London for Cheapskates Part 3: Spit, Iron and Gold at the British Library

Above: a statue of Newton in the courtyard of the British Library.

At Victoria Station, swaddled in my second-hand parka, I descended again into the Underground, quickening my pace as I joined the strong-flowing current of fellow commuters. My destination: the British Library at St Pancras. As an English major whose mother presented me at varying points in my youth with sets of Shakespeare, Tolkien and Arthur Conan Doyle, and who was engrossed by adventure novels penned by British islanders like Swift, Defoe and Stevenson, and later, the darker work of Dickens and Austen, I couldn’t skip a chance to geek out in one of the oldest, largest and greatest vaults of literature assembled in human history. Additionally, by means of a benign online subterfuge, in which I posed as a freelance writer researching unusual and interesting free things to do in Britain’s capital, I had succeeded in wangling the  final remaining ticket for a behind-the-scenes look inside the library’s Centre for Conservation, which opens its three locked sets of double doors only one Thursday each month for a small, always-filled group tour of its workshop, located in a climate-and-light-controlled studio behind an empty courtyard camouflaged by potted plants. And did I mention the tour is free? I was excited. There exist only a handful of national libraries in the world that house more books and manuscripts than the BL, which was founded in 1753 and now holds more than 16 million works, including priceless and famous objects on display such as the Magna Carta and DaVinci’s notebooks, the original Beowulf, the Gutenberg Bible and Shakespeare’s First Folio.  (The Library of Congress in the U.S. is the largest, with 30 million books, followed by national libraries in Germany, Canada and Russia.)

I arrived early enough to look around before my tour. The library provides free wireless Internet for visitors and has a nice café, with a few hundred small tables scattered around large open spaces. In the middle of a weekday, every table was occupied, and not by latte-sipping tourists taking a break from shopping, like me. These people seemed to be working – actively writing or engaged in what sounded to my unpracticed ear to be serious adult conversation. Were they actually discussing literature and writing, books? I swear on the Gutenberg that I witnessed several people writing longhand on paper with actual pencils. I saw a man and woman scrolling through a document on a Mac and speaking in a very animated way about something important to them – a thought, idea, word? Apparently there are still places in the world where the physical presence of books serves as a magnet for imagination, sucking people in for research and review and provoking face-to-face discussion. All around me, intense, private conversations were humming in hushed library tones, and I had the feeling that for many of these fellow pilgrims, simply being under the same roof with 16 million books was contributing to a powerful creative flow and sense of collective possibility. With no literary masterwork of my own in which to invest brainpower, I contented myself with a coffee and then strolled through an awesome special exhibit of Mughal art and literature, as well as a free exhibit showcasing the most famous and inventive mystery writers since the genre was invented. At 2 p.m., I found my way out back to the Conservation Centre.

Above: the King's Library looms overhead as scribes and scholars take advantage of one of the most important collections of written works in the world.

We are ushered inside by Robert Brodie, Conservation Team Leader, after being instructed not to take photographs, touch anything or disturb the lab techs. Purses and packs are checked at reception. Today we are especially lucky, Brodie informs us. The lab’s gold leaf finisher happens to be working on some restorative work, re-embossing spines of very old and valuable books; it is a rare occasion in a place of rare works. As we enter the one-story lab, a door opens from a subterranean elevator shaft. A pair of techs emerge pushing a cart of large dusty tomes bearing the title “Near India Office Records.” We step aside as the patients are rolled slowly into the south-facing workshop, designed to enable an elite corps of craftsmen and women to take advantage of daylight streaming in through large windows. The setup reminds me a bit of a newsroom – open and casual, people working with their heads down, hardly taking note of those entering and leaving – except there are no computers on the desks. Instead there are stacks of Japanese mulberry bush paper, parchment paper, leather strips and buckram; special glues made of sturgeon; thick books and manuscripts jumbled among strange and well-worn hand tools, along with wooden vises, presses and small wooden structures called tappers, loaded with dead weights, that resemble miniature looms. Here, someone is working on the original notebooks of Virginia Woolf. There is a collection of rare Soviet political leaflets requiring restoration. On that desk, the papers of William Trumbull, circa 1635 – the most expensive section of the most expensive archive ever purchased by the library. On that desk is sitting an original work of the Georgian poet Lascelles Abercrombie. Across the way, an expert bookbinder is using a large needle and a technique called French sewing to re-bind very, very old sheets of music.  The lab is a beautiful mess, a rehabilitation centre for priceless literature and written works of art, littered with yellowing, rusting, moldering relics representing some of the most culturally and historically important work of mankind.

Brodie's conservators are in such high demand that the Centre uses an estimating and bidding system, in which the curatorial staff from various departments annually submit their priorities for restoration, logging the information into a database. The database has a scoring system agreed upon by the Heads of Collection that includes factors such as the condition of the book, its rarity, level of use, and whether the item is part of the National Published Archive. How often is the damaged work actually read? Is the work scheduled to be digitized? How extensive is the repair required? Is the book or object scheduled to be included soon in a special exhibit? “To guard it, fold it, bind it, it could take us 300 hours,” Brodie says. “Six people in a unit here can do 5,194 hours of work in a year.” Once items are scored, an estimate is provided of the length of time the work will take, balanced against the work capacity of the conservators. “I have 50 people. They are the rock stars of conservation,” but they can only do so much work in a year.

Next, we head over to talk to Doug Mitchell, a gold leaf finisher who is working alone in his own secure lab. Mitchell has been a bookbinder for 40 years. He uses albumin glaze crystals, 23-and-a-half carat gold and false gold foil to make the mix he needs. Right now, he is re-numbering in gold leaf a set of large, leather-bound historical volumes known as the Portland Papers. He uses his own spit to test the heat on a miniature iron hot plate, which is heating up a tiny branding iron he will use to press the numbers. “If there are no bubbles it’s about right,” he says. He preps the leather first by rubbing it with a clear liquid to fill the leather’s pores, then quickly presses his tiny iron into the spine in a series of strokes as he retools the binding, finishing up by swiping a solvent called Hexane over the numbers to gently polish the new gold work on the spine. Spit, iron and 23-carat gold. “Done it this way since the 1400s,” Mitchell says.

Dizzy and famished by my prolonged exposure to so many books, I headed out of the library and into the Tube again in search of gustatory nourishment, emerging this time in Soho for an early dinner at the hottest cheap restaurant in London, an Italian bacaro on Beak Street called Polpo, located in a building where the Venetian painter Canaletto once lived. Polpo showed up on everybody's lists of the top 10 cheapest gourmet eats in London, so it was an easy choice, though I was worried I might not be able to get a table. At 630 pm, I had no trouble finding a seat at the bar, though by 730 the tiny eatery was jammed to the gills. This busy little gem serves really good early wines and delectable, simple Italian fare at easy prices. I ordered a glass of Valpolicella Classico La Giaretta, 2011 (11 pounds) with a bowl of spicy pork and fennel meatballs (6 pounds), followed by a plate of mackerel tartare, horseradish and carta di musica (Mediterannean flatbread) at 7 pounds and a glass of Barbera Riva Leone 2011 (9 pounds), and that was enough for me. A swanky dinner out in Soho, wine included, for under $50, not bad considering I skipped lunch and spent nothing at the library, except for a coffee. I tubed back to Battersea and collapsed, Day 1 of my London trip in the books.

Meatballs, mackerel and a couple of Italian reds at Polpo, in Soho, provided the perfect finish to Day 1 of London on the Cheap.

London for Cheapskates -- Part 2 - Thrifty Lodgings, Food and Outerwear

“To be alone among the confusion is perhaps the single most piercing emotion of any stranger in the city.” – Peter Ackroyd, London: A Biography

I stepped outside the dry cleaners into the cold London morning, accompanied by a small plume of starchy-smelling steam. A few yards in front of me, rush-hour traffic moved slowly down the wrong side of the street in Battersea Park, a suburb south of Chelsea across the River Thames, over which I had just comfortably and affordably glided in a huge red double-decker bus, accidentally getting off two stops too early. I consulted my small black moleskine notebook, which contained detailed scribbled notes and directions for my self-suggested three-day itinerary for London. Out of the dry cleaners, I had instructed myself to turn right, then right, then right onto Prince of Wales Drive. My destination: a ridiculously inexpensive $66-a-night Airbnb flat located inside the opulent-sounding Albert Palace Mansions in Lurline Gardens.

I found it easily: a red brick-faced building, four stories high, embedded in a stolid bank of similar buildings fronting a narrow one-way lane lined with cars, with inset courtyard entrances spilling over with shrubbery and overwintered flowers. It is an apartment complex today, but like everything in London, Albert Palace Mansions started life as something else, and, like everything in London, has an interesting history. These buildings, I later learned, were once part of a massive late nineteenth century indoor/outdoor amusement complex, the centerpiece of which was the famous Albert Palace, a magnificent iron-and-glass structure originally built to house the Dublin International Exhibition of 1865, and then dismantled, shipped to London and rebuilt on the edge of the gardens next to Battersea Park (which actually is a giant, municipal park). The central part of the palace comprised a 473-foot nave for a permanent orchestra, with a giant organ and concert hall at one end and a tea room at the other. Indoor attractions included exhibition booths, an aquarium, picture galleries and bars, as well as an “Indian village” featuring silk spinners, a sitar maker, singers and snake-charmers; there also were cat, bird and flower shows, and the Viennese Ladies Orchestra had a standing gig. Eventually though the enterprise went under and the land and buildings were sold to developers; over a century later, this vestige of Victorian recreation is filled with middle-class Londoners living in two- and three-bedroom flats, such as the one I now trudged up four flights of spiraling stairs to temporarily occupy.

To my relief, the apartment was just as advertised: clean, neat and bright, high-ceilinged with large windows and transoms over thick wooden doors. There was a tiny but functional modern kitchen, a tidy tiled bathroom, a light-filled living room occupied by a piano, comfy couch and a large TV, with some handsome antiques scattered about. My bedroom was cozy with comfortable goose-down bedding and a large armoire, carpeted and quiet. That’ll do, pig, I thought to myself. Hmm yes, for three days in London, that’ll do quite nicely.

It was only 9 a.m. and though I had just traveled 24 mostly sleepless hours from East Africa, taken a long train ride from Heathrow and then a bus to find a dry cleaners and lodgings, my adrenalin was pumping. London. London! Rapidly, I unpacked my backpack, containing just enough clean clothes for three days (I had previously checked my big suitcase at the Britishly-named “Left Baggage” concession at Heathrow) plus my laptop, iPad and toiletries. After a shower and change of clothes, I was back outside, having consulted my moleskine, along with a detailed London map left for me in absentia by my thoughtful Airbnb hosts, both of whom were at work. There were no Tube stops close by, but an overland rail station, accessible to me with my Day Pass, was just up the street and would get me to Victoria Station just one stop away, from which I could access the Underground. First though: food.

Just across the entrance to the rail station, a whiff of fried sausage drew my attention to a stream of fluorescent green and orange-jacketed police and workmen heading in and out of a tiny diner tucked under a dingy brown trestle. Busting out my Sherlock, I made a deduction: police and workmen = always hungry + usually in a hurry + budget-minded = high probability of cheap and tasty food, fast. By Jove, I was not disappointed. For under five British pounds, I soon found myself scuppering a lake of English breakfast food that made the Grand Slam at Denny’s seem like a foul bunt. Twenty minutes later, after a few baked bean burps washed down with the last sips of an OK café-au-lait, I was on my way, re-provisioned and ready.

Above: a working man's breakfast at Bridge the Gap, Battersea Park. Below, the always-bustling Victoria Station. 

First stop: the British Red Cross Thrift Store. With my sub-Saharan wardrobe of tee-shirts, thin cotton dress shirts and summer-weight trousers, I was ill prepared for London in late winter. Research revealed a number of highly-touted second-hand clothing shops in the vicinity of Victoria Station. I lucked out at the Red Cross store, where, after trying out a Rod Stewarty full-length black leather trench, I found a thick, down-filled parka with enormous snapping pockets and plenty of room to secret an iPad Mini, moleskine and ballpoint pen, sunglasses, wallet, fat London street map and a digital camera, in just the right size. Yes, it smelled a bit like another man, but not in a bad way, and it only cost me 40 pounds, or about $61 USD – a little more than I’d wanted to spend but hey, this is London and proceeds would theoretically go to a good cause. And on Saturday, I was scheduled to be sitting and/or standing outside for hours, exposed to the natural elements and potentially, showers of soda launched by hooligans in the crowd at the Chelsea match disappointed in the performance of one squad or the other, and I was sure I’d be glad then of my 40-pound purchase.

I stopped next at a touristy knick-knack shop and picked up a cheap knit hat and pair of fleece gloves, unaware until that evening when I emptied my pockets that the cheeky storekeeper, who cleverly pegged me for a dumb American, returned my change in Mexican pesos. At the time, though, I felt extremely satisfied with myself for successfully locating the dry cleaners, checking into my Airbnb flat, finding a good local breakfast dive and obtaining inexpensive winter wear, all before lunchtime on my first day in London. Congratulating myself on my adroitness as a traveler on the cheap, I jingled pesos in my coat pocket as I walked to the Tube station in advance of my next adventure: a behind-the-scenes tour of the clandestine conservation laboratory at the world-famous British Library in St Pancras. I was about to meet the global rock stars of book conservation in their seldom-seen command centre, and it wouldn’t cost me a peso.

Above: The BL's Centre for Conservation: the Langley of the secret world of book and manuscript preservation and restoration

London for Cheapskates - Part 1 - The Importance of Hazle Dry Cleaners

By video, I tried to justify tacking a three-night solo romp through London onto the end of a nine-week rotation at the close of my contract in South Sudan to my wife back home, who was selflessly taking care of our two little bottomless pits of need, though I would be freshly unemployed while touring one of the most expensive cities in the world at a time when money would matter more than ever.

Me on Skype:  “Did you know there are now SIX Premiere League teams all based in London, and one of them (Tottenham) has TWO Americans? Did you know football (I can’t bring myself to say soccer anymore, I am too worldly now) was INVENTED in England?’’

Tahra on Skype:  (No direct response, busy mediating dispute between the girls.)

Me on Skype: “Did I tell you that my good friend Henry Chu, London bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, is there? Yeah, he’s a great guy. We can hang out.’’ (In fact Henry and I hadn’t spoken directly since 1995.)

Tahra on Skype: (No response – video screen shaking violently, moving fast, as in The Blair Witch Project, unintelligible girls snarling, something related to a fairy doll, Tahra trying to negotiate a trade involving millet crackers.)

Me in South Sudan: “Tahra? Tahra? Hey. You ok? My plan is to write a travel piece called London On the Cheap -- I bet no one else has thought of this – and then I can offset my trip expenses by selling it freelance. Yeah. I still have some really good newspaper connections. I could probably make fifty bucks.”

Tahra in Massachusetts: “Sorry. I’m back. Of course you should do it, you may never get another good chance to see a soccer game in London. We can all wait another three days.''

My husband antennae, often tuned to the wrong frequencies, detected some wifely encouragement - was it real? I wasn’t sure until she went online and somehow bought me one of the last remaining tickets to see Chelsea, the reigning champions of Europe, winners of last year’s Champions League and one of the most elite football teams in the world, playing at their famed Stamford Bridge home stadium on the weekend I had penciled in for my London stopover. What a wife! Until that point, I wasn’t really thoroughly committed to going, and was a bit anxious about the implications, repercussions, funding and what have you. But now, with my bodacious soulmate’s blessing, having somehow finagled me one of the hottest tickets in town for a certain weekend in one of the oldest and most famous cities in the world, it would be unconscionable NOT to go – who could waste such a perfectly excellent (and non-refundable) opportunity, even if I am actually a Man U fan? Well then, it’s settled.

First up: plane tickets. The company would pay for my trip home to the States from Juba, per terms of the contract. Usually they send me Juba-Nairobi-Amsterdam-Detroit-Albany. But this time, I boldly asked if they could arrange a multi-city return ticket with a three-day stopover in London during the weekend of the Chelsea game, and a red-eye out of Nairobi so I wouldn’t have to pay for an extra night of lodging. Miraculously, the company obliged me, and I further arranged to depart Juba and get to Nairobi in the morning on a Wednesday, leaving me with enough time to cruise around Kenya’s capital before the late night flight out. Upon arrival in NBO, my plan was to hire a driver, buy some handmade beer cap toys (the girls, especially Ursula, really like them) and something nice for Tahra at a Masaai market off the Mombasa road, grab lunch with my soon-to-be former colleagues Phylis and Judy in Westlands, and make it back to the airport with plenty of time before my 11:30 pm flight to London. (Author’s Note: Kenyans can make just about anything out of discarded metal beer caps and scavenged wire. But is a lunch box made out of beer caps inappropriate for a kindergartner? I guess we’ll find out.)

Another, more pressing question: where to stay in London? I tried looking online for inexpensive inns, something small and preferably luxurious, English breakfast included, in the center of the action maybe in Soho or Chelsea, say for under $100? Or a quaint cob cottage with a thatched roof, something hobbitty, serving greens from their organic English garden aside the bangers and mash? But no such thing existed, and I wasn’t quite prepared to go hosteling. (Eleven years ago on my first night in Key West, I had to throw wasabi soy nuts at the face of a big snoring drunk across from me on a lower bunk. Packed into a warm room with five other off-gassing, respiring cheapskates. Worrying about my valuables.) My London friend, Henry, electronically laughed when I asked if he knew of any nice but cheap places to stay, and quickly snuffed out any notion I might have had about crashing with him. Ordinarily, he emailed, he’d love to have me, but he was moving to a new place in Clapham that weekend and it wasn’t a good time, but we should certainly meet for a drink at least; send a text. I decided that even if he was fibbing, I couldn’t blame him, as I hadn’t been in touch with him regularly for 18 years; possibly I had developed poor hygiene in the interval, or become an acolyte of Tony Robbins with big plans, or a Republican. But I didn’t think it was a fib. As I told Tahra during my London pitch, Henry is a great guy.

Then I remembered a website called AirBnB. It enables ordinary humans to post short-term rooms to let, with good rates, pretty much everywhere in the world, a sharing-economy kind of thing for travelers looking for something different, on a budget. I was staggered by the number and variety of places available in London, many at prices around $100-$150 per night or lower. I narrowed down my search to an area not too far from Henry’s new pad in Clapham, and not too far from upscale Chelsea (which is where J.R.R. Tolkien once lived, FYI). I found a clean-looking and tastefully decorated flat offering a one-bedroom, bathroom and kitchen shared, owned by a young married couple in Battersea Park, south of the Thames, close to Battersea Park rail station, straight shot to Victoria Station, easy access to buses and the Tube. Sixty-six dollars a night, uniformly excellent reviews from previous lodgers. It was available the nights I needed, and when I informed my hosts that I’d be getting into Heathrow very early, could they accommodate a morning check-in, they said sure no problem, they both had to go work early and would be gone when I arrived, but would leave the keys for me, a complete stranger posing as a writer working on a piece about London On the Cheap, at Hazle Dry Cleaners, around the corner from their flat. And so they did.

Hazle Dry Cleaners, Battersea Park, London. An unlikely point of entry, but when traveling on the cheap, one must allow for the unexpected.

I took a bus to Hazle Dry Cleaners, I think it was the 452 from Knightsbridge, after taking the Tube from Heathrow. Bought a Day Pass, allowed me to travel around very cheaply.

One of the first things I learned about Londoners: they only allow humps inside specific zones, in contrast to the No Humping policy on Amtrak trains back home.

 

 

 

 

 

Viral By the Nile

I finally got sick in South Sudan.

Before you come, everyone and everything you read warns of it, such that it seems inevitable: disease and suffering. You cannot work in the poorest country in the world and expect not to contract something exotic and possibly deadly. Parasites. Amoebae. Killer mosquito and insect-borne viral infections, cerebral malaria, diarrhea, dysentery, fly bites that cause comas; beetles that secrete skin-blistering toxins. A few weeks ago my boss quietly sent me to the World Health Organization headquarters in Juba to check on reports of a possible viral hemorrhagic fever outbreak up north, in an area where we have staff. The disease is also known as Ebola, named after a river in Congo, next door to South Sudan. People were bleeding from orifices and dying, but it turns out it was probably something else, my WHO contact said. They were investigating and would let me know.

And then I took ill. It started with upper back pain, followed by a pink rash, on the same sore part of my back. The pink turned to bright red, and clear white blisters popped out and marched toward my underarm. The back pain intensified and moved under and down my right arm, girdling me, radiating into my chest. The blister rash spread along the same front, and I began to worry. I knew it wasn’t malaria – there’s no rash involved and I assiduously take a malaria prophylaxis every day, even though hardcore aid workers out here make fun of me for it. Better to get malaria occasionally and gut it out, they say, than spend the money on expensive meds which mightn’t work anyway.

I didn’t think it could be diphtheria, tetanus, typhoid, yellow fever, polio or meningitis, either, because I got boosters or vaccines for all six of the above before my first trip out, two years ago. Which also makes me a wussy, I guess, if a fairly well protected one. I hoped.

After three days I was worried enough about the rash and internal pain, which now included headaches, to consult my Kenyan friend Esther, a professional masseuse. I showed her the angry rashy wasteland that was my upper right torso, and told her about the stabbing nervey soreness bubbling underneath my skin, on top of the bone.

“Nairobi fly bite, I think,” she said before turning to leave, quickly, in case it was something else, catching. I looked it up online and yes, there is a black-and-red flying beetle, common in Juba despite its eponymous name, that excretes something called pederin when touched that leaves a nasty bright red painful blistery rash.

I was secretly delighted.

A Nairobi fly bite, imagine that! Mom and dad will be horrified and tell all our relatives! I can blog about it and impress everyone! Tahra can shock our friends with the news at PTA.

I wanted a second opinion, though, so I showed my boss. She’s been here a lot longer than me and is from Bangladesh, which has its fair share of third-world health problems.

She poked it.

“Does it hurt?”

“Yes. When you poke it especially.”

“I think it could be Nairobi fly. But why don’t you go to the clinic and get it looked at, instead of just complaining about it?”

The next morning I presented myself at Unity Clinic, a clean and efficient Aussie-run shop in Juba that few people other than ex-pats can afford. They take only cash, only U.S. dollars, and it costs $125 just to get in the door.

A Scottish nurse with a clipboard and a stethoscope asked me about my problem.

“Two people have told me it’s probably Nairobi fly,’’ I said, hoping to influence her diagnosis.

“I don’t think so,” she said after a quick look.

Oh man, it could be something juicier! Maybe they’ll have to Medevac me.

“It’s a virus called shingles. It’s related to chicken pox, which you must have had as a kid." The virus stays in you, it turns out, and can erupt when you're stressed or tired. My wife, who is a very skilled Web-based medical sleuth, had arrived at the same diagnosis a week ago, though I rejected the suggestion that my illness, contracted in South Sudan, could be so un-exotic. Also -

“I thought that’s for older people?” I asked the nurse.

"Generally."

I got some pain meds and anti-virals. Apparently I’ll be better in two weeks.

What's Upstairs

I got in from Nairobi and reached Gate F5 in Schiphol Airport a bit earlier than usual for my next flight from Amsterdam. Went through the X-ray machines and handed my passport and boarding pass to a young KLM lady behind the counter. She scanned me in and I saw red text blinking on her screen: “SEAT CHANGE * SEAT CHANGE’’ and number 75J pop up. Whereas I had previously carefully selected seat 11C, an aisle seat in Economy Comfort toward the front of the plane, for the long leg to the U.S.

I hope you’re not changing my seat, because I reserved an aisle…..

Yes sir. You have been upgraded to Business Class.

Gulp. I admit, as much as I travel, until that moment I didn’t really know what Business Class was. Certainly I had HEARD of Business Class. I knew they didn’t ordinarily let people like me sit in Business Class. I don’t own a briefcase. I never took Accounting. Sudoku scares me, and I don’t have an iPhone. All I knew was this: the Business Class people always go first on the plane, I think even before people in wheelchairs and moms with babies, and then you don’t see them again, ever, and that when they walk by the rest of us sweaty impatient Economy people massed near the door, we hush down and step aside, and they walk coolly past on their cells, selling off chip-maker stocks and smelling of expensive lotion while we stare and wonder how they came by so much money.

I didn’t want to appear over-anxious, yet was the first passenger on the plane. I could feel the lowerclasses staring and wondering at me as I boarded. They think I am an American Internet wizard, that’s why my face is unshaven and my clothes are cheap….they likely think I am friends with Mark Zuckerberg. Perhaps they think I am an actor – several people have said I resemble Rick Moranis. I feel sorry for them. They will not be on the plane first and they will be so cramped, poor things. Umm....

Imagine my surprise when the flight attendant, instead of pointing left or right, pointed up the stairs. Business Class as a metaphor for heaven? WOW. Never have I been upstairs on a plane.

At the top of the stairs I turned left, and beheld a scene of great comfort. The seats were as large as Aunt Joanne’s and Uncle Reggie’s La-Z-Boys back in West Virginia – possibly larger. Grey wrinkly soft leather, or it could have been really nice fake leather that was just as comfortable as leather. Real arm rests, roomy and flat, with space for two or three cocktails at once – no elbow fights up here. The seats all had something that looked like levers sticking out of them on their right sides, at about head-height. I wasn’t sure but guessed they had something to do with turning the seats into beds. It smelled comfortable, too. Maybe they filter the air, or just do a better job cleaning the bathrooms, but there was not the usual stuffy urine-tinged-and-many-other-nervous-people plane smell that is common among the commoners – I mean, in Economy. Hey CHECK OUT THE HEADPHONES! After figuring out I didn’t have to pay for them, (they looked like you should have to pay for them), I sat down in my cavernous aisle seat and tried to reach them, new-looking and packed in plastic in the back of the seat in front of me. I had to get up, though, because the magazine holder in front of me was so far away. Is there such a thing as too much legroom?

I began experimenting with the lever sticking out of the seat by my temple. I yanked it up – nothing. Yanked it down – nada. Tried rotating it gently in clockwise and counter-clockwise motions. Maybe it was broken – nothing I tried with the lever would turn my seat into a bed. After puzzling over it for several minutes, I realized it was a reading lamp. So I turned it on and pretended I knew what it was all along, as I explored the 10-button electronic seat massage system.

They give gifts, too, in Business Class. First I got a spiffy black pouch filled with toiletries including a tiny tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush, as well as warm soft socks and a silky sleeping mask. But the coup de grace was the tiny Delft ceramic Dutch rowhouse replica, about the size of a saltshaker, containing a shot or two of expensive Dutch gin. When the stewardess came by with it, I had no idea what was happening. She looked at me, and I looked at her, so she positioned her tray a little closer to me, expectantly. I picked up the small house, looked at it, and put it back on the tray.

It’s very nice, I said.

She waited.

Is it...for me? I asked.

Yes. It is a gift.

What is it?

It is very good Dutch gin in a tiny Dutch house. You can collect them.

Of course. My kids will love it. Thank you.

The Mays, Who Live in Windsor

My 44^th birthday, the day of strange portents – a bible in the road; a fallen tree; a sleeping bat – landed on a Tuesday, a school day. Which meant both kids, now that Ursula is in pre-school, would be in school. Which meant Tahra and I would be free for several hours to do Anything We Wanted. Savoring our rare alone time, we walked  slowly from the kids' bus stop through the grey Berkshires morning toward our crooked old farmhouse. On either side of the long gravelly drive, smoke lingered over black, leaf-choked pools as we passed beneath stands of pine, maple, oak and ash, with clusters of bending, slender birches dangling thin sheaves of bark. The smell of wet rock and earth, moss and decaying leaves and pine needles, and rotted, lichen-covered fallen trees, damp humus; milkweed and ferns; the beginning of Fall.

We left the road and stepped into the muffled woods to explore an unmarked trail we'd been eyeing for the past few days. As always, bears were on our minds. We find large piles of black bear scat all over our rented, 25-acre property; in the road, on the narrow deer paths that lead from the lower meadow to the wild blueberry bushes below. We poke into the pie-shaped piles for clues to what the bears have been eating; pine nuts and seeds and dried berry remnants are often visible. Tahra scared off a bear at our compost heap one morning.  Armed only with a bucket of kitchen scraps and coffee grounds, she heard the crack and pop of deadwood snapping and saw a big black bear butt receding through the tall burdock and into the thickets nearby, and ran back to the house to tell us. The kids have seen bears in or near one of the three wizened apple trees on our property, twice, from the safety of the big picture window in our kitchen.  On the second occasion, in September, Tahra and the girls watched as two black bear cubs no bigger than raccoons clambered up and down one of the apple trees, and the mother bear sauntered across the view, too, before disappearing into the brambles. Yes, we are in bear country, and this ain't the Berenstains this time - these bears are real, and wild, and it's exciting and a little scary, too, to know they are so  near us.

On this morning, my birthday morning, Tahra and I hiked up the trail, one of many tended quiet paths that twist amongst the acres and acres of murky forest abutting the property we’re renting, on land owned by our neighbor, a retired world explorer named Norm who is rarely at home, and who has given us leave to tromp around his hilly trails. We stop to inspect tiny blue mushrooms, clumps of white mushrooms that grow in clusters of crystalline bonsai, and neon orange mushrooms popping out of fallen tree trunks. We see trees that clearly have been raked by sharp, five-fingered claws, but no bears. Soon we spot a light-filled, open area off to the left and blaze over to it. Someone had made a fairly good-sized clearing there with a chainsaw, and left jumbled piles of cut wood around. Tahra noticed a thick dead pine tree, still upright with giant shards of sturdy brown bark peeling off its base, and asked if I’d be willing to pry off a piece or two to help enclose a fort she’s been building up for the kids in the back yard.

I pulled off a chunk of bark almost as tall me, and there, stuck to the naked trunk underneath was a tiny, fuzzy, roosting bat. It stayed stuck to the tree for a moment and then fell off near my feet, unmoving, probably asleep. From what I’ve read about bats in Massachusetts, which isn’t much, I think this was a young, male “little brown bat,’’ or Myotis lucifugus, one of the most common species in the state. Males like to roost alone in the daytime in quiet spots, including underneath tree bark. These flying mammals wake up at night and wing around using echolocation to snarf down as many as 600 insects per hour. Without bats, there would be a lot more mosquitoes to plague us. Tahra and other La Leche Leaguers will be pleased to know that infant little brown bats cling to their mothers’ undersides, attached to the nipple even during their mothers' nighttime bug-eating missions, nursing away during the hunt. Earlier, while walking the kids to the bus stop, we found a lost bible in the middle of the road near our carport. Now, a sleeping bat falls out of a tree at my feet. What next? 

We covered up our sleeping insectivore and marched home. An hour or two later, a wild rain and windstorm kicked up, and the power and phones went out. Because we can’t get a good cell signal from the house, I set off in the Volvo for the top of the road, where I know the cells work. I didn’t get far, though, because at the exact same spot in the road where we found the bible earlier that morning, half of a giant, old-growth maple tree had split apart and come down across the drive, blocking me in, and bringing down the phone and electric lines with it.
 

As I parked and hiked up the road to call the power company, I remembered something interesting about this maple, one of the oldest trees on the property. The last time I was home on leave, Tahra was in the bathroom at dusk when she came rushing out to tell the girls and I that a large owl,  (probably a barred owl, we later learned), had just swooped out of the trees and landed in the grass in the middle of the yard, in plain sight of the bathroom window. We rushed outside quietly, just in time to see it fly into the upper meadow. All four of us tiptoed up the hill and peered into the dim treeline, and then we spotted it, a dark shadow as big as a fire hydrant, perched on a bare branch on the same side of the same tree that split apart and fell across the road on my birthday.

Hard to see, but that's a very small bear cub hanging onto the side of our apple tree.

Two May cubs trekking up our road to their bus stop.

Wonder tomato grown by Tahra in our garden in Windsor. Elephant salt shaker for scale.

 

 

 

Happy Number: Strange Signs

I turned 44 a week ago during a short trip home to Massachusetts, and a string of puzzling, seemingly disparate events happened on my birthday, involving a mysterious bible, a tiny sleeping bat, and a giant old-growth maple that split asunder during a wild storm and fell across our dead-end road, cutting us off from civilization (we lost internet) and knocking out the power while Tahra tried to bake my chocolate birthday cake. Unusual omens, considered individually -- did I mention the tornado warning -- but what if there was a connection? I made enquiries; here are my preliminary findings.

Firstly, 44. It’s a rather interesting number. In recreational mathematics, 44 is known as a “happy number’’ – meaning that if you replace it by the sum of the squares of its digits, and keep repeating the process, eventually you will arrive at a number equal to one, and can’t go any further. (I actually tried this, and it worked.) Forty-four is a palindromic number, too, meaning that the number is the same if the digits are reversed. The term is derived from the word palindrome, which refers to any word (such as rotor or racecar) whose spelling is unchanged when its letters are reversed. Strangely, I recently read a lengthy article about obsessive palindromists in a hip literary magazine called The Believer, to which our friend Jed Berry, a lecturer at UMass Amherst, introduced us about a year ago. Here’s another strange fact: the current edition of The Believer happens to contain an article about Jed’s excellent and critically-acclaimed first novel, The Manual of Detection. Happy Numbers. Palindromes. Jedediah Berry and The Believer. Interesting thread....coincidence?

Another fact about 44: it is the retired shirt number of baseball great Hank Aaron, breaker of Babe Ruth’s home run record. Before learning this piece of basic hardball lore, I had had occasion to read a bit about Hank Aaron’s amazing life, in a newspaper article I glanced over while on the way from Nairobi to the States. There was a short item about the legendary Aaron endorsing Barack Obama for President. Barack is also a 44 – the 44th President of the United States. Whilst pondering 44s, another one unburied itself from my memory banks. A chunky hardworking bruiser of a Washington Redskins running back named John Riggins, MVP of Superbowl XVII, was one of my mother’s favorite all-time football players, along with the dashing former Skins’ quarterback Joe Theisman, whom she once met. Riggins was number 44, and mom and I used to sit on our couch of a Sunday and watch him blow through 300-pound defensive linemen like they were dandelions gone to seed. Forty-four: Me. Hank. Barack. Riggo. And my mom’s first name is Victoria and there is a cough suppressant called Vicks Formula 44.

About this bible. It was bound in black and looked fresh from a Day’s Inn nightstand. Face-down in the wet with its thin white pages open to Deuteronomy 16-17.Tahra and the kids and I stumbled on it in the chill air shortly after my birthday dawned, at 7:15 a.m. as we walked the girls up our dead-end dirt lane to their bus stop. Another poser: what was a motel bible doing in the middle of our no-traffic road near our dilapidated double carport? Have we moved into a Stephen King novel?

I thought the answer might lie in Old Deuteronomy itself, so I looked, and what I found did verily induceth woe in me. It turns out that Old Deuteronomy, in addition to being the main character in T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, which is the basis for the mega-hit Broadway musical Cats, contains a terrifying manifesto of do's and dont's, to say nothing of the 'ths, with many detailed instructions about when, where, and why various categories of people should get stoned. (To death.)

Up next: the little brown bat and the big sugar maple.

The Secret Annexe

Outside of Amsterdam Centraal Train Station at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, I stepped alone into one of the Old World’s most beautiful and famous cities, a place honeycombed by placid dark canals lined with snug wooden houseboats, quiet brick streets fronted by not-yet-open cheese shops, bakeries, bars and boutiques on the ground-floors of handsome antique row houses featuring interesting carven doors and floor-to-ceiling windows. Every so often, a graceful steeple or belfry poked incongruously from the roofline, topping off cavernous and ancient-looking halls of worship. But what impressed me more than the grand architecture and serene canals was the city’s cycle-centric nervous system. Immediately outside the train station there is a three-tiered concrete parking garage, the kind you see full of Avalanches, Excursions and Rangers outside Metro stations in Virginia. THIS concrete parking garage, however, was full of bicycles – conservatively, I would say two or three thousand bicycles. Parked at a train station. By people who then took trains to ride somewhere else. I’ve heard that Copenhagen, in Denmark, the birthplace of the iconic Christiania cargo bike company, is even crazier for cycling. Amsterdam, though, must be Copenhagen's near rival. As the city awoke, I found myself inside a hive of bikes whizzing by in different directions, pedaled by healthy-looking bipeds. Is this what national health care, legalized prostitution and locally acceptable marijuana sales leads to? Bicycle riding and massive use of mass transit? Eco-coolness?

Anyway. Back to my mission. I only had three hours before I needed to get back to Schiphol. Within that time, if possible, I planned to have breakfast and walk through the secret entrance, hidden behind a swiveling bookcase, into the pectin warehouse where a fellow compulsive diarist, Anne Frank, survived for a miraculous two years with her family during World War II before someone betrayed her to the Gestapo, causing her to be sent to the Bergen-Belsen death camp. She and her sister died there, a month before the Allies liberated it. In all, seven of the eight people who hid in the house were killed in the camps. Her father survived Auschwitz, found her diary after the war, and recognized its power and significance as he turned its pages for the first time.

I made it to the Anne Frank Huis on the Prinsengracht Canal by 9 a.m. The Prinsengracht, or “Prince’s Canal,’’ is one of three main canals dug in the 17th Century during the Dutch Golden Age that form concentric circles around downtown Amsterdam. There are more than 1,500 awe-inspiring, monumental buildings inside this tri-canal area. The district was given UNESCO World Heritage Site status two years ago. At the Anne Frank Huis, all of the guided tours for the entire day were booked up long in advance, but I could still get in to do a self-guided exploration. I was surprised by the number of young women, including many teenaged girls of various nationalities, queued outside well before the museum’s opening. Stunningly, Anne Frank was only 14 years old when she wrote the bulk of her diary. The depth of feeling, the self-awareness and intellect of this young human screams from the pages. Hers was a hungry, hyper-kinetic mind, and she seemed to feel that the maniacal evils being perpetrated across Europe by the Nazis – though in every sense immediate, real and horrific -- were an aberration, and that humankind would correct and heal itself. Did she really believe that?

We went in and proceeded at a snail’s pace through the three-story building. The place is empty, dim, unfurnished, full of echoes and the ponderous shoe-scuffling of visitors. In this tomb-like house, not a word is spoken above a whisper. We duck through the hidden bookcase entrance into what Anne Frank called the Secret Annexe. We look out the window in the attic where Anne Frank gazed at the topmost leaves of a chestnut tree and dreamed of being able to go outside again, where she longed for her friends and planned what to study in school when the nasty mess was over. We stand in the room she shared with a cantankerous old dentist, taken in by the Franks. We see where she sat and listened to the bells of the church next door, the Westerkirk, which first opened its doors to believers in 1631.

We trudge back downstairs and contemplate madness and murder. We remember Cambodia. Bosnia. Rwanda. Sudan.

“When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But, and that’s a big question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?’’ – Anne Frank

Eleven million people were killed during the Holocaust. Anne Frank’s diary has sold more than 30 million copies. It is widely considered to be one of the greatest books written in the 20th century. She was 14 when she signed her name on the final page.

Hamsterdam

The 10-year-old boy in front of me at Passport Control in Amsterdam is preparing to puke. Fortunately I had some warning. He had jerked suddenly and suspiciously 180-degrees away from the crew-cut Dutch guy sitting behind glass in the passport booth, lowered his head and scrunched up his scapulae like a waterbird settling its wings while getting ready to spear a fish. Instinctively, his parents both stepped sideways a step or two, and I stopped in my tracks, a good three meters back. Then he let go, with a sound like glass marbles pouring onto the cold concrete floor. No moaning or sniveling, just the sudden and surprisingly voluminous waterfall of liquified toast, eggs, Cap’n Crunch and whatever else spilling onto the floor. And then, a coda – and another half-cup’s worth comes out. Mom waits a respectful beat, and then approaches to cautiously pat his back. I step three queues to the left and watch the expressions of the Dutch immigration squad behind their partitions. They seem only slightly bemused, and I can tell they are happy their jobs do not involve mops or buckets, but only scanning passport pages and asking people what their business entails, inside the nation of the Netherlands on this day.

Is this a portent? A sign that I should not, in fact, embark upon my audacious and time-sensitive mission outside Schiphol Airport during a seven-hour layover en route to Detroit? Everything to this point had gone so smoothly. Underwear and socks change in private toilet stall in KLM Crown Lounge? Check. Free café au lait and turkey/cheese roll breakfast inside Crown Lounge? Check. Figure out complicated credit card and infrared-scanning lockers system so I could store my laptop and carry-on backpack inside the departures terminal whilst touring Amsterdam in the morning? Check. But here, my first hurdle – over a boy’s puddle of vomit, and I’m not even outside the airport yet. I held my breath, and got through.

In the bowels of Schiphol, there is a train terminal. Somewhere, you would think a giant neon arrow would point ingénues like me toward the ticket counter. But instead, there seems only to be two-dozen ambiguously labeled cavities in the earth, into which mechanized walkways are taking people in different directions to various points around Europe. If I went down the wrong hole, I might end up in Vladivostok, Istanbul, Yerevan, or Athens, when all I wanted to do was ride 15 minutes down the rails to downtown Amsterdam. I asked a KLM stewardess, staring up at something on the ceiling, if she knew where I could buy a ticket. Without making eye contact, she lifted her arm and pointed sideways, at a giant neon sign that said TICKETS, about 20 yards away. I purchased a round-trip ticket and miraculously found my way onto a train heading into downtown Amsterdam, also known as "Hamsterdam" to my 7-year-old daughter. I believe she thinks the town was named for hamsters.

What I found there when I exited the glorious old train station at 7 a.m. on a Saturday made me gasp, and grab for my camera.

Independence

Above: black-crowned cranes on newly greened savannah near the River Lal, Warrap.

The rain is here. Every day now in South Sudan, the world’s newest nation, grey-white clouds parade across the horizon, driven by gusty drafts. Thunder rumbles and people look up expectantly from their black clay fields, where for the past month they have spent the majority of their time kneeling, chipping at the earth with short-handled maloudas to prepare for the land for planting.

This sub-Saharan country is mostly brittle, brown and dust-plagued for much of the year, but for about five months beginning in May, a carpet of rich green rolls out unstoppably, and a part of the world better known for famine is transformed into a land of plenty. In another month, tall maize and sorghum stalks will reach the pointy thatched roofs of farmers’ tukuls, the cylindrical mud-and-wood houses traditionally built by South Sudanese. Peanuts, sweet potatoes, melons and squash will extrude from the dirt; papayas, guavas and bananas will erupt.

On Monday this week, July the 9th, South Sudan celebrated its first anniversary of independence. This proud but poor nation of nine million people has endured a rocky infancy. A bloody border dispute with its northern neighbor, Sudan, brought the two countries to the brink of a third war a few months ago and prompted South Sudan to close its oil fields, killing the economic engine of both nations. The South Sudanese Pound has weakened dramatically against the dollar, prices for everything from sugar to rice and fuel have skyrocketed. But farming and livestock -- cows in particular -- matter more than oil to most citizens in this pastoralist society, still unspoiled by industrial agriculture. Cattle keep their horns here, and eat only grass. The Nile and its tributaries keep pastures fertile even during the dry season, and are a source of fish throughout the year. (I'm served wild Nile tilapia heads once a week for dinner or lunch. I've learned to tear the bones and breaded scales apart and eat the fish with my fingers, like a good East African.)

Despite everything on the wires about South Sudan's economic collapse, failed nationhood and impending humanitarian catastrophe on the northern border, here in Juba, there is an undercurrent of optimism. Construction has not slowed; if anything, buildings, including expensive hotels, are going up faster than ever. A Grammy winning producer who has worked with Wilco, Green Day and Fugazi is coming here next week to scout for unique South Sudanese voices. The Chinese are everywhere, opening businesses.

At my window in the morning, I listen to the children who walk briskly down my street in neat pastel uniforms and white knee socks, on their way to school. They sing and speak in Dinka or Arabic, neither of which I understand. I hear laughter. They move quickly, looking forward to the coming day.

Above: incredible sprawling tree near the River Lal, Warrap. I saw monkeys (colobus?) near here, too.

East Coast Ramble - Part 6 - Hawthorne Valley

Heathsville (VA) - Chatham/Spencertown (NY) - Windsor (MA)

We've made it from the southernmost point in the U.S. to the Hudson Valley in New York. The loose plan was this: crash for a few months in Joel and Ellen’s woodsy summer house in Spencertown and hope Gryffyn would be accepted into the Hawthorne Valley School – a Waldorf school on a 400-acre working farm a few hills over in a wide hollow with big fields, forests and a clear, cold stream running through it. We weren’t sure she would get in, but Gryffyn and Ursula spent summer in a camp there, and Gryffyn really wanted to go back, for school.

Tahra went to HVS for a few years and enjoyed it. Kids get to be kids there – going outside in all weather, exploring the farm and hills around it, walking, growing and making things, studying animals, music, art, languages like German and Spanish, movement, handwork and myth are all part of it. The farm sustainably produces good food that is consumed locally, and there's an inviting farm market in the middle of it, the kind of place you could spend an hour just admiring the cheeses. Our friend Rachel Collins works in Hawthorne Valley’s visiting students program – kids from all over the U.S. and the world apparently come to see how this school-inside-a-farm works, and spend time there learning and exploring.

After a two-day classroom tryout and a nerve-wracking parental interview, during which I sat paralyzed while Tahra coolly fielded questions about pedagogy and child development intended to determine whether we were Waldorfian fiber, Gryffyn got in. (It’s probably good I never got to ask any of my prepared questions, including: “Are the sports teams any good?’’ and "Is it cool if I text Gryffyn once in a while?’’)

With school squared away, we switched our focus to Massachusetts, where, after the school year ends, we’ll move full time into a 150-year-old farm house on 25 forested acres high in the hills in Berkshire County, just across the NY state line. It’s a big old house with a wood stove, a loft, a couple of barns and enough open space to do some growing, located on a dead-end dirt road with old fieldstone walls criss-crossing the property, and I was excited to see it. Our friends from the Keys, Stephanie and Tony and their boys, have a house and land nearby, and turned us onto this place, with warnings that we'd see bears in the yard on quiet early mornings. I hoped to see one before heading back to Juba, but didn't. I think we're going to like this place.

Above: Windsor house.

Above: view out the kitchen window, Windsor.

East Coast Ramble - Part 5 - The Northern Neck

We have arrived in the Northern Neck of the Chesapeake Bay, a place you could see easily from space, since the Bay is so huge and distinctive, surrounded on three sides by jagged rips of land inter-stitched by rivers that look like freon-filled capillaries and arteries in all the satellite pictures. The Northern Neck is one of those big rips on the west side of the Bay, and my parents’ house is perched on the edge of one of those blue capillaries – the Great Wicomico River. It’s a stunning natural environment, and the house is sited and designed to help you bask in it. There are so many windows in the place that it heats up almost instantly when the sunrays begin blasting and bouncing in off the surface of the picture-perfect cove below. Ice House Cove, overlooked by the house, is an intertidal work of art, meandering back into a grassy saltmarsh, separated by a slender spit of reed grasses from the thick river beyond.

“Heaven and earth have never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation.” So wrote Capt. John Smith, the English explorer of the Bay, in his journal, sometime around 1607 to 1609, and you might agree after a stay at Mont May, as my parents have playfully named their estuarine Xanadu.

It takes me about fifteen speechless minutes of staring out windows at the river and cove and trees to adjust to the peaceful beauty of this place, whenever I arrive. Which works out fine because the girls usually instantly cleave themselves unto grandma and grandpa with the kind of grateful desperation that should evoke self-doubt in me, but doesn’t. I wander around and look at the various ways and means that my parents have enhanced their retirement castle since previous visits. Over here, for instance, there’s an entirely new wall of Frank Lloyd Wright-ish stone pieces, framing a new stainless steel hearth in front of the fireplace. Upstairs, dad installed radiant heat flooring in the bathroom along with a magnificent new tile shower in which my entire nuclear family could comfortably stand, complete with auxiliary jets that squirt water horizontally from the wall. Outside, there is now a lovely screened porch with mechanized screens that go up and down at the touch of a button. I have no idea how he and my mom are able to repeatedly pull off these incredible feats of do-it-yourself craftsmanship, each more impressive than the last, but there seems to be no mountain of improvement they cannot scale.

Time slows down for me at Mont May. Returned to the protective loving bosom of my parents, who always think of everything, I tend to lose my socks, my keys, my ball cap. I have trouble making simple decisions, possibly because more experienced adults who once completely and successfully ran my life for me are so nearby. A sort of pubescent dumbness strikes me, exacerbated by good wine. Which made it all the more gratifying when I beat Tahra at Scrabble there one night, for the first time in five years. I fully acknowledge that her loss had more to do with the powerful doses of six different meds she is currently taking than anything else, as well as the fact that she let me make a word that probably wasn't, but I happily savored the victory nevertheless. One doesn’t win at Scrabble with Tahra very often, in sickness or in health.

Other Heathsville highlights: dad taught me how to use a chainsaw without dismembering myself or others and shared with me the results of his ongoing arboreal research project, in which he is gradually identifying more and more different species of trees living on the property (he only chainsaws the fallen or dead ones). I think he’s got eight or ten different species of oak trees, alone, nailed down, among a couple dozen others. And during a long walk with mom and Tahra, we all saw an osprey locked in aerial combat with an eagle, apparently in a dispute over a fish. In the end, the fish fell to earth and the raptors flew empty-taloned back to the river.

East Coast Ramble - Part 4 - Do Not Hump

Key West – Miami – Sanford – Lorton

Leaving the Florida Keys for destinations north, we stopped at Baby’s Coffee for cafes con leche, at Curry Hammock State Park for our customary nature trail leg stretch, and at Denny’s Latin Café in Key Largo for another con leche and lunch. Goodbye, Cuban coffee, rice and beans. You served us well.

We took Card Sound Road out of the islands, as we always do, and at the zenith of the bridge, with all the Keys behind us – the osprey, ibis, egrets and pelicans and spoonbills, the incredible family snorkeling and kayaking expeditions, our friends and all the little things we love about the Keys – the White Street Pier, Blue Heaven, Sandy’s and Salute, El Siboney, Bahia Honda, Fort Zach and our house, our garden – to the south, I thought about the character from that Carl Hiaasen book who strapped himself to the top of this bridge as a hurricane bore down, to experience the full force of it. We took some storms in the face, too. Hurricane Wilma destroyed our Pathfinder, pushed saltwater over the top of our three-foot-high porch and into the house, made the walls buck and blew water through the window seams, even with the shutters down. That vulnerability, that way-out edginess combined with extreme weather, contributes to the vitality of the islands, I think. I know Tahra will miss the big tropical storms, too.

On to Miami, to the home of Josh, Karla and Xavier, for one night. Josh is related to Tahra through Tahra’s mom’s mom. We discovered this several years ago, and have been having fun with this amazing family ever since. Josh spent time in Mali with the Peace Corps after UVA, where my brother went to school, Karla -- who wrote a book about the Maroons in Jamaica -- went to Yale, and their son, Xavier, is brilliant and sweet, a champion chess player who can also do perfect flips on the trampoline. We got in a little late but enjoyed a spaghetti and meatballs dinner cooked by Josh, with really good tomato sauce made by a Saudi college exchange student staying at the house. We’ve met college kids from all over the world during our visits to Josh and Karla, who seem somehow involved in everything good going on in Miami. We also have Josh and Karla to thank for introducing us a few years ago to sustainability idol Mario Yanez, founder of Earth Learning and The Farm at Verde Gardens down in Homestead. Mario introduced me to Florida-made avocado wine, which surprisingly, isn't as bad as it sounds.

From Miami we drove up toward Orlando, where we excitedly boarded the Amtrak Auto-Train in Sanford, pre-Trayvon Martin. The Auto-Train is THE longest passenger train in the world and was a thrill for all of us; we splurged for our own deluxe sleeping cabin, with four fold-out bunk beds, little fold-out tables, and windows looking out from both sides of our narrow t-shaped cabin. The Volvo would ride in style behind us somewhere on the double-decker train with approximately 250 other vehicles stacked inside enclosed car carriers. This may have been the only day in history that Gryffyn and Ursula actually looked forward to bed time. After climbing a short ladder and tucking themselves into individual, tray-like bunks suspended from the ceiling, the girls looked like weary but happy rock climbers hanging from bivy sacks on the edge of vibrating cliffs. The only down side to riding the Auto-Train: there are some puzzling policies, including one well-posted rule that forbids humping. (See photo, below.) Possibly to prevent derailment, or maybe because Amtrak gets federal subsidies, I surmised.

Seventeen hours, 900 miles and four states later, the train deposited us in Lorton, Virginia. When I stepped outside into near-freezing blustery weather, I had my first second thoughts about our planned move north, and flashed back to the day when I was a kid waiting for the school bus on a frigid day in Springfield, and suddenly realized my nose hairs had frozen together.

East Coast Ramble - Part 3 - Bury My Wounded Heart at Blue Heaven

My turn to get into a hospital gurney. Time for knee surgery. My doctor is a top-class orthopedic surgeon who has patched up many pro football players, soccer players, and other athletes. He has described my knee problem as a “pretty good’’ lateral meniscus tear. I could let it go, but it would haunt me. Better to let him use his tiny video-camera-on-a-stick and buzzing alligator-jaw implement to remove it. “Your meniscus is like an o-ring,’’ he said. “Take the bad piece off and the rest of it still works.’’ Manfully, I pretended to understand what an o-ring was, imagining it has something to do with car engines. The doctor and I have had a few chats about Africa, because he volunteers for Doctors Without Borders when he’s not repairing bones in the Keys. He has been to Haiti already three times since the earthquake. He has been to Africa before, and they are sending him to Somalia, next.

The girls and Uncle Brent, who arrived safely for his visit in Key West from Phoenix last night, all stayed home when I went to the hospital. Who cares about a middle-aged guy getting elective arthroscopic knee surgery for a soccer injury, even though I could have died?

But I didn’t. In fact I was home a few hours later and felt well enough to hobble around without crutches, even though my left knee had three small, sutured holes in it and my leg was swaddled in white muslin from ankle to thigh. Now it was time to finish packing up the house. With a bad knee, two over-excited children and a still-recuperating Tahra.

Uncle Brent to the rescue! This guy -- this sensitive hunky deep-thinking adrenaline-junky doctor-of-physics Grand Canyon hiking landscape photographing Ultimate Frisbee all-star uncle, who parachutes out of planes every weekend and plays kickass guitar licks, who once starred in a band called The Revolvers who opened a Tucson show for The MONKS OF DOOM (Camper van Beethoven, anyone?), who drives a fast BMW and makes a lot of money doing something complicated on computers, who once took a U-haul filled with all of MY old junk from our parents’ basement in Virginia all the way to Key West, by himself – had come down to help us out with moving stuff once again, and to see the girls and see us off. The reasons this man is still single are as hard to fathom as the elusive Fifth Quark*. Girls: he won’t last another year. Book your tickets to Scottsdale, quickly, but walk softly when you get there. Hunters have had more luck snaring snow leopards in the Himalayas, though outdoorsy supermodels from Stanford might fare ok.

Anyway, last week in Key West. Tahra and I packed up the house, with much assistance from Brent, who knows I don’t get much time with Tahra and tried hard not to be in the way while simultaneously maximizing his helpfulness. The girls helped, too, by thoroughly taping shut completely empty boxes, making fully-furnished houses (for themselves) out of large boxes while we were trying to pack them, decorating boxes and the floor with Sharpies, popping costly bubblewrap and thwarting us in the midst of trying to give away a small fraction of some their never-used toys.

Five days and a lot of packed boxes later, we reluctantly said goodbye to Brent, put him on a plane back to Phoenix and hired our fantastic babysitter, Kelsey, from down the block to watch the kids for a few hours so we could go out to dinner on our last night in Key West. Kelsey showed up for the job with her live pet duck, Prissy, in a stroller. Is it any wonder the kids love her?

Fitting that our last dinner out in Key West should be at Blue Heaven, site of my first dinner out in Key West, more than ten years ago, when I was a lonely wounded man incapable of experiencing love -- until I met Tahra at the restaurant a week or two later. On this, our final night in town, we sat under the boughs of the great Spanish lime tree and enjoyed the company of friends Liv, Will, Hanrow and Ashley with lobster, snapper and scallops, hand-picked bottles of excellent wine and a lot of funny stories. Richard and Suanne, our good-hearted friends and owners of this famous, iconic and for us – intimately historic – restaurant, showed up at the end of our meal, stole the bill and gave us hugs, and wished us luck. “You’re off on a new adventure!” said Suanne.

* Editor's Note: For anyone interested, I believe the Fifth Quark is/was something important that may or may not be real, and which after great effort by Nobel Prize winners was actually discovered at Fermilab, a giant underground particle accelerator where Brent once worked as a research physicist trying to discover how the universe was created. Brent can (and will) correct me if I'm wrong.

* New Editor's Note: Brent May clarifies that it was actually the SIXTH Quark, also known as the Top Quark, that was such a big deal. It was "postulated and then observed'' at Fermilab (DOE lab outside Chicago.) Kinda scary that he knows what this means.

Above: Ursula meets Prissy on our front porch steps in Key West