Monday morning I got up early to shoot some of the buildings at Canary Wharf, intending to head south and further explore the Isle of the Dogs.
As I walked out the doors of Fraser Place, however, I was met by a portly man with a backpack who asked me which way he should go to get to Canary Wharf station. I started giving him directions and he said he knew how to get there, he just wanted to know whether he should go up the concrete steps in front of the apartments or walk to the iron staircase by the harbor. I told him that it didn't really make a difference, but that I always took the iron staircase because it was more scenic. So he jovially proclaimed that he would go the scenic way with me then.
I soon realized I had met the incarnation of the character Joost in the movie, The Way.
He introduced himself as John and told me that he had just woken up that morning and decided he was going to walk home to Birmingham -- which is right around 100 miles from London. My interest was immediately piqued.
The quarter mile of conversation or so that we shared followed the same pattern. He would ask me a question (“Where are you from?” “Have you been anywhere else in Europe?” etc.). My answer would then serve as the launching point for a host of personal disclosures on his part. In what cannot have been more than 15 - 20 minutes I learned that he had a wife from Thailand who grew up in Sacramento, but whom he had met in Paris; that he had been so proud to see a Royal Marine slap Andy Murray on the back (because he had served with the Royal marines for five years); and that he had done shots of tequila with American girls in Paris, where he lived with two Dublin South-Siders not far from the Sorbonne for a few years.
He also provided at each juncture his brief and colorful opinions on Asian women, various quarters of Paris, American girls, South-Siders and East-Enders.
At a certain point I had already missed my turn in order to walk a little further with him when the instinct began to creep up in me to just keep going on with him for a while, ditch my morning shoot and catch the tube back from wherever I ended up. I could do it with perhaps only minimal disruption to everyone else's schedule. But would they be worried if I didn't make it back by 9:30? 10:00? 10:30? Hmmm… And what would John from Birmingham think if I asked to walk with him for a while? What if the ebullient man suddenly fell silent and had nothing to say? Would we have anything more to talk about?
After about a block and a half of such anguished tension, I told John I was headed down the street to the left (even though I no longer knew where I was). I shook his hand firmly and long, wishing him well but unable to rid myself of the feeling that I had failed him as a fellow traveler on this terrestrial globe.
Still fundamentally unsettled, I went back to the apartment and met up with the rest. We headed out to Tower of London for the morning, spring up into three groups once we got there.
The biggest surprise for me was that the "Tower" of London is not a tower at all but an entire fortification with multiple towers within two concentric walls. I had always imagined a solitary tower with a single prisoner at a time. When it was used as a prison there were multiple prisoners in various degrees of comfort.
Another big surprise was the fate of Sir Walter Raleigh. Though I would never have claimed to be a scholar of anything remotely related to Raleigh, I did know of him as an adventurer, courtier and man of letters in the Elizabethan age. I would never have guessed that he was thrice imprisoned (including one twelve year stint in the Tower) and eventually executed.
Finally, it was just interesting to note the ecumenical nature of the place. Protestants and Catholics alike we equally imprisoned in the tower, and worse, for their defiance of the official state church. The graffiti they scrawled or even carved elegantly into the walls speaks with grace and courage of their steadfast defiance and integrity in the face of a coercive state. The stories of Henry Walpole, Anne Askew and John Gerard were particularly moving.
I was also able to do some more experimental photography in the tower -- particularly making use of out of focus shots and deep earth tones. Looking out through the windows and barricades I was struck by the same incongruity of modern and Medieval or Renaissance or Victorian architecture.
I think most of the others were able to see the crown jewels, but I am constitutionally unable to stand in a line to see just about anything. So I skipped it.
After the tower, Anna, Emily, Nora and I took off to tour the HMS Belfast while the others visited the Tower Bridge. On the way to the Belfast we stopped for fish and chips, which were quite good.
The HMS Belfast was a surprisingly enjoyable tour. We were pretty much free to roam about where we liked all over the ship. Many areas were informative and surprising, but the real delight for me was the machine shop.
My grandfather, Paul Balsbaugh, served aboard the USS Oklahoma as a welder and went on to found Best Manufacturing in Modesto, CA, where he patented and manufactured a revolutionary walnut and almond harvester. (Researching Best Manufacturing for this post, I can across a fascinating 2008 article in the San Joaquin Historian.)
My father, George Balsbaugh, is a lifelong machinist who first worked in my grandfather’s shop then relocated and worked for most of his life in a variety of machine shops in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. After the collapse of the timber industry in Oregon, he helped invent a process for repairing sawmill rails remotely and founded his own company, Acculine Rails. He and my mother now travel around the country in the summer months, doing laser alignment and grinding to keep everyone’s 2x4s true.
Personally, I also worked in a machine shop while I lived with my maternal grandparents during the summer months of my college years -- Mid-State Manufacturing in Ripon, CA. At one point, frustrated by the mundane drudgery of my early college experience, I even asked the owner for a full time job. He told me to go back to college.
So machine shops strike a very resonant chord with this child from a town of five hundred souls who somehow finds himself the headmaster of a classical education school and who is blessed to have traveled the world.
When we were done with our tour, we headed back to Canary Wharf, intending to catch a “Shakespeare in the Park” version of Hamlet. But we camped out at the wrong park and when nothing seemed to be happening, we finally wandered around with several other confused theater-in-the-park goers to the correct location, only to find it packed to the gills and impossible to hear from any remaining seat. So we headed home.
Still … a remarkably full day!
Day 12 Reflections
Reflection One. John of Birmingham.
There have probably been a dozen or so moments like this in my life. I don't even know quite how to characterize them. It is the sort of thing that only a poem could begin to suggest and only if I could find the words and phrases. I do believe that the prompting of the Holy Spirit is involved.
I confess that I have followed these instincts less than I would have liked to have been able to say at this point in my life. Maybe a quarter of the time? A third at best?
Sometimes it's fear, sometimes a practical obstacle, sometimes an overdeveloped sense of dignity or order. But I have never regretted following this instinct and have always regretted not following it. Nor is the regret something that diminishes over time. Rather, what lingers and intensifies with time is the feeling that some great adventure has been lost forever, that I left unexplored a great "What if ..?" and that a wardrobe which might once have once led to a magical kingdom now yields only a shallow closet and solid oaken back. Such is the power of regret.
But praise be to God, who had rescued us from this body of death! His mercies are new every morning!
John of Birmingham, wherever you are, this prayer from the Lorica of St. Patrick is for you:
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,Christ on my right, Christ on my leftChrist where I lie, Christ where I sit, Christ where I ariseChrist in the heart of every man who thinks of me,Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me,Christ in every eye that sees me,Christ in every ear that hears me.
Reflection Two: The movie The Way is not an excellent film in any art house sense, but it has stuck with me for several reasons -- the archetypal quality of the four main characters, the questions it raises about community in the modern world, and the fact that it is a journey movie that restores the serious religious and even specifically Christian significance to the act of journeying -- the quest, the pilgrimage, the via dolorosa.
It would be worth the efforts of Christians in America to recover more deeply and broadly the Christian understanding of the journey -- but it does meaning getting off the freeway and out of the car.
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