A Walker in the Suburbs

Imagine sister cities (sister hamlets is more like it) only miles apart but often separated by a one-hour time difference. That would be Portal, Arizona, and Rodeo, New Mexico. Arizona does not observe daylight savings time; New Mexico does. From March through October, folks lose or gain an hour every time they mail a letter or pick up a coffee.

It couldn’t have happened to a mellower crowd. People are drawn to this cloud island because they love sunshine and open spaces. The locals we’ve met are friendly and easy-going. They laugh about the inconveniences and rave about the natural beauty.

When we pulled up to this vintage post office yesterday, we were greeted by a friendly postmistress with a Great Dane named Mac. She kept the place open so we could buy postcards, then hand-stamped them for us.

Portal and Rodeo are places that the world has passed by. I’m glad we stopped here for a few days.

It’s not the oldest library in America, but it is the oldest library in Arizona, and a few years ago it was named the best small library in the nation. Bisbee’s Copper Queen Library offers literacy services, chess boards, even a seed library. (This innovative program allows borrowers to take up to ten packets of open-pollinated or heirloom seeds a month.)

In this gracious two-story building, you can find newspapers on sticks, chess boards on tables and an elegant stairway to a bustling second floor.

Visitors are encouraged to sign a guestbook and mark their hometown locations with a pin on the map. We did the former, but there was no room for a pin on the eastern coast of the U.S. It was the most high-density region of all. At least from what I’ve seen, though, it has no libraries like the Copper Queen.

I’m writing from a bungalow on a hilltop in Bisbee, Arizona. The town is spread out below us and fir trees frame the view.

To reach this special place we flew from Dulles to Denver to Tucson, picked up a rental car and drove 100 miles southeast through the old west town of Tombstone. The road curved around mountains that caught the lowering light in their folds.

After we arrived late yesterday afternoon, I sat on the porch and watched the sky redden above the dark, wrinkled hills. I had seen the sun rise in Virginia from the airport tarmac, elevation 313 feet. Now I was seeing it set in an old Arizona mining town, elevation 5,533.

Sunrise, sunset. With a lot of traveling in between.

If the airlines cooperate today, we will be winging our way west and south, out to the desert southwest. Bisbee, Arizona, is our destination. A family celebration is the excuse. Not that I need an excuse to travel. I was packed three days ago.

We’ve been to Bisbee before and found it highly likable. We’ve walked its streets and climbed its stairs, toured its museum and its mine. That was in April, this is November. I’ve never visited the desert at this time of year. I’m wondering how it will look and feel.

I expect no blooms. But I do look forward to the big sky, the limitlessness, the pure majesty of the Basin and Ridge.

We’re still six days away from Standard Time, but Europeans “fell back” over the weekend. This means that Europe is one hour closer than it was last week — or will be next. I’ll take that hour and savor it, let it remind me of all I saw and hope to see in the future.

One hour closer to Amsterdam’s canals and flower market and bicycles and bustle.

One hour closer to Paris’s boulevards and cafes and museums and monuments.

One hour closer to Alsatian villages, vineyards, steeples and hills.

One hour closer … but still worlds away.

For the last few days I’ve been living on the edge. The edge of memory capabilities, the edge of “Storage Full.” My dear little phone, which has been with me for nine years, is striving mightily to keep up with the flow of bits and bytes I throw its way … but it is losing the battle.

I’ve added storage, deleted all but the most necessary apps, even purged some conversations. It’s still teetering on immobility. This morning, afraid the thing would stop working entirely, I began to delete videos. This led me into a strange netherworld of old footage from a 2016 work trip to Myanmar.

I must have flipped on some strange setting back then because many of the still photos I thought I took were actually three-second videos — not “live” shots but actual videos. Sorting through them has taken me back to that warm-hearted and wondrous country, a place transformed since the 2021 coup.

There was the ginger farmer we interviewed, the walk I took from my hotel into the village of Kalaw and its market, poinsettias blooming, motorcycles zooming. All was hustle-bustle in preparation for the Fire Tower Festival and parade that evening. A moment in time, captured in data.

I’m glad to be home, to fall asleep in my own bed and wake up in familiar surroundings. But I wasn’t away long enough for homesickness to set in. This wasn’t true for the 19th-century traveler to Paris. In those days it took long and often torturous weeks at sea to reach the continent, so trips were longer.

As we traveled in France this summer I was reading David McCullough’s The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, which is not about the “Hemingway generation” of expats but about an earlier group of Americans bound for the City of Light, beginning in the 1830s. For them, this was the trip of a lifetime, and it was not just for pleasure but for study. Writer James Fenimore Cooper, painter (and later inventor) Samuel Morse, educator Emma Willard and poet and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes.

These and other Americans thrived abroad, but they did get homesick. In fact, it was an American in Paris, John Howard Payne, who wrote the song “Home, Sweet Home.”

“Be it ever so humble,” he wrote, “there’s no place like home.”

(My last glimpse of France as our flight departed from Orly early Tuesday morning)

As we closed in on Dulles Airport yesterday, I studied the interactive map on the screen in front of me. It’s fun to see the progress of the plane, though I found myself lingering over the map of Europe.

What I noticed most was the route taken by our Portuguese Airlines jet. Unlike many flights heading to or from the continent, which hug the Canadian coastline and cross the ocean at a narrower point, our flight struck out boldly across the Atlantic.

We were flying through Lisbon, so that was part of it. And I’m sure that the weather, air traffic, jet stream and other variables were factors. But it also seemed in keeping with the Portuguese, who were some of the first to venture forth into the Atlantic centuries ago. And it matched my go-for-it mood.

It’s invigorating to venture out into the world, to find one’s way out and back again. To find the correct train platform when it’s announced over a staticky intercom in a foreign tongue. To roll with the inevitable delays. It’s a bit like flying over the fathomless depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

(The North Atlantic, viewed from the Portuguese island of Madeira.)

As we wing our way back to the New World, I can’t resist a backward glance at the old one. I’ve been a “Europhile” since I first traveled to the continent as a wide-eyed 20-year-old. This trip has done nothing to dispel that. If anything, it’s intensified it.

We’ve had the chance to see new sights and visit old friends, an unbeatable combination. My only regret is that I can’t stay longer. I don’t want to be greedy, though.

I return with many memories and images. An Alsatian village seen from the Wine Trail. The glistening western facade of the newly restored Notre Dame. Flowers spilling from a window box on the Herengracht. Rembrandt’s self-portrait as the Apostle Saint Paul.

But mostly my mind is filled with Europeans, the old friends and the new ones, even just the fellow travelers. It’s a different world over here. I’ll miss it when we’re back.

Resistance was futile. On my last day in the Netherlands I had to see a windmill. Most are in the countryside, but I’d heard of one in the city so I set out on foot to find it.

I started from the Maritime Museum, where Tom was spending the morning, and headed southwest in the general direction of the De Gooyer Windmill. I quickly realized I was on the wrong street, and the directions I’d copied before leaving the hotel (to conserve data) were making no sense. But once I saw a few street names and figured out my general location I was able to make my way slowly to the landmark.

When I finally found it, I took in the windmill from all angles, snapping some shots from across the street, others from a different direction. The molen wasn’t exactly standing in a field of tulips; there were cars, motorcycles and bicycles zipping around it. But it was there, in all its glory.

A tourism cliché? You betcha. But at least I’m planning no posts on wooden shoes.