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Traveling Again

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Traveling Again

A busy week.  Hanukkah begins Wednesday night; Thanksgiving is on Thursday, and then only a weekend before I leave for Israel.  Every trip, I promise myself I’ll be ready early, and every trip there’s chaos before I go: buying presents, running to the bank, packing.

Once I’m in Israel, I can relax and concentrate on the volunteer work with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) that keeps me busy five days a week.  On weekends I visit friends and family, travel a little, walk the beach, and eat great food in friends’ houses and in an eclectic assortment of ethnic restaurants. I just get a good dose of being in one of the most cosmopolitan countries in the world.

The volunteer work I do is important to me.  I want to help in a real way, in a country that does so much good in the world.

As I write this, 150 Israeli doctors and nurses from the IDF Home Front Command are at a field hospital in the small agricultural town of Bogo on Cebu Island, Phillipines.  They are delivering babies, restoring sight to people blinded, treating diarrhea, fever, and respiratory problems in people suffering after the disaster of Typhoon Haiyan.

Like many other countries all over the world, Israelis send aid/personnel where it’s needed in times of disaster.  They were among the first in Haiti, they were in Turkey after the earthquake, sent food during the drought in Ethiopia–the list goes on.

At home, the Israelis are making changes by leaps and bounds in the world of medicine. “Save a Child’s Heart” performs free open-heart surgery for underprivileged children from around the world, regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity.  Forty-nine percent of these patients are from Palestinian communities, Jordan, Iraq, and Morocco.

Israelis developed an AIDS treatment that targets and destroys 40 percent of HIV-infected cells without affecting healthy cells.  Dr. Avram Hershko and Dr. Aaron Ciechanover won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for research on the regulatory protein ubiquitin.  There work will lead to finding new treatments and cures for diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s as well as genetic disorders.  An Israeli company, Given Imaging, pioneered capsule endoscopy, now the gold standard for small bowel visualization. The PillCam is an ingestible video camera that allows pain-free, noninvasive visualization of the small intestine and esophagus to detect disease. There are many many other advances in the field of medicine in Israel; simply put, Israel exports more life-saving medical technology per capita than any other country.

Next time from Israel, I’ll be talking about gay rights, gender equality and other aspects of Israeli life, and after that, some interviews with other volunteers from countries around the world.

A Perpetual Journey 2

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A Perpetual Journey, 2

Lately I’ve been rereading works by authors of the American West.  One particularly intriguing author is David Kranes.  I met Kranes some years ago when he invited me as a guest artist at the Sundance Institute; he’s written a good deal since then. This past week, I’ve been re-reading his collection of short stories set in Idaho, The Legend’s Daughter, published by Torrey House Press.

Kranes is a writer and playwright whose work has won the Pushcart as well as other prizes and whose plays have been performed throughout the United States and abroad.  For 14 years, he was artistic director at Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute, where he served as dramaturg and mentored to such fine playwrights as Tony Kushner and Robert Schenkkan. His novel, The National Tree, was adapted for television.

The list of Kranes’s accomplishments is long and varied and intriguing. (He’s an expert at casino design, an award-winning teacher, and from personal experience I know he is an astute and gracious critic, who knows how to improve with no wounds.

The important thing is to read his work. His writing will intrigue, and at times, scare you, and if you are interested in language/fiction, it will send you scrambling to figure out how he does what he does with words and characters.  You’ll think, “This can’t be,” and then you’ll see that it can.

On the initial reading of The Legend’s Daughter, I was so taken by the tight dialogue, by the unexpected juxtaposition of characters, and by the surprises at the turns of the narrative, that I could have missed Kranes’s generous humanity.  His world seems at first to be unlike the world of most of us; a world of sudden shifts of circumstances, of the almost magical appearance of strangers; it’s a world where characters are compulsive. Not like us.  But reading, following the characters, you remember yourself and think Wait! This is like my world. These fears and failings, this grace and cruelty, these impetuous acts are all mine as well. Kranes’s situations, sometimes gentle, sometimes threatening, dangerous or not, plunge ahead, into unknown territory, physical or emotional, and ultimately into some understanding—or not.  Just like us.

For me one of the most compelling stories in the book is “Idaho”.  A man who is looking for peace after the last in a string of failed long-distance relationships decides to drive to Idaho, where it is “wet and gemlike and powerful” and “far enough away for love to happen”. By surreal circumstances he is enticed—in one of the most gripping passages in the book—into an ice cave.  What happens there will make you think hard, about love, about yourself, and about how powerful the urge to tell stories.

 

 

 

A Perpetual Journey

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In part 46 of Song of Myself, Walt Whitman wrote “I tramp a perpetual journey.”  I’ve borrowed part of Whitman’s phrase for the title of this blog. We all live a perpetual journey in some way; for me it has been a literal journey that hasn’t yet found an end:  traveling, living, and working through the American Midwest, West Africa, Afghanistan, Israel, Europe, and the American West.  As I think about life, it seems to me that I live in a great “muchness.”  This is to say I live in a mélange of memories: people and places that populate my mind and that I still see or yearn for and wonder about as I walk the Bonneville Trail, stand on the Ponte delle Guglie, or bag sand on the Lebanon border:  writers in Utah and Oregon, painters and authors in Israel, Venetian artists and craftmen, Tuscan revelers, comedians, soldiers, laborers, professors, cancer patients . . . dozens of lives unreeling in the mind. Thinking of them, and of Whitman again in the same part of Song of Myself,  “I know I have the best of time and space and was never/measured and never will be measured” and so I want to write here what, because of circumstances, no one else can write: this particular gathering of people and places I’ve been fortunate to know.

For an introduction, I’ll begin with a piece I published in Stories to Gather All Those Lost.  It’s a short commentary about learning the surprise a place can give you, even though you thought you knew it well.

It is 8 p.m. and I have decided to go for a walk.  I will find out tomorrow that the winds tonight are 65 mph and, with the wind-chill factor, the temperature is -80 degrees.  But I do not know this yet, and I think only of the walk.  I dig my jacket with the coyote-fur hood out of the closet.  It is an old military jacket I was given when I was a visiting poet in a prison in the Midwest.  It embarrasses me to have it; every time I wear it, I think of all the jackets like it and all the coyotes that were killed in order to make them: thousands of coyotes, all slaughtered for the Air Force.  Still, I keep it. It reminds me of the young prisoners and me, immured in the sloping stubble fields of central Iowa, all huddling in our khaki green jackets crossing the barren prison grounds to the classroom building.

When I step off the back porch, away from the protection of the garage, someone punches me in the chest.  I suck air. It is the wind. I pull the hood as far forward as it will go, creating a six-inch, fur-circled tunnel around my face.  It could be perfect.  I am warm from the waist up and around my head, but I have forgotten to wear long underwear, and my jeans are too thin:  only a minute out and my thighs hurt.

But I will not go back.  I am alone with the wind, the way I want to be.

I turn left, skirt the golf course on the north, and head toward Lundstrom Park, where, on a night last summer, I lay in the grass next to the canal and watched the Perseid meteor showers.  Now the park is cold and barren, the wind slapping against the ball diamond backstops.  The road and walks are clogged with drifts.

Tonight the wind is in a wild dance with the snow, and the wind is the stronger partner.  It howls across the surface of the streets and yards, ripping away the fine top layer of the drifts, incited to a cold stinging fog that swarms over the drifts and scuffles along a frozen gutter.  Bearing the snow, the wind shifts and dodges along the ground, stops suddenly, then leaps again, lashing my feet and legs.  Across from Lundstrom, I turn west, toward the dirt hills.  The wind is behind me now, plummeting down from the Bear River Range.  This wind wants me to do something wild.

I cut off the street into the dirt hills.  The street is too safe I’ve decided.  How far do I need to go for wilderness?

Fifty yards in, the drifts are suddenly waist high and hard.  It is as if I stood still and they crept in around me.  I start over them, slip, regain balance just before I fall, and then slip again.  I can’t get a grip on the sanded snow.  The drifts undulate in front of me.  Sucking air, I make my way.  One strong gust and I am blown down, rolling as I fall to the bottom.

Things are getting serious.  This isn’t suburbia; this isn’t Maple Drive, winding gently through one of the older developments of the town.

A friend, Kim, once told me, “Know your place.”  I think of him.  My place is a brick house behind a row of maple trees.  Secure in that warm house, I make stew and the watch the snow pile against the juniper bushes.

Tonight, only blocks away, I find another of my places.  I have walked here dozens of times before, and I know now I never knew this place; I am only beginning to understand.  This wind-torn barren field, scarred by backhoes, disfigured by the encroachment of ranch houses, is keeping itself.  The wind slaps me in the face, and I pay attention.

I push myself to my knees, dig in the steel toes of my boots, and heave myself upward, leaning hard into the wind.  My hands ache, my thighs sting.

I begin to run; I am only on the edge of being frightened.  Mostly, I am cold.  I run in a jerky, uneven motion.  My boots grip one step and slip the net, one step slides and the next sinks, waist deep.  I stumble, fall, and grope my way toward the road, head into a wind too painful to breathe.

My friend’s mother died in a drift at the end of her street.  She wanted to die there.  She planned it that way, and she went there on purpose to freeze to death.  She was only yards from a house.

This story I’m telling is small.  It is just one of the many of a season when I learned to let the snow take me.  To let it gather me in with all those lost.