2006 Europe Trip Journal: 5

October 3 (Day Twenty-one)

As Andrea rushes about, delivering breakfast to his little cafeteria full of guests, always at everyone’s service, Lindy compliments him: “Very nice.”

“I am happy,” he purrs.

Directed by him to a camera store just to the left of alley Cavazzeni’s lower egress, I hurry out and return with a new battery inserted by the clerk, anxious to try it to out. Paolo has arrived in the meantime, so Andrea leads him behind the counter, in front of the liquor bottles, and there they pose: Andrea, jacketless with a modern-art tie and a beatific smile; Paolo, his striped shirt opened a few buttons to a bare chest, the beginnings of an ironic grin.  “The masters of the James Joyce,” Andrea proclaims.

“I’m James,” adds Paolo, “and he’s Joyce.”

The same woman is at the Milano desk as at the near-desperate moment we arrived the first time. Pleased to see us, apparently aware of our adventures in the lobby since our last contact, she summons Stefano from the office without being prompted. He is there instantaneously and continues right out from behind the front desk to meet us. Immediately, though, his happy greeting slides into a frown, as he confesses, “We cannot see the castle.  Papa says we must go to the market for food. We have been mobbed by futebol crowds.  Now we are empty. He is not strong enough to go himself.”  He puts his right hand on his chest, “Heart. I am so sorry.”

“But I am unclear,” I say.  “I thought your uncle owned the hotel, and you managed it for him.”

“No, it is my father who is the owner.  You see, I am born to the business.”

“Maybe we can meet your father,” Lindy proposes.

“You have met him,” he declares.

I am baffled.

“The large man, Sergio.” It turns out that the person who came to confront me over the phone-bill matter, albeit with no English, was Papa.  Now I understand: that was a “tough cop/friendly cop” tag team of father and son who came from the office that first day at the summons of the peremptory clerk. “Don’t you see the resemblance?” Stefano asks, patting his belly. Then he takes a step toward the desk and calls out, “Papa.”

Sergio emerges from the innards like a balloon propelled and is quickly before us, as tame now as he was ferocious then, bowing to kiss Lindy’s hand, nodding grandly to me.  Stefano prattles on in Italian, while Papa remains a paragon of welcoming smiles and good will, casting benign looks upon us, as if we are good children deserving of great praise. I see the resemblance: Sergio is not so much very large as very round. He is no taller than Stefano, actually a shade shorter, but both his head and chins have expanded to their limits, so he is a huge melon without a neck, right out of The Sopranos crew at the Bada Bing.Yet he is not a “mafia don” type. When happy, he is an Italian patriarch.  Displeased, he turns temperamental diva.

Somehow as an offshoot of his soliloquy to Papa, Stefano now wants to make sure that he will get my book about my father’s hotel, and I promise again that I will have it sent. “No,” he protests, “I want to buy it, right now.  And I also want to get a book with pictures of your hometown.  Do you have such a thing?”

By luck we do have a color-photograph book called Berkeley.

“You said you wrote another book about your childhood.  If I get all three of them, how much will I owe you?’

I figure out the sum and rough postage to Trieste, cut it to a third, translate to euros, and propose an amount.  He takes out his wallet and hands me some bills.

As he does this, I am slightly embarrassed at the transaction, so turn to the clerk and ask her if she will help Stefano read the book if he has trouble.  “But I am just learning to read Italian,” she says.  “I don’t read English at all.”

This confuses me—she speaks English so well, why wouldn’t she know Italian?

The answer comes quickly, exposing my incurable provinciality; she is Croatian, from an island off the Istrian coast.  At Lindy’s request she scribbles down her name for us: Diana Radimiri.

Over at the bar Stefano asks what we will have. Lindy decides on cappucino, and I take a mineral water. He serves them up with napkins. I remark on how much of a connection there is between Trieste and Slovenia and Croatia. Stefano waves his hand in a “pshaw” gesture: “It’s an hour’s drive.  My sister lives in Capodistra, and we think of her as almost in town.”

“What does she do there?

“She is a correspondent for Slovenian TV.  She reads the news in Italian because Italians watch Slovenian stations. She is very popular.”

Lindy asks if there is any chance he will return to medical school.

“No, I will follow Papa, sad to say.  In many ways I follow Papa. Unfortunately I will attend the University of Eating too; I am already studying, as you can see.”

“Oh, you are quite slim and handsome,” Lindy says.  “All you have to do is be careful over the years, and you’ll be fine.”

He thanks her and then asks, “Did Andrea tell you we studied together at University?”

I nod.

“We used to sit at the same library table, planning that we would be a lawyer and a doctor.  Now we are hotel managers.  We could not escape our fates.”

A little later, taking a paper place mat, he asks me if I can show him where I live, both in Maine and California.  I am not much of an artist, but I draw an amorphous outline of the U.S., putting in rough humps at Maine, Florida, and Texas.  He is shocked at how far apart our two homes are, like from England to Russia.  The concept of living in two such houses is as inexplicable to him as the fluid multilingualism of Europe is to me.

As we get ready to say goodbye, he excuses himself, marches behind the desk, and unexpectedly produces the Milano laptop, extending me one more free round on it, an offer I won’t decline. In fact, as I am writing on it, I show him the email I have just sent, conveying his order.

Now that we are leaving in earnest, he calls Sergio—even Diana comes from behind the desk for our parting.  I take two photographs of the group: Diana, Sergio, Lindy, and a beaming Stefano. Then Lindy insists on one of just me and Stefano.  “We can email forever,” my friend says as we pose together. “And when you come back, you have to visit.  We can go to the castle.  Nothing will stop us this time. It doesn’t matter where you stay, the Milano, the James Joyce, because we are friends.”

We hug, and he touches cheeks with Lindy, both sides. As Papa Sergio bows yet again, we discover from an incidental comment that, despite appearances, he is exactly our age, born the same year, 1944. This adds to his appreciation of us, and he proceeds to say many things, none of which are translated, finally a booming “Arrivederci!” to send us on our way.

En route back to the James Joyce, Lindy and I follow Andrea’s directions to Umberto Saba’s store, only to find that it is closed. There is a bronze statue of Saba nearby on the sidewalk, out for the day in hat and cane and full-length evening coat, perhaps to meet the statue of James Joyce by the canal. Eschewing kitsch, Lindy poses beside it for me to photograph her, mainly an acknowledgment of her enjoyment of his poems the previous night.

We stop at the outdoor market and, finding the one biologique farmer there, procure a bunch of grapes, a nectarine, two small plums, a tomato, and a pomegranate to go with our crackers and last cans of soup and beans (from the Esselunga outside Lucca) so that we can improvise a lunch at the James Joyce.

Passing the Roman ruins and amphitheater, we realize, to our surprise, that this site is pretty much in the center of town. Today a crew of workmen doing restoration work is taking a lunch break, their food and drink spread on the old rocks themselves, a black cat stalking them from behind a pillar.

Back at our hotel, Andrea is anxious to help us set up the dining room for our private picnic, producing pots and knives and forks, and leading us to the stove and sink in the back. Then he introduces us to new guests from Vienna, a couple—bookstore owners who come, he says, every six months and stay at the James Joyce because they love Trieste. “I get all the literary visitors,” Andrea announces proudly with a glance at the photograph of his patron saint on the mantle.

These Austrians are just finishing cups of coffee, and the gentleman rises and immediately hands me his card: Walter Lux Und Sein Team, bringen mehr Licht in die Bücherwelt. Their English is minimal, but we have a point of common interest, the Frankfurt Book Fair, as we are headed there tomorrow. This year, they say, they are skipping it after twenty-one straight times, but they laud the event with a respect approaching awe, conveying a familiar sentiment that it will be overwhelming. The man is saying that something is “two times, three times,” and I don’t understand, so he repeats it in Italian, and then Andrea tells us that the restaurants in Frankfurt are not very good, but nonetheless they will double and triple their prices for the fair.

After lunch we decide that we will explore separately for the afternoon. Without a concrete goal but a craving for more roasted chestnuts, I try to find out from Andrea if there is a reliable vendor anywhere. He says, “No, not for sure,” but he takes the map and shows me a spot where I would be most likely to find one. Then he circles it.  It is a part of the city we have experienced only when driving to and from Slovenia, maybe a mile from the Joyce, but I decide to go on the hunt.

While Lindy heads toward the waterfront, I use the ruins as my directional marker and aim for the outer territory. The journey takes on a life of its on.  I soon end up on Via Carducci with its mobs. It feels like Seventh Avenue and 42^nd Street in Manhattan, just traffic, narrow sidewalks, massive construction diverting pedestrians. A perception I had when we were in Trieste the first night returns: There are so many human beings, so many faces, uncountable by any real census, unconnected to other locales.  Geopolitics says you can move all these people at once and make them an army, and history proves that you can do it, and history also proves in the long run that you can’t.  Because here they are in the twenty-first century, marching outside of history, through the global market.

I am walking in a generic European city, with the direction of policemen detouring pedestrians around caverns in the road, as traffic zooms along—unlike my fellow walkers going nowhere, purposeless, agendaless, hoping to stumble upon something interesting, trying to decide at every point how far to keep going and whether I really care about chestnuts or this is just a game.

It is a game; I have lost any other meaning and am playing tourist. I figure that if I can merely find the place that Andrea indicated, the round will mercifully be over, but I never do, and after a while the goal changes: I consider myself lucky just to find a recognizable route back. Even to accomplish that, I have to work my way from well beyond the Milano to the vicinity of the James Joyce.

Of all my outings on the trip so far, this is the most nondescript and uncharming.  It is just through the commercial district of some city that happens to be Italian. But then that’s how life is much of the time everywhere, the mythology of tourism and adventure merely disguising it.

At dinner time we make our third attempt to eat at Paolo’s favorite fish restaurant, this time with a reservation phoned in by him. We get confused again around Piazza Hortis (with its five different streets leading in and out) and then, as we pause under a street lamp to ascertain where we are, realize we are almost in front of the restaurant. Each of our errors magically canceled another one.

Weary but not very hungry, we are hardly in the spirit of a reservation for an Italian dinner. Those are meant to be many-course, all-evening affairs in which you get an appetizer and then two main dishes, as well as salad, soup, and a dessert, bottles of wine, and sit around talking and drinking, eating in spurts. We order only two appetizers—spaghetti and clams, and stuffed squid—and are out in forty minutes, a total embarrassment. In fact, Lindy apologizes for occupying a table.

On the way back to the Joyce I am looking for an Internet point off Via Cavana in a business called Knulp, proposed earlier by Paolo as a mixture between a café and a library, but we cannot even find its street on the map, and Lindy is impatient to get out of the neighborhood. I want to persist just a little longer, even though the setting is unpleasant: dark streets, young drunks along the buildings, smoking and shouting, draining bottles. Yet I remained convinced it is not dangerous.

Knulp is such an odd word.  Finally, asking directions from a group outside a bar brings immediate recognition and leads us down an adjacent street that is not on our map. There we find a bunch of college-age people drinking coffee, playing chess, reading books on couches.  For three euros we get online and read our email.

It is a pleasant evening, once we are out of the alleys, so we hang out in Piazza Unita D’Italia.  A warm breeze  coming off the Gulf, we walk to the water.

Smoking here is so ubiquitous and unexamined, as automatic as a blink, completely stylistic. As often as not, a hand is a gesture holding a cigarette. There is no sense, not even a glimmering, of negativity or toxic risk.

A terrible rock band is playing in front of one of the restaurants in the piazza. They keep turning up the speakers, and that finally drives us back to the Joyce.  While Lindy goes upstairs, I sit with Paolo and Katya, who arrived while we were at dinner, but I soon sense that I shouldn’t be there.  What seemed fluid and light the prior evening feels heavy and awkward tonight. Maybe they have stuff to work out. After all, who am I anyway? Just some tourist probably the age of their parents.  I suddenly feel like an intruder latching onto their troubled romance and youthful energy.

It is easy to forget that one isn’t young any more, to inflate superficial camaraderie. I wonder if the undercurrent of sadness I feel is that Katya and Paolo are encountering the end of their affair and struggling with it. I sense that from her, but it could also be a projection of my own melancholy mood.

“See you in America,” they say almost simultaneously as I head upstairs.

But where or when?  Texas?  Santa Barbara?  Berkeley?  Never?

October 4 (Day Twenty-two)

Four Difficulties in Leaving Trieste and Getting to Our Plane on Time in Venice

1. Retrieving the car from the garage:

It would probably have made more sense for us to have returned our rental car right away in Trieste at the pier where we got it a week earlier and then taken the train to the Venice Airport.  That way we would have paid for two or three less days of use and also not had to keep it in a garage.  After all, we were done with it after getting back to the James Joyce from Slovenia. But there were too many variables and unexplored options at that point to see this possibility clearly, plus making changes through a U.S. intermediary, as we well learned, has its own set of problems. Finally, there was no guarantee that we would be better off in terms of convenience or even economics in trying to get from Trieste to the Venice Airport on our own.

The flight was at 14:00, plenty of margin.  Nonetheless, we were done with breakfast early and at 7:45 told Andrea to call the garage for the car.  “What time do you want to leave?” he asked, as though bartering.

“8:15, 8:30 at the latest.”

“No problem.  It takes five minutes to get the car.  I’ll call at 8:00.”

There was no harm in his calling now and our getting a head start on the day, especially as our things were packed and in the lobby, but Andrea made it seem un-Italian to be in a hurry, so we sat there reading.

At 8:05 he was schmoozing with guests in the dining area, showing no sign that he remembered our situation.  The moment I went in and mentioned it he got up and strode to the phone.  After a brief exchange in Italian, he told me it would be here in five minutes, maybe ten because of traffic.

At 8:45 we were becoming concerned.  Meanwhile Andrea was overwhelmed with guests leaving, guests arriving for breakfast, and it was difficult to get his attention back on the matter. He kept saying, “Probably traffic, they’ll be here any minute.”  Finally Lindy insisted he call again. Looking pained, he got on the phone, had a brief conversation, and reported, shame-faced, “They said, ‘Scuse,’ but they forgot.  They promised, five minutes.”

At this point, we decided to save some time by hauling our stuff up the alley to the construction area where the car would be dropped off. A guilty Andrea grabbed both our suitcases and we brought the backpacks, dead computer, loose bags of food, etc. At 9:00, both of us sitting on the street by our suitcases and still no car, I ran back down the alley and asked Andrea to call again. “It’s not there yet?” he asked, incredulous.  He grabbed the phone again, yelled a bit. “It’s on the way,” he promised.

By the time I got back to the construction area, the blue Alpha Romeo was pulling up. Jumping out, the driver said at once, “Scuse, scuse, traffic, traffic, traffic, can’t fly.” He compensated by helping us load our things. I ran back to the Joyce for a proper farewell, shaking Andrea’s hand and thanking him for everything. When I got back, I could see at once that we had a new problem.

 

2. Getting the car out of the parking spot:

The man from the garage had placed the vehicle in the most obvious spot—right inside the fence marking the entry to the construction zone. However, a car trying to leave this unofficial parking lot was now nose to nose with us, and its driver was honking.  I jumped in, so that we could go, but Lindy had no real room to maneuver. She signaled for the guy to back up, but that only agitated him. He began pounding on his horn and screaming Italian invectives.  She tried to go forward between him and another car, but there wasn’t really enough space. It was not worth taking the risk, especially since he had plenty of room behind him.  One car length—or even half a car length—would have made it possible to maneuver without metal meeting metal.

After backing and going forward and turning a few degrees, Lindy couldn’t improve her angle any more and signaled again for him to back up. “I can’t make it,” she shouted out the window.  He wouldn’t budge.  He couldn’t understand her English (or he could and it was provocative), or it didn’t matter either way.  It was though his life depended on not backing up even an inch. He just kept honking and yelling, getting more and more agitated.

Lindy got out of the driver’s seat and stood in front of the bullying car, gesturing and yelling. The driver continued to gesture at the miniscule angle between vehicles, shooting streams of words we didn’t understand. Lindy was firing back words he likewise didn’t understand or perhaps didn’t care to acknowledge. She was insisting, “Please, if you would be so kind as to back up just a little bit, I could turn around.  Look, you clearly have plenty of room. Would it be so shameful to just back up a little bit?  Is there some loss of honor in backing up for a woman?”

I had become a spectator to this confrontation. I am generally more inclined to be conciliatory than Lindy.  She has a more fiery temper but, even if it had been me, I was not sure what alternative there was. I didn’t want to risk damaging the car or creating a legal situation either.

I got out of my side and walked up to the driver’s door and tried to say the same things as Lindy in a quieter tone, adding, “Non capisco—per favore” from the phrasebook. After all, it was quite maddening that all it would take to end the confrontation was him backing a little ways into the huge open territory behind him. A small man in a fancy suit, looking a little like Peter Sellers playing a cop, he simply took his hands off the steering wheel, folded them on his chest, and stared straight ahead—essentially “your move, signore.”

LIke Lindy I suspected this had something to do with women, cars, macho, competence, etc. Italy is a culture of haste, speed, acrobatic skills in small spaces and, most of all, honor. Vehicles bring these components together in a disastrous cocktail.

Achieving nothing in the way of male diplomacy, I asked her if I could try to maneuver us out, but this had become a matter of honor for her now too. She brushed off my offer and began to pull forward into the tiny space as I closed my eyes and listened for a metallic scrape. When I heard none, I opened them.  We had turned!  It couldn’t have even been by more than an eighth of an inch on either side.

The problem, however, was not alleviated by her adroit maneuver because now we were  suddenly jammed in at the rear by a small, newly arriving van. Amazingly this guy wouldn’t back up either.  Though totally different in size, shape, vehicle, and social class from our other adversary, the driver of the van began signaling for Lindy to go around him with the identical set of gestures. Meanwhile the first driver had moved right up to our nose, cutting down on our angle anew from his end again. There was probably enough space to our rear to escape, barely, but going in that direction brought the additional hazard of backing into moving traffic. So here we were, wedged between two vehicles, each of which had plenty of room to back up and let us turn but neither of whose drivers were willing to grant that courtesy.

The original white-collar guy was now actually touching our front bumper and honking unbrokenly; the new blue-collar guy was yelling and honking in a more staccato rhythm while gesturing wildly for Lindy to back around him. Meanwhile Lindy was getting angrier and angrier and more and more frantic.  Finally she got out of the car, strode right up to the van, and shouted with increasing momentum and volume, “Please. Per favore.  S’il vous plait.  Gracias.  Prego prego.”  This was an amazing spontaneous multilingual display for her. I had rarely seen her this worked up and histrionic, but the situation had exacerbated extremes of assertive feminism and theatrical rage in her that were usually under wraps. She was in full performance now, a character in a traffic drama. The fact made zero impression on the driver of the van.  He simply demonstrated, with supercilious calm and fake patience, again and again the path around him.

In the end, of course, he was right.  It was his home turf, and he got to decide the outcome. While he held his ground and made it as difficult as possible—and of course the other driver took every inch as he got it—she edged around him, avoiding the nose of the first guy, and squeezed into the flood of traffic.

This story would have been told very differently from the Italian side, and I leave it to you to figure out what the game was because clearly everyone on the Trieste team was playing.

The first ten minutes were just relief and making sure we were on the right trajectory on the map. Then it was bumper-to-bumper at high speed all the way to Opicina at which point we turned toward West toward Venezia rather than East to Slovenia.  Even though we were on a winding cliffside road all this way and there was obviously no passing, every car bore down on the car in front.

I thought of McLuhan: “The medium is the message”—in this case the automobile. There is no outside context for vehicular things.  They create their own context, their own meaning.

 

3. Finding the correct exit for Marco Polo Aeropuerto:

We were relying on the fact that the airport in Venezia would be flagged by road signs.  In fact, we were expecting directional overkill, as is usually the case with airports around cities. But this was not the case here. For a long time we proceeded happily toward Venice and only began looking for an exit when the kilometers dropped to single digits.  We got inside city limits without seeing a sign for Marco Polo. Furthermore, the map showed another regional aeropuerto nearby, Treviso, and two consecutive signs named it without any mention of Marco Polo there or elsewhere.

Then suddenly on the right where the signs were, giant trucks from Eastern Europe and Turkey were queueing up, as requested by flashing instructional grids.  At first, I expected to see a line of twenty or thirty trucks come to an end, but this queue went on for miles.  We could not see any road signs over these behemoths. At the point at which I started counting, I got to 100 and stopped. There were at least 300-500 of them, all lined up and barely moving. I couldn’t imagine a weighing station or any other official station processing these hippos in less than a week—and that was just the ones I could see.  However, this part was not our problem, and I will have to assume it got worked out.

Our problem was that the only way to read the road signs was to dart into the right lane between two trucks when we saw the top of a marker ahead. That was how we finally got a sign marked: Aeropuerto 4.  We figured that “4 kilometers” had to mean Venezia, not Treviso, so we decided to exit. That meant forcing our way through the trucks onto the ramp.  When we came to a fork at the end of the ramp, there were no signs at all.  We turned to the left, as per the map, but the road meandered and we became uneasy anew. In fact we convinced ourselves that the Venezia airport would have been labeled Marco Polo Aeropuerto and we must be headed to Treviso.  We were about to take an overpass and reverse our course when we suddenly saw a sign, the first one: Marco Polo Aeropuerto 1.

 

4. Returning the car to Euro-Car:

Once inside the airport complex, we searched for a conventional rental-car indication.  All we saw were signs for arriving and departing flights and long-term parking (including rental-car parking)—a huge outer lot marked by a circled P with no attendants. We tried entering it, but there were no rental agencies and no evident place to put the car or procedure to follow, plus we were too far from the terminal to get there without a bus.  We figured this must be an overflow rental-car lot and circled again looking for the return. But there was no other option.

Having circled back to the lot, we stopped to ask a couple fixing a fly-up tailgate with a screwdriver. The guy told us to drive right up to the main terminal and we would find the “rental car return” there.

When nothing was obvious on our next circumference, we grabbed one of the parking spaces right outside the terminal and Lindy stayed with the car while I ran in to explore.  One would never be able to park just outside the front entrance of an American airport like this.

It took ten minutes and three escalators to find Euro-Car in the basement. The woman there did not speak English and mainly kept pointing back to the lot.  Finally another customer offered to walk outside and show me where he left his car. From the sidewalk he pointed out into the vast undifferentiated parking zone, aiming and re-aiming a finger to designate a particular part of it.  I saw roughly where he was indicating and hoped I could find the spot from another angle, as surely would be the issue once we were moving again. Then I gradually worked my way back up the levels to where Lindy was parked and getting worried. We still had plenty of time, but we were within two hours of flight time.

We circled three more times without anything becoming evident to me.  Then finally, with no other choice, we reentered the big circled-P lot and this time worked our way down its aisles as through a labyrinth, trying to get ourselves as close to the terminal as possible. We kept working our way out of seeming dead ends and crossing whole lots to other lots, all the time getting closer to the terminal and within range of where the guy pointed. Finally I could begin to use his “help.” I directed us toward where I thought we should go.

In an obscure corner we came upon four unattended parking spaces marked Euro-Car.  How anyone could find these without major assistance was beyond me!  We ditched the Alpha Romeo, quickly filled out the rental form with date, miles, and gas (full), and then started carting our suitcases and backpacks across the lot.  It was a slow, interrupted process, many stops for readjustment or to get a breath.

Once inside the terminal, I ran downstairs, handed the key and the form to the startled lady at Euro-Car who was waiting on another customer, and then took off before she could say a word. We found the line for Lufthansa.

Fortunately Marco Polo Aeropuerto was a very different scene from Frankfurt—in fact a luxurious airport almost like a spa or museum, very expensive shops around a courtyard, not terribly crowded anywhere, very clean. We got through check-in and security quickly.

Our flight was delayed an hour for an incoming plane, so the line waiting to board, having formed, dispersed for the most part.  Lindy wanted to stay on it. It was such a rush getting here that the change in mood and tone was like falling through endless internal space.  I was struggling with my adaptation to the “flying” thing again. It’s an old ritual—nothing to do but allow the process to seep in, to accept a lack of control or comfort.

My mind wanders.  The Mets begin in the National League playoffs in a day, but I will not see these games. I have never missed the Mets in post-season before.  When I was younger, it would have been unthinkable. Breathe!

The surly-looking guy seated, clutching his backpack, and staring into space might well be on our flight. Passing him while on a walk to the bathroom, I glanced and saw the passport in his fist—Iranian.  I have to fight off the notion that this is ominous.

On line, I set an exercise for myself.  I bend down, take a deep breath, and go through the Korean zen mantra “clear mind, clear mind, clear mind—don’t know,” and vow that, before raising my head, I will give up the Mets, give up the Iranian, give up the flight itself. Then I rise. It doesn’t matter either way—he’s on our plane or he’s not—either way.  Universe after universe.

Still I can’t help noticing—when our queue has almost entirely boarded and he is still seated—an irrepressible gear of relief. Then he stands and gets on the very end of our line—the gear changes back.  “I have given him up,” I remind myself.

The engine roars; the plane gathers speed along the runway.  This is elating too.  Up, up—the water city we never saw beneath us, a brief glimpse, then a choppy ascent through clouds. The weather across Europe is unsettled today, and in USA Today Frankfurt shows rain. It is only an hour flight.  It seems much longer,  as it is quite bumpy, mostly above the clouds or jutting through their edges, every so often patches of land visible.

When we reach Frankfurt, we circle, then descend through an amazing cave of cumulus backlit at many levels in layers like evanescent chambers, now in sunlight, now in darkness. Finally in a hazy overcast, rocking mildly in descent, our plane touches the Frankfurt runway.  For me, that moment is when the next stage of our journey begins.

Our Frankfurt Book Fair passes we have been transporting in our suitcases allow free public transportation in the Frankfurt area, including to our hotel in Mainz, a small city a bit more than an hour outside of town.  In addition we have instructions that this Hotel Hammer has provided for getting from the airport to their front door.  The list of steps starts with a train between terminals and then involves a far more complicated journey than the brief descriptions suggest: down and then up and then down escalators; i.e., we must descend into the bowels before rising into a train station and then must descend all the way down again to get to our precise train’s level.

From our experience with Italian trains, we know more or less how to do this and so aim for the 17:59 to Mainz. Lugging our suitcases and backpacks, we have to race at the last moment, but we make it in time, throw our suitcases up top, and collapse exhausted into seats.  The train is sleek and modern (only later do we find out that our passes do not cover this higher class of transport by express, but since no one checks, we are happily oblivious, clutching our passes in our hands just in case a conductor comes).

We pull out into the city, then over a river with boats, through small towns.  I think, “My grandfather set out from Frankfurt close to a century ago.”  Yes, my mother’s father lived here before he left for Antwerp as a diamond cutter, eventually to meet and elope with my sixteen-year-old grandmother on a business trip to the U.S.

Yet I really can’t bring any but a slightly weary drama to this narration, as though I am an actor in some amorphous movie about someone else that no one will ever film or see.

Since we have all our stuff to cart, Lindy and I disagree about whether we will hire a cab. Having been led by me on some arduous journeys with suitcases that turned out to be far longer than proposed, she wants no part of leaving the station in search of our hotel pulling luggage and weighted down by bags and backpacks. I, as usual, lean the other way, figuring that if our hotel is within a few blocks, we should just walk.  “Let’s at least ask,” I finally say and, against her protest, march to the Information desk.

“Hotel Hammer is across the plaza,” the woman says.

“But don’t we need a cab with all this stuff?” Lindy asks.

“No.  Go outside.  You will see it.  Two minutes walk, probably less.”

Lindy is unconvinced until we actually stand on the steps of the station and see the hotel across the street.  “It would have been a little embarrassing to take a cab,” I tease.

But she is still angry about our last hike from the subway in Manhattan back in May and feels justified.

Hotel Hammer has put us on the sixth floor of a building in which the elevator goes up five.  Yet they are honoring us with the suite.

It is a spacious room.  The drapes when opened expose a huge window looking right out on the square, so that we can see all the traffic in front of the station, pedestrians entering and leaving. It is a great view, well worth the extra flight of stairs.

Since Lindy prefers to rest, I offer to scout the immediate vicinity in search of any bearable restaurant.  Already warned about how bad the food is in Frankfurt plus how prices are jacked up for the fair, I have low expectations for the less cosmopolitan town of Mainz.  When I ask at the front desk, the woman wonders what kind of food I prefer.  I perversely try her on “organic vegetarian,” which she doesn’t understand and then finally acknowledges by saying, “No, no, nothing like that.”  When I ask about Asian restaurants, she indicates there is an abundance of these and gives me so many directions that I leave the front door confused about anything except that I should go to the left for a few blocks and then head away from the train station.

Within a block I see a Thai restaurant, and I note it as a possibility.  Up close it is smoky inside and too much like a bar to settle for it, so I take my second left away from the station.

The street is much more urban and edgy than anything I have yet traversed in Europe.  In the patchwork of evening lights, car headlights, and neon, pedestrians rush along, and vehicles accelerate in spurts between lights. There are all the earmarks of a conventional American city—beggars, businesspeople, amped-up youths, all colors and races.  Big modern buses race along.  Sidewalks are lined with mostly junky shops and restaurants, but really every kind of commerce: electronics stores and fast foods, stylish furniture displays and women getting their hair done late in the day.  Mainz is not the small town I had imagined it to be.

German in the streets has a different resonance from Italian or Slovenian, at times haunting as if the soundtrack of an old movie you know ends badly, but also philosophical and poetic like a Grimm’s fairy tale becoming an anthroposophical parable. This is, after all, the language of Goethe and Kepler too.

I pass a tiny Vietnamese place that looks like a good candidate—a few tables and the chef visible in the front window; I poke my head in and he tosses me a menu. There is English on it and quite a few vegetarian choices. I tell him I will be back with my wife, but I doubt he understands.  The words, though, give me a graceful segue out. I continue a few blocks more before turning left onto an even busier street and find both Japanese and Chinese restaurants two blocks along it in an arcade. I dismiss the Japanese one because it is mainly a conveyor belt of sushi for customers along a bar.  The Chinese one is vast and pretty empty, never a good sign.

I probably should have retraced my steps but, since I have taken three lefts, I figure a fourth one will get me back to the hotel, more or less.  That is a wrong assumption and, after wandering a bit and finding the scenery more residential and less familiar, I ask a woman for the train station and, from her pointing, learn that I have overshot it by quite a bit along my last left and yet have not gone far enough along the previous one.

Back at the hotel I recommend to Lindy that we try the Vietnamese restaurant; it’s small and family-run and not as long a walk as some of the others. Once outside, she comments on how brisk the night is compared to Italy.  We are in advanced autumn.

The chef hands me the menu again and we take seats in a small room in the back, only four tables.  There is one other customer, a matronly well-dressed Japanese woman. We nod, smiling to each other.

As we pick out dishes, it gradually becomes clear that there is a negative here. The piped-in music is really irritating.  Even to call it music is a stretch. It is a moderately loud drumming sound, the same one over and over.  If I had to imagine it being made, I’d picture a guy with a brush, the sort that are used to baste turkeys, laboring over a drum.  He hits it in exactly the same sequence over and over again. It is not a drum sound at all.  It is an off-drum percussion sound, a sort of swish, like shells rattling but not nearly that satisfying. It is more like steam escaping in rhythm but exactly the same rhythm again and again, encompassing less than five seconds. Oblivious and careless more than pounding, its insouciance makes it utterly intrusive and aggravating.  It simply cannot be tuned out. It actually couldn’t be more irritating because rather than hammering away like a drum or rap, it sounds as though it is saying, “Oh I am so cool, just touching my drums with this brush—hear that beat, swish-swish-swish—think I’ll do it again.”  In fact, doubtless it is not a drummer repeating the same six or seven beats in the same rhythm; it is either an electronically generated sound or the recording of a percussion event set in a short loop.

The waitress is almost certainly the chef’s wife, and this restaurant likely is an extension of their apartment, for now that there are fresh customers, she comes out of the hallway past the bathroom, adjusting her blouse.  We ask her to turn down the sound, but she doesn’t understand.  Finally pantomime does it, and she walks to the center of the room and points to a grill in the floor. I had not realized it till then; the sound is coming up through the floor. Her repeated shakes of the head and gestures up and down get across the idea that she can’t lower the music.

I try to conceive how this is possible.  After all, this is their restaurant.

She takes our order, continuing to gesture and shake her head, and then reports our whole exchange to her husband as he labors away over steaming pots.

“I think she is saying that they can’t control the sound,” the Japanese customer offers. “I asked her too and got the same response.  They may call their daughter. She speaks a little English.”

“Can you communicate with them?” I ask.

“No, I am just guessing.  They speak Vietnamese and German; I speak many languages, but neither of those.”

As proposed, the daughter enters stage hallway and addresses us in very slow, careful English, “We no make noise.  Landlord music.  Won’t stop.  We ask.  Many customer angry. Many customer leave. We say, noise bad, make customer go. He no listen.  He no care.”

“Does he mean the music to be for the restaurant or is it just his music?” I ask, somewhat irrelevantly, especially as she doesn’t follow this nuance.

“I go try,” she says.  Returning to the hallway, she turns to the right and enters a previously invisible staircase.  Meanwhile our food comes and we begin to eat.

The daughter returns a few minutes later.  In fact, she comes running down the stairs, thump-thump-thump, as though chased, looking over her shoulder as she readdresses us. “He no listen.  Yell at me.”

I am totally sympathetic.  What madman would impose such a noise on this poor Vietnamese family trying to earn a living?

I do, however, suddenly see, if not a solution, an amelioration.  I go to the far side of the room, lift a giant potted plant and, to the astonishment of Lindy and the Japanese customer, deposit it directly over the grill.  The volume of the sound is reduced by more than half, and the degree of satisfaction is even greater.

I dread the response of the mother and daughter when they see the liberty we have taken with their decor, but the daughter breaks out laughing and goes to get her mother, and they both stand there enjoying the improvisation.

“Maybe we do this,” the daughter says, shaking her finger upward.

It makes me think that the muzak is punitive, and they secretly would like to fight back.  After all, they can blame the rearrangement of furniture on a customer and use it as evidence for their case.  If the guy even cares….

For the rest of the meal we chat with our fellow guest. A retired school-teacher, she is traveling recreationally, has just been in Lithuania; she has a cousin in Minnesota she visited last year.  he wanted to tour Frankfurt but, because of the Fair, could not find accommodations there. She is in Mainz like us, Frankfurt overflow.  I think, “Travel is its own country.”

The daughter suddenly returns, completely re-costumed, looking much more punk.  A small girl, I had thought she was twelve, maybe fourteen the first time. Now I am not so sure.  Lindy guesses seventeen; the former teacher who has a better feel for this kind of thing guesses twenty. That surprises me and changes my sense of her; the “daughter” is not a child at all.

She is actually twenty-two and on her way to a concert by a Japanese pop musician whom she praises to this visitor in hopes that she will take pride in her own fellow citizen.

“Not the type I would know about anymore, not since I stopped teaching,” she tells us later. “A good obedient daughter helps her parents, but when she is twenty-two and there is a show she wants to attend, she maybe helps till the last minute, then changes her clothes, and goes out to meet her friends.”

“Yes,” Lindy says, “you are probably right.  Just think of all the sacrifices her parents made to get her to this point.”

“She is trapped between worlds now,” I add, “but at least she is still somewhat loyal to them.”

We are done eating, and two laconic skinheads ordering take-out have filled the place with toxins despite a “no smoking” sign, so we all depart abruptly.

October 5-7 (Days Twenty-three, Twenty-four, and Twenty-five)

What makes this a travel journal rather than a diary is the unusual situation of “the traveler.” As a traveler I am not bound to regular life; instead I am on a continual adventure of discovery.  I am expected to explore unfamiliar landscapes and engage unexpected cultural situations, to find the extraordinary in the ordinary.  Many of my habitual concerns and cares and unexamined rituals and compulsions can be replaced by acts of improvisation.

The goal of the travel writer is to encounter novelty, anomaly, and paradox at every turn, often from ignorance of geography, customs, or both, and then to find ways to allow the reader vicariously to share this dissonance, to be a stranger in a strange land too—even if the strangenesses are slight.

For these reasons our days at the Frankfurt Book Fair are not a good candidate for travel writing. I am also abridging and altering this section in accordance with https://operajupiter.substack.com/p/the-return-of-the-tower-of-babel-f19, in order not to have make either direct or indirect reference to this event.

I will also run the three days together in a single entry.

.

After breakfast—and I credit Hotel Hammer with the best spread of all on the trip, for they gave us smoked salmon and whitefish, bran muffins, and fresh pineapple—we took the train from Mainz to Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (a trip of something over an hour, a third again as long as to the airport) and then walked to the entranceway to the massive book fair.  Each day we spent the entire day there, meeting people by both appointment and chance.  Then we took the train back to Mainz.  On the third and last evening, Lindy and I met an author, Dr. Klaus Podoll, a specialist on migraines, who had come up from Aachen and taken a room at Hotel Hammer for the express of joining us for dinner and discussing his prospective book.

Trains left Mainz hourly for Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, so we crossed the square to the tracks each morning as determined by the earliest appointment we had and rode into the city.  The many-stop commuter route passed through suburban towns, stretches of forest, across bridges (the most notable giving a dramatic view of a turbulent Rhine), very tall, narrow country houses, and, alongside the track, small farms.  Just the name “Rhine” was an invocation of transnational Europe—ancient, mediaeval, and modern—though, for all its symbolism and role in battles, duchies, and migrations, in the present it was just another muddy semi-urban channel filled with marine traffic.

The most interesting features along the tracks, especially close to Frankfurt, were little “postage stamp” gardens with huts, distinctive uses of the land creating green microenvironments that were packed with information: bright colors, peasant architecture, fences, rows and tiers of crops and property boundaries, and (most of all) a sense of use, habitation, and native ecology—not from the outside in, as a neat idea by publishers thinking about concepts but from the inside out as a folkway and indigenous phenomenology.  An evolution of people and landscape, these gardens were as innate and persistent as the slums were later on.

For me Frankfurt had the same sense of a major metropolis that I have felt in New York or Boston, Montreal or Berlin, London or Mexico City, but not in San Francisco or Seattle or Ljubljana. Its intractable urban quality spread in all directions from any point as if the city would go on forever, imparting an aura of deep-seated cosmopolitan entitlement and the patriotic provinciality of any hub.  Commuter trains converged at the central station from all over, and we filed out of our car into thick crowds milling from various platforms, gathering and dispersing on the street.

The book fair elicited its own phalanx of international commuters advancing down a series of streets, becoming denser the faster we walked.  I liked marking the key turn out of the station by a Syrian Airlines office that you would never see operating in an American city.

When we had completed this communal trek of several very long blocks, reached the pavilions, and gotten our badges out for entry, the real walk began. From the first hall to the eighth (where the English-speaking publishers were quartered) was a hike of eight to ten city blocks, maybe more. The density of the crowd and the constant climbing and descending of stairs and on escalators made it seem even longer that it was.  All day it was daunting to travel back and forth between halls for appointments or to see exhibits in other languages and countries. Imagine eight to ten Javits or Mosconi Centers, running almost unbrokenly together like gigantic quonset huts. Each of the halls—I think eight were active for this fair—had two levels, so there were in principle sixteen separate auditoriums to visit, each one packed with exhibitors, plus some adjunct tiers.

I believe that the first five halls were purely German, so they constituted their own book fair: German mainstream publishing, German spiritual and religious publishing, German science and textbooks, German literature, German art books, German pop culture and graphic novels, etc.  I do not recall quite how these halls were divided up and separated into categories, as I spent very little time in them.  Giorgio, an Italian publisher with whom we were involved in both selling and buying rights, had set himself up at a booth in the alternative-health section of one German hall, and I used my scheduled visit with him there as on opportunity to walk up and down aisles of German homeopathy, yoga, Pilates, anthroposophy, and so on.  I even selected a few titles to be sent to me in the U.S., but not many because of the expense of translation and the difficulty even of assessing a book in German.

The one appointment that Lindy and I had in one of those halls was with Haug with whom we had done business on homeopathic and other alternative-medicine books over many years (almost exclusively selling to them, but recently buying a major book from them on the extracellular matrix and taking on its translation expense.  Haug was not located in the alternative-medicine or religion sections where most of the presses with similar books had booths. They held a privileged perch at the head of the science hall.  When we realized our wrong assumption about where to start looking for the Haug booth (the wrong number sequence becoming evident), we had to run between pavilions to make our time slot with the rights manager.

Most of the other publishers of the world were spread through the sixth and seventh halls at two levels, sharing the territory with international rights agents. French, Spanish, and Italian hung out together with a few kindred languages like Dutch, Portuguese, and Flemish. I believe Turkish and Greek were also in this hall, but they might have been with the other European languages; it is hard to remember the exact site map. The general European hall comprised dozens of languages; for instance, all the Scandinavian and Eastern European tongues. The Arabic publishers were all together too in one of those two halls, adjacent to the non-English African publishers. Then there were separate large zones for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Cambodian, and Vietnamese, plus a vast series of booths representing India, a featured country for the 2006 Fair.

What was notable about so many Indian books was how their titles made them look enticing and relevant to us (plus the fact that they were already in English).  Yet opening them and looking inside revealed an almost entirely different concept of a trade book.  Something called “Native Plants and Vital Medicine” would be a dry taxonomy of local Indian herbs without any exegesis or theory, and even then many of the words would be abbreviated and presented in sentence fragments. Something called “The Planets and Chakras in Healing” could be a collection of citations from ancient texts and devotional comments.  A book on “Spiritual Yoga and Reincarnation” could turn out to be diagrams of postures with prayers and quotes from the scriptures.  So the books with attractive titles turned out to be mainly monographs and tracts, not fleshed-out books, and their sense of devotionalism was sectarian and academic in an Indian, not a Western sense.  Self-referential to the extreme, they had no accessible relevance to any but the most committed readership of advanced practitioners—and those people could best import them cheaply from India in English.

Every language was represented somewhere: Wales (and Welsh), Flanders (and Flemish), Faeroe Islands, Romania, Yemen, Ukraine, Ireland, Cuba, Iran.  My email correspondent who was taking his daughter to the “yoo” to see the “yebras” happened to be after French rights to a particular book that he wanted us to copublish. Thus he asked me to meet with its publisher, Albin Michel.  When I described the scope of the Fair to him by way of explanation for why I was slow to carry out his task, he wrote me back to pick up for him the “Yulu” translation of the “biography of Joe Namath.”

Our home pavilion was mostly English, but it also housed, for instance, the Israeli publishers for no obvious reason I could discern except a cynical one—that it meant that bags had to be checked by police at only one hall—as was in fact the case. Because the Frankfurt Book Fair is in Europe, the English hall of course was more British than American and had its fair share of Australian, New Zealand, South African, and Canadian publishers, including French Canadian ones. It was always necessary to take into account the queue for search at reentry to the hall when hurrying back for an appointment.  You couldn’t just walk into the eighth hall, as you could the others.

The scene was enlivening and enervating at the same time.  It was certainly exciting to be amidst so many languages and so much literature, but the relentless drive of commerce and the mercantile ritual overrode books as knowledge or art and turned them into just another commodity, thus made the whole show seem like any other convention, from funeral directors to new slot machines—a madhouse careening between hoopla and inertia.  Hiking back and forth between halls became more and more laborious and exhausting and, although the situation at times had the feeling of a treasure hunt, it could seem needlessly strenuous and discouraging the next minute and one could feel a hundred years old—“get me out of here!”

Smoke was a problem—if not as severe a problem as I had feared, a dilemma nonetheless. People of course smoked everywhere.  They smoked at their booths. They smoked in the aisles. They smoked in bathrooms, restaurants, and hallways. There was no escape from it. Couples sat at little tables, face to face, each contributing aggressively to a cloud of gas emanating from their area. Smoking was completely artifactual and characterological.

The French section was worse than most, a little like Paris in both the amount of smoke per liter and the ingenuity of cigarette attachment to persona. Sometimes you would think someone wasn’t smoking and the smoke would come trailing from between two fingers or along a lip.

I spent almost a half hour in the Spanish area looking for the Cuban booth in hopes that it would be especially interesting and radical, and I missed it on four straight passes and finally had to inquire because, it turned out, the cloud of smoke issuing from that one small cubicle was so thick that I was looping around it each time. The booth was obscurely situated anyway and, for some idealistic reason, I had assumed the smoke wasn’t coming from Cuba.  Or maybe I expected the mellower scent of cigars.

Many otherwise-tolerant, liberal people go into remarkably bullying and murderous road rages in their cars and feel justified. I am that bad on cigarettes, sorry to say.  Cigarette smoke makes me sick.  It was true in my childhood household: my stepfather grumbled at having to put his cigarette out when it made me carsick or gave me a headache.

These days [again, this is 2006] I am angered by often-hip people’s lack of regard for their effect on their fellow mammals as well as the blatancy with which others impose their acts on the general populace. Try global warming for something really serious, or tiger and elephant poaching for the height of arrogant narcissism.  Add the mindlessness of the act (e.g. service to the capitalist desire/addiction machine even—in fact usually—by socialists, e.g. Cuba the worst fume-pot). All cigarette smoking is, in one sense or another, denial. Though I guess you can say that all pleasure is denial (too)….

Then there is the effrontery of non-American and/or anti-American smokers in Europe who mock America’s strict policies about second-hand smoke, considering them puritanical and invasively fascist rather than environmentally enlightened.

I guess I come off as an American prude on this. I would argue that we were at Frankfurt to do business on publishing rights, not to breathe cigarette-laden air—and yet the latter permeated and dominated the scene and made itself at least an equal to the book business.

These were my two worst experiences with cigarette smoke:

1. I went to a German booth for a scheduled visit with a publisher (Michael Goerden) who supported my writing and got a few of my early books (Planet Medicine and The Night Sky) translated into German years ago.  Since he operated these days out of a large commercial house, I found my way to the heart of the main German pavilion where I was seated by a lady in a zone of tables and brought a bottle of water while I waited (though for some reason Michael never showed up).  A couple in their forties took two seats at my very table (though there were plenty of empty tables all about) and in two seconds had us in a cloud of smoke.  It was the only time on the entire trip I took out my mask and put it on.  Yes, I felt like an alien, but in this case I wanted to make a point.  My goal was to be socially inappropriate. I think I drew one brief astonished dual stare from them, and then they went on talking as if I wasn’t there.  That marked the tipping point when I gave up on Michael and left.
2. I was about to put on the mask in Taste of India, a popular gourmet restaurant near the site of the Fair to which publishing friends graciously took us for dinner (by reservation) on Lindy’s and my second night.  Whereas the Frankfurt halls dispersed the smoke fairly well, this tiny place was a cul de sac for air, a little cave. Thus, when a woman in an arriving group lit up and began casually filling the entire room with smoke as if nothing was happening, I got out the mask. But the publishing executive next to me suggested we all begin waving our menus like big fans and send a breeze her way: “Maybe she’ll take a hint.”  Luckily she had enough social conscience that it worked.

More often, that one breaks the other way, even to the point of fisticuffs in some renegade American taverns.

I spent most of my Frankfurt Book Fair time in the English-speaking hall, as it was where I had my main appointments as well as where w I rested from wandering the halls, polishing off the little boxes of organic raisins and chocolate squares our company was offering.  It was also a convenient location from where I could go out on forays to seek out friends at other companies. The combined exhibit of American publishers provided helpful staff and a bank of computers for fifteen-minute stints (you could come back later, of course, after you gave someone else a chance). All through the day one could send and receive emails vis a vis matters at play in the halls.

As soon as I could get online the first two mornings, I went right to Yahoo and held my breath.  It was like when I was a child and the ballgames ended too late for me to stay up to hear the whole nine innings. Back then I got the final score from the paper, and it came all at once.  By contrast, when you follow a game on radio or television or even pitch by pitch on a computer, you build through a plotline to a conclusion. When you see the score first, you work backward to figure out what happened and try to pick up the rhythm and plot of the game. That splash is more pleasurable in case of a win, as you get to ride back through the details on the breeze of the victory and relish the reversals as well as the scores and squelched opponent rallies, assured that it will come out okay in the end.

Both of our first two days in Frankfurt the Mets beat the Dodgers, not without travails, none of which I suffered, so I had a good storyline in my head and a shot of energy going into the Fair. [In retrospect, it seems strange that I followed baseball so closely then, for I have lost most of my interest in it since.]

I had my best adventures in the Spanish and Scandinavian sections.  Because I had an appointment at 10:00 in the Spanish area on the third morning with Lipsa, a publisher with whom we were already doing business on a bilingual children’s dictionary (and I had no prior appointment elsewhere), I chose not to walk all the way to Hall Eight but instead to stay in the Spanish zone for the hour or so between when we passed it and our slot. That gave me a chance to walk the area, country by country, booth by booth.

Spanish is less expensive to translate into English than German, plus a few Spanish books can be sold untranslated or bilingually in North America, hence the real prospect of finding viable projects here. I came upon one amazing publisher of quirky illustrated books (some surreal, some designed for autistic readership)) from Barcelona plus several other individual interesting titles at various booths, all worth requesting copies, especially one “Egyptian” tarot from Lipsa themselves (they had ten separate decks of tarot cards—from hippie to Marseiiles—with accompanying manuals lined up vertically right next to an extensive and graphic erotica section—the seam conveying an old alchemical conceit). We had thought of Lipsa as a source of children’s books and bilingual picture books, but they were equally at home with hermetic esoterica and “100 Best Postures”—a surprise.

It was also during this hour that I searched for the Cuban booth. In addition to the smoke (which I finally braved), it was boring, a few political tracts, really a cliché of a left-wing bookstore. I was hoping for ecology, economics, and culture.

I was in search of Iceland when I got enticed by the publishing of other Scandinavian countries.  I was particularly taken with a Swedish packager and publisher whose stand was highlighted by a beautiful book called Pingvinliv (Penguins), completely off-topic for us as a company, but, in light of the recent popular movie The March of the Penguins, I thought it would be worth inquiring into the rights for. Others disagreed. I felt vindicated—even if it meant losing the project (a minor disappointment)—when, upon inquiring, I found out that Harper had already bought the rights along the lines of something like $50,000 in hardcover.

The Iceland combined exhibit was made up of about ten publishers.  In targeting it, I was hoping to meet some publishing people that we could reconnoiter with in Reykjavik. First I looked carefully at the books in the stands, many of which were in English and most of those, post-card landscape photographs. Then I inquired of the man in charge whether there were any Icelandic publishers on the wavelength of our topics, enumerating them for him and handing him a catalogue.  It turned out that a company called Salka was publishing interesting Icelandic literature by women as well as some holistic health. He phoned co-owner Hildur Hermothsdotir on his and her cells and set up an appointment for me the next day.  (I have no character on my keyboard or symbol grid for the Icelandic “d” with the inward-bent top and line through it, so I am using the approximation “th” in her surname.  A check of Icelandic orthography not only confirms this substitution but offers the same English “th” for another unusual character cited below.  The “d”-like letter in Hermothsdotir is roughly the voiced “th” of “the”).

Lindy and I showed up the next day at the scheduled time and talked with Hildur for a half hour and, since the connection was promising, we made a time to meet again at her office in Iceland.

I thought that, of the many picture books of Icelandic landscapes, one was particularly powerful, and since there happened to be an English as well as an Icelandic version on the stand, I asked the exhibit manager about it. He told me I was in luck; the publishers were right there.  He pointed to three guys seated around a small table in the booth, drinking beers, deep in camaraderie. One bearded guy from the Leif Eriksson era handed me his card; his name was Ivar Gissurarson (from another perspective, he could have been a sixties veteran out of Berkeley; it’s a matter of context). I gradually figured out that only he and one other guy were from Skrudda, the publishing house responsible for the photo book; his partner looked a bit the way Thor as Superman might dress to become Clark Kent with glasses; he also had an appropriate name Steingrimur Steinthorsson.  (Here a hybrid character that merges a “p” and a “b,” combining bars both above and below the baseline, can be represented by “th,” but a different, unvoiced “th” as in “thorn” or “Thor.”)  “See you in Iceland,” Ivar called out cheerily, as they tipped their bottles to me in unison, the signature vignette of the Fair.

Roger Conover had told me to walk the Arabic pavilion in order to see people completely hostile to my presence and outside the world of books relevant to me.  I did, from Egypt through Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran, Pakistan, and so on, and I didn’t find overt hostility, just insularity. No one even noticed me.  The main product was Korans, or at least there were so many different Korans that they dwarfed everything else on display. Just like elsewhere at the Fair, people were huddled with their own kind, doing business.  After all, that’s what bazaars are for.

The Muslim quarter actually reminded me of the almost completely American Christian and evangelical publishing lineup adjoining the Israeli area in Hall Eight (for what irony of juxtaposition one can only make an educated guess—mine is biblical archaeology).  Both groups—Muslim and Christian—seemed private, sepulchral, and sacramental.  They cast different ambiances but the same mood of smugness and clannishness, as though they were about the real thing in this den of secularity and heathen blasphemy.  From my standpoint they were equally sad representatives of Allah or Jehovah. Given the grandeur, complexity, paradox, and startling magic of the universe itself, novelty and dynamic form are really God’s only token for us to judge him by, whoever “he” is.  He may be a whirling dervish, but he is certainly not a pope or mafia boss.

On Lindy’s and my first night at the Fair we were invited to the big Bertelsmann party, as we had been in the process of changing our distributor (after twenty-five years!) from Publishers Group West to Random House.  Newcomers to the Bertelsmann family, we were going to attend our first social function sponsored by them.  We could not have been better situated for an opulent, spiffy affair, as we were in the home country of Random House’s parent and at the central publishing show on the planet.

As we left Hall 8 that afternoon, we took a meandering path to the exit, as little parties were breaking out here and there throughout the hall as the hour approached 17:00, with different publishers, packagers, agencies, etc., setting out cocktails, wine, and cheese in their booths.  Each of these drew a small mob, blocking aisles, creating second-hand smoke, and in general making a labyrinth out of the hall.

People suggested that the best way to procure a cab was to go across the street to the Marriott.  Also we needed to “kill” some time—about an hour—before leaving for Bertelsmann’s event. We spent about a half hour waiting our turn in a brisk autumn breeze.  No one, of course, cared that we weren’t guests of the Marriott because no one was checking.  The doorman simply unloaded arriving cabs and ushered in the next party on line.  It was a wonder that every cabbie in town didn’t flock here, but in fact there were many gaps when everyone just stood around waiting for the next action, and then finally the line moved up a link.

We got a cab with a pleasant-enough-looking unshaven driver.

It is hard to characterize the journey that followed.  A map of it might have looked like an ant trail on terrain where sugar had been intermittently and randomly dropped.  I pictured the equivalent of a route and distance roughly matching—if we were to use Manhattan as a stand-in—from 57^th and Broadway to 72^nd and 5^th Avenue.  Instead what we got was approximately 95^th Street and York Avenue to Park Slope in Brooklyn. Only it was far more complex. We shot down obscure avenues to reemerge on busy streets, then swung off those down narrow alleys and worked our way through other deserted sections of town onto different busy streets. Probably half a dozen times I assumed we were in the last stretch, only to have us once again working our way corner by corner through an empty zone.  Every now and then I shot Lindy a glance, as my paranoia about being shanghaied or, less frightening, taken literally for a ride was rising by the moment.  Yet the fact that we always returned to busy thoroughfares tended to allay concern.

It was a great relief when the ride ended and we pulled up in front of the awning of the Arabella Sheraton Grand with lots of other traffic.  The fare was seventeen and some odd euros, and I threw in a tip. The driver, who had not spoken the entire time, said in perfect English, “You probably thought I was showing you the city, but I saved you fifteen minutes.  It was the only way I could keep you out of rush-hour traffic.”

“Are you from Frankfurt?” I asked, so relieved to get there I really didn’t care whether we had been saved fifteen minutes or scammed, yet I felt like establishing contact with this figure who had been a sullen sphinx the whole time.

“Born here, lived here my whole life.  I’ve driven a cab twenty-six years.”

“How do you have such good English?”

“I learned it in school, but driving around Anglophones gives me a lot of practice.”

The Bertelsmann party was the mother of all parties, at least by my standards. It trumped anything I had attended in my childhood while growing up in the context of my father’s hotel.  After all, this was a party for not only publishing people, guests of Random House et al., but all the departments, groups, and clients of Bertelsmann Media and Entertainment.

Relatively early, we greeted by the Random House executives in the lobby.  Upstairs we passed through halls of food, unaware initially that we were surrounded by alcoves of different cuisines. The crowd was dense to begin with, and one moved slowly.  In not too long the area became absolutely packed and I had to maneuver a step at a time, navigating gradually around bodies. Smoke was inevitable and simply had to be endured.  What was striking to me was how many well-dressed young women stood alone at the tiny tall chairless cocktail tables working their smokes hard, no food plates, some with a drink.

I started at the fruit salad, as it contained, along with fresh papaya, mango, figs, watermelon, cantaloupe, and other familiar items, a kind of shelled fruit I had never seen—about the size of a big strawberry—and some slightly larger spiny balls.  (I later saw a poster of exotic tropical fruit and would say that almost for certain there were cherimoyas and lychees and possibly taramillos and jaboticabas.)  These were all worth trying once for curiosity, though no one else but me was doing so.  I finally returned to compulsively taking from the figs and papayas.

After constructing the equivalent of a whole meal from vegetables, egg rolls, and salads in that area, I heard there was a whole sushi room and headed there.  It took quite a while navigating through the crowd, but I sidled onto a short line to get to choose from an entire sushi menu being set out on platters by three chefs working their razor knives at acrobatic speed.  There were plenty of salmon, shrimp, avocado, unagi, and uni rolls, landing almost as fast as people could gather them up.  I regretted now all the food I had already eaten.

Working my way out of the sushi room through its back end, I entered an entire Chinese restaurant and then went through an alcove in which a tall chef with a white hat was carving a roast beef for waiting carnivores.  I even accepted a piece from him for old time’s sake. I ate much too much, vaguely reassuring myself with a combination of fallacious camel logic plus a culinary version of trophy tourism. Of course, I couldn’t really eat enough that I wouldn’t be hungry again the next day.

Along the way, I ran into Charlie Winton, the founder of Publishers Group West and publisher of Avalon Books, just entering the affair.  The Berkeley equivalent of a publishing superstar, Charlie had originally developed PGW from a tiny wayward-books warehouse into the largest independent distributor in the world with his partners, expanded it for some twenty-five years, and then sold it a few years ago to a conglomerate, Advanced Marketing Systems, in order to take his fledgling series of imprints culled from within PGW under the imprint Avalon into the big-time New York-based publishing market. Although Avalon was still a PGW client, Charlie was not an unexpected sight at any “big party” anywhere.

“Welcome to Bertelsmann,” he said, shaking my hand, a somewhat wry introduction, since he was not associated with Random House in any known way.  “PGW never threw parties like this, did they?” he added.

In fact, PGW had thrown the splashiest parties at various American Book Expos, as well as seasonally in Berkeley, and they stood for the acme of a very different kind of party—plenty of decent enough food, very loud music, and hot bands, often of national stature. But PGW never tried to throw a royal party with the most expensive culinary arts available.

“I thought the PGW parties were pretty good,” I assured him.  “You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

“We never had this many suits.”

“No, and you never had this many Germans.”

“No, never this many Germans.”

With that we continued in our separate directions, and I found myself standing alongside a huge platter of strawberries around a fountain shooting chocolate for dipping them.

I scribbled down some journal notes on a piece of paper at the party:

“Almost everyone here is younger than Lindy and me.  It takes a party like this to make our age evident to me.  Anyone older than us looks like a lifer at this business, a walking ghost.  When did this happen?  When did we move through time to this outpost at the beginning of our old age?”

“…the bright lights of the transitory temporal world…”

“We are not pretty enough mammals to be having such a party, such a spread of plants and other animals.  Most other mammals at a feast would be more beautiful, less decadent, merely guileless. Picture a tiger kill of an impala or the culinary activity around a waterhole.” I could be accused of hypocrisy here but, after all, it was a celebration for the business of words, more or less at core, and the White Man has always spoken with forked tongue, all the way up the corporate ladder from the hunting band and tribe, so why stop now?

“It was like I imagine Versailles,” a friend said on the way out.

“I’d say a little more Caligula,” was another’s comment.

We took a cab back to Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, easy to hail with so many people arriving and few leaving, and it took a fraction of the time (and cost) to get there.  On the platform a young couple was passionately necking, addressing each other in intense German mostly but saying the “I love you” part in English.  Once on the train they began to spat and, even before we left the station, they were screaming at each other. Then the woman got off and stood on the platform, shouting back at the guy, seemingly challenging him to come and get her. The guy started screaming at her to get back on the train and then began saying “Fuck you!” over and over again. A third party who may have known them, or may not have, tried to intercede and got shoved against the side of the train by the guy.

We were parked at that particular station for quite a while, while the woman just stood there, mouthing back. Soon men in crowds poured on, some speaking German, others Turkish; the car filled up, and the couple was dwarfed.  She never did get back on. Then we departed the city by night.  I wrote: “Dark ride through eternal urban landscape of man, the sacred city in the vortex of secular and profane time.”

We passed over lit roads and bridges, saw people loitering in bus stations, slumbering farmlands, a giant DB tower over a toy city in the distance. As lights floated by outside like specters of future technology, the German voices around us make it feel like a subway on another planet.

The last night in Frankfurt as Lindy and I rode back on the train, I wrote: “This is another huge subway system, less well-known than the famous ones of the Earth, not New York, not Boston, not even London or Berlin. It is Frankfurt, its own place, its own universe, where people live their whole lives and die, riding these trains. I think both of my grandfather Henri and my brother Jonathan.  The former started out here on his courtship of Sally Nassberg, traveled the world, householding in Belgium, South Africa, Seattle (during the Depression), and Mount Vernon, New York. The latter saw only New York City but imagined Europe repeatedly in his poems and essays, filling his mind with landscapes from history and literature, so that now, a year and a half after he stabbed himself to death in a Connecticut boarding house, I am watching Germany partly for him, trying to transmit to him a vision of being here, on a subway train that is not New York  but where our grandfather came from.”

Other Frankfurt notes:

• Lindy and I were in the Greek section of the pan-European pavilion when a thunderstorm erupted.  It was so loud on the tin roof that it sounded initially like a turbine or a plane taking off.  It was too much white noise, too sustained to be a terrorist attack, so I just listened in wonder to the music.
• Our daughter Miranda’s first novel, No One Belongs Here More Than You, was debuting at the Book Fair at the booth of her agent Andrew Wylie (a story from it had just appeared in The New Yorker).  The U.S. rights were owned by Scribners, but galleys were set out for purchase in other languages.

There was something special about switching roles from that of publishers to that of “proud parents” and introducing ourselves to her representative at the agency, a woman named Sarah. After we enthused about our daughter from different perspectives, Sarah introduced us to the boss, Andrew Wylie.  I didn’t size him up properly and was a bit off-guard, having lapsed into my parental mode, and I reminded him that we met in the very early ’70s when he was still a poet, at a gathering that included Kenward Elmslie and Joe Brainard at a restaurant on the Lower East Side. It was a superfluous comment, and this guy, who now cruised his booth like a David Bowie clone, commented aerily, “Sounds like a charming evening, I’m sure.”

Welcome back to midtown!

• Edible food wasn’t as inaccessible as rumored.  The fact that India was a featured country at this show meant that a credible Indian restaurant operated above the Asia pavilion.  It maybe wasn’t the best Indian food, but one could get lentils, daal, naan, and curried vegetables slapped over rice for the equivalent of about $16 a shot.  Plus, it wasn’t all that crowded compared to other restaurants at the fair.  Lindy and I made the hike there together each day.
• I have no idea why my neck and back ached so.  My backpack wasn’t that heavy.  All I could figure out, using an internal somatic inquiry, was that all the tense talking went from my jaw through my neck into my vertebrae and associated tendons and ligaments.  When I began doing Feldenkrais exercises with my mouth and tongue, the pain eased a bit.

On the second night of the fair, we boarded the train at Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof for the late run to Mainz.  Reclined in separate somewhat-exhausted stupors on what seats were available, we were thinking our own thoughts as the train began rolling.  By the time it left the station the car had become quite crowded without being totally packed, and a number of latecomers had standing room only.

Across from us a conventionally handsome, if slightly rumpled young man was reading typed pages in English, occasionally writing in the spaces between words and lines. He had earphones on, and my impression was that he was both reading and listening to song lyrics and making edits to them on the pages. The writing was about war, loss, aerial bombing, love, and alienation—not bad at all.  My fantasy was that these were his own songs.

At the next stop four older teenagers burst in, nuzzling beers and shouting at each other in German. Out of control, they bumped into a beefy guy holding the hand of a young girl, and spilled beer over both of them.  Brushing himself off, the guy began yelling at them, but they ignored him, continuing their banter as if nothing had happened, even spilling a little more.  At the next stop, as though spontaneously impelled by the jolt of the train and opening doors, the group toppled out like loose marbles and went staggering across the platform.

“Arts four,” muttered our berth companion, or something like that.  I jumped on the occasion to start a conversation, asking him what that meant.

“They don’t want jobs.  In fact they refuse work.  We call them ‘arts four’; that’s their future.  You were looking at their present and their future, all in one.”

I pointed to the pages.  “Your lyrics?” I asked, rolling the dice.

“They are.”

“Why in English?”

“You can’t write this shit in German!”

I explained that we were book publishers and were just at the Fair.  “Oh, publishers, my luck!  How d’ya like to see some more lyrics?”

“No, we’re book publishers.”

“Who knows?  Publishers know publishers.”  After I gave him a card he tore a scrap of graph paper off a pad and scribbled down his website and name: www.aronsrod.de; under it, Frank “Hugo” Borger.  Then he elucidated: “I have one ‘a’ in Aron so that it’s not so biblical. And I go by Hugo rather than Frankie because when I left home to do music, my parents said, ‘If you’re going to go that way, you need another name.”

More questions elicited a fuller biography. Frank was half-German, half-Czech, in his early forties; he spent childhood summers with his grandparents in the Czech Republic (or what was then Czechoslovakia) and loved it there, now misses the innocence of youth, “Do I ever!”  He’s been playing with every imaginable sort of band for seventeen years and finally got a decent group together, his present bunch.  They’ve recorded one song so far.  “It’s not very good, though. The words got swallowed by the base.”

A couple of stops before Mainz, three military-looking transit police boarded.  “Nice red caps, boys,” Hugo declared (in English) as they passed us.

October 8 (Day Twenty-six)

Lindy and I were up early on this travel day to meet Klaus Podoll in the Hotel Hammer breakfast room. The night before, the three of us had hiked to the nearby Chinese restaurant for dinner—and we ranged over many topics.

Looking a bit like Truman Capote and a bit like a hobbit elder, Klaus was a neuropsychiatrist working in a clinical setting at the university hospital in Aachen while specializing in migraine, thus was a wealth of information—about modern medicine, the state of psychotherapy in Germany, the history and treatment of migraine, the neurophenomenology of migraine, and his specialty, migraine art.  He had brought along a binder of 350 or so slides of paintings by migraineurs, which were to form the backbone of a book that he hoped we would publish—part clinical text and taxonomy of migraine, part outsider art.  We viewed these, page by page and category by category—history of migraine, scotomata, social consequences of migraine, the geography of pain, etc.—in the Hotel Hammer library.  The binder was now waiting beside Klaus’ tea for us.

After our meeting Lindy and I set off with Klaus in search of an amazing fountain ostensibly nearby.  The hope was that the word “fountain” along with Klaus’ German would get us there.

Mainz was quiet on a Sunday morning, comparatively little traffic, sunny but cold, maybe fifty-five degrees.  The night before, there had been carousing in the square before the station, in fact all the way till dawn, so that I woke and dozed to its various cadences.  Any signs of that were entirely erased.

As with journeys to other destinations while traveling, the path to the fountain was nonlinear despite Klaus as our interpreter.  It might have been linear if we had known where the object was, but the original straightforward directions from the front desk at the Hammer required three course corrections en route.  I don’t know if this is because there was more than one memorable fountain in Mainz or because the route involved diagonal unaligned streets. We basically had to retrace our steps partway to the Chinese restaurant and then veer off to the right. Picking the right avenue and going the right distance were the main challenges.

Whereas I enjoyed engaging the riddle itself and listening to the duets of Klaus making his inquiries in German, Lindy began to worry about our getting lost and missing the flight.  I had to keep promising, “One more block and, if we don’t see it…,” and then making the same promise again until it seemed sort of empty, even to me.  I was determined to find the great fountain and sure we had plenty of time.  Yet if it hadn’t been for Klaus’ confidence and resolve not to be defeated in his native land on the matter of a simple fountain that was surely within a block or two, my stubbornness would have been way outvoted by Lindy’s anxiety. This time we had a guide and referee.  Plus the conversation held our interest, as we heard a chronology of Klaus’ life and career including how he arrived at his specialty (which started with his sister’s migraines and required several fortuities and synchronicities along the way).

The fountain finally materialized in the distance, backlit by a rising sun so that what we saw from a block away was its amorphous corrugated silhouette and fine particles of spray.  Close-up, it was a deviously complex object, unlike any fountain I had seen.  Its golden-brown structure was obviously metallic, though it was unclear what alloy, possibly bronze from its color, though it had a tinny look.  Rising on four irregularly shaped girders that roughly resembled directional flaps on airplane wings or Venetian blinds, the statue aspect was a higgledy-piggledy of little doll figurines attached at various angles to the girders so that they dominated the underpinnings.

At any distance beyond close-up, the figures blended with the girders, and the snarled debris stood out as if a piece of tangled, abandoned metal from some large industrial machine.  It could have been an exposed turbine, twenty feet high, expanding slightly as it rose to give a reverse conical appearance.

Each figurine a foot or so tall, these statuettes were fairies, witches, elves, beggars, urchins, Druid musicians, knights, shamans with huge masks, mermaids, and peasant kings and queens.  Many had crowns or long, pointed hats like upside-down funnels such that they seemed relatives of the tin woodman from Oz. I would guess there were between fifty and seventy-five such characters altogether, some joined together in groups, others hanging separately, some holding musical instruments, some bearing extremely long lances or tridents, others with the arms in gestures. Many anomalous objects were distributed among these figures; I could identify them only by free association with other things they probably were not: a torch, the tentacles of a squid, an old clock, an ox’s skull, two joined astrolabes, etc. These figures were attached at various degrees of depth, and the topmost ones danced precipitously above the statue’s edges, the feet of many of them alone attached to the main body such that it looked as though they could be ripped off by a strong wind. One of these crowning effigies was a crescent moon in the profile of a face.  Klaus guessed that these were fairy-tale representations associated with the work of Friedrich Schiller, the local writer after whom the fountain and square were named.  Schiller had been a poet, playwright, and associate of Goethe.

Water shot from the fountain in no consistent or predictable fashion. In some areas spouts between figures produced a compact stream like a hose; in others liquid splattered or gushed.  The effect was like the chaos and white noise of a waterfall.

We circled it, individually scanning the details in the floodlight of the sun.  Then I took several close-ups, and Lindy photographed Klaus and me posing near enough to feel the spray. [Sometimes my missing photographs seem quite unfortunate.]

Back at the hotel, Lindy and I collected our stuff and started on our journey to the airport.  When we got to the platform, we suddenly noticed that our train was not coming to the track where it was scheduled (as in Italy, the electronic board beside the track trumped the printed logs posted throughout the station).  A train to Vienna was now on the track designated for the airport, whereas our train was on the other side.  We moved across the platform, and the electronic board proved true to its word.

Once inside the terminal, we got on a very long line that snaked around half its circumference.  I didn’t see how Icelandair, with only one open window and check-in person, could process us all in time, but suddenly an army of clerks arrived in tandem, and the queue began moving like a disturbed snake and never stopped.  The passengers seemed to be a mixture of Icelanders, some returning from the Fair, and Americans using Icelandair as a carrier for visiting Europe.  For them Reykjavik was only a stop to change planes.

We stood beside a woman from Boston in that situation, and she regretted not getting to see Iceland and vowed to do a layover like us the next time.  I waved to Ivar, the erstwhile Skurdda publisher, as he passed us en route to the end of our line.

At the security checkpoint I was selected for some sort of experimental test and invited into a small nearby room where my CD player was checked with a chemical wipe. “I bet you always wondered what we do behind these doors,” a female custodian offered.  I didn’t, but I appreciated her joviality.  Since we had plenty of time, the only bad part was that either one of two things happened: in the haste of repacking my backpack I never actually got the CD player back from them or it slid out when I opened the pack on the flight.  In any case it wasn’t there when I looked for it in Reykjavik.  Or maybe it was a telekinesis experiment and they sent it somewhere else in the universe.

After security we trudged quite a distance down an empty hallway to the gate.  There was no seating at all.  Everyone had to stand or sit on the floor.  Actually there were four chairs, so winners of these thrones jealously guarded them, selecting proxies when they left for the bathroom.  Only when it was a half hour before boarding did the staff reveal a previously hidden waiting room, unlocking its doors and letting us in, as they checked our passports and boarding passes again.

The day was clear and sunny, and the rivers of Europe wound through a map of farmland and cities beneath us.  Then we were over the sea and didn’t see land again for over an hour: Scotland and its isles. I sat by the window because that’s pretty much all I do on flights: look down.  Lindy had an engaging companion on the aisle side, Helga, an employee of Iceland Red Cross, and they chatted almost the whole flight, first about literature, then about Iceland.  The exchange began when Helga took out Brooklyn Follies, the book she was reading. It was by Paul Auster, so Lindy said, “He’s a friend.”

Helga was surprised but delighted: “I just love everything he writes.  I am going to finish his book on the flight and I don’t want to.”

We expected to be met at the airport by a man we knew only by email: Birgir Hilmarsson, the director of the Upledger Institute of Iceland, the organization specializing in craniosacral therapy and allied modalities and one of our main copublishers.  Birgir had purchased the rights to a children’s book that we had copublished on compassionate touch, a euphemism for teaching craniosacral therapy in grade schools.  That’s how I got his name, and for a long time he was my only contact in Iceland. I wrote him on and off with questions about issues as they came up.  I initially corresponded with him in late July about lodging, and he helped us reserve a hotel room.  Not knowing anything about our tastes or budget, he first emailed a general lodging website for Reykjavik from which I chose a few possibles.  He investigated those for price and location and, without checking back with me, booked us a room at Hotel Fron, which turned out to have a better off-season rate than posted online (I had considered its web rate as the top range of what we were willing to spend, about $170, but it was forty dollars less, so Birgir felt it was okay to go ahead and reserve it).

He and I then corresponded about getting together once we were in the country.  He was maneuvering his schedule, trying to calculate how much time he could free up to take us around.  As he didn’t know anything about us and we didn’t know much about him (beyond our craniosacral connection), our correspondence became a dance of leaking information to each other while trying to gauge if there were matches of temperament and lifestyle. Once he confirmed that we really wanted his company and would not consider him an intrusion on our vacation, he offered us two or three days and said also that a friend of his might be able to take us around on another day in a four-wheel drive.

By then he knew our age, general interests, and cautions, but I had no corresponding profile of him at all—I didn’t know how old he was or what he looked like.  Without focusing much on it, I picked out in my mind a generic sort of middle-aged body-worker and gave him a European sophistication. I imagined someone who was serious, even a bit stuffy, and very, very busy with his clients, teaching, and management.

As our plane got into the vicinity of Iceland, we were soaring above thick clouds, and I was basking in my t-shirt in the sun. The flight had been smooth, so I was relatively mellow.  Then we began to descend into the bleak northern drizzle and, by the magic of this giant object made of metal that floated on an ocean of air, we came to where the Viking had first come a century more than a millennium ago in their dragon-prowed boats. The coastline appeared through the fog, a thin cursive with waves slapping against it.  Then we were over land, coal black earth as if scorched, no obvious trees or other vegetation, spare towns like Yukon outposts, a smattering of dots around a road, aluminum encampments on the Moon (“Astronauts trained here,” Helga informed us).  The landscape had a sense of vast emptiness, an ultimate blank.  Here man’s works, even those of native biology, rested lightly with a sense of unfinished morphology out of which human culture and phenomenology were yet to arise.

Then we were back over the sea, small craft and one giant fishing boat.   A lighthouse. Descending, low over the waves, that cursive coastline again. Thumping down on the runway and traversing the tarmac, we saw almost exclusively big Icelandair jets parked at their home port.

Then we were walking through that elegant wooden-floored airport at which our trip began.

As we filed through customs, I began to look around for who might be Birgir.  Holding a large, unmissable sign marked “Grossinger” was a handsome young man, mid thirties, perhaps early forties, holding the hand of a girl of about two, a white-blonde cherub of the north.  “This is Victoria,” he said, as he shifted her to his left arm and greeted us with handshakes.  No doubt who would have played this guy in the movies: Mark Ruffalo.  He was rugged and cheery-smiled with a couple of days of stubble, a hair beefier than the actor and obviously more Norse, fairer and more baby-faced.  After leading us outside, he announced he would go fetch the car, and it was soon evident why.  A hard wind blew rain in spurts across the pavement. Iceland was twenty degrees colder than Frankfurt so, after keeping pace with him through the revolving door, we quickly retreated inside the terminal to wait for his return.

“What a handsome man,” Lindy exclaimed, “and what a beautiful child.”

Birgir pulled up in a small van, helped us load our things in the rear.  Then he strapped his daughter into a car seat.  Lindy joined her in the back, and I rode up front with the driver. Right from the get-go Victoria protested the introduction of strangers.  It was necessary for Birgir to reach his hand in the back and offer it for her embrace to quiet her.  She also had a pacifier and a small doll, but she routinely tossed these on the floor and then wailed so that Birgir had to reach for one or the other and retrieve it.

He was unflappable.  Without losing any of his calm or ease, almost as though whistling without a whistle, he would reach back and get these items from the floor again and again, sometimes with Lindy’s help, and hand them back to Victoria (though she much preferred if Lindy was not involved in any way). This meant that his eyes left the road for disconcertingly long periods but, if there was peril in that, he didn’t evidence it.  He just kept smiling and speaking to her in Icelandic, while carrying on a conversation with Lindy and me in English.

The Reykjavik airport was actually in Keflavik, about an hour from the city. The weather got gustier and rainier as we proceeded, but the car was kept straight as an arrow. Birgir had a light touch on the wheel, no hands at times, guiding it back with a finger at others.  He was master of the vehicle.

Outside, the landscape was strikingly barren, yet not barren in any familiar way. It was a big open plain in all directions to a horizon of ungaugeable distance except for the intermittent appearance of the sea to our right.  More than just open, it was as though it had recently been made. The ground was uneven and irregular, with huge chunks of it pancaked up.  The lack of any trees or relief made it seem asteroidal—not a single tree anywhere, none in the foreground, none in the near distance, none toward the horizon. It was as though trees hadn’t yet been invented.  Yet the lava was covered with a light green vegetation that almost glowed in the soft grayish purple light from the clouds. This ground cover could have been a grass or clover, but it didn’t quite read as that.  On closer approaches to the road, it became evident what it was: moss.  Birgir confirmed.  Moss-covered lava stretched unabated, as if to infinity. Where the ground wasn’t green or white, depending on the variety of moss, it was meteorite black.

This was another planet, a planet at the beginning of its life.

The landscape shifted as we went along.  At times moss-covered lava was its entirety.  At others a dark sea reflected a bluish sheen. Moss was occasionally mixed with patches of other plants, yellowish shrubs, some sedges and grasses, all of it sparse and scrubby. As noted, the color of the moss varied between green—a kind of chartreuse or lime—to patches of white like lichen. The colors went in a cycle; the moss would be green for a long while, then suddenly white, then back to green, then intermittent zones of green and white.  Much of the time, a bare-bones fence bordered the road. I wondered about that, and Birgir said it was to keep the sheep off the road during the summer, but they were all indoors now.

We soon learned, to our surprise, that Birgir’s main job was as a Reykjavik policeman, a role he had filled for a decade.  He had taken part of the week off from policework, not craniosacral therapy, to host us but also to be with Victoria, who actually lived up north with her mother. He explained that he had discovered craniosacral therapy a few years ago when reading an ad in the Reykjavik newspaper. He enrolled in the advertised course and was completely won over by the system.  “At first I didn’t get the rhythm at all. I thought, ‘What is this? I’m not going to do this.’  I was used to a different sort of massage. It took me a long time. But I’ve got it now.”

Birgir’s English was quite good and, upon my comment about that, he noted that from age twelve everyone in Iceland had to learn English. Plus he had also hung out in Daytona Beach for a few months with a school friend during his youth, and he had been back to Florida and Boston for a number of courses at the Upledger Institute.

Lindy asked if he had studied any other massage.

“Yes, I studied much massage and physical therapy before, and I thought I might want to do that, as a career. You see, there is a school here, what for you would be between high school and college, and that’s when I decided to learn policework, so it’s been my job, but now I am changing.”  Since starting craniosacral therapy, he had been ambitious, purchasing the fledgling local Upledger branch from another therapist who had since moved to Denmark.  Now he was in the process of expanding it with his partner and girlfriend, Erla.

At times the coastline was broken into complex patterns of inlets, lagoons, and ragged shoreline with small islands.  So covered with moss that it grew over their lips down to waterline, they seemed less conventional islands than furry green creatures bathing with their heads underwater.  The topography was so irregular and the islands and lagoons so varied in scale and shape over such great spans that any inventory of its morphology would take hours.  There was just so much of nothing, so many shapes and angles of it, like the tree that falls in the forest unheard again and again.  It was not that no one heard or saw it, but that there were so many of them no one could count or even notice. The islands themselves ranged in size from a molehill to an acre or so, and in shape from near round or little oval hillocks to torso-shaped and many-appendaged blobs.

In the lava closer to shore were also many sizes and shapes of delicate, absolutely black pools, probably freshwater, with little white moss islands in some of them.  Their sides were very steep, suggesting small wells.

Occasionally a farm appeared toward the water.  These buildings were the most ramshackle domiciles I had ever seen, like something left over from the Sagas. They were not even abandoned farms from other centuries so much as archaeologies that could never have been inhabited, beyond ghostlike, in a landscape that had not a tree, not an animal, a rash of flowers here or there or a stand of sedges.  (Later I saw a popular local photo book entitled something like “Abandoned Farms.” Clearly these had their own aesthetics and bare beauty.)

As we got closer to Reykjavik, we passed small modern villages that had a glass and modular look.  A golf course interrupted lava, alternately black and shamrock.  Then we entered a larger town, also very modern and new, with clean lines and right angles, sharp-angled buildings rising on small hills, perfect rectangles and squares, looking as though they were made of painted metal but actually, according to Birgir, colored concrete.  They were governed by a tendency toward bright colors, blue, purple, pure orange, and pure yellow, a few shades of red, plus the requisite white and off-white.  Colors were a needed antidote to lot dealt by volcanic nature.  The first such town was Hafnarfjordur; two towns he later was Kopavogur where Birgir casually remarked that he lived. No, Reykjavik was too expensive.  He had the clinic in his house.

Outside Reykjavik huge Hitachi Caterpillars worked like advance robot scouts on this asteroid, building a settler base.  Then we were in the remote northern diocese of Reykjavik.  Like everything else, it fell entirely differently in reality than in the imagination—but then that’s what reality is for, even as that’s what the imagination is for.

In some ways Reykjavik was more ordinary than expected.  It offered none of the ornate architecture of other small European cities we had been to; yet it also didn’t coalesce into a giant urban area. The entry had much of the feel of a main street in a small North American, particularly Canadian, city.  The buildings weren’t old in a mediaeval-castle sense but in a northern-European sense. A late (870-900 AD) settlement ripened into a somewhat history-less look.  The basic architecture was rectilinear and spare, old-fashioned structures, clean lines, a definite Scandinavian signature—whatever that means.

We were soon on the main shopping street, Laugavegur, and it was quite narrow by most standards, even European, shops and apartments cozily on either side, pedestrians flowing over into the road and slowing traffic which was already creeping. Many of the buildings were flat-looking with occasional flourishes, like sides tapered in scalloped steps, or rounded turret-like balcony-windows on a façade, or multiple pyramidal skylights and roofs.  Everything was sharp—black on white, occasionally white on black, glass on white, also convex on concave, concave in convex, depth and relief defined unambiguously along surface lines.  Everything was also cleanly framed, even though one building would be thin, tall, and rounded with colonnades and the next one would be long and flat with long, flat verandas. Window panes were often a distinctive feature, with the mouldings between the glass asymmetrically located on the vertical axis so that the lower two viewing areas were tall and ample and the upper two correspondingly negligible like attic windows, the overall shape of the framing that of a Christian cross. In general, buildings tended to have either patterns of many small windows or tall thin ones like these.

Birgir was an aggressive urban driver too, as he alerted us to the approach of Hotel Fron a few blocks ahead, then accelerated where there was no lane and pulled right up on the sidewalk in front of the hotel’s entrance.  I figured he was a policeman, he wasn’t going to get a ticket; and anyway, this was probably the kind of standard delivery he wouldn’t flag either.

Hotel Fron was sleek and modern. Its small lobby featured a huge wall television screen showing some sitcom in Icelandic. Holding Victoria aloft, Birgir helped us in with the bags with his other arm, making sure of our reservation, and then he stood there with a hotel-provided restaurant guide, making suggestions, of which one stood out: Anaestu Grosum, a vegetarian place that he thought was within a block of the Fron. Then he confirmed an earlier plan—he would pick us up to take us to the Blue Lagoon in the morning; he would be in front of the Fron at 10:00.

The clerk placed us in the out building, a brief walk across a patio out the backdoor to another door, then an elevator up three flights.  Our room was large, clean, and relatively unadorned; in fact, it was two separate rooms with a door separating the bedroom from a combination living room and kitchen with stove, refrigerator, closets of dishes, and drawers of silverware. The free-standing radiators were so thin that one might think they were masquerading as photovoltaic cells.  The overall feel was pleasant, a bit chalet-like and northern. Hot water out of the tap was strongly sulphur-smelling, but the cold was regular: a paradox— we had occasionally experienced the reverse in the U.S.

Not having had any clear lunch meal, we set out immediately to explore, figuring we’d also find a restaurant for an early dinner.  Heading down Laugavegur, we stared at everything like the sightseers we were: shops, restaurants, apartments, the closely-mortared cobblestone for streets. Overall, Reykjavik had a Hans Christian Andersen appearance; it was a bit of a gingerbread city. Most of the street names were unmouthable linguistic blocks, ten letters or more, making for very long, thin signs on lamps and stanchions. One sidestreet ending at a towering Mormon-like church was Skolavorthustigur, the “th” being actually a bent “d” (I won’t try to add the accents and diacriticals). Long scrambles of letters like these distinguished not just street signs but everything: store names, traffic directions, the writing on objects in shop windows, and newspapers and books. For instance, block print on the building across the street from the Fron said Rakarastofan Klapparstig above a cartoon caricature of the head of a “sumo wrestler.”

We were amid ancient words: Icelandic is closest of all the Scandinavian languages to the root tongue—North Germanic and Old Norse in the case of Icelandic and Norwegian. It is also nearest to the roots of German itself as well as Old Dutch and Old English.  Thus, in designating modern things, Icelandic constantly intimates their roots—the roots of consciousness in more primordial things.

We crossed Smojust, Ingolfstraeti, Pingholtsstraeti, and then Laugavegur became Bankastraeti without any evident change except the name on street signs. This happened after we negotiated a wide thoroughfare down which the wind whipped like mad; it was called Laekjargata and had a big bookstore and Chinese restaurant, and then lots of open space to the left. Two blocks later we turned to the right off the main street toward the waterfront that we could sight in the distance.

We crossed the magically named Tryvggvagata and approached the harbor, but our cold walk became absolutely freezing, a droplet laden-wind off the ocean seeming as though it might lift us—and it was also getting dark.  We hiked back up toward Laekjargata, then in the other direction on Posthusstraeti which showed a park on the map. After a few blocks we found ourselves in a grassy plaza of sorts with a statue of a man in the center and the majestic parliament building in front of us, pink-rose floodlights on the stone.  The trees were strung with lights, giving a civilized feeling to the area. Then three bats circled, twittering.

We continued down to the huge Tjorn (Pond); it was populated with scads of swans and ducks along the shore. Once again, I regretted not having stale bread. We read restaurant menus here and there, but no place was quite right—too expensive and fancy, too fast-foody, too loud, enough Italian food already, and so on.

We were warned that restaurants here were very expensive, but Iceland’s not being on the euro made it hard to determine just how costly in restaurant windows.  The local currency was the kronur (noted as Ikr), and the costs of meals were in the thousands of Ikr. Dividing by 100 and then two and adding about 20% gave a very rough—and unhappy—conversion, essentially main courses running from $30-$70, but as the Lonely Planet guidebook warned, “There’s no getting around the fact that Iceland is expensive.” This was especially true of food, as it’s a very short growing season, and most vegetables have to be imported.  One can talk about how expensive San Francisco or London are but, with Reykjavik, one enters a whole new scale of lifestyle expense.

We retraced our steps up Laugavegur.  Now it was fully night and the street lanterns shone brilliantly—modern torchlike lights with big flat halos or disks on top of shiny black metal poles. They were so brilliant in the darkness that they gave the sense of the lantern that began Narnia. The combination of these giant lanterns on a narrow street sloping downward and big storefronts with narrow windows and a generally synopsized or condensed utilitarian architecture were like an old Norse village growing into a city but, at the same time, bright red Chinese restaurant signs and cars with music blaring gave a distinct “American graffiti” quality. The combination was much as Iceland was described in the Icelandair flight magazine: the crossroads of North America and Europe. Things had a gameboard feel to them a soft Hollywood-set quality, a Western town that wasn’t Western, lots of stone, glitter, grandness, even regality.  Add these contrasting vistas to the stiff cold wind off the Atlantic coming from almost everywhere, and you have a kind of snapshot of Reykjavik.

From the beginning, settlers came here because there was land to the north, to the west, and the feeling is still the same, neither entirely Old World nor New, neither mediaeval nor modern, torn between cultures as the land itself is torn between geological plates.

We found Anaestu Grosum just down Klapparstigur a few doors on the right and up one flight.  We had missed it on our first pass even though it was on the next corner from Hotel Fron.  he restaurant had bright orange-green walls, cafeteria-style offerings, food in Automat-like steel serving dishes, prices in colored chalk on a board, and a young woman helpfully touting the ingredients, giving detailed descriptions of tofu, tempeh, and vegetable dishes which, she explained, were new for Iceland. We were a little surprised that our few items and organic juices ended up costing about forty euros (over $50) but, as she rationalized, you won’t find any cheaper meals in Reykjavik, and of course it turned out that she was right.

October 9 (Day Twenty-seven)

The crowd in the Hotel Fron breakfast room, which is located downstairs in our building, is international, mainly Danish and Norwegian from the sound of their languages and other clues (newspapers, books, words on clothing); in general, these are older people, couples traveling together from the homeland.  There also a few discernibly German and Scottish tourists—Scotland is quite close (don’t remind tenth-century peasants subject to Viking raids!). Initially there are no other Americans in the room, but a group of four middle-aged women show up just before we finish our tea. In the brief time we are there with them, we overhear enough to get their basic story.  While the other cultures are collectively a low buzz, the ladies from Philadelphia are a movie soundtrack, even over the mindless MTV-like video that the young busboy servicing the room suddenly clicks on the big wall screen, probably to amuse himself—whether he thinks his guests like skimpily dressed young women dancing to rap or just doesn’t care is unclear— one can hear every word and intonation: “Someone asked me whose idea it was to come to Iceland.  You must be insane!  Can you imagine?  Check if they have decaf, dear.”

Our window of opportunity before Birgir comes to pick us up is about an hour and a half, and I decide to use it to address three matters. I want to convert euros to kronurs, find a place to leave off my film for developing, and find a computer hotspot).

It is a gray, cold day, drizzling occasionally, as I set off down Laugavegur with my hood on. I traverse four long blocks to where I pass a tourist information office located in a small plaza just off the avenue (it was closed at night). Bright and early, two young women behind a desk are answering questions. I find out from one of them that I can exchange money at a window on the other side of their room if I come back in fifteen minutes; the photo-developing place, Hans Petersen, is next door but doesn’t open till ten. I can get free Internet in one of two places: in the library further down Laugavegur and a block toward the waterfront or at the Radhus, the city hall astride the Tjorn.

I continue across Laekjargata and turn right.  A number of large institutional buildings in the vicinity either are libraries or look like them but, on closer inspection, none are.  Even though I search up and down and around a number of blocks, I can’t find the library. When I ask several people about it, assuming every native has been speaking English since he or she was twelve, I get puzzled looks without any clues as to how to proceed, not about my English but the library. My selection includes two businessmen walking together, a policeman, a group of professional women, and construction workers digging in the area. None of them know of a library anywhere close—an opera house, yes; a museum, yes; a library on the other of town, yes.

Returning to the tourist office, I clear my wallet of euros and my pocket of my larger-denomination coins (one and two euro ones) and get back kronurs in thousand- and hundred-denominations bills and nicely decorated coins with birds that are mostly worth less than a penny, despite their numerals.  They don’t want any of the many half or quarter euro coins I am carrying and certainly not anything less.

The other lady at the desk suggests I try the Radhus, so I repeat Lindy’s and my path of the previous night, back to the Parliament Building, which I have conflated in my mind into “City Hall.” When I peek inside, it seems too magisterial for a city hall, so I ask directions and get pointed to another row of buildings closer to the Tjorn.  En route, in front of a large government building, I stop to explore a shallow brick pool, filled right up to its edge with water so that the wind sloshes it over. The pool is actually very large for a mere decorative moat, about the size of a small skating rink, and its shallow flatness gives it the unusual appearance of a giant wide fountain. Ducks find it intriguing too because they have lined up along a towering rocky ledge affronting the building and are leaping off, splashing in the pool, and then cruising across it to its edge, having avian fun.  Some of them like it enough that they fly back and splodge again.

There are far more ducks and other fowl at the Tjorn. In fact, it is a zoo for birds, a standing-room-only sanctuary, as they cluster with their own kind, intermingling at all distances—swans, ducks, geese over the water, and pigeons sprinkled with “sparrow,” “finch,” and “wren” types along the shore.  I think about what a commotion some bread would cause, and I vow to remember it the next time.

At the Radhus, a woman tells me that the computer room will not open till 10:00 and suggests the library, probably not the same one. She gives me directions that lead further out along the pond and then up a hill and to the left. With about fifty minutes left, I decide to continue my expedition.

Climbing the small rise takes me into a purely residential district.  I walk among stone houses with big yards, a vicarious visitation to upper-class family life in Reykjavik. However, I don’t have much confidence in there being a library here. On a paper I am carrying, I scribble the subtle colors of buildings: brick-red, brick-red/brown, dark gray with violet, deep blue lavender, medium pale lemon, gray midnight blue, plus a spectrum of grays and tans, no one of them identical to any other, as though someone went through especial trouble not to duplicate a tint. That alone gives the neighborhood a distinctive appearance.

Since I am getting quite far out and wound in a labyrinth over the crest, I decide to forget the library and try to find my way back.  As I come back downhill, I am in a different place, among highways, approaching a small airport from which propeller planes are taking off and landing low over the city. I enter what looks like an urban college campus and, with time becoming an urgency, hale the first person I see, a middle-aged woman with glasses, a bit younger than me. I actually am not sure what to ask for, as I still have enough time to give ten minutes to a computer (if I can find one right away) and at least read my email, and then hustle back to the Fron—as long as I don’t get lost from here.  She informs me that I am on the campus of the University of Iceland and that there is a library right there (pointing to a building 100 feet away). “I’ll find you a computer,” she promises, “or you can use mine for a few minutes; there’s wireless in the building.”  She is carrying an iBook, so I tell her about the fate of mine. “That’s not good news,” she says.  “I worry about a crash all the time.”

As we walk, I find out that her name is Helga, she is a graduate student returning to school after a career as a potter while raising children and, most surprising of all, is in anthropology, the field of my own Ph.D. That raises a mood of academic collaboration between us and, when the number and code provided me by the library front desk at Helga’s urging in Icelandic (“I presented you as a visiting anthropologist,” she confides) doesn’t seem to work, she sets up her laptop and hands it to me, as we take seats at a desk.

I do my email quickly and give it back to her, but it is now far too late to make it by 10:00 (Helga guesses 10:15 if I hurry).  She offers me her cell to call Lindy, but I don’t know the number of the Fron. “That’s easy,” she says.  Googling Hotel Fron and getting their switchboard in about ten seconds, she hands me the phone, I ask for our room, and hear Lindy wondering where I am. I explain the situation and tell her I will get back as fast as I can.

“We don’t want to keep Birgir waiting,” she says.  “He’ll be parked outside with Victoria.”

As I take leave, Helga offers to lead us on a tour of Reykjavik if we have time, and she tears a piece of paper out of her notebook after scribbling her full name (Helga Bjornsdottir), phone, cell, and email address (@hi.is).

I begin running, jogging, and walking back in the general direction of the hotel.  Even with her directions, it is complicated, and I probably don’t maintain the most efficient route. In fact I soon end up on the wrong side of a giant highway just beyond the far end of the Tjorn and have to race across during a break in traffic, then work my way through a park to the urban avenues. There are enough diagonals feeding each other that I have to guess repeatedly as to which is leading most directly to Laugavegur.  As it is, I end up by the large church and come down Skolavorthustigur, having approached the Fron at a different angle and along a different azimuth than I imagined.

My combination of gaits get me there by 10:20.  Birgir and Lindy are downstairs in the lobby with Victoria, as I arrive totally out of breath.  In reality, no one seems concerned about the time; in fact, Birgir tells me to sit down and rest and then, during the ensuing account of my travels, suggests that he pull up in front of Hans Petersen so I can leave off my film.  We pile into his car and, after a U-turn at the photo store, head back out the highway toward Kefavik.

The day has turned rainy and blustery, and gusts buffet us as we zoom along.  I continue to be amazed at how Birgir can keep us safe with such lax attention on the steering wheel and road.  As is clearly the custom, he keeps offering Victoria his hand, retrieving her doll, retrieving her binkie.  Lindy, of course, tries to help—and I do too—but Victoria is still having none of that. She would not accept either doll or binkie unless it is fished off the floor by Birgir  and handed to her. Lindy picking it up and handing it to her father for delivery is unacceptable and me presenting it to her for approval brings only increased gales of crying.  Our standard situation becomes Birgir’s hand available to Victoria and his head toggling between her and our position on the highway.

After a day in Reykjavik and in the country again, I had a somewhat deepened sense of being in Iceland. I realized how the ocean is everywhere.  When you are in the United States, or in fact most countries, proximate ocean is on one side of you; the other directions are inland, very far from another shore. Here ocean was everywhere.  In Reykjavik, you walked in all directions except one to some version of a harbor. Along this road, I also had the sense of the vastness of the North Atlantic surrounding this large—but really, in the continental scheme of things, not so large—island.  Ocean would meet and dwarf us whichever way we turned, meaning not only water but wind and rain off the water as fishermen and other coastal business. The shoreline gave a new and immediate sense of the Sagas and Norse voyages to reach this unknown place, settle it, and then search the waters beyond. Iceland was still, in some sense, obscure and semi-inhabited.

Closer to Reykjavik were pretty much normal trees and grass, as the city had tamed and reclaimed the landscape for human phenomenology—but then vast stretches of lava began.  It was a redux of yesterday, as though the earth had been plowed up recently in giant lumps, and clods of the upheaval were lying every which way, pancaked across one another, forming a continuous carpet of irregular rock over irregular rock, most of it covered in chartreuse or albino moss, not a tree in sight, perhaps yellow-green vegetation for a stretch, then white for a stretch, balded to black in spots, lava pools like little eco-gems on the moon, occasional abandoned huts and farm buildings of indeterminate centuries in the distance. In any direction one saw not so much geography or culture but an indecipherable rune. In an era of Google-Earth and planetary orbiters throughout the Solar System, Iceland was imaginally blank as if beyond meaningful surveillance.

The Blue Lagoon (Blaa Lonith in Icelandic with a bent “d” for the “th”) was located on a road near the airport. One headed to Keflavik and then turned off before the airport toward Grindavik, essentially a crossroads in the middle of nowhere’s lava landscape.  Another turnoff took us on a short access road to the parking lot for the Lagoon.

The Blue Lagoon is the most famous tourist attraction in Iceland, partly because it is presented as such in all the marketing literature. It is so close to Keflavik that people using Icelandair for travel elsewhere or changing planes at Reykjavik on another airline can visit it if they have a few hours between flights. These tourists never see anything else in Iceland.

The lagoon is essentially an artificial hot springs, a geothermal spa created by a power plant, as heated seawater is drawn from deep bore holes in the lava, passed through the turbines of the Svartsengi station and then, when it departs from those as steam, enters huge converters which return it to liquid and pump it out into the landscape. This creates a series of artificial lagoons.

As we approached, we could see billowing clouds of steam rising above the lava at different levels in the distance, drifting up into the wind and being blown into tatters, continuously resupplied by thick puffs and piston-like bursts.  cy blue trickles of water flowed across the lava and collected near the road in little marly pools. The color was not a dark blue but a kind of milky gray cerulean of the sort you might associate with alchemical salts.  Birgir told us that, initially, the pools created by the power plant were appropriated by the locals as a hangout for families and teenagers. People liked to come and bathe and picnic and just look at the artificial wonders, but eventually entrepreneurs seized the opportunity and created a high-end spa. Barriers were built; the price of admission soared. At the beginning of its life as a spa next to a power station, Blaa Lonith cost the same as any of the mineral baths in Reykjavik. Now it was so astronomical compared to the inexpensive local baths—four or five times their cost—that almost exclusively tourists went there, a large percentage of them between flights at Keflavik.

The color, Birgir explained, was imparted not just by mineral salts but blue-green algae in the water.  The belief was that this particular combination of silicates, algae, and other minerals, even though the by-product of the creation of geothermal energy, was unusually beneficial to the skin. “There’s a psoriasis spa very nearby,” he noted.

When I had heard about the Blue Lagoon while reading literature about Iceland back in the States, I had assumed that we wouldn’t go because it was just a commercial power plant.  Also I unconsciously blended “geothermal” into “nuclear” in my mind and inaccurately imagined trace radioactivity or some sort of contamination. At the same time, I didn’t take into account the combination of factors that would make it irresistible: its local mythology and popularity, its singularly enormous size, its proximity to Reykjavik, and its reputation as a healing site.

When we got out of the car, I saw how intrepid and luminous the moss was, its qualis of reflected light in spots actually oscillating a bit in the fast-shifting mirror of active sky. The jagged uprisings of rock, viewed up close, were even more massive than they seemed from the car but really, on closer viewing, of every imaginable size, from something a child might turn up with a shovel (except that it was lava, not dirt), to tractor-size chunks, to things that no earth-moving equipment could possibly budge. In the hand, little pieces of it were pumicey, pocked with holes, as though fossilized breathing spots for hot gases and imaginary creatures who lived inside these rocks long ago. I collected a few of the rounder ones in my pocket.  They looked like outgassing batter from molasses cookies, golf balls from a trolls’ match, or specimens from an astronaut’s backpack on the Moon.

As we walked down the path to the Blue Lagoon, Victoria in her red jacket and white woolen cap aloft in Birgir’s arm, they looked a bit like the giant and the gnome.  We passed between hillocks of piled-up lava, so high that we were walking down a tunnel. The tendency was to think that you were in a construction area and that the concrete of some blacktop had been torn up to excavate some pipes, but of course that was not the case. The earth had done all this, most of it millennia ago, and man had been unequal to the task of remaking it into farms or cities, in fact had barely even tried. What was more staggering than the stuff itself, which was kind of ordinary, was the sheer quantity of it in all directions, making up an entire tree-bare landscape and once again reminding one of a planet in the early days of cosmogenesis.

The Blue Lagoon ate up kronurs like napkins.  Everything cost separate money, so Birgir had made sure we brought hotel towels and saved at least that fee.  At a modern front desk, we were given computerized bracelets to wear and keys for lockers. After we filed through an electronic turnstile, we went our separate ways, Lindy to the lady’s dressing room and Birgir, Victoria, and I to the men’s, as it was assumed she was pre-gender and would stay with her father.

The scene inside reminded me of our high-school locker room, except here men of all ages undressed, and the room was a sudden collection of male bodies, from boys and rowdy teens to hunks, Japanese businessmen, and octogenarians, walking around naked. We had stripped back into our membership at the mammalian zoo that lies just beneath the dominant but superficial clothing of society, the artifacts that we keep putting on these bodies we carry around all our lives.

I watched Victoria wandering in a maze of hairy male landscapes and wondered if any of this would imprint on her psyche and, if so, how. I didn’t at all think it was bad; in fact, I thought it was great, demystifying bodies for her, especially those of the other sex, right from the start.

I realized I was out of practice at this process, at least with any natural ease, but I returned to it seamlessly, even if, in my mind, it was a bumpy transition, as we all headed naked to the showers. We were Norsemen now, creatures of hot springs and snow—honorary, indigenous, or traveling by flying metal carpets.

There was a protocol for admission to the baths. The instructions adamantly required showering without bathing suits and cleaning one’s orifices, so I actually had to take my suit off and put it in a cubby with my towel and camera. Then I stood in the hot spray and soaped.  After that brief interlude I gathered my things and followed Birgir and Victoria out.  A few moments striding across the frigid outdoor patio were a powerful surge of cold, telling me how vulnerable my body was. Then I lowered myself as rapidly as possible down the stairs into the water.

It was more lukewarm than hot, but a tremendous relief to be engulfed in it (a sign said that its basic temperature ranged between 37 and 39 degrees C. at all times).  Gradually I became acclimated to the situation and began to wander outward in a thick steam that occulted bearings on the full situation. Lindy came shivering across the patio a moment later and quickly got in.  I teased her that she had been complaining all trip about never getting to take a bath because there were no bathtubs in our rooms. “Now you get a giant bathtub,” I declared.

The landscape was astonishing, surreal.  I looked out to clusters of upper torsos wrapped in steam, individual heads here and there in the mist.  A general vapor lifted off the water everywhere, with dense billowing clouds of it straight ahead, maybe fifty yards away, looking like an active volcano. That was clearly the main vent where superheated water entered the pool.  Steam escaped, shot upward, and shifted in clouds, whiteness on whiteness on whiteness on whiteness, its layers almost palpable as a kind of sensuous dance of different condensations.  The clouds and ghostly silhouettes gave the lagoon the appearance of a mediaeval religious landscape but, otherwise, the setting was industrial and modern.  With piles of black slag, minimal stone sheds, machinery scattered all over, construction underway with scaffolding and cranes, and streaming vapor, it looked like a factory slag pool with a chimney—what it was.  On the other hand, the feeling of the water was embalming, all around one’s body this kind of chalky powder blue, a naturopathic bath.

Under my feet the bottom was chunky and crunchy, so I reached down to see what I was walking on and pulled up black crushed cinders, sieving through my fingers in pebbles and coarse dust.  As I walked, the temperature changed unpredictably, delicious little bursts of hot followed by a leveling, occasionally a cool tendril.  A tiny ball of hot could arrive suddenly and swirl over my body before returning to the isotherm. Yet overall the pool got hotter as I waded and occasionally swam a few strokes toward the vent. Groups of people materialized out of the steam into bodies and faces.  From the Japanese, Chinese, Indians, Africans, and Russians, and the sounds of their different languages, it was evident that there were plenty of travelers bathing between flights.

When I came up to the vent, it got deliciously hot, hot enough that a step in the wrong direction made it too hot, though the consequence of a step in any direction changed with the swirling water.  What was coming out of the vent was obviously scalding, but it diluted so rapidly that it was bearable to stand very close to the source, steam covering my face, currents absorbing the outpouring.  It was okay living dangerously, though a group of kids flaunted the vent itself and one of them ended up yelping away.

Around the edge of the Blue Lagoon the silicate over lava formed a kind of colorful stalagmite, honeycombing as precipitates do on surfaces, so that it looked like a limestone cave, as smooth as plastic or glass to the hand.

Occasionally going into a fetal position and sinking underwater gave me a sense of being swallowed inside a fish or a womb, very mysterious and a bit spooky. In that regard Birgir related that he brought whole craniosacral classes out here to practice in the water.

“Do you rent the Lagoon?” I asked.

“No,” he laughed, “we just hold the class among the other people.  We usually have only about five or six students.”

This was Victoria’s first visit to the Lagoon, and she was in rapture, splashing around, hopping and dancing on the steps, involved in an elaborate drama that she narrated, “something about a sad child and a bird,” Birgir interpreted when asked. She incorporated each newcomer to the water into her plot, and most of them were charmed enough to stop and engage with her.  As they talked to each other in their own languages, she chattered on in Icelandic and it produced a mellifluous symphony.

A male camera crew dressed in suits, a woman announcer in a dress, worked their way on a dolly along a platform they had constructed to a spot overhanging the water where a few performers were speaking scripted dialogue.  As the sun dipped in and out of clouds, it was very cold outside the water. The crew was dressed for air temperature, and the bathing actors were dressed for hot springs, so they made a comical contrast.  I—and surely others—awaited the inevitable denouement when the crew would topple from their flimsy platform into the lagoon fully dressed, but it never happened.  “They’re always filming advertisements here,” Birgir said, “not just Iceland but many countries like to do commercials at the Blue Lagoon.”

I went and got my camera from a pile of lava in which I had lodged it and carried it out into the water, a risk many other tourists also felt worth taking. I took shots of silhouettes in different degrees of eclipse as well as thick clouds of steam rising alongside industrial huts or forges and mounds of lava.

Lindy was over by the tray of silicates, putting a mudpack on her face, not too happy that I photographed her in process. Then she waited on line for the waterfall to wash it off.  I decided to return the camera to its niche and do that too. I slapped on handfuls of muck, lavishly covering myself, then wandered about for the requisite five minutes of hardening before getting on line for the waterfall.  Birgir said that the mud in the tray was particularly healthy, as he put a dab on an unwilling Victoria now in his arms.

The waterfall was two people at a time against the wall with a curtain of streams pounding down on them. The constant weight of the water felt like gravity on my back, as though I were being dragged down by mass on a planet heavier than Earth. I stayed as long as I could bear it, about three minutes.

Birgir set Victoria by the steps and, just as I thought we might be getting ready to leave, he asked, “Would you like to do stillpoints?”

Aha, the remnants of a craniosacral class!  Sure!

I went first, lying on my back as he set one hand under my head and the other at my sacrum. I closed my eyes and floated. In my image, he was part policeman, part cranial therapist, so I felt protected in contrasting ways.  It was also very different cranial work, putting one’s trust in another person in the water, and it elicited a sense of childhood, as I floated there and felt the tensions and unwinding of fascia and fluids inside. I rolled and snaked in the water, with a tendency to want to go onto my belly, which always corrected itself just before I did. At times I had a sense of floating in invisible ambrosia in interstellar space, an ether of the sort that occultists say, though invisible to science, fills the heavenly spheres. I also experienced inklings of my own birth, not in any dramatic way but as a whisper of beginning—that one begins, must begin; the thread unravels back to somewhere, some first sensation of this world, why not here?

Then both of us supported Lindy. I held her head and Birgir her spine and sacrum. I felt how different the flow of another’s tissues was in the context of water.  There was a whole other external basin underneath against which the biodynamics of the cerebrospinal and other bodily pulses vibrated. I could tell that Birgir was an aficionado of Blue Lagoon stilpoints and unwindings, a cranial innovator.  This was his specialty, his northern birthright in fact, and I was a neophyte. My sense was that I didn’t feel as though I could get subtle enough. Yet Lindy loved il; she said it was one of the high points of the whole trip, delicious to be able to float supported.

Victoria was not happy at being scooped up to leave, so she kicked and sputtered a bit. We dashed back to our respective lockers, showered, dressed, and reemerged in the lobby a half hour later, different people from before the bath, and starving. Once Lindy joined us, Birgir pointed away from the little cafeteria at which we assumed we were going to get snacks and toward what turned out to be a large upscale restaurant. While the cafeteria was packed, the restaurant was wonderfully uncrowded.  We were given a table by a window looking out on the lagoon and the camera crew still at work. The menu was a potpourri of fusion-cuisine seafood items, a real gourmet selection, with prices up into the 3000 Ikr and few much lower than that, about $40-$50 a shot.

We selected different fishes—salmon and cod and an untranslated “whitefish,” with Birgir ordering Victoria her own meal. A breadbasket with butter came early and then nothing else for a long time.  The bread was devoured, in part by Victoria tearing up a couple of rolls and in part because we were hungry after our baths and that was what was there. Birgir was unsuccessful at flagging the waitress for more bread, so he dispatched Victoria, who was restless, toward the counter leading to the kitchen, mainly for her amusement. She made a number of bashful charges there, never actually delivering the message.  Finally, a half hour after we had ordered, I wrote on a napkin, PLEASE BRING BREAD, and handed it to Victoria. Delighted, she ran with it to the waitress as she was emerging with a tray of dishes for another table.  We soon had a refill, and then that was gone and another twenty minutes had passed when the fishes finally arrived. By then I had made an origami boat for Victoria out of my placemat, something I hadn’t attempted since back when our own kids were little.  Luckily I remembered.  Victoria had gone through so much bread that she actually pushed away her plate, and we had to take turns trying to finish her food too.

Our conversation was idle—craniosacral gossip, Americana, Icelandiana, jokes, even riddles.

I quickly rushed to the counter and got the check so we could avoid any awkwardness, and then we went back into the gray day in high spirits, Victoria clutching the boat and, after we set out in the car, now even willing to allow Lindy to fetch her doll—she had accepted us. The binkie, however, was lost, and Birgir decided to pull off the highway in Kopavogur to get another one at a variety store.

The plan was for us to take the next day to ourselves and then for us to meet on the morning of the day after with Birgir and his girlfriend (and Upledger-of-Iceland partner), Erla, to return Victoria to her mother.  We would go on a long drive (five and a half hours) to the top of Iceland and its second biggest city, Akureyri.  Birgir said we could proceed slowly because we would have the whole day, stopping at places along the way.  Afterwards we could visit the other major hot springs in the north, this being a natural one, and compare it to the Blue Lagoon.

That night Lindy and I picked one of the Italian restaurants on Laugavegur, had a requisite dinner, and walked Reykjavik at night under umbrellas, visiting the Tjorn and approaching the harbor in the other direction. Lit by street lamps the little square-block patterns of the cobblestones looked runic.