It happened so very quickly. From the instant I saw the animal until I realized we’d hit it, a second, or less, had passed, but in the strange chronology of the mind, it seemed to take much longer, and so very much happened. While Alex and I were chatting, his head down looking at the map, I suddenly saw a coyote at full gallop less than a metre away from the front end of the car, its path perfectly perpendicular to ours. I saw its yellow-brown fur, and the reticulated pattern on it, like a tiger’s, running down the length of its body. In a microsecond, I saw its eyes, intent on the safe side of the road ahead of it. I thought I could avoid it. My foot came off the gas and hovered for another tiny slice of the second above the break, and I jerked the car to the left, slightly. But there is no median on this high-speed road, and cars were coming toward us. It would do no good. I was going to strike this animal with the full force of my car, speeding at eighty kilometres an hour, and neither I nor the poor coyote would be able to stop it, and so I simply did the only thing possible, and continued along a straight path, and ran into the side of its beautiful, wild body.

I immediately slowed, looking in the rearview mirror. I could see a small piece of the car, but the coyote wasn’t there. I thought by some miracle I had only glanced it, and it had simply run off into the fields to the north. But I suddenly realized it was still under the car, and we were still moving, at maybe fifty kilometres per hour. Just at that instant, there was a loud thud, and, as I pulled onto the shoulder, there it was, about twenty metres behind.

I was stunned. Alex was overcome. A truck pulled off the road ahead of us, and a man got out, pulling on gloves. I rolled down the window, and glanced in the mirror. To my utter horror, the coyote’s head lifted off the road, wobbling. It was still alive. The man came to the window, and said he’d drag it off the road to avoid an accident. Perhaps he didn’t realize it wasn’t dead. For some reason, I said nothing, and got out of the car to see the poor thing lurch up, and hobble, in agony, onto the shoulder, limping as though one of its legs were crushed, or torn off. I felt sick, and Alex was leaning against the roof of the car, his face hidden.

Realizing that the animal was alive, the man told me to call the Humane Society. This I could do. I couldn’t help the coyote. I couldn’t even bring myself to approach it and look at the state it was in, and the immenseness of the suffering it was experiencing and which I caused. But I could call for help. I got back in the car and made the call.

Because of the proximity to Oakville, and the state of the various services in the two cities, it took three phone calls and an exasperating voicemail trap before I spoke to someone. When I hung up, I got out of the car, and watched from a distance while the man, and now two others, crowded around the wounded animal and did what they could.

“I can’t go over there,” Alex said.

“I know.” But I could go, and I had to. There was no helping it, but I should at least look at what had happened. And so I walked slowly toward it, expecting the worst. Nobody looked up as I approached. One of them had put a blanket over its body. It was curled up as though it was ready for a nap, but its head was up, and it was alert, looking at us with its yellow eyes. Its breathing was laboured; it was almost panting for breath. Blood spilled out of its mouth freely, and the foreleg that I could see, poking out from under the blanket, was soaked with it. There was a trail of bright red blood leading right up to where it lay, and I suddenly realized that I was standing in it.

A van appeared, and a woman in uniform got out. The first man was actually handling the coyote’s head, petting it, and she warned him not to touch it. It could, after all, be rabid. But it was not rabid. It was strong and healthy before the impact. The fur was thick at its ears, and its eyes, even now, were bright, alert, beautiful, and wild, even as it struggled to stay alive.

“It’s a good thing it’s winter,” the woman said. “No pups left alone.” So it was female. “Anyone know what happened?” An older man said that someone had hit it and driven off.

“No,” I said, “I’m the one who hit it.”

She got on the phone to the police, and described where we were. Someone wondered why the police were called. The older man suggested it needed to be shot.

For some reason, I thought this woman from the Humane Society would have everything she needed in her van, and would be able to euthanize it immediately. She explained that she would never touch a wild animal so severely injured, and neither would any veterinarian. The only alternative was to shoot it.

“You should all leave,” she said. “You don’t want to be around when it’s shot.”

I simply looked down at it for a second, panting blood, its injuries dramatic. If it wasn’t euthanized, it would simply die in an hour, or two, all the while in some kind of agony I don’t want to imagine. I suppose I looked distraught, because the older man took my arm warmly and gave it a squeeze. “Don’t worry,” he said, “there’s nothing you can do on these roads. And it won’t be much longer.”

And so, as they drifted away, I simply thanked the ones who had stopped, and I thanked the woman from the van, and I went back to the car.

Alex was still upset, his hands mostly covering his face. “Should I take us home?” I asked.

“No, we should go hiking.”

And so we did.

In Speyside, the trail is beautiful and tight, and crowded with fragrant cedars growing from fissures in the ancient rock of the escarpment, split from centuries of ice and rain. It snowed last night. The trail was undisturbed. Snow capped the rocks, and coated each needle on every evergreen. It was quiet, except for the occasional call of a crow, and the crack of wood in the distance.

Nobody had passed the trail here before us — the snow was pristine. The only tracks were those of coyotes, following the natural depression the trail made, moving ahead of us in what appeared to be a gallop; two animals, traveling side by side and marking the snow on our beloved Bruce Trail, hunting rabbits, or simply running freely through the forest. We followed for a while, and once, we missed the marked path and had to double back.

I loved the impression of those tracks. Here, they galloped, and here, they slowed, walking close together. They traveled along the path for what seemed like a long way. I could follow them all day. But soon, the tracks left the main trail and headed off into the trees, and disappeared from sight.

It’s an interesting story. On the one hand, it was heartening that someone had discovered happiness to come from something other than the superficial banalities of one’s life. On the other hand, it was sad that there are many people, perhaps most, who must actually learn this lesson.

A belief in fulfillment

And so I am not shocked that, like me, god believers are saddened by the hollowness of so many lives lived in emptiness, fulfilled by nothing and driven by the most amoral of motivations. I am not surprised at the satisfaction believers have in their lives, filled as they are with a pursuit that, no matter what unrecognizable form it may ultimately take, at the very least seeks meaning for themselves and everyone. I am not surprised by the confidence of their beliefs, by the resistance their faith has to that which disputes it.

Of course, I know they are terribly misguided for that faith, and the details of their belief are their ultimate undoing, and no reconciliation is possible between dogmatic positions and a truly happy existence. But I say that out of a need to clarify. It doesn’t really matter, this time.

It indicates that a life of true fulfillment comes from everything that seems not to define the majority of us. In the West, most have forgotten so simple a truth utterly. It may be cliché to bring up the fact that material pursuits have replaced our sense of satisfaction with ourselves and each other, but often truth is to be discovered anew in aphorisms like that.

It’s one reason for the divide and the ultimate conflict between those with faith and the secular world they inhabit. On a larger scale, it hints at more troubling issues: the conflict between Islam and the West, as an example, and the failure of either to find areas of common values and goals.

A flow of lives

But I must recede once again to the microcosm of a single life. Unlike James Randi, who is nearing the end of his journey, I can’t look back at a remarkable life to reminisce on scores of remarkable experiences. I’m far too ordinary.

There are issues to deal with, and things that seem like setbacks, but its very simplicity makes my life deeply fulfilling. Alex and I have a circadian beat to our lives that offers happiness I could scarcely imagine when I was in my twenties, clambouring for money and sex and superficial relationships and fun, and other trivialities. There is the expanse of Bronte Creek Park near my home, small though it might seem to some, that holds a portion of my consciousness in its fields and woods and paths. There are the hundreds of books in my library, holding hundreds of thousands of pages, that fill up the corners of my barely satiable curiosity. And there is the incidental interaction with people, acquaintances and strangers, offering the opportunity to imagine the details of another life, and, if I can, if only in the smallest of ways to make that other path slightly more navigable.

I like my work and I’m considered fairly successful, but it’s simply a lucky tool that allows me to live a life away from it. There are so many better things, more important things. The breathtaking breadth of human history in front of me at this very moment, for example, or living inside the cream-coloured pages of my library. I’m staggered when I think about the billions of lives that have shaped what humanity is right now; or the trillions upon trillions of beings that have directed the course of life on the planet.

Something in me goes very quiet when the sun sets beneath the purple clouds over the peaks of houses behind us. I feel as though I’m sharing the lives of the finches that wake me up each morning as they build a nest beneath the trough under my bedroom window, which they and their ancestors have done for as long as I’ve lived here. We’ve been here many years, but we’re still apart from virtually all the neighbours. Sometimes when we come home in the car, one of their kids waves at us, though we are silent strangers to them and their parents, and it makes me smile. Alex has a swimming friend that he picks up every Sunday morning. She usually bakes him cake on Saturday night, and he comes home full. Despite our shyness, and what must seem like stand-offishness, the neighbours directly beside us invite us for an hour or two of drink and conversation every Christmas and every summer, and have always been immeasurably kind to us.

There’s so much loveliness, so much fulfillment in life that I’m surprised when I hear stories of lessons learned, like Ms. Fitzpatrick’s. What deep pleasure there is to be found in the world’s accessible corners. What meaning there is in the most straightforward of relationships. How gorgeous things are. How important we all, each of us, are, to one another, to the flow of lives beginning in the incomprehensibly distant past and that builds our story for the sake of our existence alone. How completely beautiful, unknowable, and livable it all is.

And of course, I have no idea why I even have a need for this kind of disclosure.

Online communication is dangerously abstract. Everyone knows the pitfalls in taking people at face value through their words. The lack of any other kind of expression, through gestures or speech, is rife with the potential to cause offense even in the most innocuous of circumstances, particularly when people are bad writers, or bad readers.

But in fact, there’s another danger. There’s a danger of losing contact with what actually matters. And there’s a danger of losing the ability to even define what matters.

When interacting with others in this environment, words seem to be the perfect distillation of a person. There seems to be no better way of analyzing and correcting, or receiving and taking joy in someone, than through their unaltered, unfiltered words. Words become people. And in the end, the only thing that can possibly matter about the people you meet online, the only thing of any substance for most everyone you’ll ever interact with, is what they say.

But of course, people are much more than what they merely say.

I’m saddened by a kind of loss today, which I hope will turn out to be a personal incentive to move on to other things, to regain the measure of what’s important. To rework my words and the words of others. To remove a level of abstraction; to build with words, and to transmit my love for words through what I say, and not how it’s said.

I am not comfortable with change, less with change that’s forced, or, on the surface, unjust. But I truly welcome each experience with some measure of expectation and hope. I try to translate the things that happen, small things and larger things, into a sensible direction.

It works, occasionally. Something else starts, or Alex, in his kind and patient way, focuses things for me, and I take direction from him. Life’s good, mostly, despite annoyances and troubles, and failings and helpless starts and stops. I live near the lake. When I feel like this, I wander down there and look out across its choppy surface, to the side I can’t see, disappearing into the blue or grey or white of the furthest visible edge of the water. There is a lot to see in the unseeable. A lot to look forward to, even in the thin line at the far horizon, where there’s no telling what will come, or who will bring it.

My cell phone had been a thin connection to Alex for the entire trip, and that afternoon, I clung to it. I was leaving the next morning for Canada. The coming night seemed unbearable. I told him I wanted to push up the flight to that very afternoon. Patiently, his voice kind and worried, he accepted that wish, and only hinted at its irrationality.

My composure crumbled. From about the mid-point of the journey with my family, circumstances, and the realities of that dynamic, had pushed me aside from the group somewhat, a situation certainly only tangible in my mind. Thereafter, the clamouring hot fingers of panic were constantly scrabbling at the back of my neck. I had not known the sensation for twenty years or more, when, as a young adult faced with many fundamental shifts in life, I had regular panic attacks. Now, they threatened again, not quite able to overtake me, but clearly lurking on the edge of my consciousness. Helpless and thousands of kilometres away, Alex could only listen.

Munich revisited

The room was much smaller than my first stay at Hotel Uhland. It was really no larger than the combined space of two closets in my bedroom at home. And it was twice the amount of money: Oktoberfest, held on the grounds of Theresienwiese literally steps away from the hotel, was to begin the day after my departure. I had to leave the space for a while in order to regain my sense of composure.

I went to the city centre, and walked through the smoky, crowded Hofbräuhaus. The upper level was unfortunately closed, so I couldn’t view the historic photographs and other items apparently there. But a sense of the familiar came over me, somewhat bizarrely, crammed, as it was, with all manner of people but actual Germans. But the loud Bavarian umpapa band, the smell of German food, the waitresses wearing dirndls, and the enormous steins being slung onto long wooden tables was all just too familiar, taken together, not to be a comforting atmosphere for me. How strange are the things we find solace in, when home is far away.

I wound my way through the Viktualienmarkt, through small side streets, and finally to Stolberg Schokoladen, a chocolatier I had seen in a tourist guide. It smelled beautiful in there. I bought a lovely bar of chocolate with Sweets for my sweet written on the box.

I decided to walk to Nordfriedhof, the large cemetery well north of my hotel and the city centre, and unknown to me at the time, bounded immediately on the east by the Englischer Garten, which I had failed to visit. I suppose it might be considered dark and ghoulish, but I have always loved the peaceful gardens of cemeteries. This one was long and dark, and filled with large mossy monuments, and crosses tilted in shadow against the afternoon light near the perimeter walls. It is a relatively new cemetery, having been built in the nineteenth century, but it seems oppressively old. I didn’t see any names I recognized. Apparently Traudl Junge is buried there, and Paul Troost. I took many sombre pictures. The camera had difficulty registering any light beneath the trees.

On the way back to the city centre, I happened to come across der Platz der Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, the tiny memorial to the victims of National Socialism. I had never heard of it. It was tucked against the corners of two streets lined with what appeared to be the palatial residences of a lost aristocracy, now converted to a series of shops. It was a sad, small memorial, surprising for its inconspicuousness.

I returned to Marienplatz and sat at an outdoor café, where I ordered some goulash soup. Once again, I was assumed to be a native German by the waitress. Next to me, a young American woman struggled to order dessert of some kind, and could not understand the subtleties of the fresh cream and pastry she would soon find sitting in front of her. I have always wondered at English speakers in foreign countries, who begin immediately with their native language, without first asking — even in English — if the person can understand. On my two month European tour in 1984, my travelling partner egregiously made this mistake time and again.

By the time I’d finished my meal, evening was settling in. It would be dark quite soon. I would have to face the cramped quarters of my room, and the emptiness of night.

In the room, I looked at the pictures I’d taken that day. All but two were the photos from Nordfriedhof.

I consider myself a rationalist. I cherish reason, I attempt to use logic in discourse, I eschew the irrational, and I don’t accept the supernatural assertions of religion, theism, or the occult. I am ashamed of what I did next. I feel a smaller person for it.

As the forms of the crosses and monuments slid by on the camera’s view screen, I deleted each image, one after the other, until all were erased. These shapes of death would not be the last pictures I took on my European trip.

I called Alex again, and we talked about the next day, and his voice and his kindness settled me. I lay in bed with the phone next to me. I read for a while. The clamour of panic had since mostly receded. This was the final night. Standing behind me, the events of the entire trip seemed distant.

Found

On the ground in Toronto, there was a security delay. We waited quite some time while the aircraft was boarded by security personnel. We had to walk past a security line while officers checked everyone’s passport. It was somewhat unnerving. The long, serpentine line at the customs desks inched forward. The customs officer asked a few questions about my stay at an Austrian farm, which I had disclosed on the entry form. I walked through the customs area, and out the gate into the main airport, scanning the crowd for Alex.

I couldn’t see him. I waited fifteen minutes or so, then searched the area, walking around the environs of the gate. He wasn’t there. I was getting alarmed. I had no Canadian money, but, after many unsuccessful attempts, I managed to place a call with my credit card to the office, where I was told Alex had neither checked in nor called all day.

The plastic handle of my suitcase was slick with sweat. My heart quickened a little, the unwholesome but distant feeling of panic nudging the edges of my consciousness. Where could he be? Images of what might have happened to him on the road to the airport, in their ugly, quiet insistence, bubbled up in my mind.

I paced the floor in front of the gate. The crowd thinned. The display with details of my flight dropped down the list on the large panel above the gate’s doors, minute after minute. It would soon be gone. I’d be gone. I had no idea either where Alex was, or what I would do, or when I should do it.

As I turned to cross the floor again, he suddenly appeared in front of me, his familiar face breaking into the sweetest of smiles; he seemed tall, towering above me, his long arms coming out to touch me, his eyes, a brilliant blue, a long drink after a dry thirst, telling me what he didn’t have to say: You are home.

My father drove me to Westbahnhof. I’d just concluded a two week tour of Italy and Austria with my family, and I was leaving for Canada the following day. I had been on my own in Munich for the first few days of this trip; I would end it by being alone there for the last two.

Americans and the world

I boarded a car that was not as modern, nor as spotless, as the train I’d taken en route to Austria. My reserved seat was unfortunately a single that was set back from a window frame, so the trip would be taken while sitting mostly beside a wall. Such are the vagaries of last minute reservations, I suppose. No matter. I would likely spend most of the time reading.

Unlike the car on the trip to Westbahnhof, this car was not compartmentalized. All the seats were aside a central aisle, with no sliding glass doors. Once on the train, I watched it slowly fill up. The passengers were mostly American tourists who spoke with that unusual flattening of the long vowels, which, when listening to a Canadian, causes them to hear the two words a boot instead of the single word about.

Accents are all relative, I suppose. Once one learns German, the difference in accents between provincial Austrian and urban German is remarkable. A speaker from either of these groups must invariably think the other is doing something terrible to the language.

American tourists have a reputation of being unworldly. Actually, the reputation borders on the sense of them being xenophobic, which makes one wonder what they’re doing travelling to all corners of the globe. Recently, we went on a wine tour of the Niagara region, and stopped at Niagara-on-the-Lake for a detour. We parked at a municipal lot and went to get a ticket. A middle-aged couple seemed to be having a lot of trouble with the machine, and looked quite forlorn. They were confounded by the fact that it wouldn’t accept their American coins. “What’s wrong with our money,” they asked, quite seriously, in an oppressive South Carolina drawl. One of our group wasn’t too patient, and made some cracks about their not having noticed the border crossing. But he was the first to smile, and he dropped in enough (Canadian) coins for them to have a couple of hours of parking.

There are three hundred million citizens of the United States. A few of them are bound to suffer culture shock when confronted with the unforgiving parking metres of Canada, for example. But the unworldliness of the American traveller is a myth.

During my many years as a waiter in downtown Toronto, I’d met literally thousands of people, a large percentage of them American, and many were well-heeled, savvy travellers with an impeccable sense of fine food and good wine. In Munich, I shared the floor of my hotel with a group of Americans that included a man who not only spoke perfect German (with a midwest accent), but carried the charming urbanity of the most demanding of European hotel patrons, contrasting sharply with the huffy gruffness of some of the Germans there. And on the corner of University Avenue and Dundas Street in Toronto, near my office, one is likely to be set upon at most times of the year by boorish German or British or Canadian tourists wrestling with an oversized map.

It isn’t the nationality of the traveller that impacts his behaviour, but rather, his familiarity with travel, and his openness to the newness of new places.

Citizen Incognito

A German businessman in his late forties took the single seat facing me, offering a clipped Guten Tag before unfolding his newspaper. There was an American family directly beside me across the aisle: Dad, Mom, two teenaged sons. Eventually, the train moved out of the station, and began winding through the Austrian countryside. I couldn’t see much of it. I concentrated on my book.

The family seemed restless, and switched seats with one another several times before even half an hour was up. They took advantage of the food service cart to fuel their impatience. What I will admit to being typical in the American tourist, as much as with the Germans, is a lack of auditory restraint. They were loud. The entire car knew of their various discomforts, and the nature of their small interpersonal relationships. The man in front of me seemed interested in all this, and paid much attention to them while reading his paper. He glanced at me and smiled.

“A little out of their element, maybe,” he said, or something like it. A year ago, my comprehension of German spoken by natives was not good. I usually had to piece together meaning from long sentences, only half of whose words I might understand, or I’d have to quickly refer to my mental translation dictionary if a rapid response was expected of me. This time, though, it would be good enough for me to smile and say, “Yes, so it seems.”

I admit to some measure of shallowness, and I was pleased that he took me for a German. My German teacher, also a native, had told me that my accent was good, and would not be noticeable as foreign to most Germans in quick casual conversation. My companion seemed satisfied with my response, smiling a little smugly, maybe, as he kept watch over our fellow passengers, so obviously foreign. And so I was happy to be mistaken for a native. I have always wanted to travel immersed, and flow with ease through the daily life of the city I’m currently in.

For an hour, my travelling companion read his paper, then folded it neatly and held it out to me, saying something so rapidly, and while chuckling, that I simply couldn’t get it. “No, thank you,” I said, holding up my hand. He rolled his eyes toward the American family, still fussing and vocal, and leaned toward me conspiratorially. His voice strained by withheld laughter, he delivered another rapid spate of idiom-laced German, and I instantly foundered. In the few seconds I had before my non-response would be uncomfortable, I tried my best to pick out parts of his sentence that were clear to me to gather meaning from the common, but it was no good. And, I had already forgone giving away my foreignness. I would feel foolish asking him to repeat himself, or to reply in English. Were I to suddenly admit to being a native English speaker, his embarrassment might be depthless at realizing he might have been speaking to the very kind of tourist at whose expense he was apparently having a few jibes.

I merely looked back at him, politely attempting to smile. I suppose he sensed my discomfort, but probably interpreted it differently, and he smiled and nodded, saying, “Well, there you have it, although it is interesting.”

“Yes, it certainly is,” I said, turning the meaning to suit my little problem. He closed his eyes and leaned back into his seat. I quickly put in my earplugs and turned up the music to close myself off from any further trouble.

The journey continued through Austria, and eventually into the mountainous southeast of Germany. I believe the family had departed in Salzburg. I dozed for a while, or I tried to glance out the corner of window glass that was accessible to me. When we pulled into Hauptbahnhof in Munich, I followed the businessman to the door. Before disembarking, he turned to me and politely said goodbye, smiling warmly.

I felt a little small at my behaviour. I hadn’t had the courage to admit to being non-German when the moment of crisis had arrived. And despite this, I was still proud, in a petty way, of being mistaken for a German.

Leaving the train, I made a straight line for the station’s interior, knowing exactly which exit to take. I pictured the corner I would wait at, with the crowd of pedestrians waiting for the light to change; before I reached it, I could see in my mind the long street, Paul-Heyse-Straße, stretching in the distance toward my hotel. Other names of streets in the neighbourhood went through my mind: Pettenkoferstraße, Goethestraße, Bavariaring. Those and two dozen more had been underfoot already. I walked to Uhlandstraße and my hotel. I would have the afternoon to continue into other parts of the city.

Communal eating

The evening before I left, I walked to the city centre. It was pleasant and mild, and the streets seemed crowded with Müncheners. I’d been looking for something. I can’t remember what, or if I’d found it, but on the way back, I needed to get something to eat. Seeing a brightly lit shop with food in the window, I went in.

It was a kind of deli, and there were no tourists inside. People were grocery shopping, or eating at a few long, high communal tables near the entrance. It was nice to get away from the tourists and their haunts, and the kitschy atmosphere of some of the shops, although these are refreshingly few in Munich if you know where to go.

I walked to the back of the store, and watched people pile food on plates from a serving table, to be taken and weighed by a cashier. There were take-out trays and dinner plates. Grabbing a tray, I went over the offerings, and invented a meal of various pastas and vegetables. I went to the tables at the front and enjoyed it while listening to a family of three, with a girl about ten or eleven, talking about the minutiae of their day. They seemed to be discussing the girl’s school, and things for her to do in the evening. She looked at me every once in a while from over her plate of sausage, probably wondering why I was eating inside from a take-out tray instead of a ceramic plate.

They soon finished and left, and others came and went, alone or in pairs, talking, or eating quickly and silently, and it was one of the most enjoyable meals and experiences I remember from my entire trip. You can eat a lot of beautiful goulash in Austria, or innumerable varieties of pasta or fish in Italy, but sharing a rough meal in common with the local population of a city you have a special fondness for makes for a lovely memory.

Professor of Annoyance

I was to meet up with my family in Vienna in two days, and I’d reserved a seat on the train for the next morning for the four hour trip from Munich. I boarded about mid-morning; I seemed to be the only one on the entire car. Seats were arranged in banks of threes facing each other, and contained in compartments with sliding doors. It was cozy and modern, and impeccably clean. I settled in my seat by the window and dozed, waiting for the train to depart.

After a bit, the door slid open, and in bustled a large man in his sixties. He looked at me over his glasses and rumbled an obligatory “Guten Tag,” then took quite some time to settle in. He was expansive, in his width and his movements. He pulled out a newspaper, a binder, and other items, and took up most of the tiny table under the window as a kind of desk, while we waited for the train to leave the station.

He was kind of amusing, kind of curt. His voice was deep and gravelly. He had a thick grey beard, and wore an old herringbone jacket (complete with patches on the elbows) over a tattered cable-knit sweater that looked particularly scratchy. His glasses were half-rims, so it was easy for him to glance over the top of them at whatever might have been annoying him at the moment. And he did seem to be in a state of perpetual annoyance.

I suddenly noticed an overturned paper coffee cup with a lid on it in the middle of the floor, very slowly leaking hot coffee into the carpet. Unless I’m half-blind, or stupid (or maybe a little of both), that cup was not on the floor when I entered the spotless compartment. I politely interrupted the gentleman to ask if he had dropped it, pointing to it as my voice trailed off in the face of his stony-eyed stare. “Not at all,” he said, “do you suppose it has been sitting there all this time?”

My German isn’t perfect, and my comprehension of spoken German — particularly German spoken by an irascible and perpetually annoyed man in his sixties who would probably be difficult to understand in the most cordial of circumstances — is even worse. But that was the unusual gist of what he said to me. “I – I’m not sure,” I said, a little confused by his disowning of this item. “Hum,” he puffed, “strange.” And he went back to his paper.

Okay. I stood, picked the cup up, being careful not to dump the remainder of its contents on the floor, and left the train to throw it out.

When we finally departed, it began to rain. It was very grey and misty out, and unfortunately the landscape was invisible. I looked at my companion. He was reading not a German newspaper, but perhaps a Czech one, or Slovak. After some time, he turned to his binder and began to make pencil notes in the margins of what appeared to be a typewritten Czech manuscript, before going back to the newspaper. A Slavic writer of some kind? I hadn’t noticed anything but a perfectly German accent. He certainly fit the description of a sixty-ish middle European novelist, elbow patches and brusqueness and all. I was reminded of Yuri Testikov, the growling Russian writer on a Seinfeld episode.

After an hour or so, two young Japanese girls, quite obviously tourists, came into our compartment and sat opposite one another, chatting quietly. This did not impress my companion, who used both his half-rims and the top of his paper from which to shoot darts at these young women. When they began to unpack a lunch of noodles and biscuits, it was barely tolerable for him. Since they didn’t have access to the table, their little picnic was spread out on the seats beside them; meaning beside myself as well as my companion.

I have never heard anyone actually snort. One may read this in fiction occasionally — “He snorted his contempt,” for example — but I think one very rarely has the luck to actually hear someone snort contemptuously in real life. When the odour of the noodles reached him after a few seconds, his paper snapped in rapid succession three or four times, and he huffed and snorted — yes, very contemptuously — making his deep displeasure known to us all. Except that for reasons unknown, perhaps cultural ones, this passed high over the heads of the young women, who happily chattered and ate, and drank from bottles of brightly coloured liquid while he stared at them sidelong, barely able, it seemed to me, to contain his revulsion.

It was difficult to feel sorry for anyone. Yuri was master of his own displeasure, and the girls had no idea they were unsettling him so grandiosely. He glanced at me once or twice, maybe looking for a comrade in disgust, but I did my best to ignore the whole situation. In fact, I had to make sure that I wasn’t smiling too much in order not to insult him.

Luckily, the girls left the train shortly afterward, and he could go back to his newspaper and manuscript. He also slept for a while, stretching his legs on the seat beside him, bohemian style. I read, listened to music, or watched the rain streaking along the window. The landscape was a misty rush beyond it.

Finally, hours later, we entered the Viennese environs. My companion gathered up his belongings and his luggage a few stops before Westbahnhof, which was my destination. As he left the compartment, he turned to me and offered a very polite and dignified goodbye. Entertaining though his demeanor might have been, he was still quite classically the gentleman, and I was glad to have made the trip in his company.

My stay in Vienna was short, and over the course of the next two weeks, I’d met my family, and we’d traveled throughout Austria and Italy before arriving back at Vienna. From there, I would take the reverse trip back to Munich.

Three days later, I was standing in front of the Führerbau in Munich, where, in the presence of Hitler and Mussolini, Neville Chamberlain had agreed to carve up Czechoslovakia to stave off a likely war.

It was an abrupt and surreal displacement for me. I stood on the sidewalk opposite the building, looking up at the spot where the Reichs Eagle Hoheitszeichen, the Nazi national symbol of a menacing eagle clutching a bewreathed swastika, was once pinned. The marks in the facade were still clearly evident. Some windows were open, and I could hear piano music drifting out to the street. The building is now a music school, and this turn of events seemed purposeful and fitting.

I’d arrived in Germany earlier that day. As the aircraft descended en route to Munich, I was struck by the prettiness of the German countryside, with its square fields of green and yellow, and the clutches of houses and other buildings all with bright terracotta roofs. The tangibility of history being something I’ve always striven for, I couldn’t help myself wondering what the scene was like down there in the spring of 1945, with the Allies advancing across this countryside, overtaking villages and cities as the conflict wound steadily down.

It was pouring rain in Munich the day I arrived. I’d taken the train from the airport to the Bahnhof, but mistakenly got off only two stops short. I’d been certain I was on the wrong track. It seemed to be taking too long, and the environs around Munich seemed too pastoral. But I managed to ask a couple of people in my uncertain German to confirm my way, and soon, I was waiting in a doorway in the train station for the rain to let up. I eventually got a cab and arrived at my hotel on Uhlandstraße by the Theresienwiese. It was a pretty street with a lot of unusual corners. The room wasn’t quite ready, so I had to go exploring.

The city is like most European cities, and the centre is a ring of criss-crossing streets. It is very easy to get lost, and so I did. I had to take a cab back to the hotel, but not before a somewhat alarming tour of the centre that included many repeated street crossings.

I have a love-hate relationship with travel. I long to see the sights I know from books, and I crave to touch history at every opportunity. But I suffer particularly acutely from jet lag. On that first day, indeed, throughout my entire trip, Alex’ voice at the other end of my cell phone was not just nice to hear; it was critical to arriving safely at the end of a day. I wish for every solitary traveller to have the kind and patient and ever understanding voice of a loved one at the opposite end of a phone.

The first day in Munich was soon over. Alex helped me through the night as well, when I awoke disoriented, exhausted, and still quite jet lagged. When dawn came, I was soon out the door and in the city centre again.

When I look at the coins, especially the very old ones, I can’t help but wonder how many hands they’ve passed through, and what arcane things they purchased. The documents, typewritten, were surely handled by some female secretary with oddly coiffed hair. I wonder what she did the evening after she typed this letter or that? What route did it take across the city to find its destination in the hands of some beaureaucrat?

I like to handle history. Perhaps I seek to make it more real, or to make tangible the historical accounts I’ve loved so well all my life.

Connections

This desire was problematic for me in 1984, when I was in Athens. I was in the Agora, the haunt of Socrates and Plato, and I was confused. It seemed so small to me. Not merely ruined, it was barely visible. I could hear traffic. A modern building was immediately nearby. It was hot, though it was October, and the air was difficult to breathe. Here was a ruined marble bench; I did not dare sit on it, and I wondered who had in centuries past. It’s age was difficult to tell. It could have been two hundred or two thousand years old. It was curiously interesting.

This was all I could get from my visit to the Agora.

I don’t know what I had expected, but I hadn’t found it. Did I expect some kind of epiphany? Some transcendant experience? A kind of blinding flash of insight and beauty, as though I were a Saul? I was embarrassed. I felt silly, I felt small. I probably felt the most thoroughly disappointed than I ever had before in life. I would remember that moment often in years to come, when I had expectations I sought to temper, or when it was particularly meet that I should bear in mind how life is a series of small and large sorrows, connected by smaller, but gentle and pleasant, surprises.

A journey alone

Last year in September, I went on a three week trip through Austria and Italy with my parents, and my sister. I wanted a few days alone, so I arrived earlier than they, and stayed in Germany. I had never spent any significant time there, and I was sorry about that. With history and convenience in mind, I thought that Munich was the most strategic place to say, and a day or two after arriving, I decided to go to the concentration camp at Dachau.

When I started out at the Bahnhof, it was appropriately dismal weather, grey and rainy. I was one of only two or three on the train that morning. The announcer’s clipped voice ended with my destination — “Dachau” — and she pronounced it by inflecting the second syllable. It seemed strange.

The trip ended in a necessary bus ride through the small town of Dachau to the camp. In my barely practiced German, I had to ask a patient young woman with a small child how to use the transportation system from that point, but eventually, I arrived at the site, and found myself on a pleasant path that led to the terrible Jourhaus and the gates bearing the infamous slogan, Arbeit macht frei. (I have since learned that the iron gate that now opens into the camp at Dachau is a replica.)

I stood inside the Jourhaus gate, looking at the camp through the iron bars. I didn’t go in. People were silently milling around, passing me, as I looked in. On the grounds inside, moving slowly across the Appellplatz, I could see a dozen young men in German military uniform, touring a disgraceful part of their past. There was surely a lesson here their superiors were eager to teach them. Some school kids passed me and went through, carrying cheerfully coloured umbrellas. There were very few non-Germans here. Perhaps this was due to the time of year.

Instead of entering the camp, I looked through the filthy windows of the Jourhaus that opened from officious rooms of some kind into the area of the gate. Old electrical panels still hung on the wall at one end. It was dirty inside. I saw a door at the back of the room. I walked back out of the gate, to the rear of the Jourhaus. Nobody was around; others had either long gone into the camp, or quite simply, noone was interested in this building.

A small set of stairs led to the door, which was locked. The plaster on the outside of the building was cracked. The cement crumbled somewhat near the foundation, and left a few loose stones. There were steel loops or something set into the wall — were they wire fasteners?

And here, suddenly, without notice to me, was History.

I was momentarily dumbstruck. Had I stood on this spot seventy years earlier, had I made my way casually to the rear of the Jourhaus, I would likely have been shot, or worse. A large enough quota of human suffering began at this gate and ended inside, and I was confronting this terrible fact, and defeating the insane purpose behind it, by walking freely round this building. By examining the prosaic details of its construction. By picking up, then dropping, a small piece of concrete. By peering through the locked fence nearby, into the inaccessible grounds beyond it.

Sadly, a desire fulfilled

Eventually, I went through the gate, but not before opening and closing it a few times, feeling its iron heft. I walked the entire surface of the site, as far as I could go in all directions, over the course of several hours. I entered every open building. I touched virtually every surface I could. I read every display, looked at every artefact. I watched others, listened when I could, tried to read their faces. I stayed apart, purposely.

I recalled the trip to Greece, and my feelings in the Agora, and I was very sad. There, amidst the ruins of a beautiful age and a beautiful people, I had felt nothing but the hollowness of disappointment. Here, in this shrine to tears, I could feel, smell, and taste history. The immediacy of it and the horror of it.

Here was a convoluted fact: I experienced a pleasant surprise in finally touching history, almost quite literally; and at the same moment, connected in the same tangible and immediate way, I experienced profound and deep sorrow. I am a selfish man. I hope that the greater measure of my sorrow was for the lives needlessly ended there, for the remains under the stones that say, Ashes are buried here, for the lessons not learned, for the humanity not saved.

It’s a beautiful day, the best of the summer, and the last of the summer. There’s not a cloud in sight. It must be thirty degrees. If only it had been like this the many other weekends before. It has been a summer of rain and false starts and cancelled plans, but now we’re on our way with one last try for a day trip away from home.

The trip is a long one, more than two hours, and on the way we have to fill up. Before, as we’d move west and south, the clouds would gather, and the temperature would drop, but today, the sun stays bright, the sky crisp blue and hot. It’s perfect weather.

When we reach Port Rowan, it’s a further twenty or so minutes on the road leading along the forty kilometre spit toward Long Point. The weather still holds, the air is still hot and beautiful. There are lots of cars around, and as we get near the park, it seems it will be a crowded day in there. But not where we’ll be.

We park, and take out the towels and the frisbee and the umbrella, and start a long thirty-minute walk along the park’s beautiful beach. The lake is stunning. There’s a breeze, but the surface is relatively calm, and perfectly reflects the dark blue of the sky and the slightly pink horizon at the furthest edge of sight. It hasn’t looked this beautiful all year. When we near the water’s edge, we can see right to the soft rippling sand at the bottom for as far as we’re able to look out.

We walk past the rows and rows of moms lying motionless in the bright sun, and kids and dads yelling and laughing in the water. As we near the eastern part of the spit, the crowd thins, and then there are just a couple of families, and then we are at the division line between the park and the boundary along the bird sanctuary. We cross under the metal rope. There’s still a few people even here. A man is taking pictures of his wife and infant daughter playing in a shallow pool of water. “Can you take our picture,” he asks. Of course. It’s always him and the little girl, or his wife and the little girl, and they can never get a picture of all three, he says. They’re very happy, and both of them thank us several times.

Now there is nobody else, but up ahead, we can see one or two bodies along the beach, and somebody’s in the water. We’re here. We won’t have to wear clothes or a swimsuit along this part, at the very edge of the private property that extends to the furthest point of the spit. We find a nice flat space in the sand, and set up our umbrella, and spread out our towels. There’s only a few people here: an older couple at the very water’s edge, where a woman is reading in a lawn chair in the shallows before the lake opens up; a younger couple to our right; one or two others lying in the sand, or moving along the beach.

We walk out into the lake, past a warm shallow full of tiny minnows, and into the expanse of water under the sky. The water is beautiful, reflecting bright blue, and large ripples lap at us as we make our way out as far as possible before the lake would go over our heads. Alex has his goggles. He swims a few short laps of freestyle in the open water.

It looks kind of neat. I go back for my camera, and hold it carefully above the water as I make my way back to him. I get some pictures of him doing strokes, and then he’s standing waist-deep in the lake with the sun behind him, shining off his wet shoulders, his goggles on his head. I take more photos. He glides into the water on his back and free-floats, his face turned to the blue sky. “This feels weird, like I’m falling,” he says.

After a while, we return to our towels. Alex reads. The sun moves toward the western horizon, in the opposite direction of the furthest point of the sand bar. I lie back and doze. I listen to the sound of the waves rolling up onto the sand, the gulls and cormorants croaking or cawing in the distance.

Some time passes, and it’s hot. We take up the frisbee and go out into the lake, and toss it back and forth for almost two hours. It’s the most fun we’ve had. We both lunge as it flies overhead, or to the left or right. You can do this much better in the water, because there’s no danger of a hard fall to the ground. It’s great stretching out into the sky to reach as it flies past, then crashing into the water — either with the disc in hand, or not. The waves sometimes add to the push of water from the lunge, and many times it rolls over my head, or up against my face. I’ve got my hat on, and Alex laughs at the sight. Water pours over the bill in front of my face.

Sometimes I stop while Alex swims for the frisbee. I stand in the deep water and look into the blank horizon, against the wind, which has now picked up. It’s gentle and beautiful, still warm, but holds in its crispness a hint of the coming autumn. Then I fall back and float, looking up at the perfectly clear dome of sky.

We’re done after a while, and return to the beach. The afternoon is getting on to evening; it’ll be turning dusk soon, and we should go.

After we pack, we walk in silence back along the beach. It’s empty now on this part of the spit. Alex is walking slowly many paces behind. When we get to the park’s lakefront, we walk past a little city made out of sand that someone has built. It’s very detailed. There’s even an airport, a parking lot with little sand cars, and a baseball stadium with a diamond and grandstand seating. There’s some buildings with long blades of grass connecting them in arches, and everywhere there are feathers and sticks and grass used as markers and columns. At one end, there are three huge pyramids made of sand. Are they mountains?

Out on the lake, the setting sun is sparkling on the surface of the water at the crest of the little waves. It looks alight, or as though there are small jewels or lights rising above the surface and lowering again.

We’re very tired when we finally reach the car. We drive out of the park, and through Port Rowan toward Simcoe, where we’ll stop and eat. The sun has almost fully lowered. The light is orange and gold, the sky still empty. It’s been such a beautiful day.

We think this was the last day of the summer, at the end of a summer mostly wet and cool that had stopped us from doing the things we’d planned. But now, this last day stands behind us. The most beautiful day, the most perfect company. In the future, we’ll talk about the time we went to Long Point, when Alex swam the freestyle in the lake for the first time, when he stood against the perfect blueness of the sky, and we threw the frisbee and stretched into the perfect clear air of the loveliest day of the summer.

Audio reading of this entry.

Of course, it isn’t easy to define morality, especially when the waters are muddied with ideas about its paranormal origins, or the insistence of some people in equating morality with dogmatic adherence to their religious script. But at its most irreducible, morality is that condition in human beings that recognizes suffering in other beings, seeks to end it, and desires to replace it with happiness. There is little else that it needs to be concerned with, rules of copulation, or the hierarchical roles of certain members of society, for example. Conversely, immorality can be said to be that condition which is unconcerned with the suffering, or happiness, of other beings.

I think people tend to show their true moral fibre in dealing with strangers. I personally have a difficult time with strangers. I am usually suspicious of them, and it is with only a great effort that I can bring myself to give a stranger the benefit of the doubt. I seem to be predisposed to mistrusting those I don’t know at all. What comes along with this is a tendency to discredit the actions of strangers, to cast their most innocent actions in a bad light, to assume the worst in people. It’s a disheartening struggle, because I otherwise enjoy almost everyone around me. I’m endlessly fascinated by people’s behavioural minutiae; I truly love the humanity in people.

Alex and I are relatively new swimmers, and we inhabit the “slow lane” during our four-nights-a-week lap swim. We seem to be stronger swimmers than most in that lane, but neither of us are comfortable moving on.

An older woman, a very slow swimmer perhaps in her mid fifties, has been cajoling Alex, trying to get him into the intermediate lane. Her jokes are rather unsubtle, but her smile is genuine, and one day last week, we spotted her at another pool, where Alex had a short pleasant conversation with her.

During last night’s swim, she hinted once again that he should move on, in a pleasant, undemanding way. He responded that he lacked the confidence for the next lane, and that was that.

A young teenaged boy later got in her way. “Move,” she barked at him, jerking her thumb toward the faster lane. “Sorry,” he said quietly, and swam out of her way. “I’m fucking sick of this,” she growled.

It was actually quite shocking. One doesn’t expect an otherwise kind older woman to come up with that kind of language, let alone for a child. The dramatic about-face in her demeanor was appalling. I later reasoned that she was showing us what she truly thought of her situation in the slow lanes amongst faster swimmers, and that she could not until that moment vent her frustration on us, her peers, the way she could do on a young person.

We could do nothing but ignore her for the rest of the evening, and before the swim ended, she left, her face blank, but underwritten with some kind of negative sentiment — disgust (in herself?), dejection, weariness, loneliness.

She had, in that moment, displayed her true moral being, unconcerned for the welfare of anyone else. Her willingness to inflict this kind of suffering on someone, small-scale though that suffering might be, revealed her nature. Her behaviour was highly immoral. In that moment, there seemed no question for me that this woman should be ignored by us. She seemed a small entity, as unsympathetic as she was lacking sympathy.

Why would I concern myself with this kind of non-event? There was a momentary lowering of the guard on what appears to be a rather crass older woman, and some kid bore the brunt of it and moved on. That’s that. So why would I even give it a moment’s thought?

It is indeed for the way she left. The look on her face as she walked, alone, off the deck, was about as telling as the hissing profanity. She was indeed alone. She was indeed not proud of her reaction. She was quite friendless in that moment.

I see myself in that woman. I see the moral duality, the natural sympatico coupled with the innate dourness, the easy will to negativity. I see in her behaviour the same behaviour in myself — the path of least resistance in impersonal dealings with strangers, leading to minute forms of suffering that only add to the endless measure of unhappiness in the world. I see in her, and in myself, an agent of Sadness. Sadness doled out bit by bit, in increments barely noticeable, until their crushing weight destroys the equally minute measures of happiness that may have been offered.

Morality is the will to actively end suffering, and promote happiness. There is no small measure of suffering; there is no small measure of happiness.