Essentially the Only One

Waking up in Creston, Iowa, to the sound of diesel locomotives and bright sunlight. This is the last leg - tonight we will be home on St. Louis. It's been a wonderful vacation, full of unexpected delights and a delicious sense of exploration.

Once I get home, I can at least properly go through all the photographs I've taken with a better screen than the one my laptop provides. In a way, that will extend the pleasure of the holiday, but that's going to have to be in the evening. For it is back to work on Monday!

Our journey up to Chigaco last Tuesday took us up Route 100 following the line of the Illinois River valley.
One of the towns we passed through was Kampsville.

Situated on the western bank of the river, Kampsville exemplifies all the charms and idiosyncrasies of a small town in the American Midwest.

Like many river villages, it looks like it was built yesterday. This is probably because much of it was; as you can see from the photographs this area is subject to flooding. So the houses tend to be utilitarian in design, often prefabricated or mobile homes. Some are built high on steel stilts.

There are exceptions, like this restaurant where we stopped for home-made pie (peach and blackberry).

We arrived late in the afternoon, so the place was deserted except for us, three staff members and a worn-looking retiree sitting at the bar. A quiet Wednesday afternoon in Kampsville.

The only activity was the gentle back and forth of the ferry carrying a handful of cars across the river to Route 108.

I watched as a Volkswagen Beetle (the old series - still far more classier than the newer and less-than-satisfactory remodel) waited for the boat.

A small ramp in the road led up the ferry entrance. Cars coming to Kampsville would drive down past this village sign.

Buried in a hollow and shaded by the afternoon sun, it struck me as a modest and uninspiring welcome. Suited, though, to this unprepossessing town.

It really should be so much more. The countryside around is beautiful. There are a number of riverside parks and reservations close by. In another part of the world, I could imagine this town as a tourist trap, not a sleepy backwater.

The ferry headed off with the Volkswagen. It didn't look at all exciting on the other side of the Illinois so we did not follow it.

Time was pressing though. We had to reach Chicago at least a reasonable hour.

So we walked back to the gas station where we had left the car.
Past the stained shacks and pools of flood water, past the riverboats tied to the bank.

All looked like they has seen grander days. Some even looked as if they had been floating restaurants or even small casinos, but there were no signs or lights to advertise their trade.

Perhaps they come to life at the weekends or later in the season. I hoped so.
But I doubt it, or even if that does happen, it is hardly a moneymaker. Like so many rural towns in this area, the prevailing impression is of a gritty poverty. Not desperate, but barely getting by, and the antithesis of any sense of America as country of abundant wealth. I find such places to be real and honest. I feel at home in them in a way that I never feel in the glitzy McMansions of the big city suburbs.

I would be happy to see the poverty overcome and prosperity established for all the people, but not at the cost of turning these towns into little bastions of affluence, all show and no substance. There is a middle way.

Perhaps now, in these days of economic disturbance and the growing realisation that the disparities and expectations of wealth between the rich and poor have grown too great, this country can return to the ways of real worth, compassion and caring.Finally, into the car and further on up the road.

My wife, my sister and my brother-in-law being kept at a respectful distance by a small group of sheep. Devon coast, England, summer 2008.

And here's the music that was going through my head at the time...

Whiel we were in south-western England this summer, we took a trip to one of the big new (as of 2001) local attractions, Cornwall's Eden Project.

Essentially a botanical garden stuck in a disused quarry, it's a striking site - and sight - with its series of geodesic domes - biomes as they call them - supporting a variety of tropical and mediterranean vegetation that you would not normally find in England. Looking like a series of giant flies' eyes stuck on the landscape.

Stylishly designed and laid out, I have to say I found it almost over-the-top with its self-proclaimed greenness, particularly as underneath it all are all the trappings of another cleverly conceived money-making tourist trap, complete with concert stage for rock bands.

Perhaps this is a overly cynical viewpoint, but I saw nothing there that I have not seen for years at the Missouri Botanical gardens (possessor of a geodesic dome of its own for decades), a much less flashy but deeply serious organization that has been dedicated to the preservation of wildwide flora for many years. And I could say the same about Kew Gardens in London as well as many other similar institutions worldwide.

Small quibbles. There were lots of people there having a good time, and it certainly provides Cornwall with another good tourist destination.

The whole area was very colorful, with flags galore flying from bamboo poles, and the restaurant/shop complex was a fine as any mall I've come across.

Ironically, perhaps my favorite part was a very dense slope of English wildflowers, any one of which you might find locally but not as colorfully crowded as they were here. Inside the domes, there were tropical and others beauties galore to gaze at, all in very good condition. A strong testament to the engineering skill behind the domes and climate control apparatus.

Still, I had this continually nagging feeling that I should be more impressed than I actually was. It never left me. As we were walking out, I saw this sign concerning one of the local attractions. Somehow, it seemed to sum up my feelings about the place very well. Even if they are perhaps a little unfair.

A striking statue from the parish church of St. Mary the Virgin in Dennington, Suffolk, England.

To my eyes, a rather gruesome and morbid image, but I am looking at it through modern eyes. With a 17th century view, this monument would have a different resonance. People were far more familiar with death as a frequent occurence, particularly among children. To confront its spectre with prayer would be a powerfully affirming image.

The plaque below gives the details of the interred, members of the Rous family.

I left my soul there,
Down by the sea

One of the distinct downsides to living in the middle of a vast continent is the enormous distance between you and the sea. Growing up in the UK where no part of the island is more than 50 miles from some coastline, I naturally took it completely for granted and visited it far less than I could have.

Not any longer. It's no mistake that all our vacations are designed to encounter some shoreline somewhere and our recent trip to Louisiana was no different. Nonetheless, actually getting there was not trivial. The Louisiana coastline is one of the least developed I have ever encountered.


It's also pretty atypical compared to what I am used to. No cliffs, few beaches, no real sense of a sea/land border anywhere - the land and sea seem to blend into each other like the fingers of two hands clasped together.

Add to this the completely placid Gulf of Mexico sea, and you are not even really sure if that is what you are looking at. I tasted the water - even that seemed to have only a hint of salinity compared to the great oceans.

Nonetheless, the sea it was, complete with spray and salt wind, the cries of the seabirds, the ebb and swish of waves and a view looking out over endless water.It was warm and cloudy (as you can see from the photographs) day and evening was closing in. Thanks to the elliptical Louisiana roads and perverse lack of town markings and road signs, my map-guided journey had taken about an hour and a half for what should have been only a 45 minute trip.

Thus I arrived at Cypremort State Park flustered and not a little annoyed but, as ever, the sea worked its magic in moments. I found the most seaward point, a pavilion and walkways, parked the car and strolled out onto the decking.A couple were making love (in the 19th century sense of the word) - I noticed that they had arrived in separate cars; a clandestine affair? Certainly, they took pains to ignore me.

Not that I cared.

Luxuriating, I was. I felt my soul regenerating. A wonderful feeling.

I looked out to the opposite point, with houses and pavillions and felt glad to be just where I was. The couple left not long after, and I seemingly had the park to myself.

I walked the shoreline, watching the little waves roll in and the fading, diffuse sunlight reflecting off the puddles. The wind was steady - warm and heavy with moisture and my eyes watered involuntarily as I gazed into it. I felt my emotions being similarly extracted and entered one of these reveries where time seems to expand and the moment swells.I would stayed much longer if I could, but night falls quickly in Louisiana and I did not fancy driving back in the dark. So, reluctantly, I took my leave feeling very, very glad I had come.

I was also left with a growing sense that I was really not so far away. 700 miles is a full day's journey by car - but, nonetheless, it is only a day's journey. I find this thought very satisfying.

A relatively sleepless night, punctuated by drunken hotel guests banging on the door and dreams about writing a detective novel, but waking into a warm, sunny, hazy and blossomy Arkansas day.


Found the breakfast spread and ate one apple, one banana, a small bowl of cornflakes and a cinnamon roll. Washed it down with hazelnut coffee. Very satisfying. The TV, as usual, was on and blaring about (in this case) the Libby trial. Rather witless and overblown commentary; what is it about TV that reduces even intelligent participants to one-line simplicities?

Took a peek outside and was relieved to find no chemical factory, but instead a nondescript series of mini-malls and shops. Wandered back to the hotel room and found my family glued to the TV watching cartoons.

Am contemplating going back to bed...

Continuing what has been an unusually deep immersion into classical music over the past few days, I played the Jean-Yves Thibaudet recording of Erik Satie's Sarabandes tonight and was immediately cast back to the last time I played them.

This was in our aging Toyota Corolla, that by this time had amazed us all by flawlessly traversing the empty and lengthy roads of Quebec province far north of the St. Laurence estuary. Indeed we might have trekked all the way up to Labrador City had the road not changed from smooth asphalt to dust and gravel.

But that was a couple of days past, and now I was killing time waiting to join the ferry boat that would carry us south across the channel. Parked close to the shoreline, drinking a beer, and listening to Satie. I remember thinking how appropriate this most idiosyncratically French music was to this doggedly Frankophile town where I heard far less English than I would in any coastal village in France.

I did not want to go. I realise by now that I have a very easy time of settling into almost anywhere that I travel to, feeling within a day or two that I could live there for months. Perhaps being relatively well-traveled when young, as well as making the major shift of moving from one country across an ocean to another, has given me this facility. The downside is that I always find it hard to leave, and anywhere that captures my heart takes a little piece of it and holds it forever.

A small price to pay, I feel, for being able to embrace so many different places - in many ways, I feel like a world citizen. Consequently, I find myself out of sympathy with overtly and doggedly patriotic people. Ironically, many of the places where I feel most at home evidence precisely this trait in spades.

So am I always destined to be the traveler? Staying, from days to decades, in places yet always a little bit the outsider? Always able to see things from another culture's point of view, and in doing so capsizing the certainties that seem to glue local communities together?

I think so. As with everything in life, a little is lost and a little is gained by doing this. But it suits me.

Sometimes the most mudane situations allow the most free thinking. I love waiting for public transport. You are in limbo, completely at the whim of the conveyor's schedule, and it's an extremely liberating feeling. Unreachable, untouchable, not even quite sure of what will happen next but with reasonable and almost always fulfilled expectations. It's not far from what I imagine the afterlife to be.