I’ve changed the names of five individuals, either at their request or because I have not been able to contact them. For one of them, I’ve also changed another biographical detail. Otherwise, throughout the book, I’ve tried to describe my experiences as accurately as possible. On several occasions, however, I repeated a memorable walk, museum visit, etc., in order to take more careful notes, or to check those I had made; and on these first (or second or third) retracings of my steps I would sometimes notice something else.
A number of organizations offer both advice and community to LGBTQ+ young people and those who support them. PFLAG (pflag.org) and the Trevor Project (thetrevorproject.org) are great places to start, especially for those in the United States, while Stonewall (stonewall.org.uk) offers a number of UK-based resources. I also recommend the It Gets Better Project (itgetsbetter.org).
There’s no simple answer to the question of how best to support the communities—urban and otherwise—that we encounter as travelers. Even seasoned travelers may find Lonely Planet’s recent (2020) The Sustainable Travel Handbook a useful read before a trip. During and after a trip, local advice is, of course, best. The same book offers guidance on how to travel in a more environmentally friendly manner—a topic much on the mind of those who work in aviation and the wider travel and tourism industry—and addresses such issues as biofuels and carbon offsets.
With the exception of the London section of the final chapter (the one in which I’m wearing a mask) the last of the trips that this book is based on took place in February 2020—and most took place long before that—after which the world of aviation was altered. Studying and guiding the long-term impact of the pandemic on cities will no doubt be a generation’s work for urbanologists, architects, planners, and leaders. For those interested in learning more about the effects of both the pandemic and the climate crisis on the urban world, I recommend Bloomberg’s reliably insightful CityLab (bloomberg.com/citylab).
Except where otherwise specified, I have used the units of measurement that are customary in the United States.
Even with the help of others, I struggled, at various points, to decide how best to render foreign words in English, and when it might prove interesting or helpful to use, for example, Japanese text in addition to romanized versions of Japanese words. If the flexibility I’ve adopted seems excessive, allow me to fall back on the words of John Julius Norwich, who wrote, in the author’s note at the start of Four Princes: Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent and the Obsessions That Forged Modern Europe, “Far too much, I believe, is sacrificed on the altar of consistency….In every case I have been guided by what sounds right to my ear—and will, I hope, sound right to the reader.”
Travelers can learn more about Pittsfield at the city’s websites (lovepittsfield.com and cityofpittsfield.org) or at the website—motto: “Life is calling”—for visitors to Berkshire County (berkshires.org).
I hope that the chapter notes and the bibliography that follow will provide guidance on my sources, as well as suggestions for further reading.
I’m deeply grateful to all those who helped me check the facts and interpretations in this book; I alone, of course, am responsible for any errors that remain.
I’m always happy to hear from readers—in particular, I’d love to hear your recommendations for your favorite book about your favorite city—though it may sometimes take me a while to reply. I can be contacted via my website, markvanhoenacker.com.
The illustration is based on an elm tree in Pittsfield.
Coleridge’s “like night, from land to land” is from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
My decision to become a pilot is described in more detail in my first book, Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot.
The United Nations data I reference is from World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision and the report The World’s Cities in 2018 that was compiled from it. The first page of that report, headlined “What is a City?,” provides a good description of the difficulties in comparing the populations of cities and urban areas that are defined differently.
My father’s autobiography was printed for family and the Berkshire gang. Someday I would like to help to bring it to a wider audience.
Giuseppe Garibaldi’s words about Rome appear in several versions in both Italian and English, though the substance is the same.
William Carlos Williams’s “a man in himself is a city…” is from the author’s note to Paterson. An author’s statement precedes the note and is nearly as compelling: “I wanted something nearer home, something knowable,” writes Williams, about his choice of Paterson.
Kipling’s “To the City of Bombay” appears in more than one version; the one I’ve excerpted is from Collected Verse of Rudyard Kipling.
“Ye are the light of the world…”: I’m not sure which translation of this famous passage I heard first. The text here is from the 1599 edition of the Geneva Bible; I understand that John Winthrop is thought to have relied on an edition of the Geneva Bible in composing his sermon. See, for example, Abram C. Van Engen’s “Origins and Last Farewells: Bible Wars, Textual Form, and the Making of American History,” published in The New England Quarterly.
Joseph Smith’s “When this square is thus laid…” appears as I have it here in various sources, such as Volume 1 of History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The website of the Church Historian’s Press (josephsmithpapers.org) begins this remarkable quote with “Where” rather than “When.”
The quote from Richard Francis Burton—“Memphis, Benares, Jerusalem, Rome, Meccah”—appears on the first page of The City of the Saints, in a subsection, “Why I Went to Great Salt Lake City,” which begins: “A tour through the domains of Uncle Samuel without visiting the wide regions of the Far West would be, to use a novel simile, like seeing Hamlet with the part of the Prince of Denmark, by desire, omitted.”
I struggled with which version to use of Brigham Young’s legendary quote, especially since “This is the place” is the best known. My understanding, from such sources as The History of Emigration Canyon: Gateway to Salt Lake Valley, by Cynthia Furse and Jeffrey Carlstrom (page 54), is that the first version of Young’s words to be recorded is: “It is enough. This is the right place. Drive on.”
Benedict Anderson’s discussion of “new” city names is in Chapter 11 of Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. While I was editing this book in the autumn of 2020, I published a version of the “worst Thanksgiving I ever had” story in an op-ed titled “Thanksgiving in a Strange Land,” in the New York Times, on November 24, 2020.
Ovid’s statement about Rome and the world is included, for example, in Michèle Lowrie’s “Rome: City and Empire,” published in The Classical World: “The land of other peoples has been given within a fixed boundary: the expanse of the Roman city and of the world is the same.”
My trip to Rome with Mark, and our encounters with examples of “SPQR” throughout the city, led me to Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, which I cannot recommend highly enough. The extensive quotes from Livy are from pages 8 to 11 of The Early History of Rome: Books I–V of the Ab Urbe Condita, translated by B. O. Foster.
The story of Pittsfield’s baseball bylaw is best told by Alec MacGillis, in “Hometown Home Run,” published in the Baltimore Sun on May 18, 2004.
When it comes to the past of Pittsfield, I have been particularly reliant on the vast The History of Pittsfield, (Berkshire County,) Massachusetts, from the Year 1734 to the Year 1800, and its three subsequent volumes covering 1800–1876; 1876–1916; and 1916–1955. I understand from local historians that while these works are generally reliable, a critical eye is especially appropriate for passages regarding Native Americans. The million-volt lightning bolt is described on page 8 of The History of Pittsfield (1916–1955). The invention of night skiing at Bousquet Ski Area in Pittsfield is well documented, for example in the Berkshire County Historical Society’s 2016 volume Pittsfield, which also notes that Clarence Bousquet “invented and patented” a grip for the rope tow.
The Dutch mapmaker’s description of the Berkshires region and Vermont appears on page 15 of The History of Pittsfield (1734–1800). The descriptions of Native Americans from my high school U.S. history textbook are documented in “PHS Text Doesn’t Measure Up,” a letter I published in the Berkshire Eagle on October 16, 1991.
The General Court of Massachusetts’ “Proprietors of the Settling-lots in the Township of Poontoosuck” is from page 91 of The History of Pittsfield (1734–1800); a version of the English translation of this Mohican name appears on page 16; and the description of William Pitt (“by his vigorous conduct…”) is from page 132.
The description of the snow that fell on the morning of the city’s inauguration—“a benediction from above”—is from “Our New City,” an article on the front page of the Berkshire County Eagle on January 8, 1891. Judge Barker’s speech is recorded in Proceedings of Inauguration of City Government—January 5, 1891, available in the Berkshire Athenaeum. “We are at home…” is from page 5; “The old order is about to pass…” is from page 9; “Who shall say how beauty…” is from page 14; and “Just how much the fact that Rome…” is from pages 14–15.
“Matronly dignity,” “masculine stability,” and “1,000 candle power strong” are from “The Inaugural Ball,” an article I found in a notebook of original clippings concerning the inauguration, stored at the Berkshire Athenaeum. Evening Journal is handwritten above this particular clipping and is presumably the name of the publication. The article begins: “Monday, January 5, 1891 was indeed a red letter day for Pittsfield.”
Livy’s “It is the privilege of antiquity…” is from page 4 of Foster’s translation, mentioned above. The description of “Mrs. Seth Janes” and her adventure with the wolf is from The History of Pittsfield (1734–1800), in the footnote on page 140. Pittsfield’s “Records of the Revolutionary Service” begin on page 477 of that same volume. Noadiah was Sarah Deming’s son; the other Demings are Benjamin and John, whose relationship to Sarah I was unable to confirm.
Sarah Deming’s marble obelisk stands in the East Part Cemetery on Williams Street (known before the Revolutionary War as Honasada Street). The History of Pittsfield (1734–1800) records (in the footnote on pages 86–87) that the burial ground was “near the spot where she fixed her home in 1752,” and that the inscription “A mother of the Revolution and a mother in Israel” is on the monument’s east face. Today, that inscription faces west.
For this chapter in particular, but also for the whole of my book, I’m extremely grateful to Ann-Marie Harris of the Berkshire Athenaeum’s Local History and Genealogy Department, not only for so warmly welcoming me and showing me around, but for answering dozens of questions by email in the following months. It was a pleasure to once again spend many hours in the library that was so important to me and my family when I was a child; and to be reminded, too, how quickly one can reach Dunkin’ Donuts for a snack and a break. Thanks also to Dave. I’m glad we’ve reconnected.
I told the story of my mom’s letter to me at my flight school in “The Unopened Letter,” an article in the New York Times on December 26, 2015. Afterward I was touched to receive a number of letters from readers, describing their own remarkable stories of correspondence that had been lost and then found.
The quote from Carl Jung is from pages 197–98 of Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Today, a bust of Jung stands in Mathew Street in Liverpool, above the inscribed words: “Liverpool is the pool of life” and “C.G. Jung 1927.”
The various quotes from my dad are either from his shield, the text on the back of it, or his autobiography. The app for locating fruit in Brasília is the aptly titled Fruit Map. Clarice Lispector’s “space calculated for clouds” appeared in “Nos primeiros começos de Brasília,” in Jornal do Brasil on June 20, 1970, which is referenced in “Chronicles as Memorials: The Brasília of Clarice Lispector (and the Temporary Disappearance of the Invisible),” by Maria Caterina Pincherle.
In The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília, James Holston notes that the population density of the region of Brasília was less than one person per square kilometer (about two-fifths of a square mile) at the time of the city’s construction. In 2018, Mongolia—one of the world’s least densely populated countries—had a density of two people per square kilometer.
Kubitschek’s “integration through interiorization” appears on page 18 of The Modernist City. Caroline S. Tauxe’s description of Kubitschek is from “Mystics, Modernists, and Constructions of Brasilia,” page 48. Holston’s quote, “The most complete example ever constructed,” is from page 31 of his book. Oscar Niemeyer’s “the cathedrals of Saint-Exupéry” is from page 109 of The Memoirs of Oscar Niemeyer.
My father’s description of his airplane flight during his first days in Salvador is as follows:
There were no street names in these poorer sections. Since I could not find any maps either, I went to the airfield and easily found a pilot to take me 2,500 feet above the neighborhood to help me take pictures of the neighborhood….On the photographs, I could actually count individual houses. There were some 5,500 houses on the square mile with a population that I soon estimated at 23,000. New mud huts went up every week because a developer was selling building lots as fast as his draftsman could trace them. People came mainly from rural towns within a couple of dozen miles from the state capital and clustered by town as much as they could to have friends live close together.
Holston’s “the modernist idealization of new…” is from my personal correspondence with him. Yuri Gagarin’s “disembarking on a different planet, not on Earth” is from Tauxe, page 56; a slightly different translation appears in “Landmark Anniversary for Brasilia Leaves Architect ‘Sad,’ ” an unsigned AFP story published in the Independent on September 17, 2011 (reflecting, too, how often the accent above the first i in Brasília is omitted in English).
The translated excerpt of Dom Bosco’s dream appears on page 16 of Holston’s book. For the complete text and an alternative translation, see Eugenio Ceria’s “The Biographical Memoirs of Saint John Bosco,” available on the Don Bosco Salesian Portal (donboscosalesianportal.org).
The description of Brasília as a “capital of hope” appears, for example, in “O Capital da Esperança,” a dissertation by Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, and in English, too, e.g., “The Capital of Hope,” published by Alex Shoumatoff in the New Yorker on October 26, 1980.
I would like to thank James Holston not only for his wonderful book, but for the time he took in assisting me with my research both before and after my visit to Brasília, and for his permission to include portions of our personal correspondence. I’m grateful to Eduardo for his lifelong kindness and love for my brother and me, and for the stories he shares with us of our father. Thank you to Fernando for connecting me with Vívian, to whom I wish, of course, to express my particular thanks for her openness and generosity while spending several days showing a stranger around her city. Vívian and Fernando also assisted with fact-checking, as did Andrea Brotto. Additionally I would like to thank Rebecca Eldredge, Jonathan Lackman, Dan McNichol, Robin Tudor of Liverpool John Lennon Airport, Karen Cariani of WGBH, and Paul Grondahl; and James Gardner, whom I reached via the website (salesians.org.uk) of the Salesians of Don Bosco (UK).
The name first given to Los Angeles is a matter of some contention; see, for example, “City of Angels’ First Name Still Bedevils Historians,” an article by Bob Pool in the Los Angeles Times on March 26, 2005. The version I’ve used is my favorite, from page 7 of Remi Nadeau’s Los Angeles: From Mission to Modern City.
I came across Miguel Costansó’s quote “furnished us points…” on page 22 of David Kipen’s remarkable Dear Los Angeles; the traveler who compared the city’s air to that of “Old Egypt” is E. D. Holton, whose words from 1880 are recorded on pages 65–66 of Kipen’s book. The quote from Eleanor Roosevelt is from her “My Day” column of March 23, 1946, which can be accessed through the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project (erpapers.columbian.gwu.edu).
The quote from a New York newspaper about Los Angeles—how it can “never be a great business center because it is too far away from the ocean”—is from the New York Tribune, as cited on page 83 of Nadeau’s book. I have not been able to find the original article or its date. Los Angeles annexed the port city of San Pedro in 1909.
I’m always struck by signs that refer to “city” or “the city,” so you can imagine how thrilled I was to learn, from Thomas F. Madden’s evocatively titled Istanbul: City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World, that “ ‘Istanbul’ is simply a Turkish hearing of the Greek phrase στην Πόλη, meaning ‘in or to the City.’ ”
The description of Boston as “The Athens of America” is common; see, for example, The Athens of America: Boston, 1825–1845, by Thomas H. O’Connor. “The Hub of the Universe” apparently derives from an essay that erstwhile Pittsfield resident Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1858, in which he wrote that “Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system” (see “From ‘Beantown’ to ‘The Hub,’ How Did Boston Earn Its Nicknames?,” a report on WGBH by Edgar B. Herwick III on August 30, 2017); indeed, one wonders how Holmes’s former neighbors in Pittsfield viewed Boston in that age.
Episode 16 of Season 1 of Cheers is titled “The Boys in the Bar.” As Brett White writes in “That Gay Episode: How Sam Malone Showed Acceptance Is Macho on ‘Cheers,’ ” a March 28, 2017, article in Decider, the show’s writers were inspired by the story of Glenn Burke, whom the New York Times (in a June 1, 1995, obituary) described as “the first major league baseball player to publicly acknowledge his homosexuality.”
Frasier Crane assists Berkshires-loving anxious fliers in Episode 19—“Airport V”—of Season 6 of Cheers.
The exact function of the Milliarium Aureum in Rome remains unclear to me. In Samuel Ball Platner’s A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome we read that “on it were engraved the names of the principal cities of the empire and their distances from Rome, although these distances were reckoned from the gates in the Servian wall, not from milliarium itself.” In J. A. Cramer’s A Geographical and Historical Description of Ancient Italy, in contrast, we read that the Milliarium was “that point in the Forum from which the distances to the several gates of the city were alone reckoned.”
The slogan of Amboy, California—“the ghost town that ain’t dead yet”—appears on the town’s website (visitamboy.com). I recommend a visit. The signs to distant cities in Daggett, California, stand in front of the El Rancho Mobile Home Park on Route 66. The botanist “in camp at Los Angeles” is William H. Brewer; he’s quoted on pages 440–41 of Kipen. Nadeau’s “like the land of milk and honey…” is from page 162 of Los Angeles: From Mission to Modern City.
Mulholland’s famous line—“If you don’t get the water now, you’ll never need it”—appears in several forms. I’ve used the version that Margaret Leslie Davis records in Chapter 3 of Rivers in the Desert: William Mulholland and the Inventing of Los Angeles, her fascinating study of Mulholland and Los Angeles; while in “Just Subtract Water: The Los Angeles River and a Robert Moses with the Soul of a Jane Jacobs,” an essay published in the Los Angeles Review of Books on December 18, 2015, Joseph Giovannini includes this version: “If you don’t get the water, you won’t need it.” (He also notes the important role of the film Chinatown in telling the story of Los Angeles and its water wars.) Mulholland’s even more famous “There it is! Take it!” is recorded by Davis in Chapter 7 of her book.
The story of the distant NOW ENTERING LOS ANGELES CITY LIMITS sign, and David Kipen’s “You could trek…,” are on page xv of the preface to his book.
Nadeau’s “tributary province…” appears on page 180 of his book. Wallace Stegner’s “out over empty space” is from Ed Madrid’s interview of him, published in the Oregonian on April 18, 1993. The bowling ball–and–trampoline analogy was first shared with me by Mr. Gilbert, in physics class at Pittsfield High School, and is described in such interesting articles as “General Relativity: Beyond the Bowling Ball and the Trampoline,” published on the website of the Ontario Association of Physics Teachers (oapt.ca) on November 23, 2020.
The quote about the city of Tamara—“rarely does the eye light…”—is from the chapter titled “Cities & Signs 1” of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The quotes from the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices are from the 2009 edition (including Revisions 1 and 2), which is available on the Federal Highway Administration’s website (mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov). “To be effective…” is from Section 1A.02, para. 2; “Arrows used…” is from Section 2D.08, para. 18; “The lateral spacing…” is from Section 2E.15, para. 2; “the background…” is from Section 2E.06, para. 1.
“Our great city of many cities” is from the homily offered at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, by Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, on September 2, 2002, and archived at the cathedral’s website (olacathedral.org).
I would like to thank Bob Cullen, Jameelah Hayes, and Tony Dorsey of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, Kristen Pennucci of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, and Jon Brodsky of the Arizona Department of Transportation for their patience with my questions about control cities; and Liv O’Keeffe, formerly of the California Native Plant Society (cnps.org), and the photographer and botanist Stephen Ingram (ingramphoto.com) for their generous help in plant identification. Thank you to James D. Doyle for his explanations of the weather patterns of the Owens Valley. I’m also grateful to Toon Vanhoenacker, Peter Schrag, Andreas Zanker, Dieter Moeyaert, and Ton Heuvelmans for their kind guidance.
I wasn’t absolutely certain that the right to go out at lunch was granted only to juniors and seniors at Pittsfield High School back in the day, although half a dozen classmates remember this as I do. The song “Shenandoah” is sometimes titled “Oh, Shenandoah.” Mrs. T’s pierogies are to be found in the freezer section of supermarkets across the U.S. (mrstspierogies.com).
The statistics on tall buildings, from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat—the excellent motto on its website is “Advancing Sustainable Vertical Urbanism”—are only ever a snapshot; as a result, it’s fun to check in occasionally to see how their statistics (at ctbuh.org) are shifting. The predominance of non-Western cities on the more recent lists of the one hundred tallest buildings is striking. It’s worth noting that the equation of stories with height I used is inexact, as any must be; the relationship depends not only on differing floor-to-floor heights, but also on the nature of lobbies, screens for rooftop equipment, and crowns. For example, a modern and spacious office building of around 500 feet might have 35 floors, whereas a hotel of that height might have 45.
Statistics on the number of bridges in cities are potentially not only problematic—should an almost imperceptible structure that carries an ordinary road over a railway line be in the same category as the Brooklyn Bridge?—but hard to keep up to date. The most common total for Pittsburgh is 446, given, for example, in “Pittsburgh: The City of Bridges,” posted online by the Heinz History Center on May 5, 2017, while in terms of river crossings—the sense that might come to mind most naturally—“Just How Many Bridges Are There in Pittsburgh?,” published by WTAE-TV on September 13, 2006, states that in Pittsburgh “more than 29 bridges cross the three rivers.” A rough total (“400 or so”) for canal crossings (ponti) in Venice is given on the website of Encyclopaedia Britannica; the total number of bridges in New York City is commonly reported to exceed 2,000; a figure for Hamburg (2,300) appeared in “25 Record-Breaking Cities: Highest, Cheapest, Oldest and Most Crowded,” in the Telegraph on November 1, 2017. The database of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation lists 64 bridges of every sort in Pittsfield.
I encountered the request to “please pray for us and the Steel City of Pittsburgh for which this church is both a beacon and a protector” in Saint Mary of the Mount on Grandview Avenue.
The Mahanna Cobble Trail in Pittsfield is maintained by the Berkshire Natural Resources Council; I wrote about it in “Leaf Peeping Is Not Canceled: 6 Drives and Hikes to Try This Fall,” published in the New York Times on October 2, 2020. Melville dedicated his novel Pierre; or, The Ambiguities to “Greylock’s Most Excellent Majesty.” The pollution and the cleanup of the Housatonic River is well documented by the Berkshire Eagle; please also see the notes for Chapter 7. The café I love in downtown Pittsfield is Dottie’s Coffee Lounge (dottiescoffeelounge.com); across the street is the Lantern (thelanternbarandgrill.com), which “serves the best fries.” The world’s best cider doughnuts are from Bartlett’s Apple Orchard and Farm Market (bartlettsorchard.com) in Richmond.
In this chapter I found myself returning again and again to Pittsburgh’s official website (pittsburghpa.gov), as well as to the sites of Pittsburgh Magazine (pittsburghmagazine.com) and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (post-gazette.com).
I would like to thank Andrew and Matthew Popalis for their kindness in sharing their memories of Shenandoah; Jenny Hansell and Mariah Auman of the Berkshire Natural Resources Council (bnrc.org), and Becky Cushing Gop of the Massachusetts Audubon Society (massaudubon.org), for their assistance with various Pittsfield elements of this chapter, and for their work in preserving what’s best about the Berkshires; and Shawn Ursini of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, for his advice on how to try to relate the height of a skyscraper to its floor count. I’d like to express my warm gratitude to Jim Ciullo for his long friendship with my dad and his help with the paragraphs about my dad’s office. I’m also grateful to Rob Koon, Jon Millburg, Margaret McKeown, and Ellen O’Connell for their assistance with this chapter.
The illustration is based on the triple arch of the Cinquantenaire Arcade in Brussels.
Calvino’s “What line separates…” is from “Cities & Signs 3” in Invisible Cities. I described my love of such gate-names as Brandenburg and Kashmere in the final chapter of Skyfaring. The Pet Shop Boys song I refer to is “King’s Cross.” After I moved to London I assumed the song was written in the aftermath of the fire at the King’s Cross St. Pancras Underground station; however, I later learned that the song’s release preceded the terrible fire by two months. The Finland Station is mentioned in “West End Girls.”
The description of Aurangabad as the City of Gates is widespread; see, for example, the tourism section of the District Aurangabad website (aurangabad.gov.in). The idea that Frémont intended English speakers to use the Greek name Chrysopylae for the Golden Gate is fascinating to me; Erwin G. Gudde, in California Place Names: The Origin and Etymology of Current Geographical Names, notes that “Frémont was apparently determined to fix the Greek name on the entrance.” My father’s words are an excerpt from a short piece he wrote about his search for Henry.
The sections on Jeddah in this chapter were among the book’s most difficult for me, partly because English sources on the city are few, and partly because, as I note in the text, many of the gates have been moved, rebuilt, or renamed. I was particularly reliant on three resources. The first was Angelo Pesce’s Jiddah: Portrait of an Arabian City, which several historians have assured me is considered reliable. Thanks to its clear text and many remarkable images, I strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in learning more about the history of the city. The second was various UNESCO documents, including Historic Jeddah, the Gate to Makkah: Nomination Document for the Inscription on the World Heritage List, Volume 1, which I’ll refer to as “UN” in subsequent notes. (It’s no surprise that Jeddah was the first urban Saudi site to be nominated to that list.) The third was Ulrike Freitag’s extremely helpful A History of Jeddah: The Gate to Mecca in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, which is also the most recent (2020) of the three.
The year of the first arrival of pilgrims by airplane is given as 1938 on page 131 of Pesce; Freitag, however, notes that “in 1936 Egypt Air offered to transport pilgrims to Jeddah” on page 227 of her book. Many of the examples of the varied spellings of Jeddah’s name appear on page xiii of Pesce, as do the other quotations in the same paragraph, including that by al-Bakri. Pesce’s “at best a fishermen’s hamlet” is on page 3; “his followers to join him” is from page 61. The report on the poor state of Jeddah’s walls was by Carsten Niebuhr, quoted by James Buchan in Jeddah: Old and New. I would love to learn more about the history of the term corniche in Arabia.
“Bride of the Red Sea” appears, for example, in the title of Chapter 6 of Loring M. Danforth’s Crossing the Kingdom: Portraits of Saudi Arabia; “Town of the Consuls” appears in Pesce, page 135; “Town of Consulates” on page 73 of UN; and “Gate to Makkah” throughout UN. Ibn Jubayr’s description of arriving in Jeddah by sea is recorded by Ross E. Dunn in Chapter 6 of The Adventures of Ibn Battuta. I’m sorry I did not have room to include more about Ibn Battuta’s stays in Jeddah; for example, a full version of the tale of the ring: Ibn Battuta gave a ring to a beggar in Mecca. After Ibn Battuta arrived in Jeddah, “a blind beggar led by a boy” came to him, saluted, and used his name, though “I had no acquaintance with him, nor did he know me.” The blind beggar took Ibn Battuta’s hand and felt for the missing ring. Ibn Battuta told him how he had given it away as he left Mecca. The beggar told him to “go back and look for it, for there are names written on it which contain a great secret.” Mystified, Ibn Battuta concluded: “God knows best who and what he was.” (From Chapter 7 of Volume 2 of The Travels of Ibn Battuta, A.D. 1325–1354.)
Al-Maqdisi’s “very hot” is on page 68 of UN. The words of Nicholas of Cusa are recorded on page 19 of Philosophia Perennis: Historical Outlines of Western Spirituality in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Thought, by Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann. Nasir Khusraw’s “one toward the east…” is noted on page 77 of UN. The account of the anonymous enslaved person who noted three gates is on page 31 of Pesce; it was recorded by Richard Hakluyt (see “Imperialist Beginnings: Richard Hakluyt and the Construction of Africa,” by Emily C. Bartels, in Criticism).
Laila al-Juhani’s “You know already that the things we love…” is from her novel Barren Paradise and appears on page 297 of Beyond the Dunes: An Anthology of Modern Saudi Literature. John Winthrop’s “as a citty upon a hill” is from page 39 of “A Modell of Christian Charity, Written on Boarde the Arrabella, on the Attlantick Ocean, 1630,” available through the website of the New-York Historical Society; I had understood that the sermon was given in the Holy Rood Church in Southampton, Mark’s hometown, but Daniel T. Rodgers, on pages 18–19 of As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon, suggests that the story of these words is more complicated.
Henry Rooke’s descriptions of Jeddah’s coffeehouses—“always full” with “the common people…”—is from page 36 of Pesce. The magazine article framed on the café’s wall is from pages 606–7 of the June 12, 1926, issue of L’Illustration. The eleventh-century visitor who noted that there is no “vegetation at all” is Khusraw, recorded on page 8 of Jeddah: Old and New; the sixteenth-century traveler who wrote that “the land does not produce one single thing” is Ludovico di Varthema, recorded on page 53 of The Travels of Ludovico Di Varthema in Egypt, Syria, Arabia Deserta and Arabia Felix, in Persia, India, and Ethiopia, A.D. 1503 to 1508.
My letter to the “house near the tree” took three months to return to me; it was stamped with Arabic text, and, in English: “Saudi Post—Makkah Region—Address Incomplete.” The lovely quote from Jan Morris—“that in every row of houses…”—is from “Day 17” of Thinking Again: A Diary.
I would like to thank Ulrike Freitag for her generosity and patience in answering my questions about Jeddah and its gates, and for sharing maps from her book in advance of its publication. I would also like to express my gratitude to Ibrahim, Ali, and Samir for their kind assistance in Jeddah or from afar, as well as to Chris Denham of Network Rail, Jen Lesar, Peter Carroll, and Dieter Moeyaert.
R. Parthasarathy’s translation of “Twilight in Delhi” was published on page 8 of the April 2006 issue of Poetry.
I wished to write that the England brothers were Bavarian-born; while this was definitely true of Moses, I have not been able to confirm this of Louis. I own a postcard on which England Brothers is described as “a ‘big’ city department store in the heart of the Berkshires”; it was published by the Crown Specialty Advertising, Inc., of North Adams, Massachusetts, and is copyrighted 1972. The slogan “It Wouldn’t Be North Street Without England Brothers” is recorded, for example, in “Escalator Rides, Robert the Talking Reindeer and Other Things That Made England Brothers Special,” by Jennifer Huberdeau in the Berkshire Eagle on January 25, 2019. As for the question of whether to call it “England’s” or “England Brothers,” the former was written on the iconic blue boxes; the latter was spelled out on the store’s North Street façade. Us Berkshire gang folks have strong but differing opinions on which we used more often.
Morris Schaff’s “A Word to Pittsfield On Her Change from Town to City Government” is recorded on page 64 of the Berkshire Athenaeum’s Proceedings of Inauguration of City Government—January 5, 1891, where it is dated December 30, 1890; the poem is also included in the write-up of the January 5 festivities in the Berkshire County Eagle on January 8, 1891.
Melville’s “I have a sort of sea-feeling…” is well known in the Berkshires, and is recorded, for example, in “Herman Melville at Home,” published by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker on July 22, 2019. Melville’s description of Cairo’s Gate of Victors appears in Canto 11 of Part 2 of “Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land”; his “the Parthenon uplifted on its rock first challenging the view on the approach to Athens” is from the poem “The Apparition”; his “Crowning a bluff” is from the poem “Pontoosuc.” All are found in Herman Melville: Complete Poems, as is (in the “Note on the Texts”) the conclusion that Melville “did not intend a final ‘e’ in the title of the uncollected poem ‘Pontoosuc.’ ”
The term “Township of Pontoosuck” for Pittsfield appears, for example, on the “Plan of 1752” between pages 88 and 89 of The History of Pittsfield (1734–1800).
There are several versions of Bob Seaver’s words to Elizabeth Bishop. “Go to hell, Elizabeth” appears in Brett C. Millier’s biography, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s “Angel of Death…” is from “Dedication of the Pittsfield Cemetery” in The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes. (When it comes to Holmes and his city poems, Pittsfield got off easy: consider “Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse; / One comfort we have—Cincinnati sounds worse;” from his “Welcome to the Chicago Commercial Club.”)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Old Clock on the Stairs” is available through the website of the Poetry Foundation (poetryfoundation.org).
“Larger than a sail…,” from Anne Sexton’s “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph,” appears on page 53 of Anne Sexton: The Complete Poems; the definition of hegira is on page 481; “the street is unfindable for an / entire lifetime,” from her poem “45 Mercy Street,” is on page 483. “The dreams all made solid” is from the song “Mercy Street” by Peter Gabriel. Calvino’s “Yes, in my childhood…” is from his interview with William Weaver and Damien Pettigrew, “Italo Calvino, The Art of Fiction No. 130,” in the fall 1992 issue of the Paris Review.
My mother gave me several Wendell Berry books; my most treasured is Collected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1957–1982, inside of which she wrote “Wendell Berry is one of my favorite poets. Perhaps these poems will give you pleasure—With love, Mom—Christmas 1993.” His “the experience, the modern experience…” is from What I Stand On: The Collected Essays of Wendell Berry, 1969–2017; however, I first read it in “In Wendell Berry’s Essays, a Little Earnestness Goes a Long Way,” by Dwight Garner, in the New York Times on May 20, 2019.
“All ACFT entering Delhi TMA…” and other references to the Airport Operational Information for Indira Gandhi International Airport may be found in the “VIDP/Delhi” section of Part 3 of the eAIP documentation on the website of the Aeronautical Information Management office of the Airports Authority of India (aim-india.aai.aero); however, our on-board documentation features the all-capitalized abbreviations I’ve recorded here.
Mir Taqi Mir’s “The streets of Delhi…” appears at the start of the chapter “Mir Taqi Mir” in Beloved Delhi: A Mughal City and Her Greatest Poets, by Saif Mahmood, a book I recommend to anyone in search of an introduction to Delhi’s poetry traditions. (Elsewhere, I have seen 1723 as the year of Mir Taqi Mir’s birth.) Amir Khusrau’s “the twin of pure paradise…” is from the introduction of In the Bazaar of Love: The Selected Poetry of Amir Khusrau. “Krishna paused…” is from Chapter 55 of Book 1 of The Mahabharata: A Modern Rendering, by Ramesh Menon. Upinder Singh’s “The goddess Yamuna…” is from page 11 of Ancient Delhi.
Sarojini Naidu’s “Imperial City…” is from her poem “Imperial Delhi,” published in her collection The Broken Wing: Songs of Love, Death & Destiny, 1915–1916. Nehru’s “a gem with many facets…” is from his December 6, 1958, convocation address at the University of Delhi, as recorded in Volume 4 of Jawaharlal Nehru: Selected Speeches. Kirun Kapur’s “Arriving, New Delhi” is from page 94 of Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist.
The description of Delhi as a “city of poets” is widespread; see, for example, “Resurrecting the City of Poets” by Nikhil Kumar in the January 2019 edition of the Book Review (India). “City of verse” appears in Maaz Bin Bilal’s article in the Hindu on November 3, 2018, “Beloved Delhi—A Mughal City and Her Greatest Poets Review: The City of Verse.” Khushwant Singh’s “a longer history…” is from page xi of his City Improbable: An Anthology of Writings on Delhi. Ibn Battuta’s “a vast and magnificent city” is recorded in Chapter 9—“Delhi”—of Ross E. Dunn’s The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century.
The comparison of Delhi to Athens—“with its monumental, crumbling history…”—is in Rukmini Bhaya Nair’s “City of Walls, City of Gates,” included on page 281 of City Improbable. “Indian Rome” is from Chapter 1 of Gordon Risley Hearn’s The Seven Cities of Delhi. Percival Spear’s “Delhi can point to a history…” is from his Delhi: A Historical Sketch. The description of what we now call “Old Delhi” as “Modern Delhi” appears in the List of Illustrations and elsewhere in H. C. Fanshawe’s Delhi: Past and Present, published in 1902.
“City of Cities” appears, for example, on the Archaeological Survey of India’s sign outside Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi. Patwant Singh’s “No capital in the world…” is from “The Ninth Delhi,” a lecture he delivered on February 25, 1971, as recorded in the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts. The characterization of Edwin Lutyens having “dreamt of constructing monumental buildings” is by Jagmohan, in his Triumphs and Tragedies of Ninth Delhi. Lord Hardinge’s “A name to conjure with” is widely recorded—for example, in “Where Life Comes a Full Circle,” an article by Ziya Us Salam published in the Hindu on January 20, 2016. “Must like Rome be built for eternity” are the words of George Birdwood, recorded in Tristram Hunt’s Cities of Empire: The British Colonies and the Creation of the Urban World.
The idioms and expressions that relate to Delhi are fascinating, but—even with the assistance of several Delhiites—they were a challenge for this foreigner to describe. I understand that my version here of “Kaun jaaye…,” without Zauq’s name, is an informal adaptation of the original. “Either can be used idiomatically—and colloquially, you’d drop his name,” reports a friend. There are several versions of the story behind “Delhi is still far.” Neither I nor several correspondents have been able to locate the song that Inder described to me not long before his death, the one he remembered from 1947 and that incorporates the words “Delhi is not far anymore” (though Ab Dilli Dur Nahin is the title of a 1957 film, and Delhi Is Not Far is that of a 2003 novel by Ruskin Bond). If any readers know more about this song, please do contact me.
“Dominated the city’s cultural and intellectual landscape” is from Rakhshanda Jalil’s foreword to Saif Mahmood’s Beloved Delhi. Khushwant Singh’s “Dilliwalas were known…” is from page xiv of his City Improbable. The remarkable custom of the weighing of poets against precious metals or stones is described in Hadi Hasan’s Mughal Poetry: Its Cultural and Historical Value. Saif Mahmood’s “Urdu poetry was mostly…” and “remain the most quoted…,” as well as the words of Faruqi, appear in the introduction to Mahmood’s Beloved Delhi.
Akhil Katyal’s “a place where…” and “allowed me to…” are recorded in “Akhil Katyal’s City of Poems,” his interview by Shivani Kaul, published in the Hindu on March 2, 2020. Katyal’s “ruthless to some” and “the different people…” are from “ ‘Delhi Is Capable of Its Moments of Liberation’: Akhil Katyal on Being a Queer Poet and His Undying Love for the Capital,” published in the Indian Express on April 15, 2018. The description of his workshop—“Does the city make…”—is from “Recap: Poetry and the City with Akhil Katyal,” published on the blog of Juggernaut (juggernaut.in) on November 16, 2018.
Ghalib’s “the world is the body, Delhi its soul” appears in several versions; this one is from “Remembering Mirza Ghalib as He Turns 220: ‘The World Is the Body, Delhi Its Soul,’ ” by Gulam Jeelani, in the Hindustan Times on December 27, 2017. The article titled “Ghalib is Delhi and Delhi Is Ghalib!” was published by Firoz Bakht Ahmed on Ummid.com on February 15, 2016. Ghalib’s “Inside the Fort…” is from Chapter 1 of Pavan K. Varma’s captivating biography, Ghalib: The Man, the Times.
“Onward to Delhi…” forms part of a speech given by Subhas Chandra Bose on August 25, 1943, and is recorded, for example, in the appendix of Hugh Toye’s The Springing Tiger: A Study of the Indian National Army and of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. (In a subsequent speech, on May 21, 1945, Bose said that “the roads to Delhi are many, like the roads to Rome.”) Nehru’s “We have gathered here…” is from a speech recorded, for example, on page 59 of The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia, by Gyanesh Kudaisya and Tan Tai Yong.
Kenneth Koch’s poem “One Train May Hide Another” is published in The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch. Octavio Paz’s “high flame of rose” is from “The Mausoleum of Humayun,” in The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz 1957–1987.
In this chapter I was particularly dependent on the assistance of others. I would like to offer my warmest thanks to Raghu Karnad and Akhil Katyal for their kindness and care with all my questions, week after week, about Delhi, its poets, and its proverbs, and to Sophia Psarra of University College London, for the time she took to discuss Calvino’s Invisible Cities with me. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Saif Mahmood, R. Parthasarathy, and Rana Safvi, as well as Angel Gonzales of Poetry magazine; Theresa Knickerbocker of Skidmore College; Anand Vivek Taneja; Linda Gray Sexton; and Erin Hunt and her colleagues at the Berkshire County Historical Society. Inder Kapur and Don MacGillis, the fathers of two dear friends, helped guide me to the poetry of Delhi and of Pittsfield. I miss them both.
Translations of “Housatonic” vary; the Dictionary of American-Indian Place and Proper Names in New England: With Many Interpretations, Etc, offers, under the entry “Housetunack”: “Housatonic River, Berkshire. ‘Beyond the Mountain.’ ” The term “Westenhook” appears on the “Map of the Boundary between Massachusetts & New York: Showing the Ancient Colonial and Provincial Grants and Settlements,” available online from the Map Collections of the University of Texas at Arlington. “People of the Waters That Are Never Still” appears on the website of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians (mohican.com).
Your Hometown America Parade was broadcast from Pittsfield from 1989 to 1994 (at least). Evidence is thin for Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s widely quoted “There’s no tonic like the Housatonic.” In The Poet Among the Hills: Oliver Wendell Holmes in Berkshire, J. E. A. Smith reports, on page 98, only that Holmes “approved the time-honored local pun that the best of all tonics is the Housatonic.” (Smith also records that Holmes, on a trip to Cambridge, England, compared the River Cam’s width to that of the Housatonic in Canoe Meadows.)
The Carly Simon song I reference is “Let the River Run.” My article about Pittsfield, “The Brooklyn of the Berkshires,” was published in the Financial Times on September 11, 2010. In the article’s penultimate paragraph I noted that Pittsfield is sometimes described as the “Brooklyn of the Berkshires” before, in the final paragraph, I expressed skepticism of the need for and the merit of such a comparison. However, that final paragraph was deleted at the last minute, either because an editor didn’t like it or for reasons of length, and the article, as printed, seems to endorse the Brooklyn of the Berkshires epithet, which now appears in Pittsfield’s Wikipedia entry, with my article linked as the source.
It is difficult to pin down the share of the world’s trade that passes through the Strait of Malacca. One-third is a fairly typical answer and appears, for example, in “Whose Sea Is It Anyway?,” published in September 2015 in 1843, the Economist’s sister publication.
“Malaccamax” is a category but not, I was interested to learn, a standardized or regulated limit. The strait’s minimum depth is 82 feet; I understand from Paul Stott of Newcastle University that a minimum depth of one meter (3.28 feet) beneath the keel is desirable, but two meters (6.56 feet) is even better.
The words of Tomé Pires are recorded as follows: “gullet,” in “When the World Came to Southeast Asia: Malacca and the Global Economy,” by Michael G. Vann in Maritime Asia; “no trading port…” on page lxxiv of The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires, Books 1–5; and “whoever is Lord…” on page lxxv of the same.
The tin-animal currency and paintings I describe in Malacca are in the History and Ethnography Museum, located in the Stadthuys building. The typewriter with british empire on its paper rest is in the Baba & Nyonya Heritage Museum. The photographs of the Malacca River are displayed at the Royal Malaysian Customs Department Museum.
Examples of the characterizations of Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon appear as follows: as a “miracle” in In-ho Park’s “Miracle of Cheonggyecheon Begins…Expecting 23 Trillion KRW Economic Impacts,” published by Herald POP on September 27, 2005; as an “oasis,” for example, in Kyung-min Kang’s “10-Year Anniversary of Cheonggyecheon Restoration…Becoming a ‘Cultural Oasis’ of the City,” published in the Hankyung on September 29, 2015; as “a kind of artificial fountain in which running water is pumped up and sent flowing along the course,” by Eunseon Park, quoted in “Story of cities #50: The Reclaimed Stream Bringing Life to the Heart of Seoul,” by Colin Marshall in the Guardian on May 25, 2016; as a “gigantic concrete fish tank” by Byung-sung Choi, in Hyuk-cheol Kwon’s “ ‘Concrete Fish Tank’: Cheonggyecheon’s Wrongful Restoration Will Be Repaired,” published in the Hankyoreh on February 27, 2012. Tadao Ando’s praise (“it was impressive to walk around the reformed Cheonggyecheon…”) is recorded in Hyung-suk Noh’s “Tadao Ando, an ‘Environmental Architect,’ Cherishes Cheonggyecheon?,” published in the Hankyoreh on November 15, 2007.
The statue of the Mountie stands on the southeastern side of the pedestrian bridge in Calgary described on Google Maps as the Elbow River Traverse.
I’m deeply grateful to a number of people for their assistance with this chapter, above all to Heather Bruegl, for her generosity and her time; I very much hope we’ll have a chance to meet in the Berkshires or Wisconsin in the near future. Thank you also to Monique Tyndall, her successor as director of cultural affairs for the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians. Warm thanks also to Junho S. Kang for his help with research and translation, and for responding so quickly to my queries. Thank you to Masaki Hayashi of the University of Calgary for his enthusiastic guidance and advice; I would love to take him up on his offer of a trip to Bow Lake on a future visit to the city. Thank you also to Douglas Jau, Lena Schipper, Grace Moon, Paul Stott, and the Korea Tourism Organization.
SKYbrary (skybrary.aero) has a comprehensive explanation of hot and high flying; climate change means that pilots will have even more reason to consider the operational effects of such conditions in the years to come. The quotes from Elizabeth Bishop—“clouds floating…” and “highly impractical”—appear, for example, in “The Art of Losing,” by Elizabeth Bishop and Alice Quinn, published in the New Yorker on March 28, 1994. Some of the former uses of the Palácio are described in Volume XIX of the Imperial Museum Yearbook, available on the website of the museum (museuimperial.museus.gov.br).
The quotes from Taleb Alrefai—“sun unlike…” and “stained a rusty saffron”—appear on page 108 of The Shadow of the Sun.
The quotes from the short stories of Craig Loomis are taken from the following pages of The Salmiya Collection: Stories of the Life and Times of Modern Kuwait: “weak tea,” page 74; “butterscotch,” page 156; a “dirty vanilla,” page 184; “sun still a red idea beyond the sand and dust,” page 198.
Zahra Freeth’s “the breeze from the moving car…” is on page 11 of Kuwait Was My Home.
Alan Villiers’s Sons of Sindbad, about the nautical traditions of the Gulf, is one of the most extraordinary books I’ve read; I cannot recall ever being so quickly entranced by the sense of a window opening onto a world of which I had previously known nothing. His “good city” of Kuwait is on page 359; “one of the most interesting…” is on page 308.
Lewis Scudder’s description of old Kuwait’s “peculiar length and narrowness” is recorded on page 85 of Farah Al-Nakib’s Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life.
The story of the sheikh advising Villiers to leave Kuwait by camel is on page 312 of Sons of Sindbad; “the lustre of its pearls…” is on page 359; “youthful unmarried men…” is on page 322. Eleanor Calverley’s “came to expect…” is on page 110 of her fascinating My Arabian Days and Nights: A Medical Missionary in Old Kuwait. Freya Stark’s “an immense and happy loneliness” is from page 123 of her Baghdad Sketches: Journeys Through Iraq; she is referring to the Gulf, whose loneliness must incorporate both the land she is standing on and the surroundings of the town that she could, at that moment, already see.
More than 400 species appear on the helpful list maintained on the website of Birds of Kuwait (kuwaitbirds.org). The question of how many bird species may be seen in the UK was enjoyable to pursue. The online bird identifier of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (rspb.org) lists 406. Anna Feeney of the Society told me that 272 species breed in the UK, but 627 species have been seen. “The figures for birds in the U.K. are a bit tricky, purely, as you say, because of the migrants and birds that might just pass through very occasionally.” The figure of 627, “for example, would include the black-browed albatross, even though there’s only been one individual seen.”
Najma Edrees’s poem “The Black Sparrow” begins on page 113 of The Echo of Kuwaiti Creativity: A Collection of Translated Kuwaiti Poetry, and Ghanima Zaid Al Harb’s “Escaping from the Coma Cage” begins on page 102. Barclay Raunkiær’s “The line of the horizon…” appears on page 68 of his Through Wahhabiland on Camelback; Freya Stark’s “Water seemed to lie before us…” is from page 127 of Baghdad Sketches.
Alrefai’s “A nasty sort of fine dust…” is on page 109 of The Shadow of the Sun. Violet Dickson’s “I thought it was a bush fire…” and “and today the Bedu talk…” are recorded in her interview by William Tracy in the November/December 1972 issue of Aramco World. “Dust storms prevalent…” appears on the Airport Operational Information pages for Kuwait International Airport. The story of the Imperial Airways captain is recorded by Violet Dickson on pages 122–23 of her Forty Years in Kuwait. “In some periods, the winds…” can be found on the website of the Kuwait Meteorological Department of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (met.gov.kw).
William Gifford Palgrave’s “the mariners of Koweyt…” appears on page 386 of Volume 2 of his Narrative of a Year’s Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia, 1862–1863. H. R. P. Dickson’s “As soon as a boy can swim…” appears on page 38 of his Kuwait and Her Neighbors. The first maritime museum I mention is the Al Hashemi Marine Museum; the second is the Maritime Museum. The extraordinary story of pearl divers and undersea springs is told by Saif Marzooq al-Shamlan on pages 103–4 of his captivating Pearling in the Arabian Gulf: A Kuwaiti Memoir.
Raunkiær’s “if groups of stunted tamarisk be ruled out” is on page 51 of Through Wahhabiland on Camelback. “Sri Lanka to the Zambesi” are the words of Peter Clark, the translator of Saif Marzooq al-Shamlan, on page 12 of his introduction to Pearling in the Arabian Gulf. Violet Dickson’s “rhythmical songs…” appears on page 82 of Forty Years in Kuwait. Ali bin Nasr al-Nejdi’s “a life for a life” is recorded by Villiers on page 310 of Sons of Sindbad.
I would like to express my gratitude to Sophia Vasalou of the University of Birmingham for her research, her translation of the quotations from Taleb Alrefai’s The Shadow of the Sun, and her patient help with several other questions. Thank you to Andrea Brotto for her assistance with research and translation related to the Petrópolis section. Warm thanks also to Mike Pope for one of my most memorable down-route days, anywhere in the world; to Herbert S. Klein for his thoughts on Petrópolis; to Robin Evans and Doug Wood for their helpful thoughts on aircraft performance; and to Anna Feeney for her help with counting birds.
The epigraph is from Book 2, Part 2, of Paterson, by William Carlos Williams.
Various portions of this chapter (in particular the explanations of the sky’s and the sea’s color) were previously published in, or are closely adapted from, “From Sea to Sky—A Pilot’s Life in Shades of Blue,” an article I published in the Financial Times on September 20, 2019.
Peter Pesic’s book, Sky in a Bottle, offers a spellbinding account of the quest for the origin of the sky’s color; I was equally reliant on Götz Hoeppe’s Why the Sky Is Blue: Discovering the Color of Life and Michel Pastoureau’s Blue: The History of a Color.
Obstruction lighting for aircraft can also be a flashing white; my understanding is that red lights are considered most effective at night, and flashing white lights most effective during the day. Hoeppe’s discussion of the color of the Earth’s ancient sky begins on page 272 of his book.
The Tom Waits song I refer to is “Ruby’s Arms.” The Virginia Woolf quote about the pleasing equivalence of the sea and sky is from Part 3, Chapter 7 of To the Lighthouse (which is Chapter 8 of my e-book version, for some reason). The data on the most popular color comes from YouGovAmerica’s article “Why Is Blue the World’s Favorite Color?,” published on May 12, 2015. I was unable to find data on the favorite colors of South Africans.
Much of what I learned about Saussure came from Pesic’s Sky in a Bottle; the quote I include by Saussure is on page 60 of that book. The blue flower motif in Romanticism derives, as I understand it, from the 1802 novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, by Novalis; I came to it through Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1995 novel The Blue Flower. I first encountered Goethe’s description of blue in “19th-Century Insight into the Psychology of Color and Emotion,” by Maria Popova, published in the Atlantic on August 17, 2012.
The Herman Melville quote about “overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue” appears in the sixth paragraph of the first chapter of Moby-Dick. He mentions “the valley of the Saco”—the river in northeastern New England, presumably—but it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine he was looking up at the Berkshire hills between the writing of these words.
There are various explanations for Cape Town’s “Mother City” epithet; perhaps the most straightforward is that it is widely described as the first city in South Africa. (I’m sure “Tavern of the Seas” requires no explanation.)
Hans Neuberger’s 1970 paper, “Climate in Art,” describes his survey of more than 12,000 paintings, and what they reveal about the climate of different places.
The reference to the archaeologist Jayson Orton is based on our correspondence via email, and “An Unusual Pre-Colonial Burial from Bloubergstrand, Table Bay, South Africa,” a paper he co-authored in The South African Archaeological Bulletin.
The calculation for the percentage of the world’s population that lives north of Cape Town was initially laborious, and then easy. At first, I took the world’s population and subtracted the entire populations of all the countries that Cape Town’s latitude passes through, and then I added back in cities in those countries that were obviously to the north of Cape Town. Eventually, Susana B. Adamo from Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network directed me to an online tool (sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/mapping/popest/pes-v3/) that provides the population of a user-selected geographic area. I found it fascinating to explore how unevenly settled the world is.
Bradley Rink’s paper “The Aeromobile Tourist Gaze: Understanding Tourism ‘From Above’ ” was published in Tourism Geographies in 2017. The quote from George Bernard Shaw appeared in the Cape Times on January 25, 1932.
Cape Town’s reliance on long-haul tourism is clear to visitors; it’s also documented by reports such as the World Travel & Tourism Council’s “City Travel & Tourism Impact 2019.”
The idea that city life is more environmentally friendly is perhaps counterintuitive, but it seems well supported. See, for example, Richard Florida’s article “Why Bigger Cities Are Greener,” published on Bloomberg’s website on April 19, 2012. Although, for an alternative perspective, see “The Myth of the Sustainable City,” published on Scientific American’s website on August 21, 2016.
Some of Cape Town’s recent green-economy initiatives can be found at the website of GreenCape (greencape.co.za). The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Green City Index ranked Cape Town as one of the leading African cities. From a traveler’s perspective, the company Tourlane ranked Cape Town as the second-best African city (after Nairobi) for sustainable travel.
My awareness of the Southern Ocean has been hugely enriched by Joy McCann’s Wild Sea. Mount Greylock’s height is typically given as 3,491 feet (for example, on the official website of Mount Greylock State Reservation) but 3,489 feet is also sometimes seen.
Figures for the population of the Cape Flats are difficult to find. Documents for the Cape Flats Planning District, based on 2011 census data, give a population of around 583,000. The comparable figure for the Mitchells Plain/Khayelitsha Planning District, a region that many would consider part of the Cape Flats, is 1,113,000. These sum to 1,696,000. In 2011, the metropolitan area’s population was 3,698,000, according to the United Nations’ World Population Prospects (in 2021 it was 4,710,000).
Leonardo da Vinci’s quote about rendering farther objects bluer can be found in Leonardo’s Notebooks: Writing and Art of the Great Master, edited by H. Anna Suh.
“Every Thursday at 4 p.m.” is widely associated with the Union-Castle liners; see, for example, The Port of Southampton, by Ian Collard. I described a little of the Union-Castle history in my first book, Skyfaring.
Nelson Mandela’s description of Cape Town and Robben Island from above appears in Part 8, Chapter 59 of his Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (which I’m grateful to my stepmother for giving me, one Christmas long ago).
The description of Krotoa as a “peacebroker” is by Nobhongo Gxolo in “The History of Van Riebeek’s Slave Krotoa Unearthed from the Masters’ View,” published on the website of the Mail & Guardian on September 5, 2016. The description of Krotoa as a “matriarch of resistance” appears in the title of “Special Role of Krotoa, Khoi Matriarch of Resistance,” an article in the Cape Times, which appeared online on August 30, 2019. The proposal to rename Cape Town’s airport for Krotoa is described in “What’s in a Name? Cape Town Airport Debate Gets Heated,” published by the Associated Press on June 5, 2018.
The Twitter handle of the Signal Hill gun is @Signal_Hill_Gun. The quote from Jan Morris about the sole good road out from Cape Town appears on pages 32–33 of Heaven’s Command, the first of the three volumes of her extraordinary Pax Britannica Trilogy. I found the figure for the number of shipwrecks in Table Bay, and the decision by Lloyd’s not to insure ships that wintered in Cape Town, among the exhibits of the Iziko Maritime Centre in Cape Town.
I came across the quotation from Michael Faraday in Pesic’s Sky in a Bottle. For information on the scientific investigations of the ocean’s color, see, for example, oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov.
After recalling David Feldman’s book Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise?, which my mom gave me many years ago, I was determined to stare at the sundial in the Company’s Garden long enough to perceive its shadow moving counterclockwise, as it must in the Southern Hemisphere, but my desire for coffee overcame me.
The quote from Pastoureau’s Blue: The History of a Color appears on page 34 of that book, and the description of the absence of blue in Greek ceramics on page 25; the translation of ultramarine appears on page 25 of Pesic’s Sky in a Bottle.
The seal of the Castle of Good Hope—on welcome signs, for example—uses the old Dutch Casteel, rather than the Kasteel of modern Afrikaans. My description of the castle as the hub of a communications network is based on exhibits within the castle museum.
Nobhongo Gxolo’s description of her visit to the castle appears in her Mail & Guardian article noted above.
Buhlebezwe Siwani’s extraordinary 2015 photograph iGagasi and her other work can be found at her website, buhlebezwesiwani.com.
The biographical information on Tuan Guru is taken from the website of the Auwal Mosque and from “Tuan Guru: Prince, Prisoner, Pioneer,” published by Gerrie Lubbe in Religion in Southern Africa. The biographical information for Tuan Said Aloewie is based on signs in the cemetery, from which “banished to the Cape to be kept in chains” is also taken.
In addition to the news sources cited above, I frequently found myself browsing the websites of South African History Online (sahistory.org.za), National Geographic, BBC Science Focus magazine (sciencefocus.com), and the BBC. For a general history of one of the world’s most fascinating nations, I recommend Leonard Thompson’s acclaimed A History of South Africa.
I’m grateful to Bradley Rink and Nomusa Makhubu for all their guidance, helpfulness, and patience with my many questions. I would also like to thank Buhlebezwe Siwani, Andrew Flowers, Suzanne Lang, Paul Beauchamp, Susana B. Adamo, and Jayson Orton; and I would like to express my particular thanks to Robert Pincus for his detailed feedback on my explanations of the sky’s and the sea’s color, both for my Financial Times article and again for the versions in this chapter.
The section on Istanbul is adapted from “Four Cities in a Day,” an article I wrote for The Monocle Escapist in the summer of 2015.
The description of Istanbul as “sovereign over all others” appears in Michael Krondl’s The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice, a book about the spice trade; its description as the “Queen of Cities” is from the preface to Thomas F. Madden’s extraordinary book Istanbul: City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World, in a list of some of the city’s names: “Byzantion, New Rome, Antoniniana, Constantinople, Queen of Cities, Miklagard, Tsargrad, Stamboul, Islambul, the Gate of Happiness, and perhaps most eloquently of all, ‘the City.’ ” In our correspondence, Dr. Madden pointed out that Istanbul has been Europe’s largest city for a millennium now—albeit not continuously.
The quote concerning how the “trolley car schedules suffered to a marked extent” appeared on page 2 of the Berkshire Evening Eagle on March 9, 1916. Recent local write-ups sometimes give a total of 20 inches for the 1916 storm; but the following day, on page 2 of the same paper, the total is updated to 24 inches. Canoe Meadows Wildlife Sanctuary is one of my favorite places in the world; its upkeep relies on the dues-paying members of the Massachusetts Audubon Society (massaudubon.org).
The translation of Yrväderstisdagen has proved both frustrating and fascinating. Swedish relatives and correspondents have offered various suggestions, including: Whirlwind Tuesday, Crazy Weather Tuesday, Dizzy Weather Tuesday, and Blizzard Tuesday. One cousin advised that the term would make most Swedes think of “strong winds and horizontal snow,” but that the term can also be used to describe a person as wild, or as a whirlwind. Olaus Magnus’s quote “it seems more a matter for amazement…” is from “ ‘Things to Be Marveled at Rather than Examined’: Olaus Magnus and ‘A Description of the Northern Peoples,’ ” by Barbara Sjoholm, in the Antioch Review.
Several sentences in this chapter are adapted from “Enjoying Snow, While We Still Have It,” an article I published in the New York Times on January 26, 2013. In it, I mentioned the nonprofit Protect Our Winters (protectourwinters.org), which focuses on climate change issues from the perspective of those who love outdoor winter activities.
The quote about the snow in New York on the night before my father’s death—“strangely immune to gravity—blowing up and sideways as well as down”—and the maximum wind speed at Kennedy Airport are from “In Wind, Snow, Cold and Frustration, a Dangerous Storm,” an article published in the New York Times on March 9, 2005.
As happy as I am to share the quotations from Ukichirō Nakaya’s Snow Crystals: Natural and Artificial, I’m sorry it’s not possible to include any of the many photographs that make his book even more of a treasure. Indeed, I can’t recommend it highly enough as a gift for the lover of snow. The quotes I use as epigraphs for the four subsections of the Sapporo section are found, respectively, on pages 306, 54, 80, and 7 of his book. Versions of his “letters from the sky” quote appear in various sources, including “Ukichiro Nakaya—1900–1962,” an obituary published by Akira Higashi in Journal of Glaciology in 1962. There are English versions that use “hieroglyphs” rather than “letters,” but my understanding is that the commonly referenced Japanese version of his quote refers to letters in the sense of correspondence, rather than the units of a writing system.
To the best of my knowledge, the snowflake-like symbol of the Hokkaido Airports Company was originally a reference to a prefectural flag, and in turn to the North Star; today, the company’s website suggests that its seven points also refer to seven of Hokkaido’s airports. “The Dawn of a New Age: Birth of the Aeropolis of the North” appears on a sign in the Airport History Museum.
Lists of the snowiest cities on Earth are problematic, both because the underlying statistics are not always up to date, and also because some such lists are dominated by places that are very snowy but not very large. Be that as it may, Aomori tops many lists, regardless of their methodology, and I haven’t yet come across one on which Sapporo isn’t the snowiest major city.
Images of Mama-san Danpu snow shovels are available at mama-dump.com, where the “Mama-san can carry snow like a dump truck” quote also appeared. Snow suspenders for trees aren’t only a Sapporo thing; they’re found in many other parts of Japan, including Kanazawa, where I spent my summer homestay.
One of the stronger Massachusetts-Hokkaido bonds (“Sister States since 1990, Friends Since 1876,” as the Hokkaido Association of Massachusetts puts it) was forged by William S. Clark. Born in 1826 in Ashfield, a small settlement about thirty miles east of Pittsfield that even today has fewer than 2,000 inhabitants, Clark spearheaded the development of what would become the University of Massachusetts. The Japanese government invited him to Sapporo in the late nineteenth century to found the future Hokkaido University, the same university at which Ukichirō Nakaya would later carry out his pioneering studies of snow.
The story known as “The Divine Snowball Fight” is recorded by Umejirō Kudō in Ainu Folk Tales. The story of the magic fan is titled “The Younger Sister of Kotan-kor-kamuy”; it was recorded by Tōru Asai in Ainu Yukar: The Stories of Gods and the Ainu. “The Flying Sled,” by Hideo Oguma, is translated by David G. Goodman in Long, Long Autumn Nights: Selected Poems of Oguma Hideo, 1901–1940. My three quotations are from pages 84, 86, and 96, respectively.
The words of the curator at the Noguchi Museum in Queens—“arguably the most ubiquitous sculpture on the planet”—are quoted in “Why Isamu Noguchi’s Lanterns Are So Beloved,” published on the website of Architectural Digest on June 18, 2017.
In this chapter I was greatly helped by Hayden Herrera’s eloquently titled Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi. Noguchi’s “airplane and jet propulsion” quote is recorded in Chapter 46 of that book; his “the aeroplane wing in its relation to the fuselage” appears in footnote 5 of the same chapter; his “Moses just laughed…” in Chapter 16; his “The child’s world…” in Chapter 41.
“Play Mountain was my response…” is from the online write-up of Episode 351 of the podcast 99% Invisible, about Play Mountain. Liane Pei describes her parents’ friendships with Noguchi and other artists in “Christie’s to Offer the Collection of Eileen and I.M. Pei,” a press release published on the website of Christie’s on August 27, 2019. I also relied on “A Journey to Isamu Noguchi’s Last Work,” by Alexandra Lange, on curbed.com.
The story of Santa, the cross, and the department store window is well known among foreigners in Japan. It was rated as “Legend” (that is, “essentially unprovable”) in “Santa Hung on a Cross in Japan?,” published on snopes.com on October 23, 1999.
The Japanese elements of the Pequod are described in Chapter 16 of Moby-Dick; “Her masts—cut somewhere on the coast of Japan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale—her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne.” The Norman Rockwell painting above Kathleen’s mantelpiece is the widely beloved Home for Christmas.
In writing this chapter I turned repeatedly to the Japan Times (japantimes.co.jp) and the South China Morning Post (scmp.com), as well as to the websites of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum (noguchi.org), Uppsala University (uu.se), Japan-guide.com, the Church of Sweden (svenskakyrkan.se), Swedavia Airports (swedavia.com), the British Museum (britishmuseum.org), and the Institute of Low Temperature Science at Hokkaido University (lowtem.hokudai.ac.jp).
I am very grateful to Yukako Okamoto and Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda for their great care and attention in assisting with the research and translation for the Sapporo section of this chapter. I’m also grateful to Miyuki Chiba for her kindness to a stranger; I hope that someday we will have the chance to meet. I’m grateful to Nathalie Ehrström for her research and translation assistance with the Uppsala section, and to Kenneth Libbrecht for his guidance and his wonderful books about snow. I would also like to thank Didrik Vanhoenacker, Ewa Söderpalm, Nadine Willems, Jenni Glaser, Morgan Giles, Peter Gibbs, Edouard Engels, Mei Shibata, Drew Tagliabue, George Greenstein, John Villasenor, Lennart Wern, Edward Lu, and Kevin Carr.
Sheila Barry’s obituary was published in the Berkshire Eagle on March 31, 2018.
There is a lovely map of the coal posts around London available at the website of the North Mymms History Project (northmymmshistory.uk). I was struck by the description of Londinium’s location—“the lowest bridgeable point on the Thames”—in the prelude to Robert Tombs’s marvelous The English and Their History. Today’s A1 is associated with the Roman-era Ermine Street and the Great North Road, but not exactly; it does incorporate Upper Street in Islington.
The history of Baghdad on which I most relied is Justin Marozzi’s Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood, which is where I came across al-Yaqubi’s description of the city as “crossroads of the universe.” Al-Mansur’s hope that Baghdad would become “a waterfront for the world” comes from Lincoln Paine’s extraordinary The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World; Paine also notes that a mere fifty years after its foundation, Baghdad had grown to be the world’s largest city outside China. I have not been able to confirm the exact derivation of the “BI” in the airport code ORBI, though “Baghdad International” seems a safe bet. It seems that the previous code (ORBS) and name (Saddam International Airport) were changed to the current ones after the start of the Iraq War in 2003.
Several sentences in this chapter’s second London section are adapted from “A Pilot’s Rapturous Return to Transatlantic Flight,” an article I published in the Financial Times on November 11, 2021. Leanne O’Sullivan’s lovely poem “Note” is available on the website of Poems on the Underground (poemsontheunderground.org/note) and is perhaps still in circulation on trains, too. It was published in her book A Quarter of an Hour.
Capturing even a basic English sense of the names of the places that the Yamanote Line connects proved a fascinating challenge: my Japanese language skills are limited; the provenance of many names is disputed, while others make sense only within a cultural context that is almost impossible to summarize neatly; and some characters are used phonetically, without regard to their meaning, which makes literal translations problematic, to say the least.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, it’s difficult to compare the populations of cities and metropolitan areas whose boundaries may be defined so differently. However, The World’s Cities in 2018, a report by the United Nations, gives 37.5 million for the population of Tokyo, and notes that by 2030 Delhi will overtake Tokyo as the world’s largest city.
It’s possible that the first person to circumnavigate the world was not a European member of Magellan’s crew (Magellan himself was killed in the Philippines), but rather the enslaved man known as Enrique, whom Magellan acquired in 1511 in Malacca, and whom he brought west to Europe, and then took on the westbound 1519 expedition. Enrique left Magellan’s crew in Southeast Asia—but still to the east of Malacca—where records of his story end.
The list I referred to for the world’s busiest train stations appeared in various publications in Japan in 2013 (for example, in Japan Today on February 6, 2013). The list was widely shared and as late as 2018 reputable sources, such as Bloomberg, were still relying on it. But even setting aside the effects of the pandemic on public transport, it must nevertheless now be out of date. Although I have not been able to find a more recent list, nor the complete data that would allow me to compile my own, it seems certain that an updated list would show more stations in China, where I often visit railway termini (in Beijing, for example) that seem to be as large and as busy as many of those in Tokyo.
The camera store near Shinjuku Station is Yodobashi Camera; its extraordinary earworm of a jingle can easily be found on YouTube.
“Earthen Banks” is from Saisei Murō’s book Those Who Came from Stars. Takako Lento’s complete translation of it follows here. (Murō also wrote a poem titled “The Yamanote Line.”)
Earthen Banks (土手)
At the far end of the Tabata station is an overpass.
Earthen banks on both sides of the overpass
Have now turned lush green with deep dense grasses
I make a point of taking a walk there in the morning
In the afternoon when I get bored with work
Even after dinner I take a walk there
Strange to see the opposite bank in the evening
Lie swollen and solid
The bank this side is also long and dark
Reminding me of a deep valley
Roofs of homes over the other side
Trees surrounding those roofs
Beautiful stars flickering among trees
Soft soothing winds stroke me
Like breath from the greenery
Once in a while between them the Yamanote Line train travels
Windows brightly lit
White clothes flickering
Rounded knees of a woman passenger
The single signal is shivering in blue
Even when I am so very tired
I feel refreshed when I come to these banks
No one walks there at night
Only the wind whispers…
When I first began to learn Japanese I was struck by how the role of Chinese characters in the language seemed to have no direct parallel in English. Any analogy, then, is problematic, but the effort to make one is nonetheless fascinating. The comparison of the relationship between Latin and English to that between Chinese and Japanese is common; but then, English has its Greek-derived words, too (some of which, of course, passed through Latin on their journey to us).
The Yamanote Line departure melodies are available online (for example, at eki.weebly.com/yamanote-line.html).
In this chapter I was particularly reliant on the websites of the BBC and Japan Times (japantimes.co.jp), as well as on information I found at VisitBritain (visitbritain.com), WRAL-TV (wral.com), Japan Visitor (japanvisitor.com), and Live Japan (livejapan.com).
Sachiko Kaku first brought Saisei Murō’s work to my attention, and in the course of her generous correspondence she also provided me with several other insights into the history and stories associated with the Yamanote Line. I’m grateful to Takako Lento for her translations of Murō’s work and the biographical research she prepared on his life, and I hope that her kindness to me will bring his writing to the attention of a wider English readership. My enormous thanks are due to Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda for her patience with fact-checking and with all my place-name translation questions, and to Mei Shibata and Yukako Okamoto for sharing their memories of the Yamanote Line. Thank you to Ilya Birman for his kind help with my description of Moscow’s various circle lines. Deb Cairns, Wako Tawa, Kevin Carr, and Jarrett Walker also provided invaluable assistance with this chapter.
Words are insufficient to express my gratitude to Cindy and Dan for their warmth and open-hearted hospitality. I am very glad to know them.