Travel Story

Every picture tells a story  But sometimes you actually have to read it.

In the summer of 2012, Caitlin came home from England where she was working on her PhD at the University of York. She had an invitation, and grant, to spend a week doing research at a Yale Centre for British Art facility in Connecticut. Wouldn't it be cool, she suggested, if we all - all including then boy friend Aaron, who was living in our basement at the time - drove to New York and spent some time in Manhattan before dropping her off in Connecticut. She could fly home to England from New York. 

Karen and I, never averse to visiting the Apple, agreed. We stayed in a flat in Brooklyn. On some days, Caitlin and Aaron went off and did their thing, and Karen and I did ours. On this day, we were on our own, tramping around Manhattan, when I spotted this kid on the bench. I got a few steps past before I realized what I was seeing. The building, if you read the plaque on the pillar and the sign on the wall, is the  headquarters of the American Bible Society, a fundamentalist Christian ministry, and home to its Museum of Biblical Art.  

The kid, evidently orthodox Jewish, possibly Hasidic - note the side curls and yarmulke - is having a moment with a bronze statue of a Christian missionary (whose name I've just learned, was Jeremiah Lanphier.) Why? And what exactly is he about to do to old Jeremiah? Smack him in the head? Mess up his hair maybe? It was only afterwards I noticed that Jeremiah appeared to be copping a feel while this was going on. Maybe the kid was telling him not to get fresh. Dirty pedo!

The American Bible Society and Museum of Biblical Art upped sticks in 2015, and took Jeremy, known locally as "the contemplative man," when they left. He'd been a fixture at the corner of Broadway and 61st for eight years. I doubt anyone's missed him that much. The kid? Probably now a heavily bearded man in a long black coat and homburg hat stalking the streets of Manhattan.

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Eagle-eyed readers might notice that I've switched fonts for this blog. Blogger offers a limited number of fonts, but did add some new ones recently. You have to know where to look to find them though. This one is called Merriweather, a serif typeface, which should be easier to read than the sans serif face I was using before.

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The Trudeau government's new travel bans and rules around enforced testing and self-isolation are, on balance, a good thing, I think. But you have to ask yourself, why these particular rules, and why were they necessary now?

If you wanted to stop the new variants, which is what the government said was a large part of its motivation, given that the epicentres of those variants are supposedly the UK and South Africa, wouldn't it have made more sense to ban travel to and from those places? Why Mexico and the Caribbean?

According to Our World in Data, a non-profit that aggregates statistics from a variety of sources around the world, case rates per million of population have risen faster and are quite a bit higher in Mexico than in Canada. But in places like the Barbados and the Bahamas, they have risen at a more moderate rate since last March and absolute numbers are lower than in Canada, in some cases, substantially lower.

One reason for banning those destinations, of course, is that they're where Canadians are most tempted to go in the winter, and where the travel is pretty uniformly non-essential. It's also - not coincidentally, I suspect - where some elected officials and senior public servants went at Christmas, and then got in trouble for doing exactly what their governments had asked ordinary citizens not to do. 

So the travel ban sends a political message as well as delivering health benefits. Which is the more important, I wonder?

And the new regulations for arriving air travellers? I would have thought that, in the best of all possible worlds, the existing requirements, to prove you'd had a recent negative Covid test before flying and self-isolate for 14 days on arrival, would have been enough to contain any potential spread from air travel. 

Most expert commentary I've read suggests air travel, while it has brought some new cases into the country, is by no means a super-spreader. It's nothing like as dangerous as sitting in a poorly-ventilated restaurant, or in a church singing hymns, or gathering with family or friends indoors.

Of course, we don't live in the best of all possible worlds. The fairly draconian requirements for mandatory testing on arrival and a self-funded three-day quarantine at a government-run facility were needed, I'm guessing, because a) Covid test certificates from some places couldn't be trusted, and/or b) unscrupulous travellers were faking certificates (I don't think it would be that difficult to do) and c) arriving travellers were routinely flouting self-isolation rules.

All of this, of course, forces one to re-evaluate one's own travel behaviour. I know some people - guys I play hockey with, for example - thought it irresponsible of Karen and I to travel at Christmas. Nothing was said directly, but it was reported to me. I'm not sure, in retrospect, I entirely disagree with them. In our defense, the situation at the time we booked was nothing like as dire as it fairly quickly became, especially in the UK.

Our take on it at the time was that we were endangering nobody but ourselves and our immediate family by travelling. We drove ourselves to and from the airport at this end and were picked up and dropped off by our son-in-law at the other. We scrupulously followed the 14-day self-isolation, masking, social distancing and "bubbling" rules in force at both ends. And so far as we can tell, have not been infected.

The flaw in this line of argument is that if we had become infected or had infected family in England - always a possibility however careful and law-abiding we were - it could very well have resulted in a further burden being placed on already over-burdened health services. And that's ultimately what all this pain is about: ensuring that when people do get very sick with Covid, they can be properly cared for in hospital. 

I'm not going to apologize or anything, but we won't be travelling again soon.

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Amusing bird fact  Well, not that amusing maybe, but the South American oilbird is definitely one strange fowl. 

Oilbirds at home

It eats fruit, which it forages for at night, and lives in pitch-dark caves where absolutely no light penetrates. To accommodate this bizarre lifestyle, it has tiny hairs beside its beak that it can use to feel its way around in tight situations and it has the most light-sensitive eyes of any vertebrate. Strangest of all, it has an echolocation system which, unlike a bat's, uses human-audible sounds. It uses it to find its way around in the cave.

The bird was first observed by a European naturalist, one Alexander von Humboldt, at the end of the 18th century. Locals took Humboldt to an oilbird cave. As Jennifer Ackerman tells it in The Bird Way, "As the group moved into the darkness, hoarse screams, piercing shrieks and snarls, and grotesque retching sounds reverberated against the rocky vault and echoed in its depths."

That was the oilbird, aka diablotin ("little devil") or guácharo ("one who cries and laments") trying to find its way to the bathroom in the dark.  

So now you know.