The Golden Pine Cone

In The Golden Pinecone the brother and the sister climb into a high
valley and the pine tree with its cone is outlined against a clear sky on a
ridge just at timberline. A branch juts out at right angles to the trunk and
the cone hangs from it. It is a normal pine tree in every way, and the cone is
average as well, but something happens during the children's ascent to this
place that renders the pinecone golden and supernatural. The brother and sister
have troubled relations with their parents, and their hike into the region of
the pine tree and its cone is a quest to solve the parents' problem, which is lack
of love for each other, and the pine cone is the key which provides the answer
to the riddle of why they don't. The boy climbs the tree and picks it for his
sister, who carries it down the mountain and back home.

I read The Golden Pine Cone while I was sick in bed and its reading took
the exact length of the day on which I was sick. My mother, who didn't often do
such things, brought food to my bedside and asked me about the book and I felt
the magic of the book and the pine cone spreading warmth into the room. I hoped
that I would remain sick for another day so that I could do the same thing with
another book. My mother brought me hot lemon drinks and put an woolen sock with
hot potatoes in it around my neck and said this is how one cured bad throats.
The sock itched and she put a dishtowel underneath it, but the edges of the
sock still touched my neck. My sister was at school, and it was an only time I
can remember being at home alone with my mother.

Carcajou

In the book Carcajou the wolverine knows everything about the trapper and he
robs the trapper's traps every time he puts them out, and since the two of them
are the only beings in the high valley where the story takes place, it is a
battle of wits in which the martens and mink and weasels the trapper is trying
to catch have no part. The trapper tries poison, which Carcajou recognizes; the
trapper holds vigil with a gun through cold nights near the traps, and Carcajou
doesn't come; he tries to track Carcajou to his lair, and Carcajou keeps
moving, sleeping in different dens during the day (which is when wolverines
sleep-if they sleep at all, which they may not do, according to this story) and
he covers so much ground with his small animal body that the trapper gets lost
and starts to go mad. Carcajous or wolverines are the fiercest animals in the
weasel family (Mustela)
and they have been known to take on bears in a fight over a carcass and to
chase the bear away. Once, in the book, the trapper observes Carcajou, from a
distance, confronting a pack of wolves, and even the wolves back away, after
forming a circle around the wolverine and growling.

At the end of the book, Carcajou
and the trapper meet at the trapper's cabin. Both of them know that the story
will come to this because their minds are now linked: the animal knows the man
and the man knows the animal: both know they are part of a larger knowledge
which is contained in that high valley. A kind of riddle. The confrontation
occurs after Carcajou, who, after traveling through three valleys, pursued by
the trapper (the trapper doesn't know which valley he's in), has already
doubled back and ransacked the trapper's cabin before the latter, exhausted and
near full madness, stumbles into the clearing around it. He sees the
destruction, and he sees, in the dark of the cabin, the gleaming yellow eyes of
Carcajou looking out a him. He goes fully mad in this moment and cannot
recognize whether the eyes he sees are imaginary or real, are an animal's or a
spirit's, or are his own; and since he has no one to talk to about this, except
the animal itself, which he has already been talking to in his mind and his
dreams throughout the story, he decides to leave the valley. There is a silence
in the valley after he leaves.

Where Do I Read?

I read books in the library while
sitting at one of the tables near the windows where the light comes in and
shines on your pages when the book is propped up in front of you. Don Sperry always
sits on the other side of the table from me reading books about rocket ships
and space and I wonder how rocket ships, which have no blood flowing through
them, can be interesting to read about.
Don Sperry and I have contests about who can read the most books and get their
library card filled up fastest and get a shiny new one after the old one is all
crumply and stamped with dates. Don Sperry always wins these contests, because,
so I think, he wears glasses and can read faster, and maybe also because space
ships are faster than animals, and fewer things happen to them. Animal stories
and stories about trappers and explorers and sometimes Indians are the only
things I read about.

The books I choose must have nature
in their titles. I walk along the shelves underneath the windows on the sunny
side of our school library and I bend my head sideways to read the titles on
the spine, and I can tell right away if there are animals or nature or trappers
and explorers and Indians in the story. The titles on the book spines look
sometimes like they are holding up the book shelf above them but this isn't
true. When I pick out a stack of five books and carry them over to Mrs.
Anscombe's desk she takes out the card in the sleeve inside the front cover of
each and stamps a date on it and then she stamps my card and gives it back to
me. I get five stamps in my card. Sometimes when I am walking to Mrs.
Asncombe's desk I look over at Don Sperry to see how many books about rocket
ships and space he is checking out. I can't beat Don Sperry in reading and it
is lucky we are friends: we don't fight.

Sometimes I'm scared of Mrs. Anscombe because she has piercing eyes
that look like sharpened pencils when she looks at me over her spectacles,
which are attached to a silver chain that goes around her neck. Sometimes Mrs.
Anscombe punishes us with her sharp voice, when we talk in library period, for
example, which is supposed to be silent. She uses this voice, too, to announce
that library period is over. She strikes a bell on her desk to emphasize this,
and this is an even sharper sound than a voice in an otherwise quiet place.

More About Mrs. Anscombe

The sounds she makes and her look
makes me worry that she is angry a lot of the time. I always think that if Don
Sperry and I read lots of books and get lots of stamps from her on our library
card she will become a happier person and will smile at us for being good
readers. The other things I notice about Mrs. Anscombe are that she is very
large and has broad shoulders, grey hair, and hair on her upper lip. She looms over
the book checkout counter with her large body and pierces us with her voice and
her eyes, and I know only older women have hair on their upper lip and older
people are wise, so I think she must be wise, too, because she has read many
books, enough to make her a librarian. I'm just sad that she is angry so often
at other people who don't read as much as she does. I'm glad she is not a giant
or a mountain crag, ready to cascade down on top of me.

The Book I'm Reading Now

In a book I'm reading a boy who is
a teenager goes into a high valley to trap in the fall and then gets trapped
himself by an early winter and can't get back out through the pass. He survives
by his wits. He builds a lean-to against a cliff and sleeps on spruce boughs,
which he renews every week, and he sews himself a sleeping bag made from rabbit
and squirrel skins. He uses bones for a needle and squirrel sinew to sew with.
He eats beaver that he traps and he becomes particularly fond of the tails,
which are tender and have a bit less of the musky flavour that beaver meat
normally has. He eats rabbits of course, which he snares, and when his pants
wear out he sews himself a pair of pants, leggings really, made entirely from
squirrel skins. He sews two skins back to back so there is fur on the inside
and fur on the outside. After surviving the winter and coming back down into
the valley in spring and astounding his parents and friends by being still
alive, he returns to the high valley the next year-this is in a sequel to the
story-and he spends three winters there, trapping for a living. This time he
builds himself a cabin, and wears normal clothes, drinks tea, and even takes a
bit of sugar up with him. He dries his own meat and makes bannock from flour
that he has packed with him. I've read these books twice and hope there are
more stories about this boy who's becoming a mountain man.

Dear Mrs. Anscombe

I remember now more exactly how
your library card system works. We bring
our stack of books to your desk, over which you loom with your massive grey
body like a crag, and you open the books' back covers where the little envelope
pockets are glued so neatly (do you glue them there yourself?) and where the
books' cards are kept. You take the yellowish-brownish cards out and stamp them
with the date and also with the date on which the books are due. Then you put
the cards in a filing drawer which you keep on your counter, and it stays there
when we take the books home. On our own library cards, which are the same
colour as the books' cards and have lines printed on them, you write the title
of each book we are taking out, and you stamp the date when it is due. Then,
when we return the book, you stamp that date beside the due date.

So the important idea, in my and
Don Sperry's competition, is to get your library card filled up quickly-on both
sides; the lines go over to the back-and the strategy is to read fast so that
the date when you return the books is well in advance of the date when it is
due. This means you are a "fast reader," and you can show your library card to
others, including Don, to demonstrate this ability. A special honour is gained
if the date you return the book is the same date as when it was signed out,
because this means you have read the book in one day. This is what happened to
me with The Golden Pine Cone book, which
I read when I was sick (although I didn't return it until the next day so the
stamped date is one day late). Don and I keep our old, full library cards to
show off how many we have filled up. When Don Sperry reads with his glasses on
he always sits very straight in his chair with the book propped up in front of
him on the table and he has already got his finger behind the next page so he
can flip fast and not lose momentum.

Reading,
even though you can talk about it, is a secret activity, and I am writing you
this because I know that even though you are sometimes angry and scary and look
like a crag, you might not be a dangerous person. Books are silent, and the
library, except when you ring the bell or command us to put back or check out
our books because library period is over, is a quiet place and this is unusual
for a school in which teachers or other children are usually talking at you and
interrupting your thoughts. I like being reminded about what I am thinking,
which is what happens when I read books, and when I forget things, I can go
back to the books and be reminded again. This is good when it happens in a
quiet place. I hope you will not be mad at me for describing you in evil ways,
because I don't think you are evil. Maybe you just don't like noise. A lot of
people have secrets and angry thoughts that can sometimes give them mad faces
and sometimes make them talk loudly and abruptly, and writing and reading are
good ways to calm oneself down and make one speak softly about the secret
things one is thinking. Sometimes when you have a problem with your parents or
with teachers or with other people that you love, for example, you can write
and read about it and not get so angry.
I hope you won't tell on me to the other teachers (or to my parents) for
talking about how noisy they sometimes are.

BERLIN—Easter
is still a big deal in Europe. Unlike the mere long weekend observed in
North America, in Germany the Easter holiday that falls during the
first weeks of April stretches into a two-week early spring sabbattical
that runs to mid-month: the schools close; those who are able
to, get out of town for a few days; and the work pace agreeably slows,
especially when, as this year, the temperatures reach the 20s.

If
you’re of a mind to indulge in an appropriately theological long
weekend, the obvious place to go is Wittenberg. That’s where I spent
Good Friday, the religious holy day that commemorates the Crucifixion
of Christ. While Germany is Catholic in the southern province of
Bavaria and along the Rhine in western Germany, it is predominantly and
famously the heartland of Protestantism and Wittenberg is its source.
It’s a perfectly charming town of 50,000 or so about an hour’s train
ride southwest of Berlin. Wittenberg is where Martin Luther, a
half-millennium ago, give or take a few years, nailed his “95 Theses”
manifesto to the church door, and ignited a Reformation that split the
Roman Catholic Church.

On
the maps, it’s officially known as Lutherstadt-Wittenberg (not to be
confused with Lutherstadt-Eisleben, another nearby town where Luther
was born in 1483). A 15-20 minute walk from the train station brings
you to Martin Luther House, the theologian’s residence, which has now
been turned into a well-designed, modern museum that provides an
informative history of Luther and his movement. It contains everything
from Lucas Cranach portraits of the great reformer to 500-year-old
marginal notes in Biblical texts in Luther’s own hand, plus the usual
array of computer visuals. An unpretentious if kitschy gift shop sells
such things as bottles of Luther beer, Luther mugs, and even Luther
computer mousepads—the latter sports a picture of the theologian’s
forlorn writing desk when he was holed up in Wartburg castle in 1522,
and a quote from Luther that will appeal to aspiring scribes: “I write
without interruption.” Luther may have suffered from constipation, as
John Osborne emphasized in his eponymous 1961 play, Luther, but
he was remarkably free of writer’s block. My computer mouse is
currently resting on its rubberized Luther mat (price: 3.50 Euros), and
no doubt drawing inspiration from the reformer’s diligent writing
habits. The American edition of his collected writings, Luther’s Works, runs to 55 volumes.

In
addition to Luther’s house, the dwelling of his theological successor
Philip Melancthon is also preserved, and beyond that, there’s
Wittenberg University, founded at the beginning of the 16th century,
where Luther was a professor for most of his career. A nicely laid out
town square offers statues, cafes, and restaurants, and at the north
end of town, there’s the castle church where Luther posted his
criticisms in 1517, preached, and is now buried. The place is small
enough and easy enough to find your way around that the only guide book
you might need is one to Luther’s life and mind. That’s available in
the most recent of the Luther biographies, University of Lancaster
religious history professor Michael Mullett’s brisk and reasonably
brief Martin Luther (London: Routledge, 2004).

There
were several things on my own mind as I dutifully meandered through
Wittenberg’s streets, and in the subsequent days while reading
Mullett’s biography. First, what did Luther believe about God and why
did those reforming beliefs leave Christianity permanently riven?
Second, Luther was excommunicated from the Catholic Church by Pope Leo
X in 1520, but how did he manage to avoid execution, the usual fate of
heretics? Finally, and a bit more diffusely, I was thinking of literary
scholar Terry Eagleton’s recent stinging criticisms of Richard Dawkins
and his current best-selling atheist manifesto, The God Delusion,
for being theologically illiterate. Does more attention to theology, I
wondered, enhance one’s views about theism? The unobviousness of the
answers is worth some meditation, if not a full-fledged spiritual tract.

Although
Lutheran hagiography makes much of the reformer’s peasant antecendents,
and Luther himself insisted, “I am the son of a peasant,” in fact he
was born in 1483 into an upwardly mobile urban professional family. His
father Hans’ farming roots were quickly subsumed into his mother
Margarethe’s solidly burgher social class, where Luther’s father became
a mining industrialist and town councillor who had his portrait painted
late in life in one of those typical 16th century business pictures “as
an opulently fur-clad citizen” who “left a large sum of money in his
will.”

In psychologist Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther (1958),
in addition to conjectures about Luther’s potty training that
fascinated playwright John Osborne, the pioneering psychoanalytical
historian contributed to the Luther myth “a controversial hypothesis to
the effect that what emerged as young Luther’s difficulties with a
harsh and judgmental God were anchored in his clash with a violent and
censorious father.” The data is “teasingly scanty,” Mullett remarks,
but however dubious the sources, Luther’s mature image of humanity is
of beings rooted in indelible sin who can only be saved or “justified”
through a faith centered on the “grace” that Christ attained in his
Crucifixion. (By the by, for those obsessed with cloacal matters, a bit
of internet rummaging produces the news that Luther’s toilet was
discovered by a team of archeologists in 2004, attached to the Luther
House. I somehow missed it in my tour of the premises.)

What
we do know is that despite his father’s ambitions for Luther to pursue
a career in law, after taking a degree at Erfurt University, a
spiritually distraught Luther entered the severe Augustinian monastery
in Erfurt in 1505, was ordained as a priest two years later, and by the
second decade of the 1500s had been posted to Wittenberg University as
a theology professor. Despite an otherwise stormy career, he maintained
tenure there to the end of his life, lecturing on such Biblical works
as the Psalms and the letters of St. Paul, and taking advantage of that
relatively new-fangled technology known as printing to become one of
the first profs who literally saved himself from perishing by
publishing widely-distributed, best-selling manifestos, tracts,
lectures and translations, most notably that of the Bible into German.

Luther’s
theology is where things begin to get tricky. Whether rooted in his
extreme spiritual anxiety as a young man or in his bowel movements (or
both), the intellectual sources of Luther’s ideas are found in
Augustine, Paul, and the late-medieval anti-rationalist school within
the Catholic Church known as “nominalism.” Nominalism tended to reject
the rationalist theology of Thomas Aquinas and was in part what led to
Luther’s “championing of Scripture as the sole reliable source of
truth… arising from Nominalist suspicion of the efficacy of human
reason,” as Mullett puts it. “In place of Aristotle and the deductive
rationalising approaches that classic Scholastics such as St. Thomas
Aquinas built… Luther put Scripture in sole place as our guide to the
wisdom of God, and the whole Church should be ‘captive’ to it.” But
scripture, Mullett points out, is “itself subject to interpretation.”

The
interpretive emphasis that Luther developed is based on the concerns he
found in Augustine and Paul. Mullett describes Luther’s theological
touchstones as “the pervasiveness of sin, the weakness of the human
will and intellect and the utter need of sinners for God’s grace.” In
the texts of St. Paul, especially in Paul’s “Letter to the Romans,”
which Luther lectured on extensively at Wittenberg University and which
he treated as a “gospel,” Luther found “the basic lineaments of what
was to become the Reformation doctrine of salvation. This was that
justification comes to us solely by means of God’s grace without ‘good
works’, for the reason that our justification was won by Christ
crucified, making redundant any attempt on our part to secure our
justification by our own good deeds.” More would be added to that
doctrine, “drawing out some of the fuller logical consequences of
justification by faith, including divine predestination and the denial
of human free will.”

Despite
our intellectual and temporal distance from this sort of thinking,
especially if we’re secular humanists, part of what distressed Luther
about his own Catholic Church is thoroughly comprehensible to us,
namely, its corruption. One form that that corruption took was the
papally-authorized selling of “indulgences,” and the buying of them as
an act of “good works.” The purchased indulgences apparently
accelerated your trip to heaven’s gates, but more practically the
proceeds from the sale of these crass instruments of salvation produced
a monetary cut for peddler-monks, local bishops and princes, and
ultimately the Pope, as well as financing a variety of church projects,
including the building of the lavish St. Peter’s basilica in Rome. It
was the indulgence scandal that impelled Luther to write and post his
“95 Theses,” which were presented as an agenda for a university debate
that ultimately was about the state of the Roman Catholic Church.

How
Luther’s criticisms led to a series of public “disputations” over the
next three or four years, and his eventual excommunication is
historically understandable, even if the triangular political relations
between the Church, the Holy Roman Empire, and local German princes,
such as Luther’s protector, Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony, are a
complex tangle. When you throw in the Turkish military threat to Europe
in the 1500s, and how that limited the maneuvering room of both Pope
and Emperor in dealing with doctrinal rebellions such as Luther’s, the
politics become fascinating and offer a key to understanding the
development of modern Europe. What remains puzzling for us is the
theology.

To
make sense of the debate between “works” and “grace” through “faith,”
one has to buy into a host of spiritual presuppositions, starting with
belief in God and acceptance of the Biblical New Testament as
intellectually authoritative. To make matters worse, attempts to
investigate those suppositions by means of reason are met by resistance
to epistemological notions most of us take for granted, such as
evidence, contradiction, and sound arguments. In the end I don’t think
we can bracket off such insurmountable obstacles, and that’s why
theological arguments so often go nowhere. Still, if we want to say
something about issues like indulgences, relics, and the rest, it might
go something like this.

Immediately,
one wants to say: okay, the indulgences are blatantly corrupt and
buying special masses and other rituals on behalf of the dead to speed
them on their way from purgatory to paradise seems unlikely to be
effective, to say nothing of their being preposterous. But how about a
more moderate program of good works in one’s lifetime? Shouldn’t one’s
faith have some connection to how one behaves during one’s life? Why
insist that it’s all a matter of faith, and that good works have
nothing to do with it? Of course, that was a question that occurred to
other 16th century theologians, such as Luther’s successor, Melancthon,
who by 1530 was offering compromise formulas on doctrine in an effort
to effect ecumenical peace.

Or
take another example that touches on philosophical issues, the debate
about free will between Luther and Europe’s leading humanist scholar,
Erasmus, that took place in the mid-to-late 1520s. Erasmus, a Catholic
reformer himself, cited various Biblical and Church Father sources
suggesting that God gives humans a measure of choice that helps
determine their post-worldly fates. “Luther’s position,” Mullett
explains, “was the direct opposite: men and women have no
free will and their ultimate fates are decided by predestination.” You
can see Luther’s logic: if humans have free will, then God’s
omniscience is imperfect, and since the conception of God includes
absolute foreknowledge, power and beneficence among his prime
attributes, free will would imply human independence and a less than
perfect God. But on the other hand: if God knows and prejudges all,
what’s the point of the whole game, why bother to have created humans
in the first place, especially the sort of humans who are able to argue
about whether or not they have free will?

Of
course, all of this looks nutty to us postmoderns. But perhaps one
reason for not dismissing that now obscure debate out of hand is that
it has some connection to questions that still interest us about the
nature of human beings, and the issue of free will, now stripped of its
theological trappings. We still want to know what human beings are like
and whether we can affect both our lives and the evolution of human
consciousness, which we now understand in Darwinian terms. What’s more,
the notion of humans tainted by a kind of Original Sin continues to
enjoy widespread popular acceptance, whether the nature of that “sin”
is spiritual or “hardwired” into the evolutionary nature of the human
beast in terms of aggression, greed, and selfishness.

A
century before Luther’s challenge to the Church, the Czech reformer Jan
Hus advanced similar doctrinal views, only to be executed as a heretic.
The question of how Luther escaped Hus’s fate is an easier question to
answer than the theological puzzles. Certainly, Luther’s survival
wasn’t for lack of effort on the Church’s part to permanently silence
the German cleric. One of the factors that made it hard to shut him up
was the emergence of printing press technology which ensured that the
latest blast from Luther’s trumpet, whether in German or Latin,
depending on his intended audience, would soon be heard everywhere in
Europe. Luther is sometimes called “the first media heretic,” and it’s
clear that his access to the press was a vital factor in his survival.

A
more immediate determining factor was political protection. What
followed Luther’s “95 Theses,” whose dissemination in printed form
turned them into a European sensation, was a series of debates and de facto
court trials—at Heidelberg, Augsburg, and Leipzig—that resulted in Pope
Leo X’s excommunication of Luther by papal order, and Luther’s
spectacular public burning of Leo’s Papal Bull in Wittenberg in 1520.
The next year Luther appeared before Emperor Charles V in the Rhineland
city of Worms and refused to recant, allegedly and famously declaring,
“Here I stand. I can do no other.” Luther was condemned, and his arrest
ordered, which, if it had been carried out, would have inexorably led
to a trial in Rome and execution.

Instead,
Luther was spirited away into protective custody in Wartburg Castle by
his prince, Elector Frederick. In the economic and military perils
facing Church and Empire, Frederick had enough political maneuvering
room that even such superior forces were loathe to lay a hand on the
heretic under his custodial cloak. Why exactly Frederick would want to
shelter Luther and his views is not entirely clear from Mullett’s
account, but is obviously connected to the desire of the German princes
for relative political autonomy within a fractious empire.

While
Luther was in temporary exile in a writing room pictured on my lately
acquired mousepad, and despite his remark that “I write without
interruption,” in fact he had to break off his literary labours in
order to attend to various outbreaks of doctrinal dispute among his
followers. He slipped back into Wittenberg in 1522 to quell the
unorthodoxies of various over-zealous radical followers. Of course,
once “reforms” had begun to turn into “Reformation,” it was inevitable
that the newly established Protestants (the word first came into usage
in 1529) would themselves be fissiparous.

Luther
was soon bitterly disputing the Swiss reformer Zwingli over such arcane
matters as the presence of Christ in the Communion bread—did Jesus
literally mean “This is my body” when he broke the bread or was one
spiritually safe in treating Communion as a symbolic recollection of
the Last Supper? More immediately, Luther had to respond to the
radicalism of Father Thomas Muntzer, who was soon leading a
proto-communist Peasants’ Rebellion that threatened the order of German
princes as well as the higher orders of Empire and Church. Although
Luther initially took a moderate position on peasant unrest, he soon
vituperatively denounced the revolt against secular authority, which
was brutally put down by force of arms and Muntzer’s execution as a
heretic in 1525. Again, it’s not quite clear from Mullett’s biography
how much Luther’s conservative defense of the princely order benefited
his survival and his institutional ambitions. In any case, Luther did
survive and the rest is pretty much institutional history: the
establishment of a Lutheran Church and subsequently, a plethora of
Protestant denominations, from Calvinists to the downright doctrinally
zany Mormons.

The
ritual changes in Protestantism are clear enough. Lutheranism meant,
among other things, the dissolution of papal absolutism, services in
the local vernacular language (which meant, in Germany, Luther’s
translation of the Bible into German), and the end of priestly celibacy
(Luther married in 1525 and soon fathered a brood of children). It’s
often argued that one of the things Luther did was to spiritually
liberate people by proposing what amounted to an individual,
democratic, personal relationship between worshippers and God, and that
this liberation is itself one of founding themes of modernism. Well,
maybe that’s so in theory, but in 16th century everyday reality,
princes and pastors still largely determined religious belief and the
forms it took. As for Luther himself, in his later years (he died in
1546, at 62) he became increasingly dogmatic, viciously anti-semitic,
and steadfastly resistant to efforts at reconciliation with the
Catholic Church.

Understandably,
the Wittenberg tourist bureau and sundry other civic agencies are about
to launch a “Reformation Decade” to mark the 500th anniversary in 2017
of Luther’s posting of the “95 Theses” on the doors of the castle
church. There will be tours, services, festivals, and a series of
academic colloquia to revisit the Reformation. Maybe they’ll even
invite Oxford professor Richard Dawkins to come along and propose a New
Reformation that would discourage us from knocking on heaven’s door, on
the grounds that the whole thing is a delusion. In the meantime, I’ll
hang onto my Luther mousepad to inspire my faith that I can write
without interruption.

.

Berlin, April 17, 2007.

.

Vacations are a popular topic of discussion among Canadians,
whether it’s due to the long winters, the humid summers, or the simple desire
to get away from it all. Some people, when imaging their ideal vacations,
conjure up images of sunny beaches, tropical islands, and other relaxing
environs. Others might prefer cultural landmarks, major international
metropolises, or destinations of historical importance. I prefer highways.

In a time where the automobile is rightly viewed either as a
necessary means of transportation or a quite unnecessary evil that pollutes and
diverts resources better spent on public transit, this probably doesn’t make
much sense. They are sentiments more at home in the 1950s and 1960s, when
society was still in love with the car and, in many cases, people were quite in
love with them too. I’m not a big car lover either, to tell you the truth, but
I’d still take a day on the highway over one at the beach any day.

I’m not talking about the 401 or the Queen
Elizabeth Way, mind you. I’m not even referring to
the Autobahn, although I wouldn’t mind paying it a visit one day soon. I’m
talking about the two-lane highways, most of which were built in the early to
mid 20^th century, that today serve to connect small towns with other
smaller towns but which, in their day, were the only way to get between big
cities. Most of these have been rendered obsolete by their larger cousins,
those numbingly impersonal superhighways that are differentiated only by the
number of lanes they feature and the speeds that they permit. That irrelevance,
however, is what makes them so interesting.

These old highways are, first and foremost, a compelling
history lesson. If anyone doubts that small town life in Canada
is dying they only need to visit any of the small towns that are connected by
an old highway. Most of these clearly enjoyed better days, with humble
residential districts and quaint downtowns that have been boarded up, closed
down, and in some cases wiped right off the map. The influence of the car is
unavoidable, too, as the most common sight along the side of these highways is
the defunct gas station, which actually outnumber functioning ones by a
substantial margin. Hubcap stores, another anomaly of a bygone age that you can
only find on the sides of these highways, add yet more texture to this mosaic.

Motels, not franchised ones like Super 8 and Comfort but
genuine, Psycho-quality motels like the Pond Motel in Carleton Place that is
literally a low-rise and gravel parking lot planted next to a swampy, grey
pond, theoretically offer respite for you and your fellow travelers. Defunct
rail-yards, empty commercial plazas, and curiously prosperous bingo halls with
information billboards like the one in Norwood that reads “Norwood loves you, Glenda” round out a landscape that, for a city
dweller like myself, is as foreign as the moon itself.

Like the moon, these highways can be a dangerous and
forbidding landscape. On superhighways like the 401, if you fall asleep at the
wheel you’re gently reminded of the task at hand – driving – by the dull
shuddering produced when your wheels cross the grooves that line the sides of
all major highways. On small highways, falling asleep at the wheel is often a
death sentence, and for that reason it happens much less frequently. The roads
are also far less linear, a result of the fact that when they were built their
engineers couldn’t blast their way through the landscape as they do today.
Instead, they’re defined by the shape of the land they traverse, by its twists
and turns, its gentle inclines and declines, that together making driving a
more challenging, more dangerous, but also eminently more enjoyable experience.

But the best part of these roads, aside from their
ever-changing pitch and the seedy motels and roadside hubcap stores
that frame
them, is their inescapably social character. That probably sounds like
an odd
way to describe a road, not unlike describing a cat as tall or a house
as
friendly, but it makes perfect sense once you’ve driven one of these old highways. On major
highways,
driving has been deliberately re-cast as a purely mechanistic
operation, an
exercise in getting from point A to point B. On an old highway, on the
other
hand, driving is a team sport. The police, of course, are the other
team, and
these old highways encourage a kind of fraternal co-operation that
would make an elementary school teacher proud. It is common for drivers
to reach an unspoken agreement
to share the burden of leading the pack, which exposes the lead car to
the
dangers of a speed trap or a police car laying in wait. This risk is, however,
mitigated by the requirement, observed by virtually every car on these
older
highways, to flash oncoming drivers with your high-beams as a friendly
warning
that a cop is ahead. I’ve tried doing this on major highways and have
received
nothing but puzzled looks and, occasionally, honks of frustration from
drivers
who must think I’m trying to blind them.

My favourite old highways in Canada,
for what it’s worth, are the Crow’s Nest Highway linking Hope and Penticton
in British Columbia and Highway 7
connecting Ottawa and Peterborough
in Ontario. The Crow’s Nest,
which was rendered obsolete by the infamous Coquihalla toll highway, clings to
the side of the Pacific Coast mountains as it winds up and down through snowy
passes, alongside creeks, and through mining towns, anchored centrally by – for
my family, at least – the Mr. Frosty restaurant in Princeton. The last time I
drove the Crow’s Nest, I was crestfallen to see that the Mr. Frosty had been
replaced by an antique store, driven out of business by the Tastee Freeze
franchise that had been planted across the street, and I’ve made a point of
taking the Coquihalla, as dull and impersonal as it is, every since. In Ontario,
I recently discovered Highway 7 after years of taking the 401 from Ottawa
to Toronto, and unless I find
myself in the middle of a blizzard I’ll never the seven’s big brother again. It
is, in the truest sense of the term, a pleasant Sunday drive, even if it takes
an extra hour or two. If anything, that’s part of the fun.

Cars are rapidly becoming the cigarettes of the 21^st
century, a socially and culturally stigmatized product whose users must pay a
variety of financial and social penalties. While drivers haven’t had to face the kind of overzealous social bullying
that smokers have been subjected to in North America in
the past few years, their day in that unpleasant spotlight is rapidly approaching. This is
to the good, I think, if only because it’s clear that cars have played a major
role in global warming, a threat far more lethal than second-hand smoke could
ever be. The downside is that, like my beloved Crow’s Nest Highway, the small
highways that crisscross our country are about to disappear, whether as a
result of purposeful planning or through simple neglect. They are both
monuments to our past, when drivers shared a social bond and the term road rage
didn’t exist, and museums of alternately endearing and appalling small town
eccentricities. Get out there and enjoy them before it’s too late.

Toronto, January 29th, 2007 – 1,128 w.

The hotel itself is about 150 metres away from the statue, but you can’t quite get to the statue from the hotel, because the statue stands in the middle of a traffic circle, surrounded on all four sides by asphalt and speeding cars and trucks. And unlike the statue, which will last at least thirty years before it needs to be replaced—it probably is meant to represent the principle of balance in flight (along with how primitive people used to be before the corporations took control and filled the world with black box technology)–the hotel is a monument to ICAD-based postmodernist utility, which is to say, to the swift cycle of short-term profit, and to the ersatz.

The hotel exterior predictably quotes several clichés of Italian/Roman architecture. Romanesque arches run diagonally up the walls, and are capped in terra-cotta brick likely no more than a few centimetres in depth. On the building’s lower side, white marble slabs are faked: prefab concrete painted bone white. Neither gesture fools the eye beyond a casual glance. To fake residential hominess, the glazing is broken up into 1.5 metre squares on the main floor, and in the rooms above, to a smaller grid.

The entire building is a sealed environment. The room windows don’t open, and the environmental controls you can manipulate are minimal: low/medium/high on the air conditioner, with no dimmers on the lights. That said, the controls loom anyway. The air conditioner hums, as do the high-efficiency fluorescents, the smoke detector blinks to remind you not to smoke or set the room on fire, and the nozzle high on the wall warns you that all your elecronics will get soaked if you do. The windows are double-glazed, sealed low E and set too high on the wall to look out of comfortably.

The entire building, broad-brush and in the details, reveals the priorities of the corporations it is meant to serve. It is, first of all, designed to be efficient to its owners. Hence the sealed air system, the faked building materials and built-in obsolescence—except in the main-floor areas where corporate business is carried on and where the marble splendour of the meeting rooms, bars, and lobby are conspicuous. The marble used isn’t noble marble, just beige enough to stain everything with the golden tonalities that come from back-lighting the marble with halogens.

It isn’t until one reaches the rooms that this fades. I guess one is supposed to be dazzled by then, or too drunk, either on bar scotch or corporate slogans, to notice that the marble in the bathroom and on the countertops is fake. But the reality is that the rooms are appointed so cheaply that you could be in a slightly uppity motel on the outskirts of Vernon, B.C. and not know the difference.

This is only disorienting if you’re paying attention—and haven’t yet realized that this is the cultural goal of the corporations: to land you nowhere, even when you’re at the airport of one of the world’s most particular cities.

Shannon

While hiking in the mountains in a part of Canada called the Kootenays a young woman told the young man she was with that when she died she wanted her ashes to be strewn in the alpine streamlet beside which they were walking. Small cutthroat trout darted in and out of the shadows created by the streamlet’s overhanging banks which were composed of thick shrub growth heather and alpine mosses and the streamlet flowed through a valley of the kind left by glaciers that, when they recede (as they did from this valley approximately twelve thousand years ago) feed a small lake, called a tarn. Over time, the tarn becomes separated from the glacier (its melting edge is called a “foot,”) the silt-laden waters of which continue to feed the tarn in the form of streamlets like the one beside which the young woman and her companion were walking. In spring, which is when trout spawn (at this altitude this means late June), the trout deposit eggs in miniature sandbanks where the current is swift enough to supply the eggs with a continuous flow of fresh water and not swift enough to wash the eggs away. In the place where the young woman wanted her ashes strewn the streamlet was less than a metre wide; if you straddled it your boots would sink to the ankles into the heather and moss on either bank, and your shadow would darken the water enough to give you a clearer view of the spawning cutthroat. It’s unclear how trout make it to these high glacial valleys (named cirques by geologists) and into the tarns which the glaciers leave behind and which gradually transform the cirques into lush alpine valleys. The creek along whose precipitous edges the man and the woman had hiked to reach this place is called Shannon, and the tarn-cum lake which it empties, and into which the streamlet where the woman wanted her ashes strewn flows, is called Shannon also.

Fountain

In Rainer Maria Rilke’s sonnet Römische Fontäne (Roman Fountain) the two bodies of water are not a glacier and a tarn-cum-alpine lake but two marble basins, one rising on a pillar out of the other. The water spews from the spout on top of the upper basin and spills over its marble rim into the lower one. Rilke uses an interesting image to describe this: the upper basin’s water quietly “speaks” while descending into the water of the one below which awaits it in silent response. The German word for this receptive silence is entgegenschweigend, which means “to silent in the other’s direction.” “To silent” is, in other words, a transitive verb. The lower, receptive, waiting water, “concurrently in its hollowed hand”, shows the upper waters (in reflection) the sky which, behind greenery and darkness, appears to the latter like a foreign substance.

In the first tercet, then, the upper water reclines “without homesickness” in the lower one’s “beautiful shell,” spreads itself lazily in concentric circles and only in the final tercet, dreamily and in sporadic droplets, lowers itself along strands of moss to the “final mirror” which causes the upper first basin to smile with transcendence. Here is my translation of the poem.

Two basins, one ascending from the other

out of an ancient rounded marble rim,

and from the topmost, water quietly inclining

t’ward water, still, awaiting it below,

sending its silence to the softly speaking one

and secretly, inside its hollowed hand,

describing sky behind greenery and darkness

as if referring to an unknown substance;

calm, expanding in the beautiful shell

in widening circles which express no homeward longing,

and sometimes, dreamily, in droplets

rappelling down along the mossy strands

toward the final mirror which from below

softly transforms its basin into smiles.

I did not realize until finishing the translation that it is not the waiting water in the second basin, but the arriving water from the first basin that “silences in the direction” of the second, which then “speaks” and shows the former the sky (which, in turn, waits “behind greenery and darkness”). The word gleichsam, which I initially translated as “concurrently,” can also in German mean, “as if.” “Sky,” in German, is Himmel, which means, also, Heaven. The word “homesickness,” it turns out, does not scan well.

Roman Names

The young man and the young woman married. The woman, who had grown up in Germany and had come to Canada initially to help her sister care for her young children, decided after a time that she loved the man and the new country enough to leave her homeland and immigrate. The two went on many trips into the British Columbia mountains, trips during which the young woman, who was at times a stolid hiker and usually walked behind the man while moving through the lower mountain reaches, became light-footed when she arrived at the treeline. She would bound ahead of the man then over talus and bared rock faces like a chamois and he would look at her far ahead, outlined and tiny against a granite ascent, and he would fall in love with her across the distance. The woman explained her lightfootedness by saying that when she reached treeline and could see far she felt lighter than air, and no longer feared the gravities and constrictions—fears, terrors, thoughts, enclosures, darkening clumps of language—which weighed down her daily valley life.

Rilke came into their lives again later when the woman, who had become a composer (and who had left the man to conduct her own life) asked the man to translate another poem by the German poet because she wanted to use it in a piece she was composing, called Für Dich, “For You.” Here is the translation the man prepared:

How shall I hold my soul so that it

does not touch yours? How shall I lift it

up over you so it reaches other things?

Oh, how I long to store my soul

with something dark and lost

in a foreign becalmed place that does not

vibrate when your depths vibrate.

But all that touches you and touches me

contracts us like a bow

that from two strings draws forth a single voice.

Upon which instrument are we two strung?

And who, pray, is the fiddler who holds us in his hand?

Oh sweetful song.

The man and the woman have a daughter, whom they raised together until the daughter was thirteen. The daughter went on hikes with her parents when she was small—even riding up once in a pack on her father’s back to a former tarn below Kokanee Glacier where her parents took turns changing her diapers as she lay on soft alpine heather and moss by a streamlet—and is now grown up and has two young sons whose names, some people say, sound Roman.

The word “Kokanee” comes from kikinee, a Shushwap (Interior Salish) First Nations word which refers to the small landlocked sockeye salmon that turn blood red in fall and spawn in the creeks feeding Kootenay and other lakes in the British Columbia Interior; it names also a species of red berry that grows in local mountain regions and resembles fish eggs. The word’s etymology is uncertain but it is said by some to derive from the sound kikinee bushes make when one walks through them.

1216 words

During the 1970s and 1980s, I spent parts of sixteen summers on Gabriola Island with my two sons, trying to teach them that there’s a world beyond television, telephones, and playground supervisors, and that’s it’s actually kind of fun to inhabit. Gabriola is the most northerly of B.C.’s Gulf Islands, a short ferry ride from Nanaimo. I chose the island for the obvious reasons—it is arguably the most beautiful of the Gulf Islands, with the sheltered sandy beaches of Gabriola Sands provincial park at the north end, and a wealth of sandstone moonscapes on the foreshore for much of the rest. The island’s interior, much of it now moderately developed, still managed to feel like a forested idyll, including the 7-kilometre stretch of sun-dappled road along the northeast side that is my favourite drive anywhere in the world. And it helped that the ferry ride to Nanaimo is relatively short when you run out of food or books.

I also liked the island for a less conventional reason: its unfriendliness. Visitors to Gabriola don’t have to suffer the artsy insularity of Galiano Island’s unfriendliness, or the elevated sense of self-worth found on Saltspring. Gabriola’s unfriendliness is a look-you-in-the-eye kind, indifference without hostility. Over those sixteen summers I spent close to a year there, and during that time I socialized with just two people—a doctor and his wife who owned a place a couple of properties up the beach from the cabin I rented. I noticed, over the years, that the full-time residents spent an excessive amount of energy squabbling with one another over nearly everything under the sun, which may explain their lack of interest in outsiders.

Since I went there to provide my sons with some media-free contact with nature and to do some reading and writing of my own, the solitude was completely welcome, as was the islanders’ utter lack of nosy curiosity. We were left in peace to swim in Pilot Bay , forage along the foreshores, dig clams, trap Dungeness crab. My sons developed a competent grasp of the natural world, and I read a lot of useful books, even if I didn’t write much of anything.

A two-day visit after a 14 year absence convinced me that nothing important has changed. Gabriola is still beautiful, and it is still a wonderfully unfriendly place to visit.

I was with my then six-year-old daughter, and we stayed at Surf Lodge, on the island’s north east coast. Surf Lodge sits just south of the not-so-famous Camp Miriam, where generations of good-natured but insular Jewish kids have learned that Zion isn’t everything—or at least that Gabriola Islanders don’t want to hear about Zion one way or another. The lodge itself is a miracle of accretive inattention to the rest of the world. The Internet hasn’t arrived, television is of minimal interest, and the last culinary advance to penetrate its kitchens is Teriyaki sauce.

I’d tried to contact the lodge before arriving, but the island’s group Internet site had shut down the page for it, probably due to some minor squabble with the site operators, although I couldn’t quite get anyone to admit that. Thus I arrived at the front door without a reservation, and simply asked the middle-aged woman poking around the water-parched front garden if there was a room available my daughter and I could stay in. She looked me over, decided I wasn’t a terrorist, and said, “I guess you can have Room #3.”

I told her that this was fine, that I knew the place and the island.

That didn’t interest her in the slightest. “If you’ve got a million dollars lying around,” she added, a propos of nothing, “You can buy the place. We’re getting tired of running it. Come back in an hour or so, and I’ll give you the room key.”

I took my daughter off to see some of the island’s many sights, and we didn’t return for three hours. No problem. In less than 15 minutes, we were checked in, unpacked, and perfectly content. Room # 3 turned out to be a jewel, with an 8×12 foot balcony overlooking the ocean. At $85 a night, it was more than reasonable even though one of the beds squeaked if you merely brushed against it, there was no television, and the one lamp in the room had only a 40 watt bulb in it. Wise to the island ways, I didn’t bother anyone for a brighter bulb. The next day I stopped into the store at the entrance to Gabriola Sands Park , and bought two.

Check-in had been as laconic as the initial conversation with the owner, save for an introduction to her slightly-addled Springer spaniel, who, she assured me, was fond of children albeit prone to jumping up on them and licking their faces. I had to ask about the restaurant hours and the use of the spacious lounge.

“Everything closes down around 10 PM ,” she said. “Except the bar. But we don’t lock the front door, so you can come and go as you please. Breakfast is 8:00 to 9:30 . The food’s okay, I guess.”

All of this turned out to be accurate and perfectly unexaggerated. The food was “okay”, although by the second day it became clear that the chef’s one gourmet condiment was teriyaki sauce. The first night’s special was Teriyaki Steak and Shrimp, which was, well, okay. On the second day it was Teriyaki tuna skewers, and an attempt to get them to serve it without either the teriyaki or the application of the restaurant grill met with simple incomprehension. That said, the addition of a drinkable house wine would have made for a more-than-pleasant dining experience. Despite his fixation, the chef knew how to do teriyaki, didn’t overcook either the steak or the prawns, and was competent with rice and vegetables. What else is there to want? A floor show?

There was a floor show, actually. It’s a permanent feature and perfect entertainment for small children. But it’s not run by Surf Lodge. It’s just across the road on the beach, which is sandstone and pocked and cratered like the moon by the tides. Everywhere you look, from low to mid-tide, are the aquariums. Some are basketball sized, and some are as large as four or five feet across. They’re barnacle encrusted, and they’re filled with sea anemones, small beach crabs, sculpins and various kinds of seaweed. After high tides, you can find a wild and unpredictable assortment of beach glass, starfish, cling-fish and sometimes even small Dungeness and rock crabs.

They’re everything a six-year-old could ask for, these aquariums, and if your head is on straight, they’re more than enough for full-grown adults. I had to pry my little daughter away from them to visit the big attractions on the island. She was content to exercise her Aristotelian nature within them, counting the different species and listening to their stories while she conducted experiments with their denizens. She particularly liked the anemones and the fact that they’re carnivores. We made a serious dent in the barnacle populations around several aquariums satisfying her curiosity about how and what anemones enjoy for lunch and dinner.

I didn’t mind the carnage. Barnacles are the most populous of the beaches fauna, hell on bare feet and anyway, about as interesting as a mob of over-testosteroned guys at a boxing match. If barnacles were human, they’d be transvestites with seven-foot penises, which is why they’ve remained stuck to rocks for 300 million years without evolving. And no, that isn’t one of the stories I told my daughter.

I told her lots of other stories as we fed the anemones and still more stories as we traipsed around the island. I showed her the rope swing at the head of Pilot Bay where we used to find her older brother’s border-collie lab cross hanging by its jaws every other day, snarling half-seriously at the only thing in the world it truly found offensive. I told her of the summer luminescence in the bay, of the crabs and clams and salmon I and her brothers collected or caught—and I ate alone while they munched on ham. But mostly we cruised the foreshore, where she renamed nearly every landmark I couldn’t attach a name to.

We did stop at the cabin where her brothers and I used to stay each year, now rebuilt by a charming couple of stained-glass artists who knew exactly who I was and were more hospitable than anyone had been in the entire 16 years I came to the island. They were, I realized halfway through the visit, still outsiders on the island, and grateful for the human contact. Their renovation treated the cabin with considerable sensitivity, and that was more than enough to get me onside. Midway through the century, the locals will probably accept them, too.

My point in all this, if there is one, is that Gabriola Island is a lovely and unique place to visit, and Surf Lodge is a destination worth considering. But only if you understand that half of the fun isn’t going to be meeting people.

July 2006, 1537 w .

Marshall McLuhan’s vision of electronically-connected community hasn’t worked out the way he envisioned, and the Global Village isn’t what his urban-based proselytizing followers claim it is. It has become a subsystem of the global marketplace. Nice for wealthy interactives living in big cities, but for most people in the hinterlands–the people who were supposed to reap its greatest benefits–it’s Willow River.

Fifty years ago, Willow River, a small community about thirty kilometers east of Prince George, B.C. was my idea of paradise. About 300 people lived in its orderly grid of streets, the men worked at the local sawmill and the women did their shopping at the general store at the northeast corner of the street grid. Willow River had its own community hall and baseball diamond, people kept their small houses painted, gave up large portions of their yards to vegetable gardens, and life was coherent and good, if not over-supplied with consumer luxuries or, on some Saturday nights, any overabundance of peace and goodwill.

My family occasionally picnicked out there, drawn by the orderliness of the picnic grounds and the unspoiled beauty of the Willow River, which had its share of elusive Dolly Varden trout and a wealth of sandbars to play on. In the heat of late summer, the water even grew warm enough to swim in—if you weren’t afraid of being swept downriver into a rocky canyon, and your parents were less than completely crazed with the urge to supervise. I swam there a few times—safely, since I’m writing this—but what I liked most about Willow River was its baseball team, the Willow River Red Sox. The team, pulled together from locals—most of them loggers along with a few ringers brought in by the millowners—wore the same red-and-white uniforms as the Boston Red Sox. I showed up for every game they played in Prince George, certain they would clobber the local team. More often than not, they did.

Last week I revisited Willow River. The small grid of streets was intact, and the general store, miraculously, was still open. Everything else was changed, and not for the better. It felt like a ghost town-in-the-making, the houses rundown, the vegetable gardens grown over with couch grass or submerged by the hulks of logging equipment and wrecked cars abandoned to the elements. The surrounding forests, I can testify from close experience, are nearly as empty as the town, a patchwork of clearcuts and half-hearted reforestation, much of that now doomed lodge-pole pines the pine beetle is exterminating across the north. Even the picturesque bridge that crossed the Willow River is gone, the victim of a too-heavy logging truck. In its place is a single-lane Bailey bridge no one seems too interested in replacing with a permanent structure now that the timber is gone. The only wood going through Willow River today goes through on the train, car after car of plastic-covered spaghetti bundled by Canfor and its subsidiaries for the global marketplace. The only thing new in Willow River, actually, is a slightly cheesy softball diamond at the top of the street grid. The old baseball diamond is gone.

In 1997 the RCMP descended on Willow River to break up a child pornography ring run by a local couple. They were eventually convicted of 19 counts between them, and packed off to jail, the husband as a dangerous offender. But somehow the convictions didn’t make Willow River in 2005 feel like a safe, good place to live. It felt demoralized, empty, squalid. Most of the houses seemed deserted, and the locals that were out and about didn’t seem eager to make eye contact.

I stopped into the general store to see if things were any better there. At first glance the store seemed unchanged—spacious, with bare wooden floors and rafters. Then I noticed it wasn’t exactly thronging with customers, and the shelves were more sparsely stocked than I remembered. At the back a couple of older men were sitting at a table drinking Nescafe, the air around them blue with cigarette smoke. When they saw I was a stranger, they scrambled to hide the astrays. Eventually a middle-aged woman appeared from the back room, and ambled up to the cash register to ask if there was anything I needed help with. I bought a bag of potato chips and a Coke, and asked how things were around town.

She shrugged. “About as good as you can expect these days, I guess.”

I pointed to the souvenir T-shirts hanging in the window. “Too bad you don’t have a Willow River Red Sox hat,” I said. “They were my favourite team when I was a kid.”

“Oh yeah,” she said, mildly interested. “I’ve heard old-timers talk about them. By the time my husband and I bought the store—we’ve been here since 1987—they were long gone by then. A lot of things are gone.”

She didn’t seem distraught about living in Willow River. She was, actually, more cheerfully matter-of-fact than anything. We chatted for a while and then I asked her the question that had been on my mind since I walked in the door: “What happened out here, anyway? The town’s deserted.”

Another shrug. “Well,” she said, “the mill closed, so a lot of the people here aren’t working anymore. They’re here because they can’t afford to live in Prince George. Maybe a few old-timers are still around.”

“This used to be a lively little town. I didn’t see anyone out on the streets.”

She laughed. “They’ve all got satellite TV. They’re doing what everyone out in the country does nowadays. They’re watching television.”

Apr. 7, 2005

SEPTEMBER 7, 2004

Keet Seel. Or Kee Tseel, as the Navajo people say its name. Meaning Scattered Shards. I have long dreamed of visiting this Anasazi ruin, the only explored one in the southwestern United States where no renovations have been made. Only a bit of necessary stabilization. Otherwise, the site is much as it was in 1895 when Richard Wetherill first reported it to white America. Perhaps much as it was in the late 13th century when it was last inhabited by those who built it. Later, of course, the Indian people of the Four Corners area—Navajo and Hopi, Paiute and Ute, knew of its existence. For the Navajo, who live in the immediate vicinity, visiting these ruins where the ancient peoples lived was considered off limits—something akin to entering a person’s house without permission. They believed that the people’s spirits remained, and they would be imposing. Yet today it is they who show the site to those intrepid enough to make the 18-mile roundtrip hike. Facing the inevitability of strangers, perhaps they know their negotiation allows for a sharing of this ancient place even as it keeps the secrets safe.

My dreams of hiking to Keet Seel didn’t seem likely to materialize. There is no potable water in this canyon, and so one must carry one’s own: a suggested gallon (eight pounds) per day. Knowing I wouldn’t be able to hike 18 miles in a day, I would have to make the trip in two—necessitating also carrying a sleeping bag, minimal food, rain gear, perhaps even a tent. At my age and with emphysema, unless I had help I wasn’t likely to realize my desire. This past spring, my dear friend Mark Behr and I were talking—I was telling him my dream—and without hesitation he offered to “carry my water to Keet Seel.” Of course he carried much more than only my water.

Based on Mark’s offer, some months back I made our reservation. Hikes to Keet Seel are scheduled from Memorial Day weekend to early or mid September, depending on interest. They allow up to 20 people a day to visit the site, 5 at a time to enter the ruin. The initial idea was that Mark, Barbara and I would do the hike together. But Barbara decided it was too much for her. Her first inclination was to stay home, but I prevailed upon her to accompany us: make another shorter hike or simply spend the two days resting and sketching. When I convinced her it didn’t have to be an either/or proposition, she agreed to come along. More recently, our two friends Peg Jennings and Shana Swiss decided to join us. Peg would hike to Keet Seel with Mark and me; Shana, who also didn’t feel up to such a strenuous endeavor, would spend the two days with Barbara.

Much of the summer I have been reading everything I could find about Keet Seel. It isn’t much. As relatively few people have visited the site, and fewer still are writers or moved to write about it, there isn’t much available. I liked best the few pages devoted to the place which appear in David Roberts’ Searching for the Old Ones.

Friday night Mark drove down from Santa Fe. We had dinner together, our excitement about the impending adventure mounting. He spent the night, and Peg and Shana arrived early Saturday morning. We caravanned to the Kayenta area, dropped our things at the Wetherill Inn in that small crossroads community, then continued on the additional 30 miles west to Navajo National Monument where we were required to attend an orientation meeting at 4 that afternoon. The country between Albuquerque and this part of northern Arizona is spectacular, but it rained almost continuously on our way up: a heavy and seemingly endless rain beneath a blackened sky which had us fearful of bad weather for our hike. We would luck out with two perfect days.

The orientation was interesting. Three other hikers attended it with us. A middle-aged park volunteer named John explained the rigors of the hike. A fairly good slide show gave us some idea of what the terrain would be like, how to follow the cairns along the route, and the protocol to observe when we arrived. We would drop our backpacks at the primitive camp ground, then continue for another quarter mile to a Hogan-shaped shack where a Navajo guide would be waiting. Observing Navajo manners, we would wait at the shack’s gate and make some sort of noise—a cough or other sound—to announce our presence. The guide would then usher us past the gate to a small two-table picnic area where we would wait for him to take us through the site.

John told us that we were special for attempting this hike. He said that since Keet Seel’s discovery by Wetherill in 1895 fewer people have been to the site than visit Mesa Verde’s Cliff Palace in a single day. He warned us of the rugged terrain, told us to take at least a gallon of water per person per day (although the river was flowing and we would have to cross it many times, it has become so polluted by cattle and other animals that they do not even recommend purification or iodine tablets) and that we could leave some of it hidden along the route to be retrieved on our way out. Like most orientation meetings, though, this one did little to prepare us for the real difficulties we would face.

Sunday morning we all awoke electric with anticipation. Barbara and Shana had decided to make the shorter, six-mile roundtrip hike into Betatakin (the other ruin one can visit at Navajo National Monument). They would set off with a ranger and a group of 25 visitors around 8:30. Mark, Peg and I were free to start hiking as soon as it got light. We were on the trail by 7:30.

At the Keet Seel parking lot we hoisted our packs and set off. Mark was carrying 60 pounds: all his gear plus my water, sleeping bag, and a tent for the three of us in case of rain. Peg carried 35, probably the minimum a person responsible for her own gear would have to carry. She took all our food, which I had prepared in Albuquerque. I hiked with a pitiful 20 pounds: my camera, about half my water, and a few personal items. A small pack, but at this point in my life pretty near the limit of my capabilities.

For the first mile, the trail (carved in the 1930s) follows the gentle ups and downs of a country road. Then one begins the descent into Tsegi (pronounced Say) Canyon: a thousand-foot drop over about another mile. This descent is particularly rugged—two series of steep switch-backs followed by a dramatic sand dune which, coming back up, proved to be infinitely more difficult than the switchbacks. At the canyon floor one immediately crosses the river—the first of hundreds of crossings avoiding large patches of treacherous quicksand and trying not to get one’s boots too full of red muddy water—and climbs the opposite bank to begin what I mistakenly believed would be the easier part of the hike.

Almost immediately one leaves Tsegi and enters Keet Seel Canyon. The trail, sometimes easy to follow and at other times requiring some trail-finding skill, moves back and forth across the river, alternating between sandy terrain and harder packed earth. There are many places where dramatic erosion has torn immense portions of the trail away, forcing alternate routes that are anything but easy. Sometimes one is climbing high up the banks on either side, sometimes along narrow ledges, always burdened by the weight of the pack and the relentless desert sun. We were actually quite fortunate with the weather. Aside from no rain, we enjoyed an average temperature of around 80 degrees, with a gentle cooling breeze and fairly long stretches of shade. This of course meant that we were drinking less water than anticipated. We ended up realizing we had carried a gallon per person per day, and only needed about half that.

At the orientation meeting we had been told that this hike can be made in three to four hours. It took us six—and seven coming out. Early on, a lone woman passed us. Judging from the fact that she carried only a small day pack, we knew she would be making the 18 miles in one day. Three more heavily-loaded hikers passed us at other times, two headed in our direction and one coming out. The latter stopped to chat a bit. He was from Tucson, he told us, and this was his fourth time to Keet Seel. He had a word of advice. About a mile and a half before our destination, he said, we would see a sign pointing us up to a high trail due to recent flooding and quicksand. We shouldn’t heed the sign, he advised, because the water level had gone down since the last rain and we’d find the river route shorter and easier. We’d have to scramble around a couple of water falls, but by walking in the river we could cut off about half a mile.

We decided to follow the Tucson man’s advice. After a stop to lunch on chicken, potato, cheese and chili poblano wraps, and a couple of other rest stops, we came to the aforementioned sign and made the decision to stay in the river instead of going up to the first mesa level. After an hour or so of sloshing through muddy water and zigzagging this way and that, we suddenly had no idea where the trail went. Mark left his pack and the two of us and set out on his own to investigate. I appreciated his wilderness skills, honed throughout his childhood in the southern African bush. Ten minutes or so later he returned, having found footprints leading up and over another few rises to the Gamble Oak grove where the primitive camp site was located.

We staggered up the last steep ascent, bone weary, the three of us. Removing our packs was sheer joy. Near the campsite a Phoenix Composting Toilet proved to be one of the most amazing amenities I’ve experienced in the wild: an absolutely spotless two cubicle structure with ample toilet paper, a non-water hand-washing device and a solar panel that kept it toasty well into late afternoon. There was no one else at the site when we arrived, so we chose a spot for our little group, dumped our packs, and wandered a bit further into the grove of trees. Suddenly, across the river, we caught our first glimpse of Keet Seel: just a corner of the ruin visible on the opposite side of the river in the near distance.

After sitting for a few moments, changing shoes and such, we ventured back down the steep hill and across the river to breach the additional quarter mile to the ranger’s shack. As advised, we waited politely at the gate until a thirty-something Navajo man emerged and waved us forward. He introduced himself as Tony Holiday, and welcomed us to the site. “Go on over and have a seat in the picnic area,” he said, “and I’ll be over in a little.”

Here my U.S. American 21st century time anxiety caught up with me and, although pretending patience on the outside, inside I wanted nothing more than to enter the ruin. After about ten minutes, Tony joined us at the picnic site. Here there was another Phoenix Composting Toilet, two wooden tables with their long benches, and a large wooden box to keep visitors’ packs from prying animals should anyone have brought his or hers this far. Tony sat with us in the Navajo way, inquiring about our hike and telling us—the second time in two days—how special we were for having braved this rugged terrain and come this far. After chatting for ten or fifteen minutes he said: “Well, if you’re ready let’s go.”

We followed Tony along a narrow path leading from the picnic area to the ruin. In less than 100 feet the trees—also Gamble Oaks—cleared and it was there before us: a great alcove in the canyon wall filled with more than 160 living rooms, grain storage places, and kivas on several different levels. Contrary to other Anasazi sites in the area, this one gives the impression that the people only just left. Original pottery, utensils, yucca rope, grinding stones and corn husks are all right there where once they were the items of daily life. Some 150 people lived at Keet Seel for a single generation: approximately 50 years between 1230 and 1286. Then, like the other Anasazi in the area, they vanished. Most theories believe they became the modern-day Pueblo Indians.

At the base of the great ruin we stood and talked for a while. Tony indicated the small amount of land rent by a large ravine that extended out from the front of the site. The ravine was due to recent erosion, he said; this small delta was where the people once farmed—as well as on the mesa top. They would have cultivated corn, beans, squash and other crops. I began to imagine them going about their daily lives, farming their food, crafting the implements they needed, caring for their children, interacting with one another. His words hit the alcove walls, forming a series of echoes that gave them a strange resonance.

Tony explained that he has worked in several of the area’s parks, but that this is his favorite site. He was born and grew up in Monument Valley, just to the north. His grandparents still live there. Traditionalists, they didn’t want him to take visitors into Keet Seel. But eventually his grandfather came to understand his love of this place and his desire to share it with those brave enough to make the pilgrimage. At the beginning of each summer season, he does a ceremony for his grandson, aimed at informing the spirits who still inhabit this place that he and his guests mean them no harm. That they will enter respectfully and leave everything as they found it. At the end of the season another ceremony is performed, to make sure nothing negative comes with him back to his family and others living now.

We entered respectfully. The ascent into the ruin itself is by way of a 70-foot ladder bolted to the rock: one of the very few renovations and necessary to allow those of us unable to navigate foot- and hand-holds on an almost vertical rock face. Even with the ladder, the entrance for me (and also for Mark, as it turns out) was extremely difficult. Mark sky dives without a problem, but suffers fear of heights and vertigo in man-made structures of such a nature. I too suffer from fear of heights and vertigo. I made my way up that ladder one foot at a time, my eyes riveted on the rung and the wall, refusing to look either up or down. Having come this far, I wasn’t about to let fear defeat me. Coming down was even more difficult, as keeping my eyes on each rung necessarily meant that I caught sight of the ground far below. Tony of course scampered up, perfectly upright and without using his hands. Later, when we descended, he did so faced forward—as if he were running down a flight of stairs.

At the ladder’s top one had to make a small leap onto the packed earth path that fronted the length of the ruin. One very long white fir log had been left across the entrance of the ruin proper; perhaps left by the last family to depart, perhaps left by Wetherill, no one really knows. Tony told us that white fir don’t grow in the vicinity, and that the tree-ring dating on this particular log didn’t match the master chart for the area. On our hike out, though, we noticed a large white fir tree dead but still in the ground, leaning against the canyon wall. (One book describes this log as Douglas Fir, but it is really White Fir.) So who knows from where they brought this giant trunk. One of the unique features of this ruin is the fairly wide “avenue” or path that fronts the entire alcove.

Here we were in the ruin itself. Intact rooms showed signs of cooking fires. Beautifully crafted pots sat atop a low wall. Strange pictographs—like none I have seen before—were painted in dark blue, brown, red and cream low on a ceiling to our left. One portrays a man or woman in flight. Others depict birds I later understood must be turkeys. Original timbers formed room corners. Beautifully designed lintels graced doors and windows. Pot shards lay everywhere: hundreds or thousands of them. Some were large, giving one a fairly good idea of the vessel from which it came. Other implements abounded as well: arrow heads, grinding stones, even rope. Piles of human excrement have even been found at Kee Tseel, and have been processed to determine what these people ate. One room still has its original roof: timber, twigs, mud, straw. Eight hundred years half covering the room below.

Tony’s narrative was careful and admiring. Although he leads as many tours a day as there are groups of up to five visitors to the site, and surely includes the same basic information in all, at no time did he seem to be speaking from a script. He answered our questions and encouraged us to ask all we wished. When faced with questions about specifics, he emphasized the fact that the only way to know who these people were and how they lived would have been to have been here when they inhabited this place. All speculation is simply that: speculation.

We spent a couple of hours at the site, climbing other shorter ladders, entering rooms, gazing in admiration at the things these people made and left. I have never felt so close to the Anasazi culture. Keet Seel has a very different feel about it than the reconstructed ruins at Chaco, Mesa Verde, Hovenweep, Salmon, and along the San Juan River.

After we had experienced the ruin, we thanked Tony for his time and recrossed the river to the camp ground where we had left our packs. It was late afternoon by now. We were dead tired. We set up Mark’s small tent just in case it rained during the night, spread our pads and sleeping bags out on the ground beside it, and ate an early dinner: more wraps, some lemon bars, dried fruit and nuts. We didn’t think our remaining wraps would be safe to eat the following day—having been in our packs and thus lacking refrigeration all this time—so Mark gathered up a small offering of unneeded food and took it back to Tony’s Hogan: half generosity, half wanting to get rid of any unnecessary weight.

That night I slept well. Even getting up to go to the Phoenix Composting toilet my usual couple of times during the night was not a problem. Through the oak canopy the sky was dotted with stars, bright as they are far from city lights. The moon was half full. The temperature descended to around 38 or 40, but I was warm in my sleeping bag. Although we’d hoped to get a 6 a.m. start out the following morning, it was 6:45 when we woke. We packed up the tent and the rest of our gear, and began the long trek out of the canyons.

This time we decided to try the high trail rather than slosh through the river our first mile and a half. At the beginning, this choice seemed easier. But we soon came to a long stretch that had only recently eroded, forcing us higher onto a makeshift path that wound its way up and over and up again and over, quickly wearing us all out. Finally the detour rejoined the original trail and we were on solid footing once more. On and on we walked, counting off the half-miles each time we’d come to a slender white marker. The river level had gone down a bit, but the crossings were still numerous and chancy. The fields were alive with wild flowers: mostly great expanses of a shoulder-high plant covered with brilliant yellow flowers; also white morning primroses, red blossoms and purple. Sage and wild grasses mixed with the flowers. Red cliffs rose on either side of the river.

We saw many different kinds of tracks in the soft mud: lots of deer, some small cats, and rodents of different types. Coming in we had spotted a fox high on some rocks above us. Cows grazed throughout both canyons, sometimes high on the criss-cross of animal trails in search of grass. The calls of a number of birds—juncos and towhees–echoed between the canyon walls.

About an hour out we stopped to breakfast on granola, powdered milk, water and dried fruit. Relief from the weight of the packs. A short rest. And then on again. Occasionally another hiker would pass us, but once again we felt virtually alone in these canyons. The sense of isolation was amazing… and deeply moving.

In some ways the hike out was easier than the hike in. We recognized landmarks, picked up our stashed water bottles, made steady progress. And then we left Keet Seel Canyon, crossed the river into Tsegi Canyon, and started the long uphill ascent. Mark and Peg decided to take a real rest before going up. I opted to go on ahead, knowing I would make the uphill hike much more slowly than they would, even burdened as they were with far heavier weight. Not wanting to slow them down, I thought I might continue and make some progress before they caught up with me.

Never in all my years of hiking have I faced the kind of challenge that ascent presented. It’s only about a mile all told, but the first third is over a dramatically steep sand dune that just goes up and up and up. The sand is soft. And deep. Relentless. No relief at all. I hadn’t remembered this as a particularly difficult part of the hike—because coming down it hadn’t been. By the time I neared the top of this stretch I was staggering from the small shade of one isolated tree to the next, ragged with exhaustion. Still, I pushed on. Soon after the dune come the two stretches of switchbacks. Here the going is a bit easier, because there is at least a modicum of level ground between each raised step. It’s still painfully difficult, though, and by this time I was stopping every two or three minutes, gulping water and then an electrolyte balancer, grateful for each brief stretch of progress.

I looked back and could see no sign of Mark or Peg. So I just continued on, gasping for breath by now, the sweat pouring off my body. I realized that I was hiking almost bent double, the weight of my puny pack a real burden. At one point I finished the electrolyte balancer in the small bottle in which I carried it, and even continuing to carry the empty bottle seemed like too much. I almost left it standing on a flat rock by the side of the trail, assuming Mark or Peg would recognize it and pick it up. Then I realized if they found it they might think I had fallen off the trail. So I carried it on.

Mark and Peg caught up with me not far from the end of the ascent. They had decided to take a really long rest down below; Mark had washed his sore feet and changed his shoes for the hike out. They too had been looking ahead for a sight of me. And when they didn’t see me as near as they assumed I would be they began to worry. When we finally caught sight of each other, they were staggering slowly upward… and I was almost at a standstill. Mark shouted up for me to stay where I was. When he overtook me, he begged me to let him carry my pack on his chest. The weight of his own much heavier pack was harder for him than he could have imagined, and I didn’t want to add the weight of mine. But when Peg—also struggling hard—caught up with us she said she thought I was overtaxing my lungs and heart. She urged me to relinquish my pack for the brief remainder of the ascent, and I did.

So Mark carried his own pack and mine the remaining fifteen minutes or so. Free of any weight, I had a much easier time finishing this rough ascent. By the time we had all made it to the top, we were physically devastated, exuberant, joyful, almost in tears. Also in awe of our accomplishment and feeing deeply privileged at what we had experienced. From the top of the ascent we had another mile and a half to go. But this was fairly easy level terrain. About a quarter mile from the trail head we suddenly saw Shana walking towards us. She and Barbara, who had spent the morning at Monument Valley, had decided to come and meet us at the end of the hike. Barbara, who wasn’t feeling well, had waited on the other side of the closed trail gate. Shana, unmindful of the sign warning anyone without a permit to stay out, couldn’t resist the urge to meet our ascent. A couple of hikers about an hour and a half ahead of us had told them we were on our way.

It was wonderful seeing Barbara and Shana, and being able to share the delight of our experience. We were tired, filthy, hungry but possessed of a great feeling of accomplishment. Back in Kayenta at the motel Barbara drew me a hot bath. I removed my mud-caked hiking shoes and peeled off my sweat-soaked clothes. We all rested a while, then went over to the only acceptable (just barely acceptable) place to eat: Kayenta’s Holiday Inn.

Barbara, it turned out, had come down with the 24-hour stomach flu I had a couple of weeks back. So this morning Mark and I drove back to Albuquerque, Peg and Shana following in their car. Our new edition of The Hidden Southwest announced a nice-sounding bakery in Farmington, where we stopped for stuffed croissants and coffee. We were home by 3 p.m.

The Living Silence of a Place like Kee Tseel: Notes for a Latin American Studies Association Panel

In pondering my Latin American work-the oral history, essays, and some of the poetry-the first thing that comes to mind is how different the world in which I worked back then was from the one we inhabit today. Then my life and work were cradled in hope; more than just hope, the absolute conviction that I was part of a movement that was creating a better, more just world.

A pervasive discouragement now characterizes my world. This is not merely the result of those understandings and complexities that come with age. It is a product of these times’ appalling restriction of freedoms, narrowing of opportunity; a response to the fact that so much power is concentrated in the hands of such arch criminals, and that the field of action for those working for positive change has been so drastically reduced.

Our world is more violent, more dangerous, and a future of justice so much less palpable than it was when the Civil Rights Movement achieved its initial goals, U.S. citizens helped stop the war in Vietnam, or I was living and working in revolutionary Cuba or Nicaragua.

We are faced with an interesting dichotomy. On the one hand some of our struggles have clearly borne fruit. Among these are the increased expectations and possibilities for women’s lives, more acceptance of and respect for peoples who are "different," important advances in what we know about how to teach and learn, a more in-depth understanding of the mind/body connection, a broader more inclusive vision of history, and a recognition of the vital centrality of stories.

On the other, our struggles seem to stagnate beneath the weight of greed and recklessness. Our children’s is the first generation that cannot expect to live better than their parents. And our government is devastating the lives of innocent people throughout the world. I am not only speaking economically, but morally as well.

Class inequities are, if anything, more entrenched than they were 30 or 40 years ago. The gap between the obscenely wealthy and the miserably poor has widened. Race issues have shown themselves to be many-layered and more complex than we once imagined. Fundamentalist extremists within all the major religious conformations have spawned an ignorance and violence that permeate the relationships between men and women, adults and children, powerful nations and those most vulnerable to their designs.

After my return to the United States in 1984, retrieved memories of incest led me to understand that the invasion of a child’s body by a perpetrator with power over his victim has everything to do with the invasion of a small nation by one that is stronger and more powerful. A world in which a single country or system dominates has produced horrific policies such as that of the preemptive strike. And the cover-ups are ever more blatant. State terrorism has achieved levels unimaginable even a few years back. Vast numbers of people are manipulated through fear. And we are poisoning our nest past the point where we may be able to reclaim it.

Most of my work in Latin American oral history-the books about women’s lives, the poetry and essays written between the mid 1960s and late 1980s-was created in an atmosphere of genuine possibility. I believed in the socialist alternative. I lived its promise, first in Cuba and then in Nicaragua. Additionally, feminism gave me the tools with which I began to decipher issues of power.

Mine was the privilege of involvement, of daily participation, of constant discussion and the energy that comes from having victory in one’s sight. Even as I began to challenge some of the premises, even when I questioned certain interpretations and/or the motives of some of those doing the interpreting, what we sought seemed right to me. Not only right, but possible. I might almost say inevitable. This atmosphere of confidence and hope produced work that was daring, sometimes somewhat one-dimensional, but always honest and inspired by that vision of justice that is, for me, still very much an ideal.

Today-older, aware of the complexities of my own history and with many more questions, inhabiting a different world with a vastly different correlation of forces-I am deeply discouraged. Not depressed, but discouraged. I still believe in the ideals for which we struggled throughout the last half of the twentieth century, those ideals for which so many died and for which many of us continue to struggle today. I still envision a world in which justice reigns, in which men of obscene greed are no longer permitted to murder and maim at will, in which education and art and the health of our planet are cherished rather than obliterated.

But the brave experiments aimed at securing such a world have mostly been trampled by forces of such perverse and pervasive criminality that what would have been unacceptable even ten years back is today seen as inevitable or "normal." I am not by nature a depressive person, but I would be out of touch with reality not to feel acute discouragement.

All of which is not to say that I do not continue to subscribe to the struggles for peace and justice, the efforts towards economic and racial and sexual and cultural equalities, the desperate need to effect a change in U.S. foreign and domestic policies, a turnabout to the rampant contamination of earth, air, water and what we put into our bodies. I have come to understand incest and the sexual abuse of children as intimately linked to the manipulation and abuse of whole communities and nations, and continue to imbue my work with this understanding. The silences and lies corrode integrity as much in one scenario as in the other.

Making these connections and others has made my work richer. But the work itself no longer draws on the energy of hope. Today I struggle because it is morally imperative, not because I expect success.

Gathering Rage: The Failure of 20th Century Revolutions to Develop a Feminist Agenda , my 1992 book about the Left’s inability to embrace feminist principles, broached issues and realities I could no longer ignore. Many of the ideas in that book were taken further, and validated, by the women who told me their stories in Sandino’s Daughters Revisited: Feminism in Nicaragua (1994). When the latter was translated into Spanish and became available to the women whose stories it included, it provoked gratitude, profound turmoil and further exploration.

But the work in which this crisis is most palpable, both in the process of the writing and in the product itself, is When I Look Into the Mirror and See You: Women, Terror, and Resistance. Although I began the interviews and research in 1996, the book wouldn’t see publication until 2003. During those seven years I several times believed I would not be able to continue. I felt paralyzed. For a time, finishing seemed utterly beyond my grasp. The story I knew I must tell was infinitely more complex than those I had grappled with before. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but I was experiencing the culmination of the political/emotional crisis which has affected so many of us over the past two decades.

It wasn’t only a changed world that required a different approach. I myself had changed. While my core beliefs remain solid, my understanding of how we may be able to move from point A to point B-or fail to do so-is more nuanced, takes into account a range of variables, and seems more difficult on a variety of levels. Because I value process over product, because I deeply believe in sharing the unfinished and the imperfect, I managed to readdress the challenge. By the time When I Look Into the Mirror and See You was published it had become-for me and for others-an important piece on our ongoing conversation about power, memory, personal and public space, ends and means.

It is not only the story’s two protagonists who are revealed in the mirror of human reflection this book presents, but the author as well. In this book I am more present, more exposed, more vulnerable and more questioning: left raw by the unspeakable crimes and deeply courageous responses of our times.

And here is where I would like to speak about a strange turn my interests have taken. Of great refuge for me, since I returned to the United States in 1984, have been the ancient ruins and rock art left by those who preceded us upon this land. Living in the southwestern part of the United States, I am surrounded by the remnants of several cultures: the so-called Anasazi, Fremont and Mogollón, the unnamed nomads who roamed these lands ten thousand years ago, even peoples from further south who interacted and traded with those who inhabited the canyons and cave alcoves of Utah, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico.

As in my own life’s journey, the border dividing the northern and southern land masses of our continent has been irrelevant, malleable, ultimately fictitious.

At first, visits to Chaco, Mesa Verde, Canyon de Chelly, Hovenweep, Wupatki, Betatakin, Bandelier, Pecos, Puyé and other such sites were pleasure outings, times of relaxation and delight. They remain so. But they have acquired an added immediacy, a relevance to my life and thought I could not have imagined some years back. If it did not conjure such religious or clichéd connotations, I would be inclined to use the word pilgrimage.

It was on a recent hike to the less accessible ruin called Kee Tseel, in the extreme north central part of Arizona, that I first began to equate the experience of listening for the echoes of long-silent voices to the experience of seeking out and recording the voices of the women in many of my books on Latin America. The same interactive give and take of openness and reception, observation and voice, listening and recording, interpretation and recreation are involved. It is as if it is happening all over again, but the raw material is so much more tenuous, the results less tangible or specific, the lessons embryonic in form. This time around, there is a space that was missing then.

It is a space that would appear to be empty.

It is not.

And here I will digress for a moment to tell a story I hope may clarify my approach to this sort of space, its hidden attributes and the meaning it holds for me.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the death of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. I recently returned from Mexico, where commemorations of her life and work abound. One of these struck me as particularly intriguing.

When Frida died her husband, Diego Rivera, locked the bathroom off her bedroom and ordered it never to be opened. It is presumed that Frida died in that bathroom. Close family friend Dolores Olmedo became the director of the house where Frida was born and lived with Diego-the blue house in Coyoacán that would become the Frida Kahlo Museum. She obeyed Diego’s wishes. But this past year Olmedo herself died, and a new museum director was named. She immediately asked "what’s behind that door," and when told commanded it be opened.

Inside the bathroom were literally hundreds of indigenous huipiles, artfully embroidered cotton shifts like the one I am wearing today. The bathtub was filled with them. Frida’s jewels, her makeup, even her prosthesis (they had had to amputate her leg in the last months of her life, and she briefly wore an artificial one) were there. The writer Elena Poniatowska, in an article for La Jornada de México, says there were outfits enough so that the artist could have worn a different one every day for sixth months. The contents of that bathroom are now being cleaned and mended by experts, are gradually being put on display.

Mexico is enthralled with this revelation. But it is not the contents of that bathroom that interest me. I am powerfully intrigued by the space: off-limits for half a century and now-because of an order given and taken-become part of the public domain. As I entered the part of Frida’s bedroom to which the public has access I could see the door to the bathroom standing slightly ajar. I strained to be able to see through its narrow opening. My eyes traveled to the amorphous shapes visible as splotches of color behind the opaque glass brick that forms the bathroom’s corner wall. I glimpsed a row of shapes hanging from what I assumed might be a shower curtain rod.

What does it mean that this space has suddenly been opened, made accessible? Is there such a thing as sacred space? If so, under what circumstances may space be transformed? I speak from a totally secular point of view; perhaps I should use the word living rather than sacred. Yes, space that is alive.

Is there an energy or some other tangible physical attribute that indicates to us that the nature of a space has changed? If so, are all or only some of us privy to its existence? Does the place itself change, or does our perception of it change as a result of what happened there and what that means to us?

As regards the bathroom in the Blue House in Coyoacán, are we who enter that previously forbidden place and repossess the painter’s personal items intruding upon Frida’s life or Diego’s? What, besides huipiles and a prosthetic leg, lived in that locked room? What did its walls hide, what mysteries did it embrace? What can its being made available mean to us now-or to them then? Is time only linear?

I am fascinated by spaces once used for one purpose being opened to another. In ways I find difficult to articulate, the opening of Frida Kahlo’s bathroom bears a profound relevance to the act of stepping into an ancient ruin, a space where people once worked and slept and cooked and ate and played. There is a similar retrieval of objects once everyday utensils of the living become legacies from the dead. A similar discourse asks that we contemplate, question, decipher. We are presented with a similar desdoblamiento: an unfolding, splitting off from or dividing from itself.

I had no training in oral history when I began, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to interview, research and write what would become Cuban Women Now, Cuban Women Twenty Years Later, Spirit of the People: Vietnamese Women Two Years from the Geneva Accords, El pueblo no sólo es testigo: la historia to Dominga, Sueños y realidades de un guajiricantor, Inside the Nicaraguan Revolution: The Story of Doris Tijerino, Sandino’s Daughters, Christians in the Nicaraguan Revolution and Risking a Somersault in the Air, among other books. I learned through trial and error as I went along.

Today, as I stand in the silence of a place like Kee Tseel, listening for the voices of peoples long disappeared, I am acutely aware that I have no formal training in anthropology or archeology. My life experience has taught me how dangerous it is to impose our twentieth and twenty-first century cultural biases on others (anthropologists referring to one of the large anthropomorphic renditions on the rock wall in Horseshoe Canyon as "the Holy Ghost figure" comes to mind). I possess neither the theory, glossary of terms, physical strength nor presumption to be an "expert" on these forebears and their lives.

Instead, I bring to such sites a poet’s tools, an artist’s eye, the sensibility of a woman-identified woman, a reverence for life in all its forms, a healthy skepticism of all the reductionist theory that has kept us from seeing life’s overall patterns, and the conviction that justice and equality are not outmoded concepts. I am respectful of the beliefs and feelings of those direct descendants-the Hopi and Pueblo peoples who inherit and in their daily practice refer back to those legacies left in rock-and of the Navajo who are today’s caretakers of the ruin.

My root knowledge comes from years of experience with people who have nothing to lose but their oppression. It comes from exploring cultural as well as personal memory; from struggling to divest myself of the classism, racism, sexism and homophobia with which all who come up in a society like ours are burdened; from an ongoing exploration of power and a passion for the language that describes-as precisely as possible-its uses and abuses. My knowledge comes from learning to touch, listen, see.

A little more than a month ago two friends and I hiked the nine miles into Kee Tseel. We stood among its rooms and surveyed the evidence of a ceramic pot seemingly just about to be refilled with river or rain water, ears of corn as if only just a moment ago struck clean of their kernels, a broken wisp of yucca rope, bits of flint tools and the perch-poles that only 800 years ago hosted brightly-feathered Macaws traded from these people’s neighbors to the south. The stories-the history-entered my pores in much the same way as those I collected from the Cuban and Nicaraguan women whose words I once gathered into my books.

My days of listening to women’s stories, interpreting those stories and offering them in book form may be over. Or maybe not. What I know is that my curiosity and need move now in another direction: towards cultures that preceded by millennia this era of misplaced power and consumer violence. Stillness and intuition are once more called upon to suggest answers only very partially revealed. Learning to look, wait, and listen again becomes a necessity.

Just as there were those a quarter century ago who trivialized my books of oral history because they were not impartial, or because most of them included only women’s voices, or because they often veered from whatever academic line happened to be in favor at the time, there will be those today who do not see a connection between the threats to our survival and a hundred or so people who built and inhabited and then disappeared from a site that astounds us with its stunning mystery.

The Kayenta Anasazi of Kee Tseel lived in their 160-room alcove a mere 50 years (1230-1286). They left sophisticated tools, utensils and an art that speaks to us of what their lives may have been like. Yet there is no language holding clues to who they were, no written code to be deciphered, scant road signs by which we may see beyond the landscape that is to the landscape that was, few mechanisms for bridging the distance of time.

We cannot read the answers to our questions, but must look for them in wind, soil, rock, plant and animal life, and in our own imagination. And for our imagination to offer up those clues we seek, we must of course have spent time-perhaps a lifetime-exploring the dialectical relationship between reason and intuition, science and creativity, evidence and that which evidence so often obscures.

We can no longer live only in a world of "fact," for fact has today been twisted beyond recognition. Neither can we hide in a world of poetic license, flights of fancy, the intuitive as the only reality there is. To truly inhabit, feel comfortable in and use that space that appears empty but is not, we must keep on fighting against the current of hypnotizing manipulation and seek the connections those who would keep on heaping death upon this earth hope we will never find.

I touch this space in ruins long abandoned, but vibrant with life.

September 2004 .

                        Time

1.

At the edge of this city
my fingers brush the incised circle
still visible on cliffs of cured basalt.
Depiction of sun, moon, year.
Opening to another world
or to the body,
power perhaps, or the beginning.
Beginning time
being any point along a circle.

Soon a road
will blaspheme this land
where twelve hundred years ago
our ancestors
chipped these images
into fallen rock.
Evidence of experience,
what was seen, thought, known
and returns in needful question.

2.

At Chaco’s northernmost reach
two towers catch moonrise
in the perfect balance of their subtle notch.
Astronomical alignments
speaking to future.
Once every 18.6 years
the lunar standstill
cycled from Pueblo Bonito’s priests
to our astonished witness.

3.

At Kee Tseel
we find no timepieces
among ceramic shards,
no minute or second hands,
no Calendar Stone
adorns the kiva
or anywhere else in this alcove
where bits of yucca rope
wait to be retrieved
by hands that weave and knot,
tie turkey feathers
fix handle to obsidian blade.

Without time
does timelessness exist?
Recent, yes, and long ago.
When we were young
or yesterday
but not five minutes from now.
Seasons and moons,
growth and hungers
pronounce these meanings
we must fashion to such accurate degree.

No steady ticking clock
to guide all other clocks.
No ringing of bells
at any hour.
No Greenwich Mean, no zones
unfolding as they circle
a planet known to be round.
No tomorrow
unfurling before today.
Only a time of cold. A time of rain.
A time of balm
against your grateful skin.

4.

It wouldn’t have been our
ten in the morning,
birthday or anniversary.
Noon yes, sun directly above,
dusk or dawn as signifiers,
seasons to plant and reap,
days not burdened
by these divisions
we use to punish or reward.

Walking without pedometer.
Work
where we privilege accuracy,
time management, date book.
Acknowledging limits
unfettered by resting heart rate.
Not recipe but taste.
Life
more than this arbitrated passage
killing as it goes.

5.

Syncopated drip from the spring
at the back of the cave,
its measured sound accompanying
heartbeat and footstep
as it layers or peels away
the cache of memory
inhabiting hand and breast.

Show me directionality:
linear, circular
or beyond imagination.
Show me
where count met breath for you.
I know your working hands
saw future,
understood this mirror
traveling from my time to yours,
asking the questions
cluttering my mouth.

6.

When the last family
let the great log fall
between stone walls
across entrance or exit,
when this place was abandoned
in—now we can reckon it—1286
the only date was a place
no longer bountiful, the need
to find home somewhere else.

Time spills through my hands
like the beating of a great heart,
slow as consciousness,
quickened only
by this fitful memory
coiling in my throat,
reaching my mouth,
jolting my pulse
in grateful recognition.

Fall 2004.

Albuquerque, Oct. 19, 2004. Photographs by Margaret Randall. 

We flew up to Ottawa at our own expense, but we were met at the airport by a uniformed limousine driver who clearly had been given a photograph of me because he wasn’t holding up a placard with my name on it and didn’t seem anxious about finding us. This display of confidence naturally sent me into mild paroxysms of class terror: was I was about to be forced into my first ride in a stretch limousine? No problem. The Governor General’s limousine turned out to be an ageing Dodge Caravan, grey, with cloth seats.

I was so relieved at the sight of the minivan that it didn’t occur to me that we were travelling to Rideau Hall in the vehicle most people use to pick up groceries or to deliver rowdy kids to hockey practices or ballet lessons. I’m sure there is a black limo available for use when Saudi Princes come to visit Paul Martin Jr, (one of the services Rideau Hall traditionally provides for the federal government is accommodation for high-level dignitaries). But the Dodge Caravan, I was soon to discover, was much more appropriate, not just to us but to the spirit in which Rideau Hall operates.

The most conspicuous characteristic of Rideau Hall, you see, is that it is run without extravagance or ostentation. Another conspicuous characteristic is staff who know what they are doing and why you are there. They went about their jobs with careful efficiency and a degree of courtesy that was as understated as it was pleasant.

The room we stayed in is one of a half-dozen guest rooms at Rideau Hall, the Jeanne Sauvé Room, named after the former Trudeau-era Liberal cabinet minister, House Speaker and, between 1984 and 1990, Governor General. The room is roughly 14 by 22 feet, with 12 foot ceilings, and it is decorated in the pale blues and greys that were Madame Sauvé’s palette. The room’s centrepiece, not surprisingly given that people are meant to sleep in the room, is a king size bed. Just beyond it, an elegant but slightly uncomfortable chaise lounge is set in front of the tall windows. The small chair and matching settee closer to the door—all in pale blue—proved far more comfortable for lounging—not that I have much expertise in lounging.

The windows caught my interest very quickly. They are original, with secondary panes of glass retrofitted into each frame for insulation—some time ago, methinks, since the inserts need repainting. The room lighting is unfashionably incandescent, the wall sconces and lamps well-crafted but hardly high design. The six foot walnut desk set against the wall is nice enough, but I pulled a drawer knob off investigating it, as I’m sure every other visitor has since the desk was placed in the room. On the desk surface was a rectangular glass vase filled with pussy willows and purple iris, tasteful and correct for the season but hardly flamboyant. The small marble fireplace has long ago been bricked in, and above the small mantelpiece is a 30 by 48 inch mirror of ornate etched and bevelled glass. I wouldn’t have chosen it for my own house even though I had to acknowledge its fine craftsmanship.

The bathroom contains a surprise of the same sort. It features a blue toilet and bathtub (apartment size) that are at least 40 years old, such that the clearly newer toilet seat doesn’t match colour and didn’t quite fit. Both, along with the white and more modern sink, were spotless, and everything works fine. The towels and washcloths are plentiful, brilliant white, and scented with something quite a lot more agreeable than Downy, as are the bedsheets. I did not count percale on the sheets, but it was clear that they hadn’t been purchased at CostCo.

Modern technology? There is a telephone on the desk, no detectable internet access, but a 27 inch Sony television is set up across from the bed. It even comes with a set of wireless earphones.. I didn’t test-drive them to see if they worked. There are no ashtrays in the room, and no instructions one way or the other about smoking. I suppose if I were there on a diplomatic passport, I’d have lit up, but since I’m a Canadian, and smoking is banned in public buildings throughout Ontario, I obeyed the rules, and cheerfully.

A monogrammed royal blue folder in the desk drawer provides stationary, three postcards and some stamps. The interesting fine detail here was that the stamps featured Queen Elizabeth’s visage. I noticed this because I’ve been trying to obtain this particular stamp for some time without success. Yes, of course I filled out the postcards. But I didn’t summons an aide-de-camp in order to get them mailed. I addressed one card to my six-year-old daughter, another to my father, and the third to Leanna’s parents. I mailed them from the Ottawa airport as we were leaving.

The other memorable thing about the room is its silence, which is solid without looming. In the future of humankind, silence is likely to become the most sought-after of luxuries. Here—still—it is part of the fabric. Like the furniture in the room, it doesn’t make you think you’re in the palace of Louis XIV, but it doesn’t make you feel like you’re at a Travelodge, either.

Since this is a review of a destination and not an event, I won’t regale you with any of the social details of the evening we spent at Rideau Hall. Like the room décor and building atmosphere, the awards presentation and the banquet that followed were restrained and without ostentation. The food served at the banquet was proudly Canadian and better than good, with nary a pheasant’s tongue or wig-wearing servant in sight. The wine was Canadian, of very fine quality, and the servers were polite but not obsequious. During the award presentation the Governor General was articulate and intellectually elegant, and it occurred to me while I was listening to her speak that it could be a generation before writers will again be welcome at Rideau Hall, and that after her term is finished, a lifetime could easily pass before another public official of her stature gives a speech as free of platitudes and clichés as the one she gave that evening.

I liked it. I also felt, at that moment and throughout the subsequent banquet, the most firmly Canadian I have felt in my now semi-long life, and I have since experienced no compensatory cynicism about my visit there. Those who know me well can attest to how rare such a response is.

One more thing deserves to be said. Those who regard the office of Governor General as a costly superfluity, and Rideau Hall as an extravagance that we can do without should spend a couple of hours in the Jeanne Sauvé room doing some fairly elementary arithmetic and observing what goes on at Rideau Hall, and why. As a political institution, the Governor Generalship frees the Prime Minister and his cabinet of several hundred ceremonial duties a year, allowing the elected government an efficiency and freedom to concentrate on public administration that few executive apparatuses enjoy, and for an astonishing small annual cost. Compare it for a moment with the British royal family, or with the U.S. system, where the president and Senate members, notwithstanding the true purpose of the Vice-president, spend a huge percentage of their executive energies engaged in non-optional domestic and offshore ceremonial activity. Once you’ve made the comparison, you’ll instantly understand what I’m saying.

In addition, any visitor who arrives at Rideau Hall believing that the current Governor General is a spendthrift leaves with their ears pinned back: this is a tightly run ship. Nothing at Rideau Hall glitters. It is carefully administered, understated, and more accurate and inclusive in articulating the diversity of this country than any Canadian institution I’ve encountered. In fact, it does its job so well that it made me understand the complexity and depth of that diversity in a new way. It also made me feel proud of being a citizen of this country, not a little chastened by the strength of its character, and very lucky to have been invited to stay within the precinct of its Governor General.

1400 words.

I 

I’m a more-than-reluctant traveller. I have no desire to go anywhere. I just want to sit at my desk in Vancouver and read and write. Walking up to my local supermarket on 4th Avenue is my idea of a big adventure.

Yet, again and again, I’ve gone to the ends of the earth, as if possessed by an ancestral gene of the Wandering Jew. I never intend to go, since, as I say, I have no desire to go anywhere. So, how to account for my presence at various times, over many years, in Gdansk, Berlin, Tirana, Vilnius, Naples, Mexico City, Managua, Shanghai, Bangkok, Angkor Wat?

I always seem to back into destinations. It is as if it’s not me who wants to go to a particular place, but rather that the place is calling me to it. I know that is a romantic fantasy, but often that’s the way it feels. Take Angkor Wat, an abandoned once-thriving Cambodian city-civilization from about 800-1450 A.D., which surely meets the definition of the ends of the earth.

I was visiting Bangkok, Thailand, in early 2002—not because I wanted to, of course, but because a friend of mine, Dan Gawthrop, was living there, and encouraged me to visit him. At the Malaysia Hotel where I was staying, I met a friendly middle-aged American from Kansas City named Larry who, one morning at breakfast, told me he wanted to go to Angkor Wat in Cambodia and was looking for a travelling companion.

It hadn’t occurred to me to go there, But I saw when I located it on a map that Angkor Wat wasn’t far, just across the Thai-Cambodian border. What’s more, I’d vaguely heard it had recently been re-opened to tourists. This was after some three horrific decades in Cambodia: first, American invasion in the early 1970s, followed by civil war and the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge, then conquest by neighbouring Vietnam, and finally, a decade of "normalized" but bloody internecine politics. Now the situation was temporarily stable.

I was tempted, having heard of Angkor Wat as one of the fabled temple sites of Southeast Asia, one of the "seven wonders of the world." But for some minor reason—I think the airfare struck me as unreasonable—I held off. When Larry returned to Bangkok, just before heading home to the States, he gave me an enthusiastic account of his visit, and the idea of going there stayed in my mind.

A month later, in February 2002, I found myself at a Bangkok travel agency. It was just down the street from my hotel, a place I often passed on my way to the neighbourhood internet cafe in a narrow lane around the corner. The computer shop was a picturesque place filled with wall clocks, a large gloomy aquarium, and ten-year-old Thai kids playing Harry Potter video games. A rooster in a pen across the lane crowed regularly at an ear-splitting pitch. Passing the travel agency on the way back to the hotel, I thought nothing more profound than, Oh, what the hell, I’ll just check the fares; it doesn’t commit me to anything. So, I figuratively backed in. The overland fare was not only reasonable but ridiculously cheap.

A few days later, at 7 a.m., I was crammed into a mini-van with a half-dozen or so young foreign backpackers and we were on the highway to the border. I’m usually okay once I get to where I’m going but while in transit I assume the petrified posture of a frightened rabbit. The backpackers, dressed in shorts and floppies, were all in pairs, and at least thirty years younger than me, the only solitary traveller in the group. The American couple sitting next to me were "doing" Asia, a half-dozen destinations in two or three weeks, and seemed perfectly at home in the cramped vehicle, their feet propped up on their enormous rucksacks, eating junk food and mildly debating the comparative merits of the pop novelists whom they were respectively reading, John Grisham and Stephen King (they seemed to favour the literary merits of the horror writer King). They were slightly puzzled that I was staying in Bangkok for a couple of months—what could one possibly find to do there over such a long time?—and quickly turned their attention back to their grisly paperbacks.

After five or six hours on the road, we reached the border. There’s a Wild West frontier town, Popit (pronounced "Po-peet"), that you enter after going on foot through the usual complicated customs stations. Two things were immediately visible: gambling casinos and bread. The garish gambling palaces, built in the style of equivalent temples of chance in Las Vegas, are apparently for well-to-do Thai tourists. The bread, sold by kids who approach you as soon as you hit Cambodian customs, is a cultural vestige of French colonialism, since bread isn’t a major feature of southeast Asia’s rice-based cuisine. I bought a small loaf, which was crusty, delicious, and suddenly exotic after a couple of months of seldom seeing any bread except the toast that the hotel in Bangkok provided for Western breakfasts .

After getting our documents stamped, we were reassembled behind a corrugated metal fence in an empty lot that seemed to be a combination of garbage dump and informal bus depot, to wait for the vehicle taking us to Siem Reap, the Cambodian town closest to the Angkor Wat site. Through an arrangement between the Thai and Cambodian travel agencies, various tourists in the mini-vans are combined into a larger group and shifted onto a bus. While standing around, amid heaps of trash and various vehicles, waiting for our bus to appear, I reflected that the striking thing about travel is not just the landscapes but how you become familiar with an instant, if transient, group of people—backpackers, drivers, travel agents, vendors, guides and others just hanging about.

I was mainly and anxiously oriented to a young woman in her twenties named Ma, an obviously bright, efficient person who was in charge of the complicated business of ferrying the travellers across the border and recombining them onto the buses for the Cambodian stage of the trip. My anxiety about keeping her in sight diminished once we were at the assembly site and I was reasonably sure I wasn’t going to become a lost straggler, abandoned in the middle of nowhere. We had to wait an hour or so. I fell into conversation—in a sort of pidgin made up of various languages—with a teenage boy who was a guide in Popit. He bought a couple of meat kebobs from a passing vendor and immediately offered me one of them. The friendliness of his unexpected gesture jolted me out of my uneasy anticipation of the future back to the present and, within a few minutes in that bedraggled garbage-strewn lot, in the afternoon sun, I began to fantasize a sort of life that I might lead in that border town. I could see a table in a motel room at which I would sit, reading and writing. I think that’s the feature of travelling—in which we reconfigure our selves in an imaginary way—that changes us.

The vehicle was an ancient, unreliable-looking, battered school bus. The heat was 30-plus degrees outside and there was no air-conditioning. I sat up front, behind the driver. He kept the folding front door open to get some air circulating. At the last minute, as we were pulling out, a teenage boy hopped on, not the one I’d been talking with earlier.

The road on the Cambo side, in contrast to the smooth four-lane Thai highway, was unpaved, bumpy hard pan. It was the dry season and everything was coated in a layer of fine tan-coloured dust. Once the driver got the bus up to speed, he had to close the door to keep the dust out. It was hot inside, and there was nothing to do but settle in and gaze at the seemingly featureless landscape—seemingly featureless only because I didn’t know what I was looking for—as the bus headed in a descending direction down the long ribbon of mostly traffic-free hard pan. The Cambodian teenager introduced himself. His name was Vonnie, he spoke English, and was an Angkor Wat guide from Siem Reap. He came up to Popit regularly and rode the bus back with the aim of securing some business from the travellers headed to Angkor.

Every once in a while, the bus passed through an inhabited place. As you got near a town, the view changed into agricultural landscape. The rice fields were dry at this time of the year, so you could see the banked-up borders of hard earth that enclosed them, and a system of what looked to be irrigation channels and reservoir pits. The earth-rimmed fields were designed to keep the rice partially submerged in water during the growing season. The towns were a sudden jumble of life, startling after the long stretch of desolate road between habitations. The houses were made of wood and set on stilts because of the flood season, there were groves of banana and other trees, now covered in dust, and there were children everywhere, along with the occasional tethered water buffalo, wandering chickens, and pigs nosing about. It was a quick blur of liveliness—kids playing, people washing clothes, a bit of a marketplace—and then we were back on the empty jostling road.

It wasn’t until we passed through the third or fourth farming village that I realized that the whole point of going overland was to see precisely this: how the people lived. The noticeable feature of life was the enormous number of kids. I’d read somewhere that the population of Cambodia was 13 million now, about half again as many as the about 7 or 8 million it had been in the 1970s. And if more than half of them were under 15, that meant that the majority of the population hadn’t been born at the time of the genocide in Cambodia. For teens like Vonnie, the gruesome image of "the killing fields" was just a piece of history, as it was for most of the backpackers aboard the bus. Only a middle-aged woman I glimpsed for an instant in one of the villages, or an elderly traveller might have the horror as a direct or indirect memory. So, this is a divided society: grandparents and parents who lived through hell, and their children for whom the horror is stories.

It was a long ride, eight hours or more, with a late afternoon lunch break in the one sizeable town on the route, and a few rest stops along the way. As it was growing dark, something appeared in the distance that might be a city, but it was at least a couple hours away. Vonnie had circulated among the backpackers, looking for business, and now dropped into the seat next to mine for the end of the haul. It was dark when we reached Siem Reap. I had tried to memorize the map of the town in my guide book, but I quickly lost track of where I was as we turned this way and that through the streets. Instead of anything like a sense of direction all I have is the sort of blurry visual field that 19th century French impressionist painters invented. I couldn’t get any sense of the streets at night—there were only shadowy buildings and the occasional patch of light provided by a flicker of neon or a string of coloured lightbulbs. The bus rolled into a compound behind a backpacker hostel.

Since I was a middle-class tourist rather than a backpacker, I asked Vonnie if he knew how to find the hotel noted in my guide book, The Golden Angkor. He’d take me there on his motorbike, he told me. First he had to help unload the rucksacks from the bus. I stood at the edge of the bustling crowd of backpackers, people from the hostel, and various kids with motorbikes in the warm, anxiety-tinged night. Then I was on the back of Vonnie’s motorbike, clutching my satchel with one hand, and Vonnie with the other, weaving through the dark streets of Siem Reap.

My expectations of catastrophe, as almost always, were happily unfulfilled. We neither crashed nor was I abandoned in the middle of nowhere. The Golden Angkor, once we arrived, turned out to be a perfectly nice middle-class hotel, they had a room free, there was a Thai restaurant next door, and the room had a writing table. Angkor Wat, Vonnie explained, was about a half hour out of town. You could get there by motorbike—that’s how he made his living, taking tourists out to the site—or rent a car and driver. I preferred the latter. He said he would arrange for me to be picked up at 10 o’clock the next morning. So, there I was, safe for the night in the middle of nowhere—but not nowhere for Vonnie and the other people of Siem Reap, a city of about 800,000 people. Safe, showered, fed, seated at my writing table, memorizing basic greetings and numbers in Cambodian, which uses a system based on the number five. So, ten is double-five.

II

In the morning there was no problem getting a little metal tankard of coffee from the Thai restaurant next door and bringing it up to my room. After my morning coffee and reading, I took a walk through the streets of Siem Reap. In the hazy, soft sunlight, the villa-like buildings still carried a trace of the town’s French colonial provincial history, which had lasted until the mid-20th century. There were several construction sites with new hotels going up. The streets carried a surprising amount of traffic. Even though the map in my mind and the streets seemed to correlate, I wasn’t very venturesome, going just far enough to identify various nearby restaurants, a place that sold postcards and stamps, a drugstore. At 10, the car and its elderly driver appeared as promised, along with Vonnie on his bike. I asked Vonnie how much he charged for a day’s services, and hired him to walk me around the site, since the driver, who looked older than me and only spoke Cambodian, didn’t seem a likely guide. As a middle-class elderly foreigner who was only likely to see Angkor Wat once in his life, I wasn’t tempted to skimp.

The reason for this considerable narrative of utterly mundane travel details and the self-portrait of a timorous narrator-traveller is to make the contrast with the splendour of Angkor Wat as sharp as possible. Despite the fame of its great temple, Angkor isn’t just the gigantic, moat-surrounded, five-towered 12th century building that is mainly referred to by that name. Instead, Angkor is the name of a civilization that occupied a considerable interior region of Cambodia, from the once fish-filled Great Lake at the south to the Kulen Plateau in the north, all of it located partway between what would become the modern Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh to the southeast (and the Mekong River delta further south), and the Thai kingdom to the northwest. So, when you go through the toll station at the entrance to the Angkor grounds and pay the fee (in American dollars), you’re entering an area of a hundred square kilometres or more, with fifty or so temples, and the remains of the towns and water reservoirs built by successive dynasties over a 600-year period.

We drove along a fairly busy road for about ten minutes—already at that hour there were busloads of tourists, people on bicycles and motorbikes, pick-up trucks—until we were moving parallel to the moat, on the other side of which was Angkor Wat. The driver pulled into a large, dusty, tree-shaded parking lot opposite the temple. Behind the lot was a row of open, barn-like sheds with restaurants and souvenir stands. The tourists getting out of vehicles were quickly surrounded by groups of kids hawking postcards, T-shirts, and other items.

Vonnie took me to the low stone bridge across the moat that leads directly to the main entrance of the temple. The first sense of the magnitude of the place is the scale of the moat surrounding Angkor Wat. It is some 200 metres wide, and retained on both its inner and outer banks by walls of laterite and huge blocks of sandstone, cut to fit one against the next, all of which cover a distance of about 10 kilometres. At the moment, rather than reflect on the precise facts of the size of Angkor, I simply went on the impressions I had of the moat’s vast placid waters and the munificence of the bevelled towers ahead, located behind the arcaded outer walls of the temple. I picked up the details later on, reading Charles Higham, the leading Western archeological expert on the region, author of the rather dry but informative The Civilization of Angkor (University of California, 2001).

From the inner edge of the moat there’s a flat grassy expanse, beyond which stand the outer walls, about 4 or 5 metres high. The bridge across the moat is linked to the main entrance via a causeway whose balustrades are in the form of sculpted mythical beasts, dragon-like animals known as nagas. Inside the walls, there are a series of galleries, lotus towers, and various side temples that comprise the heart of the complex. The walls of the outermost gallery are covered with bas-reliefs illustrating the life of the king and his court at Angkor in the 12th century. Accompanied by Vonnie, I wandered through the labyrinth of the temple for two or three hours, clambering over stone doorsteps, ascending the towers, meeting statues of gods, wandering through sunlight into dark inner chambers.

So, what am I seeing, I asked myself at some point—or maybe at every point—in the process of moving from scene to scene within the temple. How does the site of this once-upon-a-time civilization mesh with the tangle of individual memory and imagination constructed over a lifetime? First, all travel that’s interesting is a kind of time-travel, or else it is merely two-dimensional. Here, it’s 2002 and at the same time, roughly 1150 A.D. Angkor is a faerie castle of childhood books, the Lost City in the jungle, the actual Magic Kingdom, as contrasted to kitschy, cartoon-based simulacra of various Disney theme parks around the world, safe holiday destinations for vacationing family ensembles.

There’s an important, complex oppositional relationship between sprawling actual historical sites—Angkor, the Acropolis at Athens, Egyptian Pyramids, those in Mexico, etc.—no matter how tarted up for tourists, and the carefully manufactured fakes. Nor are the theme parks only located in nations with relatively brief histories like the United States, which might otherwise be a reason for their popularity there. They also appear in societies with millennial-long traditions, and have become a phenomena of globalization. Ian Buruma, a Western scholar of Asian culture, points out that one of the cultural conundrums of contemporary China, Japan, Singapore, and other parts of East Asia is the craze for theme parks, an extraordinary proliferation of which are woven into the new commercial urban landscapes. "They are to East Asian capitalism what folk dancing festivals were to communism." They’re all over Asia, and "are sometimes as quickly abandoned as they were built, or even before they were finished… What is curious is not just the insatiable taste for these fantasy places, but the fact that they often blur seamlessly into the ‘real’ urban landscape."

Buruma is primarily interested in figuring out the political relationship between the theme parks, as well as other replications and simulacra, and the ultimately similar communist and capitalist regimes of the region. "So why are Chinese officials prepared, or even eager, to tear down physical evidence of a real past and replace it with copies?" he wonders. "Why do they appear to be happier with virtual history? And what lies behind the ubiquitous taste for Western theme parks, for creating an ersatz version of aboard at home?"

Whether considering authoritarian Singapore, the dubious democracy of Japan, or the communist version of capitalism of China, Buruma believes "there is something inherently authoritarian about theme parks, and especially the men who create them. Every theme park is a controlled utopia, a miniature world where everything can be made to look perfect… [and] nothing is left to chance."

The theme parks, like globalized mega-malls, are themselves utopian models for the societies in which they’re located, and which those societies are meant to increasingly resemble. As Buruma remarks, "Singapore, once likened to a Disneyland with the death penalty, is truly a place where nothing is left to chance." Everything is "subject to elaborate guidelines, more or less forecefully imposed." Among the uncertain political prospects of post-Maoist China, one of them, he suggests, is that the country, "as a continent-sized Singapore, will be the shining model of authoritarian capitalism, saluted by all illiberal regimes, corporate executives, and other PR men… the whole world as a gigantic theme park, where constant fun and games will make free thought redundant." (See Ian Buruma, "AsiaWorld," The New York Review, June 12, 2003.)

As-yet-undeveloped Cambodia, by contrast, has to make do with merely real history. Angkor Wat is relatively uncontrolled. There are a few paths marked off as not yet cleared of landmines, the occasional rope restraining barrier before the bas-reliefs on the walls of the galleries, and some uniformed official guides available for hire. Vonnie told me it was his ambition to ascend into their ranks one day. But the visitors were free to scramble around the site, skinning their knees on some precarious steep stairway up the side of a tower, free, in other words, to make whatever they can of the historical reality in which they find themselves. The first disjuncture, then, is one of ontology, of being in the presence of something real in a world whose character is increasingly virtual, not just by way of manufactured spectacle, but including all the digitalia of TV screens, computers, and relentless optics.

Second, as against the ahistorical contemporary theme parks, which can only be read as a set of signs of postmodernism, at places like Angkor, you’re confronted with the half-solved historical puzzles of a vanished civilization. The story, albeit fragmentary, is put together by scholars like Higham, from the surviving stone or brick temples, archeological remains of the now dried-out great water reservoirs, and most important, scattered texts throughout the region. The "stone inscriptions set into these monuments," says Higham, "provide a vital social overlay to the skeletal archeological remains. These usually incorporate, in Sanskrit, the name or names of the founders, the presiding god and the date. Further information follows in Khmer. The names of the king or benefactor and the gods are repeated. Although Hindu gods are often named, with a preference for Shiva, local gods are also mentioned. We find reference to the god of the cloud, a tree, the old and the young god, and the god at the double pond…" The characteristic inscription lists the amount of land belonging to the temple, its boundaries, productive capacities, the names of people assigned to maintain the temple, and a royal warning against violating the rules of the establishment. The texts are absolutely specific. One, reports Higham, "records the assignment of 17 dancers or singers, 23 or 24 record keepers, 19 leaf sewers, 37 artisans including a potter, 11 weavers, 15 spinners and 59 rice field workers of whom 46 were female."

The textual records also attest to the power of the kingdom’s rulers. About Indravarman, a late 9th century king, the inscription says that "the right hand of this prince, long and powerful, was terrible in combat when his sword fell on his enemies, scattering them to all points of the compass. Invincible, he was appeased only by his enemies who turned their backs in surrender." This claim was engraved on the foundation stone of a temple in 879 A.D., followed by a pledge made on the king’s accession: "Five days hence, I will begin digging." Indravarman lived up to his promise, constructing a huge reservoir of unprecedented size, 3800 metres long and 800 wide, which is recorded in another inscription: "He made the [reservoir], mirror of his glory, like the ocean."

Angkor Wat was built some 300 years later, the enduring temple of Suryavarman II, and without question, agree the scholars, the outstanding achievement of the civilization of Angkor. The foundation stone, reported by later visitors, is missing. What we know is that the temple was dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu and opens onto the west, the god’s quarter of the compass. For all its present splendour, Higham tells us, Angkor Wat today is but a grey reflection of its former state. Traces of gilded stucco remain on the central tower, and an early 17th century Japanese visitor reported gilding over the stone bas-relief panels. In the 12th century, it was literally a golden palace. The 4-metre-high statue of Vishnu remains, still venerated.

In the great illustrated galleries, I came upon the bas-relief panel of Suryavarman himself, sitting in state upon a wooden throne. He wears a pointed crown, heavy ear ornaments, a necklace, armlets, bracelets, straps crisscross his pectorals, and there are anklets above his feet, which are drawn up in a half-lotus posture. A forest of parasols, large fans, and fly whisks surround him as he receives his ministers, named in the inscriptions, offering scrolls and holding their hands over their hearts, signalling loyalty and deference.

Other sections of the gallery walls show scenes from the Hindu epics, massive battles with hand to hand combat; Yama, the god of death, sitting on a water buffalo, determining the fate of each person; a depiction of "the churning of the ocean of milk in search of the elixir of immortality."

But the specific purpose and symbolic meaning of Angkor remain elusive. A temple, sure, but also a mausoleum for Suryavarman? The central towers, the scholars think, represent the peaks of Mount Meru, home of the Hindu gods, while the moat possibly symbolizes the surrounding ocean, but even if Angkor and its counterparts are intended as earthly representations of Paradise—the temple as paradise theme park?—the explanations are thin and unsatisfactory. Did the outer wall enclose residential areas and the king’s palace? Where did the rice-growing peasants live? What about burial rites?

If much of the history is patchy, one macro-feature of the civilization is clearer. In addition to its reality, and what we can piece together of its history, the third thing about Angkor civilization is, in a Marxist sense, its mode of production. What Angkor is founded on is rice, water, and labour—surplus rice, control of water, and the ability to organize, protect and exploit labour power. The mode of rice cultivation in the region is what’s known as flood retreat agriculture. As the waters of the flood season subside, the rice grows in the half-submerged earth-banked fields. The point of the farming village fields I saw on the road to Siem Reap now becomes clear. The function of the giant reservoirs scattered throughout the region, however, remains something of a mystery, though one would immediately imagine some sort of irrigation system as the dry season sets in. Higham leads readers through an unresolved scholarly controversy about whether or not the reservoirs were for irrigation or other uses. But in the end, it is a surplus of rice, controlled by the warriors through force, that is the basis of dynastic power. Rice makes possible parasols, fans, fly whisks, kings on thrones, artists to make gilded stone bas-reliefs of the sinuous bejewelled body of Suryavarman.

III

Vonnie and I made our way back across the bridge over the moat, found our driver in the shaded parking lot, and I took both of them to lunch in one of the barn-like sheds that housed the restaurants. Then we got into the car again and drove along a winding, forested road, north to Angkor Thom, a city built by the regime succeeding the one that built Angkor Wat. At the entrance to the city is a stone gate about 25 metres high, a heap of columns forming a rough arch, topped by sculptures of giant, broad-faced, Buddha-like heads in elaborate headgear. In the centre of Angkor Thom is its main temple, with fifty or more of the same half-smiling, immense sandstone heads as the ones at the entrance gate. The heads are carved into the temple towers. I clambered over the stone slabs of the temple stairways, cracked and broken over time, crawling up onto a terrace a third of the way up the towers.

Angkor Thom is the creation of a king named Jayavarman VII, who was crowned in 1181, after a turbulent period of warfare, in which he repulsed a water-borne invasion—up the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers and across the Great Lake—by a rival kingdom to the east. During Jayavarman’s reign, this great new city north of Angkor Wat was constructed, with the traditional moat, city walls about 3 kilometres long on all sides, pierced by the entrance gateways and their colossal heads, one of which we had passed through, and an array of temples and palaces. On the walls of the principal temple, as at Angkor Wat, there are bas-reliefs providing a glimpse of life during Jayavarman’s rule. In addition to the familiar battle scenes, the striking feature of the Angkor Thom bas-reliefs is scenes of domestic life that give us some visual sense of the everyday world of Angkor civilization.

In one panel, a woman in labour is being helped by midwives. In another scene, two men are hunched over a game of chess. Workers are shaping building stones with chisels in another sculpted picture, and lifting them by means of a lever. Fishermen are casting nets and hauling in their catch, women are selling the fish in a marketplace. Crowds of onlookers watch a cockfight. A man carries a rice basket, another drives an ox-cart. For scholars and visitors alike, the domestic bas-reliefs are like a newsreel documentary of everyday life. They flesh out the details of the inscriptions, which record that 2740 officials and 2202 assistants lived and worked in Jayavarman’s royal city. 12,640 people had residential rights within the walls. To feed and clothe this population, there are scrupulously listed quantities of rice, honey, molasses, oil, fruit, sesame, millet, beans, butter, milk, and all clothing materials; "even the number of mosquito nets is set down," as Higham notes. Assigned to supply the temple were 66,265 men and women, a figure rising to 79,365 if you include foreign Burmese and Cham workers.

A century later, there’s a final, unprecedented, remarkable text available for Angkor civilization. The king at the end of the 13th century is also named Jayavarman and the tangled politics of his regime are unclear, other than for the evidence that part of the ideological struggle involved religion. This Jayavarman, the eighth in the line of that name, was, as Higham reports, a worshipper of Shiva and an iconoclast who destroyed or modified every image of the Buddha that the two preceding regimes had created. If you really wanted to know anything about Angkor you’d have to sort out the ideas associated with Vishnu, Shiva, Buddha, and the rest. But the complex subject of the struggles between various belief systems promoting rival gods and philosophies can be left aside here. What’s of interest during Jayavarman’s regime is that there’s an eyewitness, one who eventually sat at the equivalent of a writing table. He’s the man with whom I identify.

He was Chinese and his name is Zhou Daguan. He arrived in August 1296 as a member of a diplomatic mission from the Chinese emperor to Cambodia, and he stayed as a guest in a house in Angkor Thom for eleven months, observing life at the court, in the capital, and in the countryside. After his return to China, Zhou wrote an account of his visit, which survived in the Chinese archives, and was first translated into French in the late-18th century. (See Zhou Daguan, The Customs of Cambodia, Siam Society, 1993.)

Zhou describes the city, with its moat and walls, the gold-covered stone heads at the gates, which were closed each night and opened again in the morning, with only "dogs and criminals who had had their toes cut off… barred entry." Angkor Thom’s golden temples are recorded, along with the royal palace, the tile-roofed houses of the nobility and the homes of the lower classes, roofed with thatch. In the middle-class home in which Zhou lived for almost a year, the floor is covered by matting, but there is no furniture. Rice is husked in a mortar and cooked in ceramic vessels on a clay stove. Family members and Zhou sit on mats and eat from ceramic or copper plates. A half-coconut shell serves as a ladle, small cups made of leaves contain sauces. They drink wine made from honey and rice. At night, everyone sleeps on mats laid out on the floor, but it is so hot that people often get up during the night to bathe. Two or three families arrange for a ditch to be dug for use as a latrine, which is covered with leaves.

Zhou also provides an account of the life of the city, punctuated with religious festivals, fireworks, parades, martial art displays on elephants, and the twice daily royal audiences given by the king. But it is in that house where Zhou lived for a year that the human figures begin to move for us in the present tense, where those countless lives now utterly lost to memory have a momentary vividness.

Just at the instant of exhaustion in the mid-afternoon sun, as the visual data blurred and I dreaded the prospect of a further excursion, Vonnie casually mentioned that we could drive back to Siem Reap for a mid-day break, and then return to Angkor Wat that evening to watch the sunset, apparently the custom of both tourists and local inhabitants. Back in the cool hotel room in Siem Reap, I showered, napped, sat at the writing table with my notebook, like Zhou Daguan.

In the early evening we drove back to the now recognizable great temple of Angkor Wat. The road was crowded with local people on bicycles and motorbikes who came out for picnic dinners along the grassy banks around the moat. I sat on the steps of one of the temple entrances, facing west, watching the sun slide below the tops of distant groves of trees.

Back in Siem Reap that night, I ate at one of the restaurants I’d noted on my morning walkabout, practiced my few phrases of Cambodian on the waiters, took an after dinner walk. On the edges of town were the shadowy hotel construction sites, not middle-class hotels, but luxury dwellings going up for a different class of tourist who would jet in from Phnom Pehn, Bangkok, Tokyo. On the way back from Angkor, I had glimpsed a half-dozen giant gift emporia, temples for consumers. There was a current of uncertain excitement among the people I met, a kind of boom-town atmosphere. Those like Vonnie were quickly learning English. We’d run into some Japanese tourists at the site that afternoon, and I noticed that he’d already picked up enough Japanese for rudimentary conversations. The strangers who came to town were an opportunity, and it was all recent enough that the local Cambodians were still a little unsure about what these wealthy foreigners wanted, tentative about what should be offered, how flirtatious to be.

The next morning we drove out to the site and Vonnie walked me through various temples at a greater distance from Angkor Wat. The most energetic trek was to a temple atop a hill that you reached by scrambling up a long slope of broken rock. Once you reached the summit upon which the temple was perched, you could climb up its vertiginous staircases for a panoramic view of the countryside. The hike up the slope, however, was enough for me. I could see the towers of Angkor poking up in the forested distance. Noticing that I wasn’t enthusiastic about the clamber down, Vonnie suggested that we could take the road at the back of the hill, a dirt path that wound gently downward. The main traffic consisted of elephants carrying tourists up and down, to and from the temple. When an elephant approached I pressed against the inner edge of the road to let the great swaying beast pass.

That was enough. I’d seen what it was possible for me to take in, unless I was planning to stay for a much longer time. We made a dutiful stop at one of the gift temples on the way back to Siem Reap, but I’d already bought an Angkor Wat T-shirt from one of the kids hawking them in the parking lot, and there wasn’t anything else I wanted. I’d seen it.

IV

Angkor Wat was sacked in 1431 by the Thais, whose kingdom was based at Ayyuthaya, just north of Bangkok. It was then abandoned to the jungle. The subsequent history of Angkor is one of its “reception”—of how it was seen and understood—by explorers, colonial visitors, and now tourists like me.

In the late-16th century, some hundred and fifty years after it had been abandoned, Portuguese traders and missionaries became aware of a great city hidden deep in the wilds of Cambodia. The Portuguese had heard stories of a Cambodian king named Satha, who, while on an elephant hunt, with his retainers beating a path through the jungle undergrowth, was brought up short by stone giants and a massive wall. According to the account, Satha ordered a work-party of several thousand men to clear away the jungle, thus exposing the lost cities of Angkor civilization.

One of the first foreigners was a Capuchin friar, Antonio de Magdalena, who explored the ruined city in 1586. Three years later, shortly before the friar’s death in a shipwreck, he gave an account of his visit to Diogo do Couto, official historian of the Portuguese Indies. "This city is square, with four principal gates, and a fifth which serves the royal palace," wrote do Couto, setting down the friar’s recollections. "The city is surrounded by a moat, crossed by five bridges… The stone blocks of the bridges are of astonishing size. The stones of the wall are also of an extraordinary size and so joined together that they look as if they are made of just one stone… the source of which is, amazingly, over 20 leagues away…

"Half a league from this city is a temple called Angar. It is of such extraordinary construction that it is not possible to describe it with a pen, particularly since it is like no other building in the world. It has towers and decoration and all the refinements which the human genius can conceive of… The temple is surrounded by a moat, and access is by a single bridge, protected by two stone tigers so grand and fearsome as to strike terror into the visitor."

Two decades later, in 1609, Bartolome de Argensola wrote, "One finds in the interior within inaccessible forests, a city of 6,000 homes, called Angon. The monuments and roads are made of marble, and are intact. The sculptures are also intact, as if they were modern. There is a strong wall. The moat, stone-lined, can admit boats… There are epitaphs, inscriptions, which have not been deciphered. And in all this city—the natives discovered it—there were no people, no animals, nothing living. I confess I hesitate to write this, it appears as fantastic as the Atlantis of Plato." I too hesitate.

French missionaries entered the region in the 17th century; at the end of the next century Zhou Daguan’s memoir was published in Paris; and in the mid-19th century, with Cambodia now a French protectorate, a steady flow of mostly French explorer-naturalists, photographers, and archeological scholars began the study and restoration of the monuments. The obscure volumes of the memoirs of the often strange, wandering, fever-wracked men—I later read one by Henri Mouhot—can be found occasionally in a Bangkok bookstore.

The next morning, I sat on a bench in front of the Golden Angkor, along with some local drivers, anxiously wondering whether the bus bound for Bangkok would actually appear. The desk clerk had assured me more than once that he had been in contact with Ma, the woman who handled the travel arrangements. I saw it as a problem in logistics equivalent to the provisioning of Napoleon’s army in Russia, and likely to have the same doomed outcome. Well, that overstates it, but only by a little from the viewpoint of the reluctant traveller. The bus arrived, the backpackers were aboard, and we pulled out of Siem Reap, back onto the highway toward Popit, the border station, and then onto Bangkok. A young French couple was sitting alongside me. "How did you like Angkor?" I asked. The woman said, "Oh, the temples are alright, but we’re more interested in, you know, the people."

That night the bus pulled into the driveway of the Malaysia Hotel in Bangkok. There was an odd rush of feeling as I recognized and was greeted by the familiar faces of the desk clerks, the bellman by the elevator, the waitresses standing at the entrance to the hotel coffee shop. Did you have a good trip, they asked. "Yes," I said, "it was astonishing," then added, as do all returning travellers, "but it’s good to be home." In time-travel, what you learn is that home is in the middle of nowhere, as are we all.

Berlin, Oct. 16, 2004