October, 2023

1.

Once upon a time, a 78-year-old man living a relatively satisfactory life within sight of Cape Cod Bay, devised a plan to circle the Earth.  It would be his last such opportunity, he thought.  Yet even while strapping on his long-winged feathers he could barely walk no less fly.  One hamstring was ruptured.  One entire leg was black and deep purple.  His breathing was compromised, his heart was in persistent atrial fibrillation, and, quite honestly the guy had no real idea why he really wanted to go on such a voyage, except that he’d been planning it for years, he felt a persistence sense of needing to get away from the familiar, he wanted to walk in beauty, and he desired to travel outside the daily madness that is America.  Most of all he would travel in the hope of finding some clarity, he thought, a sense of direction, of purpose, of greater self-acceptance and full engagement with the gifts and terrors of his final chapters.  Besides, how much longer would he be physically and psychically able to take such trips on his unmistakably clear path toward the termination of his mission, a fate he shares with Daedalus’ son Icarus. 

2.

The initial plan was to begin in San Francisco where his daughter and grandchildren live and from there proceed to Kathmandu.  He actually buys tickets, one for himself, one for his friend/ex-girlfriend.  His current partner finds the planning and contemplation of such a voyage with one’s old mate, even if our hero promises said trip will not include physical intimacy, well, let’s just say, disturbing.  One wonders what this guy does not get. Not to mention the forbearance of his mate.

Anyhow, what he actually doesn’t get is his trip to Nepal.  And what he does actually get is three days in a SF hospital on the geriatric ward where he discovers he’s been bleeding to death internally.  You think there is a message here?  That maybe he really wasn’t supposed to go to Nepal with his ex-girlfriend.  That maybe he need a different plan where love and death lurk. So much for Nepal, my friends.  So much for an around the world voyage.  Here is the naked truth, if he had gotten on the plane to Kathmandu he’d be dead.

3.

And in these circumstances, the dream of circling the world ends, whereupon, humbled and far weaker, and ridiculously and instantaneously far older than he has ever been, he flies back to the Cape where his mate, Luna the Forbearing, is happy to see him safe and present, absent the need to suffer the agony of her man being with another woman in Nepal, which then brings our two lovers, in the spirit of Cupid and Psyche, to Greece.

4.

Greece is not Cape Cod, of course, not even with all that water, not America, not Nepal.  Greece is an ancient country in the middle of the Mediterranean, Ionian, and Aegean seas filled with history, islands, shorelines, coves, caves, olives, wonderful food, and antiquity, something we in the west know not.  Greece, a place he never imagined he wanted to be and yet here, without plans, without a return ticket, and without any sense where this is meant to lead, except to an inevitable rendezvous with death.  Which means pay attention. 

The flight to Greece is not easy.  The long passage between terminals in Gatwick is tiring.  The long wait between flights is challenging.  The couple takes the Metro into Athens after 18 hours of travel.  They are lost, hungry, and tired. They have another battle.  Each loses.  Again.

5.

Ah, but Greece.  Greece is music and coffee.  Greece is exceptional food and the Acropolis.  Greece is Patras, where the Lenten carnival fills a day.  Greece is meat.  Greece is Lagia, at the far southern end of the Mani, a peninsula in the Peloponnese where our Airbnb is a stone house, with olive wood burning in the fireplace, olives on the table, and slippers by the bedside.

Lagia, our first real stop, is home to an exceptionally beautiful, mural covered, old subterranean church that actually ought be in Jerusalem, adjunct to the Church of the Holy Specula.  The church priest is named George. You can call him Papa.  Papa George owns the restaurant across from the church and the horse eating greens from the back of the open pickup truck in front of the restaurant.  George owns the hotel down the beach, another hotel, and a farm.  George has 4 sons and three grandsons.  He advertises international baptism services, complete with throwing the infant up in the air at the end for photographs and making everyone happy.  He has photographs on the walls.  He makes and sells honey.  He makes and sells olive oil and olive soap.  He has never been outside of Greece.  Not once.  Still, George appears to be an exceptionally happy man, a man who appreciates the kindness and care of his loving god.

6.

We drive in Mani on roads frequently shown in impossibly spectacular photographs of overstated travel magazines.  Really, I have seen much natural and astonishing beauty in my day, but the Mani roads are tied with those in Big Sur, Cinque Terra, the road to Hana.  All the houses in the Mani are made of stone.  The fields and hills are ablaze with yellow flowers.  Mixed on the palette are deep purples, shocking reds, violets, whites.  I have never seen so many olive trees, so many goats, so few cars or people, so few gasoline pumps or stores.  It is the real world out here, home to Spartans, Homer, Poseidon.  The land of rocks and olives at the shore and in the hills.  Dogs guard the goats. The goats’ bells ring.  God is in heaven and in the sea and we are in Greece.

7.

One poor dog we see is tied mercilessly next to some goats at a hairpin turn in the road, shaking and starving.  The woman cries for him.  She takes pictures of the dog to show Papa George, who calls the police.  One never knows what they will be called to face in unfamiliar foreign fields.  On the way out of Lagia we stop to visit the dog again, to bring him some food.  His owner, a plump round dirty older woman has made the mistake of also being there. I stop the car on command and the Head of the Lagia International Pet Protection School (LIPS), who speaks no Greek, jumps out of the car and confronts the owner.  LIPS tells the woman sternly that the dog’s leash is too short, that cruelty to animals is a criminal offense, that the woman shall be reported to PETA, and besides, that she is surely going to go to hell.  This in perfect English.  And the woman gets it, or gets something, because before long her arms are spread wide and she is gesturing passionately, defending the leash’s length, telling the LIPS lady the dog is fine and besides that it’s none of her damn business.  Picture it, two Greek peasant women standing at the side of the road arguing with loud unintelligible voices and hand gestures, pointing at the dog who is trying to get away, like the guy in the car is.  Dogs and cats.  Greek cats.  They are everywhere.  Even on postcards.  We buy more than a few. Later we buy bags of dog food to feed the strays.

8.

After Lagia, we land in Sparta.  After father George, Dimitri, who emigrated with his family as a young man to Montreal, and has lived and owned property in Miami, Texas, and New York.  Dimitri has no children and no wife.  He’s made a lot of money in real estate.  His mother, who lived near him in the states, was literally dying 5 years ago when she begged Dimitri to bring her back to Greece to end her days and be buried on her native soil.  And Dimitri, ever the loyal son, brings her back to die in Greece, whereupon she has a complete recovery.  Cooks.  Shops.  Dances while Dimitri prospers, buying more houses, more acreage with lemon trees, oranges, olives.  He is already selling olive oil he packages and ships internationally. Dimitri, the epitome of the entrepreneurial spirit, approves of our plan to circumnavigate the entire country, Mani, Sparta, Mystos, Lefkada, Corfu, northern Greece to Thessaloniki, back down to Athens, a flight to Crete, you know, man plans and the gods laugh.     

9.

So first to Mystos and then Kalavryta, where the ghost of the beast appears very vividly and by surprise.  Or as the note which welcomes the visitor to the Kalavryta Holocaust Museum reads, “Fascism is not theory.  It is a performance.  You and us.  And the leading actor is Death.”

10.

Then Lefkada, where we never intended to go and I run out of superlatives. Too much souvlaki, perhaps, Lips talking to every stray cat and dog, every butterfly and bee, explaining to the restaurant owner in English and with hand gestures why the owner’s caged birds needed clean water, which results in new bottles of water being delivered to our table.

11.

We go to Corfu.  It will surprise you.  The ferry is huge… and relatively empty.  I don’t quite know what we do, but three days pass and we are still there.  Our budget in Greece is 50% housing and rental car, 25% souvlaki, and 25% café fredos. The town of Pelakas is the epitome of all thing Corfuian.  From there you drive to the northern edge of the island.  There a big ghost city is waiting for summer and Germans.  On the way over hilarious hairpin roads leading to the sea and eternity we talk of love.  Our parents are here with us… in some ways welcome guests and in others just too much baggage to keep lugging around. 

12.

This writing is supposed to be a “travelogue” about Greece, true, but the trip itself is also intended as a voyage to find a greater sense of direction, purpose, or self-acceptance as I enter and experience the gifts and terrors of this final chapter on the road to demise and non-existence.  I am weaker, less mobile, less virile, less the powerfully physical man I was.  Vulnerable.  Poorer.  Limited in ways I do not enjoy and find hard to accept.  I am sad, focused on and aware of loss and of the need to say good-bye.  Part of what engages me in this is a lifelong awareness of death’s inevitability and approach and the sense there were only a few ways to approach the end of self-aware life/aliveness.      

13.

I blame these hopelessly romantic reveries on the Bronx, of course, on firefighters, and on Chief Wesley Williams, the first African American battalion chief in the NYFD, who my father served as Chief Williams’ sole aide and driver.  Jews, Italians, Greeks, Indigenous Americans, the Irish, Germans, Catholics, poets, the Yankees, black people in transparent grief and joy, Sandy Koufax, soldiers fighting overseas, children screaming before annihilation, folks who speak other languages, butchers, woodworking shop, the dairy farm in upstate NY where our urban narrator worked summers in high school and saw birth and death in the raw all contribute to this romantic thread, but no matter what its origins, it is simply his “fate.”

14.

Meteora is the end of “us” though not of the trip.  And in truth it is really a very simple declaration that ends it, a way Lips speaks of her pain and her fears of going mad that I feel in my heart and soul. I can no longer be the source of hers and my pains.  I’ll tell you about the rest of the trip later.  I’ve left out the break into our car and Lip’s terrible losses.  I’ve left out the friends Lips made, the courage she displayed, her strength and courage.  I’ve ignored Athens, Thesonaliki, and long walks up steep steps leading to new vistas and cafes where people sing in Greek to the gods.

New insights garnered in New Guinea

New Guinea in two parts
February 13, 2014

The Baliem Valley in New Guinea is unique among all of the places I have visited on the planet, mostly because the culture of the indigenous stone-aged Dani people who’ve lived here for millennia is still dominant and palpable, although fading fast.

The plane we fly on from Jayapura on the north coast of Indonesian Papua New Guinea to the central market town of Wamena in the Baliem Valley is crowded at least in part because there are still no roads into or out of the Baliem Valley and no other way than by air to get to Wamena. Indeed, the Valley was first “discovered” and explored by westerners only seventy five years ago and those first western explorers also first flew in – by sea plane – which they landed on a mountain lake before setting out into the interior.

We are met in Wamena by our tour guide Olfied, who is from Sulawesi, by our driver, Richard the silent hearted, and by our indigenous Hoopla vouchsafe guy and porter, Yeskeel, named after the prophet Ezekiel, who is wearing nothing but a feathered headdress, a penis sheathe gourd held up by a woven thread wrapped around his waist, a loose bamboo decorative “belt” holding up nothing, a necklace with beads, keys, and safety pins, and a nice wristwatch. I’m told Yeskeel wears the watch strictly as jewelry, not because he knows how or needs to use it. I can’t confirm or deny this, but it is decidedly a nice watch. Most of all Yeskeel is definitely a man of the deepest tribal traditions, and seems to know every path, every hill, every compound, every plant name and each plant’s medicinal properties. He walks everywhere barefooted no matter how rocky the surface. And in what for me is a moment of disconcerting awareness I realize as I’m walking down the streets of Wamena with this handsome completely naked black man, with feathers in his hair and a penis sheathe, that it is me, the tall white guy, who is being stared at, a personage far less frequently seen on the streets of Wamena than naked Hoopla or Dani men are.

Olfied carries with him a well worn original of the photo-filled book “Gardens of War,” co-authored by Karl Heider, the premier American anthropologist/ethnologist on Dani culture who I met in Bukittinggi, Sumatra and who lived among the Dani for over two years in the early nineteen sixties when ritual but deadly warfare was still a core aspect of Dani culture, and Robert Gardner, the producer of the movie “Dead Birds,” as beautiful an ethnographic film as I have ever seen that documents the ritual and deadly consequences of Dani warfare and that Joy and I watched in advance of coming to New Guinea.

Manila to Baguio to Manila
December 19, 2013
I find it hard and emotional tearing myself away from Wamena, New Guinea. The plane is over an hour late and Olfied waits with us until he is sure we are on board and no longer in his care, clearly above and beyond the bounds of his duty. Yeskeel also meets us at the airstrip and in addition to his new cell phone, Yeskeel has also replaced the traditional hand woven net bag he had been using to carry his minimum traveling possessions in – thread, extra gourds, a bone needle, the craft project he is working on, some cash – and still naked as the day he was born except for his penis sheath, feathered headband, and wristwatch, is now carrying a mid size backpack like a schoolboy. Who says I am not an agent of social change?
We fly from Wamena into Sinesta, Papua, and then drive an hour into Jayapura, the Papua capital, making touristy stops along the way, including at the hilltop former army HQ of Douglas MacArthur where MacArthur and his staff planned retaking the Philippines from the Japanese in 1944. The view is magnificent. We also travel by motorized “canoe” to a small island paradise in the middle of a series of three spectacular Papuan mountain lakes where we buy paintings on canvas made of pounded bark. Lastly we stop at a very modest anthropology museum, at a very modest university, where I buy a surprisingly beautiful museum quality Asmat carving, not more than fifty years old probably, but very moving and authentic in design and expression – male and female figures holding hands atop another squatting male and female hand holding couple crafted in the classic coastal Asmat tribal style.
We spend the night on the tenth floor of the fanciest hotel in Jayapura with a commanding view of Jayapura’s spectacular deep-water harbor. In the morning, before heading to the airport I experience intense chest pain right at my heart, pain so significant and persistent I am forced to lay down. It is sharp pain, which I take comfort in, classic heart attack pain being described more often as “crushing,” but the pain really hurts (5 on a scale of 1 to 10), and doesn’t abate. I take a muscle relaxant and chew some aspirin. I have no other symptoms and am clear that unless things get considerably worse I will not seek medical care or alter any of our travel plans until we reach Jakarta, at which point we can reassess before Joy and I separate as planned and she heads home while I travel on to the Philippines.
It is fascinating and rewarding for me to observe my own calm demeanor. I am mostly hoping this is not a heart attack, or even angina pain, although I am indeed seventy three years old and have in the past decade had one LAD balloon angioplasty and two coronary stents placed inside the blood vessels which nourish my heart. I am also in persistent atrial fibrillation, which I take three or four meds for each day, and have a “benign” leakage in one of my heart valves. (I have a hard time associating the word benign with any heart defect, but I do trust and genuinely admire my cardiologist.) What I’m hoping is that this is just gas inspired pain, which is what it feels like, although unusually intense and persistent.
Joy is obviously concerned, but whether by nature or respect for how much I resent and resist being physically “mothered,” cared for, nursed, or “babied,” she maintains a balanced combination of engagement and distance that I appreciate. It is also pretty clear that if I were home I would be headed for the hospital, or at least a medical appointment, but given that I’m in New Guinea, with a flight scheduled to depart in a few hours, I’m not intending to alter my plans if I don’t absolutely have to. And if I’ve had a small heart attack, I “reason,” I’ve survived, the damage is done, and there isn’t anything much I can do about it now anyhow. And if it’s symptomatic of a severe blockage I’m just hoping it will remain partially open until I can get home and be treated. Is this denial? I’m thinking it must be, but also trusting my behavior and the choices I am making are a reflection of good coping skills. I often say that the deepest gift I received from my yoga ashram training in India is a deeply increased sense of acceptance and, although I mostly don’t want to die, I am a reasonably mature person who knows he must and shall die, and I feel I’ve been graced with a rich and full life for which I am grateful.
So we hang around the hotel for a spell and after about forty minutes, whether “on its own” or in association with the medications I’ve taken or both, the pain has abated and we are on our way to the airport and Jakarta. And because our plane is late taking off from Jayapura Joy and I do not have the time together we’d anticipated in Jakarta and after busily making sure she is checked in – without a word of reference to my heart – we take our leave of one another. “See you at home,” I say. “I’ll be in touch,” Joy says. “Wha. Wha. Wha,” we say nuzzling together like Dani warriors, and Joy is gone and my heart and I are again alone.
My flight to Manila is uneventful and comfortable. I reflect that I have no idea who I really am any more, if I ever did, or how I’ve become who I am, but the man I see in the mirror appears as an older anonymous traveler, an interesting looking stranger dressed in beads and head dress flying comfortably close to the end of his journey five miles above his home planet in a tin can.
Manila has a unique feel and look to it, mostly because of the famous Jeepney buses that just say “Philippines” and are everywhere … as ubiquitous as overloaded tricycles – motorcycles with the little sidecars attached – that you also see everywhere. And more than that there is the prominence of the food focus and the food scene. I mean I have never been anywhere where there were more restaurants, food chains, street vendors, and people eating … everywhere! Continuously. Hotdogs, skewers of pork, ice cream cones, ears of corn, shumai, sweet rolls, pizza, sweets and pastries beyond belief, all of which are being actively consumed by young and old on the street. Plus the people on the street are all comfortably and casually dressed and seem to have a nice, casual air about them.
I take the a cab from the airport to the bus terminal and ride directly to Baguio, a famous mountain summer destination and town/city six hours north of Manila where I have the name of a woman with roots in the Philippine tribal traditions of the area. Once we leave the flatlands of Luzon and head up into the Cordilleras the temperature changes notably and the scenery is fantastic, a bit like mountainous Bali. And like Wamena, which is only a degree or two off the equator, but at a mountain high elevation, so the climate of Baguio is comfortable and quite pleasant, maybe even a bit chilly.
It’s hard to find a room in Baguio – it is that popular a Filipino tourist destination – and ultimately end up in the Baguio “Condohotel,” a kind of rooming house with full kitchen facilities that is mostly populated by Filipino families seeking inexpensive quarters and the possibility of being able to prepare their own food rather than eating out, which although quite inexpensive by US standards, can still be a burden for a Filipino family on the road.
My email connection has been failing since somewhere in Bali, which is disconcerting and frustrating to me. The room is dirty and I have to keep a towel by my bed to wipe off my feet before getting into it. And although the room doesn’t compare in pathos to some quarters I’ve slept in in India … and there are no bugs or mice … I’m not completely comfortable and feel a deep uncertainty as to what I am doing here. And despite my efforts to contact the native woman I’ve been anticipating would serve as some sort of guide for me in the area, I’ve had no response from her. Indeed, truth be told, I’ve come to the Philippines for reasons that no longer seem very valid … the possibility of scouting out basketball options for Sam, the draw of seeing the homeland that was so formative to an old, fully faded, but once influential love of mine, and some fantasy about offering something to the typhoon ravaged areas … carpentry, painting, daycare, sports coaching.
As for basketball let me just note it is everywhere in the Philippines … vendors in the street hawking NBA official balls and team shorts, on the tube almost twenty four hours a day – NBA games, European League games, games of the Philippine League teams, which I believe Sam could have made (and there is no question of my objectivity in this regard). And on the NBA All Star weekend I watch some old Filipino guys at a bar watching the three point shooting contest as Stephen Curry is shooting and they are shouting, loudly, at the TV, “Come on Steph! Come on!!”
Plus it was Valentines Day, and I was recently separated from Joy, and the streets of Baguio are filled to overflowing with people carrying flowers, and holding hands, and kissing, and begging. And when I say overflowing I mean just that. The streets are teeming with people, like Times Square on a busy day … and there are lines everywhere: lines to reach the ATM machines (guarded by men with machine guns), lines to order pizza at Pizza Hut, lines to get into the SM Mall passed security – one line for women, one line for men, lines at the checkout counter in the supermarket. And the longest lines of all, this is really quite amazing, two lines at least seventy people long – yes, I counted – at each of the main entrances to the mall waiting for taxi cabs to pull up to the mall and take them home. And although cabs did appear during the time I watched they came quite slowly and only sporadically and the lines grew and grew.
On my second morning in Baguio I have pain in my left arm and a distinct facial tingle – both signs of restricted blood flow to the heart, but I remain in significant denial, only conceding that I will not travel five or six hours further north to Sagada, even further from medical help if needed. Instead I keep trying to make plans, although nothing is working for me. There are no rooms at other hotels. I can find no tours of real interest other than to old forts, churches, and strawberry farms. The Internet and computer repair shop I found is not opened and the phone number I call listed on the shop door does not respond. Even the Starbucks Internet is down.
And then the light bulb finally goes on … aren’t all these difficulties also interpretable as having the significance of “signs from the guides?” And isn’t it true that if I’m significantly occluded but haven’t had a heart attack that I want to avoid a 100% occlusion and possible heart muscle damage? I mean isn’t it true that an ounce of prevention is truly worth a pound of cure? And here my friends my South Seas journey ends, just that fast and just as suddenly as my journey to Africa ended in Dakar, Senegal last year, nothing any longer working, the mojo of the voyage exhausted and spent … and by afternoon I’m back on the bus to Manila and at the airport trying to change my ticket.
Paul Theroux, whose “Dark Star Safari” book I finally finish on the bus from Baguio to Manila, writes of journey’s end that the concluding of the travel narrative appears to fix a place forever in time, but that that “is a meaningless conceit … because all you do as a note-taking traveler is nail down your own vagrant mood on a particular trip.” I think that is a fair and accurate commentary. I try to write of the places I visit with enthusiasm and from the heart. I write trying to capture images, to convey realities, to share excitement and occasionally despair, to entertain. I say it is immensely important to listen to one’s heart … and my heart has been speaking to me as forcefully as it can without actually harming me lately, and I have been stubborn and selective in my listening. And far more than the possibility I am having some medically significant heart vessel event is the certainty that my heart is no longer happily into this trip, that I don’t want to be on this specific voyage any longer, and that I don’t have to be. I am not a prisoner, not in the U.S. Army, not in the middle of a trial I might not want to be stuck in, not a kid in a classroom, not an infant sent unwisely to a camp from which there is no escape, not a claustrophobe despairing of his apparent failure to find comfort in ordinary circumstances. I am a wise elder I dare say, a man on walkabout, a spirit seeker. And as I do yoga on my last morning of this voyage my mind turns unavoidably to the world I will soon inhabit back home, and I am witness to the serious struggle taking place in my mind (and in my heart) between my desire for refuge, hermitage, silence, and the quiet simple self acceptance of trees, and my perception of a “need” to “do” as well as to “be,” to engage, to be seen as an interesting and sociable person, a desirable person, a person of value, a useful member of the species, the family, and the community. And I do feel deeply torn. And in such a moment I realize that my true earthly and spiritual work is thus well laid out before me.