Category: Longreads

morocco: the ancient roman ruins at volubilis

wanderessence1025 January 28, 2020

It would be 3 1/2 hours to Volubilis on winding mountain roads through green fields and forests. I was surprised by all the green I was finding in Morocco. We stopped for one look back at Chefchaouen before we left the blue town behind.

farewell to Chefchaouen

We went through a poor area in a mountainous region with ramshackle dirty houses and a river snaking through the valley amidst piles of rubble and laundry hanging on rooftops. Towns were badly in need of fresh paint.

We stopped for a restroom break at a place with a swimming pool and dining tables set formally with tablecloths clustered around the pool.

The landscape flattened and eucalyptus trees lined the road under chilly gray skies. This was farmland with neat rows of crops – barley and chickpeas – and orange orchards; yellow flowers highlighted the fields. We passed a donkey pulling a cart, a flock of sheep and lambs, a shepherd wearing the djellaba. Cows grazed beside the road. I felt like I’d taken a trip back in time to a previous century. Orange groves and olive trees lined up neatly on the horizon. We stopped at a roadside stand for some oranges fresh off the trees.

a stop at the orange orchards

orange orchards

We arrived in Volubilis by noon. The site is a large expanse of Roman ruins in the middle of a fertile plain about 33km north of Meknès. It is the best preserved archeological site in Morocco, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997. Excavation is slowly ongoing, with only half the site excavated. It has an amazing number of mosaics preserved in situ.

Evidence has been found, such as Neolithic pottery, indicating that this area was settled as long ago as 3000 BC due to its fertile valley. Later it was settled by Phoenicians and subsequently by Carthaginian traders in the 3rd century B.C. One of the Roman Empire’s most remote outposts, it was annexed around 40 A.D. Up to 20,000 people lived here, planting wheat and deforesting massive swaths of land. The Romans abandoned it in 280. It then prospered under local rule as an Amazigh capital, and its population of Berbers, Greeks, Jews and Syrians spoke Latin until the arrival of Islam. Moulay Idriss founded a sanctuary here in the 8th century before moving the capital to Fès.

The Roman Empire

Volubilis and its fertile plains

Volubilis

Volubilis

Volubilis was inhabited until the 18th century when its marble and precious stone was plundered for Moulay Ismail’s palaces in Meknès. The buildings were finally destroyed in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.

Volubilis

Volubilis

Volubilis

Volubilis

Volubilis

At Volubilis, olive groves and nearly 60 olive presses were found, indicating olive oil was the economic backbone of the settlement. A female skeleton was found facing Mecca, indicating she was Muslim.

Galen’s Baths was a Roman hammam with underfloor heating and communal toilets.

Galen’s Baths

public toilets at Volubilis

The Capitol from 218 was dedicated to the triad Jupiter, Juno and Minerva.

The Capitol

A Roman Basilica to the north had columns topped with storks’ nests. The original building was two stories tall. Local markets were held in the surrounding forum.

Roman Basilica

stork’s nest at the Roman Basilica

Roman Basilica

Roman Basilica

Roman Basilica

The marble triumphal arch, called the Arch of Caracalla, dated from 217 AD, was built to honor Emperor Caracalla and his powerful mother, Julia Domna.

Triumphal Arch

Volubilis

There are a number of houses with mosaics along the main thoroughfare and ceremonial road: Decumanus Maximus.

Decumanus Maximus

arches along Decumanus Maximus

Volubilis

The House of the Acrobat showed an athlete getting a trophy for a race in which he dismounted and jumped back on as the horse raced along.

House of the Acrobat

The House of Ephebe showed a man who seems to be fishing with a lot of text and graffiti in a jumble all around him.

House of Ephebe mosaic

The Orpheus mosaic showed Orpheus taming the animals with his music.

Orpheus Mosaic

Orpheus Mosaic

The House of Columns had columns around an interior court.

House of Columns

House of Columns

The House of the Knight had an incomplete mosaic of Bacchus and naked Ariadne.

Bacchus and naked Ariadne in the House of the Knight

The House of the Labors of Hercules had a circular mosaic showing the twelve labors.

House of the Labors of Hercules

In the House of Orpheus was a mosaic with nine dolphins.

House of Orpheus, Mosaic with Nine Dolphins

Another mosaic showcased sea creatures.

mosaic with sea creatures

mosaics near sea creatures

mosaic details

There was a lone cypress tree at the House of Venus, showing the rather erotic abduction of Hylas by the Nymphs and Diana Bathing, glimpsed by the hunter Acteon. She turned him into a stag as punishment. Sadly, I somehow missed these two most important mosaics in the entire complex!

We didn’t spend much time in the Interpretation Center, but I was caught by one mosaic: Mosaic of the Triton; its dolphins were a symbol of good fortune in Roman times.

Mosaic of the Triton

The Roman Empire

We stopped outside of Meknès for a lunch made by a women’s cooperative. It was a rather derelict building in a rural area with mangy dogs wandering around. The ladies there served up a cucumber tomato salad, a delicious aubergine, lentils, chicken roasted with a nice sauce and olives, oranges and mint tea for dessert.

chicken lunch in Meknès

woman in cooperative pouring mint tea in Meknès

I said “Dusharufna” (an archaic form of “pleased to meet you”) to our driver Saeed and he got a hoot out of that. He kept laughing and greeting me with a handshake and speaking to me in Arabic. It was funny when he laughed and smiled because he had braces, a mouth full of shiny metal.

As we drove the final half hour to Fès, Aziz told us that there are 35 CEOs with G Adventures in Morocco. He told us habibi means sweetheart, but could also mean best friends for men. I already knew about the “sweetheart” meaning, but not about the best friends between men.

We arrived in Fès around 5:00. After settling into our room at Hotel Mounia, Susan and I walked past the food stalls and street vendors selling socks, belts, electronics and juices. We walked down the wide avenue Hassan II, known by locals as the Camps d’Elysses. We stopped at a café where I had a small Flag beer and Susan had a coffee. Christian from Germany joined us for a beer as well.

It was a shame our hotel was in the new town, because it made it impossible to wander freely around the ancient medina of Fès.

After returning to the hotel, we met the group at 7:00 to go out for street food. We had Moroccan soup with chick peas along with various kebabs – heart & liver, chicken, beef. I only ate six kofta kebabs. While at dinner, Christian and I told Aziz we’d had a Flag beer at an outdoor cafe, and he argued that we couldn’t have done so because it’s illegal to drink in public in Morocco. However, we did it, openly and without problem, so he was wrong, yet he continued to argue that we couldn’t have done so!

We went back to Symphonique, the bar in the basement of the hotel, and had another Flag beer and smoked some apple tobacco shisha, which brought back memories of smoking shisha along the Nile in Egypt, but not nearly as nice. Chai, Gabe, Rene, Natalie, Christian and Susan were all there.

I finally started getting into my book, The Forgiven. It had been a slow read thus far, but I liked the writing.

*Steps 11,629, or 4.93 miles*

*Thursday, April 11, 2019*

**********************

“PROSE” INVITATION: I invite you to write up to a post on your own blog about a recently visited particular destination (not journeys in general). Concentrate on any intention you set for your prose. One of my intentions was to write using my five senses, which I still struggle with, but tried to incorporate here.

It doesn’t matter whether you write fiction or non-fiction for this invitation. You can either set your own writing intentions, or use one of the prompts I’ve listed on this page: writing prompts: prose. (This page is a work in process.) You can also include photos, of course.

Include the link in the comments below by Monday, February 10 at 1:00 p.m. EST. When I write my post in response to this invitation on Tuesday, February 11, I’ll include your links in that post.

This will be an ongoing invitation. Feel free to jump in at any time. 🙂

I hope you’ll join in our community. I look forward to reading your posts!

(on journey) chapter 2: missouri as it seemed {part 2}

wanderessence1025 July 18, 2018

This is the second half of chapter 2 of my novel-in-progress. This will be the last section I’ll be posting online. The rest I will complete privately and eventually try to publish or self-publish (after lots of revision!). 🙂

These are the first three sections:

(on journey) chapter 1: on borrowed time {part 1}
chapter 1: on borrowed time {part 2}
chapter 2: missouri as it seemed {part 1}

**************************

*Missouri*

Finally at 1:30, Mykaela and Atsushi crossed into Missouri, another red Trump-supporting state. They were in the middle of the Mississippi River when they crossed, at least according to the GPS. Atsushi looked up and read the symbols: Flower: Hawthorn, also known as “red haw” or “wild haw.” Bird: Bluebird. Gamebird: Bobwhite Quail. Insect: Honeybee.

They were quiet as they drove past Florissant, across the Missouri River, past Wentzville, Hannibal, Schnuck’s Grocery Chain.

Carrie Underwood sang “Dirty Laundry:” All the Ajax in the world ain’t gonna clean your dirty laundry. Mykaela thought how simple it would be if Emre would cheat on her, if only he had some dirty laundry. She could just leave him, without any qualms. But how could she leave him when he was hurting so much, so devastated by Szonja’s suicide? He wasn’t the same person she’d married, that was for sure, and she’d never felt lonelier than she had for the last nine years, especially as it had dawned on her over the years that Emre had no interest in getting better.

Shaking thoughts of Emre from her head, she asked Atsushi, “How did you meet Chiaki?”

“My band played a concert in college. A friend of mine came to help us set up and Chiaki came along. She loved our music. After the concert, I took her to my room and I sang John Denver’s ‘Sweet Sweet Life:’ Sleep pretty darling, do not cry, and I will sing a lullaby, and she cried to the words.” He spoke with tenderness and Mykaela could tell the memory transported him to that blissful moment. “How did you meet Emre?”

“He was a consular officer at the Hungarian Embassy in Washington. I went with an International Group to every embassy party we could find. At a concert in his embassy, I was hovering over the snack table, gobbling down crackers slathered with Liptauer, this very addictive, paprika-flavored cheese spread. I couldn’t stop eating it and he thought my addiction to it amusing. He was quite older than me, 16 years, and he’d been all over the world. He’d been married before, had a daughter, and seemed so sure of himself, so rugged and handsome, with dark thick hair and dark skin, and he had a wry sense of humor. He was more cosmopolitan, more cultured, than anyone I’d ever met.”

Mykaela paused, thinking about the husband she fell in love with. Emre had been most at home in cultures not his own, and he was fascinated by urban and rural homes that people had abandoned for one reason or the other. He loved any kind of ruin. His parents had had to flee their home during 1956, when he was just three years old, during the national uprising; his father was one of the protestors demanding the Soviets withdraw; he and the other rebels were crushed by the Soviets, and soon killed. Emre had survived with his mother and two sisters. He still had a sense of humor, even after such a harrowing childhood.

It was Szonja’s death that ruined him. It made Mykaela sad to think of it. Now Emre was overcome by gloom, much like that movie they’d watched together on one of their first dates: Gloomy Sunday. The worst thing though wasn’t his overwhelming gloom, but his failure to engage, with her or with anyone.

On the long straight road leading away from St. Louis, Mykaela thought she’d never seen a more ugly corridor. Suburban sprawl for miles and miles: Kohl’s, Bob Evans, Ross, and every other cheap chain in existence.

Signs about religion got to Mykaela more than anything. Real Christians Forgive Like Jesus. She did agree with that, but that wasn’t how most evangelical Christians behaved these days. She mused about how much she had really forgiven Emre. Had she forgiven him for falling into his bottomless hole of despair, and had she forgiven him for his emotional abandonment of her?

The green-field landscape dipped and rose slightly around them. Two billboards, in succession, near High Hill, Missouri:

EVERYONE THAT IS FOR ABORTION

HAS ALREADY BEEN BORN

“Do you think a woman be allowed to choose abortion?” Mykaela asked.

“I think so, as long as the man agrees. It’s a decision for two.”

They passed Mark Twain Lake, New Florence, Williamsburg. And then another series of billboards:

ROAD TRIP TRADITION – OZARKLAND – FUDGE

CHOCOLATE HEAVEN – ROAD TRIP CALORIES DON’T COUNT

“Should we stop for chocolate?” she asked.

“If you like.” He seemed unenthusiastic, so she continued on. She didn’t need it anyway.

The land was barely changing around them, flat farmland but still some groves of trees, and slow gradual climbs. Mykaela missed Virginia’s beautiful rolling hills, green fields and tall broad leaf trees, its varied landscape.

More glaring billboards scarred the landscape: LARRY’S BOOTS & APPAREL. PASSIONS ADULT BOUTIQUE. ROCK GARDEN ANTIQUE BARN. CLUB VOGUE – GENTLEMAN’S CLUB. ARTICHOKE ANNIE’S ANTIQUES. SATIN STITCHES SEWING & EMBROIDERY.

Among more redbuds were signs for the 25^th Annual Testicle Festival. Mykaela couldn’t resist her own curiosity, so she when they pulled off at the next rest area, she Googled it: “Olean Testicle Festival to celebrate 25^th anniversary,” said the headline in the News Tribune.

She told Atsushi they’re breaded and deep fried cattle testicles. Apparently they also come from lamb, bison and — in Olean’s case — turkey.

“Testicles, what does it mean?” Atsushi asked.

“They’re the male glands; it’s how you reproduce. They produce sperm and testosterone.” Atsushi still looked confused, so she pointed to her crotch and said, “You know, the male parts.”

He laughed. His laughter was rare, but when he laughed she liked the musical sound of it. “They have a festival for that?”

“I guess so. I’ve never heard of such a thing. It’s crazy.”

Redbuds continued to follow them as they crossed Missouri. Camping World RVs and Xpress Liquor & Smokes beckoned. Jose Jalapeños offered Mexican food and Cracker Barrel promised Mom-approved Meatloaf. Huge billboards lined the road for wineries, with bold lettering in brash colors. Mykaela thought how Virginia’s wineries advertised themselves with class and discretion, on blue signs with unobtrusive white letters. Farm equipment suppliers offered their wares: Bobcat with its compact loaders and excavators. Sydenstricker John Deere with its tractors, combines, windrowers and balers gleaming in yellow and green.

It was a long slog through Missouri, and Mykaela wasn’t impressed. Mykaela and Atsushi sang together with Ben Harper on the playlist, Always have to steal my kisses from you, and Mykaela wondered fleetingly what it might be like to kiss Atsushi. It didn’t matter; he seemed to be irretrievably in love with his wife, even despite her alleged “obesity.” She probably wasn’t even obese, at least not in American terms. Japanese obesity was rare in Japan, so what he called obesity was probably just plumpness. Besides, she was married to Emre, and they had been happy once. He was the father of their children, well, sort of; at least the father who raised them if not their biological father.

They sped by signs for Lake Lotawana and Lake Tapawingo. Odessa. Boonville. Prairie Home.

Blake Shelton sang in “Sangria,” We’re buzzing like that no vacancy sign out front, as they passed the Lion’s Den Adult Superstore. At the same time, they passed a billboard: BUZZED DRIVING IS DRUNK DRIVING – DON’T CHANCE IT. Fireworks could be bought at PYRO CITY and at FIREWORKS SUPERSTORE.

Mykaela wondered, with the suggestive lyrics about buzzing and the signs — adult stores, drunkenness, and fireworks — whizzing past, if she could ever feel sparks with Atsushi. He seemed so mild-mannered, she couldn’t imagine it. He didn’t seem like the kind of man who could be ruled by passion. She didn’t know if she even had it in her herself.

They passed eateries and gas stations – DQ, Stuckey’s, Valero – and towns with names such as Sedalia, Houstonia, Knob Noster. Giant red and yellow irrigation sprinklers reached across the fields.

They passed a sign that promised: SUICIDE IS PREVENTABLE. Mykaela thought how it really wasn’t, especially if a bystander didn’t know it was coming, or the person was addicted to drugs and liable to do anything. How Szonja, before the heroin, had played the flute and loved her two cats, and had been the gentlest of girls, yet she had gotten in with the wrong people. While high one day, she leaped off the scaffolding around the 72-meter-high dome of Esztergom Basilica, holding hands with her perpetually disgruntled boyfriend, as if they could fly.

They continued on past Grain Valley, Buckner, RV Central, Brass Armadillo Antique Mall. Missouri, as it seemed, was yin and yang all at once, brash and boring, against abortion but full of adult superstores, crowded with speeding eighteen-wheelers and slow-moving farm equipment, offering secret gentlemen’s clubs and over-the-top fireworks stores. It was the most boring landscape she’d ever seen, and the most disturbing. Mykaela wouldn’t be happier when they could finally leave it behind.

*Kansas*

It wasn’t until 6:00 when they finally reached Kansas City, Kansas, their destination for the night. They moved into their separate rooms in a Comfort Inn on the outskirts of the city, with only fast food options in the vicinity.

Over dinner at Taqueria Arandas, a low-key fast food Mexican joint, Mykaela and Atsushi enjoyed Coronas with limes stuck into the bottle necks. They talked about all the people they’d encountered during the day, people young and old, whose cars were packed with all their belongings, heading west.

“It’s the American dream, to head west,” Mykaela said. “For the young ones, I bet they’re heading to Colorado where cannibas is legal.”

Mykaela’s jeep looked like these packed cars as well. The trunk was filled with her and Atsushi’s suitcases, jackets, hiking shoes, bags of art supplies, and Atsushi’s guitar, which he’d brought all the way from Japan. In the back seat were Lena’s things all jumbled: a lamp with a faceted glass orb at its base, two mid-century modern rose-colored chairs, a bulletin board filled with Lena’s hodge-podge of recipes and lists and food photos, and a pile of her older cookbooks. Lena’s butterfly collection and her lacrosse stick were also jammed in with the rest.

At dinner, Mykaela asked Atsushi to tell her about Jiro. While she ate her Camaronesa la Diabla, he told her about his son, while his taco salad sat untouched.

He told her Jiro loved a game called Kaodokus; it was similar to Sudoku but used partial smiley faces instead of digits. The smileys could have three possible shapes and three possible mouths, for a total of nine unique combinations.

Mykaela didn’t understand even Sudoku as she was horrible with numbers, so this smiley face version didn’t make sense, but she didn’t interrupt for an explanation.

Atsushi said that Jiro would sit absorbed for hours in the game, especially when he was out in his little greenhouse. He always took along matcha, a hot green tea, and he loved anything flavored with matcha: mochi, or glutinous rice cakes, soba noodles, green tea ice cream, matcha lattes and other Japanese sweets. Jiro could entertain himself in solitude for hours, but he also loved to play basketball with the neighborhood friends. He liked to pull pranks on his friends, telling them that a typhoon was coming or that he heard they were in trouble with the school principal. Sometimes he put on his jacket backwards in class because it got laughs from his friends.

After a few minutes of quiet, Atsushi admitted it saddened him that he had always worked long hours during Jiro’s childhood. He had barely seen him except to tuck him in at night and sing his favorite John Denver songs or Warabe uta, traditional Japanese songs much like nursery rhymes.

Mykaela ordered a second Corona and nursed it as the listened to Atsushi. She yearned to sense his heartbreak, but it seemed elusive. He seemed to her a solitary, impenetrable man, no more conscious of himself than a cloud floating through the sky. She could sense at moments a shadow self to him, but it dissipated as soon as it was within reach. She wondered if he could ever be truly knowable.

She pulled the lime out of her Corona, sucked on it and puckered her lips, then downed the rest of the beer. She hoped it would put her into a sleep so deep, she wouldn’t have room for dreams.

A rest area in Missouri

Missouri: endless farmland and suburban sprawl.

farm operation in Missouri

rest area in Missouri

**********************

In this case, my journey to Colorado from Virginia, where I began my Four Corners trip, took three full days of driving. Here, I continued writing the first draft of a fictional road trip novel. This post is the second half of chapter 2, which covers day 2 of the road trip. The actual sights seen along the road trip are real, but the characters, conversations, and events are fictional. My writing goal for this road trip was to write a novel about the road trip keeping in mind the following:

“Bring a character to…” Invent characters and take them along on the journey, keeping a journal from the main character’s point of view. After the trip, write a novel or novella of the trip putting those characters into the tale (in the vein of Jim Harrison’s The English Major, and inspired by a creative writing assignment to keep a journal for a fictional character).
Pick random titles from poems or short stories as titles for each chapter and let those titles inform the tale.

Include the link in the comments below by Tuesday, August 14 at 1:00 p.m. EST. When I write my post in response to this challenge on Wednesday, August 15, I’ll include your links in that post.

This will be my last post of my novel-in-progress as it will take me a good year to write and will go through many iterations. My next post will be on my actual journey to Buffalo and Niagara Falls. This will be non-fiction.

This will be an ongoing invitation, once on the third Wednesday of each month. Feel free to jump in at any time. 🙂

I hope you’ll join in our community. I look forward to reading your posts!

chapter 2: missouri as it seemed {part 1}

wanderessence1025 July 10, 2018

*Indiana*

Mykaela settled into a nubby sofa in the hotel lobby promptly at 8:00, as they’d agreed the night before. Atsushi was nowhere to be seen. Just outside the front door, she finally found him smoking a cigarette and talking to a burly pony-tailed man. Atsushi was diminutive compared to the man, whose voice was raspy and deep. Mykaela didn’t know if she should interrupt the conversation, so she stood aside, hoping Atsushi would spot her. Finally, as he seemed oblivious, she moseyed over to them. The man was saying, “I don’t test positive, so I don’t know where she done got it. She said she must’ve had it when we got married two years ago, so how come I ain’t got it? She’s cheatin’ on me, I know. I just don’t know who the dirty bastard is.”

“Sometimes life is confusion,” said Atsushi, puffing on his cigarette. He seemed quite natural at smoking. Mykaela wondered why she didn’t know this about him.

She tugged at Atsushi’s elbow and whispered, “Sorry to interrupt, but we ought to get going.’

The burly man turned to her, “Would you cheat on your husband?”

“That’s quite an inappropriate question!”

He asked Atsushi, “Would you cheat on her?”

“My wife is in Japan,” Atsushi said. “This is my friend.”

“Friends, huh?” The man sneered and glared at Mykaela. “Where’s your husband, then?”

“We better get going, Atsushi,” she said, and headed abruptly back into the lobby. The man muttered something she chose not to hear.

After they loaded their suitcases, along with Mykaela’s numerous bags full of sketchpads, colored pencils and fabrics, into the car, they stopped at the McDonald’s drive-through, where Mykaela ordered a cheese and egg biscuit and Atsushi a maple and fruit oatmeal. Atsushi told her they had been discussing the man’s wife, who was in the hospital with pneumonia after doctors discovered she had AIDS.

Mykaela frowned. “That’s a sticky problem. Nonetheless, that was so damn rude of him to ask a question like that. You don’t have to answer him you know.”

“I want to understand him,” he said. “Everyone is human.”

“You have more faith in mankind than I do.” She could smell the smoke on his breath and in his hair and clothes. Yesterday, he had smelled pleasantly of soap and caramel coffee. “I didn’t know you smoked.”

“Just while talking,” he said. “Don’t worry, I don’t smoke in your car.”

Mykaela pulled the Jeep onto I-70 and, as they settled into the drive, they passed black cows grazing on flat green pastures and later, bristly brown fields with silos and barns. This was farm country, home to corn, soybeans, wheat, and cattle.

Mykaela pointed out a sign for the Wilbur Wright Birthplace & Museum. “Wilbur Wright was one of the two brothers who built the world’s first successful airplane. The other one was Orville. You know of them?”

“I think so, but maybe I’m not familiar with the names.”

“I’ve been to Kill Devil Hills in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where they made their first controlled flight. You can go hang-gliding from the sand dunes at Jockey’s Ridge. I’ve never done it, but I always wanted to.”

“I don’t like heights,” said Atsushi. He was silent for a bit. “It might be nice to be famous.”

“For what?”

“I would be a doctor who discovers the cure for cancer instead of selling the technology for cure, but a doctor who sings and plays guitar too. Like William Carlos Williams, the poet doctor. What for you?”

“I’d love my art quilts to mimick nature, like Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings but with fabric. I want people to be awestruck when they see my work, to be inspired to honor the environment. Many of our Native American tribes believe nature and the land are sacred. I wish everyone believed that.”

“I could be a singing doctor and you could be a quilting environment activist,” said Atsushi.

Mykaela smiled. Actually, she didn’t really have much interest in being famous, although of course she’d love people to connect with her art at a heartfelt level. Mainly, she would like to get her husband to laugh again, and her daughter Lena to find the right medication and maybe a boyfriend who could give her some stability. She’d love it if Viktoria could shake her stalking ex-boyfriend Will, and if her mother would show even the slightest interest in Mykaela and her family. She wished her father weren’t ill. She would love to have a few close friends who could truly understand her.

A sign said, WELCOME TO KNIGHTSTOWN: HOME OF THE HOOSIERS. “Hoosiers are people who are born or live in Indiana. A lot of the sports teams are also Hoosiers,” Mykaela said.

“Hoosiers,” repeated Atsushi. “A strange name.”

“I don’t know if this is true, but I heard the name came from the frontier days. When people approached a house, they were afraid of being shot, so they’d call out to the homeowner. The owner would reply, ‘Who’s here?’ and it eventually slurred into ‘Who’sh ‘ere?’ I don’t know if it’s true though.”

“Who’sh ‘ere, Who’sh ‘ere,” Atsushi said several times, trying it on for size.

Huge trucks barreled past them on the highway. Whenever trucks came up too close behind her on the highway, she thought of the 1971 movie Duel, with Dennis Weaver. Although she was only two years old when the movie was made, she had seen it much later with Emre on TV. She had bitten her fingernails to bloody nubs while Weaver, driving his Plymouth Valiant over deserted California canyon roads, was harassed by the mostly invisible driver of a decrepit Peterbilt tanker truck.

“This road is a caravan of trucks,” said Atsushi.

“It’s one of the main east-west roads in America, so yes, lots of trucks.”

The I-70 corridor certainly catered to trucks. Signs spoke to careless drivers: BIG TRUCK ACCIDENT? CALL THE HAMMER. Eighteen-wheelers hunkered down in sprawling parking lots around rest areas. INDY TRUCK WASH promised clean big rigs. Double Fed-Ex trucks rumbled past them. Tractor-trailers squatted on the shoulders of exit ramps. Mykaela had never seen this in Virginia.

Gleaming silver grain silos dotted the landscape. The Mountain Goats sang, “The gray sky was vast and real cryptic above me / I wanted you / To love me like you used to do.”

When Mykaela heard words like these, she felt full of gloom. She’d like to see the future, to see if the rest of her life would be spent in utter loneliness with Emre, or if she could entice him, somehow, out of his debilitating depression. If only he would agree to psychotherapy or anti-depressants or hospitalization, but so far he’d refused. He didn’t want his mind messed up by drugs or shock therapy or whatever “experimental methods” doctors used on emotionally disturbed patients. She wondered if there were other solutions not evident to her. She tried to open her mind to the universe for possibilities, but no answers ever appeared to her. She didn’t believe in prayer that asked for specific things, like new cars or houses or healing for people she loved. She thought it was greedy to ask for specific outcomes, so she asked only for wisdom and strength to get through every day.

A billboard reared up ahead of them: HIGHSMITH GUNS – PISTOL RANGE – TOP GUNS INDOOR RANGE.

“Why do American people love guns?” Atsushi asked.

“Many of our immigrant ancestors escaped from oppressive governments. Now, generations later, the children of these immigrants still cling to the belief that citizens have a right to bear arms, to protect themselves from government overreach. But isn’t it likely that if the government became oppressive, even a man with a gun would be powerless against it? Anyway, it seems any crazy person can get a gun these days, and look what’s happening with the school shootings, church shootings, people getting knocked off at concerts. There’s no end to the insanity.”

“What kind of person kills innocent children?” Atsushi said. “I want justice for Jiro. I want his killer found. I have questions to ask him.”

“Of course we’ll go to the police in Grand Junction and try to find out what we can.”

They drove silently for a while, passing a billboard that read: After You Die You WILL Meet God.

“I wonder if Jiro met God,” Atsushi said, “I don’t have God. We are Buddhists and Jiro loved nature.”

“Why did Jiro go to Colorado Mesa University? Why didn’t he stay closer to home?”

Atsushi told her that Jiro loved plants and was pursuing a degree in Biological Sciences with a concentration in Ecology. He was attracted to CMU because of a three-week field course in Ecuador the university offered. He was excited about visiting the remote tropical habitats in South America, such as the lowland rainforest, the cloud forest, and the páramo, a high, treeless plateau. He was eager to learn about the natural histories of the organisms found in each area. He was especially enamored of grasses found at the high altitudes, especially tussock-grasses and bunch-grasses.

“Also, his girlfriend was going there to study winemaking, but at the last minute she broke up with him and decided to stay in Tokyo.”

“So, the girlfriend who deserted him could almost take the blame for his death,” said Mykaela.

“No, I don’t think it’s that way. I don’t want to blame and be angry. Jiro always loved tropic plants, always reading about them in books. He built a small greenhouse in our backyard and grew plants and grasses.”

“Did he ever get to Ecuador?”

“No, he was to go last fall.” He stared out the window as they drove in silence past Indianapolis, Monrovia, Terre Haute.

The Grateful Dead sang, “Friend of the Devil,” and Mykaela thought about Jiro’s killer, who was obviously a friend of the devil — an evil person who still had his freedom and his life while he’d stolen Jiro’s.

The land flattened out, but trees and bushes still clustered between fields, and the wind shimmied the car as it moved down the highway. The smells of hay and dust and grass permeated the car. Mykaela felt unease needling her skin, quickening her heartbeat.

They crossed Vermillion Creek. A quarry gaped under a hazy blue sky smudged with white clouds. Chuck Berry sang “No particular place to go… Riding along in my automobile,” and Mykaela felt that she and Atsushi were speeding along in this cocoon of an automobile into uncertain futures, wrapped in separate blankets of grief.

They crossed Big Walnut Creek and Honey Creek. Tom Cochrane sang, “Life is a highway.” Mykaela agreed; life was a highway with a lot of tacky road signs: billboards advertising adult stores, shooting ranges, liquor stores, fireworks, and detours to nostalgia, all diverting a person from the true road to serenity.

*Illinois*

They crossed into Illinois, the only blue state in a sea of red, and the first one since they’d left Virginia. Mykaela breathed a sigh of relief. Here were people she understood, people who weren’t nasty and hateful and all puffed up with white privilege.

Atsushi looked up the symbols: the flower was a violet, the bird a Northern cardinal, and the insect a Monarch butterfly.

“Tell me some other interesting things about it,” said Mykaela.

“There are two slogans: ‘Mile After Magnificent Mile’ and ‘Right Here. Right Now.’ And there’s a prairie grass: Big bluestem. I wonder if Jiro would have known it. I like to think he did.”

“Me too,” said Mykaela, and this time she reached over and touched his shoulder.

They sped by Whippoorwill Antiques and Effingham, and Mykaela couldn’t help but think driving on this highway was “effing monotonous.” Huge expanses of farmland opened up, bordered by sparse forests. The hills became more gradual, long straight slopes. The jeep slogged up and coasted down, as if on an endless slow-motion treadmill.

Another sign, glaring at them from the roadside: Where will you spend eternity? Jesus Christ has the answer.

Did he? she wondered. Mykaela had been brought up Catholic but now attended a Unitarian Church. They believed in the moral authority but not necessarily the divinity of Jesus. She believed herself to be moral but fallible, and she didn’t care for rigid dogma or beliefs that everyone must embrace only one religion to gain access to paradise. Hell, she didn’t even believe in paradise.

A series of signs boasted of THE WORLD’S LARGEST ROCKING CHAIR, THE WORLD’S LARGEST WIND CHIME, THE WORLD’S LARGEST MAILBOX. Mykaela looked all around near the exit to see if she could spot these “world’s largest” items, but she didn’t see anything on the flat horizon. They can’t be that large, she thought. She considered pulling off to look for them, but at the last minute sped by the exit. Too much distance to cover.

They passed Lost Creek Orchard, offering up apples, pears and peaches. Montrose, Teutopolis, giant drills, and hauling equipment with the largest tires she’d ever seen. Signs placed blame: MATTRESS STORES ARE GREEDY – LEARN THE TRUTH. Names blurred outside the windows: Pilot, Little Wabash River, St. Elmo. Cows clustered around dainty ponds on farms. BLUE SPRINGS CAFÉ promised foot-hi pies. Signs at construction zones threatened: “Hit a Worker – $10,000 fine – 14 years in jail.”

They passed two workers in the median strip trying to remove a deer carcass. It wasn’t a pretty sight, and Mykaela focused on the road, stomach turning. She knew she was lucky in many ways not to suffer like so many people in the world did, under horrible poverty, violence, endless war, starvation, slavery, mind-deadening jobs. She was lucky, so why did she often feel overwhelmed by her problems?

Mykaela thought how it was true that some cities and places have nothing to recommend them. The views from the road in Illinois were a disappointment. Maybe she’d find something interesting if she got off the interstate, but they didn’t have time for that. They needed to keep moving along.

She had to face it, as much as she appreciated Illinois for voting against Trump, it was a state with unimaginative place names, often names of people: Collinsville, Edwardsville, Maryville.

Can’t they do any better? Mykaela thought.

***********

The second half of this chapter will post on Wednesday, July 18. This will be the last chapter I’ll post on this blog. I’ll continue to work on the novel privately, in hopes of revising multiple times and eventually publishing (or self-publishing)!

For the first chapter of my road trip novel you can see the following two posts:

(on journey) chapter 1: on borrowed time {part 1}

chapter 1: on borrowed time {part 2}

**********************

“PROSE” INVITATION: I invite you to write a 2,000-word post on your own blog about a recently visited particular destination (not journeys in general). Concentrate on any intention you set for your prose. In this case, my intentions for my Four Corners trip included the following:

“Bring a character to…” Invent characters and take them along on the journey, keeping a journal from the main character’s point of view. After the trip, write a novel or novella of the trip putting those characters into the tale (in the vein of Jim Harrison’s The English Major, and inspired by a creative writing assignment to keep a journal for a fictional character).
Pick random titles from poems or short stories as titles for each chapter and let those titles inform the tale.

It doesn’t matter whether you write fiction or non-fiction for this invitation. You can either set your own writing intentions, or use one of the prompts I’ve listed on this page: writing prompts: prose & poetry. (This page is a work in process.) You can also include photos, of course.

Include the link in the comments below by Monday, July 23 at 1:00 p.m. EST. When I write my post in response to this invitation on Tuesday, July 24, I’ll include your links in that post.

This will be an ongoing invitation. Feel free to jump in at any time. 🙂

I hope you’ll join in our community. I look forward to reading your posts!

the ~ wander.essence ~ community

I invite you all to settle in and read a few posts from our wandering community. I promise, you’ll be inspired!

Jo, of Restless Jo, wrote beautifully of her time with her friend Meg in Warsaw and time spent relaxing with her Polish family in the countryside.
- Reminiscences from Poland
Mari, of Travels with My Camera, wrote a post about a visit to Daintree National Park – the Aborigine’s Dreamtime that Never Wakes – in Australia.
- Dreamtime on the Daintree

Thanks to all of you who wrote prosaic posts following intentions you set for yourself. 🙂

chapter 1: on borrowed time {part 2}

wanderessence1025 June 26, 2018

Chapter 1, part 2 of my road trip novel. Part 1 is here: chapter 1: on borrowed time {part 1}

*West Virginia*

They crossed the West Virginia border at noon, and Mykaela asked Atsushi to look up the state symbols. He told her the state bird was the cardinal, the insect the Monarch butterfly, and the flower the rhododendron. Mykaela told him she loved the Monarchs with their gold and orange stained-glass wings framed in black and she once made a quilt full of them. She couldn’t help but blurt out that West Virginia voted for Trump in the 2016 election and when she visited Fayetteville before the election, a man had been standing on a street corner with a sign that said, CLINTON – LOCK HER UP! Mykaela had yelled out the window at the man, telling him to go to fucking hell.

Atsushi didn’t bat an eye at her language, and she wondered if he even understood the curse words.

*Pennsylvania*

They weren’t in West Virginia long, less than an hour, before Mykaela pulled over to take a picture of the welcome sign: WELCOME TO PENNSYLVANIA: PURSUE YOUR HAPPINESS at close to 1:00. Atsushi looked on his phone and told her bird was the ruffed grouse, the flower was the Mountain laurel, the insect the Pennsylvania firefly. “Another Trump-supporting state,” Mykaela said. They passed through Masontown, Waynesburg, Mariana, Prosperity, Amity, Lone Pine. A town called, strangely enough, Laboratory.

A band called Hickory Wind sang “It’s a long, long road that leads to Denver, when you’re starting out in Virginia’s rolling hills.”

“This song is echoing our route — D.C. to Denver!” she said.

“I think it’s better when music tells our lives,” said Atsushi. “It is convenient.”

Atsushi pointed to the median: “Look, another road kill!” This time the feathers of a dead turkey stuck up all askew. They passed Chrome Shop in Claysville, the Kruger Street Toy and Train Museum, Xtreme Cycle & ATV Store, and Gumby’s Cigarette and Beer World. Rough roads and potholes signaled they were about to cross into West Virginia again, and they passed through Bethlehem, Wheeling and Moundsville before escaping over the Ohio River twenty minutes later.

*Ohio*

When they passed the WELCOME TO OHIO sign, Atsushi had drifted off again. He slept, mouth open, in the light of the sun coming through the windshield. Mykaela hesitated waking him up, but he’d told her he didn’t want to miss any border crossings, so she nudged him. He looked up the symbols and groggily announced that Ohio’s state bird was the cardinal, that it had two state flowers, one cultivated – the scarlet carnation – and the other a wildflower, the large white trillium. The state insect was the 7-spot ladybug. Mykaela told him this was yet another a Republican-leaning state, at least in the 2016 election. “You can thank this government, and dirty NRA money, for our lax gun laws,” she said. “It’s why every idiot and mentally deranged person in the country can pack a weapon.”

Atsushi looked down at his lap, seemingly lost in thought.

In Ohio, they passed Cambridge, Columbus and then a long sprawl of suburbia with chains such as Red Lobster, Buffalo Wild Wings and Lowes. A flashing sign warned that alcohol deaths were 26: DRIVE SOBER.

As they drove through the boring Ohio landscape, Mykaela told Atsushi everything important except why she was really taking this journey. She was talkative in a way she couldn’t have been with someone of her own culture. She told him about the places they had lived when Emre worked as a Consular Officer. She told him of the adventure of living in such exotic places, and how they fell into a routine in each place, and of their daughters Lena and Viktoria, and how 23-year-old Lena was an assistant chef at a farm-to-table restaurant near Denver and how 20-year-old Viktoria was majoring in Kinesiology & Health Sciences at the College of William and Mary.

She told him about her love of textiles and quilting and making art quilts featuring landscapes and nature. She told how she fell in love with Turkish music when they lived in Istanbul. She told him about her father Hank, a retired pharmacist who lived in a nursing home an hour’s drive away in Winchester, Virginia, and how she visited him once a week on Saturdays. She told him Lena had attended the Culinary Institute of America and was a talented cook. She told him of Lena’s Border Terrier named Jasper, and how her eldest daughter was taking up white water rafting since she’d moved to Colorado a year ago. She told him that Viktoria hoped to become a physical therapist once she graduated.

They passed Flushing and the Egypt Valley Wildlife Area while Bruce Springsteen sang about “The Promised Land.” Mykaela wondered if Quakers actually lived in Quaker City.

Chris Isaak sang, “Don’t get so down on yourself. Tomorrow’s another day.” And Hank Snow sang, “I’ve Been Everywhere,” listing the places he’s been: Reno, Chicago, Fargo, Minnesota, Buffalo, Toronto, Winslow, Sarasota…

Another billboard warned DON’T WIMP OUT: BUCKLE UP. They passed Senecaville Lake and the Zane Grey Museum in Zanesville. Atsushi frowned as he stared at the median strip strewn with mangled deer along I-70. In Ohio, the hills became flatter and Mykaela became drowsy. She wished Atsushi could drive, but she didn’t trust him to stay on the right side of the road. Besides he had drifted off again. They passed Adamsville, the Pepsi Bottling Company and the Licking River.

Mykaela felt like she was getting in the groove of being out of Emre’s orbit. Her mind felt more clear, less encumbered. I like who I’m becoming, she thought. They drove past Pataskala, Etna, Pickerington, Columbus, Dayton, London, Plain City and Springfield.

The land flattened out more, and shiny silver silos reflected the late afternoon sunlight. HAY FOR SALE was written in sloppy red letters on a board leaning on a truck in Catawba. Tom Waits sang “Come on Up to the House” in his soulful raspy voice. They passed Urbania, Xenia, Freightliner, Kenworth, Huber Heights, the Great Miami River, and flat-butchered fields. Dead bugs were smashed all over the windshield and even after Mykaela stopped at a gas station and tried to wash them off, their ghostly spots remained smeared on the glass. Trucks sped by hauling yellow dump trucks and farm equipment. Grain elevators punctuated the landscape.

Another billboard: IF YOU DIE TONIGHT? HEAVEN OR HELL?

I’m probably going straight to hell, Mykaela thought.

Atsushi said, “I believe we have no heaven or hell in Japan.”

*Indiana*

They left Ohio at 6:00 and crossed into Indiana. WELCOME TO INDIANA: CROSSROADS OF AMERICA. LINCOLN’S BOYHOOD HOME. Atsushi read from his phone: “The bird: the cardinal. Flower: peony. Insect: Say’s Firefly.”

“And, yet another red state,” said Mykaela.

“What does it mean, red state?” Atsushi asked.

“The voters in that state mostly vote Republican, more conservative. In blue states, they mostly vote Democrat, more liberal. But before the 2000 election, the colors used to be reversed. We can thank all these red states for our current predicament.”

“In China, red is communist. More left. I suppose your system is confused.”

Mykaela smiled. Yes, it is confused all right. She told him how she was against war or any kind of violence; she equally hated the NRA, and had attended the “March for Our Lives” protest at the end of March, organized by the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where seventeen students were gunned down by an unhinged ex-student.

“I cannot wait for meeting with police in Colorado to find about Jiro details,” Atsushi said. He suddenly got quiet, and stared out the window.

“I’m so sorry about your son, Atsushi. No one should have to lose a child.” She wanted to reach over and touch his shoulder, but she didn’t feel comfortable knowing how proper the Japanese were.

“I don’t see how it’s possible to be the person you were after your child is gone,” he said. “I feel I need to make some empty space in my brain.”

More billboards whizzed past: SHELTON FIREWORKS, ANTIQUE MALL. WARM GLO CANDLE CO. STORE. Finally, they pulled in for the night at the Red Roof Inn in Richmond, Indiana. The place looked like it was under construction, and not in a nice way. The building was derelict with tractor-trailers in the parking lot and shady characters – tough tattooed men and rough fellows – standing outside smoking cigarettes. Mykaela was trying to save money on her trip and had booked the hotel thinking it couldn’t be but so bad. She was glad to have Atsushi along with her, although of course they took separate rooms. After they checked in, she asked if he’d like to go to a restaurant the receptionist recommended, Clara’s Pizza King, for dinner, after taking a half-hour to freshen up.

At Clara’s Pizza King, they sat in a booth and perused the menu. A old-fashioned phone in the booth said CLARA’S DING-A-LING: YOUR PERSONAL TELEPHONE. ORDER – MAKE REQUESTS – COMPLAIN – COMPLIMENT – JUST SAY HELLO. PLACE ORDER WITH OPERATOR.

Atsushi picked up the phone and said, “Konnichiwa.” And then started speaking in rapid-fire Japanese. He hung up the phone. Mykaela burst out laughing and Atsushi, who hadn’t laughed once during their long day of driving, laughed along with her. Then Mykaela picked up the phone and ordered Sangria and a large pizza with mushrooms and black olives. They sat and talked over the lively “Despacito,” which blared over the sound system. Tiffany lamps cast wavering light and shadows. Children roughhoused on seats in a giant red double-decker bus parked in the middle of the dining room. It said CLARA’S TRANSPORT CO. and on the top deck of the bus were paintings of grandmothers, babies, and a man reading a newspaper. A poster on the side of the bus said “TRAVEL UNDERGROUND INTO THE HEART OF THE SHOPPING CENTRES.”

“What does that mean anyway?” she asked Atsushi.

“Sounds like Tokyo,” he said, referring, she guessed, to the huge underground food courts in Tokyo’s department stores.

They shared the pizza and cheered each other with Sangria to celebrate day one of their road trip completed.

That first evening in their separate rooms in the Red Roof Inn, Mykaela realized how much she wanted her life to be what she told Atsushi it was. It was as if she’d described the sunshine but not the rain. She didn’t tell Atsushi that her mother, Naomi, had left her father as soon as his health declined and took off to live the life of a spiritualist and yoga instructor in Crestone, Colorado and was now living with an organic farmer half her age.

And this wasn’t even the true heart of the “rain tales” she avoided telling Atsushi. Emre, 16 years Mykaela’s senior, had been married before and had one daughter, Szonja, who had become addicted to heroin and had committed suicide in 2009, only a year after Emre had retired and they’d moved to the U.S., sending him spiraling into a depression so deep and so severe he rarely left the house or even spoke to her any more. Emre had had a vasectomy years before he’d met Mykaela, soon after he’d had Szonja, so Mykaela and Emre needed to use a sperm donor to get pregnant. Emre had barely agreed to go along with Mykaela’s desire to have children, and he’d been bitter for many years that he’d relented. Eventually, he grew to love the girls, but he always seemed somewhat disconnected.

And then there was Lena, who struggled with bipolar disorder. Doctors couldn’t seem to get her medication right, and she still suffered terrible mood swings. She was a brilliant and creative chef but had lost several jobs when she’d failed to show up for work during depressive episodes. And Viktoria, an excellent student at William and Mary, seemed to make bad decisions about boys and had broken up with an abusive boyfriend only to have him continue to stalk her. She had gotten a restraining order against him, but that hadn’t stopped him from making menacing appearances in Viktoria’s orbit.

Mykaela drifted off but it wasn’t a peaceful sleep. She dreamed about a house with infinite rooms, and confusing doors, a swimming pool in the dining room that was boiling with ocean waves. She tossed and turned on a bed of rocks and when she opened her mouth to speak, broken glass spilled out.

phone in booth at Clara’s Pizza King

bus in the dining area of Clara’s Pizza King

**********************

“PROSE” INVITATION: I invite you to write up to a 2,000-word post on your own blog about a recently visited particular destination (not journeys in general). Concentrate on any intention you set for your prose. In this case, my intentions for my Four Corners trip included the following:

“Bring a character to…” Invent characters and take them along on the journey, keeping a journal from the main character’s point of view. After the trip, write a novel or novella of the trip putting those characters into the tale (in the vein of Jim Harrison’s The English Major, and inspired by a creative writing assignment to keep a journal for a fictional character).
Pick random titles from poems or short stories as titles for each chapter and let those titles inform the tale.

It doesn’t matter whether you write fiction or non-fiction for this invitation. You can either set your own writing intentions, or use one of the prompts I’ve listed on this page: writing prompts: prose & poetry. (This page is a work in process.) You can also include photos, of course.

Include the link in the comments below by Monday, July 9 at 1:00 p.m. EST. When I write my post in response to this invitation on Tuesday, July 10, I’ll include your links in that post.

This will be an ongoing invitation. Feel free to jump in at any time. 🙂

I hope you’ll join in our community. I look forward to reading your posts!

the ~ wander.essence ~ community

I invite you all to settle in and read a few posts from our wandering community. I promise, you’ll be inspired!

Jude, of Travel Words, wrote a poetic piece about the countryside of Northumberland and the Pennine landscape using wonderfully descriptive language.
- Countryside of Contrasts

Thanks to all of you who wrote prosaic posts following intentions you set for yourself. 🙂

(on journey) chapter 1: on borrowed time {part 1}

wanderessence1025 June 20, 2018

It used to be Mykaela and Emre, gallivanting around the world wherever Emre’s job as Consular Officer in the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs took them – Budapest, Ankara, Tokyo, Yangon, Barcelona, Addis Ababa. Now, Mykaela, after nearly 27 years of marriage, found herself setting out on a road trip from Virginia to the Four Corners area with a Japanese man she barely knew except through a brief exchange on a Tokyo train and an ensuing email correspondence.

*Maryland*

After passing a pink silo with black polka dots at Lucketts along Route 15, they crossed the Potomac River over a blue low-slung bridge at Point of Rocks, Maryland. Mykaela was leaving behind Virginia, and her husband. Not permanently, she told herself, not yet anyway.

Emre, sunk in a deep depression from which he had no will to extricate himself, refused to leave their house in Leesburg, Virginia, where they’d lived for the last ten years. After seventeen years living abroad, they’d returned to northern Virginia in 2008 so Mykaela could look after her father, who was suffering from early stages of Parkinson’s disease in a nursing home in Winchester.

As they crossed the bridge, Moby sang, from Mykaela’s Spotify playlist, “In this darkness, please light my way.” She thought how strange it was that song lyrics often wafted into her life as outer reflections of her inner turmoil.

Her traveling companion, Atsushi, was dressed impeccably for this road trip to the Four Corners area, while she had thrown on the most comfortable stretchy pants and shirt she could find for today’s nine-hour drive to Indiana. It seemed he’d be uncomfortable in those neatly pressed chinos and polo shirt, but who was she to criticize? No matter what, she would seek to understand. After all, he’d lost his son Jiro last May in Grand Junction, Colorado. In what was an apparent hate crime, he had been shot and killed and his body shipped back to Tokyo. His parents had never seen the scene of the crime and hadn’t even had the chance to visit him at Colorado Mesa University where Jiro was attending school, although they had planned to visit the following fall.

When Atsushi found out by email that Mykaela was going to the Four Corners area to visit her daughter and her mother and to seek inspiration for her quilt art, Atsushi had asked if he could accompany her so he could visit Grand Junction, see the scene of the crime, and try to understand the gun culture in America. He practically begged her, as he didn’t feel confident enough to drive on the right side in America. His wife Chiaki couldn’t accompany him because of her office job with a construction company in Tokyo. In her attempt to escape her overwhelming grief, she was immersing herself in long hours at work. Besides, she was afraid to come to a country where gun-toting outlaws seemed to roam the streets. Atsushi told Mykaela that Chiaki was rarely home anymore, spending long hours either in the office or out with her women friends, eating elaborate meals and drinking too much sake. She had become obese, Atsushi said, with what Mykaela thought was baffled disappointment.

As they drove through Maryland, lavender redbuds lined the roadway. Daffodils greeted them at the South Mountain Welcome Center. Mykaela got out at the rest stop to use the bathroom, while Atsushi sat in the car, studying the map. She was embarrassed that this was her second bathroom stop already in only two hours. Coffee always seemed to run right through her in the mornings.

Mykaela felt like they were alighting across the country inside a cozy cocoon. Driving her weathered pine green 1995 Jeep Cherokee, still dependable after all these years, she felt like a rough-and-tumble adventurer. She looked forward to taking the jeep off-road in New Mexico and Arizona.

Atsushi seemed mesmerized by the white barns and rolling hills of western Maryland. Mykaela sought to distract Atsushi from his grief by asking him to look up the state symbols on his phone as they crossed borders. She asked him to find the bird, flower and insect of Maryland. After searching on his phone, Atsushi read aloud that the flower was the black-eyed Susan, the bird the Baltimore oriole, and the insect the Baltimore checkerspot butterfly. Mykaela said there had been a period when she was obsessed with butterfly, bird and flower motifs in her elaborate quilts. Part of her obsession came about after she’d seen the movie Georgia O’Keefe and then had studied and tried to emulate the artist’s evocative flower paintings.

“I’d love to be at a dinner party with either Georgia O’Keefe or someone like Mabel Dodge Luhan,” she told her traveling companion. “She was an art patron who appointed herself the ‘savior of humanity.’ She let artists live in her sprawling Taos, New Mexico lodgings, people like Ansel Adams, O’Keefe, Willa Cather, but then I don’t suppose you know of them.”

“Yes, I know Ansel Adams. He’s the black & white photographer, yes?”

“You know him? Well, he’s not black and white, but many of his photos are.”

Atsushi looked baffled. Mykaela smiled.

“If you could choose anyone in the world, who would you choose as a dinner guest?”

He didn’t hesitate. “John Denver. Besides my favorite songwriter and singer, he also made friendship between East and West. He was photographer too.”

They drove over the Conococheague Creek, a tributary of the Potomac, translated from the Delaware Indian term meaning “many-turns-river.” She spelled it out for Atsushi to write down and challenged him to pronounce it. His English wasn’t bad at all, as he’d learned how to sound out syllables, although sometimes he got the verb sounds wrong.

Often they were quiet on the drive, looking out the window at the stubbled fields and place names: Whitetail Ski Resort, Clear Spring, Indian Springs, Big Pool. Connie Britton from the Nashville TV series cast sang, “Pour Me Something Stronger than Me,” and Mykaela thought that if only she weren’t driving, she’d like a drink, just so she could relax more around Atsushi.

When Emre had served his term as Hungarian consular officer in Tokyo from 2000-2002, Mykaela had fallen in love with Japan and with Asian fabrics. She’d bonded with several Japanese women who also loved textiles. She had gone back to Tokyo to visit her friends in 2016, and they had perused yukata stores, buying the summer cotton kimonos to cut up and use for quilts. One day she’d met her friends in Yokohama, and they’d spent the day shopping for fabrics and eating conveyor belt sushi.

After parting ways with them, she had taken the train back to Sakuragicho Station, where she had to change to the JR Yokohama green line. She wasn’t positive she was on the right train when she got on, so she asked a short balding man sitting directly across from her: “Machida?” He introduced himself as Atsushi. He spoke decent English. He asked her where she was from and what she was doing in Japan. Since he was speaking to her across the train, he asked if he could sit beside her. He was dressed in proper business attire: white shirt, tie, black suit; he informed her he had spent the day at the National Convention Hall at a medical products convention. He was in sales — medical imaging technology — and told Mykaela about technologies for curing cancer such as cryo-ablation — freezing of tumors — and RFA — Radio Frequency Ablation, or burning of tumors. He said both treatments resulted in the tumor dissolving, due to a person’s normal body temperature combined with the treatment. Mykaela wondered why this technology wasn’t saving people’s lives already and why she had never heard of it.

They talked the entire time back to Machida, about all kinds of things, including his love for John Denver. He told her as they neared her stop, with exasperation but humor, that talking to her all that time had exhausted him; he wasn’t used to thinking and speaking so much in English. To Mykaela, he seemed quite natural at it, but she remembered how much she’d had to concentrate to follow even the simplest conversations while living with Emre in his posts around the world. Atsushi said he had clients all over the world from Western and Asian countries, so he was actually used to speaking English, although it still required great concentration.

At one point during the train ride, Atsushi had asked Mykaela for her email address. When she got up to get off the train, he said that the 1-hour train ride back from Yokohama seemed much shorter because of their conversation. She had thought the email exchange might lead to an invitation to his house to meet his family, or to a lunch or dinner meeting, since she’d told him she’d be in the country for two more weeks. But then he said something that annoyed her, “Welcome anytime to Japan. Please contact me if you return.”

She got off the train and grabbed a bite to eat at a basement restaurant that served sushi and yakatori, accompanied by sake and beer. She had never heard from him again during her stay in Japan, but about six months later, he started writing to her by email in his slightly broken English. Sometimes she could tell he used Google translate as the Japanese was written above with the English translation, somewhat disjointed, below.

Mykaela asked Atsushi to get her a pink grapefruit Perrier out of the cooler, and she sipped it as they listened to “An Outlaw State of Mind” while rolling past a runaway truck ramp. Later, as they drove through Allegheny County, the Eagles sang, “Take it Easy,” and she was surprised to hear Atsushi sing along, “Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.” He was a good singer, but that shouldn’t have surprised her as he’d told her on that long-ago train ride that he used to be in a band, called Naname No, which translated, maybe poorly, to “Oblique.”

They passed through Flintstone and some roadkill in the median strip – a mangled deer, a racoon with its dead eyes staring out from black rings. Mountainsides had been cut or blasted away and a herd of black cows grazed in a green hollow. Mykaela’s ears clogged with the change in elevation and she held her nose and puffed out her cheeks to ease the pressure in her ears.

Orange flags signaled roadwork as they drove through Cumberland. Two lanes merged to one and the traffic slowed. Mykaela looked out over all the church spires in Cumberland as they slowly crawled past the town on the highway.

“An old college roommate of mine lives in Cumberland. She became a psychologist,” Mykaela said. “I lived with her for a while and she was always analyzing me. I found it so annoying. We haven’t spoken in years.”

“What if we dropped in to her?” Atsushi asked. “You could connect again. I think always good to keep lines open.”

“I don’t think so,” said Mykaela, who thought he had some nerve suggesting such a thing when he was estranged from his own daughter. In their emails, Atsushi had revealed to Mykaela that he had stopped speaking to his 24-year-old daughter Sayuri because she had moved in with a lanky blonde English teacher from Canada without marrying him. Atsushi had never met the young man but had seen them at Shibuya Crossing one day holding hands.

Mykaela wondered why she and Lilly had dropped out of each other’s orbit. She remembered when all the boys in college thought Lilly so sexy and wild because she often got drunk and danced on bar tables. She was quite exotic, being half Korean, even though she was big-boned.

After the closed lanes opened up, they passed Haystack Mountain and a wind farm on a ridge past Frostburg. A billboard advertised GOD’S ARK OF SAFETY CHURCH. The end of a white barn painted with a four-square quilt pattern of topsy-turvy pine trees caught Mykaela’s eye, and she thought of her own quilting practice and her grandmother who taught her to sew and instilled in her a love of sewing and of textiles in general. She was happiest as a child in the company of her grandmother as her own mother was too self-involved in either her crystals or strange spiritual practices.

As they passed Big Savage Mountain, they crossed over the Eastern Continental Divide at an elevation of 2610 feet. Mykaela explained this marked the watershed to the Atlantic Seaboard. Atsushi at first didn’t understand the word but Mykaela explained that melted snow or rain either flowed down from this high point east into the Atlantic Ocean or west into the Gulf of Mexico. Water from both sides of this divide eventually ended up in the Atlantic. She said later, in Colorado, they’d cross the Great Divide, where, on the far side, water flowed to the west into the Pacific.

More names passed outside the window: Meadow Mountain, Grantsville, Friendsville, and Deep Creek Lake. Rusty vehicles lay strewn all atumble at a hillside junkyard.

Dan Seals sang “God must be a cowboy at heart. He made wide open spaces from the start” as they passed Pig’s Ear Road. Atsushi didn’t know the song, but kept pressing replay to get the words. When John Denver started singing “Rocky Mountain High,” he sang along, serenading either his absent wife, or some long lost love. Maybe he was even serenading Mykaela.

She had never cared for John Denver, but listening to Atsushi sing the lyrics, they felt them take root in her: “Coming home to a place he’d never been before / He left yesterday behind him / You might say he was born again.”

She wondered if she might be born again if she left yesterday behind her. She knew she was on borrowed time, at least until she had a clear sign indicating what she should do with the rest of her life.

western Maryland

*****************

This post is the beginning of a novel I intend to write that is set on a road trip to the Four Corners area. It will likely take me a good year to write this novel at a pace of three pages each weekday. I’ll post the first two rough chapters, broken up into two parts each (four posts in total) on my blog. After that, I’ll continue the novel on my own with hopes of either publishing or self-publishing it.

This is the first draft of what will be many drafts. I’m not satisfied with it and will revise it endlessly, but for now I made a deadline, so here it is! I was inspired to write this after reading Jim Harrison’s fictional road trip novel, The English Major. The setting in my novel will be set in the places of my actual journey, but the characters and the plot are fictional.

Part 2 of Chapter 1 will post on Tuesday, June 26.

I’ve been intrigued by the idea of writing fiction set in travel destinations for some time, as well as the idea of “Bringing a character to …”

“ON JOURNEY” INVITATION: I invite you to write a post on your own blog about the journey itself for a recently visited specific destination. If you don’t have a blog, I invite you to write in the comments. Include the link in the comments below by Tuesday, July 17 at 1:00 p.m. EST. When I write my post in response to this challenge on Wednesday, July 18, I’ll include your links in that post. My next post will be the first half of Chapter 2 of my fictional road trip.

This will be an ongoing invitation, once on the third Wednesday of each month. Feel free to jump in at any time. 🙂

I hope you’ll join in our community. I look forward to reading your posts!

the ~ wander.essence ~ community

I invite you all to settle in and read a few posts from our wandering community. I promise, you’ll be inspired!

Suzanne, of Global Housesitter x2, wrote about a road trip through Yorkshire, through Robin Hood’s stomping ground to places named for monstrous beasts.
- Surrey to Nth Yorkshire Pt 1
Jude, of Travel Words, wrote about her trip to Key West, stopping to see the African Queen along the way, and finding Hemingway’s house, “Shotgun” houses, and buskers in Key West’s square.
- postcard from america
Pit, of Pit’s Fritztown News, wrote of “gettin’ them doggies rolling” on the first day of a very warm road trip.
- RailTrailsRoadTrip 2018 – Day One

Many thanks to all of you who wrote posts about the journey. I’m inspired by all of you!

imperfect lives

wanderessence1025 June 12, 2018

Once a month, like a dutiful sister, Tania visited Karmen at her cluttered apartment above a boarded-up lighting store in Pittsburgh’s West End Village. She found her sister sunk into the living room sofa watching Home Shopping Network with a glass of straight bourbon on the table beside her. The smell of dust, yellowed newspapers and dried flowers was suffocating, and the weight of all that accumulated stuff seemed to diminish the already wispy Karmen. Tania worried her older sister would eventually be squashed under the burden of daily life.

Karmen, wearing a gray sweatshirt that said BEST. AUNT. EVER. muttered a half-hearted hello and mentioned that Luka had called to see if he could stay with her. Of course, she had no space amidst the piles of magazines, stuffed animals, yard ornaments, tattered romance novels, and unopened bills to put anyone up. “Why is he looking for a place to stay?”

“Because his apartment lease ran its course. He never paid a freaking cent on it. You know, I had to pay his rent all six months since I foolishly co-signed. I refused to extend the lease, even if meant he’d be homeless.” She sighed. “He’s never given up his dislike for work.”

“Who likes work? Nobody, that’s who,” said Tania’s sister.

Karmen, once a copywriter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, had lost her job two years back for coming to work drunk. She had such a gift with words, Tania had believed her sister would become a top reporter, but she’d never put forth the effort to advance in her career. And then, after she was discarded by Gerald, her married lover of eight years, her drinking and hoarding expanded to unmanageable proportions.

Once she was fired, she took on a job digging up and moving plants at Phipps Conservatory. She had managed to hold on to the job, but Tania had no idea how she kept her drinking a secret.

Tania sat amidst the disorder and listened to Karmen marvel about the Dale Chihuly glass sculptures at the Phipps, and the new Cuba exhibit and the desert room, which Karmen liked for its prickly residents.

“What else did Luka say?” Tania feigned nonchalance.

“He was gonna get on a plane to Costa Rica. He wants to connect with the land.”

Tania didn’t even want to imagine where her twenty-year-old son got money for a plane ticket. His leaving the country partially explained the boxes Luka had left in Tania’s Washington garage in the middle of last Wednesday night while she was asleep. “What did you tell him?”

“That it was a great idea.”

Karmen was as disconnected from reality as Luka. Tania had tried to give Luka every opportunity in life, but he refused to do anything she suggested, including going to college. He wanted to start his own business designing edible landscapes but had abandoned the project when business didn’t materialize as he had hoped. Full of get-rich-quick schemes and idealism, he didn’t have the patience to wait for things to develop like most things did in life, in a methodical fashion.

She told Karmen she was going to have to cut back her visits because the Postal Museum, where she worked in Washington, wanted her to work more weekend hours. Her two days off per week would now be Tuesdays and Fridays, making it impossible to make the four-hour drive to Pittsburgh. She actually had no change in her schedule but thought she’d like to spend time lingering over her stamp collection and doing yoga instead of focusing her energies on people who didn’t want to be fixed. She felt guilty lying, but she knew she needed to detach from her sister.

Later in the afternoon, Tania made her escape by telling Karmen she had plans to meet her old college gang from University of Pittsburgh for dinner. She left $200 on her sister’s kitchen counter on the way out the door, swearing to herself it would be the last money she’d give her sister. As she drove through the Fort Pitt Tunnel toward the city, she thought of the movie, Perks of Being a Wallflower, where Charlie’s friend Sam stands up through the sunroof of the car. Though Tania would love to let loose in such a wild way, she knew she could never be so carefree.

She was careful and caring, at least that how she thought of herself. After all, she was surrounded by alcoholics and addicts of one kind or another, from her sister to her son. She had always appointed herself to take care of them, but lately she’d been attending Al-Anon meetings, for families of alcoholics, and had learned that her helpful fixing wasn’t beneficial to them, or to her.

She parked her Chevy Volt near the University of Pittsburgh and wandered with nostalgia through “Cathy,” the Cathedral of Learning. She dropped into her favorite of the Nationality Rooms, the Yugoslav Room, where once she had fallen in love with Art History and with her professor Grady, who eventually became her husband and Luka’s father. Luckily no classes were being held in the room, and she sat in one of the student chairs and ran her fingers along the inside edge of the hand-carved Slavonic heart on the chair-back in front of her. It was smooth from nearly 80 years of students sitting and being lectured on various subjects. She remembered her father, long before he was killed in the war in 1991, “notch-carving” such designs with his penknife. She studied the double-headed eagle that symbolized the religious influences of Byzantium and the Western Roman Empire and thought of how the clash of those influences had torn her country apart.

She got up to leave but first ran her fingers along the bronze sculpture of “Post-War Motherhood” — a barefoot mother nursing her child whom she has protected during the long months of war — and remembered how her mother did just that, protecting her and Karmen long after they were children, when they were young women, by finding a way for them to leave Zagreb and immigrate to Pittsburgh a year after the war started and after Tania’s father and her fiancé Josif had both been killed. Tania made the sign of the cross in front of the lace panel of Madonna of Brežje and prayed for peace of mind and for the Virgin to take care of her son and her sister. She knew she could no longer do it.

It was almost 7 p.m by the time she arrived at Fuel & Fuddle to meet her friends. They were already gathered at a table nursing craft beers. A waitress wearing an aqua-jeweled nose ring, mismatched dangly earrings and a “Feminist Killjoy” necklace, took Tania’s order. Aaron asked the waitress about the necklace and she shrugged, “I guess because I’m a feminist, I’m a killjoy.”

Tania ordered a Hitchhiker Trial by Fire beer and Chipotle Polka, mini-potato & cheese stuffed pierogies smothered with adobo sauce and smoked jalapenos. Her friends caught her up on happenings in Pittsburgh and in their lives over dinner.

For dessert, Tania ordered one of her favorite oddities from the menu, a fish-shaped waffle-covered ice cream. Tania always loved Fuel & Fuddle but wondered sometimes at the strange array of items on the menu. The waitress brought everyone at the table fortune cookies. Tania’s said: “The wheel of good fortune is finally turning in your direction!” She hoped so but seriously doubted it.

Another server wore a black tank top that said on the back: No crap on tap. Yet another had her hot pink hair pulled back in a ponytail. It was bustling place, with athletes tossing balls around on wall-mounted TVs. The brick walls displayed painted logos from brewing companies and a chalkboard listed names of brews such as Wowie Zowie and Green Zebra.

Over dessert, her friends spoke about the addicts in their lives. It turned out everyone had one.

“There is no way to win,” Mari said. “If you do the tough love thing, you feel guilty and if you care too much, you feel angry and taken advantage of.”

“We’re all spellbound by our own imperfect lives,” Tania said, “because they’re lives and because they’re ours.” She bit into her fish-shaped ice cream and got a brain freeze. She remembered another time she’d eaten odd-shaped food on the Dragon Pearl in Vietnam after Grady had left her for one of his students. She had run away to Asia for a month to escape her heartbreak, and had left Luka, still a toddler, in Karmen’s care. At dinner, as they floated on Halong Bay amidst pointed karsts, the chef had brought out with a flourish a dragon carved out of pumpkin and a junk carved from a watermelon, and she had flirted with a French boy named Pasquale over cilantro-infused dishes.

Hussein shook his head. “Why are we talking about this? We’re ruining our evening.”

The women protested that this was the most interesting topic they had discussed all night and Tania drifted back to that dinner party on the Vietnamese junk and the French boy who never showed up at her door in the unsurprising end, the tedious denouement.

West End Village

Dale Chihuly sculpture in the desert room at Phipps

The Cuba Exhibit

desert cacti at the Phipps

“Cathy,” the Cathedral of Learning at University of Pittsburgh

Yugoslav Room at Cathedral of Learning

Fuel and Fuddle

Pierogies

Junk on Halong Bay

Junk carved from watermelon

dragon carved from pumpkin

************************

THE PROCESS: This story is pure fiction but is set in several real travel destinations. It originated in a creative writing class at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland where we did the following exercise:

POEM, DREAM, CONFLICT (Exercise from The Portable MFA in Creative Writing (The New York Writer’s Workshop):
1. Select a line from a poem, biography, anything that resonates with you. Next consider a recent (perhaps troubling) dream. Then recall a problem you’re having with another person.
2. Once you have each of these items firmly in mind, begin a fictional account that weaves these three disparate strands together, following the steps below:
  1. POEM: Write one or two paragraphs based on the line of poetry (or prose) you chose. Then skip a line.
  2. DREAM: Write one or two paragraphs using fragments or themes from your dream. (It’s unnecessary to make any explicit reference to the text you used for step one.) Again, skip a line.
  3. CONFLICT: Write one or two paragraphs concerning the conflict you thought of. (Again it’s unnecessary to make any explicit reference to steps one or two.) Skip a line.
  4. PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER. Begin weaving together elements from steps one through three. Follow your impulses. When you write the piece, set it in your destination.

The story came about from a poem by Canadian poet Robyn Sarah, a dream I had while on a junk in Halong Bay, Vietnam, and a conflict I had with my South Korean co-teachers with whom I’d shared a carpool for six months. They had invited me to a meeting where they served up a fish-shaped waffle cone to smooth over their bad news to drop me from the car pool.

I wrote the last part of this piece, the dinner party, from that exercise. My goal here was to write a story set in Pittsburgh, so I added to the short exercise to flush out the characters and to set it in some of the places I visited in Pittsburgh. I couldn’t really flush them out as well as I’d like because I limited myself to 1,500 words. If this ever becomes a novel, I’ll have no such restrictions.

I’ve had in mind for quite some time to write about this character, Tania, who emigrated from the former Yugoslavia during the war, and who was educated in Pittsburgh and moved to Washington to work in the U.S. Postal Museum. My goal is to expand on this character and the story, including a journey to her former home in Zagreb, Croatia (when I am finally able to visit Croatia). The story will need a lot of research and time. I hope it will eventually become a novel.

I’m also quite intrigued by the idea of “Bringing a character to…..” (some travel destination). I’ve wanted to try an exercise such as this for a long time.

“PROSE” INVITATION: I invite you to write up to a 1,500-word post on your own blog about a recently visited particular destination (not journeys in general). Concentrate on any intention you set for your prose. In this case, my final intention for my Pittsburgh trip was to write a 1,500 word fictional short story set in Pittsburgh using all five senses.

It doesn’t matter whether you write fiction or non-fiction for this invitation. You can either set your own writing intentions, or use one of the prompts I’ve listed on this page: writing prompts: prose & poetry. (This page is a work in process.) You can also include photos, of course.

Include the link in the comments below by Monday, June 25 at 1:00 p.m. EST. When I write my post in response to this invitation on Tuesday, June 26, I’ll include your links in that post.

This will be an ongoing invitation. Feel free to jump in at any time. 🙂

I hope you’ll join in our community. I look forward to reading your posts!

the ~ wander.essence ~ community

I invite you all to settle in and read a few posts from our wandering community. I promise, you’ll be inspired!

Ulli, of Urban Liaisons, wrote beautifully about the melancholic Fado, and other Arab influences that make Portugal and Europe what it is today.
- Fado Night Dreams of Lisbon
Jude, of Travel Words, brings us along with her to Chez Ma Cousine in the center of Old Town Genève, where we can observe the unique characters and sights all around.
- Postcard from Genève

Thanks to all of you who wrote prosaic posts following intentions you set for yourself. 🙂

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