Already?

Happy Spring, dear readers, and a kiss from the sunny plains.

Summer love

Happy August, dear ones. Summer on!
Photo courtesy of brother Dave McCahill. 

Take a little trip

Sometimes I visit the places I’ve been to before. Driving in the afternoon heat of tourist traffic, I return to a red beach in India where I watched the sunrise with strangers. I think of the silence at the waterline there. 

    Or as I'm pumping gas, I go to the hill in Baños, where I walked and walked through the green, through the fields and wet woods, and could see everything from the top: the way the mountains cut into canyons and water flowed. I'd had a broken heart then, and the shard of it is forever embedded in my memory of Baños. 

    In line at the grocery store, I go to the streets of Buenos Aires on a night when the musicians were out and we sipped beer from the same bottle. I leave my life, my job, the things I need to do, and I send my mind to the places I have been. 

    Don’t we travel for this? Don’t we all want something we can keep with us forever? Travel teaches us each the same lesson: that our lives don’t have to be the way they are.

Sol LeWitt at the Mass Moca

It's a gray day in June, and I am driving to Williamstown, Massachusetts to meet my brother. I’m coming from Boston, and before that I was in Brooklyn, New York and Washington, D.C. I’ve seen Little Rock and Linville Falls, North Carolina this time around, and I even spent a night in Chatham, Tennessee, birthplace of two Nobel Prize winners. Who knew.

Anyway, I’m due to meet my brother in two hours, and there’s time to spare. I wonder where I’ll eat lunch, where I might stroll while I wait for him, and then I pass a sign for the Mass MoCA, an art museum I’ve studied in college, read about in magazines, and in general vaguely wondered about for many years. "Great!" I think, and pull in. Ample parking!

What is Reading?

This is reading:

The Secret Lives of Books, by Jena Priebe (on view now at the Mass MoCa)

Take a Ride Down a Winding Road

It's the Blue Ridge Parkway, everyone! From the heart of the Great Smokies (heart-stopping) in North Carolina to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, this road is a sliver of calm in our hectically  bountiful nation. I took a little drive on the Blue Ridge just last month, and here is what I found:

And here's what I did not find, dear readers!

• Traffic (though I hear that changes come leaf peeper season)
• Honking horns
• Billboards advertising hamburgers, cheeseburgers, God, Children's Lives - all popular billboards in OBN, I've discovered
• McDonalds
• Cops

'Twas a wonderful time, dear readers. A wonderful time. There are hikes and picnic places and blooming flowers. There are turkeys. There are little bed and breakfasts, and there are rainforests. There is so much beauty, your heart will swell with embarrassing patriotic pride.

Drive some or all of the Blue Ridge Parkway if you can, when you can. It's not going anywhere, and our tax dollars are paying. Bring a lover or just your own lonely heart. Bring your worries so that you can lose them. Drive a silent, winding road - it turns out they still exist. 

To Nepal, with love

My brother was in Nepal for almost five weeks, and he left Kathmandu eight hours before the earthquake struck.



Between Kathmandu and JFK, he spent his layover in Dubai, walking past sleek perfume shops and turnbaned men and women with heavily-lined eyes and stiletto shoes. I imagine that the Dubai airport is breezy and sweetly-scented, the walls all windows, the air cool. I imagine my brother there, scruffy, a little bit smelly. He washed his own clothes in Nepal. I imagine that the well-dressed, well-coiffed women and men stared at my brother with amusement, mild repugnance, certainly a hint of jealousy in how free he must have seemed, not caring how he looked as he walked in flannel and denim through the beautiful airport.

His phone didn’t get service until he landed in New York, and so for many hours after the earthquake hit, he didn’t hear the news. Across the Atlantic Ocean, he must have closed his eyes and brought Nepal back: snow-capped peaks, torn prayer flags flapping, alpine flowers and glacial streams. Bright, noisy cities and towns; whitewashed temples; street venders. Crowds, smiles, wind scented of incense and something else, something sweet and smoky, faintly rotten. Dust on your hands and in your hair after a day on the streets. The teeming wildness of it all, and the flush of color on every sidewalk and wall.

It was only when he landed at JFK did he hear the news. First, he listened to frightened voicemails my mother had left—Call when you get here, call right away. And then he had to put away his phone to go through customs, and while he waited in line he wondered why my mother had sounded so afraid. No phones allowed in customs, he was told. The moments dripped by so slowly, and finally he took his phone out again and called my mother and she told him the news.

Now, he grieves for a place he just met. When I spoke to him on the phone the morning he arrived at JFK, I asked if he’d seen any signs, if he’d gotten a clue. Nothing, he’d said. No sign. Everything was fine: the sun shone, the people milled about, the temples stood. Now, he eats dinner with my mother and father, and drives the quiet streets of our hometown. Winter is finally melting away. The other drivers are orderly; no one honks; it seems so clean and sterile here. There is an absence of color, now that he’s home. He wonders about the people he met; so many faces he glanced at, so many smiles he exchanged, for my brother is a friendly guy, handsome and exuberant and chatty. He hears from a few of them; houses have been lost, lives have.

Eight hours before the earthquake hit, he boarded a plane and looked out at the Himalayas for the last time. Nepal had a piece of his heart now. The sun shone; the plane took off; there was never any sign.



Readers, kindly make your way to Cloudy Alberg, my brother Dave's blog about mountains, books, bikes, teaching, and travel. He's just returned from Nepal - he left Kathmandu eight hours before the earthquake struck. You can read his Nepali chronicles here, and learn how you can help.

(All photos on this page copyright Dave McCahill, 2015)

Last Day

It’s the fourth night in a row that I’ve woken up and not known where I was. In the darkness, I blink around the room, guessing. I know it can’t be home—that knowledge has become instinctive—so where am I now, exactly? Which city, which country, is this one? And then something gives the room away—the shape of the table, the light through the window—and so I remember. This is Buenos Aires, this is San Telmo, this is the hotel on Chacabuco where I checked in yesterday and the woman sat smoking in the kitchen, not getting up to hand me the keys. I was dreaming of rivers again.

At first, my dreams were of home, of the deep feet of snow in the woods and of the smell of my mother’s kitchen. I saw my father’s hands, heard my brother’s laugh, inhaled the scent of my lover’s skin. I remembered all that I’d left in the night, and in the morning I woke, the memory of home still heavy on my chest. Those dreams left an aching, an empty stillness, and I wept for how far everything felt.

After a few months, though, the dreams shifted and turned foreign. Now I was crossing a turquoise sea over fresh coral with strangers; now I was riding a train down, down towards the snow. Now I was entering an ancient city; now I was climbing a peak, where the air grew thin and my breaths came short and desperate. I stopped thinking, at nighttime, of home, and started dreaming instead of constant motion. Every possibility came in the night; the whole world arrived. I’d been thrown; no one knew me. This was freedom.

In these last dripping days, this room is all of the rooms that I've known. My dreams skitter away and I'm left only with the emotions they held and the vague outlines of places. Sometimes I am screaming, sometimes I am crying, often I laugh so hard I wake myself up. There are strangers in these nights, although I’ve heard that every face you’ve seen in your dreams is a face you’ve seen before—on the street, perhaps, years ago, when you looked and barely saw, never knowing you’d remember. There have been so many nights like this, so many shafts of unfamiliar light through curtain cracks, so many tables shaped the same. So many creaking beds, so many midnight trips for water. My dreams run together like songs, like a woven cloth of different colors, and when morning comes I wake again, unsure.

*

Buenos Aires is perfect now. Only in the afternoon does the air feel hot, heavy, slowing our footsteps down. The rest of the time, the jacaranas drop their purple blooms onto the street, the sycamores above us shade the sidewalks, and the wind filters into the train, cool and welcome. I sweat on the bus as it crosses the city, and I watch the sun go down from where I sit on the grass in the parks. Beautiful days, these are, each one longer than the next, each one just a tiny bit warmer. I let them run through me then leave me, because you can’t hold on to hours.

*

The last rented room has a door painted with peeling, mint-green paint. Morning glory winds up the banisters and there’s an outdoor pila, like the one Hilary had in Guatemala. (So long ago, that seems.) We can wash our dishes and clothes out here and hang them on the line that stretches over the patio so that our clothes flap against the crumbling cement of the building next door. There are shared bathrooms with drains in the floors and no shower curtains; there is a little kitchen with a two-burner stovetop and no fridge. There is a single bed in my room, a small table and two chairs. There is a cup and a plate and a bowl, a fork and a knife and a spoon. A glass, a bar of soap, a folded towel, an open window. It’s beautiful here, my last rented room. I close my eyes and breathe the wind; I think to myself, no one knows. No one could find me here, even if they tried; no one would know to look for me in room 49. The walls are painted two shades of pink, one old, one new, and I think of how free you are, when no one knows.

*

Nearly a year it’s been, and today the months are impossible to fathom. The flight tomorrow still doesn’t seem real, and I know it won’t be until I’m inside that metal craft, rising up into the sky and away from this place. How much I will leave behind: an invisible trail I’ve made, a knotted route down. How much I have seen; how many things I have learned. How many people I’ve met, how many words and kisses exchanged, how many good-bye tears. This good-bye, the one that comes tomorrow, I wonder how to bear.

For it isn’t what I leave, is it? It’s what I must take, and then where will everything fit? Will they stay with me, all those faces and conversations? All those touches exchanged? And what about the landscapes—the stretches of field and beach, the passes between mountains, the high-up towns where I knew no one? There is the way time passes, here in Argentina and everywhere else I've been—time can be molded, loosened, until it loses its shapes and curves to fit your life. There is the way people value their families above all else—above work, above money, family comes. There is the slow pace of walking, and there’s the way people talk to each other. Here, we all have stories, and everyone deserves to be heard. In these countries of immense poverty, of corruption and covered-up violence, I’ve never felt safer, I sometimes think. Never have I wanted for a place to sleep, a bite to eat, an ear to listen. 

There is the man on the bus while the rain pelts down; his clothes are patched, and he touches my hand and offers to help. There is the woman who wakes before the sun comes up to mop the floors of the place where I live, and even though she hasn’t slept much and there are bags under her eyes, she smiles at me while I wash my dishes. When I leave that place, she sits with me and my packed bags and talks with me over one last cup of coffee. There are the little kids who, on my last day at their school, bring out presents they made—a hat knit too tight, a purse with a broken strap. I can see them there in the yard as I take the bus home; it’s a schoolyard with broken glass and broken swings, and there they are, laughing. There is the girl I meet on the bus, the girl I meet when I most need a friend, the girl who stays with me two nights even though she’d planned on doing other things. After she’s gone, I found the bottle of wine and the piece of cake she’d left me. There are the two kind Americans who take me in as if their home is my own, who press money into my hand for a taxi when I say I’ll take the bus. They serve me dinner, they stay up late with me, and when I leave them, I’ll weep.

There is the boy who taught me that love can run smooth. He taught me that it doesn’t have to taste sharp on your tongue, and when he told me I didn’t have anything to fear, I knew in my bones it was true. He is the one who softened me, who spoke to me in patient Spanish, who took me on his bike to the orchard, to the water. He’s far from me now, but I still remember exactly the taste of his mouth, and I won’t give up hope that I’ll meet him again. He’s the one who knew all along that this journey was mine, mine alone, and after he showed me something beautiful, he let me go.

*

On my last day we visit the Chacarita cemetery. We wind through and out of Palermo and into the poorer barrio of Chacarita, whose main streets are lined with automotive shops, car dealerships, gas stations, and the massive, tree-lined central park. This cemetery is not for tourists; we’re the only ones who wander in with cameras to gaze at the streets and streets of tombs, of catacombs, of mausoleums and of graves. Except for the men who lean on brooms, squinting in the sun, and the women who walk, eyes straight ahead and lilies in their arms, we are alone. Alone, besides the ones who lie in darkness around us, uncountable souls in this massive place.

The sun pelts down; deeper into the cemetery we walk, until the pavement turns to cobblestones and pine needles litter the ground. Above us the sky is so blue. It doesn’t feel to me like the last day; it feels like a day, a day and nothing more, a day at the end of a long string of days. A place at the end of a long stretch of places; another graveyard, another blue sky, another old man leaning against his broom. Another old cat, who stretches in the sun and then looks at me once before turning and slinking away. Down she goes, between the rows of the mausoleums, and I follow. She’s gone into one, an old, cobwebbed tomb whose stained-glass windows were long ago smashed.

Do you live here? I ask her, and she blinks her green eyes, her pupils thin as crescent moons. She coils her body back, back into where the caskets lie, crooked and broken, looted many times over. I’m just another pair of feet walking past; I’m just another body. The cat disappears into the darkness; this tomb must be her home.

In the countries I’ve seen, death is not to be feared, not really. Everyone’s seen someone die too young; everyone knows their day will come. Everyone, mostly, especially the older ones, have seen war or known blood-freezing fear, or both things. For this, I think that they’re better at living for what matters most, and this is what I hope to take home. You can decide what the most important things are in your life, and those can come first. Your wife, your child, your bread, your bath; these can be what you prize, not money or phones or a car. As for the wind in the trees and the reflection of the clouds on the water—you can let those things surround you, if you want it badly enough. If you think hard about what you really want, you’ll find that it isn’t so much. You might even find that it’s everywhere, already.

And so I will go home richer than I’d ever imagined possible, for I have seen so much beauty, and I’ve known so much love. These places have filled my mind and spilled into my heart, and I pray they’ll continue to fall onto the page. I've learned so much about what makes life sweet and what makes it sacred, and so although I'm afraid, terrified even, to go back, I am mostly just awed, for how lucky I’ve been to have known all this.

Beautiful, gay BA

Yay for photitos of Pride! (Just a week late...things have been hectic). My dear friend Sam visited last week, and we literally stumbled upon this parade, which we hadn't expected, since Pride normally happens in Spring....but this is the southern hemisphere! It's spring! It's Pride!

Anyway, it was a beautiful day, a beautiful parade, all set against the backdrop of BA's stately Avenida de Mayo. The march began at the Casa Rosa - the pink government house - and ended at Congreso. In typical BA fashion, the parade was scheduled to begin at 6 PM, actually began at 7.30, and ended in the wee hours, in beautiful darkness. It was truly an awesome thing to behold, in the truest sense of that word. I'm still high from the day. 

One week left in Argentina, my loves, and I'm drinking it all in...more to come, at least before the fateful day I'm set to leave....sadness.

A quick note about this one below-- this is the Avenida 9 de Julio, supposedly the widest avenue in the world...and at Pride it was empty of cars and filled with revelers. An incredible thing.

Wind in the blood

I write this from Colonia, Uruguay’s most picturesque and touristed town. From most points here you can see or smell the river, which is really more like an ocean, salty and massive, cargo ships visible on the horizon. I have seen Montevideo, this nation’s capital, whose elegant buildings and canopies of leaves over roads remind me of Buenos Aires. But Montevideo is smaller, walkable, and the river holds more of a presence; it flanks the historic center, which juts out, a peninsula, into this river-sea. The water is slate gray, dirty when you peer into it, but from a distance it is lovely. Close to the river's cemented banks, the buildings in Montevideo get low and old, painted bright colors, windows open. It’s a beautiful city, and Uruguay a beautiful country, with rolling farmland and evenly-spaced plots of eucalyptus. It’s springtime now, and the air smells so sweet—it’s the fragrance of the flowering trees, whose blooms resemble lilacs and whose trunks are fat like sycamores.

Uruguay is the tenth country I’ve seen this year. It is impossible, in this rented room by the water, to fathom how far I have come, how many miles I have travelled, how many beds I have slept in, as Jhumpa Lahiri put it. Over time the borders in my mind have blended, the landscapes too, and so now when I dream of the flat expanses of the Andean sierra, I do not know whether I’m seeing Bolivia, or Peru, or the southern part of Ecuador. Does it matter, anyway? The hippy girl I met in Cordoba, the Irish one with the dreadlocks and the vials of oils, told me she thought borders were pointless, and ever since then, I've pondered. Uruguay feels richer, though the slums still crumble away at the edges of the cities, and bent-over women still crouch, working, in the fields. Here, everyone walks around, or drives or sits on the curb, with mate in their hands, sipping the hot tea slowly and smoking. Why here and not there? Why bright colors, woven patterns, there and not here? Borders—those slippery, shifting crossings.

How far I feel from the Cordoba province, where I spent the last two weeks, where even the nights were warm and in the daytime the sun blazed, beating down on the city's even sidewalks and the leafy, tree-lined avenues, beating down on the scorched parks and the stately museums. How far I feel from the little towns that surround that gleaming place—Capilla del Monte, where I travelled with the Irish girl and her two Belgian friends, mother and daughter who now live in Tahiti. That little town, where we slept in a big old house with a whitewashed roof and a view of the hills all around, not yet green. In the night, the wind there smelled like perfume, rustling the dark and invisible trees and making all the street dogs bark.

There was Mina Clavera, that small city known best for its deep, clear pools that the boulders in the winding river form. There was the Scottish man with the impeccable Spanish who came to Argentina six years ago with a backpack and never left. He found a wife and now, he told me in a whisper, they are expecting. He smiled modestly as I cried out and hugged him. There were the two sleek cats, the fat frogs that hopped out at dusk, and always the river, the color of amber, that divided the town. There was Nono, the tiny puebla with the strange and massive museum, which held everything from human skulls to dolls, from crucifixes to old record players, from dishes and teacups and dozens and dozens of spoons, to seashells mounted on the walls. There were the buses in the evening filled with children; there was the old man who sold sausages and who picked me up when I stuck out my thumb and drove me home. Seventy-five! He’d said of his age, smacking his head with his hand. Seventy-five! But he didn’t look it.

Aofie, the Irish girl was called. She rolled her own cigarettes and smelled like lavender and something else, something earthy and smoky. She looked so much like a friend I had in college, a friend who twisted her hair into dreadlocks our first year and walked around in baggy pants, that I felt like I knew her, this Aofie, after just a few hours. Don’t count the days you have left, she’d said. Don’t count. Just feel. She warned me not to let the kernel of wild freedom I’ve found get lost in the shuffle, after I fly away. That night, a group of travelers came in from Buenos Aires; they sat in a circle, singing, their voices round and strong, their eyes wide open.  

You look different, Gaby said. Gaby, the one I met in Cusco, the one whose email address I lost. The one I bumped into the other day in the Cordoba market. After a few beers, a few laughs, a few exclamations of disbelief - one turn and we would have missed each other! - she told me that my face looked different, my hair. You're darker and lighter both, she said. And the way you walk - it's different. You seem like you belong.

*

To the west, the wind sings through Capilla del Monte, through Mina Clavera, through all the little towns I’ve seen and all the others I have not. It rolls up and down this continent, through all these wild and spectacular countries, and it seeps inside me, warming my blood. I want it to stay right there forever, this wind, this place, these cities and towns and hills that are blending together now. They come in the night, sneaking into my dreams, and when I'm awake I can feel them, tattoos on my skin that might fade as the years go by, but will never fully leave me.

(mate!)