Suitcases Up Steps

Somewhere around 11^th grade, I suffered from an inexplicable bout of insomnia for a few months. Never knew why it started or how it ended, but I do remember that it was sheer torture. I’d lie awake just on the edge of sleep, some way too-conscious mind way too conscious of the fact that I wasn’t sleeping and then getting frustrated and angry, which I’m sure didn’t help. Luckily, it stopped and never was a problem again. 

 

Until last night. Of course, it was jet lag and no surprise that I awoke at 2:00am, but a bit of a surprise that I was up for 4 hours with that same maddening feeling of almost asleep, but not quite! Then I clearly finally dozed off and when I heard some sounds from my wife in our curtain-darkened room, imagined that it was 8:00 or 9:00 am. Imagine my shock when I saw that it was 12 noon!!! Our check-out time! We got a half-hour reprieve and were out on the streets ready for the train trip to York, our next stop. 

 

As any long-time reader knows, I like to notice the things that are different about one place from another and in both the subway and train station, here’s one: No escalators!!! And why not? So many people dragging heavy suitcases up fifteen steps or so, so it’s not as if there’s not a demand. And yes, there is a lift (translation: elevator), but it’s nowhere near as convenient or user-friendly as a simple escalator. These days, I don’t feel like the U.S. can give a single word of advice to any other culture, but I think “escalators in train stations” is something the world —well, at least the U.K.— might consider. 

 

A two-hour trip to York and for the second time in two days, went to our Premier Inn and were not in their records, only to discover that the Premier Inn we wanted was literally a second nearby hotel, around the block in London and two doors down in York! Kind of like Starbucks in downtown San Francisco. 

 

Our Premier Inn has a broken lift, so there we were again lugging our suitcases up steps. Luckily, we got a room on the 1^st floor! Quickly settled in and hit the streets around 6:00 pm. Plenty of light, because York is a fairly northern latitude and we’re only three weeks out from the Summer Solstice. (I’m writing this at 10:00 pm and it’s only just now twilight.)

Looking for a snack, we decided on a Thai dinner, though promised each other that we’d go to the Fish and Chips place tomorrow that serves it up in newspaper, a “when in Rome” commitment. After dinner, we walked up the steps to the Medieval Wall that surrounds part of the city and started to circumambulate. Perfect 75-degree temperature (no converting from Celsius here!) for an evening stroll, looking down at the gardens of the row houses below. Came to the end and descended to walk towards the City Centre (British spelling—again, when in Rome…) and it was evocative of another city we loved visiting on our bike trip two years ago—Ljubljana in Slovenia. They both have a river running through it with walks along the side and outdoor restaurants and pedestrian-friendly streets. 

 

This is what I love about Europe. The taste of antiquity in the air in these old town neighborhoods with buildings/ castles/ churches/ walls as old as a thousand years, the people-friendly and winding meandering streets, the outdoor restaurants and cafes serving quality food, the diners having conversations (though phone addiction is creeping in). My wife just read two books about how cars have shaped American culture—one called Carrmeggedon and the other Life After Cars and both suggesting what San Francisco is beginning to do— pay attention to car-free roads in parks, slow streets, pedestrian malls, bike lanes and more. 

 

In Rebecca Solnit’s book mentioned in the last post (whose subtitle I neglected to mention– A History of Walking), she notes: 

 

“…(in the United States) public space is designed to accommodate the privacy of automobiles, malls replace main streets, streets have no sidewalks, buildings are entered through their garages, city halls have no plazas, and everything has walls, bars, gates. Fear has created a whole style of architecture and urban design, notably in Southern California where to be a pedestrian is to be under suspicion in many of the subdivisions and gated ‘communities.’ “

 

Yep! I have felt this so strongly traveling around the country giving workshops and being put up in chain hotels on strip malls with chain mega-stores and taken out to dinner at chain restaurants. How can the aesthetic experience I’m hoping to give in the workshop be fully absorbed when we live like this, surrounded by sameness everywhere and character nowhere? I remember once in Grand Rapids asking if I could walk to the movie theater in a nearby mall and they looked at me like I was an alien from another planet. I did anyway, without a sidewalk with cars zooming by. 

The next morning I was so starved for something that felt real, that seemed to be a neighborhood, that I started to walk away from the main road (again, no sidewalks). Finally, I stumbled on a park-like green space with a sign announcing future ‘development,’ walked up to a tree, looked around not surprised to find nobody there and basically took off my shirt and dropped my pants to hug that tree and try to feel like an authentic human being again in close contact with an authentic part of nature. Really! I did that! I was that desperate.

 

Talking about recalibrating our culture to accommodate walking and biking and such seems so trivial in the face of the major blitz, bombardment, onslaught we are suffering in the hands of the Moloch monsters we’ve somehow elected. And yet. It’s all connected. The AI saturation bombing is yet another attempt to render the body wholly —and the mind and the heart—irrelevant. 

In the face of that all, the simple act of walking in our bodies, in our own thoughts, in company with the natural world, is both a needed personal healing and profound collective act of resistance. When that simple step can go further yet to organize our architecture and paths and sidewalks and roads around this landslide vote for quality of life, then real change can begin. Europe remains so impressive in its ongoing commitment to withstanding the onslaught. Still no skyscrapers in Paris, the empty Salzburg fields that were there when I first visited in 1990 still there, the activity around city riverfronts in Ljubljana where people stroll and dine and sip coffee or savor a glass of wine— they seem to be holding steady. Not so in China, where they razed the colorful hutongs and chose the Las Vegas glitz and towering buildings and endless malls, as did Tokyo in its own way. And so on.

 

That’s my first day report—well, my second report, as Be Here Now was written on the train. Tomorrow an adventure to see if I can complete a loop that happened 48 years ago, when my wife and I visited York for the first (and only until now) time. To be continued…