by Bob Harris
Why did this happen? I do not know. But I think it is this:
Survival’s not scary. But deciding what you do with it can be. Forever, in all its forms, can be frightening. Jane and I simply saw it and barked and ran away up a log.
This was confusing as hell. It took a while to sort out that was what had happened. I wound up dating an actress, took a job on a certain TV show about crime scene investigators in Las Vegas, and went about getting on with a normal Hollywood life.
I pushed Trebekistan aside, ignoring the lessons and the fun sharp turns life had already taken. I showed just the right amount of forearm for a while, or at least that’s what I tried.
You can guess just how well that worked out.
Once Jane and I were good and miserable, just enough, we agreed to start dating again. But this time, only on one condition, for us both: we were alive, after all. So we’d best start behaving that way.
For Jane and for me, part of recovery meant thinking about what to do with our time still on the planet, challenging each other to follow interests that grew in the months that we crammed for the Masters. Call us eclectic, or dilettantes, or just eager students. All I know is it’s brain-fizzy fun.
Jane paints now, in fact, splashy abstracts and dazzling surrealist still lifes. These are bold and colorful and gorgeous, although my retinas often need to lie down. One day she will have a grand museum debut. I will print warning labels and alert paramedics. Eyeballs could burst from seeing colors that sharp.
Her study of languages continues to grow. Mayan hieroglyphs are Jane’s most recent challenge. She points and explains and I nod like a dog. There are theories and questions and great urgent ideas, and nobody really knows much at all. But sometimes I bark to show interest.
Jane has taken to cooking the same way that she paints. Which is to say: everything, all at once, vivid colors and styles. Taking the fine-dining “fusion” trend to a new level entirely, Jane has pioneered confusion cuisine. It’s fragrant and vibrant and intensely tasty. You might have smelled some of Jane’s food, if you’ve ever flown over California.
I think that the paintings and cooking are Jane’s secret plan to reanimate Mayans to explain what she’s reading.
My Jeopardy! cramming left me with unsolved clues about the world. They are many and ridiculously far-flung. As a writer, I can work anywhere there is paper, so it’s easy to go looking for answers and hints. This is what I’ve done often since, traveling to places I never would have imagined except for my notebooks, getting as lost as I can, and not always intentionally.
Jane drove me to the airport and kissed me good-bye for a while, although we’d talk when we could on the phone. I was headed east and then south and then north and I would return from the west, carrying only what would go over one shoulder, on a half-aimed safari in the wilds of Trebekistan.
Soon, baboons seized my rental car at the Cape of Good Hope. You may remember my one-word response, repeated many times, still wafting in the cold, salty air.
I now know how it feels to believe you are about to be savagely killed by wild animals. It is not a good feeling. But I swear this is true: the adrenaline rush really did feel much like the Jeopardy! green room, amped by a factor of lots. This was a difference of degree, not of kind.
Leaving my car to walk toward the lighthouse on the Cape’s southernmost point, I left a small bag of tzatziki-flavored chips on the floor of the passenger side. I didn’t realize I’d left the window open a few inches. That was all it took. On return, I soon learned just how clever a hungry baboon can be.
The baboon, for his part, discovered he didn’t much like tzatziki. Neither of us was pleased with these particular lessons. Another baboon chased me off. I ran. One repeated word has floated in the air ever after.
It was evening, darkening, with an Antarctic breeze. Few people were left, and other baboons were emerging to scavenge food. I was in little real danger, but I didn’t know that quite yet. I was afraid that they might scavenge me.
Another tourist passed by. She was amused and concerned, and gave me an old chicken sandwich as a lure. Five minutes of planning and screwing up courage. Then sprint, toss, evade, dash, slam! Roll the window! and suddenly I was safe in the car.
So now I know something else, if it ever comes up:
WHEN TRAPPED BY HUNGRY BABOONS WHO HAVE SEIZED YOUR RENTAL CAR JUST BEFORE NIGHTFALL IN AFRICA, THIS IS WHAT GETS YOU TO SAFETY
What is charity?
An old chicken sandwich can be spectacular wealth.
In Malaysia I got trapped in a sudden dark cloudburst.
I was looking at chevrotains, tiny snaggletoothed creatures, even smaller than pudus. (They’re also called “mouse deer,” despite being neither deer nor mouse. If that sounds confusing, consider the woodpecker.) I was in a park with a garden by a lake, and I had lost track of the time and the sky.
The downpour was almost blinding. As the rain soaked my clothes, a few minutes of walking brought me within sight of a highway. I wasn’t sure which way I was headed, but at least now I had a road. So I anticipated a long trudge, a hike that was becoming a swim.
Within moments, a guy pulled his car off the road to help out. This wasn’t a cab. I wasn’t trying for a ride yet. Before I had a chance, someone stopped. Just a guy with a heart, making room in his car.
A Proton Saga car, in fact. Malaysia’s national vehicle.
In the side window was a prayer cloth lined with Islamic verses. There was also a stuffed Pink Panther doll, hanging by four suction cups, in the rear.
For the next forty-five minutes, I sat with Faraad, a construction worker from Melaka, as he drove through a sky-opening torrent. His English was only slightly better than my Bahasa Malaysia, which is little more than “thanks” and “hello.” But still we talked about the rain and movies and music, using names and hand gestures. The conversation gradually warmed as we helped each other find words.
Faraad was about a hundred miles from home, it turned out. He had a job on a building site nearby, and was making enough money to send home to his kids, whom he loved the way he loved breathing, even though he couldn’t see them often now. His jaw clenched at this thought. I didn’t know what to say in my own language, much less his. But I understood, just like you do. So he saw that on my face, as he would have on yours.
He didn’t mind for a moment that I was dripping all over his new national car. He smiled and waved once he got me back into the city, then he drove back the way we had come. Faraad must have gone out of his way. How far I will never know.
Faraad was just glad for the company, happy to help, eager to help out a stranger.
WHEN YOU ARE STUCK IN A TORRENTIAL RAIN IN THE MIDDLE OF MALAYSIA, THIS IS WHAT GETS YOU SAFELY WARM AND DRY
What is kindness?
Not far from that spot, there’s a Hindu temple hundreds of feet in the air in a cave. You climb stairs lined with small monkeys who try to steal from your bags. Some people bring flowers that are scattered around. The cave ceiling is open, so light and vegetation descend in an ecstatic display.
It looks like a place where a god might hang out. Or Harrison Ford might get chased by a boulder. Or both.
In the distance, once you climb, are condos and industrial tracts, small explosions of squareness that block long horizons. So centuries merge, as they tend to in Trebekistan. But once you step inside the cave, all of that goes away. Light pours in from above. When I arrived, the raised temple was sun-flood-lit and glowing.
Tourists come, just as I did, so there’s work to be done, keeping the walls and the statues intact. The work on this day involved the lifting of bricks up a steep twenty-foot stairwell inside the cave, reaching up to the shrine. There was a small hill’s worth of bricks at the bottom to move. This was all done by hand in a bucket brigade: five men on the stairs, in a tireless line, hurling bricks up a slope all day long. Catch a brick, turn, and throw. Catch a brick, turn, and throw.
The bricks, I should add, were much big
ger than bricks. Closer to truth: catch a cinder block, catch your balance, and heave.
These five men worked as hard as my own father did.
And they were singing with joy. All five. The whole time.
Not well, I would add, judging from how they laughed at their own sudden strange harmonies. But they were singing.
I stopped for a chat, which involved lots of hand-waving and pictures scribbled down on a small pad of paper. (It’s a fine way of talking; when I don’t know the words, I just draw, and then offer the pen. Most people will smile and engage in the game.) They were, after all, slinging heavy bricks in the air in a backbreaking fashion in the dark in the dank in the heat, already fatigued, with apparently days of the same to look forward to. I couldn’t quite see how singing fit in.
Perhaps, near the temple, they were singing a hymn?
No, it turns out. It was just a truly happy song.
These men were from Bali. Their families were poor. They were a very long way from home. In Los Angeles they’d be the Mexican day-laborers lined up outside building-supply stores. They were singing because they were making what to them were great riches—enough that they could send home the extra, and make things better for their families.
THIS IS THE EMOTION STRONG ENOUGH TO MAKE MEN SING WITH JOY WHILE THEY SLING BRICKS IN THE AIR IN THE DARK IN THE HEAT HUNDREDS OF MILES FROM HOME, FACING ONLY MUCH MORE OF THE SAME
What is love?
Fathers working too hard to spend time with their kids specifically because they love them.
Halfway around the world, in other cultures entirely. And still I had not left the Snow Belt.
I promised that next time I was back in Ohio I would return to the spot where I first learned to drive. I would visit my father and thank him again with new eyes.
I could give dozens of examples, but over and over, what I’ve found almost everywhere looks so much like home.
On a hillside in Thailand, a Theravada monk named Yut sat atop a golden-domed temple that looked like a big Hershey’s kiss. This was high-test exoticism, as good as it gets. Yut and I sat with the Buddha nearby. There was much playing nice, and no stabbing at all.
Over the doorway to the stairwell, in British English and with no intentional sense of irony, a small sign said MIND YOUR HEAD.
So I try.
At a Ping-Pong table in a rural Indonesian village, where the only phrase I know is “thank you very much,” which lasts all evening long.
In the ocean off Rarotonga, splashing with strangers in a night so dark we never even see one another’s faces.
Lost in the streets of Cairo, suddenly surrounded by children who appear out of nowhere and even now are still helping me find my way while we imitate famous soccer players to pass the time.
IT’S THE ONE COMMON COMMODITY YOU CAN TRADE IN EVERY CULTURE IN THE HISTORY OF HUMANKIND
What is friendship?
Not very far from those places, I once met a man who was an icon in his own wealthy country and yet has donated his time to assisting Christian humanitarians, visiting some of the world’s poorest children, volunteering his time to their aid. There is no self-promotion, and he rarely discusses it. The only attention he calls to it is in promoting the charity when asked.
Who is Alex Trebek?
Even buildings start shouting long tales.
In my notebooks, in all of them, is a place called the Hagia Sophia. It’s listed as a museum. And a church. And a state building. And a monument. It’s in Istanbul, which before that was Constantinople, which before that was known as Byzantium. This is a hint of Trebekistan already.
The Hagia Sophia—“St. Sophie’s” in English—is as high as a stadium, a football field squarish in size. In the year it was built, it was the greatest cathedral in Christendom, the St. Peter’s Basilica of Byzantine Greece.
A few centuries later, it became Roman Catholic. Two hundred years more, and it was a mosque. One timeless tribute to holy ideals, its details rearranging with each shift in time.
As more lifetimes passed, things changed once again. Secular Turkey arose. The Hagia Sophia was declared a religious museum, with all traditions to be celebrated inside.
So you enter this football-field stadium of godness and see the names of Allah and Mary and Jesus all merging, as one holy place where peace is called many names. People are studying and learning and talking and listening. History matters. It teaches humility.
Trebekistan here smells of candles.
Not far down the road, near a town called Çanakkale, is another small hill called Hissarlik. This is where a man named Heinrich Schliemann invented the science of bad archaeology.
Schliemann was a head case of epic proportions, whose massive Athenian tomb portrays him as an Olympian demigod, all for his fine work at Hissarlik. In 1870 he came to believe that this hillside was once ancient Troy. Since that meant fantastic treasure and Schliemann loved wealth, he hired dozens of Turks to act as a massive nineteenth-century backhoe.
CRUNCH went Hissarlik, or at least a big chunk. And with it went priceless antiquities, shards of uncountable number, even more uncountable now that they were smashed down to fragments.
But Schliemann was right, at least in one sense. The Troy of the Iliad may or may not have been real; Homer wrote centuries later, at a time when fact-checking was impossible, unfashionable, and hardly the point. But sure enough, under the CRUNCH, in Schliemann’s great trench, was a town, and a people, and a civilization long gone.
And another.
And another.
And another and another and another and another and another.
All stacked up like pancakes over several millennia.
More-responsible people with tiny fine brushes now clamber and crawl, armed with tweezers and trowels and small air-puffing syringes. Each fragment is indexed, the story unfolds, and Schliemann is praised and cursed in each audible breath.
So on the side of a hill in what was once Asia Minor (which, as it happens, is a fine place to vacation), if you stand on one spot and look down in the trench, you can see at least nine different histories, nine different places, nine different times, all cultures now gone, in one bewildering glance.
It’s the hillside in Virginia, Bull Run and Manassas, transcendent Trebekistan, re-looping over thousands of years.
A people came. They grew. They had their own sports and their gods and their fashion designs. They were in charge. They loved their kids, ate their food, kicked somebody’s ass, and curled up when they cried. And then they screwed up. They forgot to build walls or they ran out of fish or they didn’t quite plant enough food. And poof. They were gone, with a gone kind of goneness that might terrify you to think hard about.
It couldn’t happen to them, of course. This was fact. They knew how things worked. As they always had for as long as anyone really knew. And then.
Gone. Unremembered. Their gods are all dead, their dreams nonexistent, as if they had never been born.
Then, a few centuries later, it happened again. The whole thing.
And again.
And again.
The end of the world isn’t some distant supernova off far in the future or a strange philosophical construct.
It’s in front of your face. It’s as real as your eyes.
There’s a spot on this Earth where it comes nine times at once.
I hope, for their sake, they had dances we’ve also lost. I hope they were glad for their time.
Maybe one day some grad student with an air-puffing syringe will discover they all died from giggiggiggiggling.
This would be a comfort to know.
In Finland you find a great tubular structure that sings Aeolian songs in the breeze. It’s the monument to our old Jeopardy! friend Jean Sibelius, whose music helped his nation gain freedom. (He might not be pleased that the wind, in his monument, can sound more like ah-ooh-gah than anthems, but still, it’s a singular sculpture.)
Across the Baltic, you’ll find a spot up i
n Tallinn, Estonia, where 300,000 people sang away the Soviets. If you stand on the slope in this big concert area, their voices are almost but not quite still floating above you.
Robben Island, in Cape Town, is where Nelson Mandela was caged for much of his life. You know who won. But you can still visit the prison and see what he faced. You glimpse what each day he must have kept overcoming. Or you can still stand on the steps of the courthouse, as he did on his release, dreaming of a world of peace and equality, and try to barely imagine the people he saw. (It helps if you sit down then, and simply start asking. The folks are still there. The answers come flooding. So wear your galoshes.)
In Prague, there’s a cell in an old secret prison, where Vaclav Havel, a playwright, was imprisoned as much for his thoughts as his actions. Havel eventually became the Czech president. The prison became a hotel. You can sleep in a cell down the hall, staring up at the bars that are still in the window, letting Trebekistan seep in.
THIS IS THE ONE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN TREBEKISTAN; FORTUNATELY, IT’S ALSO THE EASIEST THING TO FIND
What is hope?
There’s no shortage of horror and sadness on Earth, much of it our own bit of doing. I offer no wisdom. I know no solutions. I’m still trying to learn what questions are even worth asking.
But I do know that them is a flexible concept. It causes much trouble. It is very widespread. Play nice and don’t stab—except for them, go the rules, if we’re honest about it. And for them, we’re soon them. And those other guys—them. And then all hell breaks loose.
