The Lost Empire

-----I

And then there was no more Empire all of a sudden.
Its victories were air, its dominions dirt:
Burma, Canada, Egypt, Africa, India, the Sudan.
The map that had seeped its stain on a schoolboy's shirt
like red ink on a blotter, battles, long sieges.
Dhows and feluccas, hill stations, outposts, flags
fluttering down in the dusk, their golden aegis
went out with the sun, the last gleam on a great crag,
with tiger-eyed turbaned Sikhs, pennons of the Raj
to a sobbing bugle. I see it all come about
again, the tasselled cortège, the clop of the tossing team
with funeral pom-poms, the sergeant major's shout,
the stamp of boots, then the volley; there is no greater theme
than this chasm-deep surrendering of power
the whited eyes and robes of surrendering hordes,
red tunics, and the great names Sind, Turkistan, Cawnpore,
dust-dervishes and the Saharan silence afterwards.

-----II

A dragonfly's biplane settles and there, on the map,
the archipelago looks as if a continent fell
and scattered into fragments; from Pointe du Cap
to Moule à Chique, bois-canot, laurier cannelles,
canoe-wood, spicy laurel, the wind-churned trees
echo the African crests; at night, the stars
are far fishermen's fires, not glittering cities,
Genoa, Milan, London, Madrid, Paris,
but crab-hunters' torches. This small place produces
nothing but beauty, the wind-warped trees, the breakers
on the Dennery cliffs, and the wild light that loosens
a galloping mare on the plain of Vieuxfort make us
merely receiving vessels of each day's grace,
light simplifies us whatever our race or gifts.
I'm content as Kavanagh with his few acres;
for my heart to be torn to shreds like the sea's lace,
to see how its wings catch colour when a gull lifts.

-Derek Walcott, 2011

Austria has not gone according to plan. I was supposed to backpack for four days; I was at it for one day (and not even the full day) before I decided my pack, loaded as it was with my laptop and everything I took from Tromsø for my two months’ of absence, was too heavy. Because it was too heavy. I thought about mailing things home, but even with a portion removed the pack was heavy and, also, there was no post office in the town I had walked to, and when I got the bus back to the town with a post office, it was Saturday and any such thing was closed. So.

This is not to say that Austria, not according to plan, went poorly. I rerouted my track to run on public transportation instead of foot transportation, and viewed from bus or train these green hills are still green; and with my luggage stowed in pensions or hotel rooms I can still freely walk. Which I am.

I am also watching dubbed American films on Austrian TV. Austrian TV is pretty universally auf Duetsch, which may be one explanation for this phenomenon. Austria itself is also pretty universally auf Duetsch, which explains the reawakening of my rusty German. Actually, rusty is the generous term for it—if I’m honest, my German is broken, as in not functional for communication, and in these small towns it’s pretty rare to find someone who’s comfortable in English. So we've been using my German, and I’ve been getting by; the dubbed movies are an exercise in German comprehension. Surprisingly, I can understand enough to follow the loose outline of the plot of a film, but only if that is a particularly transparent film. Right now the new version of King Kong is on, and dinosaurs are falling off cliffs (spoiler alert), which need no translation. The first Sex and the City movie was talkier but still easy enough to follow. There are a lot of simple sentences.

A lot of simple sentences describes my own German communication. Mostly it seems to be luck if someone hits upon a word I know—for some reason I remembered the verb sammeln means ‘to collect’ which proved useful when an old man I met at the top of a mountain was telling me about his collection of eighteen U.S. license plates. I didn’t know the word for license plates, but he called them ‘vehicle registrations’ in English. He and his friends also insisted I have a Jägermeister for my health, and because, according to them, it’s Austrian tradition to have one on summiting a mountain. I couldn’t tell you whether this is true, but I know that’s what they told me in our cobbled together communication. Like I said, getting by.

In King Kong, an ape is fighting a dinosaur. Also needs no translation.

I’m breaking Croatia into two posts because my trip there had two distinct parts. Plitvice and the interior—Zagreb, the forests and villages between Plitvice and Zagreb—was the first part; the second part was the Croatian coast. There’s a place on the highway between Zagreb and the coastal city of Split where you pass through a mountain in a tunnel five kilometers long, and go for low, green forests to coarse bushes on red hills: something that looks Mediterranean, because it is. Croatia is on the coast of the Mediterranean, or, more precisely, the Adriatic, so it really doesn’t have a choice—whatever it was would be Mediterranean, by virtue of location. But it looks about as you would expect, if you, like me, had never laid eyes on any landscape that could be termed such: there are olive groves in the reddish earth, and vineyards, and sharp, brittle plants. There’s an island offshore famous for its lavender, a little sachet of which I bought for four kuna in the marketplace in Split. I wish I could say I went to some of those islands, but I didn’t have the time; I hear they’re worth visiting, though. Instead I hunkered down in one of the smaller tourist towns tucked between the mountains that trace the coast and the stony beaches, went swimming, wandered the hills. I spent an afternoon in Split, where the marketplace and town center lie inside the ruins of a palace built by the Roman emperor Diocletian in 300 A.D. But the old things I found most fascinating were the abandoned houses in the hills above my little tourist town; big, stone things with fallen in red roofs and trees growing in what must’ve once been great rooms. They’re not from 300 A.D., of course, but there’s something about their lack of pretense and explanation. If you read about Split anywhere (including, now, here) you’ll learn about Diocletian’s palace. It’s in the dictionary on my laptop, which tells me that Diocletian was the Roman emperor who launched the final persecution of the Christians in 303. He also divided the empire in 286, between himself and Maximian. I feel like I’ve heard of Maximian, but it may just be one of those names. At any rate, Diocletian’s palace, for all it is very, very, very old, is discussed. Empty houses on hills where cows graze in olive groves are not. They could belong to anyone, tell any story, though it might just be the same old one: people move out, move on, can’t afford the place they came from. People move down the hills to the beach, where they can rent rooms to tourists who want to spend the day tanning on the white stones by the blue sea and buying ice cream at the little stand by the docks. Or something like that.

This isn’t a travel blog, despite how many times I’ve up and moved, just because very little of what I do feels like traveling. Or maybe it’s the usual ratio; at any rate, a lot of the places I have been are neither more nor less than places I have lived. There are a lot of things I’ve failed to do in Tromsø because I’ve figured I had all the time in the world. Most of them I have a vague notion of doing when I get back. Some of them I probably will do; some of them I’ve probably missed. I’ve still lived in Tromsø.

But now I am traveling in a proper way, so let’s talk about that. My first stop was Zagreb, and my tour of Croatia was nothing short of whirlwind: I hit everything I could possibly hit, and the things I missed I only missed because I ran out of time. Not my settled life in Norway, this.

There is more to see in Croatia than I could see in the time allotted, which was just a handful of days; the guy at the car rental agency told me that you probably needed months. The guy at the car rental agency also told me he’d never been to Plitvice Lakes National Park, the first stop on my tour, only drove past it on the way to go fishing. Which I guess speaks to the habits of people settled in their places. He also told me that when people asked him how Plitvice was, he always told them it was nice anyway.

Well let me be the one to tell you: Plitvice is beautiful.

It is also crawling with tourists, but it is beautiful.
The eponymous lakes are terraced and connected by waterfalls, and the water is aquamarine and perfectly clear; you can see sunken trees, canoes, hoards of fish with orange fins. There are boardwalks around the lakes and waterfalls, and standing on them and looking into through the lush greenery at the fish swimming below it sometimes felt as if I were in an aquarium, not a real place, but one that had been fashioned for display.

To Plitvice’s credit, it’s real; it is also, in a way, fashioned for display. The boardwalks are treated as a sort of walking tour, and there are ferries across one of the larger, lower lakes connecting one piece of scenery to another. But there are gaps in the tour: hiking paths that branch away from the boardwalks and up into the hills around Plitvice, which are thick with beech forest.
When I was about sixteen I saw a documentary on PBS’s Nature program about this place, mostly about the forests, and that was what put in my mind that I ought to go. Old growth forest is significant anywhere, but in Europe it is about as unheard of as root beer is in Norway (no one knows what it is. I'm bitter.), and Plitvice’s beech forests are unique, and connected to the very geography that makes the lakes and waterfalls possible. That’s part of the ecology of the park, in a way: protecting these lakes, like gems, protects the rough in which they are set. The tourist destination is an umbrella for a whole range of natural assets.

That’s not what I meant to say, though. Mostly I meant to tell you what I already did: that this place is beautiful.

You Begin

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

-Margaret Atwood

The other night I was talking with a guy from Lofoten, the famously beautiful archipelago where most of Norway's famously productive cod fishery is based, and he was complaining about how little there is to do in Tromsø now that the students are draining out. "Go for a hike," my friend and I told him. But this guy from Lofoten would rather wait until he got back home, because it's nicer there.

Now, he may very well have been being contrary. But I couldn't help but want to tell him how wrong he was, and what a waste of time to grow up in Lofoten if you feel it precludes enjoying anywhere else. Because I've been that guy: so pleased with where I'm from that I forget where I am. And it's no way to be.

There are days when I'm just so grateful to be here, in Tromsø, right now. There are days when I wonder what I'm doing here, when I am uncertain and unhappy, when it's not as easy as just being grateful--but the days when I am grateful cover all those ills. And they remind me: I don't need to wait until I'm elsewhere to live my life, because I'm already here. I'm already living. And for all there might be more beautiful places in the world, or places that feel more like home, Tromsø is beautiful now, in spring. Tromsø is home now, this spring.

It's probably worth noting that even as I write this, I'm leaving in the morning, skipping like a stone across Europe and the good old U. S. of A.. But while I'm gone, most of my things are still stowed away in my little room here, because I'll be back in August. And I suspect Tromsø will be beautiful in the fall as well.

[All the fruit...]

All the fruit is ripe, plunged in fire, cooked,
and they have passed their test on earth, and one law is this:
That everything curls inwards, like snakes,
Prophetic, dreaming on
The hills of heaven. And many things
Have to stay on the shoulders like a load
of failure. However the roads
Are bad. For the chained elements,
Like horses, are going off to the side,
And the old
Laws of the earth. And a longing
For disintegration constantly comes. Many things however
Have to stay on the shoulders. Steadiness is essential.
Forwards, however, or backwards, we will
Not look. Let us learn to live swaying
As in a boat rocking on the sea.

-Friedrich Hölderlin, 1803

I had a pet inchworm for one full weekend when I was in elementary school. We were camping. I kept my inchworm in cardboard box like an amphitheater which I filled with a collection of green things I thought an inchworm might like, and I called him Inchie (my naming scheme in elementary school was very clever), and everything about this was excellent right up until I lost him, at which point I was distraught. It's possible, because the box was quite large, that I had just misplaced my inchworm within the confines of his makeshift home, but I remember searching beneath the leaves and sticks. It's equally possible, because the box was completely open on top, that Inchie made a break for it.

Either way, my only consolation was in making my parents help me search for a replacement inchworm.

Walking in Tromsø's woods yesterday the inchworms were so thick they looked like pine needles on the ground, and I felt guilty for stepping on them even though it was also unavoidable. One sat on my foot and rode with me across inchworm nations until I left him in a clutch of blueberries on a ledge above Langvannet, one of the small lakes on the north end of the island. When I stopped to take a photo, another inchworm fell on my head. When I got home, I found yet another on my arm, and dropped it into the plants outside the window. I am not sure I have the desire to care for a pet inchworm anymore, even just for a weekend. Better let them be, I think. The inchworms are plenty equipped to care for themselves, I think. Maybe they will inherit the earth, or at least those woods, though yesterday those woods were mine.

If is easy to take temporary ownership of the woods here. I can walk from where I live up the hill and get on the Lysløype, the ski path that is floodlit all winter, and from there I can find any number of thin footpaths and singletrack higher and deeper into the woods, where the network of unmarked trails expands like a spider's web. And if I want to get off Tromsøya I can catch nearly any bus and ride it to the end of its route on Kvaløya or the mainland and walk into the mountains, easy as you please. I am able to do this because of Norway's common access traditions, which give me and anyone else the right "to move freely over all wildlands except farm fields and gardens." This is called the Allemannsretten. Vera, the professor I work with here, has also told me that paths in Norway are protected: if a trail exists, has existed, no one may block it. She has told me, also, that some farmers have started to place hay bales along the roads where it is popular to park to stop people from traipsing across their land, but it's so unusual and counter to the culture that it attracts media attention. Still, when we were talking about it, Vera said she thought if there were more people or less land in Norway might be pressed to forsake this right and move towards more strident protection, which would of course be manifested as more rights for private ownership, more rights for landowners and less for everyone else. 

I owned an inchworm for one weekend because I kept it in a box. I wanted to do two things with my inchworm: take care of him, and keep him in the box. I'm not sure if the two were connected in my head. But when we talk about restricting people's rights to nature it is almost always with one eye towards protecting the wilderness, caring for it, preventing other people from trampling inchworms and leaving behind nothing but waste. But when we fence things in and keep people out, we run the risk of them never allowing people to come to know the things that are being protected, never coming to care for it, because a public good has been made privatized. We are shutting people out of land for the land's own good, but that also means we aren't allowing people to see for themselves that the land is good.

I'm not sure I would stop to watch inchworms swing in the air and inch across the top of my shoe if I had not had and lost my pet when I was younger. And of course no one's terribly concerned about inchworms, because they are small, plentiful things that seem set on surviving. But they're still part of the broader system. And an inchworm might be scaled up to Jörmungandr proportions, or perhaps that World Snake might be scaled down.

When I was younger I used to think, when I saw an inchworm suspended in the air, that witches or ghosts were somehow involved. I was a superstitious child. But the truth is no less fantastic: inchworms drop to the ground when it's time to pupate. Those inchworms that littered the ground are on their way to becoming geometer moths. The peppered moth, which is on of the many species of geometer moth, is a textbook example of natural selection: after the Industrial Revolution, the dark morph of the moth was favored because darker moths could better hide on soot-blackened trees.

So there was a third possibility for my lost inchworm, though I didn't know it at the time: perhaps he was in the box still, on the way to becoming a new thing.

Inchworms--and geometer moths--are resilient. I don't advocate laissez-faire environmentalism, the idea that we should simply treat things as we please and it'll all shake out fine. But at the same time I think there needs to be some sort of balance, yoking together environmental protection and environmental use and trusting that maybe our World Snake is an inchworm, and will be able to withstand our feet on the paths that run across its back as it pupates into a moth, black or white or peppered.

Solsikke Hvilken såmmen gikk over Jorden, hvilke hander sådde hjertenes frøkorn av ild? Som regnbuens gikk de av hans never til tæle, ung muld, het sand, der skal de sove grådig, og drikke vårt liv og sprenge det i stumper for en solsikkes skyld som du ikke kjenner eller en tistelkrone eller en krysantemum. Kom tårers unge regn, kom sorgs milde hender. Det er ikke så ondt som du tror.

Sunflower What sower walked over the earth, which hands sowed our inward seeds of fire? They went out from his fists like rainbow curves to frozen earth, young loam, hot sand, they will sleep there greedily, and drink up our lives and explode it into pieces for the sake of a sunflower you haven’t seen or a thistle head or a chrysanthemum. Let the young rain of tears come. Let the calm hands of grief come. It’s not all as evil as you think.

-Rolf Jacobsen, 1954; trans. Robert Bly

[we were chosen by the northerly]

we were chosen by the northerly
the reindeer
the fish
the birds
-----chose

and we
-----gained spring's singular sun
the tales of the blue nights

-Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, 1984