In Front of Them All

Still in South Korea

Dennis Rodman and I have a few things in common, but I’ll admit to only one of them: we both have spent time in North Korea.

My visit was brief—just one minute. It was at Panmunjeom, in the so-called Joint Security Area where the Republic of Korea (ROK, the south) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, the north) have gone eyeball-to-eyeball since 1953. A conference room (the “Military Armistice Commission Conference Room”) was built right on the line between two sides, half formally within the territories of each, to accommodate their very rare discussions. DMZ tourists can stroll around the felt-covered table on the armistice line, and be formally subject to the authority of Kim Jong-Un.

As political fictions go, my trip to the DPRK could have been more convincing. The conference room itself looks like the Cold War artifact it is—except for the UN sky blue paint-job outside and inside, which makes it seem vaguely like a pre-school. No doubt to discourage defections, the North Koreans rarely post their soldiers inside the building anymore. Instead, they’ve been known to peep in the windows from time to time, ogling whatever VIPs might have dropped in. Two ROK soldiers are usually inside, incongruously wearing shades (“designed to present an intimidating appearance”), standing in “modified tae kwon do postures”. Though they might be designed to be intimidating, the ROK guys I saw were hardly physical specimens. “Lean and mean” would be a generous way of describing them. The only action they’ve seen recently, according to our US Army guide, was to “jack up” a Japanese tourist who made the mistake of stepping behind a guard’s back. “It was the funniest thing I ever saw,” the American said, not long after he complained that his tour in the DMZ was “mind-numbingly dull”.

When it comes to living on the most heavily militarized border in the world, maybe a dull day is a good day. Things seem to be getting more interesting for a different reason, though, as South Korea seems determined to make the DMZ into a complete tourist experience. We saw busloads of visitors, in numbers worthy of high summer in Disney World, at such dubious landmarks as “The Third Infiltration Tunnel” (an invasion route from the North that was discovered before completion), and “The 1976 Ax Murder Site” (where a gang of North Koreans murdered two Americans with hatchets). The new train station at Dorasan was celebrated in 2002 as the first link in the chain of reunification, but the rail connection to Pyongyang never went through. Now tourists pay 500 won (about 50 cents) for the privilege of standing on the platform to watch mostly empty trains go a few miles, to the Kaesong Industrial Complex, and no farther.

Maybe all this is hard for Americans to understand because we have no comparable landmarks. The DMZ isn’t a battlefield in a war won and lost long ago, like Gettysburg; the conflict has simply gone on ever since, by other means. Between paranoia in the North and reunification fantasies in the South, there doesn’t seem to be much room for quiet reflection, for drawing lessons from the nightmare of history.

            The tourist materials boast that the DMZ, so long undeveloped, is now a paradise for wildlife. We have to take their word for it: the Zone still represents the world’s largest mine field, so there won’t be any eco-tourism in it soon. “Yes, animals get blown up sometimes,” says our guide, anticipating my question without any outward awareness of its absurdity, of deer tripping on land mines. In the new DMZ, maybe that’s a missed opportunity—they can offer not just wildlife-watching, but wildlife-suicide-watching. 

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro

Snapshot: Egypt, December, 2000

The Corniche outside the Temple of Luxor.

Back on the west bank. Impressions of rural Egypt: riders astride donkeys with loads of reeds splayed four feet out on either side; women draped in either black or in red; beautiful children with eyes buzzing with flies as they try to sell homemade dolls to tourists; water buffalo looking like wide-hoofed creatures from some other planet; young cops and soldiers with automatic weapons and leather cases for additional clips; ibises like gulls, swarming over canals layered with garbage; the river flowing out of the heart of Africa, slow and oily, mounted by palatial tourist cruisers and feluccas; rusty tram tracks from the old sugar cane processors; old kaftaned men sitting on kitchen chairs in front of the open mosque.

Egypt is supposed to be static, but it's changed even from Flaubert's time. Judging from the paintings in the tombs of the artisans, both sensuality and sexual equality were once known in the valley. Now, with modern Islam, whole dimensions of erotic possibility seem shut off, like an Aswan Dam of the spirit. This is a very conservative country (not counting national disasters like Afghanistan) which would probably have struck the old Egyptians as strange. They might also have resented the general air of obsequiousness around foreign cash. Now, unlike in antiquity, Egypt is a country of prudes and panhandlers.

Football in the Sahara.

Today we crossed the Nile again (near Aswan) to visit the Monastery of St. Simeon. This is a 7th century stone and mudbrick structure set over a wadi a few thousand feet west of the riverfront. Stepping off the boat, we were greeted by more than a dozen camel jockeys; the place was much like a paddock, but the camels appealed to me more this time. Their croaking roar seemed somehow cute. 

The Monastery was not the desolate museum I imagined. It is still a working church—there were more than a hundred worshippers there, under the canopies in the ruined old chapel, hearing and repeating the liturgy in old Coptic. The Christian population of Aswan—largely Nubian, it seems—also picnics in the compound after the services. I wondered if this had something to do with Ramadan (no food consumed by the Muslim majority during daylight), but no one could answer the question while we were there. Sitting up on the mud-brick rampart (in that climate, still well preserved after a 12th century renovation, I watched a bunch of boys play soccer on the edge of an immensity of desert.

The Bent Pyramid at Dahshur. The tiny figures are Maryanne and our driver.

The best monuments are barely on the established tours. The pyramids at Dahshur are older than the ones at Giza, and almost as big. They are farther out of Cairo, and thus approximate in their solitude what the Giza pyramids were supposed to be—lonely tombs, not suburban tourist attractions. The Bent Pyramid is especially evocative in its irregularity. It is a gigantic work of improvisation now frozen on the limestone sands. It has much of its casing intact, again evoking the Giza pyramids better than they do themselves. The quality of the silence there—despite the nearby presence of an Army base—is deeply satisfying. This is real antiquity, but without the pretention to ancient wisdom. For there's nothing very wise about suddenly altering the angle of a pyramid in mid-construction because the builders realized they made a mistake. Instead, it evokes the ancient Egyptians as real people grappling with practical problems. There is more human dignity in that change of angle than in a thousand Karnaks.

Text and photos © 2013 Nicholas Nicastro

Return of the Plague Rat

 

A side street in Cinisi

After doing a fair amount of traveling in Italy, I took a while getting around to visit the one ancestral place I'm sure about. That, according to my paternal grandmother Mary Rutland (nee Palazzolo), is Cinisi, a Sicilian town about twenty miles west of Palermo. 

She visited it for the first time circa 1960, after crossing the Atlantic by ship. By that time she was a widow with three children, having lost my grandfather to complications due to rheumatic fever. Single parenthood in pre-Mad Men days was challenging enough for a male, and doubly so for a woman in her forties who'd never worked a formal job before. Yet she found the time and the resources to make her way to the old country, at a time when females rarely traveled alone. 

As told at a dozen Thanksgivings and 4th of July BBQs in later years, my grandmother was welcomed in Cinisi with something close to rapture. She was guided around, feted, treated like a miraculous survivor of some Odyssean trial. Her maiden  name, Palazzolo, was the ticket to instant affinity in a place where family ties were everything. She was even introduced to the local don---though he was presented as just another old guy because "there is no such thing as the Mafia". She told this story with her usual elan, her humor and passion for the details. What she never explained (and I was either too young or too self-absorbed to ask) was what she was looking for by returning there. Was it simple curiosity? Or was it something deeper, a sense of connection for someone who had lost the most significant one in her life? These are questions I'll never have answered, as she passed away in 2000.

Cinisi is right beside Palermo's modern airport at Punto Raisi. The place-name teased me when I landed in Sicily last week, a decade older than my grandmother when she first visited. I had other priorities from the menu of Sicilian wonders-- ruined Greek cities, Arab-Norman mosaics that sparkle like sunlit surf, rococo churches like the wedding cakes of titans. Yet the opportunity to see Cinisi, a place with no touristic appeal, ate at me. Perhaps it was simple curiosity. Or maybe the desire to share something with my grandmother, now that she's gone.

The main street of Cinisi, the Corso Umberto, is surprisingly scenic. At the north end lies the inky meniscus of the Tyrrhenian Sea; to the southeast, the sheer cliffs of Mt. Scardilla, looming over the town in a way that would intimidate the skyline of Manhattan. It would be impossible to imagine a town more literally sandwiched between mountains and sea. 

Along the Corso that afternoon were the usual tableaux of old men idling over coffees, kids on stoops with smart-phones. As I strolled toward the Commune hall with my mini-entourage of family and friends, the natives looked up at us, puzzled. Were these obvious Americans lost on the way to Palermo? Were they dumb enough to think this was Palermo?

Alas, the arrival of the latest Palazzolo descendant triggered no stir. Where my childhood impressions of my grandmother's experience might have led me to imagine being recognized in the street, no crowd gathered. Wandering into a gelato place, I casually mentioned my pedigree. The cashier's reaction could be translated as: "Those Palazzolos-- we have a lot of them around here." Then she shrugged the way someone might if a plague rat had swum to shore after a load of them had been dumped at sea.

Perhaps I exaggerate her blasé. Perhaps I erroneously imagine that Sicily never changes, that family is just as overriding a factor today as it once was. Fact is, though I arrived with more people that afternoon, I cut a smaller figure than my grandmother. A solitary woman, bilingual and landing after a long trip from America, would inspire a stronger reaction anyplace than some guy in a rental car, mangling the few words in Italian he does know. That she came a mere half-century or so after her ancestors emigrated, when her people still existed in the living memories of those left behind, must have been a factor too.

I can't say I came away from Cinisi with any sense of connection to my heritage. There was one guy in the street whom I thought resembled me-- he had the same honking schnoz, the same short skull on thick peasant neck. But that resemblance may be as faulty as my self-perception. I found no connection, but I did close a circle. Even for a plague rat, that's something.

Text and photos © 2013 Nicholas Nicastro

Build It and They Will Forget?

Heritage Field, the Bronx

I had my first look recently at the new Yankee Stadium, which opened in 2009 when I was living in California. At first glance it is quite similar to the old venue. But the designers clearly had in mind how visitors' expectations have changed since the last refurbishment, in the mid-70's. There's a giant HD scoreboard, leather upholstered seats for our expanded fannies, and a wider choice of cuisine for the appetites that feed the fannies. Stadium 2.0 is richer and bigger in everything except tradition. It's no longer the House Ruth Built, but the House Ruth Would Have Built if he'd lived on a diet of cheddar melts and Tuscan paninis—instead of just cigars and booze.

       What made the biggest impression on me, though, was how the footprint of the old stadium has been preserved. Heritage Field, as it is now called, is located across E 161^st Street, a few hundred yards from the new stadium. By all appearances it is an ordinary city park, surrounded by cyclone fencing and a fragment of the old 1970's stadium facade. There is history in its ordinariness, however, as regular folks can now step up to the dish and run the base pads on exactly the same ground where Yankee legends did over the decades. You can stand where Lou Gehrig gave his "luckiest man on the face of the earth" speech in 1939; you can hoist your lumber where Reggie Jackson hit three home runs in one game in the '77 World Series, or stand where Don Larsen greeted an exultant Yogi Berra after his perfect game in '56.  It's as if the Circus Maximus in Rome had been turned into a park where you could rent a chariot to do a few laps over the hallowed old track.

       This brings me to a curious point. While the old stadium is gone, some of the surrounding structure, such as the footbridge from the old parking lots, and the "big bat" near the old entrance, are still there. In fact, Heritage Park and the other landmarks are the only reasons I could precisely locate the site of the old stadium.  If they had also been demolished, I might have supposed that the new Stadium was built exactly on the same site as the old. This is despite the fact that I'd visited the original Yankee Stadium at least a dozen times in my life. I should know exactly where it was located.

       How fallible, then, is our memory for places we take for granted. Indeed, if we imagine a time in the distant future when most of the buildings in this corner of the Bronx were wiped away, and all that was left of the 2009 Stadium was a quadrilateral of ruins, how tempting it would be for future archaeologists to mistake it for the original stadium site. I imagine that even if they managed to revive some poor stiff from 2013, some stiff like me, and asked me to show them the layout of Yankee Stadium, it would be very hard for Rip Van Winkle to help them. With the lack of recognizable landmarks, even an eyewitness could be as confused as anyone. 

       So I come back to the Roman parallel. If we were lucky enough to reanimate  someone from the early Empire, and asked him for guidance on a few topographic points on ancient Rome, he would probably be equally useless. There would be too much added to the world he knew, and at the same time, too much missing. The precise layout of the Forum of Augustus, or Nero's Golden House, would simply have been given facts in his time, about as worth committing to memory as we have for the exact address of the Jefferson Memorial (which is, of course, 900 Ohio Dr SW, Washington, DC 20242).   

      The details of the past are hard enough to recover. Perhaps more disturbing, the details of the present hardly exist in our minds either. 

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro

Snapshot: The Castle of DNA

From time to time I'll be posting impressions I wrote during past trips. Here's the first one:

Snapshot: Tübingen, Germany, August 29, 2001

Credit: Der gestiefelte kater, Wiki Commons

Delight and torment are never so tightly linked as when one travels. 

            Two days here, and it's not the diorama-like neatness of the place that still impresses me, not the preserved-in-amber charm. It's the civility. Punk kids wait patiently for lighted crosswalks to turn green; young women walk alone through half-lit streets on the edge of town. Is this orderliness something in the souls of the people? Or is it an artifact of affluence? Seems more the former, since America is affluent yet seem very short of civility. Cities in Europe are seen as assets, cities in America are necessary evils. Maybe that's why Americans are so ready to moot their cities by erecting suburban malls, but nothing equivalent is happening in Europe. 

            So many famous names for such a small town. Kepler, Hegel, Herman Hesse all had their turns here. DNA was discovered in a lab in Hohentübingen Castle--how incongruous.

            European women also differ from American. Tight, disco-style jeans never seem to have gone away here. Beauty in America is always either hyped up, or aggressively played-down with baggy jeans. It is sold or denied. European women seem to live with their beauty as if it is part of them. They own it.

            The 10:33 bus just went by. The time: 10:33.

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro