Day Out

My favorite thing to do on these kind of trips, has always been the early morning hours.  The precious time before the sun comes up and awakens the world that I am temporarily inhabiting.

Here I can go out on the smooth wet sands of the beach and have it all to myself, or nearly so.  Usually just a handful of late night partiers or a man digging in the sand for some kind of seafood.

Yesterday 2 of my Slovakian friends invited me out for a road trip, and since a full rich day is composed of more than a few solitary hours of the predawn, I joined them in their rental car.

Our first stop was the big Buddha, which probably has a more divine name but to the locals it is most often referred to  as such.  And it is big, spectacular, and still under construction.  Admission is surprisingly free but donations are requested and kindly suggested at almost every turn.

Of course the great Buddha is all curves and smoothness from a distance, but this is deceptive for it's surface is almost entirely composed of flat square pieces of marble.

There is a large hall at the base of the statue in which the monks bless tourists and also trinkets can be purchased.

You approach the monk across a series of foam mats.  Once you are before him you place your donation in a bucket at this side.  What this young Russian boy is about to soon learn is that besides removing your rubles you must also remove your hat.

85 Minutes

There are a lot of things that you can do in 85 minutes.  There was a time, not too terribly long ago when I could easily run13 miles with that amount of time.  Now I am not quite so ambitious in the sporting world but for sure you can play quite a few holes of golf.

On a more pedestrian level, when 85 minutes are lazily stretched out in front, most people can easily plow through great mounds of the NY times , even read a few op-ed pieces while having breakfast with a coffee. 

85 minutes is a remarkably generous amount of time in order to accomplish many things.  What I discovered today however is that those great big fat 85 minutes are though just not enough time to land in Bangkok, pick up your bags, clear immigration, and then check into a completely different airline.

I knew from the start thousands of miles earlier that this great crossroads of limited time and necessary motion were going to intersect in the crucial final stages of my journey.

Way back at JFK on Friday night I looked at my timetable and dark omens were already dancing with thudding steps somewhere in the back of my brain.  But back at the start in New York the journey was still young and I was clean shaven and had slept soundly the night before.

But then I headed out over the dark Atlantic. At some point my path intersected with day light, but since I was heading quickly east, the Spinning orbit of the earth quickly removed the sun out of view.  Then when I came back to earth, I found myself in a strange airline terminal in Doha in the Middle East.  It was night once again and I was puzzled at so what had happened to Saturday, for now it was nearly gone.

Knowing that the next stop was Bangkok I tried to put measures into motion that would at least give me some hope of chance of making the transition happen securely.  I talked to the airline, asked for guidance, said prayers, and generally began to see a scenario where I would be stuck in Bangkok with or without bags and trying to find a way to my final stop in Phuket.

Once more back in the air heading east.  Beneath me I crossed the gulf of Oman and saw the Himalayas just to the north.  The night was speeding past and the resolution or revealing of this dilemma was inevitably marching forward out of my imagination and into reality.

Because of strong tail winds we landed slightly earlier in Bangkok.  The door of the plane opened and thus I found myself bolting up the gateway towards the baggage area.  But what should I see at the top of the ramp was a small trim man with a bright red blazer and in his hand a large sign that said, “Mr. Marshall.”

Now it should be mentioned that I have a deep affection for Mr. Marshall signage wherever and whenever I come across it.  It has happened only a few times but it usually means that things are going to be okay or even better. 

The little Thai man holding this sign also had his own small name tag on his jacket.  It said ‘Sam.’  Now I didn’t ask him this, but I suspected as much that ‘Sam’ was short for a much longer Thai name that was nothing at all like Samuel.  But rather, one with lots of syllables and amusing combinations of vowels.

Once Sam had determined that I was Mr. Marshall he beckoned me to come with him immediately.  What I noticed straight away however what this his route  was in the complete opposite  direction of that of baggage claim. 

As I kept up to his pace of economic, but brisk skipping strides, he outlined all the dimensions of my dilemma.  Yes I could head over to the baggage area and retrieve my things but then I would be stuck in Bangkok, or, I could skip and puff the length of the vast terminal and get to the Thai airline counter and get my behind on my scheduled flight to Phuket.  He was much more polite and gracious in his description.

Since Sam had both, a large Mr. Marshall sign, and a Qatar name tag pinned to his chest I could see no other alternative than but to gamble along at his side.  Which, after some large chunk of those 85 minutes we cleared customs, was issued a new boarding pass,  and wiggled and stripped through another round of security clearance. 

His final words to me, as I drifted down another long que of exhausted travelers was, that eventually my bags and I would meet.  Though as I recall it now, the exact juncture of this meeting was still rather indefinite. 

So thus I found myself remarkably entering the Thai Airlines flight.  Which, quite frankly I really did not think I would make.  The successful flight to Phuket took something quite less than 85 minutes….in the air. 

However the stark reality, or perhaps the unenviable logistics of just how I and my bags would once again find ourselves in perfect harmony was brought to the fore the moment my behind landed.  I will not burden you with the details.  If you have read this far you have done well.

But I would note that the complicated chemistry of all this equation was thrown into even more disarray when I learned, that due to all my unpacking of documents and removing of shoes, and redistributing of personal paraphernalia that my luggage tags had gone missing. 

Now I am in a hot room in Phuket.  The air conditioner is valiantly attempting to knock some of the starch out of the humidity.  I have complete access to some key possessions.  Cash, keyboard, toiletries, and by just stupid good luck, a pair of shorts.

Some of the key required items of my holiday travel however are absent and are being missed greatly.  In particular my nike graphite 7 iron and all the little clubs that usually keep him company.

I have made, even now after a few hours on the ground, several trips to the front desk where excited phone calls have been made.  Promises though have been few and given reluctantly at that.  My feeling is that despite my own drama, and fretting, everything regarding my possessions will work themselves out in their own way. 

In addition I have now seen the limitations of just what can be accomplished in 85 minutes when trying to foray through the logistics and legalities of international travel.  But on the other hand, as I look up at my watch, I was able to tell this story, in all its rambling detail, in less than 85 minutes.

Luxury Car

Mr. Ton drove me to the airport today in his luxury car.  Which didn’t fit too closely with my own primitive standards of luxuriousness.  Still, it was a big black SUV, rode up high, was clean, spacious and comfortable. It was also neither new nor was it old.  Truth though, it was certainly several degrees of automotive quality above and beyond most of the other little taxis you find in Phuket.  

 

Mr. Ton was not the first person I had asked to drive me.  Coming out from the hotel I negotiated a long circuitous gauntlet of drivers.  All their cars were clean and ready to go, but each one, for a reason I cannot fathom was hideously overpriced for the distance I had asked them to travel.

 After several attempts of trying to come to some kind of sensible transaction with a scruffy scrum of cabbies, shielded behind dark glasses and puffing on cheap Thai cigarettes, I simply moved on to find a different thicket of hired cars accompanied by a different set of indifferent drivers, and try again. 

You Never Know Where You Will End Up

There is not always a simple plot line to all our life's little adventures.  A convenient beginning that then leads on to some clear and interesting story.  One that can be summarized, by just a few descriptive lines or paragraphs.

We all have memorable experiences.  Maybe just a few of which might interest others, if we can just find a way to breathe life into our memories.  Both the ones that happened minutes ago or ones that we have to dig deep from beneath our past.

Because I live in such a different sort of world, it is always a unique experience for me each and every time I take that long trip north to Goderich.  A pretty little town on the shore of Lake Huron.  A place, that for lack of a better description, I call home.

Going for a walk with my brother and his dog on my last day there.  It was one of those many cold snowy days that they seem to have a lot of.  Sometimes it takes a little extra push, just to get outside and get a little exercise.

You could say it is a place that not much happens, but if you had been here on August 21, 2011 you probably wouldn't think that way.   If you had been standing smack dab in the middle of town that afternoon most likely your life would have been dramatically changed.  You would have had an adventure that could not be explained or you could tell in just a few words.

This is a picture of the tornado that swept in off the lake that afternoon, and than knocked down nearly everything in its way, right up through the middle of town.  The weather service had predicted thunderstorms but certainly not this.  They knew only 10 minutes before it raged in off the lake that it was in fact an incredibly destructive storm.

I have heard a lot of the big and little stories that happened here that day.  Even now, all the bits and pieces have not yet all been conveniently put back together.  Recovery from something so huge as this is not ever a quick nor a simple thing. Some peoples lives will never be the same.

For now, in the short brisk days of January, the place is simply cold and quiet.  Or at least it seems so to me, especially when the snow squalls blow in off the lake almost for days on end.

There is always lots of snow shoveling, snow blowing, and quiet, and also probably not so quiet cursing going on because of that. I think that if I had to do this every day I would go just a little crazy.  But I suppose we all have to eventually get to used to, and accept where we are supposed to be, and then go on and do what we have to do.

Back out on the trail with my brother and his dog we managed to make it all the way across the Menesetung bridge.  Once, it was the only way in and out of Goderich for the CPR railway. Now it is just for hikers, and for those who want to get an incredible view of the surrounding countryside.

From the middle of its span there is a spectacular view of the Maitland river stretching out below.  Which somehow, whenever I try to take a picture in winter, simply doesn't come out.

I like this one better.  It is a picture I took while running early on a summer morning in July.  I ended up following the trail for a few miles, and then found my way back along the highway that leads into town.

 I am back at my other home now.  Far away from all the endless snowy Lake Huron days.  A little of that weather though seems to have followed me home to Queens.  The city has recently been caught up in a lengthy spell of severe cold.  Which looks like it won't release its grasp of the city for at least another day.

The main reason I make this trip to Canada is to visit with my Mom.  In less than a month she is going to be 96 years old.  She lives in a assisted living home in Goderich.   A place she could probably have never even imagined when she grew up on a small farm near the tiny village of Glassville New Brunswick. More than a thousand miles east of here.

She has had lots of adventures in her life.  Some that can be summed up nicely in just a few words and lines and others of course, that have no real story, but are simply the stuff that makes up who she is.  Before I left her the other day she surprised me though and told me a long story of how it once was.  When she and my dad once were living in a small rented room, just after the war.

I cannot recall just how or why her thoughts shifted back to this time and place.  What push or nudge took her so far back in her life.  Somehow a part of her mind simply shifted and she began to recall all the little details that made her words paint a picture in time that was real and vibrant. 

It was almost as though it had been just days instead of more than 60 years.  It was the moment in her life when she had been married just a few years, and not too long after my oldest sister Bette was born. 

She surprised me with just how much detail and with how much clarity she could remember.  I don't ever recall her ever telling me this story before.  Just how difficult things were when she first came back from serving as a nurse with the Canadian army in Europe.  How in those days it was nearly impossible to find a decent place to live. Or at least it was in Saint John New Brunswick.

As we left her apartment, so that I could take her downstairs for lunch, she carefully closed the door behind her, making sure that it was shut tight.  She said, "When you leave, you never know where you will end up."

Her hand paused for just a moment more upon the door and then came down and joined the other, firmly holding on to her walker.  Which she now pushed forward, as she made her way slowly down the long corridor.

A Morning At Rotary Beach

You can never quite predict just how the currents and winds that push and blow across, and deep beneath the Lake, will shape and form its frozen appearance.  Over the past week, with each new day it changes.  Almost like a turning kaleidoscope, each display differing from the previous.   Sometimes even reforming itself dramatically over the course of a few hours.  At one time the ice stacked up tight to shore in great formidable ridges and mounds, or, like this morning, spread itself white and wide, as far as the eye can see.

At this time of year with almost continuous sub zero temperatures, one cold week marching in after another, more and more ice is gradually accumulating.  Both in great bergs tumbled up on shore and the slushy mass, that cannot help but remind me of the crushed ice in a soda glass.

In not too many months the summer will return and melt and thaw all the cold memories of this beach which is locally called Rotary beach.  On hot summer days the beach, which looks now that it composed more of pebbles than of sand will be quite a different place. One which will draw people to itself for leisure and to spend long slow hours.  Kids and older folk worshiping the sun or cooling off in waters, that when you enter, will not make you shiver at all.  Not even a little.

This morning I seemed to be its only visitor.  A solitary figure, except for 2 silent crows that flickered from tree to tree in the sparse woods behind me.  Who, despite the appearance of very little food or warmth seemed to be content nonetheless. 

In some few months from now I will return here.  Dip toe and hopefully find contentment and relief from the weight of a heavy hot August day.  And perhaps remember the quiet loneliness of the beach on a January morning, as dawn was fast approaching.

Worth Seeing

I really have no idea how this photo found its way back into view after so many years.  My brother came upon it quite by accident, going through a collection of my parent’s things.  He does not remember exactly how and where he found it.  Yet when his eyes and fingers came upon it he immediately knew, that when the current version of that young man saw himself, he would be shocked.

He never mentioned or hinted at all about his obscure discovery.  Instead he cleverly tucked it casually into the lower corner of quite another picture.  For weeks it was unnoticed and certainly unrecognized by most glancing eyes passing through his home.  Perhaps being judged by the few who noticed it as simply some wild hippy stranger from my brother’s past.  He, all along knowing that my inevitable collision with it would set off a dramatic and profound reaction.

It rested there mostly unnoticed until I recently came to visit him in Canada.  It was stuck in the frame in the lower corner of an unremarkable landscape.   So when I just happened to glance up on the shelf where it had been placed.  I bellowed out an unrestrained yelp of recognition.  In an instant I bounded across the floor to see it more closely in my hands.  All the time feeling a strange battle raging inside, one composed of equal parts of dread and wonder.   

No longer able to continue to grasp firmly to the present I found myself flung instantly back into my past.  One, that under quick calculation, had to be many decades distant.  I was certainly not more than 20, nor less than 18. 

For me the conflict was simply seeing myself, at such a precious time in my life.   Which now in retrospect I believed I had to be at the very beginning of my life's adventure road.  The person starring back at me was filled with such innocence and unblemished youthful vitality.  Still to be shaped and formed by all the learning and life experience that has taken place in the years, that separates the current version of me now, from who I was back then.

.It was not that I did not know that such pictures existed.  It is just that I had not seen this particular version of me ever.  Or at least not one so close to the time when this photo was first taken.  Instead in recent years I have only seen the safe and simple ones.  Baby photos, early classroom shots, all images of myself, securely caught up in the comfortable certainty of childhood.  Not a young man who has just begun to sample vitally and fully all manner of the adventures that are composed in the great world around us.

Now a days practically all the phases of our life can be almost continually captured, and then instantly displayed somewhere in the immeasurable electronic void of the internet.  A place, in which untold millions of us can and do discharge vast quantities of data, helter skelter, every day. 

Despite our knowing how little comes to rest before caring or even interested eyes we still do it.  Each text, tweet, and email rushing here and there and yet so little of it touches or reaches others and has any meaning.  Every stroke and tap of a keypad streaming at light speed on electronic pathways that hardly ever lead to any real destination.  Or at least a destination that matters most to us, our own hearts

Of course this story is one of those same things.  I am one of the guilty.  Sending my thoughts, and now this image out into the world.  Yet if there is any true importance in all this, is that my discovering of this picture inspired me, and if I am lucky, you too might find some tiny inspiration.  Be reminded of what a remarkable journey you also have taken over the years.  And perhaps more importantly, just how far we all have yet to go. 

The Road That Passes By

Quite often I will see something extraordinary and have the idea that I can hold onto it.  Continue to extract from a fragment of time something even more precious and meaningful than what it had originally offered. 

Because I so often carry a small camera there is always a hope that it will somehow graphically aid me in this process.  Perceive the scene or event with a comprehensive permanent bundle of digital bits what my eye had just momentarily glanced upon.  All so I can then replay in my mind a singular special moment.

A week ago the weather, in not just this little strip of Canada but also across a great swath of the northern states were affected by the perfect confluence of dangerous weather patterns.  An immense wet mass of air rolled eastward across the Great Lakes and absorbed even more moisture into itself. 

At the same time a cold front pushed down from across the harsh northern country side.  There was then an immense collision, that under any other circumstances would have normally forced the huge, now merging weather patterns to release its burden of moisture as a swirling blizzard of snow.  But this did not happen.

Instead the thermometer clung to its tenuous grip on fluidity and instead remained teetering on the brink of freezing.  A precarious position as the clouds could no longer hold onto their immense burden of moisture.  Curiously, in a strange coincidence, the earth below and the atmosphere in between were set at a slightly colder temperature. 

The end result is rain that plummeted down through the slightly milder atmosphere and then instantly froze on everything it touched.  What then occurred was a slurpy cold deluge that continued dangerously for hours in many places, and by coincidence or quirk of fate, froze into a delicate gentle beautiful glaze in others. 

Many days have passed since this all took place.  In Toronto there are more than a few who have been dealt the harshest fate of this bizarre trick of weather.  No power,  trees stripped and broken, and lives now forcibly detained in un heated unpowered homes with no sure notion of when all this can be cleaned and cleared  and sorted.   Their lives most certainly drawing closer to normalcy but one which is still unpredictable.

Down here in little Goderich nature offered its most gentle frozen blessing.  No lives put under duress, no trees and buildings damaged, but instead what happened was that fickle nature offered up a delicate translucent non threatening veneer of ice.  That now, after so many days has yet to retreat under the slight advance of warmer temperatures.

My brother, along with my Mother and I had just come back from visiting a Mennonite wood shop.  A place not so far from the bustling town but when you enter this interesting little community of horse drawn carts, men with long scruffy beards, and women dressed in bonnets and long skirts, everything then begins, to my eye at least, to look different and unique. 

So as we drove back closer towards the modernity of town, nature all around me looked more interesting and delightful.  The tired sun was drooping lower, and for a moment the clouds opened up and allowed a burst of light to dazzle the icy glazed trees that framed the clear dark road. 

For just a moment my brother pulled his car to the side of the road and I got out.  Still just a little too far off from this glistening tree for the camera to frame it just right. So I continued to march towards it on the narrow slippery shoulder of the road.  With each slushy step the sun crept closer towards ducking entirely behind the clouds.

 
 .I had time to click just one picture before the curtain of cloud and dusk fell down around me.  Then, just like that, natures moment of perfect light and magic was over.

I clomped back through the frozen slop to my brother's warm waiting car.  Clicked my snowy boots together to dislodge the slush and then hopped into the back seat.

In an instant we were hurtling back towards the well maintained orderly streets of town.  The still and snowy countryside slipping away behind.  The trees that had glistened so brightly along the edges of the sleeping fields now bathed in the total darkness of the night.