Trains for the sake of trains

Life is a journey, not a destination,
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Always keep Ithaca in your mind;
to reach her is your destiny.
But do not rush your journey in the least.
--C. P. Cavafy

Lee Wachtstetter, who turns 90 next month, has lived aboard a cruise ship for the past 13 years.  She prefers it to a retirement home, and she is warmly welcomed by the crew.  The fare, after discounts offered by the cruise line, amounts to about $100,000 per year.  She doesn't disembark when the ship is in port -- she's seen it all already.

For Ms. Wachtstetter, cruising isn't about exotic destinations.  It's all about living a comfortable life aboard ship.  It's all about the journey.

I tell you about this lovely lady for a reason, aside from my finding her lifestyle to be genuinely interesting.  I want to desensitize you, to make what I'm about to tell you about myself seem tame and rational by comparison.

Sunday, I'm taking a train to Oakland, California.  Monday, I'm flying home.  Why am I traveling to the city about which Gertrude Stein famously declared, "There is no there there"?  And leaving again so hurriedly?  Not because of the destination, clearly, but because of the journey.

If you've followed this blog for several years, you know that I love trains.  Always have.  I traveled on sleepers from Portland down the Valley to Roseburg with my mother, to visit my great grandparents, when I was 3 and 4, and to Sacramento when I was 6..  I traveled alone by train to Chicago, and back again, when I was 14.  I traveled from Seattle to Boston ten years ago.  I've traveled overnight from Nairobi to Mombasa, and from Surat Thani to Bangkok.  And all over Europe, at all stages of my life.

Furthermore, to establish my point beyond fear of contradiction, by the age of 10 I had virtually memorized the Lionel Electric Train Catalogue.

I last took the train from Seattle to Oxnard, CA, at Christmas 2017.  But nothing since.  It's time for a train ride.

As a student, I often traveled as cheaply as possible.  As a concession to advancing age, I now do my overnight travel in a roomette.  The fare is considerably higher than coach, but I'll get lunch, dinner, and breakfast included in the fare.  The scenery is great, the meals aren't bad, drinks in the lounge car are always available, and -- for me, but not for all folks -- bed in a gently swaying roomette is conducive to a great night's sleep.

I leave Seattle at 9:45 a.m. Sunday, and arrive in Oakland at 8:35 the next morning.  I then transfer to a regional train for an eight-minute ride to the Oakland Coliseum station.  From there, I transfer to BART's odd little automated, unstaffed shuttle that runs from the station to Oakland airport.  There, I'll rent a car, and drive to Palo Alto, crossing the Bay on either the San Mateo or Dumbarton bridge.  I'll revisit old student haunts, pretend I'm still 18, deplore changes to the campus while envying the kids who are still students, and all too soon find it time to return to Oakland.

Thence, by Alaska Airlines back to Seattle.

I'm nuts?  No doubt.  But then, aren't we all in one way or another?  Some of us just don't reveal it  to the world in a public blog.

You can't go home again

I think of the … young man of fourteen I used to be back then, and of myself now, and of the person I might have been had I stayed here thirty years ago.  I think of the strange life I'd have led ….  And I think of this imaginary self who never strayed or did the things I probably regret having done but would have done anyway and don't wish to disown, a self who never left Egypt or ever lost ground and who, on nights such as these, still dreams of the world abroad and of faraway America....

I wonder if this other self would understand about him and me, and being here and now and on the other bank as well -- the other life, the one that we never live but conjure up when the one we have is perhaps not the one we want.

--André Aciman, False Papers, "Alexandria: The Capital of Memory"

As six months of student life in Florence, Italy, drew to a close, one of my classmates pointed out that our time of feeling at home in Italy was almost over, and that it had been a feeling that would never return.  We probably would return to Florence in the future, she said, but always as tourists.  Not as men and women who felt -- however ludicrously -- that we were honorary Italians.  And, of course, not as college students.

In fact, I have returned many times to Florence.  And every time I've returned, I've walked toward the Fiesole hills, walking up via della Piazzola to No. 43 -- to Villa San Paolo, our home away from home.  Each time, I've stood at the gate in front of the three-story stucco building, and looked up at the green-shuttered room that another guy and I shared for six months.  Each time, I've hoped for the sensation that I've returned home, that someone from the Villa would emerge to welcome me back.  That I could enjoy even an instant of reliving the past.  Each time, I walk away -- glad I returned but with a sense of disappointment.

I'll be back in Florence again in August.  I'm sure I'll once more make that pilgrimage.  I'm sure the pleasure, shadowed with disappointment, will be the same.

I experience analogous feelings whenever I return to my home town.  I wander the streets, visiting each of the neighborhoods in which I lived growing up.  Deep down, I hope to see a childhood friend emerge from one of the houses and greet me, a friend unchanged from the time I was 8 or 12 or 16.  As I walk about, I remind myself of the 1950s Twilight Zone episode in which an adult man dreams constantly of his happy childhood and eventually, miraculously, ends up a child again, playing baseball with other kids.  The guy seemed rather pathetic and creepy when I watched the show as a teenager.  I'm more understanding now.

The author André Aciman has made something of a career out of studying this phenomenon, this desire to relive our pasts, and the impossibility of doing so.  His obsession, if that's what it is, was triggered by his family's expulsion from Egypt when he was fourteen, torn from the once-cosmopolitan city of Alexandria where he was born and grew up.  Many of his essays, including the one quoted above, deal with his futile attempts to relive the past -- even just in his mind -- by returning to Alexandria. 

But beyond Alexandria, he has found the same difficulty in dealing with past experiences throughout his life.  For example, living in New York he is nostalgic for his experiences as a teenager in Paris, but when he arrives in Paris he feels nothing.  He can regain his nostalgia for Paris only through developing a nostalgia for New York, specifically, a nostalgia for those times in New York when he was brooding nostalgically for Paris.  (See "Square Lamartine" in the same collection of essays.)

He concedes, resignedly, that these labyrinthine workings of his mind and imagination drive his friends and family batty.

Most readers understandably read his best-selling novel Call Me by Your Name as a summer romance between two boys, and the movie based on his book certainly was just that.  But Aciman's underlying concern in his novel was our inability to return to the past, and his haunting sense that our lives split into parallel universes with each critical decision we make, in only one universe of which we can actually live.  

By the time we're middle aged -- or at least by the time Aciman was middle aged -- we are inundated with thoughts of the possible lives, both better and worse, we might have lived.  We go back to earlier times and places to see how we might have decided differently, but our lives in those earlier times can't be relived as they were originally lived.  We find ourselves instead watching a grainy, poorly preserved film image of our earlier selves.

We go back to Florence, hoping to still be the student we were then.  But we can't relive, with the proper intensity, our worries about future careers or our concerns about how our friends view us. Nor our joy at seeing for the first time sights to which we've since become accustomed -- e.g., that Easter morning after our nighttime arrival, stepping for the first time out into an Italian street and seeing ancient women, clad in black, vigorously washing and sweeping the steps in front of their buildings.  Instead, all we see now, standing on the same street and looking back, is a clueless kid wandering around a foreign city.

Most of us understand this, subconsciously at least, and have long ago made our peace with it.  Aciman has built a writing career struggling with its necessity.  And taking us along with him for the ride. 

Ghost language of Kernow

My visit to Cornwall will be my first to that part of England.  Saying that I'm visiting Cornwall is a bit more exotic than saying that I'm visiting Sussex or Yorkshire.  Cornwall is, in some ways, a rather odd part of England, not quite England but not quite anything else either.  Its English name derives from the Cornish kernou ("headland) plus the Anglo-Saxon walh (foreigner).  Cornwall's name today in Cornish is Kernow.

Like all of England, Cornwall before the coming of the Roman Empire was occupied by a Celtic people usually called the Britons.  Cornwall is way off in the southwest corner of the island, and its form of Celtic eventually differed from that spoken elsewhere.  A major resource of Cornwall was its tin deposits, which played an important part in its economy until quite recently.

The Roman occupation had less impact on Cornwall than on other parts of the island.  The Romans had more critical thing to worry about than control of  the isolated Cornish peninsula.  When the Romans finally left Britain, the Germanic tribes moved in -- the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes.  They also had bigger fish to fry than subjecting isolated Cornwall.  Cornwall and neighboring Devon held out as the Celtic kingdom of Dumnonia until late in the ninth century when Dumnonia was finally brought under the control of the Saxon kingdom of Wessex.

The ascendency of Wessex caused some Celtic speaking people of Cornwall to flee across the channel to what then became known as Brittany, carrying their language with them.  The neighboring region of Wales was, of course, another Celtic holdout, and caused the English kings much more difficulty.  Celtic as spoken in Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany was almost identical, with slight regional differences, as late as the twelfth century.  In fact, the Anglo-Saxons called Cornwall "West Wales," to distinguish it from the larger "North Wales."

Along with other regions, Cornwall became part of a unified Anglo-Saxon English nation by the eleventh century.  After the Norman Conquest, the Norman kings brought Cornwall under their control and appointed a Norman aristocrat as Duke of Cornwall.

Since 1421, to the present day, the eldest son of the English monarch has been automatically named Duke of Cornwall. 

Cornish continued to be widely spoken in Cornwall until Henry VIII not only abolished the use of Latin in the church, but required that all services be offered only in English.  The last native speakers of Cornish are believed to have died by 1800.  The language has enjoyed a small revival during the last hundred years.  I'm told I can expect to see occasional street signs written in Cornish as well as English, similar to the use of Gaelic in the Scottish Highlands.  Cornish (along with Welsh and Breton) is a Celtic language, as is Gaelic, but they constitute separate branches of Celtic and are mutually unintelligible.  (Today, I've read, even speakers of  closely related Cornish and Welsh would understand only "bits and pieces" of each other's conversation.)  In 2011, only 464 residents of Cornwall declared Cornish to be their first language.

Despite its rich local history, therefore, I doubt if I'll meet anyone who speaks (or understands) Cornish.  All Englishmen today speak English, even when their accents are mutually difficult to grasp.  And Cornwall has long been fully integrated into the English (now British) legal and political system, despite a modest political autonomy movement.  Such is the sadness, as well as the benefits, of a global civilization tied together by television and the internet.

Post-hike musical interlude

Mark Knopfler in 2017

I'll be hiking along the Cornwall coast next month, as I've mentioned on occasion, with some of the same people with whom I hiked in Scotland last year -- Jim and Dorothy, and some of Jim's relatives.  Following the hike, some (or maybe all) of us will end up in London for several days before returning to the States.

So, I get an email from Jim informing me that, while in London, he and Dorothy plan to zoom out to Greenwich (of GMT fame) to see a concert by Mark Knopfler.  Would I be interested in joining them?  The more musically literate among you will be incredulous, but that name meant nothing to me.  He used to sing, play guitar, and compose for Dire Straits, Jim added -- the name of a group that did ring some historical bells, but no actual tunes, in my puzzled mind.

I should explain that my appreciation of rock and pop music was tragically truncated long ago.  In the late 1960s, while not a fan like many of my peers, I did listen to the music then currently in vogue, and tried to keep up.  It was clear that the times were a-changin', and that it would be suicidal to be left behind, musically and otherwise.

 Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.

Right? Exactly. And it wasn't just self-preservation.  I actually liked much of the music of the late 60s.  Not as much as I liked Bach, ok?  But the two weren't actively competing.

A quick perusal of old LPs -- remember, you had to actually buy albums back then, you didn't just go to YouTube -- reveals purchases of the Rolling Stones, John B. Sebastian, Joan Baez, the Beatles, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Country Joe & the Fish, Simon & Garfunkel.  Sort of a mixed bag, but my selection demonstrates the era I'm talking about.

But by 1970, I was no longer in school, and my interest in current hits, and even my opportunities to listen to the radio, were fading away.   My friend Jim -- with whom I'm hiking next month -- visited me in San Francisco in 1969, and we went to the Fillmore West, a well-known venue for current music.  I was fascinated by the place from a typically (for me) detached point of view -- doing a sociological study, and observing with interest the psychedelic light show effects.  But the music itself just seemed loud.

I think the Fillmore West visit is my last memory of seeking out or trying to understand contemporary music. And, of course, in 1971 I began law school. Life as I'd previously known it came to a screeching halt, and my mind was crammed full of 17th century English precedents. Nineteen seventy-one -- the year the music died.

But putting that all aside, and returning to the present, I told Jim sure, I'd be happy to join them at the Greenwich concert.  Jim said we could pretend we were all 20-year-olds again, which sounded a little problematic, but, hey, I liked his spirit.  And if I've learned anything in life, it is that doing things outside your comfort zone is rarely enjoyable at the time, but still pays off in the long run in your ability to regale others with stories of your daring and open-mindedness. So I'll be in Greenwich on May 28.

And then finally, tonight, I did what I should have done at the outset.  I went to YouTube and listened to several clips both of relatively recent Mark Knopfler concerts from the past ten years, and of Dire Straits from the 1980s.  I found Dire Straits quite tolerable (although I was a bit amazed at the worship that many of the comments paid to them), but the later performances by Knopfler himself, seemingly aged and mellowed, accompanied by his intelligent commentary discussing his approach to singing and playing, actually quite enjoyable.

I may actually have fun.  Despite myself.

The kids return

Thirty-two years ago, I moved from the historically-Scandinavian Seattle neighborhood of Ballard to my present home, just south of the University of Washington.  My new home was in a quiet and dignified neighborhood.  Most of my neighbors were well past the first bloom of youth, many of them professors or in other staff positions at the university.  When I saw children outdoors, it usually meant that someone's grandparents were being visited.

In the past ten years, however, there's been a change in the 'hood.  Younger homeowners, many of them high tech workers -- employees of Microsoft, Amazon, and many smaller companies.  Furthermore, they began having kids.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, more and more houses now have tell-tale basketball hoops out in front.  I see more and more kids out on bikes -- earlier, in the company of doting and protective parents, but within the past five years, often alone or in the company of their age peers.  The 1950s revisited!

These changes aren't just my imagination.  The Seattle Times ran an article today reporting that as of 2017, the Seattle population under the age of 18 had risen to 115,000 -- the first time it exceeded 100,000 in decades.  Admittedly, the kid population in 1960, fueled by the Baby Boom, was 167,000.  Those were the golden days of kiddom.  The schools were crowded.  Seattle neighborhoods were quite similar to suburban neighborhoods, both in appearance and in the number of children present.  The city was so focused on the rearing and education of the next generation that I well recall -- I moved to Seattle in 1963 -- the Seattle Times printing the name and photo of each Boy Scout as he achieved Eagle rank. 

Then -- nationwide -- came the great hollowing out of the cities, as the middle classes, especially the white middle classes, fled the urban areas and their schools.  By 1980, there were only 87,000 children under 18 in Seattle, and Seattle had closed two of its more prominent high schools -- Lincoln and Queen Anne (Lincoln re-opens this fall, another sign of the times).

The tide has been reversed, but you still won't see photos of Eagle scouts in the newspaper.  Only 15.8 percent of Seattle's population, even now, is under 18.  (In 1960, that percentage was 30 percent.)  Seattle has the third lowest percentage in the nation of its population under the age of 18 (only San Francisco and Boston have fewer).  We still remain an expensive city in which to raise a family, and we would have fewer kids even now if our median incomes weren't so high.  The median income for a married couple with children is $161,000. 

Will the trend continue?  Will we have gangs of kids roaming the streets, doing wheelies on their bicycles?  Who can predict?  But not all couples seem to require children, when suitable substitutes are available.  We may have 115,000 children -- but we also have 150,000 dogs. 

Cats?  Cats refuse to speak to the census workers.

Traveling by thumb

"Nowadays, no one ever hitchhikes."  That was a nephew's response to a remark I had made about having hitchhiked once through a particular area of England. 

"No one" is an exaggeration.  But to a large degree, he's right.  Several reasons, I suppose.  There's always the perceived danger, although I strongly doubt that there's a greater abundance of dangerous characters lurking out there today than there were fifty years ago.  But not only have we turned into a bunch of helicopter parents -- we hover over ourselves as well, avoiding the darkness we fear all about us.

Another reason is that we're all -- by we, I mean you and me and most people reading this blog -- wealthier today.  The vogue for hitchhiking around Europe, especially, but around America as well, arose after World War II when not only was there a pent-up desire to get out and see the world, but also a lack of disposable income with which to do it.  Especially in post-war Europe, where for several years after 1945 you could still buy a lot of favors with a pack of American cigarettes.

Both before and after the war, young Europeans had developed a sense of wanderlust -- Fernweh in German -- to which the youth hostel movement had been one response.  Hitchhiking (as well as biking and hiking by foot) was a good fit with the widespread availability of youth hostels.

Now, when kids do travel about Europe -- which fewer seem interested in doing -- they travel by cheap airlines, or by trains, or by rental cars.  Their folks usually bankroll the summer's adventure.  If they choose, as they often do, they can afford to stay in hotels now, although hostels are still available and still attractive to a subset of the youth travel market..

In 1971, my friend Jim (with whom I'll be hiking (on foot) for a couple of weeks next month in Cornwall) and I hitchhiked in Britain and Ireland.  We hitched up the eastern side of England from London, to Cambridge, to Lincoln, and to York.  In Yorkshire, we stopped to visit Jim's British cousin, who was raising pigs in the rural countryside.  We continued up through Durham and Berwick to Edinburgh, all by hitching rides.  We met a lot of interesting drivers, whose accents became increasingly difficult to make out as we moved ever farther north. 

Finally, we met a Waterloo of sorts at Pitlochry, in Scotland, where the cars heading north were all filled with vacationing families bound for the Highlands.  They had no room for two grungy looking kids, although they often made politely apologetic hand gestures as they roared past.  We finally abandoned our hopes of going farther north, and took a train to Glascow, and then across the Irish Sea by ferry to Belfast.  After a stay at a hostel in a small seaside town north of Belfast, we got a ride to Dublin -- whoo-hoo!  After being awakened in the middle of the night by a cop, who found us sacked out in the largest park in central Dublin -- he just rolled his eyes and told us to be careful, once he heard our accents -- we toured the Guinness brewery down on the banks of the River Liffey, which for obvious reasons was a highlight of our Dublin experience, as was the related experience of listening to Irish folk music in a central Dublin pub.. 

My five weeks in Britain and Ireland cost me $160, excluding air fare. Jim thought me too lavish, and spent $140.

But I guess that in addition to perceived danger and economic improvement, there's a third reason hitchhiking has lost status and popularity -- we all today, including many teenagers, have become less free-wheeling in our travels.  We're more tied to schedules.  Today's kid can arrange hotel reservations throughout Europe for every night of his visit, by simply sitting at home playing with his computer.  In my travels, I sometimes would arrange a first night's reservation -- although I didn't in 1971 -- but to do so required an exchange of correspondence by mail and the complications of currency transactions.  It was simpler to just fly by the seat of our pants or, to change metaphors, play it by ear.  Things never worked out exactly as we had hoped -- Pitlochry being a prime example -- but we didn't care.  The complications, and how we handled them, were a major part of the experience.

I close my pondering on the glories of yesteryear by confessing that I have an appointment at the airport tomorrow morning to become approved for TSA Pre-Check.  God forbid that I should have to stand in line to go through airport security, let alone remove my shoes.  I'm a busy man; I can't waste time standing around doing nothing. I'll happily turn over all possible data, including fingerprints, to the Government -- in exchange for convenience.

Yes.  I've met the enemy, and he is me. 

Back to Egypt?

Arab hostility to Israel, after the 1948 war and especially after the Suez conflict in 1954, caused many of the Arab states to expel their Jewish populations, Jewish communities often dating back centuries.  I just finished reading for a second time André Aciman's memoir, Out of Egypt, describing his family's expulsion from Egypt in 1964, when he was a boy of 14.

Oddly enough, I've never written an essay discussing this book, although I've mentioned it in various contexts in essays on other subjects.  (Especially in my 2016 essay, Thanks for the Memories, discussing the extent to which a memoirist must truthfully and literally report his memories.)   

Aciman is a Proustian scholar and writer, and his memoir, like  his essays and novels, are not to be understood simply as historical reporting.   But, even accepting that he has taken some liberty with his remembered facts -- and displays a remarkable memory of events and conversations that occurred when he was about five years old -- Out of Egypt is a devastating description of how his extended family's life and unity were wrenched and disrupted as they were expelled on short notice from their Alexandria homes, all their assets except personal items being confiscated by the Nasser government.

Coincidentally, this week's Economist reports that Arab hostility toward the Jews they expelled has begun to soften.  Arab writers are beginning to appreciate that they share common Semitic roots and Middle Eastern history with the Jews.

A surprising number of researchers uncovering the Middle East's Jewish past are Palestinian.  Some even speak of a common fate with dispossessed Arab Jews.  "We're entering an age of post-colonialism," says a Christian cleric from Cairo.  "We're again learning how to see richness in others, not threats."

Egypt's president announced in February that he would build new synagogues if the country's Jews returned.  And his government is restoring the largest synagogue in Alexandria. 

No one in Aciman's family could have foreseen this turn of events, however small it may seem, in 1964.  A family of Sephardic Jews, their forebears had fled Spain during the expulsions in 1492, ultimately ending up in Turkey.  Growing hostility after World War I caused them to move to Egypt to seek a better life, a major disruption for a family that had lived for generations in the Ottoman Empire.  When leaving Egypt, the family correctly believed that they would never be allowed to return, except for short visits as tourists. 

In his haunting conclusion to Out of Egypt, the facts of which Aciman later cheerfully admitted were largely invented -- in detail, if not in emotion -- his 14-year-old self broods, looking out over the ocean from the Corniche:

I wanted to come back tomorrow night, and the night after, and the one after that as well, sensing that what made leaving so fiercely painful was the knowledge that there would never be another night like this, that I would never eat soggy cakes along the coast road in the evening, not this year nor any other year, nor feel the baffling, sudden  beauty of that moment when, if only for an instant, I had caught myself longing for a city I never knew I loved.  … [Those watching me and my family] would never, ever know, nor ever guess, that this was our last night in Alexandria.

The family members who Aciman so lovingly and often humorously describes are all long dead, their final years spent scattered across Europe.  Aciman himself, still very much alive, calls New York his "home," while protesting that for an exile, no place ever becomes a "home," no matter how long he has lived there.

Alexandria, before the Egyptian nationalists took over, was one of the great cosmopolitan cities of the world, and the Jews were a major component of the cosmopolis.  I doubt that the Egyptians' actions, however well intended, will ever draw many Jews back to Alexandria. 

But the gesture is welcome and may suggest a growing sophistication among Arab leaders, and a growing ability to distinguish between the Jewish people and the Israeli state.

Seattle Waterfront

I've nothing to say.  I returned from a trip to Sonoma last week, and next week will make another trip to Sonoma.  Family stuff.  Nothing -- beyond what I said in my March 29 post -- worth talking about.  And I'm still bothered by thoughts of my deceased cat, the famous Muldoon, whom I look for every time I enter the house, or even walk from one room to another. 

This afternoon, I walked along the waterfront.  Partly just for a walk on a blustery afternoon, but mainly to check up on the Alaska Way Viaduct, which is being reduced, bit by bit, to rubble.  Opening up great new vistas.  At least for those who can pay sufficient rent to enjoy them.

I have nothing to say.  But I owe you a post, just to remind you that I'm still alive and that better things will soon be on their way.  So here are some photos from today's walk.

Equipment eating up the first part of the Alaska Way Viaduct

Lots of Viaduct still to go



Chewing away on the top deck

A bear and the Wheel

The Wheel at the end of a Pier

Tourist shot -- Pike Place Market
Fish flying, straight ahead