A "JUICE JUNKIE" ARRIVES AT A RAINY DAWN IN FRANKFURT,
IN SEARCH OF AN ELECTRIC LINE TO CONNECT TO,
TO SEND YOU THE LAST IN-TRANSIT NOTE OF LADAKH-'01
August 6, 2001
It is still the same date, but not the same continent, and half a world closer to home in this rainy European dawn. I am bereft of watch, so that the former time zones are not as apparent as the time it seems to be at the point is sit down at each of the three "marker port cities"-Delhi, and Frankfurt-both in the night-and Frankfurt and Washington-both in the mid-day, a "three continent sameness" that comes along with a westward flight at 510 mph, the same speed as the sun is traveling.
I have just tumbled off the crowded L/H 747 in which most every other person was swathed in a sari, and now I am heading into the western crowd of student summer tourists sporting tank tops, cutoffs and sandals, as they return from backpacking with a Eurail Pass. I have found a German line of whatever current there may be to run through my transformers and adaptors, so I can type for the first time since the generators which could keep me going only so longs the title of the chapters put together as organizational "promissory notes" as to what might have been typed had there been time and light and electricity enough. It seems there was never enough of any of the above, largely because the Dell failed to function on battery, even two new, expensive and fully charged batteries-even long enough to "boot." If this is not able to be fixed in the brief week between arrival in DC and takeoff for Kamchatka Siberia, I will have to either substitute the IBM Think Pad or waste the whole long time in transit across the continent and across the Bering Sea to the other side of Asia from that from which I have just returned-a function for these long trips that I have hoped to use with the new system, which seems to have disappointed my frustrated writer's plans.
At least I had kept an intact "Serial Letter System" I may have begun as long ago as my first trip to Africa which has gone through a series of A-1-6 for Ladakh-'01, and may need to be kept going through a B-series for Kamchatka-'01, and Spiti/Nepal-'01 in a C-series. It may take time for the letters to be sent, received, re-collected, Xeroxed and sent back, and there may be less legibility-as we saw with the Kazakhstan story only now emerging in typescript after a year in ballpoint, but it should at least be more reliable in all circumstances, even those as primitive as the Siberian brown bear and snow sheep habitat and the remote villages of the Himalayas-now even coming up with a suggestion that it be the dead of winter for the first of the Ladakh-'02-hardly a time when I could expect more light, leisure or electricity!