Southbound Train

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.