Between the Cartwheels

Between the Cartwheels

Sam and Millie were sitting on the picnic table under the Otama night sky.

Clouds rolled across the full moon, platinum floodlight patchdancing on the wide expanse of ocean below.

Orion hung upside down above them.

“Were you the constellation or the myth, Uncle Wink?” Sam asked.

“The myth.” he said. “What were you in the myth,

Uncle Wink?” asked Millie. “The hero.” he said.

If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem

The shopkeepers had awakened. The rolling thunder of metal accordion doors resonated through the stone bowels of the old city. I watched the sunrise on the Western Wall, trying to burn off the tribal memory of a thousand distant atrocities. But the heat and light was unable to penetrate the closed eyelids of the bearded Haredim, bobbing and swaying in front of the giant Jerusalem stone blocks. After all the random twists of fate over the previous three millennia, they were still hooked through their trout gills, spiraling along the remnants of Herod’s temple.

If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem

There was the occasional desiccated shrub, camped in the interstices of a rock wall, or cobble path, but most of what held the limestone spaces of the city together was an unstable amalgam of blood and dust. Jerusalem was built with blood and dust. It flowed on the lips of the Crusader, the ‘Next Year’ of every Jew, the Moslem flight path to paradise, and in the spinal arteries of every invader-

Travels with the Anointed

Steve and I made our way slowly up the scorching steep narrow ‘snake path’ to the summit. The sunlight was too bright to look up. It was eerily quiet and lonely, except for the wolf-whistles of the black and orange Tristram’s starling that followed us through the ruins.


Music arrived at the crossroads of guitars, the friends who could play them, and the reappearance of Steve and the Albertans, on the Lemon Tree rooftop in the late afternoon. We played until hunger and thirst drove us back out into the cobble streets, searching for less ethereal forms of sustenance.


Steve and I hitchhiked on, and into the oldest permanently inhabited city on Earth. The dark green lobby of the Arab hotel we checked into still had the original cobwebs. Nothing gets old in the Middle East without turmoil. The bedding in our room was that ancient. No one else seemed to live in Jericho, if that’s what you wanted to call it...


The next morning Steve and I visited David’s Tower, climbed the walls of the old city, and ended up dressing up as Bedouins in an Arab Bazaar down Al-Mujahadin Street. I’m sure they’ve since changed the name. The fragment of an old terracotta oil lamp, with an embossed menorah, caught my eye. For more than I should have paid, I bought the fragment, and the owner’s guarantee of authenticity.


The ground began to shake. Almost imperceptibly at first, it rapidly became a converging earthquake. Up and over the rise of our little dune depression, roared two Israeli halftracks, loaded to their teeth. The tremors stopped when they did, but the shouting had only begun.

They worked they way through the languages of Babel, from Arabic to Hebrew, and finally, to English.

“What are you doing here?” The biggest soldier on the bigger vehicle demanded.

“Camping.” Said Steve. I could barely look. “Camping?” Asked the Israeli captain, not

sure he heard it right the first time. “Yeah, camping.” Said Steve, again. They

were two continents and an Exodus apart.


Acco had been captured in the First Crusade and, for almost two hundred years, provided the Crusaders with more income than the total revenues of the King of England. It was the final defense of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, falling in a bloody siege to the Egyptians, in 1291 AD. We paid a visit to the Jezzar Pasha Mosque, named after the Mamluk who walked around with a portable gallows, in case anyone displeased him.

In the Middle of the Wine-Dark Sea

We traveled out, to see the results of Arthur’s carnage at Knossus. The site was strangely evocative, and Steve and I had it all to ourselves, in the early March sunshine. We each played Hercules for our cameras, pretending to push apart the strange bloodred painted wooden columns, flanged with black and yellow stripes at their thicker tops, and planted upside down to prevent tree growth. The pillars held up the remnant palace overhangs that protected the bright colours of the frescoes underneath.

In the Middle of the Wine-Dark Sea

Lord Acton was once quoted as saying that, ‘Save for the wild force of Nature, nothing moves in this world that is not Greek in its origin.’ Lord Acton never saw Steve of the Jacuzzi, moon-walking with three Australian girls, on a spring night in a small town in southern Crete.

The Air Between the Columns

A local bus got us to Argos, and another to the cemetery at the ruins, where we hid our backpacks. Diana took a picture of Steve and I, leaning into the same heraldic pose as the paired stretching felines, on the Lion Gate above us.


Stannis took us past breathtakingly beautiful snowcapped mountains, and roadside memorials for those that didn’t make it, to a Greek coffee interlude, on the windswept terrace of an empty seaside café. Poseidon thoughtfully sent us whitecaps, to match the thick froth on our frappés.


It was a halcyon day, in the true classical Greek mythological sense of the word. Zeus was subdued, a bright interval of blue sky calm prevailed, and birds were nesting, in the air between the columns.

Alexander the Great asked me if there was anything I lacked. I gave him Diogenes.

“Yes, that I do: that you stand out of my sun a little.”

Songs of the Sirens

I had come to Kos the

same way Kos had come to me. Deliberate and studied, past the imposing Neratzia fortress of the Knights of St. John. Its most famous son was a bearded physician, born seven hundred years after the cult of Asclepius had arrived on the island, from Epidavros.

Songs of the Sirens

Steve and I borrowed bikes from our small pension, and rode the uphill trail through cypresses, long grass and buttercups, to the four terraces of the Asklepion. Between the remaining upright pillars of the most famous medical school in history, I demonstrated the correct technique of examination for Steve’s liver and spleen, on an elevated section of the stone foundation.

Songs of the Sirens

Einstein’s contribution of Special Relativity accompanied our journey, back to the old city. As time dilated, the space in the back seat widened, and length contracted in the front. When we met them that evening at the Taverna Kolossus, for martinis and moussaka...

Songs of the Sirens

I was entranced with the Delphic panorama on Mount Parnassus, and its Athenian Treasury, the hearth of the Temple of Apollo, the Stadium and the Theatre, the quilt-patched columns of the Tholos, and, in the museum, the glass eyes of the bronze Charioteer. Outside, we brewed some coffee on my stove...

Michelin Star

Under a natural tree cave on Plage de Salins, I waited out the afternoon, drawing portraits of the pines. You get better at staring into space in the South of France. It grew overcast. My stove made soup, to ward off the chill. The rain that came later, forced itself into the Gold Kazoo, now breathing deeply after so many nights on the road. I slept fitfully, and in my near narcosis, heard a screeching cat. I looked up into the face of dog, foaming at the mouth. When I awoke at dawn, their pawprints were still there, in the sand.

Damascenery

The Plaza Mayor baroque belltower in Salamanca was illuminated red, masonry mortared with chivalry. University students promenaded, around the shops and restaurants and carnival ice cream parlours, lining the old Iberian public square. Young girls waved to me from balconies. Christopher Columbus had lectured here. Hernando Cortes had taken his courses. Sleep pulled me inside the wrought-iron grills, and simplicity, of the Fonda Las Vegas.

Atlas Shrugged

The views through the mountains were exquisite. We squeezed into a ten-person taxi, for the rest of our journey to the base camp hill town of Imlil, and were extruded into a dense fog, rolling between rectangular orange stone houses, with white painted window frames. Orchards of cherries, walnuts, and apples, lay just beyond. We found a room in the Café Soleil, and the owner, Hajj Mohamed, welcomed us warmly, with mint tea and extra cushions. The falling water roar of the river carried us off to sleep, after our candlelight ran out.

Atlas Shrugged

I made coffee, and woke the others at five. After muesli and oranges, we abandoned the shack, and turned left towards the summit. I held Astrid’s hand until we were almost there. Then What-else Bruce and I raced, across the curvature of the Earth, to the strange pyramidal metal frame at the top. We became elated with the terrain gained, and the oxygen lost. The views were unsurpassed. From the summit, we saw the curvature of our kismet.

Atlas Shrugged

...my close shave from a Berber barber, possessed of a straight razor and curled toe camel shoes.

Atlas Shrugged

We ate grilled sardines on the limestone wharf. Rogue waves crashed over us. We didn’t care. Beyond the seagulls hovering over long rows of canon along the seawall, we met some French travelers, who gave us the pouch containing the key to the Portuguese fortress.

Shelter from the Storm

Room 17 was Spartan modern, with a bed, desk, bookcase, and private bath. My view included a dormant tree, power lines, and a traffic sign. The Danes have a word ‘hyggelig,’ which means cozy, in a Danish way. This wasn’t it.

Shelter from the Storm

Outside the hospital, the weather began to improve, out of proportion to Astrid’s theory of prophetic fallacy. The ice melted, the trees budded, and the spring began to unwind, into warmth and light, and the promise of motion. Molecular activity accelerated.

Gammel Dansk

I ...took him out to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, impressive for its Chagall collection, and the large bronze thumb that seemed be be waiting just for me. The museum had been named after the owner’s three wives, every one called Louise.

Gammel Dansk

My Anaesthesia colleagues held a more formal farewell feast at Café Denmark, with a groaning board of herring, shrimp, lax, frikadella, cutlets, rødkol, cheese, and everflowing Tuborg and schnapps. Odo told Norse sagas, Mads tetanized diaphragms with a Swedish U-boat story, and Thor delivered a two-edged testimonial that attempted to connect Eric the Rød with my own odyssey. They gave me a bottle of Gammel Dansk, and a Danish-Russian dictionary. I looked inside at the verbs- Past imperfect, Present indicative, Future conditional.

Balkanized

In late afternoon, we returned via the market, and found legumes and lemons and wine, and freshly caught sardines, for our dinner. On the next street over from our shelter, was the reason I had come. It was a stone house similar to others in the maze, under a red-tiled terra cotta roof, with a small Venetian column, above a stone arch. A small sign said ‘Koca Marka Pola,’ the house of Marco Polo. According to local tradition, Marco was born here in 1254 AD, to an established family of merchants.

Beyond the Pudding Shop

The Imperial Harem Imperial Harem contained more than 400 rooms, home to the sultan's mother and her forty rooms, his wives, children and their servants, his fenced bath, and the staircase, the ‘Forty Steps,’ that led to the dormitory of his concubines. Black eunuchs stood guard with their ‘beating sticks,’ along the staircase. The door to the right lead through the Golden Corridor to the sultan's quarters, where, once a year, the sultan showered his 400 concubines with gold and silver coins.


Uncle Albert took a photo of me having my first salaamic shave since Essouira. Along the caliphate trail, they were infrequent but wonderful small indulgences. Others were closer than some. It was worth the price of admission for the series of scents alone.


We passed under the gate of Troy VI, the layer that Heinrich Schliemann identified as Ilios, the fabled city for which the Iliad had been named.

The lightning streaks across the ruins added to the atmosphere, but the atmosphere crackled ever more frightening flickering images from the Trojan War, before the rest of the sky opened up everything it had been holding in reserve.


The lightning streaks across the ruins added to the atmosphere, but the atmosphere crackled ever more frightening flickering images from the Trojan War, before the rest of the sky opened up everything it had been holding in reserve. Albert and I plodded through the downpour and the mud, until a dolmus pulled alongside. The driver seemed to be studying Uncle Albert. He rolled down his window.

“J.R?” He queried.

“Huh?” Replied Albert.

“J.R. Yuwing?” The driver asked again. I turned to Uncle Albert.

“He thinks you’re ‘J. R. Eweing,’ from Dallas.” I said. “No matter who else you want to be, right this moment, you’re Larry Hagman.” Albert ran with it.

Between the Cartwheels

Travel

old city

o jerusalem

nothinggets old

giant jerusalem stone

uncle wink

constellation orthe

arab hotel

stone bowels