The Acela Express

One place I consistently find a fascinating microcosm of humanity is the Acela Express from Union Station in Washington to Penn Station in New York on any given day of the week. The journey lasts about 3.5 hours, stops at major cities along the way, and otherwise just flashes across the northeast corridor with old America passing by outside. More than what's outside those windows is what's within. Smart, well-dressed people of all ages all doing interesting things, some de-stressed, taking a nap or reading a book, others taking a call or typing away on a computer. It's a superficial assessment for sure, one that doesn't amount to much in the grand scheme of things, but when I get on that train I always feel like I'm where I need to be, in good company. I never am really ready for the trip to be over, but when it is, I love getting off that train in the buzz of Manhattan, or arriving back home in a grand city that has become mine. My earliest memories are filled with a love for trains, hours upon hours spent building elaborate tracks and stations across the floors of my first house. Easy then to follow the thread of life and find a man, now thirty, sitting in his seat, gazing out the window, lulled into a sense of belonging by the steady vibrations of wheels against track, accentuated by an occasional horn let off into the approaching night. 

Back on the bike

The things that remain most clear in my mind about riding are the roads, and I remember in particular an amazing stretch called Fitzhugh, extending from Highway 290 almost thirty miles out to Johnson City. Two gas stations bounded miles of rural ranches and scorched hills LBJ would have known well. In the middle of Texas summer, we would often drive down and park at one end, load up on liquids, and ride to the other. After refueling, we would ride back. Once, when I was in the best shape of my life and wanted to prove my worth and readiness, I went out and back twice, upwards of 120 miles, and it was probably the most difficult day I've ever had in my life.

I trained and raced long distance triathlons for years, and when asked questions around why, I usually drift back to this ride, and countless others like it that defined this period of my life. I find so much about being a man integrally tied to physical exertion, and the fact is you learn something about yourself when that kind of exhaustion sets in. It's the internal conversations as you pedal along alone across a hundred miles of road, the places your depleted mind wanders. It's the confidence that comes when you feel strong and powerful in your body, an insurance policy against the stagnation of office monotony. Ultimately, I find it's how excuses just melt away when you realize all the many things that are possible, what the human body and spirit can actually achieve. That's contagious. It infects every aspect of your life, this resiliency, this vision, and I often wish the whole damn world knew what that feeling was like.

Recently, I clipped into a new bike and rode out on new roads, from Washington DC crossing the border into Maryland, down McArthur Blvd along the Potomac River. From there, a climb up to the city of Potomac, then left onto River Road and up a beautiful rural farm road called Berryville, one you'd never go down unless you live in one of its magnificent country houses. From Darnestown, you turn and head back home, down Turkey Foot, Travilah, and Glen, before shooting back out onto McArthur into Georgetown. The treasured stops at rugged gas stations, the internal fever that builds and stays well into the night, the getting to know your city in new ways, the hunger, the soreness, the sunburns, the exhaustion. I lost something in my life when I stopped spending hours on a bike - but I knew I'd be back. One hot day and 60 miles in June represent my long awaited return to the stage. 

In Patagonia

It really was a stunning landscape, with all the elements you'd expect of the bottom of the world. Fierce winds blew in off nearby glaciers, and when the clouds weren't out, the sun kept the temperature somewhere confusing between hot and cold. It was dry and rocky in parts, and green and lush in others, peppered with llamas and condors and an occasional cougar. Every lake lit up with a different shade of blue, and one morning absent all wind, at a lake they said was always choppy, it was clear as glass, mirrored, a mountain rising up above and descending below.

Chatwin's In Patagonia accompanied me and gave context to the otherworldly terrain of Torres del Paine, and I'm reminded of the great value in returning to human life as it evolved to be. Stay away from the cell towers long enough, and the brain rewires to its natural state, where you sit comfortably gazing at nothing, or talking to the stranger on your left, rather than reaching for a phone screen and falling into the abyss that comes with being better connected. Here there was so much to see and absorb, an aching to be present, and I found myself later, well on the other side, longing nostalgically for the period of time in which my devices did not work.

There's also a blur of faces from a whirlwind week, some that months later still come to mind. There were the Chilean tour guides running on seasonal rotations that extend outward forever - they either have life figured out, or not figured out at all. There was that wonderful couple embodying happiness and love telling me, the first person ever outside the doctor, on a bus ride across nowhere, that she's pregnant, only later, in an email, to heartbreakingly tell me she miscarried for the second time. There was the beautiful, misplaced, and very taken British girl on my last time warp of an evening in Santiago, looking me in the eyes knowingly, saying so much without words, then saying that fateful final line - "I hope to see you in another version of life" - that then leaves you speechless all the way home. And of course, everything is buoyed, always buoyed, by that one particular friend who knows me on a level perhaps no one else does scattered into memories around the world. Life is injected with excitement and chaos, always, when we manage to link. She will always be integrally associated with lofty thoughts of Patagonia, laughing, laughing without end, laughing until you cannot breathe, laughing until the moment you say goodbye.

When the story of me is written, when I one day look to assign meaning to the swirl of atoms and star dust and energetic currents, it will be these kinds of things that form the substance of the argument I tell the withering version of myself. It's the formation of these bonds in bubbles across the world I want etched into the annals of me. 

Home

A glance around my room illuminates a whole panoply of things I've come to love. I love the way the trees outside my window rustle in the wind and change color on the onset of fall. I love the occasional bark of a dog in the small field that sits just within my view. I love the way my books sit on my shelves, ordered just the way I like, accompanied by a whole world of trinkets and treasures I picked up somewhere far away. I love my bar cart, and the nice booze that sits on it, which of course includes a bottle of single malt, perfect for pouring into a glass on a cold night while I watch the snow. I love the yellow chair I sit in with the scotch. I love the quotes pinned to my cork board. I love the magnates and photos on my fridge. Mostly, I love the feeling of peace and confidence that comes waking up in the morning and slowly looking around at a place that exists on my terms, and embodies my 30 years, everything finally together in one place.

The surprise probably comes greatest of all to me, watching the nature of my life change so rapidly in its day to day movements after years spent on the road - and welcoming it. That previous life was full of beautiful people and places. It was exciting and always new. Yet, as I came to recognize, it was fleeting, and built atop something more vacuous, more image than reality, masquerading itself in the exotic allure of a dozen different countries. It was something I knew I would find disappointing years down the road looking back, examining all the difficult choices I failed to make against all the things that were easy to do. I often feel inspired on my morning commute, one which takes me past the White House and old buildings with marble columns, the Washington Monument always visible in the distance. Something in that I view as evidence, usually on the harder days, that many of my observations were true. I expect they will become more true with time.

Antoine de Saint-Expurey, writing to a friend in Wind, Sand, and Stars, said that moral greatness derives more from a sense of responsibility than from courage or honesty. To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. I think there is great power that comes with this sense of responsibility, assuming it around the small confines of your world, and not relying on anyone else to make things happen. Being a man, to be sure, requires sacrifice (I sometimes feel I've sacrificed it all in my attempt to keep true things, true). But there is beauty in that sacrifice, in that struggle, in the imperfections of striving and seeking and attempting to make it all work. Because you choose a home, it is yours, and anything wrong represents something wrong inside you. That is a powerful and enabling thought I've found, as time rolls on by. 

I'd like to think all that is what people are after when they talk of home, but I doubt that's true. Home for some is purely aspirational, what someone once told them a large mansion with nice furniture would be. For others, sadly, I don't think it exists at all, either as a choice or as an idea. But home can exist for anyone. It is simply the act of assuming responsibility for a small slice of the world on behalf of yourself and the people you love. It's a place where you can provide, welcome, and build, a rose you can take care of, a place that serves as a sturdy foundation for the rest of life to both fail and flourish when you walk outside your front door. 

Ring Road 1

I played the Icelandic band Sigur Ros, and his later solo persona, Jonsi, on repeat for a majority of the thousand miles I drove across the island. His haunting melodies form a perfect backdrop to what plays out before you, as if they sprung from the otherworldly landscapes themselves. In a way, they did. Jonsi was born in Reykjavik, and he garnered fame across Iceland before exploding onto the international stage. It’s one example of many dating back to the original Sagas, of this peculiar small isolated place punching above its weight in the arts. I wonder often about this impact, what happens when geography and climate mesh with the human condition. In Iceland, surrounded by lava flows atop lava flows everywhere from a few hundred to a few million years old, cooled by the refreshing mist of a hundred waterfalls, how can you not be inspired to create, to contemplate, to heal, to grow, to connect with something deeper in this fraction of time that is your life? All the things that make the arts, the arts.

Around midnight on my last evening, shivering in the cold, I walked down a deserted road in Snaesfellsnes National Park, flanked by the ocean on one side and a glacier on the other all under the cover of stars. Waiting, waiting, scanning the skies for the Northern Lights, hoping to catch a glimpse of this miracle of nature seen by so few. There was a long period of worry. Perhaps they would not be seen this night. A few people around me went to bed, tired and cold, not really even knowing what they were waiting for. And then clouds started to clear, green light slowly appeared near the horizon, brightening outward in long streaks dancing across the sky, compounding this profound feeling of awe and smallness. From start to finish, this was the most beautiful place I've seen in this life.

What power disbands the Northern Lights,

After their steely play?

The lonely watcher feels an awe,

Of nature’s sway.

One should remember what they thought as they stood under the auroras for the first time, and for me, it was strangely emotional, feeling deeply the many layers that have so encased my heart, beginning, finally, to unravel. That culminated in something that felt a lot like letting go, and the opening epithet in a Junot Diaz book, of course, comes to mind, that where Sandra Cisneros, calmly, from the safety of time and space, floats: there should be stars for wars like ours. I reply, under my breath, looking up with tears in my eyes, full of the bittersweet heavy fullness that comes with recognizing something can be so many true things at once: goodnight dear, goodnight.

Summer

Sitting on a bench at the banks of the Potomac, I looked up and watched plane after plane rise up into the skies above Alexandria. I find this almost therapeutic, the rhythmic rise of man and machine, a symbol of our ordered scheduled world. Behind me was perhaps the oldest settled land in the area, dating back to the Virginia charters. In front of me, the blue brown water flowing past Mount Vernon, out into the Chesapeake and the Atlantic Ocean, like it has for so much longer than man can remember.

Observing airplanes takes on a different tone these days. I have well entrenched memories from places like Doha and Abu Dhabi, watching them take off from the desert out over the Persian Gulf, for months upon months upon months, wishing I was on them, going somewhere, anywhere. But sitting on my bench this afternoon, there was no such feeling. I was at peace, content, full of deep breaths and restful eyes, happy to be where I was. The paradox between eras - though a long and winding road - is a reaffirmation, since reaffirmed again. That the changes I felt pressed to make, were important. That the things I knew deeply, were true. They were true, and I feel gratitude for their veracity and the experience all that brings, challenging an odd fortune cookie once acquired in a different life urging me to settle, because it won't get any better than this. I pulled that worn piece of paper out of my Moleskine and threw it right into the water, watching it bounce with the waves and float away. The date was Wednesday, August 1, discarding last remaining bygone thoughts and dreams into the throes of summer.

If summer in Washington was a sound, it would be the cicadas high up in the trees calling out in the hot afternoons. They follow me across the squares and circles of the city, from the shores in Alexandria right up to my bedroom window, lulling me into a nap, perhaps, and reminding me where I am. 

Washingtonian

The namesake of the street I live, George Washington Riggs (Riggs Place), was a 19^th century businessman born just to the west in Georgetown. Over the course of his life he financed the Mexican-American War, had nine children, was buried in Rock Creek Cemetery, and that is pretty much it. No one in Washington apart from its amateur historians would remember his name, but the street itself is one of the loveliest I’ve seen, quiet and green, with old row houses and tall trees lining the cobblestone sidewalks. I’ve sat out there on my porch and watched summer morph into fall, winter, and spring, and have thought that you can forget about all the short lived things. Being remembered for a beautiful street that generations of families call home is a wonderful thing. 

Riggs the man joins so many others that came together to breathe life into this 218 year old enterprise that is the nation’s capital. I think of them often when I put my feet to the pavement and walk and walk and walk. Theirs are names like Andrew Mellon, who dying of cancer, bequeathed his art collection to the citizens of the United States, in what is now the National Gallery of Art. One of my favorite buildings in DC, it is a place to go to exit yourself and get swept up in aisles of beautiful things. There is James Smithson, the British scientist and illegitimate child of the aristocracy, who upon his death, donated his entire estate “to found in Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” How many millions of young children to date have walked through the Museum of Natural History eyes wide in wonder, all thanks to his great gift to the world. Then there is Peter L’Enfant, the brilliant urban planner sabotaged only by his own ego and pride, who now lies on a peaceful hill in Arlington National Cemetery overlooking the city he designed. He eventually got his own metro station, but died in poverty, a sad end to a man with so much to give. And how to forget George Washington, the city’s initial benefactor, who pushed for the location of the nation’s capital along the waters of the Potomac. Nothing about history is inevitable, nor was this. On numerous occasion the project was nearly abandoned, dismantled, and taken somewhere else. 

Where would I be without all these people? In a city of less splendor, if even a city at all. Cities are the combined force of a million small factors, forged by the choices and compromises of long forgotten people that echo across its buildings, parks, statues, and streets. So it is with the District of Columbia.

All this is the past, but the Washington of 2018 is my city. It feels deliberate, on my terms, for the first time in my life a place I’ve chosen to live because I want to live there, as opposed to letting forces outside yourself decide the twists and turns of your life. One takeaway from the last ten years, most of which have been spent flipping life on its axis, is that we should seek out and live where we want to live, because it is this hodgepodge of people and places that shapes our reality and defines so much of what we become. I look to the future and what I’ll become with optimism and humility, because I've been so very humbled, and yet still know the future is bright, because I feel that as I walk the streets of this city and breath in its air.

Washington to me is infinite meaning, something only visible once you’ve lost what you so deeply believed in, then embraced everything else there was to gain. Mellon, Smithson, and L’Enfant were my brave companions. I walked with them on so many early mornings and rainy nights, when the world felt heavy and when it felt light. It is thanks to them and so many others that I’ve stepped back and, perhaps surprisingly, found a work in progress that is home.