Category Archives: General Interest

Imagination and Travel

General Interest

Sometime in 2008 or 2009, I was browsing new fiction in the bookstore across the street from me. At random, I pulled out a novel titled, Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, a Barcelona author new to me. I was smitten by the first sentence about a father who took his son to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books where he was to carefully choose a book and assume responsibility for it over his lifetime.

At that point, Spain was not on my travel list, but by the time I finished, I had an urge to walk down Las Ramblas, ride the funicular, and see La Sagrada Família, the monumental and still-unfinished neo-gothic church designed by artist Antoní Gaudí (below). In 2010, I did all of those things, ordinary touristy things that felt magical to me because of one novel. At the time, I would have said the connection between the book and the trip was a one-off, a serendipitous discovery of Zafón, followed by an actual excursion to Barcelona.

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A few weeks ago, during a sea cruise to see the breathtaking fjords of Norway (below), I had an epiphany about imagination and travel: Whether we know anything about our destination or not, we imagine what it will be like, often taking our cues from literature and movies.  Who hasn’t set foot in Paris for the first time and been haunted by the ghosts of Hemingway, Sartre, and Beauvoir?  Upon a recent departure to Paris, my Algerian driver to the San Francisco airport told me to be sure to go to Café Flore, where the literati in the 1920s and 1930s hung out. Perhaps it is as close as we adults get to the childhood game of Lets Pretend.

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It need not be high art or philosophy that precipitates an expedition. Before we boarded the ship bound for the Western coast of Norway, a friend and I, who had been in Copenhagen for a week, took a side trip to Malmö, Sweden.  Why Malmö?  I had read six detective novels set in Malmö; she was well into her first of the series. One can go to Malmö from Copenhagen by ferry, bus or train.  Our choice of a bus was dictated by a compelling Danish TV series called The Bridge, which begins with the discovery of a body in the middle of the new Øresund Bridge (below), one-half on the Swedish side, the other half on the Danish side.  Even though I knew rationally that the plot was fiction, and the close-up scenes on the bridge shot elsewhere, I nevertheless felt like leaping out of my bus seat when we crossed what I felt was the spot.

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Something similar happened when we visited Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen’s museum home outside of Copenhagen. Despite her writing fame, we arrived dominated by images of Meryl Streep from the film Out of Africa. There we were: in Blixen’s study, gawking at her desk and the typewriter that she used to write her stories (below), or pausing before a dining table, fully set, as if guests were arriving shortly.  The smell of fresh-cut flowers from her garden in each room gave the house a living, breathing feeling, a sense Karen Blixen might be nearby in the kitchen. Still, even though I suspect the images of Streep and Robert Redford, who played Blixen’s lover, Denys Finch Hatton, may be difficult to supplant, new images will at least compete.

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Someone asked me if pre-voyage fantasies or just Googling a city or village before a trip ruins the magic of seeing something for the first time.  Absolutely not, I replied instinctively, surprised by the question and at a loss for a more thoughtful response. I suppose it is an age-old question:  Should one come to a painting, say, without any knowledge of the artist, genre, or technique so that the experience is unfiltered, or does information about a painting help you better appreciate and/or understand it.  (It’s probably clear that I’m an audio guide person.)

As I was traveling down this path of ideas, I was brought up short: In March I gave a speech in Australia at an International Women’s Conference on writing and identity, in which I contended that, since high school, I had written primarily to make sense of my experience. I didn’t realize then that the reverse could be said: that my experiences were often sparked first by imagination.

The more I considered these relationships, I more I realized the possible combinations of imagination and experience are kaleidoscopic.  Traveling can develop our historical imagination. Boarding a re-created Viking Ship wasn’t just a means of transport to see a remote Norwegian fishing village (below).  For just a moment, I could conjure the Viking period, and imagine what Viking sailors saw over a thousand years ago as they navigated their way out of the long-fingered fjords. Before this experience, I had no interest in the Vikings, their culture or their period of conquest.

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After several bus and train trips up into the mountains and over bridges, even the existence of Trolls began to seem possible. A folklorist cautioned that encounters with Trolls never end well. Upon my return home, I thought how well this old admonition applies to modern-day trolls on social media. Again, I had no knowledge of the Troll legends before I went to Norway and had always wondered why the term had become so vogue.

I am currently steeped in the novels of Yrsa Sigurdardottir, which are set in Iceland.  I wonder – is a visit to Reykjavik in my future?  Even if not, I am the richer for this new understanding of the magic and romance of travel.  After all, I can go there any time in my imagination.

–Karen M Paget

Reconciliation in Vietnam

General Interest

As I prepared for my trip to Vietnam this January, I found it surreal to put the words “tourist” and “Vietnam” in the same sentence.  I had the psyche of an anti-war activist, steeped in ten interminable years of marches and resolutions, outrage over official lies, and the general horror of bloodshed. Just the thought of being in Hanoi felt mildly illicit, since traveling to North Vietnam was once considered tantamount to treason.

In Hanoi, our tour group stayed at the legendary Metropole Hotel, now owned by Sofitel.  Built in 1901, it has been the scene of foreign intrigue for over a century, through two wars (France and the United States). It has been home to embassies and consulates, international peace delegations, including the infamous Jane Fonda visit, and even bombings, most sensationally in its courtyard during Christmas 1972. An old photograph shows a long row of one-person bomb shelters on the sidewalk in front of the block-long hotel, entered through a manhole size cover. A recently rediscovered underground bunker, where singer Joan Baez once fled during the 1972 Christmas bombings, was too jam-packed with tourists for us to visit. And, it was here at the Metropole that Graham Greene began to write The Quiet American, first published in 1955, that exposed the less savory ambitions of American aid to the French before their defeat.

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Hanoi by rickshaw

The reality of Hanoi quickly pulled me out of my reminiscent mode. The second night, we were to be driven individually by bicycle-powered rickshaws to attend an evening cultural event. Although it was the dry season, it was pouring rain. Rickshaw drivers, like the owners of the three million motorbikes that clog Hanoi streets, are not deterred by rain, although whoever owns the plastic poncho franchise must be very wealthy.  My driver kept stopping to adjust the plastic sheets meant to protect me from the rain but whose sagging edges funneled the rain inside.  As a result, my driver lost the rest of the tour group, his only English word apparently okay, which in context I took to mean oh-oh. He pumped up and down narrow streets, weaving in and out of cars, bikes, buses, pedestrians, and other rickshaws, sometimes going with the one-way traffic, other times going directly against it.  The carbon monoxide fumes were so bad at times that I had to keep my mouth covered with my scarf. A half-dozen cell phone calls later –made while trying to steer the rickshaw and as dangerous as driving and texting — he reached someone in charge and we reached our destination. This was no longer the Hanoi of my imagination.  This was Hanoi at rush hour.

Our regular Vietnamese guides were fluent in English.  Most were born after the war ended in 1975, and they were fond of reminding us that Vietnam is not a war but a country.

Paradoxically, the tour’s agenda emphasizes war-related excursions, whether in Hanoi, along the Mekong River or in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). We visited the “Hanoi Hilton,” for example, where Senator John McCain had been held a prisoner of war.  Exhibits feature pictures of his capture, his Navy uniform and helmet hang in a special display case, and videos play excerpts of him and his fellow pilots.  There is nothing Hilton-ish about this long-time torture chamber: the Centrale Maison, its real name, once served the prison needs of colonial France. In one dank cell, no longer than 15 feet, two dozen or so life-size bronze sculptures depict Vietnamese held in chains and lined up cheek by jowl. In the gloom of the cell, the sculptures look eerily human and beseeching.

The day our group left Hanoi, the Metropole staff was abuzz: Secretary of State John Kerry and his entourage were arriving for a last diplomatic visit before Obama left office. Why I wondered?  Tension in the South China Sea?  Trade discussions?  I put it out of my mind. We were on our way to Ha Long Bay in the Gulf of Tonkin to sleep overnight in a (modern) Junk.  The bay turned out to be even more beautiful than pictures can convey, with its 18,000 islands and imposing rock formations.  To wake up in the early morning mist, anchored in the middle of the bay, and watch these formations go by is simply put, magical.

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Ha Long Bay

Several days later I read that Kerry made an unscheduled visit to the Mekong Delta, a visit that turned out to haunt me throughout the trip. It seems that Kerry couldn’t sleep that first night in the Hanoi Metropole, so he spent time on a Google Earth search, trying to pinpoint the location of his 1968 Swift Boat battle, the one in which he shot an enemy combatant, saved his crew, and for which he received a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts.  He conferred with a former crewmember who thought he had the right location.

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Along the Mekong

He subsequently came to the Mekong Delta and took a boat up the Bay Hap River. He met with a former Viet Cong soldier who survived the battle, and learned – for the first time – the name and age of the person he had killed.  I was riveted. How did it feel to revisit an experience that must have included the terror of battle, the relief of survival, the guilt of taking a life, and a stew of emotions I couldn’t begin to fathom?  I thought about the battle’s long term effect on Kerry’s life, how it must have shaped his views as leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and the damage done to his 2004 presidential campaign when an attack ad used his medals against him, a phenomenon now known as “swift boating” your opponent.  In an especially vicious claim, attackers said Kerry had shot a teenager, implying a kind of recklessness.  Now he learned for sure that he did not; the soldier, armed with a rocket launcher, was twenty-four.  The battle itself began, according to the survivor, Bo Van Tam, when the Vietnamese communists deliberately tried to lure the Americans into the rocket’s range.

A few days later, we made our own riverboat excursion down the Mekong River. Gradually a new picture of Vietnam was forming in my mind, one that combined the old and the new in unexpected ways. One day, while anchored in the middle of the Mekong, we boarded a smaller boat to visit a Vietnamese village. In order to reach it, we stopped alongside a riverbank and climbed up makeshift dirt-packed steps. We then followed a rutted path through the village, passed jumbled huts and houses and rice paddies, and stopped to visit an old woman selling fish and vegetables. We jumped aside for motorbikes that bumped their way over tree roots and ruts, transporting everything from produce to spare tires. As we exchanged greetings with local Vietnamese, young children followed us pied piper style, driven by both curiosity and the possibility of candy.  I tried to imagine an American soldier tasked with identifying Viet Cong sympathizers among such close-knit villagers.  Just impossible, I thought.

On another occasion, we took small boats that puttered passed floating villages on the Mekong where Vietnamese families live on houseboats clustered together and fish to make a living.  “Poor but not starving” our guide offered.  Here, Vietnam seemed a timeless country. Yet, we were surprised to find a smattering of modern solar panels mounted on the tin roofs of some of the poorest, most ramshackle boats.  Evenings, by contrast, returned us to the ageless culture of Vietnam as performers entertained us with traditional dances and musical instruments.

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Village on the Mekong

The last leg of our tour took us to Ho Chi Minh City (or Saigon as everyone still calls it), a thriving modern city of skyscrapers and high-rise apartments. In the old Post Office, a large Ho Chi Minh portrait hovers over visitors.  Outside in the plaza Vietnamese models parade in traditional Vietnamese dresses, ao dai, in dazzling colors of magenta, gold, and emerald green.  A few blocks away, high-end stores, Prada, Gucci, and Louis Vuitton, compete for customers. Tourist books advise visitors to use dong while in Vietnam but everywhere we went, American dollars were snapped up.  We encountered not a whiff of hostility toward Americans–the first question I am usually asked.

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War Museum

Perhaps, inevitably, since we were in Saigon, the daytime trips returned to war themes. I chose to forego the chance to crawl through a typical Viet Cong tunnel in Cu Chi. In preparation for a visit to the War Remnants Museum in Saigon, we were not so subtly reminded that we would learn about the American War, as it is known among the Vietnamese. With the exception of a few obvious editorial comments, such as the term henchman, the exhibit texts seemed largely factual.

One panel features a quote from former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, one of the war’s architects: “We were wrong, terribly wrong about the war. We owe it to future generations to explain why.”   My traveling companion, who doesn’t share my political background, gasped upon reading the quote, and whispered, is that true?  Yes, I whispered back, grateful once again that McNamara had lived to write his memoir and put his mea culpa on the record. Later, I realized the question was revelatory: there must be scores of people in the U.S. and elsewhere unaware of McNamara’s damning conclusion. So much for learning the lessons of Vietnam.

It wasn’t until I had returned home that I understood why the Kerry encounter continued to haunt me. I have long been fascinated by the interplay of history and memory, and especially by the experience of revisiting history and its effect on memory. I found myself wondering if Kerry had experienced any kind of reconciliation. In the moment, he told the press the experience was “weird” and “surreal.”  Once the word reconciliation jumped into my mind, I knew it aptly summed up my own struggle, albeit on a far less dramatic, far smaller scale.  Throughout the trip I had been engaged in trying to reconcile my experience of Vietnam then and now.  I had come to Vietnam with the psyche of an anti-war activist, but I returned home with the recognition that, as the guides had averred, Vietnam is a country, not just a war.

— Karen M Paget

Rogue No More

General Interest

When the request from Shawn Fettig came to write about what the post-election future holds for the LBGTQ community, my first thought was to say that I had hung up my predictor hat, having been, like so many others, wrong about the 2016 election.  Or to respond that Trump himself is not predictable: he doesn’t seem to remember his position on any given day or even five minutes before.  Did anyone expect him to say during his 60 Minutes interview that he was “okay” with same-sex marriage? Will that stick? I concluded that my only response to Shawn about the future could be “who knows?”

But, as it happens, I’ve spent the last month sorting through old files from the last fifty-five years of my life, and had just finished with folders labeled “sexual preference fight, 1973,” and “recall election, 1974.”   I was one of the five Boulder city council members who voted to amend the local Human Rights Ordinance to ban discrimination in employment based on sexual preference, a term of art at the time, now archaic and even offensive. As I read through constituent letters from more than forty years ago, I was stunned.  I had forgotten just how viciously people had reacted to the vote, the referendum that overturned the council’s vote by more than two to one, and the recall that broke the council’s progressive majority. The vitriol, the screed, the threats of retribution, much of it apparently sent by the divine, reminded me that in the early 1970s, a majority of liberal Boulderites thought we were simply out of our minds.

And, forty years ago, no one, but no one, uttered the phrase same-sex marriage or marriage equality.  Thus, while I have little to say about the future – except organize – I am passionate about history and what it teaches us. Without sounding (hopefully) like a Pollyanna, and recognizing the pain and struggle of the LBGTQ community over the past decades, the change in attitudes has been astounding. The latest Pew Foundation poll shows strong majorities in favor of same-sex marriage and other LBGTQ rights. By contrast, consider that the women’s movement was never able to achieve its goal of passing an Equal Rights Amendment, first introduced in 1923.   What the Pew polls highlight is that LBGTQ activists are winning the hardest, most important, political battle of all – hearts and minds.

But, of course, history never marches forward in a straight line.  Electoral politics can occasionally leapfrog cultural change but, more commonly, it reflects cultural and social change. San Francisco Mayor, Gavin Newsome, for example, used his liberal base to leap into the future on Valentine’s day, 2004, by defying state law and issuing more than 4,000 same sex marriage licenses.  Initially overturned, just four years later, the California Supreme Court found the prohibition unconstitutional. More recently, who would have imagined that a conservative lawyer and a liberal lawyer would team up to win a similar victory in the U.S. Supreme Court?  Or, that by 2015, three dozen states had already made same-sex marriage legal.

Reviewing the last forty years, I think that the LBGTQ community has been particularly brilliant in its organizing strategies and alliances, forming support networks like PFLAG or Boulder’s Open Door.   In 2015, I attended the Open Door banquet that honored my daughter-in-law, Boulder County Clerk Hillary Hall, who issued same-sex marriage licenses in defiance of Colorado law. (For the record, we never conferred ahead of time: she knew what was right and did it.) A few of us at the banquet, veterans of the old sexual preference fights/losses, watched as the Chamber of Commerce Director emceed the awards.  Oh how symbolic of the changed attitudes, we marveled, for at one time the Chamber had been an archenemy of gay rights. If this sounds celebratory, it is mean to be.  The confidence, strength, and strategic ingenuity of the LBGTQ community is an enormous asset for the future, and may offer lessons to other groups who are currently under attack, fearful of what lies ahead, and who are not so strong.

Still, the fight ahead will not be easy, the rhetoric alone is abhorrent, even though, historically, it is more difficult to take rights away than to win them.  I hope that those of us who live in liberal enclaves or in deep blue states can find ways to support activists in rural and red states.  For example, using the abortion rights fight as a parallel, tithing a monthly donation to a Planned Parenthood Clinic based in a rural area is one way to reach out.  We have “sister cities” in foreign countries; perhaps the principle could apply to cities and states where activists still feel very much alone, still rogue, and where the hearts and minds fight has yet to be won.

— Karen M. Paget, originally published at Rogueactivist.com, November 2016.