Rediscover Hilight Tribe

I am in Paris searching for companions to either explore the catacombs under the city, or to travel south to the legendary boulders of Fontainebleau and get in some dear sweet climbing before hitchhiking or ridesharing north through germany to Denmark. The COP15 Climate Conference will be going down there from the 10th to the 18th, and there is going to be epic anticapitalist protests and demonstrations from all manner of radical and leftist political groups; essentially a convergence of energy of a scope and flavor I have never before experienced. I am very excited. I will try not to get beaten by the police or deported. Haha.

I am looking forward to Christmas. The english end of the fam will be all together in Hertfordshire, north of london, together with my Gigi from Manhattan, and it will be absolutely blissful to sit and drink warm tea in calm, and have conversation in socks, and write a lot. I have been saving all the paper debris that accompanies modern life, and will attempt to perform some kind of travelogue by recalling and recording the stories that accompany each of the scraps building up in the bottoms of my pockets and backpack. Should be fun, and vastly time consuming. A good work for an otherwise relaxed holiday.

Hope life is grand, and greetings with warmth from the Rue des Petites Ecuries, amidst a billowing rabble of African ethnic street restaurants.

christopher

Around the Alps in 24 Hours

Crazy Story and Needing a Host.. Posted 20 hrs ago by Christopher Boone from Tuscaloosa, United States  on Couchsurfing.org (Permalink) *

Hello Paris,

My name is Boone, I come from the southern US. I have been travelling for six months around europe and northern africa, and have just encountered a peculiar situation:

24 hours ago, I was staying with friends in Brno, Czech Republic. I had been travelling all over that country, staying with several different members of a traditional Czech folk dance group, of which a friend of mine is a member. Yesterday I said goodbye to my friends there, planning to hitchhike to Bratislava in Slovakia. I was successful in that effort, but during the travel I had a long conversation with the older trucker who had picked me up.

It turned out he was Hungarian, and had been driving a truck for the past twenty five years, experiencing the fall of communist oppression in his home country and then driving to an unbelievable list of locations including middle Africa, all over Europe, and as far East as China. In that time he had learned parts of seven or so different languages, but continued to work as a trucker for the love of it and travel. By the time we arrived in Bratislava, I was completely captivated. We stopped at a gas station on the outskirts of town, and he told me that he planned to keep driving through the night and into the morning, crossing five countries and covering some 1500 kilometers. He offered for me to continue with him. There was no way Bratislava could compete; I agreed without a second thought.

We talked all through the night in broken German and English, with a few Spanish words thrown in. His route took us out of Slovakia; through Vienna, Austria; into Southern Germany; through the Swiss border and ended in Lyon, France. By the time we arrived this morning I was exhausted, sleep deprived, but totally inspired. We said goodbye and after a few requests I found that most people on the Lyon loop road were heading towards Paris, so I went along. Ended up driving a man almost all the 450 kilometers here while he dozed in the passengers seat; my French is very limited so I was happy to drive while he slept.

Finally made it here after almost running out of gas in evening traffic, and was lucky to land near the international hostel on Rue St. Blaise, and got a room knowing there were few options at this time of night and with no preparation. However, I have long since realized that couchsurfing is one of the best ways to experience a city in the best way, and definitely the best way to meet interesting engaged locals, so tomorrow I will start reading profiles and sending some requests out to cool Parisians; Id like to stay and explore for some days, and hopefully get down to Fontainbleu to do some climbing (if anybody wants to go, I will be building a post for that specifically tomorrow).

Anyways, I know the chances are slim that I will connect with anybody on the same day I send out requests, so I have written this post in hopes that someone will host me for a day or two until I meet some people through the normal channels. I appreciate the help and energy (know it took a bit just to get through this post), I am very easy and have my sleeping bag and tent, so could even stay in someones garden if it is more convenient, and of course I am stoked to share the stories this weathered trucker told me!

 Heres hoping someone has some good news and a bit of understanding for the spontaneous traveller,

Boone

Thoughts in a gully in a horsefield

(early september, Iceland)

Now, walking alone through the irregular horsefields east of Solheimar, scouting the distance to the ancient ecclesiastical site of Skálholt, watching the growing rumbling bulk of the mossy volcanic table Vördufell, I realize my lonliness. I am a self-seer, observing the looping, undirected chatter of the roofmind as objectively as I can, searching for patterns, trying to glean truths, absolutes.

Writing this, I sit in a damp clump of tall grass growing in a gully where water once ran. Being below the level of the surrounding fields, I am sheltered from Iceland´s constant wind. Now it bears from the northeast, following the same path as the river Hvítá, which I´ll soon reach. A beautiful obstacle. It´s glacial cold almost shut my body down before, freezing my muscles and drawing my chest tight, seizing the breath from my lungs. Fear, and desire got me to the far shore.

People come to this cold island for the deadening silence and for the serenity of the empty places. They come to be quiet, to silence the mind chatter and hear down to the soul, to find those persistent anxieties and to work them loose. It´s like untying a knot or unsnarling a fishing line.

It´s a contemplative process, one requiring concentration, systematic removal of distractions, careful listening (more intuitive than physical) and finally, a methodical tugging of lines.

As any good knot solver will tell, you have to find a loose end and start a gentle tugging to unravel it all. Too much force will sinch the problem tighter, frustrating efforts. It requires a delicate teasing, a bit here, a bit there, until the nature of the knot becomes evident. Then, it is simply a matter of following through to the Source.

I´m making headway on my knot.Anyway, I think I´ve glimpsed the source. It´s community. I´ve struggled for a term that most accurately describes the feeling in mind, the feelings that shine clear and blissful, memories that replay over and over. Friends. Warmth. Nature. Adventures. Being taught to cook. I remember riding my bike past the back door of Gorgas on smooth road, screaming out so much speed, throbbing energy, a feeling of such force and depth that I could accelerate indefinitely, until the highest gear couldn´t support any further power and I was left carving and sweeping back and forth through foot traffic, standing in the pedals, just bouncing on my ankles for the joy of it. No fear for injury, for hunger, for any of the reasons that would later make me hesitate, or limit my exertion of energy; because in that place, there was such abundance, such security in Community. New College. Friends from so many paths, such diverse interests, I couldn´t find lonliness if I tried. Kids that had never met each other, overlapping and inconceivably interconnected. Sitting alone on the Quad in the sun, in twenty minutes it was a spontaneous party. A mixup festival, a patchwork of people, drawn to an intangible center of energy, drawn in by their friends, by the radiance, and always meeting new, turning strangers to allies.

Community; I think this is the least common denominator, the bottom line for this idea, the core of the knot. The thing people create when they share lives. It is a dynamic entity, always shifting and morphing through potlucks and parties, through organizing and demonstration. A free-form that thrives on change and diversity, on intrigue and exuberance.

Not to be confused with Society. Society is the alternative form of social organization, a stagnant, false thing contrived by rule and law, choked with judgement. People who play in this game are either unaware of it, which is sad but not accidental*, or by choice, which is at least confusing and at most infuriating. They may be doomed to a life of mirrors and materialism, anywhere globalization touches. They must struggle withe the pains of ´working jobs they hate to buy shit they don´t need to impress people they don´t know.´ No love, no trust, no fun.

Wake up! Money is debt, possessions are burdens.
Health is the only real wealth and security.
People are the only real love, joy, trust.

Geldbard und Kirsche

Sitting under a weeping golden cherry tree I find myself stretching and breathing.

(should this be art or information? rather, can I justify evading the hefty effort of crafting aesthetic prose, instead focusing on quantity of data over quality? Negh

It’s a good game to play. Snatch a little patience, sit down somewhere you’re drawn. Find an edge, a low lip to sit on. Four inches off the ground level. Maybe six. How thick are your ankles?

Find the sitting bones. The wingtips of the ass bones, if you will. These be the central symmetry, the base of the column that is your spine and vertical core. This will be an exercise of realizing the role, the shape and function and dynamic of that line. We are going to get tall, get small, breath into corners, exhale into flat dead relaxation and inhale into shivering extended tension until the cold morning stiffness is exorcised, the old injuries softened, all muscle knotting and bunching discovered and dissolved. Until fluid and egoless, like warm wax rolling over irregular surfaces. I want to float and slide over the terrain, effortless and uncounsciously. This is mastery of the physical machine, the human mechanism.

Fold the ankles under, close to stacking them underneath the spine as possible, knees hanging loose and out-down, open and opposite, like a book or a butterfly. Hands easy and balanced, hanging, tips together in the lap. Wherever. Just absolutely loose. Everything loose. Exhale into this looseness. Make it all floppy and warm. Helps to close the eyes. Just removes one more variable, eliminates one more source of external stimulus. Helps kill the ego too, in a public place. Fear and deep honest stretching don’t work well together. The ritual is more thorough, deeper and more effective without hesitating when your body guides you into an unusual posture or position. For one, the head must hang. People tend to steer with their neck. It is the hub of most motion, the bottleneck of nerves through the body. Feel it out. Use your fingertips. Feel the way the shoulder structure is slung across the bridge of the back, muscle wrapped across deeper muscle, nerves sheathed within. All of this structure is, at all times, functioning at variable states of pliability (hydration) and elasticity (temperature). Achiness and injuries happen most commonly when the body machine is cold and dull. Heat it up. Breathe in and out through the nose. Experiment with breath. Play with speed and force. Use your stomach. Visualize the work of the stomach and diaphragm in action. Flex them out. Breathe into the gut. Deep. Get heavy. Get centered. Like a plug on the face of the earth, heavy as sin, a buried stone. Breathe up. Get light. Lift the shoulders, in symmetry. Twist the spine. Sitting with a strong back, with hands centered and tethered, bring one elbow to its knee, and twist the other elbow to the sky. Breathe into it. See the tissue of flesh wrapped around the rip cage,  from the nape of the neck to the tip of the pelvis. Diagonally and down, running under the arms, bowed out in layers on layers. Breathe it out till its soft and supple, till you feel and know its done and done fully. Switch. Symmetry is important.

Anyway, after weirding out in the park for a while, ritual done and having successfully conjured warmth and clarity to my person, I turn, still sitting, and open my eyes to the personsound I had since sensed behind me, at the black reptilian trunk of the cherry. Its a cold misty fog drapped over the bustling campus, University of Hamburg. The sound is a man, crouching and concentrating on something, facing away from me, but nearby. Twelve feet away. His rainjacket is a deep brilliant yellow, the same as the leaves carpeting the ground around us, creating a stage of color, a circle hugged by the roots and boughs, a sandwiched space of earth and atmosphere. I can see he’s holding a small mirror.

 

I peer at him for a minute or two. Eventually, he straightens up among the low branches, turns and returns my stare. He is a man, older and with a wild gray beard and hair. We smile. We speak. First in broken German, then in English. He has something to say, and I listen. He describes coming here, to this place beneath the golden cherry, to trim his beard amongst the fallen leaves. My ears prick up. He continues in a rambling tale about nothing in particular. I notice his shirtcorner is tattered. Closed in his hand is a short lenght of fabric wrapped around a small collection of silver barbering instruments. His kit.

In a pause, I inquire about the importance of the tree to him, why here? He begins anew his rambling tale, but focusing to point out the truth of the physical reality surrounding us. I have been all along seated upon a long low wooden bench, a divider and perimeter to the border of this island of green within the larger concrete plaza here in the hub of the campus. Classbuildings and modern architecture tower overhead. Here we two are within one of three hexagonal tiers of soil. Each structured within the wooden bench. In this one, in which we now speak and exist, a yellow cherry does too. In the next, a deep, wine red oak with black bark; in the third, three yellow aspens, nearly shivered nude. ”Three and six is eighteen.” All of this he explains to me, gently and without any sign of jest or doubt. ”This is a special place.”

We shake hands. His name is Wilhelm. We go our separate ways, a light rain condensing out of the fog.

Helvitis Útlandingur!

On Wednesday the 9th of September, the day before Heimrich´s birthday, I travelled from Akureyri to Blönduos. Akureyri is one of the bigger cities in Iceland, with a botanical garden filled with plump sweet red currants (probably not intended to feed the tourists but oh well someone has to give the thrushes some competition. The dominant species here is Fieldfare. The body shape, posture and behavior like an American robin, although in smaller groups, with a mottled cream and black chest, dark body and touches of red in the eyebrows and tail. Inquisitive. Scolding.)

I travel with my thumb. Icelanders have somehow maintained an amazing degree of trust amongst their own and únterlandingers, or outlanders coming over to visit. Perhaps it is island mentality. Or perhaps because they can still read the Norse manuscripts printed on animal skins from 1100 AD as if they were today´s newsheadlines. The language hasn´t changed. And back then I have a feeling the inhabitants of Iceland weren´t easily frightened. Anyway, I´ve heard stories of kids hitchhiking around the entire perimeter loop road in under 72 hours, so you get an idea of the ease.

On my way out of town I passed a short girl heavily laden with camping material, a bulbous backpack, and several other bags hanging off her. She was walking in my same direction, so I met her eyes and said hey as I passed. I would meet her again later. The weather was amazing on this day, for the first time in a while. Rain is really the only deterrent to my minimalist backpacking scheme. I am seeking weatherproof pants and a big waterproof elastic cover for my bag. Preferably one bright yellow or some other laughably obnoxious color. Can´t be taken too seriously. People will get the wrong impression.

There were snowcapped mountaintops all along the road leading out of Akureyri. I had couchsurfed with a girl named Julia in town last night, having arrived in the murk and dark of an overcast evening. When I first opened my eyes a Tolkienesque mountain chain was imposing from the other side of the glass. The view from the flat; I took a picture intentionally allowing the window shades to show, to remind myself of the ridiculously great view.

Walking out of town, swinging my improvised didgeridoo as a walking stick, each drop in step emitting a hollow reverberating thump, in rhythm. I remember training in cross country at the SportPlex in Alexander City, with Coach Kison, and having discovered endurance in focusing on my ragged running breathing rhythm. There is something entrancing about repetition, especially with sound. You focus in on the pattern and lose yourself in it, waking up with a start to realize you´ve run through the pain of miles without feeling it, or had walked without thought for an hour. Walking meditation? Feels good anyway.

I stopped in a field of thick, untended grass to sit back and stare up at the shifting clouds forming off the cold and moisture lying solid on top of those mountains. I read about the effect the presence of the Himalaya have on that region´s climate. Clouds and moisture get blown in from the sea, heavy to rain, and when they meet the impassable height of the Himalaya they are forced to roll backward on themselves, condensing and dropping their heavy precipitation. Hence, sweltering jungle and lush growth in Northern India, while the highlands in Tibet, Nepal, Mongolia are left dry. Deserts of height. NC Independent Study: Geology and Hydrology, the emergence and causation of climate patterns, or, Earth, Water, Air: Elements at Play and How. Suggested reading? Anyone?

Was ist der Wettervorhersage?

Midday a voice of the Icelandic National Radio picked me up and took me about 90 kilometers toward my destination. We talked about the news. The sun was falling through a steep canyon with us, and the light was impeccable. Dad would have pulled over the car and taken pictures until sunset. I stared and gawked and tried to snap shots through the glass. Our driver took a phone call and inadvertently demonstrated his specialization, turning the spoken Icelandic word into a lilting rolling song. I can´t think of a way to convey this…speed and pose of an auctioneer without the feeling of rush or fluster, bounce and babble like the yodelling of old mountaineers from American cartoons, crisp articulation and smooth confidence of a charismatic leader or debater. A delight to listen to. Look it up. The spoken Icelandic word, sound file search. S´gotta be there.

Our speaker dropped me off near a bridge. He said, **I am going this way, and you are going that way.” I said, ”Takk fyrir farið!´´ Big TAKK! This is a great language. It is kind of like learning Swahili though, since less than 350 thousand live here and speak it. Sounds amazing though, the stuff of the old world, living on and unchanged for a millennium. Whew. The bridge spanned a wide shallow river, a trout fishing stream in a valley bathed in golden light. There was a weird rusted structure on one rocky bank, like a miniature house skeleton. I realized it was for hanging and drying fish. Another living tradition. I hung out on the bridge smiling at the sun in the afternoon, watching the wind and clouds work at the high tops of the valley walls on both sides of me. The heather, under these light conditions, is a thousand different colors. Deep saturated reds and yellows, greens, purples, oranges. And there are thick tufts of tall grasses, their leaves being pinwheeled around by the shifting breeze, creating a symphony of rustling, rising and falling with the knots of wind. Horses watched the sounds in the distance. I added some long low drones to the mix. The horses were interested in that. There are powerful forces at work when you get stared down by a group of beings, bigger than you, stronger than you, feet all toenails. Silent, watching.

Some of the horses here have light blue eyes. Kinda creepy.

I got picked up by some German kids younger than me, on holiday with a rented car, there on that bridge. We chatted easily. He was studying politics in school. and drinking Dr. Pepper, telling me about Germany´s many parties, how there is an evolution over time due to popularity, a party starting on the fringes, gaining support through its markedly unique policy, but inevitably growing more conservative and central in order to maintain its share of votes. Parties like companies, it seems. Perhaps it´s really a pattern of organizations in general, or at least those organizations that have an interest in maintaining public approval. Feel like there´s a study lingering here as well.. Or better yet, an endless series of conversations. **Plays well with others. Keen to talk about it**

In Blönduos I discovered that my couchsurfing connection had given me a phonenumber that no longer worked. The woman at the gas station would be damned if she couldn´t figure out how to connect me with ´Christina’, the only word of information I had to offer in help of the process. She whipped around the place, asking frycooks in the back, the icecream scooper girl, neighbors and friends that stopped in for a liter of milk or skyr. Couldn´t place it. She was far more upset that I was that she didn´t know a random person supposedly living in her small town. But she smiled, gave me back my folded pocket paper of names and numbers, quotes and tips, and pointed me across the street to the camping. I knocked on a door, paid six bucks, and then the bottom dropped out. I made a split second decision that it wasn´t going to lighten up, and ran to set up my tent in the deluge. In seconds I was soaked, my pack was wet, but gleefully I discovered in the muggy heavily breathing of my erected dry bubble that the wet hadn´t made it through to my sleeping bag. Nothing else matters, really. But a wet bed is no bed at all.

On a hunch, like the feeling you get on a Friday afternoon when class is over and you itch to scout around for activity, I went out in the rain again. I went and filled my water bottle at the bathroom, and found a lonely book on a counter, abandoned but with the dog-earedness of having been loved intensely in the past. Vietnam war literature. Grisly, stunningly detailed descriptions of the insanities and horrors of tropical battle. I started reading, and it was like runner´s trance again. I caught myself tensing my muscles in suspense when tripmines went off, gritting my jaw to the concussions around me. Footsteps woke me from the prose, the heavily-laden girl from Akureyri was walking towards me with a smile. She told me she had arrived with the rain, saw me scrambling to make my tent, and not having one herself, had rented one of the cabins. She also didn´t have a companion to share the excessive amount of space; the cabin was built to house five. I said wicked, slammed the book of blood in the heat shut, pulled up my muddy stakes, and lifted my assembled tent away from the ground with a wet resistance. Kimi and I stayed up late drinking tea and talking about WWOOFing. She was from Washington state and had a list of all the farms in Holland, which she was kind enough to let me copy down. I hung the dripping components of my tent all over the bathroom to drip dry, and we cranked on the crinkle-form radiators lining the cabin´s walls. Lining the walls of every built structure in Iceland, really. The beauty of free, scaldingly hot water just under the surface of the soil is the ease with which it provides space heating when run through rippled metal leaves with high surface area.

This is a land full of friendly strangers.

 

On James´s Birthday I packed my dry tent and ate muesli, my new favorite food for it´s density and versatility. It swells with warm or cold water. Tastes good with raisins. What more can you ask for in a breakfast?

I spent a chunk of time packing and writing in the cabin, then explored a forested island in a nearby river. Stretched and ran through the thin confused trails like a predator among the birches. Then sat and thought and breathed and felt good. Played some didgeridoo for diaphragm strength. Felt better.

On the way back up to the ‘´highway´´ I acted on another hunch and cut a short steep path up the embankment instead of following the easier, longer paved drive up. The second I crested the hill and stepped to the road I realized another impossible coincidence. There, pulling out of the gasstation parkinglot across the way was a couple from Spain that I had met no less than three times before, all around the island. ~!!~ The universe conspires. They met my eyes, laughed silently through the glass, and parked their car. We hugged, did the kisses on both cheeks greeting that is so great about other cultures, and they graciously offered to bring me along on their way to Akranes. There was a catch, though. I had to agree to ride with way out on a unpaved coastal road to scope out some seals. Damn.

Showed Susanna and Alberto how you can take a picture through binoculars, told them about discovering it on Boone family trip to Yellowstone, taking pics of distant buffalo. They were intrigued. I can´t help but gush love when I start telling stories about my family, and I can tell because I can see it reflected on other people´s faces. Making friends is really that simple, I´ve discovered. If you share stories about the people and places you love, people can´t help but feel some rub off and spread. Goodness is infectious. Thank god.

Kelps, seals, and cormorants. Slick sea rocks. Black sand, cold saltwater, the smell of the sea. Bumpy road, driving wind. Spanish biscuits. It is interesting, travellers often stow and hoard food from their native lands, so if you meet enough people you end up sharing foods from all over the place, with indecipherable packaging. I carry tea from England. Also great, when you learn to take comfort from tea made with cold water. You can drink from the streams flowing over the ground in Iceland. Often the glacier from which they are fed is within sight. Buh.

Stayed with a first-time couchhoster named Berglind and her fiancé Cristian in a town called Akranes just north of Reykjavik, beyond the Tunnels. People speak of these passages under the fjords with such myth, their creation shaved 90 kilometers, from the trip between those two cities. Or half the length. Fjords are not conducive to landtravel, it would seem. They invited me into their house just before making dinner. Traditional Icelandic, fish and potatoes. Dark heavy bread. Susanna and Alberto dropped me off outside their place in the driving rain, we crouch for a picture together, to be taken from my camera with a timer, perched crooked and rushed on the backseat with the door open. It didn´t take. But we shouted goodbye (again) with smiles and ran our separate ways. It wouldn´t be the last time I would meet them. Incredible. Not credible. Excellent. The picture would take the last time. I´ve got proof.

Cristian is a Search Engine Optimizer, a techie, a gamer, an observer of internet consumption patterns, a crafter of the system. A fusion of sociology and commerce, of technical organization and market research. We had an unexpectedly interesting conversation about it all. We watched television. Berglind is a master of knit. She was practicing nonstop all evening. She studies Icelandic mythology, the old ways of thought and action. She wants to return to the old ways of crafting woollen cloth, spinning it from the beginning, bringing it through to the finish. I think she will find what she seeks. She tells me that there has been a recent revival of the old crafts, that where knitting had fallen to a task for the elderly in the past, it was becoming cool for young people. We talked about the economic hardships of Iceland, about this same trend all over the modern world, about the relationship about monetary systems, wealth, wages, and craft. About how, faced with a hard reality, people recall the ways of the past, when individuals could create the commodities they need in life. About how, in some perspectives, financial failure can be good for a culture, can save dying arts and drying hearts. I´ll bite my tongue in the future about preaching the metric system as the end-all truth and way, because I realized that funky, difficult systems of measurement are just another aspect of cultural diversity, that just because something isn´t the fastest or most efficient, it isn´t necessarily of lesser quality or value. What we don´t need is a monoculture, in food or people or anything else for that matter. Diversity is nothing less than a necessity, and every time I test this fact with a new set, I discover new truths, small colorful animals hidden in the undergrowth.

My new friends introduced me to Michael Palin, a Brit who was a member of Monty Python in the past, but who has since become a successful travel documentarian. (It´s apparently very daft of me not to have known this in the first place, one of those dialogues:

Oh! Michael Palin! I keep seeing this name, who is this guy?

You don´t know who Michael Palin is!?

(Brawl ensues, cap dropped and lying on the floor, forgotten mid-knit… minutes later, bloodied and out of breath),

Alright, let´s watch Palin live for eight days on an Indian dhow…

They were kind enough to bring me along to Rekyjavik the next day. Berglind even gave me a pair of mittens she knitted herself of Icelandic wool, in case my hands got cold she said. They dropped me off at the Rainbow Theater downtown, because I had met a bunch of kids that live in the apartments on the second floor (eternally listening to major motion pictures through the walls) and figured it was a good place to start. As I walked around the building, I ran into Susanna and Alberto again. I grabbed a passerby to take the picture. Scrawled on the wall leading to the apartment flat was a message.

”The desire to play has come back to destroy the hierarchal society which banished it!”

Happy Birthday Hombra!

Day 89: Egilsstaðir

Day 89: Egilsstaðir

So. Here we are again, reformat. Recalibration. All systems go?

I am in the house of Ingunn, in a tiny cluster of buildings north of Egilsstaðir, somewhere in the upper eastern highlands of Iceland. One building, which I can see to my left out the window, is an elementary school where all the kids from the surrounding isolated sheep farms come and learn. Ingunn and her young daughter laura are there, teaching and receiving, respectively. Hemingway wouldn´t use respectively. Simplification.

Ingunn is a middle aged woman with short cropped blonde hair and a beautiful face. And a house full of books, mainly paperback novels by the greats. This morning I slide slow along the shelves in my socks, scanning. Steinbeck. Hemingway. Graham Green. Who is Graham Green? John Perkins accounts meeting him in Panama in Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Mind bomb. Read that one and learn about the history and evolution of stealthy Western imperialism, the process of monetary warfare and exploitation of less-than-developed countries the world over. The correlations between what he describes in the political coups and assassinations in Central and South America, and the reality that I felt and experienced living in Guatemala last year suddenly flash into sharp definition. A story spanning thirty years, characters: CIA, United Fruit,displaced indigenous generation of youth, turned outraged gangster generation of civil unrest. Don´t ride the chicken buses now without realizing the real possibility of abduction. And now I see more of the whole story. I want to study history.

NC Independent Study: The History of Empire Building and the Role of Globalization.

Required Text: A People´s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn

Further reading….suggestions?       (seriously. post!)

Katja and I are hitchhiking a vast circle counterclockwise around the coast of Iceland in roughly a week. This is day five. þþþ An aside: Title, Day 89  format inspired by a book, Himalaya, by some British? travelwriter named Michael Palin. Says it´s a bestseller on the cover. Each entry is titled with the day and location. So, I calculated this is the eighty ninth day since leaving the states. An arbitrary assignment of beginning, since much adventure and travel went down before leaving, and there have been long stretches of homebodiness since (lazing around with Gerhard in Mabella, wake swim breakfast sauna swim nap read tvgermannews eat laze sleep…) But why not? Warum nicht?

Morcheeba is pulsing through the house. Chill, groovy bass, slow pushing rhythm, dripping brooding female vocalist. Calmer and less sampled than Thievery Corporation, less epic and driving than Massive Attack. And delicious. Especially for a day like today, clouds settling down outside and reducing the visibility, turning the sky soft gray white. Grasses, spruces, stunted willows and bilberries growning wet through condensation more than precipitation. Contact moisture. A man just ran a couple of trespassing sheep out of the playground, flushing up a white winged, dark bodied ptarmigan in the process. I get the feeling that there are fewer species of everything here on this cold northern volcanonation.

Couchsurfing is an innovation that is drastically reshaping the way grassroots travel works. Ingunn invited us freely into her house, out of the dark and rain, with no more than a quick series through the site´s email service. Scanned my profile no doubt, but as I´ve just started it´s hardly a guarantee. Takes a bit of faith on both sides of the equation I guess. Said, among many other welcoming things and a tour of the place, ´´Make yourselves at home, you can eat anything in the refrigerator that doesn´t jump out at you, shower´s there, towels, comforters, this is my daughter, say ´hey´laura! We´re just going to finish watching Sleepy Hollow before going to bed. We´re big fans of Tim Burton in this house.‘‘ Wicked.

Katja is from Germany. We met volunteering at Solheimar, she lived a year in Reykjavik in 2006, and knows people and places. And mushrooms. We visited the only real forest in Iceland yesterday with our first couchsurfing friend and contact, Ricardo. The forest is called Atlavít, grows on the steep rocky shore of the lake Lagarfljót. We wandered around under spruces, pines, birches, aspens, willow. And not much else.  Reckless deforestation has its consequences. However, the fungal diversity was there. Apparently Germans, or maybe Europeans in general are more comfortable with the idea of gathering wild mushrooms  for food. Katja showed us a species of Birch companion that she calles bufus, a similar variety called Redhat, and a smaller yellower one called Ziegelippe, which means goatlips. Awesome. And also the large circular white variety that we call Puffball in the states, the one that children stomp to emit a cloud of spore smoke. Taken before they are ready for bursting, this species is edible as well. We took the lot to Ingunn as a welcoming gift. Probly´l cook em up for lunch later.

Ricardo is the only Mexican living in Eastern Iceland. He told me so, while he was pouring tequila shots and playing music videos on tv. It was a Saturday night, we were staying in Reydarfjordur, the only town with a pub for kilometers and kilometers. He took us to one of the epic, monstrous dams newly and controversially built in the Icelandic highlands, built to fuel power to the even more distrusted and illplanned aluminum smelting factories that have caused much civil dispute and international attention. ALCOA. The dam is called Karahnjukar. On one side is the reservoir, the other a staggeringly vast and deep canyon. It gave us the creeps to imagine the depth the water lapping coldly against our concrete footing must reach. Blackness.

Before going to the pub, Ricardo showed me how he got an American sports channel on his tv. We watched a replay of last years Bama Virginia Tech game while pregaming and eating jalapeno nachos. Surreal

Can you say Hvalfjörður?

I just arrived at a place called Solheimar in Iceland. It is self-marketed to the public as an eco-village, whatever that means. In this case, it means a small, intentional community of about a hundred permanent residents in the middle of nowhere in the south of the island.

Originally founded as a home for mentally-handicapped and orphaned children by a woman named Sesselja in the 1930s, it has now grown into more of a center of handcrafts. Almost everyone that lives at Solheimar works here. There´s a bakery, a forest nursery, a series of vegetable greenhouses, chicken coop, candle making, a weavery, art gallery, a church, apartments and homes, a coffeshop and foodstore, a geothermally heated outdoor pool, a cafeteria, a top of the line “green” building for exhibition and education.

I arrived on Saturday morning amidst the last of many summer weekend visitation days for the public. I met a guy named Hrunnerd, the first of many strange Icelandic names, spoken in a single gruff exhalation, like a sound you might make after being punched in the stomach or while heaving after a footrace. He works in Ölur, the forestry department. The name means Aspen, which is one of the several stunted species of tree cultivated here for private sale and government subsidized reforestation projects.

But I´m getting ahead of myself. I landed in Reyjavik, the capital. On the flight over from London I lost an hour (according to my watch) but gained an hour in which to live and breathe. It would seem that the trend now, on discounted flight airlines like Iceland Express and EasyJet that nothing is for free. In other words, don´t answer “Coffee” when the stewardess with the knee-clipping cart asks and expect not to pay an extortionate, “you´re trapping in a captive market at thirty-six thousand feet” price for a cup the size of a baby´s fist. But it was black, and it was delicious. And it only fueled my outrageous, barely contained excitement about soon landing in such a foreign land. Iceland´s green, Greenland´s ice, I recalled.

In the airport I made friends. On the airplane I made friends. Seems people are getting easier to talk to, but I know truly that I am just trying harder now. Ideas are for sharing. Life is for community. Also, I can profile an easy target. Young´uns with backpacks and dirty shoes. Turns out we were all headed for the same camping hostel on the outskirts of this fine nation´s capital. All took the same bus from the airport forty-five minutes into town. Grinning like a madman the whole way.

Talked to an Irishman in transit, all about teaching. Stumbled upon the subject by my rattling off my plan to fund travel through the Southeast of Asia by teaching English, and he responding that he was in fact teaching elementary school in Dubai. Asked him about the life there, about the stories I´d heard of outrageous terraforming projects and massive decadent real estate developments, and whether it was all fueled by oil money running out. He set me straight, told me that most of the wealth in Dubai is not about oil, and that the development was an attempt to create a grand industry of tourism. It must be working; my new friend was freckled and redheaded, his class comprised of a very international mix.

Changed buses. Met some Frenchmen, more young travellers on vacation. Sixth bracket French basketballers. Word to your mother. We found the campsite, huge and crowded, an exhibition of beautiful, heavily-designed angles and shapes of colorful spaceage sailcloth. Read ripstop. Rain shunning. Taunt, low and aerodynamic. A field full of friendly nomads in a strange land. We slung ours in a light rain, walked to the nearby grocery called 10-11, open 24-7.

I bought a liter of fruit juice and some dense dark rye bread. Paid in Krona. Flashback: changed all the Pounds I had in the airport in London, my last twenty. Got four thousand Krona in return. This is what it means to have a broken economy. A bankrupt state. If a nation is a business this one´s board of directors are resigning.

We walked along the seashore, a smooth paved bicycle path at the crest of the high jetty shore, volcanic stone. This is a young island, one with a fiery belly. Windy too, but I´m told that the geothermal energy is cheaper and more efficient to harvest. Also you can dodge the popular public argument that windmills disrupt the view. Not sure how I stand on that one. We walked in to Reyjavik. Passed a Viking ship sculpture. Took pictures. Marched to the top of the hill in the center of town, saw a statue of Leif Erikson presented to Iceland by the United States a millennium after his discovery of the island. Mine is a young nation. Did you know that the people of Iceland lived in a successful state of anarchy for three hundred years? It´s all recorded on animal skins in the government records archive. Then they went ran out of resources and had to sell the country.

Wandered up mainstreet with the French ballers. Lots of clever shops, galleries, modern artsy clothing, fox skins, dark suits. Found a cool coffee shop with a casual library tucked away in a nook in the back. I was browsing, looking for something profound and mindblowing to take with me in case Solheimar turned out to be a vacuum of literature, when the owner walked in. He pulled from the shelves Dreamland: A Self-Help Manual for a Frightened Nation, by Andri Snær Magnason.On the front cover is a message from sensual, brooding Icelandic female vocalist Bjork.

“This book had an enormous impact in Iceland when it came out. After Icelandic politicians had sold Icelandic nature cheap to some to some of the industrial giants of this world without the people´s consent, the Icelandic peole were upset. We didn´t get a chance to defend ourselves. Or our nature. I have a feeling this is a universal problem that our generation willfind solutions to. This book is one of these solutions.”

It was published in 2006. I just started it this morning. Got a feeling it is what I was looking for.

In the library, I got involved in a bit of a pick-up conversation with a couple of slouch-seated coffee sipping fellas about ecology and capitalism. Dropped the fact that I was trying to get to Solheimar. One of the guys offered to take me most of the way the next morning, which was cool, having made a spontaneous connection with a stranger and also finding a ride to my destination, but I have to say I could have emitted a tiny huff of disappointment. Hitchhiking is not only legal and commonplace on this small island, but with a population of only 300,000 the chances of getting picked up by a smiling sociopath and chopped into little pieces seems remote. I mean, the market is flooded with cute young Scandinavian girls backpacking on their holidays, I don´t worry.

I made soup and tea in the communal kitchen at the campsite. Six people working with hot food in a room the size of a broom closet. Excellent. Tried to go to bed (read tent?) early, but got caught by the sweet driving sulk of Massive Attack in the hostel´s commonroom. Wrote late into the night listening to the 100th Windows album, nod to the guy behind the desk controlling the tunes.

Guy and his girlfriend picked me up in the rain, took me as far as Solfoss. She greased her boots in the frontseat, waterproofing lastminute for their weekend hike in the Northern fjords. Gave me a list of impossible names to visit when I got the time. When I press the key that in Alabama would make “?”, instead I get “Þ”.

Hrunnerd picked me up from Solfoss. We listened to punkrock in the morning and drove along beautiful empty roads through wet green moonscapes. Dropped me off at the top of the hill, at the volunteer cabin. Walked through a warm entryroom full of boots and jackets, stepped into a commonroom full of young people speaking different languages. They are a group of eleven, divided in nationality and variously by language barrier, united in a common socialwork organization, WorldWide Friends. Cheesy, possibly, but look where it´s landed them. Yesterday we all hiked up a nearby mountain, eating wild blueberries, stomping sweet-smelling heather. Now I´m practicing my German with Oliver, Francie and Schtephen, my Spanish with Laura and Marita.

Whew, bringing it up to speed, I can feel the metaphorical warm breath on my neck of those behind me, panting in anxiety to use the internet. Paranoia. We are a generation lost without access to free information. An aside. Today I was an Ent. Today I planted a hundred and forty trees. Ölur is reforesting the landscape around Solheimar. Hrunnerd thinks all problems in the world can be solved by trees. Gave the example of the divided island of miserable, broken Haiti and wealthy, successful Dominican Republic. Said on GoogleEarth the border divides brown and green, that the history altering decision was to cut down all the trees by the Haitian government and to keep and guard them on the DR side. Maybe he´s write. Sure would be great if an articulate, well-informed and highly-readable journalist/historian/social commentator would write a book about it. Cross my fingers, come on Bill Bryson.

A girl from Russia took my picture. I was beaming, shirtless and strapped with sproutling trees on both hips, a yellow bazooka device called a Yawner on my shoulder. It´s a pipe with a mechanical mouth that makes holes in the soil, drop a tree baby through, whala! We´re players in the grand scheme of ecology. Fires in my mind: forest gardens, waste recycling, social enterprise. I wish I had a copy of Botany of Desire with me. Socksliding on hardwoodfloor, there´s curry in the air!

Morocco

Morocco is a strange land. Meine opa und ich, macht eine Reise fur Tanger, Fes, Meknes, Casablanca, und Tanger wieder. War seksundfiersig degrees! The driving there is intense, like in spain, but worse. Whenever there was an accident on the highway (there were several) the traffic would completely ignore all law and roadlines in a reckless battle to progress forward. Einmal, fier auto weit auf der strausse! (One time, four cars wide in the street? ((trying)) We’ll say this, I’m relieved and a little surprised that we were not involved in a traffic accident while we were there. Much heated driving.

 The markets are what make Morocco. In Fes and Meknes, ancient tubes and passages through the oldcity, lined with tiny shops where people sold meat, clothes, yogurt, honey, candy, bread, fruits, olives, funny pointy toed shoes, strange body lenght shirts for men and women, handmade crafts of copper, silver and iron, on and on and on. Like a labyrinth. I felt crushed by the crowds of people, and bombarded by the smells, those I could recognize and even more so by those I could not. The yogurt stall was the best. Apparently, (and this seems strange not to know such a simple process, but then again “inhygenic” practices are scarce in the United States) if you take a fresh, unpasteurized cup of milk and leave it for two or three days, it expands and thickens like a rising loaf of bread until it mushrooms up over the lip of the glass. Then you can (try to) drink it straight from the glass, or use a spoon if you don’t enjoy playing with your food. The texture is gelatinous, like soft, inconsistent yogurt; not as sweet, but absolutely appealing in concept and process.

And at another booth, (and by booth I mean rough space carved out of the ancient, twelve-meter-high wall of the passageway) there was a man with a heavily scarred face carving and hacking pieces from a slab of sweetness made from a mixture of honey and sesame seeds. Overly sweet, but the attraction was the fiesty clump of live, unrestrained honey bees swarming all over the table and in the surrounding air. An experience, to be sure.

The beaches were nice. The best dinner of the trip was a Cuscus. Gerhard and I spent one whole afternoon waiting around in the shade of an umbrellaed terrace in front of a small cafe on the Mediterranean coast, watching the heat wavering up from a blinding stretch of sand. A representative image of Morocco: a man leading a camel by a line, both dressed in dusty, colorful layers of strange cloth, and in the background a top-of-the-line, multimillion dollar yacht anchored peacefully in the languid harbor waters. Surreal.

I digress. The daydream ended when the matron of the cafe, a friend of my grandfather’s named Anissa, showed up with a single massive, ochre colored dish with a lid shaped line an inverted funnel. Tagine, it’s called. The dish was a meter wide. Enough food to feed ten people. Inside was a testament to Moroccan cuisine, and especially to Anissa’s patience and culinary skill.

Cuscus was the name of the entire dish. What I had previously known as the grain cuscus made up the base. There was a white and a dark variety: Anissa explained while we were all grinning and packing our faces that the reason she had taken so long is that she had to buy the dark cuscus  directly from a farmer somewhere in the Moroccan countryside, that it wasn’t sold commercially. Impossible dish?

Piled on top were a mess of safron-yellowed vegetables: hunks of sweet potato and yams, zucchini, onions and potato and carrots; slow-cooked, delicate chicken, and topped off with sweet, sweet raisins. There was a sauce as well: a white, yogurt-based concoction that was creamy and mellowed amazingly with the spice and sweetness of the cuscus proper. Anissa served each of us (six people) individually from the central, communal dish. By this I mean she dished out the initial portions as usual, but then throughout the course of the meal would augment her constant conversation by adding specific spoonfuls to individuals, saying things like, “Here Mozy, the sweet yam, you try it, you like sweet things here.” and without pause filling a plate and continuing the conversation across the table, not missing a beat. Very much leading the meal, but gracefully and with the maternal pride of a cook and host who knows she’s created something special and impressed everyone present, as planned. Everyone is a friend of Anissa.

I swam one day in the baking midday heat on a picturesque, white-sand beach, Atlantic side. Thousands of people, on a Sunday. Weekenders. The waves were powerful obvious,  the bodysurfers, many. Kids with fins would ride the big ones in from a distance, trading their magic shoes in with their waiting friends in the shallows. Treading water.

I got in on a soccer juggling circle on the beach. Six or seven kids, amorpheously shifting in and out of participation when you weren’t looking, new ones joining for a moment before continuing along the shore. Every big wave would flood the crowded shore, wetting the powdery sand to a paste, creating more incentive not to let fall the ball, or else it would stop solid on the ground, no bounce, with a sickly “SPUK.” Way too crowded to be playing such a game, toddlers constantly wandering through the danger zone, the ball too often careening into an oblivious, elderly woman’s lap or back, into the dazzling maw of colorful umbrellas, grown wide and filling all available space in pattern, like so many techicolor trees fighting for sunlight. Eventually a patrolling cop on an ATV ended the game, pointing out the obvious danger, and the kids slinked away into the crowd.

Soccer is one of the global languages. We communicated much better in play, then when I tried to explain to the group (who spoke only Arabic and French) where I came from, what I was doing, which city the Michael Jordan played in, where New York and LA and Las Vegas are. (They only asked about the last four.) Sign language also works internationally. And having a floor made of sand doesn’t hurt when drawing a grand map for visual explanation.

The king, Muhammed Six? has a palace in every major city in the country. The people adore him. His framed picture hangs in every restaurant, every shop. His face is young, he must be in his late thirties, early forties. Apparently, his father was hard, a tyrant. The new king is much kinder, and thus, more popular.

Once the King had a pain in his back. So he built a massive, state-of-the-art multi-million dollar thermal spa in a mountain town on the outskirts of the magnificent city of Fes, known as the oldest city on the planet and marked as a World Heritage Site. We spent three days in this small, outskirting village, visiting the thermal pool within the spa each morning. Built on location for a natural outpouring of geothermally heated, mineral-rich sulphurous water, the whole place reeks of rotten eggs. But the health benefits are blatant and widely sought after. I saw a bent, hobbled man from the Netherlands, from another continent away, wobbling with debilitating arthritis into the wet, warm womb of regal rehabilitation. (lol)

The central pool is where we spent our time. In a circular room, sulphur steam lifting off the surface of a pool fifteen meters in diameter, two jets of untouchably hot, milky-opaque water continuously pouring at either end of the wide steps. Strange warbles of sound from hushed splashes and wispers, amplified and distorted by the dome-ceiling acoustics, hypnotic dancing light reflected through windows, off the water’s face and onto the curved, deep-blue tiled walls. Try floating, eyes closed, silent breathing on the surface; inhales rise, exhales sink you under salty.

Language Theory

It turns out that children mocking foreign accents may be onto something more than just your nerves.

In my ongoing attempt to acquire the German language, I stumbled upon a web page concerning cognates and sound shifts. People always say that it is easy to learn a new ‘Romantic’ language if you already speak one. These languages are generally the ones that have evolved from Latin over the centuries,  in various geographic and cultural regions in Europe. The result is what we collectively recognize as present day French, German, English, Italian, Portuguese, etc. Because of the shared ancestry of sound and structure, there is a class of words called cognates, those which have evolved the least from their ancient beginnings.

The great beauty of learning a second or third language of the Romantic kind is that these cognates hardly require any ‘learning’ at all. Words like Kreditkarte, nuklear, Nudismus, Nitroglyzerin, Neurotiker in the good ol’ gruff German, or sexo, drugas, and musica in the smooth, lisping Spanish are all examples of the similarities of our shared spoken sound.

When I was in Guatemala learning Spanish last spring, I would often cheat when I didn’t know a word, and, like the High British child we all used to pretend to be, I would simply apply the appropriate foreign accent; one that we probably learned from t.v. or some other conduit of cultural education (like school, for example). Amazingly, my professors would let the guess pass without a blink or reprimand: as I subconsciously absorbed and reproduced their Spanish,  my guesses would more and more often be correct, and I discovered that what I had regarded as  fudging on my homework was actually becoming an ability to decode the natural pattern of spoken Spanish! Kinda blew my mind, anyway. How much easier it is to simply mock a foreign accent than memorize six hundred flash cards or crawl through a Spanish copy of Lord of the Rings with a fat Spanish/English dictionary in hand.

Anyway, the marvelous information-integration that is the internet gave me this, when I asked it politely earlier this afternoon: http://german.about.com/library/blcognates_shiftC.htm

Copy and paste, and gape. This is a list, partially inspired by the studies and musings of one  ”Jakob Grimm (1785-1863), one of the “fairy tale” brothers), proposed Grimm’s law to explain the various sound shifts between languages.” Here I have today found what amounts to the ultimate cheat-sheet of communication for use in the Deutschland, especially with the cute lady-Germans that I keep running into at a charming local bar cleverly called ‘Wonderbar’ (pronounced Vundeba!) on the Frisian Island of Sylt, located in the North Sea off the upper coast of Germany. My sixth grade English teacher would slap my wrist for this run-on. Sorry, Mrs. Little.

Aaaanyways, if you are a fellow geek of language, you may get down with the sickness of cognates. I know I will.

Central Park Sycamore Stream

Maybe there’s a race or some organization: a continuous flow of longboarders, one after the other. Twenty, thirty, forty, all individuals, seemingly disconnected but for their directions and mode, orbiting Central Park. They outnumber the bicyclists, even the joggers. Dreaded, latino, tattoed, hats, old, young. Helmets, bags, shirtless, grinning, heaving, skilled and not. It must be some event: now a bicycle powered rickshaw passes, a woman in the back videotapes with an expensive, shoulder-holstered machine… either these people are united by Saturday or by passion. Certainly nearing one hundred now. Cute EEs! Walk on the path below my sycamore perch, some glance and hide sneaky grins.. they’re shopping, self aware and dressed up. Cuties, damnit!

It’s a hill. Some of our fellas can’t make it. More and more now, and percentage wise, but fewer in total. Definitely a race. Such an array. And the smoothest pushers were in the front, alternating feet, keeping stride, using their of hand to push on their pumping knee, their weighted knee. The slow ones in the back don’t know. Laggers lack technique. An introverted couple walks by, spies and smiles at me. They can appreciate a writer in a tree: a loner.

No more longboarders now. Where do the couriers hang out? Breasts over ribs. Where are those who throw didgeridoo? Women, cute ladies on boards, laughing last. How goes, the sing-song call game? Smile back, when found out? Perhaps I am sitting for attention. Attention moves eyes, hones energy; I’m creating a lucidity, in all hopefulness. Grabs string-ends, does he? Never poses a question without already knowing the end.

My blood is beginning to pinch. Awaits Martha with pleasure. She’s clever, refined, discreet, of good humor. This place: here I sit in a hub of energy.

She says, ‘You look very comfortable up there.’ Recumbants hold a secret wonder. He’s learned, sitting and watching in a sea of eyes and fractal consciousnesses, a high provoked from unsung stories. Math: increasing variables yield increasing complexity, increasing completeness. To consider all things, god thinks in terms of all ends. Frustration comes from too few inputs.. an inherent anxiety with too simple a game, to transparent a puzzle. Dune trumps Pillars. Connectors return the glance and hold? B. Russell..’On occasion attaching a question mark to the end of an assumed is healthy.’ Some of these hipsters can’t wait to be geriatric. Stephen and Max will make great ones. CAN’T YOU FEEL IT? THE SOCRATIC METHOD’S COMING ON_, DRAWING THE LUCID WATCHER: WRITES, BLOOMS IN PUBLIC NOW.. REALIZING THE FLOWING, FEEDING, FORCE; THE ANCIENT GOD OF BE:

Strange human interaction. Tap the collective human Tao. He wants to be a writer, he wants to letter, believes the abundant, conspiring universe. Think about it this way: each glance and smile enhances the immune systems: net growth in god and joy. Cute girls on silly mopeds in skirts. Wakes up to infinite information: there’s burlap netting below me on the hillside, erosion control. Ingenious, efficient, cost and labor effective, organic and recycling. And I’ve been sitting in this place for thirty-five minutes. Degrees of striation and stretch in the fabric’s structure yield topography in the miniature. WANTS TO BE AN ORGAN-IZER, a creator of system. Aside, saw an obese, sluggish, chop-tailed squirrel, probably discovered refuse scavendry. Drafters in action, so many ounces of thin, fitted performance gear. Structure of time is cylindrical, after all. Walking distracts the eyes distracts the mind distracts the muse. Sit. Still. On a public square and see the swirling truth. Can’t type on a computer in a tree. Infinite free form art. Italianos. Legs asleep again. Walks now? Tree climb again.