Hopefully negative

We can only hope that no new lightning bolt hurled down by the travel gods wipes out our stay at Lake Como, Italy, scheduled to begin September 11.

--My Blog (Aug. 16, 2021)

Well, the nefarious travel gods have hurled yet another lightning bolt in my direction.  It probably hasn't wiped out my visit to Lake Como, but it sets up yet another hurdle for me to trip over.

Because the response to the Covid pandemic by a large segment of the American people has -- as it were -- sucked, Europe has grown increasingly nervous about allowing loud, laughing, gregarious American tourists, however free-spending, to traipse across their borders, accompanied by their nasty viruses.  Therefore, the EU announced this week that it was removing the United States from its "safe travel" list.  

And Italy responded.

Beginning tomorrow, vaccinated Americans also will have to present negative results to a Covid test, evidence that they aren't shedding Covid viruses despite being vaccinated and despite having no apparent symptoms of the disease.

It's a reasonable reaction by the Italian government.  According to the New York Times, Italy as a whole has, averaged over the past seven days, only eleven new cases of Covid-19 per day for every 100,000 in population.  The United States, by contrast, has 48.  And even my own county in the State of Washington -- one of the safer parts of the country in which to live -- has 28.

No, the problem isn't with the reasonableness of Italy's new regulation.  My problem is that it was imposed with about two days' notice.  I'm flying out of Seattle early in the morning of September 8, and will arrive in Rome early in  the morning (Italian time) of September 9.  Suddenly, I have to search for a place in which to be tested, make reservations to do so, and have the test completed and the result in hand no earlier than 72 hours before arrival in Italy, and no later than departure from Seattle.

Luckily, I think I've done it.  I've made a reservation for an antigen test at 10:45 a.m. on Monday, September 6.  The outfit offering the tests seems reputable, and is operating out of a Hilton hotel near the airport.  The price seems outrageous, especially when, with a little more time, I could have received free testing in my own neighborhood.  But you get what you pay for.  I hope.

The instructions assure me that if at any point during the procedure, I don't wish to continue, I will be free to leave with no hard feelings on their part.  That's very reassuring.  I can already feel their swab probing deep, ever deeper, into my nose.  "Oops, broke through to your brain!  Sorry if that smarts!"

Be assured you'll receive a blow by blow report of my ordeal.  Especially if the test results are positive.  With my trip thus canceled, I'll have lots of time to devote to this, my cherished blog.

Nature's art

Yesterday afternoon, I returned to Sea-Tac Airport -- a crowded scene of organized chaos.  The same scene I had left behind early Tuesday morning.

But sandwiched between those two airport scenes, I had existed in a totally different world.  Not only a different world, but a different time.  Seemingly, a rural life from the 1940s or 50s.

I've discussed my sister's Idaho home in past posts, in past years.  She and Andy, together with their son, live nine miles west of  the tiny town of Challis, abutting the Salmon-Challis National Forest.  Literally abutting -- from the window of my guest bedroom, I could read a sign indicating the National Forest border.  They live on fifty acres, fifty acres of greenery, surrounded by the dry, brown hills of late summer.  Two creeks pass across their property, one at present dammed by a family of industrious beavers to form a broad, peaceful pond.

A network of trails pass through groves of deciduous and coniferous trees.  At various strategic points, they have set benches and chairs for passers-by -- mainly themselves -- to sit, to ponder, to admire the scenery.

And the scenery is beautiful.  

But many scenes are beautiful, including parks near my own Seattle home.  What  is miraculous in this world near Challis is the quiet, the isolation, the sense of peace.  The road from Challis, after passing my sister's house, plunges almost immediately into the National Forest.  Little traffic from the "city" (population 1,081), nine miles distant, reaches this far.  There are neighbors, yes. Two.   From certain angles, you can see their houses, often through gaps in the forest.

But the more noticeable neighbors are the birds.  And the animals -- deer, beavers, squirrels.  And the family's own domestic animals -- two dogs (four while I was visiting -- they were caring for two dogs belonging to friends), one cat, five horses.  There also used to be twenty-five pet rats, but they came to a sad ending. 

But I'm giving you bare facts and data.  What I want to give you is a sense of feeling.  The feeling that at any time of the day, you can walk out of the house and stare off in any direction -- seeing a world unchanged not only from the 1940s, but, to a large extent, unchanged from time immemorial.  You can watch the sun rise or set behind nearby hills.  You can watch the shadows lengthen.  You can study the different colors presented by different times of day.

If one were an artist, which I'm decidedly not, he could paint a million canvases of the same scene, each

unique.  Like Monet, painting Rouen Cathedral or Westminster Bridge.

Not being an artist leaves me frustrated.  I can paint only with my eyes, on the canvas of my brain.  Which is like painting a masterpiece in disappearing ink on fragile newsprint.

But while the details may fade, my memory of my emotional reaction to those details remains.  And will draw me back for future visits.

Booster

October 18 is a date on my calendar that definitely deserves being circled in red:  The eight-month anniversary of my second Pfizer vaccination shot.  And as such -- the day I become eligible, under President Biden's announcement, for a third shot.  Eligible for the famous booster shot.  

(Actually, October 18 is a Saturday, and I'll be spending a long weekend in Boston, but as soon as possible thereafter.)

I've already reached the six-month point, and I'm already nervous about how well my immunity is holding up.  Studies in Israel show a fading immunity after six months, especially among older persons.  I'll be in Italy September 8-20 -- a somewhat risky plan in any event.  Although, according to figures in the New York Times, Italy so far is significantly less of a "hot spot" than is my own county here in Washington -- and my county is doing better than most of the U.S.  

But if I survive Italy's perils -- or, more to the point, if I'm able to get a negative antigen test that enables me to return to the welcoming arms of my own country -- I'll be first in line for the third shot as soon as it's available.

The original two shots of vaccine haven't totally prevented Covid infection as well as I'd hoped back in February.  The talk then was of 95 percent effectiveness, which we assumed meant that only 5 percent of those vaccinated would be infected after exposure.  But we've since learned that many "breakthrough" infections do occur, although most of them are either asymptomatic or result in only mild or moderate symptoms.

I've had innumerable experiences with sore throats, coughs, tiredness, and other potential signs of Covid-19 since February.  Was I experiencing an infection with minor symptoms?  Who knows.  I just don't want an asymptomatic infection to trigger a positive antigen test 72 hours before I head home.

Actually, I've read articles suggesting that if I have, in fact, "survived" minor Covid infections over the past six months, that might be a good thing.  Each infection gets the old immune system excited and eager to put out fires.  And if those infections came from different variants, so much the better -- I might now be a veritable fortress of immunity against all forms of attacking Covid virus.

Yes, as Hemingway once wrote. "Yes.   Isn't it pretty to think so."

A Passage North

The present, we assume, is eternally before  us, one of the few things in life from which we cannot be parted.  It overwhelms us in the painful first moments of entry into the world, when it is still too new to be managed or negotiated, remains by our side during childhood and adolescence, in those years before the weight of memory and expectation, and so it is sad and a little unsettling to see that we become, as we grow older, much less capable of touching, grazing, or even glimpsing it, ....

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In June, I described a trip that Pascal and I took to Sri Lanka in 2004.  I reprinted my journal's description of our ascent of Adam's Peak.  

I'm sure that during our tour throughout the southern portion of Sri Lanka, we were aware of the continuing struggle of the Tamils in the Northeast for independence, and of the terrorist actions by both the Tamils (mostly Hindu, some Christian and others) and the Sinhalese majority (Buddhist) in the south.  I don't recall being concerned about the struggle, even though we spent a couple of days visiting the ruins at Anuradhapura, which is near the south's border with the Tamil north.  I may have been lulled into a sense of security by the fact that a formal cease fire -- often violated -- existed between the government and the Tamils from 2002 to 2007.  After the cease fire ended, the government achieved total military victory in 2009.

This is all prelude to my having read a novel, set in the present, by Sri Lanka author Anuk Arudpragasam: A Passage North (2021).  It's an unusual novel, containing far more impressions and contemplations than plot.  But it offers a vivid image of life in Sri Lanka and among Sri Lankans, and an interesting illustration of the life and thoughts of a contemporary, intelligent Tamil.

Krishan is a Tamil who was born and raised in Colombo, the predominantly Sinhalese capital in the south.  He grew up in the same household as his mother, his grandmother Appamma, and Appamma's Tamil caretaker and eventual friend Rani, who had come to Colombo from the north to provide that care.   Krishan attended university in India, in the more cosmopolitan capital of Delhi, where he met and fell in love with an Indian student, Anjum.   He breaks up with Anjum, who is far more focused in her interests than is the somewhat dreamy Krishan.  Krishan's life is complicated when Rani, to whom he was somewhat attached, falls into a well during a visit back to her home village in the north and dies -- possibly but not conclusively a suicide.

Although set in the present, the characters' lives and thoughts are haunted by the violence of the war.  Rani had lost both of her sons to war -- her eleven-year-old younger son killed before her eyes by shrapnel in the waning days of the war.  She is kind and friendly with Appamma, but suffers from progressive depression and emotional detachment from the world about her.  Krishan, growing up in Colombo, had been shielded from personal contact with the war, but while a student in Delhi finds himself obsessed with accounts and photographs of its horrors, and a sense of survivors' guilt for not having shared his people's sufferings.

Much of the novel is given over to Krishan's thoughts and daydreams -- erudite passages that reflect Krishan's intellect and academic orientation, but also perhaps the concerns of the author.  Krishan gives a detailed and lengthy description of a Sanskrit "poem of yearning":  The Cloud Messenger, a tale of a divine spirit (yaksha) who had been punished by exile from his home and family, and who pleads with a passing cloud to carry a message to his beloved wife.  The poem describes the wife's city as a place where flowers of every season bloom at once, which Krishan construes as proof

that all seasons were collapsed there into a single season, that time itself stood still or that all times were contained in a single time -- as though, the narrator was suggesting, in ordinary life we are pulled in different directions by our contradictory desires, so that what we imagine as heaven is a place where these conflicting longings are somehow reconciled, in which the separate and seemingly incompatible times of their fulfillment are brought together,  uniting our otherwise divided souls. .  

Krishan, contemplating the ecstasy of being together with Anjum, concludes that it is only in such moments that one experiences reality, where the falsity of daily life becomes obvious .

Krishan was grateful that they were part of the same place and the same time, that for now at least they were together in the same moment, a moment that contained not only what was proximate and what was distant but also what was past and what was future, a moment without length or breadth or height but which somehow contained everything of significance, as if everything else the world consisted of was a kind of cosmic scenery, an illusion that, now that it was being exposed, could quietly fall away.

Krishan decides that, even when love dies, this knowledge that one acquires through love remains:

...the knowledge that the world we ordinarily partake in is somehow not quite real, that time does not need to pass the way we usually experience it passing, that somehow it is possible to live and breathe and move in a single moment, that a single moment could be not a bead on an abacus of finite length but an ocean that can be entered into, whose distant shores can never be reached.

The entire final section of the novel -- over a quarter of its length -- is devoted to Krishan's travel to the north to be present with Rani's Tamil family and fellow villagers at her funeral, and to witness in striking detail the cremation of her body.  He watches the smoke rising and dissipating into the sky, like a message to another world that would never be received.  Like the love-sick yaksha's cloud-borne message to his wife in the Sanskrit poem.

Summarized, the novel sounds abstruse and perhaps boring.  In reality, I found it gripping and fascinating.  The author, in attempting to follow Krishan's thoughts, describes his surroundings and his actions in great detail, bringing to life the often strange (to us) world of Sri Lanka life, a world that is often strange but in some ways very familiar as well.  A book worth reading slowly, and -- although I haven't yet done so -- reading a second time.

Dry river

The gods of travel have not treated me kindly recently.  How unkindly?  Let me count the ways.

1.  (2019)  Trip to Kashmir canceled three weeks before scheduled departure because of Indo-Pakistani conflict.

2. (2020)  Thirty-person birthday celebration in Levanto Italy canceled two months before departure.  Covid-19.

3. (2020).  Trip to Chiang Mai, Thailand, to visit my nephew.  Canceled.  Covid-19.

4. (2021).  Rescheduled birthday celebration in Levanto, Italy.  Canceled.  Covid-19.

And now -- my float trip down the Middle Fork of the Salmon river in Idaho.  The River of No Return.  

This was to be my first return to travel after being vaccinated against Covid-19.  A safe "first"  -- out of doors, in the wilderness, and in the company of a small number of vaccinated participants.  And, indeed, the culprit wasn't Covid-19 this time.

It was the weather.

We've been having very hot, very dry weather this summer in the Northwest Corner, as I've grumbled repeatedly in this blog.  My sister, who inspired this trip, has been sending me reports on the condition of the Salmon river.  The latest shows the river's average depth is down to 1.45 feet, where less than three feet is defined as "low."  I suspect that several people in a raft are going to have a rocky ride in 1.45 feet of water.

The outfitter has suggested flying us to portions of the river where the water is running deeper, and says that we may have to portage in places.  Unfortunately, that excludes the most scenic areas of the ride, together with bragging rights for having floated a continuous six-day route.  We are all older (not ancient) folks, and I suspect most of us are at least as interested in the wilderness experience as in running a fast river.  Under present conditions, however, we really would get neither.

So it looks like we're going to cancel the trip, which was scheduled to begin on August 26.  Or, more accurately, we hope to reschedule it for next summer, when we hope the weather will be closer to normal and the rivers flowing with more water.

I still have my plane tickets to Idaho.  Luckily my sister lives very close to the put-in point for the river trip, and I'll spend a few days visiting her and her family.  

We can only hope that no new lightning bolt hurled down by the travel gods wipes out our stay at Lake Como, Italy, scheduled to begin September 11.

Endless summer

My clock just chimed the hour: 3:00 p.m.  Three o'clock on a Northwest Corner summer afternoon in mid-August.  The chime prompted me to check the weather app on my phone:  Ninety degrees Fahrenheit (32.2° C), a recent uptick from the 88 degrees of the past couple of hours.  

A high temperature for Seattle, but not exceptionally high for mid-August.  What's unusual is that it's merely one of a long succession of similar days we've endured this year.  Last week, a laughable 0.01 inch of rainfall technically ended a dry spell of 51 days.  Our usually rainy June was marked by a string of days over 100 degrees, including one memorable day of 108 degrees (42.2° C).

I recall the Northwest summers of my childhood and youth.  Some were "dry summers" and some were "wet summers."  Even the dry summers had days when picnics were threatened, or washed out, by unexpected rainfalls.  I recall standing inside an open door in my garage when I was about ten, watching rain come down in sheets in mid-summer, while lightning crackled overhead.  Yes, we often had periods of consecutive days of sunshine, but just as often we had days with pleasant temperatures, no rain, but a gray overcast.  

A gray overcast -- in winter or summer -- has always been the trademark of the Northwest Corner.

Those childhood summers affected the wiring of the synapses in my brain.  Those sunny days, mixed with cloudy days and rainy days, represent "summer" to me.  Even though I knew even then that summers in other parts of the world were drier or wetter, hotter or colder, than our own.  Just like how, to me, a true forest was a forest of Douglas fir -- not one of pine, or maple, or saguaro cactus.

So this summer, even more than last summer and the summer before that, has befuddled my brain.  Summer is for hiking and camping, but I can't force myself to hike in 90 degree weather.  Well, let me amend that.  I probably could force myself to hike in 90 degree weather in California, or Morocco, or Greece -- but not in the Northwest Corner.  Because this hasn't really been summer.  I don't know what it has been.  I'm ready and able to prepare for rain or unseasonable cold.  I don't know how to prepare -- physically or psychologically -- for hiking in 90 degree (or even 85 degree) temperatures in "my" Northwest.

And so I haven't.  I walk four or five miles in the city in early morning or after dinner.  Beyond that, I sit inside and brood over the injustice of it all.

And so, I was happy to read a column by Margaret Renki in today's New York Times.  Like me, she worries about climate change, about the changes to our environment, about the losses of plant life and animal species that now seem inevitable.  Inevitable, now that experts predict an increase in temperature worldwide of another couple of degrees Celsius, even if we stopped pouring carbon into the atmosphere this very moment.

But Ms. Renki asks us to focus on the beauties of nature around us, and to appreciate them now while we have them.. I infer that we should remember that nature may be very different in tomorrow's world, but that it may still be beautiful in its own way.  We love our fir forests in the Northwest, but we can learn to love the Ponderosa pine that may some day replace them.  The earth will change in the future, but it has also changed in the past.  Only yesterday in geological time, the Northwest was covered with glaciers.  We would have admired them, if we had today's sensitivities, and would have been alarmed at their melting.

We are humans, and humans adjust.  Even to losses.

Renki writes from Nashville that the heat is "monstrous," and the air full of smoke (which Seattle so far has avoided this year).

The air is so thick, I can hardly breathe, but I can feel the breath of the earth on my ankles.  Heat rises from the sun-warmed soil.  Dampness pours out of the drew-drenched tangle of white clover and wood sorrel and mock strawberries that pass in this yard for a lawn.  The earth is breathing.  I can breathe, too, because it is still breathing.

Her assurance is not a cry to give up the fight for a better environment.  It is rather a plea that we not despair, even as we fight for the Earth, even as we see species die out, and forests dry up, and oceans rise.  We may lose much that is beautiful, but the Earth lives on and will create new forms of beauty for our descendants.  

Our own lives are short, but the Earth will endure in one form or another.  Our generation will soon pass away, but future generations will each make its own  peace with a changing Earth.  

Visiting Lebanon 1970

Another flashback to past travels. 

During the summer of 1970, I joined vast hordes of American young people in traveling about Europe on our own, with no (or only the sketchiest) pre-planned itinerary, with no advance reservations, and certainly with no iPhone contact with the folks at home. We traveled each day as the spirit moved us, as our curiosity led us, as rumors from other travelers inspired us. We carried our luggage on our backs, and our savings in the form of travelers checks.

Back in April 2014, I reprinted in this blog an article written for my home town newspaper (click to see article) describing a day's adventure visiting Damascus from Beirut.  I had arrived in Beirut near the tail end of my six weeks overseas. I had spent those weeks traveling by train and boat, staying in youth hostels and in dirt cheap hotels in Paris, Italy, and Greece.  

I had sailed by ferry from the Greek island of Rhodes to Cyprus, hoping to hop another ship from Cyprus to Beirut.  The following excerpt from my diary -- my last entry for reasons I can't recall -- takes off from that point.  Keep in mind that this was my first experience with life outside America and Europe.

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Thursday -- 13 August [1970]

Events happened quickly.  Arriving in Limassol involved an enormous amount of hassle at immigration -- the formalities taking place before we were allowed to disembark.  Everyone complained, even usually unflappable British.  You're aware that Cyprus isn't really prepared for mass tourism in any way similar to Greece.  Almost everyone on the ship was either Greek or Cypriot, or a Britisher on vacation or visiting friends -- and the British were a very small minority. 

Found a travel agent -- Scottish girl, 6 years in Cyprus -- and discovered that there would be no ship to Beirut for six days.  So on the spur of the moment, decided on a flight.  She got me my reservation -- cost about 9½ L [pounds sterling] -- and put me in a shared taxi to Nicosia, after buying me a Coke.

Interesting ride -- very hot, even the wind.  Same Mediterranean type surroundings, but a bit lusher near the coast.  Amazed at how many road signs were in English -- especially the "dining and dancing" variety.  Could see that British had been entertaining themselves on Cyprus for a long time.  Passed several armed U.N. checkpoints, but no one seemed  to pay them any heed.

 Arrived at Nicosia Airport with about a half-hour to spare -- actually though we left late -- and went quickly through customs again and filled out a couple of postcards -- I needed some proof I'd actually been there.  Then before I knew, we were off -- sat next to a Jordanian teenager on a M.E.A. flight -- many English.  Just had time to eat some very sugary -- but surprisingly good -- candies and drink a glass of orange juice -- i.e., 35 minutes -- and we were landing in Beirut.

Met a couple of girls at the airport -- Americans -- whose fathers worked at the American University.  (Gave me quite a start by talking about how they had just come back from visiting Europe!)  They filled me in, as we waited in lines, on various tips for survival in Lebanon.  Took a cab directly to the YMCA -- LL.7 -- and here I am.

Well -- it's something else, all right.  I'm not sure yet quite what generalization I could make.  In many ways, it's the most Americanized place I've been, not excluding Amsterdam  --especially here in the university district.  Bookstores carrying many of the same texts as at home, hamburger stands with milk shakes, banana splits, pizza -- the whole all-American bit.  Uncle Sam's Restaurant is practically an inexpensive Denny's.  Had fried eggs this morning, believe it or not.  Why live European when I'm no longer in Europe? 

On the other hand, the Eastern influence is very marked.  Downtown you run into men in fezes, in Arab head-dresses, in whole Arab gowns, in Turkish type clothes, stocking caps.  Women often in mid-calf peasant dresses with shawls over their heads.  One woman I've seen in complete veil -- couldn't even see her eyes.  Most, of course, are in western dress -- very like Italy and Greece.  But in the downtown market area this majority becomes rather slim, if it exists.

Just about every sign that you'd be interested in is in Arabic and English, or sometimes French.  Even license plates are bi-literal.

The markets are fantastic.  Everything imaginable for sale.  Meat carcasses hanging like skeletons, partially de-fleshed.  Fruit juice stands, packed with all kinds of fruits, and especially carrots.  Beirut must be the home of the Waring blender.  Passed one café and found it filled with grizzled old men smoking their water pipes -- tobacco, I trust.

One of the guys in the dorm room is French, but speaks good English.  He motored all over the Middle East, including Iran and Iraq.  He is very down on Beirut -- thinks it is completely uninteresting.  Also doesn't care for the allegedly money-hungry attitude of the natives.  I mentioned, "There seem to be a lot of TV antennae around here."  "Yeah, but it's not like in Europe or America.  The Lebanese would rather sip coffee and talk."  "Well, that's good."  "Yes, that's good -- but what do they talk about?  I don't know any Arabic, but when I listen to the conversations, all I hear is "Lire, lire, lire'!"

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It's maddening now that I didn't continue keeping my journal to the end of the trip.  Of course, I did document my day trip the following day to Damascus, by means of my newspaper article.  But I have only my undocumented memories, a half century later, of my travel by bus from Beirut, through Syria, to Turkey and Istanbul.  The bus was filled with Lebanese on their way to vacations on the Bulgarian coast.  The one exception was one American woman and her two young children.  Her husband worked for Aramco in Tehran, but she and the kids were traveling on their own.

Syria apparently didn't like being merely a conduit to Turkey, and so they required the bus to stay overnight in the coastal city of Latakia, where I shared meals with my American compatriots.  Then we had to wait for a couple of more hours at the Turkish border -- beautiful mountainous scenery, as I recall -- to meet the requirement that we and our bus had spent a full 24 hours in transit through Syria before entering Turkey.

I stayed at a youth hostel near the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.  A city that I loved at first sight, and still love.   I loved it even though I became deathly ill from food poisoning -- from what I decided was a contaminated ice cream cone I had bought from a sidewalk vendor -- and vomited repeatedly over a day's time into the hostel's filthy toilets, a condition aggravated by water shortages that allowed toilets to be flushed only during limited hours each day.  

I stayed several days in Istanbul -- most of them in good health -- and flew to Rome, catching a train from Rome to Amsterdam where my chartered plane (by REI) awaited me for the flight back to Seattle.

Best six weeks of travel ever!

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Photo -- stock photo of pre-war Beirut