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Welcome home to America, little brother!

Westward

On the appointed morning, a cold Thursday, I hauled myself out of bed several hours before dawn and started the days-long journey back to the States and toward the ship in Pensacola where I would be assigned for the three holiday weeks. I had clocked the walk to Paddington at 45 minutes, not nearly counting the slowing effect of one big rolling suitcase and a medium-weight backpack. So I left myself well over an hour to catch the first train out to Heathrow at 5:10, but arrived over half an hour early - the last time I would be early for anything for several days. The train runs on elevated tracks from the center of town to the airport in a clean 15 minutes - a grim reminder of how traffic rules the urban landscape, since this journey took me most of an hour by taxi when I arrived in September. At Heathrow, I stood in the Lufthansa line under disingenuous signs noting that with a new computer system in progress, lines might be a little slower than usual. An understatement at the least - I arrived an hour and 45 minutes before my flight, but barely made the gate for take-off. I was not helped when, half-way through the line, I was assured by a Lufthansa rep that I could use the automated check-in machines - I got out of line to use them, only to have my ticket rejected, and ended up having to barge my way back to the front of the line as the call was made for my flight to close for check-in.

But I did get on that plane in time, and we took off under the cloudy but calm skies. I had hoped to see some of the landscape pass by beneath on the hop to Frankfurt - the coast of the British islands, the edge of France, and across to Germany, but the clouds persisted until we were well on the ground. Half-way there, the pilot came on and began speaking in German, and I was pleased to note that I could absent-mindedly follow his chatter (despite the years since I last heard or spoke any German regularly) until I remembered that pilots never say anything unpredictable at all. Eventually I lost the thread of it anyhow. About that time we took a sharp and sudden turn, and the pilot repeated his talk in English: there was some un-named emergency on the ground at Frankfurt, and planes like ours would be diverted into a holding pattern until that had been cleared up. So we lazed around the sky in tight circles for a good ten or fifteen minutes, while the time of departure for my upcoming flight across the Atlantic inched uncomfortably closer and closer.

And by the time I got off the plane in Frankfurt, I was cornered into doing the one thing I'd hoped to avoid: running top-speed through the terminal to catch the next leg, for which the 45-minute turn around time had been cut severely shorter by the delay on the first flight. I had a flashback to being very young and on one of the myriad business trips my parents used to take us on - we had many a top-speed run through the Frankfurt airport to catch tight connections, though certainly one adult alone is a sight easier than my parents trying to herd three of us little kids and our baggage along with them at the same time. That I know of we never missed one of those connections, and I kept the record this time too, charging up to the gate while the crowd was boarding buses to cross the tarmac to the waiting plane. From there my travels mellowed considerably, helped in no small measure by the supply of Ambien I keep with me for events like trans-Atlantic flights - I hadn't used it in flight before and was quite pleased that I was only even remotely conscious for a couple hours of a 10-hour flight. Good stuff.

Atlanta was something of a mess...coming into London in September, I was surprised at how little checking they do of person and baggage - passport control was about all I went through there. Coming into the international terminal in Atlanta, I went through about three checkpoints, got my bags, gave them up again, and then had to go through security. Security, after getting off the plane?? Seemed a little odd and excessive, nevermind missing the point entirely since if passengers had had anything nefarious on the plane, they probably would have employed its use before landing and entering the terminal. In any case, it took my luggage another hour to re-appear at the real baggage claim. It was nearing the commute hour by the time I got a rental car and headed across town to pick up two boxes of gear that my parents had sent ahead of time for me to gather up on my arrival from a friend of theirs who lives there. I would have like to stay and visit, but wanted to get out of Atlanta before it got too late - which was a very good thing, because I only made it an hour or so on the road before I had to stop and sleep out the time change. By the next morning, an freeze had settled onto the city and paralyzed the major arteries with ice-slicked accidents, and I was just a hair far south enough that the roads were clear ahead of me for the next leg of the journey.

Due to last-minute schedule changes, I actually had a whole day to kill before I was due in Pensacola, and I was determined that if I had to hang around shore not getting paid for a day, I was at least going to do something interesting with the time. I bypassed Pensacola and landed in Mobile, Alabama before noon. I had to find a post office to drop some stuff in the mail to my employer, which took some maneuvering and several mid-lane stops to ask passers-by if they knew where to find one. The one I finally did find was nearly empty (but with an unbelievably slow line), and the woman behind me confided that the line should be out the door given the season, but that no one knew that this particular office was open again. Slightly confused, I asked why it had been closed in the first place. Hurricane damage, of course, she replied. Wow - this was quite a ways inland, I didn't realize that flooding had reached so far from the coast.

But that's what I had come to see: hurricane damage. Probably a slightly crass move on my part, though I really had no intention of doing what happened next. I filled up with gas and headed on highway I-10 westward toward the damage zone, not knowing what I might or might not see. Along the highway, there is virtually no sign of anything amiss. I got off at 110 toward Biloxi, largely because that was the extent of the driving I felt like I could do in one day (though I would have liked to have gone on all the way to New Orleans), and because I had heard that things were still looking pretty ugly there. Heading south toward the coast, the street started to take on that look of a third-world landscape: mildly unrepaired buildings, and small piles of debris everywhere. The road started to narrow, but with nowhere to turn around I kept going ahead until I passed a bottleneck where a half-asleep MP in fatigues startled up when I approached and told me I couldn't pass through that point. I was totally honest when I told him I was lost and trying to turn around, but once into the checkpoint there was no where to turn around, so he distractedly pointed me toward the 110 entrance about a quarter mile down the coastal strand. And so, without any intentions toward this end, I slipped behind military security and into the restricted zone.

And then, all of sudden, I understood why people who visit disaster zones of such magnitude invariably shake their heads and just say that you cannot understand it until you stand there and see it with your own eyes. There is no way to describe what the Mississippi coast looks like, even now, three months after the passage of Katrina. The first house you see, you think that maybe someone placed a bomb on the bottom floor, because the bottom floor is gone and the top floor is just kind of hanging in the air on the stilts of support beams and a little bit of drywall. And then you notice that every house on the block has the same bombed-out look. And then, as far as the eye stretches, same thing. Miles and miles of destruction so profound you can't really wrap your mind around it. A cemetery where heavy stone monuments sit askew and upended. A park where salt-drenched trees are laced with plastic bags that still flutter lazily in the breeze, like some kind of exotic celebratory decoration. A concrete bench that survived unscathed whose painted-on ad points to a McDonald's across the street, but across the street is empty beach, and the Gulf waters quietly rippling at the shore.

And the Gulf - almost still on the day that I visited, looking placid and serene and totally innocent of the carnage across the way. Like a bully kid who just gave his little brother a black eye and now smiles sweetly at his mother to cover for his malign acts. The same Gulf that rose out of its basin and rammed ashore as the storm surge that lies responsible for this mess. The same Gulf where I've worked countless seasons at sea.

Out of sight of the guard who instructed me to take the first exit off the strand highway, I couldn't help but continue on along the coast - I came this far, I couldn't see turning back now. A steady stream of traffic plied the same road, mostly official-looking vehicles who occasionally off-loaded groups of men with clipboards and hard hats who largely stood around scratching their heads. Aside from a few pieces of heavy equipment, there was little evidence of recovery and re-building - and little wonder: all the heavy equipment in Mississippi would have a hard time making a dent in the vast stretches of debris and condemned houses along just this short stretch of the coast. And the damage continues though Louisiana, where it overlaps seamlessly at the Texas border with the damage done by Rita a couple of weeks later.

I turned around when I came up to the back end of a second checkpoint, where most vehicles who tried to enter were turned away by civilian police. I had no desire to explain what I was doing back there in the restricted zone, so I swung around and came back the way I had approached, but this time took the designated exit off the coast and back north toward I-10. That was enough rubber-necking even for me, and it left me feeling kind of sickly. So much devastation. And the stories not told by the tumbling buildings - I cannot imagine there was any way that any person left on the strand during the storm could have survived the onslaught, and I do not know what the death toll was in Biloxi, if anyone failed to get out when they could.

The rest of the road back to Pensacola was uneventful save for a long detour around a freeway entrance over the water east of Mobile that had been jarred loose from its moorings. I later learned that this was not Katrina's doing - this was left over from Ivan, a year earlier, still unbuilt and largely ignored with the intervening disaster. I boarded the RN Weeks the next morning under rainy skies and choppy seas, and after some days here the dragtender told me his version of events this summer: they tied up to the dock far up into protected bay waters while the eastern edge of Katrina passed overhead. The ship pointed south into the wind, with the engines gunning full ahead, and ten or so lines lashing it to the solid ground of the dock. Against the strain of the winds, the lines broke one by one despite the best efforts of the crew. So far as I know, no one was hurt and the dredge went to work again just days after the storm, to start re-building the beach head they had lost to the raging seas. The dragtender said his home in Louisiana was miraculously unscathed, though he was unable to call home and find this out for several days with many cell towers down and the rest jammed with the volume of communication trying to pass over the airwaves. His friends and neighbors were not so lucky, and many of them lost everything they had. This is the story you don't hear so often: the ones that survived intact, the ones who have everything but a couple of roof tiles where down the street their neighbors have lost everything.

And so another holiday passes. The days are slow and cold here, and occasionally rough enough to drive us into the docks for cover. Christmas came and went, and now we wait for the new year. Soon I will be back in London.

London in the Wintertime

There is something magical about the city in the dead of winter. After all, this is the place that inspired Charles Dickens in all his fiction (some good, some unbearably bad in my humble opinion) - and indeed, leftover landmarks of his time in London mark various hidden corners of the city. Delicate meshes of lights hang in massive curtains across the Regent Street and Oxford Circus shopping districts, a sight that I have just a glimpsing memory of from my first time in London as a chilly and bundled-up nine year-old in the snowy January of 1985. Men with soot-blackened hands roast chestnuts over open charcoal briquets, and these turned out to be far more delicious burnt open on the cold street corner than they did the one time I found some chestnuts in a supermarket and attempted some version of roasting them over a stove-top flame in my own kitchen.

It's a remarkably dry year here, with a chill that chaps hands and faces and any skin that might escape coverage by scarves and gloves and hats. It's a cold that will freeze your eyeballs to your eyelids when you go outside at night, or at least it feels that way. On a rare cloudy day we actually got the lightest dusting of snow imaginable - so few flakes that you could count them as they came drifting down to rest for a second on the old brick and concrete of the school building before melting away without a trace to mark their passage. I admit that my greatest vice these days is the peppermint hot chocolate they sell only at Starbucks, which is sweet enough to make my teeth itch and rich enough to keep me warm for the walk home. The sun doesn't rise til 8 am, and at roughly the same latitude as southern Alaska, only the western sky is still stubbornly hanging onto the daylight by three-thirty in the afternoon.

In the shortening time I have till classes wind up and I head back state-side to pick up a few weeks of work, I still find that there is so much of the city that I hardly know or have even heard of at all. One day I was out on a dry run of the walk from Euston to Paddington Station (which I will have to traverse by foot on the early morning of my departure to the US, since I will need to be at the station hours before the tube starts running), when I took a wrong turn along a maze of canals and found myself in a hidden corner of town with the self-proclaimed name of Little Venice. And an appropriate name it is, with its picturesque waterways and narrow canal boats parked bumper-to-bumper along the edges. One of these boats had been turned into a cafe, and under the dusky mid-afternoon glow of a rare warmer day, I ducked in and had a warm drink and scone to steel myself for the walk back home. On another lazy afternoon I decided to make an attempt at the transit system that parallels the underground network toward the eastern end of the city, so I boarded the Docklands Light Rail and headed for Greenwich and the famous maritime museum, located next to the final resting place of the sailing ship Cutty Sark. Though the museum pales in comparison to its rival institution in Barcelona, it was still well worth the journey. I stayed into the evening and wandered round a covered marketplace full of foods and crafts and happy holiday people dressed for the blustery winter.

So many places still to see, as the first term of my year here in London comes to a close. I can only imagine that my move back to the US at the end of the summer, Portland will seem drab and dull by comparison.

Altercations With Strangers in Foreign Lands, Redux

A couple of week ago I was going to pay my rent, which - because of my lack of a check book for my British bank account - involves taking a rather ridiculously large sum of cash out of one bank, walking one block down the perimeter of Russell Square to another bank, and depositing said sum of cash into the bank of the letting agents I rent from. This is something of stressful endeavor, because while Russell Square is a pretty safe part of town, I'm always nervous that someone inside the bank is going to hear me ask for that cash and follow me out and hit me over the head and steal my backpack with the envelope full of 50-pound bills. So far this hasn't happened, but being fond of my own paranoid musings, I persist in believing that it might.

In any case, I had just left the second bank where I had relieved myself of yet another month's worth of hard-earned student loan funds, so technically I was in very little danger of actually losing anything valuable. But I was still on edge when, waiting for the pedestrian light to change to green, I felt a hand clamp itself firmly onto my shoulder from behind me. I was close enough to school that it could have been someone I knew, but I swung around anyhow, and got a face-full of smoke blown by a stranger in black hooded sweatshirt. Having had quite enough of this already, I told him in no uncertain terms to get his bloody hands off of me. He did take his hands off of me, but not without sneering and asking me in an Arabic accent what the hell was wrong with me. I didn't think this needed explaining, so I told him in no uncertain terms to leave me alone, and that I'd like to know what was wrong with him that it thought it was ok to grab strangers on the street.

And then I had a major flashback as he started shouting:

"Because you are woman! Because you are woman!"

There was something of a crowd gathering at the stoplight waiting to cross, and he was still up in my face, so I hollered back at him something about having no right to grab women on the street, probably mixed with a fair share of swearing and cursing. At which point he shouted back at me, "You are sick! You need to go to hospital! You are sick!" over and over again. Now, this happened to be right around the time that I had a bad cold and everything else, and I'm sure I was quite a sight to see with a bloodshot left eye from the conjunctivitis (and quite a sound to hear with my voice strained through the cough and that dagger-like feeling of a strep infection in my throat). But he made it pretty clear that's not what he was talking about.

Which bring up the question of what exactly is up when two total strangers of similar ethnic descent who have never met me before and probably never met each other before make the same declaration that they feel the absolute right to accost me in public. Is this some kind of cultural phenomenon I don't know about? With five years working offshore plus a good amount of international travel under my belt, I thought I'd heard the weirdest and the worst that people can come up with to throw at women. This certainly wasn't the worst (not by a long shot, not by a very long shot), but it might qualify as the weirdest. Unless you count the half-witted deckhand whose ship I worked on for some number of months who liked to flash his rear-end around and ask if his sagging pants made his butt look too big. No, wait, this is definitely weirder by far. Though I am quite aware that out of a city of many millions of people of hundreds of ethnic origins only two men have had the gall to pull this kind of trip on me, it does make me somewhat wary of Arabic men. And it makes me wonder if I just happened across the two freaks with anger management issues who happened to be of the same race, or if there really is some underlying feeling across that group of people that women who oppose harassment and groping are "sick" on one hand or "weird" on another hand and - or, as the this latter case declared, that I needed to be hospitalized to cure this oddity. At what point do I chalk up behavior to a couple of annoying individuals, and at what point does it become a cross-the-board phenomenon? And does that mean that I should assume it was just a couple of jerks, or that I have good reason to be careful of certain groups of people because of a commonly-held attitude?

In any case, the light turned green, and I crossed and headed back to school. He didn't follow me and I didn't look back again after ensuring that I was alone. If there's any justice, I hope he got close enough to get a nice breath of my germy strep throat that he could take home as a souvenir of his harassment. And a raging case of pink-eye wouldn't be too much to ask either, I don't think. Heh.