The Pony Express Trail was a mail and news delivery route. It ran between St. Joseph, Missouri and Sacramento, California in 1860 and 1861. It was a chain of horseback riders delivering mail by running relays with a leather satchel of letters and newspapers. Each rider hauled ass day-and-night in dangerous conditions (socially and nature-wise) to meet up with the next horse and rider. Through Missouri, Colorado Rocky Mountains, Utah badlands, Sierra Nevada … ten days, people. It took ten days to get something from one end to the other, and just preceding the telegraph, it was the fastest way to do so at the time. There were 120 relay riders, aged 11-40s; 184 stations, about ten miles apart (about as far as a horse likes to gallop at a stretch). Horses were traded out at each of the stations. Riders did about 75 miles per shift, and you can imagine there was a complex system of alerts, preparation, feeding, caring, and housing of horses and riders. These dudes were bad.

If you camp at Lovers Leap Campground, on Highway 50, just west of South Lake Tahoe, you will walk along a section of the Pony Express Trail to get to the rock climbing and bouldering routes near and on the face of Lovers Leap. It’s hard, picky walking over rocks the size of bowling balls. If you stop and look up at the cliff, you can see figures hanging in harnesses, calling to each other, climbing, waiting, fussing with ropes and devices. Watching one figure up there through field glasses, I  saw him fall to his next piece of protection in the wall, about ten feet.

You are probably more safe laced into your climbing partner via ropes and harnesses and protection devices, than you are finishing up the climb and trotting back to base camp, with thirty pounds of rope around your waist, where, cavalier and high from your adventure, you slip on a tiny amount of gravel, scattered over the smooth granite and with few places to catch with your hands, head into a somersault and snowball your way to a broken leg. The statistics have it that more people injure themselves on the “walk off.” Thanks to my kind friends, who told me about this subtlety, it never happened to me.

Bouldering means monkeying around on lower rocks with a pile of foam mattresses on the ground to catch your fall. But like snorkeling is to Scuba diving, there’s more freedom to bouldering, more communication among climbers, no rope, no gear, just shoes and a mattress called a crashpad, which you carry to the  site on your back, looking like a playing card from Alice In Wonderland.

Picking over the babyhead sized rocks and stepping from smooth surface to smooth surface up the Pony Express Trail, with Lovers Leap looming 300 feet high right across the talus field, gave me chills, more for its history than the danger for the weekend rock climbers. (That’s week end, not weakened. These folks are bad, too. )This trail running alongside the American River was the path of least resistance at the time, from which Highway 50 later took its direction. It seemed no place for ten miles of galloping in rain, snow, heat, boulders, and bears. Alone with your horse, Paiute Indians waiting to take you down. Once, a horse bearing the mail arrived to a station alone, its rider having been shot down.

This is my first time witnessing Real Live Rock Climbing outside of a gym, though there was a little bit of technical stuff in the Dolomites last summer, in harnesses and helmets, clipped via carabiner to fixed cables in the rock, I got curious about how rock climbing worked. Do you leapfrog each other? What happens to the “protection,” the stuff you hang your rope from along the way, that you set into the rock? Do you collect the pieces as you go past? What is the first climber’s source of protection? What happens to the rope? etc.

This trip, I was most fascinated by the guidebooks. In language singing the stoked radness of bad assery, you are advised which boulders are what difficulty, where each one is in a field of other boulders of various features and toothiness, offering something tiny to hang the rubber edge of your too-small climbing shoe on. Each boulder is not just identified in place, and described, but named. The lingo of course was a source of scoffery and funpoking for me, with a ranking-number labeling every route. Conversations among the climbers I camped with were indecipherable and laced with these numbers, plus fun words like crimping, traversing, slopers and scorching out.

I enjoyed the bouldering most, which meant a pile of crash pads, and each climber getting stoked up by everyone else as they tried to find a way up the side of a rock that seemed to have nothing but little crystals sticking out, nothing significant to hold on to. After failing, each would stand back and study the surface, as if to see what of nothing at all could have thrown them off. My conclusion is that they are using leverage more than gravity, squeezing the rock, hugging it to stay on it. Even pushing it apart, the way you climb up a doorway. Once when everyone was done trying one particularly challenging “boulder problem,” I walked up to it, just to see what it must be like to stand under its rock overhang, and even placed my fingertips on the first ledge and hung there, trying a pull-up from this. Imagine throwing a foot above your head and to the side to get more purchase.

And the stories, each telling of a climbing experience using their hands which they use like hangers, the bones of their fingers stopping their fall by simply spinning in a crack enough to stop gravity’s force. Simply hanging by their fingertips in a tiny crevice in rock. Their finger bones mechanically supporting their weight. Mid-story a climber will hold his hands up in a dance-like gesture, with the first knuckle of his fingers bent, and you know their relationship to rock, to their hands. They sculpt their transport over the rock with will, minds, and a fuckload of forearm and bicep strength. But most climbers will tell you their minds are doing most of the work. They don’t let fear, nor disbelief stop them. I laughed at the description of one boulder problem, how the first few steps were very carefully illustrated, but once you were a few steps in, if you’d gotten that far, my own guidebook, if I wrote one, would conclude, “finish by climbing the rest of the fucking rock.” The look of fun and accomplishment following the look of sheer grit and determination as a climber would top out and waltz back down to the ground sold me not on rock climbing –too late– but on doing anything hard, with focus, mindfulness, fearlessness, and turning off the shameless noise of the brain.

I sit at the bottom of a rock wall, watching Brian’s butt in a harness as he slowly ascends, removing very expensive devices of cable and metal every ten feet or so as he goes up the near-vertical rock face, communicating with Nik above on a walkie talkie, whom I watched ascending freely, inserting “protection devices” as he went, making sure they’d be easy for Brian to remove while hanging, standing, and leaning on very little. And all the while, I am sitting quietly and with gentle focus in the Sierra Nevada. Letting the day creep on, letting an hour pass while I look at rock. I peer through my field glasses at the Pyramid Peak, backed up to Desolation Wilderness, where we had ascended 2000 feet the day before in a blissful day of raging river views, oldgrowth trees, and vertical hiking in shade and redwood duff. Later, I scramble up the gentle slope of the backside of the same rock Nik and Brian are climbing to meet them at the top. We meet up with the other four climbers and Michael, Nik’s Dad. To cool off we all walk the Pony Express Trail to where it meets Highway 50. A bridge crosses the American River and it widens to a shallow slippery water slide of open granite, a perfect slope, and freezing cold water. No one’s rushing to get in, but I know it must happen, and at thirty years older than the youngest among us, my mojo determines it’s up to me to be first; so as the men modestly get down to SmartWool boyshorts my full kit of skirt and white buttondown fall away and I am naked and sliding into the freezing water to join a small rattle snake that I am glad I hadn’t noticed until I get out. I watch from the water’s edge as Nik rescues it with a long stick and places it on the warm dry rock and it gathers its baby rattle snake nerves and winds off into some dark place. I lay shivering under the Sierra Nevada sun, my bare skin baking back to life on the benevolent bed of smooth granite. Taste of Summer.

— Strawberry, CA. Summer Solstice, June 21, 2016.

Some people are voice activated. My dad’s mom was. It was impossible to talk with her on the phone because as soon as you began speaking, she spoke over you. From the moment I met her in Hiroshima, my interpreter Junko Hattori did this, and nearly got a ribbing from me more than once until I woke up to what she was doing…and just how amazingly well. I came to Hiroshima Japan last week to present a slideshow about Rocket Mass Heaters at a festival called “I Am Stove! Hiroshima” for wood burning enthusiasts (and generally make friends, celebrate DIY stuff and peace and activism and no-nukes, etc). Junko-san was to be my guide and translator. A go-between for me and the event’s organizers, the public, and the other presenters (one from Korea). She arranged all transpo, fun side trips, lodgings… But so much more, she was like the best service dog, reading my moods and guaging my needs to be informed vs. be left alone to take it all in. She made me laugh, sparked interesting conversations, and–having translated the book Rocket Mass Heaters into Japanese– she knew her way around wood combustion and heat transfer. She could talk about it easily and understood my audiences. At this event in Hiroshima, I was to give a slide show and field questions, then sit on a panel, and play my fiddle at the parties.

We’d be in a circle of Japanese speakers, plus a Korean and his Japanese-Korean interpreter as well. They were Seong-wan Kim, and Ohio . As soon as someone began to speak, there was Junko-san in my ear, sometimes tapping me on the shoulder to get my attention. Several times, I nearly stopped her to tell her not to interrupt…Until I got used to the fact that she was not interrupting, but interpreting. For every conversation that happened within our group–us, our hosts, and various friends–she carried on the conversation itself in both languages as well as one with me. Sometimes all three languages, with the Korean interpreter chiming in for Junko-san. We had very rich conversations, too, we weren’t complaining about boyfriends or the price of gas. It was deep shit. Well, duh.

Performing a slideshow for an hour-and-a half with my wing-woman at the stage’s edge was scary and exhillerating …. We actually practiced this ahead of time in the performance hall of the Jimmy Carter Center in Konu Town where the event happened. I neither wanted to leave her hanging on half-a-thought, nor feed her too much to have to remember, so I focused on brevity and complete thoughts, and quickly noticed she was talking a lot more than I was, and it turned out she was filling in the gaps around my brevity with her own knowledge, based on what she knew the audience might need. Who knows what she said, but people were pleased, and bilingual folks tell me she did me right.

Junko-san was so much more, though. I whispered to her on arriving at our first hosts’ place that I needed prompting on a lot of the politenesses/customs because we are wild animals in the USA. I would make many mistakes and would need her help. How many times she would see me looking for the words and whisper in my ear, “Arigato gozaimas.” (thank you). Or prompt me with something helpful. She instructed me that first night on taking a bath, showing me how the shower worked, and once you are completly clean from showering, you can get in the hot bath (which was already drawn, which the rest of the family would use after I did. It was covered with a thermal roll-top cover). She said it may be too hot for you, though. I thought nothing of it, I’m tough and can handle it, I’m sure. But I could not handle it, and wondered how in the world they did, and emerged from the bathroom having steamed off the top layers of skin up to my knees, which was the farthest I could get into that stainless steel tub.

That first night, we spent a quiet sleep on tatami mats in separate rooms across a hall from each other, separated by shoji screens. Their windows and interior walls and doors are all made of the same stuff: paper screens framed out in wood. Beds were thin futons I jokingly called two-ply paper towels, but they were of course more comforatble than that, yet far less cush than we are accustomed to. The pillow was a bag of some seeds, or rice hulls. In the morning she showed me how to fold my futon and bedding and stow them in a neat pile. The beautiful subtlety in their architecture knocked me out. I gaped, astounded and turned on at every view.

Every day, Junko-san gave me gifts, but having been to Japan before, (I came with the Mermen in 1991 for a tour), I was ready for her, and armed with several things like Oaklandish tee-shirts and stickers. Our generosity-fest was a delight, but she of course won hands-down.

I grew to not just depend on her but I grew fond of her as well. Bringing everyone’s content to me–bringing me the conversations but also the happenings, customs, the plan, anticipating my needs and reading my moods (of which you know there are many), sometimes in three languages, Korean, of which she is proficient, Japanese, and English!

She is the very embodiment of the movement for peace that began in Hiroshima right away after the A-bomb broke everyone’s hearts. They are the dying and living example that peace is the only way to go. The culture around this small but growing group of “Alternative Japanese” celebrates a culture of peace through appropriate technology, fun, home grown food, inventiveness, open source sharing, and throwing festivals like “I Am Stove” and worksops to spread the word. I’ll share more about my week in Hiroshima in ‘blogs to come, as I was really touched by being there and don’t want to forget it anytime soon. Since they translated Rocket Mass Heaters into Japanese 7 years ago or so, Friends of Earth and Fire have felt like true friends, and now more like family. Part of me stayed back there, learning some manners, eating pickles and slurping noodles.

–In flights en route to the Natural Building Colloquium Twenty-Year Reunion, Kingston NM, October 19, 2015.

The Jackson-pedia definition of the Schwäbisch Alps in southern Germany is a travelogue of early solo journeys, practicing my high-school German, and learning the ropes of world travel, starting with the Junior Varsity level, western Europe. My time was spent looking around and making friends, but more of me was into drawing, photography, letters to my mom and dad, love letters to boyfriends, cassette tapes, and fiddle playing. It was as though the distance from home opened a valve I hadn’t access to before. Lack of distractions, obligations, expectations, and habits allowed me to learn more about myself, cast on the backdrop of a foreign language, which meant illiteracy, or a four-year-old’s language skills. This has been so for me still, after 35 countries now, in almost as many years. I sometimes go for the solitude; to find myself.

I first came to the Schwäbisch Alps in 1990 to visit my friend Evi with whom I have one of those instant sisterhood recognitions. Love at first sight. We met through a friend when she visited San Francisco. The earthquake had just happened. The Wall had just come down. She invited me out that summer and I came with the same pack I’ve always carried, and her flat was my HomeBase. From there, I went to Berlin to ride a shitty three-speed bike around the falling wall in its graffiti-peppered transition; and drank coffee at an “Imbiss” street caravan a la “Wings of Desire.” I traveled to Munich and Greece and Ireland from Evi’s house. Always returning for refueling and some hikes. That first summer, I worked in a tee-shirt silk screening factory, hitch-hiking there every day (nothing improves a foreign language better than hitch-hiking). Albstadt was to me this conservative traditional German region of little beautiful high-end villages that you raced between at 120 k/hour. Then you slowed down to wind through the village of old people, straight-laced people. Whom when you smiled at, pressed their lips together. We’d go out to the pubs in other Albstadt’s in the region: Albstadt Tailfingen, Albstadt Ebingen, Hessingen. Each had a character, one had a dark pub, another’s pub had three levels, and the music was always loud and the company smokers and Eurohipness. It was the 80’s. In one heavy metal bar, I made out with the fully tattooed, Müll (German for Garbage).

That first visit, Evi lived in Albstadt Laufen, in the penthouse apartment of a high-tech company called Microway. I’d get up early and play my fiddle before the workers showed up in the stairway of this five-storey glass-and-steel celebration of German precision, with amazing acoustics. I still have a set of cassettes called “Treppenhaus.” And evenings for a bit I washed the stairs for some money. Tall motorcycle-leather-clad guys came by the house and Evi entertained them talking the Schwäbisch dialect, while I took it in like a dog under the table, like an illiterate kid. And I’d write letters home and yes, I’d go on many many MANY walks–with a dog, often–in the woods where Evi lives. Wherever I’ve traveled, I seek out the trails. A place to find mamma nature, ’cause there I’ll always be home. She hasn’t failed me yet.

During one autumn visit in the mid-1990’s, she put her blue suede chaps on me and we borrowed her then-husband’s thoroughbred championship jumping horses without his permission and went out on a ride. We ran though fields free, I followed her on my enormous stallion, trembling and heart-in-mouth. When my feet came loose of the stirrups and we got to a good gallop, I yelled for Palermo to indicate I wasn’t as cool as I seemed, and he ran for a low-hanging branch to wipe this bug off his big back, and knowing how to, I dived and rolled, but not without hanging my right ring finger up in the reins. The aftermath was peaceful and hilarious, and there was a pic-nic a few days later with the whole family in the hopes of retrieving my leather glove that was lost in the adventure. There it was, like a confession, hanging up high in a tree, and we snatched it down un-noticed. These memories form a lasting, untroubled, unquestioning freundschaft with Evi. Over the seven times I have been here, four of those times she lived in a different village but always in this region. And my visits would of course involve walks daily, lasting hours in these trail systems.

She took me to her father’s village, Burgfelden, where her father and grandmother lived. Where she was raised. From where she rebelled and made her travels to Greece, Spain, Turkey, the USA. Her dad was still alive when I first came and we visited his old Swiss Chalet timberframe with the plaster and the steep roof, and it was dark inside, but Evi brought to life for me the atelier of her dad and her grandma that it once was. In the 60’s this house was the only one with a TV, so the neighbors all came over for Football Games. It was a public house and gallery in the 50’s. Her dad ran it. But when I visited in 1990, it was the smokey and dark home of a humble painter, whose life had become quiet. There were paintings and sculptures on the dark walls. And leaning against furniture. Everywhere. Evi walked me to the edge of the table-top mesa this village of 350 people live in and showed me the village of Balingen below, and talked of her grandmother’s history here. That we are both artist’s kids has always been a strong point of connection for us.

When her father passed away, Evi bought her sister’s share of the 1600’s house, and began reviving it as a neighborhood hang-out and art gallery. Today, the Berg Cafe is hopping with Saturday afternoon hikers, about 20 bicycles, spandex clad, healthy, well-read and airblown, drinking beer from glasses big as buckets, talking, smoking, laughing, and eating Evi’s traditional potato salad. Night-before-last, the regulars, a pack of soft cotton button-down-clad, gentlemen gathered next to the Kachelofen and visited, played cards, eventually sang songs, rocking me in my attic bedroom. Last night, I joined the mayhem downstairs and played Happy Birthday and other great hits by the likes of Cat Stevens and Simon and Garfunkel on my fiddle. Everyone sang. Once a month or so, there is a live band, or a theater troupe in a house-concert setting with 40 or 50 people. And daily the phone rings with people reserving their place at this rarefied revival in a 1600’s house of a 1950’s artist’s neighborhood hang.

But still, I just thought that my German friend, like me, lived in a town where there was good hiking. I was wrong. The Schwäbisch Alps are a Thing. They are a destination for hikers. If I were a very wealthy hiking enthusiast, this would be a pilgrimage I would eventually make. And I might make a reservation to have a traditional potato salad and wurst in Evi’s Berg Cafe. I would show up in a rented Benz or my own Tesla, wearing lightweight wicking reds and oranges, carry a hiking pole or two. The walkman in my fannypack would be replaced by a set of high-quality field glasses, maybe a wild-flower ID book. Or Hawks in Flight. If it weren’t for this lucky bitch’s fortune I would never be here at all.

And the hiking. From pavement through to nipple-high grasses, and narrow single-track; from level to ass-burning steep, from a memorial bench painted with Edelweiss to a castle ruins, you can go for miles following carefully planted maps and signage. There are loops for an hour and loops for a day. There are welcoming outlooks onto the other villages below, frequent benches. Old trees that silently say sit here. Outstanding. World class hiking. It’s called Traufgänge, and you can visit its website (sorry only in German but maps and awesome photos are universal). www.traufgaenge.de

If you travel to western Europe, take the trails in Albstadt. There is a website you can book your guesthouses and many guesthouses like Zum Berg Cafe.

August 22, 2015, Albstadt Burgfelden, Germany

Amsterdam and Copenhagen are both my kind of fish tanks. Watch any street, day or night, and you get a bicycle-and-foottraffic show like the best variety pack aquarium. Goldfish, clownfish, mollusks, shellfish, sharks, eels, and bottom feeders, all moving at their native pace; collision-free. Parents with little kids mounted fore and aft, women with big mops of blonde hair piled, atop their heads*, people talking on their phones, people talking to each other, riding astride in the bike lane, jamming at speed, utterly relaxed, talking; intense boxers in training suits; school boys with perfect haircuts and tidy backpacks, every strap neatly fastened; women in mini-skirts; a rider leading an empty bike beside her; men in suits, women in heels; sensibly dressed office workers with laptop bags. Dogs in the front basket; tourists wreaking havok. All upright steelframes. Heavy and black. Occasionally a spandex-clad athlete, lean and hairless, tightlipped and selfishly guarding his Zone. Then all goes quiet for a moment. And all starts up again as quickly, perfect harmony again. No helmets. I’m in the fishtank too, another seacreature of the city, finally regarded as a person rather than gaped at under unemotional eyes, as in the country. Clopping smartly in my cowboy boots in the walklane (not the bikelane, it’s no way to die, people). A lot of riders spin around in their saddles and look at me as they pass (it’s the pretentious leather hat), and I get the look: nice ass…oh, you’re old. I smile back. Yeah I saw you looking. I’m getting old, and so are you.

What I wanted to do more than anything once I got to Copenhagen was ride down the bike-path astride another, in lock step pedaling. But alas, I learned it’s like dancing with someone: Easy, but time cooks it just right. You can’t just come and have that pleasure from a cold start. So I rode and rode anyway. I followed people when I wasn’t sure what to do with the traffic circle: Choose a leader and do what they do until they either stop in front of their Rococo building and put the kickstand up, lock it and walk inside as if it will be safe all night there (it will, and if it falls over in the wind, will be propped back up without damage). I treat my road bike like the stylus of a needle, how much more pleasurable to use a bike for transportation.

Following strangers has been a traveling favorite for me: If you don’t know where to go or what train to ride in a big city: Go on a tour with someone who doesn’t know they are taking you. As a woman, it’s a little easier that as a man, I think. I was never confronted, nor regarded beyond the usual stares. The fun continues as I trace my steps back to the beginning, alone, after they have either lost me, lost my interest, or walked into their building. I saw a lot of Copenhagen this way, as well as learning the traffic standards.

In my favorite cycling moment, I was returning to my hosts’ place from Bente’s house: the site of a workshop, and my slideshow. I do not travel with a “GPS-er” and love writing down all the directions on paper ahead of time, and folding that into an accessible pocket, so as I ride I can refer to it, provided it doesn’t blow out of my hand in the wind. I had found my way to Bente’s street–a little remote, a new neighborhood to me, using this method, and as I approached I was so happy to see how well-marked her property was by the archetypal urban natural building scene: A few tarps piled with sand and clay; and where cars would be parallel-parked on the curb, a couch, umbrella, and pic-nic table for the workshop participants.

After my visit there, I followed another set of directions on a crumpled piece of scratch-paper to the cafe of Rassmus, a friend of my hosts. It used to be a pharmacy, and for a LONG time. It’s a beautiful historical land-mark and Rassmuss’s cafe celebrates it well with crowds all of the time, an excellent chef kicks out good food, and I was to sip coffee and journal to some Bill Withers. As I approached the sidewalk on my trusty steel steed, there was Rassmuss, moving fast at his business. I popped the front tire onto the curb all insoussiance and set the bike in a rack and engaged the kickstand and had a charming chat and he went in ahead of me to tell the barista to make me his favorite coffee on the house.

I left there to hit rush-hour traffic this time with no directions but some idea of my hosts’ place from there, but as I rode past the Dome of Visions along the water, it began to rain, and it being summer and I being an optimist (read naïve) I had to get out of the rain or pedal faster, and went onto the approach of a bridge, and heard live bluegrass. So I found it and pulled over and it was a quartet under a sagging tarp huddled over a single mic, and there was Paul Banks, whose kids were in the band and he was playing a little mandolin. He remembered my name from the blues joint Mojo Bar where I heard him play, and I hung out until it stopped raining and they stopped playing, wishing I had a two-stepping partner along.

It doesn’t hurt that the place is flat. When a young woman is coming into her curves, we’d tease that they had bee-stings. This place has a few rises, but nothing that takes your breath, no excuses not to hop on and nothing seems to stop folks from using their bikes except having a big load to haul. Even the less-capable people use bikes with some electrical assist before giving up their right to sling a leg over the frame of a two-wheel machine and get the errands done. I saw so many older riders with great aging frames, strong spines, ruddy faces, round butts. They put us to shame.

Today I rented a bike in the small town of Doorn, where my new friend has a caravan in a camping site and she plans to live here year round among a couple of other tiny houses, for summer use. She plans a rocket stove, earthen plastered walls, a cob oven out front. The greening of the trailer park. Why not? The nice man who rented the bike to me pulled a map out and looked straight into my eyes and said “Our system for bicycle riders is really good here.” His English was otherwise not so great but he had this sentence down, and he wasn’t kidding. You cycle by numbers: Following a web of trails through cities and towns and forest lands and dunes and agriculture, and canal crossings, all on these paths that are yes all separated from the cars’ roads, all well-marked by a numbered system, frequently signposted and occasionally a large map on a trail head will show the area and several options. You can’t get lost as long as you know what number route you are on and a cross-route number. Even then it’s difficult to get lost although I did one night in The Hague as I was walking around singing to the record I’m learning for a show when I get home. I lost track, and when I looked up I was nowhere near anything familiar. That’s when I finally used my phone’s compass, and a few locals who practically took me by the hand and walked me to my hosts’ home.

Maybe in a future life I can be Dutch and live a long life on the channeled planes, riding a bike, my hair piled on top of my head. My grandpa Jim’s genetic line was called Pennsylvania Dutch but that was a misnomer, we are Swiss. Like the Alps that I’m on my way to hike tomorrow.

*There’s a way the Dutch women tie their hair up on their heads, and I have been putting off the blog because I can’t find just the right phrase for it, perhaps you can help. Here’s the thing: I was having coffee with a friend in Jack London Square a few years ago, and as we took our coffees and went to sit down outside I walked past the counter of milk and sugar, stirrers, sugar alternatives, lids, and napkins. He said “That’s so irreverent the way you just pass up the milk and stuff.” It was high praise, and an observant compliment. I take my coffee black. I have no truck with the condiments. What’s that, insoussiance? Disinterest? It’s also the confidence in a perfect result: there is nothing to be done. This is the way the Dutch women pile their hair on their heads: Quickly, dismissively, always with a perfect sexy result, with disregard; they grab it all with a big pin or chopstick or rubber band, but really it’s as if that tool has nothing to do with it. Perfect disinterest. Off-handed. Help me out. The opposite of this belabored attempt to find the right word.

Arriving to a place is like taking a water slide the first time. You’re wide-eyed, fascinated; you want to take pictures of the whole way down. But once you have been down it a million times and are exhausted and there’s chlorine-water in your nose and ears, you’re ready to lay shivering between two towels on the cement, and let your shriveled toes, shredded and fragile from scaling the bottom of the pool, explore the topography of sand in the cement. So it’s been, and I wish I could share the strange fascination I had when first entering the castle in Catalunya, my eyes adjusting to the dim light. A 12th century olive oil press was in the corner, yet a pair of volksawgen seats sat in the entrance next to a few boxes of recycling and donation clothes. I wanted to look around on arriving, but it was midnight. Then the 6-month old puppy came downstairs, wiggling like a tadpole, flipped onto her back at my feet and peed on her belly. She would have more fingers toes and shoes to chew for the next month while I worked with her master on a book he’d write. I was shown my room, tile floor, stark, bright, a two foot thick window reveal: Stone walls. An IKEA bed on a few wooden pallets and a small bedside table. A bed frame with many slats, leaning up against one wall would soon become my dryer for sweaty clothes when I came in from walks. We go into the kitchen and the living room and the dining room in one circle and I wonder when I will remember which rooms leads to which. I’m goggle eyed, there’s the cookstove I’ve seen in pictures, there is the masonry heater I hadn’t seen yet, there is the living room, just like in the pictures, a former terrace, when this place was a boy’s club, run by the bishop. And when it was thousands of other things for the previous hundreds of years. There is a smell of agriculture that reminds me of catshit. Now it will ever remind me of Girona. Pigs, in nearby farms. We sit at a long table in the dining room and chat about everything, from music to marijuana, stoves and their builders to district energy. He’s a story teller. I’m letting the dog chew my cowboy boot because this is keeping her from chewing my hands, pant legs, shirtsleeves.

I’m here and I’m of course safe and working hard on a little book: with a man who builds masonry heaters and lives in a castle in Catalunya with his partner, and a puppy dog. His first language is Danish, but he wants the book to be in English, thus more accessible to more readers; and while he hardly needs an English translator, I think he wanted me around to keep him on track with the book in his head that wants written down. We jumped right in to work, abandoning what he had previously written for the immediacy of the witness a writing partner can provide.

[As of writing this a month ago] I have been here in Europe for almost a month now, and it’s funny how it’s been hard to write postcards home. Usually I am all chatter when I get to a new place. I’m in an incredibly weird place but that’s not unusual for me. I think it’s that my language has become a broken English ‘cause that’s what I’m hearing. I have told you that I am too impressionable: I can’t even watch a movie or TV without taking on the characters. I want to post photos on Facebook, but even that seems inappropriate: This house/castle, the surrounding Medieval village doesn’t want to be broadcast: it’s too quiet and personal.

The village is like what Northern California’s wine country wishes it was, rolling grassy hills, olive groves, terracotta roofing tiles, terraces. But this shit is Real, and Real Old! The foundation of the building I’m staying in is 12th C. The carving of the date on the lintel over the door says 1649. The roads are paved but very narrow and TIDY! It’s dead quiet. I think these are retirement and vacation homes for super-wealthy people. You go out and don’t see a soul. The man across the road Guisepe, or Pep, was a surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, but when he retired early (like my own dad), he went back to painting, which he was pretty good at when he was young. Look at his hands, and you’ll see signs, as in my father’s hands, that everything he touches turns to gold. Now slow and methodical, his English is just good enough for me to find out what a bad-ass he was in medicine, and his paintings bite you in the butt from a knowledge of what’s really under the surface, in all ways. When he saw my enthusiasm about art he invited me to help him hang a small show in a city center. Today he and his beautiful young wife host the football game, in which there will be likely more talking about art than slugging weak Spanish beer. It’s stunning. A fantasy house.

So it’s off to Storage Stoves and Primer’s Primers.

Dear folks, one more overlong travel post, at the risk of losing all my friends, not just the attention span deprived. I’m moving these to my personal ‘blog at www.mudfest.net and will broadcast ‘blogs as they go up. I’ll revert to my usual curt bawdy irreverence here….

How can such a spiritual/superstitious people NOT be haunted by the guardian spirits of the rice paddies that the city of Bangkok sprawls across? I don’t always see myself and my Bay Area through the historical lens of the Ohlone people, for example, who walked on fertile grounds that we now drive and fight for parking on, but from the outside, where it’s easier to see past and present laminated together, the southeast Asian people I’ve seen straddle both worlds constantly. There’s at least one shrine on every property that gets gifts like a glass of water, fresh flowers, a portion of rice, some fried pork, incense. The household-scale temples are cranked out in factories and, like the full-scale ones, have the same aesthetic as Mexican-Catholic stuff: cheap, shiny, covered in tiny mirror mosaics facing all directions, glitter, characters from The Literature. Animals, men in meditation, combinations of these. So in the front of the 7-11, at the entrance to the brothels, hotels, moped repair shops, newsstands, government offices, etc. They know they are walking on the fertile fields where spirits watched over the food source.

I try to imagine this swampy stinky car- and moped-strangled place as the expanse of paddies it was. You can actually see a whole section of its past in many places, from a plane (pictured here, taken from the approach by air to Bangkok), along the rivers, and in the people. Using the subways and overhead trains, people-watching/gawking, I think of their feet in their flip-flops; wide, muscular, and designed for rice-farming, widespread toes fit for traversing soggy fields, spreading onto the ground, spilling over the edges of their dainty shoes. On the subways with their masks of urban apathy and peering into their self-phones, they seem oblivious and miserably cast out of their magical spirited origins, but out on the street you can lay the same lens onto the people perched on little plastic stools at the food vending stalls and it all makes more sense than in the depersonalizing subways. Their anonymous expressions as they peer into their cellphones on the trains, and their polite but empty smiles back at my stares are replaced on the streets by chatter and playfulness, their love of chaos and good food and lots of it, from a different vendor every few footsteps shines forth. The food cart is finally making its way into hipster culture in American cities and I’m so glad. We can learn a lot from them about sharing food, eating simply together.

The cart, regardless of what it offers, has some typical characteristics. Each
has wheels for rolling it into and out of place and attachments for bikes and mopeds for moving them. A hole in the stainless top hangs a wok or steamer or pot over a propane burner. In the plexiglass window of the cart, a display case of the offerings: pork, fishballs, vegetables, piles of noodles. Next to the cart, a low plastic stool holds a cooler of water with a stainless cup for serving and a stack of stainless cups next to it for helping yourself. Sometimes the water has chrysanthemum leaves in it. A seating area on the sidewalk has low plastic stools and tables with condiments, spoons and forks. There are empty five-gallon buckets and other large plastic colorful buckets around for washing the dishes in the street, separating the solids through a colander into a bucket, and rinsing and pouring the liquid sludge into the gutters. A box of foam holds temps just as well as the plastic-and-foam coolers we use in the States, without the plastic. There’s one by each cart and it gets regularly restocked by moped and pick-up deliveries of ice in 50-pound rice bags.

At night, most of these street scenes of plenty, celebrating the delicious cuisine of Thailand are swept up and the carts trailered off by their attached mopeds, leaving an empty and swept sidewalk. At four AM the breakfast ones appear as the night ones are dismantled. Few people eat at home in Bangkok, and I have seen many many families eating around their dining room tables at the fronts of their homes, in the villages. The kitchens face the street and it’s been hard (& more than once, embarrassing) to distinguish between a private dining room and a restaurant.