The July Effect

Late in June, several decades ago, I stood atop the Yerevan Cascade in Armenia to gaze across Turkey's Iğdır Plain to fathom Mount Ararat where legend places Noah's Ark.

I had just been in majestic Kiev and would shortly be in imposing Moscow. This was back when Russia was the USSR and wasn't lucky at all. What I remember, aside from a glorious Kremlin, were shortages. Long lines of weary proletariat at dreary shops that sold only one kind of lampshade. 

What I recall of Yerevan was my disconnect of being in Asia Minor, north and west of Eden. The history I learned readily connected parts east of Europe from classes about stalled advances by Napoleon or Hitler to face Cossacks or the Red Army in tactical retreat through thawing steppes. It was Eurocentric. That stiffled my curiosity of elsewhere. I knew nothing of the Black Sea or Arabia. A shortcoming of knowledge. Maybe. Maybe not. Eden's apple. Careful what comes with knowledge. What occurs when a fallen world pays a visit, when it strays to the comforts of your garden? Do you lament?

Our oldest written story is a lament and a good one, "The Epic of Gilgamesh." It is a five thousand year old assemblage of myth from a preliterate age when gods were being replaced by mortals on the thrones of the city states. It is a legend of survival and brotherhood in the furtile crescent of Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, eventually written down in cuneiform at various times on sundry tablets. Those tablets were separated, broken, lost in the 7th Century, rediscovered two hundred years ago, and finally translated just one hundred and fifty years back. "The Epic of Gilgamesh" is a quick but delightful read, maybe sixty pages. It is a lament on the trials faced by a seemingly invincible man and his trusted friend. Some say Will Smith and Charlize Theron retell the story in the movie "Hancock." 

The Epic includes a massive deluge, perhaps Noah's flood. Most certainly, the premise is a journey toward Mount Ararat to fell giant Cedar timbers for use as impenetrable doors for King Gilgamesh's fortress at Uruk. Due to its wealth, Uruk was a tempting prize to semitic tribes of Arabia and nomads off to the east in Persian.

So now I want to travel there. There is now Iraq. Sometimes a great notion takes shape - just a visa on arrival at Erbil International Airport, a car rental at Budget in downtown Baghdad, and a myriad of security checkpoints to visit world wonders: Babylon, the Tower of Babel, Sammara, the Great Ziggurat of Ur, and the port of Basra from which Sinbad the Sailor set sail.

Who is in? Don't want to drive? Drivers for hire can be secured in Baghdad as well as the breakfast indulgence Geymar, a clotted cream, served with Kahi, a fluffy flakey pastry, along with a cup of hot tea. Mesopotamia has witnessed five millenia of conquest and reconquest. We are the most recent. What occurs when a fallen world wants to pay a visit, when you want to stray from the comforts of your garden to see beyond the lore. I would lament not going. The western world may be infinitely larger but part of it ended in this abyss.

Rental cars are also available in safer Turkey and Jordan for those adverse to Iraq in the aftermath of a 2005 war and surge ending in withdrawal in 2011. Jordan has Bedouins and tales told by Scheherazade in "One Thousand and One Arabian Nights," including many of Sinbad. Though you may remember Petra mainly from "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade."

Turkey has Göbekli Tepe, the world's first settlement. Neolithic, it is pre-pottery and predates Stone Hedge by six thousand years. Like much later indigenous north Americans, Göbekli villagers did not experience a Bronze or Iron Age. Turkey also has Mount Nemrut where a Greek king reinvigorated his ancestral dynasty by constructing a tomb-sanctuary flanked by huge statues of himself, lions, eagles, and various Greek and Iranian gods.

In Turkish, kismet means fate or destiny. In Islam, the will of Allah. Popularly, it is something meant to be. Time can be the sort of thing that makes your conscious heavy. Wherever you hurt the most is where your spirit lay.

One reason I travel is to observe first hand rather than rely on colorful lore. The 'July Effect' is the sense of risk from medical errors and complications once medical school graduates begin residencies each July. Over one hundred and ten studies have shown no evidence of a 'July Effect' on mortality, morbidity, or re-admission. No causation. No correlation. But why set off fireworks this Fourth and risk a resident botch reattaching your thumb? Kismet.

A final thought. Doctors are a scarcity. In every generation there is a limited pool of talent and inclination willing to invest themselves with the years of training for this calling. The rigors needed don't seem to translate to technicians who learn a sequence of treatment steps.

Similarly due to the scarcity of tin needed to alloy with copper, Bronze Age commerce was controlled by a limited pool of talent who insinuated themselves into power and connected their legitimacy to religion.  Merchant colonies and distant trading posts were set up but caravan communication was often broken and raw materials fetched by force from reluctant tribes in Persia and Arabia. 

The Iron Age arrived once it was known how ores could be smelted. There was no scarcity of ore. It democracized power. Everyone could have iron weapons. Nothing happened to the tin man that we didn't already know. For this different reason the Middle East remains a powderkeg. Better to slip in now, quietly, through a seldom slice of peace. Allah give me quickness of tongue to put your heart at ease before the foot of my table has set itself in your stomach. It is meant to be.

Abstract

Many moons ago, I learned to cook at an Italian restaurant in what once was Times Square in Ft Myers Beach, Florida. Hurricane Ian removed it, and all other non-concrete shops and bungalows, on Wednesday, September 28, 2022 shortly after 3:00 pm. A Category 4 obliteration. Fluid water, tossed like a shaker of salt into a spiraling vapor, rended solid destruction. It all wasted away.

What remains are stories. Like this. In 1968, a forty-something Czechoslovakian woman basked in the glow of The Prague Spring - a period of political liberalization and mass protest ushered in by reformist Alexander Dubček. She then faced the Soviet invasion of her nation that August. She escaped, tucked in the back of a Volkswagen van, eventually to Florida to open an Italian restaurant in Ft Myers Beach.

I joined her in the Nadia Comăneci Olympic summer of 1976 fresh from the Breezy Freeze, a beach hangout where I worked as a fry cook. Think Krusty Krab. On the interweb I identify the Breezy Freeze as my only work experience. Nadia lists Romania as her nationality. At the '76 Olympics she received six perfect tens in various gymnastic competitions to win three gold medals.

Resolved and fierce, she commanded our attention as we gathered in bars, dined on conch fritters, and drank beer. Jimmy Buffet's "Margaritaville" hit the charts the next year. Hungarian Béla Károlyi coached her. His famed centralized program trained young girls chosen for their athletic potential. One of his first students was a then six-year-old Nadia. He defected here in 1981. Nothing remains quite the same.

Anyway, I deserted the Breezy Freeze to join the ranks of this Czechoslovakian owned Italian restaurant where Blaniece from Jamaica schooled me in kitchen techniques. I was an attentive pupil. Cooking, especially learning foreign cuisines, remains a passion. The three waitresses there often shared lessons of their escapes to their present circumstance. Clyde, a wiley islander, took my place when I was off. Otherwise harmless, Clyde had a tattoo of a knife on his arm.

On each of the three full moons I worked there, hired hands fresh off boats from the Gulf of Mexico would wander the town. The Gulf is abundant in shrimp. Taverns abound in Times Square. Alcohol on the collective breath of these mates could not mask the stench on their clothes of brine, urine and brown, white, and pink shrimp with a just a hint of grass and pistol shrimp. 

I was in the kitchen galley on the night of my final full moon there, before traveling the United States for a year in a Toyota I named Clyde, when a waitress shriek cued me in that a shrimper brandishing a knife had entered. Commotion and confusion ensued as he flicked at patrons seated at red checkered fourtops. Eventually, I shouted at the drunkard. Waddling, he slowly pursued me into the kitchen. I enticed him toward me and then back-stepped down the galley, and exited out the rear door. He stumbled out too. I darted back inside and locked the door. Story over. 

In his novel "Ultimate Excursions," Alan Gottlieb, a much better story teller than I, has me, himself, and two other college friends encounter the protagonist of his novel as we play Frisbee waterside in front of his parents' bungalow in Ft Myers Beach. It happened. It was an epic summer. We gigged. That cottage was walloped from this earth in September 2022. What remains are stories. Should you google Alan to order his novel, please know that the interweb has confounded him with a different Alan creature. The Alan I know also wrote a book about the Colorado Rockies and was an outstanding beer softball first baseman in college.

A short decade later I had changed attitudes and lattitudes. While studying for the bar I swam daily at an adjacent natatorium. Hydrotherapy.  I discovered that pool water to have several natures: mysterious, friendly, buoyant, encapsulating, resistant, and well, fluid. Some days it felt almost granular as I worked on strokes to grasp particles of water ahead of me and force them behind me and kicks that thrust me into the next reach.

In the abstract. I never was a Masters swimmer. Those swimmers not need breathe in the fifty meter breaststroke. All the oxygen need to power muscles for that short a period is already in their blood. I learned I prefer friction not aerodynamics. For one, it's cheaper. Less flashy too. I thrive in sports such as cutting the grass.

 

Which brings me to this story. Friday, June 14th at 8:00 AM MST is the Grand Depart. Aerobic knuckleheads from all over the world will compete in 2,745 miles of ultra-endurance bikepacking from Banff to New Mexico. 200,000 feet of elevation gain and loss. The winner may finish in fourteen days. That's two hundred miles a day. Top riders hardly sleep. Here is a link should you want to follow the race.

https://trackleaders.com/tourdivide24f.php

And majestic: Flathead Valley in Alberta, Grand Teton National Park, the Great Divide Basin in Wyoming, South Park, Boreas Pass in Colorado, Polvadera Mesa, and the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico. Colorado’s Indiana Pass, at just less than 12,000 feet, is the highest point on the route.

Most of the trail is well graded gravel. Nonetheless, managing water in all three forms solid, vapor, and liquid is essential. Snow melt at upper elevations in the northern Rockies is still underway leaving mud. New Mexico is arid. Exerting riders will be parched.

I cannot imagine a soundtrack. It makes me feel my sense of adventure has left me that I cannot aspire to this madness. Maybe it's time for a sidecar and a dog. No story, no song.