Out in Places Like Wyoming [3]

Cowboy Culture

Stefan is in the final year of his MFA program at Syracuse, for which he is completing a senior project and writing a thesis. The project is a body of work, newly made art in his case. And the gist of the thesis is that the artist is constructing an artist's statement about that work. It can be fairly difficult to articulate what a body of work is intended to do, to provide theoretical underpinnings, and to explain methods. Even for representational art, paintings of landscapes, say, or portraits, the artist must translate layered emotions and impulses, as well as conceptual complexities, into common language, while trying to avoid reducing the work to over-simplification. It is no wonder we often find these statements difficult to understand.

But Stefan is not representational; he is an abstract painter.  The task of making an abstract artist's statement that will pass muster for a master's thesis has to be convincing as well.

When Stefan first suggested the trip to Wyoming, he noted that at some point he became aware of the family connections inherent in his paintings. His current work is suffused with these connections, and he wanted to find more, to research, if you will, by learning about a grandfather he had never met and by visiting places he had heard about but never seen, principally the old Zoller family stomping grounds out in Wyoming.

A few months later, I showed him some notebooks and drawings his grandfather had done as a young man in Wyoming, material that I had been keeping in a box. Stefan's grandfather had a long history in Wyoming and Colorado.  He was born in Boulder, Colorado, but raised principally in Cheyenne.  He had not only been a student at the University of Wyoming, where he met my mother, but he had also returned there  to teach Engineering after his war service.

From those years, what few things of his remain include a number of schematic drawings and a number of topographical elevations from his time as a surveyor. Stefan was excited by the prospect of incorporating elements of these line drawings and mathematical equations into his work. His first efforts clearly embodied the connections he was hoping for in a way that made representational explanations unnecessary and insufficient.

[See more at   stefanzoller.com  under 2015]

The trip to Wyoming would provide a different kind of material for this on-going project that I will characterize as narrative (mine, mostly), environmental (landscape and geography), and informational.

Once we arrived, the environmental and narrative elements of this material began to unfold.  We needed to be a little more intentional about gathering information, so we decided to spend the first day at the University to see what we could find concerning my father and his work there.

As we did all of our days on site, we got up early to see the sunrise. But there was no sun on the horizon, no long and haunting shadows.  It rained off and on the entire day.  Of Wyoming's three days of annual rainfall, we got two. I made this comment to our host, the rancher, who good-naturedly responded with a corrective about annual rainfall in eastern Wyoming. I'm still not sure whether he knew I was joking.

About 9:30, after a breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast, we headed into Laramie.

Following a city map we drove onto campus and found the Engineering building without any trouble. It is situated next to the Geology Building,where we decided to begin our search for information. I had assumed any records related to surveying would be housed there. Everywhere we went we found people eager to help us.  But information was not forthcoming. We learned two things at the Geology Building: that the surveying records it held pertained to the Wyoming Geological Survey and not to the US Geological Survey. No mention of J. Harold Zoller appeared in the state data base.

The other thing we learned is that there is a rock type called wyomingite. A box of samples sat on the counter for visitors to examine or to take, which I did.

Our tour of the Engineering Building had similar results.  We found people eager to help, but literally no mention of my father. There was considerable information available about the recent era in UWyo engineering but almost nothing of any help prior to the modern era.  The modern era apparently began in the 1970s. The Zollers moved from Wyoming in 1958.

But while the visit yielded no immediate information about my father, it did provide, via a cornerstone to the Engineering Building, a commentary on the nature of engineering, circa 1926, in the form of a cornerstone. The saying advances an aggressive posture toward the human struggle with the environment. We found evidence of that struggle everywhere.

The engineering folks sent us to the University archives, located on the top floor of the University art museum that stands within sight of the football stadium.  I remember that stadium, or a smaller version of it, from my early years. The stadium is three or four blocks from the house we lived in on Custer Street.  On occasion we were taken to the game on Saturday when my parents went.  They sat on the "home side" of the field with the other Cowboy fans. We boys sat for free on the small bleachers in the north end zone, in what was known as the "knot-hole" section. When the home team scored, the ROTC cadets fired a howitzer in the south end zone and a student dressed like a cowboy rode a brown and white spotted horse around the field, whooping and waving his hat. At the end of the game my parents collected us to go home.

On game days when we couldn't attend, we could tell by the noise of the crowd and by the boom of the howitzer just how well the home team was doing.

The archives proved just as disappointing as our endeavors in the engineering building had been. Yearbooks from the years my father taught at the University did not even carry pictures of faculty, so even that baseline source proved unhelpful. We spent a number of fruitless hours sorting through a box of papers and folders that "might" hold a clue, but found none.

When we reached the bottom of the box the archive staff had brought us, we decided to stop the search.  Outside it was raining harder.  We had lunch, visited a University themed store, and then headed back to the ranch.  On the way we stopped at the Wyoming Territorial Prison, which had once housed Butch Cassidy and other, less famous inmates. We learned that the territorial penal system was both harsh and, often, unfair. Not all deserved the punishments they were given, and few were as lucky as the young man below, who was free to leave after he had taken the self-guided tour.

Back at the ranch we spent the rest of the afternoon working. Stefan set up his water-color kit and began painting. I reviewed the day in my journal.  We hadn't made the information breakthrough we had been hoping for.  We learned what we already knew: it is tough for any individual to leave evidence of his journey. What we would hope now to gain would have to come from the environment itself.

On the other hand,  we had seen where Butch Cassidy had done time to pay for some of his crimes.  We were certainly starting to learn about cowboy culture.

Out in Places Like Wyoming [2]

360 Degree Horizon

Ten miles west of Laramie on highway 130 we turned left onto Brubaker Lane.  If your frame of reference is British, where "lane" refers to "a narrow way between hedges, walls, buildings," or if you live east of the Mississippi as we do and imagine lanes to be tree-lined country byways, you would have shot past Brubaker Lane without slowing.

But ten miles west of Laramie on highway 130 a little sign points left, so we turned. Brubaker Lane is a hard-packed red-dirt road that heads in a straight line toward the horizon, its rain-damped surface pounded into washboard by truck tires. Driving slowly in our small Hyunai rental, we were impressed with clear, flat line of the horizon and with the ruler-straight road that led toward it.

Five miles down this lane, according to our directions, we would find number 445, our ranch destination. It did not seem likely to us that we would find 444 addresses -- buildings, lanes, driveways, or turn-outs -- prior to 445. Clearly our eastern frame of reference wouldn't work here.

As we drove slowly, bouncing along the miles of ribs, what was immediately impressive to us was the magnitude, the scope, the abundance of both land and sky. In every direction, the land simply opened itself; it both drew us in and filled us up. Perhaps it was our eastern frame of reference again, where horizons are usually close and broken by hills and trees.

How can one be here and not stop to stare?

We did a lot of stopping and staring in those few days.  And snapping photographs. We had come in part to see the landscape, which the photographs can preserve after a fashion; but being on the open plains demands more than seeing.

In terms of Stefan's initial objectives for traveling with me to Wyoming -- to discover family connections -- these first views and impressions were more than confirmation that we were on the right track.  For him it was all discovery and first impressions. For me, it was rediscovery and affirmation.  It has occurred to me that my ability to find beauty in austere places and seasons may come from here.

Emptiness, which is part of this experience, is largely an illusion. 

In this environment, you find your eyes distinguish things that in other circumstances you would tend to overlook. It is in part the overwhelming dominance of the horizontal, in part the interplay between the expanse of sky and the expanse of land, in part the subtle complexity of colors, in part the constant restlessness of light.

It is also the prominence of objects that in other settings do not necessarily call attention to themselves, that are perhaps muted, insignificant or unremarkable.  Or maybe just harmoniously inconspicuous.

 

Once you see it, a horse grazing at sunrise, for example, is more than horse and pasture: it is an affirmation. 

Barren though it may appear, this is not a desolate, barren landscape in the way that, say, an urban street or a blighted neighborhood can be desolate.  Take fences as an example.  Wooden anchoring posts along a barbed-wire-and-steel-post fence have a certain gravity; they have a visual purpose as well as a practical, physical one, a meaning that is both obvious and elusive.

They are, at the very least, a reminder of human attempts to tame and domesticate and control the high plains.In places those attempts appear reasonably successful.  In other place, less so.

One of the conclusions I drew quite quickly is this: What appears to undifferentiated flatness is to some degree just a matter of distance -- the further your vantage point, the flatter the landscape.

What is, in fact, true, is that the landscape has plenty of ups and down, plenty of undulation. But to see it requires proximity; moving close to the ground changes one's illusion about what is barren and merely flat.

Even before we reached our cabin at 445 Brubaker Lane, we knew our journey was a success. To see this landscape is to be inspired.  To be there, to be in it is to be possessed, another dimension entirely.  Then you turn around for a look.  From the other end of that five mile drive, the view back is something else altogether.

Out in Places Like Wyoming

Coming in out of the rain

It had been raining in Wyoming and more rain was forecast. Through the little windows of the plane even as we descended in sunshine for landing, our view was of clouds, irregular and continuous.  Here and there the clouds opened and we glimpsed the broad, nearly flat, immense plains. Then as if by slight of hand we dropped and the clouds were above us.  Below, the grasslands, the black cattle, the pronghorn we call antelope, the long straight fences, and we were settling onto the runway of the Laramie Regional Airport. Drops of rainwater streaked the windows, blurring the view as we slowed, braking hard, and taxied what seemed like miles back to the small group of small buildings that comprise the terminal.

The trip to Wyoming, to Laramie, my home town, had been my son Stefan's idea. He had expressed his interest early in the year and proposed that he and I do a tour of places he had never seen. Laramie is background that figures into much of my extended family narrative. My parents were both UW graduates, and UW is where my father taught after he returned from the Pacific theater after the war. Three of my four brothers and I are Wyomingites by birth. The landscape is part of our DNA, as it were.

Still, I confess to being a bit surprised to actually walk out of that little airport in Laramie into the wind, toward our rental car.

The wind is different here, as strange as that may sound.  As is the sky.  Even overcast with rain clouds the Wyoming sky is impressive.

Traveling to Wyoming is chancy near the end of October. The rain that had been forecast for our first full day, Thursday, could be, might be, should probably actually turn out to be snow. The woman at the Hertz counter said as much. She wanted to know if we wanted to upgrade our rental to a 4-wheel drive jeep. The rancher from whom we were renting a little cabin said, "we are overdue."

Originally we thought to come in August, before the school year started. But that plan had not worked out, so we settled on the third week of October, which we figured ought to allow us to see what we wanted to see before winter settled in.

Because it was early afternoon and because we had not eaten since very early in the morning, Eastern Standard Time, we decided to drive into Laramie to look around, get a feel for the town, eat lunch, before driving out onto the high plains where Stefan had booked us a cabin on a working cattle ranch.

So we did that.

I had picked up a street map at the airport, but once we crossed the bridge (the viaduct) over the railroad tracks on the western edge of town, the streets opened up for me pretty much as I had remembered them, even though we moved to the east coast when I was nine.

We followed Third Street for a few blocks and then turned East onto Grand Avenue, which still appears to be the main thoroughfare through town. Like most towns in "the west" Laramie was laid out in a grid, with streets running north-south or east-west. Follow Grand Avenue east and you eventually wind up in Cheyenne, after climbing through the Laramie mountain range and crossing lots of prairie, of course.  Follow it west and you wind up in the rail yards. Look to the horizon at that point and you can see the Snowy Range in the Medicine Bow National Forest some fifty miles away.

North of Grand Avenue from about 10th Street on is the University.  Another nine blocks down Grand and three or four blocks south is the street I knew as a kid, where the house my father built is located.  We found it easily and then found the park where my brothers and friends and I played and then drove by the school we all attended during our first school years. Because it was still raining sporadically, we decided to explore on foot another day.  Besides we were starved.  So we went to lunch and then drove out to the ranch, fifteen miles west of town, across the grasslands.

When we got out of the car, finally, all my senses told me we were back in Wyoming -- the wind, the smell of sage, the sounds of cattle a half-mile away, the visceral sense of distances, and the incredible play of light everywhere.

Speaking Poems

Speaking Poems

While I have no clear exit strategy and am not working with a fixed timetable, it is safe to say that I am in the last phase of my teaching career.  This phase may last for some years or I might get a late career burst of energy and want to keep going.  I just don't know. But what I can say for certain is that the 40 years I have spent teaching and the nearly 50 practicing the craft of poetry now affords me the luxury of taking the long view back toward what has transpired during that half century.

One of the sure things that has emerged as I consider where I have been and what made me who I am is that I owe a great deal to people who served as teachers and mentors to me, especially to people from my own father's generation. Poets don't generally have patron saints; but if we did, William Stafford would make a strong candidate.

I don't know where I first encountered William Stafford although it was likely during my graduate school years in San Francisco in the early 1970's, and it likely involved his poem "Traveling Through the Dark." That poem, much anthologized and much loved, reappears from time to time as if it were an answer to questions I had been harboring. It is one of a handful of poems by a handful of contemporary American poets that crosses nearly all the barriers posed by "modern poetry"; it works almost as well for those who do not often read poetry as it does for people like me.

In "Traveling Through the Dark" the narrator finds himself miles from town or from human habitation, faced with a minor crisis: a doe, recently struck and killed, is obstructing one lane of the narrow canyon road Stafford has been navigating. The car that hit the deer is gone.To one side the canyon wall rises sharply; to the other side, a precipice. The road itself, one imagines, hangs precariously on the canyon wall.

The narrator, perhaps Stafford himself, can just drive around the deer, so he might have kept going himself. Instead, knowing the carcass poses a problem to the next driver, he gets out of the car to appraise his dilemma, only to discover that the doe is pregnant and the unborn faun has apparently survived the collision that killed its mother.

Those are our details. What should he do?


As readers discover so often while reading his poems, Stafford puts his finger on exactly the point where our certainties are most vulnerable.

"I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;/ around our group I could hear the wilderness listen," he writes. "I thought hard for us all -- my only swerving --,/ then pushed her over the edge into the river."

The temptation for readers, frequently, when they reach this stanza, is to fasten onto that last line without considering the implications of the three lines that precede it. In these lines Stafford is doing his best work. To judge too quickly is to mistake the narrator's last action, pushing the dead deer over the edge, for a cold heart and a lack of sensitivity. But his hesitation, his asking of questions, is weighted with the responsibilities and implications of his decision.

Before I actually knew much about him, and shortly after I moved to begin teaching at Houghton College thirty years ago, William Stafford came to our campus to read. This would have been in 1984 or 85. I must confess I was not so much impressed as puzzled by the man and his manner.  He was dressed, if memory serves, rather casually in a flannel shirt, Dickeys slacks, and a sports jacket that I remember as shapeless and dark. He played down the reading aspect of the occasion, and he played down his role as a visiting poet. He brought no folder of poems-in-progress nor, to my memory, no books to read from, although he had written many at that point.

Instead Stafford leaned against the lectern on his forearms and chatted after being introduced as if we were all old friends and he just happened to be in the neighborhood.

He was grateful to be asked to come to Houghton, he said. He was happy to see those of us who had come out that evening. He hoped we would not be disappointed. About when I was concluding he had arrived unprepared and was filling time with chit-chat, Stafford pulled a bundle of folded papers from his jacket pocket and spread them open on the lectern in front of him. He told us, almost as if he were asking permission, that he would like to "speak" some poems.

I do not remember what Stafford read on that occasion, but I have read his many volumes of poems over and over in the intervening years.  Every time, I find myself delighted, as if I were discovering his work anew.What I have learned about the value and impact of poetry, about the qualities of direct language from reading his poems has been invaluable in my own work. Although I have scarcely been conscious of it, it would be fair to say that I have served a valuable apprenticeship with Stafford the poet.

Ten or twelve years into my teaching career I became aware that Stafford had written and spoken about his own approach to teaching -- and that I had begun a second phase of apprenticeship under his guidance, my apprenticeship as a teacher of writing. Here, too, his many books on writing, writers, and teaching -- often collections of interviews and essays -- have directly informed my own approach and strategies. Here, too, he has influenced me in ways that would be hard to number or to name.

Chief among these ideas, to choose but one, is the idea of permission to fail. Permission to fail, odd as it may seem, allows the writer to take risks necessary to discovery, to take risks that permit success. Like my other teaching mentor, Donald M. Murray, Stafford taught students so as to empower them; that was his aim and objective. He thought a teacher's primary role was to remove obstacles for the apprentice writer, obstacles that too often include the teacher.

Learning is not a competition in Stafford's view, whatever benefits we might derive from knowing how to distinguish good from better from best. Each student brings something important to the task of learning; the teacher's role is to help the student find ways to identify and develop that important thing.

The third phase of my apprenticeship under Stafford's mentoring must have begun a long time ago too, although, as with learning to write and learning to teach, I have only recently become conscious of what I have been absorbing. It has to do with living a principled life.

Stafford served his country during WWII by performing alternative service. That is to say, he declined to join the Army for reasons of conscience. Instead he spent the war living in Civilian Public Service camps, first in Arkansas and later in several west and mid-western states, and working on public works projects. It was a decision filled with considerable consequences.

It was a dangerous thing to be a pacifist, a conscientious objector, during a war that virtually everyone thought we needed to fight. Discussion of those beliefs will have to wait for another occasion; but for my purposes here, it is enough to note that Stafford's stand was both costly and courageous.  The personal risks were great.

More importantly, for me, Stafford's commitment to his beliefs is reflected everywhere, in his positive and encouraging attitude toward his students, and in the humble stewardship of language evident in his poems.

Maybe the most valuable lesson I have derived from William Stafford is the lesson of "Traveling Through the Dark." In that poem, Stafford, the narrator, stands on that little-traveled canyon road and ponders what he ought to do. He weighs the antagonisms that exist, the forces that pull in opposite directions. He weighs moral implications, and he thinks of both broadly and narrowly. The point is not that he pushed the dead deer over the precipice, however necessary that may have been.  The point is that he accepted responsibility for the situation he found himself in, a situation not of his own making;  he considered the consequences of his options, and he did his duty.

Life on the Space-Time Continuum

What's New, What's Old 

While it is likely any book with "enigma" in the title would attract my interest, re-reading V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival has been an energizing experience; not least of all it has energized me as regards my blog, this blog, which has been languishing for many months following an eighteen month focus on our visit to China in January 2013. Thus, I hope to re-imagine the blog as well as revive it along lines that will gradually become clear.  The Enigma of Arrival, a book about many things, is especially about how literature, and our ideas about literature, shape our understanding and appreciation for where and who we are.

Nearly a year after our trip to China, on Christmas Day 2013, in the evening, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren gathered in the day room of my mother's nursing home in Leesburg, Virginia, to sing Christmas carols.  A woman of dignity, grace, and unfailing good will even in her present confusion, my mother directed our singing from her wheel chair. She was not entirely sure of who we all were, but she energetically connected with music she has known for better than 90 years.We sang each carol until we ran out of word to finish out the familiar tunes.

This experience was, I suppose we could say, enigmatic, embracing as it did the bewildering landscape of my mother's mental state and the hope and sadness we all felt keenly. It was one of those occasions where the past and future, and a world of colliding emotions, are compressed into a single moment.

An hour later we were back at my brother's house, catching up with nieces and nephews, cousins, assorted family. My nephew Jameson, an English teacher himself with children in high school, asked me whether I found life in Houghton, my village in western New York, boring now that I have become a world traveler. He had lived in Houghton himself during college, so he had some notion that life there might seem tame after months lived in Korea and in England and for shorter periods in China.

It was, and is, an interesting question, although I must confess I was unprepared to hear it and, more than surprised that I had no good answer.

I was prepared for other questions. Had Jameson asked, as others have, whether it is sad to see my mother, his grandmother, in a nursing home, I would have answered, "Yes, of course, it is sad to see my mother this way."  That is the only possible quick answer.

On the other hand, a more complex, considered answer would pass over the "yes" quickly into the landscape of aging.  Despite being saddened, I am also happy and relieved that she is content and well-tended. It is not her present confinement I lament so much,  her displacement from her home of many years, but the loss of her mind to Alzheimers.

Thus, the question about boredom is both easy and complicated. For those of us with freedom and choices, boredom is a condition of the mind more often than a consequence of physical circumstances. Both boredom and restlessness, boredom's frequent companion, can be enemies of contentment, a most rare though enviable state of mind.

That said, now that my wife and I have had opportunities to travel to China and other opportunities to live for extended periods in Busan, Korea, and in London, I must confess to a strong desire to do it again, to see more, to live where the environment is unfamiliar, where I am called upon to figure out the landscape.  I feel restlessness, yes; but I hope it is a restlessness of curiosity -- a wholly different animal from boredom-produced restlessness.

I want to travel more now that I have lived, however briefly, in Europe and in Asia because travel has given a specific shape to my curiosity. Like education generally, a little knowledge of elsewhere spurs greater curiosity. We might call our time in London and Busan and southern China threshold experiences. I have had just enough of an introduction to Asian cultures to learn how much I don't know, just enough to want more.

I understand the assumptions people naturally make about small towns, rural villages, tiny communities surrounded by cows and corn fields.But it would simply be incorrect to imagine that my desire to travel is somehow related to where I live, to the small town where "nothing happens" and where the real world is held at bay.The truth is more like this: places are not necessarily boring, nor are other cultures necessarily better than our own. The capacity for curiosity, like the capacity for boredom, resides in the individual.

Naipaul spends 350 pages exploring this complex relationship between people and place. An immigrant to England, he examines his new rural home at first with "new" eyes. As months and seasons and years pass, as his new eyes gain the longer, deeper vision of the permanent resident, he understands in new ways both landscape and its human occupants.

He describes it this way:  "I had slowly learned the names of shrubs and trees.  That knowledge, helping me visually to disentangle one plant from another in a mass of vegetation, quickly becoming more than a knowledge of names, had added to my appreciation.  It was like learning a language, after living among its sounds." This does not sound like boredom to me. This learning to distinguish is what living anywhere -- geographically or chronologically -- is all about. A little later Naipaul continues, "Land is not land alone, something that simply is itself.  Land partakes of what we breathe into it, is touched by our moods and memories."

Although it would be unfair to my nephew to suggest that he sought more than companionable conversation with an often distant uncle, the question that has been bouncing around my brain is a question about smallness, about limitation; it is a question about the issue of living a diminished life. In this way, then, perhaps boredom is passive, where contentment is active.  My mother, for all that the years and her disease have taken from her, is still herself; she is learning the landscape of her world, however diminished it may appear from the outside.

And in her lucid moments, she has chosen contentment. It is not my landscape yet, but I recognize the journey.  I have read about it.

China Revisited 2013 [35]

Lessons in Obvious Wisdom

Our 13 day trip to China in January has taken me eight months to explore, a span I cannot explain simply in terms of laziness. Just as one does not easily turn down an invitation to go to China, so one does not quickly digest the experience.

Despite the time I have spent working out the narratives from my notebook accounts, with photographs to spur memory -- and to keep myself from wandering too far afield -- I am astonished both about how much material I still have not touched and about how ordinary my conclusions about China look when I set them down. Not everything will fit into this blog as an adventure. But I would like to end with some thoughts that I will try to pass off as insights.

 When I was a child, my small town American existence was so seriously White- Anglo-Saxon -Protestant that I knew only one non-white student before I graduated from high school, an African American girl whose family lived somewhere in our town. I did not know her well. She was very nice, but quiet; and, to put it bluntly, I did not know how to talk with her.

She was not the only person I did not know how to talk with; there were many. I was a shy person all of my early life. I might speak of similar uncertainties I held about interactions with kids who were Catholic, for example, although the religious differences were apparent mostly on holy days.

As for Asians, I did not know any -- except for a Japanese woman who figures dimly in my early memory, a friend of my mother's from church. I could not describe her. Unless my mother was with her, I did not actually detect her presence. She was, I suppose we could say, invisible to me. To make that statement now is both appalling and inexplicable; it speaks volumes about those time and circumstances.

What I am trying to say is that my homogeneous upbringing left me nearly totally blind regarding race and culture, a neutrality of attitude based on ignorance. Unlike many kids with a similar background, my parents did not burden me with a value system that made a virtue of this homogeneity.

Nor did my parents burden me with the language of dismissal or disrespect. To their great credit, they would never have tolerated such expressions from me.

My mother, as I say, had a Japanese friend; my father was given to inviting his foreign graduate students, always men and mostly middle-eastern or Indian, to Sunday dinner and on holidays when they would otherwise be alone.  We grew up aware of difference, but also of the dignity with which my parents treated these guests. Consequently, attitudes and language we now think of as abusive or inadequate or hateful or plain ignorant always surprised and shocked me when I witnessed those expressions in the world outside our home.

We might say that what I had to overcome, mostly, was not prejudice but a  poverty of exposure.

When my own children were able to attend a small, nearly rural school with Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Ugandan, Kenyan, Ethiopian, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Russian boarding students, I immediately understood how much richer their upbringing would be for this cultural exposure and racial engagement.

When my children were growing up, we began to have a succession of international students live with us as they attended Houghton Academy.  We began with KeeDuk, a boy from Korea, and Michael Shih, who came to us as a seventh grader and stayed for six years.

In my childhood, China might as well have been the moon. Nobody, as far as we knew, was allowed to visit China.  Any Chinese person I might have encountered on some rare occasion hailed from Taiwan or required a visit to Chinatown in New York or San Francisco.

Today, as we all know, the Chinese are everywhere -- not as refugees or political exiles primarily, but as students, entrepreneurs, business people, travelers, tourists, immigrants. In short, they go where they go for the same reasons you and I might -- governments permitting, of course. Despite the commonplace nature of this information, I was astonished to find on a weekend in Scotland in November 2010 that many shop signs were in English and Chinese. In Wales, one finds signs in English and Welsh, so one might have expected English and something Scottish in Scotland.

And the little shop lady wearing the kilt in one Edinburgh store of Scottish woolens, to my great amusement as she turned toward us, was Chinese as well.

The world I had grown up in continued to influence my expectations.Think of it this way: In 1948, the year I was born, Mao's soldiers gained control of China, ending a war for dominance with the Nationalists that had dragged on for many years. Mao's victory was considered by many Americans as a victory for world communism and as a "loss" for the west. It was an event that added to our geographical distance from China; arguably, Mao's victory precipitated the war in Korea and the war in Vietnam, both of which we Americans saw as a necessary and, perhaps, desperate fight to "stop the spread" of communism.

As further by-products of this effort, the US experienced both the Cold War with its legion of anxieties and the disruptive cultural revolution/antiwar movement of the 1960s.

My point is not to argue the politics of that time, but only to suggest the world that shaped American attitudes toward what is "foreign" -- the cultural environment I grew up in -- no longer suits our world. And the China we were so privileged to visit for two weeks in January is not the China we imagined it to be either. 

That's all to the good.

Of course, I think now, this is so obvious. What took me so long to figure it out? Or, maybe I have really known it for a long time -- in the faces of all my young Chinese friends.

China Revisited 2013 [34]

Hong Kong from The Peak

After our climb to The Big Buddha, the tofu pudding, the glass gondola return trip,  we rode the Hong Kong subway into the heart of the city for a visit to The Peak. The Peak is the highest vantage point in Hong Kong for viewing the central city.

Getting to The Peak, like getting to The Big Buddha, requires riding a rare form of transportation. In this case it was a 10 minute ride on a 125 year old tram railway that ascends 1300 feet in 10 minutes. Officially, the gradient is between 4 and 27 degrees, but from a passenger's perspective it seemed closer to 45 degrees, with most of the trip on the steepest part of that spectrum.

I was unable to manage a clear picture of the tram. For anyone who has made the voyage, the tram resembles the cog railway that climbs Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, which is only to say that the tram is an old style railroad car (two actually) with all the seats facing one direction -- uphill.

When the tram left the station and began to climb, we thought, momentarily, that we would be in big trouble if the mechanism that grips the cable failed.  Five or six minutes into the climb, we began to wish the old trains had head rests.  The ride was a serious and literal pain in the neck.

Nonetheless, the ride was clearly an improvement over the means of transportation employed prior to the building of the tram in 1888. In those days, anyone wishing to ride to the top was carried in a frail bamboo sedan chair, powered by what the brochure calls "two strong coolies."  As with their brothers who power rickshaws, apart from the benefit of the exercise for "staying in shape" it is hard to imagine an upside to a job like this. I found no information about the time required for a sedan chair hike to the vista.

At the top of the tram run, we disembarked at the base of The Peak Tower; at the top of this tower is the best view of Hong Kong anywhere.  Six or seven escalators and one more ticket booth later, we arrived on Sky Terrace 428.

We arrived a little early for the light show that begins at dusk.  The light show is not entertainment as, say, a laser show might be.  It is simply the point at which the tall new buildings around the harbor in the center of Hong Kong turn on their external lights.  This kind of light show is a fairly common feature of the modern Chinese cities we have visited so far. The lights in downtown Guangzhou, for example, are quite impressive.



As with the tram itself, I had trouble getting a clear picture of the lights themselves as they came to life on cue, which was 6:30 if I remember correctly.  My difficulty this time was not motion but the fog, the crowds (which became denser as 6:30 approached) and, of course, my on-going camera issues.

Street level Hong Kong was reasonably warm on this day in January, but the air at The Peak, given the departing sunlight and the steady breeze was rather cool.

After dinner in the tower we took the tram back down the steep hill.  To my surprise, we rode backward down the hill. Too bad, I thought it would have made for better viewing to see where we were going rather than where we had been.  Then it occurred to me that forward facing seats would have dumped us onto the floor as soon as we hit the slope.

We had a set up an elaborate system to be sure we awoke on time to catch the shuttle over to the airport for our flight back to the States. 

But the arrangements were unnecessary. At 5 a.m. the fire alarm jolted us out of bed.  We went to the door and looked out at the empty hallway. No smoke, no burning smell. 

Pretty soon Yujia appeared at our door to say, "Don't worry. Just stay in the room."

We did.  The alarm stopped.  We debated going back to bed and decided against it. The fire trucks that had gathered on the driveway below our window turned off their lights and rumbled away.

After welcoming us aboard for our trip home, the captain said we would have strong tail winds so we could expect a shorter trip to New York.  But when he turned off the seat belt sign, the largest Asian woman I have ever seen flopped her seat back into my lap, and I knew it was going to feel like a long trip regardless of how much time the tail winds saved us.