A man is sitting next to Mohammed. He has the long, unkempt beard and collared white shirt, dark vest and wire-rimmed glasses that I usually associate with orthodox religion. With the extra layers of clothes and hat and scarves, I can’t put my finger on whether he’s Russian or Greek, or even Jewish. Regardless, what he’s doing is of note: he has his arm around Mohammed, is speaking in low tones with a nodding head. A little while ago Mohammed shouted, “They kill my family. Thirty-two family I have, now I have none. Stop bombing Afghanistan.”

The two alternate taking swigs from a plastic bottle of gin. At one point, they both laugh while staring at the ground. On its own, the episode is not so uncommon in New York City in 2011. But something about the fact that we’re here, on Christmas Eve, on day 99 of Occupied Liberty Plaza, gives it a deeper significance, a sense of connections being formed at a foundational level, a flavor of renewed hope.

A proposal at the General Assembly to “prohibit” working groups from meeting during GAs and Spokes Councils is blocked by a few who have ethical concerns that it will infringe on the autonomy of others. None of the speakers question whether or not we should be encouraging people to attend GA, but the procedural constraints (questions, then concerns, then amendments) steer people away from a more natural discussion that might encourage finding common ground to start from. At this point, some regulars start breaking process and responding out of turn, shouting at people who they think misunderstand the proposal. This leads to others shouting back at them to respect the process.  I recognize a familiar pattern of dissolution among largely agreeing parties, and start to withdraw a bit.

The proposal does not meet this criterion. Consensus is declared “not reached,” and the proposer is swarmed by individuals who want to help him improve the language. This conversation will continue. At this point, a call comes out from the crowd. “Mic check! Arts and Culture would like to request a ten-minute break to pass out some candles!” A&C had planned a 9 p.m. candlelight vigil. Consensus is asked, and quickly achieved without needing to count. We gather around. I look in the bag next to the woman who announced the break and find an exquisitely detailed wax candle in the shape of a fist, with its middle finger raised.

Brilliant. We’re asked to grab some candles and stand in a circle around an area that used to be filled with plants. (They survived our Occupation, thanks to the work of several volunteer gardeners, but they did not survive the police raid). At this point, seemingly out of nowhere, my friend Becky appears. I had emailed some friends earlier to let them know where I’d be and to tell the story of a caroler who sang earlier—“I’m dreaming of an Occupied Christmas…They say protesting’s illegal/But we’ve got Norman Siegel…” etc., etc.—and of Mohammed. This apparently inspired Becky to swoop down from her sickbed to join. She is one of my oldest friends. We met in college, about ten years ago, and it seems she’s around for many of the important moments of my life. We both came to Occupy a few months ago, organically, though neither of us was surprised to find each other there. I’m grateful that I have her as a witness for what happens the rest of the night.

The artist—Mr. Matsumoto, I didn’t catch his first name—stands up on a bench and describes the candles to us. “Mic check! This is my Christmas present to you guys. I want you guys to get around and light this for me. I nearly lost my middle finger—my real middle finger—the other day. I’m a woodworker, and I make my living with my hands. While I was injured, I thought about a lot of things. I thought about my life without my middle finger. [Crowd laughs.] If I don’t have my middle finger, it really, really sucks.” [Laughs again.] “It really sucks…because it’s like losing a voice.” [Cheers.] “My middle finger.” He raises the candle. “YOUR middle finger.” Vigorous twinkles—of our middle fingers. The candles are lit and several are raised toward the Brookfield building.

I’m glad this movement began in New York, not just because I’m here and get to experience it, but because it has acquired a certain New York flavor in both work ethic and brusque humor that helps to take the edge off of the struggle. The movement retains its hard-nosed character throughout; you’ll never mistake our laughter for weakness. Here’s an example: A call goes out in the best Brooklyn accent one can muster and still hope for the human mic to accurately reflect: “Mic check! Fuuuuuuuuck youuuuuuuuu!”

We gather in a circle, sort of, and some use the human mic to announce why they are lighting the candles: for the loss of our civil liberties, for the dogs who died in the raid (this is the first I’ve heard of that), for the library. I feel that while this might be appropriate to the intention, it somehow derails the festive mood that we’ve built in spite of the cold, and I call out that I am lighting this candle to celebrate the rebirth of our democracy. A small, cheesy break, but I hear relief in the hoots that follow. I catch Stan, from ThinkTank and Outreach, giddily milling about, saying, “We have to march with these! We have to march with these!” I say to him, “Call it out! Let’s do it!” He speeds off again. Stan’s story is inspiring, though not entirely unique: he visited from Huntsville, Alabama, in early October. I met him on his first or second day here when he was planning to learn what he could and go back and start Occupy Huntsville. I saw him again two days later and he said he was thinking of moving to NYC. A few weeks after that, he moved. He’s been living with Occupy ever since—at the park, first, and now in churches. 

The idea to march comes from several places at once: “Let’s march!” Someone calls, “Around the park!” Stan, still buzzing from group to group, reappears: “No! We’re marching to Wall Street! We’re going to the stock exchange!”

This might seem an obvious idea, but it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate why it is anything but. Since the very first day of the Occupation, we have attempted to march on the NYSE. To my knowledge the only time we got close was during the large march of November 17th. The police were determined to never let us near the Exchange. Back during the Occupation, there were daily marches. When we headed toward City Hall, the police corralled us around the perimeter with blockades. But when we headed in the direction of the Exchange, we’d meet riot police and horses. Most people never expected to do it, but considered it important to continue trying, even if only for symbolic value.

Right now, on Christmas Eve, there are only three patrol officers, with three or four more community-affairs officers (and about ten Brookfield private security guards, whom I later learn are being paid triple overtime). The awareness that we can actually do this spreads through the crowd. After some confused attempts to relight the candles against the wind tunnel of Liberty Plaza, someone shouts, “Let’s just march, and we’ll light the candles…on Wall Street.”

We begin to march and the chant begins: “All day, all week, Occupy Wall Street!” I can’t help but grin, because, yes, for the first time in a long time, we’re actually doing it. The man carrying the live-streaming laptop has a debate with himself about whether or not to join; at the last major march, live-streamers were among the first arrested, in a pattern that seemed intentional. He eventually acquiesces to the will of the crowd, both the one in the park and the increasing number watching along at home.

As we make our way to the exit, I see a police officer standing outside of the barricades at the southern gate to the park. Her arms are extended, as if to confine us to half the sidewalk. Shawn from DA is confused by this, laughs and starts dancing around her in circles. She pushes him, hard, and he tumbles several feet. “It’s the sidewalk!” he shouts, nervously laughing. She shouts back, “You don’t listen! You should just listen!” I’m laughing, nervously too, because I’ve seen what happens when police are overwhelmed by numbers. But I realize what she’s doing: there’s a propane tank fueling one of the food carts. I suspect that she doesn’t want us to step on it or bring candles too close to it. Perfectly reasonable! Why didn’t she say so? I say to her, “It’s the propane tank! You could have just told us.” But she’s not listening to me.

As we turn down Broadway, the police hurry into formation, marching in a single-file line in the bus lane. There are more of them now, though I’m not quite sure where they came from so quickly. Another of our regular ingredients, the drums, pop up out of nowhere. Who decides to bring drums (and a tambourine?) to Liberty Plaza on Christmas Eve in thirty-degree weather? Well, someone named Rooster did, and, flanked by an American flag, he starts playing a brisk, tight rhythm.

The crowd chants and speeds its way through the old standards: “Banks got bailed out/We got sold out.” Then: “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Corporate greed has got to go!” The middle-finger candles are waving. We turn left down Wall Street, chanting, spinning, dancing, laughing, some with their heads turned to the sky. The parade continues down the northern sidewalk, passing Federal Hall, site of the first Congress and the first Presidential inauguration. A contingent breaks off and runs up the stairs, around Washington’s statue and between the marble columns, hooting mischievously like children left in a mall after closing time. We take the long way around the barricades that circle the intersection of Wall Street and the Exchange Street, turn right toward the corner and stop. The patrol officers are behind us, paused along Wall Street, in front of Federal Hall. There are two community-affairs officers ahead, standing side by side, facing us, backs to the Exchange. Other than them, there is no physical reason for us to stop. But we do.

We’re paused at the corner for a couple of minutes that linger with careful excitement. The parade catches up, our only possible excuse not to move forward. Some people are shouting ideas, hurling invective at the Exchange, asking for lighters and matches, but no one is saying the obvious. I look at the Exchange building: columns bathed in red light, American flags fluttering in a slight breeze, gigantic Christmas tree with a half-lit menorah at the base. Someone says, “We should light these candles and stand silently in front of the Exchange.” No one has moved down the sidewalk, past the officers, yet. I turn to the crowd, then back to the officers. With no purpose to my step, I start to walk at them, then around them. I don’t think to look at their faces, but just keep awareness of their forms in the corner of my eye. They don’t move. The crowd—we are, somehow, bigger than when we started—spills down the sidewalk. We’re here. A group of Occupiers, holding lit middle-finger candles, facing the New York Stock Exchange. The street is quiet, save for us. On the 99th day of the 99%, we did it, for the first time. We are Occupying “Wall Street.”

The patrol officers remain where they were. At the southern end of the block, a new contingent of mounted officers lines up, inside the barricades. I suppose, in retrospect, that they had the exits blocked, but that didn’t seem to be as threatening as it usually might. Shouts begin. “Mic check! I want to see one broker or banker go to jail!” “Mic check! Whose street?” “Mic check! This is our time.” “Mic check! Fuck you, Wall Street!” Someone shouts “Fuck the police!” and he is instantly met with a shower of jeers. There’s some back and forth about how we should present ourselves, about how the police are the 99%, about maintaining solidarity despite differences of opinion. Someone breaks the tension: “Mic check! To the police, our gift to you! Massive overtime pay!” Cheers. We’re standing now, some of us on the polygonal metal sculptures that line the sidewalk. There are no people between me and the Exchange—just the cobblestone street and roughly four layers of police barricades. Standing on the metal sculpture, I am above them. I realize it’s just a short jump into the street, and from there a short walk to the Exchange. I realize I’m probably more comfortable staying where I am.

The mounted officers retreat to a position farther down, past the intersection of Exchange Place and Broad Street. They don’t seem to be heading our way. Someone calls out, “Let’s hold a moment of silence for the officer who just died.” (I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but I believe he was referring to Officer Figoski, shot while investigating a burglary in Queens.) And we did. I glanced at the officers, standing at the north edge of the street. They held their hands in front of them, crossed at the wrists. It seemed they heard the request. There was some quick back and forth, and the crowd settled. For a minute, the only sound was the subway rumbling, the traffic a few blocks away, the wind whipping the flag. Alone, together, in the canyon at the heart of the financial district, a group of Occupiers and officers held their heads and their tongues to commemorate a sacrifice in service of a better world.

“Thank you,” says the man who requested the moment of silence. The facilitators from the GA realize that there’s no going back to the park and ask for consensus to reconvene the GA here. Hundreds of fingers wave in concordance. Someone offers to run back to the park to get anyone who is still there. We wait, and people soapbox. One of the facilitators, Diego, eternally cheerful, shouts, “Remember this. Remember this. Thirty years from now, you will recall this moment with tears streaming down your face.” Cheers and shouts—there’s no crying now. There’s only laughing. I mill about, talk it over with Becky, soak in the awe of the moment. But we’re unsure if we want to stay. The scout returns, says there’s no one left in the park except those who wanted to be there. The GA begins again and picks up right where we left off.

The next proposal is to support a national march on Washington on March 17th, which will be the six-month anniversary of the Occupation. The GA is not the right forum for this kind of amorphous initiative, but people are appreciative of the idea. Several points of information are offered on similar actions that are currently in the early planning stages; it appears the second half of March is going to be very, very busy. The proposal is tabled; the proposer wades into a crowd of people who want to help combine their ideas. Becky, under the weather, sees an opportunity to disengage. I hesitate, not wanting to let go of this incredible moment, but don’t quite feel up to the Process right now. She leaves and we spend much of the evening arguing over the way to consensus, drowning in the seemingly interminable bickering that some fear will destroy this movement from within. These clashes of process and principle that join to block our way forward seem impassable obstacles rather than intermittent hurdles, but if this night proves anything, it’s that once the blocks are removed, once the barricades are seen past, we all know the destination. We just need to remind ourselves that we can get there.

AARON B. is a participant in Occupy Wall Street. Right now all of his Occupy energy is focused on helping to make May Day 2012 a beautiful day to remember. He looks forward to seeing everyone out in public on May 1st, celebrating all day with tens of thousands of others in a festival of public art, performance and radical self-expression. See www.maydaynyc.org and www.call2create.org for more information.

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This collection of stories was submitted anonymously by a copilot of a major U.S. airline. The accounts published here are edited for length and clarity only. A new submission runs with every issue.

The Mystery of the Blue Cross Dagger 

DISCLAIMER: If you run out of altitude, airspeed and ideas all at the same time, it’s probably time to pray. Don’t chase the needles. Don’t chase the Flight Attendants. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.

My 10 year wedding anniversary was on September 4th. I planned accordingly. Got a week off. Wife warned me that if I took her to the NASCAR race over the weekend, we’d be divorced on Monday. Obamanomics, lack of a sitter and poor planning on my part conspired to keep us at home instead of nurturing sunburns and hangovers on a beach somewhere.

I am a traditional guy. I was sick at our wedding. Lots of cold medication and sweating for cameras. So I caught a cold for our ten-year and called in sick for my trip on the 1st. Surprisingly, the wife was less than wooed by my sentimentality.

So on the 4th, I was quarantined in the basement. The sitter had the kids, and my soul mate went to work at the track/airport. Spent a good half hour hanging with my favorite driver, Carl Edwards, after she parked his plane in her hangar. Told Edwards to call if he needed anything. No problem. He already had her cell programmed into his phone.

She ended up working late and just rounding out our anniversary partying at the track and spending the night there. Pretty sure the divorce clause only applied if I was there too, so I got that going for me.

Day 1
I can’t find my watch. No biggie. As I mentioned, I have a multitude of SPWs (Stupid Pilot Watches). I don’t like wearing them anymore, but going tempo commando makes me feel unsettled. Mine is a very time oriented job, and trying to catch a glimpse of the time on someone else’s watch, or screen or over shoulders during conversation is a neat way to suggest you might be down for a little eye contact. Or maybe some friendly pickpocketing with a side of stalking.

I’ve been there and back. Once upon a time, the watch was all-important. An essential symbol of masculinity, status, profession and class. Big. Multifunction. Plastic or leather. (Metal bands can backfire and imply copious cologne usage and a closet interest in men’s fashion magazines. Besides, it pulls my fur.) Tough guy watch. Something that says, “My function can kick your form’s ass.”

Now I crave temporal ignobility. The timepiece equivalent of an “I’m with Stupid” t-shirt. Something so utterly forgettable and utilitarian that the absence of cool is a statement of cool. A black hole of anti- cool. Crisis averted. Hampster brings my Timex. Left it at his house playing Rock Band Beatles a couple days ago. Doofy on drums. Me on guitar. Hampster on bass. We all sang. We all rocked toy instruments. We drank a lot.

My car keeps to the S&M theme, but all the beeps and warning lights from Coche Craptacular have become background noise. Baseline of annoying has been raised. What else you got? Even the queer stares from other drivers because my sunroof is open and it’s raining, can’t break-a-my-stride.

The plane is parked at an overflow gate. I go out for the walk-around. I don’t know the door code to get back in. I ask a ramper sitting in the aft cargo bay. His response is indecipherable.

The APU is running. I can’t hear her. She says it two more times. Finally, long acrylic claws are deployed as a visual aid. It seems to be mentally taxing to say the numbers and hold up the correct number of fingers. For the two at the end, she actually makes a fist. Doesn’t matter. It’s not the right code anyway.

Out of respect for the heightened security protocols in place since this date 2001, I knock on the door. One of the passengers lets me in. I try to look shifty and nervous. Act like I’m not sure what to do now. I’m sweating. I’m sure that helps.

Don’t know what to make of the Capt. The more I talk to him, the more peculiar he gets. Mid forties. Fit. Turns out he’s of Lithuanian descent. Has a rock solid Hank Hill imitation. On his left hand, between the first and second knuckle, he has a small tattoo of a blue faded cross that ends in a dagger point.

The tattoo is doubly odd because I’m fairly sure he’s Jewish and most pilots with felony records were weeded out in the background security sweep in 2002. I can’t bring myself to ask him about it.

He’s a P2P (Pilot to Pilot) guy – a union enthusiast privy to strategic info and charged with informing the rest of us clods of the latest and greatest contract negotiation dirt. This is also unusual because every P2P I’ve flown with desperately needed a punch to the face. Maybe a pile drive to the face. This guy seems laid back.

At cruise for the Pacific Northwest, I make the mistake of asking, “So what’s up with the contract?” He does not stop talking for two and a half hours. I wish he would shut the fuck up for a second so I can jot down how he won’t shut the fuck up.

At the hotel, I spend some time in the gym to briefly and gently reintroduce my body to rigors of not drinking and smoking from dawn till dawn, which is life over race weekend. Watch lots of racing to soften the malignant grinding of metabolic gears. Meet the Capt. in the bar for dinner. He’s embroiled in conversation with another crew. Former Canadian and Eastern scab, #1xx on the seniority list, and his FO. Gallons of tedious rants on the company’s callus incompetence.

#1xx regales us with daring tales of uniform rebelliousness. Gave his wings to a kid on the plane a while back. Never bothered to get another set. Gave his shoulder board to a gate agent, folded in the paperwork, because she was clearly running the show and needed the stripes to cement her authority. (The stripes showed back up in his mailbox a week later, but he still only wears the one.)

Lost his hat helping a woman change a tire one night. She found it and sent it back, but not until it had been decimated by cars, critters and couple days in the ditch. Got called out by one of our chief pilots for not having his hat, so he wore the road-kill coon cap around for a week or so.

The man is a rebel. A maverick. A trailblazer with impossibly small feet geishaed into size seven loafers. And a tool of the first order.

He pontificates ad nauseum on his skill, experience and the shortsighted stupidity of “by the book” procedures. His “co-pilots” are frightened and amazed that he can turn off the autopilot and hand-fly at will.

I buy him a beer following that same unspoken guilty logic that if you put your change in the Jerry’s Kids jar, you buy a little hex against that horror being visited upon you and yours. Maybe by pouring a B-BAB into this guy, I can avoid turning into a pompous fucktard. Use the same logic recycling the little boxes my cigars come in to prevent cancer.

Day 2
Five hours en route and I still can’t think of a tactful way to ask about the hand tattoo. Inbound to <<HOME>> the Capt. begins to regret his Chinese food. Makes one trip to the lav in flight. Tells me he has to bolt for the John after we land and will see me at C1. We park on D3. He exits and I collect my gear and head for C1. It’s a hike. Over half a mile if you walk it. Check the screens just to make sure before I get on the train. My next flight departs from D5 – one gate over from where I started.

I induce the universal body language of “fuuuuuuck.” Head back. Eyes closed. Shoulders slumped. I’m five years old. Drag my peach-bruised drama back to the escalator and back to the gate. Decide this is the Capt.’s fault, until he shows up at the plane twenty minutes later having walked all the way to C1 and back.

Get to the hotel in MCO about 2330. Capt. wants to go to Friday’s and get a beer. I beg off with the intention of going to bed, but Rambo is on and I fall asleep around 0300.

Day 3
The difference between a Continental Breakfast and a Deluxe Continental Breakfast is protein. Usually hardboiled eggs. Sausage and egg-like patties if you hit the hotel jackpot. In the same vein, the difference between a Fitness Room and a Fitness Center is weights. Usually a universal machine with patchy delaminated cables, several pins missing and few or no attachments. Barbells if you’re really lucky.

The Airport Country Inn & Suites has a Fitness Room dressed up in mommy’s heels. Weights yes. But only in five-, ten- and twenty-pound denominations…and no Uni-V. I’m no Nadius, but twenty pounds means lots and lots of reps or moving with glacial slowness. I guess both.

I do not throw rocks in the glass atrium of physical phitness. I am a “before” picture. If you’re doing it, you’re probably doing more than me. But…on the elliptical: Doughy guy, 5’8″. Little God’s eye of dryness just above his shorts line where the back fat hasn’t filled in yet, so the sweat hasn’t seeped.

He’s pedaling backwards. The elliptical is already an emasculating machine. You really can’t look cool on one. But backwards adds a disco ball. If this motion were performed on solid ground, jazz hands would be mandatory and maybe a “Sssssssssssssss.”

Whatever. It’s a pretty good workout. Problem is, the guy’s eating a big blueberry muffin. Pedaling furiously backward. Hips sashaying in a way no man’s should outside of Bangkok. Both hands are occupied with the muffin like he’s sucking the blood out of a house pet like a vampire. Crumbs shower down and collect on the rims of his no-socks. There’s another muffin in the cup holder.

At one point he uses his teeth to scrape the last of the gooey goodness off the wrapper. Red-shifting himself out of the “good for you dude” spectrum into the deep crimson shades of “Are you fucking stupid?” After he finishes muffin #1, he takes a quick phone call. Pedaling all the while.

I decide to warm up on the bike immediately to his right. The angle is sublime. From here the TV is right over his left shoulder. I’m just barely behind him like we’re flying formation. As I watch the tube, in the mirror, it looks like I’m giving him the big fat hairy eyeball. Just drilling into the back of his skull non-stop. He keeps looking in the mirror and glancing over his shoulder. I pretend not to notice.

He bails after about a half hour and I dismount for some slow-mo “Eye of the Tiger” montage reps with 20lb dumbbells. As I leave, I have to turn sideways cause my awesome won’t fit through the door straight on.

On the arrival into SJU, I pull up the arrival weather. ATIS information Whiskey. I usually write the letter big on the top of the ACARS printout so I can see it quickly when I forget it checking on with Approach Control. I draw a big W. Look at it. Look at it again. My handwriting is atrocious. I block print everything architect style because otherwise I can’t read it myself.

My W is an imperfect W. But there, in the right half of my W, I’ve drawn a perfect breast. Perfect. Couldn’t do it intentionally for any amount of money. But there it is. My fleeting artistic zenith. An accidental right boob that would make Michelangelo envious of its subtle elegance.

As I’m saying ‘byethanks’ to the pax in SJU, a matron in a coral pantsuit makes eye contact with me as she comes through first class. I get that she doesn’t speak English. She hangs her tongue all the way out the right side of her mouth. Rolls her eyes a little.

I am completely fascinated by this gesture because I don’t have the first clue what she’s exhausted/exasperated with. Normally there’s some wafting contextual tether to this kind of gesture. Some faint positional artifact to connect it to the experience it refers to. But there’s nothing. It could mean anything:

The flight was long. Getting old sucks. This bag is too big for these aisles. Shouldn’t have packed that second ham. The guy she’s following has terrible dandruff. The service sucked. Her husband is incompetent or incontinent. The baby two rows back cried the whole way. Somebody farted.

It’s intoxicating. Rarely is this sort of intimate gesture just lobbed at a total stranger. It has to be attached to something shared. She knew I understood what she was talking about even though I can’t even guess what it might be. Be like thinking of something funny and nudging whoever’s next to in the bank line to see if they got the joke in your head. Beautiful.

We get to the hotel in MCO (different hotel) around 2130. I can’t weasel out of beers again. We go to the little store behind the hotel and buy some beer. Sit at the pool till they kick us out at 2200. Sit on a bench like it’s our first date and stare at the parking lot. I ask him about the tattoo. Won’t tell me what it means, just that he’s had it since he was 15.

Day 4
The Capt. asks if I’m writing a book or something. “Sort of. Not really.” Can’t really tell him since he’s a central feature. Think about trading Follies for the meaning of that little dagger cross on his hand. But I’d probably have to rewrite it first.

On approach, with 27 people on board, I’m giddy with anticipation. We are almost empty. Stupid light. It’s his leg and landing this thing at less than 100,000lbs. is usually a simple and inexorable recipe for a crushing impact of a landing. The kind of thing that makes children cry.

The wing on <<My Airplane>> is so well designed and so slick that the plane hovers in ground effect about 30 feet off, slows to about 100 knots, then just gives up and clatters to the ground. Like one of those insurance commercials where the cables break and the piano plummets 3 stories onto the sidewalk. Funny as hell if it’s not your landing.

There’s a trick. A work-around. And unfortunately, he knows it. Keep a little power in as you raise the nose up to build more drag. Disappointed. I was ribbing him the whole way down. Anticlimactic.

‘Nice landing fucker. What does that fucking tattoo mean anyway?’ He still won’t tell me.

For more Four Day Follies, see 4dayfollies.com.

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I wonder about Paris. Is it fake? Did it ever exist? Why is it so clean?  Some of the old alleys have been closed-up, collapsed, filled-in. Were they ever real? Is Leon-Paul Fargue

still dead? Where are today’s egg worshippers? I’ll have the ouefs enmeurette at Chez Yvonne, merci. It’s gone? Merdre!

The Hotel Gay Lussac is spitting distance from Jardin du Luxembourg. My room has a bed, a chair, a chiffonier, a little dim lamp. My omelette is jambon. With a tartine. Now I’m in the Jardin looking at the Palais, where Watteau lived and worked in 1707/10.

Now I’m in the Louvre.  What is this big picture of a cheerless gink in a white jumpsuit? What’s that donkey doing down there?

Elsewhere, Watteau’s little men in silver leggings and girls in pink and silver gowns appear to be fish. Appear, yes. It’s all a dream. If you reach out to Paris, your hand will go right through it.

About Square Rapp.

You’d expect some kind of hissing noise to emanate from the Theosophical Society, but no. Tomblike silence. Anyway, try to get into #29 (1901, Jules Lavirotte, arch.) Bang hard on the dazzling art nouveau door.

Wear a blue smock and carry a clipboard. Tell them you’re the drains inspector (L’inspecteur des tuyaux or de canalisation). Once inside, get a load of that staircase.

Meanwhile, who was the Saudi potentate who owned the Hotel de Lauzun, with the green dragon drainpipes

on the quai d’Anjou, Île Saint-Louis—and probably the buildings on either side? No doubt the world’s most pricey property. Well, he sold it to the City of Paris, and now it’s closed to the public. Impersonating l’inspecteur du tuyaux won’t work, but once in a while a tour group is allowed in.

And here I’d like to put in a word for the tiny Bar de l’Entracte, 47 rue de Montpensier (1er) around the corner from the Comédie Française. It’s a peaceful, sweet little dump. Just go. Have a beer.

And another thing. Alastair Brotchie’s delightful Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life, is being neglected. You know who you are.

Back at the Louvre. The Martyrdom of Saint Denis, a big fat altarpiece by Henri Bellechose (ca. ) gets its own room.

(Mr. Trevor Winkfield would have you believe it’s by Jean Malouel, who also worked for the Duke of Burgundy, but Bellechose’s name was on the receipt.).  I guess it is the greatest of them all, if you like chopping heads off. The crucified Christ is accompanied by God the Father and the Holy Spirit. To the left, St. Denis in prison receives the last communion from Jesus, and to the right he is martyred with his companions Rusticus and Eleutherius. That’s all, folks!

Okay, it’s not all. Kimono on boulevard Haussman has a fantastic selection of Gallo socks  in various colors and patterns.

Halary sells very expensive socks with wonderful birdseye and other patterns. Le Bon Marche has a large sock section. The first Spontex viscose sponge was produced in Beauvais in 1932, and is still going strong. Wonderful thing. Buy it anywhere on either bank. And it’s Jean-Paul Hévin for all your chocolate needs. Hotel de Costes Bar and Lounge (if you dare). For the best upscale escorts, ask for Dani at Le Meurice Hotel.

Porter and I strolled along the currently unhip Canal Saint-Martin, en route to the Hôtel du Nord. Since Marcel Carné’s adorable film of the name same (1938), the bar has been rearranged and the hotel is now apartments, but the façade hasn’t changed. We met a very nice couple, who work in French television, and sat drinking with them well past  closing time. The young man’s father, it turned out, was the poet in Max Jacob’s Advice to a Young Poet (Menard, 1976). Est-ce normal? But about the movie:  Arletty and

Louis Jouvet are walking under the humpbacked bridge. He’s going fishing and she’s tagging along. He’s says he feels suffocated, that he needs a change of atmosphere, that she’s his atmosphere. (My French is useless and they’re speaking like machine guns.).

I’ve never been called an atmosphere before. If I’m an atmosphere, then you’re a weird shithole. Ooh la la, the guys who hang around the neighborhood without being from it, and brag about who they used to be, they should be gotten rid of. Atmosphere! Atmosphere! Do I have the mug of an atmosphere? Since that’s the way it is, go to La Varenne by yourself. Good luck with the fishing and the atmosphere!”

The word atmosphère, on one level, is antique slang for movie extra. Now they’d say figurant. So the screenwriters, Jean Aurenche and Henri Jeanson are having fun. She’s insulted that he’s comparing her, a great star (Arletty, not her character) to an extra.

Atmosphère

air – alourdir – ambiance – assainir – assainissement – atmosphère – chaleureux – clandestinité – confiné – considérer – convivial – convivialité – dégeler – détendre – électricité – électrique – émotion – empoisonné – empoisonner – enfiévré – envoûtant – esprit – euphorisant – excité – glacé – irrespirable – lourd – morose – onirique – pesant – poisseux – purificateur – rafraîchir – raréfier – réchauffer – refroidir – rendre – rentrer – saturé – sonder – suffocant

Thanks to Ron Padgett, Olivier Brossard and John Ashbery.

Why did Fargue…

…break up with Jarry?

oeufs en meurette

Ingredients

* Clarified butter
* 6 large shallots, peeled, each cut into 3
* 3 slices fat bacon, cut 1/2-inch pieces
* 3 cloves garlic, crushed, plus 2 cloves for browning bread
* 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour (1 1/2 ounces)
* 1 14 cups Burgundy (12 fluid ounces)
* 1 cup beef bouillon (8 fluid ounces)
* 1 lump sugar
* Bouquet Garni (1 bay leaf, 4 sprigs parsley, 1 sprig thyme, 3-inch piece celery), tied with string, or if using dried herbs, tie in muslin bag
* Freshly ground salt
* Freshly ground black pepper
* 3 tablespoons red wine vinegar
* 3 tablespoons butter (1 3/4 ounces)
* 4 slices white bread, cut in rounds
* 4 eggs
* Freshly chopped parsley

Directions

Pour 1 1/2 ounces of clarified butter into a pan and heat until smoking, about 400 degrees. Add the shallots and stir briskly. Add the bacon and brown lightly. To this mixture, add the crushed garlic cloves. Stir in the flour and cook until golden brown, about 4 minutes. Add all of the Burgundy and whisk in off the heat. Add the bouillon and stir thoroughly. Now add the lump of sugar, for luck. Pop in the bouquet garni, salt and pepper and simmer for 1 1/2 hours. After 1 hour add the red wine vinegar. At the end of 1 1/2 hours, add 1-ounce fresh butter to the sauce.

Pass the sauce through a sieve and scrape every last drop of it through. Return to a clean pan and allow to cook gently. In a skilled cook the garlic in a little clarified butter to release the natural juices. Drop the rounds of bread into the garlic butter and add a little more clarified butter, if necessary. Fry until crisp and golden brown. Prick the wide end of the eggs with an egg pricker or needle and lower them into a pan of boiling water with a wire basket. Count 10 seconds and remove the eggs and break them into a cup. Take the water off the boil and add a pinch of salt and the eggs. Raise the heat and gently poach the eggs. Meanwhile remove the fried bread rounds from their pan and place in heated serving dishes or small bowls.

With a slotted spoon remove eggs from water and place each on a piece of garlic bread. Pour the sauce around the egg, leaving some white showing. Garnish with parsley.

Recommended drink: Chateau Margaux 1990.

LARRY FAGIN is of Hungarian-Russian-Polish stock. He has lived in Hollywood, Salzburg, Vienna, Wiesbaden, Paris, New York, San Francisco, and London. He edits Adventures in Poetry books and was the founder and artistic director of Danspace at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery in Manhattan. His latest book is Dig & Delve (Granary Books). He teaches privately. Prospective students go to larryfagin.com

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We walked down the Malecon between traffic and the ocean. A boy standing on the seawall tried to cast his line past the rocks, where his brothers and sister trawled the tidal pools. We were the only foreigners around. Boys shouted from passing cars. At least half of the cars were ‘54 Buicks. Machismo Cubano: six well-oiled young men in muscles shirts and silver chains sitting in the back seat.

At night, the Malecon is a catwalk. Girls moved confidently arms linked past young Cubanos sprawled along the wall, cooing, clucking, yelping, whispering, panting, groaning, singing, sighing under the street lamps. We wanted to observe, invisibly, but existentially we were part of the parade.

On the inland side of the Malecon an older crowd sat among dilapidated pillars and vaulted foyers. Pot-bellied men seated around card tables played with dominos and beer bottles. Decades separated them from their hunting days, yet they would still muster a whistle or cat call as we passed. Their plump wives sat to the side surveying us or looked out toward the pitch-black void where the ocean was.

Two dogs slept in the gated stairwell of our casa particulare between paroxysms of barking. Anita owns the casa. There is evidence of a family in her photographs. She is reserved but seems sad. Perhaps her husband left her or her oldest son died. Or maybe he defected to Florida and started a family she would never see. Or, in the case of Maria, who owned a nearby casa and had a degree in physics, maybe she was a solitary scholar who never got the chance to work as one. Instead, she made a living hosting young travelers and fat, sunburned tourists whose currencies were worth twenty times her own. She posted pictures of the inside of her house on the internet, of her living room hung with plants and her view of the ocean from six stories up, and waited for a bite from the next intrepid Westerner. After seeing to their breakfast and collecting a fistful of dollars, she retired to her television or terrace and waited.

Walking on the Paseo del Prado, a long promenade lined with stone benches and small trees between two boulevards. The kids there are in various states of undress: swim trunks, soccer jerseys, no shoes, school uniforms embellished with neon spandex shorts or flip flops, or, for the girls, high heels. It was hard to tell who was headed to school and who would spend the day playing pickup soccer between the benches, always in danger of losing the ball to the perpetual traffic just behind them.

The buildings along the boulevards are in worse shape than those on the Malecon, but they are all full. Cubans wear through buildings like they wear out their clothing. Windows were open in the midday heat and families flowed out, bees from their hives, until all you could see were frames and wires.

Second-story balconies are the domain of elderly women who overlook the movement of the Prado. There was no bustle of industrious society or riotous outburst of oppressive boredom below. It is something between the two, a slow burn, running on rumors and impressions of wealth.

The sound of birds chirping indoors. I wanted to look for the noisemaker: dubbed “Flintstones” on TV; dubbed “Life Goes On.” This has got to be a joke from the Ministry of Communication or some board of public opinion control. They let enough American culture in to appease general curiosity. (Nothing to see in America, just a bunch of mawkish white people dealing with their retarded kids.) There are only channels. Channel 2 showed a documentary about the days leading up to the 1959 revolution. It was on a loop. It had probably been on repeat since television landed on the island.

Hemingway is a comfort to tourists. He makes the street bustle fit better, tames it by making it literary. His room at the Hotel Florida has been preserved for viewing. It’s where he began For Whom the Bell Tolls. He still occupies his favorite seat at La Floridita just down the Calle Obispo (“best mojitos in Havana!”) in a life-size bronze effigy. He also occupies several slots in the postcard turnstiles. Tourists love the photo of Papa and Castro the best. They’ve read some of Hemingway’s writing and by extension can claim a bit of the revolution, or at least disown some of their imperious voyeurism.

We figured a clever way to counteract attention: the Havana down-tempo walk. This wouldn’t make us more Cuban, but it might flummox those would-be callers who mark us by our quick pace. Speed camouflage. It didn’t work.

In Habana Vieja the streets were narrow corridors. All the doors and shutters were open. The living rooms were tiled extensions of the streets. Grandma and son sitting in wooden chairs watching television, crucifix on the wall, framed painting of noble Fidel or dashing Che. We looked past the living rooms into hidden stairwells, trellises and deeper corridors. Women sat on front stoops talking while their boys played in the streets with bottle caps and sticks. Two girls practiced salsa beside a boom box, the littlest ones holding onto their mothers’ knees.

Son bands played in all the bars in Old Havana. It was a tourist set-up. The saxophonist was about to come on for a solo when a drunken patron started blowing on his empty beer bottle. He looked Scandinavian, and wore a Nike t-shirt and gold watch. He finished to a round of applause from his compatriots. The saxophonist, wincing, jumped back in.

At Bar Montserrat, a thin man in a white shirt and trousers seated us at a table near the back. A large table of Dutch tourists dominated the room. There were dozens of empty mojito glasses in the center of their table. They danced in their chairs. There were a few single men with prostitutes at the bar. A young African Cuban darted onto the floor and grabbed his friend. She could barely keep up with him. When she couldn’t take it anymore, he came to our table and persisted against our refusals to dance. Finally he asked if we had a cigarette for him. Justine gave him one. His name was Rey. He taught ballet, salsa and meringue to support his mother and twin sisters. He couldn’t sit still. In the middle of a sentence he would get up to shake his hips or pirouette. He left the cigarette burning in the ashtray to dance a few bars with his friend, then came back to our table. He wanted us to write him from New York, and to look him up on YouTube. He told us he used the computer at Montserrat to upload his videos. He smoked a few more of Justine’s cigarettes.

We sat next to a window that opened onto the street. A young woman leaned into a car window, talking to the driver. She shouted to Rey. The thin man in the white shirt and trousers made a joke, maybe about Rey and the woman. He seemed to have trouble walking and laughing at the same time.

The band took a break. The singer came over to our table. He didn’t speak much English but he stayed for a drink. He only ever wanted to be a cantate. He and his band spent the last few months in Shanghai. “Ni Hao!” he greeted us. He looked like a boxer. He raised his hands and belted out the first lines of Chan Chan. He intended to close in on me, since Justine was tending to Rey, who was doing some sort of bunny hop, twisting his cigarette in the air. The cantante grabbed my hand and caressed my wrist, prolonging eye contact. He asked for a pencil and my notebook in order to compose a poem in a language I could understand. Mis ojos…I am like a flor, tan dulce. The subject changed to something in fast Spanish. Whatever Rey just said caught the cantante’s ear. The cantante showed us a tattoo of Che Guavara’s head on his left pectoral. He puffed his chest and pointed to it. “Che, mas valiente, mas intelligente…”

We left Old Havana to go to the Casa de la Musica in the Miramar District, where the Cubans dance. It cost 15 Reals to get in, which seemed like a lot but might’ve just been the gringa admission. It was a dark, cavernous dance hall with a stage at the back and tables on both sides of the dance floor. All the tables were taken by regulars. There were no tourists anywhere. We stood by the bar and drank cans of beer. The curtains opened on a 17-piece salsa band. No one sat for this. Even the unschooled would recognize that Cuban salsa is different. It is fast, round and complex: the body reflects more aspects of the percussion and there are more grooves interlocking partners have to calibrate. The simple explanation for the difference is the African influence, but this doesn’t help us since it is impossible to pick up with your mind.

Justine and I got dance partners and headed to the floor with trepidation. Artemio showed me the basics then kicked into gear. I couldn’t follow. We went over it again. “Don’t think about it. Don’t think.” He pulled me closer so he could force my movements like a doll. He stopped and pointed to my eyes and then to his. “Look here. No looking at your feet. Don’t think about it.” The floor was packed. Everyone formed rows facing the stage. A man jumped in front of the band and called out movements to the crowd, who mimicked him in unison.

We took a pedicab back to the casa, pedaling through the backstreets no faster than we would’ve walked, listening to the squeaking axel and the soft pant of the driver, past a darkened building bearing an RCA studio sign. The one with the victrola.

We took a bus the next day to Valle Vinales, where a crowd of women at the station waved handwritten brochures, pleading with passengers to stay at their casas. The station was in the main square next to the tourism office and a bar. Yaela and M met us with their one-year-old son and showed us the way home. Yaela’s yellow hair was still wet from the shower and touched her tanned shoulders. She was an expert on night lizards, but there was no money for research. Now she mostly occupied herself with her son and her home, which was always open to tourists. M was affable. He told us he could arrange a tour with his friend Serge if we wanted to hike through the valley.

Serge led us through the fields and over the gentle slopes of the Valle Palmarito. Every mile we passed a farmer working on a patch of red earth. When we saw a cabin set high on a hill, Serge asked us if we wanted to meet the tobacco farmers who worked there.

Miguel greeted us on the porch with his son Raoul. Their house was a regular stop on Serge’s tour so they were always ready for guests. Raoul brought us fresh coconuts and a cigar. The tip was dipped in honey. Justine and I shared the cigar and pet their old dog, Mariposa. Miguel’s thick mustache and deep crows feet gave him a permanent smile. He looked 60, but islanders age differently, so he could’ve been in his early 50‘s. Raoul’s slick pompadour and inward eyes seemed inherited from old Hollywood rather than a guajiro farmer. His shyness nearly made him mute. It was Miguel who wanted to talk, using Serge as a translator.

It started to rain so we moved inside. The room was empty except for a few chairs, tin cups and a machete for splitting coconuts. There were coconut husks piled in the corner. Miguel motioned for us to push our chairs in a circle. Raoul stayed by the window to watch their sow, tethered to a tree in the yard.

“What kind of women the men in your country like? Thin—fat—eh, dark skin? White skin?”

“You do not paint the face. If a man is going to love you he has to love you for how you are when you are natural.”

“Do you like Cuban men? Uno Cubano, egale quattro Europeanos.”

“Cubano, mas fuego. Fuego? Fuego.” (Nodding.)

“Once you have a Cuban man you won’t want another one!” [translational hilarity: perhaps we wouldn’t want another Cuban one.]

“You have a man?”

“She is getting married…”

“You don’t have a chico?”

“Do you like tall? Short? Negro? Blanco?”

“Ah, she likes everything!”

“You eat everything! You have a big mouth.”

“You are thin now but when you have fifty years you will be fat from eating so much. My wife is very fat. She has big breasts like pillows and keeps me warm at night. I love her.”

“You can have a big garden, but you must love only one rose.”

“They think you’re a total slut.”

“I have no idea how that happened.”

“You’re on your own.”

“There is much to say to the woman who has found her one rose:

You have not had your heart cut in two parts. It’s very important for that to happen when you are married…And then you will have the heart cut in four parts…Then there will be pieces for your children also.”

KATE THOMPSON lives in Brooklyn where she hoards bird flu vaccine and a few contraband North Korean nukes under the sink. All because Anthony Michael Hall never responded to those letters. Its a crazy world, full of sound and fury, and she’s not helping one iota.

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When I picked up my press credential at St. Anselm’s College in Manchester, New Hampshire, for the ABC News Republican Primary Debate on a clear Saturday night in January, I expected to be steered to a press gallery close to the stage in a musky debate hall. But there were more than 600 journalists on the campaign trail in New Hampshire in 2012. So we were stationed in a nearby basketball gym, in long rows of tables facing two large projection screens showing the television broadcast. We would be watching the debate the same way most baseball broadcasters watch the ballgame nowadays: on television. But the real-time color commentary would be via Twitter, and our press box felt as big as an airport hangar. I grabbed a folding chair on the side between a Norwegian journalist and a nattily dressed Romney national finance chair who had escaped the packed greenroom to enjoy the relative roominess of our cavernous press lounge and because “the food is better.”

I shouldn’t have expected anything less than a sprawling media corps, but the image of a salty fraternity of wisecracking journos in fedoras dies hard, I guess, as do all sentimental tropes of American culture. Shoot, there are upstreamers to accommodate now. Guys like Phil Anderson, a cheery, red-cheeked student and Occupy affiliate up from Boston. He roamed the press hangar in a black peacoat, holding a flip video camera and camping headlamp rigged to a tripod pole by an L bracket and Velcro. He was narrating the proceedings to 15 or 20 people watching his live stream online, pointing his camera at whatever they asked him to via the onscreen chat feed. If that sounds a little technical, just picture a college student walking around with a phone-sized camera strapped to a pole, seemingly talking to himself like a schizophrenic, but possibly representing the future of media.

It was an exceptionally punchless debate, full of eye-rolling platitudes and few direct attacks on Mitt Romney, the frontrunner. A local TV cameraman explained that the League of Women Voters used to run the debates, but when ABC News took over, it changed from “a news event covered by the news to an entertainment event produced by Disney (ABC’s parent company).” The press stars were there too, of course, and mostly bored: Mark Shields, the Washington Post columnist and liberal commentator, shuffling around the food table and hawing in his Boston accent, “No more cookies?”; Don Gonyea, NPR’s chief political correspondent, tut-tutting and oohing over such wondrous statements as Rick Santorum’s disdainful retort that “there are no classes in America.”

When the debate mercifully ended, we all scuttled to a smaller gym next door that served as the official spin room. Amid half a dozen constantly forming and disintegrating press scrums you could make out craggy veteran politicians making a play for a possible cabinet post down the road by talking up the talking points of the candidate they’d chosen to latch onto. Hello, Tom Ridge, former homeland security chief, coming out of the woodwork to do a little spin service for Jon Huntsman. Hello, Nikki Haley, late Tea Party sweetheart turned embattled South Carolina governor, stumping and preening for Mitt Romney in a long-fringe silver dress. There were the candidates’ spokespeople as well, gamely running out their best lines. Take R.C. Hammond, Newt Gingrich’s spokesperson: “Gingrich walked like a president, talked like a president, must be a president.”

As always, there were the oddballs that our national political carnival attracts, such as Craig “Tax Freeze” Freis, who’d flown out from California to challenge President Obama in the Democratic primary. He handed me about 30 photocopied documents, including the official Democratic ballot and a newspaper article about a lawsuit he had won against the Democratic Party in Southern California. I told him to call me if he had an official campaign event, but I later realized that I had probably unknowingly participated in the only type he could afford.

Over the next couple days, I attended the campaign events of all five candidates actively campaigning in New Hampshire. In many ways they are homey events, in rustic town halls, small manufacturing plants, conference rooms of woodsy resort hotels. They range from the booster-club pageantry of bunting, pom-poms and confetti guns at a Jon Huntsman pep rally to the long-winded bloviating of a Newt Gingrich lecture in a hot and steamy high school gymnasium. They can seem dingy, or at least provincial, at the time. But when you watch the clips on television news or see the photos in the paper, they gain an aura of authority.

Ron Paul’s events are the most fun in the aggregate, as you can’t avoid appreciating this wily, frumpy, 76-year-old doctor from southeast Texas who has inspired young people across the country to become Constitution-waving enthusiasts. They feel the media constantly portrays them as being crazy, which they are not. They just quote policy specifics with a Star Trek convention-goer’s fluidity and possess the zeal of a true believer, and so your average non-believer never knows quite where to file them. Barbara, 50, a paraprofessional from Meredith, New Hampshire, who didn’t want to give her last name, was unwavering in her support for Paul’s plan to eliminate the Department of Education, even though she might lose her job in education. “If that would happen, I’d find jobs elsewhere,” said the former Democrat turned Republican.

The Ron Paul organization that garnered an impressive 23 percent of New Hamphire’s vote seemed a winning mix of rollicking misfit party bus and cagey professionalism. My humble Red Roof Inn in Loudon, New Hampshire, was the home to 90 Youth for Ron Paul volunteers who’d come from out of town, and whenever I came home at night they’d be roaming the hallways like a college dorm. One night they had set up chairs in a circle in the lobby of the hotel and three black-jean-and-jacket rockers were jamming on acoustic guitars. The next morning, I found myself making coffee in the hotel breakfast nook next to a young man wearing a suit with a piece of duct tape on the back that said “Statistician.” I asked him if he was the statistician for Ron Paul, and could I get a quote, and he shot me a look: How did I know? When I explained, he was still reluctant to give anything more than the perfunctory “it was a great experience.” James Padilioni, 25, a student from Westchester, Pennsylvania, who was filling out a grad school application on a laptop plastered with stickers for various causes (“Yes We Cannabis,” “SchoolsNotPrisons.com,” “Students for Liberty”) stopped himself when I asked him to describe his election-day activities. “Our organization is our secret weapon; nobody else has what we have,” he said. “Why give away your secret recipe?”

Barring political catastrophe, Romney will be the Republican nominee, and his campaign clearly boasts the top talent and money. His events are by far the best produced and most tightly scripted, with former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty serving as the curtain-raiser hype man and Kid Rock’s “Born Free” accompanying his entrances and exits. (Sample lyric: “free, like an untamed stallion.”) Romney’s desire to be liked has an earnest, almost frantic quality. After introducing his wife and splendid family (the best advertisement for the Mormon church in America right now has to be the gorgeous tableaux of the Romney and Huntsman families), he moved to the side of the stage and stood with his hands tucked in his pockets, stock-still, seemingly determined to never stop smiling. He fools few people with lines like “A chance to run for President—wow, I never thought I’d do it,” or the Obama-esque riff, “I was just a high school kid with skinny legs.” Left out is that his father was governor of Michigan and served in the Nixon administration when he was loping around on his skinny legs.

His ad libs are pricelessly awkward, such as this opening line at the Rochester Opera House: “I can feel the warmth in this room, not just temperature-wise but emotional-wise.” And his stump speech seems written by an algorithm devised to appeal to all parts of a skeptical Republican base. He has a moment where he asks, “Are there any veterans here? Please raise your hands… Thank you,” leading to sustained applause. He admits that his father was born in Mexico, hastily adding, “to American parents living there,” as if to snuff out any potential Birther elements, even though it’s only his father. He closes by quoting from “America the Beautiful,” joking, “I said in Iowa that corn counts as amber waves of grain.” He makes no mention of his Mormon heritage and religion, though his campaign slogan, “Believe in America,” seems a sly reference to his hope that voters will see past his much-maligned religion.

There was short-lived hope among reporters on the trail that Huntsman might make it a close race in New Hampshire. The horse-race approach to campaign coverage is, for better or worse, what people want to read about most. Why get bogged down in policy comparisons when politics can become a thrilling sporting event? And at the Jon Huntsman voting-night party at The Black Brimmer bar in downtown Manchester, the place was packed with the sort of unlikely supporters reminiscent of Obama’s insurgent 2008 campaign. Jon C. Hopwood, 52, a boisterous progressive who’d previously never voted Republican in his life, had battled through the physical sickness he felt when he was given the Republican ballot at the polling place and cast for Jon Huntsman. “How could he be more conservative than Obama?” Hopwood asked. “Obama cut my mom’s food stamps, he cut my home heating oil. I voted for Obama ’cause my friends told me he was a progressive, but we got a center-right Republican. Maybe with Huntsman we’ll get an Earl Warren.” Elisabeth Langby, 54, a writer and academic of Swedish birth, said, “Huntsman is the best presidential candidate since I became a citizen in 1990.”

But even though Romney is a French-speaking millionaire from liberal Massachusetts, he has run the best campaign so far, and, perhaps by process of elimination, seems to have won the blessing of the Republican establishment as the best chance to defeat Obama in a general election. The parallels to Sen. John Kerry are striking, though he never served in the military, so he will not be swift-boated the way Kerry was in 2004.

The journalists on the trail even seemed ready for Romney to secure a win in South Carolina and deliver what would seem a knockout blow to the rest of the field. All the press photographers I talked to admitted they were addicted to the adrenaline rush of campaign reporting, no matter how brutal the press scrum and how long the days. But as they pulled out their laptops to download their pictures and send them to their editors around the world, the fatigue was evident. One veteran CNN cameraman talked about how the explosion of independent media has made for press scrums with more amateurs who block shots without getting good ones of their own. But generally the press are a welcoming tribe, willing to share a joke or a cigarette with whomever happens to be with them in the trenches that day.

There is an inevitable insularity on the campaign trail, as journalists spend 16 hours a day covering events, tweeting and writing stories and reading each other’s coverage of the campaign. As most journalists must file immediately for the digital edition, and instantly on Twitter, sometimes they can’t even see the candidate when he gives his stump speech, but just hear him through the speakers and are ready to tweet and then file a story about any flub he makes. It seems a bizarre world, until you join it. Then it’s hard to pull yourself away. Thus I found myself watching Jon Huntsman’s speech at 2 a.m. in my hotel room, the same speech I had seen live several hours earlier. I had to talk myself into turning off the television, and even then the images of American flags, of perfectly coiffed candidate hair, of the crush and click of hundreds of camera-laden photographers, swirled in my head.

DAN HOYLE is an actor, playwright and journalist. His award-winning solo plays Tings Dey Happen and The Real Americans have played Off Broadway, around the country and overseas on a U.S. State Department tour. He’s currently under commission for a new solo show with First Person Arts in Philadelphia and a multi-actor play with the SF Playhouse. He’s written for Sports Illustrated, Salon, Mother Jones, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

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Haven’t you missed the sun and rain and streets?

During those long nights, didn’t you dream of these paths as you were eating ful and smoking? And how often did you torture yourself with thoughts of entering an old tavern? And dream of a man with vague features, your hand in his, your mouth open toward the sky welcoming the first showers of rain as the smell of clusters of jasmine and bitter orange blossoms linger everywhere.

Dreams to which you bid farewell and welcomed back every night while you placed your head on the pillow. And here, your dreams are being fulfilled. The streets are in front of you . . . behind you . . . perhaps in you . . . I have to call my family now.

Ten years and one waiting follows another for both me and them.

And now, going home is a must.

Don’t you remember . . . ? Only a short time ago, you were asked what you would do when you were released. You laughed: “I’ll buy a pack of Hamra cigarettes . . . a flask of èaraq, and then go to a park far away out of sight, and inhale the smell of soil soaked with blood and sweat. I’ll roll over the grass and the dew, and sleep under a blackberry bush.”

“You don’t want to go to a public place?”

“No, I’ll turn my face to the wind, to the air, to the neverending sky, to wide places without doors . . . iron ones to be exact.”

I’ll set loose different sounds; I’ll sing and imitate the voices of animals and people. If any eyes confront me and accuse me of madness, I’ll raise my voice up high, despite them.

Yes . . . I’ve dreamed a lot. Here is the wide horizon, and the apricot trees, the grapevines, and the olives. And the fountains of pure, cold water.

Here is the city that has astonished the new comer with its towering buildings. It has grown so much.

I have to go home!

What’s this? Astonished, expectant eyes look at us . . . And this restaurant is surprised with numerous womanly faces: brown . . . white . . . blond . . . tall . . . short coming in one mass to call their families. Some of them are crying in joy while fingers tremble as they turn the dial of the phone. The patrons of the restaurant . . . were they crying, laughing? Or was it that their eyes turned her to stone. Worries and ruptures. Minutes ago we were dreaming of freedom and it’s as if it was only an allusion, the imagination. A little while ago, I was riding in a carriage without time or place, an imaginary carriage. Maybe I saw it on children’s show.

The street, here it is . . . The cars are honking their horns . . . University students and lovers.

Would lovers come near this place? How would words of love come out?

Look! Their faces turn forward. Their glances are apprehensive . . . worried . . . mute.

“I need two liras, Miss, I need two liras. Brother, I need two liras. I’m not a beggar . . . just two liras to call my family.”

Clear signs of surprise.

“Were you traveling?”

“Yes, a long journey that was extended . . . a journey far, far away.”

“In America?”

“No, in the deepest depths of the earth, for a human being, in a spot where there is no room for air . . . for the sun . . . the light of the moon . . . for walking . . . running . . . for oxygen . . . a graveyard.”

Looks of amazement and astonishment. Crazy, crazy. A collective fleeing from my face. Good-bye friends . . . Good-bye places. Places of the cruel and bitter journey of my life. Good-bye to the shackles . . . to the black doors . . . Good-bye!

And now what do I do?

My father is absent . . . rather, he died . . . his death changes the current of this moment.

Going home is a must. I won’t get drunk or gamble with the future . . . I won’t . . . and I won’t. Won’ts and prohibitions are enough.

Hello to you ground. Hello, Damascene rose covered in dew. Your color is still pale and your smell is the same . . . and that white jasmine sways in joy. . . I’ll gather up a bunch of it . . . but . . . why?

The smell of the air has changed. I’ve distanced myself from the dungeons.

The smell of the air is saturated with gas . . . as well as the sky and the fog. The eyes are worried, happy. The city opens its arms hugging me while I embrace the drops of rain hidden in the sky, spread them over the ground. I rub my depressing clothes, dust them with the soil . . . Hello to you my lost and wasted childhood . . . I will reclaim you now. I play in the nearby gardens, my mother screams reproaching me . . . oh, for those days. “The dye” has invaded my hair after “the gray invaded my part,” my life has passed, and I no longer remember it. It is the moment, the moment of creation, of birth, of the birth of life, vocabulary, it’s the language of the tongue, gestures: the means of understanding between people.

Ah..the cars . . . their sounds, their noise . . . their speed.

Can I embrace all of the eyes and kiss all of the faces, and the streets and alleys? And who will interpret and understand the meaning of my behavior? No, there’s no time . . .

I want to wander in the city, to light a cigarette . . . to take a deep breath, to eat corn on the cob, to visit old houses. I won’t be able to do any of these things . . . I want to climb up the mountain . . . I want . . . I wish . . .

“Taxi . . . Taxi”

I’ll arrive home with my suitcase with all it contains in my hand . . . worn out things . . . papers . . . sorrows . . . they have the age of an obligatory residence.

How will I be welcomed? I wonder who I’ll find at home.

Gypsies are the inhabitants of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-the hidden riffraff of society, families and children that grew numerous, everyone lives in the house . . . Has anything changed? Will I know the children? The young have grown up . . . they’re no longer little . . . how frightening!

Will I know the house? On the right . . . the left, that’s the face of our neighbors’ boy, the first alley, the second, the third . . . Yes, here . . . please.

“How much do you want?”

“Look at the meter.”

“It’s a lot.”

“Don’t you take taxis?”

Many faces. Young ones I don’t recognize . . . whose children are they? Strange faces, I won’t be afraid of strangers from now on.

The city is lit up by signs . . . The city is illuminated by electricity and colored lights . . . are they greeting me? It’s grown and changed a lot. . . Here is the old alley, my alley . . . Its ancient houses haven’t changed but from the other side, the trees have been cut down and new buildings have been built . . . this is the gate of our house, the old, wooden gate that is always open. The residents have nothing worth stealing.

Damn this suitcase that I carry from one place to another and from one time to another. It’s shared in all of my travels in all the cities-north, south, west, and east. Every rip tells a story and a tale. It’s carried bitterness and joy, and now it’s coming into the house with me. Do I knock on the door? Why?

Everyone comes into the house-even strangers-without permission. They used to say that your home resembles those on the top floors but it’s still on the ground floor. Ground floor, an Arab house, the dwelling of the sons of one village fleeing from the loneliness and fear of the city and unknown neighbors.

Three families gathered together, and grew in size as each family began to need houses that could absorb the new number. Even then, every room embraced and watched over the large family with the affection of its ancient soil.

All day, the doors of the rooms are still open to the sun, to relatives, to acquaintances, and to friends, many changes in the features of the faces and in sizes . . . where is the river? They pointed me to a small dry swamp. They had dammed it up.

We were young, stealing or buying cigarettes, sitting next to it in spite of the putrid smell, smoking and telling stories, making ourselves listen to each other’s lessons.

I’ll go in . . . what kind of fear is within me . . . not fear. Joy . . . a shiver . . . various, mixed feelings . . . Let me go in . . . Where’s your courage? . . . Here I am opening the door, it’s my cousin, tall and with his blue eyes . . . He’s changed . . . Yes . . . Are you . . . ?

“Yes.”

He said it with a smile and added:

“Thank God for your safe return.”

“Come, my dear, and let me kiss you . . .”

My uncle’s wife came out of the room and laughed. “If it wasn’t a disgrace, I’d have trilled in joy.”

“Where’s my darling, beautiful little one? Come.” She’s grown up that much? Where are the black locks that I cut? Your eyes! Their color has changed from the gray of the sky to the green of the tree in a dark evening. Have you grown up so much? You’ve become a young woman!! Where are the school jumper and the ribbons? Why did you grow up during my absence?

Children don’t wait and neither does life. Time passes everyone by.

I can’t believe it; the little princess has grown up and become a beautiful young woman!! Take this piece of chocolate I bought for you. . . Do you still like it?!! Don’t you stammer on the letter “S” any longer? You’ve grown up . . . You’ve grown up.

Only now, I have felt the weight of the years that have passed. Now I have come to know the meaning of gray hair. I should have asked for henna a long time ago. I’ve surpassed the stage of wearing jeans . . . the years have deceived me . . . and I won’t be able to imitate the lightness of my youth.

How can these years be concealed when this fake dye doesn’t replace anything?

Time didn’t stop for a single day . . . What do you think of all those lean years . . . You’ve lost your sense of time and forgotten the wrinkles on the face and in and below the corner of the eyes.

I’m over thirty years old. I’ll cut my hair-after today, I won’t leave it or fan it out in the direction of the wind or the streets. There was a time and it has passed, and now I have to get rid of old habits.

Oh, my little one, how I’ve missed you, you were the partner of all my dreams.

What is it that I feel?!!

I don’t know!!

The tiles of the house are broken, worn out from the many feet that have come in and gone out. The refrigerator has been replaced, the television is very old, funny and sad, the floor of the room has sunk, the pillows, the sheets . . . the pictures on the wall are new, pictures of the deceased, The backgammon dice are lost forever, hanging in memory with the picture of my father and uncles. Oh my god, what has happened in my absence, Death is there in the faraway distance-even death has lost its meaning with the absence of a funeral . . . mourning . . . the sound of the Q’uran . . . lament . . . singing, the movement of the absent . . . Here I am, sensing it right now.

The chair is in its same place. My father used to always sit on it with the backgammon dice in front of him with neighbors and friends.

Here’s the courtyard with solitary walls as the spiders nest in all the spaces filled with emptiness. This wide house has shrunk . . . the place of the grapevine is a kitchen and a small room, the second kitchen is in the basin of roses, and canisters of kerosene are in the place of the Indian apricot tree and the pine.

The courtyard has changed a lot; it’s no longer what I dreamed about returning to thousands, millions of times. I pluck the jasmine and eat from the grapevine.

“Hi, Samir.”

“It’s Reemi, not Samir . . . but Samir . . . ?”

He’s become a young man, wait a minute . . . Samir, come and say hello.

A mustache . . . a beard . . . what happened?

You still only remember those who were young, and you need time to get acquainted with everyone.

My mother . . . the wrinkles on her face have grown, as has the curve of her back, her body has wasted away, diminished.

“My dear, don’t be surprised that the years pass by without stopping or waiting.”

“It’s true.”

The remnants of traces are still on the walls, but the mouse holes have eroded most of them . . . and that heater.

“Do you feel cold?”

“No.”

I don’t know what I feel.

The glass is in its place, it didn’t change, the clock, the tape recorder are new and the oven. The wool blankets are still kept in the best place. The small, old vanity with its broken mirror . . . That’s better than my being confronted with time every morning and evening. It’s enough.

“This is chocolate for visitors.”

“Thanks.”

This “neon” civilization enters the house very slowly, but it enters.

“If only we had a decent income . . . we would have changed many things . . . the eye sees much but the hand is small.”

“I’m sorry . . . I’ve added a lot to your worries and troubles.”

“Don’t say that . . . You’re our daughter and with us now, and that’s wonderful, and beautiful, and enough.”

“I’d like a cup of mette. I dreamed about drinking mette here in this room with you.”

The tears become petrified.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Darling, are you remembering your father?”

“There’s no need to remember him. He left a scar on my heart and god alone knows when it will disappear.”

“You’re not eating?”

“No. I don’t feel like it.”

Mette . . . cold water . . . listening to Fairuz.

“There aren’t any tapes . . . we’ll buy them tomorrow.”

“The mette and sitting in the courtyard are what’s important . . . I’d like a sip of *Šñaraq.”

“There’s *Šñaraq at your uncle’s house . . . I’ll bring it for you now.”

I smelled the scent of *Šñaraq, of chamomile, but didn’t drink.

“It’s cold today. Don’t sit out in the courtyard.”

“It’s not important.”

“As you like.”

“I don’t want to see anyone today.”

“Shame on you. The neighbors want to say hello, and your friends too.”

“My friends?”

“Yes . . .”

Here is the darkness . . . the cold . . . the fear once again . . . the place for sleeping has changed . . . What do I do?

“Talk to us . . .”

“About what? I can’t speak tonight.”

Here is night . . . entering naturally . . . for years, it’s come and then fled by force . . . its threads creeping away slowly and lovingly . . . the evening retreats to make a wider space for the night.

“Where’s my uncle?”

“He’s sleeping.”

“I’ll wake him up.”

Looks mixed with joy, surprise, and loss.

The night, once again worry assails me . . . This is my bed . . . I’ll sleep on it. My sister took it over in my absence. A pack of cigarettes by my side, the wooden ceiling sketches forms that I can’t explain.

“Wake up.”

My mother’s voice trembles.

“What is it? . . . I was released only today . . . It’s still early for the nighttime visitors.”

“Your friend and her parents have just arrived.”

“Hello.”

“Oh what a pity . . . You’re sleeping . . . were you drunk?”

“I swear to God, I haven’t tasted a drop of alcohol, but I smelled it.”

“Thank God for your safe return . . . we’ll go now.”

“A cup of coffee.”

“Another time.”

“Bye.”

Now I go back to my worry again. This is my bed, so why do I feel alienated? I spent my childhood, my adolescence, my youth here . . .

I wish it were summer . . . I would have slept in the courtyard . . . estrangement creeps in everywhere. What has changed . . . feelings . . . feelings of joy, neutrality, surprise . . . of love I can no longer distinguish. A sudden move from a place far, far away . . . where dreams are torn to shreds and disappear, entering the circle of memory and a deep and terrifying exile . . . then suddenly, back to home . . . from cement walls that obstruct the sun from here . . . from strange faces that I don’t know, that I met by chance and lived with completely by chance and loved by chance, blond and brunette women, blue, hazel, and brown eyes I became familiar with also by chance . . . and suddenly, I left them when a voice called out “Get your clothes together, quickly. You’ve gotten used to sleeping late . . . Quickly, get your clothes, your things together.”

I get into a car; I enter places I tried forgetting for a long time . . . They followed me home with their dungeons, and the sounds of torture . . . does that make sense? Even now, I don’t believe it . . . Perhaps it was a daydream . . . a fantasy, this is my bed, my mother’s voice.

“What’s wrong, darling? Can’t you sleep?”

“I want to go out to the bathroom.”

I am at home-my mother’s voice . . . the old wooden door . . . the courtyard.

Let me open the gate . . . the alley is narrow . . . I am at home . . . Sleep is running away from my eyes . . . and the cigarettes are showing inner turmoil and painting a haze that doesn’t end.

“Darling, try to sleep.”

But where is he? . . . Into the game of the unknown once again . . . the game of place . . . my father . . . But this is our home, his face, where is his picture, in front of you. My father, please don’t try to look at me . . . I’ll turn my face away. Tomorrow I’ll talk to you for a long time. Even now, I don’t believe you’ve died although my heart is split with sorrow for you and for the young ones . . . Please, don’t be angry with me. I know that you have a good heart and always forgive my mistakes . . . I know I made a lot of trouble for you and you ran behind me, and tried to help me . . . But I don’t possess anything except your love . . . Please don’t blame me now-I’m tired . . . so tired, and I want to run away . . . Let’s put off the discussion until tomorrow.

I have to think about facing people . . . I want to sleep . . . just sleep . . . there is the call to prayer . . . I’ve missed hearing it . . . Long ago, its voice reminded me of troubles, and this time its voice comes to me in a mellow, soothing way-I haven’t heard it for so long.

Morning appears naturally . . . its first threads slip across the window. I’m sure I’m at home . . . daybreak is dawning . . . and sleep is overpowering. Dreams have intertwined with reality, with illusions . . . but all that’s important is that I am home and in my own bed.

Damascus, December 1991

HASIBA ABD AL-RAHMAN is a Syrian poet and human rights activist. Her novel al-Sharnaqa (The Cocoon), based on her prison diaries and writing and published eight years after her release, is the first Syrian prison novel by a former female political prisoner. Translated by SHAREAH TALEGHANI. Full text here.

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February 10

I know the shape of this coast, the rocky shore, dark waves rolling in thirty-four thousand feet below. The jet engines hum. A businessman raps on the lavatory door. A line of tile-roof houses appears, then, further inland, factories and highways and the broad, unlit fields of Viré, Flares and Nonancourt. The captain makes an announcement. The businessman sits. The plane banks left and the great circle of Paris rises above the wing.

This is the route you take to the Alps, where French skiers wedel in fluorescent stretch pants and Italians eat osso bucco in the summit lodge.  But that’s not the destination of this ski trip. The final destination is still unclear. It’s to the southeast, I believe. Over the Pyrenees, across two oceans, on another continent…

I’m unprepared. My only bag is a small canvas backpack with a sleeping bag, ski pants, rain jacket, two pairs of socks, a compass and a book inside. I’ll find skis and boots somewhere on the mountain. There’s a guide there, too, who grew up in the foothills. If there’s snow, he’ll sniff it out. If not, we’ll sit in a teahouse and talk about the crazy shit going down in the Middle East.

Land on runway 4B. Taxi to the gate. Espresso at a kiosk. The connecting flight leaves in six hours from a different airport—tickets were cheap—so I take the RER to Gare du Nord, hub of the civilized world and center of Paris’s circles. You can catch a train to Chamonix, Brindisi, Istanbul or Moscow at the station. I take one to Montmartre and follow the winding streets and staircases straight up to the Sacré Coeur on top of the hill.

The orange rim of the sun lifts above half a million chimneys. A choir inside the basilica sings a prayer. Songbirds drop from their roosts and flit across the courtyard. A young soldier holding a machine gun looks at his phone.

Yesterday I fixed my car on a sidewalk in Brooklyn. Tomorrow I’ll be on another continent. This kind of travel doesn’t make you see things differently. It makes you see things for what they are.

Hugh of Vermandois, brother of King Philip I of France, left from here in 1096 to join the first crusade. It took his army six months to march to Constantinople. That afternoon it takes me two hours to fly over the Mediterranean and land in Africa. The coast is bigger and wider here; the beaches are sandy and there are no houses. I drift off to sleep an hour after takeoff. When the plane begins to descend, I see twelve minarets backlighted by the setting sun.

There’s a wall around the city. Sultans used to spear the heads of their enemies on it. There are twenty gates to get in. Inside are jade-tiled mosques, dirt streets, candlelit fountains, riads, fire, smoke and twenty thousand taxi drivers looking for a fare.

To the south, barely visible through the haze, is the uprising. The mountains are pastel shadows against the red haze. They’re bigger than I expected—brown and thick on the bottom, razor sharp and white on top. Somewhere in the middle there’s fresh snow. I need to sleep. Then go and find it.

February 11

Light falls in sheets through the slatted roofs of Marrakesh’s souks, bends around corners, reflects off the cobblestone. Berber men in gown-like djellabas shuffle past. Six teenagers play soccer in an alley. There are goat heads and snails for sale at a kiosk on the corner, falcon wings and crystals at the pharmacy across the street. The tanneries use pigeon droppings to tan leather on the roofs of Dar Dbagh.

For a thousand years Marrakesh has been a place where you arrive. Ciuinean gold, Saharan salt, slaves and goods of all sorts were transported through breaches in the twelve-thousand-foot High Atlas Mountains, past the palmeries and kasbahs of the northern flanks of the range and across the high plains of El Haouz to the city’s markets. Caravans from the kingdoms of Benin and Ghana hauled their cargo through the passes and Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur rode through on his campaign against Timbuktu. At the end was always Marrakesh.

I’m sore, dirty, lost and jet-lagged. For 380 dirham, a middle-aged man scrubs black soot off my skin at a steamy hammam downtown. I wander to a teahouse and sit among twenty men playing cards. They wear black jeans and black leather jackets, smoke cigarettes and look at the small topo map I printed off the Internet. The mountain I want to ski spans the entire High Atlas range. To the north is the road to Marrakesh. To the south are two rivers, a dozen oases and the great void of the Sahara.

There’s hardly any information on the range, other than the fact that there are a handful of mountains above twelve thousand feet—and sometimes they get snow. I’m shooting for Toubkal. At 13,671 feet, it’s the tallest peak in North Africa. If there’s snow, I’ll find it there.

February 12

Fifteen diesel Mercedes sedans are lined up outside a small café. I ask a driver to take me to Imlil. He points me to another driver, who puts me in a car and cuts a deal with yet another. The old Benz purrs to life and we roll out of the city, through the slums, past ten miles of eucalyptus trees and onto the plains. Charms, earphones and a small tablet inscribed with Sanskrit swing from the rearview mirror. The driver wears a gold ring on his finger and plays a Joni Mitchell album I’ve never heard. The road turns to dirt and we pass through a narrow gorge with five-hundred-foot cliffs five feet from the shoulder. Vendors and mountain guides look on when we enter Imlil. They see my rain jacket and crowd the taxi to offer their services.

Jamal Imerhane of Toubkal Guide is my contact. His brother, Rachid, will take me up the mountain. Rachid’s friend, Mohammad, will take me to the snow. The brothers worked as muleteers growing up in Imlil, hauling tourist gear on donkeys for a few dollars a day. The town sits at five thousand seven hundred feet and is the gateway to Toubkal National Park. The brothers are Berbers, the mountain tribe that has controlled the Atlas since people first crossed it.

We start walking right away, eight hundred vertical feet over a mile to the town of Armed. The houses here are made of mud or cinder blocks. Wooden crates of oranges and nuts lean against the walls. An older man in an orange djellaba waits on the roof of his house. He’s holding Scarpa ski boots and Dynastar skis with Fritschi bindings. His wife asks us to take our shoes off at the door and shows us to three plastic chairs on the roof. The skis are one hundred fifty dirhams a day to rent, including boots. I try them on and they fit perfectly. The tea is free; the man laughs as he lifts the kettle high and fills three small glasses.

We shoulder the gear and cross a wide floodplain south of the village, then Rachid rents two mules and straps our skis and boots to them. We head up again, through terraced fields and a walnut orchard. Flocks of sheep roam the hillside and a few shepherds watch us walk past. The sky darkens and snow starts to fall at seven thousand five hundred feet. There are blue chunks of ice floating in the stream, and a small shack selling knit handbags, hats, djellabas and fresh oranges—whole or juiced. We take a break, then continue up, and up, thousands of vertical feet on a seemingly endless trail. The snow deepens around nine thousand feet and the mules start to slip. Every now and then a rimed peak reveals itself through the clouds. They are all caked in snow, with near-vertical snowfields and thin, winding couloirs.

We stop at another shack an hour later and drop the mules off. We’ve been walking for seven hours and blisters are forming on the balls of my feet. It’s well below freezing and I duck inside the hut to put another layer on. A man boils tea in a golden pot and pours four cups. We sit on milk crates and pillows and he heats up two clay dishes of tagine and serves it with a loaf of flatbread.

The man is an angel and I feel revived. There are Dynastar skis from the 1980s leaning against the fieldstone wall. Metal bowls and utensils lay on a small stone hearth beside three cases of empty Coke bottles. Rachid eats quickly and talks to the man, then we put climbing skins on the bottoms of our skis, step into our boots and continue on a slick white track.

It’s snowing so hard a half hour later I have to close my eyes. It doesn’t matter. For the first time since I landed I feel at home. The familiar motion of skinning—the hiss of the glide—is somehow grounding. I pass Rachid, then Mohammad, who gives me a dirty look. At ten thousand feet an hour later, the clouds break and the giant cirque we’ve skied into reveals itself.

Everything is white: giant, craggy peaks, hanging snowfields, twisting chutes carved into rock faces. Boulders and rocky ridges lay exposed on the valley floor, but up high it’s all snow with descents everywhere you look. One couloir to the west drops what looks like three thousand vertical feet straight from a summit all the way to the valley floor. Another to the west wends left and right for almost as long down the flank of a giant massif. This is an old range, created fifty million years ago when Africa collided with Europe. The continents collided again when the French occupied Morocco for half the twentieth century. When they finally went home in 1956, they left behind a climbing refuge built in 1938 by the French Alpine Club of Casablanca.

We ski to the stone structure and put our boots in wooden cubbies in the foyer. The hut keeper, Hamid, puts our skis in a metal rack next door beside a stack of blue propane tanks. The place sleeps thirty-five. There’s a kitchen on the ground floor with three propane burners and an eating room with four large tables and bench seats. Power comes from a hydroelectric turbine in the stream outside. The “pharmacy” sells aspirin, sunblock, Pringles and Nutella and upstairs are four bunkrooms for guests.

Hamid’s family has managed the hut for three generations. He’s wearing a bright-yellow djellaba and is half out of his mind. He slaps Rachid on the back every time he addresses him and hollers indecipherable English at me. He shows us to our room and I drop off my pack on a lower bunk. Hamid shakes my hand and departs with “Thank you very much! You crazy? Cocaine?!”

He leaves and I push open the wooden shutters. The mountains are giant, sheer and steep. Icefall arches over the cliffs. A snowfield wends up the middle of Toubkal then disappears. The rock walls on either side of the snow are almost one thousand feet tall. I can’t see any of the summits on the eastern side of the valley—just two golden eagles circling over the snow.

February 13

Mohammad is up at 6 a.m., fitting ski crampons over his bindings. I eat a few pieces of bread with marmalade, then meet him in the boot room. He hands me a pair of climbing skins. My boots are cold and wet and my clothes are wet too. I put the gear in my pack with a few candy bars, boot up and head out.

Mohammad is already skinning up when I click in. Three Italians suited up like NASCAR drivers hike in synch a mile in front of him. They have tiny randonnée skis and boots that look like sneakers. We climb a gradual grade over two moraines to the foot of the snowfield. It’s much steeper than it looked from my window, and we both put on ski crampons and make slow, precise steps up the headwall. The sky is bright blue and the sun is still below the ridgeline. The snow is hard, almost ice.

Halfway up, one of the Italians falls. He picks up speed as he slides and cartwheels down the slope. His ice axe and snowboard tumble behind him. He screams as he falls, like in a movie, then slides to a stop eight hundred feet below. I recognize him as one of the louder fellows from the night before. He hollers to his friend to come help him. His friend glances down, then keeps climbing.

It snowed a foot last night up high. It’s clear now and I can see dozens of ski lines—two-thousand-foot rock-lined chutes; rows of giant rocky ridges with ribbons of snow caught in the draws. From the top of Tizi’n'Toubkal pass three hours later, it looks like you could link descents all the way across the range and end up at the beginnings of the Sahara.

Wind rakes the snow on top of the pass. Clouds are moving in. We break for a few minutes, then start up again. Mohammad is losing steam and I take the lead. It seems to piss him off, but I don’t want to get caught up here. We’re hiking now, skis on our backs. The wind has blown most of the snow off the rocks. Every five hundred feet, a four-foot cairn marks the way. The relief is unbelievable: seven thousand five hundred vertical feet in forty-eight hours. A precipice drops off two thousand feet just to the right of the trail.

We reach a false summit, then scramble around a long, thin ridgeline. The wind is blowing so hard I have to crawl on my hands and knees the last hundred feet. I can see the summit tower, a small metal structure strung with prayer flags. The air is getting thin. One step, one breath.

Then there are no more steps. We’re standing on the highest peak in North Africa. The Sahara is like a dark streak across the horizon. It is surreal, having come from Brooklyn to the souks of Marrakesh to this view of fortified Berber cities on the edge of the desert in less than four days.

It’s cold on the summit, so we hike back to the pass and put on our skis. Mohammad steals first tracks in the upper bowl and promptly face-plants. I cut skier’s left to a fresh swath of snow along a rock wall. The first turn is intimidating—we’re far from help—but after a few more it’s the same old motion: compress, turn, link to another. I ski eight hundred feet, then traverse to another patch. It’s steeper there—deeper, too—and I make another twenty turns to the headwall.

Mohammad is angry I didn’t follow him and insists we stay in the low-angle belly of the draw. He takes off and I wait until he disappears behind the rollover, then traverse again to a steep couloir. There are no tracks in it and I ride a thousand feet to the bottom—ending on the slope I’d been looking at from my window.

Hamid is waiting at the refuge. He fetches a tray of tea and bread and asks where Mohammad is. Then he takes my skis and boots, climbs the hill and skis back down in three wild turns, his djellaba trailing behind him, yelling “Ski Moroccan!”

It’s only noon when we finish eating, and I spend the rest of the day in the common room, reading and sleeping. It’s cold outside. The only heat in the refuge comes from a small fireplace in the corner of the room. There’s a map of Toubkal over the hearth and an old wooden ice axe hanging beneath it. The room is white with a blue-tiled stripe around the middle. Two wooden windows face down the valley toward Imlil and another up at thirteen-thousand-three-hundred-ninety-two-foot Ras Ouanoukrim peak to the west. There are stickers on the bulletin board from La Grave, Serbia and Squaw Valley. Climbers, skiers and tourists filter in all afternoon, wearing brightly colored puff jackets. The guides and porters wear djellabas and outdated ski jackets. They play Ronda on one of the small wooden tables, slamming playing cards down and accusing each other of cheating. The images on the cards are of money, trees, fruit and princes.

The refuge is an odd place with thirty-some strangers huddled together, all trying to stay up late enough so they can sleep through the cold. There’s a great boredom here and people fight it with books and cards or listen to music and watch frost grow across the windows. Hardly anyone speaks the same language well enough to have a conversation. Last night in the bathroom—where water freezes in the toilet bowl—a woman cried and asked to go home while her husband consoled her.

February 14

Mohammad is up and eating breakfast at 6 a.m. the next morning. He’s still sore at me. Moroccans are proud of their mountains, proud to know the way. An hour later he leads up the skin track at a brutal pace. I’m so tired I can barely see straight. We keep right up the valley this time and head toward Ras Ouanoukrim. The mountain is only ninety-eight feet smaller than Toubkal. It’s much steeper and icier, too, I find on the eastern ridge.

The wind is so strong on the first col, it eats the snow away and blows my hat over the edge. We take off our skis and climb a steep chimney. The Italians are in front of us again. They all have crampons on their boots. All we have are twenty-year-old worn-out toes on our Scarpas. We balance on a half inch of ice each step for six hundred vertical feet. The wind gusts to forty miles per hour and throws me off balance. I’m holding my skis over one shoulder and both poles in the other hand. I show Mohammad the crampons on the other climbers’ feet. He shrugs and continues on.

Up here is where the ghosts come back. I think about family and friends, dead and alive. I see vivid images of their faces. There’s nothing else up here. Just wind and ice and a half inch of life I’m clinging to with each step. It’s part of the chore, facing the ghosts, and it’s part of the reward, too. Because when we make it to the summit, it’s not just the top of a mountain. It’s a rebirth.

We can see the whole High Atlas and Anti-Atlas ranges from the top, brown-and-white peaks scratching the blue sky all the way to the Atlantic. It’s blowing forty-five miles per hour now and we have to kneel to take our skins off. “Bravo!” the Italians yell, then skate to a couloir leading down the northeast face. Mohammad skis straight down the icy bootpack and I follow him for a bit, then take my own route down a skinny couloir.

The slot is rocky and steeper than it looked from below. The first two turns on the forty-five-degree slope are soft, though, and slough runs down the fall line. It feels good right away and I link two more, then six more, then twelve. I let out a yell—working the mountain every turn, dropping down the chute that must be near-vertical in the summer.

Mohammad appears across the valley and waves his arms. I cut left at the bottom of the chute and get another thousand vertical on a gentle powder slope. There’s a firm base beneath the new snow, but it’s soft enough to set an edge in. Wispy contrails soar behind as I link each arc. I’m out of breath; snot runs from my nose. I can hardly breathe, but I can’t stop. When I make it to the skin track, Mohammad is gone.

I follow the skin track back, looking over my shoulder at the maw, the wind whipping the summit and my tracks winding up the couloir and out of sight. Then I make a few more mellow powder turns to the refuge, take off my skis and climb the stairs to the cold, white bunk room where I dream twenty dreams every night.

February 15

It’s time to go. The climbers are gone; skiers are eating breakfast. Everyone in the common room is cold and silent. Sun rains down outside and the wind howls. I’ve been able to see my breath when I eat, sleep and brush my teeth for four days. I haven’t said more than ten words to anyone in almost a week. It’s an odd psychological experiment, this withdrawing, watching, thinking.

We pack up after lunch and head down. Back to the mule station, the orange stand, a piece of fuselage from a Ukrainian plane that crashed in 2002. We pass a shepherd and fifty sheep clambering up the path, then an old man in a djellaba in the floodplain. Closer to the bottom we pass three tourists riding mules. Mohammad waves to the muleteers. I avoid eye contact with the guests—overweight Europeans wearing gold jewelry and holding cameras.

We follow a small concrete aqueduct to Imlil where the vendors are out in force. They sell crystals, carpets, charms and crampons. It’s sickening to see the Berbers reduced to this. We pass them quickly and meet Jamal at a small restaurant. The brothers embrace and catch up on news. We have lunch and when it’s over, I ask Jamal to find me a taxi. He does and I ask the driver to take me south. He asks where, and I tell him I’m not sure. Over the mountains, toward the river. Somewhere far from the snow where I can walk into the desert.

PORTER FOX was born in New York and raised on the coast of Maine. His fiction, essays and nonfiction have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, Powder, Narrative, The Literary Review and Third Coast, among others. He has been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing, nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and was a finalist for the 2009 Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize. He recently completed his first collection of short stories and is working on a travel narrative set on the coast of Maine and an anthology of short fiction with poet Larry Fagin. He is also a member of the Miss Rockaway Armada and Swimming Cities art collectives and collaborated on installations on the Mississippi and Hudson rivers, Venice Biennale (2009), Mass MoCA (2008) and New York City’s Anonymous Gallery (2009). ”Lost” was first published in Powder magazine.

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BURNING UP

Burning up in sun and wind
I cook quick and easy
writing in the evening
palms ride the breeze beyond Culebrita
Frankito favors Oso Major in the night sky
Eric the Southern Cross

I find the isolated snorkel spot
to face down barracuda, gata, Tiburon y pajaro
comic interlude with a grinning grouper
young kingfisher asleep in folded feathers
tijerita, the scissortailed flycatcher, whistles la cucaracha
night heron scopes out the scene
sipping from puddles under the mahaguia tree

Chinches overtake the sweetest man on the beach
blistering heat blankets the downside of the grasses
Aldo climbs a tree between innings
his calloused feet are like hands
thorny acacia and Hurricane Hugo have chased the farmers out
Hugo took down grapefruit, avocado, lemon, lime, panepen and canepas
what’s left is grama and acacia
spoiling baseball
sand slows to a whisper
shiny seed casings perch in shaded pods

Caracoles carbuncle the tiburones like billboards
noodle light in thin roofless quality above me
peppered with cinders
hike up your gaiters a notch

Take me home gumbo airplane
mangoes underwing
neighbors don’t eat them
too lush on the tongue
Leda and I bridge our differences
with dulce de leche
she and Henry speak like parakeets
Henry refuses to work with words or numbers
he used to tell stories
now he listens
he can’t get his boat out of drydock
17 miles off on another island
he has no words so he can’t make plans

Do I need field glasses for the hike?
I commit to the mountain passes
Eric has walked through there before
do I have any faith left in people things or time?
now Eric’s up on a wildflower slope
how can we manage the visits?

I’ll be up in the Pyrenees on Sunday
flying north from Madrid
start walking the Camino de San Campostela
sleep in my bivvy and pad

 

Culebra, P.R.

2007

THE SAND WORM GOT US

for Porter

 

This happened when I was here
the concrete under me rippled
earth traveled down then up
people flapped their hands
one vomited omelette and coke
preempting the faux feeling of home
the current quit the fisherman
he brought in his motor and line
spewing fumes
coral citation directed his speed

Pick a border and go to it
I move galones de piedra closer to the dock
the port swells with sewage
the frogs are mechanical
& here come the mosquitos

I bake, swim, marinate
la brisa, las nubes
mimosa, star anise, cocoa butter
TV and sugar reflux

The sun’s shadow crossed Mosquito Bay
scrim of nimbus within cumulus
in a fixed but temporary state
letters written lotions lined up
time on view settles down
the cumulus change from pink
to white to gray
the nimbus are steel blue
the sky caked pink tips

Culebra, P.R.

Dec. 2010

 

I was born in a large brood, then left them at age fifteen. I have been a traveler ever since. I teach four- and five-year-olds, which keeps me both philosophical and immediate. The mother of a young woman, I try to see the world from the perspective  of a young adult.  My writing is charged with the largeness of being connected to a clan, but the anger of being estranged from them: the view of near and far simultaneously.

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 I. Around and ’Round

For why enter in on a circular path
On a pilgrimage leading straight back…?
—Elephant Micah

The beauty of rhythmic repetition is that it ties time into knots. When the same thing happens again and again, memory and expectation overlap. This time feels just like the last time, but it carries us forward. The sun rises, the clock ticks, the chorus of the song comes back around. After a couple of times, we’re ready to tap our fingers or sing along. But no matter how regular an occurrence, no matter how identical its reiteration, it can’t be the same. You’ve changed, I’ve changed. The world has changed. The return of that familiar pattern might tempt us to believe in eternity, but eventually the song is over. We confront ourselves again in the silence that comes after the last echo.

Remembering the details of a music tour is a bit like trying to hum a song that you’ve only heard once. You know how it changed you; you know how you felt when you listened to it. You know the overall rhythm, but the tune and the words come back in bits and pieces. And the most compelling part of the melody is the part you can’t seem to pin down. It makes you want to hear the song again, even though you know it will always sound different from the way you remember it.

I may tour with Dark Dark Dark again, or I may not. After five years of making music and traveling together, our working dynamic is changing. We’ve been on hiatus for five months now, so my tour journals seem more like a distant reminiscence than a current report. Still, thinking of life on the road reminds me that it’s not so hard to feel at home, anywhere.

II. Tour, Tourism and Not Collecting

We are on tour. Five people with musical instruments, sleeping bags, extra socks. A battered white van with a wooden loft behind the bench seat. A couple of milk crates full of snacks and tea. A show every night, always in a new town. The hospitality of strangers or old friends. A drive each morning, sometimes departing in the hushed hours after the show if there’s no place to stay. Constant change can become a kind of routine if there is a rhythm to it. In the steady flow of unfamiliar streets, new faces, new music, memories blur together. It’s okay, though. We’re not traveling to collect memories of every detail. We’re here to play a show, and we’ll be back soon enough.

On a midnight drive I drift off to sleep and awaken suddenly, not sure if I’m on land or at sea. The van sways gently on the freeway’s swelling curves. Have I been dreaming or remembering the street I wandered yesterday before the show? This very stretch of highway could be the same as last night’s. Every detail of the asphalt is in focus through the cracked windshield, but nothing to distinguish this stretch of paved land from any other.

We share the term “tour” with people who go on journeys to inspect geographical sites, remnants of history, triumphs of industry. They gaze at wonders and listen to the tales of origins. They collect trinkets, photographs, memories—miniatures of the outer world to take home to their inner one. We collect supplies that help us feel at home in Baltimore or the truck stop in Kentucky. Hot water, scrap paper, a lottery ticket.

We bring our home with us so we can host guests wherever we go. Each day’s work is devoted to transporting this world, setting up the tools of its making and bringing it to life for an hour or less. Then we dismantle it again, coiling cables and folding stands, carrying amplifiers and packing it all away in cases and canvas bags. And back to our tortoise shell, our house on wheels. No matter where we go, it is the same place.

Oh, there are adventures, too, no doubt about it. Unplanned detours, chance meetings, a dance party down the street, a home-cooked breakfast. But these come and go, blurring together like dreams of uncertain credibility. Should I try to collect these dreams and save them for later? I’m busy trying to take my world with me to the next place. Why try to collect pieces of everything else along the way?

III. Collecting After All

I have always been skeptical about souvenirs. It seems like such a burden to try to memorialize travel by collecting objects. On tour, I don’t save show posters or set lists. I don’t buy trinkets, T-shirts or even records. My backpack is heavy enough already.

Still, somehow I end up with a few token objects that I hold onto without really thinking about it. I don’t keep them with a collector’s sense of order and purpose. A collector has sets, categories, classifications. A collector is driven by the thrill of the hunt for the next piece of the puzzle, the next edition, the missing link. Every once in a while I pick up a fragment that has some personal significance, and I can’t bring myself to let it go. But I don’t consciously try to find more fragments of the same type. I hold onto the thing because its appearance is attached to unusual circumstances, or the thing itself has a compelling presence. In the circular routine of a tour, it is a lucky interruption. I recently dug through some boxes of odds and ends, searching for tour souvenirs, trying to figure out if I’ve begun any collections in spite of myself.

These found or gifted pocketknives are as close as I’ve come to having a proper collection of anything. I keep them because they’re useful, but also because they’re attached to a sense of time and place. The small silver knife came from upstate New York one summer, a gift from a friend after I lost a different knife. We explored an abandoned house, and I think we found the knife there, or at least that’s the memory I’ve attached to the object. The tool reminds me of mildewed books and torn carpet, moss growing on wooden rafters. I wore the knife on my keychain for at least a year afterward. I’ve used every gizmo on it, even the corkscrew.

I think the red Swiss Army knife comes from the same winter tour when we had to pull off the freeway in the middle of the night in Maryland during an ice storm. I don’t remember how I acquired the knife, and I’ve rarely used it.

I found the orange “juice” multi-tool on the sidewalk in San Jose. There were tangerine trees planted in wooden boxes in a nearby parking lot. I saw a glint on the concrete, almost the same color as the fruit. The pliers are slightly bent, but the scissors is amazing.

The large Douk-Douk was given to me by my dear friend Matthieu. He knew I admired his knife when we used it to cut a watermelon while sitting on the cobblestones in a public square in Venice. We drank water from a wrought-iron fountain and ate slices of juicy melon, laughing at the mess we made. He etched an arrow design into the handle of mine.

The larger of these two feathers came from a particularly aggressive duck in a public park in Tallahassee. We had a whole afternoon to relax before our show, and we took a picnic lunch to the park. There was a flock of ducks around the pond. One of the ducks had a tail feather that seemed to be detached but somehow stuck to the other feathers at a crooked angle. This duck, agitated, wouldn’t leave us alone. We thought that this loose feather was the cause of the duck’s bad temper. On a dare, Marshall decided he would steal the feather. I lured the duck away with tortilla chips and Marshall snuck around behind to pluck the crooked feather. I’m surprised that I still have it.

The smaller feather came from my friend Monica. While visiting her house in Oakland, I told her I liked the color of her parakeet’s feathers, and she found one on the bottom of the bird’s cage for me to take.

The striated piece of driftwood came from a river bank. Someplace we went swimming to ease the monotony of a long drive between shows. Maybe it was half-buried in the sand where I laid my clothes down. I don’t remember where it’s from, or when.

The jawbone, sun bleached, was by a sidewalk in the city. Someplace I walked aimlessly to kill time before the show. I don’t remember where it’s from, or when. Somehow, I kept both and they ended up together.

IV. Rain, Terschelling

I am standing under a grove of trees next to a narrow road. Bicyclists pass me in twos and threes, their plastic ponchos ballooning behind them. The asphalt is slick. I’ve passed this grove twice now, or is it three times? I know I’ve been walking in circles, and I’m going to take a break for a while until the rain subsides.

The festival-goers pass, parading from one event to the next, with brochures and umbrellas. They laugh and swig cans of beer, or pedal lazily. The rain is no interruption for them; it’s just part of the North Sea landscape. I start walking again.

We play two concerts that afternoon, but with a few hours between shows I have time to explore the Isle of Terschelling and get a glimpse of the Oerol Festival. I’ve passed geometric plywood video kiosks, catering pavilions, a Dutch rockabilly band playing in a tent, a makeshift bar filled with drunken revelers all lifting their beer mugs and singing along with an accordion player. The festival events are spread out along the unmarked roads and trails of the rural island. I happen upon some experimental theatre performances, but without any understanding of the Dutch language the dialogue is lost on me. And in spite of the map I picked up at an information desk, I can’t seem to figure out where I am, so finding any particular show turns out to be impossible.

If the rain stops, we’ll perform again in an hour. I doubt the weather will clear, so I’m not worried about being lost. I’d like to get back to our backstage tent to dry off and have a cup of tea. Even though it’s summer, the wind from the sea is cold, and I’m not dressed for the weather.

Somehow, I end up back at the forest pavilion stage a few minutes before we’re scheduled to play again. It’s still raining, but an audience has already gathered, huddled in their ponchos, waiting for the show to begin. We have some delicate acoustic instruments and a lot of electricity on stage. It seems like a bad idea to play under an open-sided pavilion with water blowing in from all sides. We’re ready to call off the second show when the rain tapers off.

After the second show, we have a cup of tea with the stage manager, Linda. She asks where we’re going next, and we tell her about our itinerary for the next few days.

“So, this is what you do?” she says. “You go to a different place every day, all over the world, and you perform?”

We agree that this is basically our job as musicians.

“Wow,” she says. “That must be…so…”

I mentally supply the next word for her. I’m sure it will be “romantic” or “exciting” or “amazing.”

Well, yes, we will say, it’s wonderful but it is also exhausting and repetitive, and although we see a lot of places, we don’t get to know many very well because most of the time we’re riding in the van or unloading the van or sound-checking or playing or reloading the van or sometimes even getting some sleep. So, yes, we are very grateful to be doing what we love, but it’s not as dreamy as you might think.

She finishes her sentence.

“That must be…so…terrible.”

We laugh because she understands, more than most.

V. Half In, Half Out

One July evening we play in a crowded courtyard behind a bar. There isn’t enough space on the patio stones, so people lean out of the doorway and cluster on the fire escape above our heads, listening. Without a stage or lighting there’s hardly a separation between us and these strangers. There’s no illusion about what it is we’ve brought with us: a set of songs and little else. They are with us for an hour, listening, understanding how we pass our time. Applause, kind words, and then it’s time to pack up and go.

After the show our hosts take us to the nearest supermarket to pick up a snack, then we head for the creek in the center of town to meet their friends. The banks of the mountain spring have been walled with concrete where it passes through the city park, forming a long rectangular swimming pool. The surface is like black glass, reflecting yellow streetlights and the shadows of passing joggers. A few pale swimmers surface and push rows of ripples away into the dark. There are clusters of kids by the water’s edge, huddled in conversation, bikes overturned beside them.

We sit with one of these groups, and conversation buzzes with the endless possibilities of a summer night. After the hush of a concert, these kids are done listening and are ready to live. More bikers roll up, beers are pulled out of backpacks, phone calls are made. I sit on the edge of the concrete bank. My bare legs disappear into the cold water. I’m too exhausted to jump in. An hour ago, I was on stage, hosting guests in my portable world. Now I’m part of the audience again.

VI. Swimming

The gate is locked. Wrought iron, ten or twelve feet tall, it secures the only entrance to the courtyard where we’re trying to go. Stelth is standing with us. “Hold on, I’ll get us in,” he says. With a quick leap, he spiders his way from foothold to foothold and squeezes his body through the narrow space between the gate and the brick arch overhead. In a matter of seconds, he is calmly opening the gate from the other side. Stelth is not a nickname. His mother was prophetic—or persuasive.

Nine of us stroll into the brand-new condominium complex like casual guests. It’s been unbearably hot all day, and five of us have just driven 250 miles with no air conditioning. I am barefoot, and the concrete is cool in the shade of the corridor. As we enter the courtyard, the hot wind pushes a curtain of clouds over the sun. The rectangle of turquoise water at our feet glows and flickers. I manage to look away from the pool and check out the rest of the courtyard. Off to one side, a bunch of clean-cut kids in bright swimsuits lounge at patio tables, drinking cans of beer. They smile at us. If they know we don’t live here, they don’t care. Maybe they don’t live here either.

Then the first drops of rain begin to fall, cold and heavy, arousing shrieks of surprise and groans of disappointment as the would-be sunbathers gather up their towels and aluminum cans. We hesitate for a second and retreat back into the corridor as the drizzle turns to a downpour. But we’ve come all this way and now we could have the whole pool to ourselves…

Stelth goes first. He disappears into the water like an otter. His dark silhouette twists to the opposite side of the pool. Laura is next, and soon the two are splashing and shoving each other around like kids, making a frothing whirlpool. I leave my T-shirt and shorts in a pile next to the wall and jog across the deck in my underwear, shivering under the torrents of rain. I jump, feet-first, and the water swallows me instantly. Shivers and doubts dissolve—along with temperature, time, weight, distance, words. It’s always like this in the world underwater. A gentle pressure reminds you of the boundary between your skin and everything else. Beyond this sensation, nothing is important. You’ve left the land-world behind. Even in the chlorine stink of a condo pool, the water has its power.

I don’t know how long I’m in the water, somersaulting, kicking, watching the downpour churn the surface. It is only a few minutes. By the time I emerge, the rain has stopped.

After a swim, there is always a feeling of being at home in the world again. How simple it is to breathe and move through air. The revelation connects every swim to every past swim…

I’m climbing out of a strange pool in Denver with goose bumps on my skin.

I’m a child again, my arms aching, almost too weak to clamber out of the community pool.

I’m a teenager, striding out of Lake Michigan at midnight, elated by the frigid water and hot July air, the pitch darkness and the faint silhouettes of my naked friends beside me.

I have no idea where I am, but I belong here.

JONATHAN KAISER has played cello with the band Dark Dark Dark for the past five years, touring extensively in the U.S. and Europe, collaborating with Swimming Cities and the Miss Rockaway Armada and acting in Todd Chandler’s film Flood Tide.  Jonathan composed much of the material for the band’s two live film soundtrack projects (for Flood Tide and Fritz Lang’s Spies), which have been presented at venues including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Jonathan received an MFA in visual art from the University of Minnesota in 2011 and is currently working on recording new music and practicing inaccurate-perspective drawing.

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For millennia, Jerusalem’s Old City has inspired violent, possessive passions by partisans of three religions, and many factions of each, all vying for shards of the same sacred real estate. To walk up the Via Dolorosa is to reconceive the world’s endless religious struggles as metaphor of a neighborhood turf war without end. The neighborhood boasts three religious travel destinations so alluring, they aroused the Crusades.

The Wailing Wall is a remnant of Solomon’s Temple, built around 1000 BCE and destroyed four hundred years later by Babylonians—then reconstructed and destroyed again a millennium later by the Romans. A block away sits the boulder from which Mohammed leapt upward on a visit to heaven and where Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac—now within the Dome of the Rock Mosque. All this lies a few earthbound steps from the Via Dolorosa, along which Jesus carried the cross up Calvary Hill.

If the Old City inflames the faithful with possessiveness, it at least astonished this faithless tourist. I came to Jerusalem in 1987, shortly before the Intifada, to visit a friend. “Take care,” he said when I mentioned the prospect of walking the Via Dolorosa. He shrugged one of those communicative “Life is like that…” and threw in one of those hand curlicues that Israelis specialize in. “Ancient feuds still play out there,” he said. “Mostly interfactional violence.”

Tourism goes on forever, as do the mundane lives of residents here—and their half-hummed prayer at the Wailing Wall, at the nearly adjacent Holy Sepulchre Church, at the Dome of the Rock Mosque. Eons of residents and tourists have bumped into one another along its carless lanes, perhaps most often while wandering through the souk—the street market that sprawls across Jesus’s path. Centuries of interreligious bargains struck there have yielded up such booty as souvenir ashtrays bearing images of the faith of choice; velvet paintings of the Last Supper, and of holy Arabic script; mother-of-pearl rosaries, and mother-of-pearl-inlaid olive-wood and cedar camels, omni-priestly sandals, inter-festive wedding dresses, woven rugs for prayer and general use and various Aladdin-ish brass oil lamps.

All along the way, the pilgrims stand out, blocking crowded corners in lost batches, far from (one guesses, overhearing) Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, France and, as a cheery old guy exclaimed, “Idaho!” They’re forever arriving, as so many have before, and tracing for themselves the Fourteen Stations of the Cross. The Stations have long been marked along the Via Dolorosa with those Roman numerals, I through XIV, that encircle the sidewalls of every Catholic and Orthodox church. Crusaders, having struggled to reach the Holy City, sometimes surveyed the path exactingly, pace by pace and angle by angle, then struggled home to their castles in Europe and replicated it in their backyards, a prayer repeated, sometimes scaled down, as though the geometric particulars of the route were themselves essentially sacred.

***

I began the route, map in hand and edgy because that was the mood of the city. Some of the stations are a bit off the street, in surprising niches. Guides wandered up to strollers. One Abdul Jaussi said he was a high school teacher and offered to show me “everything.”

“Are you Catholic?” he asked.

“Jewish by birth,” I answered, “but not religious.”

“But you are nice!” he exclaimed.

That out of the way, we agreed on a fee and he commenced to guide: “You came into the Old City through the Lion’s Gate.” He pointed back down the street toward an arched opening in the high stone wall that ringed the city. “Crusaders came in there. General Allenby came in there when the British took over in 1917. In 1967, General Moshe Dyan came through the Lion’s Gate too. All the conquerors came through that gate.”

He led me down the street, into the yard of a Moslem elementary school, and, with his foot, pointed out the First Station of the Cross, where Jesus had been condemned by the crowd that chose to release Barabbas. A certain tan, concave cobblestone in the center of a rough basketball court marked the sacred spot. There was a half-cup of rainwater in it from a morning shower. A netless hoop dangled askew from backboard, and a tetherball pole stood a few yards from the stone, not quite on the sidelines.

A schoolboy tapped the cobblestone with his foot. “You may wash your hands here too,” he said in English. The stone had worn smooth. An artist had recently painted murals on the courtyard walls: an ostrich, a jack-in-the-pulpit and several deer on what could have been a New England mountainside. At the exit hung a big red poster of a dejected, stooping child clutching a teddy bear. Abdul translated the legend: “Be aware of troubled children.”

Electric saws snarled through the yard. On Fridays at three in the afternoon, said Abdul, Franciscans walked the route, some bearing crosses. And by prearrangement, which Abdul could handle should I so wish, groups, led by priests, could rent crosses of their own to carry along. Indeed, Abdul later took me to a woodshop in a back alley nearby, where a couple of carpenters repaired organ pipes next to a stack of rental crosses they’d constructed. Passing the schoolyard, an old man hugged bags of groceries. A guided pair of tourists stood, heads turning by degrees, taking in a sequence of distant sights across the valley as their guide named them. Two Greek Orthodox priests hurried by, heads close in talk, followed by a pair of similarly robed, similarly conversing Hassidic Jews, two Arab workers with shovels, two little girls giggling their way home from school and two teen boys gossiping in Brooklyn English.

Amidst this everydayness, the deep traditions of three major religions had formed. There must also have been shoppers and visitors and priests on other business the day of the Crucifixion and the day of Mohammed’s heavenward journey and even the day of the destruction of the Temple, just as we see shoppers and kids on bikes at the edges of newspaper photos of war scenes.

Abdul led me up the street to the Second Station, in the courtyard of a Franciscan convent built where Jesus had received the cross. Pillars and ornamental stone scrollwork from earlier buildings had been arranged about the yard, “said to have come from Pilate’s headquarters,” said Abdul. A gray all-weather model of Crusade-era Jerusalem stood in a corner.

Many visitors here had dual identities: they were tourists and worshipers. A party of ten, whispering in Italian, many with fold-down ballplayer sunglasses, shuffled through the yard, stoop-necked with fatigue. Pilate had washed his hands of Jesus here. Lurid dioramas with sad-faced figures replicated the anguished scene. A few tourists knelt and touched a tiny grid gouged in the fieldstone, “Made by bored Roman soldiers who played dice upon it,” said Abdul.

A tractor towing a wagon of rolled-up rugs roared past. Someone had stacked egg crates and garbage sacks in the street, right below the Third Station plaque, where Jesus had fallen for the first time. A man carrying perhaps a dozen loaves of bread in a clear plastic sack walked by, shoes clicking briskly. A street vendor whispered, “Please, sir-r-r,” insistently, repeatedly shoving forward a religious booklet. The proprietor of a souvenir-and-food stall shouted across to me, “New Testament! Three dollar!”

Before the Armenian Church, twenty yards farther on, we came to the Fourth Station, where Jesus had encountered his mother, Mary. Directly across from it, before another knickknack shop, T-shirts swung like flags in the morning heat: “My Grandmother Went to Israel and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt.” Under its canopy the Arab proprietor sipped tea, almost lost between high stacks of sheepskin booties, Bedouin headdresses and more smart-ass shirts: “I Climbed Masada,” and, over a picture of a jet fighter, “America, Don’t Worry—Israel Is Behind You.”

Abdul walked on up the street and put his hand into a palm-sized nook in a stone wall. This was Station Five. “Here, where Simon of Cyrene helped carry the cross, Greeks believe Simon put his hand,” Abdul said. With the proud presenting gesture of a used-car dealer, he patted the rock, polished smooth by many hands before his. The portable radio in the film-and-guidebook shop across the way played tinny heavy metal. Next door, in “Olivewood Workshop,” woodworkers lathed artifacts.

Where Via Dolorosa turned off a street called El Wad, amidst more shops, Abdul pointed down and announced, still in his guide’s voice, “Yesterday they kill one person right here. In the night. Jew? Arab? We do not know. They took it away, the body.” Another bit of chatty information, or misinformation. What did Abdul make of it? “Arab killing Arab. Gangs, not tourist.”

Beyond the spot was a fruit stall where women picked through stacks of oranges and almonds, scents mixing, and more stacks of gleaming carrots, and cabbages the size of goats’ heads. “Families live all around here,” Abdul said. “It is good. You don’t need $10,000 car, and vegetable is here. Live two, three family together.” Members of a large English delegation plodded past, their transit taking several minutes. Abdul waited a bit on the other side of the line and then moved far ahead. He seemed to know all the market men, nodding and chatting with a friend, then another farther along.

I walked past Station Six, where St. Veronica had wiped Jesus’s face, past Hubbly Bubbly Store and then past St. Veronica Gift Shop, whose window was full of graphic statuary of the sufferings of Jesus. A dog-eared sign said, in faded letters, “Sale 50%.” Jesus had fallen for the second time at Station Seven. A friend of Abdul’s ran a crucifix and rosary and Star of David stall that also sold benign “PEACE” T-shirts and also ones that read “Fighting for Peace Is Like Fucking for Virginity.” The adjacent stall sold interfaith diapers.

I chased Abdul past lamb carcasses hanging from a butcher’s stall. Out a shop window peered an Arabic teenager, veil drawn back, a wistful smile and tears on her cowled face. We passed, and declined to buy purses in piles, stacked copper pots, schools of salted fish. Coming out at the far end of the arched, packed street market, I jogged right and caught up with Abdul where Jesus had met the women of the city, at Station Eight.

We mounted ramp-like stairs at a large sign that said ZALTIMO SWEETS, clambered between children shooting marbles on the rough stone and climbed by the rear porch of a youth hostel called Tabasco, near Station Nine, where Jesus had fallen for the third time. Abdul gaped across at the European teenagers lounging shirtless on the hostel’s rear deck and muttered, “They drink beer there.”

A sign by the hostel read, “Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate.” We approached the prime real estate of Christianity—where a half-dozen sects eternally attended their faithful tasks, asprawl each other like old lovers. Their dominions intertwined, stacked and interwoven directly above the sacred ground of Calvary. An Ethiopian Orthodox Monastery lay atop the Holy Sepulchre Church. The nub of the great church dome stuck into their courtyard, a small cupola in the monastery yard. Far below, Coptic, Greek, Armenian and Roman sects had uneasily shared the cubic volume of Holy Proximity for centuries. Protestants had no place here, and their historians have asserted other locations for Christ’s tomb, a few kilometers away.

In the green and pleasant courtyard of the Ethiopians, priests smiled in the sunshine. Their round-shouldered plaster cells seemed serene, removed from the jumble of the Christian Quarter. A bony cat dragged a bag of chicken bones its own size through an archway into the adjacent Coptic courtyard.

Abdul led me down through a tiny Ethiopian chapel decorated with paintings of Solomon and Sheba, into the Coptic Sanctuary below, then curling down more stairs into the grand Holy Sepulchre Church itself. The final five stations of the cross were within this marbled maze, clustered, overlapping patches administered by contending orders.

At Station Ten, Roman soldiers had taken Jesus’s robe. Roman Catholic territory started here and included the Eleventh Station, a few feet away, where Christ had been nailed to the Cross. Just steps further along, the Greek Orthodox controlled Station Twelve, where the cross had stood, and Station Thirteen, where Christ had been taken down. The dimly lit church branched into side chambers everywhere. Fragrant, acrid pine incense wafted through everyone’s territory.

All over the dusky walls hung an overwhelming mishmash of sorrowful icons, of rose and tan and black and white marble panels, set above scrolled railings and mosaic floors, an accumulated decoration of wonderment.

“Do you want to touch the real Calvary, where it really happened?” Abdul asked.

I nodded. Abdul lifted the velvet skirt draped over a table of glimmering votive candles, lanterns, statues. In the dimness below, I made out, then touched with fingertips, a slit the width of my palm, opening through the marble floor. I squeezed my fingers down into it and felt the rough, cold stone of blessedness, Golgotha, the Place of Skulls, the quick beneath the ornament of the Church. In candlelight, I glimpsed the cold, sacred rock and recalled most of a verse from T.S. Eliot’s The Hippopotamus:

Flesh-and-blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.

This was an obscure facility. I looked up. No one in the passing crowd glanced down. A tourist stopped Abdul, who appeared especially knowing here, and asked, “Is this where the REAL THING happened?”

“Yes, yes,” Abdul answered assuringly. The woman’s eyes glowed. Overhearing this, an elderly priest, perhaps Italian, slowly placed his hand over his mouth, seemingly astonished, then embarrassed by his own strong reaction. Throughout the stone chambers, cameras flashed, collecting memories.

A nun, eyes always averted, dutifully scraped from a marble shelf the wax of a thousand candles recently bought, placed, lit and spent, a thousand pleas for merciful intervention. By her side, an Orthodox priest in flowing robe offered to sell passersby more “virgin candles.” A Greek teenager in pink pedal-pushers and red sneakers whispered excitedly and giggled and pointed, arm in arm with her lean young man. Another tourist asked Abdul, “Afterwards, they washed His body on that rock?”

“Yes…”

“That actual rock?”

“It’s a tradition…” Abdul began to answer, then stopped and shrugged. He led me to the tomb, the Fourteenth Station, a tiny hut, an ornate, two-chambered mausoleum, free standing, far beneath the huge church dome and the Ethiopian goat pasture above. In the tiny anteroom of the hut rested the rock slab that had sealed, then come away from, the tomb where Jesus had lain. It was covered with a shield of thick plate glass.

An old couple, perhaps from the American Midwest, touched the glass, fingertips darting out then clenching back into pockets. A dark-robed Orthodox priest bent slowly down, as though savoring a beckoning lover, and kissed the glass, downright romanced it, stayed on it for one, then two whole minutes, holding up the line, his lips a snail glued to the sidewall of a fish tank. The line crowded up behind, but no one disturbed his quaint ecstasy. Two nuns placed their rosaries beside the priest’s cheeks, to capture proximate holiness.

We crouched and entered the inner chamber of the hut, the tomb itself. A deep-eyed, somber, cassocked priest attended the tiny room. He regarded Abdul—they must have encountered one another three or four times on a busy tourist day for years without end—and Abdul did his job, blending sects: “This is where our Lord is buried,” he said, “and you may light a candle…” We crouched and backed out, discreetly.

In the bright street, a choir of doleful brothers, at the end of Via Dolorosa, chanted plainsong. Their music was pure, beautiful, a modal, snaking, endless tune so like the call of the muezzin a block away announcing another prayer time from the minaret of the Dome of the Rock Mosque, and so like the muttered tuneful chants of the rabbis a block away at the Wailing Wall.

Abdul smiled and led me graciously past one final murder site and on to the Holy Sephulcre Gifte Shoppe, where he nodded to another friend and where crowns of thorns, in several hat sizes, went for two dollars apiece, then on to the Jaffa Gate, and on out through the wall to the New Jerusalem.

MARK KRAMER has written for The Boston Globe, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, The Atlantic Monthly, Outside and other publications. His books include Three Farms: Making Milk, Meat and Money from the American Soil, Invasive Procedures: A Year in the World of Two Surgeons, and Travels with a Hungry Bear: A Journey to the Russian Heartland. He co-edited the anthologies Literary Journalism and Telling True Stories: a writer’s guide to narrative nonfiction from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, published by Plume/Penguin in 2007 and adopted by many writing classes. He was, from 2001–2007, writer-in-residence and Founding Director of the Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism. He was writer-in-residence and professor of journalism at Boston University from 1991–2001 and taught at Smith College for a decade before that. He lives near Boston and runs an ongoing workshop for mid-career writers with longform projects. See www.tellingtruestories.com for more.

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