360 Degrees Longitude

by John Higham

  “No idea,” September replied. “The good folks on our ferry gave us a gentle shove down the plank when we asked them that question. We’ve looked, but there’s no obvious ferry service, no postings, nothing. The waiter is pretty sure we can find ‘something’ in the morning, though.”

  Dilara informed us that she keeps abreast of world events by watching CNN. “I watch it in English to help learn the language better.” Over a period of an hour Dilara gradually approached the subject of life in the United States. It felt like she was tap dancing around something; finally, it came out. “Life in America must be … difficult with so many guns and all those gangs.”

  That comment caught me off guard, but I let September do the talking for the two of us. I gave her a one eyebrow raised, one eyebrow furrowed look, to signal her to probe deeper.

  “You’ve been watching too much CNN,” September replied conversationally; then she shot me a meaningful glance. “A lot of us are guilty of that.”

  Dilara was proud of her liberal cosmopolitan attitude. She told us that in spite of all the “obvious” dangers, she even planned to visit the United States someday. “I’m certain that some parts of the U.S. are safe,” she explained. “By the way, could you please tell me which parts those might be?”

  My reaction was to blurt out, “It’s safe everywhere!” But I knew that wasn’t true, nor was Dilara’s view that nowhere was safe. The truth was somewhere along the continuum between “nowhere” and “everywhere” and it was impossible to portray that concisely with economy of words. After being together for so long, September and I are able read each other with just a glance; I could tell she was thinking of the best way to respond. After a pause she said, “You’ll find most people in the United States are friendly wherever you want to go. Just go, and trust your instincts; you’ll be fine.”

  That is, after all, what we were doing now. I saw in Dilara a reflection of my apprehension of traveling to an unknown country. Thus continued the process of discovering how alike we humans all are, no matter which passport we hold.

  • • •

  Several hours later we found ourselves on Turkish soil. We hadn’t yet been through customs when a machine gun-wielding official at passport control decided that Jordan’s blond hair looked too flat and tousled it. Trying to keep the encounter positive, I said, “Wow, Jordan. A guy with a machine gun touched your hair. Can I touch your hair, too?”

  “Dad,” Jordan protested, pushing my hand away, “when we left Italy you said personal force fields didn’t get any smaller than six inches.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said. “Guys carrying machine guns feel like they can get away with anything. It probably won’t happen again.”

  The pier and passport control in Çesme is a long walk from anywhere. We started to slowly make our way toward town. Katrina was hobbling along with her one crutch, pulling her suitcase with the other hand. Jordan was still using the other crutch, occasionally for its intended purpose, occasionally to pole vault himself over some imagined obstacle.

  Suddenly, ten weeks of frustration came out. “I hate this crutch!” Katrina exclaimed, tossing it aside. “I’m going to try to walk without it.”

  September and I froze. “Katrina, you don’t want to rush it,” September advised. “Remember your last X-ray wasn’t that long ago and …” But September couldn’t finish the thought.

  “You’ve already told me, but the doctor said I would know when I was ready, and I’m ready now.” Katrina had come out of the womb with her will forged in iron. Nothing we could say would change her mind. I just stood there with a look of horror on my face as she took her first steps, preparing myself to pick up my daughter from the sidewalk after her leg folded under the weight.

  Her stride was slow and each step deliberate, but she left her crutch there on the sidewalk and never looked back. Picking up this newly discarded treasure, Jordan exclaimed, “Cool. Can I have it?”

  Fresh off the boat, we hadn’t yet acquired any local currency. It was time to feed ourselves and I had a hunch the corner shop by the dock would accept my euros, but had no idea what the exchange rate was. Selecting a few food items, I handed the cashier a 20-euro note and acted as though this was a perfectly normal transaction. To my relief, he simply handed me a bunch of Turkish lira as though this were a perfectly normal transaction.

  When I got out of the store, I looked at what the clerk had handed me, eager to familiarize myself with the exchange rate. To my extreme befuddlement I found myself holding three five-lira notes, three one-lira coins, and a one-MILLION-lira note. Being an engineer, I can only work with two, sometimes three, significant digits. Looking at the one-million-lira note I wondered why I cared about the fives and the ones.

  “Check this out,” I said, handing Jordan the one-million-lira bill. “They gave me a million dollars.” We had been using the word “dollars” to denote the local currency, whatever it happened to be, because through Europe it seemed we changed currency types every other day and couldn’t keep track of what they were called.

  Jordan’s eyes bulged to the size of saucers. “COOL! Can I have it?”

  What we later found was that Turkey had recently devalued their currency by a factor of one million (!) and that there are both new and old flavors of lira in circulation. The one-million-lira bill and the one-lira coin were equivalent.

  The difference between the “new” and the “old” money, however, was lost on Jordan. Over the next few days whenever I got another one- (or five-) million-lira bill, Jordan would hoard it, thinking that the store clerks kept making mistakes. By the time we left Turkey he almost had enough to buy himself a Happy Meal, but to hear him talk about it, you’d have thought that Donald Trump had better watch out.

  • • •

  Çesme is a beach town; in late September Çesme skies were a brilliant blue and the sun seemed to be brighter than normal. After a quiet day of recovering from disembarking at 3:30 a.m., we were ready to head to the beach. It was pleasantly warm and the lightest piece of clothing I owned was my Bill’s Burger Barn shirt.

  “Cheap communist construction!” I said, pulling the shirt on. “It’s little wonder that this shirt was on the clearance rack.”

  “Mmmm?” September looked up from what she was doing.

  “Oh, it’s just this cheap shirt. Now the seam across the shoulder is unraveling. That’s the last time I buy a shirt from the clearance rack in a former Eastern Bloc country. I’m throwing it away.”

  “You don’t have to. I can fix it,” September said, reaching for her needle and thread. “It’ll only take a minute.”

  “I thought you hated this shirt.”

  “I do. But I’ll fix it if you want.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, wadding up the shirt and tossing it into the circular file. I put on my old T-shirt.

  We strolled along the shops on the way to the beach when a man approached us. “Hello my friend!” he said. “Where are you from?”

  “California.”

  “Really? Me too!”

  I eyed my new “friend” with suspicion. Then he continued, “We have all types of beautiful handwoven carpets that will complement your home in California.”

  “No thanks,” I said, without breaking stride. “I don’t need a carpet.”

  We continued to make our way toward the beach, but it wasn’t long before we were approached by another carpet salesman, then another.

  After we had disappointed a few carpet salesmen, Katrina gave me a devilish smile and said, “You need to replace your Bill’s shirt with one that says, ‘No Thanks, I Don’t Need a Carpet!’“

  “Yes, I suppose I should,” I said, but something at the beach took my mind off shirts. “Wow! Check out the bikinis!”

  “No thanks. Doesn’t do much for me,” September replied.

  “No, that’s not what I meant. Well, perhaps a bit. But I never would have guessed I’d see women in bikinis in a Muslim country.”

 
; “I guess there are Muslim countries, and then there are Muslim countries.”

  “Yeah, if it weren’t for the five-times-daily call to prayer blasted over loudspeakers from every street corner, I’d have thought we were in Mexico.”

  Of course, I didn’t have a clue what the muezzin, aka Mr. Singy-Person, was saying during the call to prayer. In fact, he doesn’t say anything. The call to prayer is a song, sung in a bluesy, country-western twang. I speculated that it is really a song about how Mr. Singy-Person lost his job, lost his dog, and his mother-in-law is moving in. But I didn’t have the nerve to ask the locals if this was the case.

  Turkey is a huge country, but with much less transportation infrastructure than Europe. There are few trains that crisscross the country, nor are there villages around every bend. Distances between towns and regions can be vast and the terrain desolate. Our options for getting around were limited to renting a car, taking the bus, or flying. When it was time to move on, we opted for the clean, efficient, and ridiculously inexpensive bus network.

  As we made preparations to leave Çesme, I glanced around our hostel room to be sure we hadn’t forgotten anything. Katrina had already left the room but her crutches were leaning against the wall near the door. As I went to retrieve them, September shot me a glance; the glance was all I needed to tell me that it was time to leave them behind.

  Katrina hadn’t used the crutches since setting them aside after first arriving in Çesme, though her stride was slow and deliberate and would be for weeks to come. Jordan wanted to keep the crutches as they were a cool toy, but September and I hoped they would find use by someone who needed them. We quietly slipped away.

  Initially the broken leg was a bitter blow, but it changed us, improved us, somehow. In the first weeks of our trip we had struggled with the issue of too much time together. When Katrina had her accident, for a brief moment packing up and going home seemed the logical thing to do. I struggled with emotions from rage at the person who had hung the rope to despair that we couldn’t engage in the activities we had come for. In the weeks that followed somehow the fact that we couldn’t “do” as much seemed less important and our ability to enjoy simply being together gradually increased. Without warning, our original problem of “too much together time” simply evaporated. Now what once threatened to beat us was quietly left behind without fanfare. We would be challenged again before coming home, but we faced these challenges differently from the outset—with the experience of knowing that if we banded together, we could overcome almost anything.

  • • •

  We boarded a bus to Selçuk, the modern city near ancient Ephesus. September and Katrina plopped down onto a bench seat and Jordan and I took the bench directly behind them. Jordan and I busied ourselves with watching a sitcom I had downloaded onto my e.brain an hour earlier. We spent half an hour glued to the tiny two-by-three-inch screen when I noticed September and Katrina giggling and shooting me the occasional glance, telling me that whatever they were laughing at, I was the butt of the joke.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “Tell him, Mom!” Katrina begged.

  “Yeah, tell him,” I said.

  “Your shirt wasn’t cheap Commie construction,” September said, trying to keep her composure. “It was robust Commie construction.”

  I had no idea what September was talking about. Katrina and September looked as though they had just won the lottery. Relying on one of the wittiest retorts in my arsenal I said, “Huh?”

  “It was virtually indestructible,” September replied. “Tightly woven poly-blend fabric, triple-stitched seams—the works. It wouldn’t have come unraveled without a little sabotage.” I should have suspected such from the woman who once sewed the flies of my underwear together to remind me to either sit or put down the seat.

  “I’m sorry,” she continued, “but I just couldn’t bear to be seen in public with you wearing that shirt.”

  My mouth was moving but nothing came out. Finally, I was able to form the words, “And so you waited to tell me until we were well out of the city so I couldn’t retrieve it from the landfill.”

  “Something like that.”

  Jordan, in particular, was scandalized to learn that his own mother was capable of such seditious behavior. “Well, Jordan,” I explained, “I should have known better. Your mother once donated my California Superbike School T-shirt to a homeless shelter. But she promised that she would never throw away any of my shirts again.”

  “And I kept my promise. You threw it away.”

  Katrina, not being able to hold back any longer, burst into giggles. This called for more than just soap squished together. Jordan and I started scheming over how to get even with Team Estrogen.

  • • •

  We pulled into Selçuk and checked into a hostel near the bustling town center. One of the hostel workers decided to make it his mission to get Jordan to smile. He knelt down so he was at Jordan’s eye level and, tousling Jordan’s hair, said, “Such blue eyes!”

  “Smile, Jordan,” I said.

  He ignored me. He was rapidly learning to avoid every adult he saw; our intention of giving the kids an appreciation of other cultures was backfiring in Turkey. Jordan’s blond hair and blue eyes were something of a novelty, and he was getting way more attention from well-meaning strangers than he wanted. Initially, we were having some success getting him to smile as strangers rumpled his hair and told him how cute he was. But by the time we hit Selçuk, we were judging these encounters as successful if Jordan didn’t grimace and clench his fists.

  “You’re getting attention only because they love children here,” September explained.

  “I don’t like being treated like a little kid!”

  We didn’t want Jordan to have ill feelings for those who were trying to be friendly, but a kid from the United States is used to having strangers keep themselves at arm’s length. Katrina, being a middle-sized girl in a Muslim society, was largely immune to the pats, pokes, and prods, and so every time we transitioned through the hostel, she became a human shield to protect her little brother from “Mr. Patty-Head.”

  Selçuk is adjacent to Ephesus, one of the greatest cities of the ancient Mediterranean world. Ephesus was first occupied by the Greeks, then the Romans, and was abandoned in the sixth century when the harbor silted up. Ancient Ephesus was best known for the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. When we went to see the Temple of Artemis it was just a stone column sticking up out of the ground, pieces of it having been carted off to the British Museum some decades earlier. Of course when we were at the British Museum the previous June, we naïvely assumed that this Wonder of the Ancient World would still be on location and not relocated to downtown London.

  Luckily for us, the amphitheater where Paul the Apostle preached had not been relocated to downtown London. Interestingly, the audio guide we rented didn’t tell the story of Paul the Apostle. It told the story of local artisans, whose livelihoods depended on making figurines of the many-breasted Artemis, Goddess of Fertility.

  As the story unfolded, we heard about a new-fangled religion being preached by someone named Paul, claiming to be an apostle. Paul started gaining converts and preached that the worship of Artemis was wrong. The local artisans whose livelihoods depended on the Artemis figurines saw Paul as a threat to their livelihood, as the Temple of Artemis was famous and drew crowds from far away. The artisans incited the crowd at the amphitheater to jeer at Paul by chanting “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” A riot ensued and Paul was obliged to leave.

  If only those artisans could have seen 2,000 years into the future, they would have known they could still make a living crafting crosses and crèches for the hundreds of pilgrims who now file in daily.

  Jordan’s Journal, October 1

  Today we went to the ancient city of Ephesus. It has a marble street. It is really slippery when it rains. We played hide-and-seek. I got “gum” flavored ice cream, except I think
it was actually like the tree-sap kind of gum. It was really bitter. We hid it in a napkin and threw it away. All of the patting on the head and tickling and poking is getting even worse. I hope the next town we go to isn’t as bad. I want a hat with metal spikes on it.

  The following morning September was doing laundry by hand and I was doing homework with Katrina and Jordan in our room. “I’m going to make breakfast,” I announced. “Finish what you’re working on and come down in 15 minutes.”

  As the kitchen was located adjacent to the lobby, Jordan’s eyes narrowed to slits and he clenched his teeth. Omar—Mr. Patty-Head—was usually found busying himself in the lobby.

  Fifteen minutes later, I heard Katrina and Jordan talking as they approached me in the kitchen. Then I heard the heavily accented voice of Omar. “What’s wrong, don’t you like me? I just want to be friends.”

  I thought about intervening, but I also knew that if Omar was successful in coercing a smile from Jordan, he would let the kids pass. Then I heard Katrina say, “My brother doesn’t like that.” I knew something was up; Katrina wouldn’t stand up to an adult, especially a stranger, unless something was wrong.

  I hurriedly finished what I was doing only to hear her repeat the same words, louder, “My brother doesn’t like that.” I peered around the corner in time to see Jordan on Omar’s lap, struggling for freedom. There was nothing nefarious happening. I believe Omar simply wanted to make a friend and took Jordan’s reluctance personally; he was reaching out in his way.

  As I was about to make my presence known, Katrina took hold of Jordan’s hand and said pointedly, “Jordan has to come with me,” and she pulled him free and then walked into the kitchen where I was.

  I knew confrontation was difficult for Katrina. “You’re a good big sister,” I said.