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Where have I gone?

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This is the one thing in my trip that I really wanted to see:  “The Hole” at Gorgazzo. So far, the deepest any cave diver has reached is 695 feet (212 meters).  Below that, there may be the Hall of the Mountain King. Nobody knows.
For the chronically curious, here is a rendering of the path of the abyss as far divers have gone. I’m guessing that there may be so many similar subterranean chasms everywhere on Earth that the planet is probably one big wiffle ball.

The silence from my end has been too long and also not explained.  I can’t do anything about the length (except to break the silence now and stop the clock), but I can explain.

I’ve been in a car — how un-Venetian — with some friends for a week, stravaging around northern Italy from Milan to Pordenone and down to Venice.  They were here from Virginia to watch their son play some soccer matches against their Italian counterparts.

This trip gave me a chance to visit, if only briefly, plenty of places I’d never been, several I’d never even heard of, only one of which I’d ever really wanted to see (see photo above), and also the chance to stand interminably in the rain on the muddy sidelines of even muddier soccer fields.

The Veneto has just been through the rainiest March in 20 years — three times more water fell everywhere than is usual.  The vintners can’t prune their vineyards, the artichokes are a month behind, and the boys who ran and slid around drenched by the frigid deluge can tell you that they discovered a degree of wetness which nobody, not even skindivers, has ever experienced.

As for our itinerary, “We past through some of the damdes plases ever saw by mortel eyes,” as a Confederate soldier put it in a letter home.  At the top of the list is the Hotel Antares in Villafranca di Verona.  If you’ve ever wondered where the occupants of UFO’s go when their intergalactic aircraft run out of fuel, I can give you the address.

Now that I’m back and most of the laundry has been done, I confess that I feel very little urge to write anything about Venice at the moment.  Catching up with the news here over the past few days has subjected me to a downpour, so to speak, of non-news even more monotonous than the record rain (see above).

What’s been happening in the most-beautiful-city-in-the-world is what has always happened, and what, apparently, ever will happen. By now it appears that there’s hardly any point in mentioning current events, because the same stories will keep turning up every week till Jesus comes back.

The procession of news by now is so repetitive, and so demoralizing, that the 1.20 euros we spend for the daily Gazzettino have become a sort of charity contribution to keep it in business.  The national chronicle is stuck in an endless loop of the same names and the same chicanery, and the local reports form one interminable droning chorus about as interesting as singing “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall.”

Classic themes: The constant deterioration of the city — palaces, churches, and bridges are falling to pieces, sometimes near or even on the heads of passersby, and the snaggly paving stones are so untrustworthy in some places that they trip as many people as they can each day and then snicker because they know they’re not going to be punished. There is the phenomenal inefficiency of the public health service.  The occasional little old person found dead in his/her home after days/weeks/months. The closing of generations-old stores that can’t pay the insane rent increase, which has typically been raised in order to install yet another glass/mask/pizza-by-the-slice business.  These shops sell glass and masks as being made in Venice, which in a sense they are;  not by Venetians, though, but by swelling numbers of Chinese immigrants who toil in sweatshops and live in little mainland hellholes.

If you tire of those stories, you can always read about the spectacular mismanagement, in myriad and ever-more-imaginative forms, of the public transport system. It’s amazing how many ways the ACTV finds to throw away money it insists it doesn’t have. And tomorrow there will be yet another transit strike: no buses, no vaporettos, a 24-hour dislocation of life which will produce no results. So there will have to be another one.

Speaking of money, it continues to gush, like water from a busted pipe, out of the Venice Casino, which once was one of the top three contributors to the entire city budget. Then there are the pitiful protests, as tiring and pointless as the wailing of a baby with colic, against the big cruise ships — “pitiful” not because I agree or don’t, but because cruise ships are now such a crucial part of the municipal economy that driving them away would kick the last leg out from under the tottering financial stool of the city’s economy. And “pitiful” because all the schemes which have been proposed to solve this so-called problem will create real, tangible, measurable problems for all eternity.

To sum up, the news from here is a ceaseless litany of the same issues, the same excuses, the same inertia, the same blithe, extravagant, “who, me?” waste of everything including now even my patience and my curiosity.

Oh: And the “Boy with the Frog,” claimed to be scheduled for removal on March 18? It’s still standing there. I let myself get excited by what sounded like a real decision, and now I’m embarrassed. I evidently had more hope than good sense, even after all this time.

If I were a reporter for the Gazzettino, I’d write my stories sitting at home in my underwear listening to old Janis Joplin tracks. I’m not saying anybody actually does that.  But they could.

The only interesting thing I’ve heard in a week was about the ten-year-old boy who snuck out of his house in the middle of the night in his pajamas to go smash the window of a toy store with a brick in order to get his hands on the thing he wanted that his parents had refused to buy for him.  That was different!  But it wasn’t in Venice — it was in Vicenza.

This face isn’t from Venice, but it could be. In fact, it should be.
On a side street in Polcenigo, there is someone better than Geppetto: It’s Franco, who not only can repair all sorts of things, but makes enough money from it to be able to afford this nice little shop.  People probably come from all over the EU.
Here’s something even more astonishing: The city of Pordenone had a mayor who was also a saint: Blessed Daniele D’Ungrispach. That was back in 1384 and 1404, but still — it was possible for at least one person in human history to pull it off.
One elegant pastry shop in Pordenone had some remarkable Easter cakes. I like the chick and the broken eggshell, but it’s the basketweave icing that really fascinates me. It’s not that somebody COULD do it, it’s that they had the PATIENCE to do it. But then again, I didn’t check the price.  It was probably worth the effort.
The rain, the cold, and all the flimflammery in the world are powerless to slow, stop, detour, or otherwise ruin the astonishing beauty of spring.  This is a great thing and I need to remember it.

 

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Shine and shadow

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It started out like this, with me admiring my fantastic R. Crumb legs. Then I began to notice lots of other people had them too.

Yesterday was the first day of spring (“Hold the One-Star!” an old newspaper friend of mine would yell here).  But the weather yesterday didn’t seem very convinced.

Today, though, we had all the early warning signs of spring: clear skies, fresh breeze, warm sun, everything within sight looking as if it were taking a figurative luxurious deep breath and throwing open its windows. On a less poetic, but no less significant level, every woman in the neighborhood appeared to have washed every item of clothing in the house, down to the dog socks, because then she could hang it all out and literally watch it dry.

You all know my fixation on laundry.  Maybe March 22 should be called the First Day of Laundry. Or better yet, we’ll reassign the feast day of St. Hunna of Alsace (“The Holy Washerwoman”) from April 15 to March 22.  Just a thought.

But I had a feast day of sun and shadows, myself. This afternoon I had to walk to the end of via Garibaldi to pick up a shirt from Rosie, the young Moldovan seamstress with fingers of gold, who had finished turning its collar.  I was happy to have the shirt, along with its additional two years of useful life, but I was even happier to see the sun going down. Because at 5:00 PM or so it had reached the perfect level to create a wilderness of shadows along the broad strip of pavement.

People, dogs, children, assorted objects from pigeons to dog poop, each came attached to its own dark silhouette clinging to whatever point was touching the ground.  Roller skates, sneakers, skateboards, paws, flagpoles, old ladies, shopping bags, toddlers — everything had its own personal doppelganger.

Watching all this as I walked home was hugely entertaining.  Some people were pulling their shadows along behind them, others were pushing them in front, but whether the shadows were being made to frolic or to stand stock still, or walk smartly along or  stretch out into long exaggerated strips of black, or go all shapeless and run into other nearby shadows and disappear, they were all over the place.

Some people look at the sun; I was looking at where the sun was not.

Pigeons join the shadowfest.
Then things began to get a little cluttered. I was good with the dogshadow, then I began to notice that the chairs, the tables, the sandwich-board, were all throwing their shadows into the crowd. It was starting to look like there were even shadows without objects attached to them. I wouldn’t put it past them.
Before long, via Garibaldi had more shadows than things. I don’t understand how that works.
Bringing it back to the basics: Two men with the Modigliani approach to their shadows.
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Back from Kilimanjaro

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There is no way that photographs can convey the magnitude of this mountain. Happily, this is one rock I didn’t have to climb over.

I went, I saw, I climbed, I did not conquer.

Actually, I didn’t intend to conquer anything — it’s always annoyed the hoo out of me to hear mountains referred to as being conquered.  As far I (and some mountaineers I’ve talked with over the years) am concerned, the mountain lets you climb it. If it doesn’t, you go home, preferably not on a stretcher.

What conceivably could be conquered is altitude sickness, but one needs to have several weapons at hand which I did not, primarily more time to acclimatize.  While  our eight days is longer than some treks, it wasn’t enough for me.

I did four days, or half the trek, and stopped at 13,665 feet (4,165 meters). Palpitations. Shortness of breath, otherwise known as panting.  Even when I didn’t have those, on Day 2 (“the Day from Hell”) I felt as if I were walking in knee-high water against a powerful current. That was when the trail was flat.  On any upward incline — and especially any rocks to climb over, of which there were far too many that day — I had the strength and capability of a garden slug.  It wasn’t anything like normal tiredness, with which I am deeply familiar.  It was like having faded away till I became my shadow, wafting gently near the bulk of my body.

Finally a voice came to me that said, “If you ever want to see home and hearth and family and the gas bill and that cranky lady in the housewares store again, turn around now.”

We continued to walk, but we never seemed to get any closer to the mountain.  I didn’t have any sense of it, but we were already on the mountain.

Seeing that the only 100 percent guaranteed remedy for this condition is to descend (many sources add “immediately,” which I didn’t do), down I went, along with my friend and colleague, veteran photographer Karen Kasmauski, who was also feeling the effects.

I don’t know how the other people in our small group avoided or overcame this condition.  I know that they all made it to the summit except for one girl, who stopped with an hour yet to climb because of intense diarrhea.  Another side effect, if you want to know.  And that was after they’d been climbing for ten hours.  Ten (10) hours.

Two other members who made it to the summit had to have oxygen and were basically carried down by their porters for a while.  One of these trekkers, a young woman with more competitiveness than sense, saw that her friend was going to reach the top before her, and consequently started to run in order to pass her and get there first.

You cannot run at 19,000 feet.  On the master list of crazy, potentially life-threatening things to do, this ranks up there with poking at a family of blue-ringed octopi. I don’t know how she managed to keep going, but the result was that not only did she need oxygen, she doesn’t remember anything of what happened after that for a while.

True, she can now say she climbed Kilimanjaro.  (Of course, I also can say she climbed Kilimanjaro.)  I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about not be able to say I climbed it. But let’s move on — the world is full of all sorts of mountains.

For example, education.  After the trek, we spent a day visiting two schools which were benefiting from our group. At the first, an elementary school more than an hour outside Arusha, we delivered cartons of schoolbooks. Schoolbooks, I’ve concluded, bear a strong resemblance to oxygen tanks for any child who wants to climb up in life.  It’s not that your village child must become prime minister, but without books it’s no more likely to happen than that I would reach the top of Kilimanjaro on roller skates.

This is a class at the primary school where we brought several cartons of books.

At the second, Mwedo Girls Secondary School, which is exclusively for Maasai girls, our group is sponsoring two daughters of one of our group members, Theresia Ismaili Majuka. We got a tour of the school, and saw Theresia’s joyful reunion with her girls after four months.  Theresia lives on Zanzibar, where she makes and sells handicrafts to tourists on the beach.  She doesn’t let the girls come back to her village on breaks or vacations, because of the high probability that some family members (male) will contrive to marry them off and that will be the end of that.  It happened to her.

I believe that Theresia is the first Maasai woman (perhaps first Maasai, period) to climb Oldonyo Oibor, the “White Mountain.”  She did it to promote the message of our group, which is “Everybody has a right to education.”

I admire her for seeing it through, but not as much as I admire her dedication to her daughters’ future. The size of that makes any mere mountain look pretty puny.

Theresia just gave it up on the ride back to Arusha.
She came down the mountain walking like one of Napoleon’s soldiers on the retreat from Moscow, but she did it.
Naturally she got all dressed up to see her girls. It was a wonderful moment.
For a moment at dawn at Moir Camp the rising sun spreads the shadow of Kilimanjaro over the high escarpment. “I always had this vivid dream that I was a professional woman,” Theresia wrote in her account of the trek. “But after being married off, my school days were gone forever. I still have this dream, as vivid as when I was a little girl. It will follow me forever, like a shadow.”
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Kwaheri for now

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That means “goodbye” in Swahili.  It’s the second word I’ve learned, right after “hello.”  I’m taking this in easy stages.

There is a fascinating website called Omniglot which has gone so far as to provide a translation of  “My hovercraft is full of eels” into Swahili, but I don’t think I’ll need to know that. I don’t think I’m going to be seeing many eels.

But I am going to try to climb up onto the Roof of Africa to see if anything needs to be repaired.

Back in two weeks.

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