Being home

   When we’re back home after a trip, Carol and I head off in different directions: she to the laundry room to wash even the clean clothes she’s returned with (“bedbugs like to hitch a ride in suitcases.:”), and I to the couch to unpack from the trip a little differently.

   I first try to get the measure of whether I behaved as a tourist or a traveler. Tourists rush about cramming as much activity as they can into their two-week vacation before rushing back home exhausted, complaining they need a vacation from their vacation. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was “off” about this last trip of ours, until I was able to reconstruct it in touristy terms. We went to Europe in the rush of its tourist season. Every place we went had some sort of a self-imposed deadline, as we were due in Heidelberg for a wedding in the middle of it. There was this drive to see as much as we could, yet not stray too far from a day’s travel from Heidelberg. Time and place did open up after the wedding, but by then the rhythm and pace of the trip seemed to have been set. We rushed home even sooner than we had planned. Carol noted my blogs of the trip lacked the usual purposelessness, with none of the charmingly pointless observations of our two earlier trips together, as well as my previous solo journeys. Not to put too fine a point on it, the trip carried the same unease for me that perplexed Gregor Samsa when he awoke to find himself turned into an insect.

After an experience like we had at Auschwitz, I was happy to be able to reflect, as we took the convenient and cheap Prague Airport Express bus the next morning, on our overall experiences behind the former Iron Curtain. Leaving the throngs of foreign tourists clogging the Charles Bridge behind for the more familiar throngs of homicidal maniacs in NYC brought a renewed sense of order to my world, following the previous day’s reminder just how close we can bring ourselves as a people to the Gates of Hell.

   The Nazis at Auschwitz used the word Stücke or pieces to describe and completely dehumanize their captives. They didn’t start out calling them that. Back in the 1930s in a Nazi propaganda film, immigrants in general were referred to as “parasites…bringing with them crime, corruption and chaos.”

   Also, Auschwitz itself did not start out as a death camp. In the spring of 1940, the Nazi conquerors of Poland needed some place to house their Polish POWs. It chose an abandoned army barracks in the town of Osiewicz, near the Polish/Czech border. Only after iterations as a work camp for Polish political prisoners, then captured Russian soldiers and finally, when penning Europe’s Jews in ghettos proved increasingly costly to maintain, did the Nazis hit upon the idea of “repurposing” Auschwitz for mass extermination. It took a full two years before Auschwitz went from POW camp to death camp. And even then, there was a period when the camp population still waged a daily “battle of starvation, disease and appalling physical abuse,” according to a BBC documentary on the camp.

   It was the bug’s bad luck to have wandered up the gossamer curtain in our hotel room, just as the early morning sun had revealed its presence like a spotlight from a guard tower.

   “Reid, please kill it, it might be a bedbug,” Carol commanded, as her sleepy, still opening eyes caught sight of the invader immediately.

I was more attuned to the thought of crushing an insect in the city that was home to Kafka’s most famous work, Metamorphosis, than I was contemplating Carol’s summation of the bug’s identity as yet another swipe at my choice of low-rent accommodations. “Sorry, Gregor,” I said, as I knocked it to the floor and crushed it into extinction, “but I can’t allow m’lady to awake from a troubled sleep, now can I?”

The 11:10 to Prague

   To a range of responses generally ranging from the bewildered to the bemused and on to the mildly annoyed, I manfully try to address the host countrymen in their native tongue. I greet them with a bonjour, guten tag or buon giorno. When it’s time for the check, I ask for the l’addition s’il vous plait, die rechnung bitte or ill conto grazie. But all my attempts to address my Czech hosts in their native tongue were met with complete incomprehension. I think it’s the Czech alphabet that’s my problem.

With a combination of broken German, English, sign language and baby talk, I was reassured by the Heidelberg ticket agent that our connection to Frankfurt would not split into two trains, and Carol and I could relax for the short, one-hour trip, and then on to our ultimate destination of Dresden.

   The problem with travel in Europe for me are the cities with “must see” sights that you haven’t seen yet. For a mindless wanderer, a must see creates an obligation, a commitment to accomplish, an achievement requiring plans, knowledge of opening times, tickets, lines, security checks, amidst a sea of selfies, tour group flags – and for reasons that completely escape me – cone-licking tourists in mock poses with a fondness for miniaturizing the particular must see into something that appears to be hand held.

Sometime early on this current trip, Carol and I began to think we might not be going to Hell after all. The combination of perfect timing, perfect opportunity and perfect luck that had befallen us in our previous travels had redemptively abandoned us so far. Where once we had been Roadrunner, we now seemed to be experiencing the aggregatable fates of Wile E. Coyote.

   Nostalgia, when done right, is charming. When we rolled into Williams, AZ prior to our train trip to the Grand Canyon, I felt we had discovered a little town that had gotten nostalgia just right. Carol was still a bit unsettled from seeing our accommodations for the next two nights. Even after I had explained how the guy backing up next to us in his pickup with his personal belongings neatly tied off in hefty bags had made his reservation using Expedia.com, she remained skeptical, suspecting I’d once again booked us into a hotel occupied by characters in a Rob Zombie movie.

   I can sum up my initial view of the Grand Canyon this way: totally fake. There is no way a river is responsible for what you see here. The Mississippi River has been depositing Minnesota onto Louisiana for eons, but it still looks like Louisiana, which is to say, an unreclaimed swamp. That’s what rivers are supposed to do. They do not paint breathtaking landscapes like they were van Gogh or Monet. Even the little kid standing next to me told his mommy, “it looks fake.”