Whatever Happened to The (American) Heroes?

There's a song by The Stranglers called Whatever Happened to the Heroes. It describes how Leon Trotsky "got an ice pick that made his ears burn." The theme is "no more heroes anymore."

I'm not convinced the Machiavellian Trotsy was a hero. A visionary, perhaps. But there are certainly no more heroes anymore.

The American hero has been on his last legs for a while. He's that Monty Python knight who fights on limbless. He's riding out into the sunset on a horse with no name. This realization hit me with the deaths of John McCain and Burt Reynolds.

McCain, as we know, was a real-life hero who endured torture and went on to do great things. I don't know much about Reynolds' personal life but he was a loveable kind of all America tough guy who loomed large on the screens of my childhood. I never really rated him as an actor. Some of his characters were downright annoying. Then I reassessed my opinion after seeing his Oscar-nominated performance in Boogie Nights.

Since his death, the refrain "boogie nights are always the best in town" became lodged in my head and won't go away, even though the days of disco have receded to the margins of my memory.

Back when I grew up the American heroes loomed larger and cast long shadows. Their fortitude offered a curious contrast with the spineless cast of liars who strut today's stage clad in the transparent clothes of reality TV.

Reynolds was hardly a loveable character in Boogie Nights. He was a hard-hearted maker of pornography. However, his character has an avuncular adherence to a certain set of values. In Deliverance, Reynolds is Lewis Medlock, a dashing and swashbuckling Atlanta city slicker with a smattering of outdoors knowledge. His gung-ho character is eventually brought crashing to earth by an arrow.

The Reynolds in the closing stages of the movie is unrecognizable from the character who stepped boldly into the wilderness. So it was with Reynolds' life. In his last days, the fragile character in a wheelchair bore no resemblance to the heartthrob of yesteryear.

Reynolds saw a lot of potential movie roles slip away. He could have been Han Solo. Loves eluded him too. Sally Field, his other half, slipped away. After his death she said. "He will be in my history and my heart as long as I live."

Like the classic American hero and the greatest of Shakespeaker's characters, Reynolds was flawed. He is one of the last of a dying breed. No more heroes anymore.

In Devil's Garden

You have to drive all the way through Arches National Park to get to Devil's Garden but it is far from undiscovered. The trail from the parking lot leads through a narrow defile in the rock to arches, spires and a maze of narrow rock walls called "Fins." These form where persistent rainwater erodes parallel features caused by the uplift of salt deposits below the surface.

At least that's the official version. I prefer to believe that the devil was tending his garden one ghastly night and hewed these features out of the rock with his hideous pitch folk.

This section of Arches may be in God's Own Country but the weirdness of the red and rugged canyons here feels more like walking through a simmering slice of hell that the green pastures of heaven or Jerusalem which we all know is found in England's green and pleasant land.

I looked up to the red chimneys or rocks and the buzzards soaring above me and followed a trail that wound up the rocks like the spine of some long dead sea creature. There are many arches up here. Many may lack the 'wow factor' of Delicate Arch but it's thrilling to find one hidden away behind a canyon framing a bright green shock of foliage in the afternoon sun.

Landscape Arch, however, is far from humble. It towers between two rock walls, stretched to an almost impossible width.

In 1991, a 60-foot wide slab of rock fell from Landscape Arch and headed for the trail. Miraculously nobody was hurt but one brave or foolhardy visitor had time to snap a picture of the rock as it rolled toward him.

Devil's Garden is not a place for the meek. It bristles with dangers and the path heads up to a precipice. The crowds fall away the deeper you travel into Devil's Garden. 

I felt alone but also at peace in the wilderness. I didn't all virtuous like Christ tempted by the Devil in the desert. I don't believe in the notion of finding ourselves in the wilderness or in uncovering clues in stream beds or under juniper bushes. I do believe that we all need to get away from it for a while and look on savage and remote places. I believe in letting the scale of it all wash over us, of letting go of our pent up obsessions.

It's a bit like that first time your parents introduce you to the night sky and try to explain the vastness of it all. How it would take millions of years to travel to the nearest star and the light you see from a celestial body may be long dead.

We are a vast universe within our own skin but we are as insignificant as the fleeting white flowers on the columbine. Even great rulers waste away in the vastness of the desert. In the words of that fleeting genius Shelley.

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Between a Rock - Reflections on Arches National Park

The desert can be an unforgiving place. Still, there are times in your life when you crave extremes. When I headed to Moab, I wanted to be between a rock and a hard place, although the cliche jars. I wanted dry stream beds and cactus as brittle as broken glass.

Perhaps I was haunted by that time when I drove back through Bakewell, so many years ago back through the Derbyshire Dales with their quaint tea rooms and honey colored stones. When you are pursued by your intrusive thoughts, you don’t want Bakewell pies. 

You don’t want meandering brooks and bridges and hordes of tourists or to wander around Chatsworth to see ladies in frilly frocks. You want sand as hard as iron and unyielding rock faces.

I wasn’t so shaken this time but there was the sad realization of the breaking of the human spirit, of something that seemed of substance but crumbled like a foundation of sand. It had been a long journey across the bone-dry ridge to a shimmering mirage. Had the last few years been so illusory like the world viewed a looking glass, down a rabbit hole?  Perhaps I had been blinded by the lidless sun. I had ignored her jagged flaws and discounted my own. I had glossed over it, belittled it.

I had learned lessons too. Pedestals are only for athletes and the memory of the elevation fades as soon as they step off. Gold is a base metal and it gleams rather than glitters. Nobody is perfect. Not even a perfect stranger. The colors leach under the glare of the desert sun.

Today we retrace some of those footsteps. I fall into an easy rhythm next to her. I adore her but I eschew those old notions of perfection. We are far from symmetrical. We are two steps from the edge. The human spirit is like Balanced Rock and it will fall into the abyss without care.

Moab can quickly remove the layers from the soul. The earth here is so red and the approach into the town with its gas stations, wreckers’ yards and Jeeps chewing up the earth, made me feel small. 

I drove to an unprepossessing hotel and paid above the odds for a room. I didn’t shop around. I wanted to get out of Moab and into Arches. I wanted to see the weirdness, the deformed rocks, the high arches or stone and the far-off snows of the La Sal Mountains,

Arches does not disappoint. The only downside is the crowds. After enduring the long lines to the visitor center, I drove up to Park Avenue and walked down a dry riverbed surrounded by high buttes. The last time I was in a place called Park Avenue it was in the middle of the city. We drank too much and forgot where we were staying incurring the wrath of a New York cabbie. The place with the canopy. Behind the big tower.

Park Avenue in Arches has towers too, hulking great masses of sandstone that line the path. The heady cocktail of languages here reminded me of the Parthenon or Venice. However, walking usually thins out the crowds and Park Avenue was no exception. Within 20 minutes, I was in relative solitude under the austere castles of rock.

I fell into a pattern, stopping at the viewpoints along the route. I admired the petrified hills that formed a labyrinth of hobbit homes into the desert, the livid green of Fiery Furnace with its fierce yellow foliage.

It took me a couple of hours to see what people come to Arches for. You don’t need to be Columbo to deduce people come to Arches to see arches. 

Our spirits crave an illusive perfection. We have built cathedrals replete with arches to glorify God for centuries. Still, we worship such structures. This national park has the largest concentration of natural stone arches in the world. There are more than 2,000 but most of them are unvisited.

At the trailhead that features Double O Arch and Double Arch, I started to get a feel for the structures that define the park. Many of those who went to see the arches had the air of visitors ticking off items on a shopping list. They talked about home prices and neighbors with drug problems. They used names of places in California that made me feel far from home.

It seems crass to talk about home prices amid the serenity of the arches, sacrilegious even.

Evening was approaching by the time I embarked on the path to Delicate Arch. 

It’s described as a short trail of 1.5 miles each way. I had little water but the temperature was falling. The reds and greens of the desert came alive as the sun slipped away. Delicate Arch is the most photographed place in Arches National Park and it was crowded even later in the afternoon. Still, there is serenity here in open spaces, even though the path felt like far longer than 1.5 miles and my last gulp of water was soon gone.

So many iconic places can be a disappointment in real life. The Bridge of Sighs is so small, the Parthenon always seems clad in scaffolding. 

Even the Grand Canyon can fail to convey its sheer size. Delicate Arch is as breathtaking as I imagined it would be.

The arch rises from a bed of smooth rocks framed by the snow-capped mountains. It's a lovely and lonely place where it's possible to steal a moment away from the crowds. Although Delicate Arch is the highlight of many visits to the national park, I decided to return the next day to explore Devil's Garden.

On The Petroglyph Trail at Mesa Verde

Back east hemmed in by the heat, the tall buildings and trees teeming with insects, I often think of the west and its honey-colored canyons.

Being in the desert fulfilled a dream from long ago when the swing would point west and I would close my eyes in the setting sun and think of cowboys, stream trains and cacti crowding the skyline. The old cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde in Colorado live on in my imagination now. I think of the faraway world of the ancient people and the words of Willa Cather from The Song of the Lark.

"From the ancient dwelling there came always a dignified, unobtrusive sadness; now stronger, now fainter - like the aromatic smell which the dwarf cedars gave out in the sun - but always present, a part of the air one breathed. At night when Thea dreamed about the anyon - or in the early morning when she hurried toward it, anticipating it - her conception of it was of yellow rocks baking in the sunlight the swallows, the cedar smell, and that peculiar sadness - a voice out of the past, not very loud, that went on saying a few simple things to the solitude eternally."

Cather has always encapsulated the feel of the West, the loneliness, and the promise. The melancholy ghosts of the past.

The Ancestral Pueblo people made Mesa Verde their home for 700 years but in the end, their simple dream of living off the land died. In a precursor of what was to come, they used up the resources and could no longer sustain themselves. Still, the dream of waking up and falling asleep to the rhythms of the canyon lives on in the quiet places under the cliffs.

In Mesa Verde, I found myself alone in the honey-colored canyons. There was no cellphone coverage and 21st Century distractions. Just a simple museum with a visitor center, the serene cliff houses, the skeletal desert trees and the buzzards circling overhead. I was passing out of one world into another for the afternoon.

I took the Petroglyph Trail, walking briskly in the still chilly afternoon sunshine. I was alone on much of the trail that traverses the side of the canyon. I took a guidebook and stopped at many of the markers along the way to read the descriptions. It struck me that in this age of information overload and the 24-hour news cycle, how little I knew about these plants that sustained the Pueblo people, how little I knew about the bedrock of life hundreds of years ago.

In the desert, I found a search for knowledge and a world miles away from our money-obsessed existence. At least for an afternoon.

Without the guidebook, I would not have recognized Mormon Tea or known its leaves are merely small scales that aid in conserving water. Mexicans, Indians, and early Mormon pioneers brewed a tea from the stems of this plant and it was used to cure a raft of diseases.

The pinyon pine had been ripped open by porcupines exposing wounds on the tree, allowing organisms to infect it; a large juniper was infected by bark beetles. If porcupines damage too many trees, their food supplies will be depleted and they will die. Thus nature has its checks and balances and the relentless cycle will go on, probably long after the extinction of man.

Walking the Petroglyph Trail reminded me of the microscopic nature of our world. One man is a small speck in the canyons out east and not even a pinprick in the vastness of the Cosmos.

In this borderless wilderness, we are all destined to wander companionless like Shelley's moon for much of our micro existences. The ancient people recognized as much when they carved the petroglyphs in Mesa Verde in the rocks that were once part of an ancient sea.

The symbols on the rock include the Horned Toad Clan that denotes the split of the people who migrated here from the other clans and the Lizard spirit symbol whose influence over the people led them into a period of directionless wandering that approached a state of lunacy.

Looking over the mesas, I could see how you could lose your mind out here. In a curious way, I could also see how I could regain it.

Mark Z and His Infectious Facebook Habit

In 2011, I wrote in this blog about how it was time to defriend Mark Zuckerberg and surgically remove Facebook from our lives. Facebook, I argued, was becoming increasingly Big Brother and was monitoring our every movement. It was doing it in a more insidious way than having an angry face staring from TV screens into every room. Of course, a lot of things have happened since 2011 but a lot of things have stayed the same.

Two things strike me about that blog. The first is that I did not heed my own advice. I probably check Facebook at least 10 times a day and not because I derive any pleasure from it. It’s become a habit as mundane yet as routine as making one’s bed. I’m not sure that’s a good example.

Secondly, the Big Brother concerns about Facebook have grown beyond the theoretical to become a great big orange, in your face reality.

Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm hired by President Trump’s election campaign, improperly obtained data from as many as 50 million people from Facebook and used it in nefarious ways that may or may not have impacted how we voted.

The result was a rare appearance of Zuckerberg before the U.S. Senate and an article in The Guardian by Julia Carrie Wong about a mistake she made 14 years ago with a boy and no, while Zuckerberg did not give her herpes, the virus of Facebook has wormed its way into our lives and infected relationships.

Given all we know about the corrosive nature of Facebook, why do we still do it? To be fair this can be said about many facets of life. Why do we derive perverse pleasure from pulling nose hairs on the freeway in front of loved ones? To some extent, this may be because we are oppositional and take some pleasure from making people squirm.

It's like those people who publish stomach churning ‘couple’ pictures on Facebook and frame them in a heart for good measure. The subtext here is 'we have love in all it’s sickening lovedom and you are stuck home alone cleaning up cat sick.' We are getting action and you are not. We are far too cool for school.

Much of Facebook is about projection rather than reality. We post the pics that hide our sagging double chins. We breathe in. We seek to look debonair or like 'dad of the year' taking the kids to Billy’s Popsicles to rot out their teeth on an estranged parent’s watch.

We don’t wake up in the night and tell Facebook what we are really thinking. To be fair I have a Facebook friend who does that. S from a less desirable London borough who tells us less desirable things about her life, her workmates who generally make her want to puke, the fact she hates getting up so early; the delayed train, the broken arm, the ex-lover who should be avoided with a poopy stick because he’s a stalker. Her life is as rancid as anything that has ever come into contact with Sean Hannity. And we all need to know every putrid detail.

Funnily enough, nobody wants to read this stuff. We don’t want to read about someone’s life as a train wreck because there are elements that are disconcertingly familiar. We may not be S from the sad London Borough but we are all a few inches from derailing.

My trip back to my 2011 blog self makes me realize how much things stay the same. Mark Z can look as nerdy as the nerdiest kid in physics class and we still won’t defriend him. Looking back to my blog of 2011, I realize something else. People read me and responded. I was the popular kid in the class. Mark may even have wanted to be me before he started making $2 million a minute. Now I write to a void but hey – I have 482 friends on Facebook and plenty of love pictures. What more does a self-respecting guy need in 2018?

How We Loved and Lost the Wilderness

When we were kids, our vacations were far from exotic. In Britain, vacations are called holidays. They are often endured under squally skies. It wasn’t until I saw one of the many American TV shows that flooded our television screens, Dallas or Knotts Landing that I first heard the word ‘vacation.’ At the time, it seemed very exotic like the kind of things Americans did.

Our visions of America were hazy and colored by movies, cop shows and the man next door, the mysterious ‘man in America’ who was often away across the Atlantic making large amounts of money.

When I pictured the word ‘vacation’ I visualized oversized hotels on Miami Beach, row after row of chandelier adorned opulence embraced by palm trees.

Our holidays were less glamorous. We went to cottages and when the budget was particularly tight to caravans which are like small portable trailer homes.

One week in July, our home was a metal contraption in the middle of a bleak field in North Cornwall. It may have seemed unprepossessing but we made the most of it. I would hike across the field to the woods with my sister and go on long expeditions. We found a large barrel up against a hedgerow, affording impressive views onto the rolling fields.

The woods of North Cornwall

In the days that followed, we kept going back. We adorned it with soft furnishings and nailed wooden slats over the opening to make it a forest home. The project took on a life of its own. I’m not sure to this day why the project gave us such satisfaction. Maybe at the age of 10 or thereabouts, we had reached a perfect symmetry of happiness.

From the home in the woods, we would watch the sun fall over a hay wagon and the last colors of the day being breathed into the clouds before they were gone. It was the nearest thing to the frontier and the American prairie that was ironed into my consciousness from an early age by Yogi bear and books featuring steam trains heading over the Rockies.

Although this was the only time we built a forest house I recall another time about two years later. It was a blustery day but I rode my bike far to the western reaches of Gloucester. I found a copse of trees and started gathering up branches. I built a teepee-like structure. There was a desperation in my movements. No matter how many branches I assembled and how much foliage I found, the structure remained skeletal and exposed to the unremittingly gray sky.

The bleakness of the looming teen years washed over me and I walked away. Later I wondered what fueled my frenzied gathering of sticks. Was it a desire to go back to those half-remembered sunsets of North Cornwall? To a world half-forgotten.

I was reminded of these two house-building projects when I started reading Last Child In The Woods by Richard Louv.

The books is about the death of outdoor adventures and the way children have retreated behind their electronic devices. I can relate as I am constantly trying to drag my kids off their devices and into the great outdoors with various degrees of success.

Louv recalls reading Shelters, Shacks and Shanties as a child. The book was written in 1915 by Daniel C Beard. He describes how children can build up to 40 different dwellings in the wilderness and the woods. To Louv, the books conjured up images of underground forts in cornfields and other delights in nature before The Lovely Bones tainted such places with horrors like kidnapping and murder.

Louv mourned the lost frontier that his generation and ours experienced in nature. “In the space of a century, the American experience of nature – culturally influential across the world – has gone from direct utilitarianism to romantic attachment to electronic detachment,” he concluded.

I can only concur. It fills me with sadness that the only structure my kids are likely to build in the woods is on Minecraft.

Blue Skies Over The White Cliffs of Dover

Don't let anyone ever tell you the skies of England are never blue or the sun is always obscured by clouds. Don't let anyone tell you the famous white cliffs of Dover are really not white but a shade of gray, that the symbolism of the past has been buried in the present.

On the day we returned to the white cliffs the sky was a deep azure and the chalk cliffs gleamed in the afternoon sun. The downland shimmered and rolled down to the magnificent bastions. Dover Castle was the solid presence it has been for the past 10 centuries.

Much has been written and sung about this place. Famously Dame Vera Lynn sang.

There'll be bluebirds over
The white cliffs of Dover
Tomorrow
Just you wait and see

I'll never forget the people I met
Braving those angry skies
I remember well as the shadows fell
The light of hope in their eyes

The song is old and it stirs memories of another era when the white cliffs meant more than pleasant walks to the South Foreland Lighthouse. The white cliffs meant bravery against the odds. They were the very last bastion against the waves of darkness.

August 2017 was three-quarters of a century removed from August 1940. The skies high above the white cliffs were empty from here to the hazy outline of France but for the white and wispy clouds. 

Yet back in 1940 they echoed to the low roar of bombers. Wave after wave of Heinkels and Dorniers hummed overhead like heavy black birds shackled with swastikas and bombs. It's no exaggeration to say the future of the world depended on those chaotic August days above the white cliffs of Dover. The Nazi threat may be consigned to the history books but it lives on in popular culture be it the Nazgûl from Tolkien's Middle Earth George Lucas' Death Star.

I'm not naive enough to believe in good guys and bad guys even though I would pester my parents during every movie when I grew up; who are the good guys who are the baddies? Are the cowboys good and the Indians bad?

Yet during the summer of 1940, there was no disputing who the real heroes were. Day after day the sleep-deprived British pilots scrambled in their tiny fighters to the skies to tackle their vastly superior foe. Airfields such as Biggin Hill were bombed over and over. The ground crews would work round the clock to patch up the runways and the Spitfires and Hurricanes would return to the skies. These men in their rickety flying machines were the last defense against the unthinkable.

The RAF pilots suffered terrible deaths in their tiny planes and manpower ran short. The toll inflicted on the enemy was even greater. In the end, the Luftwaffe lost heart and turned to the easier targets of bombing Britain's cities at night. The thin line held and the white cliffs were never breached. Adolf Hitler turned his murderous intent to the icy wastes of Russia where his armies would meet a terrible end.

The pilots of the RAF had stopped the darkness from spreading and often paid the ultimate price.

The words of Winston Churchill traveling back through time sound more like a movie than the kind of thing we would expect from a contemporary politician.

"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

Today those who lived through Britain's darkest hour are dwindling. The fighter planes have long since gone from the skies over the white cliffs. Hitler's invasion fleet that never went to sea is a footnote in history. We won our freedom and the specter of hate has been vanquished. 

Yet around the time of our walk about the cliffs, I was disturbed to scroll through my phone and read the news from my home state of Virginia. Charlottesville, where I had been just months earlier at a climate change march. Now it echoed to the sounds of riots. In the streets, young men attacked protestors dressed in the hideous helmets and garbs of the Third Reich. Thickset men with bull necks sported swastika tattoos on their arms. The menace that had lurked so many years ago on the hazy outline of France was reborn. Or perhaps it had never gone away.

Today racism is again on the march and the sickening pall of the furnaces that burned the flesh of the many is belittled and discounted. 

I didn't see any bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover and the blue skies were empty of bombers. I found myself wondering for how long.

Robbie Williams - A Brit Naughty in the USA

I chanced on this video the other day and it made me wonder whatever happened to Robbie Williams. There's something rather appealing about seeing Robbie out west in Montana or Colorado or wherever this video is shot.

He looks a bit like an odd fish out of water on a horse, a naughty Brit in tight Union Jack jeans who is intent on getting frisky with the local girls - or at least one who looks like the lady who was a Mermaid from Splash.

Clearly, Robbie wanted to make a splash too, looking all moody in the hot tub, making eyes at the mermaid chick.

The video is funny on a number of levels, not least because Robbie grew up in Stoke On Trent, a place of grim back-to-back houses and beaten up chip shops. It's one of those places the train stops at on the West Coast Mainline to the great industrial cities of the north and you find yourself thankful you are not getting off at.

Robbie, by all accounts, was constantly in trouble at school. I doubt if he ever set eyes on a horse. He was selling double-glazing (not an expression you hear stateside) until he entered a talent show, joined the boy band Take That - and the rest is history.

He was married in 2010 after a couple of stints in rehab. The last media I can find on how was the cancellation of two concerts due to 'worrying test results.'

I'm hoping he's OK. It just wouldn't be the same if Robbie wasn's just a Brit naughty.

Rochester - A Solid Presence on the Medway

I like Rochester. If feels as old as time itself and has an unassuming saltiness from the nearby estuaries and the Medway.

Although I would take issue with the Guardian writer who described it as "ravishingly beautiful," it's certainly pleasant and picturesque in a very English way.

Unlike Canterbury, Rochester is thankfully free of the hordes of tourists. It feels like a find. We were here half a decade ago. A picture of my daughter throwing a tantrum in front of the sold castle comes to mind.

To be fair, the castle has seen better days and worse days. Rochester Castle is famous for its huge, brooding keep. We climbed high up the ruin and gazed down at the chasm. Above the dank place that was once the cesspit we read about how in medieval times, all the human waste was dragged past the kitchen and out of the castle once a month. The lord and lady would make sure to be out of town on this particular day.

Rochester Castle is famous for the Great Siege of 1215, an event that brings to mind the defense of Helm's Deep in The Lord of the Rings. In the same year, King John had been forced to sign the Magna Carta, a document that placed the Monarch under the rule of law and arguably for later democracies and the American system of government.

The barons decided John could not be trusted to implement it and the scene was set for a bloody civil war. With rebels holed up in Rochester Castle, John laid siege to it. The siege engines battered the castle walls day and night, but still, the great keep held.

Eventually, a mine was set beneath the south-east tower, causing it to collapse. John was reported to treat the garrison mercifully, allowing them to leave after their hands and feet were lopped off.

The brutality of the past is hard to envisage on a sunny afternoon on the castle green. Below the steps of the castle, a Rolls Royce had pulled up and a bride posed for silence. The afternoon was punctuated by the sound of gentle tap tapping as participants in a renaissance event put up tents.

Rochester is a city of cobbled street and old pubs beloved of Charles Dickens who set Great Expectations and The Pickwick Papers here. Dickens spent his final days here and wanted to be buried in the understated cathedral. Instead, he was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Dickens' love of Rochester is understandable. It may not be ravishingly beautiful but the city is pleasant. It's like that friend or lover who you felt the closest to. No matter how long you are away, it's always blissful to come return.

A Sorta Fairytale

Michael and Miranda crisscrossed the interstates together in her small gray car, from mountain valley to plain, the wind always rushing through the open window, the bike rack rattling.

The open road seemed to go on forever, her hand resting on his neck, his gently brushing her leg.

Like the song, it was a sorta fairytale. They could stop and start and pick back up whenever they felt like it. They could love and fall out and love again. They were constantly in each other's thoughts. They endured the miles. They lived for the next meeting. They lived for a day that never came.

The silver lining was elastic but it never snapped. Then one day Michael crossed a line. The bubble broke. Shattered car parts clattered across the road. Her final words were flat and cold. Words like rusty old car parts on the grass verge that had lost their meaning.

When Michael looked back down the highway it was empty, the road trips were a distant memory. Then he thought of the lyrics of the song.

"And I'm so sad
Like a good book
I can't put this day back
A sorta fairytale with you.."

Passion in the Garden - Vita Sackville-West and Sissinghurst Castle

On my recent trip to England, I was glad to have made the trip to Sissinghurt Castle in Kent, because the notion of the place has always fired my half-realized imagination.

The idea of Sissinghurst provided a dimly-lit corridor to a half-forgotten but glamorous past. To the Roaring Twenties, the age of art deco and The Great Gatsy, when America was a place to aspire to and Britain saw a flowing of culture and art; albeit with one foot still stained with the blood of the trenches.

However, to experience Sissinghurst Castle is all about layering. To my parents, who had never heard of Vita Sackville-West, Sissinghurst was another garden owned by the National Trust and a tall tower. They had been before and declared themselves disappointed. However, they had forgotten about their previous visit by the time I suggested a day out.

To my kids and my nephews, Sissinghurst castle was a great place to play hide and seek and to turn their nose up at the strange food in the restaurant.

However, for me visiting Sissinghurst was about experiencing something else, although I was woefully ignorant about Vita and her husband Harold Nicholson, I was captivated by the idea of change and the way they conjured beauty from an abject ruin.

Sissinghurst was once a Saxon pig farm. In the 1700s, up to 3,000 French prisoners captured in the Seven Years War were imprisoned here. The conditions were vile and inhumane with poor food, stinking sanitation, and rife disease in the cells.

When the poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicholson purchased Sissinghurst in the 1930s, it was in a shabby condition and the fields around were used to grow cereal crops, the National Trust notes.

The garden they created at Sissinghurst became famous for its enclosures linked by vistas, and its harmony of color.

Sissinghurst contains the Cottage Garden, the Herb Garden, the Rose Garden and the White Garden, with its brick paths, geometric compartments, and foliage of abundant white and silver lilies, tulips, roses, lilacs, and dahlias.

Its iconic tower is stacked high with books and further down the garden, a small but alluring outbuilding contains a typewriter with a window opening up onto a sweep of the moat chocked with lily pads.

Vita the accomplished gardener is, of course, only half of the Sissinghurt story. Vita was the only daughter of the Hon. Lionel Sackville West and his illegitimate Spanish wife, Victoria and a Latin passion beat behind her fine English exterior.

Vita is remembered for her sexuality and many affairs, most famously with the novelist Virgina Woolf. Vita was the muse for Woolf's revolutionary novel Orlando which circumvented the censorship rules in early 20th Century Britain, a place where homosexuality was not just frowned on but criminalized.

Vita was more than an author and a gardener. She wrote to an American penfriend. "As dusk falls, I come in and write the book I am trying to write ... and then I really feel myself in my tower, shut away. I become an author again and I am happy. But that is not the whole story."

Vita wrote of her love for Virginia Woolf in letters to her husband, who was also homosexual.

In one letter she wrote: "Dined with Virginia at Richmond. She is as delicious as ever. How right she is when she says that love makes anyone a bore, but the excitement of life lies in "the little moves" nearer to people. But perhaps she feels this because she is an experimentalist in humanity, and has no grande passion in her life."

Sissinghurst was gifted to the National Trust in 1967, the year of my birth. Today it feels preserved in a cozy timewarp like many other National Trust places. The genteel elderly men and women who monitor the visitors to the tower would as likely talk about homosexual love as they would cannibalism on Easter Island in 1534.

The gardens are a model of geometrical perfection. To walk down the brick paths and to smell the blossoms is to walk a scented path back to childhood. I visited so many of these places and the sun always shines. There is nothing wrong and jarring with the world. When we get thirsty we go to the tea room, when we get confounded, we head into a maze. There were never prisoners here, just the long and lazy acres of the rolling Kent countryside on a sun-kissed afternoon in England.