By rail in Britain

British London-Glasgow train
at station in Carlisle.

One month from today, I fly to London in preparation for my eight-day hike through Westmorland.  The hike begins in Appleby, in north central Westmorland, and ends 95 miles later in Arnside, Westmorland's one small exposure to the sea at the far southern end of the county.*

The hike will be fun -- an adventure -- but also fun will be my travel between London and the beginning and end points of the hike.

To get to Appleby, I will take a mainline train from London's King's Cross station to Leeds.  At Leeds, I transfer to the storied Settle-Carlisle line -- a line barely saved from discontinuation in the 1980s -- and follow its scenic route (14 tunnels and 22 viaducts) to Appleby.  I took this same route last summer as far as Kirkby Stephen, one stop before Appleby.

Returning from Arnside, I take the Furness line -- which skirts the Lake District along the coast of the Irish Sea -- to Lancaster, an 18 minute ride.  Then from Lancaster, I connect with the Glasgow-London train to London's Euston Station.

In booking these trains, I was filled with envy.  Virgin Trains alone -- operating the London to Glascow route -- has nine trains per hour leaving Euston, one of which each hour is bound for Glasgow.  And Virgin is only one of a number of train companies operating within Britain. 

Trains on the mainlines -- e.g., London-Edinburgh, London-Glascow -- operate at 125 mph.

Here, in the United States, Amtrak operates one train per day from Seattle to Los Angeles, one train per day from Seattle to Chicago.  Admittedly, these routes involve longer distances than those between London and cities in Scotland.  Because they operate on old track owned by private freight companies, Amtrak's passenger trains rarely operate above 70 mph.  They are subject to delays when encountering freight trains competing for use of the same track.

Nevertheless, Amtrak provides train service that is pleasant and scenic, and provides very satisfactory sleeper and diner service on major routes.  It does so despite being routinely underfunded by Congress.  This underfunding is, in part, a reflection of tight budgets.  It also, however, is a result of political opposition -- more ideological than rational -- by many Republican members of Congress to virtually all forms of rail travel (including rapid transit in cities).  For some reason, neither air travel nor auto travel face this same visceral hatred.

We may not have to make comparisons between Europe's passenger trains and those of Amtrak much longer, however.  President Trump's proposed budget kills all of Amtrak's routes except those traveling in the congested Boston-Washington corridor. 

Instead of killing passenger train service, we should be developing a system that approaches the level of competence and convenience provided by Europe.  But I guess we're committed to the belief that Europe has nothing that we Americans -- in our unique exceptionalism -- will ever want to emulate. 
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* Yes, I know that Westmorland hasn't been a legal county since 1974, having been combined with Cumberland into today's Cumbria. But it lives on as an identity -- culturally, and in my own heart!

Cousins

Hayden (left) and Maury

J. S. Bach had twenty children by his first wife, and thirteen more by his second wife.  I ran across this dazzling fact yesterday, and, bemused, reported it on my Facebook page.  I wondered if Johann and his two Frauen were able to think up names for 33 kids.  Or whether he simply had them catalogued, along with his one thousand plus musical compositions, with BWV numbers.

Bach was, in all respects, prolific.  My family, like many families nowadays, is not.  Nor has it been for several generations.  Sure, we do have aunts and uncles and cousins.  But we don't have many of them.  When I was a kid, we never had holidays where the house was full of relatives whom we hardly knew.  We knew 'em all.  Well.  Which was nice, in its own way -- substituting quality for quantity.

Which brings me to the point of this little discussion.  Tomorrow -- late Easter afternoon -- I'm flying down to Sonoma to enjoy the company of most of my small group of relatives -- my sister, my niece and three nephews, and the generation after that.  "The generation after that" would be my two great nieces.  We have entrusted the family name and fortune to just two young ladies, and -- barring some surprises -- I suspect there will be no more.

But again -- quality trumps quantity.  Those two great nieces -- Hayden, age 6, and Maury, age 7 -- have all the intelligence, cuteness, sense of humor, and general delightfulness that the average uncle might hope to find combined in eight or ten great nephews and/or nieces. 

I was with Hayden at Christmas.  She lives in Glendale, California, where she attends kindergarten at a local parochial school  Maury, on the other hand, I haven't seen for over a year.  Maury lives with her mother in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where she is a second grader in an international school.  She and her mom have been in California over her spring break -- and the two cousins have been hanging out together in Southern California.

Both girls are traveling north to the Bay Area during the next day or so, with their respective families, and I'm eagerly looking forward to admiring them in person.  On their small shoulders rests the family's future!

Good Friday 2017

Another little bit of my past

The green grove is gone from the hill, Maggie,
Where first the daisies sprung;
The creaking old mill is still, Maggie,
Since you and I were young.

The Seattle Center Arena -- rebranded as the "Mercer Arena" in more recent years -- came crashing down yesterday.  Built in 1927, the Arena had seen the 1962 World's Fair blossom about it, and had remained as part of the Seattle Center which evolved from the fair. 

The Arena sat next door to what was once the Civic Auditorium, built in 1928.  For the World's Fair, the Civic Auditorium was transformed into the Seattle Opera House, which it remained until it was radically remodeled as McCaw Hall in 2003 -- where it now hosts both the opera and the Pacific Northwest Ballet.  Siblings, born in the 20s, and still looking good. 

One sibling yesterday gobbled up the other, however -- McCaw is annexing the space from which the Seattle Center Arena has been eradicated, and the Seattle Opera will move administrative offices, storage, and other non-performance functions into a new four-story building.

The Arena -- not to be confused with Key Arena, former home of the fugitive SuperSonics, by the way -- was perhaps the least known building at the modern Seattle Center.  It was built originally as an ice arena, and had at times hosted professional ice hockey teams.  It ultimately became a "multi-purpose venue."

For me, however, the Arena has a more personal connection.  It was in that building that I spent three long days in 1974, sweating over the Washington State Bar Exam.  My baptism by fire, from which I emerged unscathed, a spanking-new attorney, still wet behind the ears.

And so my heart jumped when I saw the photograph of its on-going demolition on the front page of the local newspaper.  It wasn't a beautiful building, or even a particularly useful building.  But it had seen me through an exhausting experience.  To me, in 1974, it had seemed a timeless part of the Seattle scene. 

Nothing is permanent.  "Nothing in life is certain but change," as the man said.  All things pass away.  I just wish they didn't pass away quite so frequently.

The Old Patagonian Express

Soon after publication of his now-classic work of railway travel, The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux conceived the idea of a trip entirely by rail, so far as possible, from his home in Medford, Massachusetts to Esquel, Argentina -- the point farthest south the rail system could carry him. 

The result of this adventure -- and adventure it was -- was The Old Patagonian Express, published in 1979.  Criticisms of the book have been many and varied -- the trip was contrived, Theroux just wanted something to write about, he hated everything he saw, he hated everyone he talked to, it was all about him, it was all about his personal dislike of the countries and scenery. 

I understand the criticisms -- Theroux isn't to everyone's taste in travel writing -- but I think they misunderstand what Theroux was attempting. 

The book begins right at the beginning -- on a cold, February day, Theroux takes a commuter train from Medford to Boston's South Station.  He then takes the Lake Shore Limited (still running) to Chicago and the Lone Star (now defunct) to Laredo, Texas.  (He must have transferred to the (now defunct) Inter-American at San Antonio, although he does not mention that change of trains.)   He discusses people and places along the American railways with the same careful scrutiny and occasionally caustic criticism that he was to bring to his experiences south of the border.

As Theroux makes clear, he found the quality of trains -- in general -- to decline steadily from Amtrak's service, to that of the still generally acceptable Aztec Eagle (now defunct) from Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City,  to the discomforts and horrors of nameless trains whose horrors increased the farther south he rode -- with no real relief in sight until he crossed into the promised land of Argentina. 

From Mexico City he traveled to Veracruz on the Gulf coast, and then through Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, arriving at Argentina's Buenos Aires.  After a short stay in Buenos Aires, he took a final, tiring ride south into Patagonia to the end of the line at Esquel.

This book is not a travel guide for a fun-filled frolic in Latin America.  Theroux wanted to find out how possible it would be -- and what it would be like -- to extend a normal commute ride into Boston as far south as he could go.  Comfort wasn't a consideration.  "The train held only the very poor -- everyone else had taken the bus."  In a sense, it was a stunt -- not a suggestion for vacation travel.  He points out on a number of occasions that tourists were visiting some of the same areas he did, but far more enjoyably and easily.  He didn't think much of those tourists, and the superficiality of their observations and experiences, it's true, but that's beside the point. 

But beyond being a stunt, he shared the belief of many travelers -- especially student travelers of that era -- that you learned more about a country by struggling through it than by being guided from one luxury hotel to another.  Theroux didn't stay in luxury hotels.  I think it's open to argument how well he understood the overall conditions in some of the countries he visited, but that wasn't his objective.  He certainly gives us a feeling for what life was like for the great suffering majority of each country, those who did not belong to that country's elite.  I certainly understand more viscerally after reading his book the social and economic distinctions between the lives of the indigenous Indian population and those of the white population of Spanish descent.

I also have a better understanding of the differences in cultures and standards of living -- at least in the late 1970s -- among the countries through which Theroux passed.  Central America isn't a uniform banana plantation.  As Theroux remarks from relatively prosperous Costa Rica:

Outside that station there is a steam locomotive mounted on blocks for travelers to admire. In El Salvador such an engine would be puffing and blowing up the track to Santa Ana; in Guatemala it would have been melted down and made into antipersonnel bombs for the White Hand.

Theroux sounds negative in his description of many countries, as many reviewers have complained.  But those countries -- at least those portions of those countries through which his trains passed -- had (and still have) many problems.  He set out to be a careful observer, and he carefully observes the poverty and the despair of the people he saw.  Similarly, he carefully observes the geography, the weather, the flora and fauna. 

While his reactions to his surroundings were necessarily subjective and dependent on the slow progress many of his trains made through various regions, not to mention his own somewhat gloomy personality, it is difficult to describe one's surrounding in any meaningful way without telling the reader how you yourself react to it -- that a mountain appears beautiful, or threatening, or boring to an observer tells the reader more than his simply describing its height and color and vegetation.  

Theroux is introspective.  At many points of the trip, he asked himself what on earth he was doing.  He was miserable, he didn't like what he was seeing, he didn't like where he'd just been or where he was going next.  And, at times -- the untold secret of all solo travelers -- he was desperately homesick for Medford and for his family.

I'd love to visit every country described by Theroux, but not on the trains he traveled.  Which is just as well, because beyond Chicago probably not one of those trains still runs.  So Theroux's book is a last farewell to a now-dead railway system, a valediction to an experience we ourselves can never duplicate.  But it also is an intimate view of the side -- a sleazy side -- of many nations that the visitor on a group tour will never see, just as entering an American city by rail reveals aspects of that city that the local Chamber of Commerce doesn't brag about.

And -- once in Esquel, his journey completed -- Theroux admits

I had known all along that I had no intention of writing about being in a place -- that took the skill of a miniaturist.  I was more interested in the going and the getting there, in the poetry of departure.

A final note about Chapter 20.  Once he arrived in Buenos Aires, Theroux was introduced to Jorge Luis Borges, one of South America's most prominent authors, already closing in on 80 years of age.  The young Theroux and the elderly Borges hit if off immediately, and had many meetings and meals together.  Theroux's recounting of their conversations stands alone as a fascinating piece of writing, and in itself justifies reading the book.

The Taming of the Mullet

Denny, Kathy and Clinton
Lunch overlooking the Bosporus

Ok, gang.  I've continued poking through my old papers and have come up with the latest, probably the last, and certainly the least significant of my early works.  In 1994, my 17-year-old nephew Denny, his parents Clinton and Kathy, and I vacationed in Turkey -- primarily with a small group on a wooden gulet sailing along the southwest coast, but also a number of days on our own in Istanbul.  Some of us, at least,  heard for the first time the words "mullah" and -- on menus -- "mullet." 

Puns ensued. 

Shortly after we returned home, I sent the ditty below to my relatives as a humorous [sic] commentary on the good times we'd had.  It's based on Lewis Carroll's "'Tis the Voice of the Lobster" from Alice in Wonderland, which in turn was a parody of a now ignored morality poem for children called "The Sluggard." 

We loved Turkey.  We loved the Turkish people.  We loved hearing the calls to prayer, even when they woke us early in the morning.  Nothing in these verses was intended as an insult to Muslims or to Islam.  Nor is my publishing it now, as an example of my own silliness.  It is no more a criticism of Turkey or of Islam than were Lewis Carroll's works an attempt to ridicule the British Crown (red queen and white queen), or the Royal Coat of Arms (lion and unicorn).
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'Tis the Voice of the Mullet,
I'm bound to declare,
That awakes us from dreams
And calls us to prayer.

'Tis the Cry of the Mullet,
At noon, I opine,
That halts our sightseeing
And demands that we dine.

'Tis the Wail of the Mullet,
From his tower so steep,
That ends the day's doings
And sends us to sleep.

Our days are divided
Into five easy pieces,
By the Amplified Mullet
Whose howl scarcely ceases.

Kaş, Kalkan or Stamboul,
No matter which city,
The Ubiquitous Mullet
Sings his same horrid ditty.

For Iraq and Iran,
So given to bullets,
Have pity -- they're bonkers,
From listening to Mullets.

But a Mullet, not chanting,
Is merely a Fish,
Glaucous eyes staring upward,
From a cold serving dish.

When found thus, mouth open,
At the Merit Antique,
One Mullet was left breathless
By a kiss on its beak.

'Tis the blush of the Mullet,
Shines forth red like a salmon,
That loud-mouthed old fish
Had been smooched by a gamin.

'Tis the croon of the Mullet,
Who (what power love hath!) is
Singing ballads to the city, like
a Turkish Johnny Mathis.
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The Merit Antique was our hotel in Istanbul.  The last verses commemorate the dinner when my nephew spied an intact fish on his dinner plate and gave its lips a smooch.

Note that this was written in 1994. "Mullet" as a hair style dates only from 1996. Also note that the call to prayer is actually given by a "muezzin." But we didn't know that.

Go Zags

I just watched Oregon lose by one point to North Carolina in the NCAA semi-finals.  As I've remarked before, sounding maybe suspiciously defensive, I usually have little interest in basketball.  But Gonzaga won earlier in the evening, and -- as an enthusiast of all things Northwest Corner -- I was naturally happy about the idea of an all-Pacific Northwest NCAA finals game.

Of course, as soon as such a line-up had become apparent, the entire nation outside the Northwest would have turned its back on the telecast of the final game, and gone off skateboarding, or Netflix browsing, or playing Parcheesi, or whatever Americans do nowadays when not watching sports.

I know this to be true, because of my experience the last time I paid much attention to basketball.  That would have been some time ago, back when Seattle played the Washington Bullets for the NBA title.  That would have been back when Seattle actually had an NBA team -- the SuperSonics -- a team that was later bought by an irascible and greedy owner who hauled the team -- lock, stock, barrel, and trophy case -- off to Oklahoma City.

Oklahoma City!

At any rate, after the Sonics whomped the Bullets, I tactfully brought up the subject of Seattle's shiny new championship with an old law school friend who was then residing in Philadelphia.  "Oh," he said, with a bored expression, "no one's interested in the NBA anymore."  Yeah, right, you idiot.  No one's interested because Seattle -- not a "real basketball city" -- had won the title.  But they were interested last year and they'll be interested again next year.

Despite his having offended me, I stayed on friendly terms with him for a number of years, watching as he became Philly's City Attorney, and ever more embroiled in East Coast affairs and, I presume, locked into East Coast provincialism and prejudices.  The same East Coast which, in its entirety -- I extrapolated from his casual comment -- had scorned the stupid Seattleites and their silly NBA title.

Which is why I now realize that, for the good of college basketball, the TV networks, and the many fine advertisers, it's best that the nation not be confronted with a Gonzaga-Oregon matchup on Monday.  No one would have watched, and advertisers would have lost a lot of money.  It'll be bad enough if Gonzaga wins -- as the Sonics once did -- but at least the nation outside Washington and Oregon will have tuned in under the automatic impression that the Tarheels were about to send the kids from Spokane packing back to Indian country.

As the fox said in Aesop's little story, the grapes will be probably sour, anyway.  But I'm cheering for Gonzaga.