Wildlife in the Q

            When we drove the 30 miles of dirt road between Teec Nos Pos and Shiprock, we employed a few strategies to keep us interested in the familiar route that took more than an hour to travel. One thing we did was to count the green lizards sunning themselves on rocks beside the road. These guys, including their tails, were about eight inches long. They extended their front legs, so from toe to head, they were four to five inches tall. With their chin skin and large heads, they looked prehistoric. There were myths about them too—we’d been told often that they were poisonous, so when we encountered them on foot, we gave them wide berth.

            Striped racers and bluetails and the little freckled gray lizards were, on the other hand, harmless. My brother Rick loved to catch the little fellows, and he would put their mouths to his lower lip, and let them hang from it, a glint in his eye. We had a cellar in Teec where my mother stored row upon row of jarred fruits, vegetables and hens past laying—golden globes of peaches, pearly pears, maroon plums with their leathery skins and soft threaded insides, red-orange tomatoes, green beans, and dill pickles with sections of dill plant and thick, crisp slices of onion in amber liquid. My mother sent me down of an evening to bring up plums for dessert or beans to eat with fried potatoes with pink chunks of Spam. When I pulled up the creaky door to the cellar, lizards scuttled across the cracked wooden steps and made me shiver.

            They still surprise me here in the Q, perhaps especially because they are so much less common, and because even now they seem to come out of nowhere. A few days ago, as I walked in my neighborhood, a striped racer whipped and rasped across the gravel in my neighbor’s yard. I couldn’t help shivering and laughing at myself and remembering my trips into the earth for my mother’s canned goods.

            Despite the fact that metropolitan Albuquerque was nearly 900,000 strong in the 2010 census and the fact that I live in a completely urban part of the city, I’m still treated to sightings of wildlife that surprise me with their variety. Pigeons and mourning doves are most frequent; they love to feed on grass, flower and weed (I hope) seeds in my yard. In the evening hundreds of grackles wheel the sky and just as many crows light on trees and buildings to hold their raucous conventions. Robins tell me spring has returned, and I can’t help thinking of that very important robin in The Secret Garden when I see them. Sparrows have their place, too. I don’t own a hummingbird feeder, but the little whirrers still come by to check into the morning glories, poppies and cucumber blossoms. Whenever I see a roadrunner, the NM state bird, I feel happy. They’re such comical characters and are usually running around, very upright, with some prey hanging out of their mouths—grasshoppers, lizards, and the other day I saw one with a mouse. Somehow they manage to look so pleased with themselves. And then there are the very small gray-brown birds with red heads. They’re like the ones who used to populate the elm tree outside the many-windowed room where we ate in Teec. My father said they were finches. There are plenty of butterflies, too—small monarchs and smaller white and yellow monochrome flutterers.

            The most common of four-footed creatures are rabbits. I often see wide-eyed cottontails on lawns in my neighborhood. They seem to think if they sit very, very still, I won’t notice them, although I’m looking right at them. I always tell them out loud that I’m not going to hurt them, that they’re safe with me, but they give me the suspicious eye. There are long-eared jackrabbits, too, though I see them in less populated parts of the city that still resemble their desert home. The occasional skunk also makes itself known.

            I’m pleased to see all this wildlife in my urban setting. It reminds me of a story Irene told me about walking home in Copenhagen, very early in the morning, through a demolition area. She saw a huge badger waddling over and between chunks of concrete after a night of hunting. I wonder how the wildlife feels in this territory we humans have so voraciously taken over. I’m thankful that they consent to grace us  with their presence.

Question: What wildlife are you privy to, particularly if you live in the city, but also rurally?

Seeking My Stamkafé II

            I love my weekend days on the town when I start with a plan, and the plan evolves into spontaneous exploration. This has proven to be the essence of my Year of Standing Still, in which curiosity often overtakes deliberateness. Saturday was that kind of day. I wanted to speed up my search for a café where I could ensconce myself in comfort for a few hours on a regular basis, a public place to think of as one of my places, my stamkafé. So I did some online research and decided I would pop into several Downtown and Old Town places, taking only an eyeball tour to see whether any, just on the surface, met my criteria as listed in Seeking My Stamkafé I (April 19, 2012 ). A reconnaissance mission to be followed by more in-depth visits to the deserving.

            I decided, however, to first make a real visit to Michael Thomas Coffee (MTC), which I’d noticed a few times when passing through a mixed neighborhood known as the Southeast Heights. Already a block away, I could see the MTC location because a gaggle of bicyclists stood out front re-helmeting after their morning joe. MTC appears to be housed in what used to be a two-car garage, the garage doors having been replaced by picture windows. It’s in an alterative commercial complex that includes Body Works, where I’d been for massage years ago, a wheatgrass greenhouse, Spring Song Gallery, a meeting space, patio and garden areas. The indoor space is small, and a coffee roaster takes up a goodly amount of space behind the counter. At 10:45, when I arrived, tables and chairs were pretty much taken. However, a counter along one of the windows still boasted vacant, padded, cobalt-colored stools. There were no comfy, stand-alone chairs of the sort that encourage lingering visits.

I don’t find high stools comfortable at all, so I took my black iced tea (of sufficient strength) out to the patio, where I sat in a plastic chair with cushion, put my feet up on another plastic chair, and enjoyed the Spanish broom, red roses, giant sunflowers not yet in bloom, but having reached a height of over five feet. Off to the side was a flourishing vegetable garden and pond. This part of MTC could entice me during clement weather, but come winter, I couldn’t see this as my stamkafé. Not until I went into the bathroom and discovered numerous board games on a metal shelf. Then I could imagine sitting at one of the tables with a friend over a game of Scrabble while dark clouds mixed with rain raged outside the windows.

But it was something other than MTC itself that made me shift my thinking as the day progressed. Driving away, thinking to reconnoiter the Downtown coffee places, I saw a set of three buildings, arranged in a U around an expanse of lawn under tall trees. The buildings were a soft gray stucco, neutral in their appeal, but there was an intriguing Southwestern design painted on it and, in the center of the design, the words Pura Vida. On either side of the lawn stood seven small, box greenhouses, obviously custom-built by the same man who made my little greenhouse. The whole configuration was reminiscent of Danish co-housing, which I love. Luckily, three of the residents were outside tending their gardens, and I learned that there are 14 two-story, two-bedroom apartments, that the multi-generational tenants love living there, the landlord prefers community-minded people who want to farm the greenhouses, and that the renters gather for spontaneous movie nights and barbecues. It’s the kind of place that appeals to me as I think of eventually renting, rather than buying. I considered then the rest of the neighborhood—several public parks, the Ernie Pyle Library, housed in the famous WWII journalist’s old home all nearby. Also, the Nob Hill neighborhood, which is home to my natural foods co-op, plenty of fun shops, an art theater, and UNM, all in hefty walking distance.

Suddenly MTC seemed a much more likely candidate for stamkafé. I strolled back for a second iced tea—blackberry-sage black this time—and to snap some photos of the patio and the hand-painted, former office chairs. The staff is unobtrusively friendly. The pastries, however, appeared uninspired, some of them even wrapped in plastic. Wonderful smells of roasting coffee could, however, compensate.

My Love Affair with Libraries and Librarians II

Thanks to Monica Friedman for this poster.

            Teec Nos Pos, in the north central part of Navajo Country, still feels like home. It is also more clearly than any other place on Earth, not-home. Because of its location within the Navajo Nation, it can never be my permanent dwelling place. Yet, if home is where the heart is, Teec Nos Pos will always be the place. We left there the year I turned nine. I knew it was my fault that we left. It was because I was so unhappy at boarding school. We left during monsoon season. On the afternoon of our departure, it seemed apocryphal that the heavens opened and rain fell as from a great waterfall, accompanied by sheets of blinding light and tremendous blasts of thunder. Dips in the road from Shiprock to Gallup became rivers. More than once we had to pull onto the shoulder because my father couldn’t see to drive. The Navajo name for Gallup is Na’nízhoozhí, meaning “bridges,” after the double bridges that once crossed the Rio Puerco on First Street. At those bridges, we were forced to wait in a line of traffic for the water to flow back under the bridges instead of over them.

            None of us wanted to live in Gallup; however, there were three things about Gallup that I could not help liking. Foremost was the fact that I would be attending Rehoboth Mission School as a day student. Third was the candy store in the little stone house at the bottom of steep Elephant Hill, less than a block below our house. There we could spend our weekly nickel on wax lips and mustaches, candy Pall Malls, orange-slice jellies, and Payday and Big Hunk candy bars.

Second to living again at home, surrounded by the people I loved and who loved me, was the utter joy of the Gallup Public Library. At long last I could touch the books, run my fingers along their many-colored spines, smell the pages, browse through chapter titles, decide for myself—this one looks interesting, that one funny, this one hopeless. I could check them out, carry them back up to Green Street, sit on the dark walnut window seat and be transported, take them back the same day or whenever I finished, and hunt for more treasure. Gone were the brown paper packages from Santa Fe.

Lit with natural sunlight, the Gallup library was furnished in southwestern style. Its walls were hung with oil paintings done by Works Progress Administration (WPA) artists. The heavy blonde wood chairs were carved with Native designs and upholstered with shiny leather seats. Thick carpeting hushed our voices and footfalls. Octavia Fellin, the descendent of Italian miners, was responsible for the fact that a town of fewer than 10,000 souls was home to library worthy of a much larger city. She not only knew how to select books, she had the crucial ability to successfully lobby the city council for funds. Miss Fellin left very little to her assistants. If you called the library, only one person ever answered. “The library. Miss Fellin,” she said, as if there were no other library on the planet. Certainly there was no other Miss Fellin.

A very large window separated Miss Fellin’s office from the rest of the library and her desk faced out like the throne of a benevolent queen who wore pleated wool skirts and white blouses with lace collars and turquoise and silver brooches. Naturally her shelves were lined with books, but also, just as naturally, with owls. Carved wooden owls, metal owls, Native American pottery owls, onyx owls. When I grew up, I once brought Miss Fellin an owl woven of gold straw. In 1975, Miss Fellin was named librarian of the year for the State of New Mexico. When Viktor Frankl: A Life Worth Living was published in 2006, Miss Fellin, now long retired, came to my very first signing—held in the renamed Octavia Fellin Public Library in Gallup. Her attendance was a greater honor to me than any of the awards the book has received. 

My Love Affair with Libraries and Librarians I

The first library I remember visiting was in the small town of Farmington, in the northwest corner of New Mexico. Farmington was a bordertown to the Navajo Reservation. At home in Teec Nos Pos, we ate vegetables from my father’s garden, eggs and chickens from our hen yard, and mutton from the trading post or people my father visited. Once a month we all piled into the family station wagon and drove 30 miles to Shiprock over a dirt road clotted with cabbage-sized cobbles, then another 30 miles to Farmington to buy staples. The list for a month’s worth of supplies was long, and we children sweated and battled it out in the car while my parents shopped.

It is a credit to my mother that she took the time from hunting down necessities during one of those trips to take me to the public library, which was housed in a small Craftsman-style cottage on a side street. We walked up a narrow sidewalk flanked by lawn and shaded by autumn leaves. Inside, every available wall was lined with books. I inhaled the wonderful smell and rushed to find the children’s room. Before I could choose a single volume from the feast, my mother entered a conversation with the woman at the large wooden desk. I was shocked to overhear her say that I couldn’t check out even one book. The time limit was the standard two weeks, and obviously that wouldn’t work for us, as we came to Farmington only once a month. My mother had promised that this was a way to get books, to move beyond the world of our own set of My Bookhouse Books. After the shock, I was crushed.

Then the woman offered a pale but viable alternative. The State library in Santa Fe provided a service to rural New Mexicans. The librarians there would mail me four books a month. After reading them, I would mail them back.

Only four? What if I finished early? Could I send them back and get more?

No. Only four. Per month.

Four was better than none. 

If I knew what books I wanted, I could request them. No guarantees, of course.

Mostly I didn’t know what books I wanted without being able to look and touch and hold, so I was at the (tender) mercy of the State librarians, whom I bless to this day. With them began my love affair with libraries and librarians. Each month I awaited the brown paper package, tied up with string (definitely one of my favorite things) from Santa Fe. Those librarians introduced me to children’s classics like The Secret Garden, which remains one of my all-time favorite books, Little House on the Prairie, The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle, and The Wheel on the School. They also sent less well-known books. Meindert De Jong's companion book of the Netherlands, Shadrach, drew me into the canal world of my great grandfather. The story that had me in stitches, so I requested it more than once, was Lazy Liza Lizard. Liza was a mischevous, bonnet-wearing, bucket-toting reptile, ever scheming to do as little work as the title suggests. Since when do lizards work? Since children’s books. Long before this, I had discovered the altered state induced by reading, and those wonderful ladies (I imagined them as ladies) in Santa Fe sent me to other worlds for four years.

I would call them glorious book years, and in one sense they were. But they also felt like years of a starvation diet. I always devoured the four books within the first week, as often as not reread them, then dutifully packed them up in the reverse side of the brown paper, and sorrowfully walked them, my erstwhile companions, down to the trading post from whence they would be mailed.

Request: Please share your earliest library memory.

Seeking my Stamkafé I

            On the last day of their visit in September, my Danish guests, Hanne and Lisbeth, went horseback riding in the Sandia Mountains with Cheyenne. Afterwards we all went for a late lunch at El Bruno’s, then a ride down one of the most upscale, rural streets of Albuquerque—Rio Grande Boulevard with its adobe mansions and quarterhorse-breeding stables. After that it was an in-town drive from one end of Route 66 to the other. We made a midpoint stop along the Mother Road across from the UNM campus at R. B. Winning’s Coffee Shop.

            We seated ourselves at a sidewalk table with cappuccinos and home-blended chai. Hanne asked if this were my stamkafé. Stam comes from the verb stamme, “to come from” or the noun stamme, meaning “tribe” or “roots”. A stamkafé, then, can be your regular hangout café, and it’s often where you practically co-own a regular table with a regular group of friends. I told Hanne I didn’t really have a stamkafé, and I didn’t think Winnings would be it. Winnings gets good reviews for its coffee and baked goods, but some poor comments for skuzzy clientele and possibly a little more funk than I like.

Busy writers at Water Street Coffee Joint

Since I go out on the town one day per weekend, I have begun a search for a café I could claim as my tribal haunt. I do like a certain amount of funk, definitely coziness or even better, what the Danes call hygge, an untranslatable blend of cozy and festive. I want comfortable chairs, not so deep that only a person of long femur can relax in them, good coffee and good tea, good pastries, a place that invites me to stay and read or write for several hours. Wi-fi is nice but not essential. Location in a neighborhood where I like to walk is a huge plus. Oh, and interesting fellow clientele is a must.

Granite Carpenter in Blågårds Plads

My favorite stamkafé remains the Water Street Coffee Joint in Kalamazoo. It meets every one of the above criteria, and was a place where I often met up with other writers to chat, write, and grade papers. In Copenhagen there are several cafés I enjoy. There’s Café Blågårdsgade with pleasing funk in the funky neighborhood of Nørrebro and directly across the street from Blågårds Plads, which is home to 22 granite sculptures of working people—among them the Fishwife, the Baker, and the Blacksmith—created by sculptor Kai Nielsen. There is also Café Månefiskeren (Café Moon Fisher) in famous or infamous Christiania, with all the funk-charm you could possibly want. A stroll through Christiania is never boring, the coffee is good, and the atmosphere entirely welcoming. Plus, it is a five-minute walk from where I live there. In San Francisco my hangout was Café La Boheme in the Mission District. Every wooden table different, comfy overstuffed couches—also all different—plenty of funk (sometimes a bit too much), good coffee, endless possibilities for walking among colorful Victorians and Latino markets. The clientele are ever fascinating.

A Corner of the Daily Grind

So what about my search in the Q? I’ve ruled out the many local-chain Satellites as too hip and thus somewhat sterile. Starbucks—same and worse. I’ve matronized the Daily Grind thrice recently. It is in the neighborhood that increases my happiness index to a height that I cannot ignore—Heuning-Highland, also known now as Edo (East Downtown). The coffee is excellent and tea choices are acceptable. The fluted muffins are to die for, as are the green chilé pockets (flaky, buttery pastries filled with potatoes, green chilé and cheddar). At lunch there are creative soups and good salads. The staff is friendly. There is funk. There is wi-fi. Across the street is the wonderful old Main Library, the one I frequented for years when I lived in this neighborhood and is now the Special Collections and Genealogical Library. The Daily Grind has a patio and is housed in a quaint, crumbling complex of buildings that I’ve always found intriguing. It has two drawbacks: you must go through a food preparation area to get to the bathroom, so going becomes a rather public event--several public events if I stay awhile. Also, the chairs are not all that comfortable. I don’t want to make my choice too quickly, but the Daily Grind is definitely in the running. More to come as my search continues.

Question: Do you have a stamkafé? Do tell.

The Gifts of Travel II

Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen

It was our last evening in Copenhagen, and Cheyenne’s dad was helping us pack an old-fashioned computer monitor into a large carton, slapping neon orange “Fragile” stickers all over it. We started giggling about the word for suitcase, kuffert (the “u” pronounced like the “oo” in “hoof”) because when you say just about any word in any language enough times quickly, it starts to sound hilarious. I told Jan it might be my last visit to Denmark because Cheyenne was getting old enough to start traveling there on her own. I had all kinds of reasons, carbon footprint being number one. Close behind was the idea that I ought to be donating what it cost me to make such expensive trips to the feeding of people who are starving. I hadn’t yet arrived at thinking I might consider standing still for awhile.

            Jan got very serious then. He said, “I think it’s important that you keep coming. It’s important for people to travel. You give us--me anyway--whole different ways of thinking about things. Don’t stop visiting.” Several years later a friend from Norway said, “If it weren’t for you, I would think all Americans are the same—the way they appear in American movies.” Of course, these were sentiments I was glad to hear.

            Those exchanges (by definition of “exchange”) are a two-way proposition. Going back to the scene on the train in Poland (“The Gifts of Travel I” in my post of 4/5/12) and my conversation with those Polish students, I can say that we broadened one another’s perspectives. They showed me that it was a misconception that Lech Walesa was every Pole's hero. On the other hand, my response to their criticisms of his presidency was first of all to share my surprise. Thus they elaborated on their disappointments. Then I suggested, “Maybe he was the perfect person to lead the fight for freedom, to inspire others to action. But maybe his gift isn’t administration.” It was their turn to be surprised and then to agree with me and to say how glad they were to be enjoying independence. They gave me a less than heroic Walesa, and I gave them back a little of the hero.

            The invaluable exchange of perspectives is what makes travel live up to Mark Twain’s pronouncement, Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. Of course, the exchange can constitute a gift to others or a curse. As often as not, I’m just living my traveling life, not terribly aware of how I might be affecting others. Such is life.

The Gifts of Travel I

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime. ~ Mark Twain

            The gifts of travel are twain—gifts to oneself and gifts to the world. Of course, it benefits me in a personal way to become a more whole human being through travel. Anytime any one of us becomes more whole, it cannot help benefitting the world around us, so there is naturally an overlap between the two categories of gifts. Visualize a Venn diagram, if you will.

            When I moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan in 2004 to attend a creative writing program, I got a library card and visited an Impressionist exhibit at the art institute on my first day there. Within a week, I had shopped the farmers’ market, joined the Citizens Credit Union and the Peoples’ Food Cooperative, and had ordered organic meat from a collective that delivered once a month at the Unitarian Church. The next week I attended a presidential debate party at the home of my major advisor. I got to talking with his wife about some of my discoveries. I’m sure I didn’t stand there listing them as I did just now, but she asked, “How did you get so connected so quickly?”

            “It comes from moving and traveling so much,” was my reply. Even though I had never really thought about this before, I knew it was true. Nomads, by necessity, are quick to find the best places to meet their daily needs. They know how to access resources that will lead them to the best grazing for their sheep or the best organic produce for their table.

            I include living in a culture outside one’s own as a form of travel, and travel to me is different from tourism. It has less to do with the length of a stay outside one’s own milieu and more to do with the way one goes about it. Tourists usually attempt to meet their needs in the new place as similarly as possible to the way they meet them at home. From this fact comes the stereotype of the ugly American (or ugly German or Japanese, as the case may be). Ugly Americans demand that their hosts speak English. They shower contempt on those who can’t or don’t, while they themselves speak only English and never intend to speak anything else. They eat only where they can get American food or national foods that have been adapted to American tastes. They stay in hotels that might be found anywhere in the world. They usually rush from one place to the next, in order to cut as many notches as possible in their tourism belts. I must add, of course, that not all tourists are like this, but from the common occurrence arises the stereotype.

            Travelers, on the other hand often visit fewer places more deeply. They’re interested in making friends, getting to know how everyday people live in an unfamiliar place. They want to understand a new culture, learn at least some of the language, even if only survival words they will forget when they leave. Travelers, even when they are there for only a short time, often act as though they are actually living in a place.

Krakow street from the medieval guild hall

I considered myself a traveler when I went to Krakow, Poland in 1991, although I would be there for only for 4 days. I went by boat from Copenhagen across the Baltic and by train from Swinoujscie. This meant I was traveling with other Poles, students, who were (thankfully) eager to use their English, and I got to learn their attitudes about the politics and economy in Poland. I was surprised to find that they were not very happy with Lech Walesa, who was then president. I had thought he would be everyone’s hero (more about this next time). When I got to Krakow it was 5 a.m, already bright daylight in summer. Outside the depot stood a stocky, short man, probably in his 60s. He was offering a room to rent in his and his grown daughter’s home. He spoke no English, and I didn’t know any Polish words yet. However, he had some German left over from WWII, and I had some left from the university, so we communicated enough for me to decide to take his offer. I had already planned that I would stay in a home (thanks to the Lonely Planet guide I knew this was possible) because I wanted to see first-hand what ordinary life in Poland was like. What I remember most now was the bathwater system, with a boiler tank in the bathroom that had to be heated in advance of a bath. The apartment was far enough from the city center that my walks to and from the train station gave me yet another opportunity to see urban Polish life. On my route, I saw mostly gray rows of early 20^th or 19^th century apartment buildings and one large, well-used park. Except for a single restaurant meal, I bought my food in an open-air market. The only thing I planned to visit that a tourist might see was Auschwitz, my reason for the trip. There, the cabbie, who would drive me from the Birkenau camp to the train station, invited me into his home in the town of Oswiecim, which was more modern and of a different class from the one where I was staying—so yet another view, combined with the stories of someone who was a small boy when Auschwitz was in operation. 

On the train back to Swinoujscie, I made a list of words and phrases I had learned—all 23 of them. The only one I still remember is voda minerala (mineral water), What else did I learn about Poland that I hadn’t known before? I learned that Poland is softly green in early summer; I had always thought of it as a grim place. I saw how very resourceful rural Poles are. Many houses had clearly been built piecemeal: whenever they had enough money, the owners bought a few bricks and added them to the walls, whatever type of brick or block was available, so houses looked like patchwork quilts. I learned that Poland grows a lot of rye and that rye waves blue-green in the fields. At Auschwitz I saw how many non-Jewish Poles had perished in that place. I learned that stumpy women in babushkas are not the norm. The majority dressed in contemporary styles, truthfully, more fashionably than I did.

I do not mean to limn myself as a traveler nonpareil. Nor do I mean to say that being a tourist is bad. These are just some examples of differences between the traveler mindset and the tourist mindset and of some of the gifts I’ve received by allowing myself to be a traveler. I do think that the traveler’s perspective is what Mark Twain was referring to when he said that travel is fatal to bigotry. That doesn’t mean that tourism necessarily perpetuates bigotry, though I do think it happens quite often.

What are your experiences of travel versus tourism? Do you agree or disagree with the analysis I’ve presented? What have you learned from travel? Delight me and my  readers by answering any or all of these questions. If you do respond, please consider responding on the blog site itself. Please?