Snowy Owl

 (Photo by Trude Hurde by permission)

Yesterday, I drove 15 miles from my home in Tustin, California to see a miracle, a Snowy Owl that has been hanging around a Cypress neighborhood for a couple of weeks now.  There she was, sleepily preening atop a suburban roof, looking down occasionally at the crowd of tripods, cameras, birders and neighbors delightedly watching her.  I say "her" because the dark barring on her snowy chest, back and, particularly, wings, indicates a female, but it is possible that she is actually an immature male.  This is just one of the many mysteries of how an Arctic species landed in the Southern California urban jungle.

At first sight, you are amazed at her sheer size--just about two and a half feet from talons to the top of the head.  She has immense, yellow eyes; they are a clear indication that she hunts by sight as well as by hearing.  Her seemingly blasé attitude toward the multitudes below her is unaccountable.  What does this world look like to an apex predator, accustomed to hunting across the frozen tundra for lemmings and hares, nesting on snowy rises and enduring sub-zero temperatures?  It is easy to anthropomorphize such a Muppet-looking bird and forget that she is a raptor at the top of the food chain in her own environment.   Her species fly hundreds of miles in search of food, following rodent irruptions and exploiting the available food sources.  Right now, given sufficient prey, she should be mating and brooding, but there are no other Snowy Owls here.  Snowies don't interbreed with other species, so for this year, at least, she will remain alone.

The people below murmured together in wonder.  They smiled and those who had brought children delightedly pointed her out.  Cameras clicked constantly.  One guy shot film from the roof of his van.  Local news trucks turned up as did the police, politely but firmly, ordering everyone out of the street.  One couple had come from San Francisco to see the owl, another from San Diego.  Every time she moved or ruffled her feathers, the crowd gasped.

It is wonderful to see how engaged and thrilled people were at seeing the owl.  It reminded me forcefully of how I came to be a birder myself.  I was working in Atlanta in February 2000 when I started taking my lunch over to Power's Ferry along the Chattahoochee River instead of at my desk.  While eating my sandwich, I would squint at the flocks of tiny, yellow-butted birds flitting through the trees above my picnic table.  After a few days, I bought the world's cheapest pair of binoculars.  I noticed enormous blue-gray birds standing guard in the reeds along the river, then furry brown, ratty creatures building nests of twigs right in the water.  Next day, I bought a terrible field guide and a couple days after that, ran across a park ranger, who explained.  At fifty years of age, I had finally seen Yellow-rumped Warblers, Great Blue Herons and Muskrats, all common species.  In less than ten days, I was getting up in the dark to bird the Chattahoochee for an hour before going into work.  I was hooked.

Twenty-two years later, I finally saw one of my nemesis birds, a Snowy Owl, not in Alberta or Alaska where I had searched previously, but almost in my backyard.  She is a physical manifestation of the world of Nature that exists, often unseen, all around us.  I hope that for some of those who flocked to see her, she will be their "Spark Bird" as the Yellow-rumped Warbler was mine.  I wish that revelation to everyone.  Happy New Year!

Palimpsest

When I was a little girl, I loved to spend the weekend with my grandmother.  We would walk the old neighborhood where she lived in Santa Paula, a sleepy, agricultural town in the Santa Clara Valley of Ventura County.  Granny would recount stories of the people who had lived in the Victorian and Craftsman houses.  She knew their names, their pets, their relationships and failings.  She wove their histories into overlapping stories that covered generations, Canterbury Tales of love, deceit, forgiveness, crime, courage and passion.  Layer overlaid layer as the years passed, new tales superimposed on the old like parchment scraped of ink, ready to reuse, but with faint stains bleeding through in places.

I am now the age of my grandmother when she told me these yarns.  I am back in Aix-en-Provence, far from that drowsy town in California, yet as I walk these much more ancient streets again, the old feeling of double-vision returns.  I see the winding passages that lead from the wide Cours Mirabeau with their trendy boutiques and faintly beneath, the Medieval cobbles, ghostly monks, scurrying merchants and lower still, Roman soldiers and fountains.  Above these imagined images, are my own memories of two, previous visits, my personal history of cafes where I shared l'apero with friends and markets where I shopped for aubergines and oranges, felt the bite of the Mistral and sipped hot, mulled wine in the Christmas cabines.

The scene is familiar and exotic at the same time; the palimpsest is clean and smeared simultaneously.  As I look back on my life, my travels and adventures, the same strange blurring occurs. It is not that the bottom layer is obscured, but that the lavish layering of experience is like an illustrated manuscript with lively marginalia adding dimension.  "So, this is age," I think.  I had hoped for wisdom, but this is not bad.  Puzzling out the stories beneath and above provides an almost, but not quite, psychedelic richness that challenges and invites me to see the follies and foundations, a few triumphs and some tragedies. Time is a river that flows always onward, but memory, like vellum, is blessedly faulty and human.

Saint-Denis

North of central Paris, almost at the end of the No. 13 Metro line, there is a cathedral that rivals the more famous Notre Dame for medieval grandeur. I first read about this church in my Western Civilization class forty years ago. It is almost the first, truly Gothic cathedral, built by the famous Abbot Suger in the 12th century. Unlike Notre Dame, however, it is not crowded with tourists jostling each other to snap photos, making it a delightful Saturday outing even in July.

Once, the church was an adjunct to a great abbey, but the French Revolution swept all of the cloisters away. One of the two towers of the facade crashed down in the 1800's, giving the building an endearing, lopsided look. You can see how early it is--there are no flying buttresses like the lacy extensions on Notre Dame that stretch out from the exterior walls like air roots. St. Denis is an altogether heavier building. It does not, like Chartes, appear ready to leap into the sky. Neither is it a dense, earthbound Romanesque church, squatting possessively on its foundations. It is visionary, but without all the details having been worked out yet.

Because it takes so long to complete a true cathedral--more than a hundred years--you can see the 13th century innovations superimposed on the the basic design. If you go into the crypt, you can even see the few remains of the Carolingean church, dating to before Charlemagne in the 7th century and at the very bottom, the 4th century Roman basement where the remains of St. Denis and two other saints once rested. Medieval pilgrims used to walk a circuit around the tombs, sometimes on their knees. Their pennies enriched the abbey and allowed Abbot Suger to build his dream.

Inside, the basilica has become a repository for the tombs and cenotaphs of French royalty, going back to Dagobert, a Dark Ages, Merogovingian monarch. As royal lineages died out and Capets followed Valois--sometimes militarily--they brought or created their predecessors' funeral monuments to St. Denis. It was a way of proclaiming that the new regime was the legitimate successor of the old. It is roughly similar to modern American political parties laying claim to being the "true" inheritors of the principles of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or the ancient Roman kings claiming descent from the hero, Aeneas. It makes for odd juxtapositions, like the thoroughly High Medieval sculpture of Clovis and Charles Martel, who lived 300 hundred years earlier and certainly never wore the elaborate mail and jointed armor their images depict.

It doesn't stop at the Middle Ages. Louis XVIII, almost the last, faint gasp of the Bourbons, had two, life-sized statues of his brother and sister-in-law, the doomed Louis XVI and his foolish wife, Marie Antoinette, placed in the cathedral in very pious postures. He was underlining his descent from the Ancienne regime, although it did him little good. His brother, Charles, succeeded him for a few years, but monarchy was dying in France.

It was fascinating to roam among the various monuments, some elaborate, some humble, and realize that Saint-Denis is France's lumber room of rulers, a kind of funeral attic. The centuries are jumbled together; glorious medieval stained glass next to garish, 19th century "restored" windows. Renaissance doublets mix with Medieval curt hose. It's all a glorious confusion and gives history a very human face.

And on top of all of that, there is all that gorgeous light, pouring into the cathedral from the windows.

Darwin's Test Tube

"Iconic," you read, when you bone up on the Galapagos.

"Amazing."

"Stunningly beautiful in a stark, primitive way."

It's all true, of course. The Galapagos are all that and more, but what struck me like a zen stick alongside my head is how trusting, how positively confiding, the animals inhabitants are. They appear to have little or no fear of people. A Galapagos Mockingbird hopped right up to my foot on Genovesa Island as if I were some interesting new tree. It then proceeded to accompany my group of bemused, fellow-birders for fifty yards, hopping beside us or leading the way until finally losing interest.

On Santa Cruz Island, three-foot-long Marine Iguanas lay unmoving as we carefully walked around and between them, piled on the sand like a collapsed huddle of footballers. A male Galapagos Sea Lion challenged us to the extent of walking toward us on the shore until we parted to let him pass, whereupon, dominance established, he threw himself down in our midst and streched langorously. On Isabela Island, the endangered Mangrove Finch perched 18 inches from us when our guide, Peter Freire, played its song from an iPod. A Floreana Mockingbird from the Island of the same name landed on my friend, Martha's, head! Everywhere we have sailed in these enchanted islands, it has been the same. The animals are completely nonchalant at our approach, even when we are within a few feet of their nests. It is almost unnerving how relaxed they are with us.

Of course, Nature suspends her laws for no one. We saw a Short-eared Owl casually snag a Wedge-rumped Storm-Petrel right out of the air when it flew fatally close to the owl's perch on the lava. One nip of its bill on the back of the neck and the Storm-Petrel was dinner. We watched Magnificent Frigatebirds, those pirates of the air, swoop down repeatedly on Green Sea Turtle hatching in the sand in the late afternoon son. Virtually all sea turtles are endanged, but in the Galapagos, they are protected only from human beings and other introduced species, not from their natural preditors. I doubt that many hatchings from that nest survived to reach the ocean.

Darwin's Test Tube, this hot house of genetic drift, has not changed much since the Voyage of the Beagle in 1835. To survive here, animals must be able to out-compete or out-run their neighbors. We, the aliens, are not the enemy because, mercifully, we are not allowed to be, but that is not the same thing as being protected from the law of the survival of the fittest. Magnificent Frigatebirds, Short-eared Owls and Galapagos Hawks have to eat the same as Mangrove Finches and Green Sea Turtles. In the end, it's not about the survival of the individual, but the survival of the species. It's something we Homo spapiens would do well to remember.

A Moveable Feast

The ants are coming! The ants are coming! Far from striking fear into the hearts of birders, army ant swarms are longed-for events because they bring out the antbirds. Army ants, contrary to the 50's adventure and horror movies of my youth, do not consume everything in their path, such as cows, horses and the occasional tourist. They are out for insects, larvae and invertebrates, although if the odd egg or infant bird falls into their path, well...that's another matter. Their prey will naturally try to escape, leaping, flying or running as fast as it can, only to fall victim to the various antbirds that specialize in following the swarms.

Last week, my friend, Martha, and I, along with six other birders and our guides, encountered one of these ant swarms crossing our trail. Within a few minutes, we went from seeing a few columns marching across the mud to a generalized melee spreading across the rain forest floor. In their midst, dozens of bicolored and ocellated antbirds were dancing about, swooping down on caterpillars and other, many-legged creatures trying to escape the onslaught. The bicolored antbirds' strategy was to perch horizontally about a foot off the ground on twigs and vines, scouting out the ground below, and then diving for the scurrying insects. They would flare their tails in excitement before they dropped like raptors onto the kill. The ocellated antbirds had a different and more methodical approach; they poked at the leaf litter, tossing it aside ruthlessly to expose the fleeing bugs and pounced on them. Occasionally, there would be a brisk exchange of territoriality and the ocellated antbird, a weightier opponent, would chase the bicolored antbird away.

We watched the show in fascination. The antbirds were beautiful and terrible and innocent. They blindly addressed their own need. Once, a plain brown woodcreeper appeared opportunistically to take advantage of the harvest. The ants spread out across the trail like water spilling from an overflowing tub. Then, slowly, the swarm moved off into the deep brush and the streams became trickles. The antbirds followed like pilot fish snatching morsels of food from the mouth of the shark.

We always think of Nature with a capital "N", motherly, benign and all-knowing. Seeing the ant swarm and the camp-following antbirds reminded me that it's small "n" nature, clever, thrifty and unsentimental. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is safe. Nothing is predictable.

Panama City

There could hardly be a greater contrast than between Paris and Panama City! I'm just back from a morning 's birding the grounds of our comfortable hotel beside the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal and the esplanade along the water's edge. Magnificent Frigatebirds glide above like a dozen black-and-white kites. Orange-chinned Parakeets chatter as they egg-beat their way across the skies so clumsily that they look as though they might fall at any moment. The air is filled with bird song and construction hammers and salsa music from portable radios and casual shouts or greetings from the hawkers and taxi drivers who work the hotel district. It's tropical chaos.

Tomorrow, eight of us depart for Burbayar Lodge in eastern Panama. Other than my friend, Martha, I haven't met any of the other birders, but we will get together tonight for dinner. It's always fun when bird nerds meet. Lots of tall tales of birds seen and birds missed. We are all hoping to see a particular bird for our Life Lists. For some, it's Panama's national bird, the Harpy Eagle, which has a seven foot wing span and snatches monkeys from the canopy for dinner. I'm hoping to see the shy and lovely Agami Heron, which skulks along the edge of forest streams. My experience is, however, that what we see is unpredictable, but always fascinating.

Last year in western Panama, we saw the stunning, Lattice-tailed Trogon and missed the common, Sulfur-bellied Flycatcher. We repeatedly saw a Three-toed Sloth, which has the blank visage of a cartoon character--somewhere between Mr. Bill and the smiley-face emoticon. There's just no telling. Not knowing what is coming next is part of the fascination. So much of our lives is pre-programmed and scheduled. In the rain forest, everything is moment-to-moment. Maybe something wonderful is waiting around the next corner of the trail. Maybe nothing lies ahead but heat and mosquitoes. You just never know. It's not television. You can't TIVO it and replay it at a more convenient time. As Aldous Huxley once wrote, it's "here and now, boys, here and now." And really, what could be better?

Il fait froid! Saturday in Paris.

It's cold! I went for a ramble in the 5th arrondissement today and had to stop and buy another scarf to double twice around my neck just to keep the wind out. The 5th is Les Jardines district, named after the Botanical gardens east of Notre Dame on the Left Bank. It's at the very edge of the old Roman City of Lutece, but more about that later. My main goal was the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle or National Natural History Museum. My Aunt Margaret, a seasoned and delightful traveler, recommended it to me and such a chilly day seemed like the perfect opportunity for an indoor browse.

It's a wonderful space, a late Victorian fantasy of high ceilings, balconies and wrought iron banisters that twist themselves into stems and flowers and buds so organically that you can almost see them leaning toward you as you climb the stairs. It's a long building filled with skeletons--more or less modern on the first floor and ancient on the second. Giraffes tower over musk ox, yak, lion and turtle. Elephants and rhinos with wicked tusks and horns crowd whales, including the complete skeleton of an enormous southern right whale. I stood close to it, awestruck and thinking of the time I went out on a sail boat with my friends, Joyce and Tony Maycock, in Puerto Madryn, Argentina. Some curious right whales sailed right under our keel! They seemed pretty impressive at the time, their eyes rolling upward as they checked us out, but now that I can see exactly how big they were...well, I'm glad I didn't realize then that they were longer than our vessel by about 10 feet!

This was nothing to the second floor, however, with a full-sized apatosaurus. Okay, brontosaurus for those of us who grew up reading Roy Chapman Andrews' stories of his dinosaur-hunting expedition to the Gobi desert. And speaking of Andrews, who brought his own silver and china and changed for dinner after the long days' digging, I also saw a couple of Protoceratops andrewsi's eggs in a case. It was a strangely moving moment to see something I had read and been thrilled about when I was thirteen or fourteen. Until Andrews, the proported real-life model for Indiana Jones, discovered these eggs, no one had been able to prove how dinosaurs reproduced. It was a little bit of scientific and yet still quite romantic history before my very eyes.

I wandered about the district for awhile, discovering a carrousel with a carved dodo to ride on, long allees of polled trees leafless in the January cold, and the grand mosque of Paris. I had lunch at the latter in the blue-tiled courtyard, dining on a lamb tagine under a heater. The place was hopping with Parisians of all faiths and flavors, so I think I stumbled on a local secret. The tagine was terrific and the waiters were fatherly. I was seriously tempted to try the hamman or baths, as the prospect of an afternoon of steam was very appealing, but I heard the call of Roman ruins.

Now Roman ruins to me are a bit like catnip to my cat, Izzy. I just can't resist. I had read in my trusty guidebook that the remains of the old arena were not far away. Sure enough, after only two blocks, I came upon Rue de Arena, a promising development. Sadly, however, there is not much more than the footprint left. You can see where the sloping tiers of seats rose on two of the four sides of the oval floor of the arena, although only one small section still holds seats instead of a grassy slope. It is small; particularly if you have ever seen the arena at Arles or Nimes. It needs all of your imagination to visualize crowds of Romans and Franks pushing into the seats, vendors selling food and drink, and gladiators and animal handlers performing in the pit. Joggers trot through and families pushing prams take the short cut between streets. Rome and Lutece, the Roman name for Paris, seem more distant than the mammoths in the Natural History Museum.

I finished up the afternoon with a stroll down the Rue Mouffelard, ending at the 15th century church of St. Medard. Rue Mouffelard runs along the edge of what was once King Phillip Augustus' city walls. (Think Timothy Dalton as the handsome, young King of France in "The Lion in Winter." I'm sure the real Phillip looked nothing like him, but one can dream.) As it slopes toward the Seine, it becomes crowded with specialty shops selling cheese and chocolate and pastries. (I succumbed to a macaron framboise or raspberry macaroon. These are nothing like our cocoanut lumps, but consist of two outer layers of merange as light as an angel's breathe surrounding a thin, intensely tart layer of raspberry jam. Need I say more?) There was an open-air market at the bottom of the street in front of St. Medard. The church is famous for being the 18th century site of spontaneous healings preceded by strange convulsions and religious ecstacy, but today it is as quiet and restrained as a dowager wearing Chanel.

I stepped inside the late gothic church and immediately found myself in the middle of a christening. A baby boy was being initiated into the faith and not caring for it very much, snuffling and squirming in the priest's arms. Everyone was singing and the music, unpolished and beautifully authentic, filled the vaulted ceilings. Other visitors, intent on prayer or lighting candles, scuttled past and I joined them in a side chapel. I could hear the service continuing, understanding just enough French to realize that the congregation was now singing the 23rd Psalm. It was lovely to get a glimpse of Parisian life that did not involve restaurants or museums or shops--just a family coming together to celebrate the arrival of a new member.

Last Tango in Paris

No matter how stressful the work may be on this assignment, Paris is always a good idea. I stole that line from a really bad remake of "Sabrina", but it's still true. Walking today through the 4th Arrondissement, I passed tiny little medieval streets that miraculously survived the many clearings since Napolean, including Rue Nicolas Flammel, for Harry Potter fans. It was rainy and the usual black and gray sported by fashionable Parisians was allieviated by brightly colored umbrellas. I bought myself a vase at Au Printemps, the enormous department store, and red tulips in the Metro, so my room suddenly looks like a residence instead of a hotel. Assignments are what you make them.

Last Sunday, I went to the incredible Musee d'Orsay. If you love impressionist painting, this former railway station-turned-museum is the Omphalos, the world navel. Never will you see such a combination of Renoir, Van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Degas, Cassett, Morrisot, Boudin and Gaughan, including some iconic pieces like my very favorite, "Olympia." I turned a corner and there she was, the reclining nude with her African maid behind her bringing in flowers from some admirer. She looks directly out of the canvas, however, at the viewer: bold, assured, challenging. This was painted in the Victorian era when people covered chair legs out of embarrassment and any nudity in a painting had to be covered in mythological allusions. These sanitized nudes looked like pink-and-white china figurines, all coyness and unreality. Olympia surveys her audience directly and without shame. She is the first intimation of a modern woman. "Olympia" was so shocking to the Establishment that Manet's painting was refused at the yearly Salon.

Turn another corner and you will see Seuret's wild, pointillist vision of a circus, the colors jumping out at you like the acrobats. On another wall hangs Degas' "Ironers", their hands at the small of their backs or rubbing their necks, a bottle of wine at their elbows and stacks of laundry yet to do. You can feel the heat coming off the painting. Monet's haystacks and the cathedral at Rheims at all hours, Toulouse Lautrec's seamy Moulin Rouge denizens--it's all there and more. Spend a couple of hours at the Musee d'Orsay and you'll fell as if you've been immersed in the demimonde of the last half of the nineteenth century. There's nowhere else like it.

Unlike today, it was a clear day and I strolled back along the Seine. Black-headed gulls rode the river or perched on the canal boats moored below the quay. The trees were still bare, turning the sky into Mondrian's leaded fragments. I'm in Paris, I thought, but I kept running into familiar faces. Thomas Jefferson stood on the Left Bank at the edge of the bridge to the Tuilleries, his bronze knee britches and lace jabot very correct for his tour of duty as our second American ambassador. (Ben Franklyn, that old roue, was the first.) Down the river, a tiny Statue of Liberty decorates the bridge below the Eiffel Tower. I looked up river to Notre Dame's two, square towers and remembered that Shakespeare and Company is still directly across from the cathedral, selling English language books just as Sylvia Beach did when Hemmingway used to cadge a couch at night. Paris is woven into our history and our pysche like the Frontier and the American Dream.

Paris in the Winter

It's just past ten o'clock in the evening on my first day in Paris and I'm running on adrenaline. I arrived to a very gray and wintery city, as you can see from this photo of the park in front of the Musee Marmatton where a wonderful collection of Monet's paintings, particularly the last, almost not-representative water lilies, shimmers from enormous canvases. I'm writing from my hotel lobby, the only place in the hotel with free WiFi to the accompaniment of rather loud, Jim Morrison tracks from the early Doors.

I can't say that I'm loving this hotel, which is about six miles out of the city center and was a 12 Euro taxi ride to and from the Monet Museum. It's comfortable, but the area is industrial, grim and under what appears to be permanent construction. With the somber weather, it's a bit depressing. It's not even close to the project offices; I have to take a bus because it is outside the metro radius! Not acceptable! I'm told, however, that there is a hotel with kitchenettes right across from the client's offices with a negotiated Fluor rate of 100 Euros, as opposed to the 99 Euros here, so I think I'll change in a day or two.

The winter in and of itself, though, is rather nice. The trees are quite bare, so you can see their structure in the parks, like bones in a huge x-ray. People are wrapped up in jackets, wooly hats, mitten and scarves--mostly black. Good thing I stocked up on black and gray clothes. I was asked for directions twice this afternoon, so I must fit in better than I expected. Until, of course, I open my mouth.

I had a charming, slightly rowdy dinner with seven of my team members tonight at a local bistro--fois gras du canard avec pommes. Why does everything sound better in French? The dish was absolute heaven, but I think it wouldn't have been quite so like an angel's kiss if it had been labeled sauted duck liver with apples.

I'm taking advantage of my day off tomorrow and trying to decide whether to go to the Louvre or the Musee D'Orsay. Either one would be superb, but there's this amazing restaurant at the D'Orsay, so .... I'm already reminded of the journal I kept when Keith and I first came to Paris in 2000, "France on 5,000 Words a Day." I had meant to write about all of our experiences, but when we reread it, we realized that we were mostly writing about the food.

C'est la vie!

Ahmed the Elephant

Ahmed might be the most famous animal in Kenya. He was a forest elephant who lived for 55 years--a good, long life for wild, bull elephant--in the Marsabit National Reserve. Marsabit is famous for its extraordinarily large elephants. Ahmed became a symbol for the people of Kenya after independence from Great Britain, making them aware of the importance of both wildlife and ecotourism for their nation's future. Ahmed has magnificent, ivory tusks, as you can see in the old photo of him in the preserve. The people of Kenya became so concerned for Ahmed because of the danger from ivory poachers that many wrote to their first president, Jomo Kenyatta, asking him to protect Ahmed. President Kenyatta assigned two, full-time game wardens to follow Ahmed day and night to guarantee his safety. Everywhere Ahmed roamed, his two guardian angels watched over him!

When Ahmed died of old age in 1974, a death cast of his body was made and the full-sized replica was made and placed in the Kenya National Museum. That is where the title picture was taken. I am 5 feet 2 inches tall and Ahmed towers over me!

Elephants still roam the Marsabit Reserve, wild and free, along with lions, leopards, buffalo and rhinoceros. There are many such reserves here in Kenya. I am going to one this afternoon for the first time, Nairobi National Park. I don't know whether or not I will see elephants today, but I will certainly see lots of big animals. When I do, I will think of Ahmed and what a gift he was to all of us.

La Dolce Far Niente

The sweetness of doing nothing. No matter how much I try to emulate this famous Italian saying, I'm just not hard wired for it. Here we are in a gorgeous hotel located on a stunningly lovely bay on a tropical island, surrounded by beauty, and I'm mentally tapping my feet. Despite the heat which gently (or not so gently) urges you to slow down, I want to be up and doing. The Caribbean culture in general, and Martinique in particular, do not really support anything but a leisurely approach to life!

Perhaps that is why I have been unable to settle down to blog any earlier on this trip, which started on the even less touristed island of Guadeloupe. No matter how hard you concentrate, you just can't do a lot of things here. For one thing, everything closes down between 12:00 or 12:30 and 3:00, no matter what the printed tourist information tells you. On Saturday, we took a taxi to the sugar plantation where Josephine Napolean was born and spent the first sixteen years of her life. Posted as opening after the mid-day siesta at 2:00, it actually opened at 3:00. For another, it's simply time-consuming getting from place to place. Traffic is difficult and the roads are slow. Despite our best efforts, we are spending a lot of time spending time.

Now, it is not a tragedy to be forced to watch the rain blow the palms around or to enjoy a leisurely sunset with a cold drink in my hand. This is not a complaining blog--or not too much of one--but it is a self-enlightening one. Not for me the South Pacific atoll or the Caribbean paradise, unless I'm strenuously hunting for a life bird or performing some other Type A activity. For me, la dolceza sta farcendo qualcosa. The sweetness is doing something.

The Tower of London

The first time I came to London, I was an eager, young history student and the city both disappointed and disconcerted me. I longed to step back in time and feel the past all around me. Instead, I was confronted by a pastiche of eras and traditions from pre-Roman to all-too-modern. Bauhaus, post-modernist ice cube, Jacobean and Georgian architecture were jumbled together cheek-by-jowl. I could hardly see Christopher Wren's masterpiece, St. Paul's Cathedral, for the tatty office buildings around it.

While my views have changed somewhat and I have come to embrace the layers of history that this most fascinating of cities has to offer, the Tower of London does not disappoint the history seeker. Sitting on the banks of the Thames where the eastern edge of the Roman walls of Londinium ended, it is almost a shock to see it's massive, Norman towers--twenty in all--and enormous moat. The original buildings were started in 1086, twenty years after the Norman conquest that displaced the Saxon dynasty. Edward I, the "Longshanks" you might recall from "Braveheart", extended the walls, gatehouses and the moat to its present size. Henry VII added the Tudor buildings lining the green inside the castle. The Tower of London, in fact, is also a compendium of historical times and styles.

What makes the Tower different, however, in spite of the tourists and the gift shops, is that you step into a flowing river of history which continues unbroken from the past. The yeoman warders or Beefeaters who walk you around are there primarily as guards, not guides. The reason they are dressed in their peculiar, red uniforms is that these are what they wore to guard Elizabeth I when she was imprisoned by her sister, Mary I, in the tower. The reason that they are all retired non-commissioned officers is because the Duke of Wellington, the hero of Waterloo who defeated Napolean for good, only wanted trusted men of battle in charge of the ultimate defensive building in London. Wellington had been made Constable of the Tower as a mark of favor and reward for his long and distinguised military and political career. It wasn't a comfortable sinecure, but an important, working position.

The Beefeaters actually live inside the Tower with their families. They have their own doctor and their own, parish church, St. Peter ad Vincula, or St. Peter in Chains. Their children have the right to be baptised and married in that church even after their yeoman warder father passes away, a right that continues for their grandchildren and great-grandchildren in perpetuity, since anyone baptised in St. Peter ad Vincula can be married there as well. This makes the Tower of London the most exclusive village in England with the possible exception of Windsor Castle.

Somehow, it's easier to come close to English history here than just about any place else. You can, for instance, see the carvings in the stone of the Beauchamp tower made by state prisoners to mark their imprisonment with verse or coat of arms or, in the case of Robert Dudley, a later favorite of Elizabeth I, a cunning Latin play on his name and an oak leaf. You can also see Henry VIII's massive armor--he had 54 inch shoulders and a 51 inch waist the last time he managed to struggle into it. You might also talk to Dave, a yeoman warder who guarded Rudolf Hess, a prisoner in the tower after World War II until he was removed to another location. The British army was concerned that his guards disliked him too much and might harm him. Dave, our guide, told us that he believed him to be an unrepentant Nazi to the end. This is history with a vengenance.

My point is that in spite of the moving walkways that take you past the crown jewels in the tower vault, the Tower of London is the real deal. It is as close to living history as we will ever get. Except, of course, for the history that we all live through. Because today's current events are tomorrow's history. Like it or not, we are all living in the Tower of London.

Jews Court

It is so easy when traveling to fix on the things I see. Sometimes it feels like I am in a travelogue, moving from one amazing sight to the next. Walking up Steep Hill in Lincoln is a bit like that. Whether it is the Cardinal's Hat or Jews House, the Castle or the Cathedral, it's just one early Norman structure after another. From immediately after the Conquest in 1066 to about a hundred years later, the Normans were in a frenzy of building, using the remains of the Roman colony, Lindum Colonia (Lin-coln) as a convenient source of dressed stone to do it. I got so caught up in antiquarian delight that I forgot to think of the town as a place where people once and still live.

On the way down, however, I stopped at the book store now housed in Jews Court, at one time a synagogue before Edward I decided that Jews in England had already loaned him as much money as they possessed and had them expelled. Jews were directly under the king's protection, which made it difficult for them to refuse to finance royal military adventures as long as they had assets. In a neat move that foreshadowed today's financial shenanigans, Edward decreed that all monies owed to the Jews would henceforth be payable to the king. It might be considered as nationalizing the banks, if the concept of a nation, instead of a fief, had actually existed. In one stroke, the king made an entire people redundant. Jews Court stands next to Jews House and until 1290, this was the heart of a small, but important community. Now the two buildings house a restaurant, a used bookstore and the Lincolnshire Historical Society.

I was just looking for a Margery Allingham novel, an obscure and delightful mystery writer from the 40's who can be difficult to find at home. I was successful, but found myself talking with the proprietor about Jews Court and then, without warning, we were deep in an hour-long conversation about Cromwell, intolerance, the American Civil War, the rise and fall of Lincoln as a city, labour politics and primary source material. It was one of those far-ranging discussions where your brain has to skip to keep up with the lightening flashes of connection.

The owner admired Cromwell, a generally unlovable figure, and detested Charles II. "A waste of space," was how he put described that charming and lazy Royal. It wasn't just the rise of Parliamentary authority that he approved. He reminded me that it was Oliver Cromwell who, in spite of his strict Puritanism, allowed a group of Sephardic the Jews to remain in London in 1656 at a time when they would well use a safe haven. We moved on to Gettysburg and Robert E. Lee's fatal military mistakes at that turning point. He did not admire Lee, whom he considered at prig and a traitor to his oath of service to the United States.

Hmm. What about Cromwell's oath to King Charles I as a member of Parliament and outlawing Christmas revels once he became Lord Protector? Traitorous? Priggish? More intense discussion ensued, ending with a recommendation that I read Antonia Frasier's biography of Cromwell, which he conceded was very even-handed for a Catholic. Startled, I said that surely that kind of personal allegiance didn't matter to a modern historian. "Oh, no," he protested. 'You must remember that Lady Antonia was a Pakenham, a famous English Catholic family."

Clearly, I was wandering in unfamiliar forests of social history and personal bias with surprising glens of tolerance. I wondered if the 13th century was contagious. We talked on until closing, shook hands and parted, having exchanged everything except our names. As I walked down Steep Hill, it occurred to me that this is what is missing from history, the complex, emotional quotient. Just like my new acquaintance, Edward Plantagenet, Oliver Cromwell, Charles Stewart and Robert E. Lee all had their individual prejudices and quirks and should be painted, as Cromwell once said, "warts and all." Wherever there are people, there is politics, but also, an internal psychology that both resembles our own and is wildly, almost unintelligibly different.

Cuthbert Tunstall

Unlike other Castles, Durham is located directly across from Durham Cathedral, barely a stone's throw across the green. This is because it orginated as the dour fortress of the Prince Bishop of Durham, tasked not only with opiscopal duties, but also the defense of the border against the Scots after the Norman Conquest. William I thought a bishop, dependent on the king for both appointment and succession, would be a safer alternative to a baron to hold this strategic position.

Today, because Durham Castle has become "Castle" College, one of the several colleges of Durham University, you can't just wander about on your own. Instead, a student well-versed in Durhamiana escorts you through the impressive warren of 11th-to-19th century buildings. Our guide had loads of fascinating stories to impart about hidden Norman arches and the Tudor kitchens, but my favorite came at the very last as we rested our weary feet in the chapel.

Hanging descreetly on the wall beside the choir stalls, was a strange portrait of Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall, who was appointed to office just four years before Henry VIII broke with the pope and made himself the head of the Church of England. In the painting, the bishop holds his hands up awkwardly in front of his chest, just slightly apart. That's because his portrait used to show him holding a rosary.

Turnstall succeeded Cardinal Wolsey as Bishop of Durham and undoubtedly did not wish to continue that pattern after Wolsey was arrested for treason. Wolsey died in prison before his trial, but there's little doubt that he would have followed Sir Thomas More--now Saint Thomas More--to the block if he hadn't acquiesced to Henry. The rosary was hastily painted out. Tunstall was long-lived and survived both Henry and his sickly son, Edward VI, into Mary's reign. When Mary returned England to the Catholic fold, Cuthbert Tunstall followed her lead and the rosary was painted back in his portrait.

An octogenarian, Tunstall was still in office when Elizabeth I came to the throne and the country was once more Protestant. His portrait was again adjusted to fit the prevailing mode.

It seemed a bit late for heroism after so much accommodation to the prevailing political winds, but Cuthbert at last made a stand. He refused to take the Oath of Supremacy and was imprisoned in Lambeth Palace. Like Wolsey a generation before him, Cuthbert died in captivity at the age of 85.

The interesting thing, however, is that although the rosary was painted in and out with changing fortunes, the hands maintained their stiff, unnatural pose. How easy would it have been to pose them in prayer or fold them diplomatically! Throughout his life, however, the bishop continued to hedge his bets.

It's a measure of how uncertain the times were and how of how hard it is to understand them when we have the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight. After all, we know how the story turned out. It seems unthinkable to us that Elizabeth might have been overturned or that her successor, James I, would have followed Rome. It wasn't clear to Cuthbert Tunstall and many others. This painting with its strange history, made me feel that insecurity.

Evensong

Durham Cathedral is the church militant and triumphant. Unlike Chartres or Salisbury, which seem about to leap into heaven, Durham shoulders its way upward. With massive pillars in the jagged Norman dog-tooth style supporting the highest cathedral in Christendom, the ceiling almost disappears above you. Imagine sitting in the choir stalls, peering up into the dark shadows while voices, like incense, rise all around you. This is evensong.

When the host of my B&B suggested the service to me, I remembered attending a gorgeous evensong at York Cathedral several years ago with Keith and immediately planned my visit accordingly. It was a surprise, however, when one of the priests invited the half dozen of us huddled below the towering roof to come into the choir and sit in the empty stalls next to the singers. Unlike the well-attended York service, this was suddenly intimate and deeply personal. Only a dozen choir members filed in: a few men, a couple of boys and several girls. But when they started to sing, the sound filled the cathedral vaults.

Almost all of the content comes from biblical text. Originally a combination of Vespers and Compline, most of the service is sung. I was unfamiliar with the sequence, but a summary was conveniently provided for the uninitiated. As an attendee, this leaves you free, for the most part, from response so that you may pray, meditate or, like me, simply float upwards with the song. The power of the music was profound. It echoed through the immense spaces above us and wrapped us in an intertwined web of soprano, baritone, tenor and bass voices.

Walking out into the cloister and then the summer rain afterwards, I had the impression that I was stepping out of a stream of faith that had preceded me by two thousand years and would continue on long after my departure.

The Omphalos

The British Museum might be my favorite place on the planet. It's certainly my favorite museum. How can you beat a place with so many iconic pieces of human civilization? Want to see a Neanderthal hand axe? A 1.8 million year old pebble tool? How about a winged bull from the Assyrian Palace of Nimrod? Or do you fancy the stunning garnet inlay on a belt buckle from the Sutton Hoo ship burial? It doesn't really matter which you choose, because they are all at the British Museum.

Walking around the BM, as the Brits call it, is like visiting a cross between an exclusive gentlemen's club, a 17th century curio cabinet and an archaeological site. Perhaps because the collection morphed from Sir Hans Sloane's unwieldy 18th century private collection, even the modern bits have an eclectic, Renaissance Man feel to them. This is enhanced by the BM's new, "Hands On" program, where staff members bring out authentic relics which you can handle under their supervision.

Today, I was allowed to hold an 800 year old Viking ivory comb from York. I felt like a guest in Sir Han's house being given one of his latest artifacts. It was smooth and surprisingly heavy. The tines had been set into the frame in sets and then filed individually. I imagined a woman from the Danelaw running it through her thick, blond hair. There were also bone skates and a bit of twisted, silver bracelet with a tiny, dragon finial. It was fascinating to hold such personal history in my hands.

Strolling through the overwhelmng Egyptian sections, I looked on the enormous red, stone head of Amenophis III, once pharoah, and realized that I had first seen it 39 years ago when I was 21 on my first visit to England. It was time travel in every sense of the word.

If the Smithsonian is American's attic, then the British Museum is the Omphalos, the navel of the world where we can speak to the gods and come to understand at least a part of the cosmos.

The New Forest

The New Forest is not really new. It was established around 1079 by William the Conquerer as a royal hunting park out of 20 separate settlements and farms, hence a "new" forest. William didn't ask the conquered Anglo-Saxons occupants' permission for this. Instead, he imposed Draconian forest laws and his ill-fated son, William Rufus, introduced mutilation for any breach thereof. William Rufus died while hunting in the New Forest in 1100 in what we would call highly suspicious circumstances, but he was so universally hated that there were too many suspects to batten on the downtrodden peasants.

In exchange for losing title to their lands and the right to hunt the deer, however, the New Forest inhabitants gained a few privileges: to graze their stock on the common land, including pigs in the fall to eat the fallen acorns and beechnuts. Some commoners also were allowed to cut wood, although that right went with specific properties. Not everyone who lives in the New Forest owns a house with that ancient right. Yes, these customs still continue. Your property may come with grazing or wood or pannage (i.e. pig-feeding) rights. Of course, you can't increase the footprint or livable space of your house by more than 30 percent, but that's another story.

So, while the origins of the New Forest may be somewhat grim, they don't in any way reflect our experience this weekend, when we were guests of Sue's childhood friend, Sandy, and her husband, Andrew. Yesterday, for example, was a perfect English summer day. We bicycled across the heath, the wind billowing the manes and tails of the grazing ponies, and through the twisted woods of beech and oak. (Too early for pigs!) The enormous trees were so tall overhead in places that they formed a green bower through which we sped. Deer barely bothered to lift their heads as we passed. We ended up at the Royal Oak, a tiny pub in a clearing with picnic tables where we carried our drinks to take advantage of the sun. As lovely as this was, we could see that the snug parlor, barely large enough for three tables, would be even more welcoming on a chilly day when the mist came down and the forest was wreathed in fog and mystery.

Ten miles out and ten miles back again to Sandy and Andrew's warm, brick home and lovely garden full of fuschia, roses and rhododendrum. Andrew barbecued a leg of lamb while robins, nuthatches, great tits and a song sparrow topped up for the evening at their bird feeders or took a late bath in the fountain. Best of all was the talk and laughter, wide-ranging and generous. William Rufus may have come a cropper in the New Forest, but we came away with friends.

Hut Circles

As we have walked through the pre-historic downs of Dartmoor and Exmoor during these last ten days, we have frequently seen bronze age hut circles and standing stones...in our trail guide. Our experience, however, has been that we on the path--or what passes for a path--looking vainly at the place clearly described--usually far more clearly than the trail itself--and wondering, "Where is it?"

"Do you think that depression could be a hut circle? It looks kind of roundish."

"Hmm. Maybe. Maybe not."

"It says here that there is a standing stone at the top of the moor."

"Hmm. I don't even see a kneeling stone."

These are the conversations Sue and I had as we traveled the 89 miles from Ivybridge to Lynton. Both of us studied anthropology at University, so it was more than a little demotivating to be unable to recognize a hut circle when we saw one...or didn't see one.

We are, however, very happy to have completed our odyssey in good weather--mostly--and in good spirits. Here in Lynton, on a cliff above the fishing village of Lynmouth, we awoke this morning to the sound of gulls and the smell of frying bacon in our Georgian bed and breakfast, Croft House. As Bridget would say, "Life is good!"

What's in a Name?

Withypool. Drewsteignton. Morchard Bishop. Chagford. As we walk through Devonshire (and bits of Somerset), we can't help but wonder how these names came about. Many are purely descriptive. Withypool stands for willow pool after the many willows growing along the River Barle and the pool the bend of the river created. Chag, it turns out, means "gorse" and Chagford marks one of the only fords over the Teign River in the district. In a place where people have lived for over 4,000 years, the old names tend to stick.

Drewsteignton is more of a johnny-come-lately as English towns go. Drewe de Teignton, a Norman knight, held the manor under Henry II and his son, Richard the Lionheart, which means sometime after 1154. Morchard Bishop is an even later creation. Morchard or "morchet" is Celtic for great (mor) woods (coed). The Bishop wasn't tacked on, however, until it was sold to the Bishop of Exeter in 1165. The London Inn, where we had dinner, went through many morphs and belonged to the bishopric as the London Hotel until 1908.

Of course, we knew none of this before we arrived. As George Bernard Shaw memorably wrote, the Americans and the English are two peoples separated by a common language. It's fun, however, to speculate on the names and try to puzzle out their meanings. We are most often wrong, but thank heavens, there is always Google.

Meetings

Perhaps the best part of walking the Two Moors Way has been meeting other people on the same path. Take Bridget, whom we've run into three times now, an almost 70-year-old German free spirit who travels with no accommodation booked and no baggage forwarded. She told us that she always finds something at the end of the day. Earlier on her walk--like us, from south to north--she ended up spending the night in an innkeeper's mobile home. We found her again at West Bowden Farm and had dinner with her tonight in Withypoole at the Royal Oak, where she has a room across from the bath. "Very comfortable," she said, approvingly. Bridget strides along with all her possessions on her back, chatting with everyone. After dinner, enjoying a half-pint of Guinness, she suddenly grinned infectiously and said, "Life is good." Clearly, this is her basic philosophy.

Then, there's Roy and Olive, who also shared West Bowden Farm with us. An English couple who have been married for fifty-seven years--a life sentence, mock groans Roy--they finish each others sentences and tease each other unmercifully. Olive is apt to break into a dance for no particular reason except that she feels like it. Roy examined Sue's walking stick, which she picked up on the River Dart, and authoritatively pronounced it hawthorne. He explained that it had once been part of a hedge, showing us how the conveniently shaped "handle" had been espaliered to make a ninety degree turn.

One of our favorite people was Mrs. Doris Snell, the doyen of Shippens in Morchard Bishop. Not an inch more than four foot six inches high and perilously close to ninety-years-old, her energy and brisk kindness were amazing. "Can I help you with yer suitcase?" she asked me, as I struggled up the narrow staircase, trying not to dislodge the dozens of china plates and brass bells crowding the wall. Coming home from dinner at the London Inn where Mrs. Snell had booked an open reservation for us for dinner, we found her doing her ironing in the kitchen. When Sue couldn't finish her second (and enormous) sausage at breakfast, she asked chirpily if she could "wrap it up for yer in a nice bit o' bread?"

In Holne, an entire pub befriended us. Jim--"just call me Darling"--gave us a lift from Scorriton to Holne when we limped into the only pub on the first day after getting lost and spending an extra two miles on Abbots Way. Bo, a displaced Swede who now runs the Dartmoor Spring water bottling operation, talked politics with Sue while Alan, a teacher passionately in love with Shakespeare, told me all about the latest Globe theater production of MacBeth. He actually went home and then returned with the program to encourage me to take in a performance when I got back to London.

There have been so many people who touched our lives on this trip. Jo, a Welsh girl in Ivybridge, tried to teach us a few words in her language as soon as she found out Sue's ancesters had immigrated from Wales. Monica from South Africa, who looked and dressed exactly like our image of Miss Marple, talked science, literature and politics with us in Chagford. It seems as though almost everyone we met has jumped into our lives as though we have known them forever, even though in the nature of rambling, we part almost immediately and permanently. There's a metaphor here somewhere, but right now, we are too busy and too happy experiencing this brief, but poignant comraderie to ponder its meaning.