Rat-a-Phooey

That is what they say I said when they found me in the blackness after three hours; found me crouching in the blackness over the plump, half-eaten body of Capt. Norrys, with my own cat leaping and tearing at my throat. … When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse me of a hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behind the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls.
--H. P. Lovecraft, "The Rats in the Walls."       

I have rats in my walls.  Maybe, if I'm lucky, only one rat.  Singular.  But I don't know.

What to do? 

A number of years ago, I had a similar problem.  Well, I thought to myself, they're probably cute little fellows.  They're noisy scampering around, but they do no harm.  But it was winter, and food was scarce.  I discovered that they had been eating the bindings of my books.  A fatal step. 

With a single spring-loaded rat trap, I ended the lives of six rats within a two hour period.  They were hungry, and my traps offered peanut butter.  I made them offers they couldn't resist.  Unfortunately for them.

I was relieved to have them gone.  But I felt persistent remorse.

Rats, for most of us, played a benign role in our childhoods.  There was Ratty, of course, in Wind in the Willows:

When they got home, the Rat made a bright fire in the parlour, and planted the Mole in an arm-chair in front of it, having fetched down a dressing-gown and slippers for him, and told him river stories till supper-time.

Rather pleasant chap, eh?

As kids, we had a couple of rats as pet.  They were affectionate, and loved to be handled.  Their habit of scrambling up the inside of our pants leg was, until one became used to it, somewhat off-putting, but eventually was accepted as a sign of friendliness.  One of my nephews even now has about 25 rats as pets, each named and possessing its own individual personality. 

And there was Stuart Little, who is usually thought of as a mouse, but whose illustrations by Garth Williams show him as more rat-like.  (In fact, at the outset, the book informs us that although Stuart had been born to human parents, he "looked very much like a rat/mouse in every way.")  Stuart was such a moving, sensitive rat-person that his trials and humiliations broke your heart.

And finally -- subsequent to my massacre  of The Seattle Six -- was the release of the movie Ratatouille.  It's hero, Remy, was sophisticated (in that French sort of way), intelligent, kind, ambitious -- and, ultimately, an acclaimed Parisian chef.  What's not to like?  I have no comment as to the on-line debate as to who would win in a fight -- Stuart Little or Remy.  These debators are the same primitive humanoids who would like nothing better than to see a fight to the death between a giraffe and a unicorn.

Moved by young Remy, and reinforced by my boyhood experiences with rats, both actual and literary, I decided to handle my own present rat problem humanely, respecting the ratness of my house's rats as I would wish them to respect my humanity.

For about $100, I bought a number of ultrasonic noise makers, designed to make life so noisily irritating for rats, mice, spiders, and flies that they would break their unilateral rental agreement and move elsewhere.  I plugged my devices into electrical outlets in most rooms of my house, and waited for the Great Exodus to occur.

Nothing.  Although the experience for the rats was supposedly like our trying to live inside a jet engine, the noises in the walls continued.  Amazon, for once, didn't bother asking me to write a satisfaction report on my purchase -- they probably knew I'd been scammed.

Next, I spent $16, again through Amazon, for a live trap.  Bait it with peanut butter, the door crashes down, and you have a live rat waiting to be released to the great outdoors.  How far away?  Not until I'd bought the trap did I begin reading on-line expert reports on how to transplant the little devil.  Apparently, rats have excellent homing instincts.  I would have to carry them 5 to 10 miles away, experts opined -- and ten miles would be far better than five miles.  Otherwise, they'll return, perhaps bringing newly acquired friends with them. 

Also, a rat accustomed to a comfortable home in Seattle is going to be totally confused if dumped in a field or forest somewhere.  If he can't find his way back, he very likely will starve to death, or, alternatively, end up some larger predator's meal.  His chance of survival is minimal, and rats in the wild live only a year under the best of circumstances.  The kindest thing to do, almost all writers said, was to kill the little guy humanely.  And an old-fashioned snap-trap of appropriate size for rats is as humane as a rat death can get.

So.  I'm not happy.  Aside from sharing my house indefinitely with a rat or rats, who do tend to multiply, my only real option is to kill it or them.  Once more I turned to Amazon, ordering three rat snap-traps at $1.99 each.  They will arrive tomorrow.

The executions (one or more) are scheduled for my basement tomorrow at an undisclosed time  They will be private -- I'm not selling admission tickets.  I bear my rats no ill feelings.  I do not demonize them, as Mr. Lovecraft did in his story.  Rats try to live their lives as best as they can, as I try to live mine.  We all face forces we cannot overcome; we all, ultimately arrive at the same destination. 

I commend their spirits to the gods of small creatures, and ask forgiveness for my own self-centeredness in placing my comfort above their lives.

Florence then and now

First view of the Duomo
at night

Eighty excited university students stared out the windows as our bus wound its way through the dim, narrow streets of Florence.  It was April 2, 1961.  Our bus had carried us all the way from the Milan airport.  We were arriving in the dark at our new home, arriving in the early morning hours.

It was Easter.  We were shown our rooms at Villa San Paolo -- boys on the second floor, girls on the third.  As close to coeducational living as any university students had ever experienced in those days.  We collapsed in our beds only to arise again -- perhaps half the group, members of any or no faith -- three hours or so later to attend Easter morning mass at the small parish church around the corner, the church that in some way owned the villa. 

We walked out the gate into the early light of morning.  The first Florentine resident I saw was a small lady, dressed all in black, sweeping her doorstep with a primitive broom.  I really was in Italy.  My image of Italy.  My first travel outside North America.

Duomo

The church was surprisingly modern in design, and I was mildly appalled by the use of electric lights for candles.  But in those days, the mass everywhere was in Latin.  Everything, aside from a sermon delivered in excitable Italian, was quite familiar.

Last week, I arrived by rail from La Spezia at Florence's Stazione Santa Maria Novella.  I arrived not in the dark, but in the late dusk.  I wasn't delivered to a villa, or shown to what was in effect a dorm room.  Instead, GPS in hand, I walked less than ten minutes to a decent hotel room I had booked, half way between the station and the Duomo (Florence's famous cathedral).  Fortunately, although by then dark, it wasn't too late to go exploring, and I walked around the Duomo and down the avenue to the civil authorities' corresponding "cathedral," the Palazzo Vecchio (or Palazzo della Signoria).  The night was warm, the crowds were out, the streets were packed.  The floodlit buildings glowed in the darkness like ghosts out of the past.  Florence once again worked its magic on my imagination and on my soul.

Duomo seen at the end of
a quiet nighttime street

I had given my self the entire following day to revisit Florence, my train back to Rome not leaving until 5:30 p.m.  I made the pilgrimage I always make when in Florence -- the half hour walk back up toward Fiesole, to Villa San Paolo.  Florence really hasn't changed much, physically.  The buildings remain the same.  There are more traffic lights.  The buses are newer -- you no longer enter the rear entrance and pay your fare (30 lire, or about 5 U.S. cents) to a little man sitting at a small desk who gives you a flimsy ticket.  The local people are better dressed, but still conservatively dressed by today's standards.  The residential streets seem to carry less traffic than I recall from past visits.

Street approaching Villa
San Paolo

But the downtown streets -- the area where the tourists gather -- are much different in their usage (but not their appearance), from the streets I first remember.  Like then, of course, most of those streets have very narrow pedestrian sidewalks -- wide enough for only one person to pass.  But my memories are of streets crowded with motor vehicles, and of one's difficulty keeping on the sidewalk and out of the traffic.  The traffic flow around the Duomo was always heavy.  Mary McCarthy devotes much of the first chapter of her The Stones of Florence (1956) to the horrors of Florentine traffic.

Those who try to sight-see discover the traffic hazard.  The sidewalks are mere tilted rims on the edge of the building fronts; if you meet another person coming toward you, you must swerve into the street; if you step backward onto the pavement to look up at a palace, you will probably be run over.

Now, motor traffic is barred from virtually all of the downtown.  Necessarily so, I would imagine, because the tourist pedestrian traffic fills the streets.  The increase in tourism since my first stay in Florence is almost unbelievable.  Florence has always attracted tourists.  E. M. Forster wrote his novel about tourism in Florence, A Room with a View, in 1908.  But in 1961, tourists were still isolated individuals.  I was always surprised to hear an American accent; I was delighted once when an American approached me and asked me directions in halting Italian.  Today, the areas around the Duomo and the Palazzo Vecchio are beehives swarming with tourists, tourists with American accents, as are most of the nearby streets around them.

Villa San Paolo

And yet, move but two or three blocks even farther away, and the pedestrian traffic is minimal.  I'm not sure how the motor traffic was banished without serious inconvenience to residents -- there must be parking lots outside the city limits.  I would expect to see a large expansion of public transit, just to fill the needs of local residents, but the bus lines appear about the same as they were decades ago, with no more buses on the streets. 

But, whatever the sacrifice of convenience by the local people, from the tourist's perspective the abolition of motor traffic has been a great gift.  The magnitude of today's tourism would hardly be possible without it.

But I long ago digressed!  The walk to Villa San Paolo was much as I recall it as a student.  The villa itself has long ago been taken over for other uses, and since the last time I was in Florence, ten years ago, access has been barred with a locked gate.  I had to take my souvenir photos through narrow slots in the gate.  The church below the villa is still functioning, and still looks oddly modernistic.  The little tobacco shop, a block or so away, where we students bought our soap, toothpaste, and postage stamps, is now gone, but I could hardly expect the city to remain frozen in time circa 1961.

Parish church adjoining
Villa San Paolo

When I visit Villa San Paolo, I often continue up the road past the villa to the little hilltop town of Fiesole, but I had too little time this year, and the temperature -- although ten degrees or so cooler than I had experienced in Rome -- still deterred me from setting out on a long, uphill walk.  I returned downtown.

In 1961 -- and even much later -- the Duomo and other churches of historical importance were wide open to the public.  You just walked in and looked around.  On several visits to Florence, I climbed stairs to the top of the dome, enjoying the view.  Now, there are lines everywhere.  Church authorities finally concluded, I gather, that their churches are not only places of worship but also historical monuments.  And fees for admission are therefore charged.  Which is reasonable.  Neither the church nor the city has an obligation to provide amusement to their visitors without asking some compensation -- but it makes sight-seeing less spontaneous.

The Uffizi Museum, home of world-famous Renaissance art, has always charged admission, of course.  But you used to pay your minimal admission fee, enter, and wander about in the company of a small group of fellow visitors.  In 2019, on the other hand, the line outside the Uffizi was too discouragingly long to even consider joining.

Statue of "Fernando the Great"
staring down the street at
the Duomo

In one of Mary McCarthy's other books, this one a novel, Birds of America (1964), she has her protagonist, a teenage college student, vent his frustration with the crowds of tourists milling about the floor of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.  He notes that the congestion simply means that no one is able to contemplate the art work in a manner that makes the visit worthwhile.  He suggests to an unsympathetic professor that admission to major architectural and artistic sites should be by competitive examination, with a certain number of places reserved for admission by lottery (to add a non-elitist element to the program).  Like the boy, I find the idea attractive in the same way that I find feudalism attractive -- by assuming that I myself would be one of the privileged few.

But, seriously, visiting a museum or famous church in the company of a few other visitors is a different experience from being forced to struggle your way through a crowd.  The decreased value of the experience is real, but I -- unlike McCarthy's young Peter Levi -- have no solution to put forth.


Quiet street in the Oltrarno

In my remaining time before returning to Rome, I followed the Arno river downstream, past the Teatro Comunale, where I saw "West Side Story" as a student, performed as part of Florence's annual Maggio Musicale festival.  I then crossed a bridge over the Arno to the quiet "Oltrarno" section of the city, hiked back on up to the Ponte Vecchio, crossed back, and collapsed into a chair at an outdoor café, where I lingered happily over a late lunch. 

Ever since I was a student, Florence has woven its way in and out of my life, each time I've returned to Italy.  We've become pretty good friends.  We plan to get together again soon.

Roamin' about Rome

Hadrian's Tomb across the Tiber

Impressions of Rome: August 2019.  My eighth visit to the Eternal City, from which I returned Thursday. 

The heat.  Good golly!  None of my prior visits have been this hot.  The temperature reached the high 90s virtually every day.  I took a siesta -- reading in my air conditioned room -- each day between about 1 and 5 p.m., after which the temperature dipped below 95.  Visitors to Rome have always complained about the August heat, and those Romans who can swing it take the entire month as a vacation.  They flee to the beaches or to northern climes, leaving the city to the clueless tourists.

The people.  As a corollary of the above, Rome in August is a city full  of tourists.  Largely American, judging from overheard voices and accents.  I've joked about American tourists in the past -- their ignorance, their lack of sensitivity, their loudness, their, well, American-ness.  Either I've grown more mellow with time, or there has been a real change in the typical American tourist.

Traveling alone, I had plenty of time to observe those around me, and I was pleasantly surprised by many or most of my compatriots.  They spoke quietly, they were good-humored, they seemed intelligent, they were interested in what they were seeing.  They were traveling on their own, not herded about in tour groups (nor were the Japanese tourists, of whom there were many).  They seemed at ease.  They brought their teenage and pre-teen kids, also a revelation.  The kids weren't whiny and bored, even when it was hot and they must have been tired.  They sat at dinner with their parents, joining in the conversation with interest and laughter.  I saw no eye-rolling at the follies of the "old folks."  Does Rome improve kids?  Or do only "good" kids come to Rome?

The major attractions.  Don't go to Rome in August -- or maybe anytime during the summer -- planning to check items off your bucket list.  The Vatican Museum, St. Peter's, the Colosseum, the Forum?  Maybe one of them, if you have the time, but not all of them.  How long can you tolerate standing in line in unshaded 98 degree heat?  Nor maybe should you count on visiting many of the other, lesser indoor attractions, such as certain churches -- a surprising number of which had lines.  Save those for another visit, if possible -- a visit during an off-season.

Lonely streets in the centro storico.  Don't get me wrong -- even in August, there are plenty of "lonely streets," plenty of quiet corners in which to sit and reflect.  But under this strange heading, I include a goal, which even I myself hadn't quite formulated -- to wander alone, pleasantly lost, in the centro storico -- the maze of ancient streets in the Campo Marzio between the Tiber and the major arterial called the via del Corso.   I'd wandered into that area on earlier trips, but without quite understanding the area's history.  But I had since read André Aciman's atmospheric reflections:

This warren of old alleys goes back many centuries, and here sinister brawls, vendettas, and killings were as common in the Renaissance as the artists, con artists, and other swaggerers who populated these streets. … Getting lost -- the welcome sense that you are still unable to find your way in this maze of side streets -- is something one never wishes to unlearn ….
--André Aciman, Alibis, "Roman Hours."

In August, the maze of streets and piazzas remains magical, but not really sinister and not so conducive to daydreaming while one wanders.  I still was lost, constantly, but the maze is full of your American countrymen, and every tiny trattoria or café has extended its tables and chairs out into the streets.  The magic is real, but it's a more immediate and contemporary magic than the echoing sounds of old duels and brawls and the clashing of swords suggested in Aciman's writing.

So those are some of the reasons not to visit Rome in August.  But if you can't go in, say, June -- by all means go in August.  Neither the heat nor the crowds could overcome my conviction that there were few places on earth better worth visiting, and especially visiting as a solo traveler.  And especially, if walking is for you a pleasure, and not an unavoidable chore.

I was in Italy for only one week, and out of that week I spent only 3½ days in Rome itself.  But in that 3½ days, I walked 53 miles.  Rome's a big city, but a very walkable city.  It has three subway lines, which are sometimes useful, but the subway doesn't cover the tourist's city in the way New York's does.  I used it most frequently as a quick way to move from my hotel, near the railway station, to the Spanish Steps, which served me as a launching point to the centro storico, the Tiber riverbank, and the Vatican area.  But taking the subway in Rome was like driving to a trailhead in the Pacific Northwest -- the walking had yet to begin. 

And more frequently, I just started walking from my hotel.  Either walking down the via Nazionale to the Victor Emmanuel monument, and from there following the Corso directly to the Spanish Steps.  Or, more interestingly, walking south past the basilicas of Santa Maria Maggiore and St. John Lateran, looping back to the Colosseum, around the Palatine Hill, past the Circus Maximus, to the Tiber.  (I provide these details only because they're fun to write down.)  As the days passed, I discovered (or remembered) alternative streets leading from the railway station area, but those were the two principal routes away from my hotel toward "tourist" Rome.

Days before I left Seattle, newspapers carried the startling news that the police were banning tourists from sitting on the Spanish Steps -- something tourists had done for generations.  Rome is one large museum, went the argument, and no one allows tourists to sit on the floor of the New York Metropolitan Museum eating sandwiches and ice cream.  And, like it or not, no one was sitting on the steps, although the police didn't interfere with a minute or two of sitting while a friend took a photo.  At the top of the steps, past the church (Trinità dei Monti), one enters the Borghese Gardens, an enormous park full of museums, amusement rides, a zoo, a lake, and playing fields.  I had often skirted the edge of the park, but had never really explored it.  Like New York's Central Park, it was a green haven made for walking -- but less crowded.  It made the city's heat more tolerable at mid-day, and some of the museums sounded worth exploring on a future visit.

I also had passed the famous Hadrian's Tomb (aka Castel Sant'Angelo) on many past occasions, but had never gone inside.  It was well worth the visit, with informative panels explaining the intricate history of the tomb/fortress/palace, and with an excellent view of the entire city and the Vatican from the top. 

Long walks along the Tiber were irresistible, because of both the views and the shade from the sycamore trees planted along its entire length.  Meals at cafés -- mainly but not always -- in the centro storico -- were always good, and never rushed.  (It's a common theme among travel writers that Italian waiters are always available and helpful -- until it's time to pay the bill.)  People watching, while hanging around squares like Piazza Navona and the Pantheon was a source of free entertainment --  watching the buskers, as well as the antics and interactions of my fellow travelers.

One week is not long enough for a trip overseas, but travel creates a form of time dilation.  My visit to Italy was just underway a week ago, but that time feels far more distant.  Aside from my 3½ days in Rome, I spent another two days traveling by train to Levanto on the Ligurian coast for a very brief few hours visit, and then to Florence for a night's sleep, with the following day devoted to the city that was my very first experience with Italy.

I will offer a few thoughts about Florence in a later posting.
-----------------------------
PS -- Another problem with Rome in August is that all of the city's music series seem to end in July or the first week of August, including the open air opera series at the Baths of Caracalla. Operas performed outside obviously don't have the best acoustics going for them, but I saw Aïda at the Baths of Caracalla many years ago, and it made up in drama for anything it lacked in musical fidelity. Fun experience.

PPS -- Gelati! Another reason to visit Italy. A good temporary antidote against 98 degree temperatures!

Print journalism

The Internet is a wonderful invention; after all, it permits me to "blog."  But not all changes that the internet brings us are contributions to our cultural well-being.  One such change has been the increasing disappearance of the print newspaper.

Yesterday's New York Times (still in print, thank god) contained an entire section devoted to disappearing newspapers, one of which was Seattle's own Post-Intelligencer.  I subscribed for years to the P-I, which at the time was Seattle's morning paper; the Times was delivered in the evening.  But the P-I's first edition hit the news stands around 4 or 5 p.m. the night before its official date, actively competing  against the Times on the Times's own turf.   "Read the P-I, stay ahead of the Times" was  the P-I's clever slogan.

But the Times had the last laugh.  The Post-Intelligencer was a Hearst paper, better than many other Hearst papers, for what that was worth.  It was the senior paper, having been published under one name or another since 1863.  The Times was (and is) owned by the local Blethen family, and had been since 1896.  The P-I gave up competing in 2009, and now publishes only an on-line edition.  The Times switched to a morning paper, once the P-I was gone, recognizing that evening papers were disappearing across America.

Seattle, like most other cities, thus became a one-newspaper town.  The P-I joined the dust heap of history along with Portland's Oregon Journal, San Francisco's Examiner and its Call-Bulletin, and Los Angeles's Herald-Examiner.  With print readership down, one newspaper per city may make financial sense, but it makes reading the paper less fun.  Especially for people like me who, even as a student, managed to read the P-I each day with breakfast, and the Times before dinner. 

Paralleling the decline in metropolitan newspapers has been the decline in student newspapers.  At the university level, I'm now most familiar with the University of Washington Daily which, despite its name, since 2018 has come out only once a week in print format.  My undergraduate school's paper, the Stanford Daily, on the other hand, still publishes a daily print edition with weekly supplements for entertainment and for sports.  Its circulation is 8,000 and it is distributed at 500 locations on and off campus.  Its motto, at least when I was in school, was "The Peninsula's Only Daily Newspaper," although "daily" meant five school days per week.

But the newspaper that has meant the most to me died long ago.  My high school paper was the Lumberjack Log ("log," get it?  haha).  It was published every two weeks on the presses of our city's daily newspaper, and its distribution was eagerly awaited by a student body anxious to see their names and the names of their friends in print.

When I ask myself what aspects of high school were most meaningful to me -- meaningful in the sense of igniting my interest and having some impact on my future life, as opposed to merely providing me with credits needed for graduation -- I have no hesitation in pointing first to editing the Lumberjack Log and, as a somewhat distant second, taking part in school theatrical productions.  Work on the paper taught me not just how to lay out a page or copyread stories or act as a reporter, but how to meet deadlines, deal with the hopes and egos of fellow students, and produce a product that I could both take pride in and be held accountable for.  I still have a bound copy of all the Logs published my senior year.

The Log staff exchanged papers with a large number of other high school papers in the state.  Many were inferior to ours -- little more than mimeographed newsletters -- but many were much more impressive.  I used to pore over the papers from large Seattle high schools, marveling at both their technical superiority and at the more sophisticated student body their writing seemed to represent.  I will now give special recognition to the Kuay Weekly, a now defunct publication of a now defunct Queen Anne High School.  Queen Anne's building, high atop Queen Anne Hill, was converted to condominiums back in about 1981, when it seemed that everyone with families was moving out of the city.  Perhaps Queen Anne may someday be reconstituted in a new building -- if so, I hope the Kuay Weekly is revived.

As I say, at some point -- I have no idea when -- the Log, which had been a school institution since the founding of both the high school and the city in 1923, simply ended publication.  Probably from lack of interest from students who had grown less apt to read newspapers and less apt to be interested in extracurricular activities.  I assumed until today that high school journalism was essentially dead in all high schools.

But I see that all of the Seattle high schools in my part of town, at least, still publish school papers.  The Garfield Messenger, the Roosevelt News, Ballard's The Talisman, and Nathan Hale's Sentinal.  I can't tell whether these papers are all published in print format, or merely on-line, but both Garfield's and Roosevelt's do seem to be.  Their graphics are vastly superior to anything we had available to us when I was in high school.  I hope their writing is as good as their graphics.

The fact that Seattle school newspapers seems to be bucking the tide of retrenchment, seen in metropolitan papers -- while the Log from my home town has faded into oblivion -- may be another sign of the differing opportunities available to the affluent and the not-so-affluent.  Seattle is booming and its schools, if not rolling in money, are better supported than most large city schools.  My home town, on the other hand, like many other small, non-suburban towns, is in a period of prolonged decline.

But cities rise and they fall.  I have hopes that the proud name of Lumberjack Log will be revived at some time in the future, supported by a city that itself will be reviving.