by Don George
OK, he said with a grin, then instructed our driver to make a U-turn. Suddenly we veered off the main road onto a dusty driveway. We bumped past a one-story mud-brick house and a startled grandmother sitting on its porch, then rolled to a dusty stop at the edge of the tile-maker’s lot.
Manuel and I descended from our van and walked over to the work crew, under their bemused stares.
“Hello!” Manuel said. “My friend here would like to learn how roof tiles are built. Would you mind showing us?”
“With pleasure,” said a strong, compact man in a white baseball cap, orange shirt, and mud-spattered apron. He approached us with a big smile, and when I extended my hand to shake his, shyly indicated his own mud-lined hands. He didn’t want to dirty my pristine palms.
He explained to Manuel, who translated to me, how roof tiles are made. First you get clay from the local quarry and heap it in a big pile to dry in the sun. Once it is completely dry, you wet it thoroughly with water and then mix sand with the clay, so that the mixture is about 20 percent sand. You have to check this mixture very carefully, the foreman said, to make sure that there are no bubbles because bubbles will cause cracks later.
Then you leave the clay mixture to dry in the sun and the shade for two days. After that, you cover it with a plastic tarp and dry it for one more day.
“That’s the clay you see here,” the foreman said, pointing to a muddy mound under a sky-blue tarp. “This is the material we use to make the roof tiles.” Then he looked at me and grinned, “Do you want to try?”
I looked at Manuel, who smiled at me. “Why not?” I said.
The three workers broke into broad grins and one lifted off his own mud-layered apron and handed it to the foreman, who gingerly draped it over my neck and tied it behind me.
Then we went to work.
First, under his careful direction, I scooped a big handful of clay from the slick mound under the tarp. Placing that handful on the dirt ground just in front of the mound, I kneaded it into a sausage shape. Then I transferred this mud-sausage to a rectangular metal mold roughly six inches by ten inches, with sides about a half-inch high.
I placed the sausage at the end of the mold closest to me and then began to spread the clay the length of the mold. The foreman showed me how to work my hands along the clay, almost as if I were massaging it, making sure that it filled every crack, crevice and corner entirely.
By this time, five kids ages four to fourteen had come to watch the show. We all inspected my work to make sure that I had filled the mold evenly and uniformly, with no air bubbles anywhere. Finally the foreman gave a smiling thumbs-up. Then he told me to take a thin, smooth piece of wood, about three inches by eight inches, from a pail of water. I slowly slid this piece the length of the clay, skimming off any excess, to make sure the surface was absolutely smooth.
Next I carefully lifted the molded clay out of the mold and placed it onto another mold curved in the shape of a semi-circle. I left it there for a few minutes, just enough time for it to assume the curved shape of a finished roof tile. Then I slid it off the curved mold and carefully carried it—trailed by the ever-growing gaggle of kids—to an area where hundreds of roof tiles were laid in neat rows, drying in the sun. With a little flourish, I placed mine at the end of the closest row, then posed with it, surrounded by the giggling kids and smiling workers.
As Manuel and I went to leave, we thanked them all profusely, especially the foreman, who had so graciously and generously interrupted his day to teach a stranger his everyday art.
I extended my now mud-caked palm. He looked at it and then at me, and clasped my hand into his own.
Living-History Lessons in Berlin
This story came from a Baltic cruise I took with my wife in the summer of 2014. I wasn’t expecting to get any material for great stories on this cruise—the trip was supposed to be a vacation—and this piece is a good example of why a travel writer should always have his/her mind open and alert. Before we docked in Germany, I had arranged for a private half-day tour of Berlin with a guide. As we approached the capital on the train from the port, I imagined we would have a pleasant four hours seeing the city’s main sights and monuments. But as soon as we met our guide and she began talking in a deeply personal way about the day the Berlin Wall came down, everything changed. Goosebumps rose all along my skin as she told her impassioned tale, and we felt transported through time with her. Sometimes the world delivers the deepest connections when we least expect it—and that’s why we have to be alive to every moment.
IT’S ONE THING TO STAND IN A PLACE where a historic event transpired a thousand years ago. It’s entirely different to stand in a spot where history was made during your own lifetime.
This lesson resonated for me on a mind-expanding cruise around the Baltic Sea in the summer of 2014. Our voyage included day tours in Stockholm, Tallinn, Helsinki, St. Petersburg, and Copenhagen. In each city we gazed at grand, centuries-old cathedrals and statues commemorating epoch-making events. And yet in each, history remained somehow cerebral and out of reach—until we reached Berlin.
My wife and I traveled by train from the port of Rostock to Berlin’s central rail terminal, where we met a wonderful guide, Sabine Mueller, who immediately took us to the Brandenburg Gate.
As we stood in the shadow of the iconic arch, Sabine said, “I want to tell you about the night the Berlin Wall came down.”
She recalled that in a news broadcast aired at 8:00 p.m. on November 9, 1989, the East German authorities announced that the eastern borders, including the borders between East and West Berlin, would be opened. She was twenty years old at the time and had been living in West Berlin since she was a toddler.
“People in East Germany listened to these broadcasts, too, and as soon as they heard this news, they streamed to the borders,” she said. “The East Berliners were afraid that the decision might be reversed at any moment and wanted to take advantage of it while they could.
“The next morning I was awakened at dawn by a phone call from my friend. ‘We have to go to the Wall!’ he said. ‘Why?’ I asked, still half asleep. ‘Because they’re tearing it down!’”
Sabine paused and goosebumps ran along my body. I was in two places simultaneously, one foot in modern-day Berlin and the other in the newsroom at the San Francisco Examiner that long-ago November day as the first reports streamed over the wire. Standing in Berlin in 2014, I felt the same exhilarating breeze I’d felt in 1989 as I read eyewitness accounts from the German capital and marveled that changes beyond my comprehension were sweeping across the planet.
Sabine pointed at our feet, where a trim line of light gray concrete perhaps eight inches wide ran down the street. “This marks where the Berlin Wall stood,” she said. “My city was divided.”
“Think of it,” she continued. “Twenty-eight years earlier, in 1961, barbed wire had been erected overnight. Some East Berliners who had spent the night in West Berlin woke up unable to return home, or faced the decision of whether to stay in the free West or return to loved ones in the East, knowingly giving up their chance for freedom. Some people who lived in East Berlin but worked in West Berlin suddenly couldn’t go to their jobs. Families and friends who lived on separate sides of the Wall were torn apart.”
Sabine explained with photographs that the Berlin Wall was actually two walls separated by a no-man’s-land that varied in width from about 30 to 500 feet and was punctuated at regular intervals by watchtowers and guards. Anyone attempting to cross was shot, she said.
“So you can imagine the euphoria I felt, we all felt the next morning when my friend and I raced to the Wall,” she went on. “There were crowds of people drinking and dancing and celebrating. Some people had hopped on top of the Wall; others were chipping away parts of it. No one knew what the future would bring, but in that moment no one was thinking of the future—we were just intoxicated by the sense of history happening under our feet, in front of our eyes.”
Three hours later, Sabine ended our tour at one of the most substantial sections of the Wall still standing. Alone, isolated, stretching about a city block, it seemed such a frail confection—a long drab wafer of a wall, perhaps ten feet tall and less than a foot thick, that looked as though it could be toppled with a good kick.
I stared and thought of all the lives that Wall had ripped apart, the dreams that it had buried. It was almost impossible to grasp the authority it had once imposed. Indeed, Sabine said her own school-age children found it hard to believe the Wall had ever existed. It seemed so absurd, so impossible.
It was an equal challenge to reconcile the privations of the Communist past with the prosperity of the capitalist present, proclaimed in the bold, corporate-branded buildings and brisk, besuited businessmen we’d seen on our tour. And that was a good lesson, too—that Berlin was resolutely not mired in its past, but had moved on to embrace a once inconceivable future.
As we surveyed that symbolic slice of concrete, Sabine smiled broadly, her eyes alight, and I thought anew of how travel can connect us to history—and to the people and stories that compose it—in the most visceral, heart-pounding way.
I thought, too, of another truth, fundamentally related to travel but soaring beyond it: that no wall can subdue forever the human will.
And as I imagined Sabine dancing and hugging her newly freed countrymen in this very spot in the fall of 1989, these words formed in my mind: Walls fall; people rise.
Berlin’s living history had opened my eyes.
At the Musee d'Orsay
I visited the Musée d’Orsay in Paris on the same momentous return trip where I had the epiphany in Notre-Dame Cathedral which I wrote about earlier in this collection. Both of those pieces were the product of a lesson that was just beginning to crystallize for me: the importance of focus. The closer you focus on a place or a thing, the more you notice, and the more you have to say. When I began this essay, I wanted to write about the extraordinary richness of art in Paris, and how that richness added layers to the life of the city and to my interaction with that life. I first tried to write about three museums, but in my 750-word Examiner column, I could barely begin to say anything about each museum. Then I tried one museum, then one gallery in one museum, then five paintings in that gallery. Each time, the essay seemed too superficial, just glancing the surface of the topic. Finally I realized that the only way to do this topic justice would be to focus deeply on one painting and re-create my interaction with that painting. And that’s what I tried to do in this essay. After it was published, an art professor at San Francisco State University wrote to me that she was making it required reading in all of her courses—so perhaps I did something right!
I HAVE BEEN LOOKING AT MONET’S Les Coquelicots, the painting of two women and children walking through a field of bright red poppies on a sunny, cloud-dappled day, for about forty minutes. It moves me just as profoundly now as it did when I was last in Paris twelve years before; it still tugs deep within me, cuts through all the layers to something fresh and fundamental and childlike.
At first I stared at it closely, my nose within a foot of the canvas, so close that I could see the black-dot eyes of the child in the foreground—something I had never seen before, or at least never remembered seeing.
Get that close and you reduce the painting to its elements: layers of oil paint on canvas, brushstrokes, dabs, tiny tip-tips with the brush. You realize just how fragile a thing a painting is, and just how common.
And you realize too that it was made by a man—fragile, common—who stood at the canvas and thought: “a little more red here,” dab, dab; “a cloud there,” push, push; “how can I capture that light?”
Look at the painting closely this way for a few minutes and you break it down into an intricate complexity of colors and textures and forms.
Then step back and—voilà!—all of a sudden it is a composed whole, a painting: a cloud-bright sky and poppy-bright field, a woman with a fancy hat and a parasol and a child almost hidden by the tall grasses in the foreground, and in the background another woman and a child almost obscured against a distant stand of trees. They are on a walk, or a picnic—a story begins to compose itself, to take on a life inside and outside the canvas.
And you realize that this is a kind of miracle, that colors and shapes dabbed on a piece of cloth 115 years ago have somehow reached across time and culture to touch you.
Look long enough and feel deeply enough, and your eyes fill with tears.
And when you feel these wet, cool, unexpected tears, you look around you suddenly as if waking from a dream, and see men and women in shorts, blue jeans, dresses, and sportcoats, holding guidebooks and pointing at the canvas and sighing, or whispering in passionate appreciation.
You feel strangely displaced—for a moment it was your painting, or rather, you were a part of it, and now you are outside it again—but then you think, “This too is part of the miracle, that one painting can touch so many people.”
You think of art’s extraordinary power, that a scattering of people and poppies in a field can push age, despair, fatigue, and cynicism away, can focus you so intensely on this time, this place; that time, that place.
You stand close to the canvas again and see the complexity of colors—the fields all gray, brown, green, yellow-green; the poppies red and pink; the sky a mixture of light and dark blues; the clouds gray, purple, white.
You see that the forms are simple: a gently rolling landscape; smoothly, sparingly suggested people. And that the child in the foreground holds flowers that are almost the same color as the band in his (her?) hat.
You step back one last time and see peace, lightness, a sense of infinite wonder and potential, a childlike purity.
And when you return to the luminous streets you know you will hold that vision in your head, like a handful of flowers on a country-bright day.
You know that you have returned to Paris. You know that, deep inside, you were never away.
California Epiphany
When I became Travel Editor at the Examiner, I quickly realized how little I knew about the region in which I lived, and how much there was to do and discover right in my own backyard. There was a reason why people flew halfway around the world to explore Northern California! My daughter was born the same year I became Travel Editor, and while my wife and I enthusiastically took her around the world from the moment she could fly, her presence was one more important incentive for me to travel close to home. So I began to explore California. I made the journey described in this story on an October weekend in 1988, setting out with no clear idea of what would befall me or what I would write about, just trusting that the world would deliver. And as always, it did.
WHILE I LOVE WANDERING THE FAR CORNERS of the globe, I’m continually amazed by the range of riches our own region has to offer. I re-learned this again one October weekend when I explored a spectacular stretch of my favorite California road, Highway 1, from Bodega Bay to Leggett.
At the trip’s beginning on the outskirts of Bodega Bay, the road wound through green and brown hills, dotted with purple, red, white, and yellow flowers like drops from a pointillist’s brush; then ribboned along the coast, offering soul-soaring views of crashing white waves, ragged red-brown cliffs, and craggy black rocks at every turn. I passed trim clapboard galleries, boutiques, and souvenir shops, and peaceful houses of brown weathered wood tucked into the green folds and creases of the hills, smoke pluming from their chimneys.
for sale signs and fences demarcated the land, and satellite dishes symbolized reality, but more impressive were the profusions of wildflowers lining the road like nature’s bridal bouquets.
My first stop was in Point Arena, whose downtown displays just what a downtown really needs in Northern California in the 20th century: a post office, bank, deli and grocery store, telephone office, gas station, liquor store, movie theater and video rental place, café, natural foods store, and tribal
office (the Manchester-Point Arena Indian Reservation is located just inland).
I drove to the Point Arena Fishing Pier and had my first close encounter with coastal life: the salty smell of the sea, the slap of the waves and the sight of fishing boats bobbing and bewhiskered men in messy blue jeans and flannel shirts casting off the pier. They caught only seaweed while I was there, but we all knew it didn’t matter: They were catching the sunshine and the bracing wind, the deep blue sky and the screeches of the birds, the weekend company of each other and the summer lusciousness in the air. Behind them a signpost at the Arena Cove Bar & Grill pointed the way to Acapulco, Berlin, Anchorage, Pebble Beach, Las Vegas, Honolulu—and I had a feeling that was about as close as any of them wanted to get to the outside world.
Beyond Point Arena proper, I followed a winding road to the Point Arena Lighthouse. This singular structure is lovingly maintained by a dedicated group of volunteers who call themselves the Point Arena Lighthouse Keepers, Inc. One of the keepers greeted me at the entrance and filled me in on some of the lighthouse’s history: how the original lighthouse began operation in 1870 and functioned until 1906, when it was effectively destroyed in the great earthquake; how the new 115-foot steel-reinforced concrete tower debuted in 1908 with one extraordinary addition: a first order Fresnel lens over six feet in diameter and weighing more than two tons, with 666 hand-ground glass parts and a brass framework, all built in France and shipped to California.
In an adjacent museum another volunteer pointed with pride to the old artifacts—plates, lanterns, tins, and other treasures recovered from shipwrecks; historical information about and photographs of California’s lighthouses, the 1906 earthquake, and the Point Arena area; and an enchanting exhibition of poems and drawings by local elementary school students.
The views from the lighthouse were inspiring: undeveloped, free-flowing countryside dotted with sheep; wild, unbounded water. But even more inspiring was the love these volunteers clearly felt for the tower and its surroundings. Call me a meandering mystic if you will, but I think that kind of love, concern, commitment adds a special quality to the landscape—it imbues it with a spirit that becomes a part of what you see and sense when you visit there. And if you are lucky enough to feel that spirit, not only do you carry it away with you, but you also leave some special part of yourself behind that enhances the area all the more.
