Valley overlooking Tucking Mill Lake, Bath

Passage from Dover to Dunkirk, via Reims, to southern Germany

Past the old vicarage down the hill in time for the last of the owls, bending at the bottom through a valley to the lake for disabled anglers — No Picnics, No Model Boats, No Dogs In The Lake, No Fouling — an old groundskeeper with his even older dog Susie, what looks like a stethoscope up his sleeve is a slingshot he uses to keep the cormorants from poaching his trout, driven inland from all the over-fishing they come in to spite him now, to leave thumb-wide gashes in his fish and die a slow death by infection, for he maintains the lake for all his sins he laughs, and has a lot of time to think about it alone with his dog and the cormorants who gather in numbers in the trees to watch and wait, and come to stand for something more over time.

And he can’t imagine what he’ll do when she leaves, his dog Susie, but makes a face as if he’s experiencing it for a moment but then shakes it off, shakes my hand twice, says I hope you’ll come back to see us again and tells me where to go when we do — and eastwards to Canterbury, a candle they’ve kept burning since they destroyed Becket’s remains but missed a few small pieces of bone some make a pilgrimage to see, Becket’s bloodstained robes reduced to a thumbnail behind glass — to the white cliffs of Dover where they get chalk from the bones of all the tiny sea creatures and the dead stacked together and turn them into pictures on the driveways in the suburbs by kids, washed away in the rain, a garden hose — and across the channel to France along the splotches of white spray, the curling waves, the cathedral where Joan of Arc crowned King Charles and did all she did because she believed she was meant to — the A6 to Kaiserslautern, to Karlsruhe, returning home to Germany with Bob Dylan playing, a dried sausage, a glass of Sekt, waking to Eberhard in the morning hacking like a witch.

Three countries in a day and a half, no further than upstate New York to Pennsylvania, to New Jersey — the old woman up the street complains our cat bit her cat Chucky, a terrible name for a cat — our cat driving Chucky back, his territory confined to an overhang, stripped away of all his language and his customs, reduced to a blog post, a tweet, a story that will change each time it’s told based on who’s telling it — and the lines on the map move from side to side.

Categories: travel, writing

Tags: aging, cats, chalk, cliffs of Dover, death, fishing, Joan of Arc, Pink Floyd, poetry, suburbs, Thomas Becket, travel, war, WWI, WWII