The Best Travel Writing, Volume 11

by Rolf Potts

  A man with Savanna Syndrome is mowing the lawn of a deserted house. The viridescent postage stamps help to keep up appearances and impose shape and meaning on a broken city. In Indian Village there is talk of the dangers of close cropping and the best way to avoid white clover and crab grass infestation. A cutting-edge monoculture preoccupied with cylinder and rotary mowers has grown up in some of the abandoned districts and many private places now smell of freshly mown grass.

  Not far from the cultivated sectors wildflowers grow in abundance, as though nothing has ever disturbed the pristine pastoral verdure. There are a few sugar maples and a solitary Tree of Heaven that has taken root in a crevice of crud. A pheasant rooster flies over a fence from an allotment planted with vegetables. Swathes of switchgrass, alive with the chirruping of grasshoppers and foraging black Californian squirrels, grace a brownfield frontier. Thomas tells me coyotes have been seen wandering through this forty square miles of non-human wildness and beavers and salmon have returned to the Detroit River.

  We keep going up Woodward out into the cornfields and hanging gardens of Michigan. As we cruise through the all white suburb of Warren I hum Aretha Franklin’s “Freeway of Love.”

  Twenty miles out and still on a four-lane highway we wind through wooded parkland past vast stretches of manicured grass. Independence Township and Romeo resemble hillbilly rifle camps where wolverines and northern bears are known to prowl. Birmingham has a fresh, raw expensive look with stylishly decorated mansions and fancy drive-in restaurants. There is an odor of new money and plenty of Pashmina Princesses in Bloomfield Hills. This verdant terrain dotted with ornamental lakes provides the denizens with security and exclusivity.

  Automobile manufacturing had been good for Ford’s white employees. They had been well paid and well represented by the United Automobile Workers Union. Many had been able to cast aside their blue-collar immigrant heritage and enter the ranks of Michigan’s middle class. A fair few had followed their boss’s lead and settled in rural log cabin and red barn communities with schoolhouses, general stores and chapels buried amidst the pastures. Unfortunately Detroit’s new high society ended up dragging the hard drive of the city behind it down Telegraph Road and into the garden suburbs. Sterile business parks and struggling enclosed shopping malls sprawl all over. In the rush hour, the feeder roads coming off the Chrysler and Edsel freeways are choked with commuter traffic. Although haunted by an irrational sentimentality for the old neighborhoods, most return to their “Paris of the West” only on special occasions—and always with extreme caution—to watch the Red Wings at The Joe, to buy potted chrysanthemums at Eastern Market, or to disinter their distant ancestors from the desolate boneyards. For most of Metropolitan Detroit, downtown might just as well be an Indian reservation.

  A few neophyte techies, condemned by their anxious and sentimental parents to grow up in these alien dormitories, have discarded their bourgeois utopias that left no trace and followed the Belleville Three back to “Gra-shit.” Chided by Eminem’s rap “Ain’t seen a mile road south of Ten” and encouraged by “Isms,” peach orbs, Alice in Wonderland chessboards, and the illuminated orange-topped Qube building, they try to reclaim the streets through which I tramped this morning with Thomas. I read that two metrosexuals are selling psychedelic Fordite swirls created from a concretion of automobile paint enamel. There is the zero-emission Element One racecar, Baxter the Rethink Robot, and the driverless car. Twitter has arrived at the M@dison building.

  On the way back to the MGM Grand we make a sightseeing stop at American Jewelry and Loan. Outside on the forecourt a man in a cowboy hat is talking up the virtues of his beaten-up Lincoln in an attempt to raise enough money for a Honda ride-on mower. Thomas tells me that Les Gold now has more pawned grass cutters than plasma televisions or vintage guitars. The lawn is a divine American sacrament, but here in no-man’s land I have started to associate it with bad karma and the pugnacious Harry Bennett.

  Ford’s missing art has arrived in Detroit and his advice that failure is the opportunity to begin again, only more intelligently, is the new vibe. A wrecking ball has brought the last smokestack down and Detroiters can now see the killing moon and an endless horizon. Healthy lines of broccoli, rows of okra, and patches of Napa cabbage flourish in black soil allotments and redress my jet lag. The hub is going back to the farm. A creeping green quilt tended by an army of guerrilla gardeners is spreading over the corroding carapace of bulldozed gray steel. Brambles are spilling over a Firestone tire and a few birches nourished by decomposed textbooks are growing through the open skylight of the Detroit Public Schools Roosevelt Warehouse. There are lasagna beds composed of alternating layers of brown and green on a junk-mail base ripe with pumpkins. A new and different natural world has infiltrated the ruins. Peasant markets feed the growing number of locavores. Beautiful hydroponic “grass” farms and orchard paradises brimming with forbidden fruit fill the void. The grass roots of a higher consciousness are sprouting in the gaps exposed by ferric disintegration. Watched over by angels in the arrivals hall of Michigan Central you can now buy a rail ticket to the open sea. The river tells me that Detroit is changing into the redemptive Composite City.

  Andrew Lees is a writer and Professor of Neurology at University College London. Recent books include Liverpool, The Hurricane Port, The Silent Plague, William Richard Gowers Exploring the Victorian Brain and Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment. He has also published essays in the Dublin Review of Books, Scottish Review of Books, and Tears in the Fence.

  PETER WORTSMAN

  I Am a French Irregular Verb

  Speak in French when you can’t think of the English for a thing . . .

  —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

  Forgotten is the pain of memorizing all those irregular French verbs, the torment of rounding the mouth just right and skewing the glottal apparatus so as to emit a fair approximation of the proper nasal inflections. The Gallic syllables are honey on my tongue, a mastered password that lets me pass, if not as a native, then as a presumed Luxembourger, French Swiss or Belgian, or perhaps an Alsatian, a useful trick for traveling incognito in these troubled times.

  In my own private atlas of the heart, the Old World is divided down the middle by an imaginary Maginot Line, a border which, I readily admit, bears little, if any, relation to today’s geopolitical reality, but which bisects Europe along a tenuous fault line riddled with psychic land mines along which the phantasms of inherited memory stand guard. While the European Union dropped its national borders, according to the Schengen Agreement of 1995, the dividing line on my internalized roadmap has a serrated edge that roughly runs along the Rhine.

  On one side they speak German, a loaded language, burdened for me, as the son of German-speaking Jewish refugees, with contradictory associations, since it is both my mother tongue (the language I spoke with my mother) and the guttural grunt of asphyxiation. On the other side they speak Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity). The French have a sense of humor about their national slogan. I recently saw it parodied with a wink in graffiti spray painted on the side of an official government building as: “Liberté, Égalité, Béyoncé.” Simplistic though my distinction may be—and I am full well aware of the historic inconsistencies and discrepancies, of the vagaries of collaboration and resistance—in Germany my throat tightens and stomach twitches with apprehension, while in France I breathe easy, eat well, and fall in love.

  In the harried but hopeful expression of every African street peddler of counterfeit Louis Vuitton handbags, inflated plastic flying saucers, creepy crawly, sticky fingered little figurines that shimmy down windows and walls, and other innocuous knickknacks knocked off in China and hawked on the streets of Montmartre and the Parvis de Notre Dame, I see the face of my late beloved father, who, as a young man, an illegal alien struggling to make ends meet, lived off the doughnuts he whipped up illegally in his garret room on the Île Saint Louis to peddle to tourists at t
he Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Exposition Dedicated to Art and Technology in Modern Life), better known as Paris Expo 1937, where the pavilions of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, situated within winking distance directly across from each other at the fairgrounds, represented the opposing forces of a world order soon to dissolve around him.

  These greasy Viennese treats flavored with zest of lemon rind were called Gebackene Mäuse (Baked Mice), a name derived from the tiny tails sprouted from the globs of dough congealed in boiling oil, which name and notion sent us children into peals of laughter every time our father fried us up a batch. And so, for me, the Île Saint-Louis, that mouse-shaped lump of land where mimes, magicians, musicians, pickpockets and puppeteers play the crowd—a pauper’s paradise in my father’s day, more recently co-opted by sheikhs and erstwhile Russian apparatchiks-turned-insider traders—and where the exclusive ice cream-confectioner Berthillon dispenses exquisite scoops—will forever be associated with sweetness.

  I am a French irregular verb. My father sowed the insidious seeds of French syntax in me early on. It was his grownup pleasure and my childhood chore to have me practice French pronunciation almost as soon as I learned to mouth and mimic English. My ears were receptive, but my mind was lazy. I failed to grasp why these nasally linked syllables mattered so much. French declensions wouldn’t help much on the baseball mound. Rolling the lips into a hollow circle to shape a proper Bon jour wouldn’t buy me a bubble gum or a pretzel stick at Jimmy’s Luncheonette. My father lost patience and slapped me when I mispronounced. I protested. But resistance was futile.

  In junior high I was always the best in French, but when at the parent-teacher conferences, my father challenged the “very good” as opposed to an “excellent” that Mr. Banks, my junior high school French teacher, circled on my report card, Mr. Banks shrugged: “Not even Charles De Gaulle deserves an excellent in my book!”

  My high school French teacher, Miss Lorenzo, a skinny, tight-lipped, mouse-haired, prematurely old matron of indeterminate age who must surely have learned her French at a convent school, unwittingly took us to see the movie Viva Maria! by Louis Malle, wanting to expose us to things French, but when Brigitte Bardot proceeded to perform a striptease on the silver screen, a scandalized Miss Lorenzo promptly shuffled us ogling adolescent boys out of the cinema in disgust. That and reading “Le Dormeur du Val,” a poem by Arthur Rimbaud about a soldier found lying in a field, who, only after the poet discovers a red hole in his head, we realize is dead, are my most vivid memories of French class.

  But I do recall having to assume all kinds of contorted positions, the painful polar opposite of stances featured in the Kama Sutra (which I would discover in college), pressed body to body on the subway in the morning rush hour, my wrist thrust into the overhanging strap, hand gripping a French grammar, memorizing my noun declensions and my irregular verbs. And once, arriving late for a first period French exam, on account of a delay on the Canarsie Line (now known as the L Train), I remember passing the gauntlet of pigeons positioned on the overhead ledge of the school, when one let drop its hot liquid payload that landed on my forehead and ran down my left cheek. I wiped myself with a handkerchief in disgust, still muttering French irregular verbs to myself, bravely marched into class, inured but able, and scored a perfect 100 on the test, and have retained a hostility to pigeons ever since.

  And so I graduated high school with the gold medal in French, a tri-color ribbon dangling from the fake gold pin which Miss Lorenzo proudly pinned to my graduation gown, kissing me on both cheeks, the closest I will surely ever come to nomination to the Légion d’Honneur—which somehow stirred up the memory of the striptease scene in Viva Maria!, though Miss Lorenzo was definitely no Brigitte Bardot—and which medal I recently rediscovered upon rummaging through old papers and possessions in a desk drawer. (I wonder if wearing the medal and fluttering tri-color ribbon while waiting in line to board an Air France flight might impress the ground crew and merit consideration for preferred seating?)

  I started off college as a French major, the favorite of Professor Rothschild, a somewhat more erudite and intellectual, albeit equally tight-lipped and stoic, replica of Miss Lorenzo, until I fell from grace. In the final exam she asked for an analysis of one of the works covered in class. I had underlined racy excerpts from Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), by Charles Baudelaire:

  “C’est l’Ennui! L’oeil chargé d’un pleur involontaire,

  II rêve d’échafauds en fumant son houka.

  Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,

  —hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

  “It’s BOREDOM. Tears have glued its eyes together.

  You know it well, my Reader. This obscene

  beast chain-smokes yawning for the guillotine—

  you—hypocrite Reader—my double—my brother!”1

  And having taken the scholarly initiative, laudable I thought, of furthermore reading the poet’s Les Paradis Artificiels, his treatise on the effects of opium and hashish, and in the undergraduate Romantic mood of the moment, taking what I thought to be his message to heart and mind, smoked a pipe of hash before class and boldly confessed to the fact in perfect French in my blue exam booklet, Professor Rothschild took my bravado as a personal affront and gave me an F. Whereupon I switched my major to English, but kept my fondness for Coleridge’s opium-induced dream poems to myself.

  But French profoundly infiltrated my private life. My father would never, alas, live to meet Claudie, whom I met at a party in a state of total intoxication, true to Baudelaire’s poetic dictum:

  pour ne pas être les esclaves martyrisés du temps, enivrez-vous, enivrez-vous sans cesse de vin, de poésie, de vertu, à votre guise.

  (so as not to be the martyred slaves of time, get drunk, keep getting drunk on wine, on poetry, on virtue, as you please.)

  I managed to charm her in the warp and woof of my slightly slurred irregular French verbs and perfectly declined French nouns; intoxicated state notwithstanding, my sentences held together and actually made seductive sense.2

  Nor did my father ever live to see the French seeds he planted in my thankless mind bear fruit in the form of our hybrid Franco-American, perfectly bilingual, perfectly cheeky offspring, our daughter Aurélie and son Jacques, walking, talking bundles of Gall, with a twinkle of insouciance, an ironic smile, and emulating Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Serge Gainsbourg, and countless French rebels with or without a cause, with a cigarette forever riding the lower lip, who correct my gender errors and my wife’s occasional English faux pas, and in the way all children do, remind me of my many faults. Merci, Papa!

  It’s only natural! we Americans maintain to affirm those truths we hold to be self-evident. C’est bien normal, ça! (It’s normal!) the French insist, to substantiate the naked facts at the tip of the nose. There is perhaps a certain irony that we Americans should harp on the natural in our Brave New World of artificiality, the home of artificial flavoring and coloring, plastic, MSG, processed foods, fracking, McDonald’s “Happy Meals” and Monsanto’s genetically engineered blockbuster crops. “All natural ingredients,” as per the required marketing etiquette, can be found on the box or flap of most American packaged, i.e. processed foods. Our seemingly limitless “natural resources” are there to be drained dry. It’s only natural in a country with an elected Congress inclined to gloss over environmental protection.

  As for the French norm, consider the following definition found on the website About.com:

  “Normal is a semi-false cognate. While it can mean ‘normal,’ it is often used in a more figurative sense, as in ‘usual’ or ‘expected.’ For example, the weather is supposed to be clear and sunny all week, but there’s a freak rainstorm. One might say:

  Ce n’est pas normal—‘That’s not right, not what was supposed to happen.’”

  French schoolteachers earn their stripes at various Écoles Normales (Nor
mal Schools). The French inculcate the norm early on in untutored little savages, and the upper echelon of professors are graduated from one of a handful of Écoles Normales Superieurs (Superior Normal Schools), whose graduates, the elite normaliens, comprise a select pedagogical club of sorts of which my wife is a member (roughly equivalent to the privileged spawns of the Ivy League, only in France, they pay you to attend) who ascend to leadership positions in which they, in turn, set the new norms. An ordinary person, particularly an American, can sometimes be made to suffer a sense of abnormal ignorance in the company of normaliens. It is only normal, I suppose, that, as an American, I should be held personally accountable for all artificial flavoring and coloring, plastic, MSG, processed foods, fracking, McDonald’s “Happy Meals” and Monsanto’s genetically engineered crops, just as I hold the French personally responsible for the dissemination of smelly cheese. Naturally, I protest my innocence. But such protestation of innocence is further proof of a shamefully abnormal ignorance of the norm.

  Just as geography makes the French hexagon a natural bridge between the sun-drenched Mediterranean and the chilly gray North Sea, so, too, are the French, in custom and manner, a hybrid of Latin looseness and Teutonic rigidity. But the formidable bulwark against linguistic corruption upheld by the stiff-lipped members of the Académie Française, the solemn brotherhood of guardians of the language, who collectively comprise a veritable dictionary-dyke in a valiant, albeit vain, attempt to keep the sacred tongue from springing holes, is sabotaged by an unstoppable influx of Americanisms and a seemingly bottomless well of argot and colorful idiomatic expressions, some mentionable in good company, some not.