize that the man and what he stands for transcends the place.

I visited Machu Picchu.  In isolation its magnificence is resounding; its deserted calm overwhelming; the people who made it are everywhere around you, the place overshadowing who they are now.

I visited Battle where William the Norman fought and King Harold fell in 1066.  While there you read plaques that ask you to look out over cow pastures and imagine these two mighty armies clashing and, well, the best I could do there was imagine something out of Monty Python.  Not all sights inspire and without reminders it is easy to see how most things are lost to history

During WWII the Siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days–or about two-and-a-half years.  Following WWII Leningrad was restored and there is no evidence that two massive armies slaughtered one another and the civilian population that failed to evacuate.

Death tolls are deceiving and can only hint at an outcome.  They are also imperceptible and as the body count escalates the ability to perceive the carnage starts to gloss over.  The pain of a family member dying is gut wrenching and palpable, yet to imagine two million human beings dying in any number of ways in the Siege is somewhat hard to grasp.

For the Soviets WWII was particularly painful.  It is estimated that twenty million Soviets died during WWII or over one third of all deaths estimated as a result of that war.  The Soviet take on the war was that they took the brunt of it and won the war for themselves and the West–perhaps.  However you look at it the numbers are astounding and incomprehensible.

Part of the Intourist tour package was a required visit to the Piskariyovskoye Cemetery outside Leningrad.   This is where, for me, all of these numbers came crashing together.

Leningrad is a beautiful early eighteenth century city with a very low slung skyline.  It was built by Peter the Great beginning in 1703.  For all intents and purposes it is a contrivance, much like Washington DC.  Europe looked at the Russians as just a bit beyond their Barbarian past and Tsar Peter looked to Saint Petersburg to dispel those thoughts.  Until the rise of the Soviets in 1917 it was the capital of Russia.

The Piskariyovskoye Cemetery, I’m sure, inadvertently mimics that low slung skyline.  Spread out over 10.5 acres of land are mounds of earth rising about two feet high.  These are common graves with only granite markers to denote the year of each mounds internment.  About a half million people are buried here, anonymous to all but themselves.  There are no markers denoting heroes, cowards, or thieves; children or adults.  They are all here killed by a bullet; by a bomb; or starved to death; soldier or civilian.  And curious to think that this cemetery alone holds thousands more than the total US death count for the war.

Anybody that has been on a tourist bus knows the artificial noise that rises and falls as people expound on what they think they know and gets louder as they go further into what they don’t know.  That’s how we arrived.  As we debarked and our tour guide herded us together that noise fell off precipitously to mouth gaping, eye-blinking silence.  You can feel this place.  It’s haunted by an overwhelming silence–only the wind in the trees raises a fuss.

I, fortunately, had no war to fight.  My generation, relatively, unmarked or defined by a war–too late for Vietnam, too early for the Gulf.  These people, interned, years ago, did have a war to fight—an awful and brutal one at that.  These people I now knew and it was a sobering experience; the return bus ride was a contemplative one.

A few days later, in Moscow, we would be reminded again of the shadow that WWII cast on the Soviet population.

VII The Trade

Leningrad is a painted lady.  The sky while we were there was a snowy slate that made the yellow, blue and red painted buildings stand out that much more.  It is a very handsome skyline that is poked at by St. Peter and Paul, the largest free standing column in the world in front of the Admiralty and various other churches spires and onion domes.

As far north as Leningrad is adds an evening glow that, in December, lasted until about ten and then, like someone throwing a switch, pitch black.  The Neva reflected this all back to create a very lively sky that moved up and down the color spectrum and it went inky black too when the switch was thrown.

It was in this inky black that we wandered into the second evening we were there to try and trade our clothes for…well we didn’t quite know for what.

Mark and I went into the night sure that we were being followed–more paranoia.  A light snow had begun to fall and it was getting colder by the moment.  We didn’t wander far when we were approached by a young man asking for a light in Russian.  His pantomime gave it away; otherwise we only recognized “tovarish” (comrade) in his slew of Russian.

“Americanitz,” we chimed in unison.

“Ah, Americanitz…trade for pants, for watch, for shirt?”  He would have taken anything and obviously the cigarette thing was a ruse, an introduction so to speak.  I was wearing my merchandise–a pair of Levi 501s that were nearly blown out in the crotch.

I pointed at my pants and said I would trade, what did he have?

“Fur hat, two army belts and 100 rubles.”

“Done.”  It was that easy and maybe I could have gotten more but it sounded good to me.

The minor issue, of course, was that I had to go back to the hotel and get my only other pair of pants on and my trade goods off.  My paranoia was getting deeper than the snow, but off I went.  I’m sure that it was well known that this was going on, but I was sure that my jeans would be the tipping point and that I would have the opportunity to write about the Gulag from a foreigner’s point of view.  Instead I was in and out with no issue and the deal was done behind a dumpster next to an apartment building.  The new paranoia was that I would be knocked cold behind the dumpster and left with nothing–well probably nothing at all, least of all my pride.

Again nothing happened.  I was now the proud owner of one smelly rabbit fur hat that barely fit my head, two Soviet Army belts and 100 rubles.  For anyone that has followed my adventures with Mark won’t be surprised that while I did my deal he was off making a much more dramatic, convoluted and dangerous deal not too far away.

As I made my way back to the hotel with my loot Mark came running and sliding through the snow to stop me.

“I made a deal with another guy for a sable fur hat.  We have to go to his grandmother’s apartment in his taxi.”

“Okay,” I said without thinking.

By this time the snow was coming down heavily and now I need you to picture your favorite Cold War spy movie with a Yank behind enemy lines entrusting themselves to the local taxi driver.  You speak no Russian and the driver pidgin English.  What’s your ride?  Why the infamous Trabant of course.  As we approach our driver reinstalls the wipers–they would be stolen if left on.  We jam ourselves in the back seat and it’s Mr. Toads wild ride from here on out.

It’s left, then right, straight for speed, and slide through the next few turns.  There are no lights but that of the Trabant, the snow is falling faster and heavier.  Dark figures are walking along bundled from the cold and heaving heavy bags as they made their way through the snow as our driver paid them very little heed.  We are moving further and further away from the city center and onto roads that are overarched by post war apartment blocks and, if it’s possible, getting darker.  Other than the strain of the engine, we are very quiet as we realize that we may have made a serious mistake.

After what seemed an hour of driving we pulled over into the parking lot of a concrete apartment block ten or twelve stories tall.  Our driver signals us to stay put.  We suggested some Russian hospitality, but he says he can’t wake his grandmother and off he goes.

It’s dead silent, dead cold, and except for one street light, dead dark.

I looked at Mark and him at me and for once his bravado totally escaped him.  We had no idea where we were, we had told no one we were leaving, and we had entrusted ourselves to a chain smoking taxi driver who was scared of his grandmother.  Time passed.

And time passed.

Finally a dark figure emerged from the apartment block and jogged to the car.  We held our breathes.  We would either be floating down the Neva toward the Finnish Sea or Mark was going to get one sweet fur hat.  You may have guessed by this point that it was the latter.  My fur hat looked like road kill compared to his.  It was plush, well made, and it didn’t smell.  It was a deep brown, almost black, it was beautiful.

Our driver was all smiles at this point and pulled out a Mason jar of vodka to celebrate our deal.  We celebrated the deal all the way back to the hotel.  Was our driver drunk?  You bet.  Were we drunken passengers?  You bet.  Were we happy to be alive?  You bet.  Were we any smarter?  Probably not.

VIII The Train Ride

After a few more minor adventures and incidents it was time to get on a train to Moscow.

Russians, and therefore the Soviets, like the Chinese, are a xenophobic lot.  The Chinese because of their insular culture and the Russians because of their knack for being at the crossroads of any number of invaders and conquerors.   So it was of no surprise, but of some interest, that the Russian train system road on a different gauge than that of Europe—a narrower one if I remember correctly.

As we left our hotel we were handed a boxed lunch for the train ride.  We were escorted to and through the train station to our train.  If I didn’t know better I’d say that our rail cars might have been taken by Lenin himself.  Quaint would be a polite way to describe those cars, maybe comparing them to well worn clothes would be another.  In any case we hoisted ourselves, our bags, and our boxed lunch into our train car and we were left to our own devices—no escort.

Like any conveyance I find myself with my face plastered to the window.  I didn’t want to miss a thing.  Well it soon became obvious that there wouldn’t be much to see beyond Leningrad.  Its urban footprint quickly gave way to a snow covered landscape of low trees and small towns clinging to the side of the tracks.  I sensed our lack of escort wasn’t because of a new found level of trust, but more that if we did choose to disembark there was no place to go.

It was also like going through a time warp.  Beyond Leningrad it was as if cars and trucks no longer existed.  If any vehicle was waiting at a rail crossing it was usually a heavy, lumbering horse shrouded in its own atmosphere pulling a Babushka in a troika.  The houses were one story, shed like things with garish, brightly colored grotesqueries that would have been perfect in “Dr. Zhivago”.  And the snow seemed to get deeper and deeper.  It was really quite beautiful, but after a while it lost my interest.

I was soon hungry and started to tuck into my boxed lunch.  Like most countries the Russians have their own, home grown, soda that they proudly serve with just about any meal.  For Peruvians it’s Inca Cola which is sickly sweet and yellow if I remember correctly.  For the Soviets it was Tarkhun, again sickly sweet, but green.  That came out first.

Next I moved through several slabs of stuff—meat, potato and fish and quite literally chunks of it.  All of it was very good despite its less than appealing presentation.  And finally something sweet—can’t remember for the life of me what that might have been, but again quite edible and no points for presentation.

Sated, I soon became itchy and started to wander through the train.  It was like wandering through a live presentation of National Geographic.  There didn’t seem to be any classes to the cars—Marxism at its best, yet there was obviously a delineation from car to car.  Several cars were loaded with farmers taking stock and vegetable to market.  In this case to Moscow.  Chickens, pigs, ducks et.al. jammed into cages and all talking at once.  All these farmers were right out of central casting and again perfect for “Dr. Zhivago”.

As I made my way from one of the cars to the next I was met by a Soviet soldier, obviously, inebriated.  I stopped to stick my head out the window to be blasted by a shockingly cold blast of air.  When I pulled my head back in the soldier frumped his lips, nodded to me and extended his Mason jar of vodka.  “Spaciba, tovarish”, and I took a long pull of that magical and tasteless potato concoction.

All of the cars were packed with people, their stuff and their smells.  The smells were so foreign to me that it was actually pleasant.  As I reached the final car I was surprised to see a snack bar.   Behind the steward was a shockingly tall collection of half triangular boxes that when stacked formed boxes.  I had to have one.  I gave over however many kopeks this delicacy required and took it back to my seat.  Pulled it open and took a big swig, a really big swig.  It was a bad idea.

Initially it went down like milk and had a hint of milk to it, but then the harsh aftertaste that fortunately didn’t burn, but tasted like it should have.  I managed to hold it down, just.  I was later to figure out that it was unpasteurized milk and had I not been on a train may have been able to meet the cow that gave it up.

And then we were there, seven hours later and it’s time to take a breath.  Like anything written about Russian, filmed about Russia or thought about Russia you need an interlude.

III Interlude

Now that the Soviet Union is close to being twenty years into history it is difficult to relate to those that didn’t experience the Cold War what a colossus the Soviet Union was.  How it was feared and how everything that the United States did during that time was a reaction or response to what the Soviet Union did and/or we perceived them doing.

Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was firmly in power at the time and would die several years after our visit.  It would be a cavalcade of lesser lights that followed him that would see to the demise of the Soviet Union, but at the time there were no hints that this could or would happen.

It has always struck me as odd that it was possible to travel to the heart of our mortal enemy.  We were treated very well; we were given the best accommodations; we were given the best seats to any sporting event or performance.  We were given the best of everything in hopes of casting the best light on their system.  Yet the overarching perception was of a poorly maintained, worn around the edges, somewhat desperate country that ran despite itself—even then at the height of their power.  It was something out of Mad Magazine and not Time Magazine.

Hedrick Smith’s “The Russians” was the insider’s guide the Soviet Union at the time.  Smith, a New York Times reporter and editor, purposely titled it the Russians to emphasize the fact the even though the Soviets’ were touting the forming of a new and perfect socialist entity, its underpinning was not far removed from the Czarist/Serf model that it had replaced.  The average Soviet citizen was not well off.

So here we were travelling through the Belly of the Beast well fed and very comfortable.   Like visiting Pashas we floated above and aloof from the general population, but we walked among them.  It was Potemkin at his best, but like Potemkin’s ruse it didn’t work.

Once we scratched the surface and did interact in various minor and more involved ways it became obvious that the Russian people were a warm and gregarious lot.  It was not only among themselves but to anyone within their range.  I was roundly scolded by a babushka for not having my hat on one a cold day, all in Russian, but very obvious to anyone with a mother.  While on the subway in Moscow we were witness to any number of extremely drunk passengers that slumped to the floor and were then gently and lovingly put back into their seats by those closest to them.  There was nothing false about the average Russian.  Yes Sting, the Russians love their children too

So having left the beautiful Leningrad on the cold shores of the Neva we arrived to the very gray, very cold Moscow that looked to dominate its landscape not live with it—but this part of the story will have to wait for another time.

To one and all, a Merry Christmas and the best of the Holidays and here’s to a much better and welcoming New Year.

00:53:13 A wormhole, about yay big:

Thus quoth the astronaut, in the movie “Zathura”, as he holds up his thumb and index finger to outline a small orifice.

I love this line.

It’s a pithy way to say that something is difficult; difficult to understand; to find; to go through; to comprehend.

1.

I’ve tried to peak around the corner a number of times in an effort to cheat time—not to garner more of it, but to see how this book will end and is this only volume one. Too comprehend.

The first time I thought I had gotten a look was when I was in the second grade.  I was in a Quaker elementary school and like a lot of my early years; quiet reflection was not one of my abilities.  For me it was all head on, very visceral.  Rambunctious would best describe me.

So with the elegance that only slow motion can detect I jumped from the upper deck of a playground jungle gym and squarely on my head.

Isaac, the custodian, picked me up and carried me.  In my time compressed timeline I am then in an ambulance, laying thrilled by the sound of the siren.  As I looked up the ceiling light was filled by the head of someone dressed all in white.

A halo sparked around the edges of someone’s head.  Presbyterian Kindergarten, Catholic first grade and now Quaker second grade, made it quite obvious to me that I was in the presence of an angel. My mother told me it was my father in his whites.

Even being told the obvious that image haunts me.

2.

In my teen years I could hold my breath for a long time.

To push this talent to an extreme I had trained myself to relax to an extreme.  My resting heart rate was very low and I could slow it even further.  I would take a deep breath and lower my head into the water and fade away.

I never contested anyone with this talent or even told anyone what I was doing.  I also never pushed it to the SEAL extreme of borderline death—I think.  What I did do was to reach a point of relaxation that allowed my mind to wander away.  It was very much like going through a door.

A small door with very little room on the other side, but comfortable all the same.  Once there I would leave for two or three minutes, sometimes more.  When I came back it was rarely for lack of breath, but for a sudden consciousness that said to go back.  Up would come my head, my long hair framing my face with the sound of water streaming back on itself.

3.

The highlight of my architectural education was going to Machu Picchu.  It was part of a three week journey to Peru, that included two weeks far down the Amazon River and then for a week in Cusco and Machu Picchu.

Machu Picchu is a place I had wanted to visit since I was a child. “Gods, Graves and Scholars”, lent to me by my mother, was the portal that opened my mind’s eye to history and man’s footprint.  It motivated further exploration that brought the Incans to light for me.

I was certain that if there were truly power points on earth that this would be one of them.  A blue aura would emanate from the stone like the aurora borealis; the universe intermingling with our small rock.  I would be able to hear the Aborigines; echoes of the Druids; and the ancient Incans.  I would see beyond our earthly existence.

Well, the closest I came to seeing the other side was on the bus ride as it switched back again and again as it made its way to the ruins.  The road is perilous and view down is straight down—nerve wracking.

The ruins themselves are spectacular, but there was no blue light, no epiphany, the universe stood at its usual distance and the voices I heard were mostly in German and English.  The place is breathtaking but quite dead.

4.

So in this brief survey it seems that, in fact, I haven’t gotten the briefest glimpse of the other side.

I do think, though, that the journey is the difficult part and that passing through the time sphincter will be the easy part.

Just shut your eyes and hold your breath.

No really.

Well, not really.

It’s confusing.

Just before Thanksgiving Min and I went into DC.  For Min it was a return visit to the Building Museum and the Lego exhibit.  For me it was my umpteenth visit to the West Wing of the National Gallery and in particular for the” Harry Callahan at 100” exhibit.   He didn’t make it to 100 but his birthday did.

Except for major pieces of his that were shown in group shows I hadn’t seen an exhibit of just his work, so there were some surprises, mostly good, but like most photographers, at least, the collection went a little thin around the edges.  His multiple exposures were less than interesting and his “twigs” in the snow images that he is very well known for were dated.

His images of his wife make up for the lesser work. Like Stieglitz with Georgia O’Keefe he transcended his love and admiration for his partner well beyond the pale.  The images of his wife Eleanor are touching, beautiful, and poetic.  He seems to use her visage to occupy the cold and gray of his surroundings with warmth and charm.  She may have been a harridan in life, but that would be unknown here.  She is a siren; a sylph; a nymph—she is female beauty and danger wrapped in one.

Also curious was the size of most of these prints.  Most of the early work was very small in scale, not much beyond a 5×7 and, most, smaller than that.  There is preciousness to many of the images.  The size of the images are, seemingly, as brief as the shutter speed.

Hopefully I will be able to go back, because my first visit to any show is a fairly quick walk through to let the images wash over me and then to go back to really soak myself in the pictures that initially caught my eye and to appreciate others that I at first dismissed.

Callahan’s trajectory of photographic success was a typical one.  For him it was an early meeting with a giant of the day (Ansel Adams) that led to his moving forward seriously with his own work.  Beyond that it was a progression of teaching and showing that culminated in a well respected career as a photographer that was followed by and written about by many.  No surprises—well scripted.

After arriving back from our Thanksgiving trip to DC I was greeted by my always helpful neighbor with my mail and several UPS boxes.  In one was a book I had been looking forward to for some time.  It was as monograph with the work of Vivian Maier—“Vivian Maier, Street Photographer”.  A woman who had worked in utter obscurity for decades leaving behind over 100,000 negatives (the same as Callahan) that were plucked from the darkness at the eleventh hour at an auction house that had earlier acquired the contents of her unpaid storage unit.  She died soon thereafter in her nineties never having met the man who purchased her negatives and would make her famous.

As mentioned Callahan’s arc was a comfortably recognizable one.  Maier’s is not.

As I paged through the volume I felt I was looking through a history book on street photography.  Every major name in the opus was represented by an image in this book.  Her images are as good if not better at every turn.  The difficulty comes in the realization that other than amassing an amazing number of negatives Maier left nothing behind that could speak to her influences.  Were these conscious decisions to emulate images she was familiar with or something more toward the “idiot savant” end of the spectrum?

As far as I know there are no prints from her negatives done by Maier that would hint at how she would have shown them.  Would she have preferred precious—not much larger than her 2-1/4 inch negatives or the approximately 9×9 images in the book?  Does it matter?

One thing is for sure her talent will always be on the fence.  Her talent will always be advocated by others. Her voice will never be lent.  The art world doesn’t like surprises, particularly ones that have no other voice than the image.  She was apparently a crusty old nanny with few vices other than photography.  Vivian went off script.

For me personally, the work is beautiful.  It doesn’t matter who her influences were or how she was influenced.   The difficulty now is in the editing of her work by others.  I tend to think that many of the images were pulled consciously or not because they did tingle with familiarity.

Ansel Adams long ago compared the making of a photographic print to the playing of music and the negative being the score.  In fact anyone with reasonable credentials can print from Adam’s negatives.  With Maier you have the added facet of editing the score yourself—unlike Adams she left behind no primer.

Her story is a wonderful one.  It is a story that will resonate for some time and she will be a talent that will rise and fall with the seasons—in and out of fashion, but never classic.

If only she had stuck to the script.

I’ve written this one in my head any number of times.  I’ve written it in my head going south on the NJTP.  I’ve
written it in my head going north through Scranton.  I stopped writing it in my head when I realized I was on 87 vs. 287 and had to be sure I didn’t miss the Cross Bronx.

I thought that I would throw a lot of art history at it and go through some long winded dissertation on the state of art over the last two hundred years, but……

Am I creative?

Well I don’t know, but I think I’ll tell what it means to be creative to me-my own little story.

I build things.  Always have.  I disappear into my creations, I mean way gone.  Models, forts, rubber band guns, rebuilding my bike–anything with my hands.

I’m a perfectionist.  So much so that if it isn’t right–just right–I’ll destroy it.

In a nutshell I am both a creator and a destroyer.  I’ve always had that; it just took time to make it work for me.

I would love to say that I was repressed, that others held me back from my passion, that no one recognized my
genius, but until I was twenty three years old, there was nothing to repress, held back or recognized.  I was your
average, aimless young man.

Most Likely to _________?  I was most likely to do what?  I was so ill defined I didn’t have a clue what I would like to do.  Like most people, I had a long list of things I didn’t want to do, but no real handle on what I could do.

It wasn’t until I was twenty three that I made a move that was of my own volition and desire.

Family, friends and strangers had long said I had an artistic bent and, in truth, through my humility I thought  they might just be right, but I didn’t know what to do with it.

My work history following graduating from college was sketchy at best.  Through the lens of a poor economy and no discernable talent I went from one minor job to another.  A short—eight days—stint in the military would have given me a good foothold into the working world.  However it was there that I made my first Big-boy decision—a career in the Navy Supply Corps was not what I wanted to do with my life.  I dis-enrolled (DE’d in military parlance).

A brief career as a baby photographer (six months) was a first step toward my future—a horrid experience on the whole, but I had a knack for the photographic aspect of the job.

And then one of those odd jobs that leveraged it all—the House Post Office, pitching and delivering mail.  Such a mindless position that I had more than ample time to think about things.  What to watch on TV, what to have for dinner that night, oh and what to do with the rest of my life.

I was living the single DC life in Silver Spring, Maryland, just where East West Highway makes a hoop-di-doo to
avoid going through DC.  It was a short walk to the Metro that took me to the House Post Office in the Longworth Building and then, later, to the Crypt in the Capitol Building.

I don’t remember the particulars, but I do remember my friend David Barnes convincing me to put together a
portfolio of my photographs, drawings and doodles and apply to the Corcoran School of Art.  He was one of those people who told me I had a talent, maybe not a gift, but at least a talent.  He was big into penny-stocks, so he was used to betting on long-shots, but it was enough to motivate me.

And damn if they didn’t accept my application.  I was thrilled for a day or two, and then horrified that perhaps they didn’t look closely enough at my work and had made some egregious error.

I was convinced before I got there that I would be surrounded by young da Vincis, Picassos, et al.  At twenty three I was the old man in the program and probably more nervous than I would have been had I been seventeen.  As it turned out I had more talent in my pinky than most of these darkly dressed pretenders.

As an aside, our culture has this misconception that if you are antisocial, quirky, gay or can’t match your socks
that you must have a creative disposition; that you must need an outlet; that your “problem” can’t be discerned by inkblots, but by creating them.  For this reason I wasn’t surrounded by the aforementioned artists, but by a motley collection of antisocial, quirky, gay, and non-sock-matching people with varying levels of talent.

Just for clarity, except for the gay part, I was a high functioning antisocial, quirky, and non-sock-matching member of the group.  I blame my inability to match socks on my color blindness.

My point is that creativity has no recognizable look.

But there I was, a pig-in-shit.  The Foundations program was one of my more lucent periods.  It was a
moment in my life when my skipping stone touched down.  Everything was fresh and new.  Everything I had imagined I could do with a blank piece of paper, a blank canvas, a piece of clay was all put before me.  It was a door unlocked.

I had entered the program with all intention to continue with photography, but as one new media after another
presented itself I wasn’t so sure.

My walks from the Corcoran to the crypt in the Capitol Building usually included a stop at the East Wing, the Hirshhorn, the Renwick, the Air and Space, the Museum of American Art and the Portrait Gallery—obviously depending on the day, but to that point and since had never spent so much time in art galleries and museums.  Their creative collections are immense and they were washing over me.  It was daunting and inspiring.

While I was at the Corcoran, and later at VCU, I never called myself an artist, but when asked I said I went to art school.  Most of my friends referred to themselves as artists right off the bat.  I had no such pretension.  In a lot of ways I still don’t.

So what does it mean to be creative? I still don’t know. I am now an architect—come to by a very roundabout route, but one that has taken every creative instinct that I’ve had and put it to use.  I think what I’ve done is best summed up by the notion of the creative instinct.

Like any animal that works on instinct I have very little to explain the whys, whats, and wherefores.  So sadly I can’t tell what creativity is or where it comes from.  For me twenty-three was the year I woke up, took my life into my own hands, for better or for worse and walked down my own creative path.   And it is fortunate that I have creative outlets for I could very easily live in my own head at a greater distance than I already am.

So there you have it.  Probably an unsat answer, but at least what it means to be creative to me.

How will our ends be dictated?

Yeah I know, real pick me up questions—pass the toast and put me to bed.  Several things I have experienced over the past several weeks have put more of a laser focus on these thoughts so I share them with you now in three acts.

Act I

I recently attended a symposium, “Transcending Architecture”, at the Architecture school I attended in DC—the Catholic University of America.  It was a two day affair in very uncomfortable seats, in an acoustically awful auditorium, and, for a dweeb like me, totally absorbing.

One speaker in particular caught my attention. Mark E. Wedig, a Dominican friar, came at the notion of transcendence and the numinous from the theological perspective.

Now, I can operate at a fairly high level in many things, but the friar was using words I knew in combinations that made them new and somewhat incomprehensible.  But, from the haze I heard him quote a French phenomenologist, Jean-Yves Lacoste, who contends that the liturgy is nothingness.  My first thought was that this was a bit on the nihilist side of things and, indeed as he worked his way further into his argument it was.

“The only way in which true nothingness can be seen is in the shadow of the overwhelming plenitude of God; pure darkness can only be perceived when one has first encountered absolute light,” writes Michael Burns on his blog, Daily Humiliation.  This is an intriguing response to the notion of nothingness.

Before this I hadn’t really perceived nothingness as inhabitable space, but he more I thought about it the more compelling it became.  I was so wrapped up in this thought that I’m not sure where Friar Wedig went with his talk.  I do know where I went however.

First, the liturgy as nothingness is a notion that must be contained and it is the responsibility of the congregant and/or congregation to occupy this void, either through their belief or their willingness to responsibly question their belief.  The physical space they occupy, the church, the synagogue, the mosque offers sanctuary and solace to safely wander the void and ultimately to transcend the nothingness to a numinous state.

Secondly the numinous is a temporary state.  I don’t think the nothingness is a lack of understanding or belief or an area that can be seen only through the “overwhelming plenitude of God”, but the shadow world we live in.  Without belief and/or the ability to transcend the everyday the liturgy will truly be nothingness and our being pointless—and what is “true nothingness”?

And finally, sacred spaces are the vessels of this nothingness.  We are invited in with very little pretext to move through the darkness to the light and most sacred spaces physically process you to the light, whether with glazing and/or ceiling height.  Can a building offer this transcendence without a liturgy?  In general, no; most of us need direction. Can the liturgy offer us transcendence on its own? In general, no; we need the structure of the structure; we need the order and comfort of a physical space to perceive the nothingness, to offer our belief as the light from the shadow.

Act II

My neighbor was tragically killed by a truck while crossing the street to her house.  I heard it.

She and her husband crossed at the same spot many times before with no consequence other than to get to the other side.

I was sitting in our living room working on my computer when I heard the sound of a car being hit, but it was one sided—it wasn’t two vehicles.  This was immediately followed by a woman’s quick scream of surprise.  That was it.  It was not more than a second..

I raised my head in anticipation of the sound of brakes, or more metal being smashed, or more screaming, but nothing.  I went back to my computer.

A half-an-hour later I heard the sound of an idling semi and I went to the window to see what was going on.  There hadn’t been the sound of sirens or anything else out of the ordinary so when I looked out the window I was shocked to see a body lying under a sheet, in the middle of the lane, a ways onto the bridge.

I was entranced.  Who could it be?  Who had succumbed to the proverbial Bus?  Who had come to the ultimate moment of transcendence?

For quite a while the body lay there while emergency personnel went about their business as they waited for whom I didn’t know.  It wasn’t until an EMT pulled back the sheet that I had my first clue of who it might be.  At that point the body was face down.  The EMT rolled the body over and then I knew and it literally took m breath away.

“It took my breath away”—an expression that is used quite casually.  I’m as guilty as the next, but at tha moment I knew exactly what it meant.  It was as if I had swallowed nothing.  I wasn’t choking, the air just wasn’t there.

I wanted to reach out to her; I wanted to stroke her hair; to tell her everything was OK, everything was alright.  Help would be there soon, but she had already passed, she was dead and for what seemed forever lay under that sheet.

I have never been this close to death before.  I had never seen, in this case, heard how quick it can be.  I had seen a plane crash years before at an air race, but other than knowing a pilot had to be in the plane, it may as well have been a model.  This was a vibrant member of the community, a mother, a wife, a thoughtful person, gone in an instant—our fragility on full display.

Act III

Irene is a name that is not often heard these days. The hurricane naming committee decided 2011 would have an Irene for the ninth hurricane of the season.

It began in the usual way, churning far away, ready to devastate some enchanted Caribbean island, and gathering strength for its trip north.  The computer models had soon laid out a path that would take it up the East Coast on a rare path that could take it up the Chesapeake and finally through New England—it was now US newsworthy.

It followed the computer path pretty well, although it lost a lot of its strength and by the time it neared us it had been downgraded to a Category 1 Hurricane, a Tropical Storm.  A bit of wind and a bit of rain that would could cause flash flooding. It all sounded fairly benign.

So on Sunday morning I set out for the Mad River Valley and Yestermorrow.  Before I left I told my son Min to get together a small suitcase, his rain boots, rain coat, any entertainment he may need and to help his mother do the same. I also lectured him on the dangers of weather and its utter unpredictability.  So Min don’t think that safe zone he had erected in the playroom with the blanket for a roof would do any good. I told him that if it became too windy, too rainy, or a combination of both they were to head to my office.

I shared my wisdom following my review of the weather for the day, so I thought it would simply be lesson in being prepared for any exigency not an actuality.   So off I went, over the rain slicked roads of Central Vermont, Route 100 and 107 in the main, to Yestermorrow.

When I was a child the end of the world was to be a nuclear holocaust.  An impersonal exchange of ICBMs between the USA and USSR that would require us to hide under our desks at school; be herded to a central location; and finally retrieved by our parents to be taken home to quietly radiate with our immediate family.

Since the demise the Soviet Bloc that scenario has been tucked away along with such lovely acronyms as MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks), and SEATO (look it up).  However, with the rise of the Weather Channel an entirely new set of lingo has hit our shores.

Isobars; Category 1 thru 5; High Pressure and Low Pressure; and we all have a friend who obsesses about the weather whom we now call (in my case) AccuCas.  But this all seemed another case of the Weather Channel making much ado about nothing.

The class began at nine and we worked through the day to the sound of rain coming down throughout that time.  It didn’t sound unusual and class ended promptly at three that afternoon.

I packed up, said my goodbyes, and as I passed by the office I thanked them.

“If you can’t get home you can stay here the night.”

“Thanks, that’s very kind” I replied, thinking they wouldn’t see me again for a while.

As I began down Rt. 100 South it was quickly obvious that the situation was a bit unusual.  Earlier when I made me way North on the same road I had noted places along the way that I thought might be a problem should flash flooding actually happen.  Going south there was already a number of spots that had flooded that weren’t on my list.

As I moved further along I was running along with two purposes.  One was to get home to make sure Lisa and Min were safe; the other said turn around you fool this isn’t good.  My first inclination moved me forward although my second inclination was sounding louder in my mind.

The smell of mud was getting stronger and stronger as I drove.  Who knew that the smell of mud could be so menacing and frightening?  I began to drive on the side of the road furthest from the raging water as parts of the road had already slid into the water.

My mind was shrinking, my ability to think waning, when, finally, a barricade made the decision for me.  I wheeled around quickly and then flew back to Yestermorrow at sixty to eighty miles an hour.  My mind had opened up again as I realized a dead Mikey was no good to anyone.

As I neared the last bridge before getting to Yestermorrow—an iron bridge that was being battered when I had left and even worse now—I sped up a notch to get over it.  Seemed a good idea at the time, but I think had the bridge given out while I was on it my speed would just have made me hit the other side a little harder.

Finally safe at Yestermorrow I met up with several other people from my class who were trapped as well.  Sitting with a warm cup of coffee we decided that we should become Eco-terror tourist, to see what Mother Earth had wrought.  My first inclination had been to hunker down and wait it out, but my curiosity got the best of me and off we went.

First stop was south toward the iron bridge I had just crossed.  It was being pounded by water and debris.  Trees were literally falling off the banks and being crushed and shredded beneath the bridge.  As I watched more people arrived including a family of four.  Like a magnet the destruction drew all but a few—me included—toward the bridge.  It was as if a TV screen separated them from the onslaught that raged in front of them and no harm would come.

Fortunately none did, but I found it curious to think that these people somehow thought they were invincible.  That this terrestrial life would do them no harm or that somehow they would swim to safety should something happen.  For me it was the motivation to see my ten year old grow up that kept me at a distance.  Yet there was an entire family nearly standing on the bridge having their picture taken by one of my compatriots.

Our second stop was at the covered bridge into Waitsfield. By the time we arrived the water had receded a bit and the bridge stood firm.  The bridge was elevated and the water had come just below the road deck. Where we were standing had just been under three feet of water.  The houses that lined the road in various states of disrepair were one hundred fifty to two hundred years old—mostly wood framed, but some of brick.  Neighbors helped one another bring back pieces that had floated away.

As I looked I realized that these venerable old structures were all in the flood plain and as mentioned were all quite old.  Two other things struck me.  One the bridge was elevated high enough to avoid being underwater and, two, one small, brick house, much older than any other house around it sat on a mound even higher than the bridge.  There was a structural memory there that damned the human memory that tends to forget these things.

Finally we returned to Yestermorrow.  I went to my room and slept like a baby.

Coda

So there you have it insight, tragedy, and foolhardiness. If I were Shakespeare……

But I ask again what would your epitaph be?  Your last words?

I heard my neighbor’s last sound.  It haunts me still and I suspect it will for some time. It was a sound of surprise, death catching us completely off guard.  It would be left to others to give voice to her final words.  An open mike memorial service that lasted three and half hours did just that and probably said more than she could have summed up in a sentence.

Someone like Neil Armstrong can pass quietly, nothing to be spoken; he said his piece on July 21,^, 1969.  I won’t insult your intelligence by writing those words here.

Julius Caesar came out with, “Et tu, Brute?”.  This was said to his friend Marcus Brutus and probably reported by Brutus.  But who’s to say–the majestic and powerful seem to say pithy things at their final moment quite often.  We should all have publicists.

A good friend’s father just died and he passed quietly after saying the Rosary with his wife.  It was reported that a moment after they had said the Rosary that his wife said, “Bill, did you just die?”  Sure enough he had, and a very good man passed on transcending our human travail.

I once told a girlfriend that we live for our death. By that I mean that we try to walk this world the best we can; to overcome our selfish needs; to do the best we can for our family and neighbors.  Just to do our best with what we were born with so that perhaps someone will mention our passing in a kind way.  And as I recently read, we don’t truly die until the last person who knew us passes on as well.

I will leave you with a short obit from the London Times that my wife Lisa has had taped to our refrigerator for years now—

Watson, Graham—died peacefully after a delicious dinner.  He will be greatly missed by those whom he loved.

Brilliant.

His memory left to brighten the day,

Hasse left us in a lesser way,

On a dreary rainy day,

The passing season pulls at the leaves,

A reminder of our tenuous grasp,

Lime is spread,

It is all dead.

The breeze of angels’ wings,

Whispers through the trees,

We wish for tears

To fog our fears.

Neither makes sense,

Both we knew.

They float now past our foggy vision

We only know that it was God’s decision.

Borders has gone out of business.  A sad reminder too many and a surprise to a very few.

Now, I did my best to support it and kill it all at the same
time.  I spent lots of time reading magazines I had no intention of buying; plotting for future purchases on Amazon; and drinking lots of their coffee.  I had a Borders Card and I did buy enough there to get my Borders Bucks, so I wasn’t a complete scoundrel, but….

Yes, but, I do have a Kindle.  If any of you truly think our houses will have shelves to keep our large collection of books in the near future, you are sadly mistaken.  Even Ikea has redesigned its Billy book case to be deeper and happier as a storage shelf and not a book shelf.

Is this a bad thing?

No, just a different thing.

Anyone of my age well remembers LPs and for me my father’s large jazz collection of 78s.  Where are they now?  Some land fill somewhere.

I think it’s harder with books because we grew up with the story of the Guttenberg Bible and the advent of the printing press.  The great democratizer of knowledge—the power of the printed word.  Books everywhere.  You needed to know something you found it in a book.

One of the first jobs I had fashioned for my future was the Information Librarian.  I thought that would be the coolest thing to look things up all day.  To track down minor details lost in abstracts, moldy magazines and even moldier ancient texts.  An archeologist of the mind–a keeper of facts.  Can’t tell you why I didn’t pursue it, but my mouth still waters at the thought of banks and banks of card catalogues and indexes.

So as I approached West Leb’s version of Borders, with its huge swayback sign that said, “Going Out of Business” for the last time it was with sadness.  I’m just not a Barnes and Noble guy, although they do have Starbucks, which is a plus.  The yellow caution tape had now girdled the remaining stock towards the front desk, so there was more empty space than not.

Children’s section, gone. Music—long gone.  DVDs—not many.  Even Sting’s latest CD was being shilled at a
great markdown—I bit.

Amongst this shriveled bit of bookery was an elderly lady who wandered the aisles as if she had all the time in the world.  Stopping every few feet to run her fingers over the spine of a book, flip through a few pages and just being blithely in the way.  I passed her several times as I took advantage of the markdowns and finally made my way to the cashier.

The little old lady stood in front of me in line.  Just before her turn a woman was making her purchase,

“I am so sorry to see Borders go out of business.  It’s so unfortunate.”

“We are as well.  But the lease has been purchased by Books-a-Million,” he offered up as a salve.  More like Bactine, it helps but it still hurts.

Amidst the deluge that is an Irene-like closing, with yellow markdown signs everywhere, empty bookshelves shoved around in total disarray, bits and pieces that have no obvious use, but for sale anyway, and yellow
caution tape delineating the dangers of the closed areas, our wizened little lady looked around wide-eyed, suddenly conscious, blurted out, “Borders is closing?!”

Yes my dear it has.  Is it a monument to bad management and bad business planning or a sign
of the demise of the printed word?  Just so I can be right—it’s both.  Barring an upper atmosphere electromagnetic pulse that fries all our electronics, books are going the way of the dinosaur.

I will miss Borders because it always felt like a really nice library where I could drink coffee in the stacks and peruse an amazing collection of magazines.  Things were categorized by type—fiction, literature, science fiction and on, and not by the dismal Dewey decimal system.

I have been totally subverted by Amazon but, I wonder, when they go out of business, where will they hang the banner?  And who will blurt out, “Amazon is closing?!”

Just asking.

Blue, Blue, Blue

I kicked my head back

Stars were popping

Piercing the blue as it became

Black, Black, Black

Flashing red light on its horizontal flight

A later report said

Pop, Pop, Pop

A cartoon dragon raged across a white sheet

The soundtrack roared, it screamed

Our hero blew it to smithereens

Scream, Scream, Scream

The movie ended

I had only snored once

The blue warm air

Given over to a black cold night

The sheet now blank

I set off for home to

Dream, Dream, Dream

Like many American males I love cars and movies with cars. If I had my druthers and monetary wherewithal I would have a garage full of American, German, Italian, Japanese and whoever’s high performance car.

So, let’s see, my first car, a 1974 Ford LTD. It had belonged to my grandfather.

And my second car? A 1981 Plymouth Horizon that I managed to keep on the road for over eleven years and 130,000 miles. It wasn’t a particularly good looking car and by the time I had it towed to the junk yard it was downright ugly.

The list doesn’t get any more interesting following the Horizon, so I won’t bore you with it.

If I could be a stunt driver in any movie it would be either “Bullitt”, “The Vanishing Point” or the original “The Italian Job”. I was driving the Horizon when I had my Steve McQueen moment, my Bullitt moment.

2.

Easily one of the most interesting jobs I had was working in the House Post Office in the Longworth Building. And one of the most interesting parts of the job was the interesting cast of characters I worked with.

All were there through some direct, indirect and, in my case, very indirect relationship with a Congressman or woman. We were all in patronage positions, every mail pitching, box chucking one of us.

There were a few congressional children who worked all year round, but during the summer a hoard of them showed up. Some even displaced people who had come on with the understanding that they would be gone to make room for the kids. Some of these congressional children worked, others showed up on payday, and some skipped all formalities and had their checks mailed to them. But I digress.

On the particular night I will describe I was with a co-worker whom I got along with very well and spent time socializing with after work. This night he had asked me for a ride home because his car was in the shop and his girlfriend was unavailable—we will call him M and he was not a congressional child.

Our shift ended at 10pm so the streets of DC were relatively empty as we headed toward his house in Northwest, close to American University. We chatted aimlessly, laughed too loud and repeated one of our favorite stories that ended—“I bumped my head………twice,” said with a Southern drawl, the bitter end of a tail of one of our lesser co-workers. You had to be there.

At this point I’m fairly sure we were on Military Road when I saw some headlights coming very fast towards us in my rearview. My car rocked as a TransAm busted past us at a very high rate of speed.

“Holy shit!” screamed M.

“Wow”, I added.

And then? And then a Hollywood stunt turn in the wild. One of those where the ass end of the car slides around one hundred and eighty degrees with the wheels smoking as they try to overcome the cars inertia and get it moving in the opposite direction.

And it did. It literally leaped at us head on.

Now if I got anything from my test-pilot father it would be coolness in adverse situations. I was intent on the TransAm while M, with a death grip on his seat, was screaming—and I have to say it—like a girl. The Trans Am was coming at us head on and accelerating.

At this point all went silent and I remember thinking that this guy was in control. My choices were limited because I didn’t know who he was or what he was after, so I realized my safest bet was to keep going straight and let him do whatever he wanted. He was obviously trying to scare the hell out of us and M had already gotten rid of hell and was onto whatever leaves after hell.

I wasn’t scared. I would be scared later after I extricated us from our predicament.

The TransAm’s lights were growing at a great rate and at the last second, and I do mean the last second, swerved around us. The Horizon was rocked again and this time I tromped on the gas—this is rather comical if you are at all familiar with my car—and we were off.

I looked in the rearview and again witnessed a beautiful Hollywood stunt turn, but I wasn’t going to wait around to see how close he would come this time.

Now, the beauty of mechanical separation is that the Trans Am still had to bleed off a great deal of forward motion in his picture perfect turn. This allowed the four exhausted squirrels that were powering my car to get far enough away to lose sight of the Trans Am.

At this point I was pushing beyond the Horizon’s performance envelope as I flew through red lights, stop signs, one family’s yard, several post boxes and I juked left and right through one neighborhood after another. I checked my six constantly to see if the TransAm was anywhere in sight. It wasn’t.

Sound returned and M was still screaming as I slowly worked my way back to his house, stopping one street away.

“What was that all about?” I asked M.

“No idea. Oh my God I think that guy was trying to kill us.” M replied.

Probably not, because he would’ve had to have done serious harm to himself, but……….

3.

For years I thought this was an isolated, interesting, random event, but like most things it wasn’t.

While I knew M at the post office his brother had been in prison on drug charges and I would find out later through another friend that M would also go to prison on drug charges. In fact nearly the entire House Post Office would go down on drug and money laundering charges ten years after I left.

I have little doubt that M knew who was in that TransAm and we’re probably lucky we never came face-to-face with whoever was in that car.

So kids, remember, just say no and, if you can, get a faster car.