Parlez you Deutch?

 

“Ist… Toiletten?” 

The guy addressing me looked a little overwhelmed amidst the hubbub of the Freiburg im Brisgau train station.  He was wide-eyed, dark-haired, brown-skinned, and barely out of his teens.  He also, it seemed, needed a bathroom.

“Ja!” I nodded encouragingly.  “Ist Toiletten!  Um… Ist ein Euro…”  I pointed to where a coin had to be inserted in order to enter.  Ugh.  Pay toilets.  But still, toilets. 

Apparently this young man had the necessary euro, which was a good thing, because I was pretty sure I’d used the last of my own coins on the way into the bathroom a few minutes earlier.  He smiled.  “Danke.”

“Bitte”.  I smiled back, watched him successfully gain access, and moved on.

He didn’t speak German.  Then again, neither do I. 

My friend Amy and I planned our European vacation with just enough attention to detail to be sure that we didn’t end up stranded in airports, dark alleys, or idyllic-yet-bemusing mazes of hundreds of tiny vegetable gardens.  But we left much of the trip up for grabs, including the question of precisely which towns we’d immerse ourselves in.  Or which countries.  And, by extension, which languages.

I detest the arrogance of Americans who expect the entire globe to speak English to them.  Sadly, however, I am no more linguistically equipped than many such travelers.  This means that if I want to see anything of the world, I need to be willing to look like an idiot. 

Amy and I agreed to meet up in Karlsruhe, a mid-size college town in western Germany where she was wrapping up a short teaching gig.  The Black Forest area and the nearby Alsace-Lorraine region of France were part of our vaguely-planned travel agenda.  Switzerland was more of a whim. But, as entire nations with hundreds of years of complex history go, it was an excellent whim.

Amy speaks passable but imperfect German, plus a little French remembered from the distant past of high school.  I speak terrible but enthusiastic French, gleaned from the same high school classed plus two years of not-very-dedicated practice with the cheery Duolingo owl.  I also speak approximately thirty-seven words of any other given European language, learned via guesswork, Latin roots, and osmosis.

Obviously, we were all set for international adventure.

I flew direct from home – Fairbanks, Alaska -- to Frankfurt.  This trajectory offers incredible luxury in over-the-Artic surrealism, allowing a traveler to acquire ten hours of jetlag over the course of a nine-hour flight.  Despite my language inadequacy, the train connection was easy.  Of course it was.  Because Europe. 

Our first full day was spent exploring Karlsruhe.  Ergo, talking was up to Amy.  From the start, she and I were unofficially playing a game that I’ll call “Anything But English”.  The goal was to conduct conversations without our interlocutors figuratively or literally rolling their eyes and switching to our native tongue.  This game was stacked; while Amy’s German is much better than my French, Germans are much more likely to know English than are their French neighbors.

As such, my verb-mangling and noun-forgetting found plenty of scope on the next stage of our journey, in the ridiculously scenic and historic small city of Strasbourg, France.  More than once, I was reminded of David Sedaris’s snortingly funny self-deprecation in Me Talk Pretty One Day: “On my fifth trip to France… things began to come together, and I went from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. "Is thems the thoughts of cows?  I want me some lamb chop with handles on 'em.”

I had different but equally bungling food-related questions. “C’est un legume? Pas de viande?  Je suis une vegetarienne.”  The server at the outdoor café – all the cafes were outdoor cafes, idyllic in the cobbled streets, shaded by umbrellas or spreading maples – was a time-worn and kindly chain-smoker.  She assured me that “le poireau” was indeed a vegetable, but that still left a lot of wiggle-room with regard to what kind of tart I was ordering.  I dredged my brain.  I knew the words for peas, onions, carrots, mushrooms, tomatoes, beans, cabbage, lettuce, cucumbers...  Okay, so it wouldn’t be a lettuce and cucumber tart… wait… “C’est un legume comme un oignon vert, mais tres grand?”

The server grinned.  “Oui, oui!”

“Leek!” I said, with a far greater sense of triumph than leek-identifying could reasonably warrant.  “It’s leek tart!” 

“Leek,” our server repeated, earnestly hoping to help the next clueless American or Brit to come along.  Who says the French are unaccommodating?  She wandered off to place the order.  A few minutes later, she returned to tell us that, malheureusement, there was no leek tart today.  Quel dommage.  Mais la tarte a l’oignon est vraiment très délicieuse. 

We ate onion tart.  The sun shone down on the cobblestones.  Our server cheerfully smoked another cigarette while ambling off to get us the bill. 

In some ways, Amy and I traveled exactly like the middle-aged people we are.  Clubbing and nightlife were nowhere on the agenda; we were more interested in cathedrals, museums, architecture, parks, forests, and gardens.  On the other hand, we toted backpacks, draped sink-washed laundry around our modest shared hotel rooms, and walked 12-16 miles per day, just… seeing stuff.  We ate fruit by the pound from market stalls, and consumed fresh-baked croissants, pretzels, and baguettes with glutenous and gluttonous abandon.  We climbed all the steps, turrets, hills, and belltowers.  All the belltowers!  And we made linguistic fools of ourselves.

At our Strasbourg hotel, the desk clerk, a tall, slender young Black man, grinned at my French and asked where I learned it.  In high school, I told him -- which was a long, long, LONG time ago – and from the little green Duolingo owl on my phone.  He laughed.  Did I speak English? he inquired.  When I complimented him on his command of my own language, he told me that he’d learned it from his dad, who was from Ghana.  His self-deprecating tone suggested that his bilingualism was easy, almost a form of cheating. 

Thousands of new citizens are enriching the linguistic complexity of Europe.  All three of the nations that Amy and I visited have thriving populations of immigrants, as well as kids growing up as first-generation natives. Many of the new residents are refugees.  France has welcomed half a million in recent years, mostly from Afghanistan, Syria, and Sri Lanka.  Germany is now home to almost one and a half million diverse new residents, a fact that feels keenly poignant on so many different levels.  In the streets, I heard mashups of… well, okay, I’m not entirely sure.  French and Pashto?  German and Arabic? It’s a gleeful, colorful, complicated, wonderful Babel out there, and we threw ourselves into it.

Wandering the pedestrian plazas of Strasbourg one evening, Amy and I found our dinnertime palates tempted not by haute cuisine, but by a cheerful hole-in-the wall Syrian place.  “I feel like we should eat French food while we’re in France,” I said, then paused.  This food WAS French food, being eaten by newly French people. 

The felafel was excellent.

Later in the trip, a young man who looked perhaps of Syrian origin politely approached me as I was returning a rental bike to a rack.  He wanted to know if he could check out the same bike after I’d checked it in, because it clearly worked well and was the right size.  He started the conversation in German.  We were in a border town, so I tried French.  He responded in kind.  It wasn’t until we were pleasantly parting that it became clear that he also spoke perfectly serviceable English.

This three-flavor blended language became even more prevalent in Switzerland, which is not just a border town but a border nation. Basel, Switzerland was easy to reach (trains!)  The Rhine was azure in the summer heat, and I envied the locals bobbing sociably down the river, their clothes and valuables floating with them in little dry-bags.  These folks were clearly planning to hop out refreshed and take public transport home (trams!).  Basel also had the coolest cathedral of all, boasting two bell towers AND a dim and delightfully creepy crypt.  And everyone in Basel seemed to speak at least three languages – not necessarily one at a time. 

My mother spent a year in Switzerland as a young adult, honing her high school French into fluency while typing letters for an international corporation.  Years later, trotting out her rusty language skills, she laughingly remarked that her French was better after a glass of wine.  She had a point.  As Sedaris demonstrates, multilingualism requires a level of letting go. In Basel, I felt like there was no way to do language “wrong”.  It was here that I gave up any last pretenses of knowing anything about verb tenses or noun genders, and just jumped into the full-on linguistic bedlam.

I thought that communication would revert to being Amy’s job when we left France, but Basel wasn’t the only place that felt like a free-for-all.  Late one afternoon, on another scorching-yet-wonderful day of exploring, I heard, “Excuse me?”  An anxious-looking girl of about 12 or 13 was addressing me in English… with a thick French accent… in Germany. 

It took me a moment to parse this.  But the surrounding gaggle of notebook-toting middle-schoolers offered an instant flash-back to mid-eighties school field trips with Amy and 23 other tragically awkward children.  We often visited neighboring states, such as the wilds of New Jersey, where we had to record important facts about historic monuments or pause to “notice the terrain”.  These poor kids were clearly on a field trip to a neighboring nation.

I jumped in and started trying to help them in my awful French. This resulted in several fits of uncontrollable giggling from the hangers-on, but a look of relief from the poor girl who had somehow been forced by her peers into the position of interlingual spokesperson.  She answered me in a rush of French. 

I did my best.  La rue à droite, puis tournez à gauche, c'est tout près. I’m pretty sure they would have found the cathedral without my help.  It’s très grande. But there was satisfaction in communication – even though I couldn’t explain, in French, the connection and nostalgia I felt.

I wasn’t sure I would have been able to explain it in English.  Nonetheless, throughout the trip, my lack of ability to explain myself didn’t stop me from doing things that might require explanation – such as stopping in the middle of a German city park and sticking my head in the lake. 

In my defense, there was a clear precedent.  A brisk, fit, 70ish guy in a bathing suit and towel had just emerged from an early-morning dip.  It was about 6:30 a.m., but the temperature was already about 70 (or 21, for reasonable metric Europeans).  A combination of jet-lag, enthusiasm, and scorching weather had rendered me a Very Early Morning Jogger.

When I popped up, my hair refreshingly soaked, a woman appeared at my side.  She looked like a solid citizen: about my age, earnest, tidy.  “Guten Morgen,” I smiled.  She answered.  And didn’t stop answering.

This woman seemed to be a chatty-yet-solemn extrovert with time on her hands and a lot to say.  It involved water.  And chlorine.  And. . . I don’t know, something complicated about cancer, a tragedy, children, medical care?  Things were better now?  It was worthy of lots of head-nodding and hmm-hmming.  It was way too late for me to try to explain that I do not, in fact speak German.  At all.  Instead, I kept a straight face and nodded seriously at the serious lady who was telling me serious things.  I learned a lot from her – albeit not, perhaps, precisely the things she was trying to tell me. 

I learned that listening, even without comprehension, can still be valuable.  I was reminded that body language accounts for a staggeringly high percentage of communication.  And I pondered the deep, complex, overwhelmingly hard-wired linguistic instincts that have driven humans to invent and propagate languages. Everywhere.  Every era.  Pidgins, creoles, dialects, sign languages, and all the insanity of verb tenses – we’ve done this instinctively, collectively, literally thousands of times.  Language is not merely a characteristic of humans, it’s part of the fundamental definition and blueprint of our species.  We’re tool-using apes, true, but even more obviously, we’re apes who communicate – socially, informationally, educationally, connectively, crucially, constantly.  Even while dripping next to a lake.

Eventually, I used polite gestures to suggest that, gosh, maybe I’d better be continuing my morning run.  I smiled.  I turned.  “Danke schon!” I said, as I jogged away. 

I meant every word.

The trip ended before I wanted it to, as all trips should. On my flight home – a surreal nine solid hours of it being consistently 2:10 in the afternoon – the Condor flight attendant spoke to me in German, and I carefully replied with my miniscule vocabulary: danke, bitte, wasser, CocaCola.  She was undoubtedly laughing at me behind her polite smile.  Her English was impeccable, and she was, somewhat inexplicably, using that language to communicate with the fellow Fairbanksan who happened to be seated next to me.  But I wasn’t ready to return to the humdrum of “yes please” and “no thanks” until I was through Customs and Immigration.

Looking back on the trip now, I think that although I clocked a few victories in almost actually speaking French, my favorite foreign-language conversation was the one that took place in elemental Deutch.

“Is toilets?” 

“Yes, is toilets!”

I don’t speak any German.  Neither did the young stranger in the Freiburg im Brisgau train station.  We’re both human, though.  Sometimes that’s what matters most.

Just Passing Through

Photo of our community living room, blatantly stolen from Scott Pauker's blog
(http://spokeandwords.com/hitching-prudhoe-bay-part-2/)

When the kids and I found the sheet of fresh cookies and the pan of homemade brownies that Scott Pauker had left on our kitchen counter, I felt a twinge of regret that he would not be there to share them with us. 

Not that our little community of nine adults and four kids would have any trouble gobbling down the treats without outside assistance.  We have a strong track-record in Postprandial Gooey Deliciousness Consumption.  It’s part of the rhythm of the evening, which starts when we hungrily gather to sniff out whatever the chef du jour has concocted, and ends when we drag unwilling children home for necessary slumber. 

Dinner itself is usually gratifyingly replete with dark leafy greens, organic legumes, and whole-graininess.  While dining – and in the comfortable after-supper half-hour of plate-scrubbing and leftover-wrapping – we all decompress from work, gripe about current events, share our very best in off-color humor, or (in the case of the eight-to-ten-year-old crowd) happily absorb the off-color humor while bouncing off the walls.  Finally, we settle down to the pleasures of Dessert Time.

For two evenings during the previous week as well as two evenings this week, Scott had made a nice addition to that tableau.  His sunburned grin radiated his total lack of concern at finding himself in the midst of some kind of weird intellectual hippie mini-commune.  They use an outhouse and make jokes about Oxford commas?  Yeah, I’m cool with that.  He filled us in on enticing tidbits of Seattle news and biking lore.  He shared amusing details of his Adventure Thus Far -- and we were fond of his penchant for washing more than his share of the dishes. 

But, of course, he couldn’t hang around Fairbanks, Alaska forever.  He had places to go…such as Tierra del Fuego.  On his bicycle.

“Will we ever see him again?” asked Molly. She was indirectly responsible for the hoard of baked stickiness that was now brightening our morning with the joys of anticipation; with the honed cunning on an almost-third-grader, she’d been the fastest responder when Scott had kindly asked what sort of foodstuffs he might contribute to the general well-being of Tamarack Knoll. 

“Probably not,” I admitted.  “But we can follow his adventures online, if you want.”

“Okay.”

Molly sounded interested rather than disappointed.  She’d liked Scott.  Still, at age eight, she already seems well-acquainted with the fact that people come and go.  Travelers don’t always return. 

She strapped her own bike helmet over her raincoat hood for the decidedly less epic ride to this week’s summer camp – Shakespearean acting for the eight-to-twelve set – and the subject shifted to the question of why Lizzy’s bike has a rear mud-guard, while her twin’s does not.  But, as we splashed our way up our dirt road, and as I offered pointers on what gear a bike ought to be in on a steep incline (“Try a lower one, kiddo… no, a LOWER one…”) I found myself mulling over how we relate to the transient people in our lives: The Travelers.

I’ve blogged previously about the importance of community; of friendships; of sense of place; of ties that are permanent (okay, fine, not permanent on an intergalactic scale, but you know what I mean); and of people who are SO AWESOME that one can pawn off one’s kids on them at short notice. These myriad bonds are at once as complex as calculus and as comfortable as couch cushions.  In our clock-watching, parking-lot-infested, glowing-screen-riddled lives, the time-and-connectedness algorithms are often tricky to compute, and the fabric of community needs a bit of darning, to say the least.  But where, in weaving that mathematical tapestry, do we place the person who is new, foreign, strange, unknown, and temporary?  What is the role of The Archetypal Traveler?

The Traveler shows up in plenty of stories, from the Odyssey on out.  He or she is the Gypsy, the Tinker, the Explorer, the Warrior, the Vagabond, and the Stranger all rolled into one.  She is the Fairy Godmother, who appears for just long enough to do her trick with the pumpkin.  He is that Brad Pitt character who runs off with all the money in Thelma and Louise – but that’s not why you remember the character, now is it?  He is Gandalf, who never quite seems able to stick around long enough for the entire adventure, due to mysteriously pressing business elsewhere. 

Scott, of course, is not an archetype; he’s a specific, cheerful, 37-year-old man from Seattle with muddy Spandex and a liberal-arts background.  But, for the purposes of my ruminations, he makes a splendid archetypal proxy. We’d never heard of him until a few weeks ago.  He came our way as the friend-of-friends-of-friends, in a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon kind of way. 

Jay mentioned to me, in a vague sort of way, that “some biker guy” might be passing through, like, sometime, and did I think the community would be okay with letting him crash in the guest room?  As the Communications Specialist of the family (a job that falls to me by default, not based on any useful skillset), I posed this question to whomever happened to be around, received some unperturbed “yes” responses, and promptly forgot all about it until my phone rang, showing an unknown out-of-state number. 

“You’re where?  Old Nenana?  Okey-doke, you should be here in about twenty minutes.” 

I went to find a set of sheets, some sandwich-fixings, and a towel with not too many holes in it.

The Traveler is, by definition, is on the move. He’s not merely someone you’ve never met before; he’s someone who has been places you’ve never been, and is going places you probably can’t even imagine: “You’ve never heard of the Millennium Falcon? … It’s the ship that made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.”

Han Solo may not have known the difference between units of distance and units of time, but he was definitely going places: "Look, I ain't in this for your revolution, and I'm not in it for you, princess. I expect to be well paid. I'm in it for the money.” The traveler may or may not be one of the Good Guys in White Hats, but he’s interesting – and undeniably, oddly magnetic.

The Traveler doesn’t just crop up in literature (yes, of course Star Wars is literature!); he or she also seems to crop up with some regularity in our community.  Why?  Well, I’m not sure.  It might be because, given that there are five households in our group, we naturally receive five times the standard-issue number of guests.  It might be because Fairbanks is the kind of place where people frequently couch-surf – sometimes in a not-getting-off-this-couch-without-a-crowbar kind of way.  Or it might be because our community has an excellent reputation for not yet having slaughtered a single visitor in our ten-year history. 

Be that as it may, the vast majority of our guests have brightened and enlivened our lives.  Fairbanks is not a place that people “just pass through” unless they are up to something just a bit peculiar – such as a stint at Toolik Lake field station, measuring arctic shrubbery while enjoying the enthralling company of a few billion mosquitoes. We’ve housed researchers, families, relatives, and strangers.  We played host to the now-community-legend Fred, a retired African-American factory worker who came up to Alaska just to take part in the White Mountains 100 wilderness race.  I’d explain all about Fred, but this sign that the kids made says it all.  

Some of this enlivenment-via-house-guest, granted, involved a sort of after-the-fact “Type 2” fun.  The young woman who left a large, bloody, meaty item in our freezer, for example… well, she might have been lacking a few rudimentary social skills, but she left us with a most excellent story.*

Why are we drawn to The Traveler?  Why, knowing that we have no chance of developing a permanent bond, a reciprocal relationship, or even a real friendship, do we eagerly take in the traveler, make him a sandwich, and tell him to “make himself at home”?  Scott gave us wine, dishwashing, and brownies, but such generosity wasn’t expected or required.  What intangibles make The Traveler worthwhile?

What is The Traveler giving away for free?  Well, in the course of my 42 years, I have not only encountered The Traveler many times; I’ve also been The Traveler.  When I signed up to join the US Peace Corps at the ripe old age of 21, I had only the vaguest notion of what it might mean to go away and live in a less-developed foreign country for two years.  That is, I thought about many of the things I might have to give up: running water, electricity, spaghetti, Cadbury’s.  I didn’t understand quite so clearly what it might mean to give up familiarity, belonging, being at home.  I didn’t understand what it would be like to have to explain – weekly, daily, hourly – everything about myself, my worldview, my race, my nationality, my culture.

But there was no choice.  I was The Traveler.  I needed to describe snow to children who had never experienced temperatures below sixty Fahrenheit.  I needed to describe the American educational system to people who had struggled to get as far as seventh grade.  I, a lone white woman in a sea of resentment, needed to discuss racial tensions, the misunderstood plots of soap operas I’d never seen, the entire history of slavery, what New York City is like, the fact that I was NOT a Mormon missionary, class warfare, hurricanes, the CIA, school gardens, international trade, and English grammar.  My role as story-teller was non-negotiable.

I recall, with peculiar clarity, the day when I was seating at the bottom of a pit – destined to be a new school latrine -- with a shovel and crowbar.  The temperature was well over ninety.  It always was.  I was dripping.  But I was digging with fierce determination, in part because I knew that everyone had one eye on their own work, and one eye on me.  As I worked, a very old man, seated comfortably above-ground, turned to no one in particular and wheezed, with absolute conviction, that white girls sure can dig an outhouse.

If it hadn’t been clear before, it was clear then: the payment for my acceptance was not only my tales from afar, but also my role as a proxy for every American that everyone had never met.  I was The Traveler.   And being The Traveler is fascinating.  It’s exhilarating.  It’s also utterly exhausting – although not usually in the bone-weary sledge-hammer sense.  It’s draining socially, psychically, and emotionally. 

Scott passed through our humble not-a-commune on his way north to the official start of his bike ride at the Arctic Ocean.  He passed through again on his way south.  We saw him for a total of four evenings.  Since then, we’ve followed some of his adventures via Facebook and his blog.  “Oh, look, Scott made it to Whitehorse… Hey, did you read the piece Scott wrote about Skinny Dick’s Half-Way Inn?…” 

We won’t see him again.  The brownies are long gone.  The kids are not pining for the missing guest.  But when another Traveler gets in touch with us (by text or Facebook or pure-white carrier pigeon tossed upward from the slopes of a mythical volcano), we’ll welcome her.  We’ll make her a sandwich, and offer her a shower (replete with caveats about our limited water supply).  And we’ll ply her for stories, for mystery, for vicarious armchair-adventure.  She’ll understand the currency.  It’s one with a long history, and yet – despite the Age of Communication, despite supersonic speeds and instant messaging and a distinct lack of tinkers, magicians, Gypsies, and bundle-carrying train-hopping hobos in  a world grown small -- it still clings to shreds of its former value.

Community spells comfort, familiarity, home.  Without a community of friends and family, it’s easy to feel lost, ungrounded, purposeless.  The Traveler, on the other hand, symbolizes the mysterious, the unknown, the adventure you haven’t yet had, and the places you haven’t yet seen – but might.  Without The Traveler, the world can seem too small, too dull, too unchanging, too lacking in possibility. Thus, Community and Traveler are yin and yang.  We need one because we need the other.  And– at least at some time in our lives – we all need to take at least a brief turn at carrying the tales.  We probably won’t cover as many parsecs as Han Solo.  We probably won’t keep our pedals turning all the way from the Arctic Ocean to the tip of South America.  But we’ll at least gain some appreciation for those who do.

Happy trails, Scott.

* The young woman in question called us up about six months later and told us that she’d be swinging by to pick it up.  When we informed her that’s we’d thrown it away (not without some confusion and disgust), she was incensed.  “You threw away my bear heart?!”