More travel funnies…(3)

More travel funnies…(3)
Torrey Orton
May 22, 2011


Habits for peace

It's rained something around 5 inches (120+mm) in the New York - New Jersey area in the last week or so. Every dip that can gather water is awash and the lowlands are flooding… but not news worthily. Net effect for us is to have worn our wet weather gear more often than a month in Melbourne. Each day is threatening, especially in the afternoon.

 

As so often, facts do not inhibit personal or organisational habits. Yesterday we were in Princeton New Jersey to watch some junior lacrosse being played by Noah, a niece's 11 year old. Nice day, first over 23C (75F approx.) since we arrived on east coast two weeks ago, sunny with slightly massing clouds….We headed back to the car and passed a university club's lawns being decisively (volume) and thoroughly (carefully set spray patterns) watered by ground staff. What to think?? Must have been on the work schedule. Always a good idea to follow the schedule. It is management's principal expression of both power and competence, the backdrop to premonitions of worker disregard, disrespect and disobedience.

 

Whenever a worker's acting dumb, there's probably a dumb reason. Just keepin' the peace.

 

Sign free zone

 

The Heritage Hotel in Southbury, Connecticut presents itself as a leading locale for spas and golf and all round luxe in the region. It's also the one which lost our reservation (they found it, too, after a few days stumbling!). Anyway, we had survived our first return to driving on the right in 15 years or so by arriving on the outskirts of the very well-advertised town of Southbury looking for signals of the Heritage. Finding it took another 30 minutes, a search exacerbated by my driving timidity for sure. But, there were no signs if you came from the south as we did that day. The first sign, which was too late to obey unless you knew it was there beforehand, only came into view around a corner of a four lane junction – the kind I was still a bit delicate about negotiating. Had to turn around after passing through the stop lights the sign was guarding to get to use its direction.

 

Pennies from..??

 

I imagine to modernise the currency would be seen as a part of the world socialist conspiracy to undermine American values. Otherwise why do they still have one cent pieces – and one dollar bills for that matter – in common use?? I've been collecting pennies in dribbles for two weeks.

 

The undermining aspect would be the implicit recognition the buck's hardly worth a bang anymore. It is promising for Australia's place in a world of failing advanced economies that we acknowledged that two decades ago. A decade later we got signed up for real advanced economy status with a GST, which might be seen now as a symptom of incipient socialism had it not been introduced by a conservative government. The fact that Swedish rounding was the mathematics of choice might have been an excuse if others were lacking for an indictment. The case would have been closed if it were known that New Zealand had been first by three years in this rush to rational self-management.

 

Penny wise, round foolish? This wouldn't have rated so much ink but for another fact: Americans are still wedded to the pathetic, though empirically reliable, pricing policy of trying to make any whole number look smaller by dithering with decimals. But, then so are we. Hence, Swedish rounding is a terrific late capitalist creation. Too bad about the name.

 

And then there is this screamer!

 

Note seen on front door of neighbouring house:

"I've gone; the house is locked. The key is

under the log, top left on the wood pile"

True story; unimpeachable sources; impeccable credentials; direct personal experience. Only in the USA??!!

 

 

 

 

More travel funnies…(2)

More travel funnies…(2)
Torrey Orton
May 19, 2011


"...the only white people on the train"

This is a race joke. It was told on himself by a 70 year old anglo friend who was on a New York City subway with his 13 year old son a few weeks back. He looked down the carriage and thought 'we're the only white people on the train'. Something stopped him saying it just in time. He remembered that he was the only white guy on the train. His son is a product of his second marriage. His mother is Sri Lankan; he's clearly not a white guy.

 

His father's not without deep experience in matters of race, having spent a number of years as a teacher in Harlem schools and as a curriculum consultant in many others in the late '60's where he was often the only white guy on the train. In between, I guess he forgot what he is. How anyone can do that you may wonder. He did, too. I still am.

"The last time I saw you…"
    

This is a sex joke masquerading as 'just between you 'n me, for your ears only' boy talk. Talk about giving it all away in a paroxysm of paranoia! C was on the door for new arrivals at the reunion. He had also been particularly solicitous of our travel comfort, accommodation arrangements and general well-being. He was not a guy I knew at all well in the day. I do a bit more now.

 

Having overseen our hotel registration from a distance, he rushed out to join us on the way back to our car (for luggage transfers) whispering (as he often did),

"I saw you play hockey once in Buffalo." (Western New York, near Niagara Falls).

Me: "When was that?"

He: "A few years after leaving school".

Me: "Oh yeah, against Yale in 1964. We got killed 13 to 3. I don't remember seeing you there."

He: "I just don't want you mentioning it to my wife. I was there with another girl."

Me: "Sure thing. No worries."

 

Of course carrying such a secret was difficult; it always lurked in the wings looking for a chance to sneak out. Two days of reunioning provided regular opportunities for sharing back. I was eased in my self-management by the fact the secret totally lacked salience for me, though gaining small traction from my wonder at the marvels of guilt and its persistent need for self-exposure. I can only hope his sharing it with us reduced the burden for him. It was big enough for him not to have heard that I never noticed him that day in '64. Perhaps the clang of the puck in our goal distracted my attention. Certainly paying attention did little to stop the clanging. Maybe I should have been there for C after all??

Tar pit triumph

In LA I saw a tar pit at last, fulfilling an unrecalled childhood (mid-primary age) dream arising from one of those enduring standalone impressions of a sabre-tooth tiger risen from the pits decades ago, with mastodons and ground sloths in the background. This was a totally unmediated perceptual success. Seen one, seen 'em all. I hadn't the slightest need to see a dozen more, which were easily at hand in the La Brea display ground. The need fulfilment was probably assisted by the smell-o-vision nature of the experience – I smelled the pit before I saw it. Primary sense trumps secondary. Not funny; just nice.

Streets of New Haven

We went back to the place of our first married year (and my first 7 years of adult life!) New Haven, CN for a few hours after the reunion. We knew it was likely to be disappointing because we had been there a few times over the last 20 years – another rust belt city bereft of manufacturing and host to long term urban poverties.

 

The story is this: the streets in, through and around the Yale University environs are clean and well-paved. Those in the areas to the north, west and east, largely black inhabited, were potholed from end to end. These holes were suspension clatteringly and control compromisingly pervasive. The south is Long Island Sound. Only a few fish pass there.

Not funny at all.

Appreciation (37) …learning to see, again

Appreciation (37) …learning to see, again
Torrey Orton
May 18, 2011

Closed mind, open heart – a wonder about travel blindness(es)

Walking around LA a week ago, and driving a bit, too, I couldn't see much of wonder but a jumble of visuals of mildly disappointing grades. After a few hours my distress resolved into a recurring view of faux New England houses spread around varieties of Mission Revival. Mission Revival fit the environs. The faux did not for me. They reached out like an ugly stick in my eyes.


The faux had a number of features. There were the inappropriate window sizes and styles, as if they had been borrowed from a different genre. Their scale was wrong to my eye. Then there was the fault of interbreeding: colonial mixed with ranch – two regenerations from the post-war era. Again a travesty of proportions signalling a bungle, arising perhaps from architects mixing pages from two standard issue design playbooks. In a related, later discussion with the architect of my two friends, he mentioned a similar construct as the design process of another local travesty (in his view, which I shared).


I was in the in the hands of two aficionados of local architecture, hence cautious with airing my disappointments. Rather, I managed to enquire about what I was seeing – its sources, ages, and social implications. After a few more hours my automatic rejection of the offending mis-proportions retreated almost unnoticed from the front of my awareness. It then became easier to explore with them. What's going on with me and this?


A Kimberley experience.


A few years ago I spent two weeks driving and camping around the Kimberley. I had looked forward to the experience with a mountains-and-seas anticipation - that is, my normal expectation of pleasurable visuals which has applied to every trip in my adult life: local, interstate or international. I had forgotten those formative visual experiences like learning to love the Australian bush which opened me to previously unknowable things in the world. It's hard to spontaneously like the Australian bush from a Massachusetts bush background – almost no congruencies other than being bush.


The upshot of the first few days in the Kimberley was a lingering disappointment with its failure to be alps – Australian or European! Now, I had no excuse for this. I have travelled fairly broadly and sometimes deeply in Australia for 35 years at this point. I have done so with enjoyment from my first exposure to the flat lands between Melbourne and Geelong in 1971 (my closest priors being a few glimpses of the Connecticut River valley in the 1950's and a day driving in Ohio in 1967) and can champion the deserted regions with energy and commitment to newbie travellers down under.


So, in some sense I had lost contact with this openness in myself…amazing failing, even more so because I did not even know I had lost it!! I still cannot follow how this happened, but happen it did. I underwent a covert regression or created it somehow. As I am writing I begin to see how, maybe! I brought to the Kimberley an unintentional biased eye – the one that announces itself with an act of disapproval of its field of vision.


Maybe it worked this way. My experience of the European Alps over 35 years, but more intensely in the time before the Kimberley, had coloured my expectations about great visual and physical experiences. A moment ago I was about to write it had coloured my preferences in such experiences, but that is not what it was; it was my anticipations blending into my expectations: I was looking forward to more Alps because I was only getting a taste for them, and wanted more, but did not quite know that then. The Kimberley, by choice at that time, fell across the pathways to that acquisition. It required special organising of many others to do the Kimberley as we thought best to do it, and the others turned out to sometimes be an unexpected experience in their own right. Another disturbing distraction.


Like the LA experience, the Kimberley emerged from the overlay of my inappropriate anticipations and expectations as one of the most memorable of my travel experiences, marked by my continuing desire to return for another run under the cold night skies and warm day ones of early winter there. Maybe it will be on our grey nomad agenda one day.


So what?


This has been a long detour from faux colonials falsely accused. The explanation of my visceral resistance to what reality was presenting is adequate; the pathway to less resistance is not so clear; its implications are worrying for learning…or, just a naturally occurring stage/phase in learning?

More travel funnies…

More travel funnies…
Torrey Orton
May 11, 2011


We're off to my 50^th boarding school reunion, a family reunion and a France reunion for a month, with various interludes and postludes along the way. I start with preludes.

 "No record of reservation…"
Travel funnies started before the travel this time with the news by email that our reservation for the reunion had never been received by the Heritage Hotel…a discovery thanks to a query from classmates about the state of our accommodation and such since the school had no record of them (not that they should have since I'd never sent them and no one had asked for them!). I was rabid about the news, driven by the fact I was awake at 3am to receive it and had dopily turned on the email.

I fired off a note of complaint to the school's event manager with my reservation number and date of approval (Feb 10, '11). …. And somewhat later set off for a morning's therapy at 7am by train and tram, whence another unfunny chapter opened unexpectedly, disappointingly and totally unnecessarily.

Back to the trams…where months ago I noticed that I often entertained myself with pre-work exercise in segments marked out by the train/tram route on the way there. There was a theoretical hitch at that time: that I occasionally almost got it wrong - "The almost is the lurking awareness that I could still mess up, or be messed up, by misjudgement plus fate" I noted at the time. Wait or walk, I wondered again this morning.

Well, this time, already angered by the accommodation screw up a few hours earlier, I walked and waited in vain. Arriving at one tram stop, I had five minutes to go to the next scheduled tram and was caught midway by an early arrival passing me by, stopping at the next stop and waiting for two minutes for its schedule to catch up with it, and then moving off just as I caught up with it!! This sequence was repeated two more times as my pre-work walk turned into a 40 minute, 3 kilometre quickstep to the clinic, arriving 12 minutes late. Fortunately, the expected client was s serial lateness offender and bore the wait well (forewarned by SMS of course). Still, I was smoking, but only wisps showed.

 (The accommodation bungle was recovered three days later, or so I was promised by email.)

 LA International Airport…incoming
There's a song which celebrates the West Coast entry to the US. Well, it was an undeserving entry this time. Apart from an eventual 1 hour wait in an incoherent and disorderly queuing system, we got a standing room only wait in the plane on arrival due to congestion in the entry hall. We were told there were a thousand just-arriveds standing in our way. I should have known we were really in for trouble when I sighted a sign saying something like: With our 140 years of customer service we know paying attention to customer needs counts! I read this as a line from the mouth of LA Tourism thinking they really have reached heights of self mockery. A few metres further up the passage I saw the words were an HSBC bank self-promotion, but then…

Joining their last members (maybe 500 folks or so) 15 minutes later, we started our passage in a hall with no toilets other than a pastel sign promising renovations of the previously available offerings were well under way…and this after 13 hours in the air.

The entry hall was itself quite new, with numbered ranks of passport control stations spread in a 150 meter array before us. Trouble was, they were less than half staffed, though they were armed with a terrific set of terrorist detection tools – both iris cameras and handprint capture machines. There was not even a hand-lettered sign telling us which line was for foreigners and which for returning natives, though there was a quite well-designed one for diplomatic and special business travellers, of course.

 LA …outgoing
A day later we got the AA treatment (no, not that AA; the American Airlines AA) on the way to our next stage. The boarding routine was a marvel of self-contradiction which seemed to work. There were stringent carryon bag limits clearly posted around the departure halls with explicit threats that oversized ones would be thrown into the hold (delicately by their experienced staff waiting hopefully below the plane to receive renegade bags from watchful cabin staff).

The warnings were enough to make me slightly antsy about the somewhat oversized backpack I was carrying. No need to worry. Others were carrying material for a beach party. Due to my abiding never-be-late phobia, we had arrived early and due to Jane's possessing a higher grade of Frequent Flyer, we boarded in the first rush scoring empty overheads for the effort. What came next was a scramble by the masses to grab space which was close to the unconscious meaning of unseemly…not quite pushing old ladies out of the way but an outbreak felt imminent.

Coaching from the sidelines was the chief speaker for the cabin staff - running through the outsized bag routine as a request for civil compliance rather than an order. She backed up the civility theme by encouraging the scramblers to "help each other" with the short, weak and maybe old as worthy targets for help (if they couldn't lift their overweight bags, couldn't get them to fit the compartments (quite a few), or just couldn't find space, though passing the weight and size reg's). After 20 minutes wrestling bags, jockeying for position and "helping" the place was cleared for take-off. Lots of bags disappeared under seats in front, to the point of leaving little foot space, but then whose fault was that.

Was I seeing another instance of a self-regulating system at work?? The last I remember was the response to the US Airways flight #5149 which crashed without loss of anything material but itself in the Hudson River in January '09 (just where we were heading!). Cameras monitoring the area of the crash (by chance) caught ferries and other boats turning to save passengers before formal rescue could have been organised. Local players had chosen to disregard their SOP's, city, state and federal regulations with probable risk to their licenses and captain's bars to do the obviously right thing. Perhaps an example of "giving forward", as my niece described an effort of hers to make a difference in some family matter. More another time.


Fly well, fly high.   

Appreciation (36) …out of Africa?

Appreciation (36) …out of Africa?
Torrey Orton
May 4, 2011

"Ask him when he came out of Africa?", she said quietly.

We were in the fourth day of four in a leadership program for journalists. The group of 9 held six women and three men from seven countries/regions: Indonesia, Fiji, Vanuatu, Irian Jaya(Papua) province of Indonesia, PNG, Timor Leste and Solomon Islands. They spoke 15 or twenty languages between them and no one language was competently held across the whole group. Individuals often had 5 or six, including English, pidgin, family or clan languages and a national language. So there was a constant play of interpreting throughout the learning activities. I was the only non-islander English speaker in the group. I was also 30 years older than everyone but Jason, who was about 50. Jason held down the darker end of the colour spectrum for which I anchored the lighter, with everyone else spread out in between* - the ethnic Indonesians closest to me, the Papuan next and the others following to Jason.


Our program included five segments, in this order, on personality, stress management, culture and leadership, negotiation and conflict management, and mentoring/networking, all with an orientation to the leadership demands of being a journalist in their respective contexts. The culture segment opened the door on a range of shared histories among us, and the overall shared history of European colonialism. In the process of exploring the cultures in the room I pointed out that we all come out of Africa. This was news to everyone.


At some later point in our excursion through negotiation and conflict management I mentioned to the group that there is published research evidence about the out-of- Africa claim and I had the book – Spencer Wells' The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey. Jason jumped at it, along with another – Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies – which explains cultural success in geographic terms, as well as the unintended depredations of Christian colonialism (germs, mostly).


On reflection, I have to admit that saying I come out of Africa has a very low face-value truthfulness about it. A case of the mind's eye getting it wrong to any unbiased observer. I just don't look anyone's 'black' or tan or Asian, or…Italian. The research shows (love that frame!) that my relatives are traceable to a female origin out of Africa quite a while ago. But it is demonstrably obvious that I'm not black or tan or anything other than fading lily whiteish. And it is even more incontrovertibly clear that I didn't come out of Africa in any comprehensibly practical sense. Talk about an inner truth?! The genes shape us but the appearances make us.


And so the quietest group member, and occupier of a prime position in the darker range, Fijian Dorothy said, pointing at the leader with no clothes running the training – me:

"Ask him when he came out of Africa?" she posed quietly.

 

And three of us – Diana, Jason and I - broke into unstoppable laughter, with tears, which lasted three or four minutes, reigniting as they do with recollections or repetitions of the cue line "Ask him…" I've since repeated it enough to drain the trigger of its tickle.

 

 

*I recalled as I was entering the culture segment of our work that I had first encountered the colour conundrum 45 years ago as a beginner high school teacher in New Haven, CN, USA. This was particularly the first time of my really being a minority person for a bit. Years later in China it was daily for two years – a more shaping experience. At that US time I devised a simple experiment. In English classes with a majority of blacks and an ethnic multitude of whites, I offered an exploration of the substance of the terms 'white' and 'black'.


We (including me) lined up in a horseshoe (so everyone could see everyone else) whose gradation from darkest to lightest, and back, was agreed by all. The result always was that some self-identified 'black' kids actually were over the line into 'white' and vice-versa, as agreed among the participants in any particular line-up. (This kind of perception is the empirical origin of the current identification 'mixed', which is established in the identity stats of the UK census and an ongoing subject of discussion in the US). The kids had little trouble agreeing on the fade from light to dark and vice-versa, yet clung energetically to the soundness of their practical judgment that the difference was black and white clear!! Black hung with black and white with white. Therein the dilemma of the difference which is not, but is!


This dilemma is played out in both light and dark communities as they privilege the other in their beauty gradings – for some purposes. The lights approve tannedness among themselves (even fake tan!), but get queasy with permanently tanned members of their 'community' (maybe they've got a bit of dark the lights suppose) and the darks approve with envy the lights of theirs while at the same time reserving true darkness membership to the darkest (nearest to Africa??). What a human mess. Was 'mixed' cooked up to bridge the unbridgeable distinctions without creating a discriminatory difference??