Running Hopi: Transcending time and getting schooled by Hoffman Shorty

 

I run. And I weep. My tears may come from the fact that it’s 6 a.m., or perhaps from the burning in legs and lungs as I try to hold the pace of the leaders. But I’m pretty sure my sobs come from a deep joy inspired by the way the rising sun lights up the ancient buildings of Old Oraibi on a mesa distant, and the way it does so at the very moment that gravel road gives way to a narrow rain-dampened trail. This trail, I imagine, has been trod for centuries by runners vying against one another, or heading off to distant farms to tend to the corn. My 97 fellow runners and I, it seems, have transcended time.

It’s early September, and this is the 40th annual Louis Tewanima 10 kilometer footrace, which takes place in and around the Hopi village of Shungopavi in northern Arizona. The race is named after a Hopi who was yanked as a young man from his home in Shungopavi in 1907 and shipped off to boarding school in Carlisle, Penn. There, the cross-country coach noticed the youngster’s talent, and Tewanima began running competitively. He finished 9th in the 1908 Olympic Marathon, and won the silver medal in the 1912 Olympic 10,000 meter run, setting an American record that held until Billy Mills, a Sioux, broke it in 1964.

Read the rest of the story here. 

Goin' back to Winslow

Winslow, Ariz. has been described as sad, depressed, quiet, dead and creepy. Buildings once housing bustling businesses were abandoned and not even secured, left to the pigeons. A local gas station reportedly had spelled out “God Hates Winslow” on its sign. That’s probably not fair: The reservation border town of 10,000, once the economic and social center of northern Arizona that lies at the low point along the rails between Gallup and Flagstaff, is simply a victim of the vagaries of transport, just another old railroad town bludgeoned by the Interstate and bled dry by the automobile. Were it not for the prison, a community college, the power plant down in Joseph City and the hotel and fast food chains serving I-40 motorists, the place might just blow away.

At least, that’s how it looked 19 years ago, the last time I spent any time in Winslow, an accidental visit that was traumatic enough to cause me to avoid the place ever since. These days you’ll still encounter rundown gas stations, a high unemployment rate, decaying motels and the detritus that tends to pile up in the liminal spaces of the West. But you can also find vast hallways filled with giant, haunting contemporary paintings in the restored La Posada Inn – built in 1929 to serve a slower, more elegant society. In a few of those once-abandoned buildings, a type of art unfettered by market considerations has replaced the pigeons. Later this month, the Station-to-Station art on rails project is stopping in Winslow, featuring Cat Power, Jackson Browne and Ed Ruscha’s cactus omelette. And don’t be too shocked if you encounter an icon of contemporary art a la Ruscha in the restaurant at La Posada, where the food rivals any you might find in Santa Fe.

Read the rest of the story at hcn.org... 

The Stumbling Stones of Aldekerk

One of the reasons we moved to Germany in 2010 was because Wendy, my wife, and our daughters have German citizenship. They are citizens because Wendy's grandparents, Arthur and Margaret Mendel, fled the Nazis back in 1938, and German law says that those who lost their citizenship between 1933 and 1945, along with their descendants, can have it back.

The story of Wendy's grandparents and their families is heartbreaking and fascinating. It's a story I hope to write down someday. In the meantime, I made this short video about Wendy's grandfather's home town of Aldekerk, and the installation of Stolpersteine, or Stumbling Stones, in front of the family house there. The Stolpersteine, of which there are thousands throughout Germany and in some neighboring countries, are a project of the artist Gunther Demnig, who places the little brass sculptures in sidewalks in front of houses from which Jews and other victims of the Nazis were taken or where they were murdered. When we stumble upon them in Berlin, which is quite often, sadly, we always stop and read the inscriptions.

Up until June 2012, there were no Stolpersteine in Aldekerk. Now there are two groups of them, one for each of the two Jewish families who called the small town their home until the Nazis took their homes and many of their lives away from them.

Sometimes the number of memorials to the Holocaust in Berlin can be overwhelming. And sometimes we might ask, Isn't it enough yet? The answer is clear: It will never be enough.

Music: Requiem for Victims of East Japan Earthquake (sanmi) / CC BY 3.0
and Brendan Kinsella playing  Bach - Aria Variata, BVW. 989 - Variation No. 3 from freemusicarchive.org under a public domain license. 

Berlin's Bahns & Buses: Hauptbahnhof

Berlin's Hauptbahnhof, or central train station, is considered one of the most beautiful train stations in the world. I have to agree. Its grandeur, the way the light filters through the glass and steel and down through all the layers of the station make it an awe inspiring place. It is, I must admit, a bit weird to walk out of all that modern grandeur into the surrounding part of the city. Indeed, it doesn't feel like a city here at all, but rather like, well, a lot of space with some cool modern buildings off in the distance. I've come to cherish the space and the feeling of near-vertigo one gets while standing out in the grassy field across the river from the train station.

For a lot more video footage of the Haubtbahnhof, go to my Bahns & Buses video & essay. For views of other train stations in Berlin, check out Feuerbachstrasse, Olympia Stadion, Deutsch Oper, Westhafen, Gesundbrunnen.

Berlin's Bahns & Buses: Gesundbrunnen

Quite honestly, the biggest train station in northern Berlin is rather boring. In fact, there's not really even much of a station here, just lots of tracks and platforms and a big flat area where the station probably should be. Nevertheless, you can board long distance and regional trains here to just about anywhere, as well as the U-8 and the Ring-Bahn and the S1.

If the station itself isn't so great, the area around it is worth exploring. My favorite Berlin park, Humboldthain (along with its ghosts), is just across the way. The Berlin Wall ran very close to here, and the Bösebrücke is just up the tracks. A flood of people streamed across that bridge, which marked the division between East and West, when the wall came down. Leading right out of the station is Badstrasse, a wild street full of colors and smells and Turkish grocers singing their produce-selling songs. There's a great Lebanese restaurant a couple blocks down from the station, along with some great Turkish bakeries.

Berlin's Bahns & Buses: Olympia Stadion

It was a dark, cold, damp day in mid-January when I arrived at the Olympia Stadion S-Bahn station. The train was almost empty. The train platforms -- there are many of them, to accommodate the crowds during big soccer games or other events -- were absolutely empty. I suppose it's like this in the middle of a week day in winter, when nothing is happening at the stadium. Still, it was creepy.

Even more creepy were the stadium grounds themselves. They were overwhelming in scale, and overwhelming in their barrenness -- a blank slate on which my imagination could run wild, transposing Leni Riefenstahl images all over the place. The only thing that seemed alive, that escaped the blank rationality of it all was that gnarled tree growing up as if from stone and concrete, all crooked and mysterious. That tree made me feel better.

Even the U-Bahn station was deserted and dark, as if forgotten. I waited there and looked up at the security camera. It glared back at me. When the train came, it was empty, as if it were a ghost from another time.

For my other Berlin's Bahns & Buses posts and photos: Overview & video, Feuerbachstrasse, Deutsche Oper, Westhafen. 

Berlin's Bahns & Buses: Westhafen

S- & U-Bahnhof Westhafen isn't exactly one of Berlin's iconic stations. It's perhaps best known as one of the stops you're likely to use when going to the Ausländerbehörde, an experience most folks would like to forget. Westhafen's on the border of Wedding and Moabit, and in the middle of a major industrial zone: It's in the shadow of a big coal power plant, and next to Berlin's big port, Westhafen, on the Spree River.

But it's got some things going for it, aside from the opportunity to go up on a neighboring bridge and watch big machines make mincemeat of scrap metal over at the port. For one thing, it's right next to one of the coolest Kleingartenkolonies in town, a narrow row of cottages and gardens surrounded on both sides by railroad tracks and utter industrialization. And then there's the art, mostly comprised of letters on tiles in the station. At first, the letters seem to be random. But then one realizes that they tell a story of Heinrich Heine and how he lost his name when he fled to France. The rest of the letters -- in a typeface rejected by the Nazis -- spell out the Declaration of Human Rights. The project was done by artists Françoise Schein and Barbara Reiter in 2000, and the story is nicely told in this video.

Westhafen's Kleingartenkolonie, sandwiched between tracks and tracks.

Berlin's Bahns & Buses: Deutsche Oper

During my time in Berlin this winter, while my kids and wife were in school and I was supposed to be doing some real work, I got a bit obsessed with expressing my infatuation with the city's public transportation system. I wrote a sort of love letter and video to the U-Bahns, S-Bahns and buses. During the time, I also found myself drawn to the train stations, themselves. So, for my last few days here, I've been riding the rails and taking photos of various Bahnhofs.

Today's feature is the Deutsche Opera (German Opera) stop on the U-2, one of the older lines that cuts right through the center of town going east/west. The stop is in Charlottenburg, in West Berlin, and opens up to the opera itself -- one of three major opera houses currently running in Berlin. I had never been to a real opera before moving to Germany in the summer of 2010. Then, that winter, my family and I made up for it, attending a half-dozen performances in the Deutsche Oper, the Schiller Theatre (filling in for the old, grand Staatsoper, which is being renovated) and the Komische Oper.

My favorite venue is actually the Schiller (just down the street from the Deutsche Oper). It's rather humdrum, and lacks the slick modernity of the Deutsche Oper, or the opulence of the Komisch. But I just like the way the seats are set up at such a steep angle that you're always looking down at the stage. I also like the fact that, in our experience, the most expensive seats in the house didn't all sell, which means they were available to those cheapskates (us) who show up for discount tickets 30 minutes before the show. At the Schiller, we often had some of the best seats in the house for a pittance.

The opera is just another one of those things that the government subsidizes here because it believes that art and culture are necessities. Not only can the average citizen get a cheap ticket at a world-class performance, but the unemployed can pick up an opera ticket for about $4.50. Yes, you read that right. Socialism? If so, socialism is a beautiful thing.

But back to the Bahnhof. This is one of the classic stations in Berlin, with nice tile mosaics, cool font for the signs, and separate mosaics for various composers in the hallway upstairs. For my video/essay about the transport system, go here. For more Berlin Bahn photos: here and there.

Berlin's Trams, Buses and Bahns, Oh my!

Owning a car sucks. I mean, really: You've got to pay for gas, insurance, oil changes, tires, maintenance. You've got to worry about crashing it. You've got to fret about driving in adverse conditions (traffic). So, it was with great cathartic relief that we sold our car, along with most of our other possessions, when we moved from rural Colorado to Berlin a couple of years ago. After we got here, we had a brief moment during which we thought we needed to buy a car. It passed.

No one needs to own a car in Berlin. A thick and complex public transportation net stretches from one end of the city to the other, so that no matter where you might be, a U-Bahn, S-Bahn, tram or bus is no more than a few blocks and a 10 minute wait away. And once you're in the net, you can get within a few blocks of wherever it is you might want to go. Add to that the fact that Berlin is bike-friendly, with plenty of bike paths and lanes and its lack of topography (making a ride from one side of the city to the other, even on an old Communist-era one-speed, a rather quick and not-too-grueling endeavor), and you've got a city in which cars are superfluous.

Since I don't like cars, I like Berlin. But the public transportation is more than just a car substitute. It's a great medium through which one can see and experience a dynamic, diverse and rather spread out city. At least Joseph Roth thought so. A newspaper columnist in 1920s Berlin, he was one of the greatest chroniclers of the city. In his 1922 column, "The Ride Past the Houses," Roth wrote:

The S-Bahn line goes right past the houses, affording its passengers many curious and interesting sights... Sometimes a ride on the S-Bahn is more instructive than a voyage to distant lands. Experienced travelers will confirm that it is sufficient to see a single lilac shrub in a dusty city courtyard to understand the deep sadness of all the hidden lilac trees anywhere in the world.

Which is why I return from a ride on the S-Bahn full of many sad and beautiful impressions, and when I navigate a little bit of the city, I feel as proud as if I had circumnavigated the globe.

Of course, that was nearly a century ago. Now, with trains, trams and buses going everywhere, it's even more true. Aside from walking, riding buses and trains is the best way to see Berlin, and it's a lot quicker. If you want the typical tourist sights, just hop on Bus 100 at Alexanderplatz, climb up to the top-floor (it's a double-decker, just like the 15 Euro-a-pop sightseeing buses) and relax as you glide past the Brandenburg Gate, the Siegessäule, the Reichstag and Bellevue Palace, embassy alley. And the round trip costs just 2,30 Euro, or about $3; spend four Euros more, and you can spend the whole day riding buses and rails, through every part of the city imaginable. I've been known to do the entire Ring Bahn loop, just to see some of the city's fringe, a stunning view of the Spree near Ostkreuz and a good glimpse of wild street art and abandoned industrial areas.

Yes, and there are the people, too. Berlin trains are nowhere near as animated as, say, those in Naples -- Germans are a bit more zurückhaltend, or restrained. But the trains are packed with humanity of all sorts -- rich and poor, workers in suits and coveralls, old and young. They chat, they stare out at the landscape slipping by, old German ladies lecture parents about their kids' behavior and they read. Yes, read, not stare transfixed at electronic devices. Mostly they read newspapers -- I credit the public transportation system for the success of Germany's print periodicals -- and a few magazines. Also books. It's not crazy to see, in one day, different people reading Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Adorno and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

With all those people in small spaces, it's inevitable that love will eventually blossom. Which is why the BVG, which operates the transportation net, has its own "missed connections" page on its website. Make some meaningful eye contact with someone on the U-1 but were too shy to introduce yourself? Just go to Meine Augenblicke page and post an ad. Here's a rough translation of one from today:

I found you beautiful.

M41
Date: 10/01/2012 16:00
Posted: 10/01/2012 22:15
From: slacker

You (female, brunette, brown wool cap, nose piercing, striped fleece jacket, black boots) rode with me (male, blond, blue parka, gray scarf) in the M41 direction of Sonnenallee S-Bahn station. We stood side by side and I gazed at you often. You gave me looks, too. If I wasn't imagining things, it would be nice if you would contact me so that we can go mini golfing sometime. 

Mini golfing? Really? So sweet. The point is, riding the Berlin Bahns isn't just a commute, it's an adventure. It's life. And it's a huge part of life that most of the United States is simply missing out on. Instead, we doom ourselves to sitting for hours in our sealed little steel bubbles, in traffic on some placeless freeway between the suburbs and the strip mall. Too bad. 

I wanted to capture the experience of Berlin's public transportation, so I made this video. It's a bit long, and for that I apologize. But just think of it as a 12 minute meditative break (the music, after you get through the intro, facilitates deep thought). Every shot is either of, or from, Berlin's public transportation. Most are from trains or buses, with a bit from trams. The Hauptbahnhof -- a grand, modern station full of shiny steel and glass -- plays a leading role. The gritty Warschaustrasse station in the east gets a small part, as do a few passengers and even a woman plucking her eyebrows in her apartment window, directly across from the S-Bahn station.

Feuerbachstrasse S-Bahn

I like this station because it's round. And because the font on the sign is very cool. And because the name is translated, roughly, as "fire brook street."

Berlin Bahns: Images

I'm working on a video -- just for fun -- about Berlin from a train, bus and tram's-eye-view, and so I've been spending a lot of time on the public transportation, which I really enjoy. Here's a few of the images. Video coming to this blog soon.

View of Berlin from the platform of the Hauptbahnhof (main train station)

Crazy trees and church near U-Bahn Friedrich-Wilhelm-Platz

Empty U-Bahn car, U-1.

Berlin New Year Pyrotechnic Orgy

I used to think American towns on Fourth of July were kind of crazy, r.e. fireworks. But as this video shows, even our "quiet" Berlin neighborhood becomes rather explosive on New Years Eve, or Silvester. High-powered fireworks are sold everywhere leading up to the holiday, and they can be set off with impunity and do. For hours on end. The music in the video -- a bit of sacred to go with the profane -- is by the Tudor Consort.

Quis non posset (The Tudor Consort) / CC BY 3.0

A letter to the CEO of United Airlines

Jeff Smisek
CEO, Continental/United Airlines
77 West Wacker
Chicago, IL

Dear Mr. Smisek

I recently flew with your company on a trip from Denver to Frankfurt. It was the big leg of a trip I often make, from Boulder, Colo., to Berlin, where my family lives. Usually I fly with Lufthansa, but this time I opted for the home-grown firm, and I thought you might like to hear about one of your customer’s experiences.

First off, let me give a hearty and sincere “Thank You!” for getting me across the Atlantic Ocean in one piece. I do realize things could have turned out a lot worse, and I’m grateful that your pilots kept the plane in the air. They are to be commended.

I wish I could go on to say how you put your German counterparts to shame in other departments. I cannot.

In hindsight, I’d have to say that my problems began in Denver, while I waited to board and one of your employees asked that passengers volunteer to check their carry-on luggage. Since only a few of my compatriots stepped up, I decided I should pitch in. It worried me a bit, because my carry-on had all my clothes for the next five weeks in it, including my only winter coat (it’s cold in Berlin) and a brand-new camera. But I figured if you could get a multi-million dollar jet over the ocean, you should be able to do the same with my bag. Besides, I was less than enthusiastic about participating in the battle for the overhead bins, which almost never ends well.

The Denver to Dulles leg went splendidly, thank you. And the movie wasn’t even half bad, despite the fact that the censors dubbed “jackhole” in the place of “a#@hole,” which really doesn’t work well. I did have a fairly tight connection, so I got a nice jog in through the Dulles terminal -- always nice to stretch the legs during such a trip -- arriving at the gate just in time to board the flight to Frankfurt. I settled into my seat, and prepared for the long ride. Then I noticed that everyone else was watching movies on their video monitors. I also noticed my monitor was producing a never-ending stream of gobbledygook. At first, I figured it would fix itself as soon as we took off. Except we never took off.

After we had waited for about 45 minutes, the pilot announced that there were mechanical problems with the plane and we would have to wait another hour before takeoff. I’m 100 percent in favor of fixing mechanical problems before takeoff, even if it means a bit of a wait. After all, a few days earlier, one of your planes had an emergency landing in Grand Junction on its way from Denver to L.A. because of a bad engine. Such a landing in the ocean or on a Greenland glacier would be decidedly less pleasant, especially since I did not have access to my aforementioned winter coat. My building anxiety (flying scares me in the best conditions) would have been eased had I been able to watch a movie or, even better, have a nice, stiff drink. Yet my video monitor was still on the fritz (everyone else’s still worked fine), and the only alcohol flowing was among the plutocrats in first class. I pushed my flight-attendant call button repeatedly, to no avail. Finally, after the hour was up, the plane was fixed and we were getting ready (again) for takeoff, I hailed a passing flight attendant. He looked at my monitor and said, “Well, it might work later.” I explained that it hadn’t worked for over an hour. “Okay,” he said, already a bit impatient, “I’ll try to reset it.” He did. It worked, and I got to see the first part of Contagion, a movie I have been wanting to see, even if it is a questionable choice on an overseas flight filled with germ-carriers. 

Or at least it worked until the PA sparked up with another announcement: The problem with the pressurization/air-conditioning was not fixed, after all. The wait would continue. I tried to get back to the movie, but my video monitor was broken again. I flagged down another flight attendant. She reset the monitor. Back to Contagion and a now-building anxiety, on many fronts. Instead of handing out free cocktails, as they should have done after we had sat in the plane for nearly two hours, the flight attendants handed out free pretzels.

The PA kept kicking in to tell us that we would have to continue to wait, sending my video monitor into gobbledygook each time. Finally, after we had been on the plane for approximately three hours, we were told that we were switching planes. We de-boarded. We waited at our new gate for another hour and a half. We were told we had to board very orderly, and quickly, or else the flight would be cancelled. Yet we were also forced to wait until all the first class folks leisurely made their way onto the plane. We took off, a mere 4.5 hours late. This time my video monitor worked, but Contagion, the movie I had made it halfway through, was not a choice. I did note, with relief, that the delay gave the baggage folks plenty of time to get my luggage onto the correct plane.

I paid $1212 for this flight. Typically, I pay about the same for the Denver nonstop-to-Frankfurt (and then to Berlin) on Lufthansa. On Lufthansa, even those in the coach-class are offered warm, wet towels before meals to wash their hands and refresh their faces. Then the pre-dinner drinks -- including a variety of cocktails and wine -- come, free of charge. The food is airplane food, but it’s usually quite edible, even tasty. Wine is offered, free, during meals, and flight attendants are always happy to top off your glass. After dinner, they bring around Calvados and Bailey’s. Yes, it, too, is free, or rather, it’s included in the price of the ticket.

On United, I received a meal that would have violated the Eighth Amendment had it been served in a maximum security prison. The “pasta” was mushy, covered with some sort of pea and tomato sauce that could only have been concocted from the plate-scrapings of last month’s first class offerings. It was so lacking in flavor that I used my entire salt and pepper packets to make it edible, and even still I barely choked it down. The bread roll was styrofoam-white and cold; the “spread” some strange dairy/soy stuff that made margarine seem like a delicacy. I ordered a wine to try to wash it down, and to her credit, the flight attendant offered me one free glass (normally $7 for some cheap swill that pairs best with beans and weenies heated up in a can under a bridge) “because of the delay.” Now, I know it’s not easy to run an airline in these hard times, and you’re just cutting costs where you can. But I also know that you got paid $4.4 million last year; it just seems like maybe you could put, oh, I don’t know, $.1 million of that into coming up with at least quasi-edible food for your customers. Maybe?

My original plan had been to get to Frankfurt, collect my luggage and make it to the train -- where a first-class berth awaited me courtesy of a special online offer -- just in time to zip off to Berlin. I wanted to use the opportunity to use the aforementioned camera to shoot some video of the German landscape sliding by for a project I’m working on. I got to Frankfurt alright (4.5 hours late). The former-carry-on-but-checked-at-the-gate luggage, containing aforementioned camera, clothes and winter coat, did not.

I staggered out of the baggage claim (22 hours had passed since I embarked on my travels) and found a credit card pay-phone on which to call my wife to tell her how late I’d be. My repeated, very expensive attempts at the call (I had the wrong number) apparently alarmed my bank back home, which triggered the deactivation of said credit card. Not knowing that, I headed to the train ticket counter, where I was told that my special offer ticket was invalidated since I missed my train and I’d have to buy a new ticket, for 194 Euros. My sanity continued to falter, but I took hold of myself, made my way to the United counter, and begged the woman there to put me on a flight to Berlin. Not possible, she said, but United would reimburse me for my new train ticket at some later date. I’m still hopeful this will happen.

I went back to the train office, and told them to put me on the fastest train to Berlin. They ran my credit card. It was declined. I started to see blue spots everywhere I looked, and pressure built in the back of my skull. You see, I needed the credit card to pay for the phone call to my bank to get the credit card reactivated, yet the credit card, obviously, did not work.

Luckily, I had a few Euros left over from my last trip, and started stuffing them into a pay phone at a horrid rate while my bank put me on hold once, then again. Then I was cut off because I ran out of change. I went to a fast-food sausage joint for more coins, and on the next call the customer service rep hung up on me (perhaps because I sounded slightly dangerous at this point?). None of this is the direct fault of United, of course, but had I arrived in Frankfurt on time, none of it would have been necessary, either.

Finally, I reached the correct person, my credit card was fixed, and I got on the train, which turned out to be relaxing and quite enjoyable (and the light was perfect for video but, alas, I had no camera). I arrived in Berlin eight hours later than planned. Too bad they don't run trains from Denver to Frankfurt.

I do want to thank you for the bonus miles I received for my troubles. I am booked on another United flight next month to get back to the States (oh how I wish it were on Lufthansa again), and I thought that I could maybe use those miles -- in addition to others I have -- to upgrade to business class to make the trip tolerable. When I tried to use your website to make the upgrade, however, it told me that I don’t have any reservations (despite the fact that other parts of your website confirm that, yes, indeed, I do have reservations). I’m guessing that when I call, I’ll be told that my reservations aren’t the right kind to upgrade, which happened recently when a friend with a lot of miles tried to upgrade my ticket on the troubled flight I've been going on about.

In any event, I won’t be volunteering to check my luggage at the gate. Assuming I have any luggage that is -- though I'm hoping it's on its way, it remains lost, somewhere between Berlin and Denver. (UPDATE: The luggage arrived intact, 24 hours late!)

Thank you for listening.

Sincerely,


Jonathan Thompson

Return of the Corn (at Taos Pueblo)

The roads that wind across the Taos Pueblo reservation pass through a cultural and environmental mosaic of a type common in the rural West, where natural beauty and human poverty overlap and sometimes blend. Here is a thicket of wild plums growing up along a lush irrigation ditch, the Sangre de Cristo mountains rising up as backdrop. Here is a tiny stuccoed house, accompanied by an old Chevy Chevelle that appears to be slowly melting into the shrubs and dirt. Nearby, a burned out, roofless shack sits undisturbed while a Rez dog, his thick fur dreadlocked with dirt and neglect, rambles in the dust alongside Deer Jaw road.

Occasionally, this intruder notices a shock of bright green. Each one is a cornfield, the maturing stalks emerald in the sunlight. It's surprising because after World War II many farmers in Taos Pueblo and in other parts of the West gave up traditional farming.

But farming, including corn growing, is slowly coming back to the Pueblo thanks to grassroots efforts that have sprouted over the last decade,  such as the sustainable agriculture initiative and the Red Willow growers cooperative. Now, the return of the corn is also being helped along by a couple of guys who were looking for changes in their own lives, and by an old tractor named the Red Buffalo.

Read the rest of this post here.

Bats, bear poop and prairie dogs: A country boy meets the urban wild

In the beginning was the bat. Roger, Isolde,* and I sipped margaritas on a warm August evening in their Boulder condo. Suddenly, Roger slammed down his drink, pointed to the ceiling and screamed, “Look out!” As a black, papery blur fluttered around the living room, I dived to the floor and slithered under the table. Roger, more experienced in such matters**, whacked the bat to the floor with his flip flop, trapped it in a bowl and relocated to the out of doors. After we determined that the house was clear, I crawled out from under the table and noticed a scratch on my arm that wasn’t there before. “Rabies is 100 percent fatal,” Roger said. Then he mixed another round.

The bat incident, which occurred just a few days after I moved to Boulder, was my initiation into the urban wild. I’ve spent most of my life in rural areas, and many days and nights exploring the depths of so-called wilderness. Yet my encounters with wildlife, especially potentially hazardous ones, have been fairly scantº. That is, until I moved here, to Colorado’s sprawling and heavily populated Front Range metropolitan area.

I knew Boulder was fraught with hazards, from yoga instructors, clad in curve-and-crevice-revealing spandex pants striking poses in upscale coffee shops, to guys in short shorts yammering on about body mass index, to the high-priced frozen yogurt treats that, only after you get through the checkout line, you realize are made for dogs. But wild animals? Yes. It turns out that whether I’m on a trail run or my daily commute, I’ve become a sort of suburban Craig Childs, with every bike path and cul de sac offering the neck-prickling danger of some animal encounter.

Read the rest at the High Country News Goat blog (where I'll be doing most of my posting while I'm here in Boulder). 

Rain Bow meets Sun Flower

Darkness and light in the North Fork

Berlin to Boulder

I've been back in the US of A for just over a month now, and the culture shock is waning. Kinda. After spending a year in Berlin, my wife, daughters and I came back for the summer. I'll be sticking around for another nine months, as a Ted Scripps Environmental Journalism Fellow at CU Boulder. I'm super excited about the opportunity; I'll be taking classes, reporting and writing, with a focus on environmental issues in the West.

Which is just what I focused on for several months while still in Berlin: I wrote a monster of a story for High Country News about global economic influences on the extractive industries of the West. It's some crazy stuff. Check out the story, and accompanying infographics here. I'll start posting here -- about being back in the US and other personal musings -- again in mid- to late August.

I come from the land of no history

Sometimes, being the only American in the room can be a little, er, embarrassing. I find myself in that position quite often, especially in German class.

I've taken nearly five months of German classes since arriving in Berlin. Actually, I should call them integration courses, since that's the official name, and that's also the goal: integration. The German government wants to mold me and my fellow Auslanders (foreigners) into good Germans. So they require folks like me to take these courses in order to keep my residency permit. Mostly, the courses just focus on language, but they also sneak a bit of German culture, politics and history into the mix. Out of five different classes, each with 17 to 25 people, I've always been the lone American. As such, I've also been an object of curiosity in my classes.

Probably about 1/3 of my current classmates come from various parts of Africa, another third comes from Poland and other former Soviet-bloc countries, and the final third is a mix, with folks from China, Vietnam, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Brazil. And then there's me: The Newbie. I call myself that because I've only been in Germany for less than a year; most of my classmates have been here for at least three years, some as many as 23 years (Yes, 23 years, and they're still taking German classes. Whether this speaks to their language-learning abilities or to the difficulty of the German language, I can't say). I also call myself the Newbie because I come from the U.S., which is not only part of the "New World," but which also is sort of new, or maybe young, in other ways, which were impressed upon me in class recently.

We were reading a sketch in which a middle-aged guy looked back on his life in Germany, and remembered when the Berlin Wall was built, remembered seeing Kennedy during his visit, remembered the Wall coming down, etc. That prompted my teacher to ask the class what historic events we had witnessed. Everyone had a story: The Africans of Civil War and strife, the Poles of the end of Communism, the Pakistani of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. As one student after another told his story, I scanned my memory for something, anything, that would compare. 9/11? It was dramatic, sure, but I was thousands of miles away when it happened. I compiled a mental list of other big events, and as I did so, I realized that while I had indeed experienced a lot of history, I had mostly done so from some distance, i.e., via the television.

I started panicking. What was I going to say? Should I be honest and tell them about the really important moments of American history that I had witnessed? The revelation on television about our former President, his intern and a cigar? The invention of the iPhone? Or something even more critical to world history: The final episode of Seinfeld? Or Lost? Or the Sopranos?

Damn it's embarrassing to be an American sometimes. Luckily, thanks to someone's narrative about suffering under the hands of Slobodan Milosevic's terror, the conversation changed to: Who was your country's worst despot. I relaxed a little bit as a picture of Dick Cheney, riding in his wheelchair all Dr. Strangelove-like at Obama's inauguration, popped into my head. Finally, I was up. I opened my mouth to speak, but the rest of the class answered for me: "Bush!"

Berlin's temporary Thai-town

Today, we went to Thai Park. This made me very happy.

When we first arrived in Berlin nearly a year ago, we simply expected that it would be filled with great foods from all over the world. After all, it's a big, hip, happening and perhaps even the coolest city on the planet. Therefore, we should be able to find some hole-in-the-wall, authentic-to-the-point-of-being-kinda-scary, Thai, Vietnamese or Indian food on every street corner. No?

No.

Berlin may be teeming with fantastic, cutting-edge art, dance, lectures, the opera, music and even -- as we experienced just a few weeks ago -- wild parties replete with Gypsy jazz in an abandoned insane asylum. But the food scene isn't quite up to par -- doesn't even touch Portland/SanFran/Berkeley/LA. Sure, we've found great Lebanese fare, and stumbled upon a sublime Italian restaurant not far from our house. But the offerings from Asia have disappointed. They are bland or overpriced or laden with so much MSG that Wendy slips into a hallucinogenic daze shortly after eating.

Dong Xuan Center.

So, last December we headed way out into the East and visited the Dong Xuan center. It's a cluster of kind of rough-looking warehouses nestled amidst the bigblock apartment buildings of the former DDR, and serves as Berlin's Vietnam-town. Even on the coldest day of the year, with snow piled everywhere, the place bustled. Long hallways are punctured with doorways leading into shops, some tiny, some huge, that sell wholesale clothing, nail salon supplies, cheap plastic items and groceries. A guy can buy a live carp and a cucumber-thingy that resembles extra-terrestrial genitalia, get a haircut and a manicure, and buy a Gucci knockoff, all in one building. And it has restaurants, too. Delicious. Authentic. Cheap. But soon after we began the long trek home, the MSG -- or something -- kicked in, and Wendy tried to pick a fight with a lamppost that she mistook for a Neo-Nazi.


If Dong Xuan was good, Thai Park was way better. We'd heard about it long ago: A park where a bunch of Thai people gather and sell food. I envisioned something like the local Turkish market, only with Thai food and goods sold out of kiosks and booths instead. But when we wandered into Preußenpark, we quickly realized that we were in for a brand new experience.

There are no booths or kiosks here. Instead, the vendors set up on blankets and under umbrellas on the ground, and operate out of minimalist camp kitchens that are at ground level (all the cooks are actually sitting on the ground, operating little charcoal or gas fired grills). It's totally illegal, I'm sure. And eating there during one of the worst food-related e-coli outbreaks ever might not have been completely wise. Still, since the source of e-coli is still a mystery, we could be infecting ourselves with our oatmeal each morning, so we figured we'd go for it.

Offerings ranged from a salty/sweet lime drink, to all kinds of alcoholic cocktails, to octopus on a stick, to what I suspect were fried bamboo worms. We got four pork satays, two rice puffers, two Thai iced coffees, three spring rolls, two bags full of fresh fruit, a bowl of pho-like soup with meatballs made out of what I think was beef offal, and a few other things. We spent no more than 20 Euros for the whole shebang, probably less, but as I was suffering from some weird infection of the eye, I was relegated to lying on the picnic blanket in a slightly feverish state, taking a bite now and then, and watching the surreal scene unfold before me, and didn't partake as much as I'd liked in the perusing and purchasing of the food.

Nor do I have any photographs, which is kind of too bad, but I'm fairly sure the dude who sold me the satay muttered something about the Thai mafia, my nostrils and live, flesh-eating worms if I were to somehow expose these open-air kitchens to the world.

So, instead of photos, I'll try to communicate what I saw while lying in the grass: The Thai folks sit in the shade of a rainbow of umbrellas or under the big trees, the light trickling down through the leaves. Out in the searing sun, the Germans lie out, one after another, offering their flesh up to the sun. Germans are always doing this, as though daring the skin cancer gods to punish them. The pungent aroma of marijuana smoke from somewhere nearby. When we arrive at noon, maybe 15 vendors are selling food. More and more arrive with each passing hour, including a group of kind of beady-eyed guys (see Mafia reference, previous paragraph) who quickly set up a square of folding tables encircled by folding chairs. It turns out to be some kind of gambling racket.

On the other side of us, a makeshift massage parlor has emerged as if from the dust and grass of the park. A Thai woman with cateye glasses vigorously rubs a nubile young German woman clad in a tiny bikini. My eye aches, and inexplicably, an epiphany: I should have become an accountant. The urge quickly disappears. Light trickles through the leaves, and the marijuana odor lingers.

Behind us, some older German folks have set up their own cooking operation, and they sit on parkbenches with TV tray things before them off of which they eat slabs of meat, very white bread, and potatoes smothered in a creamy white sauce. I'm not sure if this is an affront, or an effort to join in. A Thai woman walks urgently from blanket to blanket, carrying a big blue plastic trash bag. She's not collecting trash, but seems to be selling something from the bags. She doesn't stop at our blanket.

Ahhh, but the food. The food. Grilling, frying, boiling. Crispy, salty, sweet and sour. Meat and sprouts and electric-colored cocktails. I lie on the blanket and let the aromas waft over me. My eye hurts. But I am happy.