Rewind to America, but don’t forget about G…..

I guess it’s time to go home when the pizza that looked and tasted so good the first day in Marseille starts looking and feeling like pasty flesh hanging over my belt after three or four. People probably make fun of me for cooking noodles and veggies in my room, but it works, I assure you, and I’m not talking about money. I’m talking about health. I used to eat all that greasy starchy restaurant food back in my career as a trade show geek. I felt like shit most of the time. That ‘campout feeling’, that lack of mental clarity and general malaise, does not come from not bathing. The last week in France proved that. It comes from no vitamins. Two or three years ago in Mexico I finally said, “Ya basta!” after running out late into the Mexican night to find an open pharmacy with vitamins available. It worked. If I go a few days without veggies, maximum one week, I start failing to boot. So I started making my own meals, limiting the street food to once a day at most. Vitamin pills work, too, but not the cure-all. When you get old, you start playing for keeps. It’s just like my old pickup; the older it got, the more maintenance it needed. If Doonesbury went into shock twenty years ago realizing, “We’re our parents!”, then now imagine what I feel like realizing, “I’m my old pickup!” At least I’m not a trade show geek any more. There was a major one going on while I was in Barcelona and I didn’t even go. I used to seek these out to look for wood-carving customers, Paris Frankfurt London, all of them. Music festivals are more fun.

So it’s time to rewind the tape and re-trace my steps. That contradicts my rule number one- ‘backpack, don’t backtrack’, but it really doesn’t matter when you’re flying. Every thing looks pretty similar from thirty-five thousand feet. Airports are certainly all pretty much the same, except maybe for Iceland. Landing at Reykjavik International is like landing on the moon. The landscape is quite similar in fact, except for all the water in Iceland, in profuse solid liquid and gas forms at all times. Iceland in fact is the only place where the mid-Atlantic ridge juts above the water line, so it’s a geologist’s wet dream, spewing and sputtering and bursting at the seams. That is where new land is oozing out and spreading the continents apart. There are places where you can see that graphically. I’m more interested in the movements of the sun and moon. When we landed there a month ago a fresh snow had just fallen, so it was pretty surreal. Accordingly the sky was pretty cloudy that day, so it was hard to fix the positions of the sun, but it didn’t seem so weirdly dark, just like a very grey day for about six hours. They’re on GMT, so the timing seemed strange, too.

So the return trip started off uneventfully enough. I showed up early at the Marseille train station to catch the TGV to Paris. The station is not closed off from the tracks so it’s pretty cold, but not as bad as my arrival, raining like hell. The only heat are a few vertical space heaters that people crowd around till done, kind of like human Doner kebabs turning from red to brown. What is that stuff, anyway, mock leg of lamb? It tastes OK, so I’ll reserve judgment. The TGV runs like clockwork, over five hundred miles in three hours fifteen minutes. It’s like a plane taking off that never really leaves the ground. All in all, it’s not a bad deal for the buck, just enough time to pause and reflect before the fast rewind from Paris back to the US. So it’s all over but the Visa bill, or is it? The flight to Iceland and the connection there went smooth enough, down from the sunny skies on to snow-bound landscape, parallel realities that have co-existed since time immemorial. Skies are usually sunny at 35,000 feet, unless it’s night time. Down below it’s different. We occupy a thin stratum of habitability here in the troposphere, where solids and liquids and gases can coexist and light breaks into a full spectrum unknown and unknowable five miles up or five miles down.

For some reason I got a window seat on the final leg from Reykjavik to JFK. I don’t know why. I almost always get the aisle, the faster to make my connection. \After we took off, the area around Iceland was cloud bound for more than an hour, ho hum. I never got to see the northern lights either. Fortunately I saw them my first hour in Fairbanks. I need to see them again. We connected. It’ll have to wait. Then the clouds broke below. The water looked strange, like cottage cheese, the homemade kind, not pasteurized, where the liquid has separated. It must be ice, little wavelets frozen into lumps and ridges. We’re moving into a different part of the Atlantic, out of the Gulf Stream’s soothing waters that keep England green at latitudes that delight the polar bears in Canada. The ice thickens, not because of anything happening to it, but because we’re moving closer… to what? I look up and there is a massive ridge of ice on the horizon, but not horizontal. It’s vertical, cold and erect in a permanent salute to a higher power. I break my gaze long enough to check the flight map on the video screen. Oh my God! It’s Greenland! While the rest of the crowd turns their attention to the opening credits to Dustin Hoffman’s ‘Magorium’ or some such Hollywood fantasy, I watch as the wall of ice comes nearer and nearer, transfixing me in the process.

I was not prepared for what came next any more than I was prepared for what came in Mali. We proceeded to fly directly over the southernmost corner of Greenland and some of the most ruggedly beautiful landscape I have ever seen in my like, the world’s largest island, distantly related to Antarctica, unspoiled by the machines and machinations of man, virgin landscape proud and defiant. Only Antarctica itself could have been more comely, but I haven’t been able to justify a Buenos Aires to Melbourne flight yet. I will. Imagine what a flyover of Greenland or Antarctica would cost should you want to purchase such! In a word, the cost would be prohibitive, and that would be low altitude and high risk. This was the bird’s eye view from seven miles up where the troposphere pauses before becoming stratosphere and I myself pause in deep reverence to something much larger than me and my silly mental feedback. If there is a God, then He looks a lot like Greenland, solids subliming into gases, patiently waiting their turn until summer when they can get liquid again, warm wet and wild. I gaze spellbound as the plane continues on into the sunset; leaving Iceland at 5pm and landing in New York at 6pm, the whole trip is in sunset. Nobody seemed to notice. It’s almost as if nothing had really happened. I know differently. I’ve seen something you don’t normally see, unless you’re an airline pilot, and not likely even then. Greenland is the opposite of the northern lights, solid and forbidding, the perfect husband to Aurora’s electric mood swings, they making love over the northern landscape where humans don’t dare to tread, not lightly at least. The trip has had its epiphany at the last moment, and I’ve been thoroughly rebuked. Everything is NOT the same at 35,000 feet. It’s nice to be wrong. But it’s not really over yet, is it? Next week I go back to Thailand.

Marseille without Bars, American without Tears

So first this was supposed to be a European trip, focusing on the Arctic, with a side trip to Africa. Then it became a Mali trip, with a side trip to Norway. Then it became something else altogether. Why the interest so far north? Well, I’ve got an obsession with the Arctic, and I’m considering writing a travel book on it, so I gotta’ see it in the depth of winter, too, just to know what it’s like. It’s not exactly like I’m chasing the Chukchis in Siberia or anything like that. The west coast of Norway, and Iceland, are the greatest temperature anomalies in the world, with the possible exception of Lima, Peru. The temperature there, right at the Arctic Circle, in the dead of winter, is about the same as Flagstaff, Arizona, cold but tolerable, and much much darker. That’s what I needed to see. That’s the definition of ‘otherworldly’ for me, watching the sun rim the horizon, a few degrees above being summer, a few degrees below being winter. Phenomena like this can give real empirical clues that the old sun gods driving chariots across the sky were a little weirder then the ancients imagined. In reality, however, explaining the actions of Venus’ was probably the bigger clue. Even as late as Marco Polo’s era, readers were astounded that he didn’t fall off down there rounding SE Asia. Columbus read carefully. Anyway, that still doesn’t mean I want to do my big Norway adventure in darkness, so when I got the good Iceland Air rate to Europe with stopover included, that was an easy fix. It’s hard to pack for the Arctic and Africa at the same time, though, so I’m not really prepared for cold and wetness. I tend to put about as many miles on my shoes as my Dad put miles on the tires of his Gremlin, so they’re about falling apart by now. If the sky gets cloudy, my feet start getting wet just out of habit.

So it turned out to be something of a European trip after all. That’s the nice thing about multiple flight segments rather than one long round-trip from Arizona to Africa. Not only can you save money, and get stopovers, but you can cancel out partially and still salvage the trip. Actually, even losing half my Air France flight and buying the one-way on Iberia, I probably still came out cheaper than round-trip Arizona-Africa. Air France just laughed when I suggested that some consideration for a ‘medical emergency’ would be nice, since I’d taken the trouble to cancel my return and all. Maybe I’ll get the frequent-flyer miles anyway. But Europe’s still nice, even with the new weaker ‘bushy’ dollar. It’s hard not to like a place that names its main cities after sausages and mystery meats, e.g. Frankfurt, Hamburg, Vienna, etc. Budget airlines are proliferating like Thai food restaurants, threatening the old state-subsidized flag-carriers and giving real options for budget travel. The only problem is that you miss the scenery in between. This is ominous in an era when the real social and economic gaps in the world are between urban and rural. Our brothers and sister in the outback are in danger of being forgotten. This is especially dangerous in poorer countries that are heavily centralized. Fortunately most of our north European heritage is less like that, probably why it took them so long to show up in the history books. This is the good thing about Internet and advance telecommunications. It allows civilization’s greatest accomplishments to accommodate, and exist in communion with, Nature.

So life starts to take on a certain regularity after a few days, wherever you go. That’s not tourism; that’s traveling. Marseille is no different. I walk down the main thoroughfare of La Canebiere, named for its historical hemp, every day as if it were my own. It always looks different at night. I try to avoid getting hit by the streetcars that are so quiet they sneak right up on you. ‘Desire’ was noisier than that I believe, all clanging and clattering and keeping me awake at night. I check the price of avocadoes every day out of habit, dumbfounded at prices that vary from one to three dollars a pound. There are no wi-fi cafes here, but that doesn’t matter, since I can usually steal a signal from the fancier hotel next door. I check my e-mail and see how work is going for the Dengue Fever concert I’m promoting. I check to see if I’ve got any export business. I check to see if I’ve got the rejection notice for my novel yet. I send out this little message in a bottle as if I somehow know it’ll come back to me with interest paid, in love if not money. I’ve even been reading my junk mail, something I rarely do. I still don’t check to see how Amber1967 looks at 40; that’s a little too spammy for me. I’ve stopped working out every morning to avoid antagonizing my longsuffering kidneys, but that’s probably not a bad idea anyway in a place where showers cost five Euros a pop. I take a long walk or two a day instead, trying to discover new neighborhoods. I stick post-it notes on my laptop as if it were my office. I maintain an intravenous (coffee) drip, so that I won’t fall asleep at my keyboard and wake up to find myself in the Matrix. I’ve learned to eat Nutrella, which I’ve long noticed imported to Thailand, but never given a fair trial. It’s not bad, on bread for breakfast or whenever, even makes a decent cup of hot chocolate.

French TV is all backwards, though, ‘Days of Our Lives’ on at 9am and the good science documentaries on after midnight, but that’s OK. I’m just trying to understand the French. They’ve got Hannah Montana of course, Billy Ray’s achy breaky daughter. ‘Hunter’ re-runs still play here. That’s weird, but not as weird as ‘Alf’ reruns playing in Peru. At least Hunter’s a person. I’m not sure what time the flab-&-abs exercise ads come on. I try to keep up with the Clinton-Obama match-up. According to French TV, les Americains sont fatiguees’ de Bush. Tired of Bush? That’s an understatement. According to another columnist, Obama is the cowboy hero riding in to save the day and secure the happy ending for America and the rest of the world. Maybe they’re right, but I’d take whichever candidate can beat the oil mongers. The French liked Jerry Lewis after all. I go change money, since my hotel takes no plastic and the ATM’s are a rip-off internationally now. They even changed my West African CFA francs, not surprising here in Little Africa I guess, so that’s cool. I’m so blissfully bored I’ve even considered shaving my beard, which I started on the long train ride in Mali, then became attached to. Don’t tell my wife. It’s nice to be able to be bored anywhere in the world. It’s like home, not some border-town curio market with over-zealous salesmen hustling and hassling and drawing lines in the sand between us. I walk the red-light district after dark, listening to the cooing and purring of tired old service workers who probably got too old for Pigalle and came to work the provinces. They’re trying to get all romantic calling out from sleazy bars in dirty alleys. It doesn’t work that way. The desire for youth and beauty are hard-wired into our urges for merges like footnotes to an evolutionary dead end, sacrosanct and inviolable even when we’re just going through the motions. Almost anybody would rather go to Amsterdam and see young filles from anywhere and everywhere ready to get all Germanic for a lot less. Me, I’m just looking for halibut. Boredom can be dangerous.

I feel like Nitiphoom Naowarat, the guy on Thai TV, who travels around the world to check the prices of rice on the shelf and to see if they’re from Thailand. He interviews Thai people around the world as if they were really Chinese who just… don’t go there. He’ll go anywhere that hates America or globalization, so that he can join in the demonstration, donning the local garb and banging a drum. He even got his Ph.D. from Moscow University, but long after the USSR had folded. It’s easy to be Communist when it’s all over. He came in first in the elections for Senator in 2006. He even helped stir up sentiment against Thaksin, so that’s cool. He was doing just fine until a phone conversation was leaked to the Internet of him in a dispute over a half million dollar debt in a five million dollar business deal gone sour. I guess he doesn’t look so revolutionary anymore. But mostly he travels to interesting places, and then does nothing. I like that. What are you supposed to do anyway once bar-hopping is a thing of the past? You find pleasure elsewhere. I’ve seen hepatitis-C friends go through this for years, and now it’s my turn. I may never go back, even when the kidneys are healthier. The thrill of intoxication has slipped a notch or two over the years, thank God. The bars don’t represent a prison so much as a waste of time. There’s only one vice left; fortunately the ulamas OK’d it long ago for halal consumption. I’ll have a double macchiato, espresso with a head of steamed milk. It’s the drug of choice.

Jet-lagged in Flagstaff: Training for Iceland and Dreaming of Timbuk2

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!