The plane glides down to the runway over images of grid-work houses and corporate-scheme commercial areas. This is California. America! Now there’s a concept, village life long relegated to the back pages of memory and a kind of nostalgia usually associated with young children at Christmas. Christmas! Now there’s another concept! But I feel nothing, either for America or Christmas, nothing but loyalty, the kind usually reserved for a long-suffering spouse, not like the passion aroused from more obscure objects of desires. This is Los Angeles, cold and abstract, giving action-packed thrills to Homies around the world, giving nothing but heartache to its own children, bastards of an Anglo/Espanol forced marriage that would never be resolved philosophically, but would be forever pacified under an avalanche of entertainment. That’s the American way, winning us a Cold War and, if Dubai is any measure, hard at work against the jihad. If it weren’t for home computers and the dot.com boom, we might all be speaking Russian instead of Chinese, and searching the aisles for BVD’s instead of DVD’s.
So here I am, freezing my butt off in the northern Arizona desert and thinking about the Sahara while training for the Arctic. I swore I’d swear off Flagstaff when the Hong Kong café closed down, but here I still am, long after the HK was replaced by a combination sushi/tapas bar. Think fusion, that’s the modern Flagstaff, no more the Indian reservation border town with Navajo ladies wearing their bank accounts in turquoise. Flagstaff has long been sanitized for the back-flow of Californians looking for new sushi and burrito and noodle opportunities. That’s OK. I like those things, too. It’s just that the HK was my kitchen during my Dark Age here, kinda’ like Hop Sing’s for that Communist on Seinfeld. It also represented a direct link to a remote frontier past of Chinese cooks on railroad crews, chasing the dragon (I forget her name), when it was illegal to park in front of an opium den. That was a time before Chinese restaurants were categorized as Mandarin, Cantonese, or Szechuan. Back then there was only one kind: ‘chop suey.’ That era is fast drawing to a close, though you might still find it in out-of-the-way places like Gallup or Grants, NM, places where motels still go for twenty bucks a night and time has long stood still. But Flagstaff’s still OK. There’s still the incomparable natural beauty and the Hopi ‘rez’ is only a couple hours away; can’t get that in Cali. The influx of Trustafarians doesn’t make things any easier for the rest of us financially, but it can be still be more than ‘poverty with a view’ for anyone with some fresh ideas and initiative.
Today is the shortest day of the year. That seems like a good time to have jet lag, as if things aren’t weird enough already. Jet lag kills me. For the uninitiated, this occurs with drastic changes in time zones, and means that your body’s circadian (circa dia= 24+/- hours, get it?) rhythms are disrupted, meaning you want to stay awake at night and sleep during the day. Sound like someone you know? Some say it only happens when traveling east to west or west to east, but I don’t know. All I know is it’s like some druggie hangover and for me it can easily last a week. It’s like someone is following me around all the time, and that other person is me. Many people claim to have cures, but I only know misery. At least it doesn’t happen north to south. That much I know. The trip Rio to San Fran proved that. That’s a long flight, mostly south to north but also east to west. Nothing. No jet lag at all. It was almost like being normal, whatever that’s like. I’ve even gone more than half the way around the world, as if trying to outrun the jet lag, go so far that you’re normal again. Don’t do that.
The weirdest experience was when I was in Reykjavik in June watching the sun set at around 11pm and the strangest sensation came over me, as if the great conductor were cueing the orchestra from above. You guessed it, jet lag, coming on like a twenty-four hour virus. I’d only flown a few hours that day, from London, so any effect from those few time zones was inconsequential. To me that proves jet lag’s perceptual link to the Sun’s position in the sky. It was a fitful night, but I managed a few zzz’s, and in the morning, I felt fine, no jet lag. That trip only fueled an already-growing obsession with the Arctic Circle, defined by the fact that I have yet to actually get there. Since then I’ve been to Fairbanks, AK and Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories in Canada, but all of these fall a degree or two short of the full Circle, the degree of latitude that corresponds precisely to the degree of the Earth’s tilt, meaning that the Sun rims the horizon to a greater or lesser degree all year, never getting any higher than that same 23 ½ degrees in the sky. Sound good? I’m planning a travel guide to the Arctic Circle. Order your advance copies right here. Global warming, anyone? Let’s surf the Arctic!
So I’ll be back in Iceland mid-January for the first time since that trip 3-4 years ago. If you’re going to write a guidebook, you’ve got to see it during that long winter, too, don’t you? No problem, it’s only one night. That’s the nice thing about Iceland Air. Not only do they have some of the cheapest flights to Europe from the East coast, but you can stopover up to three days at no extra charge. I’d stay longer, but I’ve got to get down to Mali for the music festival season. It’s the strangest trip I’ve ever planned, and this is the revised simplified version. Originally I had planned to go to Norway, but then thought better of a week in darkness, once I got the Iceland Air bro’ rate, that is. Those rates are only good for one a month excursion, and… a week in darkness? If it sounds like a diet of frozen buns, be assured that this is as warm as it gets at the Arctic Circle during the winter, bathed in warm Gulf Stream waters, and sitting on the volcanic mid-Atlantic ridge. Should be about like Flagstaff, actually. Notice the symmetry? So how do you pack for Iceland and Mali at the same time (and including New York, which I haven’t even mentioned yet)? Very carefully. Stay tuned. And Merry Christmas! Let’s eat!
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