Plans, Explorations, Travel

 

The daylight faded altogether from the sky, and the stars came out and were reflected in the water as chips of silver that wriggled like tadpoles in the ripple of the paddles. Now the marshes looked to me uniform and without landmarks, the reed tops showing barely darker than the sky, and the route we pursued among the winding waterways seemed arbitrary, our destination a pretence. 

 

-      Gavin Maxwell, A Reed Shaken by the Wind

 

 

New Yorker magazine called A Reed Shaken by the Wind “an almost perfect book of travel.” First published in London in 1957, the book tells of travels Maxwell made in the company of Wilfred Thesiger to explore first-hand, before it disappeared, the world of the marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, living “in reed huts built upon little floating islands like dabchicks’ nests.” Even so, despite traveling among them and staying as a guest in their “nests,” Maxwell’s acquaintance with these human water inhabitants was perforce secondhand and at one or two removes. He did not speak their language, for one thing. For another, he was a “guest of a guest,” welcome as Thesiger’s friend and wholly dependent on the goodwill Thesiger had created over the course of many visits.

 

It is a beautifully written account, as can be shown by dipping into almost any page. Perhaps in part because he was not distracted by superfluous conversation, Maxwell’s observations were acute, detailed, and colored by his own responses. For instance, he writes of the water buffaloes thus:

 

…In the water, where they spend all the time when they are able, showing only a weary head or a length of dripping back like the keel of a long-submerged wreck in shoal-water, the buffaloes seem primeval, pachyderm, patient and wearily enduring; a little tragic, too, reminiscent, perhaps, of forgotten news-reels of swimming cattle left derelect by flood. Their eyes are suffering, reproachful. Their voice is the voice of despair, tinged faintly with resentment … not a moo or a bellow, but a very deep and infinitely prolonged groan. 

 

 

Maxwell and Thesiger may not have found their segregation from marsh women a limitation of their travel, since that was simply a fact of the way of life in the marsh – men in one room, women in another; and only women (by their nature already unclean) collected the water buffalo dung that was so essential as a fuel and building material – but as a female reader I found the omission of any woman’s real presence more than a small lacuna. Obviously, were it possible in the 21^st century to travel to this part of the world, it would not be among my chosen destinations. – Well, there’s another reason for travel books, eh? Not only to read about places we have been or would like to see but also about places we would never want to visit.

 

 

Visiting Tucson, Arizona – now, that’s a different matter, and it’s less than two hours from my rented winter digs. The thing is that when I switched cameras a couple years ago, the telephoto lens for my old camera did not fit the new, and it’s been frustrating doing without that capability. My first winters in Arizona, the old camera and long lens let me get close to the birds: lately, I’ve been kept at a distance.

Monument Camera: OPEN!

And so, a visit to Monument Camera has been on my wish list, but when the Artist and I made the trip a couple of years back, we stumbled on a day the shop was closed. This time I planned better (You see? Plan? Travel?), checked days and hours the shop would be open, and managed to find my way to the shop on Fort Lowell Road shortly after it opened on Thursday morning, using only printed maps and my own sense of direction. I was proud of myself – a little overexcited, too, as well as relieved and intrigued, with more than a tinge of melancholy to be there without the Artist. In short, quite a mix of emotions.

 

Luckily for me, there were no other customers that early in the day to witness or overhear the state I was in. Lee, the owner, showed me three different lenses. One I rejected immediately, as too large and complicated for my amateur needs. Of the others, I liked the price better on one but was pretty sure the other would give me more long-term satisfaction, so we concluded the business transaction easily. 

Proprietor in the Classic Camera Corner

Lee told me he had bought the shop three years earlier but that Monument Camera has been in business for over 50 years and is the sole survivor of dedicated camera shops in Tucson. I told him about my bookstore in Northport, which will be 30 years old this coming summer, and we agreed that our businesses share more than one delightful feature, the best being not knowing what any particular day will bring. “You never know who will walk in the door,” he said, adding, “mostly nice people.” Yes, that’s true for me in Northport, as well!

The second part of my Tucson plan was to meet an old Kalamazoo friend (not old herself: she is four years younger than I am!) at the Book Stop on 4^th Avenue. The Artist and I loved the 4^th Avenue neighborhood! We loved the Book Stop! So naturally a wave of memory threatened to submerge me as I looked for a parking place, but, with that accomplished, what a joy to see my tall, beautiful friend striding toward me on the sidewalk! 

The Book Stop: OPEN!

Now as any bookstore aficionado can tell you, a bookshop, especially one specializes in used books (or am I prejudiced?), is definitely a place of exploration (see my post from the first time the Artist and I found our way there), and my friend and I dove right in. Though I was too focused on my own discoveries to investigate hers and will have to ask her to tell me what she bought that day, here’s what I brought home: 

Note the book of poems by John Wood, late of Kalamazoo, Michigan, and a dear friend. The bookseller was surprised that I “couldn’t resist” Anthony Trollope’s North America, a splurge that pretty much wiped out the trade credit for books I’d taken in, but impressions of my world by the author of The Warden – how could I not want to take that book home? What did his explorations of the so-called “New World” say to him? (Stay tuned to find out, if you haven’t read the book yourself.) When I mentioned to the bookseller that I was on “seasonal retirement” from my own bookstore, she asked if I were writing my memoirs. No! “Have you?” I asked. She brushed away the question as if it were unthinkable. And then I think of the secret scribbler in Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop and wonder how many of us have secret scribblings we hope might someday add up to something. 

 

In the same block as the bookstore is a food court, made up of various old shipping containers, each one a different take-out restaurant, surrounding lovely, colorful, shaded seating, where we had hoped to have lunch. Dogs are even allowed! Sadly, however, although it was 12:15 p.m. when we explored the gems on offer, most were not open. Yet? That day? We walked on up the street….

 

…and found a small, unpretentious East Asian establishment, Lemongrass Restaurant, where we both chose the same item from the menu and were both more than satisfied. Delicious! When I splurged and added the fresh mango-yogurt drink to my meal, I thought I would have to take half the drink and half the meal home to Dos Cabezas with me, but everything was so good it entirely disappeared! Okay, I wouldn’t need dinner. And yes, we complimented and tipped appropriately.

 

Locks of love! Like Paris, France!

("Hippie chick," he used to call me.)

The 4^th Avenue vibe feels very Sixties to me, and yet since it’s practically next door to the University of Arizona, the sidewalks are teeming with young people. It’s a friendly neighborhood. One young woman complimented my “outfit,” and one older woman stopped me to say she liked my hat and to ask where I’d found it. “It was my husband’s,” I told her. I didn’t tell her I was also wearing his scarf, watch, and belt….

(Jim Harrison once made a scathing remark about ellipses, so I smile and think of him every time I use that punctuation….)

 

Since Sunny Juliet had stayed home, so she wouldn’t have to wait in the car on a sunny day while I pursued my urban explorations, once I started on my return trip there was no dallying. I missed her and was eager to get home. My friend and I hugged, thanked each other for our time together, and went our separate ways, and that evening I fell asleep over a bound volume of uncorrected proofs from 1986, something I’d been reading before the Tucson expedition: On Persephone’s Island: A Sicilian Journal, by Mary Taylor Simeti. Sicily is (sorry, Mary!) another place I’ve never yearned to see, but the author writes beautifully, and I feel I am seeing the island -- its contours, vegetation, traditions, and history -- through her eyes as I read, and so I have my travels without the possibility of losing luggage or having my passport stolen. There is a lot to be said for armchair travel, as well as roaming over the face of the physical earth. I like both.

Home following adventure is very satisfying.

 

And now comes another sunrise, another day in the high desert. This world, too, merits daily exploration, even when my plans are not much more than a trip to the feed store and doing laundry. Any day, really, is like a day in a bookstore or camera shop: one never knows what the day will bring. What will we see? Whose path will cross ours? 

 

Sunrise as beautiful as a sunset --