My Journey Abroad - an excerpt just for you

My Journey Abroad

Flying from Dulles in Washington DC to whatever the name is of the international airport in Zurich I kept waiting for feelings of anxiety and nervousness. I was hoping that this would be like the proverbial descent into stardom, that waiting masses of admirers would greet me at the gate, like the Beatles arriving at JFK, screaming my name and waving signs. But I arrived alone, with no one to even greet me. The porter did smile and the customs agent wished me a pleasant journey.

“What is the reason for your visit?”

“I’m going to hike around the continent and-”

“Pleasure,” he said.

STAMP. He handed my back my passport.

“Enjoy your trip. Next!”

I wandered from the area looking for a map, instructions of some sort that would give me a clue as to my next step. I was in a brand new country, across an ocean I’ve never seen, with people who I couldn’t understand. I was ready for anything.

I found a train going into town, an express straight to the train station I would get to know so well. At the time, I had no idea of that, so I hauled my pack on board, rested it between my legs and watched as the train whisked through the fields surrounding the city. I saw little through the windows.

The day was cloudy and almost wet, but not quite. The air was pregnant with moisture, as if any minute, fat thick raindrops would fall from the sky like little bombs, exploding in icicle freeze bombs. After an overnight flight, you notice things like that. What you fail to notice is the degree of tired you are at the time. You think that being a young, virile American male, with hoards of screaming admirers that failed to show up at the gate, you can tackle trekking across a brand new country with ease. Nature invented certain failsafes for idiots like me. The body will accept not sleeping on a plane in the crowded regurgitated air and cramped kennel like quarters. It will accept the limitations placed on it from lack of food, sufficing to survive on peanuts and cola, tiny finger sandwiches with wilted lettuce and half cooked Beef Wellington. It would even agree to march through crowded train stations, day after day of hiking down uninhabited country roadsides, infrequent naps caught in train compartments. But what the body needed before any of this was rest. Nature would take care of that by shutting down all unnecessary functions, including deductive reasoning. What do you do in America when you are travelling and tired? Pull off the highway to a small cheap motel, crash on the bed in front of a faded color television set and sleep for nine hours. What do you do in Switzerland when you are getting ready to travel but need rest and can’t find a cheap motel just off the highway, television or no?

You find a bed and breakfast, sleep from three in the afternoon until breakfast the next morning and hope that the privilege doesn’t break you toward the end of your trip. All battles and excursions should be carefully planned to the most minute detail to limit the amount of funds wasted on frivolity. In the most dejected state of tiredness, sleep is not a frivolity.

I was lost in a new city, uncomprehending the three maps in my hand and pocket and too tired to ask for directions. I wandered down a dirty alley, past a series of empty plate glass windows and stumbled into the first bed and breakfast I could find.

How was I to know it was in a red light district? I slept through the most exciting night of my trip.

FRANKFURT

He languished in a wheelchair, an old hand fashioned monstrosity with a stretched wicker back and rusty handles. Mired in a corner, it was positioned so the falling sun would rest on his afghan covered legs. I did not know his story. Maybe he was a soldier from the great war, his face was lined and his hair white enough for it. It was Germany, so I couldn't know who he fought for, though I wanted to suspect it was our side. He smoked American cigarettes with trembling hands. When he smiled, it filled his whole face, and he meant it.

“You should drink with him," the waiter said when he brought my coffee. I counted out each deutschmark, trying to concentrate on the conversion to tip ratio and calculate whether I could afford to drink it.

"I don't speak German."

"No matter. Just sit with him."

I watched him walk away, then looked at the old man. I don't like old people. They scare me. They annoy me. I'm not the type of person who looks at the elderly as a source of wisdom, a font of learned experience. Rather, I tolerate them out of respect for my grandparents. My mother told me once "A fool learns from his own mistakes, a wise man learns from others," is a forced lesson on listening to my grandfather. He was blood. I would listen to him, and smile because he gave me twenty dollars for my birthday and tried to teach me how to fish. He earned my respect. That didn't make him any less annoying. So I wondered why this student/waiter who I had struck up a conversation with in hopes of sleeping on his couch that night instead of a park bench would suggest I sit with a decrepit stranger.

I slung my pack over one shoulder, picked up my coffee and several packages of crackers and walked over to him.

"Guten tag. May I sit sir?"

I motioned with my hands, the universal gestures of understanding. He looked at me, looked at the table and nodded.

"Bitte."

I sat down and offered him a cracker. He shook his head and held out a cigarette. I declined.

I do not speak German, or French, and my Spanish is limited to a few phrases that could get me beer, or arrested or beat up. So my decision to go to Europe and walk the earth seemed ambitious. I blame it on my mother. She was a teenager of the sixties, a flower child. Weaned on Jack Kerouac and marijuana like thousands of young, idealistic students before her, she wanted to backpack across the Continent. She never made it, but passed the dream on to me.

"I always wanted to hike across Europe. Over there, you can hook up with a group of kids, and crash together and hang out. It's the coolest. I want you boys to do that, just hike around in nature, and take the trains. See all the things I read about. Doesn't that sound great."

I didn't give her a thought as I sat beside the old man in the cafe in Frankfurt. All I could think about as he started rattling at me was, " I should have studied more in first semester German."

His voice was cracked from too many cigarettes, but he shot his phrases like a machine gun. I could tell when he asked a question. He did that thing we all do, where we raise the end of our sentence a half octave. He helped out by nodding and smiling, or shaking his head. I monkeyed him, nodding , shaking, smiling, trying to drink my coffee and watch the people walk by without being rude. He waved the waiter over.

"He wants to know what you do. Are you a student?"

I nodded.

"I'm just backpacking around. I'm a writer."

I have read that if you say a thing often enough, it becomes true. And I do sit in front of a typewriter occasionally.

The old man laughed and slapped his dead leg. The waiter laughed too.

"What did I say?"

"He says he knew a writer once. He starved to death too." He pointed to my crackers and walked off.

The old man grabbed my arm, tugging. He began talking.

"When I was around your age, I aspired to many things, but never to write. I was going to be a great soldier, like a warrior from ancient Rome. I put my lot in the army, believing I would advance quickly and be a general before I was thirty. But I liked the women too much and spent more of my time and paycheck in the brothels than on being a better soldier. Perhaps I was lucky my ambitions led me to bed, than to battle.

"One night, after a sojourn in the district, the air raid sirens went off. Lights blinked out, and I ducked in a doorway. All around us in the darkness, you could hear the pattering of feet as people scurried for cover. But you could never hear the planes. They flew too high. All you heard was a quick whistle, then the explosion. Or at least that is how I imagine it to be. That is how I hear it on the television. What I heard was the low whistle, then nothing. I woke up with no legs. But I can still woo a woman, or at least I could until I got old."

He laughed and patted my shoulder. The waiter came back.

"He wants you to meet his cat."

"What?"

"He told you about his cat, now he wants you to meet it and stay with us tonight."

He leaned over and unlocked the wheels on the chair, spoke in German, then looked at me.

"My grandfather wants you to stay at our flat tonight. If you push him home, he will show you the way."

"Thanks." But you don't know me. I mean, I know this is how it's supposed to be over here, but in my country, we feel funny if friends have keys to our apartments. How can you let a total stranger into your life?

The old man leaned forward, clasped my hand in his tough weathered grip. The waiter held out my backpack.

"I am Alfred. Don't worry, you will be safe with us tonight."

I put on my pack, thanked him and started pushing the old man down the street. He smiled at me, pointed at this building and that, rattling on in his machine gun talk.

"Not far from here, I knew a girl----"

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