Saving Humanity One Picnic Table At A Time

Our gang in Mariana

Walking out of the San Juan, Puerto Rico airport into an atmosphere of perfectly temperatured summery air I muse to myself, “Hmm, this isn’t so bad.” It’s definitely an improvement over the snow-covered backyard I left behind in Connecticut.  But even with the lovely weather, I still have a lingering anxiety about the next five days, which, because I’m on a service trip, are to be spent among strangers doing God knows what to serve humanity.

I always aspired to be the great humanitarian who would brave a foreign environment to make life a little bit better for a less advantaged community.  Of course, being most skilled in the art of punching letters on a keyboard, I’m not exactly in a position to fix a cleft lip, engineer fresh drinking water, build a house, or instruct villagers how to improve their crop yields. Still, there must be something I can do.

And sure enough, by the time I return to the airport to fly home I will have:

• Inhaled paint fumes and possibly even lead paint dust in the service of beautifying recycled picnic tables;
• Slept in a bunk bed and survived a snoring roommate;
• Endured four cold showers;
• Wandered outside in the middle of the night to locate a bathroom while hoping that the armed guard wouldn’t mistake me for an intruder and mow me down;
• Demolished my careful, health-focused diet regimen in favor of fried corn, fried wheat, fried rice, and salty processed snacks;
• Fallen asleep in a fourth grade class;
• Sampled multiple varieties of moonshine;
• Took dozens of photos of beautiful sunsets and sunrises;
• And laughed harder than I have in years.

Mariana Puerto Rico

Arriving in Puerto Rico in mid-March, I am headed to the hurricane-impaired mountainous village of Mariana.  Mariana is best known for its annual breadfruit festival, although the whole time we are there none of us actually sees a breadfruit.  The town itself is poor and elderly, whose residents largely worked in the pharmaceutical factories at the base of the mountain in the city of Humacao — until they closed.

When Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico in September 2017, it hit Mariana first, wrecking havoc with the local power and water systems.  When my church wanted to raise funds to “help Puerto Rico” and searched for a worthy recipient, we were impressed that when faced with municipal and federal indifference, Mariana’s local mutual aid organization had jumped into action to prepare and serve hundreds of meals a day, reestablish some electricity, and erect a water purification system. (See video below for the compelling narrative.)

I was proud that our church raised $14,000 for Mariana but in the back of my mind, couldn’t help but wonder if this was really a good use of the money.  So when the international humanitarian agency Crossing Thresholds began taking volunteers down there to support that same village, I signed up.

On this trip there would be five women and two men, including the organizer Rusty Pedersen, the former owner of an outdoor adventure company and a long-time leader of service trips in Central America.  I quickly come to understand that there’s a whole population of people whose idea of a great vacation is to fly to a remote under-developed country, sleep on cots, and dig toilets.  Many of the women on the trip have traveled with Rusty before and they fondly tell war stories of lousy food, intestinal problems, and scary reptiles in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Nigeria.  All I can offer was that I had been to Norwalk, CT to hand out frozen turkeys in a food pantry.

On the ride from the airport to Mariana I was surprised to see that Puerto Rico itself is not as physically devastated as I was expecting.  A lot of work has gone into repairing the most obvious damage.  Downed trees have been removed and roofs repaired.  Power and water have been restored virtually everywhere.  The lingering effects are harder to see externally, especially for a island that was already relatively poor to start with.  In fact, the worst effects may be what you can’t see: that so many former residents left the island after the Hurricane and never returned. (And just to be clear, these observations only reflect what I saw with my own eyes and are not meant to associate myself with the U.S. President’s budget proposals.)

The Center for Community Transformation

This disused school is rapidly being converted into a community center

The objective of our trip is to help the people of Mariana convert an abandoned school into a community center.  The newly named “Center for Community Transformation” will be both our workplace and home, since we are eating in the former cafeteria and sleeping in two former classrooms that have been converted into gender-separated dorm rooms, each with ten bunk beds, which, I discover, my church paid for.

I slept in that bunk bed and enjoyed Happy Hour on those couches

Considering that the facility was abandoned for years and then assaulted by Hurricane Maria, it’s in remarkably good shape now.  The people of Mariana and the volunteers who came before us did an enormous amount of work of cleaning and restoring it to working order.  It’s debris-free, well-landscaped, and freshly planted.  There’s a beautiful room serving as a children’s library and another room with eight washing machines and driers that will be a community laundromat.  A refrigerator, stove, and sink have been moved back into the former cafeteria, which now serves as a large all-purpose dining and meeting room.  There are also incubator rooms set aside for local small businesses start-ups.

Eventually the people of Mariana want this facility to become the heart of the village, and already, even before it’s officially open, the Center is hosting yoga classes and a health clinic, while providing space for aspiring social workers.

The kitchen and dinning area of the main community room

Knowing that I wanted to learn how our church’s donation had been spent, the Center’s director Francisco Nieves sat down with me to review the receipts from Wal-Mart, Ikea and other local stores where they had bought tables, bunk beds, couches, office equipment, and other items with the money donated by our congregation.   The level of  transparency and accountability is very impressive.

Not everything is running smoothly, though.  Almost comically, at one time or another every toilet is either shut down or overflowing, which I discover one morning at 3:30 a.m.  And the Center is powered primarily by a generator that feeds a night-time battery until solar panels arrive to replace the ones that were stolen a few weeks ago.

Mornings

Once we settle into the Center, the rhythm of the days becomes clear.  Because of my chronic sleeping problems I am invariably the first of the volunteers to rise, sometimes as early as 5:00.  Given how many snorers were in our party, Rusty had handed out earplugs like there were ecstasy tablets at a rave.  But the snoring wasn’t the real problem, it was avian sounds — the roosters and other birds crowing and tweeting at the sunrise — that roused me so early.

Since all the common rooms are locked at this time of day I usually struggled to catch up on mainland news via my smartphone and the island’s spotty Internet connections, or, more satisfyingly, read quietly under a bathroom light until breakfast.  At other times I played the aging hippie and just watched the sun rise — and what a sight.  Puerto Rico is so beautiful that it’s hard not to snap photos as soon as the early morning starts appearing on the horizon.

A Puerto Rican sunrise

Mornings were for manual labor, although a couple of the women inventoried and organized the supplies and planted new landscaping.  The rest of us were on painting duty.  This included nine tables that had been built by a previous volunteer team out of recycled doors as well as the new doors that replaced them.  But before the tables could be painted, someone needed to sand off several generations of paint.

“That’s a man’s job,” the women agreed, so I ended up using a power sander to remove as much paint off as I could. That’s damn hard work, by the way.

By about Day Two we agreed that any really difficult physical labor — moving the tables outside, for example — could be left for the next mission trip, a group of 16 college kids coming in from CUNY Lehman.  Let them risk the hernias, we decided.

Prepping the tables for painting

The women in the group decided that a Jackson Pollock theme would work best on these tables.

Afternoons

I hate to admit it, but after a morning of physical labor, I was spent almost every day.  Thankfully, the afternoons were usually designated for educational opportunities, which is how I ended up in a fourth-grade class observing vocabulary enrichment lessons.

Alas the lessons were in Spanish, and after a morning of hard work I was drowsy.  And wouldn’t you know it, some kid caught me dozing, giving me a big smile when I snapped awake, accompanied by that universal sleeping sign of a head resting on two clasped hands.

The community’s elementary school, where almost all the students are economically disadvantaged.

We also met leaders of the mutual aid group (Communal Recreational and Educational Association of Mariana, or ARECMA — see more info at this link)  that runs both the center and the mountaintop park that served meals after the hurricane.  We also met representatives of the educational non-profit that Crossing Thresholds is supporting.

The meetings with these agencies were my least favorite part of the trip, to be honest. Like public and semi-public officials everywhere, our interlocutors wanted to assure us that everything was going great with their organizations.  Outwardly friendly, they could also be opaque, especially when faced with direct questions.  And the people in our group, who were experts in child and senior issues, had many many questions, as well as opinions and suggestions about how things could be done.  I couldn’t tell whether the nodding agency officials were being polite or actually interested in the river of ideas we were proposing.

Evenings

Evenings came early on this trip; not because the sun went down early, because it didn’t, but because once the work, educational, and napping responsibilities were over, it was time for a brief and invigorating cold shower, followed by happy hour, which convened daily in the men’s dorm room.  Alcohol can obviously be a destructive element in many people’s lives, but in our group it became a serious source of bonding, stripping away most uptight inhibitions and stimulating some hilarious storytelling.

Dinner came early too — starting at 5:30 or 6:00 p.m.  One night we attended a movie about the Mariana recovery effort that was, to our bemusement, in un-subtitled Spanish, meaning that none of could understand the narration.  No one complained, though, because we were at top of the mountain surrounded by one of the most beautiful sunsets ever witnessed.

One night we had dinner at the top of the mountain

One night we stayed late at dinner because we wanted to give baby gifts to a pregnant ARECMA employer who was working with the group and had been adopted by us as everyone’s favorite kid sister.  On another night, a birthday cake emerged and as we were singing “Happy Birthday” it transpired that the happy birthday wishes were for ME, even though my birthday had been more than two weeks earlier.  This resulted in a embarrassing stumbling speech from the stunned  birthday boy, who couldn’t think of a thing to say.

With no television or radio and spotless Internet connections, we debated how to pass the time on nights with no activities on the agenda.  We tried to think of games that would amuse us, but as they say, the journey itself became the destination and we talked so much about how to entertain ourselves that we never did play any of those games.

And that was just as well, because people started moseying off to bed at 9:00.  I usually managed to hold off until 10:00, falling asleep almost immediately.  I didn’t sleep long, but when I was asleep I was asleep.

Nutrition

Our cooks

For most of my life I acted like good nutrition was for wimps.  Lately I have turned over a new leaf, renouncing processed food, bread, juice, sugar, cured meats and other Big Food poisons.  All that went out the window on this trip.  I even drank a can of Pepsi. Yes, I could have announced dietary restrictions like some of the women on the trip, but out of a combination of politeness, machismo, and gluttony, I gobbled down everything that was put in front of me.

Our meals were prepared by three lovely Mariana ladies who might or might not have worked in the cafeteria of the old school we were transforming into the community center.  I never did get the answer to this.  They doted on us like grandmothers, although it’s possible we were as old, or even older, than they were.

These women eased us into Puerto Rican fare, like those deep-sea divers who have to be slowly brought to the surface to avoid the bends.  Our first dinner was spaghetti, sauteed hamburger, and tomato sauce, accompanied by lettuce greens and bottled salad dressing — a meal that my mother had served many times in the early 1960s.  Our first breakfast was a selection of boxed cereals, pancakes, fruit salad, and white bread that we could toast.

But as the days went on the meals became increasingly interesting.  Both lunch and dinner were major meals — chicken, pork chops, fish, steak, tasty fried fritters made in a variety of shapes and sizes from a variety of grains.   And of course salads, rice and beans.  All of this could be accented with a selection of hot sauces and washed down with water or cans of soda.  All of this was delicious.

And once the staff warmed up to us, the bottles of moonshine came out.  More than once I heard the story of how at every Christmas there would be a steady stream of police officers headed up to the illegal stills in the Mariana mountains to procure their own holiday hooch.

It would be rude not to sample, right?  And it was tasty so why not?  I had always assumed that the Pappy-produced moonshine  in “L’il Abner” tasted like turpentine but in Mariana, at least, it’s fruit flavored, marinated in coconut, pineapple, mango and other substances to mask the fact that it’s usually more than 100-proof.

Was it worth it?

The most common refrain from people who return from mission trips is, “I got more out of it than I gave.”  By that they usually mean they got the psychic rewards of doing a good deed and feeling good about themselves, while also becoming more grateful for their immensely privileged life back in these United States.

When you’re doing unskilled labor and not literally changing lives through medical care or advanced engineering, it’s harder to measure your impact.  Your contribution can seem like less than a drop in the ocean.  And even if you are the doctor who restores sight to a hundred kids, you have to wonder in your moments of existential despair, so what?  Those children will still grow up poor in a corrupt system that’s stacked against them.

And yet even though my efforts were infinitesimally small compared to the poverty in Mariana, never mind all of Puerto Rico or even the world, I did return with a sense of satisfaction.  Not self-satisfaction because I know how much is left undone.  But I did feel part of a steady stream of service workers, including those who came before and those who will come after, who are quickly bringing this project to life.

Could I have mailed a check for the cost of the trip so that ARECMA could have hired a local worker to do what I worked on more efficiently?  Absolutely.  But would I have mailed that check without personally seeing what was going on there?  Almost certainly not.

There’s one other point that needs to be made.  The dirty little secret of the trip is that despite the cold showers, disrupted sleep, and hard physical labor, it was fun.  My co-workers were a blast and Puerto Rico was beautiful.  It was not a standard vacation but it had all the elements of an adventure trip.

So yes, it was worth it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Geezer’s Guide to Joshua Tree National Park

If, like me, you’re from the East Coast, the words “Joshua Tree” probably summon up the U2 album of the (almost) same name.  But it’s also the name of a hugely popular National Park about two and a half hours from Los Angeles.

My wife and I spent a week visiting the park in early April, happy to escape the cold and rainy Northeast.  We were looking for arid heat to renew and cheer us and we got that in spades.  We didn’t come back spiritually refreshed, or anything like that, but we did return with elevated moods.

Here’s an overview of the park, in case you ever want to visit:

The Park Itself

Joshua Tree National Park is a huge expanse of wilderness that includes both the Mojave and Colorado deserts.  It lacks many of the jaw-dropping features of the more famous parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite, Zion, or Big Bend, but it has a unique grandeur of its own.

The landscape consists of flat deserts populated with cacti, the Seuss-like Joshua Trees that give the park its name and bizarre mounds of boulders.  It was my continual frustration not to be able to take really great photos.  The color palate in pretty monotonous, consisting of variations of brown (ranging from khaki tan to milk chocolate) leavened occasionally by tarragon green, which made it hard to capture the depth or height of the objects.

And it’s hot. Even in April the park can be hot.  Yes, it’s a “dry heat,” but the sun can be baking and by early afternoon we were always too hot to continue hiking.  And to be honest, you’d be crazy to be hiking all afternoon if you’re staying at a place with a swimming pool.

Joshua Tree is probably closer to a major metropolitan area than any other National Park, which makes it an easy day trip from Los Angeles or Palm Springs.  This means its vast expanses can sometimes get a little crowded.   It’s also surprisingly popular as a camping destination.  There were campgrounds everywhere, nestled in between dunes, pinion pines and rock heaps.

A typical rock heap

I’m a little surprised at the popularity of the campsites because the park itself is very unsparing.  No food or potable water is offered anywhere inside the park and there are no showers, ranger stations, lodges, or concession stands. The only sign of civilization are the frequent toilets scattered throughout the campgrounds and at each trail head.  These bathrooms don’t have running water, though, so don’t expect to wash your hands.    The bottom line if you’re camping is that you need to bring in every ounce of food, water or fuel you expect to consume.

A Word About The Joshua Tree

As noted, the park is named after the Joshua Tree, a tall yucca plant with a twisted trunk and three to six branches reaching straight up that are crowned with spiky leaves.  The tree (or “tree” depending on how you define a tree because this is not really a woody plant) was named by the Mormons after the prophet Joshua, who reached out his arms to God in prayer.

The park is aptly named after these trees because they are everywhere.  There are so many of them in the middle of the park that it begins to look like the vineyards in Napa Valley, or more sinister, like an army of zombies.

This always reminded me of “The Night Of The Living Dead”

I had always thought that the U2 album was named after the park, but in reality, the album is named “The Joshua Tree,” in other words, it’s dedicated to a specific tree, which is supposed to symbolize the hardiness of the American spirit or some such BS.  Further, the photo on the album cover was shot pretty far away from the park (and by the way, that particular tree has since fallen down, which hasn’t stopped fans from going to great lengths to track it down.)

Attractions — Mostly Hiking

You could spend the better part of a day driving around the park looking at the sites from the car and you’d probably get a good sense of how remarkable the landscape is, but I’d certainly recommend getting out of the vehicle and walking around a little to get the full effect.  The park offers many different hiking trails of various levels of difficulty.  We took some pretty aggressive hikes, but didn’t kill ourselves.  Here are the highlights:

Hidden Valley

This probably the most popular spot in the park. It’s located about half an hour from each of the park’s northern gates so really accessible.  The parking lot to the entrance is slightly misnamed — the sign identifies it as the Hidden Valley picnic area.

The site is a huge ring of stone piles and rock walls with a relatively flat surface in the middle.  To get inside you squeeze through a narrow entrance and once there you feel like you’re in a Disney attraction.  Boulders are strewn everywhere , providing a foreground for the rocky cliffs in back of them.  There’s a one-mile trail around the inner circle of the bowl that takes about an hour to complete.  Perfect for kids and geezers.

The story they tell is that in the 1800’s cattle rustlers used to hide their contraband inside the hidden valley, which was once covered with grass. It might even be true, but the real attraction is the weird landscape and the awe it evokes.

Lost Horse Mine Loop

This is a six mile loop up and around a mountain that’s considered a “strenuous” hike. You can cut that in half if you just go up to the abandoned mine and back, which is what we did.  Total elevation is about 600 feet, which doesn’t sound like much but when you’re my ago you can climb a long way and huff and puff a lot only to discover that you’re only up 100 feet.

But the trek to the discarded mine is worth the effort.  The views are spectacular especially once you reach the mine itself and hike a little bit higher to the summit, which provides a full 360 degree view of Lost Horse Valley. (By the way, this is another trail with signage issues — there’s no sign on the spur path leading up to the mine.)

Skull Rock Trail

Easily accessible from the 29 Palms park entrance, this is a mile and a half loop trail that begins at skull rock itself — a giant bolder with hollows where the eyes and mouth would be on a human skull.   The skull is very photogenic, with people posing for photos all day long in the “eye holes.”  The trail itself is not too arduous and very scenic — again, if rocks and cacti are your idea of scenery.

The only downside is that the trail is bisected by the main road and for long stretches you can see or hear cars buzzing by, which undercuts the illusion that you are off on a solitary wilderness exploration.  Also, about halfway through the trail you enter the Skull Rock campsite and there are no signs to tell you that you need to walk down the road, among the campers before you pick up the trail again.

49 Palms Oasis

This hike is technically in the park but it’s not accessible through the main entrances.  You drive down a road in the town of 29 Palms to a parking lot where the trail head begins and just start hiking.  In other words, there is no entrance fee.  You walk up the side of a 300 foot hill and down the other side to reach a lovely oasis that may or may not have 49 Palms.  It’s a great place to rest before the walk back.  It’s about a mile and a half each way so a nice morning’s hike.

Two crazy stories about the hike.

First, as we were returning we came across a large tortoise in the middle of the path and an Asian woman who pleaded with us to move the animal far away from the path because if the “Chinese people” came across it, they would take it.  My wife forbade me to touch the thing and fortunately it crawled away on its own.  Later I mused on the improbability of anyone from any nationality carrying this very heavy tortoise out of the park in a backpack.  Was the woman looking for help herself Chinese?  Couldn’t tell.

Then, we walked about a quarter of a mile further and I spied a rattlesnake on a rock next to the path.  He didn’t look too happy and was curled up and ready to spring, which I’m sure he would have done if I’d continued another five feet.  I stepped back and we had a face-off until he eventually slithered off and settled into a completely camouflaged coil under a rock.  Never reach under a rock in the desert!!!

Cholla Cactus Garden

This is not really a hike — it’s more of a half-mile stroll through a mass of cholla cacti, which are short cute (but potentially painful) plants that seem to glow in the sun.  I wouldn’t make this a priority but if you are driving from the Park’s north entrance to the south entrance at Cottonwood, it’s definitely worth a stop.

Lost Palms Oasis 

I am told this is a great hike.  It’s a “strenuous” seven miles down and back to a canyon with an oasis.  Unfortunately it’s over an hour drive from where we were staying at the southern exit of the park and we could only check it out on the day we left the park for good.  We walked about a half mile in and out and it’s a very nice hike — the geography is slightly different because this is part of the Colorado desert, so there are no Joshua Trees.  But still plenty of rocks.

Keys Views

Also, not really a hike.  This is a scenic overlook about 45 minutes from the northern park entrances.  You can get out and walk along the overlook, which provides a pretty spectacular view of Palm Springs and the mountains behind them.  The quality of the view depends entirely on the quality of the air.  The day we went was windy so their air was dusty and opaque.

Hall of Horrors

About five minutes down the road from Hidden Valley is a parking lot for “Hidden Horrors,” which is rarely mentioned in the guidebooks as a destination, but it’s a nice little diversion.  It’s essentially an unmarked half-mile ramble between two ranges of rock heaps.  This place is apparently popular with amateur rock climbers who like to leap from rock to rock.  Better make sure your sneakers have a good grip because a slip could be painful.

Accommodations and Eating

We stayed at the 29 Palms Inn, having learned about from this glowing piece in The New York Times.  This is not really an inn like we’d think of in New England, it’s actually a collection of adobe cottages clustered around an oasis.  It’s a pretty dreamy spot.  We never put on our air conditioning because the thick walls kept the room cool during the day and at night open windows would let in the desert breezes (we’d wake up to temperatures in the 40’s after having been in 90’s heat during the day).

Crucially, the inn had a nice swimming pool, where we’d retire mid-afternoon to cool off in the water, read our books and sip free Arnold Palmers.   There were four or five families with small children staying at the hotel, many of them from the UK or Germany, and it was fun to watch the kids slowly get to know each other and play together in the water.  Eventually we’d learn all their names and reminisce about the days when our own house was full of a gaggle of exuberant toddlers or tweens.

The inn also has the best restaurant in town, featuring interesting California-American cuisine.  Every night we were there the restaurant had set aside a table for a dozen different senior Marine officers, who were either stationed at or visiting the neighboring Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center.  Great guys — serious and respectful.  Other than that, it’s first come first serve for tables.  (And people eat early here.  It gets full at 5:00 p.m.)

We also ate at the famous Pappy and Harriet’s, which is a sprawling western theme park of a place up in the mountains.  The place is located in Pioneertown, a former movie set that is now mostly a backdrop for selfies. The restaurant is always packed (you should call for reservations weeks in advance) and the southwestern food is heaping.

Live music starts at 7: a few years ago some lucky patrons were surprised by a short set by Paul McCartney. But Lucinda Williams and other famous roots musicians have performed there.  The walls are covered with posters, photos, license plates, and stuffed animals and there’s definitely a happy friendly vibe.

Another great place to hangout is the Joshua Tree Saloon, which has many of the same elements as Pappy and Harriett’s, including cool decor, live music, and huge piles of food but is more relaxed because it’s not the destination that Pappy and Harriett’s is.

Final Thoughts

I loved spending four nights at the 29 Palms Inn, hiking in the morning, swimming in the afternoon, taking naps and generally chilling out.  If you live in Los Angeles and have never been to Joshua Tree you’re crazy.  This would be a fun day trip and a terrific weekend getaway.

If you’re from the East Coast and have never been to a national park, this would not be the place to start.  Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon are must-sees before Joshua Tree.  Yet for really getting away from it all and slowing down, there’s nothing quite like the desert.  By all means put this park high on your list.

 

 

 

 

Elvis Faulkner

[Note: This post was originally published on another platform on April 6, 2011)

Graceland Living Room, Memphis Tennessee

William Faulkner and Elvis Presley, two sons of the South born 15 miles apart in Mississippi, were mama’s boys, barely high school graduates, champion substance abusers and of course artists at the pinnacle of their fields. They were also property owners, each purchasing large estates as soon as they could scrape the money together.

I recently visited both Graceland, in the Memphis suburbs and Faulkner’s lesser-known home, Rowan Oak, about 90-minutes south in Oxford, Mississippi. It was impossible to approach these places – especially Graceland – with an open mind, but that turned out for the best, because the contrast between what I was expecting and what I saw actually intensified the experience.

First consider the fact that they even have names.  You would expect a nouveau riche rock-and-roll star to give his new home a fancy title, but you wouldn’t really think that the greatest American novelist – a true artistic soul – would be so pretentious.  In fact it’s worse; Graceland is named after Grace Toof, the aunt of the original owner, so Elvis had no part in choosing that metaphorically apt name.  In contrast, Faulkner himself came up with “Rowan Oak,” which is also the name of magical tree in Celtic mythology.   Faulkner gets points for originality and romanticism, but still, it’s the kind of affectation you’d expect from the plantation owners in Gone With The Wind, not a Nobel Prize-winning writer.

What I did not expect was that Graceland and Rowan Oak would be about the same size.  Graceland is really not that big.  A classic Colonial built in 1941, it’s a comfortable home, but it’s smaller than about a dozen houses within a ten-minute walk of where I live.  Probably considered a mansion in its day, by today’s standards it’s only a lower-upper-class home.  The rooms are nicely proportioned, but there aren’t that many of them.  And the kitchen?  Well, let’s just say that this would be the first thing to go in any HGTV makeover.

Rowan Oak living room

Rowan Oak, a Greek Revival home built in the 1840’s, is almost as big as Graceland, with large spacious rooms and a gentile atmosphere. (To be fair, Graceland is definitely larger if you count the subterranean space – it has a huge cellar with numerous game and trophy rooms).  Faulkner bought the property in 1930, when he was only 32 and barely supporting himself with his writing; he struggled for years to pay for the upkeep and repairs, at one point even taking a job as a maintenance man at the local power plant.   In other words, he wanted to be true to his Muse, writing novels that were barely comprehensible to a popular audience; but he also wanted to live the life of a country squire even if that meant diverting time from those novels to churn out semi-trashy short stories for popular magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and spending years writing Hollywood screenplays.

Rowan Oak entrance

What’s most striking and unexpected about Graceland and Rowan Oak is their handsome grounds.  Both are 15- to 20- acre estates set in average middle class neighborhoods where the other houses sit on half- and quarter-acre lots.  They have beautiful sweeping lawns with paddocks and riding areas.  They are both fantasies of how landed gentry would live.  One of them even has a “meditation garden” – and it’s not Rowan Oak.

What makes them different is their overall ambiance and how they reflect on their owners.  Each is decorated to appear as they did when Elvis and Faulkner lived there and this has not been a benefit to Elvis’ overall image. As a poor boy who suddenly found himself rich, he spurned antiques and other classic decor as “old,” insisting instead that all his furnishings be new.  Unfortunately, he had the bad luck to die in the 1970s, a decade that now appears to be a bad joke all the way around.  I doubt that many of us would emerge with enhanced reputations if our 70’s interior decorating were exposed to the rest of the world.   To be fair to Elvis, though, much of the house, especially the living room and dining room, is actually quite tasteful (although I bet that, as in many homes of that period, these formal rooms were rarely used).  The famous Jungle Room is certainly over the top, but kind of fun and the TV and game rooms in the cellar are not that different from the game rooms of my youth.

In contrast to Graceland, which is frozen at the moment of Elvis’s death, Rowan Oak hearkens back to a period before Faulkner was famous.  Faulkner died in 1962 but it is clear that no fifties or sixties decorators ever set foot there.  I wonder if this is really the furniture that was left there in 1962 or if an attempt was made to recreate the years (in the 30’s and 40’s) when Faulkner was writing his masterpieces?  The furnishings aren’t the high-end antiques that Elvis scorned; these are just old tables, chairs and couches that were probably in the family for generations.  The house does have a lived-in feeling (lived in by the Waltons maybe) but there’s nothing to suggest anyone lived there after World War II.  The most revered item in the house is Faulkner’s Underwood manual typewriter, which could have come off the set of The Front Page.  The two concessions to modernity are a radio from the last 1940s in his daughter’s room and an air conditioning unit installed in his wife’s room the day after his funeral.

Elvis gets a bad rap for tastelessness and trying to rise above his station – kind of like the Beverly Hillbillies – but I think people should cut him a break.  Graceland is a little garish but not as bizarre as I’d heard;  what critics really object to is the 70’s itself and the refusal of Elvis’ fans to treat it as a joke.  Maybe some of that cynicism should be directed Faulkner’s way.  He too aspired to rise above his station but he worked harder than Elvis did at creating his own myth.  Or maybe we ask too much of our artists.  In the end they are human too, with the usual delusions, dreams and ambitions.  It’s one of the reasons we go to see where they live: to remind ourselves not just that they are people, but to hope that a little bit of the immortality they created will rub off on us.

So I Took A Viking River Cruise

Our ship in Passau, where we started the cruise

Almost everyone I know who watches “Downton Abbey” is fascinated by the idea of a Viking River Cruise.   Those ads are irresistible come-ons to a certain demographic of the population: those white, upper-middle-class Americans who would like to display a continental flair but haven’t had the time or opportunity to acquire one.  My wife and I are empty-nesters who had never been on any cruise, never mind a river cruise, but found the ads so compelling we decided to take the plunge:

The Value Proposition

The ads always implied a degree of luxuriousness that I always thought was out of our price range.  So I was surprised when I received a mailing last January that promoted a “two-for-one” sale and actually looked at the cost.  We had been planning to go to Prague, Vienna and Budapest anyway, and the brochure advertised a Danube cruise that included Vienna and Budapest (but not Prague, alas) for a lot less than I had expected.  And when I called to book the cruise I was further informed that the price included the cost of the airfare.

This seemed too good to be true.  But I’m happy to report that it wasn’t.  My wife and I are just back from the cruise and we agreed that we never could have flown to Europe, rented a hotel room and fed ourselves for the price of the cruise — certainly not for that level of comfort.  I hardly think that Viking would want to present itself as a budget option for a European vacation, but the bottom line is that if you plan this right, it’s actually cheaper to take a cruise then to try to arrange everything yourself.

I say this because here’s what’s included in the price of the cruise: airfare from many major US cities; transportation to and from the airport to the ship; overnight accommodations; daily tours; all meals (including wine at meals, and yes, there were people who drank champagne at breakfast); and some post-dinner entertainment or briefings.  To veteran cruisers, this is not news but to me it was a surprise at how easy everything was, in addition to being affordable.

To achieve a rock bottom rate we booked the cheapest cabin, which was on the lowest deck of the ship.  The cabin itself was two-thirds underwater and our view was out a portal that you could peer through only when you were standing up.  The room itself was very nice — modern but smallish. There was a TV, a closet and a bureau, just like a hotel room. The bed was extremely comfortable and the feather pillow was the best I’ve ever rested my head on in any hotel anywhere.  The only weird aspect of the cabin is that the bathroom and shower are encased in glass walls.  The glass was clear when we checked in and no one explained that you could make them opaque by hitting a certain switch; so the first day was a bit awkward.  But even with the clouded glass walls you want to make sure that you and your companion have already achieved a degree of personal intimacy because there’s no sound-proofing.

Our cabin — note the glassed bathroom and shower and don’t forget to switch from clear to opaque glass

The rooms on the second and third decks were somewhat larger, although with much nicer views.  These cabins either had French balconies (basically floor to ceiling picture windows) and actual verandas with two chairs and a small table. There are also a handful of suites with separate living rooms and bedrooms (which cost twice as much as our semi-submerged stateroom).  Under the right circumstances, I’d think about upgrading to a French balcony to get the extra light. I don’t think the verandas are worth the extra expense, though, because it’s not clear when you’d be sitting there; you don’t really want to be planted on one side of the ship when the boat is cruising (given that there are sights on both sides of the river bank); worse, when the boat is docked, it’s likely as not to be tied up to another Viking ship so there is no view at all except for the cabin of another ship.

Given the wide variety of prices, it’s interesting that everyone is treated the same regardless of what deck they’re on.  I suppose this is an American conceit — that everyone is equal.  This is not like the airlines with their first class and economy section.  Regardless of how much we paid, we all ate the same food, had access to the entire ship and went on the same tours. So, yay democracy!

The Ship Itself

If a big ocean cruise is like a floating resort, a Viking River Cruise is like a floating boutique hotel.  The ship only has space for 190 passengers and offers none of the features that attract folks to a rowdier ocean cruise (i.e., no casinos, climbing walls, pools, or daiquiri bars).

As nice as it was, this is not a high-end luxury cruise.  Their target market seems to be the upper 5% not the upper 1%. Nevertheless, the common spaces were casually elegant and great places to hang out.  The ship has three decks of common areas.  The top deck is an outdoor space with deck chairs and tables that extends the full length of the vessel.  When you’re up there you understand why Viking calls them “longboats.” It takes a long time to get from aft to stern.  This is where you want to be when there’s daytime cruising and you want to see both shores of the river.

The next deck down houses the lounge.  This is a fairly swanky bar with floor to ceiling windows from which you can also watch the passing scene.  It’s a mellow space during the day and the gathering place for all passenger briefings and the late-night entertainment.  Off and on throughout the day, we were treated to a pianist; he was a perfectly decent guy but for my taste, his repertoire was a little too heavy on show tunes and other American standards that you’d get in any dive piano bar.   Off the glassed-in lounge was an outdoor lounge where you could have casual meals or get patio bar service.  Also on this level was the “library,” which consisted of a bookcase of books and a few comfy chairs, and the Internet center, which comprised two wired PCs.

The Lounge

Beneath the lounge was the main reception area and concierge desk attached to a large formal dining room (again, with floor-to-ceiling windows).

And that’s it in terms of amenities. When you weren’t touring on land, you basically had to entertain yourself by reading, looking out the window, taking a nap or drinking.  The ship does have Internet service but it was spotty (this was the most vocal complaint from the passengers).  I was never prevented — for long — from getting email or social media and I was able to access NYTimes.com (but not the WSJ.com), so I wasn’t as unhappy as some other passengers.

In terms of actual cruising, the ship spent a lot more time tied up at the dock then it did moving from place to place.  We cruised for one extended period during one afternoon, complete with narration of sights on the shore; we also cruised one day from 7:00 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. so we could experience a dramatic entrance into Budapest.  More often the cruises were at night.

A highlight of cruising was going through the locks.  I never knew the Danube had locks but there they are. We had to navigate nine of them on this voyage.  This was fascinating to watch for a couple of times.  After that, not so much.  We went through most of the locks at night anyway (which was actually a problem for me because the banging of the ship in the lock woke me up.)

How About the Food?

This is the question that everyone asks.  The food was fine, considering that we all ate at the same time.  My wife and I had all our meals on the ship (except for one lunch) and you could either eat off a menu in the dining room or have a buffet in the outdoor lounge.  Breakfast was the same every day: a big spread of egg-, yogurt- or bread-based choices, plus meat, cheese, muffins, smoked salmon, etc.

We never ate lunch in the dining room, preferring the casualness of the outside lounge, but the menu had three choices each day plus buffet options too.  Upstairs in the lounge we ate buffet-style with sandwiches, salads, soups, etc.

Dinner was at 7:00 p.m. each night in the dining room.  The daily menu had three first course options, three main course options (meat, fish and vegetarian) and multiple deserts.   And of course all the wine you could drink.

The food was uniformly good.  My main complaint was that — like the piano music — it was too Americanized.  A lot of steak and a lot of fish that people would recognize from home.  The one night we went completely exotic was the best night — an Austrian feast, with all local delicacies.

The advantage of this approach is that you almost certainly will not get a bad meal.  The downside is that you never get the thrill of finding a really great local restaurant and experiencing something out of your comfort level.  Another downside is that there was just too much food around all the time.  With so many options it was hard not to overeat at breakfast and lunch; and it was hard not to overindulge between meals, with a frequent afternoon tea, and cookies and coffee available 24-hours a day.

Your 150 New Best Friends

For me the most daunting aspect of the cruise was the prospect of interacting with a ship full of strangers for seven days.  I mean, what if someone wanted to talk to me!!  In the end I shouldn’t have worried because there was an unspoken etiquette that everyone would attempt to be friendly to everyone else.

Viking markets to Americans and the clientele was overwhelmingly USA.  I was not the only passenger who had been seduced by the Viking ads on Downton Abbey — this was a frequent refrain.  At least half the other passengers fell into one large demographic group: white, married, upper-middle-class, heterosexual, Americans aged 55-70 — the kind of people who would be interchangeable at a suburban country club.  Usually one spouse was retired, frequently both.

Outside this basic norm there was one single guy traveling alone, two Japanese-American couples, one large group of unattached women, one couple with a sulky teenage daughter, a British couple, a German couple, an interracial couple, a gay couple, a couple of dozen passengers over 70 or under 55 and then a handful of oddballs to add color.

We made it a point to eat with different people every night and in the end I feel like I learned more about America than I did about Europe.  Some of the people we met included:

• A Japanese-American from Hiroshima who survived the atomic bomb because his father had moved the family outside the city limits several weeks before the attack.
• A couple who’d raised their family in Fairbanks Alaska and have been on seven Viking river cruises.
• A guy from New York who’d trained as a priest but became a lawyer for the New York State prison system, and a hard-partying couple from Texas whose son actually did become a priest.
• Beekeepers from Maryland who use localized bee stings to treat arthritis.
• A couple who’d lived in Santa Monica all their lives and whose daughter-in-law is in charge of costuming for several TV shows.
• A perfectly happy couple from Charlottesville who were each on their third marriage and whose son was also on his third marriage. The husband was a HUGE Sound of Music fan who admitted to being videotaped several times dressed as Maria and singing and twirling, “the hills are alive…..”

Our strategy was to walk into dinner about five minutes late, identify a table with interesting-looking people and ask if we could join them.  They’d almost always be relieved they didn’t have to eat alone like the sad sacks in a junior high school cafeteria.  Twice we sat with two sets of couples who had gone on the cruise together, but instead of being fifth wheels, we found ourselves acting as new blood for four people who might have gotten a little tired talking to each other.

There was also a group of five couples who’d met last year on the Rhine River tour and enjoyed each other so much that they’d planned to go as a group this year. They always sat together and boisterously enjoyed themselves, becoming the de facto popular kids table.  My wife and I never got to be chummy enough with anyone to exchange email addresses or Facebook accounts but we still felt a pang of regret when the tour ended and we realized we’d never see these folks again, given that we all had these shared memories.

In Between Eating and Sleeping

Budapest was beautiful, especially at night

Since the ship doesn’t spend a lot of time cruising and the passengers are very get-up-and-go types, the land tours are crucial to the success of the cruise.  I’d never appreciated the importance of a program director before, but on our ship, The Freya, our host was great.  The rarest of species — a funny German — Oliver was the glue that held the tour together.

The passengers met every night at 6:45 for Oliver’s 15 minute briefing on the coming day’s activities.  As part of the cruise package there were six daily tours and numerous additional ad-ons for special outings — concerts,  a winery tour, a chance to see palaces or the Lipizzaner stallions in Vienna, a visit to the Jewish quarter in Budapest.   We went on all the regular “included” tours, which usually left at 8:30 a.m. and lasted for two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half hours.  These tours usually involved a combination of bus and walking, with narration from local guides throughout.  The guides ranged from very good to excellent — the best ones were in the former Eastern Bloc countries of The Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, who had grown up under communism, despised it, and were hilariously sardonic and cynical about their former regimes.  All of this made me grateful to have grown up in the U.S.  Being caught between the Nazis and Soviets, never mind their losses in World War I and the wars with the Ottomans, these countries have experienced a lot of tragedy.

Our stops were at a number of smallish cities I’d never heard of — Passau Germany, Lintz Austria, Durnstein Austria, Meltz Austria and Bratislava (the Capital of Slovakia) —  and two world capitals: Vienna and Budapest.  The half-day tours were fine for the smaller towns but not really adequate for the big cities.  Between the half-day tour and the half-day of free time, we only scratched the surface in Vienna and Budapest and of course, we never explored any of the local restaurants.

Still, everywhere we went was remarkable.  We had a full-day visit to Cesky Krumlov — an amazing little restored city of The Czech Republic that is like stepping back into a Disney fairy tale. Elsewhere we saw three gorgeous St. Stephan’s cathedrals, each more fabulous than the rest.  We visited a local winery. where we had an EXTREMELY convivial wine tasting. We saw an Monastery that was so sumptuous that it looked like a Tsar’s weekend palace.  Great stuff everywhere from a civilization that peaked 200 years ago.

Each night there was some kind of activity planned on the ship.  A lecture on Mozart, another lecture on Austrian history, a night of games, a dance party another night.  We skipped a lot of that, being too tired at 9:00 p.m. for those kind of activities (although somehow we managed to stay up past midnight watching The Sound of Music on our cabin TV. But that’s another story.)

Will We Do It Again?

Sure, I’d take another Viking River Cruise, although probably not right away.  I still want to see Prague and Berlin and not just for one day.  But the idea of floating down the Rhone or Rhine rivers through wine country sounds very enticing.  In the meantime, Poldark is returning to Masterpiece Theatre and we can reminisce about our cruise at the beginning of each episode.