Landscape

On most days of the year in the Colombian city of Bucaramanga, you can spot paragliders in the distance sailing along the valley’s edge.  Or, if you take a bus up from the city to the mountainside itself, you can sit and watch folks gallop off the grassy slope right in front of your eyes.  You’ll see them suspended, swooping and rising, steering their way through sky.  You’ll see them rushing forward into what suddenly seems a giant world of open air.

The paraglider in this picture is Dimitry, an ethnic Russian from Latvia with whom I shared a room for three nights.  He was nearing the end of a year-long journey around the world and had begun this last leg in South America with a few weeks of language learning in Chile—he clearly mastered basic conversational skills—and then found his way north to Colombia, where he was now devoting himself to galloping off mountainsides.  Dimitry was the sort of guy who might enjoy a good view from an armchair, but he was not content to just be in the armchair.

Recently my mom asked for an enlargement of this photograph for their living room, attracted to its themes of liberation and transcendence as well as the contrast between transience (paraglider) and permanence (chairs).  For me, partly because I know the guy in the air, the picture brought to mind something Paul Theroux once wrote.  Describing the objective behind his book The Old Patagonian Express, Theroux says that he wanted to “take the train that everyone took to work [in Massachusetts], and then to keep going, changing trains, to the end of the line [in South America].”  Later he writes:

As you read it, you should be able to see the people and places, to hear them and smell them.  Of course, some of it is painful, but travel—its very motion—ought to suggest hope.  Despair is the armchair; it is indifference and glazed, incurious eyes.  I think travelers are essentially optimists, or else they would never go anywhere.

For a lighthearted self-portrait while on my own tandem parasail an hour earlier, click HERE

Stretched out at an elevation of 8600 feet and home to some eight million people, Colombia's capital Bogotá is best seen in its entirety from Monserrate, a 10,300-foot peak located on the city’s east side.  I use the word “entirety” loosely however, because I’m not sure we see anything—including Bogotá from a mountaintop—in its entirety.

I arrived at Monserrate at 4:00 p.m. and would stay till after six so that I could watch night fall on the city.  This would also give me the opportunity to descend, through darkness, back into Bogotá aboard a cable car, peering through a glass window at the city drawing nearer.  If I recall correctly, this was the first time I’d been on a cable car at night.  Suspended in darkness you see clearly how many things about the world are actually hidden.  Even the handful of passengers in the cable car were but whispering shadows and silhouettes to one another.

In Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, a character makes an observation that one could also make as he descends toward a city in an unlit cable car:

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.  A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

We err in assuming that we know all there is to know about someone.  Sometimes we err even in assuming we know half of what there is to know.  I often think this when I watch news pundits speak with false authority about people who live in and are shaped by places that the pundit has never been.  But sometimes I think it about myself too, not least when I'm gliding through darkness surrounded by silhouettes, approaching a city whose language I do not speak and in which I'll spend so little time.

If you visit Costa Rica’s Marino Ballena National Park at sunset and see a couple walking into the blazing light, you might take a picture.  Later, in looking at the picture, you might decide you like how it could lead one to ask, “Is this couple on a remote beach and all alone, or are they part of a long line of others who are traveling the same road (as evidenced by the footprints)?”  What you really like about the photograph, however, is the way it illustrates the problem of extremism.

When I looked toward the violent light of the setting sun, it was absolutely blinding.  It made balanced seeing impossible, for it obliterated part of the sky and sand.  My eyes cowered before it, and my mind tried to make sense of how a fair chunk of the landscape was simply blown out, gone.  When I turned away from the scene and opened my eyes fully again, everything appeared spotted and discolored.  Several minutes passed before my vision fully recovered.

There is something attractive about extremes, inlcuding the extreme light of a setting sun.  Extremes are definitive and bold.  They push out nuance and complexity.  They burn with awesome simplicity and confidence.  But through this act of marked over (or sometimes under) exposure, they also—and here’s my point—declare that parts of a landscape are not worth seeing.  And so while I love a strong sunset, I’m glad that the sun isn’t always setting, because I don’t want to see just part of a landscape.  I want to be where light, because it is spread across the spectrum rather than slammed to one end, elucidates rather than obscures.  And I want this not just at the beach but also in Pakistani politics, in American churches, in Israeli and Palestinian ways of thinking about history and each other.  I want it in Congress and on Wall Street, and when I’m talking with my friends.  I want it in literature, in my writing, and in what I see on the news.

In Milan Kundera’s book The Unbearable Lightness of Being, there is a scene in which two characters, Franz and Sabina, are making love.  A lamp is on near the bed, but Franz prefers to keep his eyes closed, especially as the pleasure builds, because doing so allows him to dissolve “into the infinity of his darkness, himself becoming infinite.”  Sabina, however, is repulsed by this, and finding the sight of a closed-eyes Franz distasteful, she closes her own.  Instead of infinity, darkness for her meant “a disagreement with what she saw, the negation of what was seen, the refusal to see.”  Kundera also writes:

Living for Sabina meant seeing.  Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness.  Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina’s distaste for all extremism.  Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

I saw this horse on two different visits to Isla Bastimentos, in Panama’s Bocas del Toro archipelago.  Drawn to the salty taste of the surf, it would wade into the water and then mostly stand still, letting the occasional wave slap its face.  After maybe half an hour it would then return to the beach and slip silently back into the jungle.

It was a captivating scene: the clear and vibrantly colored water, the jungle-green backdrop, the horse maintaining such solid focus on its salty bath.  Its life didn’t seem that bad.  Certainly it was less stressful than many of its ancestors would have known, given that for much of human history horses have been instruments of war.  Since before 3000 BC they've been ridden in battle, and a training manual for chariot horses was in existence as early as 1350 BC.  It wasn’t until after the time of Christ, however, that the paired stirrup came onto the scene, revolutionizing yet again the tactics of war.  The English travel writer Colin Thubron, in his book Shadow of the Silk Road, explains its spread and significance:

The heavy stirrup was a Chinese brainchild as early as the fourth century AD, it seems, and as it travelled westward, stabilising its rider in battle, it made possible the heavily armoured and expensively mounted knight.  To this simple invention some have attributed the onset of the whole feudal age in Europe; and seven centuries later the same era came to an end as its castles were pounded into submission by the Chinese invention of gunpowder.  The birth and death of Europe’s Middle Ages, you might fancy, came along the Silk Road from the east.

Yes, this beach-loving Panamanian horse had it pretty good, as did the rest of us on the island.  We had put our shirts and stirrups aside, and the history of war felt rather remote.

Half an hour from Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, sits Masaya Volcano National Park.  The vultures love it here, catching the warm sulfur-scented air that billows out of its crater.  A sixteenth-century Spanish friar once called the place "La Boca del Infierno” (The Mouth of Hell).  The birds, however, if they spoke Spanish or English, would probably just call it a fun ride.

Or, if the birds knew Russian, they would perhaps sit in trees and read Dostoyevsky, conversing with one another about the wisdom latent in passages such as the following, from The Brothers Karamazov:

My brother, a dying youth, asked the birds to forgive him.  That may sound absurd, but when you think of it, it makes sense.  For everything is like the ocean, all things flow and are indirectly linked together, and if you push here, something will move at the other end of the world.  It may be madness to beg the birds for forgiveness, but things would be easier for the birds, for the child, and for every animal if you were nobler than you are—yes, they would be easier, even if only by a little.  Understand that everything is like the ocean.  Then, consumed by eternal love, you will pray to the birds, too.  In a state of fervor you will pray them to forgive you your sins.  And you must treasure that fervor, absurd though it may seem to others.

The picture above, taken in 2007, shows a typical home several miles outside Hoi An, a town near the coast of central Vietnam.  The words below also come from Vietnam, though they were written three years earlier—and also several hundred miles away—during my first visit to the country.  At the time I was on the edge of the semi-remote town of Dien Bien Phu, where I had fallen in love with a rickety old bridge near the intersection of two dirt roads.  For a second day in a row I had come to sit and watch the bridge—and the stream of life that crossed it on bicycles, on motorbike, and on foot—from the table of a humble café.   I was two and a half months into a fourteen-month overland journey from Beijing to Istanbul:

I was beginning to see how much “home” would be a theme in the journey still ahead of me.  I had come to Asia with the theory that one should invest more time in building bridges than walls, and that’s what I planned to write about.  But with each passing month—that is, with more time spent in watching ordinary life and realizing how extraordinary this thing we call ordinary really is—I began to think a lot about home as well.  The idea of it as primarily a physical structure or as a place within national borders began to thoroughly dissolve.  In its place was emerging the idea of home as a gift—something too large to be constrained by borders, too spiritual to be only physical, and too untamed for one to claim to own as he might a piece of property.  Home was this bridge at Dien Bien Phu, the moon that shone above it at night, the dust kicked up by motorbikes while I drank Coca Cola.  None of this was ownable; it was all something that had to be received, just as one holds outstretched hands to receive a gift on Christmas.

For the articulate thoughts of another traveler on home (she goes by the name "Sol"), click HERE. 

After World War I, while stationed in what is now Pakistan, TE Lawrence wrote to a friend back home, “I do not want to meet my past, round some future turn in the road.”

Lawrence, better known by many as Lawrence of Arabia, didn’t much care for his past; he certainly didn’t want to be reminded of it.  One of the few things he liked about being stationed in Pakistan was that it kept him out of England, where he cringed before – if not outright despised – the way people viewed him as the famed “Lawrence of Arabia” who performed legendary feats during the Great War.  He wanted those years in Arabia to be behind him, not to define him.

Fame and disillusionment plagued Lawrence, but less famous individuals can also wish to not meet their past round some bend in the road.  The things, people, and ideas to which we give our bodies, energy, and time will often greet us again.  This is part of what gives weight to our choices.   This is why what we do now will always be part of tomorrow.

I took this photograph shortly after sunrise while walking among olive trees belonging to the West Bank village of Yanoun.  In Israel/Palestine, one walks through a terrain where both peoples routinely meet their pasts (which is full of hurt, abuse, violence, and dehumanization) in the present.  But as I walked down this quiet village lane, I thought not of social/political realities but of my own life, and I hoped that in the future, in those moments when I meet my past around a bend, that it might mostly be a good thing.

I made the mistake of arriving in the Vietnamese hill station of Sapa on a Friday, when it seemed half of Hanoi had already arrived for a weekend getaway and so had filled all the hotels.  Fortunately, after about two hours I found a place to stay on a road leading out of town.  This hotel was full, but they had an unused room of sorts on the roof that they’d rent me for $5/night.  While waiting at the reception desk for someone to find a key, I turned around and saw this man standing on the balcony.  The lush mountains drew the attention of us both, but in my case so did the scene of a solitary man gazing out at them.

Here’s a quote from a novel by C.S. Lewis called Till We Have Faces.

“And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.  But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.”