Excerpt: The Distances

Seventeen

The nights grow cold but the days remain warm, reluctant as the last leaves in the turning trees to abandon summer.  Seasons are the land's way of travel.  Wandering moods of sunshine and overcast, restless breezes smelling of rain, storms that carry over the horizon leaves from another town, spiraling them in the piazzas.  
     One day it's snowing, the next it's warm enough to go shirtless in the yard.  The bouyant air colored with the odors of Fall, rich as compost, silvery as the steaming backs of livestock in their stalls, sweet as smoke from the burn piles curdling the sky.
Then a storm passes through and rinses everything cool again.  Golden poplars above the muddy fields, vivid grass along the roads.  Rosehip petals floating in a swollen ditch.  Under turning skies the land strides forward, impetuous, half naked or in a new gown, urging us to do the same, to move while there's still time, to travel, discard, color, abandon, to put one foot in front of the other before winter seizes the roads.


I follow the frozen edge of the field as far as it will go before crossing to the copse.  The chilly night has furred the trees white with tiny crystals on their branches.  I reach the trees and lean on one, my breath puffing the air.  The animals are fed, I've had my coffee, there's nothing to do for half an hour before Sarah and Greta are up.  I wait, watching as sunlight threads through the morning fog, draws it back, sparkles across the exposed countryside.  
The trees center me.  My hand on a trunk, I feel how they reach down into the earth and branch up into the present.  They offer a calm hub at the center of the spinning continent.  A perch from which to watch the cars riding small and quiet on the highway for Mestre or Trieste, the trains darting for Portoguaro, Milano, Paris, Berlin, beneath a sky lashed with jet exhaust.  Here I'm free of all that, the squandered kind of travel, the dismal commutes, the webworks of schedule and deadline, career and expectation.  Here I'm content, with the feeling of reading an old book, not needing to go or do anything else but turn these pages, study the leaf shapes, watch for migrating birds.  A romantic feeling that the past is still with us, held sturdily in the rings of trees that remember the open country, how it went on and on and will again.
I push through branches and wander into the copse.  There's one big tree, a linden, that I never forget.  At its base I peal back frozen leaves and dig down only a few inches before I knock the top of a metal box.  Brushing it clean, prying open the corroded hinges, I find everything is still inside.  Four thick stacks of lire wrapped tightly in plastic bags.  Bread bags from the Eighties, white crumbs in their folds.  I almost laugh to see them.  But I don't laugh.  I touch the brittle surface, needing only to know the money is there, waiting for when I'll need it most.  


The sun pitches light across the black rows of fields glinting with frost.  With that light I hurry back to the house.  In our room, I strip down and wash at the corner sink, scrubbing with a clothe under my arms, washing my neck and face.  Sarah moves around me to get to the toilet.  I didn't hear her come in last night.  She smells of wine and cigarette smoke from her shift waiting tables; she smells like someone else.
"What time is your appointment?" she asks.
"Ten.  But I'm meeting Jimmy first."
"Your ambassador."
"My consiglieri.  We're both ambassadors to you."  I pinch her: "So be on your best behavior."
I put on clean pants and a sport coat of Stefano's that comes short on my wrists, then go to the kitchen.  Clara is stirring polenta on the stove.  I take a pear from the basket, and remind her that I'm using the car.
"Buona fortuna," she says, accepting a kiss on her cheek.
When I return to our room, Greta is jumping on the bed.  Singing and bouncing, left unattended, she's kicked the pillows to the floor, one of them pressed dangerously close to the radiator valve.
"Where's mommy?"
She points to the door.
"Vieni," I lift her to my hip.  "C'e polenta for breakfast."
"Yummy, polenta!"
I leave her happy and hungry with Clara, then look for Sarah on my way to the car.  Coming around the house, I see her standing outside of Fabrizio's door.  A winter coat draped over her shoulders, she's explaining something to him as he blinks sleepily.  He reaches for the open coat, perhaps to kindly button it closed, perhaps to calm her expressive hand.  I can't be sure what I see from across the drive.  He leans toward her as she speaks, his lips nearly touch her ear.  Then nothing more.  They hold still as a deer that's heard a twig snap.
I open the car door, they look my way.  I watch for any over-correction, any sign.
"Good luck," Sarah calls in a high, encouraging voice.
"Non ti basta mai," shouts Fabrizio.


The old Peugeot wobbles past the last farmhouse and onto the banked highway for San Dona.  At an opening in traffic I punch it, the engine bogs, and cars back up behind me.  But after half a kilometer we're moving at pace, past a roadside cafe, a mall of various shops, a mercato biologico and a clothing store.  Mist rises off the fields, farmhouses gleam like seashells in the skimming light. His hand moves inside her coat, feels the curve of her hip beneath the satin nightgown.  Above hidden canals tendrils of fog spin upward in the sun.  Have I put her through so much?  Does she deserve this, or have I brought it on myself?  A feather of affection to balance the scales.
I crank up the heater and open the window to the chilly air.  The sky is a metallic blue, chipped by cirrus clouds to the north.  When the cold finally comes, like a pruning knife cutting away the faded colors of the country, we must be ready for it.  We must bundle tight to us what is most precious.  We must go into winter like stepping from a hot bath, with enough heat in our hearts that we crave the cold.  We must want our breath to catch in our chest.


In San Dona I find Jimmy at the Cafe d'Or, sitting alone with a newspaper and a cup of coffee in front of him.  He looks untroubled, freshly-shaved, cavalier.  I don't know if unusual his condition should worry or relieve me.  He snaps the newspaper against the table, beckons me to sit down.
"Have coffee," he says.  "There's time.”
"We should get going."
"They working you too hard at Casa Vignotto?  Don't worry, it'll go through."
I sit down.  The waitress brings me an espresso.  Jimmy slaps the rolled newspaper against his palm.  "Your boy Bush is fucking everything."
"Tell me about it."
"He's matta.  He's a philanderer."
"A philanderer?"
“Yes, a philanderer.  A man who ruins things for enjoyment.  Here, we separate god from pleasure.  We find they don' mix so well.  But in America, god ruins the fun for everybody."
He sips his coffee, pausing for my retort.  I check the time on his phone.
"What's wrong with you?"
"Nothing.  I'm just anxious to go."
"Then we go."
From the piazza we walk to Via Ferriera, where we come to the Affiliato di San Dona d' Piave, a minimalist building of white marble, a Fascist monument to speed and potency, though I doubt we'll get anything of the sort.  We take the stairs to the second level, go into a waiting room, and introduce ourselves to the official sitting behind glass.  He looks over my documentation.  He's a thin man with a mole on his cheek and a delicate severity to his movements.  He bends back the pages of my Italian passport, glances up at me.  After some consideration, he steps to a file cabinet and returns with a form which he slides under the glass arch.
"Fill it completely," he says.
We sit at one of the oak benches along the hall and do the paperwork.  A dozen other men, dark-skinned, north Africans, stand about or sit crouched over their cell phones.  A young pair chatter and chuckle in Swahili as though nobody else is around, their free, unabashed voices echoing through the stark hall, making light of a lightless vault.
When I return the finished forms to the receptionist, he tells me to sit down again.
"But we have an appointment at ten."
"Si."
"It's almost eleven."
"You must wait as everyone else."
I look back at the others, at Jimmy vigilant for any misstep.
"Why aren't they being seen?"
"Sit down."
"Why are we all waiting and not being seen?"
Jimmy hurries over.  He stoops and speaks through the perforated glass in a formal Italian I can’t possibly follow.  Finally the official raises his chin, nods ascension, and says nothing more.
"We go to lunch," Jimmy announces loudly.  “The kind official will hold our place.”
We walk back to the piazza.  The air is warm enough to take a table outside.  The waitress brings us Compari spritzes.  The piazza and its narrow side streets are busy with people hurrying home or into the cafes for lunch, cutting through the cool sunshine.  Men who had worn sweaters to work now drape them from their necks as capes.
"Two days ago it snowed, and now this."
"Yeah."
"Don't worry," says Jimmy.  "The bastard must squeeze the balls, to feel he is doing his job.  It's like opera.  If you don' cry a little, it was no good."
The waitress brings small dishes of antepasta.  We order another round of spritzes and a bottle of Barbera for the main course.
"Medicine for the balls," says Jimmy, lifting his sparkling drink.
"You know this guy Fabrizio, staying at Clara’s?"
"The architect?  What about him?"
"I think there's something between him and Sarah."
"It's not possible.  This is what's troubling you?  Fabri with the woman's lips?"
"He flirts with her.  I think they were about to kiss this morning."
"Think?"
"I'm not sure what I saw."
"And so what?"
"So what if he kissed my wife?”
"Surely he flirts with her.  He’s Italian, and she's a beautiful woman in Italia."
"I don't like it."
"At least you have a woman to be crazy about.  So it makes her happy to flirt, what the hell?  If she hides the flirting, then you can worry."
The waitress brings bowls of minestrone, then opens the Barbera.  She's tall and light-haired, attractive: as she corks the wine Jimmy watches her with the pleasure of anticipating something fine. Next she brings out plates of bisteka, thin cuts of beef browned in olive oil and rosemary.  We eat quietly.  Jimmy pours more wine and concentrates on his steak, turning each cut in the golden oil.
"We had bisteka that night, waiting for Claudio."
"Bisteka?"  Jimmy shakes his head.  "No.  It was pastasciuto.  I remember it getting cold in the bowl."
"I couldn't eat anything."
"You and Clara arrived late.  You should have been hungry," he smiles suggestively.  "But we were too worried to eat.  Then we fell asleep on the couch."
"Is that what you told the police?"
"It was true enough then, so it's true enough now."
I push up my lips dubiously.
"You prefer the rest of the story?  What does it matter now, Miki?  Or is there something else?"
"You know what I did."
"I know what you told Clara and me."
"I went back to the house.  My nonni were asleep.  I cleared out everything the police might look for."
"And brought it back to us."
"Right.  For us to divide up like thieves."
"We were protecting him."
"When we could've been looking for him."
"We did what he told us to do.  Though I have to say, it seemed a little small to me."
"It's what I found."
"Certo," he nods, not from conviction, but from a certain acceptance made long ago with himself. We've had nearly twenty years to make peace with any inconsistencies in our story.  Losing that peace wouldn't help anyone.
"Thanks to you," he taps his fork to his plate, "because of your bravery, there was nothing else to find."
"Bravery?"
"Imagine your poor nonni.  Losing Claudio, and then the fucking police turning the house upside down.  You did good, Miki, you saved them from even more pain.  You kept things simple.  You allowed them to believe their son wasn't so guilty after all.  And not-so-guilty, over time, becomes innocent in the heart of a parent."
"And in the heart of the not-so-guilty?"
"Simple helps him too."
"Simple as Claudio lying in a field for days."
"Miki, basta."
"We should've been looking for him."
"To find him shot three times?  We didn't even know where."
"We knew enough to look."
"We knew enough to keep our heads down, like he told us."
"I knew where they met."
"Come on, Miki."
"The same field every time.  Claudio figured it was good luck."
"He never told me where.  Why would he tell you?"
"He didn't.  But I knew.  Clara took me there once."
"Clara?  And how did she know?"
"It's where they went to . . . be alone.  The field north of the winemakers, where the old woman found his necklace."
"You still have it?"
"Yes."
He nods, considering the matter.
"And why did Clara take you there?  Also to be alone?"
"You want to keep things simple?"
He laughs, he puts down his fork and leans forward on the table.
"It is simple.  It's why the necklace came back to you.  What, you think I didn't know you were fucking Clara.  I could see.  It didn't bother me then, and it doesn't now.  We were all a bit guilty and a bit innocent, Miki.  He didn't treat her the best, let's say.  He didn't give her all she deserved.  And if Claudio were here now, I'm sure he'd be happy to know you loved each other."
"We didn't love each other."
"No?  Why not?  We were young, it was natural to be in love with everything.  Even the pretty girlfriend of your uncle, who you admired.  Even the fantasy of getting rich and moving to America.  Even of becoming a star like Marlin Brando in the movies.  That's the luxury of getting older, Miki.  You can forgive yourself the silly ideas of your youth."
"You wanted to be an actor?"
"Funny, no?  So instead I moved to Amsterdam to put on a show for tourists."
He shakes his head, then empties the wine bottle into our glasses.
"You're not laughing, Miki.  Our talk goes up, it's time to laugh, but then you go down again."
"Why did you come over to Clara's the other night?"
"What?  To say hello, of course."
"You cut out before saying hello."
"Che te ne frega, Miki?  I thought we were having a nice lunch."
His eyes close, smothering a spark of anger.  He isn't a violent man.  Cynical at worst, he inclines toward a humorous view of life.  Life that should give him no more trouble than it's given weight to his dreams.
"Certo," he grins.  "You're back and it's fresh for you.  But why dig this up, Miki?  We have our families now, our lives.  It's in the earth now.  And I think if you stay in Ceggia, it's better you leave it alone.  Drink more wine, make another bimba with your beautiful wife, enjoy the life.  Because if you stay like this, who will you hurt?  Your nonni?  Clara?  Yourself?"
"I won't hurt myself."
"No?  You're too strong for that?  Strong like your nonno?  Like Claudio?"  
He sips his wine.  Tired of our talk, he watches the piazza.  The streets have grown quiet, the stores have drawn down their metal grates.  Even the white paving stones look sleepy in the wintry sun.  A bell tower tolls two o'clock.
"We ate pastasciuto that night," he says.  "The best I ever made.  Then we waited together, and prayed for his return."


At the Affilitato everything went smoothly, nearly without a hitch.  We waited half an hour before a man in a navy blue suit lead us to his office, shook our hands and congratulated me on bringing my family back to Italia.  My mother was Italian and I was Italian and my daughter who carried the Vicenzo name was Italian and Italia would always welcome home her children.  As for my wife, there was another form required.  It would arrive in the mail and after obtaining a stamp of registration from our Commune we were to return it to the Affilitato in person, both to confirm our photographs in their file, and for the opportunity for him to meet my dear wife and daughter.  I was not to neglect this last directive.  He was proud of us, as if we were his own, and he apologized for the required verification of our marriage certificate, a mere formality, he was sure, as everything would certainly go through.

Dresden Art Story: G8 Studios

Usually the story goes the other way. Usually the artists move in at the start and are moved out at the end. Usually the artists do the scrubbing and weeding and revitalizing and repainting of a place, only to be shown the door to the next rough edge of town. So that's why this story is different.

I sit at a dinner party outside an old repair station for trains, the switch yard in view, listening to Paul Elsner tell me of his adventure saving this studio space from the city of Dresden. Overgrown tracks, languid sumacs and chestnuts against the dusky sky where the word MEGA glows in big red letters above a warehouse. Paul was walking through these yards on the northwest side of Dresden eleven years ago when he peeked into a broken window of the repair station to see a vision. Two stories of metal framed windows in sand-stucco walls, ancient grease smell in the air, elevated work platforms, spacious rooms that would be perfect for repurposing into studios for artists and architects.

"I thought, who owns this place? What can be done to bring it to life?" Paul takes a drink of his Meinz Pils, waves hello to a lanky man arriving by bicycle to the party, then continues with his story. "So I found the owners, Deutsche Bahn, the German railway . They said, 'Yes, you may rent it. Just we don't want to be responsible for anything. You do everything and take all the risk.' Then we signed a contract which gave us no protections except that they must tell us three months before eviction."

On that paper-thin agreement, they moved forward. Other artists joined Paul in cleaning, arranging, fixing and switching the repair station onto tracks of a new destiny. Stock rooms converted to studios; catwalks of dangling wire cleared of hazards; an open main floor where a bar was built and events are held with the roll-top doors raised to a view of the leafy rusty yard. Events like this dinner party to celebrate Paul's birthday on a late spring evening.

"We say artists are the thing that heats the water in coils and sends it out again: like a boiler. Artists are the boiler in a society. They reheat the cold water and make circulation."

"But boilers aren't removed in the end."

"No.  That is why I like this story," he smiles. "They wanted to move the boiler. It was a very difficult year. One day a man came looking around. What are you doing here? he asked, amazed at everything. I asked the same of him. He showed me his papers. I'm from the city, he said. And you should not be here."  

Paul stands to kiss goodbye a friend who's departing. The long table is cluttered with dishes and wine and beer bottles and tobacco pouches. The man who had arrived on bicycle begins grilling wursts over a portable grill. Others recline in humorous conversation, occasionally speaking English to accommodate their American guest. The friend walks off, becoming a shadow in the yard, and Paul sits down again. In the European manner, he's hosting his own birthday party as a gift to his friends. He's a focused, affable man, smartly dressed in sport coat and jeans, his black hair combed back, his blue eyes squinting thoughtfully. He was raised in East Germany, shepherded through the DDR schooling system to become an electrical engineer, before the Wall fell and he found architecture to be his truer calling. Architecture and art inspired by ideas of language, such as Marshall Mcluhan's concept that modes of communication inform our societal norms. Presently he has a light installation on the roof of Kraftwerk-Mitte, a former power station in Dresden. It's a large LED display that, as Paul explained earlier, "deals with what it means to convert the alphabet into the binary code, and vice versa."

Paul refills our glasses and resumes his story. The man snooping about the station was an official from the Planning Department. The city of Dresden had just purchased the rail yard and repair station, and the official, coming to examine the property, had no idea anyone was inhabiting the place. Both men were vexed at each other's presence.

"It's a little strange they didn't know we are here," says Paul. "Or they knew, but they acted not to know. They were ready to send us away. But, but, I had this contract they couldn't ignore. And we showed them news stories of our events and shows, so they saw we had a history of being responsible for the place. Still, Planning wanted us out. They wanted their big design to rebuild this area with two schools. But in the Cultural Department we had some friends. So we dug in and worked with them. And always I had this contract with me as the principal leaseholder, something they couldn't ignore.

"But they gave us a challenge. They made a list of improvements we had to make, expensive ones. I thought, how can we pay for this? We had a newsletter with circulation of over six hundred. I came up with this number: 600 times ten. If everyone gave ten euro we would have six thousand for the improvements. And everyone came through, supporting us. We put the necessary electric brake on the roll door (which it never had for decades and all was fine.) We made some further electrical improvements, we did all that was wanted. And they accept us now into their plan. They will build two schools, a primary and a high school on the yards. But they will leave this green area open and our studio space to us.

"And we are changing the relationship so we have an association, and perhaps a non-profit to run the events and make a permanent bar here. For me, I must change a little too. I can't be the main person anymore. It's a bit too much. In German we say you are a dancer with your legs spread out, so you can't move one way or another. I made this place for my art, but it's become a job that keeps me from my art. So we change it for the better, I think. And the important thing is: we're still here."

Paul sits back and savors the evening, the table surrounded by friends and artists, the orange sky behind ragged sumacs at the back of the yard, the soft air clinking with the sounds of raised glasses and conversation where once trains were brought to be renewed. And where, the tracks switched by a degree, trains of a different kind are still brought today.

Road Sign in the Cascades

Hair
Nails
Tanning
Hay for sale

Heat Remedy #2

Contemplate the weather. Drift with the season.

We've had two summers in one. At the start of June the cool temperatures and afternoon storms swooping down over the Northwest reminded me of summers in Germany: fragrant, rain-freshened, leafy and inspiring you to jaunt into the hills or follow the parks along the river.

Then with the force of a sledgehammer striking an anvil, one-hundred degree heat bludgeoned the valley and every urge was a desert instinct to hunker in the shaded hammock and watch the foothills flare in the sun. Read some Pavese, or Doerr's Four Seasons in Rome, or Calvin and Hobbes when Ada comes trotting up the hill and dives in beside me carrying her favorite book. Books, iced drinks, stories of past summers wading into the river as a boy to catch snakes and crawdads or a bucking ride on a plywood river board tethered to a tree trunk. And naps, of course. Anything to compliment our oasis of piled shadows under the lilac and maple, our languid fantasy that the hammock is a boat adrift on thin clouds in a weltering sky. Eleven consecutive days of one-hundred-plus highs (one day reached 110) matched the record set in the early 2000's.

Then the surprise of a couple more weeks of pleasant eighties and afternoon clouds bulking the stratosphere and evenings tussled with rain or wind storms. The dewey grassy smell of early mornings just before the sun ignites the treetops. The reward of a bicycle ride through slatted shadows of the neighborhood, or an evening walk up Hull's Gulch among the sage and bitter brush, the kestlings roving above the locust groves.

But now a heat wave has hunkered in again, with the real start of fire season. The sweet smoke of grass fires in the Owyhees curdles the air and ruddies the sunsets. We have no choice but to float the Boise River. We join our friends Nick and Hollis and their two young girls in renting a raft and riding the high water under leafy willows, charging the ferocious class one rapids with the girls shouting "full speed ahead!"  We take out at eddies, picnic under the cottonwoods, watch rainbow trout nick the surface as they snatch insects in the evening light. The water is bracing cold but the girls count up their courage and hold their noses before jumping in to their necks.

We, all of us, count up our courage.  Monday will come with its work and trudging and cursing in the heat and smoke, but we savor our Sunday believing that the more we enjoy the pleasantries of life, the less its hardships have hold of us.  Like dipping your head in water before crossing a sunbaked field, we soak in these river days for sustenance.

Heat Remedy # 1

Come home from futbol pasted in salt from running two hours under a scalding sun, and without showering or anything foolish like that, belly-flop right down into the kiddy pool, shins creasing the sides, water sloshing everywhere, your back taco-ed and your hips hard to the plastic floor.  Then pull your laughing disbelieving girl-child in with you, just to show her how medicinal it is.  Then have her go inside and bring the radio out, then return for a cold one from the fridge because she forgot that part.  

Then tune in some cumbia on one of the Latin stations out of Caldwell or some dub and dancehall on Radio Boise and start up a game of Wiffle Ball with the girlchild standing to bat in the kiddie pool while you pitch from the shady spot under the patio umbrella where the table serves to both hoist your beer and deflect views of your near-naked self from the neighbor woman next door who couldn't care less anyhow but you're trying to be somewhat discreet because your shorts are white and wet yet you can't go inside to change because that'd alert the wifey to all the fun you're having making a soggy delirious mess of the yard and your Sunday afternoon as the girlchild belts one whistling past your ear and your slipping lunge and she's rounding second, dauntless and scampering to third, then incredibly, ill-advisedly heading for home, daring you to throw it which you do, with real zing because the little tart has upped the ante, her long legs flowing and her laugh tripping you up as the white ball kisses the air next to her shoulder and she jumps with both feet into the home-base pool shouting safe! safe! safe! -- an inside the park home run,  an inside the heart home run, the crowd going wild as you mob her at the plate with kisses.

Notes from Deutchland

The Poulets, Anna's family on her mother's side, have been wonderful. Like good Germans they've organized every hour of our days here, making certain that we maximize our enjoyment of the place and our time together. Uncle Stefan and Aunt Jutta have planned a tour of the Rhinegau and a visit to the menagerie; cousin Anja and her husband Ali have arranged a visit to Hessen Park and a dinner at her house in the country; Uncle Gogo and Aunt Anne have reserved a room for us in the Bear Hotel in Wiesbadden and made plans for a lunch and dinner at their home in the hills overlooking town; Cousin Tina will drive from Bavaria to visit us for a day wandering Neroberg Park; Cousins Christina and Dietlef are planning a dinner out on the town and a Sunday brunch for the entire family at their home in Budenheim.

The arrangements go on and on. We feel well-cared for, pampered even, like honored guests from a distant land. Indeed, I do feel honored to be kin to the Poulets. They're a sweet and kind family, and of course everyone dotes on Ada, forgives her tired moments, insists she needs only another slice of kuchen to improve her spirits.

Our first afternoon, dreamy from jet lag, we took a walk with Uncle Stefan through the woods along his property. Stefan is a trim, intelligent, assiduous man who, having retired from his position as a judge, has turned his robust energies to managing his property, hunting boar, and splitting firewood which he sells to his neighbors.

Stefan lead the way, eager to show us about, down through apple and plum trees heavy with fruit to the narrow switch-back road leading to the meadow below. We passed his hochsitz, his "high-seat", the tiny hunting shed on stilts from which he watches and shoots wildschweine; his work shed smelling of oiled tools and greased machinery; and finally the neatly stacked rows of oak and elm wedges that amounted to a steady summer's work.

The sky brooded with low clouds over trees still green and heavy from the evening rain. We followed the sandy road, amazed at the lush serenity. A dozen goats were grazing above the meadow, their bells tonking softly from the hillside. Ada wanted to pet them, of course, but we kept her to the leaves and muddy banks of the road. The sun broke through and everything glimmered surreally.

"I love Germany," sighed Ada.

Weakened by travel, by all our scheming and worries and packing and pre-bill-paying to make this trip materialize, by months of working fifty-hour weeks in California away from Ada and Anna so that we could save for this otherwise hare-brained fantasy of a tour to see our families in Europe, by years of dreaming almost desperately for this trip to the Old World, weakened and tired but suddenly filled by the realization that we were here, in the cozy nest of Germany surrounded by caring family and the beauty of the countryside, the shimmering trees, I swept Ada off her feet and squeezed her with everything I had.


Biergartens beside the playgrounds: This might be my favorite example of how Germany does things right. There, somewhere between the timbered playsets and the cafe tables, lies the summation of civilization.

The kinder go a romping over the fort-like swings and slides while their parents, just a stone's throw away, enjoy some adult time over crisp Pilsners and appetizers. The kinder get some creative and adventurous exercise, sluicing water into troughs from iron pumps, scaling climbing walls, while the parents relax in the sun and recover their ability to hold adult conversation. The kinder get to be kinder and the parents, for a spell at the big wooden tables, get a recharging dose of spirits and sophistication.


Germans are civilized without being prissy. Their civility isn't snobbish or effete, but smart, practical, and always hearty. They're like the country boy who's read all the books in his uncle's library: Goethe, Mann, Steinbeck, Pound. He can quote Proust while turning a spit over a fire that's slow-roasting the wildschweine he shot before dawn. His little rustic haus is in tidy shape. The thick doors seal tightly against the cold, the slate-tiled roof hasn't leaked since his great grandfather built it before the Great War. The table is set with smooth wood-handled silverware, fresh bottles of Pilsner, and the porcelain plates his mother bought in Mainz one fine day on holiday. He opens the door for air. Standing in his underwear he looks out at the blue morning. It's autumn, cold and crisp, the trees smokey with color against the sky.

The boar will take awhile longer. He pops the cap off one of the beers, pours a glass for his guest and himself. "Man's duties increase with his knowledge," he repeats, and winks before taking a long drink.


Hessen Park. If there's a specific name for this type of park, my cousin-in-law Anja didn't know it, nor did her husband Ali.

"It's just Hessen Park," he said, lifting and dropping his arms contently.

How about Nature-Kulture-Heartiness-Training Park?

I think that would about some it up.

Ah, Hessen Park. Where historic houses and buildings from the region, dating to the 17th century, have been brought together and restored into a rambling countryside village set among apple orchards and newly-cut wheat fields, bordered by oak and elm forests, and the cozy heritage of a German past.

Hessen Park, slender two- and three-story houses built of stout timber post and beam, with mud-straw infill. (Fachwerk: post and beam construction that can be quite ornate in its moulding, scrollwork and inscriptions. Fachwerk: as in, Fuck, this is a lot of work!) The houses are slender structures of stacked, well-lit, intimate rooms, the kitchens set on the ground floor so the oven fire heats the house. Simple, tiny living indoors; crafty, earthy living outdoors. The original micro-houses.

Joining the meandering crowd, we follow a dirt road through the village, past the coopers shop, a bakery, the rope-maker's shed where children are learning to twist jute into rope, the weaver's house with its mesmerizing looms, the blacksmith's shop with its sooty mechanical lung of a bellows, and a towering windmill full of massive wooden cogs and immense grinding stones. Children are running about, or sweetly concentrating in the craft courses, making little rafts from willow branches, pumping the levers of the looms, connecting themselves to the past all around them.

Hessen Park. It's all a very cheerful, rustic, playful, thoughtful history lesson for kinder and adults alike. And of course, there's a biergarten, right beside the playground. We set Ada loose among the carousing kinder and sit down at a picnic table to order riesling and potato soup, beer and bratwurst for lunch.

When the food arrives I go for Ada. I had taught her to ask "Sprecken Sie englisch?" when spoken to, and here she was at the swing with three older girls, asking just that.

"I don't have any friends here," she added rather pathetically. The bigger of the three blinks at Ada through round spectacles, saying nothing. She blinks and blinks and I worry some older girl nastiness might lash out from her. But she turns to her friends, says something in German, and the three of them set to putting Ada in the big basket and climbing in with her. All four of them in the basket together, cute as kittens. The older girls, standing, begin to rock and soon they're swinging high and laughing. I leave them to play. Ada's lunch can wait. Our table is a few strides away and like a good German I must be practical and not let my soup go cold or my beer go warm.


Riding the train from Frankfurt to Berlin: rolling green countryside, cows grazing on the hills, orderly forests of elm and oak opening to ruddy wheat and corn fields, compact villages of white stucco houses topped with red porcelain tile roofs and gleaming solar panels, a church steeple, a narrow road leaving town for a sky of swollen white clouds.

You would never guess, having an hour ago been deep in the industrial innards of Frankfurt, knowing Berlin and the big coastal cities to the north, that these verdant expanses exist. There is almost no sprawl here in Germany. You leave a city, you leave a town, and beyond a stone wall the country begins, thrilling you to wander.


Berlin. Prinzen Garden! In the Kreuzberg district there's a public vegetable garden and cafe installed on a block beside Moritz Pl. Station. Super cool, a rustic creative agricultural venture of personal and shared garden plots, interspersed with birch trees and garden sheds and big bins of compost, a bicycle workshop, (clean) restrooms housed in a shipping container. The scene partly anarchic, very hip (Zeph girls in high-waisted  jeans, hair in top-knots, reading under the trees), well-organized and obviously well-loved by the participants. We shared a bowl of delicious creamy vegetable soup from the cafe, made from vegetables grown in the garden.


Berlin. Mitte: galleries, cafes, boutiques, leafy playgrounds among the intimate streets of Auguststrasse and Linenstrasse. Ada has come to anticipate a playground every few blocks in this city, and so we use those ingenious slots in the apartment rows -- park spaces where a building was bombed or destroyed in the war -- as rewards and encouragement for her when she tires of yet another slog before white walls. In the cafes she gets more hot chocolate than she's had in her entire life.

Travel is a condensed version of life. Each day a new season, every hour a new day, dramatized by blood-sugar highs and lows as meals are missed or supplemented by chocolate and beer. One moment Ada is singing in love with Germany, telling children she's just met in the park that she wants to move here. The next she's frustrated by another gallery, pining for her friends, slumped in my arms, depressed as Sartre, unable to lift her feet over the cobbled streets.

On our lakes tour outside of Berlin, sitting in the prow of the ferry, Ada exclaimed, "It's so beautiful it makes me cry." Then she thought it funny to feign crying over the mansions and estates set along the lush banks of the river. She hammed it up: so much beauty, so many tears.

But then, her emotions jump-started, she was actually crying. She became so overwrought with sorrow that she began to bawl. We couldn't calm her. Like a good drunk, she grew spiteful: "I hate boats. Why did you bring me here? I never want to ride a boat again in all my life!"

All of this in a period -- or should I say an odyssey -- of three minutes.


Common sense and cordiality. What I love about traveling in Italy is the feeling I've gone into the past. But then I visit Germany and it feels I've shot into the future, a nearly utopian future. The cities well-planned with parks and solid infrastructure. The streets clean, the trams and trains running efficiently and dependably. The homes solidly built, topped with porcelain tile roofs and solar panels, the windows and doors sealing tightly. The people, if sometimes a little cool blooded, always polite and helpful.

Germans are often accused of being rule-bound, which may be true when it comes to matters of safety and civic function. But the rules of propriety are regularly bent, just a little, towards practicality and common-sense. Want to drink a beer on the street? You're a grown adult, have a beer. Don't go smashing bottles and we'll all be just fine. A mother needs to breast feed her baby on the train?  A kid, or an old geezer, needs to piss discreetly behind the trees in the Cool Park? We're all human here, and we're all human together. Common sense seems to be the over-riding ethos of the land, perhaps because most everybody has a good deal of it.

A common sense that the system is working, that it's been thought through, that society tacks toward the good -- and government strives toward that common good -- when the playgrounds are clean, the bridges stout, the schools well-funded, the health care universal, the food system safe, and a day's work begets a respectable day's pay.

Common sense and cordiality. Even in Germany's biggest city, Berliners are generally polite. Turkish and East German families, artists and professionals, expats from all over, everybody gets well-enough along because again, the rules can be trusted. The game isn't rigged for those on top. And for that, people act, not as though in competition with each other, but with decency.

We were passing through a gritty neighborhood on a Saturday afternoon. Men were drinking and playing cards outside of the bars and doner restaurants before the metro station. The only person I saw passed out in all of Berlin was slumped against a wall. A broken beer bottle had been swept into a corner. So here was where Germany fell apart. Here was her underbelly, a poor neighborhood on the industrial outskirts of the city, where her dark side showed through. A gang of workers, wobbling with drink, were standing before our turn into the metro. I grabbed Ada's hand and felt my senses go on alert. One or two of the men saw us coming. They stepped back, and as they did, reached to pull their drunk comrades aside so that we could pass through. I nodded appreciatively at one and he nodded back. Even in the roughest of neighborhoods, a family was to be respected.


Pickup Fussball in Kreuzburg Park. Organized by the Heine Hotspurs, a crew of sporting artists, English teachers, musicians, Frenchies, Irish, and some Germans too, the games were 7 minute battles of six versus six, three teams rotating, played by on a fenced rubber court beneath leafy plane and chestnut trees downwind of the camel yard. A skilled, intense, clean game, the winning team staying on until their third straight. The waiting team keeps time, stretches, rolls a spliff of "park weed", talks about the spreading legalization of marijuana throughout Europe and the U.S.
Finally the game comes to a hollering halt when two blokes, both English, clash heads going for a high ball. Bloody crescents in temple and brow have us all caring for the unfortunates with water and handkerchiefs. The Irishman, who seems to be the head of the Hotspurs, says to me apologetically: "Wow, this has never happened before. I swear."


A Lovely Sunday in Berlin. Our last day in Germany, spent with friends Till and Mori and their two energetic young boys (who gave Ada a lessen, despite being a year or two younger than her, in being resilient and capable of self-defense!)

Strolling about Auguststrasse, we revisited the art show in KW, then brunched on the walk outside a cute restaurant beside the fussbal pitch. Afterwards we walked along the river Spree to the restored museums. (The architect who did the renovation famously kept many elements from the past: shrapnel divots from WWII, blocks left unstuccoed.)

On a dance floor set on the river bank people were dancing tango as couples and families ambled by under the still-green trees enjoying the warm September afternoon. We found a bench and rested and watched the clouds. The kinder tossed pebbles at the water. A tour boat chugged past, stout tourists sitting docily and lifting bottles of beer to their mouths. We watched the city scroll by like a little cloud in the sky, changing subtly in the blue.

A Wayward Winter's Eve

This always happens to me: the first days apart from Anna and Ada I drift about in purposelessness. It's embarrassing to admit, but when I'm finally left to myself, loosed from the mooring of daily family life, it's as if gravity and discipline has been lifted away and I can't put one foot in front of the other. For a spell I become languid, indulgent, wistful in a vacuum of solitude, books, beer, and of course some English Premier League on the old telly.

After seeing the girls off at the airport I sat in the car outside the Coop, unable to go in, reclined in melancholy as I watched pigeons whirl about the steeple of Saint Johns Cathedral in the metallic light. Finally inside the store, I struggled to buy a few desultory items: two Fuji apples, a gallon of milk, a six pack of beer, a head of broccoli, a half pound of chuck. The poor things looked woeful riding the conveyer into the checker's hands. I had plucked them out of their gleaming bins to orphan them in my wayward house.

At home things hardly got better. Ignoring the many chores and renovations needing to be done, I sat on the couch and read Sartre. The weight of responsibility loomed overhead like a Hokusai wave clenched before the moment of explosion. To relieve the pressure I opened a bottle of beer, watched out the windows at bright leaden clouds above the black trees and thought of the skies of France, Italy, Berlin. Italy's dreamy, humid, water-color skies above distant poplar trees. Berlin's monumental skies of towering cumulous, humming with the weight of history, the stormy moods of the North Sea.

Thinking of Europe, then of good urban design, I popped another beer and wrote an email to the Ada County Highway Department deploring the crap design of a certain 'boulevard' in town: a bike-lane-less thoroughfare of parking lots and business malls that was once pretty countryside along the Boise River. A livable city, when moving traffic to outlying neighborhoods, must not do so at the expense of existing neighborhoods. We all know that; all of us but the traffic engineers who seek volume over quality.

Now my blood was up. So there: I'd done something. The boulder was moved a hair. Just enough to break my inertia. Next I put on Radio Boise, got moving to the music, Youth Lagoon, Mason Jennings, and disconnected the gas logs and piping from the fireplace. Why pay for gas when I've got all the lumber I can collect from the job site? Why heat the house at all when it's only me here, me and Ada's little red soccer ball sagging on the hardwood? Me and my big ideas, the glinting sky, another beer and all the time in the world to do nothing with the life in front of me.

I paced the house, I tidied up the slovenly leftover things that I'd never have let gather had Anna been here. Coffee grounds and newspaper sheaves on the counter. As dusk settled my energy mounted: a whirling, unfocused energy, like a squall that pings your face with dust and ice. I put on coat, scarf and gloves, and bicycled downtown to Boise Bicycle Project. It was their annual members' meeting. Lots of good people, hip younguns, cute old folks, people of benevolence and beards, tight jeans and idealism. A keg of Ranger IPA in the workshop; pizza from Pie Hole. Everyone brought together by love of community and bicycling. Jimmy and Nate gave inspiring, quirky presentations of the organization's achievements in 2013 and goals for 2014. BBP has launched a project with Mayor Dave Bieter called Ride On Boise, which will include a citizens' advisory committee and advancements of all kinds.  (I don't recall the details due to the beery atmosphere, but they can be found at the BBP website.)

Afterwards everyone hung out, made certain the keg didn't feel neglected. Inspired, I couldn't go home. Or was I fearing the vacant house? I rode over to The Modern, had a whiskey at the bar, then felt restless to move again. Outside, it had begun to snow.  Light, icy flakes twisting out of the blackness, refreshing my spirit as I rode over to Penguille's for a night cap. A country-western band was playing on the little minstrel stage. The place was pleasantly crowded, the tiny wooden stalls full of revelers. The barkeep poured me a Bushmills and I walked about taking in the collection of Western Americana art on the walls: naive heroic oil landscapes of alpine lakes and poised bucks; freemason banners full of classical oddity. Calmed, centered by history and place, the avuncular old timey atmosphere of this outpost in the modern world, I sat at the bar and took in the band.

Stand up base, steel electric, drum set, slide guitar. They played the Bob Wills classic Rolly Polly, about the hungry growing boy who "eats everything from soup to hay . . . as long as he can chew it, it's okay." The song made me think of Ada and Anna, of our family life far away from this wagon ride through the snowy night. I had forgotten how homey a bar could feel, how important such places are to those who can't or won't go home.

Somebody brushed my shoulder: it was the singer in the band. They were making their way to the bar on their break.
You're good, I said to him.
Thanks, he said.
You play here much?
Now and then.  We play again next week.  You should come.
I will, I said, being polite, knowing that by then I wouldn't need to.