June 2010 Archives
Just yesterday Jane and I paused just off the traffic-clogged Tottenham Court Road to read of a neighborhood effort to not only maintain but increase the planting of trees along one street. 'We love our street' read the caption at the top. I knew much of what followed, purify the air, soften the effects of heat and cold, muffle traffic sounds and, of course, beautify and enliven that human habitations in sight of their branches. But I learned within about 90 seconds considerably more. How trees take root in the urban landscape, which requires care. How it is better to use a ground radar system to locate pipes and underground utilities than to dig random ditches in search of leaks and breaks. How pavement and footpath and earth and tree roots are really part of one system and must be thought of it that way. Love. Love of place, city, neighbors, future and past. London.
Jane and I have covered considerable territory in our month here. We know it's more than geographical. The stress of travel has challenged us at times, we have risen to the challenge and now what? Home? Where or what is home? I am musing upon the latter, but this is only me. I am not even sure where I have been in this last month. Going up and down the stairs, negotiating the hallway, living room and bathroom at Jane's cousin's house challenged, even exhausted, me for a couple of days. And yet this is what keeps me able to walk, balance, and have any life out of a wheelchair. The latter sat parked in a garage for two days, the house being inaccessible. Arduous, but Jane noticed that I was walking more securely on my own, balancing better, and seemingly more physically self-assured at the end of our stay in Buckinghamshire. A journey.
And just the opposite achieved in our own little box at the English National Opera where I could rest my paralyzed leg on a spare chair, leisurely watching while Scarpia bled to death over a table in Act II, bemoaning that it is a woman who has severed his aorta. One has to be deeply macho or profoundly Italian, I suppose, to think such a thought at such a time. For my life's journey has taught me that women are quite capable of stabbing, along with a number of other things. And if you really want to protect your left ventricle, it might be wise to avoid trying to shtup your favorite soprano in front of 2000 onlookers. And there's the other thing, that whatever my inherited fear and distrust of women, Jane's feminine presence has infused my life. And now we head home.
But not before a Friday night dinner with Jane's old friends, one of whom is curator of instruments at the Royal Academy of Music. The RAM must be the equivalent of the Juilliard, with a music museum included. Musical scores, a floor of Stradivarii, old posters showing that Der Freischutz opened in five London theaters in one week...but all this changes at 5 PM. At least on this night, the museum shut down, the public ushered out, as the RAM faculty and students pounce on the rare piano collection. It's a workshop, and work is the key word here, for having rolled in from Regents Park Jane and I get to watch great musicians, students, instructors, historians, work over this instrument collection to understand what sounds like a most esoteric and abstruse matter of violin technique.
Except that there's nothing remote about this. Led by one faculty member, a great ensemble violinist, we are in search of Joachim, his style of playing and influence on everyone from Brahms to Fauré. I can't even read music, but I can read the passion of all assembled. This matter of elusive style, while I can barely grasp the concepts, let alone hear the nuance...is dizzying, the way we hear about how it was all happening in Paris, even for Brahms, and how Clara Schumann's influence extended far and wide. And now RAM musicians are gatheringhere in front of George Sand's square piano...square because Paris, then and now, was tight for space, and one needed to shove a right-angled instrument against a wall, particularly in her salon where a billiard table dominated much of the room. And now to build a case, and illustrate a point, someone unfolds an additional built-in music stand, to the right of the keyboard. What was this for? The violinist, of course, for this piano was designed for chamber music, the two musicians to sit side by side, facing away from the audience, both playing into the soundboard of the piano...their reflected music achieving a blend in this way, and composed with just this merged acoustic in mind. And before I can quite take all this in, the orchestra pit and stage at Bayreuth, we learn in an aside, designed to reflect music in the same way...well, a trio of young students pop up to explain their masters project.
This has something to do with musical blends, and I can't understand it, but it's too late to worry about understanding, for they have launched into a trio. It's breathtaking, and there's something about the soprano, a dark skinned South Asian singing impeccable German, that I find mesmerizing. At the conclusion, their professor makes another side comment, entirely off the track, that this student trio must learn to 'step on each other's toes, for this is part of music.' And part of life, so much of which is in evidence this evening, that I can only attribute it to...in a perception that must be overblown and inaccurate...London.
The lead professor here, a man with a double barreled name, is now into a major handwaving contest with a German colleague, a man whose hair is almost as long and whose enthusiasms reach similar heights over the matter of Brahms, and what the latter did or did not know about Joachim's violin bowing, the two of them now sharing the center of the room...although the English guy holds all the power, for he holds Joachim's actual violin. I am aware of something prevailing here, a disheveled English intellectual thing. I love it, being naturally disheveled myself. We need to be among our landsmen, and for the evening, and despite the fact that I cannot read a note of music, these guys are mine.
It's hard to say when it's all over, or more precisely why, but we get a good hint from Jane's friend the curator of instruments. She and her daughter are moving about the room, quietly putting the pianos, varying shapes, sizes and epochs, to sleep. I watch the two of them, carefully grasping the hinged cover on a square piano and jointly closing the lid from both ends. It is tender work, meticulous, an act of love. As has been the entire evening. We all head down the Old Marylebone Road, a Dickensian lane not to be confused with the modern Marylebone Road, a major six-lane thoroughfare in and out of the West End. No, this is a small, winding and utterly picturesque period neighborhood , recast with expensive shops and restaurants. We stop at a Greek taverna. There follows an evening of extroverted merriment. I love Jane's friends, love what they have done with their lives. I'm exhausted, of course, by the time we finally snag a cab...which to be precise, is all Jane's doing, having overcome her natural reticence to do what often must be done...having me in the wheelchair lurk in a doorway while she steps to the curb and flags the cabbie before he can pretend not to see her labor-intensive consort who requires extra time to stop and unfold a ramp, steer the wheeled passenger inside, etc. I am really grateful for this 11 PM cab, having packed far too much into our final few days in London.
Fortunately, the mind has a way of unpacking what seemed, at the time, too much. It doesn't take long to realize that our afternoon in the British Museum had much of Jane about it. She wanted to see one display in particular, the 'Viking horde' found in 2007 near York. It's quite a story. Some guy out with a metal detector swept up a silver bowl full of struck Viking coins, bits of metal used in lieu of coins and other artifacts. Jane spent her time considering these objects, then became captivated by other ancient, pre-historical pieces in an adjoining display. Among them was a mammoth tusk carved in the likeness of two reindeer swimming. At 13,000 years old, this is the most ancient piece of representational art on display in the museum, and among the rarest in the world. Jane spent about half an hour contemplating this one. I wandered about the next exhibit on the roots of modern archaeology, then returned to find her still meditating, and quite ready to leave the museum. She had taken in what she could. She was not about to breeze through something this full of human and natural history. It was rich, powerful and enough. We headed back to the hotel.
Fortunately, on Sunday, Jake, my cousin's son, headed me toward the new St. Pancras Station. Not that there was anything substantially wrong with the old one. The grand old Victorian station caught my eye when I first arrived in London 40 years ago. It is all peaked roofs and chimneys and brick work, but going on and on like Toad Hall on LSD. Little did I know that in that era the great station had just been saved from the wrecker's ball. Thank God for human imagination. Thank God for poetry. In this case, it took both. The great English poet, John Betjeman, championed the preservation of St. Pancras Station, in print and on the radio. And when Jake and I get inside the massive refurbished station hall, this is almost the first place we go, to the upper level where a magnificent statue of the portly Betjeman stands watching the arrival of trains from Paris.
St. Pancras has not only been preserved, but elevated in social importance as Britain's gateway to Europe, the terminus of the ever-speeding Eurostar trains. The latter now zip between the capitals in under 2 1/2 hours, reducing the fabled journey across the English Channel to something along the lines of a trip on BART, the San Francisco area's subway system.
Betjeman's statue is surrounded by bronze castings of some of his greatest lines, while year-round sunshine streams through the Victorian glass canopy overhead. Surely there can be no better antidote to seasonal affect disorder then the winter light through these windows, cleaned and sparkling after a century of soot. The restoration not only preserves but highlights the original Victorian wrought iron building frame, its pillars everywhere. On this upper floor things are remarkably hushed, for the noisier work of tickets and boarding occur downstairs. Here, it's all terrace, a classy restaurant or two and an imposing statue of a young couple embracing. The woman's skirt is tight on her bottom, lifted slightly, the whole effect cheery and erotic on a massive scale, the cast piece being at least two stories tall.
At its base bronze scenes of life in British railway stations over a century. Gaunt soldiers lean deathly and uncomprehending from the windows of arriving train, a worried crowd awaiting them on the platform. A contemporary woman simultaneously hugs a man and checks her mobile phone. City gents in bowler hats stare from a 1920s subway car. Hordes crowd an underground platform during the blitz, chatting and drinking and managing kids while a couple snuggles in the corner, the man's hand up her skirt. Life, beautifully captured, the horror of war and the commonplace erotic comfortably side-by-side in representations that would be scandalous in an American counterpart, say, an airport. It is high art, the station. And on the lower level, where trains depart for British destinations, I find some of the best shopping in London. We have pastries, Jake considers a book, I purchase a new wallet. It's not much to buy, but most of what's here cannot be bought.
In the morning, Jane and I come here for a final coffee. I read the Guardian. I read the future. We'll be back.
As soon as we had arrived in the UK, really arrived and shut the door on the back bedroom in Alastair and Caroline's Gloucestershire home, and Jane and I had stretched ourselves out on the bed for a brief nap before dinner, it hit. It probably hit harder in Jane's comforting arms. In any case, it came as a surprise. Shattering journey over, in a family setting, 6000 miles from home, it came flooding out. Rage. Sustained anger. One note, one angry note, held indefinitely. It seemed to have no object, this rage. A certain switch had been thrown and remained in the on position. Fury. Constant and seemingly endless. I tried to think it through, make sense of the rage. Perhaps my body was reacting to the rigors of the trip. Yes, but only partly yes, it seemed. Deeper, truer, the angry release of months of grief. Why anger? Because it has all been surprisingly hard, and I am quite tired of it, and I can't even say what 'it' is. Proximity to death, coming to grips with my own, this is as much sense as I can make of the experience. Sad memories, triggered constantly and by anything. Jane and I chat about our upcoming Tosca at the English National Opera, images of her dressed for the evening spawn memories of Marlou in low-cut dinner attire aboard the Queen Mary.... A painful recollection of how much the dressy dining experience meant to her, how she must have known they were not many more such evenings left, how utterly lovely she looked, will do how inadequate I felt trying to hold my back straight against the photographer's backdrop in one of the ship's foyers...for yes, the ship's commercial photographer must rake in quite a bundle posing pre-dinner couples in full fig...and I am certain that Marlou has saved this photo and it will float hauntingly to the surface from some carton or desk drawer yet unopened. And it will flood at me again, the sadness of a life uncompleted. And after a year, I can see how this grief is deeply intertwined with something older, my mother's sad incompleteness. My brother recently reminded me that Frances Bendix asked to be interred next to her husband in a military cemetery in Southern California...this woman who had so bitterly divorced, never remarried, whose ex-husband had died 30 years before her...and at the end of it all, this must have been the best of her life, her turbulent years of marriage. And I still seem to be extricating myself from her losses which I must have sensed too acutely and intuitively as a child. Jane, consummately nurturing, brings a clear message that it's over, a new chapter has opened. Yet grief, mourning for what has been lost, continues, while this rage tells me enough. Relax. You're somewhere else. And enjoy it.
I can't say that I precisely enjoy getting on the train to Reading, Alastair and Caroline waving me off on the Moreton-in-Marsh platform, but this isn't the sort of thing that keeps an aging quadriplegic young? Perhaps, but all departures have an excessive poignancy for me. Home Farm, Alastair and Caroline's address, now seems like my home, the only home, my place of belonging, from which I am always being wrenched...all this an afterimage of childhood, the family falling apart, parents ever remote and self-absorbed. Fortunately, soon there is Kingham, then Charlbury, stops on the Worcester line now quite familiar. I am in the hands of First Great Western Railway, on my own, and this is essential to the spirit. At Reading there is a helper with a ramp, and this man stays with me and even guards my bags while I find the loo...a wheelchair-accessible one, at that. There's enough time to buy a Guardian, and then the express for Plymouth rolls in, and together we roll out. The train flies along, packed to the rafters, but swift and modern and quiet.
It gets ever greener, England does, as it narrows and stretches south and west. Someplace beyond Taunton, Somerset, we slip through a tunnel and out into a vale, a slight and mild English valley, one slope curving with the softness of a giant breast, cobbled streets and terraced houses of some village trickling down its side. To an American, at first blush this has a storybook feel. Particularly to someone raised in the flinty, arid southwest of the US, all this green softness of farms and thatched cottages and trimmed lanes seems to fly from pages of Beatrix Potter. Whereas Beatrix Potter emerge from something else, a way of life that achieves an easy bloom in the summers. But in the winters, or just under the surface, rural life must have broken the backs of many. But today, Britain looks so prosperous, vans dropping off Internet orders up and down the country lanes, surely Devonshire life must be about as easy as it looks. Impossible to say, for I am a visitor.
Jane isn't. She is very much a native and supervises the wheelchair-ramp arrival at her most familiar of railway stations, Exeter. Sun. It is sunny here. England's June had been canceled in favor of November, but maybe there has been a reprieve. Jane and I head for the sunny end of the platform. I take off my wool jacket and stare at the inexplicable summer warmth.
Britons complain endlessly about the state of their railway system. At least they still have one, and here is splendid evidence, the Tarka line across Devon, south to north. There are all of two carriages, but they are packed. We roll up valleys, the train clickety clackety over the old-fashioned, unwelded rails. Until the stream beside us gives up being a creek and widens into a river, then a river valley, then the estuary of the Taw. Welcome to Barnstaple, North Devon. We are renting a cottage nearby, and the proprietress has been full of good telephone advice about what to do now. Get a taxi, she says. There are plenty of traditional black cabs at the Barnstaple station. There is also a country bus, and I lean in that direction. Jane has a chat with the station agent who isn't quite sure if the buses can take wheelchairs. Our cottage landlord is certain they can't. Never mind the fact that a transit website proclaims virtually all of North Devon's buses to be accessible. Surely the locals know.
Thus the essence of disabled travel everywhere. Perhaps there aren't quite enough disabled people yet, although just wait as the baby boomers age. Perhaps access to wheelchairs hasn't been around long enough in the developed West. Whatever. Outside, in the line of cabs waiting to take arriving passengers somewhere I can't see a single wheelchair-compatible taxi. One driver does have a van. He asks how much my wheelchair weighs. This is a naïve question. The answer is about 250 pounds. Worse, the cab driver wants to borrow a ramp from the railway station. I can tell he doesn't know what he's doing, and it's a relief when the agent tells him no. He phones around and can't find a cab driver. Fine, I tell Jane, let's bus it.
It's not that simple. First, the next, highly occasional, bus is just about to leave. And not from here, but from across the River Taw in Barnstaple's center. Jane runs inside. The station agent has offered her a worthwhile bit of advice, but rendered in the imprecise and impenetrable British style. The bus from the center of town will come right by here and stop at the top. 'The top' means anything in Britain. 'The top of the street' signifies, variously, the next traffic light, a place where there is a rise in the road or, quite possibly, a pub. The second complication involves our car from Enterprise. Jane is going to pick it up while I proceed, in theory via taxi, to our cottage. But all this is falling apart, as disabled travel plans often do. There's only one bus for hours and it's about to leave, stopping briefly at 'the top' on its way to our part of the North Devon countryside.
Neither Jane nor I would describe ourselves as remarkably assertive, but travel squeezes remarkable things out of anyone. Jane sprints to the railway station bus stop and has a word with one of the drivers. Now we know where 'the top' is, but how to get up the sloping road in time, with all our bags.... Hop on, says the bus driver. His bus takes us past a roundabout and up a hill where buses wait to pick up passengers headed out of town, a small convergence of traffic in what might be termed Barnstaple's rush hour...and there it is, my bus, the #325. Our driver stops right by it, yells to his colleague in the target bus, lowers me via his ramp...and fuck it, I can't get up the curb. Not to worry, says our driver, roll back aboard, and I'll drive you closer to the curb. All this helpfulness while I delay seven or eight waiting buses...well, it's fairly inconceivable. It's the country. It's North Devon. I thank everyone profusely, and Jane pays the £1.35 disabled fare before waving goodbye. She has to hire a car from Enterprise, after all, somehow schlepping all our bags back to the railway station alone. And I had worried about traveling alone to Reading.
This is a real country bus, a native bus, the most telling attribute being its speed. We hurtle along the River Taw, hang a right up a hill toward the village of Athrington, when bam, we brake to a violent stop. I am thrown against a bulkhead. No worries, I tell the driver, eager to conform to the national spirit. A wide lorry has come blasting around a curve. It takes impressive driving to handle a bus on a road like this. All the more evident as we turn from one single-lane road to another, in the tight and tidy confines of Athrington, maneuvering beside the wall of a pub. We bound over a hill and into the next village, High Bickington...which for days afterward I keep referring to as Great Bickington, English place names being a source of endless confusion to me. The bus halts, wheelchair ramp descends, and the driver apologizes for dropping me so far from the stop. Not to worry, I assure him. The instructions for the cab driver had told us to avoid High Bickington. I'm not supposed to be here, can't see anything very high about it, and am trying not to panic...which squeezes me, in the manner of travel exigencies, into action.
First, I stop two locals. Perhaps they have just alighted from the same bus. I do not know. I am chronically oblivious. What is certain is that they are standing there, and speaking to them requires the local language. That is to say, elaborately polite and self-deprecating English-speak. I am terribly sorry, this is the first thing out of my mouth. Everyone in Britain who is vaguely polite is terribly sorry for everything. What I am terribly sorry for is that I am rather lost. This is how I put it. Not utterly lost, hope abandoned, just rather. I have both apologized and appropriately muted my plea for help. Naturally, the middle-aged woman to whom I am speaking apologizes herself. Oh, she tells me, she really doesn't know her way around awfully well, being new to these parts herself...having just arrived nine years ago...this without an ounce of irony. Her husband appears, also professes to be baffled, and now has a look at my e-mailed instructions for the cab driver. He recognizes none of the roads but knows the cottage. He easily points out the most direct route but advises to avoid the road. Which is like asking a bird to avoid the air. He leads me down an obscure village lane, then walks beside me while country drivers blast long at their accustomed 100 mph. You'll be fine now, he assures me, pointing up an apparent driveway. It's only a mile. Or so.
Of course it isn't a driveway, for I know better. This is a Devon country lane. High green hedges line both sides, with space in between for a single car, definitely not two, and probably not enough space for a car and a wheelchair. The thing curves, anyone can see that. The man is waving goodbye, and I am staring at the Lane of Doom. Good thing I brought my powerful Swedish wheelchair, good suspension, sufficient range...not that I really know. Do I have enough battery power for a mile or so? Possibly. Certainly, I cannot see more than 50 feet ahead, nor can these speed-crazed rural drivers see me. Keeping close to the left hedgerow, I pour on the wheelchair speed. I make around one curve and almost get creamed by a Land Rover. The driver halts, beckoning for me to proceed. This seems a sort of madness, for while he waits I barely make 5 mph. The man waves as I bounce past him. Around the next curve a woman walks her dogs. Another car, which also stops in plenty of time. There is plenty of country traffic on this road, but everyone is alert. It goes on and on, and the road test, past where a country family sells brown eggs, a man repairs cars, someone rents cottages...and damned if I'm not here, down a long rutted gravel drive, and into a working farm.
Jane and I set up home in the former stables. It rains. We drive into Barnstaple to see a touring production of 'The History Boys,' Alan Bennett's famed play. I can't quite grasp this, how a little town can have the Queens Theatre, an Edwardian playhouse, intact, functioning and hosting this incredible traveling play from West Yorkshire. It's a stunning evening with a caliber of cast that only rarely turns up in the Bay Area. Funny, intellectually challenging, sometimes breathtaking...and in Barnstaple. It's a hard act to follow. So we don't, staying home the next day. The cottage is lovely, and so is Jane. It rains. At the end of day, it stops, and the sky clears. The end of day comes at 9:20 PM, when the last patch of sunlight disappears from the lawn outside our cottage. Days last a long time in northern Europe. Jane and I descend the paved path to a wooden deck at the edge of the pseudo-farm buildings. In the distance, a brilliant sun sets over the Bristol Channel. The scene below us, indescribably English. The countryside rounds and dips into the crevice of some river, while a swath of forest follows the vale, dark green and tufted like broccoli. The quilt of fields, each irregular square a different color, some chartreuse with cabbage, some bluish green with wheat, acquires depth as the light slowly fades. The hedgerows separating the acreage grow higher. The clarity of air blowing off the Atlantic, the quality of midsummer light, the brief and violent sunset...is there any doubt why Jane and I are here?
