Perspective as in great mountains where we’re less than ants in the dunes
As passive viewers who frame the world in small-screen format and don’t read would become stranded in the stacks of a huge library
Without the whole
Trek in the nearly vertical Himalayan world at fifteen thousand feet, an elevation higher than any European summit. Peer into valleys that lie at two thousand, and then turn to stare up at crests and peaks in the sky three whole miles above
Wonder at the vast complexities of the regions of the world
Flat Niger
Easiest in winter, start in the capital, Niamey, where it’s always over 35°C, some days up over 45° in the shade, even worse as the heat builds into mid-summer
Bilma to the east, oasis in a sand ocean, fifteenth-century trading center, Bilma is in the center of the Sahara, 13°E, 19°N, in the Grand Erg de Bilma that runs northeast-southwest
By road to Ngumigmi very near Lake Chad, then due north with camels, twenty days, and the toughest part, out to the southwest to Agadez by truck, and back to Niamey, in a small plane or by car
Flexibility controls travel
The most arduous trips are any long blue-water sailing voyage, and trekking on ice, in tropical bush, or in any desert for more than a couple of days
Then the clean, simple ones almost without risk, like flying off in a small plane, long-distance swimming, daytrip mountain hiking on the margin late in the day above tree line
Finishing in chill salmon shoal-clouded evening dropping downslope into a high Andermattesque cold starry alpine night
Perspective drifts gently and relentlessly no matter where we’ve been and only rarely do we look up agape at mare’s-tail clouds
Or down at the wet shiny black salamander in the leaves
Or at the way paint flakes from a window sash with the wood’s grain coming up in shoals
Notice the softness in the eyes of neighbors, the beautiful hair of the old woman ahead in line, the dexterity of the supermarket cashier, the polite exchange of deferences at the door
Or feel awe that we are able to feel, sense, know, extend, share, sometimes assure, a tumbling, varied, typically unpredictable, continuous personal cascade across a world as absorbing and remarkable as observation and imagination allow
That confidence that thrives by nursing these awarenesses
In the old, low mountains behind Basel, from Bergmattenhof above Hofstetter on the north slope of the Blauen on a warm morning, partly cloudy, dry, light west wind, rain clouds far out over the Vosges
Climb to the Solothurn-Baselland line and only see one wren on the way up
Lie in the leaves on top, open forest floor for fifty meters all around, planning not to move until another bird, of any sort, appears
Give it up after half an hour and hope for the wren again on the way down, only hear a jay’s alarm call
Basel is almost insect free
Assiduous about its industry’s agro-poisons
Ride the tram with a Down syndrome teenager and his mother into town. He wears a fat gold chain and pendent gold-leaf earrings
And watch a gaunt woman in black, hung with silver jewelry, a generation younger than the rheumy silver-fox driver in black turtleneck and black leather pants who is bossing her
She lifts a black wall piece the size of a doghouse from a gleaming black Grand Cherokee, black interior, backed up to a Basel gallery painted matte black inside and out
In the afternoon, on down the Rhine in the Vosges, the Hohwald on the ridgeline border of the Alsace and Lorraine, the Col du Donon, seven hundred and fifty meters
On the peak a couple of hundred meters above the pass is a fake Gallo-Roman temple from 1869, erected in the square-cut brownstone of French First World War monuments and tombs
Seven authentic Gallo-Roman steles are arranged in a half circle facing the faux temple
The middle stele is a nude female relief carved without head and neck and thirty percent larger than life
Depicted full frontal from clavicle to toes, the vulva at the height of a viewer’s face
The other steles have heads, some heroic, some in profile, all life size or smaller
In the military cemetery below on the pass’s saddle, the grave, in the first rank, first file
Dolorès Rodrigues, Ambulancière 27e C.S., 12.05.1945, Lieu de la 1ème inhumation, Dorlisheim. Tome 1A, Cimetière Militaire de Donon
She was first buried where she died, on the Strasbourg road from Stutthof near the junction of N422 and N392
Months after the US Army and French liberation troops had come up on the concentration camp at Stutthof and flushed the Germans eastward out through Dorlisheim
Stutthof, the only German death camp in France, ten kilometers away from the Col du Donon, in view to the southeast across the high mountain plateau
Their congelation experiments used upwards of seventeen thousand Jews, Roma, and resistance people
Those who were not killed by the scientists, the guards murdered afterward
Sixty years after the last German firing squad, the camp’s partially rebuilt barracks were being painted and cleaned up for a Jacques Chirac visit
Some of the wooden buildings and guard towers were burned out in the 1980s by rightists, nationality publicly undetermined
A sunny day sixty years after the Germans hurried away, leaving thousands locked in and starving behind Stutthof wire, a dozen of Chirac’s guns stood around the gate, leather jackets, sunglasses, buzz-cuts, a pre-visit survey in four blue Renault vans
A brown lizard moved slowly down a cut-stone wall by the camp cemetery
A big and clumsy immature buteo, a buse variable, barged through low oaks by the gravel quarry that prisoners had worked
Out beyond the camp’s quarry, four bicyclists sprawled roadside, three women, a man, voluble and animated about how far across the Hohwald they might ride that evening
The sun setting toward the tops of a line of firs on the high tableland west of the Champ du Feu a few kilometers on
Near there a shepherd with over four hundred in his flock, pointed to where three lambs had just been born on the ridge below a large white microwave dish
His staff, a crook cum throwing shovel
A small finely machined German-made stainless-steel tool, a burnished smooth finish on an eight-foot shaft
We tossed a few clods sheepward in the sunset with it, in the mode of fighting-brushfire-throws, in the way of shepherds down through time
As those throws turn a flock
Talked of mountain work, of timber, herding, fire, the animals, the setting sun through the dust in the mountain air
He said he’d never even been to Colmar, and never to Switzerland or across the Rhine at all, had barely ever come down out of the High Vosges, let alone even thought of going to Niger
He asked what it was like in Switzerland, in western and southern France, in Paris, about the sheep in America and what the breeds are, what American mountains were like
He watched his flock pass as we talked, ewe after ewe, his eyes following them raising dust against the red sun
In perfect perspective