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For whom does the bell really toll?

In France, the ringing is incessant

SHOULD YOU DESIRE to escape the din of daily life and decompress by soaking up the local culture of a quaint, quiet village or town in France, here’s a pro tip: Stay away from churches.

To be clear, I’m not advising you against visiting or patronizing a place of religious worship. But if you enjoy sleeping in on vacation, beware that these houses of the holy contain bell towers, or what can easily be described as the world’s largest alarm clocks.

Turn sound on: The bell tower of the church of
Ste. Thérèse ringing out in Rennes, France

As a seasoned traveler who is also a light sleeper, I have an exhaustive list of places to avoid when securing lodging: busy streets and intersections, hospitals, fire departments, sports stadiums, bars and clubs. But until now, “church bells” was not on the list.

In France, there are somewhere around 45,000 places of worship, most of them of the Catholic persuasion. The overwhelming majority of these temples possess a lofty tower where a hefty tube of cast bronze is suspended. And when that metal-alloy cylinder is struck with what is known as a clapper, the reverberation can be heard and the resonance felt for great distances.

Moreover, the knell of the bell is not a rare event. Every occasion seems to warrant a clanging. They chime to announce the hour. They toll vigorously to recruit parishioners for services, of which there are many throughout the week, especially on Sunday. They peal excitedly for what seems hours on end to honor a multitude of saints on the days of their birth or their martyrdom.¹

On the town

WE ARE TEMPORARILY residing in the city of Rennes, France, situated at the confluence of the Ille and Vilaine rivers, which drain into the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic Ocean some 100 Km to the southwest. The weather here is mild, often overcast and sometimes rainy, as is typical of a coastal town.

This city is the administrative capital or prefecture of Brittany. And although Rennes boasts a population of nearly 750,000 in the greater metropolis, it’s really more of an aggregation of tiny villages and neighborhoods, many with the requisite cobblestone streets, provincial-style residences and small shops (which seem to be closed most of the time). There are also many modern apartment buildings and offices. This city even has a subway system. But in general, the place feels unhurried, relaxed, low-key.

The city of Rennes, France, along the Vilaine River.

In our little quiet neighborhood, we may hear magpies, crows, seagulls, pigeons and an occasional backyard dog voicing objection to its aerial companions. Cars, trains and the usual hub-bub of city life are barely audible. We rarely detect jets overhead, even though there is a regional airport just six or so kilometers away.

And then this serenity is interrupted by the ding-donging.

We are across the street from the Eglise de Sainte Thérèse, an impressive neo-Gothic structure built about 100 years ago. They spared no expense on the bell towers. And whatever that cost was, they have gotten their money’s worth. From 8 a.m. until 8 p.m., they ring on the hour. (Occasionally, however, someone might lose count. )

A view from our apartment of Rennes, France. The flat terrain allows ringing bells to be heard at great distances.

For religious services, there is a preamble — a warning of sorts — of three sets of three rings. And then, after a brief interlude, all hell’s bells break loose. This carillon² cacophony may endure for ten or fifteen minutes. For the musicians reading this, I detect four tones: 1. The tonic, 2. A major second, 3. A major third, 4. An octave. If you remember singing class in school, this would be DO-RE-MI-DO.

Every neighborhood has its own church with its own bell tower. Because the terrain is flat, the sound carries unimpeded. Frequently, not just one, but as many as three or four churches nearby compete for attention with Sainte Thérèse.

All this chiming got me to thinking how this tradition got started and, perhaps more to the point, why this anachronism persists.

Hear ye, hear ye

LOUD SOUNDS HAVE BEEN used to communicate for just about as long as humans have been assembling in social groups. Whether its a conch shell or a drum, any reverberation that can carry for long distances has been used to convey a warning (enemy is approaching), or perhaps an invitation (festival tonight to celebrate the solstice).

Once organized religion became commonplace, trumpets, gongs and other such instruments were used to invite the masses to, well, Mass. It wasn’t until 604 A.D. that a Pope Sabinian sanctioned bells as the most effective method of communication.³ And the rest, as they say, is history.

The question, though, is why continue? In this day and age, we certainly don’t need any reminder of the time of day. And, let’s face it, the bell-ringers are not going to be as accurate as a smartphone clock, which is synchronized over the air with an atomic timekeeper (located in some secret bunker in the Colorado mountains) right down to the millisecond.

As for the announcements of religious services, wouldn’t a group text be more effective? (Add a link to a Patreon page to skip the fund-raising basket that’s passed from pew to pew during services.)

In fact, all this ringing can unequivocally be defined as noise pollution. Studies in Switzerland and the Netherlands have concluded just this. But tradition is strong here in the land of the Gauls, and it is unlikely the musical tones emanating loudly and clearly through villages, towns and cities will be silenced by some silly, modern notion of what constitutes clangour.⁴

So I, consequently, have developed my own tradition to cope when the boisterous bells erupt, which is to mutter under my breath: “Off with their heads!”

FOOTNOTES

France boasts 1,376 Catholic saints, of which 656 died as martyrs. ↩︎
Carillon is derived from Old French quarregnon, which means the peal of four bells. ↩︎
Pope Sabinian was only in charge for two years, but he certainly achieved a rather notorious kind of immortality with his bell-ringing decision. ↩︎
Clangour is defined as a loud non-musical noise made by a banging or ringing sound. ↩︎

Walls, bridges, and baboons

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The wind-swept sand dunes of the Colorado Desert in California.

We may think we’re Great, but, alas, we’re still Apes

ON A DRIVE FROM Yuma, Arizona to San Diego, California, I was captivated by the ever-changing, surreal topography. But two human-made structures punctuated the natural landscape in a way that got me to thinking about how much our species has in common with baboons.

Yes, baboons. But first, a bit about the scenery.

Sherry imitates a towering saguaro cactus
in the Arizona desert.

On Interstate 8, it seems the moment you traverse the border at the Colorado River, the saguaro cacti disappear. It’s as though these succulents, with their iconic outstretched arms reaching for the sky, are a proprietary brand of the Copper State.

Not to be outdone, the Golden State immediately presents you with the quintessential sand dunes of the Colorado Desert, sculpted by the wind into smooth giant hills, resembling mounds of poured sugar. Except for the occasional Joshua tree, yucca plant, or creosote bush struggling to survive, the dreamy-yet-desolate terrain seems right out of Lawrence of Arabia. You might expect to see the titular character bouncing astride a loping camel, kicking sand in the air with its hooves. The distant silhouette of the Chocolate Mountains adds to the backdrop, as though painted on a movie-set canvas.

It is just past the dunes that I-8 veers directly south and then hugs the international border with Mexico. It is here that you will be introduced to The Wall.

Structure No. 1: The Wall

DEVOID OF EVEN A SEMBLANCE OF AESTHETICS, the giant black fence of solid steel thrusts discordantly out of the terrain. To put it in today’s lingo: the wall is photobombing the vast, arid landscape. The Wall serves its utilitarian purpose, but with mixed results, as has been true of such barricades for millennia. Its xenophobic ancestry can be traced to the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall, and in more modern times, the Berlin Wall.

Ineffective though it may be, The Wall’s brutalist design sends an unambiguous political message: KEEP OUT.

The Wall separates the town of Jacumba Hot Springs from its sister pueblo of Jacumé, Mexico.

Continuing west on I-8, the next section of The Wall you will spot is in the diminutive town of Jacumba Hot Springs. This hamlet of 800 or so souls has the privilege of sporting one of the first incarnations of this ugly fortification, erected during the Clinton administration.

I’m not sure who had the bright idea to construct this monstrosity with steel plates left over from the Vietnam War. Maybe some political consultant thought this could be spun as a “swords to plowshares” narrative.

But the irony is just too delectable to ignore. After using this material to violently (and unsuccessfully) invade a far-off land, all in the name of democracy, the U.S. then recycles this war-machine detritus to “protect” itself from huddled masses yearning to be free… Give me your tired, your poor,¹ but not if they are your next-door neighbors, I guess.

All of this is worthy of a treatise on its own, but I’ll have to save that for a later day.

Although the wall in Jacumba is technically on the edge of town, it’s perceived by the villagers as having cleaved their lives in two, since many residents had or still have relatives in the sister pueblo of Ejido Jacumé on the Mexican side. What was once a casual 10- or 15-minute walk can now take a half day of driving — via the nearest “official” border crossing.

There’s plenty more diverse scenery to savor on this leg of the journey, including the Anza Borrego Desert and the Jacumba Wilderness itself. Also worthy of note is Smuggler’s Gulch, named in the 1880s for the cattle rustling that occurred between the U.S. and Mexico — in which direction I’m not sure. Here, in a very narrow canyon, giant sandstone boulders, many the size of a McMansion, teeter on cliffs. These car-crushing rocks appear ready to roll any minute.

Structure No. 2: The Bridge

The Nello Irwin Greer Memorial Bridge, more commonly known as the Pine Valley Creek Bridge,
rises some 440 feet, or 134 meters, from the ground.
Photo by George J. Janczyn. Used with permission².

AS YOU CONTINUE YOUR JOURNEY to San Diego, you’ll ascend once again and eventually enter the Cleveland National Forest. You will then be confronted with a deep canyon that would be impossible to traverse in any vehicular manner were it not for a unique marvel of engineering.

This is the second of the two aforementioned structures that brought baboons to mind (yes, I’m getting to that). And it is officially known as the Nello Irwin Greer Memorial Bridge, named in honor of the engineer who managed the project. But it is more commonly referred to as the Pine Valley Creek Bridge.

Now — full disclosure — I’m a bit biased when it comes to comparing walls to bridges³. The former is there to exclude one group of humans from another. The latter, on the other hand, intends to unite us.

At the time of its completion in 1974, the Stone Valley Creek Bridge was the highest concrete girder viaduct in the world. That is impressive. But for me, what is even more inspiring is how Greer and his team accomplished this feat utilizing such an elegant design.

The segmented cantilevered method used to hold the road bed aloft is a clever Y-shaped row of pillars. Moreover, the entire ensemble seems to at once blend in with its environs and enhance the scenery at the same time.

I can’t think of many “man-made” structures that can do that.

The backstory on this span across Stony Creek is a fitting juxtaposition to The Wall in Jacumba. Greer rerouted I-8 to save the town of Pine Valley, for which I’m sure its citizens are forever grateful.

The Wall cuts a town in two; The Bridge saves a town. You can see where this is all heading and that is why it is now time to cue the baboons.

EQ vs. IQ

I CAN’T SAY I HAD EVER HAD even a modicum of interest in learning about these distant primate cousins of ours until 2019. At the time, Sherry and I were hiking in the Table Mountain National Park at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa.

Although the Cape feels like the edge of the world, this walk did not seem particularly remote. There’s plenty of fellow tourists and the trail is clearly marked. There is even a restaurant at the summit.

A baboon mother and child, resting in the shade in Table Mountain National Park, on the Cape of Good Hope
in South Africa

But to our surprise that day, a mother baboon with a child in tow casually crossed our path and then nonchalantly sat on a wall, seemingly oblivious to our existence. We stopped for a while to grab a video but kept our distance, out of respect.

I was inspired by that incident to read up on baboons and came across A Primate’s Memoir, by renowned primatologist Robert Sapolsky, who had spent decades living among and studying these animals in eastern Africa.

To look at them, you’d notice very few physical characteristic similar to homo sapiens. Baboons walk on all fours, have a snout that seems to be a cross between a dog and a bear, and possess enormous, menacing canines just for good measure. They have tails and sleep in trees.

And to be sure, baboons do not make things, like walls and bridges. So what do we have in common?

Baboons are very social creatures, notes Sapulsky. They live in groups ranging from a few to fifty. They “work” a four-hour day, which is all the time they need to forage for food. They sleep another 10 hours. And that provides them with a full 10 hours to interact with one another.

And interact they do. They make friends; they make enemies. They establish hierarchy that can be inherited. If you are the offspring of the alpha male, you have it made. There are prom kings and queens, and wallflowers. They woo, they mate, they raise their offspring.

They can be snobby. They might bully. They can be empathetic. They can plot and form alliances to outmaneuver rivals. They seek revenge, often very viciously. They are not above kidnapping.⁴

Sounds a lot like a Netflix eight-episode dramatic series. It should not be surprising, then, that baboons seem to reflect so much of human behavior, since we still share 94% of the same DNA.⁵

We have certainly progressed intellectually far beyond the capacity of any of our ancient ancestors. We have self-awareness, sophisticated language, arts and sciences. We build not only walls and bridges but amazing technology. But let’s face it: our emotional intelligence, or EQ in modern parlance, hasn’t evolved at the same pace. That stuff has gotta be buried very deep in that 94% DNA we have in common.

As the old saying goes, we’re just apes with nukes. And that’s never been truer — or a scarier thought — than it is today.

Curiosity, the cat, and the Doomsday Clock

FROM THE MOMENT OUR ANCESTORS descended from the trees, we have been testing the law of unintended consequences. We discovered fire, brought it into our caves, where, along with warming our hands, we inhaled smoke and developed lung cancer. We hunted megafauna to extinction. We created factories and vehicles that burn fossil fuels that are cooking our planet, which, by the way, is our one and only ride through space.⁶

The list of things we have tried that have backfired is seemingly endless.

The Wall hasn’t stopped people from attempting to cross the border. It has, however, created a thriving underground economy — literally. Tunneling under the wall is a big business. And coyotes — guides who charge a fee to smuggle people across the border — are making money, sometimes simply scamming destitute El Norte-bound travelers out of their last pesos.

For the most part, we’ve tested this law of unintended consequences in the physical world. We more or less understand this tangible realm. We can sense it. We can feel it. We can grasp it not only intellectually but emotionally.

But the virtual world is different. Whereas in the physical world, the intended purpose of a bridge is obviously distinct from a wall, in the virtual world, things get blurry in a hurry.

Our past meets our future: A prehistoric human hand connecting with a robot hand. Image, appropriately enough, is AI-generated.

In the 1990s I was working in Silicon Valley at the very infancy of the Internet. In those days, the buzz phrase du jour was “democratization of information.” Everyone would have an equal voice and be able to project that voice to the world. That bridge quickly became a wall when corporate interests privatized the internet, rewarding our worst instincts to drive their ad-based revenue models. And that’s where our baboon behavior just became amplified. Bullying, hate crimes, tribalism.

Emotionally, we just can’t keep up. Technology is advancing at a logarithmic pace, but the areas of the human brain that deal with emotion — the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, limbic system, hippocampus — continue to evolve linearly at, well, a snail’s pace.

In the brave new world, the scale at which our endeavors are likely to backfire is exponential.

With Artificial Intelligence (AI), we are being promised new and greater opportunities without any idea of what the scope of the consequences will be. It reminds me of the story about the moment just before the first test of an atomic weapon, when Enrico Fermi mused that there was a greater-than-zero chance the explosion would ignite the entire world’s atmosphere. ⁷

And yet, we did it anyway.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but humans somehow keep on ticking.

Yes, we have somehow survived — so far. But there’s something else ticking, coming from the Doomsday Clock, which is now at a mere 89 seconds before midnight, its most dire setting since the metaphorical instrument was created in 1947. To put this into perspective, the clock stood at 7 minutes during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Eighty-nine seconds before midnight. Will you look at the time? It’s getting late. And on that note, sleep tight.

FOOTNOTES

Paraphrased from the poem, The Collosus, by Emma Lazarus. The poem is inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. ↩︎
Creative Commons License 4.0. ↩︎
My reverence for bridges was further instilled by my father, a civil engineer who designed and oversaw construction of numerous spans in his career. I remember as a child driving to Long Island and crossing the newly opened Verazzanno-Narrows in 1965, then the longest suspension bridge in the world,³ as dear old Dad regaled his offspring with myriad facts about the engineering marvel holding our rattling little Rambler station wagon some 228 feet (70 meters) above the water. ↩︎
Sapulsky cautions against anthropomorphism, using terms such as kidnapping to describe baboon behavior. ↩︎
Even higher with chimpanzees: 96%. ↩︎
Humans would not survive the massive doses of radiation they would sustain in a journey to Mars. The proposals by megabillionaire oligarchs to inhabit other planets is pure folly with today’s technology. ↩︎
Fermi jokingly offered to take bets, but it’s hard to imagine anyone wagering that such a catastrophe would occur, because if it did, collecting one’s payout in a planet engulfed in flames might be a tad difficult. ↩︎

On the road, yet again

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How our peripatetic past became prologue

DOROTHY GALE, she of Oz fame, was fond of pronouncing: “There’s no place like home.” But, did she really mean it?

Was life on that monochromatic farm out in the middle of nowhere, Kansas, really better than the glorious Technicolor™ world of Oz, where she had met all kinds of characters and had experienced the time of her life?

I’m pretty sure she felt at least a tinge of ambivalence about the whole affair. She was reticent to leave Oz, but happy to be returning to her family.

Sherry and I can relate to Dorothy’s conundrum, if somewhat in reverse. We are sad in leaving home sweet home, yet exhilarated to be exploring a new chapter in our time together.

Top right: Our patio and much-used pool. Bottom left: Our music studio. Right: Our family room, including one-of-a-kind items we would not sell: The Japanese-style table Sherry and I made, a wood sculpture made by Francine Berg, a painting by Andy Newman, and underneath it a little school-house style bench I made. Plants are all Sherry’s handiwork.

WE LOVED OUR HUMBLE ABODE, nestled in the meandering hills of the Conejo Valley, California, just an hour north of L.A. and 20 minutes from the Pacific Ocean. We had wildlife visiting diurnally and nocturnally, often very vocally (owls hooting at 3 a.m. comes to mind).

It was a bucolic lifestyle. At dawn, we would sip our coffee to the pace of drifting fog, which by late morning would burn off to reveal yet another glorious day in the Golden State. At dusk, we could sip our wine, reveling in our panorama of the fuchsia-hued Santa Monica Mountains, as the sandstone peaks caught vestiges of light from the setting sun.

A view from our (former) backyard
of the sun setting on the
Santa Monica Mountains.

But we knew, unequivocally, it was time to leave it all behind on the morning of Nov. 6, 2025, as I described in this previous post. And so here we are, on the road, with no place to officially designate as “home” and no particular place to go. At the moment we are in an apartment in the U.K. Next week we’ll be in France. We have a vague plan that eventually takes us to South Africa, but that plan is certainly subject to change.

In February, when we put our home on the market and began packing up our things, we found ourselves wishing aloud that there were someway to magically transport our house to another land, preferably in some manner less turbulent than a tornado.

There is some place like home

THE DWELLING AND LAND that we occupied for nearly five years is a beautiful place.

We moved there at the height of the pandemic. During that stressful time, our new habitat felt like an oasis in the middle of a blinding sand storm.

Although it was a track home in a suburb, it was surrounded by open space. It had a very aesthetically pleasing yet practical design, and with lots of character, thanks to artistic flourishes commissioned by the previous owners.

Sherry harvesting fruit from our strawberry tree.

It was our first real estate purchase together and we spent a copious amount of time adorning it with our own personal touches. We converted one room into a professional music studio (aka Sherry’s Batgirl Cave,¹ since she spent an inordinate amount of time in there, often into the wee hours, mixing and producing).

We had a bright, spacious kitchen designed for cooking, where we doubled down on our culinary efforts and whipped up some savory repasts. As I write this, I can sense the scintillating aromas wafting about: sourdough bread fresh from the oven, or maybe briani (a Mauritian version of Indian biriani) simmering in a cast iron pot on the cooktop.²

Our backyard led to a protected, natural landscape (hence, the abundant wildlife). We had a lap pool and fruit trees. And when Sherry wasn’t in her Batgirl Cave, she was out tending to or harvesting her beds of herbs. She also became a proficient indoor gardener. Greenery of every variety adorned our walls, tables, shelves, and nooks and crannies.

Many days we found ourselves reciting this sentence: “Let’s never move again.” We were staying put. Done. Finished. Or so we thought. In the words of Yogi Berra: “It ain’t over until it’s over.”³

A trial run: Silicon Valley to Conejo Valley

THIS WAS NOT OUR FIRST GO on this merry-go-round. After Sherry moved in with me in my little rancher in the San Francisco Bay Area, we decided to do a complete remodel, transforming the ramshackle structure into a sleek, open, modern domicile. And then in 2018, we set about selling that home and most of our belongings to try the vagabond lifestyle before settling down again 24 months later. So, in some ways, that entire episode was a trial run; we just didn’t know it at the time.

Our previous home in Los Altos, CA. We converted a sleepy little rancher into an open, naturally lighted abode. We adorned our backyard with lots of homemade garden art. A mere two years later, we sold the house and most of our contents to hit the road.

Home is a state of mind

TO KEEP THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE, we think about the generations before us. My father’s parents were born and raised in a tiny village in Italy. They joined millions of their fellow citizens, emigrating in the 1890s to what they hoped would be a new and better life in the United States. I have documented that odyssey here. (My mother’s parents did the same in the early part of the 20th Century. I am researching that story now.)

Sherry’s family escaped war in China in the 1930s, in some cases by disguising themselves to stow aboard boats of questionable sea worthiness. After enduring a grueling maritime trip, they set foot on the tiny island of Mauritius in the middle of the Indian Ocean. They, too, could only hope that this new, tiny speck of terra firma would be the scene for a better life, clear of the violence and famine they had endured in their homeland.

Born to run, or at least to move

EACH GENERATION OF OUR species tends to view whatever events shaped their era as unique. But let’s face it, what we are going through is nothing compared to the first of our ancestors, who decided to leap down from a tree at the risk of being eaten by saber-tooth tigers.

Even our grandparents had it pretty easy in comparison to what those guys went through.

Once these ancient relatives descended from their arboreal perches, they began to look around and see what they could find. They were on the move. Then, some 400,000 years ago, as they continued to migrate, they began erecting shelters,⁴ thereby establishing a sense of permanency. And yet, they kept moving.

The cycle today might be that we establish “roots” somewhere, but then move — because of an employment opportunity, to help a family member, or just to seek out new horizons. Yet, the tendency to explore beyond our immediate environs seems permanently ingrained within some neurons deep inside our cerebral cortex that we inherited from long ago.

THE WESTERN CONCEPT of home is quite limited, when compared to other cultures. For the Bedouin people, it is not a place so much as a family. The denizens of Nuakata Island, Papua New Guinea refer to home as the village of their matrilineal ancestors. It has nothing to do with what dwelling they are currently inhabiting. The Warlpiri in Australia consider home a combination of where they came from and where they have camped in their lifetime.

The indigenous people of what is now the United States had many different approaches. The stereotype is usually nomadic tribes erecting tepees as they followed roaming bison herds. But tribes in the Northeast, such as the Mohegan, engineered and constructed wigwams, domestic structures so well insulated and waterproof that the European colonizers considered them far superior to the mud-and-straw huts they had left in their villages on the other side of the Atlantic.

Yet, these tribes didn’t necessarily consider those wigwams “home.” The lands in which they hunted and farmed were home. In his book “1491,” Charles Mann explains that these people didn’t sit still in one place and they didn’t exactly wander. They actually tended huge swaths of terrain, creating an entire ecosystem, in which controlled burning was used to fashion a sort of giant natural park. In that park they could readily harvest all the flora and fauna they needed for sustenance and for shelter. That was home to them.

Two of a kind, of one mind

WHEN SHERRY AND I FIRST MET, we both had already done a considerable amount of traveling. She out of necessity, having grown up in such a remote location. (Fun fact: Mauritius is just about half way around the world from California).

It’s a long way from California to Mauritius:
18,400 kilometers, or 11,500 miles.

For me, well, I guess I have the wandering gene in my DNA. At 18 months old, I embarked on my first solo bipedal journey. Apparently, I made it three blocks or so down a very busy West Street in Bristol, CT, before my mother caught up to me and summarily ended my odyssey. Of course, I was too young to remember that story, but it became family lore.

I inherited this wanderlust from my mother, undoubtedly. She had an indefatigable zest to search. There’s always a chance that something interesting just might be around the corner, so why not find out? ⁵

Then, in high school, my parents did just that, uprooting their entire clan of nine kids from the tiny hamlet of Whigville, CT., to pursue a new life. In the Nutmeg State, we were living in a century-old farmhouse, with the Nassahegan State Forest abutting our property and a dairy farm across the street. But somehow that wasn’t pastoral enough. So we ended up in the Pine Tree State — Maine — on our very own farm overlooking the Kennebec River, 90 miles south of the Quebec Province border. Now that was rural. We were out there.

The 100-acre farm my parents purchased, overlooking the Kennebec River in Solon, Maine, 90 miles south of the Canadian border. I spent my teen years learning to operate a tractor, a chainsaw and an axe, among other tools of the trade.

When I came of age, I set out to slake my thirst for the unknown, this time via automobile. A buddy and I took a cross-country road trip, which ended in California, where I immediately declared that this was where I wanted to live. Although most of my adult life has been in that state, I did take a break by living in Germany for a spell. And I have traveled to six continents and too many countries to count, whether on vacation or for work.

So, perhaps, it was meant to be, for two likeminded globetrotters to meet and share this passion for exploring the planet.

In the end, I guess, we can agree with Dorothy’s declaration: There is no place like home. Sure enough. But we’d hasten to qualify that proclamation with another well-worn, albeit corny but appropriate aphorism: Home is where the heart is.

FOOTNOTES:

A sort of portmanteau. Sherry’s love for fruit, especially mangos, has led me to surmise she was a fruit bat in a previous life. You can read more about her studio here. ↩︎
Briani has become my favorite meal. ↩︎
Yogi Berra also claimed: “I’ve never said most of the things I’ve said.” So we’ll have to take his definition of finality with a proverbial grain of salt. ↩︎
It could be as long as 1.8 millions year ago, depending on how you qualify what a structure is. ↩︎
Mom was always in search of a bargain. Second-hand stores, thrift stores, discount stores that sold dented cans, rejects, or day-old bread were always on her radar. But she was also an avid collector. If you hopped in the car with her to run an errand, you might end up 40 miles away at an antique store. ↩︎

Sherry & George’s great adventure

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Going, going, gone: How and why we left the U.S.

AS I WRITE THIS, I am sitting at a tiny kitchen table in a flat on the 20th floor of some nondescript apartment building in Canary Wharf, London.

Our cantilevered balcony, with its tempered glass wall, provides a bird’s-eye view of the Isle of Dogs Canal some 200 feet (or 60 meters) below, but obtaining that perspective means standing on said balcony, which provokes a serious case of vertigo. And so we content ourselves with a more limited but secure view from indoors.

We arrived late last night, after a long day’s journey by train from Frankfurt, Germany that carried us past rolling hills, mustard fields and verdant forests and then, with the screech of the brakes, plunged us into the mayhem, chaos and attitude that is so très Paris.

There we switched from the TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse, or high speed train) to the Eurostar, to be whisked through the Chunnel to Merry Ol’ England.

One of the minor details I missed when booking the tickets was that we would be switching not only trains, but train stations. Traveling from Gare de l’Est to Gare du Nord requires a mere 5-minute cab ride. But convincing a taxi driver in France (where arrogance is apparently written into the job description) to help load a pallet-load of luggage (we are not traveling lightly) for such a short distance, then ferry us through lunch-time traffic but a mere number of blocks, and then help unload the bags was no easy task. Sherry’s fluency in French (and fluency in assertiveness, I might add) came in handy. So did the €20 I handed the cabbie.

Our motivation for this sojourn was not so much to come here as it was to get out of the United States.

The romance of traveling by train is gone

ONCE INSIDE THE STATION, we were met with a cacophony of fellow travelers, all of them in a hurry and more than a few of them rude, a labyrinth of checkpoints with impatient attendants shouting orders and cursing the ignorance of the passengers. Thanks to Brexit, we had to elbow our way through multiple security screenings and baggage X-ray machines that made the TSA seem positively tame.

The Eurostar train was comfortable and relatively quiet. The staff were polite and the meal was fair (certainly improved with a glass of white wine). This all provided a bit of respite for what was to follow.

We arrived at St. Pancras Station and took the quintessential Black Cab (or hackney carriage, if you prefer) during the height of commute hour to our apartment. If you don’t know the set-up of these rigs, your luggage is placed in front of you in the passenger area, not in some trunk. Each swerve of the cab illustrates in real time Newtonian physics, with an equal and opposite reaction. A body in motion — or luggage in this case — stays in motion, until met by a human body that bears the brunt of all the jostling.

That was the easy part. Getting the key to the rental unit was an ordeal unlike any we have encountered, and we are very seasoned travelers. This all added at least an hour (and an additional £25) to our already taxing journey, but we finally found entry to the building, ascended the “lift” to the aforementioned flat and collapsed.

On a stroll across a pedestrian bridge spanning the Isle of Dogs Canal on an unseasonably warm and sunny day for April in London.

We have a bit of business in London to attend to, and friends and family to visit. Beyond that, our plans are vague, undefined. That is because our motivation for this sojourn was not so much to come here as it was to get out of the United States.

In with the Ex-pats

MOST LIKELY YOU’VE read stories about citizens of the U.S. contemplating a permanent change of address, leaving the country because of the political calamity now engulfing the world’s largest economy (a position that might not hold for long, based on the current downward trajectory). Some estimates claim 20 percent of U.S. citizens are investigating emigration. But do you know anyone who has actually followed through with that intent? Well, you do now.

Here is how it unfolded:

On Nov. 6, 2024, I awoke to the news that still to this day seems incredulous. I found myself that morning pacing the kitchen floor and actually heard myself uttering this phrase aloud: “We have to get out of here.”

I’m an early riser, while my better half is a night owl. But within minutes of arising and hearing the news herself, she was in agreement with me and we began to discuss our options.

We are decisive. We are also organized. And so a strategy with spreadsheets and punch lists was created, and we went to work executing our grand plan.

Within a month of that fateful November day, we had interviewed several realtors and chosen one to represent us in putting our humble abode on the market.

In the meantime, we arranged for the sale of almost all our personal belongings, and the very tiny portion of goods that we kept were either sent to storage or put aside to be stuffed into our travel luggage.

In between all that frenetic activity, we actually spent a few weeks in Malaysia and Taiwan for a milestone-birthday family celebration on Sherry’s side of the family. This excursion was more like a business trip, since an inordinate amount of time was consumed working on our exit plan remotely, with voluminous conference calls, emails and texts.

We returned to the U.S., and by mid-April, we were done with all of it. The title to the house was in the buyers’ hands, their money was in our bank. And so we hopped in a rental car (we had already sold our vehicle) for one final road trip to visit family and then to tick off a few bucket-list tourist spots (namely, the Hoover Dam and Death Valley, both of which I highly recommend visiting).

We returned the rental in L.A., where we spent a few days downtown (our old haunt). Then, on Monday morning, 21 April, we boarded a very creaky Lufthansa 747 at LAX and landed some 12 hours later in Frankfurt. We chose Germany as a starting point to our new adventure because Sherry hadn’t been there before and I thought I could show her around the place, since I lived there for a spell.

We didn’t get to much of the tourism portion of the plan. That’s because we hadn’t planned on the Big Crash. To be clear, I don’t mean the stock market. We actually anticipated that one (as did most of the thinking world). This one was physical, emotional, and compounded by jet lag. We had been running on adrenaline for six months, a frenetic pace that included copious amounts of stress and more than one or two raised voices with our real estate agent, our estate sales manager and one or two other contractors handling things.

And when it was all done, we were exhausted. We also still had quite a bit of “paperwork” to finish, bank accounts, changes of address, and travel arrangements to make. So we wound up mostly holed up in a typically utilitarian German apartment for the better part of a week. We did visit our local neighborhood, which was a pleasant blend of shops and cuisine from around the world. And we did hop on a train for a day trip to Heidelberg, which I’ll post about later.

What comes next is anybody’s guess

NEITHER OF US WANTED to leave. We had a beautiful home nestled in a pleasant little burb with plenty of open space in Southern California. We had coyotes, bobcats, rattlesnakes, hawks, owls, rabbits, even roadrunners in our midst. We were 20 minutes by car from the azure waters of the Pacific Ocean. We’d take a weekend every so often to L.A., which usually included a night at the Philharmonic and a dinner at our favorite little Italian restaurant. We had a very comfortable life. But it was clear to us on that day in November that the U.S. had reached a point of no return to any sense of normalcy.¹

For those of you who plan to stay and fight, we applaud you. But for us, we are taking our cue from that great poet-philosopher-songwriter and TV personality Kenny Rogers: “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, know when to run.” ²

We don’t know exactly know where we will go or what will follow, we only know it was time to run.

Stay tuned.

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¹A term unwittingly coined by Herbert Hoover.

²For those readers old enough to remember that classic hit, “The Gambler,” I apologize for having condemned your brain to running that melody on infinite loop. It should subside in about 24 hours, if my experience is any indicator.

A little light reading on the plane

A curious bit of infotainment while on board an Air Portugal flight over the Atlantic. As we glided across the celebrated body of water, our TV screen map included locations and dates of major maritime disasters. The Titanic, of course, is the most famous. But the other ship names included in this map aroused enough curiosity to do a bit more research when I reached dry ground.

Only two years after the Titanic disaster, The RMS Empress of Ireland collided with a the Norwegian Storstad, resulting in 1,012 deaths. Percentage-wise, it is a higher mortality rate than the Titanic. What is truly tragic about this incident is that the ship sank in the relatively calm and shallow waters of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in Canada. And the Storstad remained afloat and was on hand to help rescue passengers and crew. But the hull of the Empress was sliced open in the accident, causing the vessel to take on water so rapidly that it capsized and sank within 14 minutes. Reportedly, open portholes contributed to the rapid flooding.

I remember stories of the Andrea Dora shipwreck as a kid but, did not know the details. Apparently, this gem of the Italian shipbuilding industry collided with the MS Stockholm in 1956. (What is it with these Scandinavian sailors, anyway?) Forty-six people perished off the coast of Massachusetts. But it could have been a lot worse, considering it had a total of 1,700 passengers and crew.

The U.S.S. Thresher submarine disaster of 1963 remains a mystery, 55 years after its sinking off the coast of Massachusetts. What is known is that all 129 crew members died as the hull imploded under immense pressure while plunging to a depth of 8,000 feet.

Not included in the Air Portugal map was an even more recent nuclear submarine disaster involving the Russian Dursk. The entire crew of 118 perished in the sinking in 2000. (Technically, this occurred in the Barents Sea, a body of water just north of the Atlantic and just south of the Arctic Ocean, but, hey, close enough for my book.)

Up in the Air

Not surprisingly, the Air Portugal map did not include major air disasters in and around the Atlantic, but here’s a few of the more notable ones:

Tenerife, Canary Islands, 1977. This collision of two 747s on a runway is still the largest air disaster in history, resulting in 583 fatalities.

Pan Am 103, better known as the Lockerbie Bombing, took the lives of all 243 passengers in 1988 when terrorists blew the plane up on takeoff. The flight was bound for Detroit via The Pond.

In 1996, TWA 800 exploded on takeoff from JFK, killing 230 people as the aircraft plunged into the Atlantic just south of Long Island.

Air France 4590 was bound for New York City from Paris on a hot July day in the year 2000. But debris on the runway punctured a tire and a fuel tank, resulting in the horrific calamity that cost 109 people their lives. This was the only accident involving the commercial super-sonic transport in its 27-year history. But it was also the last, as the joint venture between the French and British owners grounded the plane from that day on.

The only one I recall from the South Atlantic is also the most recent: Air France 447, en route from Brazil to France. In 2009, the craft plunged uncontrollably into the waters, killing all 228 aboard. Analysis of the accident concluded that ice crystals caused the autopilot to malfunction. When the pilots reacted. they over-corrected, sending the plane into an uncontrollable dive.

There’s more, of course, but these are the most notable.

Hashtagging #AirPortugal in case they want to add some new data to their infotainment maps.

And, hey, if you are reading this at the airport, have a safe flight!