Chapatis and Change

by Sean Talbot

The traveler sees what he sees; the tourist sees what he came to see.

—G.K. Chesterton

Days float through Udaipur, Rajasthan, like beggars indifferent to distinction. The warm January sun shimmers on Lake Pichola, reflects the region's august history in its murky water. There are three clouds in the sky, more than in the week since I arrived.

Across the street from Café Edelweiss, where I am eating dessert before breakfast, a blind local man stands on a speed bump, white cane in hand. Dark skin and cataracts, thick mustache, carefully combed hair. A rusty sign hangs from his neck. A message in Hindi is painted in beautiful script. What I presume to be the same message in English is written in a sloppy hand, blue text on white:

My Eyes Opration.

Please Help Me.

He holds a receipt book in his left hand, a written record of those who have not ignored him. It is open to the first page. He wears a five o' clock shadow, and leather cross-trainers, dirt-ridden and worn like the oily hands of the motorcycle mechanic who works in the open air nearby.

Does the blind man know that the gold chain fitted to his neck shimmers in the sunlight? Can he hear my steady eyes upon his, or sense the traces of my guilt for staring into a face of India which cannot, for once, stare back?

In my ears, these are raucous, electric thoughts; my heart beats amplified in my ears like the temple bells ringing in a nearby alley.

We both turn our heads toward the clangor.

A group of boys line up outside the cafe, on the street side of a chainlink boundary; one, then three, then seven of them, holding hammered iron bowls, like lidless kettles. Inside them, small, sculpted men sit upon beasts soaked in black oil, covered in marigold petals.

For weeks, I’ve wondered what gulf exists that would keep the "open-hearted" traveler in me from connecting with, or relating to, the locals, a land that defies and contradicts every adjective I've used in attempt to capture it.

“Kana,” a boy says, over and over again. "Pani."

He can't yet be nine years old. He looks me hard in the eye, points to his mouth, then to my plate, and back to his chapped lips.

Food, water.

Every guidebook, hotelier, rickshaw driver, and doctor I’ve met since arriving in India has given me the same advice: do not give to the beggars; they come into the cities because there’s more money in tourists than in farming. Giving does them no good.

"Chapatis, sir, chapatis," says a barefoot boy wearing soot-covered clothes. The boys stand one meter away from my table, behind a chain hung like a velvet rope in a cinema queue line. There are no chapatis on the silver screen of Café Edelweiss; only white people and pastries and dark chocolate. My table is on the front lines: fellow tourists talk and eat behind me, seated strategically deep in the cavernous, piss-yellow dining room.

I want to show my compassion. I want to let the boys know that I see and hear them, that change is possible. But that’s just what they’re looking for, my doctor friend had said.

The boy adorns puppy eyes and whimpers. I want him to leave. I cannot even use the Hindi phrase I learned in Varanasi for banishing touts—nahi chaiye, I do not want. These children offer me nothing, want only my food.

"Hello, sir, chapatis." A hoarse, intimate whisper from the old beggar this barefoot pre-teen will someday become: "Please."

Two nights ago, I saw him squatting in the street, near a fire of burning garbage. His companions were huddled in tight circles: understanding, community, friendship. Things I cannot—do not—offer him.

Instead, I ignore him, all of them, and their pleas for kana; hello, please, sir, chapatis.

Sir, please. Hello?

I cannot—will not—eat in front of them, nor can justify teasing them with the two sandwiches on my table, both heaping with eggs and bacon. I pretend the sandwiches are not there. I write instead, holding my tears back because maybe they'll think I'll break, and then they'll have full stomachs for the day, and return tomorrow, psychologically and digestively reinforced, expectant.

My downward glare renders me into another deaf tourist. The tourists at the tables behind me talk louder as the boys hold up the bowls and ask, in the same melancholic whine, kana, pani, please sir, ma’am, chapati.

Silence from the nosebleeds. The boys leave.

I am an awful, selfish voyeur. Another white invader whose economic contributions profit hotels that shun locals as a cultural norm. A Bikaner hotelier said to me, any unmarried Indian couple cannot, by Indian law, stay in a tourist hotel.

If, by chance, a foreigner befriends a local, the latter is typically not allowed in the foreigner's hotel. In the case of my friend Rita, a British woman who invited an Indian restauranteur to dinner at our hotel, the owners enthusiastically said the local, who worked at the hotel across the bridge, was "a good Indian man, and is welcome here!"

For most of us tourists, however, they fear rape, or robbery, or some other sin for which we do not have a word.

After twenty eternal minutes, the rest of the boy beggars move on, unfazed by rejection, determined as when they arrived. Will the customers at the next café feed them, or the one after that?

There are programs to help the poor, the guidebooks say. If you want to help them, donate to the following causes.

The guidebooks say nothing, however, of the heartache in seeing a man, like the one sitting under a tree in Pokhara, Nepal lifting his amputated, gangrene femur in the air with one hand, and a rusty tin can in the other, marked simply, $.

That gulf between us seems wider than the Pacific Ocean. Airplanes and cargo ships could not bring me closer to the little boy standing three feet away, who has returned to the cafe’s chain barrier. Perhaps he saw something in me and came back to retrieve it.

Who am I, exactly, that I would refuse a child food at the word of a rich doctor or a guidebook written by a western author, which both say it would do the child ‘no good’? How can one who has not known true hunger say such a thing? If my friend Kokayi, an American activist whose mission is to end child hunger in the United States, saw me now, he would dash our friendship to the dogs.

Who am I to deny a request for a photo, as I have, from an Indian family on holiday, or a few rupees to a local woman in the park? Is it because I wish for a connection based less on transactional experience, or that I would prefer the barter economy of buskers or street artists, a few rupees for a song? What if these children have not had the opportunity to learn an instrument, or how to use their voice, but to beg to survive the day, or a mother's callused hand?

What inalienable right have I, a fellow human, to project expectation or desire upon a culture that asks so little of me? To think: I want an experience to have a particular impact on me; I need to see this or that, or need to feel as if my experience is somehow authentic. I loathe the roles this little boy and I have been born into, pointlessly, for we are equally bound to our respective ranks in the caste system.

In many parts of India, tourists and travelers alike—particularly Westerners—are automatically inserted into a predetermined slot of economic import. We are ushered to the front of lines at train stations, hospitals, treated kindly by hoteliers who routinely hit dog- and boy-beggars with sticks.

Oh, that I could offer them anything!

Already I deny the boys something so easily given. I could buy each one of them a sandwich, filled with protein and served on fresh-baked bread. I could pay out-of-pocket for the eye opration for the blind man.

So why don’t I?

Because I’ve been conditioned to think that it wouldn’t change anything. Lonely Planet and Slumdog Millionaire declare that compassion and guilt are juicy prey for the Begging Industry; that, regardless of my intention, the money would certainly end up in the hands of kidnappers, rapists, and sleazy businessmen, and that no amount of change would keep these boys from returning to Café Edelweiss tomorrow.

The impossible gulf between local and foreigner widens. If it is not, as they say, what happens to us that matters, but how we react to it that hones our character, I wonder if compassion, in this case, isn't quite enough.

Sean Talbot is a writing coach and Alaska commercial fisherman based in Portland, Oregon. His writing has appeared in Everywhere All the Time and Airplane Reading. He writes about place, home, and culture in his blog, Stumptown Lives.​

Muito Perigoso

by Jeremiah Bass

           When we got off the plane, the first thing I noticed was the smell. Every foreign country I’ve visited has its own odor. Brazil was no different. A mild hint of salty air reminded me of Jamaica, where Casie and I had been wed nearly eleven years earlier, but the lingering smell of unsanitary bathrooms reminded me of the Greyhound buses I’d frequented as an adventurous youth. The smell was just the first in a long line of surprises and potential hazards.

Side streets were shared with horses, mules, donkeys, goats, cows, sheep, and the occasional iguana. Healthy trees weren’t cut down when roads were made, either. These mid-road diversions were spray painted white and orange so motorists didn’t crash into them. The abrasions and bits of plastic and glass embedded in the bark indicated how well this tactic worked.

We arrived for our seven-month stay at the end of the rainy season and the thin layers of asphalt had washes and gullies that would have destroyed our 1980 VW Beetle had we been unfortunate enough to veer into one. To make drivers aware of these mid-street chasms, Brasileiros filled the holes with whatever broken bits of furniture they had lying around.  One morning there was a bent, metal, fold-up chair sticking about six inches out of a hole big enough for a child-sized desk. A few mornings later, that same hole required a fold-up table to raise awareness.

While Casie worked at the university—a forty-minute drive one way—I taught English lessons at the university and to private clients near our vizinhança. My students were professors, children of professors, business managers, lawyers, doctors, and my favorite, Paolo, a middle-aged man who designed water slides for Beach Park—the home of the Insano, Brazil’s tallest water slide.

Paolo and I spent many days walking up and down the beach in front of the apartment my wife and I were fortunate enough to stumble upon—a two-bedroom that came fully furnished, including dishes, pots and pans, sheets, and a drying rack; all clothes were hand washed and air dried. In front of our apartment, there was a baía: a small bay that filled with high tide and emptied with low tide. “Muito perigoso!” Paolo told me on our first long stroll down the coast of the Atlantic. At first, I struggled to see the danger. Water went in, water went out. During high tide, from our balcony, I’d watched kite-surfers skim the waves of the too-blue water, their boards moving as fast as the sea birds they’d startle from the resting water. During low tide, fisherman would rush around the ankle-deep water netting stranded fish, crabs, and mussels. But then I recognized that between high and low tide, when water rushed through the bottleneck of the bay, no one, not even the boldest kite surfers, would skim through those vacuum-like rip currents.

After Paolo showed me the safest way to get from our apartment to the bay, I ventured there daily as part of my mental health regimen. Walk on the beach, yoga on the beach, meditate on the beach, then trudge back through the cacti and discarded coconut husks that lined the goat trail connecting our apartment to the seaside. I could have driven the two and a half kilometers from our apartment to the nearest road that wasn’t flooded or filled with livestock, but on most days, the walk to and from the beach was enlightening.

I’d come across multiple squatters in the scrub brush. They lived in a halfway finished apartment complex where construction had been suspended indefinitely since the complex’s proprietor didn’t actually own the land upon which he’d started building his multi-million-dollar luxury suites. Not only were these unfinished skeletons the only thing impeding our view of the bay, they were also a perfect home for unsavory types. There was constant access to fresh mango and cashew fruits in the scrub, but they also fished and crabbed. While these squatters didn’t have much money for luxury foods, rice and beans—staples of the Brazilian diet—were cheap. Recycling was one way to get enough money for these essentials, mugging was another. Helping people park and then guarding their car as they strolled the beach was easiest and therefore, most common labor for the squatters.

For fifty American cents, you could have one of these squatters stop traffic, direct you to the best parking spot, stop traffic again when you wanted to leave, and clean your windows. Meeting them in the scrub between our apartment and the beach wasn’t the same kind of interaction. If they thought you might have money, you could give them some, or they may try to take it—which is why I would walk to the beach in nothing but my bathing suit and a pair of worn out running shoes. My broad tattooed chest may have been my saving grace. Standing nearly a foot taller than the average Brasileiro may have helped too. Or perhaps it was just the odd luck that had followed me throughout Brazil. On more than one occasion, our VW died during the commute to or from the University. On every one of those occasions, within a three-minute walk—or ten minutes of pushing the Fusca—an able and inexpensive mechanic had us back on the road in minutes. Luck, it seemed, was on my side.

Near the entrance to the bay, there was a rock formation that had been shaped by eons of high and low tides. It was filled with holes that held water at low tide. Aquatic life like crabs, sea anemones, sea urchins, and things I can’t begin to name in English or Portuguese lived in these holes. During low tide, the rock formations were about shoulder high on me. Casie and I would explore the holes, looking for whatever creatures we could find, daring one another to touch these unnamable entities.

 At high tide, the rock formations lingered under mere inches of water like stony crocodiles. Throughout my life I’ve had a strange fear of things sticking out of dark water. As a young man, it was trees that hadn’t been cut down during the creation of the many small lakes my family fished. The underwater moss that crept along the rotting bark of uncut trees sent shivers up my spine. The ten, twelve, or fifteen feet of dead tree that reached through the surface, standing in lakes like Devil’s Kitchen, had the same spine-chilling effect. In Brazil, the rocks that were such a source of pleasure at low tide were an equal source of fear during high tide.

Most days I’d time my mental health walks and lessons with Paolo for low tide. Not only did this give me the chance to explore the rock formations, but it also offered an extra hundred yards of flat, packed sand to stroll down. Depending on the tide, the walk could be heavenly path or a scalding, shell-filled road of perdition.

On the weekends, Casie and I would hit the beach early, before the hordes of city dwellers overtook the sandy retreat. Often, we’d drive the two and a half kilometers to the nearest safe parking spot to avoid the potential mugging waiting for us in the scrub. Down a one lane, cobblestone road—with only a few trees and pothole obstacles threatening harm—a narrow parking lot lay hidden.

After a breakfast of Pao de coco, eggs, and bananas we’d slip into our suits, start up the Beetle, and pilot the rust bucket down the cobblestones. All valuables were locked safely in the car, where our fifty-cent guardian would stand barefoot, scaring away would-be thieves.

On a normal Saturday morning, about four months into our stay, we woke up later than usual but still decided to drive to the beach in hopes for a spot among the crowds we knew we would find. We found the last parallel parking spot outside the parking lot. There were three cars behind us that  would have to use the lot and pay for their day at the beach. As per our usual routine, we disrobed, sluffed off our sandals, and I tied the car keys to the inside of my swim suit.

The tide was higher than usual, but not “high.” If we walked fast, we’d still be able to dig through the cavernous rock formations. The sun, already blisteringly hot, forced us to take a few time-consuming dips in the Atlantic, though typically we just walked along the edge of the water, skimming our feet in the waves.

The closer we got to the bay, the further back beachgoers seemed to be moving their gear. When we neared an old fishing shack a few dozen yards or from the bay, sunbathers had positioned themselves almost at the dunes—where the water broke during the highest of tides.

“Do you want to turn around,” Casie asked.

I thought about it for a second, and replied, “Let’s keep going.” It was a beautiful, cloudless day, the breeze was cooling, the sound of the waves crashing against the beach drowned out all the noise of weekenders. A kite-surfer hit a high wave and took flight for a few seconds before another high wave caught the bottom of his board. It was a spectacular showing of control.

“Did you see that?” I asked. But Casie’s attention wasn’t on the kite-surfer. Where the bay met the ocean, a group of people stood shouting and pointing at the water. A few weeks before I’d seen a huge loggerhead in that very spot. I know thatCasie, like I, hoped it was the cause of the excitement. We looked at one another and started running.

In the water, where ocean tide was rushing into the bay, there was a current strong enough to keep the kite-surfers away, a current that had ensnared a young Brasileiro.

“Ajudem-no! Ajudem-no!” “Help him!” The excited crowd shouted at no one in particular. Fifteen people stood around watching the boy sink, then struggle back up through the surface, then sink again. By the time we arrived, he was exhausted to the point that he couldn’t keep his head above the water.

Two men with life jackets stood waist deep in the rushing current trying to wade out to the boy. At the rate they were going, neither had a chance of getting him in time. A heavy Brasileiro threw the lid of his Styrofoam cooler, but the current pulled it away before the boy could grab hold. Panicked chants of, “Ajudem-no! Ajudem-no!” continued.

My heart raced. Casie squeezed my hand tightly. I looked at her, questioning. We both knew I could get to him before the waders could. I’d been trained as a lifeguard and knew how to grab the boy and swim him to safety, but Paolo’s caution echoed in my mind, “Muito perigoso!” “Muito perigoso!” “Muito perigoso!”

I took my sun glasses off, handed them to Casie, walked across the terrifying, cavernous rock formation, and dove in into the current. My feet scraped down a hidden edge of the rocks. A stinging burn shot up my leg as salt water debride the wound. I looked for the boy as I swam, but could not see him. The current pulled on me like the g-force in an accelerating car. Taking slow, heavy breaths, I pushed on.

When I got to where he should have been, the boy was gone. Fighting against the current, I looked for help from the crowd of shouting onlookers. It was like trying to get answers from a panicked, foreign language speaking audience of The Price Is Right. There wasn’t anything coherent at first, but the shouting made sense after a few slow-moving split seconds, the boy was under the water.

I dove.

I opened my eyes, salt water stinging them, my leg burning.

I dove deeper, fighting against the current.

When I finally saw him in the dark, sand-filled water, the unconscious boy spun, limp, like clothes in a washing machine. I grabbed him, locking my left arm around his shoulder and head, and pulled toward the surface. When we emerged, we’d been pulled almost all the way to the other side of the bay’s opening. Five strokes, from the edge, a cramp in my back, three, my body burned, two, I needed a rest, one …

On shore, I let the boy go and realized that he wasn’t as much a boy as a young man. A mouthful of water passed his mustachioed lips as he rolled onto his side, coughing. I shook a few thankful hands, gave modest, possibly incoherent responses to the onslaught of “Obrigado,” checked to make sure young man was breathing regularly, caught my breath, and swam back through the settling water.

I’ve often wondered if Casie and I hadn’t slept in that morning, or if we hadn’t gotten the last parking spot, or if we hadn’t walked the rest of the way to the bay, or if my fear had caused hesitation at the last second, what might have happened. I always tell Casie, “Someone would have saved him.” She disagrees. But I wonder what forces of the universe put me in that place at that time, and helped me overcome my fear of what lay hidden in that murky water—a fear that has never returned. Maybe it was fate, maybe that young man is destined for great things, or maybe it was just the luck that followed me on our exotic journey…

Jeremiah Bass is an English Professor at the University of Wisconsin—Stout. He has written and published multiple short stories and poems and is currently searching for homes for his first two novels. Jeremiah lives on a small farm in Spring Valley, Wisconsin with his wife, dog, horse, and two ornery cats.

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The Old Spiral Highway    

by Liz Olds

A

t 15 I read On the Road and wanted to be Jack Kerouac. I wanted to live big and travel far. I wanted to hop on a freight train and go to the edge, to get picked up hitching by road-crazed hippies in beater cars going nowhere. I often put on my orange aluminum-frame backpack and, with nothing in it, walked to the edge of my suburban Maryland subdivision and imagined I would stick out my thumb and hitch to San Francisco, land of Ginsberg and Kesey. I had read Howl; I had read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I was well-educated in the ways of the literary travelers, although I never walked that extra mile to the highway. But I dreamed, despite the lightness of the empty pack on my shoulders.

        At 18, finally free of the constraints of family and subdivision, I chose Idaho for college. Idaho represented the frontier and freedom to me. More practically, I picked Idaho because a high school friend also went there, although I chose Moscow, up in the northern panhandle, and she chose Pocatello in the south. I had the idea that we would see each other on the weekends, not realizing that we were actually 700 road miles apart. On my map Idaho looked like Maryland sitting on its edge. I had no idea how vast it was.

I had only hitched once, during my freshman year, down the Old Spiral Highway from Moscow into Lewiston, to scrounge in the Goodwill for the men’s shirts and pants I felt most comfortable in. But I had dreamed many times of a longer trip and looked forward to the time when an opportunity would present itself. How hard could it be? I would just stick my thumb out and magically a real Kerouac would appear to whisk me back up the Old Spiral Highway home.

T

hanksgiving weekend of my sophomore year, 1976, I decided to go to Corvallis, Oregon to visit an old flame I’d met at Girl Scout camp and hadn’t seen or spoken to in three years. I didn’t call ahead because it would rob the trip of its Kerouac-ness if I did. 

On Wednesday I took the Greyhound to Corvallis. Dusti, the object of my affection, wasn’t home. Her confused mother stood with the door slightly open and advised me to come back Saturday. I took the ‘Hound back to Moscow on Wednesday night, and on Friday night, with only the price of a one-way ticket left, took the red-eye bus back once again to Corvallis. My desire for a dramatic reunion replaced whatever common sense my 18-year old self may have possessed. I would trust to the gods of the road to get me home somehow.

The romance part was a bust. In the end, Dusti and her mother did put me up for the night, and Dusti agreed, rather too hastily I thought, to drive me the ten miles from Corvallis to Interstate 5, the inland highway that followed the line of the Oregon Coast. There I could catch a ride to Portland and then on east to Idaho. Early on the Sunday morning after Thanksgiving, wisps of fog curled around the pine trees and swaddled the foothills. I caught a ride after just a few minutes and was in Portland by 9 AM.

I bought a pack of strong, foul-smelling Egyptian cigarettes in Portland to pass the boring wait between rides.

Still lucky, I was picked up by a travelling salesman in a Datsun 240Z and we cruised down Interstate 84 past the series of Corps of Engineers Dams on the north and the little streaming waterfalls coming down the high hills on the south. We topped the speedometer at 90 MPH which made me nervous, but the little sports car was built for speed and so was the highway.

The salesman was a chatty guy. He talked about his own life on the road, which was pretty straight and not what I was dreaming of with my romantic notions. He said he had thought I was a 14 year old boy standing by the side of the road when he picked me up. He bought me a hamburger and fries and I thought that was nice. Closing in on Walla Walla he suggested that I spend the night with him in his motel and I wasn’t sure if that was nice or not but since he didn’t push I didn’t need to know.

We reached Walla Walla, just 2 hours from Moscow, at 3:00. With plenty of daylight left and a stream of students heading back to school at the end of the long holiday weekend, I thought for sure I would get an easy ride and be home by dinner. The salesman dropped me off at a small strip mall on the outskirts of town. All the stores were closed. There was a bank with a time/temperature sign in front of it at my end of the mall. When I got out of the 240Z the sign read 3:00 PM/20 degrees.

I stood under the sign, smoking with one hand and hanging my thumb out with the other. For warmth I had on an old green parka with a fake fur hood and an orange lining I had bought at that Goodwill in Lewiston. It looked warmer than it was.

I measured the wait in cigarette puffs, drawing the smoke in deep while watching the number in the pack dwindle. I noticed the temperature numbers gradually going down as well. Apparently a cold front was coming in. But, not to worry. A ride would surely be along soon.

As time passed, so did the cars. No one stopped. No one would even meet my eyes as they sped by.

I could hear the buzz of the sign and watched the numbers on the temperature side falling. At first I didn’t feel it getting colder, but numbers never lie. Then the wind picked up.

My feet numbed. I wore high-top Chuck Taylors and some wool socks I had stolen from a friend. I hopped from foot to foot to keep the circulation going. No gloves, I didn’t like gloves. Can’t hold a damn cigarette with gloves on. The numbers on that temperature sign were rolling like a pinball score going the wrong way.

So was the sun. I would like to say at least it was a beautiful sunset, but the outskirts of Walla Walla are flat and that stretch of road with the little shoe repair shop and H&R Block office in the strip mall was pretty ugly. The sun just went down.

And the cars kept going by.

By 5:00 it was dark and 6 degrees. I had to admit to myself I was getting a little afraid. I didn’t really think I would die out there, but I would be in for a miserable night. I lit my last cigarette.

I jumped up and down, waving wildly as the cars passed. I could see into the warm interior of the cars, surprised at how clear the faces of mostly young students appeared as they averted their eyes when I tried to implore them with my own.

Now it was dark, a couple of hours into my wait by the side of U.S. 12 in Walla Walla, Washington. Time slowed, my blood was slowing, and the only thing going fast was that damn temperature sign, now at minus 2.

I’ve experienced colder temperatures, but never for so long and never so exposed. Every breath I took hurt my lungs and froze my boogers solid. My eyeballs felt like they were freezing. Shutting them didn’t help, they hurt closed and they hurt open. And I was getting pissed. There were plenty of cars on that road, occupants ignoring me as they drove in heated comfort home. Home. Why the hell wouldn’t someone pick me up and drive me home?

I stood by the side of that road for 6 hours.

Then, over a little rise came an old white Chevy panel van. I nearly cried when the yellow blinker came on and the van slowed. The driver reached across the passenger seat and opened the door.

“I’m just going ten miles up the road but at least you can get in and get warm for a while.”

The man seemed old to me but he couldn’t have been more than 35. He had a long, slightly disheveled and thinning blonde ponytail and a big full-faced beard. He asked was I going up to Moscow and I said yeah and that was the sum total of our conversation. The weak little heat fan blew on me from the dash and everything tingled.

After 15 minutes he pulled into a gas station, filled up the tank, went in to pay and came back with two Styrofoam cups of hot coffee.

“I believe I’ll drive just a little further up the road.”

We drank the coffee in silence. I knew I was taking a risk as he drove “a little further up the road.” It occurred to me that he might be a serial killer. In my young teenage dream I had not imagined this freezing, lonely trip, nor possible outcomes other than absolute safety. It was too late for second thoughts now; I was committed to this ride. But after a moment of doubt I opted for trust. Even though he didn’t say anything there was no menace in his demeanor. All I knew for sure was that the coffee was warm and so was I and the miles were rolling by under my butt. There didn’t seem to be much to say. We didn’t exchange names.

S

ixty miles later we reached the bottom of the Old Spiral Highway, the pass from Lewiston that rose 2000 feet in 9 miles of switchbacks, a two-lane monster road with 7% grades and no-shoulder drop-offs into thin air. This wasn’t all the way home, and I had a nasty stretch of road ahead, but it was a major crossroads with two 24-hour truck stops and plenty of cars and semis, a place to get more coffee and be inside, warm and safe until I could snag a ride up the pass into Moscow.

As I was getting out of the van I calculated the miles and realized his generosity added up to hours rather than minutes. He still had the ride back. I hoped he had music to keep him company. I didn’t really know what to think. Both the tough Kerouac part of me and the little kid who bravely carried an empty backpack to the end of the subdivision were astounded by his generosity. I didn’t know how to simply be present with his kindness. For the first time in an hour I felt compelled to say something.

“Thanks, uh, give me your address; I’ll send you some money.”

“No need. I’ve been where you are and I know how it feels. Just pass it on, man, pass it on.”

It seems important to me now that he did not take me all the way home. I noticed it then, but didn’t think about it much. Who in the world would want to drive up and down that Old Spiral Highway in the middle of the night? One moment of inattention could send a car over the side into oblivion.

Now I think that it was more than self-preservation. He did not patronize me by assuming I couldn’t take care of myself. I felt welcomed into the brotherhood of the road, the home I wanted at the time. A home I knew more about when I asked a young couple going up the hill for my last ride of the night than I had at the beginning of my long, cold day. Whether he realized it or not, he was treating me not as the fourteen year old boy I appeared to be, but as a fellow-traveler, and as someone who really would remember when I got the chance later on in life to “pass it on”.

Liz Olds grew up in Maryland and fulfilled her dream of traveling the U.S. by Greyhound, Amtrak, a 1969 red VW van, and her thumb in her salad days. She finally settled down 35 years ago in Minneapolis, MN where she currently supports her writing dreams cashiering at a big box store. She has been published in Inside Bluegrass, Paid My Dues, The Grapevine and was the recipient of the 1983 ALA’s Children’s Recording of the Year for the song “Just like Sally Ride”, which the late Ms. Ride especially enjoyed because it did not use her name as a pun. Liz plays the banjo and is a blues programmer on KFAI-FM. She recently graduated from the Foreword Apprenticeship Program through The Loft Literary Center.

Mothers and Other Creatures

by Charles Bergman

 

In my mind, travel and forgetting have always been linked.  I’ve lived much of my life as if I could outrun memory, or, if I got good and lost, erase the past.  Though I never ran away as a teen-ager, I’ve sometimes thought of myself as an adult run-away.  The farther away, the more remote, the better.  Never mind that I know rationally I can’t really leave anything behind.  It hasn’t stopped me from trying.  It’s a core illusion, a mistaken belief that’s been hard to eradicate.  Maybe I’m typical of many Americans in this way, in love with cars and frequent flyer miles and the open road. 

That’s why I was startled when my sister called me in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  I had only just arrived earlier that morning, and was standing in line at a money exchange, travel-weary and jet-lagged.  The last thing I had expected was a call from home, much less from the past.

“Mom died last night,” Carole said, getting right to the point.  “A stroke.”

Jolting news, but no real surprise.  Our mom was well into her eighties, trailing a long medical history.  She wore a pacemaker for her heart and had long seemed frail and failing.  But she also had a wide streak of the hypochondriac, in all honestly, and loved the attention of doctors.  And that made it hard to know exactly what was going on with her medical condition.  Plus, she had a huge lexicon of medical terms—from her long career as a medical stenographer—which made her an expert at stoking all her worries about her health.   

Recently, though, she had found a renewed zest for life.  We had moved her out of her subsidized apartment in Seattle, where she had lived alone, and into an “assisted-living” home.  It was low-income, nothing fancy.  But she loved it, with all the people and a whole new social life. She even took up watercolor painting.  Carole and I began to think she might have several more years.

Her declining and ambiguous health had given us lots of time to prepare in practical ways for this moment, arranging cremation and paperwork.  What surprised me though was how emotionally unprepared I was for this moment.   

 I considered returning home, but quickly decided that that wasn’t really possible or necessary.  Buenos Aires was just a stop-over on our way much farther south—to Tierra del Fuego and, beyond that, Antarctica.  My wife, Susan, and I were traveling with twenty undergraduate students for the month of January.  Without me, the students couldn’t go on.  Plus, Carole and I decided we could easily schedule our mom’s memorial service for a time right after I got back.

I asked our local guide to take the class on a tour of Buenos Aires, while Susan and I headed back to the hotel to talk—to remember.  Memories and scenes I’d worked hard to put behind me quickly came back.   My mom’s adoration of doctors had escalated during my childhood to an addiction to prescription drugs.  She had several bouts of electroshock therapy, which was confusing and disturbing to me as a boy.  Terrible fights with my father, loud and bordering on violence, exploded into an ugly divorce by my early teenage years.  Once single, mom was gone every weekend, hanging out in cocktail lounges, becoming an alcoholic.    

My sister and I?  Left at home on our own.  I hated imagining what our mom was doing in bars and lounges, and grew increasingly angry.  These memories are still painful, even as I write this. 

When I left for college, I didn’t just go off to school.  I tried to leave my mom and my childhood behind—my first attempt at leaving and forgetting.  Not only did I think I could reinvent myself, I tried to become mother to myself.  At key times in my life, when things got tough, I hit the road.  I grew expert at leaving.   

Charles and his mother, Ellie

Much later, when I tried to talk to my mom about those chaotic years, she would grow defensive.  Every conversation became about her and how hard it had been for her.  Whatever I wanted from her, she couldn’t give.  The only solution I could see was an emotional compromise.  On one hand, I learned to be polite and dutiful toward her, a good son.  On the other hand, I quit trusting her with deeper feelings, nothing vulnerable.

You don’t have to travel to create emotional distance.  Mom felt the “it” between us, but I don’t know if she understood it.  I do know it hurt her in her later years.

As Susan and I talked in the hotel, deeper memories and lost images also began to surface.  I had forgotten how much, as a small boy, I adored my mother.  She was full of life and had a great sense of humor.  Her oldest child and only son, I loved to make her laugh, to entertain her.  Embarrassing to admit, I did routines for her—even singing for her— and she affectionately called me her “little clown.”  I remembered a blue and green dress she had.  When she wore it, I thought she was the most beautiful woman ever.  Once, in seventh grade, I faked being sick to stay home from school and try to bake a birthday cake for her.  It was a disaster, but mom doted on me for the effort, which was all I really wanted. 

In a darkened hotel room, I found myself revisiting some of the darker corners of my life.  That early love for my mom was a casualty of my later anger toward her.  And it explained why her nights in cocktail lounges when I was a young teen hurt so much, felt like a betrayal.   It was sad, but it also felt strangely satisfying to feel that early love for my mom again, before it proved dangerous and painful.

Next morning, we left for Tierra del Fuego with the class.  The students had heard the news and were gracious and sweet.  I thought I’d done some good emotional work and was ready move on, leaving mom behind once more.  But she was waiting for me in the far south.

 

          If the Andes Mountains are the spine of South America, then Tierra del Fuego is the continent’s tailbone.  Ushuaia calls itself the southernmost city in the world, “fin del mundo,” the end of the world.  Of course, there’s a lot more world south of Ushuaia, but the idea captures the frontier scruffiness the place—gaping holes in the sidewalks, rusting buildings, relentless gray skies. 

          Landing in the plane here can be its own minor adventure, dropping through snowy peaks and skidding to a stop at the end of a runway that sticks far out into the windy Beagle Channel.  We emerged from the small airport to find our guide, Marcelo de la Cruz, waiting for us. 

          “It’s terrible about your mother,” he said immediately, wrapping me in a huge, sympathetic hug.  The news had traveled ahead of us south.

          Marcelo is like Ushuaia, disheveled and full of rough simpatico.  His curly dark hair is never combed, his shirt-tails always un-tucked, and his coat rarely zipped up, even in the rain. 

Marcelo de la Cruz

          Marcelo is also a recognized expert on the birds of Tierra del Fuego.  People come from around the world to find the region’s unique species with him.

          “I got something special for you,” he said in heavily-accented Fuegian Spanish.  “Tomorrow night we’ll find an owl.”

“The owl will help you,” he continued, referring to the loss of my mom.  “You must let yourself be brushed by the wings of the owl.  You must be wrapped in the wings of the owl.  The owl will take care of you in this moment.” 

          Marcelo knows I love owls.  We’ve birded many times together in Tierra del Fuego, and with him I’ve seen many of the great birds of the far south—Magellanic penguins, Magellanic woodpeckers, Austral pygmy owls, and more.  This time he wanted to show me a rufous-legged owl, or “la lechuza,” a handsome, strictly-nocturnal, and hard-to-find “specialty” of the region. 

My traveling is not only about forgetting, of course.  It’s also a search, and often the object of the search is a pretext for something I don’t fully understand until I encounter it. I very much wanted to see this owl. 

          The next night Marcelo and I raced down dirt roads through Tierra del Fuego National Park in his small Renault.  He drives as he speaks, fast and sometimes careening toward recklessness.  We stopped several times, listening intently for owls in the dark forest.  Nothing.  Then, about 2 a.m., Marcelo heard something and plunged down a trail.

          By the time I caught up with him, about 300 meters into the forest, Marcelo was standing in a small clearing beside a huge beech tree.

          “Shhhhh,” he whispered.  “It’s here.”

          Marcelo pointed his flashlight at the fork in the tree, perhaps ten feet away.  A little owl stared unblinking into the beam.  A quick glimpse, maybe ten seconds, and it flew.

          “It’s still here,” Marcelo said.  “Above us.”

          Directly overhead, the owl peered from a thick branch.  I strained my neck backward to look up at it.  About a foot tall and heavily streaked, it peered left and right.  I squeaked like a small mouse.  The owl spun its round head, stared at me, and clacked its beak.  It was aloof but sharply curious, sweet-face and big-eyed. 

Rofous-legged Owl by Charles Bergman

          Owls are irresistibly anthropomorphic, with their human faces and upright posture.  They have ancient associations with darkness and graveyards and death.  And also with wisdom, perhaps from their ability to see in the darkness, which is why I love them so much.    

          “How did you know that the owl was there?” I asked Marcelo later, as we clattered back to Ushuaia, rocks clanging off the undercarriage.  I was impressed that he had heard it from the road.  I’m experienced with owls, have found them all over the world, including all nineteen species of North American owls.  But I hadn’t heard this owl at all. 

          “I will tell you how I find the owl.”  Marcelo waved his arms passionately as he spoke.  “I penetrate into the life of the bird.  I feel the owl in order to see it and hear it.  You must feel the bird in order to find it.”

          “Maybe I’m crazy,” Marcelo laughed, by now almost yelling.  “But people do not know what’s possible in nature anymore.  Now you have been embraced by the wings of the owl.”

          I loved the quasi-mystical connection he asserted with the owl.  He was not being metaphorical.  Marcelo is a hard-headed ornithologist.  He keeps careful, scientific records of all the birds in Tierra del Fuego.  But the owl is not just a biological being to him, known intellectually by data and statistics and maps.  It’s also a presence that he knows in his gut, by feeling it.  Still, for all my sympathy for Marcelo’s views, it was not until I returned home a month later that I felt the owl’s embrace. 

 

When I got back from Antarctica and Argentina, my sister and I organized a memorial service for our mom at the assisted-living home where she had lived her final two years.  A big, impressive crowd showed up to remember her.    

          Every relationship consists of a unique mixture of remembering and forgetting, and sitting on the fold-out chairs in the chapel in the home, I found myself thinking that death gives us our most intense, perhaps the ultimate, experience of both. 

The chaplain at the home called my mom by her nickname, Ellie.  He talked of her life in the home, focusing on one story from her painting class. I knew she loved the painting class because she had shown me several of her paintings.  But this was the first time I heard this particular story. 

          He said that my mom had wanted to paint a picture of a photograph from one of my books, a photo I had taken.   Her idea was to paint the image and give it to me.  According to the chaplain, she tried over and over again to paint the photograph, but she was never happy with her images.  She never showed me anything. 

“It was a photograph of an owl,” the chaplain said.

At those words, I almost wept, bending forward with my face in my hands.  I knew exactly which photograph, which owl, she had tried to paint.  Immediately I remembered the owl that appeared to Marcelo and me in Tierra del Fuego, just after my mom’s death. 

Susan, my wife, was sitting next to me at the service. She leaned toward me and said quietly, “The owl in Tierra del Fuego was your mom.”

Susan has no doubt about it.  In that moment in the memorial service, I believed it too with an overwhelming clarity of feeling. 

All my traveling, and there she was at the far end of the world.

          Now, over a year later, I love to recall that moment in the chapel.  I’ve told others the story of my mom and the owl, and many believe that my mom was that owl. But I no longer feel that clear and immediate faith.  I’m less certain about what happened.  Who or what was that owl?

Without doubt, the chaplain’s story added meaning to the owl and other experiences in Tierra del Fuego, but I can’t pin it down.  Often in Tierra del Fuego and Antarctica, I felt animals were speaking to me, offering consolations in languages that I don’t know, but which, like music, moved me irresistibly. A pod of humpbacked whales, for example, was feeding amid a wilderness of surreally-shaped icebergs along the Antarctic Peninsula, surfacing over and over again within feet of our Zodiacs.  They breathed in vaporous whooshes and their breath drifted over us in misted murmurs from other worlds. 



Humpback Whale by Charles Bergman

Now though I’m left feeling mostly two things about that owl.  The first is awe—an overwhelming sense that something powerful and indeterminate was given to me by the owl.  And it reduces me to the state that comes before knowledge and faith and even words, which we call awe and wonder.  It’s the feeling that lurks behind all the big questions that give shape and meaning to our lives. 

          The other feeling is gratitude.  To Marcelo, who showed me the owl and insisted that I be wrapped in its wings.  To the owl.  When a wild creature presents itself, reveals itself, it’s like a gift that nature makes to whatever longing we carry with us inside.  The owl in the forest is now completely tangled up with my memory of my mother.  And finally to my mom.  One of the best things she ever gave me is this last, ungiven gift.

  

Photos:  All photographs are by Charles Bergman.

Charles Bergman teaches English at Pacific Lutheran University. He's the author of three books, including Wild Echoes: Encounters with the Most Endangered Animals in North America. He's written extensively on wildlife and animals, including the 2009 cover story in Smithsonian magazine on wildlife trafficking in Latin America. He has a weak spot for the Southern Hemisphere, has completed two Fulbright Fellowships in Latin America, and has led four classes on study tours of Antarctica.