Southbound Train

Tsunamis and Turtles

Hawaii turns me into a morning person like nothing else can. Realistically, I’m sure the time difference is the culprit, but I like to pretend that I’m a better person there, kinder and more easy going. Pretend I wake early because the mynah birds are engaging in morning chorus that I don’t want to miss, because the flowers are turning their faces to the sun and I can, even in a hotel room, smell the pikake. Make believe that the fresh morning (so shiny I think each one is the first dawn, ever) is so irresistible that even I, a confirmed and crotchety night owl, want to greet the day singing. Prosaic reasons or not, I was awake Saturday morning when Anna texted me at 7:30. She was sorry it was so early, but were we ok?

I looked around the room, looked out the window, looked down and thought, yes, but, oh no. I suppose that like most of us after 9-11 my first thought was airplanes and I loaded CNN before Mike could turn on the TV. Once I saw “earthquake” and “Chile” I knew that the next topic was going to be “tsunami” and “Hawaii” and my mind had a moment of blank. That was the ocean I could see out the window, after all. Further googling and watching of local news plus a call to the front desk both filled in the blanks and alleviated any urgent worry. Our room was on the top of a 25 foot cliff, the waves were expected in the 3-6 foot range, and the disaster team told us we could stay put.

It was barely 8 and we had empty stomachs and three hours to wait until wave time, so we walked to the shopping center three hotels down, looking for food. There were other people out too, mostly talking on cell phones and (like me) taking photos of the beach for potential “this is what it used to look like on Ka’anapali” documentation. The restaurants were closed, the hotels were serving only $30 buffets and we decided that with the roads still open and a supermarket a mile away, we’d try for that option. Too late, as it turned out – the supermarket was turning people away at the door. We scored a smoothie from a gym and headed back to wait it out along with the rest of the island. Our block of rooms fell in a safe zone, so we split our time between the newscasts and the whale watching, with increasing time going to the whales as the morning progressed.

I’d seen a whale, actually, as we were landing, and it seemed unreal, a frame from a Discovery Channel show, a large gray shape in the water below, moving with surprising gracefulness past a toy sized boat. Driving from the airport to the resort we stopped at a crowded scenic overlook and stared, along with everyone else, and the three or four spots of whale activity not so far from shore. There were geysers of spray blown straight in the air, dark shapes breaching the water in low arcs and sometimes a billowing wave following the improbable sight of a whale coming vertically out of the ocean. I’ve never been whale watching, never had the desire, but I was entranced by the whales. Any time I looked at the ocean, there they were; it was harder to miss them than to spot them. Saturday morning was no exception and I think most of us held captive on our black and craggy volcanic cliff looked at that as a good sign. If the whales were playing, certainly they could sense no great malevolence in the ocean. And playing was the only way to describe what the whales were doing, really. I saw splashes and waves and rolls and more than one perfect tail fin waving at me before slipping back into the blue. A mother and calf were lolling close to shore and the baby was practicing the big kid moves – a breach, a pectoral slap, a little mini tail lob. It was particularly endearing to see it attempt the spyhop – slowly it raised its (comparatively) small nose and head out of the water, straight up. It wobbled, spun a little, then fell back in. I could only imagine that it was proud of itself for trying.

We were, undeniably, stranded for the time in paradise. The sky was brilliant cerulean blue, the ocean beneath it a gleaming rumple of silk. The breeze was soft and scented with the mix of flower and growth and salt that is unique to Hawaii and the sun was just on the uptick of hot, seeping into my skin as I shielded my eyes with my hand and watched the whales play. At the low lying resort in view to the north of us, the palm trees leaned over the empty, smooth butterscotch stretch of beach, white wavelets foaming over the sand before sinking into it entirely. Tropical postcard paradise, unaware by all appearances that a small wall of water might be, at that moment, headed towards it with destruction in tow.

I wasn’t afraid. Disconcerted, maybe. I knew we were safe, and I knew that most everyone else on the islands was as well – the evacuation procedures were through and the news media on the job. The possibility of the destruction of homes and shops and roads and potentially lives was certainly there, but I had a gut feeling that the entire situation would end up exactly as it did – a wonderful exercise in understanding that the islands can, with advance notice, handle a potential emergency with grace and minimal fuss. I couldn’t quite picture the worst. I would have preferred, as I think we all would have, to not spend the majority of a beautiful day wondering what the ocean was going to deliver, but that uncertainly and missing breakfast were the worst part of the day. I read a book in the sun, listening to the lulling and ancient songs of the whales. I watched the mynah birds bully the plovers over crusts from my sandwich.

Later, when the all clear was given and the pools and beach were again our playgrounds, I snorkeled among the Moorish Idols, the Trumpetfish and the Humuhumu-nukunuku-apua'a.  A puffer fish swam below, paused, eyed me and came closer than I felt necessary. I think my hands looked like potential food, and I was floated as motionless as possible hoping I would become boring. I did, and he slipped off, hunting for another treat. Close to shore Mike pulled my arm and spun me around, pointing – not more than five feet from us were three turtles, feeding on the coral. I floated and watched as they rolled with the surf, rocks doing ballet. Prehistoric and a little intimidating, they moved with amazing grace in the deeper water, but floundered and tilted when carried up onto the boulders of the shoreline. Their hooked noses were hard and sharp, and they tore at the growth on the coral, snatching bites as they wheeled past. I let the current maintain our separation and just watched the show, so much better than the turtle encounter we had in Barbados where the turtles were surrounded by flailing snorkelers and had a nasty tendency to bite. Honu are fascinating, heavy and laboring on land, almost avian under water, and I felt privileged to swim so close to them, the ocean’s apology, maybe, for the morning tension.

Most of the time we travel without incident, but I’m often asked about safety – do we feel safe places, do we think we shouldn’t have gone to certain cities, at specific times? Do we worry about the airplanes, the terrorists, the political uncertainty, the potential crises? We’re not daft – of course these things cross our minds, and we consider them when making a decision of where to go and what to do – but I would be lying if I said that I gave them undue weight. Something terrible can happen anywhere. It was hard, when we went to Southern Thailand, to not remember the scenes from 2006. Standing on that beach I did eye the water with a little mistrust, and again on Saturday, I eyed it in Maui, after the threat was past, and wondered what it might have in store for me – and then I waded in and found the turtles, heard the whale song floating past my ears. It might be safer to stand always, on the front porch at home, but I hate to consider all I’d be missing.

Just look how pretty it was: Maui Photos

The things you leave behind

We snuck out of Tennessee just ahead of the storm, pushing through clouds heavy with snow on our way to Chicago and then San Francisco. I wasn’t sure we’d make it, actually, and for once I wasn’t sure I cared. The prospect of five inches of snow to a California girl who has a full pantry and works at home isn’t the most daunting, and I thought that a little sledding in January might be the most seasonally appropriate thing I could do. The weather was sluggish, slower than a jet plane, and we watched it swirl on the weather maps as we sped away, headed towards the fickle mix of fog and sun that is San Francisco in the winter.

Landing at SFO is waking from a long dream and not knowing if I am home or still lost somewhere in my mind. We started our flying career from there; spent many an hour under the early computer font gate numbers waiting for the fog to lift and the planes to leave. Am I coming or going? Is the dog waiting for us in Redwood Shores? Is the raccoon looking in my bedroom window to see if I’m asleep? BART took us into the city, the first time, actually, that we’ve been back here, alone together, since we moved to LA an unfathomable number of years ago. We rode all the way to Powell and Market and walked to our hotel and I thought what a change it would be to spend time in the city without Mike cursing at pedestrians. Radar said there was rain coming in from the Pacific but the skies were bright and breezy for the moment; we rode the cable car to Chinatown for the first real Chinese we’ve had in I don’t know how long. I don’t understand why Nashville is so lacking in decent orange peel beef but it is and we descended on that food like starving refugees.

It was a Muni pass kind of weekend, so we had to walk through old Jackson Square to find the bus that would take us to Alamo Square to the iconic row of Painted Ladies that I had never seen. The skies opened up along the way, so I saw them from under a dripping umbrella, but I saw them, finally. The city beyond hadn’t yet slipped under the rain and it was lit by the last rays of sun, a glistening swan song before the deluge. My pant legs stayed damp all night, but it didn’t matter much as we were hopping from cocktail to cocktail in the Mission before an epic bus and cab ride out to dinner in the Richmond, on the far west end of Geary. The venues were new but so many of the surroundings were as oddly familiar as the airport; the Beauty Bar, Ti Couz, the absurd feeling that maybe we shouldn’t be walking in the Mission but aren’t we reasonable people for doing so. I think the Thai restaurant where I turned a greener shade of pale was out Geary somewhere. I suppose we reminisced some – cocktails have a way of bringing that out of even the least inclined to the past – and that isn’t me. I don’t remember (see also, cocktails) but I do know that I felt both at home and glad that I wasn’t. One of the bars was a San Francisco scene of the most tedious kind – we’d paid before our drinks were gone and talked for blocks about the particular affectation that can be San Francisco. And yet …

I woke Saturday without a hangover but with a nagging sense that I was somewhere more comfortable to me than I imagined it would be. Leaving the hotel revealed one of those perfect days that used to make me thrill to where I lived, warm sun, cool breeze, light sparking off every surface. How could I not be enchanted, riding an old streetcar down Market to the foodie heaven of the Ferry Building? If I noticed, acutely, the astronomical prices of the organic beets and the handcrafted soda and, good grief, the oysters (and I did) it didn’t lessen the simple pleasure of seeing abundance displayed in a beautiful space, lit by light reflecting off water. Shrimp breakfast burrito, tangerines, unctuous cured meat, caramel pots de crème, perfect, perfect, Italy level cappuccino. And then, a gift, a friend I haven’t seen in years, discussed the previous night (I guess I must admit fully to the reminiscing) in the flesh. We exchanged phone numbers and I feel that this is the most wonderful souvenir of the trip I could possibly hope for, to stumble on a part of myself from the past in the universe of this city, just the right place at the right time on a Saturday morning.

We chose an afternoon in the de Young mostly for its location; Golden Gate Park was made for days like this. The American painting collection was luminous, so many landscapes and so much a profile of the country through its growth and I am sorry it has taken me this long to see it, though I think that like so many things lately, it presented itself at just the right time. Leaving where I am from, living far from what shaped me – this has changed my perspective and broadened my understanding in ways I wouldn’t have previously imagined. I can’t claim it has made me a better person, but if I marvel over a painting that I might have previously skimmed past, well, I’ll take that as growth too.

A walk through the park, another bus ride – people are such dramatic characters, aren’t they? A bus ride, for even a few blocks, is a minor stage. The Bob Marley’ed dad taking his pre-teen daughter out for the day and chastising her for forgetting something, turning it into a colossal relationship bummer, talking to her like they’d been seeing each other and she was a difficult woman rather than a forgetful child. The woman who wanted change for a $5, all round shapes held together by belts and denim, looking for change or a free ride. The wan and younger than she looked (I bet) business woman who gave it to her, expensive shoes looking wrong against the worn rubber of the bus floor. Punky kids leaning against the doors, cowed by the little Asian auntie who climbed over them, us and a seat back to sit where she wanted. The toothless man who swore he ‘usta eat armadillos. I suppose we fit in, or didn’t, as much as the rest of them, and we didn’t ride far, just to the corner of Haight and Ashbury, the old center of a lost universe, now a crass commercial imitation of itself. Curio shops and tchosky vendors and faux head shops with penis shaped glass pipes – thankfully we were there for a bar with a cool vibe and good cocktails, bone marrow and sardines and a table in the window next to a couple with a baby in a stroller. From there it was off again on another round of drinking; a speakeasy without a sign, a tiki room with rain showers at the top of a hill, a funky bar with a good bartender and then a buuuuuussss to the Marina for another late dinner and an arrest scene that seemed surreal even considering the amount we’d drunk. His ear hurt, man, and the cops were hassling him all the way to the station.

Sunday bounced in equally clear and bright and we rode the train down to Millbrae for dim sum and friends, then rode back into the Presidio with them for the Disney Family Museum and then Crissy Field, an amazing Golden Gate Bridge view, a visiting pinniped and more of that unshakeable sense that some part of me, certainly, was left here in this city where I’d lived, sort of. It wasn’t that I wanted to move back, really – I’d spent a good part of the glorious weekend wishing I were in the snow, in the place that I’ve been calling home with less shrugging, lately. The city was never my home, and in some ways I feel more at home in Tennessee than I ever did in the Bay Area, wonderful friends and memories notwithstanding. But there was just something about San Francisco that I couldn’t let go of, can’t, even now, snowbound and cozily home, forget. At the risk of sounding maudlin and older, perhaps, than I am, I think it might be about the age I was when I lived in the Northern California fog. I was young, optimistic, newly free of school and then newly married, un-bruised by the general tumble of life. This weekend reminded me of that shiny self and I thought of how nice it had been to be her.

Reminisce with me: San Francisco Photos

Mile High

Denver is one of those airports I rarely leave – we connect there, in and out in the thin air and then on to somewhere else. I think I’ve only left the airport twice, and once was by force thanks to a combination of weather and airline ineptitude. When we walked out of the terminal Friday night I was struck by the novelty of seeing the Colorado landscape from a constant altitude.

Actually, Denver is a city I haven’t spent any real time in. I lived in Colorado for a summer and went to Denver a grand total of once, for a Rockies game and a wander through a LoDo I wasn’t old enough to drink in. The majority of that summer was spent driving into the mountains and out onto the prairie at all hours of the night, blasting Garth Brooks and singing out the windows. Denver was too much a city to hold our attention those warm months of our last summer of irresponsibility.

Denver some horrifying number of years later was perfectly capable of keeping us busy for two days, and our winter training in Tennessee thus far meant that we walked to the car thinking it “wasn’t that cold” only to see flakes of snow swirling around the street lights. How things change, when a Californian thinks mid thirties “aren’t that cold.” I guess I’m wearing socks with my loafers permanently these days, though I actually wore my new Christmas cowboy boots which kept my feet warm and qualified me (in my opinion, at least) for the pink and green cowboy shirt I bought from Rockmount Ranchware, a longtime business in Denver and inventor of the snap-front western shirt. The building is from 1908 (old for a western town) and is part of the great old building haven that is LoDo, lots of brick and square architecture, arcades of windows and fancy saloon doors on the fronts and nothing but blank faces with faded advertisements painted on the sides. Further out, Denver sports the sad evidence of a building boom in the 70’s and 80’s, but in downtown someone fought the good fight for the old warehouses; it isn’t hard to imagine the streets filled with ox carts and the wooden sidewalks crammed with prospectors and cowboys lookin’ for a good time.

We spent time in the Colorado History museum, where I lost Mike to a huge room filled with mining equipment and at Hammond’s Candies (well out of downtown) where he lost me to people making lollipops by hand. I’d never seen hard candy being made and I was amazed at how alive the rope of flexible candy was. Four people were making heart shaped suckers – one pulled a stretch of candy and cut it; it slithered across the heated surface to the woman who lifted one end and coiled it, just like a cowboy and a lasso. The next person dimpled the top into the bow of a heart and pinched the point at the bottom, and the last inserted the stick and slid it onwards to harden. That the store at the end of the tour was a wonderland of color and sugar didn’t hurt the experience, nor did the amazing sweet smell of the air inside. No wonder the Oompa Loompas were a little nuts – I was sugar high in just half an hour.

We learned that not living near stores we like makes us unrestrained shoppers, that altitude really does give flatlanders headaches and dry  mouths and that Denverites love to eat breakfast out. A huge percentage of the nice restaurants in downtown serve a breakfast or a brunch and also believe in morning cocktails. I ate a pancake flight the first morning, beignets the second and if we had breakfast spots like that in Nashville I’d stay in for dinner and get out for breakfast far more often.  Leaving Denver behind, we drove to Golden and cruised downtown (where we saw geese skating on a frozen pond) and braved the winds of Lookout Mountain to see Buffalo Bill’s grave. Lonely place, up that high, whistling wind tearing through the pines. I don’t think he was considering January when he wanted to be buried up there; it was colder than cold – but maybe he knew that people would flock to Colorado, and he’d need to be up here, clinging to the rock, just to have some privacy. Looking down and out shows the growth of Denver and its associated communities, spreading across the prairie in a way I don’t remember from college, expanding to fill the open space in every direction. I think people spend so much time looking at the mountains that they sometimes miss the beauty of the flat plain that runs into them, seeing it as nothing more than space to fill with houses and buildings and roads … but I remember the drives across the sweet grass scented prairie evenings with as much fondness as I do the twisty mountain roads. I like that intermediate space where the flat ends, full stop, and starts pushing skyward, and I’m sorry to see it as covered up as it has become. I think Bill would be too.

The associated gift shop sold the most appalling ticky tacky and I wondered why it is that people associate cutesy bears and cartoon trees with the rugged intensity of the Rockies. I’ve seen this same kind of kitsch in every gift store I’ve seen in mountain towns in Colorado, and the sheer disconnect boggles me. I bought the kind of postcard that I remember from my childhood (a faded photo and deckle edges) and then we headed back down and skirted the mountain all the way to Boulder and on to Longmont, to streets that I still know how to navigate and the warm glow of good friends and shared memories and glorious Mexican food. Leaving the restaurant we split into the girls’ car and the boys’ car and if you’d been anywhere within a couple of blocks you would have heard about this thing called wantin’ and havin’ it all blasting from a car taking the long way home, in the dark, just because it could. I guess some things never change, and as much as I liked Denver, that’s the best reason I can think of to leave the airport more often.

Here's the proof: Denver

Ich Liebe Berlin

I have a confession: I was afraid I wouldn’t like Berlin. Worse, I was afraid I would actively dislike Berlin, that the three days we spent there would be cold and gray and tedious, marked by desperate attempts to stay warm and find something we liked enough to brave the cold for. I kept remembering being frozen and sick in Paris, searching to find the magic that so many people told me was there and coming up wanting. I could hear my friend from college who spent her study abroad time in Berlin lamenting the gray, the concrete, the cold and the depressing facts of what had happened there. Friends of the family who lived there similarly named it depressing. Gray. When I told people we were going, they got that glazed over sound to their voices, mumbled “how nice” but didn’t mean it. Worst of all, there was Daniel,  President of the I love Berlin club of America. I didn’t want to disappoint him, I didn’t want to have to come up with nice things to say, be vague, skirt the topic. Disliking Berlin would be horrible. My fear was, I would.

Sometimes being proven absolutely stupidly wrong is wonderful.

I feel like I should write about all the things that we saw – true to form, we crammed in most of the big ticket items. Jewish Museum? Check. Brandenburg Gate? Check. Reichstag? Check, at least from the outside. Impressive streets, impressive churches, impressive shopping, check, check and check. Art, architecture, history, modern, Prussian – we even managed a visit to Knut, the famous and very cheeky polar bear star of the Berlin Zoo. I could talk about all of these places and more in detail, describe the fabulously modern buildings at Potsdamer Platz or the thoughtful Liebskind building housing the Jewish Museum. I could geek out over the DDR museum, complete with a furnished apartment and a sit in Trabi. Checkpoint Charlie and the museum about the wall and the Topography of Terror exhibit displayed on the rubble foundations of the Gestapo HQ – all deserve devoted discussion. The problem is, all I want to do is talk about Berlin.

For a city with immense history, Berlin doesn’t spend much time looking backward. Certainly, it says, I understand why you think you’ve come here. Please, be my guest: consider my past glory, revel in my Prussian beauty, mourn my scars – and when you’re done with all that, come talk to me and I’ll show you what really matters.  Because what matters in Berlin is what it IS, not what it was.

It isn’t that the past isn’t here – it is. Oh, how it is. I was overcome with the immensity of many of the places we walked. I braved the crowds and made Mike take my picture in front of the Brandenburg Gate, and if you could zoom in enough, you’d see that my eyes are suspiciously shiny. I was actually choked up walking down Unter den Linden and I told Mike, voice shaky, that I didn’t realize how geeked out I would be by actually being in Berlin. I marveled at how Prussian it was, and how different that was from the Bavarian Germany that I knew. So much German history has never fit for me with the towns I’ve visited near Munich but here, in the capital of capitals, I finally understood the history I had learned years ago to be true.

History was everywhere I looked – especially recent history. In my lifetime, the streets I was casually strolling have been off limits, the city itself carved in two, amputated. Each side must have been constantly aware of its phantom limb, itching and aching in the middle of the night. Amazingly, today, there is little way to note what was where and belonged to whom unless you carry a pre ’89 map in your head. The wall is mostly gone, preserved in a few places behind protective fences; all that remains is a double line of cobblestones meandering oddly through the streets. Photographs of Potsdamer Platz left me openmouthed, amazed at the transformation of bare no man’s land to modern city in such a short time. I remember when the wall fell: photographs and video of people climbing the it, knocking it down, celebrating its demise. I remember the time before, the fear and apprehension, the us versus them, and then, amazingly, I remember the time after when, for all its momentous import, the fall ceased to be thought of at all, as though the wall had never been there. Walking those streets, seeing people who lived through the change, perhaps on the fabled “other side,” seeing the places in the old West that were developed to replace what was walled off, I felt my feet itch. I was there. It was amazing. I’d never considered that recent history could be as exciting as the far past, and I’m grateful to Berlin for teaching me that lesson.

I feel like I’ve contradicted myself, spending paragraphs talking about history after asserting that is isn’t what makes Berlin. The thing is, it isn’t – but that doesn’t make it any less powerful. Instead, it makes Berlin that much more impressive, because with as much as has happened there, Berlin could, like so many cities, rest on its laurels. People would come just for what happened, and the center could be a tourist area, and no one would be the wiser, but Berlin manages to transcend. More than anywhere else I’ve been in Europe, Berlin far exceeds the sum of its parts. All of those wonderful things we saw – they aren’t Berlin. All the history that I soaked up like a greedy sponge – it isn’t Berlin either. You could visit every museum, see every monument, read every posted sign, and if that’s all you saw, if that’s all you came to see –you’d leave having missed the entire place. That sort of tourism works fine in a city like Rome, where what you are there to see is obvious, or Salzburg where you walk through the mountain and into a theme park, but Berlin is vital now, its spirit and continuing evolution trumping its statues and grand buildings. Seeing it has to become interactive; you have to be open to the idea that drinking outside with a space heater and a lap blanket and a bunch of locals is as important as the Kulturforum, perhaps (blasphemy) more.

I get the sense that people actually live in Berlin, not just at the edges but right in the center, shopping at KaDeWe and seeing movies at Sony Center, feeding the seals at the zoo and drinking by the Spree as it flows past the Dom and the museums. The monuments and major buildings were lit up while we were there for a Festival of Lights, and people, very obviously Berliners, not tourists, were clustered in front of every building we saw, watching the light show and seriously setting up cameras to take photos. I liked the levity it takes to turn historical buildings magenta and neon green; yes, it says, these are historical buildings and they should be appreciated, but we are here, today, now, and we’re going to dress them up twenty-first century style.

I wouldn’t send someone to Berlin for their first trip to Europe, or maybe even their fifth. I can imagine that if I had gone there before I’d been to other cities that fit more with what tourists think of as “European” I’ve have been disappointed. There isn’t time travel in Berlin the way there is in Rome – hell, the Nikolaiviertel, a quaint, medieval quarter by the river full of shops and restaurants isn’t old – it was built by the DDR in 1987. My InsideOut guide, printed when the Euro was new, was missing huge chunks of what I saw. Berlin is not static. Instead of waking up in the past, visiting Berlin is waking up in the now, taking part in the daily living of a city that knows how to live well. The city is changing around your ears as you walk, mixing in some new with some old, some east with west, tossing outside influence in for good measure and yet still remaining, somehow, essentially German in a way that I didn’t understand until I was there. I arrived virtually blind, armed with my studies of history and a list from Daniel but a complete lack of understanding about what I would find. I left in love with a city, and I can’t wait to return.

see what I saw ... Berlin

Spotted in his natural habitat

Pontuef in the Chicago Red Carpet Club, waiting for a flight to Frankfurt and on to Berlin. He'll be home Monday night, all full of curry wurst and doner and the world's best bread.

Wide Open Spaces

I’ve never really gotten the Southwest – it shares a shoebox in my head with modern art. I understand its relevance; I know that some people are very moved by it. Objectively, I can see its value, and sometimes I’m even caught unaware and say “oh, now that’s neat” but mostly it seems like something that people like because liking it makes them cultured. Liking that giant white square canvas with the red dot just off center really advertises our evolved aesthetics, doesn’t it?  The heart of passion in an indifferent world, and all. The Southwest is that red dot, a last bastion of lawlessness and rugged open space in an otherwise bland and increasingly Olive Garden-is-authentic culture. Its spare simplicity will turn us all into artists, open minded thinkers, visionaries. Visiting is worship, a deep breath of clean air and clearer thinking, a higher pursuit than mere tourism. People claim to be moved by a visit to the desert, they get (as Mike would say) moony about it. Lacking the proper amount of peyote, I’ve always been left, if not cold, a little chilly.

I’m wondering, now, if I was just lacking perspective.

Living in California (and in Ojai, really) I knew all about places with spiritual connections, pink moments, breathtaking western beauty. And growing up there made me immune to much of what prompts “those LA people” who visit Ojai to sit around drinking coffee and “just being.” Yes, of course it is pretty, and I like it, and if I could have afforded to live there, I would have taken the opportunity without much hesitation. But stunningly beautiful? I suppose. New Mexico and Arizona have always seemed a little too close to home to get very excited about. They’re dry. Flowers appear in small little scrubby clumps. The architecture is Mexican-Adobe influenced. The colors fall into either the brownish gray spectrum, or blue. Have I mentioned the great empty expanses of rocky dryness that probably harbor snakes in great numbers?

None of this is to say that I don’t like visiting – I do. I enjoyed driving through the desert this spring, I like a weekend at an Arizona spa as much as the next girl, and we were really looking forward to going back to Santa Fe this fall, but more for the feel of the town and (let’s be honest here) the food. I got all the green I could handle by moving to Tennessee, but the Mexican food has been a bit of a letdown. I was expecting to go and be thrilled by the chilies and the smell of the air, but I wasn’t expected to be knocked sideways by the beauty of it all. I opened the curtains the first morning and was amazed by the clear brilliance streaming onto my face. I’d forgotten the clarity of western light, harsher than what I see every day here but beautiful in its intensity. The sun in the desert may be illuminating rocks and scrub and green along the side of the highway that comes from a spray gun and not the earth, but it manages to turn all these unlikely things into sculpted bas-relief.

Driving from Albuquerque to Santa Fe takes only an hour, a drive that in the past I’ve written off as unattractive, at best. This trip it was a revelation: flat open land runs away from the interstate and up the sharp edged peaks of the Sandia Mountains, flecked with black.  A pink moment here would turn them into watermelons, a mirage for the thirsty people clustered under cottonwood trees that hug the banks of the Rio Grande as it sneaks through the desert, hoping to escape notice. The haze of green those trees form in the valley is a faint echo of what I see out my window every morning and it points out to all who are paying attention that the lifeline, however shallow, is still here, not yet swallowed by a parched earth. I’m amazed by the tenacity of any life that makes it in this magnificent harshness, the haze of purple flowers along the roadside all the more beautiful for their unlikely presence. Nothing here wastes much energy – leaves are small, vines don’t overextend themselves and the roadrunner we saw in the parking lot was pretty stingy with its feathers. There isn’t a lot of color in the landscape; everything tends to shades of gray and brown, and before I lived in green I couldn’t see the interest in the monochromatic palette.  Now, accustomed to lushness, I find the sparing but intense use of blinding yellow and burning red exhilarating and shocking. Turning the corner and seeing a strand of ristras drying against an adobe wall or a yellow bush alongside a gray shale hill, I see art.

That same adobe wall against a depthless blue sky is beyond my words. I want to take a thousand photos of the same thing, rounded warm edge against hard, luminous blue. For the first time, I communed with Georiga O’Keeffe. I too, could move here and paint that same image every day, never tiring of the perfect simplicity and infinite complexity contained in one window. I saw a quote over and over while we were in Santa Fe, O’Keffee on New Mexico “no one told me it would be like this.” How could they? O’Keeffe grew up in Wisconsin; nothing could have prepared her for the elemental force of the desert. Until I moved to my own Wisconsin, I certainly couldn’t have told her. Now I understand why she returned, again and again, until finally she never left. I understand the draw of the basic forms that build everything there, the shocking color and the clear air, the dry nose and the relentless sun.

Living in the west, I never really bought the things it stood for. It wasn’t a metaphor for rawness or lawlessness, not a place to test my inner strength or to take the measure of a man. It wasn’t full of promise or ruin, a do or die proposition – it was just home. Having left that home and set up elsewhere, I can see why it has been framed as all those things and more by those who come from the east and the green. It shocked me to step out of the hotel into that bracing, incandescent air, to see the expanse of heaven and earth and nothing else and to feel my smallness within it, less relevant than the strings of chiles and the turquoise doors that echo the sky. Even more shocking was that I liked it. Pass the peyote.

Photos: Santa Fe & Taos, September 2008

Country Bumpkins in the Big City

While it is absolutely still true that we have no friends here in Tennessee, we DO have friends in Atlanta.  Good friends. Smart, funny friends. Friends who like to eat out and drink cocktails and bum around the mall. Friends who had the foresight to move into a great neighborhood with a local gelato place that is probably the best we’ve had in the US. Friends who, I fear, are going to get very sick of us, because Atlanta is only three hours away, and we like car trips.

I had a list of shopping needs for Atlanta, places I’m used to having (the Container Store, Trader Joes, Crate & Barrel, le sigh) and Atlanta, she delivered. Our trunk was full when we headed home, and I was amazed at how excited I was to go in a real mall with stores I hadn’t seen in months.  I felt like such a kid, ohhing and ahhing at the big city with the big buildings and the nice Nordstrom and the busy traffic. And the huge huge houses that we drove past in Buckhead, the kind of huge that makes whatever salary I make every year look like small change.

When we first visited Atlanta in 2005, I liked it well enough, but downtown seemed deserted,  mid-town was a little scruffy and the whole place felt disjointed, like a city without a personality. Now, though, mid-town is a city in its own right, packed with neat little stores, interesting restaurants, places I wanted to stop and poke around. Huge Centennial park seems to spill over its boundaries, making all the streets fanning out from it similarly green and tree shaded. People sit out in cafes and on sidewalks, and we had to stand in a line reaching down the street every time we walked for gelato. Eating well is easy, from scruffy diner breakfast to swanky small plates dinner; I also managed a Chipotle burrito. Oh, Chipotle.

A weekend hanging out in Atlanta was a lot like a weekend hanging out in LA, or in Nashville, except we shared it with people who hang out the same way we do – sleep in a little, go out for breakfast, randomly shop while running errands, cocktail hour dragging long into dinner hour. Silly conversation and maybe a game? It was pretty perfect, and on our drive home we decided that it was kind of like hanging out with ourselves – our smarter, more educated selves. (Nothing like being friends with two PhDs to put my own diploma in perspective.)

I did feel rather small town and provincial, though. It amazed me how quickly I’ve gotten into the habit of living in a small place, and how easy I have it here. Traffic is waiting for two cars to pass so we can pull out of 31 Flavors. Crowded is the line for the Genius Bar at the Apple store (again). I am so clearly spoiled. We’ve given up some convenience, being here (though not much, if I’m pressed for honesty) but what we’ve gotten in return is the easy life. I feel spoiled, and a little simple, that all it takes to make me happy these days is a fox in my backyard but so be it. I’m working on the not revolutionary but difficult idea of being content with what where and who I am, so I’m trying not to judge myself for what makes me smile. Next time I visit Atlanta, though, I’m determined to not drive around with my mouth open and make stupid comments about how busy it all is. I moved to the country but I didn’t grow up in it. Perspective, perspective, perspective. Y’all.

Big Wheels Keep on Turning

We went to Alabama last (last) Saturday, mostly because we could. Tennessee shares a border with eight states, and most of them are within a reasonable drive from us. (It is also the only state other than Mississippi that has three repeating letters its name. Useless trivia, hot July version.) Eight. Coming from southern California, where everything short of Vegas was a serious undertaking, this is a bounty of unexplored territory.

We chose Alabama because it was the closest, honestly, and because we knew nothing about it. Huntsville is only about an hour from here, and from there it takes about the same to get to Muscle Shoals, where I wanted to go solely because Lynyrd Skynyrd sings about it. For a Saturday in July with no agenda, what better reason did we need?

The drive south on I65 took very little time, and we were at the state line picking up brochures for anything and everything inside of an hour. Most of the cars in the parking lot were out of state and filled with kids and sporting equipment and what sounded like pent up frustration. We pulled up in the convertible and got a lot of dumbfounded looks, like who ARE you people and why are you in Alabama and just WHAT do you think you’re doing with that car?

The brochure racks are my downfall – always have been, always will be. Row upon row of shiny paper advertising underground caves and antique shopping and camel rides and and and. Yes, and, in this case, the Scottsboro Unclaimed Baggage Center. This caught both of our attention, Mike’s because he thought he was going to get a deal on someone’s interesting (but lost) souvenirs, and me because it appealed to the snoop in me who is always eavesdropping on the people at the next table. I can look inside people’s suitcases? Cool, let’s go.

Scottsboro is about 40 minutes outside of Huntsville, through rolling hills and fields and otherwise not much else. We did see a mud volleyball tournament en route, prompting us to make snarky comments that really don’t bear repeating. I can’t be unkind about the views, though, which were beautiful and lush and surprisingly different than Franklin, particularly in light of the fact that northern Alabama is technically part of the Tennessee Valley. The green is a little thicker in Alabama (as is the air) and the trees are festooned with kudzu in a way we don’t see around us. Snarkiness was also prompted by the people burning trash in their backyard, not more than a mile from a sign urging “don’t burn, keep Alabama the Beautiful.” Usage of “the” in relation to Alabama state slogans also prompted snark, actually, but none of this deterred the fact that Alabama is legitimately pretty.

The Unclaimed Baggage Center – is not pretty. Scottsboro itself has a charming if clearly dying downtown, but at the outer edge is unclaimed bag row, giant cheaply built warehouse structures bursting at the seams (if you believe the hype) with lost treasures from around the world. Mmm hmmm. The parking lot is packed, so I guess a lot of people DO believe the hype, but the sad fact is that 99.9% of the store was like shopping at Good Will. Used clothing, more expensive than it should be, partially used perfume, overpriced outdated electronics, a pervasive dingy smell and the uncomfortable knowledge that stranger’s skin cells coat every surface. I was a little squicked. Mike says that unclaimed baggage is bought by the pound, contents unseen. He thinks that this place is selling “the good stuff” on eBay and putting the rest of it here, and I’ll concur that what’s here better be “the rest of it” because, well, ew. We were hoping for knick nacks, bits of odd memorabilia, or at the very least good luggage. We got used clothes, a huge selection of Christian literature and a box of Depends. Also baggie upon baggie of partially used toiletries (travel sized) a surprising number of tools and more plastic key chains than I’ve ever seen in one place. I wonder, really, how baggage gets this lost – it has to sit for 90 days before it can be sold off, and airlines really do make the effort to get things back to their owners. How do you lose luggage and then not go looking for it? Of course, based on what I was seeing, maybe you’re better off without the contents of your bags.

If I was disappointed in the UBC, I was pleasantly surprised by the Muscle Shoals area. Technically, we spent most of our time in Florence, birthplace of WC Handy, location of a Frank Lloyd Wright house and possessor of a really beautiful college campus. Tuscumbia, next door, is the birthplace of Helen Keller, and Muscle Shoals itself is famous for the studios where all kinds of musicians have recorded. The towns all sit around the Tennessee River and are connected by a number of bridges, the most interesting being Wilson Dam. Driving across we could see the rocky shoals far below on one side and the high water on the other, with Florence rising up the side of the cliffs ahead of us. The dam is one of nine TVA dams along the Tennessee river, and it cost $47M to build between 1918 and 1924. It is the highest lock lift east of the Rockies, and generates some huge amount of electricity, made obvious by the power lines running away from it in all directions. I good portion, I’m sure, head back towards the huge aerospace buildings that sit on the outskirts of Huntsville, giant things with names that reminded me of cold war defense contracts.

We left Florence in the early evening and drove home in our own car ad along the Natchez Trace. The Trace is a very long and thin National Park running from Nashville to Natchez and we had it mostly to ourselves for more than an hour. The road is swooping and gentle, a well paved ribbon of speed between small meadows edged by dense trees. We took the top down and listened to the Golden Oldies station and enjoyed the simple pleasure of the drive, warm air on our faces and nothing but trees to look at.

I’m not really sure what I expected out of Alabama. Maybe nothing, really – we went on a whim, mostly because we could. I would go back – the brochure rack certainly contained more to see, and I’d like to get as far as Mobile some day – but it isn’t somewhere I felt a connection to. It seemed to me that the South became more rough-around-the-edges-Southern there – the towns a little less prosperous, the people a little more likely to stop in for an ice cream wearing nothing but combat boots and jean cutoffs, the houses a little more rundown. At least now, though, I have some idea of the southland everyone’s singing about on every radio station around here.