CategoryGeography

fires and containment

While swimming laps the day before yesterday outside at Highland Park, I didn’t notice anything particular about the air I was gulping. Likewise, when I drove back to the Vintage Center to hang out with Dad, there may have been something about the air in retrospect but I didn’t note it at the time. But by the time we left a couple of hours afterwards at 3pm, a yellow haze blanketed the city, obscuring buildings just a few blocks away. Someone else leaving with us speculated that it was debris from the implosion of the Commercial Street Bridge earlier, or smoke form the Canadian wildfires.

Screenshot 2026 07 17 at 09 35 21

I knew that they were replacing the bridge, that the contract provides bonuses for finishing the work early and penalties for going beyond schedule, that the scheme involves a clever slide of the already constructed replacement bridge. How could I not know? The Parkway East is shut down before and after the Squirrel Hill Tunnel, redirecting all of those cars through the East End. I braced for bumper-to-bumper traffic in my neighborhood, because that corridor can get jammed, especially during rush hour. However, they reprogrammed the lights to go longer, including an extended green on the left from Penn to Fifth, so the major arteries actually flow more smoothly now. In my opinion, they should permanently eliminate the stuttering green lights in Oakland driving east from the cathedral to Shadyside. I suspect these were intended to prevent speeding, but unfortunately the effect is to slow traffic to half the legal speed limit, frustrating drivers, and wasting time and petroleum. One downside is that the capillary streets feeding in can get backed up, especially the left turn from Craig to Fifth near my parents’ place.

While I knew about the construction, I didn’t know the timing of the detonation of the old bridge — I would have expected them to have accomplished that a little sooner, rather than on the sixth day of closing the highway. Anyhow, I figured the bad air that afternoon at 3pm couldn’t possibly have been particulates from the demolition. 376 is too far way, the event happened hours ago, and I thought the firm doing the work would mitigate dust by spraying with water afterwards (although I don’t actually know if that happened here).

Yet somehow I didn’t know about the Canadian wildfires this year. How could I have not known until the evidence was right before my eyes, and entering my lungs? How could I not have anticipated this, which I have observed before as a snowbird?

For the past couple of nights, I kept the house shut tight, in place of my ritual of throwing open the windows and closing them in the morning. Usually I have the house respiring rhythmically during the summer, circulating cool dark air, then holding its breath during the day. Instead, I turned on the air filter.

…

On the Fourth I took the busway down to Point State Park for the fireworks. I had not intended to go because of the extended heat wave, but to my surprise it broke that afternoon, while I was attending the biweekly Spanish language Meetup at Whole Foods. Two weeks later, we’re towards the end of another heat wave. Smoke and heat.

I had seen fireworks downtown several times during First Night, but this was only my second time seeing them at the Point. Maybe fifteen Julys ago, before my colleague Susie artfully arranged for close proximity shows for CMU’s pre-college programs, I once took a yellow school bus downtown with the students and our older child. I can still remember the weight on my shoulders as we both gazed at the sky. And I remember, once upon a time, as I carried our younger child up the steps to the front door at the end of a long drive home and then up the stairs to his bed, I said to my wife: There will be a last time when we hold them like this.

Now they are launching. Fireworks in the sky.

The show, billed as the largest in Pittsburgh’s history, was spectacular. I thought there were going to be drones too, but instead it was an old-fashioned pyrotechnic display. I remembered others throughout my life — at Olin Sams’ farm when a spark fell into my eye, at a grandstand in Ithaca, on a hillside in Providence, on Patriots’ Day in a taxi along the Charles, in a field in Santa Fe on New Year’s Eve of the new millennium, on Roosevelt Island looking towards the Statue of Liberty, from a hotel balcony in Louisville before the Derby.

Los fuegos artificiales. In high school the jokers would say chemistry was for those interested in explosives and drugs. I loved it anyhow, it made sense of the world. Geometry was fun for its proofs, French for new perspectives, English for building with words.

…

The crowd spontaneously sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the first shells launched from the river barges. The American sense of defiance, we call it the day of independence, but the emotional undercurrent is resistance, and the fireworks I love are cousins to the bombs we drop. At some point the crowd broke into shouts of “USA! USA!” for a half-minute, delighting the South Asian Indian family near where I stood, but I was a little embarrassed for being in midst of the World Cup red card fiasco.

I used to believe that fireworks would explode in outer space, that it would be easy to create a spectacle out there. After all, a shell is a packet that incorporates the fire triangle of heat (to overcome activation energy), fuel (aka reducing agent or electron donor), and oxidizer (aka oxidizing agent or electron acceptor). The oxygen in the atmosphere seemed irrelevant.

It’s more complicated than that, as I found after pulling vacuum and attempting to ignite gunpowder a decade ago with Matt and his students. It’s true that an atmosphere containing oxygen isn’t strictly necessary, because potassium nitrate (saltpeter) is present as an oxidizer. However, there must be some atmosphere or other way to keep the fuel, oxidizer, and heat in adequate contact with each other. The mean free path on Earth at sea level is a fraction of a micrometer, but on the Moon a particle typically travels kilometers before meeting another in the lunar atmosphere. The air on Earth forces fuel and oxidizer particles to collide with each other, as well as prevents heat from dispersing too rapidly. It’s rocket science.

The finale was amazing, I have never experienced one like it before. Not just their brightness and colors. I could feel the concussive shocks deep in my chest, the heat on my face.

I was in middle school the first time I visited the Point, on a field trip from my small town in Ohio. The fountain was relatively new at the time, having opened in 1974, and my teachers remarked they hadn’t seen it before. The little things we remember, I lost my Snoopy comb on that bus. And I remember we were riding around Pittsburgh and someone called out, “Hey, look, there’s a black person!” Nearly everyone of my classmates rushed to the windows on the right of the bus, pressing the glass. Only Jeanette and I stayed seated, looking at each other. The shock must have been apparent on my face, the heat in my chest.

Light and heat. Smoke and ash.

Posted on by William Alba 0

words are as a honeycomb

On Friday after dropping off MM at a medical appointment, I asked S where he wanted to go after La Bonita supermarket — to walk along the Las Vegas Strip, to visit the Atomic Museum, or to go to the library. Being our child, he immediately rejected the Strip. We ended up at the museum, but only after we swung by Tropicana and realized the library was closed for Juneteenth.

Libraries have always been there for our family.

Since last summer I’ve been to libraries in some of the places I visited. Downtown Reno is filled with so much greenery that it feels like being in a terrarium. Pittsburgh‘s South Side holds a fantastic board game collection, and Homewood still feels like my local even though many familiar staff members retired during COVID. The Vancouver branch has an extensive shop. The Juneau branch is on the water, with a marvelous stained glass window depicting salmon, and restroom signs in both English and Tlingit. The National Library of El Salvador in San Salvador is brightly lit and brand-new and open 24 hours, and has a spectacular overlook of the plaza. The National Library of the Philippines in Manila devotes an entire floor to historical and cultural manuscripts, and the staff helped me find the best available digital scans of Rizal’s work. I stayed only long enough in the Bangkok City Library to appreciate the quiet setting. The National Central Library in Taipei is across from the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall and has a convenient 7-Eleven on the lower level.

To my surprise, the library in Taipei allowed me to encode my transit card so that I could tap in anytime, after filling out a short form. (I had chosen a transit card with Winnie the Pooh when I arrived, only later realizing that it could be construed as a dig on Xi Jinping.). At the library in Manila, for a nominal fee I purchased a photo ID to show instead of my passport at the entry. In addition, I bought a T-shirt there, as well as in Juneau. I figure that if I’m going to buy a souvenir, I’d might as well support the libraries in the local community.

Of course I’ve also visited various college libraries for work and on tours with S, including at Bard, Allegheny, Chatham, Pitt, and UNLV. Last month I also saw the medical library attached to the Műtter Museum in Philadelphia, although I don’t think of it as a proper library, since the stacks were locked away.

For all of this, I hadn’t visited any of the local public libraries here in Henderson for a very long while, until last weekend. These days I mostly read in digital format. Furthermore, since Marissa changed schools and doesn’t drive in that direction during the academic year, I no longer frequent the Paseo Verde, Gibson, or Heritage Park branches, and as a snowbird I’m usually not here at all during the brutally hot summer months.

I’ve severely slowed my purchase of physical books in the past couple of years, because I already have shelves and stacks and boxes. But last weekend at Paseo Verde I couldn’t pass up a hard copy of A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish, in its third edition from 2000, though I already have an electronic copy of the sixth edition from 2018. I have always enjoyed the sweet combing through reference books in hard copy — grammars such as this one, lexicons like the Big Liddell, dictionaries including for rhyming, the CRC handbooks for math and for science, thesauruses, atlases both real and fictional, concordances, manuals — in retrospect who could be surprised that I married an encyclopedia editor.

Posted on by William Alba 1

purgatory

Today I awoke with a start, in utter darkness. Is it after noon? Did I miss the meeting with my scavenger hunt teammates? I reach for my phone — 09:10. Nine in the evening? No, I use ISO 8601 time. But it’s not really nine in the morning, not yet, not here where we are, wherever we are, in the middle of the ocean. I need to set back my clocks one hour, as I did yesterday morning, as I did the morning before that, as I did a couple of mornings before that, during this long transatlantic voyage.

I am barely able to communicate with the outside world: obviously there are no cell phone towers, and I did not spring for satellite and anyhow it’s Starlink and I won’t give another penny (let alone hundreds of dollars) to Musk. So I sip on the 150 minutes of data included with my cruise, an average of fifteen minutes per day. I upload and download email and text in batches. If I have a factual question, it goes on a list to look up later, or I simply rely on memory: just like the old days, the “before” time.

Even when I do connect to the Internet, my MacBook Air (M1 2020) and iPhone (14 Pro) don’t update automatically to the time onboard the ship, so I adjust them manually. I, the human being, need to inform these machines of the hour, rather than vice-versa. However, for whatever “user-friendly” reason, the Apple UI does not allow the user to simply define timezone in terms of UTC offset. Instead, I enter the name of a city that happens to share the same timezone. Far from land, how are we to do this?

Fortunately I maintain a habit of making lists and spreadsheets, and fortunately I store most of my data locally rather than in the cloud. We have moved far enough longitudinally over the past twenty-four hours that ship time is now shared with Santiago, Chile rather than Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Before that, it was Fernando de Noronha, Brazil; Praia, Cape Verde; and of course where we began in Lisbon, Portugal.) 

Oh, wait, even that methodology does not work. I suppose because Santiago and Rio don’t share the same {Daylight Savings Time / Summer Time} convention? My spreadsheet is based on timezones as defined by my trusty Oceanus (OCW-S100-1AJF) watch, so another possibility is that the timezone convention for those places has changed since the watch was manufactured. Another question to look up after I return to shore. In the meantime, I find a way to change the hour directly on these devices.

With twenty-five hours in a day, I sleep in. I seem to recall a circadian rhythm study in which someone entered a cave and allowed their own body clock to flow completely independent of external influences such as sunlight, temperature changes, clocks, and mealtimes. That person settled on a twenty-five hour day. I think this was conducted in the 1960s, in order to understand the sleep patterns that astronauts might prefer. I wonder if this study has been replicated, and whether the results hold across age, gender, and other variables, such as whether a person is alone or in a group. It’s the sort of research that is low cost, relatively easy to perform, and should easily receive IRB approval. 

On this ship, the Norwegian Epic, I was assigned one of the least desirable cabins (inside stateroom, without any windows, and at the fore, where the rocking of the ship motion is stronger than in the middle). Fair enough — the $89 fare I paid after CruiseNext credits to travel east to west, from Lisbon to San Juan, is even more affordable than the $129 fare on Norse Airways to cross west to east, from JFK to Rome. And in addition to being conveyed thousands of miles, I’m receiving ten days of food, lodging, entertainment, amenities, and service.

Upon arranging my four pillows to block the glow of the phone and my chargers, I sleep in complete darkness. The twenty-five hour days allow me to enjoy late breakfasts.

…

Here is what I ate at breakfast today:

  • mushroom, onion, mozzarella omelet, seasoned with Tabasco
  • baked beans
  • hash-brown potatoes
  • roasted, seasoned tomato
  • toasted English muffin with butter
  • yogurt with dried cranberries, dried apricots, walnuts, canned peaches, honey
  • peach pastry
  • pain au chocolat
  • regular and decaf coffee blend with cream and sugar
  • two glasses of cold water

I sit in La Cucina, one deck down from the Garden Café, because it is quieter and I can always find a seat near the prow. I look out onto the water, more blue today than any other. The second morning of our crossing, just before it rained, I thought I saw some flying fish leaping in front of the boat. I also saw a bird, hundreds of miles from land, and wondered why it didn’t alight to rest. I’ve occasionally seen seaweed and rough waters, but not today. The white caps are infrequent, and I already tknewll we were in relatively smooth waters, from the rocking of the ship when I’m in my stateroom.

I bring back to the room a couple of cups of crushed ice, in order to scrub the walls of my high-walled 1400 ml Nalgene bottle, which has a couple of stickers from my Alaska cruise in September. Over the summer I discovered that black beans work well to clean the walls of the bottle, rather than trying to use a long-handled brush. It turns out that ice, some liquid body soap, a bunch of good rinsing work well too, to remove the musty smell.

…

Here are the sorts of things I have been thinking about at breakfast each day:

  • how swiftly and safely we are crossing the Atlantic, in comparison to centuries past
  • how deep the water is, what kind of life is present, and whether the ocean is more like rainforest or desert
  • the ocean is my heritage as a Filipino (my father’s habit of describing the Philippines as a country of a thousand islands)
    • the Filipinos who serve on this and every cruise ship
    • the Filipino-Americans in the Navy —  according to Romer, whom I met three nights ago at Noodle Bar and who served as a radio technician on a nuclear submarine, there are many Filipinos in the Navy

Yesterday morning I revisited my childhood thought that Filipinos would make ideal astronauts, crossing the vast ocean of outer space. Reducing payload is essential when overcoming the gravity well of the Earth, and Filipinos generally occupy less mass and volume. Similarly, we consume fewer calories and breathe less oxygen — our bodies and mind run efficiently, at least based on my limited observations as a scuba diver whose tank runs out more slowly than others’.

Maybe this is on my mind because Apollo 13 is on the TV at the moment. I think this is the fourth time I have seen it on the TV. It repeats, presumably on some cycle, along with movies such as Interstellar, a film where Carey Mulligan plays a singer of a folk duet, Captain America: Winter Soldier, and the most recent Captain America movie in which Falcon has become Cap and the President played by Harrison Ford nearly goes to war with Japan over adamantium (this same movie promoted at a pop-up Marvel store near Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo last January).

Yesterday the two movie channels started to put on rotation the one where Kurt Russell plays Herb Brooks coaching the 1980 US Olympics team, maybe it’s called Miracle or Miracle on Ice. I also spotted part of Roman Holiday yesterday afternoon. In that movie you can see the Spanish Steps and the interior view of the Colosseum, but on this trip I didn’t see the former and in fact didn’t enter any of the usual tourist sites in Rome. I only visited outdoor spaces around the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain, and my beloved Pantheon.

In fact, on this trip I dedicated about as much time awake in Rome as in New York City, having decided to explore Naples for the first time instead. I took only one day in Sintra, and just a couple of hours in Lisbon, because I had visited last year. I tell myself that these decisions are fine because I will have other opportunities to visit these places again. I tell myself that I will have other opportunities because I firmly believe this to be true.

…

During this trip I continue to make spreadsheets and lists, including of the places I visit, the activities that I do, how much things cost. And the day before yesterday I began to a spreadsheet to figure out how many days I am at home each year versus how many days I have been traveling, from 2019 onwards.

The other day I checked out some books from the ship’s library. I have been reading Saving Time by Jenny Odell while waiting for shows to begin, since sometimes the theater and smaller venues fill up. In the first chapter Odell describes how spreadsheets reflect a drive for mastery over time — the drive of capitalists to control the how laborers move their bodies, which perversely becomes the drive of ourselves to increase our own efficiency, so that we bind ourselves in servitude to time.

To build on Odell’s observation that time is not fungible: The bare reality is that a day in the life of a 17-year-old is not the same as that of a 60-year-old. The minutes on first awakening are not experienced in the same way as those before going to bed. The capitalist seeks to give equal weight to every unit of time, but they are manifestly different. We have created the idea of money, which is fungible and countable. But then when we say “time is money”, we enslave ourselves to the idea that our time is also fungible and subject to accounting.

Our society is in general obsessed with quantification. Imagine life before being railroaded. We used to perceive time through the movements in our heavens, the beating of our hearts, the rhythms of our songs. Imagine life before stickers were placed beside your name on the kindergarten door. We used to learn for the pleasure of knowing and sharing.

…

When I was a child, we would say bedtime prayers. We would ask God to bless family members. I wondered what it meant for the dead to be in purgatory. How did they experience the passage of time? How could we pray to them or for them, how could we communicate to God, if they were approaching or experiencing eternity, while I manifestly continued to grow older all the time?

Yesterday I awoke with a start, in utter darkness.

Posted on by William Alba 1

where life wants to be

When we drove to and from Reno this past week, we didn’t take the quickest route. Marissa had done this road trip twice before and preferred skirting the Sierras instead of going exclusively through Nevada. In fact, during our travels she remarked several times how you could tell we were in California because it was more beautiful. Well, there is a subtle beauty to the high flat desert, but it doesn’t compare to a greener alpine landscape, with vistas of snow-covered mountains.

On the way back approaching Beatty, there is one place in the desert unnaturally blanketed by acres of grass, irrigated in circles. There are no crops, the lawn didn’t seem for pasture, and the boundary between the lush sections and the dry dust is stark. Immediately I realized that someone had water rights and was using them, only so as not to lose them. The place is called Oasis Ranch and according to this article from last January the property is for sale at $9.37 million dollars, with an annual water allotment of 3.27 million gallons. As of today it is still listed at that price on Zillow. That water usage is about 25 times more than the average house in the Las Vegas Valley. And for what? To have an enormous lawn. It’s outrageous. With that money, just buy a house in a part of the country where the grass grows.

In Pittsburgh during the summer, I’m continually mowing the lawn, cutting down trees volunteering along the fences, pulling ivy from the walls of the garage and house. Life wants to be there.

It’s similar to when I was leaving Santa Fe twenty-two years ago. As I walked the edge of Central Park the first evening I was there temporarily for a few weeks, I laughed as the rain misted my face. Santa Fe is beautiful in its own way (The New York Times has a strange obsession with the place), and the first summer I visited it thirty-three years ago I was stuck in a pounding thunderstorm that turned to hail as my friends and I descended Atalaya. But usually it’s so dry there. When I was walking through water in New York it was like a dream, a dream come to life again. And then when we moved there cross-country and reached Pennsylvania, Marissa saw the rolling green hills and she, who had lived in flat Illinois her whole life before we moved to New Mexico, she said it was like paradise.

…

When we lived in Manhattan, I walked around the city a lot, which of course is what New Yorkers do. This transformed my mental map. I thought I knew the city fairly well: I was born in Belmont near Arthur Avenue, and also lived as a child in Bensonhurst and the South Bronx; I visited Midtown and the Village frequently even after we moved to rural Ohio; my college girlfriend grew up in Bay Ridge; and I had plenty more personal and professional opportunities to visit over the years.

But walking around the city made me see it differently. I previously would take the subway to get around, popping down in one place and then back up again, as though Scotty were beaming me via transporter. I knew the lines well enough to get myself from Coliseum Books to Book Scientific to the Strand. I knew the Compleat Strategist was next to the Empire State Building, but that FAO Schwartz was closer to MoMA and Radio City, and the Met and the Guggenheim were on the Upper East Side.

Yet in my head these were distinct destinations. When the electricity went out across the entire Northeast the month we moved there, I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and up Broadway until reaching our apartment off Columbus Circle, and even in the dark I began to stitch together what once was separate. As I became more of a pedestrian, I realized how Chinatown, Little Italy, SoHo, the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Union Square, and other neighborhoods connect to each other. 

The same sort of thing happened on this trip. Fifteen years ago I took Green Tortoise on my first and only trip to Yosemite, and afterwards we saw the tufa at Mono Lake, stopped at a Chevron station where I emailed the family, swam in the fresh water of June Lake. Seven years ago I visited Reno for my first conference with the Society for Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology, although I saw only the section near the Truckee, up along Virginia to UNR. At various stages in my life I considered studying or applying to teach at Deep Springs College. These places were separate in my head, but on this trip they began to come together.

…

A necklace of episodes. A highway of memory.

Posted on by William Alba 0

three score

On my birthday, my sister Joyce wrote

So you’re 16, right?? Hope it’s a good one!

I immediately replied

Jajaja, estoy orgulloso de haber cumplido sesenta años!

…

When I was younger, birthdays felt more significant. Even half-birthdays, even though we didn’t celebrate them — I used to tell adults my age in half-years. I remember telling my mother before a party at the bowling alley that 10 felt important because I was going into double digits, and that was also around the age where I stopped declaring half-years. But then at 15-1/2 I got my learner’s permit, and at 16 my driver’s license. At 18 I could vote but had to register for the draft, at 19 I was legal to drink, but then they changed the age and I had to wait again until 21.

Many of the rest sort of blur together, in part because they don’t mark legal transitions. I do remember celebrating 29 together with friends, although I don’t have a strong recollection of celebrating the 30th. 35 was Dante’s age midway through life (“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita”), as well as my age when I first read Dante. I married that year. I was aware that I was old enough to be President.

40 was filled with changes, moving from Manhattan to Pittsburgh, saying goodbye to Mookie, buying our first house. However, like 35 before and 50 after, while the year was eventful, the actual birthday, not so much. The years became more important than their passage. The sweeping of the hands on a clock, not the marks where they pause.

…

Increasingly the birthdays, even the half-birthdays, have started to take legal import again. At 50 my health insurance would pay for the shingles vaccine and for a colonoscopy. At 59-1/2 I could withdraw penalty-free from my retirement accounts. At 62 I could begin Social Security as well as purchase a lifetime pass to the US National Parks. 65 is my full retirement age for Social Security and when I become eligible for Medicare. If I wait until 70 for Social Security I could receive maximum payments. At 72 I must start taking required minimum distributions from my retirement accounts.

60 is not a subject of the law, it is pure, important for its own sake. 60 is a beautiful round number, plenty of divisors: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, .., just naming them is like counting the passage of time. And 60 is intimate with time: seconds in a minute, minutes in an hour, now years in a lifetime. It is an age when I do not take for granted that I can travel to other countries and walk pilgrimages, decide on a whim to go parasailing or scuba diving, sleep a good night’s sleep on a thin pad when I go camping. It is an age where I have learned so much, forgotten so much, can continue to build and learn too.

Sí estoy orgulloso de haber cumplido sesenta años.

Posted on by William Alba 1

of pilgrimages

Last Saturday around 4am, my younger brother-in-law replied to some texts I had sent earlier, where I casually remarked that the Appalachian Trail, Pacific Crest Trail, and various waterways could be considered “pilgrimages” (with the word in scare quotes). He wondered what I meant, so I replied with some groggy early morning thoughts, which I’ll organize a bit more here.

For me, a classic pilgrimage involves several elements:

  1. Trail. There is a path, or a set of possible paths. For example, there are defined routes for the Camino de Santiago (I completed the last part of the Portuguese Coastal Way from Vigo). There are also different routes on the Kumano Kodo, although only four or five are recognized for Dual Pilgrim status. While the way of a pilgrimage could be long-trodden foot trails such as these, for me a pilgrimage could be along converted railroad tracks or canal paths, such as the Great Allegheny Passage and C&O Canal Towpath from Pittsburgh to Washington DC, or on a natural body of water, such as the Colorado, Mississippi, or Hudson Rivers.
  2. Trial. A pilgrimage involves physical hardship or mental challenge. Such difficulties are relative to individual capabilities; I think many people visit the Holy Land at an age when they are less spry. As for me, because I already tend to travel lightly, at low cost with little baggage, and close to the ground, the challenges of a pilgrimage need to be commensurately higher. On the Camino, I was unaccustomed to walking long distances anymore, it often rained on my hikes, and without reservations I worried whether the public albergue that night would be full. On the Kumano Kodo, while I stayed in comfort and often took public transit, it was challenging to figure out how to navigate rural Japan.
  3. Rarity. Would it be possible to have a pilgrimage every day, for example when traveling to and from work? I think it’s possible to have an appreciation for living those moments — the year when I worked at Bard College and lived in Rhinecliff, I often felt for the beauty of my commute, the Catskills flashing between the trees from across the Hudson. However, I do think in general a pilgrimage should take you out of yourself and your daily life. I don’t know. Last spring I met Antonio, who had walked the Camino de Santiago forty times over the last twenty years, making it his life to help people along the way.
  4. Recognition. When I landed in Narita last month, the customs officer was surprised that I had only one backpack, small enough to fit under the seat in front of me (and at the time weighing only 4 kilos in total). When I explained that I will be walking the Kumano Kodo, he immediately understood. I feel a sense of fellowship and shared experience when talking with others who have walked either pilgrimage. As far as recognition, for both of these pilgrimages are also the stamps in the credential booklet, and at the end the certificate / compostela. On the Kumano Kodo I also collected special goshuin to honor the 20th anniversary of its status as a World Heritage site.
  5. Destination (or destinations). Generally a pilgrimage should involve a destination, something on which body and mind are focused on reaching. In the case of the Kumano Kodo, there are three destinations, a triumvirate of Grand Shrines. But although a pilgrimage should have something to aim for — whether singular or multiple, intermediate or final — for the Camino de Santiago, the Way was more meaningful for me than the End. Or rather, the point of the pilgrimage was not reaching the end, but rather what happened on the journey.
  6. Reflection. This gets to the most important aspect of a pilgrimage, which is internal. Although a physical body may travel with difficulty along a well-known path to reach a destination, what is most distinct for a pilgrimage, as opposed to a hike, is an element of mindfulness. On the Camino de Santiago, I often considered thought about how the parts of the pilgrimage reflected life, and how ultimately you are walking along a path that does not belong only to you. On the Kumano Kodo I learned to ritually purify my hands and mouth, and then bow and clap while I thought about the focus of each kami to be best of my ability.

Like every definition or classification scheme, this is imperfect. Jay, a history professor at my last full-time job, took a personal pilgrimage to retrace the road trip that his father had taken across the United States in the days before the Interstate. Ed, a history teacher at my first full-time job, had a mission to visit every Major League Baseball stadium.

If I compare my own experiences on the Camino de Santiago and the Kumano Kodo, my journey on the former trip was more trying, and the final destination was more clearly defined, and it is more widely known. But even though it didn’t fit my archetype of a pilgrimage as closely, the Kumano Kodo was not a lesser experience.

My brother-in-law in our texts last weekend shared that one of his spiritual teachers dissuades his students from pilgrimages, because they can exhaust your money and health, and that the main practice of mindfulness/meditation can be done anywhere, and the bias of saying one place is more sacred than another is a created concept. I agree that the notion of “sacred” is a created concept, a kind of crutch. But so are mandalas. Words are created too, and I lean on them every day. Words and pilgrimages, even as they are invented, help us in our finitude.

Posted on by William Alba 0

Dual Pilgrim

Last month I traveled to Japan. The first time I was five years old, when we flew from our home in New York to visit Manila, Dumaguete, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Honolulu, and LA. I’ve wanted to return to Japan for many many years, because I have specific childhood memories: walking the grounds of the Imperial Palace and seeing geishas made-up and dressed in kimonos; staying at the Imperial Hotel, where we watched sumo on the television while Dad received a massage; eating tempura for the first time on the recommendation of the concierge; and, unlike anywhere else we visited, being surrounded by words I could not comprehend with my eyes or ears.

On my most recent trip I tried food I’d never had before and often found myself in places where the language was beyond me. But as Heraclitus says, you can’t step in the same river twice.

During my journey to Japan, I completed the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage:

2025 1 24WILLIAM ALBA HP

When I visited the office in Tanabe on January 24, they told me I was the first person this year to be certified as a Dual Pilgrim in their office. I think most people elect to complete their journey formally at Kumano Hongu Taisha, but I was traveling west to east and my plan didn’t take me that way. I hold that I actually completed the journey on the 23rd, after visiting the three Shinto Grand Shrines, but then again what is time when crossing the International Date Line, and anyhow the process of certification can happen on a different date: a student doesn’t graduate until Commencement, even if all requirements are completed beforehand.

When I asked for my Philippine nationality to be recognized in their records in addition to the US, the clerk in Tanabe asked me which passport I had used to enter the country. Fair enough — Japanese law disallows their own citizens from holding multiple nationalities. So even though I am a dual citizen, my listing on this website as a Dual Pilgrim of the Camino de Santiago and of the Kumano Kodo shows only one nationality.

This photo links to the Dual Pilgrim website. The URL and text refer to “Willam Alba”, although the photo and certificate spell my first name correctly. Personally, I think this adds to the charm, reminding me how the person who took my picture and wrote my certificate struggled with the spelling of such a common name as mine, even though she could speak English far better than I can Japanese. There’s also something a bit poetic about it, taking the “I” out of my name, a removal of ego from the sign.

Posted on by William Alba 0

un regreso al hogar

La semana pasada regresé a Bard College para familiarizarme con la currículo del “Language & Thinking Program”, es decir, un programa del lenguaje y pensamiento. La semana que viene regresaré a Nueva York de nuevo.

Me gusta mucho el paisaje en el norte del estado de Nueva York. Para mí es el paisaje de Dios, de verdad, especialmente los lagos Finger alrededor de Ithaca y al lado del río Hudson cerca de Rhinebeck. Cuando mucha gente piensa en Nueva York, piensa en solo la ciudad. La ciudad sí es buena, me gusta también, es mi lugar de nacimiento, pero el resto del estado es tan precioso. Tengo muchos recuerdos como estudiante y profesor allí.

Regresar a Bard College fue algo así como un regreso al hogar. Es el primer lugar donde enseñaba mis propias clases en una universidad. Además, aprendí mucho del estilo de la enseñanza en el Instituto de la Escritura y Pensamiento. Está enfocado en usar el acto de la escritura para explorar y explotar textos y para recurrir tus propias experiencias. Tengo muchas ganas de enseñar en esta manera otra vez.

Hay un dicho que no se puede volver al hogar. Es verdad, con el tiempo hogar cambia y tú también. Hay edificios en el campus que no existió la última vez que estuve allí. El centro de estudiantes tiene una piedra angular con el año 1999 y recuerdo cuando se estaba construyendo frente a los dormitorios donde los profesores nos alojábamos. El edificio es antiguo ahora, se puede ver óxido y otros signos de desgaste. Antes fui uno de los más jovenes profesores, al principio de mi carrera, y la semana pasada fui el más mayor en la sala.

Sin embargo, los métodos siguen siendo los mismos. Hay un objetivo común ahora, un ensayo al final de las dos semanas y media, y pienso que esta tarea es buena. Sin duda será difícil y agotador, tanto para mí como para mis estudiantes, pero vale mucho la pena. Es un lugar para jugar con el lenguaje, es una comunidad verdadera de escribir y pensar.

Posted on by William Alba 0

dos partidos

Ayer fueron dos partidos de futbol — la Eurocopa con España contra Inglaterra, y la Copa América con Colombia contra Argentina. Quería que España y Colombia fueran los ganadores. Aunque tengo buenos recuerdos de los fans de futbol en un pub hace muchos años, España podría ser mi futuro hogar. Mis maestros de español viven en Colombia, así que la elección era clara.

Antes de y durante el primer partido, los presentadores hablaban solo de Inglaterra. Estaba muy decepcionado. Describieron a algunos jugadores ingleses en gran y heroico detalle, pero no dijeron nada sobre los españoles. Mostraron al rey de España varias veces, pero no dijeron quién era hasta el fin. Durante el entretiempo y después del fin, reconocieron que España es el mejor equipo, pero no dijeron ni cómo ni por qué. Es un asunto de discriminación lingüística. Qué vergüenza.

En el segundo partido, enmarcaron el encuentro como un partido entre el experimentado Messi y el enérgico equipo colombiano en una racha de victorias. No era una posibilidad de discriminación lingüística. Me dolía cuando dijeron palabras españolas. Una presentadora dijo “gracias” con tres sílabas, y el tercero sonó como “ass”. Entiendo que el nombre “Colombia” en inglés tiene dos vocales neutras, pero todavía me estremecí escuchar esta pronunciación. Un presentador dijo “Chile” una vez con la pronunciación correcta, así que es posible.

En fin, España y Argentina fueron los ganadores ayer. España fue muy eficiente, controló la pelota la gran mayoría del partido, y defendió bien la portería, incluyendo una secuencia cerca del fin. El partido comenzó tarde y hubo un espectáculo largo con Shakira durante entretiempo — después mucho tiempo, Argentina superó a Colombia en tiempo extra. Los dos equipos merecen sus campeonatos.

Posted on by William Alba 0

Un camino (una conclusión)

En este blog llevo una quincena escribiendo sobre mi camino. En los títulos, escribí “Un camino” porque para mí este viaje fue solo mi camino. Sería impertinente decir que mi camino es El Camino de Santiago. Es simplemente uno camino, sin mayúscula.

Es un poco irónico que el cuento dura más de dos semanas aunque el viaje real dura menos de una semana. Además, no pude escribir todos mis pensamientos, solo algunos de lo más destacado. Esto es característico del acto de escribir. No se puede decir todo.

De una manera, mi camino sigue. Según algunas personas, no hay tiempo entre un viaje en El Camino de Santiago y el siguiente. Estos simplemente son descansos en un solo Camino de Santiago largo. Puedo ver este punto de vista. Como dije en el final de mi última entrada, no me parece que mi camino terminó cuando llegué a la catedral en Santiago de Compostela.

…

Salí de la ciudad muy temprano en la mañana del 3 de mayo. Traté de tomar un autobús hacia el aeropuerto pero nunca llegó. Vague por las calles y finalmente tomó un taxi. Eso me sentí un poco más como el final, montar en un coche.

Cuando regresé a Madrid, fue como volver a casa. Tomó un autobús a Atocha y hablé con dos estudiantes universitarios de botánica — estadounidenses en su primer viaje a España. Mi hostal no aceptó mi mochila, así que regresé a la estación para tomar un tren Cercanías a San Lorenzo de El Escorial y El Valle de los Caídos. Pero eso es para otro momento.

…

Voy a tomar un descanso. Llevo ocho semanas escribiendo todos los días (excepto 11 de junio) en este blog. Me he demostrado a mí mismo que puedo mantener un hábito de escribir cada día.

Pero escribir en este blog ha sido un poco difícil, especialmente recientemente. A veces me costaba mucho escribir sobre mi camino. Tenía que ser auténtico e interesante. En vez de eso, suelo escribir cualquier cosa en la que esté pensando. Contar una historia exige más estructura.

Además, tengo proyectos que tienen que ver con la escritura, con plazos para completar. En varias semanas estaré enseñando en un programa intensivo de escritura y pensar. En septiembre daré un presentación sobre riesgos en comunicar con extraterrestres. Quiero empezar a una traducción de español a inglés.

Por eso, desde ahora voy a escribir menos a menudo en este blog. Todavía tengo un propósito de escribir todos los día, pero en formas diferentes, no solo aquí. Mi racha de ocho semanas fue un éxito, pero tengo otras cosas que hacer …

Posted on by William Alba 0