The Only Quote that Really Matters
Shriekback:
"Free your ass, and your mind will follow."
"Free your ass, and your mind will follow."
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 9:48 PM
1 comments
Friday, September 30, 2005
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Budapest
For no particular reason, I’m thinking about Budapest today, a city that was, for no reason I could think of even at the time, one of the best places I’ve ever been. Because, let’s face it, Budapest looks like any other industrial city anywhere in the world. It’s been bombed into submission so many times that it’s little more than a jumble of concrete and dull, cheap architecture.
But I loved the place. It had a vibe.
My cousin and I had taken the train—she wasn’t happy about that, but I love long train rides—from Prague, a city that has to be one of the most beautiful in the world. Prague is your high school girlfriend, or—no—it’s the woman you wish you could be in love with. Endless beauty and excitement.
But I also thought Prague had this “get it while you can,” vibe. Just like Budapest, Prague has been destroyed too many times to count. Things are good now, and everybody is running around like it’s the last night at the fair, and you have to get all the pleasure you can before the lights go out for good.
Budapest, though, was more resigned. There seemed to be a Zen take on it. Kind of, Okay, it’s all good now, but you know the sky is going to fall again sooner or later, so we might as well all sit down and have a drink.
Budapest has all these cool tiny museums: we went to the Bible museum, the subway museum, the Lutheran Museum, which is across the square from the first McDonalds to go in behind the Iron Curtain.
And Budapest’s main museum—which both guidebooks we carried simply noted “had some nice art”—is the secondary repository of the riches of the Hapsburgs. We are talking Art here, so much of it, such good stuff, the Rembrandts are hidden off in a side room.
I have an extreme fondness for 12th-15th century religious art, and the museum had room after room of it, suffering saints, beatific martyrs. Golds and reds and blues that have never again been seen.
Maybe that’s why I’m thinking about Budapest today: because a day spent thinking about beauty is a good day.
But I loved the place. It had a vibe.
My cousin and I had taken the train—she wasn’t happy about that, but I love long train rides—from Prague, a city that has to be one of the most beautiful in the world. Prague is your high school girlfriend, or—no—it’s the woman you wish you could be in love with. Endless beauty and excitement.
But I also thought Prague had this “get it while you can,” vibe. Just like Budapest, Prague has been destroyed too many times to count. Things are good now, and everybody is running around like it’s the last night at the fair, and you have to get all the pleasure you can before the lights go out for good.
Budapest, though, was more resigned. There seemed to be a Zen take on it. Kind of, Okay, it’s all good now, but you know the sky is going to fall again sooner or later, so we might as well all sit down and have a drink.
Budapest has all these cool tiny museums: we went to the Bible museum, the subway museum, the Lutheran Museum, which is across the square from the first McDonalds to go in behind the Iron Curtain.
And Budapest’s main museum—which both guidebooks we carried simply noted “had some nice art”—is the secondary repository of the riches of the Hapsburgs. We are talking Art here, so much of it, such good stuff, the Rembrandts are hidden off in a side room.
I have an extreme fondness for 12th-15th century religious art, and the museum had room after room of it, suffering saints, beatific martyrs. Golds and reds and blues that have never again been seen.
Maybe that’s why I’m thinking about Budapest today: because a day spent thinking about beauty is a good day.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 3:20 PM
1 comments
Monday, September 26, 2005
Three Random Thoughts
1. South Island, New Zealand. The glow worms were the third most beautiful shade of blue I've ever seen.
2. Off Victoria, British Columbia. Treat the world right, be where you're supposed to be, doing what you're supposed to be doing, the world will dance for you and orcas will spy hop, looking on with sheer envy.
3. Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, headed for the Middle East: never, ever sit near fat men wearing blue velour. Smurfs from hell.
2. Off Victoria, British Columbia. Treat the world right, be where you're supposed to be, doing what you're supposed to be doing, the world will dance for you and orcas will spy hop, looking on with sheer envy.
3. Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, headed for the Middle East: never, ever sit near fat men wearing blue velour. Smurfs from hell.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 5:39 PM
1 comments
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Nepal, 1989
These are simple geographic facts: we have just taken off from a runway that was covered in small yellow flowers, and flown into a cloudbank, at an altitude maybe three or four thousand feet lower than the mountains all around us.
The monk behind me fingers his mala, worn prayer beads made of some kind of seed, and I file that idea away for the future. If there’s going to be a future.
My broken knee and I have been jammed into a seat that would only be comfortable if you had no bones to begin with.
This morning, when the sky was still bright and we were contemplating the too-abrupt end of our trek, while we were petting the pig, the mountains glowed with that peculiar Himalayan light, the kind of light you expect a genie to make when it’s popping out of the bottle, all promise and special effect.
And now the mountains are invisible. We are swallowed by cloud, the plane is jumping on thermals, and the monk, beads not quite enough, has begun a low hum that sounds like a metal ice tray vibrating in a broken refrigerator.
If there were not a clear language barrier, I would turn around and tell him this story: When I was in high school, my English teacher liked to discuss ways of committing suicide. Always, he’d come back to the idea of jumping off a very tall building, because you’d have that lovely freefall sensation, and, of course, when you’re falling, “only the last inch hurts.”
But I don’t think the monk would go for that.
Let me back up a minute—or a couple days, anyway.
Under most circumstances, this would all be pretty interesting: my left knee, over the past forty-eight or seventy-two or ninety-six hours, has taken on the size and appearance of a basketball, one of the basketballs from the long-defunct ABA, those red, white, and blue balls that gave Dr. J. his start.
Call it a lesson in Nepali transport: the motorized rickshaws are better than taxis, because you can’t slam your leg in the door of a rickshaw.
But it’s quite possible to slam your leg in the door of a taxi. Or, to be exact, your knee.
Okay, so it still isn’t that easy. And no, I don’t really feel like explaining exactly how it happened. Enough to say it did. Slam. Scream. Pain. And then lots and lots of very colorful swelling and a complete inability to walk in a straight line. Or to walk much at all, for that matter.
Even that might have been okay, but after two days on a bus—past, by actual count, fourteen overturned trucks or buses, and those road signs that are nothing more than exclamation points, as if to indicate should your own bus pitch over the cliff you won’t even have time to get a word out—day one of the trek into the Himalayas starts, against all common sense, with a 3,000-foot descent.
And by the end of the day, the real question is, what genius planned this?
That first night, I had no idea where we were, but it simply didn’t seem that important. We were next to a stream—the echoes of the pig that they dragged across the bridge a few minutes ago finally died away—in a shelter with a thatched roof. Standing seems entirely out of the question, so I laid down, unable to see my foot over the swelling in my knee.
Under most circumstances, that would be pretty interesting, too, but we have nineteen days of trekking left, and what’s really interesting me now are the chances of an emergency flight out.
There are different kinds of limping, I discover. Uphill limping, when the porters, tump line around their foreheads, seventy pounds or so of gear hanging down their backs, pass my by as I try to figure out how to work the incline without having to bend my knee. There’s the flat-land limp, up on a ridge line where small girls, carrying half a forest worth of sticks each, come out to see who’s walking by their village. There’s the late-night, how-did-we-ever-trust-local-flashlights limp, stumbling in pitch black under a moonless sky.
I meet a doctor on the trail, show her my knee, and she says something really useful, along the lines of, “Wow, that sucks.”
Helpful. I like that.
That first night, it rains, hard. Nearly drowned out by the sound of water hitting the tent, there’s the frantic sound of the porters and the sherpas digging trenches around us.
And about twenty minutes later, there’s a scream, because they dug the trenches so that all the water flowed straight into the trek leader’s tent.
These guys can’t even lift the packs they’re carrying—it takes two of them to lift each pack, helping a third settle it on the line around his forehead—but once loaded, they’re off to the races, singing, laughing, and going much, much faster than me, as I discover the “even the bloody porters who are half my size and carrying a hundred pounds each are moving faster than me” limp.
Looking back, I don’t remember going up very many hills. Surely we must have, because we were in the mountains, and the general trend was up. But what I mostly remember are the downhills, putting all my weight onto the strong knee, heading towards the bottom of yet another river valley, where there would be a small house or two, a few pigs, and a view that, properly framed, would sell thousands of photos out of a booth in any mall in the world.
People wait all their lives to see things like this, the mercury glow of the river, the hills reaching up towards the pure white mountains.
I’m looking down too much. I know I am. But I have to watch where each footstep lands, or my knee will buckle, and I’ll be down for the count.
My wife, very beautiful in a trekking skirt we bought her in Kathmandu—our one practical purchase—keeps me company until I get too pissy, and then she rambles off on her own, checking back on me just enough to know I haven’t been forgotten, and if I weren’t so busy being grouchy, we could probably still have a pretty good time.
On a ridge line at twilight, there are the most beautiful trees I have ever seen, the kind of trees that old National Geographic specials promised me when I was a kid, making me want to go into the huge world.
This is as huge as it gets. I realize I’m limping through the Himalayas, and despite the pain, start laughing in sheer glee.
Update, Vegas, 2005
I've been walking with a cane for much of the past year. It started with an undefined knee problem, which gave way to arthritis in my left foot. Then, in Venice in May, in my right foot, a couple tendons decided they wanted to go on vacation. Most recently, in August, I got on a boat in British Columbia just fine, but when I got off, something had gone quite dramatically wrong in my left knee.
So really, in the past year, I've traveled through ten countries, spent three weeks north of the Arctic Circle, but mostly, I've passed the cane back and forth between hands, depending on which leg has decided to go AWOL.
But one must make the most of all situations. I have learned cane moves--twirls and spins and Fred Astaire taps. And I have discovered that when you have a cane, you can really get away with murder. Get on the airplane first to avoid the herd seating arrangements. And, if somebody annoys you, you can whack them in the ankles, then smile and apologize. "Gee, sorry, I'm just not used to using this thing yet."
But I really should have bought that silver elephant-headed cane in Venice. If something is going to be in your life all the time, it might as well be beautiful.
The monk behind me fingers his mala, worn prayer beads made of some kind of seed, and I file that idea away for the future. If there’s going to be a future.
My broken knee and I have been jammed into a seat that would only be comfortable if you had no bones to begin with.
This morning, when the sky was still bright and we were contemplating the too-abrupt end of our trek, while we were petting the pig, the mountains glowed with that peculiar Himalayan light, the kind of light you expect a genie to make when it’s popping out of the bottle, all promise and special effect.
And now the mountains are invisible. We are swallowed by cloud, the plane is jumping on thermals, and the monk, beads not quite enough, has begun a low hum that sounds like a metal ice tray vibrating in a broken refrigerator.
If there were not a clear language barrier, I would turn around and tell him this story: When I was in high school, my English teacher liked to discuss ways of committing suicide. Always, he’d come back to the idea of jumping off a very tall building, because you’d have that lovely freefall sensation, and, of course, when you’re falling, “only the last inch hurts.”
But I don’t think the monk would go for that.
Let me back up a minute—or a couple days, anyway.
Under most circumstances, this would all be pretty interesting: my left knee, over the past forty-eight or seventy-two or ninety-six hours, has taken on the size and appearance of a basketball, one of the basketballs from the long-defunct ABA, those red, white, and blue balls that gave Dr. J. his start.
Call it a lesson in Nepali transport: the motorized rickshaws are better than taxis, because you can’t slam your leg in the door of a rickshaw.
But it’s quite possible to slam your leg in the door of a taxi. Or, to be exact, your knee.
Okay, so it still isn’t that easy. And no, I don’t really feel like explaining exactly how it happened. Enough to say it did. Slam. Scream. Pain. And then lots and lots of very colorful swelling and a complete inability to walk in a straight line. Or to walk much at all, for that matter.
Even that might have been okay, but after two days on a bus—past, by actual count, fourteen overturned trucks or buses, and those road signs that are nothing more than exclamation points, as if to indicate should your own bus pitch over the cliff you won’t even have time to get a word out—day one of the trek into the Himalayas starts, against all common sense, with a 3,000-foot descent.
And by the end of the day, the real question is, what genius planned this?
That first night, I had no idea where we were, but it simply didn’t seem that important. We were next to a stream—the echoes of the pig that they dragged across the bridge a few minutes ago finally died away—in a shelter with a thatched roof. Standing seems entirely out of the question, so I laid down, unable to see my foot over the swelling in my knee.
Under most circumstances, that would be pretty interesting, too, but we have nineteen days of trekking left, and what’s really interesting me now are the chances of an emergency flight out.
There are different kinds of limping, I discover. Uphill limping, when the porters, tump line around their foreheads, seventy pounds or so of gear hanging down their backs, pass my by as I try to figure out how to work the incline without having to bend my knee. There’s the flat-land limp, up on a ridge line where small girls, carrying half a forest worth of sticks each, come out to see who’s walking by their village. There’s the late-night, how-did-we-ever-trust-local-flashlights limp, stumbling in pitch black under a moonless sky.
I meet a doctor on the trail, show her my knee, and she says something really useful, along the lines of, “Wow, that sucks.”
Helpful. I like that.
That first night, it rains, hard. Nearly drowned out by the sound of water hitting the tent, there’s the frantic sound of the porters and the sherpas digging trenches around us.
And about twenty minutes later, there’s a scream, because they dug the trenches so that all the water flowed straight into the trek leader’s tent.
These guys can’t even lift the packs they’re carrying—it takes two of them to lift each pack, helping a third settle it on the line around his forehead—but once loaded, they’re off to the races, singing, laughing, and going much, much faster than me, as I discover the “even the bloody porters who are half my size and carrying a hundred pounds each are moving faster than me” limp.
Looking back, I don’t remember going up very many hills. Surely we must have, because we were in the mountains, and the general trend was up. But what I mostly remember are the downhills, putting all my weight onto the strong knee, heading towards the bottom of yet another river valley, where there would be a small house or two, a few pigs, and a view that, properly framed, would sell thousands of photos out of a booth in any mall in the world.
People wait all their lives to see things like this, the mercury glow of the river, the hills reaching up towards the pure white mountains.
I’m looking down too much. I know I am. But I have to watch where each footstep lands, or my knee will buckle, and I’ll be down for the count.
My wife, very beautiful in a trekking skirt we bought her in Kathmandu—our one practical purchase—keeps me company until I get too pissy, and then she rambles off on her own, checking back on me just enough to know I haven’t been forgotten, and if I weren’t so busy being grouchy, we could probably still have a pretty good time.
On a ridge line at twilight, there are the most beautiful trees I have ever seen, the kind of trees that old National Geographic specials promised me when I was a kid, making me want to go into the huge world.
This is as huge as it gets. I realize I’m limping through the Himalayas, and despite the pain, start laughing in sheer glee.
Update, Vegas, 2005
I've been walking with a cane for much of the past year. It started with an undefined knee problem, which gave way to arthritis in my left foot. Then, in Venice in May, in my right foot, a couple tendons decided they wanted to go on vacation. Most recently, in August, I got on a boat in British Columbia just fine, but when I got off, something had gone quite dramatically wrong in my left knee.
So really, in the past year, I've traveled through ten countries, spent three weeks north of the Arctic Circle, but mostly, I've passed the cane back and forth between hands, depending on which leg has decided to go AWOL.
But one must make the most of all situations. I have learned cane moves--twirls and spins and Fred Astaire taps. And I have discovered that when you have a cane, you can really get away with murder. Get on the airplane first to avoid the herd seating arrangements. And, if somebody annoys you, you can whack them in the ankles, then smile and apologize. "Gee, sorry, I'm just not used to using this thing yet."
But I really should have bought that silver elephant-headed cane in Venice. If something is going to be in your life all the time, it might as well be beautiful.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 5:38 PM
0 comments
Saturday, September 24, 2005
Fear of Food
Moments like these are why you program pizza places into the cell phone’s speed dial: he waiter, looking altogether too pleased with himself, puts down a small pale plate. There’s some kind of sauce that looks a bit like an oil slick, but that’s not the scary part.
I have to ask exactly what the scary part is.
“A foie gras lollipop,” the waiter says.
Clearly I’m a poltroon for not knowing this already. Clearly I’m a poltroon—what a lovely word that is, one that really should make it back into daily vocabulary—for not knowing that somewhere on a farm in a country where they smoke Gitaines and take themselves way too seriously, men are force feeding ducks and geese, and these birds are giving up their very lives for—
foie gras lollipops.
Thought two that’s a little alarming about this: clearly, there’s a store somewhere that sells sticks for foie gras lollipops. Last month, while in Vuntut, we were telling stupid camper stories, and the winner would have been “then she asked where she could buy sticks for roasting marshmallows,” except we all knew you could buy that very thing.
It is the kind of knowledge that keeps me from sleeping well, along with the simple, ugly fact that before I went to Vuntut, I went out and bought fleece pants, in Arizona, when it was 116 degrees out, and it only took me one phone call to find a place that sold them.
Over the past week, I’ve been in Vegas at the annual convention of the Society of American Travel Writers. It’s the first time I’ve gone out to play this particular round of reindeer games, and it was more than a little interesting. Met some really nice people, and best of all, people who understood the complaints of this job. As anybody with any job, we have a lot of complaints. Slow pay, poor pay, the search for a laundromat with instructions you can figure out, the increasing incivility of air travel.
But face it, if I tell the average cubicle worker that I’m writing up two pieces on the Arctic and doing research for a story on the Canary Islands, all they’re going to do is concentrate on what seems like a large amount of money for each word written, and the fact that I’m just back from the arctic and headed for the Canaries. All that looks good from a cubicle.
But does the foie gras lollipop? This is the fourth meal in a row we’ve been offered foie gras. Maybe more, I don’t know, I skipped breakfast the past couple days, so maybe it’s been six meals in a row. Maybe I missed foie gras french toast, or foie gras waffles, or orange foie gras juice.
The other three meals, though, the foie gras just came in a big chunk. And foie gras is like the cherry on top of a sundae in a certain respect, in that, if you don’t like it, if that red color makes you a little queasy, there’s always someone else around who loves the things.
Here’s my big complaint about the job: meals that last five hours. Only twice can I think of times I didn’t mind, and that was because of company, not the food.
Now, I respect the fact that a good chef is an artist, but if it’s taking forty minutes between courses, we either need more hands working in the kitchen or we need to rethink what’s being served up, before we’re offered foie gras-flavored Captain Crunch.
So here’s about all I’ve learned from yet another week of too much food, prepared too fussily, with too many ingredients thrown in just for show: foie gras shovels onto other plates quite easily.
When I come to that realization, I figure out what the stick is really for.
I have to ask exactly what the scary part is.
“A foie gras lollipop,” the waiter says.
Clearly I’m a poltroon for not knowing this already. Clearly I’m a poltroon—what a lovely word that is, one that really should make it back into daily vocabulary—for not knowing that somewhere on a farm in a country where they smoke Gitaines and take themselves way too seriously, men are force feeding ducks and geese, and these birds are giving up their very lives for—
foie gras lollipops.
Thought two that’s a little alarming about this: clearly, there’s a store somewhere that sells sticks for foie gras lollipops. Last month, while in Vuntut, we were telling stupid camper stories, and the winner would have been “then she asked where she could buy sticks for roasting marshmallows,” except we all knew you could buy that very thing.
It is the kind of knowledge that keeps me from sleeping well, along with the simple, ugly fact that before I went to Vuntut, I went out and bought fleece pants, in Arizona, when it was 116 degrees out, and it only took me one phone call to find a place that sold them.
Over the past week, I’ve been in Vegas at the annual convention of the Society of American Travel Writers. It’s the first time I’ve gone out to play this particular round of reindeer games, and it was more than a little interesting. Met some really nice people, and best of all, people who understood the complaints of this job. As anybody with any job, we have a lot of complaints. Slow pay, poor pay, the search for a laundromat with instructions you can figure out, the increasing incivility of air travel.
But face it, if I tell the average cubicle worker that I’m writing up two pieces on the Arctic and doing research for a story on the Canary Islands, all they’re going to do is concentrate on what seems like a large amount of money for each word written, and the fact that I’m just back from the arctic and headed for the Canaries. All that looks good from a cubicle.
But does the foie gras lollipop? This is the fourth meal in a row we’ve been offered foie gras. Maybe more, I don’t know, I skipped breakfast the past couple days, so maybe it’s been six meals in a row. Maybe I missed foie gras french toast, or foie gras waffles, or orange foie gras juice.
The other three meals, though, the foie gras just came in a big chunk. And foie gras is like the cherry on top of a sundae in a certain respect, in that, if you don’t like it, if that red color makes you a little queasy, there’s always someone else around who loves the things.
Here’s my big complaint about the job: meals that last five hours. Only twice can I think of times I didn’t mind, and that was because of company, not the food.
Now, I respect the fact that a good chef is an artist, but if it’s taking forty minutes between courses, we either need more hands working in the kitchen or we need to rethink what’s being served up, before we’re offered foie gras-flavored Captain Crunch.
So here’s about all I’ve learned from yet another week of too much food, prepared too fussily, with too many ingredients thrown in just for show: foie gras shovels onto other plates quite easily.
When I come to that realization, I figure out what the stick is really for.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 1:56 AM
0 comments
Friday, September 23, 2005
How to Be Haunted
Some places get under your skin; some slide across the surface like a shadow in front of you; and some, you know you never, ever need to go back to again.
Left Vegas this morning. This was the third time I was there, although the first--didn't get out of the airport--doesn't really count. Second time, eleven years ago, spent most of the time shopping for books. Some good bookstores there, at least there were back then.
This time, checked out the fake hotels. Why go to New York when the fake one has slot machines? And, having been in the real Venice just a few months ago, I can tell you the Vegas hotel Venice is . . . well, all it needs to be complete is a Doge with a giant head running around shaking hands.
I loved watching people take pictures of these things. Gondolas right next to the Strip; the fake Euro fountains. This morning, a guy taking a picture of a fake tree inside a fake greenhouse.
So is there any need to ever go back to Vegas again? Nope. Not saying it wasn't interesting, don't want to denigrate the fun a lot of people have there, but I can mark it off the list and never think of going back.
Then there are places that slide off the surface. Everybody I know loved New Zealand; I thought it was Canada after a really long plane ride. Had a good time there, saw some really, really cool things there--the glow worm cave was amazing--and if I end up there again, I'm sure I'll have a lot of fun, but it's a big world, there's a lot of stuff I've never seen before that I'd like to see, and of course, as Italo Calvino so aptly said, there are "books you would read if you had the time, but unfortunately, your days are numbered." That's my take on a return to New Zealand.
Then there are the places that never leave your head. Wadi Rum in Jordan. Any part of Japan in the dead of winter, when the sweet potato vendors are pushing their carts in the streets. So many parts of Alaska, BC, Yukon. Iceland, just to see how the light hits the mountains again.
I was on the plane down from Vegas, thinking, I don't have to be on a plane again until late November, when it's time to go to the Canary Islands.
But now I'm thinking there's time, there's time. And there's such a big world out there.
Left Vegas this morning. This was the third time I was there, although the first--didn't get out of the airport--doesn't really count. Second time, eleven years ago, spent most of the time shopping for books. Some good bookstores there, at least there were back then.
This time, checked out the fake hotels. Why go to New York when the fake one has slot machines? And, having been in the real Venice just a few months ago, I can tell you the Vegas hotel Venice is . . . well, all it needs to be complete is a Doge with a giant head running around shaking hands.
I loved watching people take pictures of these things. Gondolas right next to the Strip; the fake Euro fountains. This morning, a guy taking a picture of a fake tree inside a fake greenhouse.
So is there any need to ever go back to Vegas again? Nope. Not saying it wasn't interesting, don't want to denigrate the fun a lot of people have there, but I can mark it off the list and never think of going back.
Then there are places that slide off the surface. Everybody I know loved New Zealand; I thought it was Canada after a really long plane ride. Had a good time there, saw some really, really cool things there--the glow worm cave was amazing--and if I end up there again, I'm sure I'll have a lot of fun, but it's a big world, there's a lot of stuff I've never seen before that I'd like to see, and of course, as Italo Calvino so aptly said, there are "books you would read if you had the time, but unfortunately, your days are numbered." That's my take on a return to New Zealand.
Then there are the places that never leave your head. Wadi Rum in Jordan. Any part of Japan in the dead of winter, when the sweet potato vendors are pushing their carts in the streets. So many parts of Alaska, BC, Yukon. Iceland, just to see how the light hits the mountains again.
I was on the plane down from Vegas, thinking, I don't have to be on a plane again until late November, when it's time to go to the Canary Islands.
But now I'm thinking there's time, there's time. And there's such a big world out there.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 3:03 PM
1 comments
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Wondering Where the Lions Are
It's pretty easy to get songs stuck in your head here in Vegas. All the casinos are playing late 70s, early 80s music, the kind of stuff that makes you glad you don't listen to the radio much anymore. Although, to be fair, every now and then, something pops in that makes you wonder what they were thinking. Last night, heard the Motels singing "Suddenly Last Summer."
Everything here is planned, and that's what makes it so interesting, sort of like the David Cronenberg movie Crash, where they staged car wrecks. Everything, from the color of the walls to the texture of the carpet, is planned, and it's frightening how it all works. Nobody is smiling, but everybody will go home and say they're having a good time.
Is that burning rubber stink in my room just the air conditioning cleaning out the cigarette smoke from the casino--have had a sore throat since I got here--or is it true, that they pump extra oxygen into the rooms to keep you awake and make you think about going downstairs to gamble some more? Oxygen does smell a lot like burning rubber, when there's too much of it around.
What does all this have to do with lions? Very little. Between the Mirage and Treasure Island, there's a gigantic, marvelously ugly statue of Sigfried and Roy and a lion--apparently from happier days. And there tends to be a line of people, waiting their turn to have their picture taken with the thing.
You think about how, when the house is on fire, when the floods are coming, most people run in to save their photographs; is this what they're saving?
I think it was Jean Cocteau: someone asked him "What would you take out of your house if it was on fire?" And he said, "The fire, of course."
Which leads us through a process that probably only makes sense to me, to the Bruce Cockburn song, "Wondering Where the Lions Are," and that wonderful, wonderful line, "Sun's up, um hm, looks okay/well the world's survived into another day."
Everything here is planned, and that's what makes it so interesting, sort of like the David Cronenberg movie Crash, where they staged car wrecks. Everything, from the color of the walls to the texture of the carpet, is planned, and it's frightening how it all works. Nobody is smiling, but everybody will go home and say they're having a good time.
Is that burning rubber stink in my room just the air conditioning cleaning out the cigarette smoke from the casino--have had a sore throat since I got here--or is it true, that they pump extra oxygen into the rooms to keep you awake and make you think about going downstairs to gamble some more? Oxygen does smell a lot like burning rubber, when there's too much of it around.
What does all this have to do with lions? Very little. Between the Mirage and Treasure Island, there's a gigantic, marvelously ugly statue of Sigfried and Roy and a lion--apparently from happier days. And there tends to be a line of people, waiting their turn to have their picture taken with the thing.
You think about how, when the house is on fire, when the floods are coming, most people run in to save their photographs; is this what they're saving?
I think it was Jean Cocteau: someone asked him "What would you take out of your house if it was on fire?" And he said, "The fire, of course."
Which leads us through a process that probably only makes sense to me, to the Bruce Cockburn song, "Wondering Where the Lions Are," and that wonderful, wonderful line, "Sun's up, um hm, looks okay/well the world's survived into another day."
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 5:17 PM
1 comments
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Strip Search
I walked the Vegas Strip three times yesterday. That really wasn’t what I’d set out to do, but sometimes things just happen to you, and there isn’t much you can do about it.
Three times up and down the thing—plus a couple more times in vehicles—leaves one overwhelming question: Why?
People standing on corners, sucking drinks out of glasses shaped like the Eiffel Tower; Japanese carrying huge tripods that support cameras the size of business cards; that intense look of absolutely no pleasure at all that people have when they’re hunched over the slot machines.
The last time I was here, eleven years ago, someone told me that in summer, the big hotels—which were much, much smaller back then—expected one heart attack each per day in summer, with people drinking too much and then going into the heat.
Not understanding this place is a problem, because it’s my job to understand places, to get into the them, figure them out, and report back. Been doing it a long time, pretty good at it, and rarely fail to find some kind of hook that lets me into the place.
Girls with more tattoos than I have; handfuls of flyers for strippers; extremely charming elderly couples walking hand in hand in a way that offers hope.
I don’t know.
But tonight, a lovely breeze was blowing across the desert, there was the slight hint of rain in the air, and some flash echoes of very distant lightning that made all the neon seem irrelevant.
Three times up and down the thing—plus a couple more times in vehicles—leaves one overwhelming question: Why?
People standing on corners, sucking drinks out of glasses shaped like the Eiffel Tower; Japanese carrying huge tripods that support cameras the size of business cards; that intense look of absolutely no pleasure at all that people have when they’re hunched over the slot machines.
The last time I was here, eleven years ago, someone told me that in summer, the big hotels—which were much, much smaller back then—expected one heart attack each per day in summer, with people drinking too much and then going into the heat.
Not understanding this place is a problem, because it’s my job to understand places, to get into the them, figure them out, and report back. Been doing it a long time, pretty good at it, and rarely fail to find some kind of hook that lets me into the place.
Girls with more tattoos than I have; handfuls of flyers for strippers; extremely charming elderly couples walking hand in hand in a way that offers hope.
I don’t know.
But tonight, a lovely breeze was blowing across the desert, there was the slight hint of rain in the air, and some flash echoes of very distant lightning that made all the neon seem irrelevant.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 9:04 AM
0 comments
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Unreal City
Vegas. At the Paris casino, a fake tower under a fake sky, but very real slot machines. In fact, those might be the only real things here. The Bellagio has delusions of grandeur, the Mirage, where I'm staying is a trailer park stacked thirty floors or so high. New York New York smells wrong, but looks right--except for the slot machines.
And since the tigers ate that guy, things just aren't the same around here.
Day after tomorrow, to the nuclear test sight. We're not allowed to take cameras, so it's good to know, when the end of the world does come--isn't that what the nuclear tests were, a dress rehersal for the end--we won't have to worry about lack of documentation.
And since the tigers ate that guy, things just aren't the same around here.
Day after tomorrow, to the nuclear test sight. We're not allowed to take cameras, so it's good to know, when the end of the world does come--isn't that what the nuclear tests were, a dress rehersal for the end--we won't have to worry about lack of documentation.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 4:31 PM
0 comments
Friday, September 16, 2005
It's All in the Details
On Chief Shakes' Island, Wrangell, Alaska, there's a reconstructed clanhouse--made by the CCC, about a third the size of the original, but still one of the more authentic-feeling clanhouses in Southeast--and a bunch of totem poles, along with a few graves.
One pole, to the left of the clanhouse entrance--the door is very low to the clanhouse, both so you had to bow and show respect to the house when you entered, and also so that the people inside could bash you in the head before you had time to straighten up if they didn't like you--is called "Bear Up the Mountain." Think of the flood story, but instead of Noah, a bear climbs a high mountain to get away from the water. The pole has the bear's tracks up the side, then the bear himself crouching at the top. It's astoundingly beautiful, my favorite of all the hundreds of totem poles I've seen.
And then, with nothing more than a few berries, someone found a way to make it even better. Four berries, bright red, between the bear's claws.
One pole, to the left of the clanhouse entrance--the door is very low to the clanhouse, both so you had to bow and show respect to the house when you entered, and also so that the people inside could bash you in the head before you had time to straighten up if they didn't like you--is called "Bear Up the Mountain." Think of the flood story, but instead of Noah, a bear climbs a high mountain to get away from the water. The pole has the bear's tracks up the side, then the bear himself crouching at the top. It's astoundingly beautiful, my favorite of all the hundreds of totem poles I've seen.
And then, with nothing more than a few berries, someone found a way to make it even better. Four berries, bright red, between the bear's claws.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 11:22 PM
0 comments
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Joe Jackson
No matter what mood I'm in, there's a Joe Jackson album that has me covered: from classical to almost punk, Joe rarely does the same thing twice, and whatever he does, it's worth checking out.
Just thinking of a couple lines from his song "Shanghai Sky" (on the album Big World, which first came out on actual vinyl--remember that stuff--and there were two disks in the sleeves, but side four was blank; maybe the only three-sided rock record ever made):
Strange how the world got so small
I turned around and there was nowhere left to go.
So sad, the dream always dies
Each new arrival closes places in my mind.
But I can dream
Until I go
Of smells that I don't recognize.
Off to Las Vegas in just a couple days. Vegas smells, as I recall from my last visit, like air conditioning.
Just thinking of a couple lines from his song "Shanghai Sky" (on the album Big World, which first came out on actual vinyl--remember that stuff--and there were two disks in the sleeves, but side four was blank; maybe the only three-sided rock record ever made):
Strange how the world got so small
I turned around and there was nowhere left to go.
So sad, the dream always dies
Each new arrival closes places in my mind.
But I can dream
Until I go
Of smells that I don't recognize.
Off to Las Vegas in just a couple days. Vegas smells, as I recall from my last visit, like air conditioning.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 6:06 PM
1 comments
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Another One from the File Cabinet
Wrote this, had no idea what to do with it when it was done. In a slightly different version, I stuck it in a few guidebook editions.
Trade beads make me happy. One of these days, I'll blow the fifty or sixty bucks to get one of the ones Lewis and Clark took along with them.
Consider: you're about to go to the other side of the world, to a place no one from your world has seen or knows about. Once there, you're going to have to make friends with the locals. What do you bring them? Something useful, right?
Or maybe not. For hundreds of years, what travelers brought were beads and trinkets--especially beads. On Semen Dezhnev's 1648 voyage to the waters between Alaska and Russia, the first expedition to make it into the waters of what's now called the Bering Strait, official stores included "5,000 blue beads," valued at two rubles and a poltin, or the equivalent of the "3 red snowshoe boots" Dezhnev also took along. There's never an explanation for why he only took three boots. It didn't matter; the beads were the hot ticket, and would remain so for the next 200 years.
When you really look into the issue of the beads, you discover that they acted as a kind of balance point in Russian-Alaskan relations. In the earliest days, the Alaskans were anxious for the beads, and the Russians disdainfully tossed them about like royalty bestowing favors. But after a while, the balance of power changed. The Alaskans had enough beads; they were ready for something more useful, like medicine, weapons, or the new craze, tobacco. By the time of the transfer of Alaska to the United States, the Russians found themselves not only despised, but holding useless currency.
The Russians weren't bringing anything new when they took beads to Alaska. Alaskans made their own beads, the most popular of which were made from the colorful dentalium shell. However, getting these was kind of a hassle: you threw a dead body into the water and waited for the dentalium to cover it. It was a high price to pay for wealth. Other beads were made of tooth (caribou was the most common) or some more easily obtained shell. The Aleut, Athabascan, and Southeast Alaskans used beads to decorate clothing--especially hunting visors and caps--and as jewelry, with earrings being the most popular use. Beads were also used for labrets, small decorations placed in a cut near the lips.
But tooth and bone beads were just local, homespun products. Once the big, shiny factory glass beads came in, it was like trying to convince a kid that a homemade shirt is as good as one with a sports team logo. The local crafts disappeared, and for most of the next two hundred years, there was something of a bead rush going on in Alaska.
Sadly, we really only have the Russian side of the story, but it's obvious that the sudden arrival of so many different kinds of beads flooding into Alaska from Russia caused a kind of market craze for them, with imagined rarities and scarcities that put to shame the modern lust for Pokemon cards and Beanie Babies. The worth of beads varied by color, more than shape, and one kind of bead was worth more in one place than in another. A complicated system of values and equivalencies quickly developed across the territory.
The first English account we get of the power of trade beads is in the journals of Captain Cook. When he arrived in Prince William Sound in the spring of 1778, Cook discovered that Russian blue beads were the items of choice. He wrote, "these they seemed to value very much, and I had some difficulty to purchase two or three." As for trading the beads he himself had brought, one of his crewmen noted that "for a few Beads we might purchase of the Natives almost any Quantity of dryed fish we please, either Salmon or Halibut." With such riches to be had--Cook's men were handing out beads like confetti--the Natives paddled up to Cook's ship the Resolution so loaded with furs to trade that they looked like "bears or seals."
In the early 1800s, a single pair of matched blue-green beads was worth three or four caribou skins, or about nine beaver skins in the Norton Sound area (near modern-day Nome or Unakleet). In the Kenai, Alexander Baranov negotiated a treaty that guaranteed the payment of "1 sazhen beads" per beaver pelt (if you're trying to keep track of the measurements, there were two sazhen in a funt).
On the extreme value scale, in the Aleutians, there were reports that in 1791, a good set of earrings made of European beads could buy you a "girl or woman in eternal slavery."
Even though the glass beads pushed out the local product, they were used for exactly the same things. The Russians just killed what they could and then moved on to the next place, never truly taking the Alaskan landscape into their way of thinking. The Alaskans took what the Russians had to give them, and immediately incorporated it into their daily lives. Ivan Veniaminov noted that Aleut hats were "adorned with sea-lion whiskers, trade beads and bone" (interestingly, you could tell whether a hunter was left or right handed by the side of the hat the whiskers were on). As for labrets, in K.T. Khlebnikov's account of his stay in Russian American from 1818-1832, he noted that the Aleut men, "in the soft part of their nose below the gristle they make a hole in which they wear a type of long earrings threaded with beads, corals and amber."
Beads were also accorded ceremonial use: in Southeast, at funerals, some groups would take the strands of beads owned by the deceased and smash them against trees. Only immediate family members had the right to pick the unbroken beads up for reuse.
Although they were the ones bringing in the beads, the Russians really looked down on all this. G.L. Davydov, a fairly sensitive observer for the time, commented on Alaskan uses for beads that "Many of the women would be attractive . . . if they did not decorate themselves in what seems to us an ugly way." As far as the Russians were concerned, they were trading nothing for something, and getting away with it beautifully.
But this couldn't last. The Russians brought in beads by the ton, and inflation was bound to set in. Already at the turn of the nineteenth century, Davydov found that "beads have lost most of their value on Kad'iak because the inhabitants have accumulated a lot of them and have nowhere to dispose of them." In Southeast Alaska, where the Hudson's Bay Company competed with the Russians (and, unlike the Russians, the HBC was willing to trade guns and other fun stuff), it took up to a full pound of beads just to buy one beaver pelt. By 1831, beads were so low on the list of items used for trade in Sitka as to be not worth the effort of counting; an expedition that brought over 1000 blankets for trade brought only four "clusters" of beads. The market was flooded.
Although it was Russians who first brought beads to Alaska, very few if any of the beads were actually of Russian manufacture. In the earliest days of exploration, when expeditions went overland, most of the beads traded in Alaska came from Murano Island, in the lagoon of Venice, where glass bead factories had been in operation since the eleventh century. When the Russians began to send ships around the Cape, stopping in India and China before reaching Alaska, they discovered the Chinese-made beads were a lot cheaper than Venetian. For the last years of Russia's time in Alaska, factories in Canton supplied the Russian expeditions, as they had supplied those of Captain Cook.
Most of the beads taken to Alaska were made in one of two ways: a piece of glass could be drawn out into a long tube, and then the beads cut or broken off that; or one could wind glass around a thin metal tube, again, breaking the individual beads off.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the Alaskan demand for beads was gone, and the Russians found themselves without anything to trade; there was a sudden scramble to find new, desirable materials. They tried calico--red was popular--but with HBC bringing in guns and half the Native men in Alaska addicted to imported chewing tobacco, it was too little, too wrong, and too late. In the end, the Russians just couldn't let go of the idea that the beads were worth something. At the transfer of Alaska, the "cut beads" that the Russian American Company was trying to sell to the territory's new owners at 37 1/2 cents per dozen were useless. Inside this boom and bust is the history of Russian Alaska: tentative outreach, mutual benefit, excess, and retreat.
There's no way to even guess how many trade beads were brought into Alaska. It is safe to say that there were at least several tons of beads in motion along the shipping lanes and trade routes of the territory. That makes for quite a pile of beads, and it's no wonder that stashes of them still wash up on shore, or are found under forest mulch.
The beads are a physical link to the days of Russian trading and war ships. In the shops today, you'll find that it's still the blue beads--perhaps the same kind Captain Cook found in Prince William Sound, more than 200 years ago--that have the highest value, and, just like in the past, even today a sazhen or so of reds can be had for less than it would cost to buy a beaver pelt.
Trade beads make me happy. One of these days, I'll blow the fifty or sixty bucks to get one of the ones Lewis and Clark took along with them.
Adventures in the Bead Trade
Consider: you're about to go to the other side of the world, to a place no one from your world has seen or knows about. Once there, you're going to have to make friends with the locals. What do you bring them? Something useful, right?
Or maybe not. For hundreds of years, what travelers brought were beads and trinkets--especially beads. On Semen Dezhnev's 1648 voyage to the waters between Alaska and Russia, the first expedition to make it into the waters of what's now called the Bering Strait, official stores included "5,000 blue beads," valued at two rubles and a poltin, or the equivalent of the "3 red snowshoe boots" Dezhnev also took along. There's never an explanation for why he only took three boots. It didn't matter; the beads were the hot ticket, and would remain so for the next 200 years.
When you really look into the issue of the beads, you discover that they acted as a kind of balance point in Russian-Alaskan relations. In the earliest days, the Alaskans were anxious for the beads, and the Russians disdainfully tossed them about like royalty bestowing favors. But after a while, the balance of power changed. The Alaskans had enough beads; they were ready for something more useful, like medicine, weapons, or the new craze, tobacco. By the time of the transfer of Alaska to the United States, the Russians found themselves not only despised, but holding useless currency.
The Russians weren't bringing anything new when they took beads to Alaska. Alaskans made their own beads, the most popular of which were made from the colorful dentalium shell. However, getting these was kind of a hassle: you threw a dead body into the water and waited for the dentalium to cover it. It was a high price to pay for wealth. Other beads were made of tooth (caribou was the most common) or some more easily obtained shell. The Aleut, Athabascan, and Southeast Alaskans used beads to decorate clothing--especially hunting visors and caps--and as jewelry, with earrings being the most popular use. Beads were also used for labrets, small decorations placed in a cut near the lips.
But tooth and bone beads were just local, homespun products. Once the big, shiny factory glass beads came in, it was like trying to convince a kid that a homemade shirt is as good as one with a sports team logo. The local crafts disappeared, and for most of the next two hundred years, there was something of a bead rush going on in Alaska.
Sadly, we really only have the Russian side of the story, but it's obvious that the sudden arrival of so many different kinds of beads flooding into Alaska from Russia caused a kind of market craze for them, with imagined rarities and scarcities that put to shame the modern lust for Pokemon cards and Beanie Babies. The worth of beads varied by color, more than shape, and one kind of bead was worth more in one place than in another. A complicated system of values and equivalencies quickly developed across the territory.
The first English account we get of the power of trade beads is in the journals of Captain Cook. When he arrived in Prince William Sound in the spring of 1778, Cook discovered that Russian blue beads were the items of choice. He wrote, "these they seemed to value very much, and I had some difficulty to purchase two or three." As for trading the beads he himself had brought, one of his crewmen noted that "for a few Beads we might purchase of the Natives almost any Quantity of dryed fish we please, either Salmon or Halibut." With such riches to be had--Cook's men were handing out beads like confetti--the Natives paddled up to Cook's ship the Resolution so loaded with furs to trade that they looked like "bears or seals."
In the early 1800s, a single pair of matched blue-green beads was worth three or four caribou skins, or about nine beaver skins in the Norton Sound area (near modern-day Nome or Unakleet). In the Kenai, Alexander Baranov negotiated a treaty that guaranteed the payment of "1 sazhen beads" per beaver pelt (if you're trying to keep track of the measurements, there were two sazhen in a funt).
On the extreme value scale, in the Aleutians, there were reports that in 1791, a good set of earrings made of European beads could buy you a "girl or woman in eternal slavery."
Even though the glass beads pushed out the local product, they were used for exactly the same things. The Russians just killed what they could and then moved on to the next place, never truly taking the Alaskan landscape into their way of thinking. The Alaskans took what the Russians had to give them, and immediately incorporated it into their daily lives. Ivan Veniaminov noted that Aleut hats were "adorned with sea-lion whiskers, trade beads and bone" (interestingly, you could tell whether a hunter was left or right handed by the side of the hat the whiskers were on). As for labrets, in K.T. Khlebnikov's account of his stay in Russian American from 1818-1832, he noted that the Aleut men, "in the soft part of their nose below the gristle they make a hole in which they wear a type of long earrings threaded with beads, corals and amber."
Beads were also accorded ceremonial use: in Southeast, at funerals, some groups would take the strands of beads owned by the deceased and smash them against trees. Only immediate family members had the right to pick the unbroken beads up for reuse.
Although they were the ones bringing in the beads, the Russians really looked down on all this. G.L. Davydov, a fairly sensitive observer for the time, commented on Alaskan uses for beads that "Many of the women would be attractive . . . if they did not decorate themselves in what seems to us an ugly way." As far as the Russians were concerned, they were trading nothing for something, and getting away with it beautifully.
But this couldn't last. The Russians brought in beads by the ton, and inflation was bound to set in. Already at the turn of the nineteenth century, Davydov found that "beads have lost most of their value on Kad'iak because the inhabitants have accumulated a lot of them and have nowhere to dispose of them." In Southeast Alaska, where the Hudson's Bay Company competed with the Russians (and, unlike the Russians, the HBC was willing to trade guns and other fun stuff), it took up to a full pound of beads just to buy one beaver pelt. By 1831, beads were so low on the list of items used for trade in Sitka as to be not worth the effort of counting; an expedition that brought over 1000 blankets for trade brought only four "clusters" of beads. The market was flooded.
Although it was Russians who first brought beads to Alaska, very few if any of the beads were actually of Russian manufacture. In the earliest days of exploration, when expeditions went overland, most of the beads traded in Alaska came from Murano Island, in the lagoon of Venice, where glass bead factories had been in operation since the eleventh century. When the Russians began to send ships around the Cape, stopping in India and China before reaching Alaska, they discovered the Chinese-made beads were a lot cheaper than Venetian. For the last years of Russia's time in Alaska, factories in Canton supplied the Russian expeditions, as they had supplied those of Captain Cook.
Most of the beads taken to Alaska were made in one of two ways: a piece of glass could be drawn out into a long tube, and then the beads cut or broken off that; or one could wind glass around a thin metal tube, again, breaking the individual beads off.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the Alaskan demand for beads was gone, and the Russians found themselves without anything to trade; there was a sudden scramble to find new, desirable materials. They tried calico--red was popular--but with HBC bringing in guns and half the Native men in Alaska addicted to imported chewing tobacco, it was too little, too wrong, and too late. In the end, the Russians just couldn't let go of the idea that the beads were worth something. At the transfer of Alaska, the "cut beads" that the Russian American Company was trying to sell to the territory's new owners at 37 1/2 cents per dozen were useless. Inside this boom and bust is the history of Russian Alaska: tentative outreach, mutual benefit, excess, and retreat.
There's no way to even guess how many trade beads were brought into Alaska. It is safe to say that there were at least several tons of beads in motion along the shipping lanes and trade routes of the territory. That makes for quite a pile of beads, and it's no wonder that stashes of them still wash up on shore, or are found under forest mulch.
The beads are a physical link to the days of Russian trading and war ships. In the shops today, you'll find that it's still the blue beads--perhaps the same kind Captain Cook found in Prince William Sound, more than 200 years ago--that have the highest value, and, just like in the past, even today a sazhen or so of reds can be had for less than it would cost to buy a beaver pelt.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 6:28 PM
0 comments
Monday, September 12, 2005
The Moose Story
My cousin, after reading yesterday's post, said she would be a moose, not a caribou.
So here's the moose story.
We were on a motorcycle, between Tok and Glenallen, in Alaska. It was a stupid motorcycle, a Honda ST1100, this gorgeous machine that had a spedometer that went up to 160. All I can tell you for sure about that is 120 was not much more than half-trottle and the thing idled at 35 miles an hour.
Beautiful bike. Exactly what you didn't want to have for driving the Alaska Highway.
We came around a corner, and there was a moose in the road. I slammed on the brakes.
Little known fact: moose kill and injure more people than any other large mammal on the planet except hippos--and other people, of course.
Moose started to come towards us, a slow trot.
Clearly, she didn't know what a motorcycle was, but it did not amuse her, and she saw it as a threat. We didn't see the calf hidden in the brush until later, but moose was clearly in attack mode.
Time to get out of there. Problem is, thanks to the basic laws of physics, two people on a grossly over powered bike with way too much rear wheel torque means you don't turn around easily.
I started walking us around.
The moose was about a hundred yards away, starting to come faster.
When the moose was fifty yards away, I started calling back to Lynn that we were going to die soon.
I was not joking.
If I could get this unbalanced bike around just a few more degrees, I could lay on the throttle, we could use that 0-60 in under 3 seconds speed and get out.
This was where it was all going to end for us. No question. Could see the hackles on the moose.
Right about then, a car with Iowa license plates came ripping around the corner, stopped right next to the moose. All four doors popped open, people jumped out, their cameras snapping.
You could see it on the moose's face: I don't know what this thing is, but it just had babies, and I'm getting out of here.
She turned, she ran, she was invisible in the brush in a matter of seconds.
Later, when we got chased by the wolf, we both thought it was just funny.
So here's the moose story.
We were on a motorcycle, between Tok and Glenallen, in Alaska. It was a stupid motorcycle, a Honda ST1100, this gorgeous machine that had a spedometer that went up to 160. All I can tell you for sure about that is 120 was not much more than half-trottle and the thing idled at 35 miles an hour.
Beautiful bike. Exactly what you didn't want to have for driving the Alaska Highway.
We came around a corner, and there was a moose in the road. I slammed on the brakes.
Little known fact: moose kill and injure more people than any other large mammal on the planet except hippos--and other people, of course.
Moose started to come towards us, a slow trot.
Clearly, she didn't know what a motorcycle was, but it did not amuse her, and she saw it as a threat. We didn't see the calf hidden in the brush until later, but moose was clearly in attack mode.
Time to get out of there. Problem is, thanks to the basic laws of physics, two people on a grossly over powered bike with way too much rear wheel torque means you don't turn around easily.
I started walking us around.
The moose was about a hundred yards away, starting to come faster.
When the moose was fifty yards away, I started calling back to Lynn that we were going to die soon.
I was not joking.
If I could get this unbalanced bike around just a few more degrees, I could lay on the throttle, we could use that 0-60 in under 3 seconds speed and get out.
This was where it was all going to end for us. No question. Could see the hackles on the moose.
Right about then, a car with Iowa license plates came ripping around the corner, stopped right next to the moose. All four doors popped open, people jumped out, their cameras snapping.
You could see it on the moose's face: I don't know what this thing is, but it just had babies, and I'm getting out of here.
She turned, she ran, she was invisible in the brush in a matter of seconds.
Later, when we got chased by the wolf, we both thought it was just funny.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 10:13 PM
0 comments
Sunday, September 11, 2005
Motionsickness
For a glorious while, the magazine Motionsickness showed the other side of travel, the "why are we here and whatever were we thinking of" side of travel.
I had a column in the magazine while it lasted--for those deeply interested, what got published is on my regular website. But here's one that didn't have time to see the light of day before the magazine stopped publishing.
Let's hope it comes back some day. It was a fine thing.
Consider this: Reindeer and caribou are exactly the same animal. The sole difference between the two is that caribou migrate and reindeer don’t. And why don’t reindeer migrate? Because they started off as lazy caribou. Lap and Sammi, those fabled northern tribes, noticed this while they were out hunting, and so segregated out the stay-at-homes to form the nucleus of a domesticated stock. A few hundred generations later—carefully breeding to make sure no animal went wandering, keeping that far horizon DNA out of the gene pool—and Santa Claus stories aside, what you’ve got is the simple fact that reindeer are nothing more than couch potato caribou.
Now for the ugly truth: we as modern humans have been bred for the couch ourselves. If we have any of the Chatwinesque nomad genes left, they’re buried under fast food wrappers, Monday Night Football, mortgage payments, conversations that include “Haven’t been there, but seen it on TV once,” and worries you’re not getting all the soap scum off your shower tiles.
But if that’s the case, why are there still caribou among us, ready to migrate?
To understand why we move, we have to start with how the very idea of travel is sold to us. We’re hardly out of the cradle before the PR machines take over. And why do they care? Because of the money, of course. What were the Seven Wonders of the World but an early effort to get people out and spend money on boats, meals, guides, donkey rides, cheap souvenirs? The ugly truth is, if all you do is stay home, sooner or later you have to stop buying stuff, because your house is full. Yeah, you can buy a bigger house—and in the past 30 years, average house size has doubled—but still, the most expensive electronic toy you can buy is still cheaper than a month in Rome.
If you go outside, though, the possibilities for spending are endless. The small percentage of people in the world who travel—only 11% of the people in the U.S. even have a passport (some put that number as high as 19%, but that’s still far fewer people than tune in to watch Survivor and hope somebody’s bikini slips)—add up to serious money. In fact, if travel were a country, it would have the fifth highest GNP in the world.
Never forget that your backpack cost more than the average family of four makes in most countries.
We are not products of an innate, genetic wanderlust, as Chatwin argued. We’re the products of omnipresent marketing efforts.
So why do some fall for it when others never go further than to price Barcoloungers?
Maybe that first trigger that sent the select few of us wandering was a Tintin or Huey, Dewey, and Louie comic. Those ducks did go everywhere. Maybe it was Willard Price’s African Adventure books—think Hardy Boys, but with guns and wild animals. For me it was probably the combination of my Aunt Eleanor, who lived all over the world and sent home incredible Christmas presents, and an early reading of Journey to the Center of the Earth.
And then thanks to that early exposure, whatever your reason, the bending of the twig, we are those who have been bred to consume travel, curious about the way light slants through leaves at latitudes far from home. We’re a target audience, as surely as that percentage of people who fall for pizza ads aired at 6 PM.
So how do the marketeers do it? How do they lay the glorious trap? Why has modern travel become less about discovery of the world as a chance to go on a cruise where you never look out the window, to a resort where you never have to leave the grounds or figure out the local currency?
How did we, as a culture, sink this low?
Dean MacCannell, in his brilliant book The Tourist, develops a four-step theory of how travel destinations are created and then sold. Once you know the paradigm, everything makes sense.
First, naming. It’s the bait. Pick a spot, decide to sell it. That simple. Does anybody really care about the Eiffel Tower? Even Gustave Eiffel, the guy who designed it, hated it. But now people go to his tower because they’ve been told to go, because it’s a name on the list, a thing that’s easily defined.
Second, framing and elevation. Set that spot off from all the other spots around it, so there’s no confusion. You can whack up a big fence around it and charge admission—the Disneyland model—or do something more subtle, like carve out a scenic overview on the highway. The entire National Park system is nothing but framing. Define the boundaries, set it off from the profane world outside. Suddenly you know this is a place where you’re supposed to feel differently, as if you had just walked through a church door in the middle of High Mass. You know, in the words of Salman Rushdie, that “what is required of you is attention.”
Third, enshrinement. This is when the framing and elevation hit their peak; it’s the real place where the selling begins, establishing that name brand. In the Middle Ages, churches all over Europe had agents running around stealing bits of saints—a bone, a flap of skin—from each other. You get one in your church, suddenly you’re important, you have name recognition, you can draw in the crowds. Today, you cross-market between the movie, the theme park, and the fast food restaurant.
Stage four, reproduction. Ultimately, this is most important step in the modern world. Maybe once upon a time people sought out differences, but we’re the era of the chain store, a generation that draws familiarity around us like a wrapper from a Hong Kong McDonalds. If anybody bothers to remember our lifetimes at all in the history books, this will go down as the age of reproduction, making endless chains of representation, re-presenting the commonplace with all the subtleties of a sledgehammer to the frontal lobes, until nobody remembers what the original idea was at all, because the original idea is no longer as important as the way you reference it. More people can quote lines from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire than Shakespeare.
Here’s my own favorite reproduction chain: take the Redwood Forest. We have a forest. Nobody ever really gets out and looks at the forest, though, certainly not as a thing in and of itself. The forest has been abstracted into a representation of forest, by the path you follow through it. You’re not getting the whole experience, but it’s close enough, like a greatest hits album. Forget those trees over the hill, let’s stick to the ones by the side of the road.
But then the path itself gets reproduced, abstracted one more level down: specific trees to look at. There’s the tree that the highway goes right through, there’s the tree with the shop. So suddenly, instead of looking at an entire forest, you’re looking at a single tree, and thinking you’re getting the experience.
And of course, we know in the modern world that all paths lead to the gift shop, so at the tree with the store in it, what do you do? Buy more reproductions. Postcards or toothpicks, you’re taking it home with you. Stand-ins for the real thing.
One more trick to the reproduction phase: I have no idea if it’s still there or not, but when I was ten years old and went to Disneyland for the first and only time, there was a gigantic concrete redwood in the middle of Frontierland, just in case this was your one and only chance to find out what a redwood looked like.
Somewhere, I have a postcard of that.
But why are we so susceptible to reproduction? Because, like microwave pizzas, it’s been coded into our worldview. Forget nomadism: historically, being mobile is entirely a new phenomenon. Up until fifty years ago or so, the only people who ever went more than a hundred miles from their homes were men sent off to war. Yes, there were the grand tour fops, but as far as populist travel goes, year zero was when Arthur Frommer published his first edition of Europe on $5 a Day. Up to the day of the jetliner, reproduction was an absolute necessity, because there was no chance at all anyone would go look for themselves.
Now that we can go look for ourselves, the trick hasn’t changed. You have to bring these spots home, where they can be seen, and so marketing is a huge thing, trailing streams of reproduction like dust off Pig Pen’s shoes. But like any effort to sell, it works with some and not with others. I can watch a thousand NBA commercials, and I’ll still feel zero urge to actually suffer through a basketball game. By the same token, most people really don’t want to go anywhere.
And maybe one reason why is this: have you ever seen an honest travel ad? Beaches are always empty, bartenders always smile, and there’s never a kid whose parents broke his legs so he’d be a better beggar.
Advertising and marketing have a deservedly bad reputation—like the Joe Jackson song says, “everything you ever dreamed you could want/but nothing that you need.” It’s the myth of the ever-expanding economy: you have a job making useless things so you can make money to buy useless things that other people make, and somehow we all keep getting richer and ignore the fact that our houses are full of useless plastic objects.
Those stolid reindeer-like genes introduced by a society of big screen TVs and SUVs that have never seen a dirt road are incredibly difficult to overcome. Most people want where brought home to them. Reproduction is purely enough, because they know the image is a lie.
Spend a day watching the Travel Channel. See how few of the shows are actually about travel.
And we shouldn’t be sorry about this: it keeps the places we go less crowded. Be glad the evening news is trying to make sure you go no further from home than the local mall. Be thankful that Chatwin was full of it, that the masses of society aren’t chomping at the bit to get out.
The happier the reindeer are, the more room there is for caribou dreams.
I had a column in the magazine while it lasted--for those deeply interested, what got published is on my regular website. But here's one that didn't have time to see the light of day before the magazine stopped publishing.
Let's hope it comes back some day. It was a fine thing.
Reindeer Games
Consider this: Reindeer and caribou are exactly the same animal. The sole difference between the two is that caribou migrate and reindeer don’t. And why don’t reindeer migrate? Because they started off as lazy caribou. Lap and Sammi, those fabled northern tribes, noticed this while they were out hunting, and so segregated out the stay-at-homes to form the nucleus of a domesticated stock. A few hundred generations later—carefully breeding to make sure no animal went wandering, keeping that far horizon DNA out of the gene pool—and Santa Claus stories aside, what you’ve got is the simple fact that reindeer are nothing more than couch potato caribou.
Now for the ugly truth: we as modern humans have been bred for the couch ourselves. If we have any of the Chatwinesque nomad genes left, they’re buried under fast food wrappers, Monday Night Football, mortgage payments, conversations that include “Haven’t been there, but seen it on TV once,” and worries you’re not getting all the soap scum off your shower tiles.
But if that’s the case, why are there still caribou among us, ready to migrate?
To understand why we move, we have to start with how the very idea of travel is sold to us. We’re hardly out of the cradle before the PR machines take over. And why do they care? Because of the money, of course. What were the Seven Wonders of the World but an early effort to get people out and spend money on boats, meals, guides, donkey rides, cheap souvenirs? The ugly truth is, if all you do is stay home, sooner or later you have to stop buying stuff, because your house is full. Yeah, you can buy a bigger house—and in the past 30 years, average house size has doubled—but still, the most expensive electronic toy you can buy is still cheaper than a month in Rome.
If you go outside, though, the possibilities for spending are endless. The small percentage of people in the world who travel—only 11% of the people in the U.S. even have a passport (some put that number as high as 19%, but that’s still far fewer people than tune in to watch Survivor and hope somebody’s bikini slips)—add up to serious money. In fact, if travel were a country, it would have the fifth highest GNP in the world.
Never forget that your backpack cost more than the average family of four makes in most countries.
We are not products of an innate, genetic wanderlust, as Chatwin argued. We’re the products of omnipresent marketing efforts.
So why do some fall for it when others never go further than to price Barcoloungers?
Maybe that first trigger that sent the select few of us wandering was a Tintin or Huey, Dewey, and Louie comic. Those ducks did go everywhere. Maybe it was Willard Price’s African Adventure books—think Hardy Boys, but with guns and wild animals. For me it was probably the combination of my Aunt Eleanor, who lived all over the world and sent home incredible Christmas presents, and an early reading of Journey to the Center of the Earth.
And then thanks to that early exposure, whatever your reason, the bending of the twig, we are those who have been bred to consume travel, curious about the way light slants through leaves at latitudes far from home. We’re a target audience, as surely as that percentage of people who fall for pizza ads aired at 6 PM.
So how do the marketeers do it? How do they lay the glorious trap? Why has modern travel become less about discovery of the world as a chance to go on a cruise where you never look out the window, to a resort where you never have to leave the grounds or figure out the local currency?
How did we, as a culture, sink this low?
Dean MacCannell, in his brilliant book The Tourist, develops a four-step theory of how travel destinations are created and then sold. Once you know the paradigm, everything makes sense.
First, naming. It’s the bait. Pick a spot, decide to sell it. That simple. Does anybody really care about the Eiffel Tower? Even Gustave Eiffel, the guy who designed it, hated it. But now people go to his tower because they’ve been told to go, because it’s a name on the list, a thing that’s easily defined.
Second, framing and elevation. Set that spot off from all the other spots around it, so there’s no confusion. You can whack up a big fence around it and charge admission—the Disneyland model—or do something more subtle, like carve out a scenic overview on the highway. The entire National Park system is nothing but framing. Define the boundaries, set it off from the profane world outside. Suddenly you know this is a place where you’re supposed to feel differently, as if you had just walked through a church door in the middle of High Mass. You know, in the words of Salman Rushdie, that “what is required of you is attention.”
Third, enshrinement. This is when the framing and elevation hit their peak; it’s the real place where the selling begins, establishing that name brand. In the Middle Ages, churches all over Europe had agents running around stealing bits of saints—a bone, a flap of skin—from each other. You get one in your church, suddenly you’re important, you have name recognition, you can draw in the crowds. Today, you cross-market between the movie, the theme park, and the fast food restaurant.
Stage four, reproduction. Ultimately, this is most important step in the modern world. Maybe once upon a time people sought out differences, but we’re the era of the chain store, a generation that draws familiarity around us like a wrapper from a Hong Kong McDonalds. If anybody bothers to remember our lifetimes at all in the history books, this will go down as the age of reproduction, making endless chains of representation, re-presenting the commonplace with all the subtleties of a sledgehammer to the frontal lobes, until nobody remembers what the original idea was at all, because the original idea is no longer as important as the way you reference it. More people can quote lines from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire than Shakespeare.
Here’s my own favorite reproduction chain: take the Redwood Forest. We have a forest. Nobody ever really gets out and looks at the forest, though, certainly not as a thing in and of itself. The forest has been abstracted into a representation of forest, by the path you follow through it. You’re not getting the whole experience, but it’s close enough, like a greatest hits album. Forget those trees over the hill, let’s stick to the ones by the side of the road.
But then the path itself gets reproduced, abstracted one more level down: specific trees to look at. There’s the tree that the highway goes right through, there’s the tree with the shop. So suddenly, instead of looking at an entire forest, you’re looking at a single tree, and thinking you’re getting the experience.
And of course, we know in the modern world that all paths lead to the gift shop, so at the tree with the store in it, what do you do? Buy more reproductions. Postcards or toothpicks, you’re taking it home with you. Stand-ins for the real thing.
One more trick to the reproduction phase: I have no idea if it’s still there or not, but when I was ten years old and went to Disneyland for the first and only time, there was a gigantic concrete redwood in the middle of Frontierland, just in case this was your one and only chance to find out what a redwood looked like.
Somewhere, I have a postcard of that.
But why are we so susceptible to reproduction? Because, like microwave pizzas, it’s been coded into our worldview. Forget nomadism: historically, being mobile is entirely a new phenomenon. Up until fifty years ago or so, the only people who ever went more than a hundred miles from their homes were men sent off to war. Yes, there were the grand tour fops, but as far as populist travel goes, year zero was when Arthur Frommer published his first edition of Europe on $5 a Day. Up to the day of the jetliner, reproduction was an absolute necessity, because there was no chance at all anyone would go look for themselves.
Now that we can go look for ourselves, the trick hasn’t changed. You have to bring these spots home, where they can be seen, and so marketing is a huge thing, trailing streams of reproduction like dust off Pig Pen’s shoes. But like any effort to sell, it works with some and not with others. I can watch a thousand NBA commercials, and I’ll still feel zero urge to actually suffer through a basketball game. By the same token, most people really don’t want to go anywhere.
And maybe one reason why is this: have you ever seen an honest travel ad? Beaches are always empty, bartenders always smile, and there’s never a kid whose parents broke his legs so he’d be a better beggar.
Advertising and marketing have a deservedly bad reputation—like the Joe Jackson song says, “everything you ever dreamed you could want/but nothing that you need.” It’s the myth of the ever-expanding economy: you have a job making useless things so you can make money to buy useless things that other people make, and somehow we all keep getting richer and ignore the fact that our houses are full of useless plastic objects.
Those stolid reindeer-like genes introduced by a society of big screen TVs and SUVs that have never seen a dirt road are incredibly difficult to overcome. Most people want where brought home to them. Reproduction is purely enough, because they know the image is a lie.
Spend a day watching the Travel Channel. See how few of the shows are actually about travel.
And we shouldn’t be sorry about this: it keeps the places we go less crowded. Be glad the evening news is trying to make sure you go no further from home than the local mall. Be thankful that Chatwin was full of it, that the masses of society aren’t chomping at the bit to get out.
The happier the reindeer are, the more room there is for caribou dreams.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 2:18 PM
0 comments
Saturday, September 10, 2005
What's Going On
Housekeeping matters: for those of you who've left comments, I've had to turn on verification to keep the spammers out. Somehow, I don't want garden tool websites to have their words tangled up in mine. It frightens me that spam must obviously work, or there wouldn't be so much of it, the same way it frightened me that before leaving for the arctic, I was able to find fleece pants here in Phoenix, despite it being 110 out the week I went shopping.
What's wrong with us?
Articles out in the current issues of Budget Travel, Executive Traveler, AAA Highroads. Just turned in a piece to AARP: The Magazine. This next week, I'll work on pieces for Sierra, Arizona Highways, and Art & Antiques.
I have the best job in the world.
What's wrong with us?
Articles out in the current issues of Budget Travel, Executive Traveler, AAA Highroads. Just turned in a piece to AARP: The Magazine. This next week, I'll work on pieces for Sierra, Arizona Highways, and Art & Antiques.
I have the best job in the world.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 9:30 AM
1 comments
Friday, September 09, 2005
The Wonderbeast
The dog in the picture is not dead, her neck is not broken. She's actually very, very comfortable, as best we can tell. At least, this is not an unusual position for her to be in.
Dogs do several things. I can't remember who said it--maybe Pam Houston?--but first, owning a dog ensures that you live in a place suitable for humans.
Second, dogs remind you that fun is quite simple. Chase the ball, bark at shadows.
Dogs also remind one that naps are very good things.
Bosco likes to chase her tail. Not so unusual. But the thing is, she sits on it first, so it can't escape.
What does any of this have to do with travel? Very simple. Dogs do it better than anyone else.
Bosco and I go for the same walk every night, fifteen minutes. We've done it for six or seven years now, and every single time, it's still exciting to her.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 12:50 PM
0 comments
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Spacetime
From Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos:
"The combined speed of any object's motion through space and its motion through time is always precisely equal to the speed of light."
My head hurts from the implications.
"The combined speed of any object's motion through space and its motion through time is always precisely equal to the speed of light."
My head hurts from the implications.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 4:07 PM
1 comments
Monday, September 05, 2005
The Siq
It doesn't take long for Amanda and I to get fed up. We're at the head of the Siq, and here's the problem with press trips: people want to talk to you. And these people have been talking for a while, and about half the facts they're offering up are wrong.
Finally, Amanda simply walks up to them. "We can look this stuff up later. Ed and I are going to go on ahead."
Amanda is very cool (amandacastleman.com).
The Siq is that narrow slot canyon that leads to Petra. At certain points, it seems the walls are so close you can reach out to either side, but from every point, the canyon towers overhead, the sandstone dripping improbable shades of pink. Along the way are a couple minor attractions, tombs, stuff carved out of the rocks, but the point of the Siq is that all of its twists and curves lead to--
quite suddenly, I'm looking up at the top of the canyon and a straight line appears.
Petra.
It's nearly an hour before the rest of the group catches up to us.
Which means they missed the camels kissinng. They missed being alone inside the Treasury. They missed that albeit slightly delusional feeling of coming on a place like it was brand new and had never been seen before.
Mostly, they missed the surprise.
Finally, Amanda simply walks up to them. "We can look this stuff up later. Ed and I are going to go on ahead."
Amanda is very cool (amandacastleman.com).
The Siq is that narrow slot canyon that leads to Petra. At certain points, it seems the walls are so close you can reach out to either side, but from every point, the canyon towers overhead, the sandstone dripping improbable shades of pink. Along the way are a couple minor attractions, tombs, stuff carved out of the rocks, but the point of the Siq is that all of its twists and curves lead to--
quite suddenly, I'm looking up at the top of the canyon and a straight line appears.
Petra.
It's nearly an hour before the rest of the group catches up to us.
Which means they missed the camels kissinng. They missed being alone inside the Treasury. They missed that albeit slightly delusional feeling of coming on a place like it was brand new and had never been seen before.
Mostly, they missed the surprise.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 10:29 AM
0 comments
Sunday, September 04, 2005
Anna Ng and I
"I don't want the world; I just want your half."
Blanket Bay, New Zealand. My room costs more per night than my house payment runs for a month, and here's the truth of places like this: you still watch TV for a little while, then go to sleep.
But it's a beautiful place, there's a balcony with a view out over the lake, and there's a bathroom that seems to go on through four or five time zones.
Which is when I realize: I don't know if it really does.
So I get up, fill one of the several sinks. Fill another. Another.
Pull the plugs.
And I figure, at what this room costs, each time I run this experiment, seeing if water really is swirling the wrong way down the drain, I'm probably burning up twenty bucks worth of time.
Blanket Bay, New Zealand. My room costs more per night than my house payment runs for a month, and here's the truth of places like this: you still watch TV for a little while, then go to sleep.
But it's a beautiful place, there's a balcony with a view out over the lake, and there's a bathroom that seems to go on through four or five time zones.
Which is when I realize: I don't know if it really does.
So I get up, fill one of the several sinks. Fill another. Another.
Pull the plugs.
And I figure, at what this room costs, each time I run this experiment, seeing if water really is swirling the wrong way down the drain, I'm probably burning up twenty bucks worth of time.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 8:29 PM
0 comments
Saturday, September 03, 2005
Thursday, September 01, 2005
Hansel and Gretel Went Back
Hansel and Gretel went back.
They had to, ultimately. They could be rescued from the gingerbread house, taken home smug and warm to their mother and father, fed steaming bowls of vegetable soup, but there would always be that memory. They’d remember every time they smelled toffee, cinnamon. They’d remember when they saw the way the ceiling beams curved like candy canes.
Even more, they’d remember when night started to fall; the fading line between dark and light would fill them with terror. They’d remember the forest, and how they had walked in, deeper and deeper; they’d remember the way the trees had arched over them and the way water had dripped from leaf to leaf to needle to needle like a particularly delicate water clock in motion. They’d remember the strange sounds of unidentifiable animals, animals with too many claws and teeth. They’d remember the smell. More than anything else. The smell of loam and moss and rot. The smell of their own fear, dropped with every little white pebble Gretel left behind as they walked under branches of trees entwined like hands praying for salvation from doom.
After that, how easy would it be to accept the safe, sane life, the life at which the Brother’s Grimm only hinted, the life after they went home? Somehow, with the faith none but children have, they beat death. They beat the forest. They beat the darkest fears of being lost forever, sunk in the Abyss.
Every night after, the woods whispered to them.
And so they went back. It was inevitable. For a few years, they fought the call, they lived a life with no sharp edges, though one haunted by the way sun rays filtered down through the leaves, and by how those same leaves seemed to seize the light as evening came on, making the familiar climbing tree in the yard as dark as a witch’s cooking pot.
Then they went back.
They were older now, of course. Hansel’s voice cracking when he sang hymns in church, the blouse of Gretel’s Sunday best starting to push out. They’d shared on late nights, leaning so closely together that it almost seemed incestuous, the dreams they’d had. The old woman living alone in the middle of nowhere. The angle of the house’s roof sharpened by dripping icing icicles. The smell of an oven warming.
Buried under thick blankets while the wind howled, they talked about their dreams of the forest, running naked as wolves through the briars. Dreams or memories of catching the moon in bloody hands, falling exhausted against a gnarled tree where tiny chips of bark stuck in Gretel’s hair, and Hansel only found them, eased splinters from the blonde tangles of wildness, much later, while they were in the cage, getting fat.
Walking back towards the woods which sat low on the horizon like a waiting troll, Hansel and Gretel talked about what it was like having no idea, no idea at all, where they were.
They had to, ultimately. They could be rescued from the gingerbread house, taken home smug and warm to their mother and father, fed steaming bowls of vegetable soup, but there would always be that memory. They’d remember every time they smelled toffee, cinnamon. They’d remember when they saw the way the ceiling beams curved like candy canes.
Even more, they’d remember when night started to fall; the fading line between dark and light would fill them with terror. They’d remember the forest, and how they had walked in, deeper and deeper; they’d remember the way the trees had arched over them and the way water had dripped from leaf to leaf to needle to needle like a particularly delicate water clock in motion. They’d remember the strange sounds of unidentifiable animals, animals with too many claws and teeth. They’d remember the smell. More than anything else. The smell of loam and moss and rot. The smell of their own fear, dropped with every little white pebble Gretel left behind as they walked under branches of trees entwined like hands praying for salvation from doom.
After that, how easy would it be to accept the safe, sane life, the life at which the Brother’s Grimm only hinted, the life after they went home? Somehow, with the faith none but children have, they beat death. They beat the forest. They beat the darkest fears of being lost forever, sunk in the Abyss.
Every night after, the woods whispered to them.
And so they went back. It was inevitable. For a few years, they fought the call, they lived a life with no sharp edges, though one haunted by the way sun rays filtered down through the leaves, and by how those same leaves seemed to seize the light as evening came on, making the familiar climbing tree in the yard as dark as a witch’s cooking pot.
Then they went back.
They were older now, of course. Hansel’s voice cracking when he sang hymns in church, the blouse of Gretel’s Sunday best starting to push out. They’d shared on late nights, leaning so closely together that it almost seemed incestuous, the dreams they’d had. The old woman living alone in the middle of nowhere. The angle of the house’s roof sharpened by dripping icing icicles. The smell of an oven warming.
Buried under thick blankets while the wind howled, they talked about their dreams of the forest, running naked as wolves through the briars. Dreams or memories of catching the moon in bloody hands, falling exhausted against a gnarled tree where tiny chips of bark stuck in Gretel’s hair, and Hansel only found them, eased splinters from the blonde tangles of wildness, much later, while they were in the cage, getting fat.
Walking back towards the woods which sat low on the horizon like a waiting troll, Hansel and Gretel talked about what it was like having no idea, no idea at all, where they were.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 2:40 PM
2 comments
Links
Previous Posts
- Last One to Leave, Shoot out the Lights
- Lou Reed Knows Everything
- The Irony of Giving Something the Title "Untitled."
- Atom Vampire
- And Because Amanda Whined
- Only the Last Inch Hurts
- "I must now commit suicide."
- Microwaving the Duck
- The Light on the Flats
- A Few People Who Needed to Be Whacked with a Cane
Archives
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