A song left in the jungle

Mother Nature’s been taking the U.S. on a wild ride lately. Drought and wildfire in the Southwest and flooding rain here in the Northeast. The kids are out of school now, and they’ve commandeered the computer in my office, so I’ve set up my laptop in the kitchen, which has two glass doors and a large arched window. I write a little, but mostly I stare out at the rain. It’s become a permanence, a fixture. The rare sunny day feels odd, unfamiliar, something you vaguely remember but need time to get to know again.

I sit and type and watch the sheets of water fall beyond the kitchen door. Sometimes the sheets are faint, gray, quick cascades of small, staccato drops. Sometimes they're denser, whiter walls of fat water. These make an eerie but pleasingly fulsome sound as they wrap around the house and build to a thick, wet crescendo.

The kind of crescendo we listened to from the thatch-roofed verandah and open-sided gathering room of our jungle camp on Peru’s Momon River, an Amazon tributary. We’d made it back from a late afternoon nature walk seconds before a pregnant beige sky let loose a rain so heavy it made the brown Momon boil and the piranha jump and flip and the hammocks strung on the verandah twirl and spin into gnarled knots.

We watched the rain for hours. In the jungle, you make your entertainment, or you take it from the nature around you. The whipping, deafening skywater kept us rapt.

With rain still falling at dinnertime, we gathered around the long, wooden communal dining table and shared a pot of monkey stew. Afterward, the camp’s full complement – a group of some dozen tourists, guides and camp staff – stayed gathered on the verandah. We shared stories over bottles of local beer.

One of the cooks had a guitar, and he sang a few gentle Peruvian ballads. Then he asked, “Can anyone sing an American song?” I took the guitar and played “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”

Before I finished singing, the cook left the room. He returned with an old cassette tape recorder. “Please,” he said. “Please play again. We would like to keep your song here.” I reprised, and after I strummed the final chord, the cook rewound the tape and played a bit of it to make sure he’d captured the music. He then clicked the machine off and held it to him like a treasured thing.

Sometimes, when the rain falls heavy, I think of that wet, wonderful night and marvel that I left a song in a faraway jungle. That my voice might still be heard from time to time above the swooshes and rushes of the brown Momon is an honor. A treasured thing.

LoriHein.com

Crail, Scotland: Hands off the life preserver

A recent issue of Coastal Living magazine ran a piece about the collectibility of antique life preservers, which the article called "life rings." A perfect, crisp photo spread showed life rings hung on the walls of perfect, crisp coastal cottages.

Lifesavers as decorations. Antique life rings, with ship, port or other provenance-proving markings can fetch $300, and reproductions go for as much as $60.

Before you bring life rings home to hang on your wall, make sure the seamen they were crafted for don’t need them anymore.

Where there’s a market, there’ll be thieves, so the harbormaster of the village of Crail in Scotland’s Kingdom of Fife did what he could to shame anyone thinking the life ring hung on the walkway above his village’s fishing harbor would make a fine souvenir. On the stand holding the harbor’s life ring he wrote, in black paint, "To steal this Lifebelt shows your own value of human Life -- harbour master"

The kids and I had crossed the road bridge over the Firth of Forth in Edinburgh and were headed toward St. Andrews. I took the long route and hugged the coastal road that ran through the East Neuk, a corner of Fife filled with working North Sea fishing villages. We rode slowly through Crail, Elie, Pittenweem, Anstruther and other hardscrabbly beautiful places where sea, salt, history and fishing are what life’s about.

But, because it was Sunday, we didn’t see any fishermen. Scotland shuts up tight on the Sabbath. The fishermen in Crail – and Elie, Pittenweem, Anstruther and towns all the way to Kirkcaldy – were at rest. The fishing boats were in and tied up tight, and there were plenty of available parking spots at the villages' compact stone harbors.

Monday through Friday, harbor parking is reserved for fishermen. They’re on the sea, working in the wet and wind to bring in the daily catch. And hoping they won't need life rings like the ones that hang at the harbors.


LoriHein.com

Peru: Celebrating the summer solstice

This year in New England, my corner of the world, winter yielded early to spring, which has unfolded fully into summer. The summer solstice heralds the season’s official calendrical arrival, but the days are already long, hot and bright. I wake early now to spears of gold light penetrating my slatted blinds and dawn bird song sifted and scattered by my window screen.

For ages, humans have waited, yearned, prayed for the sun’s seasonal return. They’ve made offerings and built temples to it, devised formulas and calendars foretelling its reappearance, and charted its apexes and nadirs in their skies. They’ve organized their lives, planted their crops and undertaken their voyages according to its place in their heavens.

Each year when summer spreads its rays of light and heat across my bit of Earth, I think of the great granite slab that rests atop Machu Picchu in Peru. Machu Picchu is a place of a lifetime, and every inch of it brings wonder. But the gray rock altar, hand-hewn centuries ago into strikingly powerful geometry, especially touched me. The mass sits on a cliff edge thousands of feet above the brown-green Urubamba River, and it seemed to me to be reaching, communicating beyond its stone roots into the sky and past the place where Earth’s air ends.

Indeed, the monolith’s ancient Inca carvers intended nothing less. The rounded stone spur that rises from the altar’s base is called the Hitching Post of the Sun, Intihuatana in Quechua. Here, Inca astronomers performed ceremonies to ensure the sun’s permanence. Through Intihuatana, they predicted with precision key dates, times of year and planting seasons. During solstices and equinoxes, Intihuatana’s edges align with significant geographic and geologic features in the surrounding mountain landscape, vivid proof of the Incas’ broad awareness of, reverence for and connection to the natural world they inhabited.

To celebrate June’s summer solstice, descendants of the Inca will celebrate Inti Raymi, the festival of the sun, and ancient places like Cusco and Machu Picchu will fill with natives and visitors gathered to thank the sun for continuing to shine.

Many will hike to and stand beside Intihuatana, "the place where the sun is tied," to contemplate the invisible tether that hitches a brilliant, distant life-giving orb to silent rock.

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The tragedy of Little Bighorn

This month marks the 130th anniversary of the Battle of Little Bighorn, when Indians won the day but sealed their fate. Little Bighorn National Monument is an eerie place, and unless you listen carefully to all the ghosts that haunt Last Stand Hill, it's too easy to hear only the white man's version of this bloody bit of American history.

I write about a visit to Little Bighorn in my book:


Big Horn County was brown, dry, rolling. The Crow Reservation sits on the prairie. At Crow Agency, the reservation’s main town, Indians gathered for a festival in a green park off the highway, teepees pitched in the park and pickups lining the perimeter.

When we got to Little Bighorn, I thought of the Crow just down the road, and how they might feel about this national monument. We bought food at the Kentucky Fried Chicken outside the entrance, and I wondered what the young Sioux behind the counter thought of the site that brought in tourists who bought mashed potatoes and popcorn chicken.

I’d seen Little Bighorn many years before from the air, on a flight to somewhere in California. I’d seen Custer’s whole hill, and could contemplate the approach, the ambush, the surprise and the death, from 25,000 feet. The sky had been cloudless, as if God had said, “Here, look down now. Look down on a place where men killed each other for reasons even I don’t understand.”

William Faulkner said, “The past is not dead…it is not even past.” Last Stand Hill marks the spots where Custer and some forty of the approximately two hundred and forty Seventh Cavalry soldiers who died on June 25, 1876 fell. Directly across from Last Stand Hill, on the other side of a narrow road, we watched men work, bare-chested in the blast furnace heat, on the Native American monument that will be connected to Last Stand Hill by a rift, a slit, a gash – a physical feature announcing that “a weeping wound or cut exists.”

On June 25, 1988, American Indians placed a plaque at the foot of the granite obelisk commemorating Custer and his cavalrymen. Now in the Visitor Center, the plaque holds these words by G. Magpie, Cheyenne: “In honor of our Indian Patriots who fought and defeated the U.S. Calvary (sic) In order to save our women and children from mass murder. In doing so, preserving our rights to our Homelands, Treaties, and Sovereignty.” At the base of the plaque were items left in tribute: coins, ribbons, flags, and notes saying, “Thank you for honoring the Sioux.”

Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho fought that day. After the battle, surviving Indians were rounded up and incarcerated, and some who had witnessed the Battle of Little Bighorn drew pictures of what they had seen. Called ledger drawings, they were drawn on the only paper available in military prison camp – ledger paper from the camp commissary. The Marquis and Colter ledger drawing collections hung on the back wall of a Visitor Center room with sweeping views of the battlefield and Last Stand Hill. I turned from the wall to the windows, from the windows back to the wall. Looking at the drawings, – some naïve, some masterfully rendered, all the product of eye, hand, soul and heart – I realized Last Stand was a double-entendre. Yes, it was certainly Custer’s, but I was looking at eyewitness accounts of a victory by the victors, who were then swept away to draw pictures on paper that white men used to take stock and make an accurate and precise accounting of things.


from Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America. To order your copy or download the e-book, click here. Your purchase will help me keep this blog ad-free. If you download the e-book ($8.95) and then find that you'd like a signed hard copy, I'm happy to offer a discount and pay the shipping. Send an e-mail with "Ribbons e-book" in the subject line and I'll shoot you the details.


LoriHein.com

Hong Kong: Walled in in Kam Tin

Hong Kong is one of the most exciting and visually stunning places on the planet. Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, where most visitors spend their time, are nonstop feasts that engage all the senses. A day trip to the less-traveled New Territories offers slices of relative calm and a break from the bright lights of the big city.

Mike and I rode the Kowloon metro north to the end of the line and hopped on a Kowloon Motor Bus headed for Yuen Long, a New Territories district. Our goal was Kam Tin. I’d read about a 500-year-old walled village, Kat Hing Wai, one of the village settlements, or wai, that dot Kam Tin town. We’d been riding Hong Kong’s hyperkinetic wave for days, and I needed a rest, a place where we could ratchet down the pace a few hundred notches. Where better than a remote Ming Dynasty walled village of a few hundred souls?

Bus 64K climbed up into breast-shaped mountains covered in forest and wooded parks. We hopped off the bus before Kam Tin and made a short detour to Lok Ma Chau, a New Territories lookout point that crowns an area sprinkled here and there with rice paddies and duck farms. From the top of Lok Ma Chau, dubbed "Look Ma, China!" during Hong Kong’s run as a British colony, you gaze from Yuen Long district across the Shenzhen River to mainland China and the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, a massive, characterless city where platoons of cheap labor churn out mountains of cheap goods.

After we reached downtown Kam Tin, we walked 15 minutes down a dusty, straight street lined with low, flat-roofed brick houses. Laundry flapped in the blue air and just-made firecrackers dried atop neck-high bamboo racks that ran much of the length of the road.

We came to the walled village, which sat in a sea of weeds and scraggly trees, and tall grass grew in what was once the moat. We found the village’s only entrance and stepped into a tight, close world of brick walls and charcoal fires, narrow alleys and dark doorways, greasy windows and small shrines, smoking joss sticks and bicycles at rest. The place is a fascinating, claustrophobic labyrinth of tiny houses, some modern, some dating to the Ch’ing Dynasty.

The first settlement at Kat Hing Wai dates from the late 1400s, the Ch’ing-hua period of the Ming Dynasty. The 18-foot-high walls were added in the early Ch’ing (Qing) Dynasty to protect villagers, members of a family clan called Tang, from roving bands of thieves and pirates. The clan’s Hakka descendants live there today, and Hakka women in bright printed blouses, black slacks and flat shoes pose for pictures for a few yuan. I invested in some shots of Mike bookended by the gap-toothed grandmas in their black lampshade hats.

After an hour in the village’s walled confines, I needed air, and I needed out. When we stepped through the gate into the sun, a Hakka woman seated on a kitchen chair asked us for a small donation. We made a contribution to the preservation of this ancient place and made our way back past the racks of newly minted fireworks to Kam Tin’s bus stop.

Some two hours later Bus 64K deposited us into the bustle of Kowloon. Neon and traffic and skyscrapers and clogged sidewalks and vendors and hawkers and crammed apartment buildings and junks and harbor ferries and clouds of food smells and jars full of snakes sitting in apothecary windows and everybody moving, moving, moving. A wonderful, welcome frenzy.


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Rivals: Moscow and St. Petersburg

“So,” I said to Dana after we’d been in St. Petersburg for a full day, having traveled by train from Moscow where we’d spent half a week. “How do you like St. Petersburg?”

“I like the other one better."

I knew what she meant. I felt it, too. Moscow is raw, electric, kinetic. It pulses. St. Petersburg is soft, plush, elegant. It satisfies.

Our first evening in St. Petersburg, “Peter” for short, we ate at the Café Magrib on Nevsky Prospekt, Peter’s main boulevard and social and commercial heart. On our way out, we stopped to talk with the handsome young man working the coat room. Over our spaghetti dinner (the Magrib’s menu spanned the culinary spectrum from kebabs to pasta to sushi), Dana and I had had a fun conversation that began with her asking, “How come everyone in Russia is named Alexander?”. So, when the coat room clerk introduced himself as Alexander, Dana crumpled into a fit of laughter. Alexander (whom we later dubbed "Alexander the 13th or 64th or Whatever") furrowed his eyebrows at her while she devolved into a giggling heap. Not a great way to foster international entente.

Trying to salvage the situation, I asked Alexander about himself. He was a delightful, intelligent, articulate young person, a college student, and we ended up spending almost as much time talking with him as we'd spent eating our spaghetti. Alexander the 64th spoke impeccable colloquial English, which he started learning at an early age. Since the third grade, he’d been tutored by a Russian woman who’d spent years living in London and who’d returned to St. Petersburg to teach English. I asked him about his plans, about what he wanted to do when he got older, and he talked about literature, math and economics. He was interested in everything. Indeed, the varnished coat room counter in front of him was piled with books on a range of subjects. Most were open, so, between interruptions by coat room patrons, he'd been devouring them simultaneously.

He asked us about America, about life in American cities, about Boston, the nearest metropolis to our home, then about everyday life in our suburban neighborhood. Had we stayed longer, he probably would have coaxed me into describing the contents of our kitchen cabinets. He did ask about the cars in our garage and where they were made. "Germany?" he asked. He might as well have said, "Mercedes?" He thought we were rich because we traveled. "No, Japan. And Detroit."

He turned the conversation back to his motherland. “So," he asked, "how did you come to be in Russia?” Like other Russians we'd met, he seemed impressed and pleased that we’d come not on business or with an agenda, but just to see the country as tourists. Our currency rose enough to make up for the unexplained laughing fit.

“So, you have been to Moscow. And St. Petersburg. Which do you like better? Which is more beautiful?"

The cities have been rivals since Russia's creation, so this was a loaded question. Alexander leaned his head out of the coat room booth, rested his elbows on the polished wood counter, held his chin in his hands, and waited. In his question was my answer.

“St. Petersburg,” I said, “is more beautiful. But Moscow is bigger, more exciting. Both cities are wonderful, but in different ways.”

He liked that. "Yes. That is it." He discussed the merits of each and ended by attributing their respective characters and ambience to size: "They have ten millions of people. We have only three or four."

He leaned back, keeping his chin in his hands, and said, “Please. I hope you will come back to eat tomorrow. I hope I will see you tomorrow.” We had 12 meals in St. Petersburg, nearly half of them at the Magrib.

(photo: The Hermitage, St. Petersburg)

www.LoriHein.com

Shiprock from Route 666

Blogger's photo uploading capability has been restored, but rather than tempt fate (probably not a great idea on 6/6/06) and risk losing this morning's post (see below) by trying to edit this photo in, I give you Shiprock on its own. Tse Bit' A'i to the Navajo: Rock With Wings.

The end of the road for Route 666

It had been Route 666 -- the 6th offshoot of Route 66, the Mother Road -- since the 1920s. But when folks along its New Mexico stretch complained to governor Bill Richardson that they were getting tired of devil jokes and beastly wisecracks and stolen street signs, Richardson and transportation officials in Colorado, Utah and Arizona, which had their own segments of the route, had it renumbered. In May 2003 it became US 491.

When the kids and I drove it in on our post-9/11 American journey, it was still Route 666, the Trail of the Ancients:


We’d entered the Navajo Nation. A sign on the Navajo Missions Communication Center asked people to "Pray For Rain." My fire danger radar had been up in earnest for nearly two hundred miles now, and I sensed things were about to heat up for real. I’d checked the maps for alternate routes, should fire close the roads I’d planned to take, the roads that lived within the lines of the Route Narrative. Parts of the Route Narrative might need to be rewritten. KDAG 96.9, "serving the whole Four Corners area," had thanked firefighters for saving homes and urged them to "stay sane and brave." Not a good sign. Out of the frying pan.

Bloomfield and Farmington oozed into each other, like the natural gas industry that holds them together and keeps them alive. With little else around to please the tourist, Bloomfield’s Dairy Queen, which we would have jumped at anyway, looked like traveler’s heaven behind the heat waves that danced on the blacktop. The vanilla soft-serves made our hours of desert driving feel like a race run once the medal’s around your neck. We got larges this time, and Adam lucked out because Dana couldn’t finish hers.

Shiprock was the reason we were here in this burning hot Bloomfield-Farmington sprawl. My brother-in-law, Jim, once hiked near Shiprock, a dramatic monolith that rises nearly eight thousand feet and dominates the Navajo Nation visually and spiritually. He spoke of its monumental profile, its remoteness, its deep meaning. I value Jim’s opinion on any subject and put Shiprock on my list of things to see if I ever had the chance.

As we drove through the Navajo Nation, we looked on bright blue meat markets selling mutton and lamb to families eating outside on aluminum tables; satellite dishes painted with Indian motifs; a few mud hogans; stores selling two dollar a pack cigarettes; penned sheep; tightly-packed green and gold hay bricks sold from pickups for five dollars apiece; billboards urging teens to practice sexual abstinence; power lines; houses selling "Frye Bread, Sweet Corn, Roast Mutton." And always, there was Shiprock. To the Navajo, Tse Bit` A`i. Rock With Wings.

We drove out of Navajo land on Route 666, the Trail of the Ancients. The road was arrow-straight, and when the colossal monolith was no longer in front of or beside us, it sat in the rearview mirror and remained there, gradually filling less and less of it as we neared Colorado. Dana had been reading for a long time. She looked up and out the window. "Shiprock is still there," she said quietly. Like Acoma, a place that always was. A great ship of stone riding the earth, giving the people a link to the past, a grip on the present, and hope for the future.

(Blogger's photo functionality has been down for a few days. When it's fixed, I'll edit in the Shiprock photo I had planned for this post. )

excerpt from Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America, Lori Hein, 2004

LoriHein.com

Swimming in Wurzburg: The naked truth

We landed in Frankfurt, Germany and drove to the Dorint Hotel in Wurzburg, where I’d made reservations. This was an off-season trip, and I’d booked the Dorint because it had an indoor pool. For every hour of cold weather sightseeing they’d give us, we’d give the kids at least as many of swimming and lounging around. This strategy’s worked for us around the world.

We checked into the Dorint and made our way to the Schwimmbad. As we collected towels from the girl at the spa’s reception desk and snack bar, I peered through a window at the pool, a sumptuous haven with a waterfall and grotto-like area with fake caves and swirling water.

And, I saw a buck naked old man.

I turned to the kids and reminded them (they’d been seeing bare-breasted babes on Mediterranean beaches since they were toddlers) that people do things differently in Europe. "You might see a bare body or two in the pool," I warned.

Talk about your understatements.

It wasn’t until the kids and I had emerged from the locker room – there was only one, unisex – and had been splashing around for a few minutes that I realized we were the only people in the whole place with any clothes on. (Mike, who had a cold, wasn’t swimming. He laid claim to a lounge chair and went to sleep.)

I speak mediocre German and knew the "kleide" part of "Umkleide" on the sign above the locker room door meant "clothes." But what I thought was a dressing room was really an undressing room. We used the space to change into bathing suits. Everyone else used it to change into nothing. While we suited up, they disrobed.

Adam, Dana and I hopped into the pool, and the warm water and exercise began immediately coaxing the jet lag from our bodies. Our senses sharpened, and we took stock of the scene around us.

Butts, boobs and genitals greeted us from all directions – submarine, floating on the water’s surface, spread across chaises on the pool deck. Some bathers did the circuit, bursting out of the pool, then flapping around as they ambled from sauna to steam to tanning bed to Frischluft, literally "fresh air," a walled-in outdoor terrace (with paintings of palm trees) where people sat chatting in the 20-degree Fahrenheit great outdoors in their Geburtstag suits.

The kids and I caught the hang of this circuit of events and started to participate (cloaked as we were in our bathing suits, which felt like suits of armor but which, under no circumstances, were coming off). And that’s when we got into trouble.

Evidently, you ’re supposed to shower between each "event." The spa-parcours etiquette goes: pool-shower-sauna-shower-steam-shower-tan-shower-outdoors-shower-pool-shower... A man with a red-striped robe that he alternately put on and took off had deputized himself as the pool police and had been watching our every clothed move. He reported us to the dainty girl at the reception desk, and we were spoken to. We ceased and desisted from doing the circuit because all those mandatory showers, besides being wasteful, were way too much work.

So we swam some more, rinsed off in the shower, then went into the sauna. The Schwimmbad policeman was in there. He didn’t like us, we didn’t like him. As soon as we sat down, he left. Crucial informant work to do?

The pool girl tracked me down and told me there had been "complaints" that we hadn’t sat on towels while in the sauna. My jet-lagged brain called up the best German it could muster, and I shrieked the rough equivalent of "You ‘ve got to be kidding! We’re in this hot space with naked people who are exposing their privates to surfaces all over this spa. We’re wearing clothes, so the way I see it, we’re the hygenic ones, keeping our naughty bits to ourselves. We're hermetically sealed. Please tell the old guy with the red-striped robe that I paid a hundred bucks a room to be here and I’d appreciate his keeping his parts and his opinions to himself."

I was wired. Jet lag lets you speak in tongues.

The pool girl laughed. "Totally OK," she said. "Don’t worry about anything." I laughed back, told her we’d learned our lesson and that we’d perform better – albeit clothed – tomorrow.

When we were ready to leave, we woke Mike, dreaming deeply in his chaise. He’d missed all the drama. For well over an hour, he’d slept, surrounded by nude people whose personal parts sneaked and peeked from terrycloth robes or swung unabashedly through air and water. And through it all Mike had dozed, the most clothed person the Dorint pool had ever seen, his cold seeking cure behind long pants, a turtleneck shirt and a sweater.

But he was barefoot. "Where are your shoes?" I asked him. "Over there. Some guy in a red-striped robe told me to take them off."


www.LoriHein.com