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Yosemite, San Francisco and Afghanistan: Flashbacks or reruns of time passedby Dominique de Ziegler ('67)Travels in Afghanistan and summers in California, flashbacks or reruns of time passed? This head-on question struck me this summer of 2009, a summer like all others for the past 15 years that started in Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara in July is medicine for me. Not that this resort town at the northern edge of Southern California is any kind of treatment for some ailment that I do not yet have. No, Santa Barbara is simply where I’ve been invited to convene over the years by the UCLA team, my old Alma Mater and the mold in which I was forged. It’s also where I am invited to talk about my topic of choice in medicine, ‘human reproduction’, a subject that I’ve been focusing on and making a living off for the past 30 years. Over the years, I also had my chunks of Californian life after the Santa Barbara meeting, big or small, with some members or all of my family, as the meeting became the entry portal for my summers and a long-earned recess from work. This year, the after-Santa Barbara life was a going-back trip to Yosemite. Yosemite is a long-established replay of time passed, as my first-at-Yosemite was with Frans Yves, a Lycée pal, with whom I explored the wild American West barely a month after the Lycée was forever over in the summer of 1967. Since then, all the returns to Yosemite – there were many – made me itch for more, with ‘more’ spelled with a capital M. It was more in the form of longer hiking trips over higher passes, further away from civilization, deeper into the great American wilderness. This year, ‘more’ took on new flavors, as I was with my 11 year-old son Elliott (aka ‘Le Coyote’). And in the backpack carried over the John Muir trail there was a book that sparked it all. It was about kites and Afghanistan and it took me back there in the midst of walking through Yosemite. And after Afghanistan the book opened to a Californian exile, one that unearthed my own Californian exile that popped right back up at me so unexpectedly. At Yosemite, we spent a day taking our equipment through a dress rehearsal and doing some last minute shopping. The next day we took the hikers’ bus that leaves the Yosemite Lodge at the crack of dawn. We were with a happy crowd of wilderness permit holders – soon campers to be –licensed by park rangers to venture deep into this Californian sanctuary. We got off the bus at Tuolumne meadow and started hiking up and across the high Sierra country. Ultimately, we crossed legendary points such as ‘Sunrise’ and continued on to Merced Lake. From there, we followed the river named after the lake that flows down at times leisurely, and at others with fracas when it flows over rolling rocks and boulders all the way down to the bottom of the Yosemite Valley. For several days my son and I lived on the food that we carried along in my back pack. It consisted of varieties of freeze-dried lasagna and other modern-day marvels for the hiker that in the evening we cooked on our stove and ate by the camp fires that we lighted at night. The water we drank and used for other housekeeping purposes – civilization hops on for the ride in your mental baggage– was purified from streams and lakes with a Millipore pump of the type that they used in Viet Nam. We went over mountain passes that topped the 11,000 ft mark and walked through forests and grassland. Once, we gave way to a black bear with a cub-in-tow that hopped along some 300 yards behind mom. In a forest we might easily have cut in between mother and cub. And mothers – bear or not – don’t like this too much. But our encounter took place on the edge of a clearing – a lush meadow that spawned over a bright and open swath of land that smelled of nature at its richest and very best. I rapidly spotted the jumping silhouette of the reckless cub that trailed so far behind mom. So we gave way to Mrs. Bear and family, not being in any kind of rush anyway. Each night I pulled the book from the backpack and started reading by the camp fire. It was a story of kites flying over Kabul, ‘a must read’ I had been told. Ant the Kabul of the book – the cradle of the author – rooted back to 1975, so close it seems today from the Kabul of 1970 that Frans-Yves and I had driven to. It was a heck of a trip in a small car, more like a golf cart – a Renault 4, ‘La 4L’ – that in France they called a car at the time. And when the hero of the book finally leaves Afghanistan we find our Californian exile. An exile who in many ways, I dreamed of being when first in California with Frans-Yves in 1967 and that I later became during my UCLA years. A state of being that I finally walked away from and declined to return to when UCLA repeatedly offered me the helm of ‘Reproductive Medicine’ there, the last time this summer. California had been a long lasting dream – America at its best – that I had to live through and sip from for ultimately freeing myself from its myth and other demons that haunted my mind. First I had to be this immigrant that I fantasized about in order to, at long last, untie all ties and peacefully return to where I had never really been but ultimately decided to settle, Paris. After five days or so of hiking adventures – having bitten through a fair chunk of the great American wilderness – Elliott and I made landfall with civilization in San Francisco where we ate fettuccine pasta topped with curled shreds of Parmesan cheese and vintage virgin olive oil. And all this was served on a white tablecloth with a glass of Italian red wine on the side. It was on Columbus Avenue, in the heart of the Italian district. We stayed in San Francisco, the city of all-hills, flowers (remember ‘67’) and bling-bling cable cars. By the crack of dawn – actually, at 4.30 AM or so – I got up each day and left Geary St, by Union Square, to go jogging. Through laziness or well-inspired wisdom, I avoided both Knob and Russian hills. I stayed on Geary until I turned right on Polk, one street off Van Ness, and kept going on Polk all the way to the ocean. Then, after passing the marina and its glut of for-sale yachts, I entered Crissy Field Park, where the Army once had an airfield by the same name with a runway that ran parallel to the shore but that has been long torn and forgotten. There, I saw dozens of small lights that flickered and danced with hesitation in the peach black darkness, as if some little people in desperate search for redemption were trying to send messages to subdue some faraway goddess. When I got closer I saw they were bunches of weirdoes dressed in white taking some crazy Chinese body-art lesson. I guess they – they were mainly women, but there were a few guys too – were doing all this before resuming their ordinary lives, in the financial district or elsewhere, doing some menial tasks at a computer desk for whatever company, for whatever important or unimportant reason. We were in California after all. I passed them in silence. They didn’t even notice me. I was just a generic crazy jogger strolling along in the darkness, a weirdo in my own way pursuing other goddesses of my own choosing. Then the running path brought me beneath Presidio Park where the darkness was so total that I could barely see my own feet as they hit the ground beneath me. Yet they kept going with the same regularity as before and got me safely to the end of the path, right where there were stairs that cut through eucalyptus trees and lead way up to bridge level. I started crossing the GG Bridge still embedded in the elusive seclusion of the night. With my feet pounding the metal floor of the bridge, I could see the somber reflection of the frigid Pacific waters on each side, on the right through the open fence of the bridge and on the left through an opening between the pedestrian path on which I was and the road. Every 30 seconds, or so it seemed, the stillness of the night filled itself with the loud and persistent sound of the fog horn that engulfed everything. Nearly half way across the bridge the suspended cables fell from the fog and ran low on the outer handrail before rising again through the fog, gigantic cables all bundled up together that climbed toward an imaginary sky above. On my right, in the far distance, appeared the first gleams of the day that started dazzling from behind the city. A telephone box was attached to the rail of the bridge at the midway mark. It bore a fluorescent sticker that said ‘there is hope, make a call’. My thoughts caught by the word ‘hope’ started drifting for a while, though not of the desperate kind that would make me think of jumping off the bridge. I looked up and above my head. For moments I thought I saw myriads of kites crisscrossing the sky high above me in some kind of enticing ballet. The repetitive blasts of the bridge’s fog horn were suddenly echoed by a different, more strident and higher pitched sound that came from a freighter that entered the bay after days of trans-Pacific crossing. The ship passed beneath me with its flimsy deck lights shimmering as they reflected on the choppy waters of the San Francisco Bay. The humongous boat was loaded to the gills with piles of containers that I imagined full of Toyotas and flat-screen TV sets. There were no kites flying above me, just the night soon bound to die but still dwelling a little longer, all cocooned in the San Francisco fog, unwilling to let go yet. With two hours of jogging on the odometer , I started feeling deliciously warm. My mind simmering in the heat that mounted from the body in motion was aroused by chill lashes of night fog that hit me in the face in sudden and crisp gushes. Thoughts started free-wheeling in the pursuit of fantasies, secret and untellable fantasies, in the arms of which I abided and rolled over with pleasure. Through the fog, I saw myself entering Afghanistan. The car, freed from the clutches of a dozen mighty customs officers at the border with Iran, started rolling again and soon we rested in the delicate city of Herat, eating kebab and rice with our fingers, lying on rugs that had been set for us in an outside patio while the sun receded after a long and hot summer day. And more memories started flowing, unwinding from the hidden spools of my mind, reeling in their wake more and more images that originated from some unauthorized reruns of the past, or were they just flashbacks? All this came from times that are long and irreversibly gone. I could smell the strong flavor of the dark chai, the sense of rest experienced at night in caravanserais, or in the chai-shacks where Frans-Yves and I bunked on that winding old road to Bamyan with all its passes, each higher than the previous one. I could see again the clear and transparent aqueous-blue of the sky that the road seemed wanting to reach at the extreme ends of these Afghan valleys, where the world ended against mountains that stood higher than mountains ever rise. And each had to be climbed to see life being reborn on the other side of the pass, finding another valley that lied there, richer and lusher than the valley we had just left, where eternity had for ever moored. There were the sedentary people that we saw in these valleys. Their somber demeanor marked their menial attachment to the land that they all bent over, that they kept caring for. It was their entire wealth and their burden at the same time. And there were the nomads with their arrogant look of freedom and their proud gait, whom we saw restlessly on the go, crisscrossing the country, going over mountains with their caravans that endlessly stretched along the narrow valleys. And there were their glorious women – wives and daughters – dressed in the brightest colors, parading on top of their camels, their faces shamelessly unveiled, beautiful and full of so much feminine and earthy arrogance, inviting yet looking down on the sedentary people tied to their land and their work that both provided for and enslaved them all at once. There were also the mishaps of the road and a string of mechanical failures. I see again Frans Yves jumping up and down on the tire of ‘La 4L’s wheel that lied by the side of the road – ‘La 4L’ in unstable equilibrium on a couple of rocks, shamelessly exposing its barren axle – to unstick the flat tire from the rim before it could be pried off. And days over, there was the sun that tirelessly observed our exploits, those crazy 20 year olds kids who drove to where the world ended, in Afghanistan. I never returned to Afghanistan. Friendships from the Lycée have since sieved through the test of time, some vanishing and drifting away, while Frans Yves became the lasting brother who he is today. This Afghanistan that fills my memory is gone and so is the medicine that I studied. The world has changed. Afghanistan is in rags and tears. Medicine is in desperate need for inspiration, seeking the screenplay that could stage its marvelous achievements and tell it where to go. But today, America’s rotting health care system may be our ultimate best chance for a change as decaying health in the US – a cancer in its own way – makes the long yearning for an overhaul now so totally unavoidable. On the GG Bridge, there were no kites flying. I was by myself. There was just a dying night reluctantly giving way to a new day that tried to elope with the sun, hoping to run away if only for a few hours from the claws of the summer San Francisco fog. My fantasies had deserted me as joint aches, pains and sores of all sorts started flocking in. The body, which began hurting, crippled new thoughts in the womb before they could flourish. I was now jogging back toward the city, watching the sky catching the colors of new before the sun would rise from behind Russian Hill. With the city approaching, my fantasies got a new script, one in which the goddesses and the dream lines of their feminine curves that enthralled me before had now vanished, giving way to a bare culinary backdrop drawn by my insistent hypoglycemia, one that made me crave for a Starbuck latte with a blueberry muffin on the side. And when I return to Paris, I know I’ll grab a bite with Frans-Yves and Roger. We’ll sure chat about ‘DB’, Francis and the wonderful “She’s” with whom the wildest of our fantasies hatched for the first time and then never receded. And there will be for sure a bunch of others popping up in the backdrop. But we’ll no doubt talk about today too and the marvelous tomorrows to come. Were these reruns from time past or some boosts pushing forward to try to keep me running? |
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