Gulch

Night Crossings

It's a little before five pm and I'm sitting in the upper deck of an Air France 747 soon bound for Paris.  Part of my mind is thinking about the Trans Atlantic flight that lies ahead of me but mainly I'm wondering what type of people my row-mates are.  Specifically, I'm wondering if the fact they are both wearing shorts and tank-tops for a flight between Toronto and Paris on a day when temperatures are below freezing makes them very Canadian or just very crazy. 

The man is large and has a tattoo of some sort of motorcycle or perhaps snowmobile logo on his upper arm.  The woman is blonde and tan and a bit fidgety.  Before they have even sat down, though, they seemed to have charmed all of the more reserved French people sitting across the aisle.  Everyone likes it when a guest is enthusiastic about visiting their homes and their enthusiasm is strong enough to be contagious in a way that the CDC might issue an alert if they monitored such things.

Before our flight even takes off, I learn that they had won a free trip to a warm beach resort in the South of France from a radio station.  I relaxed a bit when I heard that, happy to hear the people that I would be sharing so small a space for the next six hours were optimistic rather than insane (which hasn't always been the case with people I've sat next to on long flights).

"This plane is really nice," the man states after a flight attendant serves everyone their own small bottles of wine.  "We should only fly wherever Air France goes."

I nod my head in agreement.  I have never ridden in the upper deck of a 747 before, as lowest price mostly dictates how I travel and the upper floor is usually business or premium class.  However, thanks to some tips buried in the forums at FlyerTalk and a little luck, I was directed up a flight of stairs as I got on board.  The upper cabin is surprisingly small and spacious and feels like how I imagine air travel to be rather than how it usually is: comfortable, relaxed, and modern rather than cramped and hassled.  Because of the curve of the cabin walls there is even an extra eight inches of space between my window seat and the window that has been fitted with an extra shelf. 

Our row is three back from the cockpit door and being that far forward makes the flight especially quiet.  The huge power and thrust of the engines clearly comes from behind us and it reminds me of the large car ferries I regularly rode on when I lived on an island, a fast ship sailing through the sky.  On a map, I imagine, the night ahead of us is a slow moving black glacier that slowly sweeps across the globe.  We will cross from one side of night somewhere over eastern Canada and arrive on the far shore of day near Paris. The night ahead of us is not so much a matter of time but a matter of distance, something to be crossed.  

The flight between Toronto and Paris takes about six hours and it crosses the night in much the same way it crosses the ocean: too quickly for the body but not fast enough for mind.  Or maybe that's backwards.  At any rate, one minute you're having dinner as the sun sets outside, eying the in-flight movie and being slightly amazed that Air France shows nudity, and the next moment your being served breakfast while the sun rises and you're pretty sure - but not positive - that the same movie is still playing.  Your mind feels like a two wheel drive car churning through mud, for all of the work and energy involved, there should be more forward motion.  The farther my body travels in the plane, the farther it feels like my mind falls behind.

"I can't wait to land and smoke," says the women sitting next to me as the sky outside lightens and night falls further and further behind us. She starts to fidget with the seat back tray.

"Oh, but there is no smoking in Charles du Gaul," says a french lady sitting across the aisle. "You must go outside."

"There's no smoking sections at all?" the woman asks, her voice taking on the troubled note of someone who just had their credit card denied while paying for dinner at a fancy restaurant.

"No, none," the French lady replies with a sympathetic smile.

"Oh, I hope we land soon."

And, for the first flight in a long time, I hope we don't.  Instead, as I sit back in my chair and watch the clouds go by, I realize that I'm happy in just the most basic act of travel: that of going forward.  Of course, I just hope my mind catches up. 

Losing Venice

“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Polo said. “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”
-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Jen and I arrived in Venice at dusk. The huge block of a train station was strangely empty despite the vast number of briskly moving people. The second week of January, it seemed, was a slow period for tourists. The people in the station carried small bags and moved with the unconscious confidence of a commuter following a path walked twice every day. These locals, with their intentional way of moving, were surely escaping the city and on their way home after work. They made the station feel empty; like a parking lot at Disneyland filled with only the cars of employees. Venice, whose lifeblood is tourists and travelers, was quiet and despite the cold rain falling from the dark sky, I was giddy – we had the amusement park to ourselves.

I had been to Venice before. In the final days of July 1995, I traveled to Europe for the first time. I was twenty years old and had both a lot of assumptions and a lot of questions about the world. For various reasons, my point of entry into Europe and the traveling life was Venice. The Montana to Venice route was a long one, and when I arrived there I had picked up a strong cold and a serious case of jet lag. My memories of those first few days have a dreamlike quality (no doubt aided by jet lag pills and cough syrup) that I have always associated with Venice.

My traveling companion and I walked aimlessly around the narrow streets of Venice for a couple of days. We avoided the crowds, museums, and cathedrals. Instead, we spent our days crossing over steep bridges, walking along murky and smelly canals, finding treasures here and there: fountains filled with hundreds of rich green turtles, languages we couldn’t identify, statues that we didn’t understand. We didn’t really have any plans or desires other than just to enjoy the city. It was hot and crowded and yet it was like nothing I had ever experienced. The city’s scents and flavors, streets, bridges, corners, and alleys exceeded anything I had dreamt about.

On this trip, I was interested in seeing how the Venice outside of the train station and the Venice of my memories compared. I had looked forward to visiting it the most out of anywhere in Europe and I was impatient to get out of the train station. Jen and I quickly procured a map from the tourist office – humbly backing out and waiting our turn after the clerk yelled at us that only one person at a time was allowed in the small office. We peered at our notes on how to reach the hostel, the Foresteria Valdese. After a short ride down the Grand Canal, we found ourselves partially lost in a dark, quiet street. Despite the rain, the dark, and our heavy packs, it was a joy to walk in narrow streets without automobiles. We eventually found the hostel, which was located in a decaying villa on the confluence of three canals.

We spent the next week strolling around the city in the cold January rain. Walking, even in frigid weather, is the perfect activity in Venice. We wandered and strolled for hours, often getting hopelessly lost in the floating city. The streets were quiet and off the main routes we encountered very few people. We enjoyed not knowing where we were in the city, consulting our map was always done with a slight hesitation and a feeling of sadness.

The other day I was going through some of my files and I found a post card I had mailed myself from the Venice train station. On the front is a picture of the Canal de la Conica, with a tall building on each side and a number of arched pedestrian bridges over the greenish water. In the background, the Bridge of Sighs is visible. On the back of the card, this is what I wrote:

Jen and I have walked for hours through the labyrinth-like streets of Venice.

And still it is not enough.

Venice it the archetype dream of a city – there are always new corners to turn, bridges to cross, treasures to be found. Since we are here in winter, the back ways are often quiet, solitary passages and I long to find new ways to get to new places. We leave tomorrow, knowing that the time we spent here is not enough and that, perhaps, no amount is.

I suspect that every time I enter a new city, I judge it against the Venice that exists in my mind. Walking around the Inner Harbor and broad streets of the old part of Victoria this fall, I have found myself visiting the narrow streets of Venice in both my daydreams and night wanderings.

Of Memorials and Monuments

Not being Catholic, I don’t have much to add about today’s events. I took this picture of the stones of St. Peter’s Square when I was in Rome last year. The red stone indicates the location where the Pope was shot in 1981.

In a city filled with elaborate, magnificent monuments, the simplicity of this one one spoke loudly to me.

Endings

In London, Jen and I come across a strange sight.

We are, as we have done in so many cities, walking along the side of a river that curves and flows through the metropolitan – giving it a focus, a center, a life. The rivers that we have seen are not only the hearts that give birth with trade, transport, and sustenance but they also are that necessary void of empty space in which a person can stand out from the shadows of the buildings and really get a good look at the place around them.

Jen and I are doing just that - in this case, we are along the Thames admiring the jarring clash of the stones of medieval buildings and the glass of modern towers that have grown up next to each other along this sluggish river. We amble along, enjoying the warm spring sunshine, the river, the bridges, the endearing accents, the people. We desperately try to take it all in and hold on to it as hard as we can - grabbing it with our mental fingers until they go white and hurt with the effort - knowing that this is it , our last day in an unfamiliar town, a different culture, a place where we are still traveling. And although it is a great day, the sadness that has been underlying everything is still with us. We fly home tomorrow.

As we walk, we notice that there are small crowds gathered in the middle of each bridge spanning the Thames. The bridges mirror the nearby buildings, with the medieval looking Tower Bridge, the bland 50’s era London Bridge (the original, sadly, now residing in Arizona), and the stunningly futurist Millennium Bridge. We have crossed them several times, peering into one side of the city and then the other.

The crowds farther up the river seem to be focused on a barge sluggishly making its way upstream. We head to the center of the nearest bridge to see what is going on. We wait patiently, and as the red barge gets closer, I can see that an airplane is lying on its deck. Even though its wings have been cut off and its tail has been clipped, the plane is still sleek and powerful looking. It nose comes to a sharp needle-like point and its wings sweep back in a way that can only suggest speed. It is, of course, the Concorde Supersonic Jet – the only passenger airplane that allowed the (not-so common) public to fly at more than twice the sound of speed. It could cross from London to New York in about three hours, the same trip that Jen and I will be doing tomorrow will take seven hours.

This particular Concorde belongs to British Airways and is the last one to be decommissioned. Its final trip is not a weightless one through the sky but a slow, earthbound one on the barge to a museum in Scotland. No Concorde will ever fly again.

As I look down at the white bird-shaped jet, I can’t help but think that it resembles nothing more than a harpooned whale being dragged back to the city for dismemberment and consumption. Of course, I have actually never seen a dead whale, but the pictures and stories I’ve read suggest something similar to what I am seeing below me – a graceful, elegant creature cut up into a corpse, tied down to a barge, and hauled to land. I think that perhaps if Ahab’s story had ended differently, the death of his dream would resemble the death of the dream below me. It is a sad scene, one that resonates with the sadness inside of me. The people on the bridge are quiet and respectful.

I call the Concorde a dream because I had always imagined taking a flight on it. It represented the future –although it was first designed in the early 70’s, its technology and graceful design seem decades ahead of the passenger jets built 30 years later. One part of me never actually liked the idea of making flying so easy (because I believe the difficulty, slowness, and challenge of travel makes it that much better), but the 12-year old boy I once was, responded to its spaceship-like lines, its tilting cockpit, its supersonic engines and just yearned to take a flight on it. This boy thought that, like everything else, better technology would move forward and all planes would one day look like the Concorde. I was wrong – the barge below me proves that one of the dreams of a 12-year old boy is over and I can’t help but wonder what other dreams of my 12 year old self will die in my life time – Space exploration? World peace?

The barge sails under the bridge and up the river. I give it a farewell wave and in that wave I remind myself that I am living another dream from my childhood – the dream of traveling and seeing the world. And although the sadness inside of me reminds me that this trip is ending and that we will be flying home soon, I remind myself that this dream is not dying.

Of Dreams and Buildings

The night after I take a tour of the Casa Batlló, I see it in my dreams. This does not surprise me greatly because it is a house made for dreams – its serpentine roof and sinuous walls seems to be completely at odds with reality and everyday architecture. Where a normal building would have straight walls and ceilings, the Casa Batlló has great curving walls that rise to meet ceilings that twist in upside-down whirlpools. Where other houses have shingles, the Casa Batlló appears to have scales on its roof. Its windows are framed with bone-like pillars and its chimneys are covered with shattered tiles. The house, like other dreams I have had, is ever shifting in its meaning. From one angle, the balconies on the patios look like hungry mouths, from another, carnival masks, and from another, skulls.

Barcelona, at the turn of the century, was ground zero for the Modernisme architectural movement. The Modernisme movement (which is related to art nouveau in France) drew its inspiration from nature, the use of local crafts such as ceramics, and the blending of arts. Designed and built by Antoni Gaudí in 1904-1906, the Casa Batlló is my favorite site that I have seen in all of Europe. It possesses a sheer blend of artistry, imagination, and practicality that merge together in what is absolute genius.

Antoni Gaudí is perhaps one of Barcelona’s most favorite citizens. Tourists and locals alike flock to see his art - the houses, churches, palaces and parks that he designed. His buildings are filled with curves and shapes that are more commonly seen in nature than in structures built out of bricks - spirals from seashells, arches from trees. Yet, for all of his wild, imaginative shapes and looks of his buildings, the underlying structural designs are equally impressive.

At a time when buildings where created with load bearing walls – remove the wall and the ceiling falls – Gaudí created buildings with some of the earliest known skeletal frame designs such as those used in houses and skyscrapers today. He also instinctively knew about the concept of ‘ergonomics’ (designing things to fit the human body) long before the term ever came into use. In the Casa Batlló is a wooden banister that resembles a backbone from some mythical beast. It looks neat, but it is also impressive to discover that the wood has been shaped in such a way that it fits a person’s hand perfectly when they grasp it. Windows are larger on the lower floors to allow more light and air, elements that Gaudí thought were essential to a comfortable living space.

Gaudí spent the last twenty years of his life working on his private dream: the Sagrada Familia. It is a huge modernist church with arching bell towers and internal pillars that resemble trees. It is Barcelona’s most popular tourist site. He died before the first four towers could be build and 116 years after construction was started, the church is less than half way complete.

While the Sagrada Familia is still part dream (and I am not sure if the dream is the part that exists or the part that still has to be built), it is the Casa Batlló that I see when I close my eyes at night.

This is a good time to visit the Casa Batlló. It has not always been open to the public but because it is the 100-year anniversary of when Gaudí worked on it, not only is the main floor, courtyard, and back façade open, but the roof and the attic are now also open. These areas are scheduled to be open until 2006 so there is still time to make plans to go see it.

In the dream I have the night after we take the tour, I stand in the middle of the street, close to a good viewpoint where Jen and I stood for at least an hour earlier that day, letting my eyes wander over the skull/carnival mask porches and the scaly roof, the bone framed windows, and then tiled skin and then, like in a movie, my point of view zooms back and I see the entire house and I can’t help but feel that it is looking back at me and somewhere, inside the house, I know that there is a door I must open.

The Casa Batlló is a dream of a building and I can only hope that it comes to visit me in my dreams often.