Chicago, Illinois
It comes off almost as a sigh.
Chicago-O’Hare is well known for being a finicky place to make connections, due to weather or traffic. I’ve mostly had good luck coming through here, with only one weather delay. Today though I have enjoyed the hospitality of the C concourse for most of the day, compliments of a United flight to Vancouver that was cancelled at 9:00. I’m now awaiting the call for the 3:25 flight home.
So what does the C concourse have to offer the stranded traveller? There are Starbucks outlets, but they lose their appeal after a couple of shots of watery espresso. Hudson News is omnipresent but despite selling The Atlantic, The New Yorker and The Economist, they seems suspiciously short on Harper’s. I am half imagining that the reason is political, given Harper’s stinging rebukes of establishment American politics of late. Whch is why I want to read it. Instead, I bought a copy of Best American Short Stories 2006, edited by Stephen King who provides an entertaining and honest assessment about the state of American short stroy writing: alive but not well. His selections for the anthology are great.
Food…so not much around here of note. I’ve always appreciated the fact that you can get Odwalla juice pretty freely around here. I’m loaded on some kind of blueberry B-vitamin power mix. Of the outlets, the Corner Bakery has the nicest sandwiches, freshly made pannini. When I need a fill, the Manchu Wok offers heaps of non-descript Chinese food, MSG free at least and it fills the belly for the four hour flight to Vancouver on United, which I have redubbed “The Hungry Skies.”
Wireless is cheap, at $6.95 a day which is a steal if you’re logged on for as long as I have been, and there are these power stations that are nice to work at. Power plugs in the waiting areas are scarce and nearly all in use by businessmen sucking down the watts while they make uberimportant cell phone calls.
And so the day proceeds, slowly, without any remarkable incidents, watching the crowds ebb and flow and waiting for UA1119 to spirit me to the west coast, eight hours later than I expected to get home.
Burlington, Vermont
I grew up in Ontario and this my favourite time of year in Eastern North America for many reasons. But chief among those reasons is what happens to forests out here in the fall. It is hard to describe to anyone who has never seen them, a maple forest in the fall, where the colours are bright yellow, orange and red. Pitched against a blue sky, the scene is iconic, beautiful and stirs up a nostalgia in me for home.
Flying from Choicago to Burlington today, we crossed over the maple woodlots of the farming country of southern Ontario and upstate New York which were alive with the colour of turning. Then over the Adirondacks, past Mount Marcy and Skylight, two peaks I have climbed upon, these ancient worn down mountains, 20 times older than the ones I live on now but still showing their grandeur and the shape of peaks and valleys covered with pine and spruce with pockets of yellow birch and red maple. Over Lake Champlain, and into Burlington, a lovely older town on the lake, biger and more modern than I remembered it from a previous visit in 1993 but still small enough to have a main street feel about it.
Met up with my Art of Hosting mate Lenore Mewton and we stopped in at the CommunityMatters reception at the Echo Centre and then on for an excellent meal of contemporary Cantonese food at A SIngle Pebble.
Beautiful part of the world to retrun too, and I’m eagerly looking forward to the gathering tomorrow.
My friend Peter Rukavina is a pretty good traveller. He usually make a couple of trips a year to Europe, some with family in tow, and he offers this wonderful guide to travelling in the continent, RuK style.
Bekkevoort, Belgium
Arrived here last night in preparation for the first gathering of Art of Hosting practioners in Europe, the first Art of Hosting on the Art of Hosting. I’m staying with my friend Ria Baeck, in a small converted stable on an old farm in the countryside outside of Brussels. Tom Hurley joined us this morning from San Francisco (he’s sleeping right now) and Toke, Monica, George Por, Maria Scordialos and Sarah Whitely and others are all arriving this afternoon. Tomorrow we start in a learning centre about 15 minutes away from here called Heerlijckyt.
The flight from Vancouver, through Heathrow was a strange experience for me, It was in many ways a journey back through some personal time and landscapes that have formed me. In 1978, when I was almost exactly the same age as my daughter, I moved with my family to England, where we lived for the next three years. Since 1981, when we left I haven’t been back to Europe at all, so it was interesting landing at Heathrow again, almost 29 years to the day since I first landed there. There is nothing recognizable about the place to me, and I used to know it pretty well. I was an avid planespotter in my youth and I used to spend whole Saturdays with my friend Dominic Adams at Heathrow, watching the world come and go. Today I’m hard pressed to even guess where we used to watch planes from, if indeed that structure is even there anymore.
But this journey was also significant for other quick visits to personal landscapes. In flying from Vancouver to London, we travelled over almost all of the major homelands of my ancestry. First the fields of Saskatchewan, where my great grandmother’s family farmed, and then the Ojibway lands of Ontario, and much later, the homeland of my father’s family, the north of Ireland. We were within view of Moy, the town where my father’s family left from in the 1860s to come to Canada. A few minutes later our low earth orbit took me over the Isle of Man, where my some of my mom’s mother’s family came from. We sort of missed Scotland although it lay not far off our port wing, and that was it; the sum total of the landscapes in which my genes had travelled most recently. I covered in nine hours what it took my genetic material hundreds of years to do.
Ria met me at the Brussels airport and we drove east through southern Flanders to this little rural farmhouse, nestled in a beautifully tended garden. All I know about Flanders has been shaped by the Canadian narrative of the First World War, and so a lot of what I was seeing in this incredibly peaceful and pastoral land was some ancient grief of the wars that have raged over time in this place. I even pulled out a CA$10 bill when I got here and noticed for the first time that it has the first stanza of “In Flanders Fields” printed on it. (I’ve been travelling so much these days I currently have four currencies in my wallet, Canadian and American dollars, Euros and British pounds)
So here I am, happily ensconced in a Flanders fields and awaiting the arrival of some mates for what will prove to be a tasty gathering. More to come as we cook together.