Re: Foreign travel, anywhere to anywhere

“Up, up and away!”
—Action Comics, New York City, 20th Century

Who were you abroad? Where did you go? What did you find? What did you think?

For reference: four articles on a 2008 visit to Egypt and South Africa, where I lived as a child. They're archived (The wicket gate) as . . .

• Letter from Cairo
• Letter from Johannesburg
• Letter from Durban
• Letter from Kleinmond

Letter from Kleinmond

{In 2008 I spent nine weeks in Africa, where I lived as a child. Here, the 4th of four articles written as letters to the hometown newspaper:}

KLEINMOND, South Africa--Delegates to the "power-sharing" talks under way at Cape Town between factions of the politically torn, economically melted down nation of Zimbabwe to the north raised weary eyebrows by walking out of their R750,000 ($100,000) three-star accommodation after 24 hours in favor of a five-star resort at Pretoria.

Among their complaints (reports the Cape Times) was a lack of in-room minibars and the fact all rooms were not equal, which led to delegates "refusing to socialize after the meetings or around the breakfast table."

Think of it: All this costly misery for the politicians of a country where I recently bought a $500 million note and another $50 million note, Zimbabwean, dated "on or before Dec. 31, 2008," both for $2, American. (I was robbed: The rate rapidly rose to 100 billion and then 200 billion to the dollar.)

Lavish spending by public servants of a sister republic is page-11 news in South Africa, itself beset by stories of greed and infighting among factions of its own oligarchy, by widespread corruption, rising prices, high unemployment and crime rates. By a recent poll, some two-thirds of whites asked would like to move to another, presumably five-star country. But fourteen years after the establishment of this "Rainbow Nation," the dissatisfaction is more about opportunity and class than about race.

A quarter of the well-off class now are black professionals, but some 30 percent of all blacks polled also would prefer other-country accommodations. Poor township blacks who had dreamed of homes, land and a job under the new regime now are taking to the streets. Getting away from them, whites currently are in movement from "the North" (Johannesburg and Pretoria) to the eastern and western Cape provinces, drawing grumbles there for the culture of high fences and attack dogs they bring with them.

There are strong contrasting views toward all this woe, however. One is that none of it actually is happening and to say so is unpatriotic. Another, which I as merely a visitor can subscribe to, holds that too many people are being a little high-strung. In the course of introducing my family to a country where I attended elementary school, I have sampled the full range of three-star South Africa. For a lower-income North State resident, its bed-and-breakfasts, cottages, rondavels, chalets and guesthouses have been at least adequate. Delegates at a talkathon should in any case have been drinking at the house bar that most three-star outfits provide. It's just more sociable.

You wouldn't want to stay in a township, unless it's three-star (and some hostelries already are). But three-star, midrange South Africa, from my experience, is in many ways exceptional, most of them positive. I recommend it.

It's not a motel, for one thing, and not part of a chain. It may be a thatched cottage or a room in a historical home, and it probably is all cozy and picture-pretty and planted in a garden, with a driveway and courtyard paved with bricks arranged in circles and scallops. It has a bath if not a shower, maybe a toilet adjoining with no door. (One in Sabie had a Victorian tub at the foot of the bed in the center of the room.) But it includes a "full English breakfast" of two eggs, sausage, thick bacon, beans, fried tomatoes, fruit salad, cereal, toast and coffee. It comes with daily made service. An all for $20-$30 a person.

South Africa has these places down every street, signposted at the corner.

In ("Ostrich Capital of the World") Oudtshoorn, two nights ago, we had the entire upper floor of a Victorian parsonage for the Dutch Reformed "mother church" across the lane; at no extra charge, the tones of choir practice wafted to our balcony stoep, thoughtfully appointed with easy chairs and capsule biographies of Their Royal Highnesses the Queen Mother and the Queen, along with an Afrikaans New Testament. The furnishings are all antique, the furniture crafted from now-rare stinkwood and yellowwood ($80 for 3).

But a week before, we resided in a hippie pizza joint up a muddy hill at Coffee Bay on the coast, above an all-night trance dance taking place in the banana trees below, for $55.

This, now, is being written from Apartment #1 of a vacation house at an unassuming village, Kleinmond, on the atmospheric but much cooler coast below Cape Town: no garden, but there is an exquisite Blue Flag beach across the road - river lagoon, crisp, blue-green waves and gnarled rocks - and towering purple mountains behind, set against a World Heritage ecozone ($48).
Until now, especially where we were taken into somebody's home, however weary of company they may have been, we have been able to count on the bonus of wonderful, old-fashioned conversation, often occurring late at night over Klipdrift brandy and Coke, the lubricant of cultural choice here for many. These encounters have been as memorable as the trademark ones with game animals:

The displaced Viennan now an adventure-tour guide, near Kruger Park, and his stories of monkey shines, stubborn lions and elephant browsing so close at night "you could hear them urinating and you could even smell it."

The two lightning-protection installers from Johannesburg, huddled with us around a coal fire in the sitting room of an old stone mansion on a chilly night in Mossel Bay, trading revelations about the others' history and present state of being.

The pert B&B owner descended from every Dutch and French Huguenot family in the phone book, a little insecure though she owns a huge, scenic swath of central Oudtshoorn and her husband an old farm up a no doubt scenic valley in nearby mountains. God, she feels, "put both white and black people in Africa for a reason"; she cites the zebra for confirmation of this intelligent design and frets that forces may be at work to "take the white out of the zebra."

Here at Kleinmond, owing maybe to building configuration, the conversation has been missing. Separate upstairs apartments are occupied by solitary males, both silent and maybe sinister. The gothic atmosphere - those worries about the future - that's drama in a country without much television: three to five channels, where available, running old U.S. movies, education, Afrikaans soap operas that veer into English and the news in Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho or, yes, Afrikaans.

A country where movie theaters are scare and vital road signs may be in any one of four of these languages. Where toilets flush from the center of the tank, by pulling a knob up or pushing it down. A country of chilly nights in winter (which this now is) widely without heaters. Where liquor isn't available on Sundays until 2 p.m. and then not for long - where, indeed, a small town like Kleinmond shuts down and goes home for the night at 4 p.m.

Late on a Sunday night, an owl hoots rhythmically in the mist out back, and the tense American upstairs continues to pace, bouncing his small ball and watching his window. He has been doing that for two days and nights. Maybe he too needs a five-star facility.

Letter from Durban

{In 2008 I spent nine weeks in Africa, where I lived as a child. Here, the 3rd of four articles written as letters to the hometown newspaper:}

DURBAN, South Africa--Successful overseas travel is all about making connections. Catching the plane, the taxi. Finding the right exit on a strange freeway in a foreign land, more challenging. Connecting with the people who can help you - or even save your neck.

Durban, on South Africa's warm Indian Ocean coast, is saying good-bye, as I write, to holidaying families at the beach with school children between the winter and spring terms. It also is fairly crawling with bug experts from distant lands such as the U.S., all drawn here by the 32nd International Congress of Entomology and Durban's winter sun.

The value to me and my traveling family, of these separate developments, is considerable, it turns out. Nightly accommodation will now be a lot easier to book and less expensive but for a new price rise to beat the country's 9 percent inflation rate. And I have found a promising general destination here for some of the refurbished computers that Redding resident Jim Ballard gives away free to the needy.

He and I agreed before this return trip to the country where I attended elementary school, that South Africa was a worthy destination and that I would try to help place them. The reason for the present optimism has to do with stinkbugs.

A woman sharing the Afro Colonial sitting room of a bed-and-breakfast across the street from the Durban Botanic Garden had her head buried, other night, in study materials - was she a student? No, she said, she was presenting a paper Thursday at the bug event. Important insect people were flying in from all over, and she was honestly more botanist than entomologist. Her topic? I enquired. Stink bugs - their use as a food item by two peoples in Limpopo Province, where she works as an environmental educator.

A certain model of stinkbug, fatter than ours, is a much sought after - and almost depleted - delicacy there; enterprising outsiders are bringing them in. By a special method, the stink is removed, and the bugs are then eaten fresh or dried like pumpkin seeds, with a similar crunch. Her Powerpoint file was impressive, cataloguing all aspects of stinkbug life. I and the host were intimidated, almost, into sampling from the pile of pale carcasses presented, until her husband said: "Oh, but don't make them eat these dry ones."

Here's the deal: The husband, it develops, is a computer teacher in a private school at Haenertsburg. He is sure he can find someplace in the lush but under-equipped Olifants River region that could put Ballard's computers to use. He's going to talk it around, meantime taking his two irrepressible young daughters daily to the beach and uShaka Marine World.

Another Redding connection ("connexion," actually, in this UK-influenced part of the world): Up the trail to a waterfall near Sabie, in Mpumalanga Province, my wife stopped a man and a girl wearing a sweatshirt that said "Austin." Was she from Texas? No, but she was attending college in my hometown, Sherman, and her father was Ed Taylor, formerly a forester for Champion International in Anderson and the partner of my wife's mother's next-door-neighbor.

Ed would like his former associates in the States to know he is happily at work in the forests of Africa, for York Timber. He could, I would imagine, write a book about forestry differences. I myself am amazed how South Africans manage to harvest eucalyptus poles straight as lodgepole pines, cutting and bundling them in the field like bales of hay, when those derelict eucalyptus groves south of Red Bluff are presented as a vision of money to be made, frustrated by a wood prone to warping and cracking. Another connexion, this one just personal, with Shaka, the Zulu historical figure, large as life still today: The set for Shaka Zulu, a 1985 miniseries, has been turned by a hotel group into a sort of Zulu Knott's Berry Farm (the funky pre-1970s one), up an improbably bumpy road near Eshowe. Despite Hollywoodization, everything here is authentic, from the millet beer you can drink from the communal dipper, to the dancing to pounding drums.

While there, through being talkative, I met a man my age who had been dropped off in my dad's three-ring tent during a Durban evangelistic campaign in about 1948. (My father appears to have been the first American-style evangelist to come here.) The preacher was a Texan, the presentation dramatic. "Man, is this church or is this show business?" the man remembers thinking. He had been dumped there by his father and instructed to "find the path," he said. Interesting that he remembered the episode, from 60 years later - and how improbable that I then connected with him at a time and place.

As improbable, almost, are those instances where people seem to show up when you really need them to - like guardian angels. We've had three. The first was a trucker in Botswana who cleared our path on a pitch-black night up the country's narrow two-lane north-south artery, over a course littered with cattle, goats, warthogs, elephant and, once, a big rig broken down in the north lane with only brush for a hazard marker.

The second was the trucker, already mentioned, who inflated our flat last tire from his airbrakes tank so that we could limp to a garage in Nata, Botswana, and repairs. (That tire then conveniently blew out only two kilometres from the gate of our next destination, instead of 200.)

The third angel was Lily, Zulu housemaid of the excellent Botany Bay B&B, where we stayed here. We had taken a taxi to see the so-called Indian market. (Durban has the largest Indian population outside India.) On a Sunday, almost all the stalls were closed, and we wandered away through a sprawling open area resembling a busy train station, where Africans were hawking everything from old batteries to traditional medicine - from there further outside recommended boundaries to the emphatically untouristic chicken and then the teeming produce market.

And here, with no taxis anywhere on the horizon, we found Lily, making her way home - or she found us. "It is me!" she had to say twice.

Letter from Johannesburg

“Do not give strangers a ride under any circumstances.”
—Around-About-Cars, South African rental agency instruction

“A wanderer in a foreign country cannot easily find his proper place,hence it is a great thing to grasp the meaning of the time.”
—I Ching, “The Commentaries,” Hexagram 56

{In 2008 I spent nine weeks in Africa, where I lived as a child. Here, the 2nd of four articles written as letters to the hometown newspaper:}

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa--Where Southern Africa is concerned, the truism about not being able to "go home again" crashes headlong into another: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

My American parents, returning in 1983 to the Witwatersrand region of South Africa, where we lived in 1948-1950, found our name still listed in the Johannesburg phone book. It's not there now. Our old house at 45 8th Avenue, Highlands North, is there, as I find on my own return visit. But this formerly all-white suburb is today a stretch nearer the now-black - and crime-ridden - city center, the whites and the money (whites still have most of it) having moved further north and constructed opulent malls to accumulate in.

My old bedroom. where a thief with a long, razor-blade-embedded, hooked pole was surprised by my father one night pulling my jeans and the blanket off my bed through the latch hole of the window burglar screen - that is now hidden behind a landscaped swimming pool and the whole thing walled in and barely visible through an iron security gate. My push on the intercom buzzer goes unanswered, though cars line the driveway. Then entirely open to the street, the neighborhood is now entirely walled in, strung with razor wire and guard-posted. So is the whole city.

But the suburbs are now democratically, racially mixed. "Everything is!" says the white proprietor of a "bottle shop" in the Wal-Mart-style "hypermart" nearby, who is old enough to have benefited from the now discredited "apartheid" system of racial separation. (The center then was a produce stall on a truck farm.) "That's a good thing in a way. On the other hand, you have to keep a sharp look out: Look behind you, but also look on your left, look on your right, look ahead. You must be very careful now."

The vacant lot where my father introduced American-style tent evangelism to a recalcitrant Union of South Africa (U.S.A.), is now a Shell station. But the church his efforts built still adjoins grassy Patterson Park, the iron fence seven feet higher than then and topped with the ubiquitous razor wire. The primary school I attended in back has actually expanded, but all its students but one are now black, white parents having gone elsewhere when the end of busing, a few years ago, exposed them to the real risk of carjacking; the curriculum now includes Zulu. Our unannounced arrival ranks as something of a Second Coming, bringing instant recognition and a room-by-room tour.

The Doll House drive-in on Louis Botha Avenue, which we visited after Dad's four-nightly services, still serves the same whopper cheeseburgers and banana malts thick with real fruit; the expanded menu includes a "Dagwood sandwich" and window service, and the carhops and most of the customers are black. We look to the right and the left across the parking lot, snapping photos. Is this dangerous? Later we get lost, threading the maze of walled streets still carrying the Afrikaans designation of laan (lane), picking our way from place to place on the instruction of gate security people, all black and invariable friendly. Unfamiliar birds in unwonted profusion squawk and twitter on all sides and above - in the midst of danger, a tropical garden. Did I mention the electric fences?

Johannesburg, Africa's commercial capital, lies far to the north, on a southern latitude equivalent to Havana, Cuba, near 6,000 feet in elevation; nights dip briefly to the 40's now in mid-winter, but days are warm and the winter sun hot on the skin. We drive north from here on a toll road (on the left side, in a "hired" car) through a scrubby landscape that strongly resembles the view from Airport Road east of Redding, California, but with baboons. We are bound for Botswana and, from that country, into a corner of another - Zimbabwe - one week before the scheduled "runoff" election (ultimately reduced to a single candidate, the President).

Road signs are still the same schizoid combination of English and Afrikaans (the Dutch-based creole of South Africa's first white population), but now the towns themselves are being stripped of their Afrikaans names in favor of Bantu ones, so we are directed first to Nylstroom ("Nile stream," a geographical confusion of the first-arriving Boer farmers), then to Modimolle, but the signs indicate the same turnoff - to Ellisras and Laphelale, again one and the same place.
Victoria Falls town, though, in the corner of Zimbabwe whither we're bound, shows no sign of budging from the staid colonial character with which it has been endowed since its "discovery" by missionary David Livingstone. It shows no sign, either, of the racial - and tribal - tensions dominating the news from here. A (white) woman on our tour bus to the Falls turns in her front seat as we park outside some shops. "See how it is here?" she demands rhetorically. "In spite of what you read - look, everybody is friendly and there's no trouble at all. It's the same in Cape Town. It always depends on where you choose to go."

I personally am looking for the initials I tried to carve in a tree outside the staid, posh, colonial Victoria Falls Hotel when I was 9 before being stopped by a policeman. (I was dead certain then of being carted off to prison.) No luck with that, or course. But I note that the trees that are likeliest candidates for honors have lost many of their branching trucks - my name doubtless with them.

Back again at our northern Botswana base for the Falls excursion, round an open bar opening on the Chobe River, we strike up conversation that night with a (white) woman leathery of complexion and about my own age. She is nostalgic, savoring earlier milestones in a life spent entirely in Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia), Zambia (Northern Rhodesia) and Botswana (Bechuanaland): driving with her children to Maun across the red Kalahari Desert and scraping sand from under her wheels with her hands when she got stuck, so as not to damage her freshly done nails.

"It was very different then," she says. "You could go anywhere on a whim, without all that fuss over papers and documents at the crossings."

She recalls the days spent on her father's tobacco farm in Southern Rhodesia - the occasional all-night gatherings of white farmers of the region, adults below and children segregated inside a grass shelter made for them in a nearby koppie (hill) of their own, with their own cadre of servants. "It was all separate then - the kids and the adults. We never knew what the big people were doing, you know." Her account reminds me at once of the Booker Prize-winning memoir by another child of Rhodesia, Alexandra Fuller: Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight.

"Yes!" she exclaims. "She was just here last week, that woman, asking questions and trying to find someone who knew her parents. She was looking for clues that would explain why her mother killed herself. She only just left the other day."

My own parents died in 2000 and 2003, rich in years but, to their terrible disappointment, short of the expected Second Coming of the Lord (Nkosi in Zulu). In their place I am leading my own Redding-bred family - a wife and two daughters of the Video Age - through a home in my own remembered past - stepping gingerly - looking this way and that. It's like picking your way across a minefield in the garden of Eden.

(Did I mention the white lions, the herds of elephant? The two blown tires from a single pothole in Botswana? The distance trucker/angel who kept us going by rigging a transfusion from his airbrakes tank?)

Letter from Cairo

{In 2008 I spent nine weeks in Africa, where I lived as a child. Here, the first of four articles written as letters to the hometown newspaper:}

CAIRO--Rocking and rolling aboard the first-class train between Aswan and Cairo, we relax a little. We are used by now to the dense tableau of beauty and filth that flies past us through the streaked window. We have been in Egypt for one week now, and our digestive systems are adjusting, along with our eyes. Somewhere between Qena and Tel el-Amarna, the wife relaxes also and gives me a kiss: "Thank you for bringing me."

We are near the start of a nine-week visit to Africa, where I lived for 10 years as a child and young man. For many Americans this would seem to be a trip into danger. Indeed, we are sharing the back of the compartment with several police in uniform and plain clothes, all packing side arms - here, apparently, for our security. The country we cross - Middle Egypt - is Egypt's hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism.

In 1997 a tour group of Americans and Europeans was gunned down outside the tomb of Hatshetsup, on the West Bank. But those terrorists have been hunted down and killed or driven to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the others are dormant. With security checkpoints at the door of every hotel, Egypt now is thought to be safe.

With that settled, it must be said that it is a place of compelling beauty and wonder, every frame of the visitor's view-finder loaded with exotic detail enough for an hour of reflection. Bananas and date palms in clumps and groves rise from tidy plots of sugarcane and rice to the horizon, tended by men in their gauzy gallibiyahs, all fed by irrigation canals from the Nile. Canal banks are piled with dredged mud and trash - a slurry of broken concrete, discarded plastic water bottles and bags, car parts and tin cans that finds its way into the fields without apparent damage to the legendary fertility of Misr ("the black land"), Egypt's own name for itself since ancient times.

As a metaphor that mix will do for Cairo as well. The present downtown, latest in a series, was erected by European architects and engineers 150 years ago for the Khedive Ismail, in a former marsh along the river. Ismail bankrupted the economy with the effort and so lost his country when Britain repossessed it for collateral.

Today the central district is a warren of once-elegant stone buildings, caked with smog (Cairo's air, like that of the Nile Valley entire is dirtier than LA in the 1970s), the richly ornamented cornices and balconies remain intact. But whole sections of many buildings have been abandoned. The cage elevators linking floors tend not to work, and the marble staircases that are the alternative are worn in center and smeared and littered with dirt; broken windows on interior open spaces reveal balconies and rickety fire stares draped with drying laundry, strung with fraying wires and piled with the detritus of years.

Many of the less expensive hotels ($25-$45 for a double) are found here. We left one such for another, newer, with a fifth floor terrace overlooking Cairo's fashion district, around the Talaat Harb Square; brightly lighted all night, it resembles Paris. But look again: The coffee (ahwa) and tea (shai) sippers at the sidewalk cafes are smoking sheesha, a sweetened tobacco, in water pipes; glazed eyes suggest it is laced with hashish. That skyscraper on the horizon is a mosque minaret. The street entrance to the building is marked with handprints in sheep's blood left by celebrants of the last Ramadan, after their fast-ending feast - said my guide, "to protect from (how you say?) envy."

The social system is, by American standards, archaic and insulting to womanhood; the women in our party were subject to a range of outrageous behavior, from constant marriage proposals to groping in the streets, especially when shoulders and heads were left uncovered. No, this isn't Kansas, or even Cottonwood. If "Westerners" (why are we called that?) were to find anything here to envy, it would be spirit of Egypt's people. The single word to describe it best is exuberance. The people you will meet, everywhere, smile and laugh a lot more than we do - however miserable their circumstances to our eyes - and they are almost unfailingly friendly. Most, because we are friendly too and tip well, unlike the Europeans on both counts, love Americans. They admire our stable democracy, if not always our permissive culture. (Intensely interested in the current presidential contest, they pry us for insight. Their own favorite was Barack Obama - his name means "blessing” in Arabic - until a statement pledging support to Israel. Now they don't know.

Except for three relatively quiet hours before dawn, the streets are choked with honking vehicles and dodging pedestrians from curb to curb, in defiance of lane striping and traffic lights, an organic stream like ants in movement. Yet we saw not a single collision or instance of "road rage."

Hurtling down the Giza road to the Pyramids, early one morning soon after our arrival in Egypt, our taxi driver put the pedal to the metal to catch a second taxi carrying others in our party of six. Edging to within inches of the car at 75 miles per hour, he reached out and give its rear fender a resounding slap. The startled look on the faces inside was beyond haggling over price."Welcome to Egypt!" he roared happily.

Re: Foreign stereotypes about U.S.; the U.S. reputation abroad

On a recent nine-week visit to South Africa & Egypt, I met little of the expected—earned?—hostility against the U.S. for its foreign involvements. Off the opinion pages, people were friendly. Some were excited to meet us. I tried several dodges as a precaution: I was first “Canadian”—now a joke that brings a big laugh. then “Russian” (“ya Russki!”) because Russians abroad are supposed to be money-less. Finally I became “Californian.” That brought a big knowing smile and the clarification: “Ah, American!” If I said I was from “the U.S.A.,” I got the same clarification. People abroad wanted me to be, specifically, American.

Re: U.S. stereotypes & attitudes toward foreigners & non-U.S. institutions

“. . . Thou are like to meet with, in the way which thou goest, wearisomeness, painfulness, hunger, perils, nakedness, sword, lions, dragons, darkness, and, in a word, death, and what not.”
—Mr. Worldly Wiseman in The Pilgrim’s Progress, Chapter 1

Africa is still terra incognita on the West Coast’s map of the world. Learning that I with three female family members would be spending the summer in Egypt and South Africa, family and acquaintances reacted in a range from stereotyped but envying (“. . . lions and tigers and bears!”) to speechless (“What’s there?”) to alarmed about imagined perils “in that part of the world.” Yet we met little but graciousness there. And though Johannesburg’s razor wire was unnerving, we never felt ourselves at serious risk. We were careful—maybe we were lucky, because South Africa’s crime rate is indeed high. I think, too, the negative buzz on this side owes much to Americans’ generalized fear of foreigners (xenophobia) and distaste for any place that does not seem to share our culture, especially if Islamic. Color bias, of course, is not limited by geography. In South Africa, I found, crime is sensationalized by the white press, the real risks magnified by white paranoia over racial mixing, which is new; foreign governments have tapped into it, the UK warning its wayfarers: “Avoid isolated beaches and picnic spots across South Africa and stay in company.” That’s extreme. I bought a green gallibiyah in Luxor and look forward to wearing it on the front lawn in rural California. Now there’s a risk.

Re: Ugly Americans: Americans abroad

The “ugly American” in the influential 1958 novel by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick—remember—was the good guy, a private American citizen. In popular usage today, he’s the obnoxious one, a role taken in the novel—and in U.S. policy often since then—by the slippery neocolonial diplomat. Today, is the U.S. a force for good or ill in the world? Are U.S. travelers obnoxious? In nine weeks in Africa (2008) I saw few and exchanged words with none, except a tense fellow-flat mate in the southern Cape, who showed me the circuit breakers and fled upstairs to watch his window. Egyptians said Americans tip much better than Europeans. In South Africa, Americans were objects of friendly curiosity. Locals in both places made a distinction, per the novel, between the government and “ordinary Americans.” Is that distinction deserved today?

Road to somewhere

The Pilgrim’s Progress, the 1600s John Bunyan allegory of “Christian” picking his way from a City of Destruction to a Celestial City, themes this exploration. A major artifact in the universe of European culture, it remains as useful now for illuminating psychic geography as when I discovered it, at about 9, while in transition from Eugene, Oregon, to a City of Gold in South Africa.

Johannesburg was no paradise, turns out, but merely the first in a series of pit stops on a route pointed toward return to “America”—terrestrial paradise in my preacher dad’s political geography—and, ultimately, a further departure for our final destination and proper home, somewhere in the sky. The blue-bound volume I found in Dad’s library (with the lurid illustrations of “Frederick Barnard and others”) offered a map. As circumstances and reference points changed, I checked it again for bearings. But after returning to the U.S. seven years later, I gradually became aware of a peculiarity in the map: “America” wasn’t quite the paradise advertised. What’s more, the first destination was looking a lot like a second home, now lost. That home, in time, became a destination again. I was repeating.

But there was a theme in the circling, I noticed eventually: The parents, in 1947, had hauled me to South Africa just in time for the formalization of apartheid. Seven years later we had returned to the U.S. South, just in time for the Civil Rights movement. Out of college and given the choice, I took a job as an English teacher in greenest Uganda, itself newly independent—and returned to Los Angeles three years later in a miasma of smog, just in time for the 1960’s cultural wars. A few years later, pining for Africa but unable to return, I fled from the manufactured paradise of “Matterhorn” and “Swiss Family Robinson Tree House” to the forests and mountains of Northern California.

Redding, on the southern edge of “God’s Country,” is no paradise either, though people continue to arrive here thinking so. Yet I have called it home for most of 35 years—a viewing platform, at least, for the Delectable Mountains of somewhere. Newsman, family man, gardener, college instructor, public-relations hack and slacker, I paused here to think about homes, destinations and what separates them.

In 2008 I made a return visit to Johannesburg and other wild spots in South Africa, at a time when the nation is changing its names and its face to align with a new reality and an altered view of the past, the one when I was there before. The perspective of this site is the product of those specific stops and that advantaged time span.

It is the result, equally, of investigation into some history not directly my own but widely shared: My own travels are add-ons to wanderings by ancestors and by people I would not have met had I gone elsewhere:In the 1500s, a Hassenpflug who was a Huguenot fled from France into Hesse-Kassel, Germany. Some 300 years later a descendant, my grandpa, lost a boot in the Red River crossing into north Texas. My mother’s grandfather, meantime, was fleeing western Russia in the late 1800s exodus and diaspora of Russian-German farmers. Her dad then grew up along the emigrant’s trail, from Ohio to sod house in Nebraska to the last Oklahoma land run (for the Cheyenne and Arapaho grant). It was the right pedigree for the parents who met in college and, soon as able, volunteered as Protestant missionaries to Africa.

As a schoolchild in the old Union of South Africa (U.S.A.), I was thrown into a racially segregated society and culture like those I had just left, down to detail: It was created, like today’s U.S.A., by fleeing Calvinist dissenters (including Huguenots), English empire-builders and their descendants. In the process, these settlers had displaced indigenous peoples, killing or humbling them. They had fought over control, then gone on together to build a European-style industrial civilization and join the British Commonwealth of Nations—all of these nations (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India and dozens more) being settler creations also, like the American U.S.A.

Back in the U.S., I watched as world race politics then changed. Europe lost its overseas empire. Euro settler populations across Asia and Africa saw themselves increasingly as stranded in a newly strange place. White South Africans declaredindependence, then in 1994 gave up their country to a surging black majority. Today, whites whose families have been in Africa for 200 years are fleeing or adapting to once-despised African social ways, to black culture and a rewritten history.

Worth noticing, I hope: South Africa’s is a story that, with this sea change, diverges from that of the U.S. Those settler-created governments also in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Latin America are under increasing pressure from indigenous peoples. And the U.S.A.? The U.S., meantime, has been presenting itself as a model democracy: the model for the world—“a city upon a hill,” in the popular-again phrase of Pilgrim settler preacher John Winthrop (who intended to create a theocracy).

The U.S. has been able to do this, of course, because its settler forefathers virtually wiped out the indigenous peoples—who often enough greeted them with open arms—to get Euro majority rule and because their inheritors today prefer to know almost nothing of this history. The U.S.’ indigenous—still being called “Indians”—have had to fight in court for the land and compensation awarded them in bad-faith treaties hundreds of years old, a story of little interest in the majority culture and weakly reported. At the same time the nation has advanced from a Monroe Doctrine, claiming the Americas, to a “Bush Doctrine” claiming the world, for the U.S. brand of “liberty.” Is anybody out there stirred by this set of circumstances?

My purpose with the site is to open a discussion—to provide a country inn for Pilgrim to warm his hands around the common fire, summon up the demons looming in his darkness and, I hope, exorcise them. Rooms are available inside. Continue to Border crossing for Customs and tourist information. Or enter through The wicket gate.