I do not want to visit the South Pole, or its northern counterpart, for that matter.  But getting close seemed attractive.  So last month my wife and I made a trip to Patagonia, timed to match the height of the southern summer. We were very lucky with our companions, our accommodations and the notoriously fickle Patagonian weather.

Although Ferdinand Magellan’s passage early in the 16^thcentury and a subsequent navigation south of the continent by Francis Drake opened Patagonia to recorded history, it is only with the entry of English navigators and missionaries in the 19^thcentury that a dense description of the area unfolds.  Two voyages captained by Robert Fitzroy, the second with Charles Darwin aboard, described the region’s topology as it charted its waters for commercial navigation.  Anglican missionaries, beginning in the 1860s when Thomas Bridges first settled among the region’s native people, documented their language and lifeways. We found ourselves amazed that humans would willingly subject themselves to Patagonia’s harsh conditions, coddled as we were in the arms of a safe and well-provisioned National Geographic expedition.

Our trip was divided almost equally between ship and shore. A Chilean-flagged vessel, the Ventus Australius, custom-built to ply the shallow fjords and to raise and lower inflatable boats off the stern, ferried, fed and entertained 152 passengers for a week.  The ship navigated parts of the major passages that link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and visited three of the regions major glaciers.  Patagonia holds 15% of the world’s ice, but here, as in the rest of the frozen world, its glaciers are in full retreat.  We marveled at the ice, its monumental volume, varied shapes and multi-coloration.

“Paine” is the Tehuelche word for the color blue which appropriately describes the huge rock outcropping at the center of the park.  The “torres,” a constellation of peaks foregrounded by Lake Balmaceda bears more than a passing resemblance to the Wyoming Tetons, rising from Jackson Lake.  And like the view from Jackson Lake Lodge, the Tierra Patagonia hotel offers a magnificent prospect of the peaks. From the vantage of our room, my wife and I watched the torres each morning and evening as the sun’s light and cloud formations changed the mountains’ mood—bright, dark, hooded, indifferent. We were very lucky.

Fit and daring visitors can arrange to climb several of the peaks or hike the challenging, four-day “W” circuit that reaches the high valleys and glaciers deep inside the park.  Even with this kind of strenuous exertion well beyond our capacities, our group of sixty and seventy somethings hiked briskly across the surprisingly diverse lower reaches of the park where rheas, foxes, condors and guanacos displayed themselves. The guanacos particularly charmed me.  These wild cousins of the llama and alpaca roam everywhere in the park, sometimes in herds of several dozen animals. While the main body of the herd grazes the sparse grasses, lookouts posted on high ground keep watch for predators.  Humans apparently pose little threat in the guanaco’s eyes; here pumas are the enemy. We had the rare privilege of spotting one of these handsome predators when our guide, alerted by a high-pitched whinny sounded by guanaco lookouts across the valley, pointed out a large, golden cat that sauntered out of a patch of grass before disappearing from view.

We all realized our good fortune.  The tour organizers provided comfortable accommodations and smoothed the passage across borders and through airports. But they cannot guarantee animal sightings or control local meteorology. We endured just enough rain and high winds to realize how unpleasant and capricious the Patagonian weather can be.  As I write, temperatures in Punta Arenas are in the 30s with rain and high winds.  We lucked out, for sure.

Heathrow the Horrible

My wife and I recently visited the Christmas markets on the Danube River.  We used London’s Heathrow airport for our European entry and exit and were amazed at how convoluted its intra-terminal transport system is.  Heathrow uses an escalator-elevator-purple bus-safety screening-train-airline check-in desk-bus-outside stairs delivery system.  How long would that take? you may ask.  We arrived in London two hours before our Houston bound flight and were (gratefully) the last passengers to claim our seats.

On the way from the States to the continent, we had a five-hour layover that allowed us to ponder the signage and ask for directions at leisure.  But that experience, and the knowledge that we would be running this gauntlet in reverse in two weeks, made us realize that we would need to put on our running shoes and keep our wits about us to get home without missing our flight.

The transit in three stages.

Stage one: follow the purple arrows from the arrival zone, down two escalators, to a waiting area that led to a bus that ferries passengers from one terminal to another. My wife asked the gate attendant, who had a curiously North American accent, if we would need to pass security at the next terminal. “Probably,” she said.  The answer should have been “you betcha.” Intra-terminal movement at Heathrow relies on a road and tunnel network that serves passengers, food services, maintenance vehicles and small, British Airways vans.  All of these conveyances bob and weave through a traffic system guided by stop and yield signs and an opaquely- acknowledged hierarchy of right of way.

Stage two: from the bus stop ride escalators from ground level to the second storey.  By this time we were getting anxious, and we were not alone.  Just as we boarded the stairway, a group of young women clad in spandex and carrying backpacks sprinted past.  Although it was not immediately clear at this point, we were all headed for a British Airways security position.  In preparation for the metal detector, I removed my iPad from my carryon, took off my belt, and put cell phone, wallet, and loose change into my jacket.  I thought that I was clean for scanning, but no. I had not removed my pocket handkerchief and had to go through a body scanner. 

Stage three: As we hoofed toward the train, I held my coat, my carryon, my belt and my pocket handkerchief.  I tried to reassemble on the run until my wife muttered “I don’t care about your damned belt, hurry up.”  An elevator dropped us at a train platform where we boarded a vestibule that stopped at the range of gates that included ours, and we hopped off.  At some point during the train ride British Airways changed our departure gate, but, luckily, my wife spotted this, and we did not have to travel far out of our way.  As we puffed up to the ticket position, the attendant welcomed us and said that she was just about to announce that we had forfeited our reservation.  All we had to do now was descend to ground level, board another bus and climb an outside staircase to the airplane cabin door.  

Everything turned out for the best, I suppose, and as it turns out, we could have been routed through Gatwick, where rogue drones had grounded all flights for the day.

To learn more, a YouTube video, “The Horrors of Heathrow: a short history,” might be a good place to begin.

Ghosts Rising

Montgomery, Alabama, seems such an unlikely spot for a recognition of our country’s relationship with African Americans. So the news that Montgomery is now host to an installation dedicated to the legacy of slavery and lynching in America came as quite a surprise and made the desire for a visit irresistible.

Montgomery is a town of ghosts.  Not a ghost town, like Selma has become, the Alabama state bureaucracy insures the city’s survival. But phantoms lurk everywhere in the city.  And now after ignoring its ghosts for decades, Montgomery has begun to bring them into the light.

The town rose to prominence after 1830 as a center of the domestic slave trade.  A slave market functioned at the spot now occupied by the city-landmark Court Street Fountain, a location contiguous to both the river port and the railroad. Several warehouses, recently repurposed for retail purposes, once served as slave “depots,” a term that unnaturally sanitizes what were barracoons for human cargo. Alongside the depots stood buildings occupied by the slavers’ financiers, among them Lehman Brothers, now a ghost itself.

Relics of the Civil War, whose fury scarcely touched Alabama, stand prominently in downtown Montgomery. The Confederate “white house,” where Jefferson Davis took his oath of office and where Robert E. Lee’s birthday is celebrated annually, functions as a museum documenting antebellum life. The nearby Winter Building is now occupied by a law firm, Balch and Bingham, but it once housed the Southern Telegraph Company from which the Confederate Secretary of War telegraphed the order to fire on Fort Sumpter.

Jim Crow cast a long shadow over Montgomery. Its legacy is only now being recognized.  The recently restored S.H. Kress building provides insights into the separate facilities afforded black and white citizens throughout the South.  An elaborate facade on building’s Dexter Avenue side welcomed white patrons to the store; African Americans came in the back entrance from Monroe Street and were funneled into the basement.  But nothing documents segregation policies more graphically than the restored building’s engraved marble slab that once proscribed the use of water fountains by “White” and “Colored.”

Montgomery figured prominently in the Civil Rights movement. On Dexter Avenue-- heels pointing toward the Alabama River-- toes pointing toward the State Capitol, enormous brass footprints serve as monuments to the marches that African Americans undertook to abolish Jim Crow.  A walk in the direction that the toes point passes the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. led services from 1954 to 1960, and ends at the capitol steps that George Wallace refused to make available as a podium for Dr. King’s speech that kicked off the march to Selma in 1965.

My wife and I made a trip to Montgomery last month to visit the much-publicized National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Unaware of the memorial until it was reviewed in the New York Times, we wanted to see what seemed to us glorious monument in an unlikely place. (We found that the Memorial was not so well known in Alabama.) The installation approaches the legacy of white supremacy with powerful images that remind visitors of the twin horrors of the African American experience, slavery and lynching.  Slavery finds its most poignant expression in statuary.  At the entrance a group of five figures enchained appears: male and female, old and young; such fear, such defiance. Further on an array of 800 rust clad metal cubes— coten steel according to the Memorial’s web site-- suspend from the ceiling of a huge veranda. Each cube represents a county in the United States where a documented lynching took place. Each county is incised with names of the victims, more than 4,000. (My boyhood home, Cross County, Arkansas, has a cube with two names.)

We learned from one of the docents, a young African American man from Pittsburgh, that museum executives have invited each county represented in a hanging cube to take possession of the duplicate that lies like a grave marker on the grounds of the Memorial.  To date only a single county, one in Minnesota, has expressed interest.  

Ghosts still lie under Montgomery’s soil, but they are coming to life.

Route 83

Route 83 from Abeline to Taos

477 miles, 5,480 feet altitude gain

National Center for Children

Pump jacks in cotton fields

Gigantic wind farms

BNSF railroad—coal cars and petroleum tanks moving east, boxcars moving west

Sky-scraping concrete grain silos

Buddy Holly Museum

Grazing beef cattle

Penned dairy cattle

Hay fields studded with round bales

Fields of corn and sorghum

Rolling irrigation systems, quarter of a mile long

Llano Estacado

Tumbleweeds

Exotic road kill

Tumbled-down gas stations

Mom and Pop motels

Snow in the Sangre de Cristos

Taos Pueblo

And on the last night we were treated to a sunset worthy of Van Gogh himself-- crimson sky, with spiral clouds and pin wheeling wind turbines.

Ancestors

My father, Dave Block, Jr., died in 1993.  He was the third generation, and the last, of his family to work out of the same office in Wynne, Arkansas.  Among the archived business papers, I discovered correspondence that documented attempts to provide a bequest to a French ancestor in the years immediately following World War II.  Those letters set off a slow and sporadic search for Block ancestors in western France.

In 1870 my great grandfather, Rafael Block, left Alsace for America.  A century later a namesake, my uncle, visited the ancestral village and copied Rafael’s birth certificate, showing that he was born in 1853, the son of Herman Block and Rebecca Feist in Trimbach, Bas-Rhin.  

(As an aside, this would have made Rafael seventeen years old at the time of his emigration, an age ripe for conscription for service in the Franco-Prussian War.)

In 2009 my wife and I made a trip to Trimbach to see if we could discover any traces of Rafael’s family.  We located the village cemetery, adjacent to the parish church, and walked through the headstones.  A woman from the village—I assume she was local; she was placing flowers at a gravesite—sensed our purpose and asked for our family name.  My first answer employed an anglicized pronunciation. “No one by that name buried here,” she said.  Another attempt, that changed the vowel sound to a long “o”, made a better impression.  “Were they Jews ?” she asked.  “Then you want to visit the Jewish cemetery.”

She told us to drive south on highway D-104 and look for a wooded area on the west side of the road.  After a bit of searching—there are several wooded areas—we spotted a pillar standing at the edge of cultivated fields.  That five-foot obelisk marked the north entrance to the cemetery.  Our efforts at exploration were severely handicapped by a tangle of trees and vines that covered most of the plots and by the Hebrew inscriptions on most of the tombstones that we could reach.  I took photographs of some the inscriptions, and we drove on to Switzerland.

On our return to the States, I sent images of some of inscriptions to my nephew, Sam, who had recently studied Hebrew for his bar mitzvah.  Nothing ever came back from Sam, but our 2009 visit verified that there was a Jewish cemetery in Trimbach and sparked hopes that exploring it might turn up markers of our ancestors.

Although my sisters and Block cousins greeted reports of our trip warmly, several years would pass before we followed up.

At the end of 2016, the descendents of one branch of the family agreed that the time had come to return to Trimbach.  Cousin Diane began to search the copious genealogical information now available on the internet and turned up several possible leads. I made contact, in Google Translator French, with the Trimbach City Hall and received an immediate response promising access to village archives.  Searching for someone to decipher the Hebrew inscriptions proved more of a challenge.

On our 2009 visit, my wife had the presence of mind to annotate our guidebook with the address of the synagogue in Haguenau, located on the Rue Rabbi Bloch. (We thought the name might be providential.)  And using that address, I wrote a letter (ink on paper; I could not locate an e-mail address) explaining our purpose and need.  I have no idea of how many hands that missive passed through subsequently-- the Haguenau synagogue is now closed-- but in four months a representative of the Jewish community in Strasbourg e-mailed to say that he had located a person willing to accompany us to Trimbach and interpret the headstones.

Six months later nine of us-- Blocks, spouses and offspring--converged on Strasbourg from Santa Fe, Houston, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Prague.  After a couple of days spent comparing notes and enjoying ourselves, we decamped for Wissembourg, our base camp for exploring the cemetery.  Our interpreter, Yanir Ritter, arrived the next day, and with the corps of discovery now complete, we set off for Trimbach, twenty kilometers away.

 According to Wikipedia, Trimbach, Bas-Rhin, has a population of 462  (seems about right). There’s city hall (mairie)-- open Tuesday through Thursday-- a Catholic Church, and the Boulangerie Pâstisserie La Minzbrueck.  It’s the kind of place where locals notice strangers.  So with only a little effort, Diane made a contact, which led to another contact and through them we learned that the location of the Jewish cemetery was quite well known; it appears on the map displayed prominently on the Rue Principale.  And an added gem, Madame Reine Birie had taken particular interest in it.  At 10:00 the city hall opened, and we were invited to review the documents stored there.  We, and especially Diane, were disappointed to learn that the birth certificate we already had in hand exhausted the traces left by Rafael Bloch.

A little before noon we left Trimbach for the cemetery. One of the villagers alerted us to watch for a large poultry farm across the road.  Sure enough there stood the pillar, but where were the woods?  Something had changed.

Working from memories of conditions in 2009, I advised everyone to carry work clothes, gloves and heavy shoes.  At one time we considered buying garden tools capable of clearing at least our relatives’ plots.  In the end we settled for a pair of hand clippers bought in Wissembourg.  To my surprise, and our delight, advanced planning went for naught.  Sometime in the recent past, a work party had cleared away the undergrowth and righted most of the gravestones, making our search much easier.

Turns out that there are several Blochs buried in Trimbach: Nanette who died in 1899, Emmanuel (d. 1892) and Babette (d. 1909).  The inscriptions on their markers offered no additional information, and the Hebrew characters, citing passages from the Old Testament, were likewise unrevealing.  None of these Blochs matched the names and birthdates that Diane had discovered. 

But there was one other Bloch plot in the cemetery.  And this one held the remains of a Rebecca, neè Feist, died 1855.  This was Raphel’s mother who died when he was only two years old.  We all rejoiced; Diane called it the happiest day of her life.

On the second day Reine Biri joined us.  She brought along a wealth of information about the cemetery itself and about its clearing in 2015.  The cemetery dates from the mid 19^th century and served as the resting place for several small communities in the area.  The last burials date from the mid 1930s, just before the forced evacuation preceding World War II. Diane copied it all and is working on a compilation.

So ends our America to Alsace. If nothing else, the trip to Trimbach furnished time to share meals, drinks and family stories. Perhaps it will provide an impetus for additional research and travels.  Where is Herman?

Toilettes

Some things are ubiquitous in France: glorious food, traffic circles, toilettes. Let's start with the last. The country's infamous street facilities, useful only in the direst of emergencies, have largely given way to single-occupancy cabins connected to municipal sewer and water systems. From the outside the installations resemble toadstools, or, perhaps, gun turrets on the Maginot line. A control panel indicates four possible statuses-- "vacant", "occupied", "wash cycle", and "out of service." From the vacant status, pressing the open button retracts an elegantly curved door to reveal a stainless steel toilet bowl and two ceramic basins. For males requiring only basic service, the choice is clear. Women, or men in need of something more complicated, will require suspension. My wife described two positions; others are, no doubt, employed.

Post processing services include paper, soap,  water, and an electric hand dryer. These are unpredictably available, but voilà. 

The cabin employs a button marked with the industry standard <|> symbol to exit, but this is not always clear to the user. I once tried to depress a lever attached to the door, thinking that it would release the latch and set me free.

A sensor, perhaps at the threshold, closes the door and starts a minute-long wash cycle that cleans the bowl and floor and resets the "available" indicator.  Your Euros at work.

Near Home

One of the many perks of my marriage is the right to a once- a- month reservation at  “The Property,” her family’s house on Galveston Bay.  An hour from Houston, and a long way from its hustle and bustle, the house offers ample space for holiday reunions and a site for solitary idylls for the rest of the year.  I write with the Memorial Day get together fresh in my mind.

In the early 1970s my wife’s parents located the site and built a house with an unoccluded view of the west bay and adjoining marshlands, a glorious prospect, especially at sunset.  Upon their deaths the deed passed to their four children, who equally share rights and responsibilities. The original house was severely damaged by Hurricane Ike, so much so that rebuilding seemed preferable to reconstruction. My brother-in-law, a talented designer, oversaw the project, making it larger and more hurricane resistant and incorporating a number of improvements to the original floor plan.  One of the many first cousins did the construction. So now we have great views and deluxe accommodations, and the cousin has a chunk of change.

Photographs taken over the years document changes to the marsh and to the neighborhood. Like a receding hairline, the marsh has slowly lost ground to the bay.  A futile attempt to impede erosion left behind undulating segments of a breakwater fashioned from a cloth-lined tube stuffed with earth.  Birds and intrepid anglers sometimes perch on its slippery surface. The spit of land that includes The Property has seen subdivision of some of the original lots and increasingly dense occupation, with one fortuitous exception.  A prosperous neighbor to our east bought and leveled a house that once stood between our property and his. This provides us additional privacy as the prosperous neighbor is seldom in residence.

In an elegantly written  history he calls The Gulf, Jack Davis recounts human depredations of marine resources in the "fishy sea."  We have played bit parts. Twenty years ago family weekends always began by laying crab traps in shallow water.  Sometimes we dragged the bay bottom with a twenty foot net deployed over the side of our power boat.  The haul, not always carefully culled for juveniles and females, filled our plates.  But our improvidence contributed to a sharp decline in the crab population, and the onset of old age has diminished our zest for fishing.  We no longer own a powerboat, and our kayaks often rest peacefully in the garage. Luckily a seafood market has located nearby, and my wife and in laws are excellent chefs.  The holiday routine revolves around cooking, eating, drinking and getting ready to repeat the cycle.

An interest in birdlife has offset our decline as watermen.  On the bay brown pelicans, black skimmers, laughing gulls, and several species of terns demonstrate their hunting skills.  Skimmers, as their name implies, fly close to the water, their lower mandibles extended just below the surface to vacuum up small fish. Pelicans and terns dive from the sky, the former making a loud splash, to capture prey from above and then swallow it whole.  We are sometimes lucky enough to see osprey, an eagle whose technique is to snatch fish near the water surface before butchering them on a safe perch.  Gulls scavenge, grabbing flotsam from the water, pestering hunters for part of their catch, or demonstrating remarkable aerobatics chasing bits thrown into the air by our delighted nieces.

Marshlands provide cover for shier, less agile fliers.  Herons and egrets wade through the shallow water searching for fish and crustaceans that they spear with their long, sharp beaks.  My wife and I recently saw a giant blue heron with a large, wiggling snake at the end of its bill. Roseate spoonbills are unmistakable in their deep pink plumage, especially striking during mating season, and their characteristic feeding behavior, swinging spatulated bills back and forth to capture small animals and insects from the shallow water.  Birds heard but unseen include the American bittern and the Clapper rail, the latter prized by our expert bird watching friends.

Galveston Island, although small, low, and close to the Texas mainland is an important stopover on the biennial bird migration to and from the neotropics.  Two years ago we witnessed what birders call a “fall out.” Songbirds had exhausted their energy reserves flying across the 650 mile-wide Gulf of Mexico, and the headwinds from cold front forced them to land abruptly. Baltimore orioles, Prothonotary warblers, painted and indigo buntings, ruby throated humming birds, arriving in singles and pairs, dropped almost simultaneously one afternoon and immediately grazed watered lawns and oleander hedges.  It’s hard to conceal bright orange, indigo, and red against brown and light green cover, so the birds moved in plain sight.  They sucked up nourishment and hydration as we looked on in delight. But it was only a pit stop; the next day none remained.  

We anxiously await another fall out at The Property.

In Africa

At the time of our marriage in 1975 my wife and I “signed” a pre-nup.  We agreed to have children and to go to Africa.  The children came along in due time, and after forty-one years together, we completed our vows with a trip to Kenya and Tanzania.

No thanks to me, the planning went very smoothly.  Somehow I contacted an outfit styling itself TrueAfrica.  I thought that I had gotten their recommendation from a friend who had recently visited Botswana, but no.  Well, perhaps from my sister-in-law, a world traveling physician, not her, either.  I must have imagined or dreamed up TrueAfrica.  But whatever fates placed us in their hands, we were blessed with everything we hoped the trip would be.

Traveling to Africa requires a lot of sitting in airplanes.  At this time no US-flagged carrier flies non-stop to east African destinations.  Our choices required a flight to a European capital and subsequent travel to former colonial regions.  We chose BritishAir, Houston to London and London to Nairobi. Two months after the trip I remember nothing of our time in the air; memories begin at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.

We arrived at 10:45PM and retrieved our luggage at midnight.  Airport infrastructure, at least the baggage handlers, could not manage the near simultaneous arrival of two international flights.  As we stood around, we met a number of our fellow passengers—a couple of Londoners on their honeymoon, a 30-year British expat returning to Kenya after visiting relatives in England, and a 40-something man who became so distressed with waiting that he had a Trump-like tantrum, yelling at the baggage handlers and cursing Kenya in general as a disorganized, third class country.  Our greatest worry was that the long delay might have complicated our transit to the Nairobi hotel.  Lucky for us Kenyans have first class patience.

The Fairview is a lovely place, built at what was the edge of Nairobi in the 1940s.  Much has changed in seventy years, and now the property sits smack dab in the middle of a gated community that also houses several embassies.  Security is tight.  We passed an armed guard at the hotel gate and a baggage scanner before check in.  In anticipation of President Obama’s visit in 2015, the authorities installed surveillance cameras, similar to those all over the British Isles, to record street traffic.  We inadvertently tested security the next day as we walked through the hotel gardens.  A path that promised a panorama took us to a position with a view of the garden and the hotel. Across the street rose a high wall with Kenyan soldiers patrolling its perimeter.  My wife noticed a sentry post on the wall itself, manned by a soldier of clearly un-Kenyan nationality.  She waved.  Rather than returning her friendly gesture, the soldier pointed and scowled.  Almost instantly, a man in a suit hurried up behind us.  He introduced himself as the hotel security chief and told us to return to the garden.  Turns out that we had gazed into the Israeli embassy compound.

Later in the day the hotel arranged a taxi ride to the Kenyan National Museum, our only tourist foray into Nairobi. The museum holds a well curated display of the country’s history from pre-colonial times to the present, sprinkled with skeletons and taxidermied bodies of the country’s celebrated wildlife.  The ride back to the hotel displayed the capital’s not-so-famous rush hour traffic.  Automobiles mixed it up with motorcycles, pedicabs and pedestrians. My wife and I agreed that Nairobi’s drivers are even less observant of rules of the road than their Latin American counterparts.  The Fairview welcomed us back with an early dinner and a comfortable bed.

Our flight from Nairobi to Kilimanjaro International Airport, just across the Tanzanian border, took us to the east of the majestic mountain of the same name.  The view from the plane would be our only glimpse of the peak.  Clouds occlude the summit for 300 days of the year, and our day at Hatari Lodge was not among the favored sixty-five.  Hatari (“danger” in Swahili) was the title of a movie filmed in the locale in 1962.  Howard Hawks directed and John Wayne starred, but more important for the future of the lodge was the appearance of the German actor, Hardy Kruger, in a supporting role.  The beauty of the area so impressed Kruger that he purchased land used in the filming and attempted to attract German tourists until newly independent Tanzania imposed laws discouraging foreign involvement in the national economy.  While the property offers fine accommodations and an open park that attracts game—we saw zebras, cape buffaloes and a pair of giraffes—its charm pales against that of the Tanzanian game reserves and national parks that we would see in the days to come.

To cover our wide-ranging itinerary, we made several short hops in single engine aircraft.  The first, Arusha to Kuro (Tarangire) had a pilot who spoke with a Castillian accent.  He looked so young that one of our fellow passengers asked how long he had been flying.  I was thinking “Tanzian Foreign Legion Air Corps.”  But Luis, from Madrid, proved older than his looks and had flown several years for Air Excel.

Tarangire National Park is justly famous for its large elephant population.  The park includes a large marsh that attracts animals when other water sources disappear. Although we saw elephants everywhere we went, the view of more than 100 in a single location was unforgettable. We also saw our first lions in Tarangire.  A pride of four females devoured a cape buffalo as we watched from our open Toyota Landcruiser.  We were so close, too close for my comfort, initially, that we could hear the lionesses crunching the bones of their kill.  As long as we did not leave our seats, the beasts apparently saw us and the vehicle as an unthreatening background.

In her pre trip research, my wife identified a site off the safari track.  The Kondoa rock paintings document ancient human occupation in east Africa.  Mary Leakey described the paintings in a book published in the 1940s, and more recently UNESCO has declared them a World Heritage Site.  To our request, the tour operator responded that no one had asked to visit Kondoa before.  That should have signaled hatari, but with our intrepid driver, we set off on the “highway” south.  Turns out that despite its cultural importance, Kondoa is rarely visited, and we discovered why.  The track to the paintings is steep, rocky, and gullied.  Only by the grace of the high-clearance, four wheel drive Landcruiser did we reach a parking lot.  Just who did the art, its significance and its dating are yet to be determined.  But clear to anyone with eyes and an imagination, the paintings show two dimensional representations of humans and prey animals—buffalo and giraffe.  I expect that the next time that tourists utter “Kondoa,” the True Africa folks will reference our experience and suggest that they reconsider.

From this point on everything—the fabulous Ngorongoro Crater, the giraffe colony near the Dunia Camp, waiting in vain for the Wildebeests to cross the Mara River (but seeing them framed in a double rainbow), and the single cheetah followed by a dozen tourist vehicles—went by like a dream.

Sick

The symptoms were flu-like, high temperature and chills.  My impulse was to ride it out, but when the thermometer read 104, my wife drove me to the emergency room late on a Friday afternoon.  Thus I entered the world of medicine, a landscape similar to that of some distant planet.

My experience with emergency rooms was limited to visiting my mother at a downtown Los Angeles hospital near the end of her life.  That one was secured by a uniformed policeman cum sidearm and a metal detector. This one lacked any visible security, but this is Texas, and everyone present may have carried a concealed weapon.  Emergency rooms are all about triage.  A clerk, phlebotomists, nurses, and, finally, a physician gave interviews with annoyingly-repetitious questions (what are your symptoms; when did they begin; are you taking any prescription medications?), listened with stethoscopes (“take a deep breath”), poked and drew blood.  About an hour after we walked in the door, my wife and I were ushered into an examination room where the poking and questioning began anew. Isn’t this redundancy what sharing digital information is supposed to make obsolete?   Finally a nurse terminated the examination and inserted an antibiotic drip. Then we waited, me on a gurney, my wife in a chair. 

Sometime around 3AM, my wife crawled onto the gurney with me.  She had finally reached the end of her heroic endurance, and she was cold.  By this time the antibiotics and extra strength Tylenol were reducing my symptoms.  The fever broke, and a nurse was on the point of releasing me when she witnessed my very shaky walk to the rest room.  I toddled back to the gurney with her aid.  Soon the fever returned as did the antibiotic drip. Tests would reveal that I had contracted something called streptococcus maitis, from a bacterium that resides in the mouth.  I had made myself sick brushing my teeth.

Diagnosis in hand, I was admitted to the hospital.  An orderly issued a hospital gown, socks with nonslip soles, a bed pan, towels and washcloths.  I felt like a GI starting boot camp.  Then a nurse assigned me a room and hooked up an IV pump that administered antibiotics and a saline solution.  Over the course of my stay eight nurses (Jo Jo, Michael, Florence (twice), Rachael, John, Michelle and LaVell) attended me day and night, taking vital signs, refreshing medications, asking for my name and date of birth. Their irritating care and the medication quickly reduced my symptoms and raised my hopes for an early dismissal. I received visitors and read novels for the rest of the weekend.

On Monday physicians began their rounds.  First among them was the infectious diseases specialist who had prepared my wife and me for our upcoming trip to Africa.  After going over my chart, he asked if we had altered our plans.  What he really meant was that, despite my protests, he intended to do whatever he could to convince us to postpone the trip.  In the end, and after getting the same advice from the resident overseeing my hospitalization, our primary care physician, and my sister-in-law, the pediatrician, I gave in.  Apparently, if not completely eradicated, the maitis bacterium can cluster on a heart valve and cause serious pumping problems.

The next evening, as I lay in bed, a technician installed a PICC (peripherally inserted central catheter), a thin, flexible tube threaded through a vein on my upper arm into a ventricle.  This allowed direct delivery of medication to the heart from syringes supplied by UPS.  The next day I was free to go, but not before signing a half ream of forms authorizing release of medical records, acknowledging that I understood the nature of my illness (a stretch) and promising to be good (what choice did I have?).

Once at home, I began a regimen of antibiotics administered through the PICC.  Every day at 11AM sharp my wife used syringes to push medicine and anticoagulants into my chest cavity.  This lasted a month and, apparently, did the job.  To mark the end of treatment, a nurse removed the syringe connection and pulled out the tube.  Therapy ended; billing began.

As a seventy-year-old and a retired academic, the cost of treatment and hospitalization did not affect my financial health.  But trying to deconstruct the billing documents has been migraine-inducing.  There are lines detailing services and costs followed by lines for Medicare, Medicare deductable, sequester adjustment, and finally “Amount You May Owe Provider.”  Some of the numbers are enormous, but through an inscrutable arithmetic, the bottom line is nearly always $0.00.  It is this system that Mr. Trump wants to disrupt; it gives me chills (and fever).

Super Bloom in Death Valley

I was visiting family in Los Angeles when someone said “super bloom.”  Turns out that the expression refers to an intense flowering in Death Valley. In November of 2015 heavy rainfall in the desert set the stage for an eruption of flowers in the National Park.  Los Angeles news sources featured nearly daily accounts that described this year’s flowering as a once-in-a-generation event.  Even though it meant a five-hour drive through dense traffic, we decided not to miss it. 

Demand for viewing the super bloom had exhausted the supply of rooms in the Park’s three hotels, but we were able to reserve two nights at the Shoshone Inn just outside the southeast entrance.  Shoshone, population 31, is a remnant of what was once a mining area.  The town features the Inn, a general store and Post Office, the Crowbar Restaurant & Saloon, an RV park, and a thermal spring.  Maps of the area show access to the eastern side of the National Park via California Highway 178, but the November rains that set off the super bloom also washed out sections of the road, requiring an hour’s detour north to Death Valley Junction.

We stopped first at Zabriskie Point, a spot named for a mining administrator in the early 20^th century, now best know for the 1970 film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.  Even sharing the view with a large group of Road Scholar tourists could not diminish its beauty.  The “point” itself is a sharp upcropping of blonde schist framed by dark-colored deposits of volcanic lava and backdropped by the blue silhouettes of the Panamint Mountains. No flowers yet, though.

At Furnace Creek a Park Service Ranger offered us advice based on where the most intense colors had been reported and directed us south on California 178, passable as far as the Badwater salt flats.  As we drove, the eastern side of the rocky surface of the valley floor softened with an overlay of yellow flowers.  Closer inspection revealed that the carpet-like appearance was loosely woven, intermittent plants rising above the desert floor.  A wildflower guide purchased at Furnace Creek helped us identify the yellow flowers as Desert Gold, a plant that displays bright petals and seeds on a spindly, brown stem.  We also saw the violet-cupped Desert Five-Spot and Purple Mat, with its tiny, star-figured blossoms.

At Badwater a Ranger led a walking tour of the salt flats that fan out from the highway.  Many of the questions she fielded concerned the flowers rather than the salt formation.  From her explanation we learned that a super bloom actually has two stages.  The heavy fall rains rinse away a thick seed covering, setting the stage for the flowers that we saw in February. But this initial gambit must be followed up by subsequent moisture that allows the early flowers to survive and for other species to erupt.  The Ranger expressed concern that without a rain before the first of March, the “super bloom” would not fully develop.

Wonder what happened.

Peace Corps to Evo

With my wife's retirement in September, we left the world of work to live near our son in Houston. A new home means a new house, and there is nothing surer to disrupt domestic tranquility than the selection of trims and colors and cabinetry. So in the name of preserving the general welfare, I left the house to my wife and flew south for one last trip to the Andes.

Although I have been back to Bolivia many times since I first saw it in 1968, it has been nearly fifty years since I visited Chuquichambi, the little town where I spent my three years in the Peace Corps.  I wanted to return while my aging body could endure the rigors of high altitude, risky diet, and uncertain transportation.  This seemed like the time.

Bolivia in the 1970s was a series of regions united by little more than a name. Moreover, the tiny elite and small middle class that had controlled the nation since its creation had very little interest in the countryside. When I left Chuquichambi in 1971, the town had 500 inhabitants, the same population recorded in 19th century records.  It had no electricity, no system of communication and no reliable roads.

It was this last deficiency that posed the greatest obstacle to a return trip.  In my experience, the onset of rains in November meant the end of predictable passage across the fifty kilometers that separate the town from the Pan American highway that runs south from La Paz. The annual rains turn the flat, dusty pampa into a sea of grasping mud. But it was now or never. I contracted a driver and four-wheel drive Land Cruiser, and this November meterology was running in my favor.

The Pan American Highway is now a four-lane expressway, and the ten kilometers between it and the jump off point on the railway is paved to two lanes. As we chatted on the drive south, I had warned the driver, Humberto, that we would have to ferry the Desaguadero River before we reached the pampa. But much to my delight, there is now a  bridge over the river, and on the other side of it a sign reading: "Papel Pampa 37 KM," "Chuquichambi 51KM." More surprises followed. All of the fifty-one kilometers were on a raised, gravel roadbed, much in need of grading but all of it a foot above the annual water level. Chuquichambi now has a bridge across its small river, electricity, and a cell phone tower, located just out of town. (I called my wife and learned that carpenters had misread the blueprints to the kitchen.)

These changes, all occurring in the last five years, are directly the result of Evo Morales' presidencies.  Morales, himself of a rural, peasant background, has diverted significant funds and attention to developing the countryside.

As Humberto laid out a picnic lunch, I walked around, testing my bearings. The town plaza was as I remembered it, but the church and its bell tower had been rebuilt, smaller  and closer to the plaza. The two buildings of greatest interest to me, the secondary school built with funds from the United States (see images below), and the house where I lived, were still as I remember them.

After lunch Humberto and I parked in the plaza, hoping to attract attention.  It didn't take long. First two tween-aged boys on bikes stopped and stared. Though they had no memories of the distant past, the boys served as a catalyst to my hopes.  One summoned a middle-aged man who remembered my residence in his youth and the building of the school. He asked me to give him names that I remembered.  Not surprisingly, everyone on my list is now dead. But a woman sitting in an open doorway nearby, now very old and nearly deaf, turned out to be the widow of one of my best friends.  She summoned her son, now middle-aged and nearly toothless, and we talked about old times. As we shook hands and parted, he thanked me for coming back and proudly observed that "we've progressed a lot since you were here last."

His words are full of meaning.  Operating under the ethos of development, the Peace Corps’ purpose was to bring progress to the countryside.  But in reflection, I, and many of my cohort, have realized that progress comes only from within.  What the Peace Corps intended, Evo Morales delivered fifty years later.

The drive back to La Paz featured one episode from the past.  In Chuquichambi Humberto learned that there was a more direct route back to the Pan American Highway and decided to take it. The route was shorter, but it included a ferry across the Desaguadero. As our vehicle reached the east side of the river a pilot launched his craft, and took us across, using a long pole for propulsion and navigation.  This modern-day Charon’s days are numbered, though.  Concrete bridge spans and a crane lay near the landing.

School 1971

School 2015