A Walker in the Suburbs

We’re back in London before our Wednesday flight home, staying in the Victoria Station neighborhood. It was where I arrived as a wide-eyed 20-year-old, fresh off the channel ferry, and where I met Mom on another trip a few years later.

Mom and I had flown different airlines to London and had decided to meet at the tourist office, where Mom, arriving first, would try to book us bed-and-breakfast accommodation. Dad had suggested that we meet under the clock, which is where he rendezvoused with his dates when he visited the city from his air base in East Anglia. No, we countered, we would be practical. We would meet at the tourist office.

I’ll never forget my first glimpse of Mom in Victoria Station. It was one of the first times I remember seeing her not as a mother but as a person in her own right. She looked young, almost girlish. She looked as in awe of the place as I must have looked.

But what really shocked me was where she stood. The tourist office was located directly under the clock, you see. So we met there after all.

Now the timepiece is perfectly positioned above the ladies’ loo. Not the most dignified spot for it. But time marches on, something I’m acutely aware of visiting this bustling city, which has grown tremendously since I last visited in 2003.

The old places have a gravitational pull, though. Which is why I feel at home in the shadow of Victoria Station. Not exactly under the clock — but close to it.

A bonus today: a visit to a place I didn’t even know was on our itinerary: Byland Abbey. This is one of the structures destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Henry VIII’s power grab. The king wanted to remove all vestiges of Catholicism from the country, but first he snatched from the monasteries anything of value: gold chalices and monstrances, even the lead from the stained glass windows.

Earlier in the week we toured St. Mary’s Abbey in York, another pilfered monastery. But Byland was better preserved and in a more stunning locale — appearing like an apparition in the North York Moors.

We saw the church, library, warming room, kitchen and refectory. It was uncharacteristically sunny and warm, making it easy to linger on the grass and admire the tiles and the stones.

I tried to imagine what the place was like in the 12th century, hundreds of years before it was destroyed. Another world, of which we have only the vestiges, but enough to set the mind spinning.

Yesterday, we traveled 200 miles north of London to the town of York. It felt like we traveled 200 years back in time, too. If not 2,000!

Guidebook author Rick Steves describes York as a “big, traffic-free amusement park for adults.” After 24 hours in the place, I have to say I agree with him.

What you have here is accessible antiquity: Roman walls, the medieval splendor of York Minster Cathedral (where we just heard evensong), and a lane — the Shambles — that looks like London did before the fire in 1666.

“The archway you see there,” said our guide, pointing to the one pictured above, “people have been walking through it for 2,000 years.” That says it all.

Today we leave the Angel Hotel in Guildford, the ancient hostelry that has kept us safe, dry and warm(ish) these last nine nights. We head off on an adventure cruising the Surrey canals on a British narrow boat.

England is honeycombed with waterways originally designed to move cargo more smoothly and efficiently than horse and cart. Once these canals outlived their economic utility, they became a vacationer’s paradise, providing access to hidden countryside.

The way to explore them is with a narrow boat, a specially designed canal vessel, no wider than seven feet and typically 60 to 72 feet long.

Narrow boats ply the canals that thread their way through locks and past houses and pubs. After a two-hour tutorial, we will be turned loose with one of these boats for three days.

This is not the part of the trip I planned, and I’m happy to take a back seat. My Kindle is charged, and I have books to read. I’m behind on journal writing and would welcome some time “below deck” with pen and paper.

In other words, the next phase of our trip is a great unknown. Ancient mapmakers had a phrase for it: “hic sunt dragones” — “there be dragons.”

(No canal photos yet but a shot of the Thames, which I hope we don’t reach on our narrow boat. Plus, another snapshot of Big Ben.)

We were still knee-deep in the pandemic when I left the world of paid employment to “write, study and travel” — as I phrased it in the farewell note I sent to colleagues. Five years later, I wonder if I’ve lived up to that self-imposed to-do list.

Have I written? I could blog less and pen longer pieces, but I haven’t been idle. I’ve published essays, embarked on book reviewing, and written a book proposal.

Have I studied? I’m on break this year, but in late August I plan to start my final year of master’s work, culminating in a thesis. So a checkmark there, too.

Have I traveled? Never enough, but no complaints!

There was, however, a subtext to all these tasks — to shake free of the 9-to-5 shackles. I’m still working on that one, still driving myself too hard, pushing myself for no good reason except that’s what I’ve always done. This post is evidence of that!

Caring less seems a funny goal for the next five years, but maybe it’s the one to pursue!

(Packing up my office in July 2020. Still months of full-time work ahead of me, but all of it at home.)

We’re in the waning days of National Poetry Month, now celebrating its thirtieth anniversary. At the writers conference I help plan, we are devoting two panels to the genre.

I’ve been thinking about poetry lately. I think too much to write it well but when I’m under its spell my prose is closer to where I want it to be.

Why is this? I’m not sure. But maybe poetry is the written word distilled to its purest form.

What is it about a vista that appeals to us? The balance of color and texture, of breadth and height? Is it familiarity? A place that reminds us of a yard or a hillside we knew long ago?

I was thinking about this while on a walk yesterday. I took that route because of a specific vista that I knew I’d see from it. But more than halfway through my stroll, I realize I’d missed it. The view I was remembering was from a winter vantage point.

I love the green profusion we have now. It’s most welcome, especially when it’s hot outside. But with it comes a narrowing of vision, a lack of perspective. The new growth cocoons us, keeps us from harsher realities. And that’s fine with me. I’ll accept that trade.

I’m a morning person, so what I’m about to say should be taken with a grain of salt. When I woke up today, all I felt was gratitude. This is not my usual pattern. Typically, my gratitude is mixed with a goodly amount of anxiety: What needs doing? Who needs help? Where should I begin? I let to-dos dominate my earliest waking hours.

I have fantasies of rising mindfully, moving from bed to yoga mat, stretching and saluting the sun. From there to longhand writing, no keyboard. Posting can wait, emailing, too.

This is not what usually happens, of course. And it’s not what happened today, either. But what did happen was a wash of gratitude, an awareness of time passing, but also of my presence in it.

This didn’t last long. The checklist raised its hand, demanded attention. But for those first blissful moments, I was aware only that I had awoken to a new day. And that was all that mattered.

I write this post from the room that was once for dining, then for playing, and finally, given over to a much-loved doggie. It’s a room now dominated by two bookshelves and a large aviary bird cage. In the cage are two petite parakeets. (Are there any other kind of parakeets?)

They chirp merrily as morning sun floods the room with light. It is a pleasant way to begin the day and is why I once tried calling this the morning room. But that was too highfalutin a term and did not stick.

I observe the budgies. They are flitting from perch to perch, nibbling on a collard leaf, bobbing and feinting. Cleo has Hoffman coming and going. He dances to her tune. She’s the older woman, and he struggles to win her affection.

He warbles and chirps and cocks his head as if to ask, what do you think of that? Most of the time she can’t be bothered, but she provides just enough encouragement to keep him going.

Which is all to our benefit. He fills the house with song.

(A photo of Bart, one of Hoffman’s predecessors, similarly colored, though suffering from a rash at the time.)

Speaking of warmth without shade, I just finished reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, which explains that we are living through an “extinction event” caused not by an asteroid or volcanic eruption but by homo sapiens. Consider these facts Kolbert presents:

“Human activity has transformed between a third and a half of the land surface of the planet. • Most of the world’s major rivers have been dammed or diverted. • Fertilizer plants produce more nitrogen than is fixed naturally by all terrestrial ecosystems. • Fisheries remove more than a third of the primary production of the oceans’ coastal waters. • Humans use more than half of the world’s readily accessible fresh water runoff.”

Most of all, Kolbert writes, citing Dutch scientist Paul Crutzen, who named this era “Anthropocene” to indicate that it is shaped by humans, we have changed the composition of the atmosphere. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the air has increased by 40 percent in the last 200 years.

All of these changes are happening faster than our world can adapt to them. So, despite the noble efforts we’ve taken to save individual species or to rid our forests of knotweed or other invasive plants, the fact is that the world we’ve created is changing the planet on which we live. Here’s Kolbert again:

“When the world changes faster than species can adapt, many fall out. This is the case whether the agent drops from the sky in a fiery streak or drives to work in a Honda. To argue that the current extinction event could be averted if people just cared more and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong, exactly; still, it misses the point. It doesn’t much matter whether people care or don’t care. What matters is that people change the world. This capacity predates modernity, though, of course, modernity is its fullest expression. Indeed, this capacity is probably indistinguishable from the qualities that made us human to begin with: our restlessness, our creativity, our ability to cooperate to solve problems and complete complicated tasks. As soon as humans started using signs and symbols to represent the natural world, they pushed beyond the limits of that world.”

The Sixth Extinction was published in 2015. The situation has only become more dire since then.

(Dinosaur footprints from the coast of Portugal.)