One Last Walk with Me, through Autumn

Autumn has arrived in London, and autumn is a season for yellow and red.

Autumn has arrived, and for all the time I’ve spent away from writing about small places over the course of one long year, I am at a loss. There is a great, wide city below me, and there is nothing beyond it.

This is the end of the horizon; the culmination of a great long journey that has taken me two years and three continents to arrive at. After moving onward and outward; after friendships and jobs and monsoons, I am a graduate student. There is absolutely no telling what comes next, not even by the longest long shot, not even with the wildest guess.

Really, there is nothing next; there is only this—this big moment, this long year, this one-eightieth of my life, if we’re being optimistic. Then, a country I may or may not have been to yet, a job I haven’t applied for yet—one that doesn’t even exist yet, perhaps a woman that doesn’t know me yet, perhaps.

The thought fills me purpose. There will be no picking and choosing from small things here in London; I have to take big bites, sweep the whole place until I find a space to call my own and begin building something like the rest of our prodigious species.

I cannot leave you with much; this has to be a hasty, temporary goodbye. But, dear friends, know that it has been my pleasure to share these moments with you.

So come on one last walk with me. I’ll take you into some of my favorite local spots so far, through a rare Indian summer we had a couple weeks back.

I promise, I’ll be quiet.

–Adrian

Our walk begins in my room, with my view.

Our walk ends above London. Thanks for coming along. Until we meet again, my friend.

Dincolo

Dincolo is a Romanian word for indicating something which is over there; not here, but in a place sort of like wherever here is.

A view out into the fields, where power is carried across the expanses by old steel towers.

I’ve only ever heard it used as a location-word. For instance, when one goes to the book store and they don’t find the book they want, the cashier might say, “go dincolo, to the place at the other end of the road, you’ll find it there.” A seven year-old playing hide-and-seek with his mother might, upon sneaking up behind her in the living room, giggle in joy, “Momma! You never searched dincolo in the kitchen very well huh!? I sure got you!”

I first heard it as a proper noun from a gangly gypsy boy sitting a few rows ahead of me on the bus ride to Romania. After the check at the Hungarian border, the driver handed back my passport, one of two which got taken off a bus of 50. The Romanian border guards always take American passports, out of curiosity; maybe just to get a taste of Dincolo, the proper noun. The Gypsy smiled my way and said,

“Ah, so you’re from Dincolo.”

“Guess so.”

“And he speaks Romanian too! Wow!”

I nodded and noticed chauffer watching me with perked eyebrows before turning and heading back to the front. I put my earphones on and hoped no one else would ask about what America’s like. A chubby young man with a goatee sitting in the other row did, making me pause my music during the best part of Where is My Mind. I rattled off that I was from Detroit, continued that I was born in Romania, smiled, and in that universally recognizable gesture of downcast eyes and feigned preoccupation which teenagers use to demonstrate how they don’t want to talk to you, put my earphones back in.

The plumpest, juiciest and most sundrenched peaches in the world can be found at Grandma's house. They taste like the sunshine.

Seven days pass, and I’ve heard the word a couple more times, not thinking much about it. On my last day, I walk into this pharmacy to buy some medicine for my ailing stomach. The place is small, about half the size of a studio apartment, empty and dimly lit by two flickering halogen tubes. The cashier strolls in and asks if she can help. I sheepishly hand over the list of medicine my doctor scribbled on a piece of scrap paper and ask if she can help me find them.

After consulting what I assume was her computer database, she asks:

“How small is the baby?”

“The baby?”

“Yes, this is medicine for infants.”

“I’m sorry, I really don’t know. Whatever it says on the sheet I guess.” It would take me a while to figure out that baby-medicine, used to populate newborns’ stomachs with healthy bacteria, was just what I needed. Embarrassed anyway, I offered an explanation:

“It’s not for my baby. I’ve got a friend…”

“Oh, so you are taking it Dincolo…”

She looked up at me, an expression on her face which I could quite place; a combination of understanding, introspection and regret.

Behind my grandparents' country home, kids walk down a hill upon which wine grapes once grew. The vinyards have been mostly bought up by Italian land speculators now.

“Dincolo?”

“You know? Out there?”

Two things struck me: First, she thought I was buying the medicine to export it illegally to Europe, as one finds it cheaper in Romania. Second, Dincolo does not exactly mean elsewhere, it means anywhere but here.

With apples this juicy, why would anyone ever want to leave?

Which says a lot about Romanians I guess: downcast, mildly self-loathing, outward looking. They grab what social artifacts they can and incorporate them hastily, making Eastern Europe (or at least the slice thereof in which I was born) a patchwork hovel of cultural flotsam from the West. Those lucky enough to catch a piece might have the luck of a change in the currents; they might hang on, half drowning all the way to Italy or Germany or—God, America—to do who knows what. Nanny, probably.

Does this apply in even the remotest sense to the majority of Romanians? Am I only referring to a minority, not indicative of any sort of underlying social malaise? I can’t pretend to know, but it’s what I saw in that moment, in her half-curious eyes.

A back alley in the big city, as seen in the reflection of the apartment window. The streets are usually quiet, as people tend to keep to themselves.

So what causes Romanians to look upon their own soil thusly? Why look outward so desperately as to categorize entire landmasses as Dincolo with a capital D?

Perhaps it’s that in Romania, there’s so very little left. Communism eliminated the creators; the poets and artists, the landowners and producers, the thinkers and dreamers and risk-takers. It left in its wake skittish sheep, dreaming of elsewhere. It destroyed two generations’ trust in their ability to influence the outcome of their world. It created a people who would rather shrug and say so it goes than take up arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them. That certainly explains the only sport in which Romania has excelled post-1989: complaining that no matter what happens, the government will always be corrupt and bankers will always rule the world.

And that’s what Western Europe has yet to understand about the East; that’s why there can never be real cooperation between the two sides of the lingering Curtain. Pump in all the development funds that you want; you’ll never manufacture dreamers. Build all the infrastructure you can, you’ll never construct a single optimist. As for builders and creators; forget those entirely—they cannot be bought with Euros or Pounds or Dollars.

Great people are like lush forests. They only grow in the nutritious soil composed by those which have come before. Once that’s burned away, the giant old trees cannot be replanted in their native soil. They only return after the rich loam which sustains life appears again. Generations pass. Perhaps that is why those sprouts of human potential seek so desperately to go elsewhere, to darker soil.

As for me, well, that’s another story so don’t ask.

In Romanian, dincolo is pronounced deen-kò-lò, with short Os.

A country evening.

To Matt “Che” M., Sam “Smegs” P., and Matthew “Horsey” H.

Che, Smegs and Horsey! Sam, sorry for stealing your old profile picture, but to be fair, it was me behind the camera.

Corsica and a Tragically Disabled Camel

Gentlemen, I miss you all dearly. I miss our walks and talks, and I long for our two Euro cañas over which we shared laughs and traded insults.

Two years ago, almost to the day, we entered a cathedral in Northern Spain after having trekked a good part of the Camino de Santiago together. What a day! To be greeted with that final stamp on our humble little passports!

My first glance of what I thought would be a Mediterranean paradise in Calenzana, the beginning of the GR20

This year, I flaunted that warm memory for a trail quite unlike the Camino. This route, far from being a hike among friends through quaint villages and scenic countryside, greeted me with more than a few unpleasant twists.

To start, there were no warm meals (at least affordable ones), no marvelously intoxicated evenings (at least affordable ones), and certainly no friends like you (…)

Getting up the Cirque de Solitude with a 20 kilo backpack on vertical rocks with a chain is FUN!

To pitch a tent cost six Euros. A Coke cost five. A warm meal would range between 15 and 20, and rarely consisted of anything more than pasta with lukewarm tomato paste, maybe a potato.

The second day of hiking, full of sunshine and optimism, looking toward the highest peaks in Corsica

The point being that the GR20 is a tourist trap, through and through. Ubertrekkers hike 24 kilometer days with their titanium poles, trying to being their personal records. Passing them, you’ll see Swiss families riding up in their Euro-Vans to complete one étape and then find a crowded “white sand” beach to swim at, if only they could see the sand between all the Gucci blankets. At bergeries (mountain huts), the only places where you’re allowed to legally pitch tents, gardiniers send you back out in the rain because you’re not allowed to eat your own damned food in the communal kitchens.

A plane flies over the Cirque de Solitude.

Corsica itself is beautiful, but don’t kid yourself: the GR20 provides the hiker—and I suspect even the ubertrekker—with no sense of achievement upon completion. It’s long and difficult, and yeah, I finished it in 11 days instead of 16 because I’m a badass, but so what? I feel only a little better than if I would’ve gone to the gym to run 180km on an inclined treadmill. Now, if you dropped the temperature in that gym to about 10 degrees Celsius, made the treadmill out of slippery rocks, and dumped cold water on me occasionally for how much I got rained on, you’d be right on par with the trail itself; no need to deal with some bougey French woman’s bitching…

The clouds rolling in yet again in the early morning.

…which brings me to why I canceled this trip in the first place. I did actually end up meeting two kind Italian brothers on one of my last days there. Lazy ones they were, and just my type. We detested the trail together; we laughed in the face of the daily rush, woke up at 8:00 and rarely left camp before 10:00. Arriving at our destination around 18:00 and after 3-hour lunch breaks, we were usually the last people to set up our tents. One fine day I placed my shelter next to a woman whom I’ve since dubbed Princess.

You might be able to tell that the wind on this hill crest was a bit rough.

As I finished pitching my humble little sanctuary on the only flat ground available at that particular bergerie, a smiling French woman wearing lipstick came my way and began clucking at me en Francais. By this stage, my motivation to demonstrate how open-minded and accommodating to French culture I was had been entirely exhausted. I asked her in English to address me in my native tongue. She smiled, and with that same shy “I don’t want to look like I’m telling you to fuck off but fuck off” smile, asked me if I wouldn’t move my tent away from hers. I asked why, to which she responded that “it’s a matter of privacy.”

The fifth day, looking out toward the sea many miles away.

To which I responded, in English, and in these exact words. “I’m sorry ma’am, thank you so much for your valuable opinion… and my apologies for struggling to find the proper words in French… but I’m not entirely sure that I give a shit.”

A view from the ridge where I met my Italian friends.

And in seeing quite how adamantly I did not care, she left with what could only be described as a curtsey of the eyes and another forced smile. That one interaction, two days before the end of the trail, convinced me to double-up the next day and reach the finish-line early, if only to leave that cramped little shit of an island before I lost my temper and went on a smoked ham-fueled rampage. I’d already stepped on a nail, hiked in freezing rain at 2,100 meters, and been scowled at like a feral dog by almost ever bergerie tenant along the trail. In spite of everything, that princess was the straw that broke this camel’s back.

Slept under this tree when I just didn't feel like walking the extra two kilometers to the next Bergerie.

I told the story to the Italian brothers, my new friends, ending it with the old saying about straws and camels. The following conversation ensued, and it’s largely in thanks to them that I left Corsica with a wide grin on my face just two days later:

A Sailboat in Santa Giulia harbor, after I woke up from a good night alone out under the stars.

“How are camels related to this?” Francesco asked.

“I don’t know, they’re pack animals…” I replied.

“So the saying is Arabic?”

“Arabs aren’t the only people that have camels you know…”

“Yes, but Americans definitely don’t, unless you’re talking about zoos, and then they probably don’t use those camels to pack straw.”

From the night I slept on the beach by the airport, at least the sun sent a parting gift my way. It ended up being a cold night, I needed a toasty little fire made of driftwood to keep me warm.

“No they don’t, but take the camel as a metaphor for me, and the straw as a metaphor for that principessa by the tent. The straw’s relatively insignificant, right? But now I want to leave, so even though it was small, the inspiration it provided had a big effect. Get it?”

The last day, ready to escape.

“So you mean it’s like the drop that spilled over the water?”

“Yes but that’s much less dramatic isn’t it?”

“I don’t know, I mean, the result is pretty big when you compare it to the cause.”

“What? A tiny bit of spilled water is more important to you than the imminent paralyzing of a half-ton animal?”

“No, but it gets the message across just as well don’t you think?”

At a beach near Porto Vecchio, somebody let wet sand slip between their fingers and made a mud castle.

“Absolutely not! You wipe water away with a towel or something… you can’t just wipe way a handicapped camel.”

“So Corsica is a handicapped camel for you?”

“Definitely.”

“I see. You Americans are funny.”

“And you Italians are hairy.”

The famous, multifunctional TFX-9.

And with that I’ll try and forget about my nasty little half-vacation. There is one other story I want to tell, a good one, where nice things happened and I learned a lot of lessons about life and the meaning of everything, but I’ll save that for another time. For now, I’m glad to be back in Geneva, with its clean streets and stuffy people.

At least they’re not Corsican mountain folk.

Flying back over the alps, I wondered for a brief minute why I ever left.

The Next Month

A little dock where I like to sit on sunny days and read.

Dear friends,

I’m coming up on my last few days here in Geneva, looking forward to an extended vacation in Corsica.

The first third of the trek, highlighted on the map I'll be using.

My goal is to finish what is considered Europe’s most difficult overland trek, the GR20. The route begins in Calenzana, heads up around Monte Cinto, the island’s highest peak at 2,700 meters, pushes south across the central mountain range and after 180 kilometers, ends in Conca.

The high passes and the border with Southern Corsica

Food and water will be scarce but accessible, and I have a purifier. Internet should be nonexistent, but then again, that’s what I said when I went to the Spiti Valley. I ended up watching clips from English soccer matches with Buddhist monks on their smart phones.

The end of the route in Conca, the beginning of what I hope will be13 days' worth of hitchhiking. Every guide I've read says Corsica is the best territory in Europe for catching ride.

Anyway, the whole thing should take about 15 days, which gives me another 13 to do with as I please. So for a good long time, you’ll find me bumming around one beach or another, studying my Hindi and hitchhiking.

Why did this Swiss erect a fountain of a baby choking a goose right in front of our apartment? Because Goose-Choking is the national sport, of course. That's how they make all that Swiss Foie Gras.

Funny, I’m writing this in Geneva, and if I open the window it’s cold enough so that I can see my own breath. From my friend’s apartment you can usually get a good view of Mt. Blanc and the Jet d’Eau. Hard rain’s falling, so the tallest mountain in Europe is shrouded in cloud and the 460 foot high fountain seems redundant.

There ya go. Tallest peak in Europe at 4,808 meters (15,774 ft)

That’s one thing that always gets me about Switzerland; it’s perplexing that people aren’t shouting with orgasmic joy that money seems to rain down and fall into the gutters here. I mean, holy shit; free health care, excellent public transportation, jets of water that pump out 7,000 liters of water into the air at 200 km/h under a sky that’s absolutely pissing. Bloody minimum wages near $4,000 a month. Not one goddamn smile in sight—the Swiss just walk everywhere with a steely purpose; the Turks passively smoke sheeshas and eat schawarma in their innumerable kebab stands. I swear this country has so much money because they tax smiling.

The Jet d'Eau, a monument to just how much money this place has rocketing out of its pasty white ass.

Anyway, once I’m done in Corsica it’s back to Geneva for me, and then London. Of course, I’ll have a few things to say about my new home but I’m apprehensive about it. I wonder if and when I’ll be able to fall in love there, with that London and its expensive Indian food. That’s the thing with writing about cities in developed countries; the wrinkles where all the interesting stories live have been ironed out; the cracks paved over.

Ah, to be back in Europe.

This is pretty much as bad as the pollution in Lake Geneva gets. One stainless-steel shopping cart. Don't know how it got there, but at least it's not rusting, right?

Chase

After my job ended and before I left DC, I gave some thought to the slow weeks in between.

When I was little, I thought that all the congressmen met inside the rotunda, and the President worked in that little tower below the statue.

In the mornings I used to pass the rotunda of the Capitol building, wondering about all those suits and skirts breaking a sweat on their way to various meetings. Their faces always had a kind of hardness to them, like all faces here. They were exceptionally hard to snap. Their wide eyes, always focused forward, gave off this concrete determination that I never found out how to get past.

The Washington Monument is the only object in DC which is allowd to be taller than the Capitol.

By afternoon, I’d linger on the empty avenues. Most people were at work in the forest of eight-story buildings along K-street. Some black men wearing baseball caps rode by on bicycles; young people with excellent diction and animated hands met one-another at coffee shops just like the one in which I’m currently sitting. Their late-lunch chats invariably fluttered around the subjects of politics or employment.

BROBAMA!! Woooooooo!!! <3 U BRO!

Every night I’d watch the city start drinking itself into a dreamless slumber. Those determined eyes stayed wide; they prowled the bars, popped their collars, put on slightly trimmer, more revealing versions of the clothes they wore earlier that day.

So that’s why she hit me so hard.

More than any other place I have ever seen, the Lincoln Memorial is the meeting place of nations. Chinese tourists ask Peruvian dads to snap photos of them; Indians bobble around haughty French hens. Texans gawk at the Capitol building in the distance. None of them are pictured here.

***
The first thing I ever said to her was, excuse me miss—hope I’m not bothering—do you know any places around here that are hiring? That was about a month ago.

Now, here we were in the middle of another late night at Sova.

“You never meant to ask me about finding work, did you?”

I grinned and avoided her eyes for a bit. She could produce this searching look you don’t find in DC. Not focused on any goal other than the person directly in front of her; it was probably why I stood around for twenty minutes trying to think up a conversation after she got off work that night.

“Nope!” I thought she might as well know the truth; I was leaving in a week anyway. I mean, I am leaving DC in a week.

The famous Washington Hotel, one block from the White House. Beckies mill out front, waiting to be shuffled into taxis with smartly dressed drivers.

“’Course I never cared about finding jobs. You remember how I kept walking in and out of that room talking with my friend on the phone?”

“Yeah?”

“I was just making sure you were still sitting there, thinking about how I’d start something with you. You had this openness to you, like you wanted to find someone to talk with.”

“I did, or at least I wanted to; I’m glad you caught it. Nobody here ever sits down and just starts talking to me, it’s like they’re all either too busy or too worried about bothering me from whatever important thing it looks like I’m doing. That’s DC for you.” She looked down.

“I guess it is.” I took a sip from my second or third mint julep. We’d all lost count of drinks hours ago. That’s why 2:00 AM had somehow slipped through our fingers, and now the bar staff was closing shop. Last call.

Even the famous K Street has a vanishing point.

A hoot went up “Bartender, bartender, where’s mine!?” Phil, the guitarist from that night’s bluegrass performance, somehow fit in one last round and flew into a hollering rendition of Yellow Submarine. Everyone but Chase and I sang along.

Chase. Like a game of tag, or a bank. We had to shuffle our barstools close in order to hear each other over the singing.

Twenty-four hour news networks would be so much more tolerable if politicans still dressed like that.

“You know, I knew this would happen.”

“What?” …sky of blue/SKY OF BLUE! and sea of green/SEA OF GREEN!…

I laughed, and she put a free hand on my knee, half worried about what I’d say next. “I swear Chase, I swear, I’m not trying to make a play here, but I had a feeling I would meet you eventually.”

“Oh come on Adrian! What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” I’d been trying to push our conversation in this direction for the whole night. Her boyfriend seemed like an alright fellow, so we had to talk in vagaries.

They's my boys!

“It means I knew you had to be possible, and I’m so glad that you are. You have no idea.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. I mean come on, you said it yourself: ‘nobody sits down next to me in this city.’ There you go! I sat down next to you and we talked for two hours, and then again, and again. And you have your life, and I have mine, but damnit, Chase, you exist! It’s just good to know that once in a blue moon, I can feel that from the very beginning with someone.” …WE ALL LIVE IN A…

“Feel what? Are you talking about like with that last girl? Jane and the Crane?” I laughed at her steadily improving memory of my past relationships.

Construction is rampant all along K street. Cranes shoot up like weeds, helping fill the DC sky with ever more eight storey sky-reflectors.

“Chase. You’re going to a festival full of naked hippies running around in the middle of the desert blazed out of their minds for days on end, until finally they light a giant wooden man on fire and dance around the embers.” She smiled the whole time, but now she burst out laughing and slapped my knee hard.

“Adrian! Are you saying… wait, let me get my balance here. Did I just hear that I’m your type?”

“Come on Chase, you know you’re more than my type.” …A YELLOW SUBMARINE, YELLOW SUB…

“Well thanks mister ‘I’m-always-leaving, I-can’t-fall-for-anyone.’ I don’t know whether to be flattered or worried.”

“Don’t be either. It doesn’t matter. I’m just happy that somebody caught my eye and I called it right for once. And don’t start getting all judgmental on me; you’re leaving for California aren’t you? San Francisco down below the fog? Avocados and Berkeley; some jazz and salt water and high rents?” She sipped a strong gin and tonic, I continued.

How the city sees itself.

“Come on, we’re all transients here. That’s what this city is about; that’s what all capital cities are about. People come in and they find what they want, and then they move on. I don’t know, it seems to me that if they stay around, it all ends up losing the magic, or just gets to you, or something. Anyway, everything’s possible in places like this. I guess in a way you’re a lot like this place.”

…as we live a life of ease/LIFE OF EASE…

“You’re going to start monologuing again aren’t you?” she said, eyes narrowed above a warm smile.

“Ha! You read it, and that’s why we’re sitting here having this conversation!” I took her hand and didn’t let myself linger there too long.

“Anyway, I was saying that you’re a lot like this place, right? You know, like something temporary, something that passes through your life, and you’re happy it was there. You can never really keep it, you can’t hold on to it, you just let it show you what you want, and say your thanks that you got to be in its presence for a little while a little longer than you thought you’d be. You come back someday when you’re ready, and even then you can’t ever possess it; and if your energy jives with it and you try and stay, it’ll consume you. You love it from afar to stay sane, unless you want to walk around with one of those stony looks plastered to your face for the rest of eternity; that or a totally broken heart. You move forward, you get past it, you find out what you want and pursue it somewhere else. This city’s is a place to learn; this is life’s playground, or chess board, or whatever you want to call it. I mean, I’m not saying you’re a game-board.” I looked into my now empty glass and tilted an ice cube into my mouth.

“Hum. I think I’m getting a little off topic. Anyway, does any of that make sense to you?”

And behold! In DC, even the value and dignity of labor has been acknowledged! Here's the statue to prove it. I guess we can go ahead and take away their bargaining rights now.

She turned to applaud the end of Yellow Submarine, and in a second snapped her head back. Her hair whipped around and fell over her shoulder, and she let out a breathless laugh.

“No… Adrian, it makes no sense at all.”

She took my hand, put down her drink, and we shuffled around a few times to the first lines of Wagon Wheel. We sat back down after the first refrain, too exhausted or tipsy to do much more spinning.

Golden horses preside over statues of the Nation's keepers.

“Huh.”

I nibbled on one last little mint leaf thinking I’d never really get to tell her how nice it was that I’d found what I wanted again, and oddly enough, how happy I was to be leaving just as that happened.

I wondered about myself for a minute. In the context of leaving this city and this girl—both beyond my reach—explanations were useless. I ultimately think she knew what I was getting at, though I did a shoddy job of getting there. So it goes.

She picked up her phone and sent a message. Phil packed up his guitar. Can you miss something and be happy you’re leaving it at the same time, even while you’re still there?

Some moments passed and we caught our breaths. Chase put a friendly hand on my shoulder.

“You know, I’m sad you’re going.”

“Huh. Me too, actually.” I lied.

Bye-bye Beltway.

The Lincoln Memorial stairway.