(See what I am saying?)

The Sinai Flux

The white light began to bleed into the far end of the tunnel.

"Welcome to Asia" Jeanette said as the bars of fluorescent lights above the car streaked past us.

We were heading east under the Suez Canal. We were passing through the fulcrum that hinges the Arabian Plate to continent of Africa. The Sinai Peninsula is the part of that plate that is above sea level; a fractured slab of Africa that is becoming part of Asia a little faster than my fingernails grow. (2.6 cm/yr, is an official estimate, fingernails: 2.3 cm/yr ) It is being slowly torn away from Africa by the continental drift; the slow and groaning turn of the earth's gears. The Sinai's desolate mountains have been carved away by wadis into a furrowed brow on the face of an ancient man; his reaction to the world he watches around him.

The Red Sea looks like a slug crawling north between Africa and Asia. The Gulf of the Suez is it's right antennae. As we turned south and followed the shoreline I strained to remind myself that this landscape was home to someone. That that land was as familiar to someone as the back roads and wooded fence lines to me. The sand was littered with hundreds of plastic bags, shining bright in the sun like a field of dandelions. The minarets shone in on the horizon like grain silos. And the small mud huts sat silent and firm like farmhouses on barren winter evenings. Transport trucks showing license plates from Iraqi border towns idled at armed checkpoints like complacent old men with their tractors in autumn, pulled off to the side of the road to allow for the rest of the faster moving world to pass.

I told myself that that land was home to someone. It was a familiar and sentimental anchor - perhaps even a chain - for someone to always be tethered to.

We drove down along the edge of Asia. The speed limit on the Sinai Peninsula is 100kph. No one obeys it. We blurred past the barges moving in the opposite direction (8 knots is the speed limit upon entering the canal) on the perfect blue horizon to the west. The furrowed mountains crumpled the eastern horizon under iridescent blue sky. I was a long way from my home. The chain in my heart was pulled taught. It stretched around the world like a dog on the end of a rope, trying to break free for no reason except to be untied, for no reason except to be free; to see was was past the edge of the barn yard, but who would come back to the porch when the sun had set. Some wander far from home. Some wander for 40 years. Others stay put and let the faster moving world pass them by. But my life, and everything it was moving fast.

The continents were moving. Ships were sailing. My fingernails were growing. My leash was uncoiling.

Backseat Rider

The Coloring of Cairo

Growing up I remember in art classes we were encouraged to color with crayons on black and white illustrations. I remember great emphasis and value placed on smearing the colored paraffin neatly between the lines, and the highest praise was given to those whose colors stayed strictly and solidly between them.

I suspect they do not teach that way in Egypt.

The streets in Cairo are clogged with cars like blood cells in a vein during a heart attack. The geometric lines in lanes and parking lots are trampled like Douglas Mackenzie colored his art projects in 3rd Grade. He always ate glue and once stabbed a compass through the palm of his hand. One time he pushed Mrs. Davis down the stairs into the cafeteria. I don't remember him much after that.

We walked to lunch. Memories were drawing themselves in my head. Memories that were made when my future was as blank as a new coloring book, were coming back years later in places i never dreamed i would be. The juxtapositions of me in my surroundings were compounded by these thoughts. As we approached the restaurant i walked around piles of garbage sitting on stained and greasy concrete. The trash was piled high in front of a store window with misspelled english words. In the window were racks of fashionable women's sunglasses staring at the rubbish, their large lenses shining like scarab beetles in the white hazy Egyptian air. An antique Rolls Royce idled in the traffic. Sour cigarette smoke blew past the veiled women on tattered bicycles talking on gold Sony Erikkson mobile phones. Beautiful children tugged at my pants, trying to sell me plastic packed tissues. Motor oil floated on a puddle of water and blossomed like an iridescent kaleidoscope from the tremors in the broken concrete beneath my feet.

For lunch I ate koshari, tameia and fava bean sandwiches, a far cry from the Staunton Elementary School cafeteria menu. After we ate, I stood on the corner of the street under the white haze, in the blue smoke, on the concrete stains. Cairo throbbed in my temples like a migraine. The taxis buzzed like black and white bumble bees, spitting exhaust from their tails and sirens from their mouths. Occasionally their drivers would stick their heads out of the window like a condemned man in a guillotine, shouting sharp syllables of Arabic into the bright white light in the open streets. The sounds slapped against my eardrums and vibrated my mind.

Douglas Mackenzie was scribbling his crayons across the pages of his coloring book.

Fancy sunglasses were shining in the sun.

The Staunton Elementary school sat vacant and dark.

Cairo throbbed, puddles of oil quivered in its veins.

and i stood on a street corner, trying to keep my mind between the lines.

Educated In Paris

There are two facts about the Charles De Gaulle International Aeroport in Paris, France that will have a lasting impact on my life.

#1. Frutiger is a typeface used world wide in signage and visual communication. It bears the name of the Swiss type designer Adrian Frutiger who designed it when commissioned in 1968 by the newly built Charles De Gaulle International Airport at Roissy, France a suburb on the northern side of Paris. The new Airport needed a new directional sign system, but instead of using one of his previously designed typefaces from his illustrious career as a type designer and setter, Frutiger chose to design a new one. The new typeface, originally called Roissy, was completed in 1975 and installed at the airport the same year. Since being implemented in it's original context, the typeface has been released and used across the globe.

#2. It is the place where Christina, my traveling companion, and I missed the Train to Belgium by 3 minutes.

They do not sell condolence at the Paris train station. Only tickets. The stern faced French woman at the counter never cracked a smile as Christina explained our situation in French to her. Her only answers were "Non". I don't think that woman has ever smiled.

The new tickets cost €50. The exchange rate that day was 1.42 in favor of the Euro, meaning, those 3 minutes cost me $24.00 a piece.

Our instincts were to try to use the old tickets on the next train. Partly due to fear of failure and a heavy fine, but mostly because of honesty. The new tickets were bought. 3 hours later the next train to Brussels arrived in the bowels of the Charles De Gaulle Airport. We boarded and sat down with a slight sigh of hope that our bad luck was over. When the man wandered down the aisle to stamp our tickets, Christina handed him the old ones. A cruel test I suppose. To pass it, would have only made us feel worse: if he stamped the old tickets, it would have meant the new tickets were a waste of €50 – a considerable sum on any day, a dramatic one when all you have left is worthless american money in your pocket.

The man took the two expired tickets, looked at them casually and pinched them both one by one between his stamp, and handed them back to Christina.

"Merci..." she said with a painful sigh. The kind you make when you waste €50.

Decisions in life are made. There is no way of knowing that if you live your life by any principle – the least of all honesty – that it will ever pay off; 3 hours later or ever in this lifetime or after. It certainly didn't in the first 3 hours.

When you throw a stone into a pond, the ripples radiate from the point of contact, and eventually lap upon all edges of the bank. When you make a choice in life – good or bad – it too radiates in all directions, and eventually laps upon those near and far to you.

The train arrived at the Leuven station, getting us to the platform four hours late. Ralf was supposed to drive us from there to Aachen whereupon we were to take a second train to Bonn. We later learned he made special arrangements to leave work early and take us along with a friend to Aachen. His efforts were in vain. Due to our late arrival, Ralf had waited but eventually left, making his friend late to his appointment.

We had to take a train from Leuven to Bonn. When we arrived in Leuven, we had 1 hour to walk across town to Henrike's house, pack our belongings and walk back across a town I just learned existed 3 days ago and learned to pronounce properly 2. I was certainly not acquainted with it's streets, especially after dark. Luckily Henrike met us at the train station on her bicycle. As we were walking back to her room i was careful to observe my surroundings as we twisted through the cobweb of cobblestone. As we entered the stone plaza that spanned the city hall and the Church, a pair of police woman stopped Henrike.

One of the officers chattering scornfully in Dutch. Henrike dug in her polar-fleece jacket for her identification, but did not have it. The police woman then escorted her away. She spoke with chagrin in German to Christina as she was being led away from us across the plaza between lime green reflective jackets.

She was being taken to the station for walking her bike without her light on.

Christina and I were left standing on the plaza. Our train to Germany left in 30 minuets. We still had to find the nunnery across town. We still had to get back to the train station. i was still wearing old underwear inside out.

In physics, a benchmark equation states that energy can never be destroyed, it only changes form. In a benchmark epiphany, made while running through the cold dark streets of Leuven Belgium, I discovered bad luck nor the trouble it causes ever dies, it just changes hands.

For the next 15 minuets i thanked my father and the rural countryside of Miami and Hocking Counties in Ohio. For a country boy used to rural and urban land areas being divided by roads and fence lines nicely parceled out in tidy square acres, european cities are a fractured labyrinth of roads expanding outward in a radial pattern from the feudal days of the european fiefdoms. But despite our foreign surroundings, we navigated among the Stella Artios Signs and stone buildings and found our way to our waiting bags.

On our way back out the door, I took one last moment to ask the students cooking supper in the kitchen 2 things:

1- How to get back to the train station in 12 minutes.?
2- How much was a fine for pushing a bike down the street without a headlight?

Answers in a thick Belgium Accent:
1- The bus stop at the top of the hill.
2- Could be €150 if the police are having a bad day.

We made the train to Aachen with 6 minutes to spare, enough time for Christina to get a Sprite and a Twix from the vending machine. It seems not only has American music and culture saturated the global market, so too has saccharin and high fructose corn syrup. The train creeped to a stop in Liége, 10 minutes late. Our bad luck was a big stone. It's ripples went far. And it's energy was still changing shape. We lugged our baggage off of the train. The connection to Bonn had already left. Christina negotiated a portion of our train fare in refund and called her cousin Josh, who was at the time en-route to Aachen, to find a train we were not on. By the time Christina hung up the phone (conversations on U.S. phones are short, at $1.50/min.) Josh had re-routed his trip and added another 91 km- he agreed to pick us up in Liége.

We arrived in Bonn at 11:00 PM. I laid my head down in Josh's flat like the last domino falling in a long string of bad luck that involved much more than myself.

Decisions are energy. They resonate and weave and sometimes push their way through time, through people, through train stations and countries. They ebb, they flow, and their causes and effects move like tides. They echo through people in many ways. Some are fatalists. Some are determinists. Some pray to their God for every outcome to every choice they make. Some think He has long since decided, regardless. Others push through life like it is a crowd at the Charles De Gaulle Airport, attempting to force their schedule in life by nothing more than their own perceived merit. Often it seems we try everything, and then do not know anything when it comes to what we owe the outcome of the choices we make. Thus we are never any wiser than the day before, and attribute our good and bad fortunes to anything and everyone on earth – and above – as we see convenient to do so; but seldom do we consider our actions to rest solely on our own decisions to live, and die, and to miss trains by.

One thing was certain to me as I closed my eyes: the decisions I make create my reality and those around me as I push through life. They determine my present and they can haunt my future as well as they can haunt others'. I alone am responsible – at the very least – for that.

I made one last decision as I closed my eyes:

Uncooperative French women in Airports are caused by events i will never know.

Honesty and truthfulness may perhaps pay off someday, but not on a train to Brussels.

Belgium Bicycle laws have been made for reasons I have no control over.

Train schedules are delayed by factors beyond me that I had no direct part in.

All of which I was made aware of by my own lack of 3 minuets in life.

And as I fell asleep in Bonn, I determined: life is far more educational when not every decision is the right one.

The Green Fairy

The Belgian Hangover

Leuven Belgium is the home of two things of note: Stella Artois and the Katholieke University Leuven.

A Béguinage is a collection of small buildings used by Beguine Nuns, several lay sisterhoods of the Roman Catholic Church, founded in the 13th century in the Low Countries. Today they house students studying at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

Henrike is one of those students. She is a friend of Christina's studying psychology at the Dutch speaking institute. According to Henrike, the particular structure in Leuven she lived in was built in the 15th century. It sits in the south central part of Leuven, a town that radiates outward from a central marketplace. A city map of Leuven looks like a sheet of glass with stone thrown into it, it's streets are a Cobblestone cobweb fracturing out in a haphazard radial pattern. And on most every acute street corner, hangs a Stella Artois sign over the door. The beer is a national export that finds it's way into taps across the States.

Belgium also has many, many other beers of merit. I now have empirical evidence of this. Henrike's boyfriend, a native Belgian (He is not Dutch. I made the mistake of referring to him as such. ) took it upon himself (with only moderate encouragement) as an ambassador to his small northern european country to show me the brewed bounty of his lands. This took a while. During which i learned many things. The most noteworthy , or rather the best to survive the night was of the political parties in Belgium. This was a topic of conversation during my stay, mostly because of the National hoax that was aired on Belgian T.V. and covered by the international press. The hoax, a mock news report that covered the fictitious cessation of the southern French region of the County, brought to light the political divisions of the country. In a country of 10 million there are 3 major political parties, and two others with recognizable clout. [ For More: Read This]

As i worked my way to the bottoms of bottles of Hoegaarden, Chimay, Rochefort, Dupples, Triples and various other Trappist Beers far too local and specific to remember, i thought about how many, and how few, choices I had in America. In a land of 300 million people, I have hundreds of types of beers to drink. When it comes to the national election booth, my choices are only 2.

Köln, Germany

The Germany Impact (Part 2)

Each house in Freudenburg has perfect posture. We walked through the grey morning down narrow tidy streets. Acrid smoke from archaic chimneys blew between the steep pitched roofs. The houses stood tall and stern in their black and white german Fachwerk Hauses like men in pressed suits with their collars turned up, waiting for centuries in an austere pose for something they deemed worth moving for.

"I don't think I could ever live here." she said to me.

"It is too...." she searched for a word. A woman passed us silently on the street. She, nor her groceries in her white cloth bag offered us any expression.

"Uptight." I said.

"Yah." she replied.

I smiled quickly again. Perhaps now i had also had seen both lives my great grandfather has seen, and for a moment I thought I understood why he left where he did. Being uptight has never been an attribute of my family.

When we returned from our walk, her grandfather greeted me at the door and began speaking to me with a smile. Christina explained to me he spent the morning on the phone and found the phone directory for Oppershausen. It listed 23 families with the last name of Roth; likely the family name before the Ellis Island Immigration office took their best shot at phonetically registering my name in shorthand on ledger sheets.

He went on to say he phoned a few of them. The first was a chimney sweep, who suggested contacting his 80 year old aunt. She however, was unavailable. Further investigation revealed that during a massive shift in State Government in 1879 all public records were lost- including birth and death certificates. Access to the only other record keeping for the area would require a visit to the local church.

I thanked him for his investigative efforts. He replied with a smile and beckoned us to lunch. I took off my shoes, put on the 'house shoes' I was given to walk with in the house, took off my coat, washed my hands and went to the dining table.

The Germany Impact (Part 1)

Yesterday I awoke in my bedroom on the farm in Ohio to the heavy but soothing breathing of a golden retriever beside me in my bed.

This morning I opened my eyes to Donald Duck speaking in German. The T.V screen hung from the overhead storage in the center ailse. The Lufthansa stewardess was passing out breakfast sandwiches. Like most overnight travel – whether it be on planes, trains, or automobiles – sleep was reduced to delirious cycles of other people's conversations and vignettes of vague memories. The skin around my neck felt like concrete forms in which the concrete was setting. My wrist watch said 5:30 AM. The woman at the end of the row pushed up her window shade, and a sweep of white midday sun shone into the cabin.

My first memory of Germany will be grey. The Frankfurt airport is a steel skeleton, it's hide stretched across it's frame in plate glass. There is no color. The sky was a turbid and monochrome canvas. It was strikingly similar in mood to the pale gray skies of Ohio, and I smiled quickly because I had now seen the same two skies my great grandfather did. And for a moment I thought that I understood why my grandfather's father stopped where he did when he left Germany; the sky over each is the same.

We arrived that night at Christina's grandparents house. Their house sits on a side street in Freudenburg, their backyard filled with a garden that slopes up into the hillside that pockets the quiet valley. Her grandparents do not speak english, but I was compelled to inquire about the town of Oppershausen, a very small dot on the map roughly 140 km from their kitchen table. In 1881 my great grandfather, at the age of 6 left Oppershausen with his entire family. I took a crash course in family genealogy the night before I departed the States and told him (via Christina) all I could remember, and asked all I could. According to her grandfather, the French Revolution likely caused the family of 10 to embark on such a journey, along with several extended family members.

The notion that people are the only species to have the ability to define their own reality will never cease to stir me. Everyday I continue to make choices that will create an entire new set of circumstances not only for me but also for those around me. A decision in 1881 led a man to take his family to America. That choice alone has completely and utterly defined my reality the day I was born 97 years later.

I spent my first night in Germany in a quiet room thinking about the infinite amount of choices that were made before me to dictate my own personal reality. I thought about the near infinite decisions I have made in my own life to further define myself.

As i fell asleep, i thought about the many decisions I made just today that made my life what it was. The best of which may have been the 250mg of Melatonin i swollowed to force fit my circadian rhythm into the 7 hour time change.

Arrivals and Departures

The camera man turned on the light atop the camera as the crowd began waving their American flags.

I was facing the security gate in the Columbus International airport and heaving gray PVC trays into the X-ray conveyor belt like bales of hay onto an elevator, to be carried into the darkness of the hay mile. The TSA screening machine swallowed the trays with a slow and monotonous moan like a glutton at buffet, the sound representing a process that leverages the inconvenience and consequence of our daily migrant lives against pacification of our minds.

Behind me the crowd began to cheer as American soldiers, still clad in their desert fatigues filed out into the concourse. Daughters ran to their fathers, Wives kissed their husbands. The soldiers were returning home from the Middle East.

I was leaving to go to it.

I fed the last tray of carry on luggage into the mouth the security machine and walked through the gate.

It seems that I am always going in the opposite direction as most.