Day 21: Friday, October 20th 2017.

We returned from our American odyssey a full year ago so it seems a fitting time to now sit by the log burner, take myself back to last October and finish this final post as the mellow light of autumn returns to this old England.

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We leave Buffalo, leave Marie and her two young owners to continue their lives and then set off for Vermont. Like all the other people we’ve met on our journey, inside my head they’ll remain in some kind of stasis, frozen in time inside our memory, never getting any older.

We pick up two vanilla cappuccinos from a drive-through MacDonald’s and set off in the sunshine, full of excitement to see my friends and relatives and the fall colours of Vermont; the autumn of our journey, the end, yet not quite the end. The drive is once again pretty spectacular as we take numerous unplanned detours trying to outwit the satnav. Upstate New York was another name, another place that held mythical status in my imagination. It was where famous writers, musicians and artists lived; exiles from New York City, who, having made their name and their fortune in the vertical claustrophobia of the metropolis, now live in beautiful isolation in sprawling wooden houses hidden in the woods, spending their days writing, painting, walking, thinking and just being. In the woods. My imaginary, upstate New York house would have one large room that contained only a grand piano, sitting on bare boards in the otherwise empty space. When seated at the piano, as its ivory tones gently reverberated around the room, I would be able to see a crystal clear lake just visible through the dappled autumn sunlight filtering through the maple trees as their crackle-dry leaves spiralled gently to earth. The artists and writers would obviously have their own, equally serene arrangements. (You can tell I’ve not given much thought to this half-imagined, half-planned retirement option.) So here we are, in another mythical land, driving through the Adirondacks, home to High Peaks Wilderness, Sentinel Range Wilderness Area, Mackenzie Mountain Wilderness, Giant Mountain Wilderness. You get the idea. Not forgetting the eponymous chairs of course.

We don’t see James Taylor, Ansel Adams, J D Salinger, Joni Mitchell, Harper Lee or similar anywhere on our journey. They’re all probably busy chopping wood for the fire, fishing by the lake, sitting reading on the back porch or maybe just dead?

As we approach the state line the satnav shows up some water and I assume there’ll be a bridge to cross over into Vermont but as the dot on the map creeps towards the end of the road we turn a corner and surprisingly arrive at a small jetty where cars are slowly making their way on to a small ferry-boat that will take us across the border, which in this case is Lake Champlain, a huge, freshwater lake that stretches all the way up to the St Lawrence River and Canada. It’s a perfect introduction to this coda of our journey. The pink evening light glows golden, there’s hardly a breath of wind and there’s a serene calm that only the evening can hold; that quiet transition as day turns to night. Car engines fall silent and the few passengers sit quietly as the low throb of the ferry’s engine ticks over before filling its lungs, ready to churn up Lake Champlain and take us across the water to Charlotte, Vermont. And the sun slowly sets.

From the Vermont side of Lake Champlain it’s a short drive to Burlington and our final AirBnB with Mary and her cat Lilly. A quick unload then we drive over to Elisa’s house. Elisa is from Finland, (at least she was born there, I guess now she would say she was from Vermont?) But to me she is the lightning rod that connects me to my mother (her great-aunt), someone I never got to know as she died when I was a baby, and someone who was rarely spoken about within her remaining family for reasons too complicated to discuss here. So the connection runs very deep, too deep to fully describe here. Elisa stayed with us in our cottage in England as she waited for her Green Card to arrive, that passport to the New World and a new future so coveted by thousands before her. It was a stressful time for her but during her stay she spent some of her days translating the diaries my mother had written during her time as a displaced person in a detention camp in Germany shortly after the end of World War II; diaries that had remained in a suitcase underneath our bed for years, waiting for this moment to reveal their secrets. Like Elisa, my mother was also waiting for a decision to be made about her future, her national status, and where she would live; the consequence of her convoluted life story. It was in this camp in Lübeck that she met my father who was working with the Control Commission, the joint organisation set up to decide who, amongst the thousands of souls all displaced by the war in Europe, were ‘genuine,’ and who were Nazis and collaborators hiding in plain sight. Having read my father’s diaries, written at the same time, it was a pretty ghastly job. Executions took place on a regular basis after what were sometimes, given the sheer pressure of numbers, probably fairly peremptory trials?

Two very different personal accounts of this turbulent time emerged. My father’s, a very formal description of events with little emotion and I guess more than half an eye to possible breaches of security. And my mother’s, which, after Elisa’s translation, turned out to be the warts and all outpourings of a headstrong, fiery, independent young woman riding an emotional roller-coaster. After a lifetime of wondering, with Elisa’s forensic attention to detail and studious care, I heard my mother’s ‘authentic’ voice for the first time.

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Elisa’s parents had made the trip over from Finland to see her, her husband and their new grand-daughter so being able to spend time with them too was wonderful. I can vividly remember meeting Elisa’s dad, my cousin, for the first time when I visited Finland in 1969 aged 16. I saw him across a crowded dining table surrounded by all my relatives, brought together for a rare family gathering, and immediately felt a very strong frisson; this person looked like me: I felt ‘at home’, in my rightful place, I felt I ‘belonged’. Having studied children’s’ emotional development as part of my counselling training in recent years, and the importance of direct eye contact between mother and baby in helping to provide a sense of security and belonging, it now makes absolute sense to my why I felt that frisson; a baby needs to look at his mother’s face and feel, “Yep, I can see myself in there, everything’s cool, everything’s ok with the world”

But maybe that same need to belong, to be with one’s own, is also at the heart of intolerance, xenophobia and nationalism? It’s maybe not enough just to feel secure ‘at home’, we need to keep the ‘others’ out at all costs. Because…..? It’s probably also no surprise that so much intolerance is stimulated by visual cues: the colour of someone’s skin, the way they dress, the shape of their features. Perhaps that need to look into our mother’s eyes and seek recognition can also, given extra ‘fuel’, encourage some kind of unconscious fear and mistrust of difference; a kind of Darwinian survival strategy – beware of other tribes, they might steal our stuff? Might have worked a treat a few thousand years ago but in 2018 I think it needs reprocessing?  I often feel more comfortable in the company of strangers than with those I know – a useful by-product of not belonging perhaps?

So the travel blog has turned into a rather more personal reflection of life, love, loss and… (can’t think of another ‘L’). But hey, (cliché-alert) ‘life’s a journey’ ain’t it? And this particular journey (the road-trip, not the life hopefully) is coming to an end, fittingly, in the Fall.

We saw Vermont in the Fall. We saw picture-perfect Stowe with its golden colours. We had lunch at the home of the Von Trapp family. We saw the graveyard where Ben & Jerry’s failed ice cream recipes were laid to rest, (I thought the same). We bought maple syrup.

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We talked a lot, laughed a lot, cried a bit, and saw Elisa and her husband’s baby learn and grow in the blink of an eye. Just like her parents.

This last week was filled with very personal and emotional moments; moments too personal, intimate and ‘particular’ to trouble you with here. However, I did write a song about Elisa’s translation job which I played at another open mic night at the Red Bean cafe in Burlington, which again, fittingly, was the very last day of our trip. And in some kind of perfect alignment of the stars Elisa and her husband (due to the fact that granddad and grandma were on hand to babysit), were able to come and see me perform it.

We left Burlington and drove through endless miles of trees and mountains, often shrouded in dark, heavy clouds, occasionally split open by piercing shafts of sunlight. We eventually arrived in Boston and re-entered the ‘real world’: missed exits, hire-car returns, luggage, lifts and check-in desks; the ritual of the homeward bound. We had to fly to New York to catch our connection back home but due to storms en route the desk-clerk was trying to get us on a direct flight from Boston, a much better option; always better to fly in the opposite direction to storms I feel. But that wasn’t to be so the last leg of our American adventure saw us being shaken like rag dolls in the very back row of seats as the aircraft’s tail shook violently back and forth like a shark trying to speed home as quickly as possible. A final reminder from America; “You won’t forget us will you?” We won’t.

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We went looking for the New World, looking to see how this land of the free was coping with the aftershock of an election that had seemed to split the country in two. A land of immigrants, half of whom now seemed to be turning their faces against their modern counterparts, and who didn’t seem able or willing to correlate the facts of their own history, which began only a few hundreds of years ago. A complicated history bound in glory or vainglory, whichever side you prefer to go with. There are usually two sides to every story. A history of settlement/invasion, colonisation/ethnic cleansing, entrepreneurship/exploitation, individualism/selfishness. A pattern acted out by countless dynasties over the centuries, my own homeland being one of the worst culprits in this respect.

The US had been split in two once before, split by interpretations of what is ‘right’, what is ‘just’ and what is morally acceptable. Questions that, to the ‘liberal intellectual elite’ – that now reviled breed – are, literally, ‘unquestionable’. Right is right yes? The civil war that followed seems to have left a lasting scar that festers still. To be at war with oneself is a sad and ultimately unwinnable war; no-one comes out unscathed. I can only hope that the wheel that seems to constantly turn will soon return to some kind of social and humanitarian sanity. But I guess to question that metaphor more deeply, a turning wheel has no final resting place, it can never find stasis. Unless it’s a flat tyre of course, but as a metaphor that doesn’t bear thinking about. So maybe it’s just about living and dealing with change – the only constant. And living and dealing with difference – ie everyone else in the world, other than ourselves. A big ask I know.

So to think that human nature might change in some way, that a New World (whatever that is) might be possible, is perhaps a tad – a big tad – naive? History doesn’t offer us much in the way of reassurance but to probably misquote former British Prime Minister Jim Callaghan, (not someone who immediately springs to mind when trawling for prosaic quotations); “You might never reach the promised land but that shouldn’t stop you marching towards it.”