Book Review:  Rough Sleepers by Tracy Kidder

Posted on July 15, 2023 by John Walters

Rough Sleepers is a term used to refer to the portion of the homeless populace in Boston that sleeps outside on the streets instead of in shelters. This book tells of the Boston Healthcare for the Homeless program, and specifically of Doctor Jim O’Connell, the man who initiated it and gave most of his life to it. Originally, the chief of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital asked O’Connell to participate in homeless outreach for a year when he finished his residency; that one year turned into two, and then into a lifetime of service. O’Connell developed real love and empathy for the patients he met on the streets and in the shelters, and devoted himself to their care. He was not always able to get them off the streets, and Kidder, who spent a considerable amount of time riding along in the program’s van and observing the level of care at its clinics, explains why. The problems of many of the program’s patients go back to their childhoods, to broken homes, dysfunctional parents, violence, sexual assault, and early drug and alcohol abuse. Still, despite these difficulties, O’Connell and his team always see them as precious people with their own sensitivities, vulnerabilities, talents, and stories.

There is no doubt that the United States is in the midst of a homeless epidemic. Often what we hear about in the news is precisely the wrong ways of addressing the problems: by ostracizing the homeless, arresting them, destroying their makeshift homes, outlawing sleeping on the streets – everything except providing the basic food, housing, and medical care that they need the most. The program in this book is a model for how to deal with homelessness in a positive way. Instead of criminalizing those who have become destitute, the program’s personnel treat their patients with respect and dignity. O’Connell likens his task to that of Sisyphus, the Greek king whose punishment in hell is to roll a heavy boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down so that he has to return to the bottom and roll it up again. Despite all the program’s efforts, the homeless problem seems endless and insurmountable. But that doesn’t mean they can just give up. Indeed, once the doctors and nurses in the program discern the depth and personalities of the patients they are nurturing, they often form long-term commitments to the program.

I have been homeless in the past, mainly when I spent time on the road traveling around the world in my youth. I was often broke and dependent on the hospitality of strangers. Once when I had run out of money and my passport was stolen in Iran, I begged on the streets of Tehran for two weeks before I could raise enough money for a new passport and move on. As a writer seeking experiences I could turn into stories, for me homelessness was a grand adventure. For most of the modern-day homeless the situation is different, though. They have no option but the streets – as well as shelters and clinics when they can find them. Try to imagine being thrown out of your house or apartment and being forced to abandon everything except the few belongings you can carry with you. Imagine further that when you try to pitch a makeshift tent to keep off the rain or snow the authorities come along, rip it down, and possibly cart you off to jail. Homelessness could happen to any of us under the wrong circumstances. If it does, we will be very fortunate if we can find sympathetic, compassionate people like Doctor O’Connell and his team to help us out.

This book needs to be read and appreciated by as many people as possible. Highly recommended.

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On Rereading Nexus by Henry Miller

Posted on July 8, 2023 by John Walters

Acquiring and reading Nexus came about through a visit to a small used book store I hadn’t been to in years. It’s had the same owner for decades, and I used to frequent it and stock up on books when I would visit Seattle while living in Greece. I wanted to purchase something to show solidarity with his efforts to keep his shop open, and Nexus is what I came up with after a quick browse.

I haven’t read anything by Henry Miller in years; when I was young, though, and just starting to learn what a commitment to writing was really all about, I somehow stumbled upon Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. It had a profound effect on me. It’s the story of Miller’s early years in Paris, when he was dirt poor and often itinerant, a companion of all sorts of nefarious street people. It’s shot through with vivid imagery, surrealistic descriptions, and eroticism. It is a cry of freedom of expression, a hallelujah celebration of Miller finally finding his own unique voice. That’s what got to me most: that Miller found a voice that was his and his alone, and though it was frequently raunchy, iconoclastic, and even depraved, he shouted it out as loud as he could.

Tropic of Cancer was his first full-length autobiographical novel. He followed it up with Tropic of Capricorn and others. His magnum opus, though, was the three-volume Rosy Crucifixion, consisting of Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus, which tell of his years in New York struggling to get started as a writer before becoming an expatriate in France and later in Greece. In Nexus, he and his wife are seriously contemplating a trip to Paris; his wife and her girlfriend even go to Europe for a time but leave Miller behind. The book ends just as he and his wife are about to board the boat to France together. Before that, Miller exuberantly describes his misadventures and the idiosyncratic people he meets leading up to the voyage in his own inimitable style. For instance, while in the midst of a passage depicting an altercation between himself, his wife, and his wife’s female companion, he might suddenly launch into a prolonged exposition on Dostoyevsky; a visit to his Jewish neighbors might bring on all sorts of discourses on history, literature, and international cuisine. He deals in the absurd, and he delights in allowing his multitudinous idiosyncratic characters ramble on and delve into all sorts of subjects.

I approached this book with trepidation; I’ve kind of outgrown Henry Miller. If you read him long enough, you’re sure to find something to offend you. Sometimes he seems to be out to deliberately offend everyone and everything. He maligns everyone, especially himself, and often his antiquated slurs carry more offensive weight now than when he wrote them many decades ago. A quote from the beginning of his novel Tropic of Cancer helps put this all in perspective: “This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty…what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps but I will sing.” That’s Henry Miller for you. If you can’t handle that passage, you’re better off reading some other less offensive writer.

As for me, as I said, I haven’t read much by Miller or even thought much about him lately. Reading this book for me was primarily an exercise in nostalgia. It reminded me of how important Miller once was for me in my development as a writer. He helped me realize that abandoning conventions and rules and the styles of other writers was essential in breaking free to discover my own voice. I would suggest, though, if you’d like to sample some of Henry Miller’s work (he really is a fine writer) without all the raunchy language and controversy, start with his excellent travel memoir on Greece, The Colossus of Maroussi. 

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Book Review:  The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann

Posted on July 1, 2023 by John Walters

The title of this book confused me at first; I thought it referred to a bet. In fact, however, The Wager refers to the HMS Wager, a British man-of-war named after Admiral Sir Charles Wager, which left England in 1740 as part of a squadron of six warships commanded by Commodore George Anson. The squadron’s mission was to find and engage Spanish treasure ships. To accomplish this, they sailed southwest, pursued by Spanish warships, and amidst tumultuous seas and frequent storms rounded Cape Horn, the southernmost end of South America.

The extreme weather caused the ships to become separated. The Wager turned north prematurely, got too close to the coast, and wrecked on rocks in western Patagonia. The acting captain and some of the officers and crew made it to shore on a cold, remote, uninhabited island that became known as Wager Island.

The story is told in ruthlessly grim detail, beginning in England with descriptions of the deteriorating condition of the vessels before they set sail and the need to send out press gangs to kidnap able-bodied men to serve as sailors. Grann graphically depicts the brutal life onboard British ships, the filth, the vermin, the lack of decent food, and the horrific scourge of scurvy, a debilitating disease caused by a lack of vitamin C. Burials at sea were common, so much so that by the time the Wager rounded the cape many of the crew had died or were incapacitated and the ship was undermanned. On Wager Island, the lack of food and poor living conditions led to anarchy. Most of the surviving sailors mutinied against the captain and his loyal officers and on a makeshift vessel made their way back through the Strait of Magellan and up the east coast of Argentina. Some of them survived and eventually made it back to England. The captain and a few of the officers that had remained with him also finally got home, leading to a court-martial to find out what had really happened amidst conflicting reports.

This is an exciting true story, and Grann has researched and written it extremely well. It is easy to empathize with the difficult plight of the castaways. I wonder how I would have fared and the decisions I would have made if I had been an officer or a member of the crew on this ill-fated voyage. That any of the shipwrecked officers and crew survived and returned home is nothing short of miraculous. Naval vessels were so primitive and so prone to rot and breakages and infiltration by pests, navigation was so imprecise, and medical science was so rudimentary that it is a marvel that seafarers were able to accomplish what they did, including exploration of vast unknown oceans and circumnavigation of the globe.

This is the type of book that doesn’t come along very often: a thrilling, well-written true story of adventure, tragedy, and eventual triumph on the high seas. Highly recommended.

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Book Review:  The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes: The Adventures of the Great Detective in India and Tibet; also known as Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years by Jamyang Norbu

Posted on June 24, 2023 by John Walters

Many novels and stories have been written by a variety of writers using the character of Sherlock Holmes. I have read none of these by other authors than the original until now. However, when I was young I read with delight almost all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories about the uniquely methodical and logical detective. I came across a passage about The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes in a book about novels from various countries around the world. It attracted my interest because it is set in South Asia, an area that has long fascinated me and where I lived for ten years. Because Norbu is a Tibetan writer, the novel carries a strong sense of verisimilitude.

If you are familiar with the Holmes saga, you are aware that Doyle, having decided that his “literary energies should not be directed too much into one channel” decided to kill off his heroic detective in “The Final Problem.” In this story, Holmes has a last confrontation with his archenemy Professor Moriarty and they both fall to their deaths at the Reichenbach Falls. Doyle’s readers were devastated and outraged. Tens of thousands of them cancelled their subscriptions to The Strand Magazine in protest. After a hiatus of just a few years, Doyle resumed writing stories about his idiosyncratic detective. To account for the years from the incident at the falls until Holmes resumes his career, there are only a few lines in a story called “The Empty House.” Holmes tells his biographer Dr. Watson: “I traveled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by visiting Lhasa and spending some days with the head Lama.”

This novel, then, offers an account of what happened during those years when Holmes had disappeared from the British public’s eye. It is told from the viewpoint of the East’s equivalent of Watson, a Bengali by the name of Huree Chunder Mookerjee, who is in fact a character taken from Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim. Mookerjee is involved in the espionage intrigue that Kipling, in his novel, refers to as “the great game,” and he becomes Holmes’s assistant as well as his biographer. It seems that deadly assassins loyal to Moriarty are still on Holmes’s trail and intend to do him in. Holmes, meanwhile, is determined to make his way, for reasons that become apparent as the novel progresses, to Tibet. Mookerjee meets up with Holmes in Bombay (now known as Mumbai), and together they travel to Simla, the summer capital of the British Raj, with Moriarty’s henchmen hot on their heels. Eventually, at the invitation of the Dalai Lama, they undertake a trek through the Himalayan Mountains to Tibet.

I don’t want to give too much away, because this is a rousing good adventure tale. The allusions to Doyle’s and Kipling’s writings are fun, and Norbu’s familiarity with Tibet and its culture add depth and nuance. The author has even added a fantasy element to the tale, which caused me to recall times of yore when I would become absorbed in amazing tales of lost civilizations by Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard, and others. Escapism is what it is, with larger than life characters grappling with evil in exotic locales. It would make a fun movie along the lines of Indiana Jones. In the meantime, find a copy somewhere and give it a read. You won’t be disappointed.

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Book Review:  Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

Posted on June 17, 2023 by John Walters

This new study on poverty in the United States and what to do about it is by the author of the brilliant study Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. In Evicted, Desmond focuses on about a dozen Milwaukee residents who struggle to survive amidst deep poverty. In Poverty, By America, he gives a more general overview about the national problem of poverty and suggests solutions based upon a wealth of research. In fact, the notes delineating his research sources comprise about a third of the book. That’s not to say that the book is dry and overly academic – not at all. Desmond is intent on explaining poverty in a way that everyone can understand, and for the most part he succeeds. His author’s photo on the back flap is, to me, symbolic of his integrity. He is not draped in a suit and tie with a goofy grin pasted onto his face; instead, he wears an unpretentious black tee-shirt and has an intent and determined expression. Compared to most author photos we see these days, it radiates sincerity and resolve.

One thing that occurred to me as I read this book is that the people who need it most probably wouldn’t touch it. It made me ask myself whether it really does any good to bring these things to light when the audience of readers will be mostly sympathetic souls. Well, of course it is better to know these things rather than not know them, because we can all be part of the solution instead of the passive see-no-evil problem. I can’t really attempt a comprehensive summary of his ideas, but in a nutshell, he points out that middle class and rich Americans obtain far more government assistance than the poor. This is one of the glaring faults of the system that keeps the poor oppressed. For example, the well-off obtain many billions of dollars in mortgage assistance; this is out of reach of the poor because banks are reluctant to approve mortgages for smaller, more affordable homes. Additionally, poverty could be all but eliminated if the rich simply paid their fair share in taxes instead of utilizing all sorts of evasive loopholes. It reminds me of recent news stories of the IRS wanting to hire more investigators to close some of these loopholes, but a mob of corrupt politicians protested loudly that these investigators were an unnecessary expense. How can that be true when they could have added multi-billions of withheld and hidden taxes to the treasury?

Desmond emphasizes that the most powerful are responsible for the vast problem of American poverty. These include “political elites” who have ignored the plight of low-income Americans, “corporate bosses” who prioritize profit over the welfare of their workers, lobbyists for special interests, and property owners who have made housing unaffordable for the working class. To remedy this horrific situation, says Desmond, we have to invest in programs to mitigate poverty, empower the poor by providing them with decent wages and workers’ unions and good schools and decent housing and assistance in reproductive planning, and allow affordable housing to coexist with more affluent homes in nice neighborhoods. In his epilog, Desmond challenges readers to take action to end poverty in America, which is, in fact, an achievable goal if we go about it the right way and with the proper motivation and attitude. I’ve been poor much of my life; I know how it is to struggle for sufficient resources to survive, and also, in better times, how much more liberating it is to breathe a sigh of relief when basic needs are supplied. This book is a call to arms in the war on poverty, and we should all take heed.

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Book Review:  Liberation Day: Stories by George Saunders

Posted on June 10, 2023 by John Walters

I have been eagerly looking forward to reading the latest short story collection by George Saunders, but I had to be patient, as it is a much-sought-after item at our local library. Now that I have read it, I can’t help but compare it with another Saunders collection, Tenth of December. Both collections are fairly slim at just over two hundred pages, and both have a mix of mainstream and speculative fiction stories. As with Tenth of December, I liked some stories in Liberation Day more than others. Of course just about every reader of short story collections is going to have favorites. And in both collections, the science fiction tales are the strongest stories in the books.

A recurrent theme in the science fiction of George Saunders is the exploitation of the lower class as helpless pawns, puppets, and performers of the rich and influential. In Tenth of December, this is brought out in the story “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” in which live third world women are hung as decorative mannequins outside of the homes of the affluent. In Liberation Day, there are no less than three stories with similar themes. “Liberation Day,” the longest story in the book, tells of members of poor families being pinioned to the walls of special rooms in the homes of the rich, and after their memories are erased they serve as instruments of entertainment; their owners manipulate their limbs and their voices from special consoles. “Ghoul” is a weird, brutal dystopian story of the inhabitants of a closed underground system of tunnels and caverns who must endlessly rehearse their parts in a series of theme parks for visitors who never arrive. “Elliott Spencer” also tells of memory-erased individuals who are coerced into servitude.

Other stories such as “The Mom of Bold Action,” “A Thing at Work,” and “Sparrow” deal with more mundane situations, but Saunders uses multiple viewpoints, diverse styles, and events that sometimes resemble scenes out of sit-coms to bring them to life.

One of the things I appreciate most about this collection is the author’s willingness to experiment with styles and viewpoints. It brings to life one of my favorite pieces of writing advice ever, from Saunders’ book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. After meticulously analyzing and drawing lessons from the short stories of some of the greatest of Russian writers, this is Saunders’ closing piece of advice: “The closest thing to a method I have to offer is this: go forth and do what you please.” In his short story collections, it is clear that Saunders follows his own counsel. He has fun with his words, his plots, his characters, and his themes. Sometimes some of the stories start a bit slow, but as he goes along, Saunders adds layer after layer of nuance until by the end he has taken readers in completely unexpected directions. And that’s what short story writing is all about.

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Book Review:  When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

Posted on June 3, 2023 by John Walters

Paul Kalanithi, the author of When Breath Becomes Air, majored in literature in college and then decided to go into medicine. He chose to become a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist, which involves some of the most difficult academic and residency training possible. For him it was not about finding a lucrative career, but rather a calling to be able to serve humankind in the best way possible. When he was six years into his residency training, he was diagnosed with a lethal form of lung cancer. The doctor was forced to become a patient. He died just after finishing his residency at the age of thirty-six. He wrote this book in the last months of his life, when it was evident that he would be unable to go back to his work as a surgeon and the drugs and chemotherapy he was undergoing were proving ineffective.

Like another memoir I read not long ago, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad, about a twenty-two-year-old diagnosed with leukemia and the trauma she underwent in the medical system in efforts to save her life, this would seem to be an agonizingly painful read. And Kalanithi’s book does have its difficult, intense passages, but overall it evokes a feeling of hope and triumph rather than despair. Remember that Kalanithi trained in literature before he trained in medicine and had at one point considered becoming a writer. His language throughout the book is intense, poetic, and insightful.

What elevates the author’s account of his medical training is his ethical focus. He was deeply concerned about the patients in his care. For their sakes he was willing to forego an easier lifestyle and put in grueling hours of work. Because he had the capacity to help, he felt the obligation to do so. As a neurosurgeon he looked forward to a lifetime of service to those in need, and as a neuroscientist he looked forward to discovering new and better methods of treating brain injuries and illnesses.

This all came to a crashing halt when he began to suffer unbearable pain and was diagnosed with stage IV metastatic lung cancer. Before he began treatment and would be unable, he and his wife decided to have a child. Their daughter was born eight months before he died. She brought him joy and a sense of completion before the end.

This book confronts the dilemma of facing unexpected death; but then, for most of us, regardless of our age or the state of our health, death is unexpected and unwelcome no matter when it arrives. It was one thing for Kalanithi to confront the reality of dying patients, but quite another when the roles were reversed and he was the one contemplating the realization of his own mortality. I think it is good to sometimes remind ourselves that one hundred percent of us will experience death at some point. There are no exceptions. There is no escape from this truth. We can try to prolong our time in these fleshly bodies, but sooner or later we will die one way or another. Knowing this can help us evaluate our lives and make decisions that can imbue the time we have with significance. It is a reminder we all need now and then.

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Book Review:  The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere by Pico Iyer

Posted on May 31, 2023 by John Walters

Fogged in by a spate of loneliness, I decided to deal with the gnawing, empty feeling by turning the negative into positive. To accomplish this, I conducted a search for books on solitude, and compiled a list of about a dozen or so. I was hoping to glean some insight into what makes solitude desirable and apply these ideas to my own situation. Of the selections available at the library, I chose to start with this one.

The Art of Stillness is a small, slim book in which a large portion consists of images or blank pages. The text is about the length of an essay or magazine article. The author Iyer is an elite intellectual and professional travel writer. In the introduction he emphasizes that he offers no answers, only questions that readers can expand upon. According to Iyer, nowhere is the place you arrive at when you “sit still long enough to turn inward.” Disasters are opportunities to start again, he claims, and we can change our lives by changing how we look at them.

I soon realized that though this book is well-written, it is not really aimed at people like me and does not offer any insights into long-term solitude. Instead, Iyer offers high-class executives and other intensely driven individuals the concept of meditative solitude as a temporary break from their other activities. Solitude for Iyer is a few weeks of respite in a monastery or retreat in the hills near Silicon Valley, an option which is beyond the means of ordinary folks. In other words, “going nowhere” is a vacation rather than an ongoing lifestyle choice.

That’s not to say that this book is devoid of value. Within its parameters, it offers insightful examples of others who have taken solitude seriously. For instance, Iyer briefly tells the story of the love affair of Thomas Merton, the famously reclusive monk and author. Although he had taken a vow of celibacy, during a hospital visit the fifty-one-year-old monk fell in love with a twenty-year old nurse. They ultimately did not consummate their relationship, and Merton chose to “marry the silence of the forest.” Another example is Matthieu Ricard, who spent almost a year in a cabin on a mountainside in Nepal; every week or so he would take a photo of the same view, but it was ever-changing due to the mutable weather and seasons. Eventually he published the results in a book called Motionless Journey.

Anecdotes such as these add nuance and flavor to a book that otherwise skims the surface of its subject but does not make any effort to explore it in depth. Iyer does not see stillness as an end in itself, but rather a means of refueling for further accomplishments. He comes across as a traveler passing by and remarking on activities he observes rather than a committed seeker. This does not render the book ineffective, but it limits its scope. Evidently the material in this book is the basis of a TED talk, and in fact The Art of Stillness is labeled “a TED Original” from TED Books. So imagine you are attending a lecture to the upper class on the theme of meditation, stillness, and going nowhere, and then you’ve got an idea of the range and length of this book.

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Book Review:  All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Posted on May 27, 2023 by John Walters

I have just finished reading this amazing novel, and I am unsure of how to approach it as a reviewer. In truth, I am in awe of it. I approach it as I might approach a priceless painting or sculpture in a museum: afraid to touch it in fear of shattering the illusion. It’s a fairly long novel without a single extraneous word. It is complex, jumping from one time frame to another and one character to another in short but intense chapters, but it is easy to follow and never for a moment did I lose the story’s thread. It is a near perfect work of art.

Who would have thought that a novel about World War II could resonate so deeply in this modern era? And yet it does. It escapes its historical trappings and becomes universal. It gives every one of its characters, from the most vulnerable to the most ostensibly evil, profound motivations for their behaviors and intricate though sometimes succinctly expressed backgrounds. Within a very short time after you commence reading it, you will find it very difficult to put down.

The story begins with the Allied bombing of Saint-Malo, a town on the coast of France where a teenage girl named Marie-Laure lives with her great uncle. Marie-Laure became blind when she was six years old. When the Germans invaded France, she and her father fled Paris for Saint-Malo. Her father worked in a museum and carried with him a valuable diamond known as the Sea of Flames. A parallel story tells of a German boy named Werner, a whiz with radios and electronics, who is sent to a brutal military school and is conscripted into the Nazi army at the age of sixteen. A further plotline concerns the evil Sergeant Major Reinhold von Rumpel, an expert in gems who ruthlessly hunts for the Sea of Flames through various Nazi-held territories. The horrors of war are vividly described as the story progresses, but these awful realities are mitigated by the love, tenderness, and compassion of those caught up in the conflict, who seek to survive and protect their loved ones as chaos and disaster erupt all around.

As the story progresses, Doerr expertly draws the various threads tighter and tighter until they all come together at the Battle of Saint-Malo. I have read more novels than I could ever count, and yet seldom have I encountered a book as superbly crafted as this one. Most novels of this length have weaknesses such as occasional ponderous descriptions, pontifications of the author, or pointless digressions. Doerr avoids these errors. The writing is focused throughout, always clear and sharp and on-point. I have a certain time in my daily schedule that I designate for reading, but with this book it was extremely difficult to avoid going overtime for just one more chapter, and then another, and so on. In short, this novel is well worth reading. Don’t let the World War II setting, which has been used so often in the past in innumerable books and films, put you off. This novel far transcends its background; its themes and insights, as I mentioned above, are universal. Highly recommended.

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A Journey into the Wasteland (of Downtown Seattle)

Posted on May 20, 2023 by John Walters

Downtown Seattle isn’t what it used to be. In my youth it was a wonderland, a special place to go for shopping and entertainment. It was safe enough that my parents felt comfortable dropping a group of us kids off to see a movie and then picking us up later. During sales periods or winter holidays the streets would be lined with lights and we looked forward to strolling along the sidewalks with our parents. Later as a young man I would go downtown with my friends for double or triple features at the ornate cinemas or to head to the waterfront to view the exhibits in the aquarium, eat fish and chips at outdoor tables, or take ferries to the islands in Puget Sound.

A few days ago I took a bus downtown to meet two of my sons. They had flown in from their disparate college and work locations to attend a metal concert in downtown Seattle. I met them at their hotel and we went to have a bite to eat and walked around a bit before they had to head to the airport for their flights out. It was the first time I had been downtown since before the start of the COVID pandemic. I had heard that things had changed, that violent incidents had increased, and that safety warnings had even been issued. Still, I was unprepared for the shock of how much the area had deteriorated. There was vomit and rubbish on the pavements, and indigent people were everywhere: on every corner and in many of the doorways. Some sat on the sidewalks with rough cardboard “spare change” signs propped in front of them, while others gathered in groups or wandered along the sidewalks mumbling to themselves. There had always been homeless people here and there downtown in the past, but never as many as now. They were literally everywhere. I could sympathize, of course, having been broke and homeless myself for years when I hitchhiked around the world; however, I had voluntarily embraced homelessness, while these multitudes around me were victims of the current cataclysmic economic catastrophe.

It was a hot day, but instead of the brilliant blue of yore, the sky was gray and glowering due to the smoke from wildfires in Canada.

The strange contrast between wealth and poverty, between the tourists who strolled from attraction to attraction and the filthy street residents trying to survive was accentuated when my sons and I stopped for a sandwich at a bakery. We supposed that having a bite at a bakery rather than a sit-down restaurant would save us time and money, but the amount we were charged for three small sandwiches took my breath away.

We decided to head for Pike Place Market, which has remained more or less the same over the decades: low ceilings, polished wood floors, and fascinating idiosyncratic small shops. The highlight was my discovery that the used book store in the heart of the market was still there and had the same owner with the truly encyclopedic knowledge of the used book trade. We wandered the various levels of the market and then decided to walk along the Seattle waterfront, which has always been one of my favorite places. Alas, the peaceful ambiance of the waterfront is gone. When we descended to the bottom of the market and approached Alaskan Way, the street that runs alongside the piers, we were confronted with an apocalyptic wasteland. As far as we could see the street was gutted and filled with pits, mounds of earth, construction equipment, and construction workers. At first glance we couldn’t even discern a path through to the waterfront itself. We decided to abandon our plan for a waterfront walk, realizing it would have to be accomplished amidst grating noise and roiling dust. In chagrin we retreated to the relative calm of the crowded market.

On the bus ride home I wondered what had become of the city I had once known. It had grown, of course, from a neglected oasis to a tech hub; its population had increased greatly since I had grown up there. Still, growth can be positive instead of negative. But the city center I had just seen had somehow imploded into catastrophic desolation. I wondered if it could ever be saved and once again become the glittering attraction I imagined from my youth. Or had it ever really been as perfect as I remembered it? It had been different anyway – cleaner, brighter – that was for sure. For the present, I was thankful to be able to retreat to the relative safety and cleanliness of my apartment complex in the suburbs.

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