"He Wood Ride Anything with Wheels"--Riding a bike made of ash wood up a 1000-meter climb

This bike is entirely made from ash wood including the seat and handlebars

It's not great for a 1000-meter climb on a switchback road.

Several times during my recent trip in Europe and Asia I switched my plans to avoid the places where the pandemic was currently worst.  I was in Athens when I was supposed to be in Rome.  It was a Sunday. The bike rental shops were closed. The only place I could rent a bike was at an upscale hotel that was connected to a local company that makes bikes from ash trees--fifty bikes per tree and then they plant fifty seedling trees for each tree they use. Here is their website.

The bikes are seven-speed, planetary hub city bikes.  Three miles away from my hotel was a 1000-meter high mountain in the middle of the city with several cell towers at the top. It was 60 degrees, sunny and I wanted to ride!  So I rented the wooden bike, raised the seat as high as I could and rode up the mountain.

At three miles up, the road got really steep and I had to walk a hundred meters, but then it leveled a little and I kept going.  The view was beautiful. Halfway up I looked back at the city and was looking down on the Acropolis.  Further up the road turned south and I was looking at the harbor and the Aegean Sea.  Near the top the switchback interval got shorter and the grade went above ten percent.  I gave up when I was looking at the base of the cell towers knowing I could get a steel bike with a triple crank the next day and ride to the top.

Along with its planetary gearset, the bike had a caliper brake on the front wheel, but a coaster brake in the rear. On the way down the mountain, riding into a couple of switchbacks I slid the rear wheel when I went to backpedal and braked instead. By the bottom I was used to it, but it made me realize that I backpedal on the way into sharp turns--some of the switchbacks were 180 degrees.

The road had few guardrails and many long, sheer drops. I thought if I had really screwed up with the coaster brake my epitaph could be:  "He Wood Ride Anything with Wheels."

Google maps is mostly wonderful, but occasionally just terrible.

Alligator or Crocodile: Google maps wanted me to find out in person!

Google maps is mostly wonderful, but occasionally just terrible.  I rented a car at the Athens airport and drove back to a hotel where I was staying. The hotel was six miles away in a little village.  For some reason, Google maps told me to leave the highway and take a dirt road to the hotel.  For almost a mile, I followed the road with an increasing sense of foreboding.  At first it was two very small cars wide, then narrower. 

Then it went from straight to winding. There were stray dogs on and near the road. Then the road turned slightly downhill.  Although Athens is mostly very hilly, the area near the airport is flat and occasionally marshy. Slightly downhill can be significant.

It was.  I rounded a corner and there was a puddle. A big puddle. A width of the road puddle. I stopped. I stared. In the light of a waxing moon, the puddle was black but illuminated by the lunar light.  I looked beside the puddle and saw no clear path. The puddle itself was smooth—not rocks or branches sticking up through the surface, so it was deep.  The Renault Clio I was driving had about three inches of ground clearance, I had one bar of cell service, so I turned around and went back to the highway. 

Google tried to get me to turn around and go back to the impromptu alligator habitat, but I kept driving on the highway until it recalculated me a route on pavement.  Or was it crocodiles?

Persistent Pitch Men and Women in front of Athens Restaurants

Restaurant row in Athens.  Each restaurant has a 
pitch man or woman saying some version of "Eat here!"

Between my hotel and Athens and the place I rented bikes was a block of restaurants. They were side by side competing for tourists who could only eat so many meals.  My favorite coffee place was also at the far end of the line, so I passed restaurant row several times a day for three days.

Outside each of the restaurants was a hawker.  A man or woman who would say, “Eat here. Authentic Greek food. Or pizza if you want.” I passed by. Crossing the narrow street to the opposite sidewalk was no help.  Some of the times I was walking by I was wearing spandex—not a fashion choice of anyone else that I could see. 

Finally, the last night I wanted to eat a pizza, so I went in the restaurant with a tall, bearded guy doing the pitches and ordered pizza and water. 

When I left, I had to pass by a half-dozen other hawkers. One of them, a short, intense woman in her forties said, “Why did you go to his place? What did they offer you? Was it free beer? They give free beer.”

I was going to keeping walking, then I stopped and said, “They gave me a brand-new car. They gave me a 2020 Renault Clio.” 

She looked stunned for a minute then recovered and said, “What else?” Then the woman hawking for the restaurant beside hers, a taller woman in her late 20s, smiled and said, “Yes, what else did they give you?” 

I said, “Two motorcycles. A Ducati Monster and Honda CBR1000.”

She said, “You better be careful and not drink too much if you are riding those bikes.” 

I said I drank a whole bottle of sparkling water and would not touch the bikes till morning.  She smiled. The first woman forced a smile. Clearly, she had a side bet going about whether the old guy in spandex would ever eat in one of their restaurants.

A Woman Who Took Charge Like a Drill Sergeant Meeting a Recruit Bus

On the 15th of February at the beginning of a five-week trip across Europe and Israel, my friend Cliff and I took an Al Italia flight from Frankfurt to Tel Aviv, changing planes in Rome. Because the first flight was between two European Union countries, there was no customs check. We had a two-hour layover and knew there would be a customs check before flying to Israel.

We landed about a half-hour late; the next flight was in another terminal. As we left the plane, Cliff and I wondered if we would be spending the night in Rome. As we cleared the Jetway, we saw a tall, blond woman wearing an Al Italia flight attendant uniform holding a sign that said: Tel Aviv.

When we joined the group, she made a quick count, then an about face and marched away holding up the sign and saying, "Follow please."  We followed, about 20 of us. Fast. Cliff and I made jokes about whether we could keep up. We also said if she were not ex-military, she had us fooled.

After a long march she swept up to the customs area and pointed at two lines we were to join.  We obeyed.  All 20 of us. Customs proceeded quickly under the eye of our leader.  When we were all through customs, she counted, turned and marched us to the gate. We made the flight in plenty of time.  Once we were in line, she turned and marched back to her other duties.

It is a small joy for an old sergeant to follow someone confident who knows exactly what she is doing.

Shades of Yellow--in Taxis

This lovely, pale shade of yellow is the color of taxis in Greece

This German-standard color of taxis has also been declared yellow by the government in Greece. 

This is the cab of Niko, the taxi driver who took me to my hotel. It is only yellow in Greece.

When I first arrived in Greece, the hotel where I was staying sent a taxi for me.  The taxi ride was free, along with a very low nightly rate at the hotel.  The driver, Niko, met me at international arrivals. We walked to his cab. I noticed that many of the cabs were Mercedes and that they were a pale yellow—very different from the harsh yellow of NYC taxicabs.  When we got to his cab, it was cream color.  I said, “This is the color of a German cab.”

Niko spoke English well and told me about flying to Europe to buy the cab.  He was part of a group of Greek cab drivers who got permission to use cabs in German cream color rather than yellow.  He said the government decided to call cream color a shade of yellow, allowing any cabbie who wanted a cab that color to do so without special permission. 

Like German cabs, there are no ads, phone numbers or writing of any kind on cabs.  Not all are Mercedes, but all the cabs I saw were a paler yellow than is true in America. 

As in Tbilisi and Jerusalem, I saw a lot of Priuses as cabs.  Hybrids really are at their best in the intermittent, fast/slow/stop driving of city cabs. Niko wanted to keep driving Mercedes sedans as long as he could.  We talked like two old motorheads (which we are) about the joys of driving the A5 Autobahn in Germany in the middle of the night and going 150mph. 

Niko wants to travel to America someday, to New York and to California.  He loves Greece and is very proud of the projected number of tourists for the coming year. He said 36 million was the projected number.  The coronavirus will certainly put a damper on that, and on Niko’s travel plans.  

Nostalgia for Tito in North Macedonia--former Yugoslavia

Dozens of statues in every direction in the center of Skopje

In Skopje I met a very funny guy named Ferdinand. "Call me Ferdi," he said when I asked his name.

He asked me how I liked the statues in the center of Skopje. When I hesitated he said,  "I hate them. It's ridiculous." He began winding up toward a speech.  "We have no trains, the buses are old. The bridges are crumbling. But we have statues everywhere. Who needs them? I don't!"

He went on about the corruption and stupidity that has dogged his country since the fall of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. "Under Tito we had the best two decades in that past century. Maybe ever.  Tito falls. Capitalism is not so good for us.  Under Tito, the government worked. Now....." he shrugged.

Then he straightened up, his blue eyes flashed, he smiled and said, "But you guys elected Trump. At least we did not vote for someone who bragged about being corrupt. He showed you who he is, and you elected him."

I could only agree.  In "On Tyranny" Timothy Snyder recommends making friends in countries that have suffered under authoritarian rule.  They know what's coming. Ferdi's words echoed the Russian emigre writer Masha Gessen who said we should believe the tyrant when he says what he will do.

We talked about Bernie Sanders. As with other people I have spoken to in Europe, they all think Sanders is Trump's ticket to life rule. "If Trump runs against Sanders, democracy ends. Maybe it already has."

As I left I passed a lot of statues and some very old buses.

"If You Share A Room with A Monk in Jerusalem, You Have to Expect An Early Wake Up"

My recent ten-nation trip began with a week in Jerusalem. I met my old friend and roommate from our Cold War military service, Cliff Almes, in Darmstadt, Germany.  He has lived there since we both left the military in 1979, becoming a brother in a monastery there. He is Bruder Timotheus. 

We stayed in a German Guest House in the middle of the Old City of Jerusalem just 100 meters from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. For a monk of 40 years, being that close to the most holy site in Christendom was a blessing of the first order.  The Church is open between 4am and 6pm each day and mobbed with tourists and pilgrims every hour except 4-5am. 

So, Cliff awoke every morning at 3:30am, dressed and spent an hour at the Church.  Then came back. I was glad we could stay at a place that delighted Cliff so much.  I seldom go to sleep before midnight. Even if I weren’t an iconoclast, there is nothing that interests me enough to get up at 3:30am. 

Mostly I got back to sleep and stayed asleep through Cliff’s return, waking for the communal breakfast at 8:30am. 

Cliff stayed in Jerusalem a few more days as I went off to the Republic of Georgia. Two weeks later we went to Dachau and Nuremberg together.  We met in Darmstadt in the evening and drove to Dachau. At one point I asked if he had any reason to set his alarm before 7. He smiled and said, “No, but if you share a room with a monk in Jerusalem, you have to expect an early wake up.”

"Go Take a Flying F#ck at a Rolling Doughnut!" -- Kurt Vonnegut

  

In a touching scene in the movie “Ford v Ferrari” Carroll Shelby, a Texan, tells a boy who lost his father in a racing accident, “Your Daddy thought you was finer than fur on a frog.” I was watching the movie in France in English with French subtitles. The translator said something like “Your father thought you were a very good boy.”

Metaphor, like poetry, does not translate easily or well.

The moment brought me back to trying to figure out military metaphor when I first enlisted.  The American military is more than 60% southern and western, so for a Boston Yankee like me, I had trouble understanding what some of the sergeants were saying. 

One of the first metaphors that confused me was hearing a sergeant say of a soldier struggling hopelessly with the wrong wrench for the job, “He looks like a monkey trying to fuck a football.”  I have a literal mind, so I could picture what he was saying, but could not understand why he was saying it.

But those ten words hold lots of meaning. A monkey, at least in popular culture, is extremely sexually active and so might try to have an erotic relationship with almost anything.  The monkey is presumed to have great energy which it will use even in pursuit of an impossible goal. So, a soldier trying with great energy to do something impossible is like that monkey. 

In that era, the American military was trying to reduce the amount of swearing by sergeants. When one soldier was disagreeing with and rejecting another soldier, he could say, “Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.”  This, like suggesting intercourse with one’s self, is an impossible task, and one that would be peculiarly painful in the likely event it failed or even if it succeeded. This insult had been in circulation at least since World War II. Many years later, I was reading “Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, and smiled when I read the rolling doughnut metaphor.

But before I heard the traditional version, I heard my crew chief use the non-swearing variant using bureaucratic language to say the same thing. He said: “Please attempt aerial intercourse with a motivated, perforated pastry.”

After a while, the Army use of metaphor came easily to me. You could say I caught on, “quicker than chicken on a June bug.”

The French Unaware Americans Think French Only Surrender in War

Freedom Fries in the Congressional Cafeteria. 

Talking with French friends, I mentioned visiting the War Memorial at the center of the town of Foix in the Pyrenees.  The small town had memorial for war dead from both World Wars, Indochina (Vietnam) and Algeria.  As I walked around the memorial, I remembered the Republicans who started the “Freedom Fries” campaign and poured out bottles of French wine.  The draft-dodgers and never-servatives at the center of the campaign said the French were afraid to fight in Iraq.

The truth was, the French understood the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld lies behind the war and its ill-conceived plan and refused to be part of it.  The French view was the correct view.  Worse still French troops were on the ground in Afghanistan from the beginning of that war, because fighting the war that made sense. They fought and died in Afghanistan from the beginning of what has become America’s longest war.

I mentioned that the Republican cowards were using the stereotype common in America that French only surrender in war; my friends were surprised. They knew about the Freedom Fries foolishness but did not know that it was a stereotype with a 70-year heritage. 

When their protests began: “Lafayette; Napoleon; a million dead, five million wounded of 66 million population of France in World War I…”  I said this stereotype was as ubiquitous as the stereotypes of Russians, Germans and Brits that were part of their culture. 

The anger I feel when I remembered Freedom Fries is both because I have trained with and respect French soldiers and because the Republicans in question were and are such manifest cowards: now led by their Draft-Dodger-in-Chief.  When I hear that stereotype, I see cowards like Trump, Limbaugh, Cheney, and hundreds of other Pansy Patriots who send Americans to war and death and never served themselves, the worst letting another man take their place. 

Although a few more French intellectuals now know the low esteem in which the French military and French manhood is held by Americans, most residents of our allied nation are blissfully ignorant.  Which is certainly for the best.

Evangelical Escapees Around the World

When I travel, one of the categories of people I meet are Evangelical Escapees. Sam fits in that category.  He grew up in central Ohio in a family that was in Church twice on Sunday, Wednesday, and his teens youth group on Friday put him in Church at least four days per week. Three times a year, the big Church had a weeklong salvation event. In the summer, the whole family traveled around the south. His father was teaching and preaching at Camp Meetings. 

Sam, of course, had no choice about attending any or all of these services. For him, childhood was managing boredom attending events he had no interest in.  He was interested in science. His dad was a high school principal for a day job, but Sam was walled off from advanced studies because he had so many commitments outside school. “I never had time to really do homework. I did okay in school, but I wasn’t like the kids who took advanced classes.”

Sam left home after high school and eventually became a professional mountain bike racer. He married a researcher with a PhD in bioinformatics who got a job at French pharmaceutical company. Sam opened a bike shop in Paris.  He has a clientele of amateur athletes and some professionals on the French national team. He is a perfectionist who does bike fitting for people who want top performance. 

Sam is in his early fifties, tall, thin and fit. He is a strong rider who is very much part of the cycling community in Paris.  He speaks French with an American accent. He has a strong voice and speaks slowly. When I have heard him speak to clients, I can understand him a lot better than the native French speakers he is interacting with.

Sam says his parents really lived the faith they proclaimed. His problem was with nearly everyone else in his Church life. He learned racial epithets at Church before he heard them in “the world.”  And in the kind of Church he grew up in, Creation Science, the arrogant lunacy of asserting the earth is 6,000 years old was the only science. 

Better than Brainwashing--a convoy leaving Camp Adder, Iraq.

Sam is very far from his childhood: physically, spiritually, culturally, but not as far as a soldier I served with in Iraq. David heard me arguing with some Creationists in the mess hall before we deployed. He came up to me later and asked, “Can you really be a believer and not believe all that [Creationist] shit?” He had been told the opposite all through his childhood. He enlisted because he wanted to get away from home and Church, but he could not to a secular college. So, he turned 18 and headed for Iraq.  War was better than brainwashing. And after deployment he went to college with the GI Bill. 

David went back to his childhood hometown after serving in the Army, but got the secular education he wanted. Sam keeps in touch with his family, but is happily staying quite far from home.

   

SIXT is My Favorite Car Rental Company in Europe

When I rent cars in Europe, I try to rent from SIXT if I can. It’s not always possible.  Sometimes they cost more than the competition, sometimes they have no availability, and most recently they had a mileage limit when no other competitor did. 

But my best car rental experiences have been with the bright orange German brand.  I first rented from SIXT in the Frankfurt Airport on a business trip to Germany in 1999.  I had rented a plain vanilla Opel. I greeted the guy at the counter in my barely remembered German from 20 years before. He smiled, spoke English noting my horrible accent and offered me an upgrade. 

He said, “For an additional $10 per day, you can have a BMW 750i.” I blinked. “Really?” I said. “Yes. No problem. Silver. Would you like to upgrade?” I would and did. I went to the lot and there was a silver BMW with a 5.4-liter, 322hp V12 engine. It had a five-speed automatic. I usually get stick shifts in Europe, but I was too happy to care about the transmission. 

On the A5 Autobahn at 2am I verified that rental cars have a governor or speed limiter set to 250kph (155mph). The two-ton sedan was glass smooth at that speed.  Twenty years before I drove that same autobahn in a $400 ten-year-old 1969 VW Beetle with a 40 hp 1200cc flat four. With a tailwind I could get that car just over 100kph.  Everything passed me in the Beetle. In the BMW, I passed everything. It was awesome. 

The next time I went to Germany, I again reserved a plain vanilla Opel with SIXT. I asked for an upgrade and for roughly $10 per day, I got an Audi A6 Turbo.  And that night I checked the speed limiter. 

In November at the end of my last trip, I rented a from SIXT. No upgrade, but very friendly service.  It was a day trip from Paris to Le Mans. After seeing Ford v Ferrari in Paris, I was jazzed to see the site and museum of the most legendary 24-hour race. 

I have rented with Europcar more than SIXT because they tend to have the cheapest cars, and some of the places I go, like Latvia and Georgia and Israel, no SIXT cars were available. 

But the orange logo of SIXT will always be my favorite.

Visit to the Museum at the Site of the Nuremberg Rallies

Hitler at Nuremberg

On the same day my friend Cliff and I visited the Dachau Concentration Camp, we also visited the museum of the history of the Nazis in Nuremberg. 

This Bavarian city was the site of several Nazi rallies before Hitler took power in Germany and became the spiritual center of the Nazi cult (Fuhrer cult) after the Nazis took absolute power in Germany. 

Fuhrer Cult 

Our visit began at a museum build inside a semicircular, multi-story building that was to be the site of meetings for thousands of Nazi leaders.  Nearby are the fields that were once the site of the infamous Nuremberg rallies.  The tens of thousands of Hitler worshippers who crowded this huge field were not enough of an audience for the Nazi cult, so they enlisted Leni Riefenstahl to make the award-winning film “Triumph of the Will.” 

The film focuses solely on Hitler, the one man who embodies the Reich.  Watching the film reminded me of a guest speaker in media class I took 40 years ago.  The videographer who addressed the class talked about his work and his career path and mentioned some of his clients. One client in particular caused a few of the students to catch their breath—a particularly loathsome politician. 

One of the students asked, “What about values? How do you pick your clients?” His answer, “Whoever the client is, I maintain the highest production values.” The class was over at that point.  Riefenstahl did the same on a much grander scale.  Whether she was a true believer or an opportunist, she made an award-winning film. She maintained production values promoting one of the most evil men that ever lived. 

After we saw the film about “Triumph of the Will” and the images and film of the Nuremberg rallies, Cliff said, “The Trump rallies really are sad events compared to these.” I agreed. Ten thousand racists yelling “Lock her up!” are hardly the grandeur of Nuremberg. But the spirit is there.  The American President call the press the “Enemy of the People” (Hitler’s lugenpresse or lying press is much the same) and calling Americans who oppose him human scum, another echo of Hitler’s calls for extermination of the Jews, really are in the Nuremberg spirit.

There are differences besides scale. Unlike Hitler, Trump whines like a baby. “Witch hunt!” he says declaring himself the biggest victim in world history. Whining will not lead to a hundred thousand Seig Heils.

America First Nazi Rally in Madison Square Garden 

on February 20, 1939

The echo of Trump in the 1930s American Nazi phrase “America First” looks very ominous when touring the spiritual home of the Nazi empire. But Trump is a coward and a bully who slinked away from service as a young man when Hitler volunteered for the most dangerous duty in the terrible trench warfare of World War I. No one will make the movie “Triumph of the Whine.”

In the area surrounding the museum are places that would have been developed into imperial sites for larger and more elaborate rallies as the Nazis conquered the world.  The conquest failed and when the war began, money for lavish parade sites dried up. 

Now one of the main rally sites has some massive blocks surrounding what is now a soccer pitch.  The sites are incomplete, grown over and inhabited by people walking, hiking and playing games. 

Because Nuremberg was the spiritual center of the Reich, the Allies chose it as the site to put the Nazi leaders on trial for war crimes. It is strange to think that even at the end of their wretched lives they were given the justice they denied to millions. 

Memoir from an Antproof Case

Tonight I finished a book I thought I had read more than 20 years ago, but I had not. I had read a couple of chapters and lost interest. But I have read all of Helprin's other novels and short stories, so I decided to give it another try.

I like it better now, but having finished it, I will not keep it. I won't read it again.  It is the memoir of a grumpy 80 year old. Worse, it is a grumpy 80 year old who loathes coffee. He attacks espresso machines on occasion and has ended friendships and marriages because of his anti-coffee obsession.

For a coffee lover like me, his rants are painful.  Worse I am in the midst of reading the 15th book in the Master and Commander series in which the central characters are two great friends who share a love of music and coffee.  And I just spent a week with a good friend from the Army in the 1970s who has been a Franciscan monk in Germany since shortly after leaving the military during the Cold War.  Bruder Timotheus and I have very different lives, but we share a love of good coffee.

I realized as I read the book, it is also something of a blueprint for my favorite novel by Helprin: Paris in the Present Tense. In both novels the central character is at the end of his life telling a story that begins with losing both of his parents in a brutal, senseless murder.  Both lead lives of love, loss, promise, courage and failed expectations.

But Paris left me wanting to re-read the book and mark passages, which I did. Antproof  left me smiling thinking that this was the trial run before the book I love most.

Since it is Helprin, there are brilliant passages:
The human soul is ordinary, existing by the billion, and on a crowded street you pass souls a thousand times a minute. And yet within the soul is a graceful, shining song more wonderful than the stunning cathedrals that stand over the countryside unique and alone. The simple songs are best. They last into time as inviolably as light.

And Helprin's books always have humor.  This book begins: Call me Oscar Progresso, or for that matter call me anything you want.... following that first line I was ready for a grumpy old narrator.

And the book is dedicated--To Juan Valdez.

Riding with Racers is the Same the World Over

One of the many peletons at Longchamps in Paris

When I ride in Paris in big pack, known around the world as a peloton, the behavior is as universal as the French word that describes the group.  In Paris on two consecutive days, I rode with big groups—twenty to forty riders—who I never met nor shared a common language with, but I could ride inches away from them to the side and front to back for miles with no problems. I speak and read some French, but not at 90% heart rate.

The behavior of the riders was completely predictable. They signaled when leaving the group. When I was in a fast group, riders from slower groups would speed up beside our group, then move into a gap if one appeared, or join our group from the back. Riders moved slightly out of the group to spit or for snot rockets, unless they were in the fastest groups, then they did their best to go straight down and kept on pedaling at a furious pace. 

In the fast groups, the toughest riders are out front, the rest of us draft as best we can and hang on. These groups formed straight pace lines with riders occasionally dropping off the front to rest at the back.  In the slower groups, a younger guy would occasionally pull out of the pack and attack the group, speeding away or becoming the front of a now faster group.  Sometimes they stayed at the front and raised the speed of the group for most of a lap.  Other times, they dropped to the back again as soon as they were caught. 

One beautiful thing to watch is how groups behave when they are overtaken in the narrow stretches at either end of the loop.  Most of the two miles is a 30-foot wide road with room for fast groups to sail past slow groups. But at each end of the loop is a short stretch that is just eight feet wide.  On the west end this 20-meter stretch is a downhill curve. On the east end is a 100-meter lane before the road turns south in front of the entrance to the horse racing track inside the Longchamps oval.

A group spread out five wide approaching the narrow sections will squeeze down to a pace line. The faster group does the same and two long lines either speed through a right bend or share a lane side by side in smooth parallel lines of heavy breathing and 100 rpm pedaling. 

Most of the riders wore black cool-weather tights and jackets. The temperature was in the low fifties both days. A few, the real racers in the groups, wore jerseys and tights from local race teams.  The sponsors, as well as I could make out, were a plumbing store or an electrical shop in the city of Paris or a suburb.  Some of the slower riders, and some of the guys speeding out to attack the group, wore the colors of Tour de France teams from a few years ago.  The fan-boy attire is universally the sign of a rider who is not a member of a local team. 

Unlike America, where closed roads and bike paths draw roller bladers, scooters, dog walkers, strollers and any number of rolling hazards to fast moving bikes, the training race loop is by tradition for cyclists.  Runners use the path on the inside of the loop. If they run on the pavement, they jump off when a large pack approaches. 

Also, bike culture becomes more and more uniform among the faster riders.  People going 9 mph commuting to work in flat cities like Amsterdam, Beijing or Bangkok ride any number of bikes sometimes older than the rider.  The fastest riders have carbon frame bikes of recent vintage with components very like everyone around them. They dress alike, except as noted above, and spend a lot of time training to be faster and better on the bike. 

I love the riding. I love bike culture. And I love being able to fit in with bicyclists in other countries around the world in the common culture we share.  The wheel thing, one could say.   

Visiting Dachau with My Friend Cliff

Never Again on the wall at the Dachau Concentration Camp.

Cliff and I have been friends since the late 1970s when we were roommates in the Wiesbaden Military Community. We were two of the 250,000 American soldiers defending Europe as part of NATO.  We both left active duty in 1979. Cliff and his family have a long and interesting military history dating back to the Revolutionary War.

Cliff stayed in Germany and eventually became Bruder Timotheus. We have stayed in touch, talking every month or two since 1979.  We had occasional visits before I retired, either when he was in the US to visit family or I was in Europe on business. 

Since I retired, we have been able to travel together. Dachau is the third concentration camp we have visited together. We visited Buchenwald last year and the Osthofen Concentration Camp in Rhineland-Palatinate in 2017.  Last month we spent a week in Israel together. We have both been to Yad Vashem, but not together. 

For Cliff and me, faith and spiritual life has always been the center of our conversations.  Since 2016, Cliff has helped me to navigate the spiritual crisis in my life that began with the election of Donald Trump and became a full-on disaster after Nazis marched at Charlottesville. Trump became the first President since the rise of Hitler who was unable to condemn Nazis and even suggested they are “fine people.”  Cliff suggested I listen to two rabbis with a podcast from Israel who just spoke about the Nazi rally in Charlottesville. We have been talking ever since in ways only two old friends, and two old soldiers can.

Here are some thoughts from Dachau. I will be posting much more about the trip in the coming weeks.

Dachau was among the first of the concentration camps, founded in 1933. It was the very first extermination camp adding a crematorium early in its terrible history. 

Dachau was also very much a slave labor camp. The main camp had 36 satellite camps at various times. Inmates were sent to these camps to work in the arms industry and other industries.

We walked toward the rail station from the camp itself. The route has a series of 11 signs showing where the camp guards lived and the training grounds for the SS troops assigned to Dachau. 

Dachau was a terrible revolving door for SS troops. Before the war, elite SS troops trained in Dachau. The best of these troops led the invasion of the Soviet Union, a war that began in June of 1941 and was supposed to end in victory by October.  Victory never came. That long defeat was best told through the eyes of a man who enlisted at 17 and served through the whole war: Guy Sajer, the Forgotten Soldier.

As the war dragged on and defeat followed defeat, wounded SS troops no longer able to serve on the front lines returned to Dachau to serve as camp guards.  The guards they replaced were sent to the fight the Russians, some of them returning wounded, unfit for frontline duty. 

Dachau, like many concentration camps, sits right in the town.  Housing for the SS officers and men was right outside the camp and part of the community.  Public records show marriages between local women and SS men and many other legal documents such as deeds and police records that show the camp was part of the community.  

On the day we visited we followed a very casual formation of German soldiers touring the camp.  The soldiers wore different several different hats, most were in camouflage coats, but some of the group were in civilian clothes and not all wore jackets. My friend Cliff and I were walking behind the group together, two old Cold War soldiers looking at the young men and women serving in the military today.

I smiled looking at the 30-odd soldiers and said to Cliff, “What a Cluster Fuck!” Cliff smiled back and told me about walking with a friend from the German Army (Bundeswehr) in Israel in 2017. They were near the Wailing Wall in Old City Jerusalem when they saw a group of Israeli soldiers touring the area.  The Israeli soldiers were also walking casually, not marching or in any sort of formation. Cliff’s friend from the Bundeswehr said, “We would never look like that in public in uniform.” 

I asked Cliff if he was going to tell his friend about the Bundeswehr group we saw. He said, “Not sure. You have to be careful about messing with other people’s gods.”

Dachau was one of the last camps liberated by the armies invading Germany from east and west. American troops, including 20^th Armored Division, liberated the Dachau camp on April 29, 1945. The war ended the following week, but the fighting was bitter and costly right to the end of the war. 

Just before the Americans arrived, the SS marched 7,000 prisoners out of Dachau to try to get them to other camps. Most died. The prisoners also attempted to take over the camp before the American troops arrived. They failed. Most were executed. The 20^th Armored identifies themselves as the Liberators on their official division patch. The 20th is one of three American divisions identified as Liberators.

As I write this, I am in the cafeteria at the Dachau Memorial.  On either side of me are long tables with German high school students laughing and talking and looking at their phones and eating snacks. These students, like the students we saw at the East-West border outpost at Fulda, Germany, are letting off steam after listening solemnly to their teachers talk about the atrocities of the last century. Their teachers are off in the far corner eating real food and talking quietly. 

As with every other camp I have been to, life goes on both in the camp and around the camp.  The site is preserved like a cemetery, but as with cemeteries, houses, highways, hotels, Hondas, Hyundais, and haberdasheries fill the spaces around the consecrated space. Nature abhors a vacuum. Around scenes of atrocity and horror, life grows, adapts and changes, and moves on.

Communities adapt to the environment they find themselves in.  In the 1930s and 40s under Nazi terror, Dachau became one of the centers of enslavement and death in the Nazi empire.  Today, Dachau is a town with restaurants, laundries, stores, repair ships, buses, trains, and ice cream.

Visiting Ramallah--Trump Peace Plan Looks Ludicrous

A luxury apartment complex outside Ramallah. 

Built with money from Qatar, it is so far out that it has few residents.

During my visit to Israel, I was able to spend a day in Ramallah and the surrounding region. Ramallah is the largest city in the what would be a Palestinian state. It is close to Jerusalem in the region Israelis call Judea--the Judea part of Judea and Samaria.

T-Mobile deals with this ambiguity with a welcome message unlike the messages for any other border crossing. I wrote about that here.

I went from Old City Jerusalem on a scheduled city bus with my friend Cliff.  The 9-mile trip took us about an hour.  We were the only non-Arabs on the bus.  There was a huge security area about halfway between the Old City and the central bus station in Ramallah. We did not have to stop there on the way over.

At the Ramallah bus station, Cliff's friend Michael picked us up. He lives in Ramallah and has a counseling practice for victims of domestic violence and trauma.  He drove us around the city of Ramallah and the surrounding region.

He lives in the city with his wife and children.  For him, a settlement of the question of Palestine could not come too soon. He is an Arab Christian. He wants to be an Israeli citizen. He hopes that can happen, but would like peace in almost any form.

He says that no one he knows takes the Trump plan seriously. The U.S. did not speak to anyone from Palestine. Michael thinks it does not take into account the reality on the ground. He drove us to an upscale shopping mall with an ice skating rink. A few miles from that mall are Israeli settlements and Arab villages.

A new mall near Ramallah. 

The settlements and villages form a patchwork that will not allow an easy-to-define border.  Unless the settlements and villages are torn down, the border will have to allow for passage of Arabs and Israelis between the places they live and the two states that will result from the Trump plan.

Michael wants to live a good and safe life and have a future for his children.  He took Cliff and I to his home, gave us food, then took us to the bus station.  The 9-mile trip back took more than two hours and included changing buses at the security checkpoint.  Residents of Ramallah who work in Israel take these buses back and forth every day and have commute times as bad or worse than what we experienced.  

Michael had no faith in the Trump plan, but hopes some plan brings peace to the region. I hope so too.

Disposable Health Wealth

When I left Israel, I took a direct flight to Tbilisi, Georgia. I had never been to this country on the east end of the Black Sea with a civilization dating back more than three millennia. I had a vague plan of seeing Tbilisi then heading to Azerbijan and maybe Armenia before returning to the Georgian capital.  I stayed in Tbilisi for all of the four days I was going to spend in the region. A week ago I wrote about how much I loved riding here.

One of my recent meditations is on thankfulness. It occurred to me after I left the Republic of Georgia, that one thing I can be very thankful for is a ridiculous amount of disposable health.  Of course, the fact that I can fly to Israel and Georgia and ride also says I have disposable wealth, but the riding in Georgia in particular says I have disposable health.

Every day for three days I rode up a six-mile or a nine-mile hill and rode back down through switchbacks occasionally passing a car.  Even as I approach my seven decade with the body and mind I was born with (except for a few replacement parts), both still function well enough to allow me to ride a bike up and down a mountain every day, eat local food, explore the city on buses subways in addition to the bike, and then fly off to another adventure.

But as with all the healthiest people I know, health is not the goal. At various times in my life, I have obsessively worked out because I wanted to be a bicycle racer,  to be a soldier again in my mid-50s and then an Ironman. But I have never made being healthy a goal.  The result of being a soldier, a racer or an Ironman is health, a lot of health, disposable health.

I am so very thankful for the health that allows me to make a plan, then change the plan based on what is in front of me.