Staying Put

The year is 2025. Imagine you are a Martian, minding your own business, when out of the blue a spaceship lands nearby and out pop four pale earthlings, who announce they are colonizing your planet. They are the first wave of settlers sent by Mars One, a Netherlands-based non-profit, which last week whittled 200,000 applicants to 100 finalists. Most are in their 20s and 30s. They seem educated and motivated, adventurous and idealistic, a little nuts. Eventually 24 winners will make up six crews that will blast off every two years, beginning in 2024. The trip should take seven months. There's no way back, so they’re going for good. An MIT study estimates they will survive for 68 days. This isn’t the first time small groups of humans have set out on months-long, one-way trips. The Mayflower carried 102 Pilgrims; 100 people settled at Jamestown. If history is any guide, the greenskins would be wise not to offer to help the immigrants – because life on Mars will never be the same once the pioneers set about planting gardens and blowtorching ice in the name of “expanding ourselves as a species.”

We have blown through this planet amazingly quickly; so it’s on to the next frontier. I won’t be going. I’m too old, and besides, I’d like to see what I can still do here – for, as Oliver Sacks wrote yesterday: “I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

The Lake District

It’s hard to picture Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud as I drive along Lake Windermere in northwestern England, past billboards marketing water sports and hourly cruises, the slightly nauseating smell of fish and chips, and casually dressed tourists whose crimson necks and ruddy faces reflect temperatures in excess of 85 degrees. Yet the next morning, as I stand on a hill above the lake, looking across to shadowy peaks beneath the pale blue sky, I am struck by the beauty of the place. Beside me is a slab of stone, set in memory of Gordon Stables, who died July 4, 1978, age 55 years: “By his endeavors he prevented electricity pylons being placed on this landscape” – followed by lines from Wordsworth’s The Recluse: ‘Tis, but I cannot name it, ‘tis the sense

Of majesty, and beauty, and repose,

A blended holiness of earth and sky,

Something that makes this individual spot,

This small abiding-place of many men,

A termination, and a last retreat,

A centre, come from wheresoe'er you will,

A whole without dependence or defect,

Made for itself, and happy in itself,

Perfect contentment, Unity entire.

This is not the grandeur of the Rockies or even the Highlands to the north. Its beauty is more civilized, the kind of pastoral landscape the Romantics loved. Today I long more for wild places, perhaps because the wilderness is disappearing so fast, perhaps because my own life seems sedentary and tame.

On the other hand, I hike without fear of being attacked by sheep.

“Warre of every one against every one”

Amid the western world’s preparations to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of World War I, maybe it’s a good time to think about World War III. Maybe not. It’s a depressing subject, and most of us prefer to live our lives removed from both the threat and the reality of war. But that’s not so easy in a world where war seems to be everywhere, including places where we spent many years, thousands of lives and trillions of dollars to avert it. “You break it, you own it,” Colin Powell famously told George Bush before the Iraq war, and we certainly broke it. But what does it mean to own it? Clearly, we don’t control it, and it seems foolish and dangerous to think we can. Moreover, whenever we concentrate on one war, others break out elsewhere. What’s a great power to do?

We can no more disengage from the world than control it, much as Americans might like to, and, as the big business of tourism demonstrates, the world beyond our borders is not just a dangerous place. It’s also an interesting place. Perhaps for us armchair policy makers, that’s a start. We can’t change the world, but we can engage it differently. Just as the movement to reclaim city parks considered too dangerous to enter began when people refused to cede them to muggers, so, instead of pulling up the drawbridge, we can go out into the world with curiosity and an open mind. Just be careful.

Ask Not . . .

Of course you cannot visit Sicily without coming across a corpse. We chanced upon ours on our fifth day, as we walked across the beautiful Madonie Mountains high above the town of Castelbuono. Near the end of a four-hour hike that had begun just below the lingering snow – which came as a surprise to those of us who had packed for the tropics – we arrived at a small shepherd’s hut, where carabinieri in crisp blue uniforms and gold braid drove up the wagon path and strode into the nearby woods. The victim was a young man, whose hands and feet were bound, and who had a single bullet hole behind his right ear. There was no sign of a struggle, but his tongue was missing, presumably as warning to potential informers. Or such, at least, was the tale we spun among ourselves. Slowly, more details trickled out. He was not a young man, but elderly, possibly in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, who had wandered off from his home and been missing for seven days. He had walked a long way to die. Perhaps he had feared becoming a burden to his family and so had come to the most beautiful place he knew, ready in the early spring to return to the earth from which he had come. I will never know. But he has become one of countless people whose lives intersect fleetingly with mine, about whom I know nothing and yet whom I cannot forget.

Slight Memories

Often when I travel, I remember the little things – not the images I bring home in a photograph or a postcard, nor the grandeur of antiquity or the self-importance of men – but an unexpected phrase that voices a larger reality or a gilimpse of a passing scene. • “I want to ask you,” our 72-year-old driver, Vittorio, says as we sit down to dinner the first evening, “what you think is the difference between life and death.”

• As we look out over a broad valley from an amphitheater the Greeks built on a high hill 2,500 years ago, someone asks why the highway below is elevated above the plain. Is it to protect the road from flooding, or an earthquake? “I suppose,” our guide answers with a smile of bemused resignation, “because it costs more.”

• As we descend from the ruins of a 14^th-century castle, we meet a young couple whose two-year-old son is gathering stones. Someone wonders if he is making a barricade. “We know how to build barricades,” says the mother sorrowfully. “We are from Ukraine.”

• In the seaside town of Cefalu, in a small chapel with plain whitewashed walls and stations of the cross hand-carved from dark wood, and on whose ceiling is a simple fresco of Jesus and the words, “Come to me, all who hunger,” a choir of six women and an old man at the organ fill the space with music of incomparable beauty.

From such slight memories come the lasting imprint of my journey.

A Couple of Sicilians

My plane had barely landed in Palermo when I read that Antonin Scalia, one of America’s most infamous Sicilian-Americans, had paved the way for the oligarchs to buy the American government, as the Supreme Court continued to dismantle campaign finance reform in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, a decision, in the words of dissenting Justice Breyer, that effectively makes the limit on individual contributions “the number zero.” That mattered little to Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote, “There is no right in our democracy more basic than the right to participate in electing our political leaders” – ignoring the fact that most of us are now less able to participate in a system that facilitates private conversations between people who have money and want legislation and those who make laws and want money. For an example of how that works, see Republican Congressman Dave Camp’s effort to write a tax-reform bill that was loudly acclaimed by the business lobby – until individual businesses noted parts they didn’t like. Suddenly, tax reform is dead and Camp is leaving Congress. Meanwhile, those of us who don’t want to buy the government will be endlessly pressured for donations to stop those who do.

Here in Sicily, where government is assumed to be a wholly owned subsidiary of La Cosa Nostra, President Rosario Crocetta seeks to eradicate corruption and open the government to the people, despite nonstop threats to kill him. The fact that he is an openly gay Catholic must really drive Scalia nuts.

Sicily's Home Front

Advised that Italy had joined forces with Hitler’s Germany, Churchill allegedly responded, “Seems only fair. We had them in the last war.” We tend to equate valor with military bravery – and overlook the violence just below the surface of our relatively safe and peaceful lives. This is not possible in Sicily, where I am headed today. In anticipation, I read Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily, which tells the history of La Cosa Nostra and its intricate ties with the Christian Democrats, Italy’s major political party. It is a frightening tale, guaranteed to cure any visitor’s narcolepsy. Unfortunately, I have insomnia.

Robb shatters the image of a mafia operating in the shadows, imposing a corrupt peace and killing only its own dissidents, describing a “Palermo destroyed like Beirut by a war that’s lasted over forty years, the war of mafia power against the poor,” one that caused 10,000 deaths in a decade, stole billions, and came to America with Lucky Luciano, who left Sicily in 1919 and returned with US forces in 1946.

It has been a war with authentic heroes, men who sought justice knowing they would be killed in its pursuit: Alberto Dalla Chiesa, prefect of Palermo, murdered with his wife; Giovanni Falcone, magistrate, murdered with his wife; Rocco Chinnici, chief prosecutor, murdered; Paolo Borsellino, deputy prosecutor, murdered; Mino Pecorelli, journalist, murdered. These and countless others, including Sicily’s current president, Rosario Crocetta, knew the cost we pay by keeping silent and looking the other way. They are truly brave men.

I will try to report on my trip, but I don’t know if I will be able to, so this may be my last post until I get back in mid-April.

Christmas Travels

The president has returned to Hawaii for Christmas, just as Joseph returned to the place of his birth for the first Christmas two millennia ago. Perhaps because he was going home to be taxed and seemed a person of little importance, no one demanded Joseph’s long-form birth certificate to disprove rumors he was really a Syrian, while Obama is still dogged by those insisting he was born in Kenya. May the president shed the malaise that has lately fallen over his administration and return to Washington reborn in the spirit that excited us so in 2008. Just because the president is on vacation, however, does not mean that all issues of racial identity have gone on holiday. Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly rushed to fill the void by announcing that Santa Claus is a real white man – and that Jesus was a white man, too. (“That’s a verifiable fact.”) Fox News’ crack investigative team is now looking into allegations that Santa is undocumented and Jesus was actually a Jew.

In other birthday travel news, Denis Rodman is back in Pyongyang, organizing a basketball game between young North Koreans and NBA veterans to celebrate Kim Jong Un’s 31^st birthday on January 8^th. The big obstacle is that the Americans are afraid to come, despite Rodman’s insistence that “it’s all love here.”

Here in Maine, our family traveled through ice, snow and cancelled flights to get here for Christmas. It’s an exciting and hopeful time. I wish you warmth and good cheer.

Burmese Scenes (Resilience)

(1)   The moment the rusting green ferry touched the banks of the island not far from Mandalay, children swarmed the gang plank, hawking the usual wares: plastic-wrapped postcards, jade bracelets, bronze bells, wooden elephants. My special tormentor was Ida, a 14-year-old with an engaging smile and extraordinary persistence. “You buy,” she said, taking a small bell from her pack. “Very good price.” “No,” I said, and repeated as she pulled out a gong, a necklace, bracelets. “No. No. No.” “Please, Jamie,” for by now she knew my name. “You make me happy.” She walked with me to a horse-drawn cart that would take me to an inland temple, producing ever more baubles from her bottomless pack. “Maybe later,” she said, following the cart on foot. I looked away, and when I turned back she was on a bicycle, looking determinedly at me. At the temple I succumbed, buying two bracelets for a $4. “I remember you” were her happy parting words, but she had already locked her eyes on someone else. (2)   Descending the covered stairway from a large pagoda, running the usual gauntlet of vendors, I saw a man painting lacquer ware. He had no arms, and one leg ended at the knee. I thought of thalidomide babies and those suffering from mercury poisoning in Minamata half-a-century ago. With his stump, he clasped the bowl against his body and, with his paintbrush between his toes, he drew the delicate lines required of his art.

It’s amazing, when I look, how many scenes I see that remind me not to feel sorry for myself.

They Endure

The last words of The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner’s tale of aristocratic family disintegration and underclass survival, kept running through my mind as I flew home last week. “They endured,” he wrote of Dilsey, the matriarch of the black family that had served the Comptons for generations and witnessed the white family’s self-destruction. I was trying to make sense of my short visit to Burma (officially the Republic of the Union of Myanmar), and those two words seemed to offer a clue. The Burmese have endured half a century of one of the world’s most repressive military governments, one that brutally crushed any dissent and created an Orwellian surveillance network that kept its aptly named Insein Prison overflowing. Actually, life hadn’t been that great before: Burma was ravaged by Japanese and Allied fighting in World War II, which followed a century of British rule, when the “white man’s burden” was carried on the brown man’s shoulders.

Last year, “the generals” shifted gears. Without explanation, they loosened their harsh rein and opened up the country to the outside world. The speculation is they need both hard currency and a counterweight to China. People in Burma talked more freely than I had expected, but their answer to any question about the future was a fatalistic, “We don’t know.” As a tourist I went where I was told and saw what I was meant to see, but still I carried away a deep respect for the resilience of a people who endure.

Traveling Man

When I travel to new places, I become increasingly impressed with my own ignorance, a trait I normally like to keep under wraps. It isn’t just that, to get where I’m going, I stand in long lines like a sheep, pass through machines that penetrate my body, and sleep sitting up. Far more unsettling is that, in the comfort of my armchair back home, I had a clear understanding of the world, which was delivered to me in books, newspapers, my computer. Then I ventured “out there” and discovered that I didn’t have a clue. For every single thing I knew turns out to have been a projection I imposed on a world that is too vast, diverse and messy for me to grasp. I think we all do this. If we didn’t create a subjective framework to order the world around us, we would be bombarded by the chaos, much as the autistic children I once taught felt besieged by the stimuli that came unfiltered to their minds. Likewise, when I landed in Burma on a journey I hope to write about this week, I encountered a world of colors, smells, sights and ideas that overwhelmed me. I had left everything I “knew” back in my armchair. I had to take the country on its terms, not mine, and I didn't begin to understand it. Travel forces us out of our smug isolation and challenges our preconceptions. That’s why Hilary Clinton’s 900,000 miles traveled and 112 countries visited is not a statistic; it’s a secretary of state’s job description.

Burma Road

I told someone not long ago that my two favorite decades were the 60s – the 1960s and my sixties. That was probably more distilled memories and wishful thinking than the truth (and, in fact, my actual favorite times were when my children were young and still willing to play with me). But I do think of the 1960s as a time when hope and altruism drove young people to try to change the world. As for my current decade, sixty, whatever it may seem, is actuarially no longer old. But as the years pile on, I have become oddly aware of a sense of anticipation for the future, even of the optimism I was supposed to feel when I was young. For there seems little use in worrying about all my separate failings when my entire body is sending me a message of, well, inadequacy. Like it or not, this is who I am. Recently, a friend urged me to see “Quartet.” It is a wonderful film about people who learn – because it doesn’t come naturally – to grow old with joy. They are musicians, and they may no longer be able to hit the high notes, but they can still sing. And they do.

I leave later today for Burma, daunted by the hours of flying but excited to see a completely new place. I am told that, for reasons of time management, Internet access and personal well-being, I must take a break from my blog. So I will take notes and give you a vacation. See you in March. Rejuvenated.

Ah, Wilderness

Nineteenth-century census maps show the American population moving steadily west across the frontier, with a few exceptions: northern Maine, the Everglades, and a large unpopulated circle in upstate New York. The Adirondacks were too inhospitable to sustain life for any but the most rugged people. Today, the 6.1-million-acre Adirondack Park is the largest U.S park outside Alaska. It is famed for its 46 “high peaks” over 4,000 feet, and an exclusive club of “46ers” has climbed them all. As of Wednesday morning I had climbed none of them. By Thursday morning I had quite unexpectedly climbed four, including Dix, the sixth highest in the range.

Wednesday was clear and beautiful when I set off with my friends Michael and Anne, 50 pounds of essential supplies on my back. The first indication we might not be heading into paradise was our arrival at the “the slide,” a several-hundred-foot, very steep open face of rock on Macomb Mountain. Too terrified to look at the panorama unfolding behind us, we crawled our way up, only to find that the mountaintop was still far away. We trudged up and down three peaks along an unmarked “herd path,” and as we slogged up Dix itself, exhausted and worried about our water, it grew dark.

We stopped at a spot far too small to pitch our tents, and when we threw our sleeping bags on the ground, Michael discovered that a chipmunk had eaten through his Ziploc bag of Tang. This rendered bear-proofing preparations unnecessary, and as we settled in for the night, we each adopted a bear strategy: Michael smoked a cigar; Anne stayed awake; and I snored. And of course we put Michael and his Tang downwind.

The rain began at 11:30.

PS For another way to do this, see http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/opinion/sunday/kristof-blissfully-lost-in-the-woods.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Gentrification

Everybody needs a little gentrification, but too much of it can turn you into a snob, The same is true for our cities, where empty buildings, collapsed property values and empty space have created opportunities for urban homesteaders and real estate predators alike. Places like Detroit and Flint badly need investment – in their economic base, in their physical infrastructure, in their neighborhoods, in their schools and public institutions, and in their people.

But in their desperation to increase their tax bases, city governments seem only too willing to once again displace their poor. The signs are not hard to see. The downtowns in these cities are relatively safe places, as the first step of most investors is to provide security for the suburban workforce and monied visitors.

“Gentrification wants to move us out, however they can,” said Charity, “Benign and malicious neglect, market forces, erosion of services, even eminent domain.” She knows. Her childhood neighborhood on the river was taken by eminent domain and turned over to a developer. There are gated communities even within the city limits, places that have almost no interaction with their neighbors, who are sometimes only a block away.

The current cliché of the 99% misses all this. In the neighborhoods, where crime is rising and is primarily “black on black,” there is little sense of community, no great solidarity. People talk of the sense of powerlessness and the apathy, the epidemic of alcohol to numb the pain.

Any effort to revitalize our inner cities that once again pushes these people out of the way will fail, as it should.

American Apartheid

For a city that was built by and for General Motors, Flint has the most terrible roads. In fact, its entire infrastructure has collapsed, and there is no money to fix it. One of the city’s most dramatic sights is the 235-acre “Buick City,” which was once the largest industrial complex in North America and is now a vast, deserted concrete desert. Flint belies our image of urban decay. With no high-rise projects, it is a city of tree-lined neighborhoods of single-family houses where 200,000 people once lived and half that number remains. But on those streets are hundreds of abandoned and burned-out houses, which remind you that Flint is the most violent city in America.

Flint’s automobile plants provided thousands of well-paying jobs through the 1970s, and the city attracted a diversity of peoples to work in them. With the need for only a high-school diploma, there was little interest in higher education. “My mother made $18 an hour on the line,” my friend Delma remembers, “which was good money, especially for a Black woman.” But it was exhausting, mind-numbing work, and “she came home miserable every day.”

People sought solace in liquor and religion, and while there is only one grocery store within the city limits today, there are churches and liquor stores wherever you look.

Ironically, the University of Michigan is buying much of the downtown for its fast-growing Flint campus, and the city’s symphony orchestra still plays monthly in the Cultural Center, a peaceful oasis of museums and the library cut off from downtown by I-475 – the bypass that destroyed the city’s most stable Black neighborhood 40 years ago. It’s a small oasis: less than a block away sit abandoned houses on tree-lined streets.

Charity

The History. As you drive along the flat Michigan plain, Detroit rises before you with the power of its past – the city that was built by America’s first cars and went on to build the world’s automobile industry. With the creation of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler at the turn of the 20^th century, the city grew rich, and it grew rapidly through World War II, when it converted its massive production capacity from cars and trucks to tanks, ships and planes, becoming the “arsenal of democracy.” The decline came swiftly. The Horror. Entering the city, the first thing that hits you are the great barren gouges of concrete that let suburbanites come in and out of the city without touching it. And then, the emptiness – the absence of people, the expanses of empty lots, the abandoned buildings whose glassless windows rise 12 stories into the air, the black shells of burned-out houses and charred dreams. Detroit has lost over one million people since 1950, half its population since 1970. Those federal highways began the process by carrying city dwellers to subsidized homes in segregated suburban neighborhoods. The collapse of the auto industry finished it. Ninety percent of the population today is non-white, impoverished and vulnerable. Unemployment is epidemic. Crime and hopelessness have joined hands. “There are people here,” my friend Charity says, “who would kill you without thinking about it.”

The Hope. Rising in the neighborhoods like the grasses that push through the empty sidewalks are small signs of hope. There are 27 urban farms in Detroit, 15-1800 community gardens. “We don’t want Wal-Mart here,” says Charity, who notes that 150,000 people live outside the cash economy. “There is power in these gardens,” she says. “They show our resilience and our resistance.” Imagine: the future of Detroit, once the symbol of industrial power, may rest on local agriculture and small family businesses.

On the Road

Everybody talks to you in Toledo. Or so it seems. I arrived there in the evening, and as I walked along the Maumee River, almost everyone I passed greeted me. Some just stopped to have a conversation.

Toledo is the gateway for my quick visit to Detroit and Flint, Michigan, two of the most devastated places in America. This is fitting, for Toledo, which sits on the western end of Lake Erie, has a long history as a gateway between the continent’s vast interior and the eastern commercial centers. Its faded grandeur speaks of a past when goods traveled by water from Thunder Bay, Ontario, across Lake Superior, down Lake Huron to Erie, as well as by canal from Cincinnati and the interior and then on to both the St. Lawrence Seaway and New York City. Later, it became a railroad link between Chicago and New York.

Its established transportation networks, its proximity to Midwestern cities, and the coal, oil and water that fueled their growth, led Toledo to become a manufacturing center that produced all sorts of accessories for the automobile, particularly glass, which gave it its nickname – “the Glass City.”

From then its fortunes rode with the automobile, which brought enormous wealth until it began to collapse in the late 1970s and left devastation in its wake. Toledo’s population dropped by 25%, and it suffered the high unemployment, white flight and abandoned neighborhoods that have plagued so many American cities.

But it hardly prepared me for what I was to see in Michigan.