Prolog   To separate the two examples of travel geographically in space, I'm inserting the topic of travel historically in time, which takes place in the mind. I've already said it requires imagination, and is aided by theatrical devices.

It is easier to conceptualize geographic space. Since seeing historic time is so abstract, it is much more difficult to visualize, and I wasn't good at it. Here is one device, that could be described as theatrical, that helped me.

At the time of my first trip to Europe in 1957, my friend and I were sitting on a railing waiting for the Roman Forum to open after lunch. That may sound odd, but then, and to some extent still, Italian workers close down museums so they can all go to lunch at the same time.

In any event, a street vendor came up to us, demonstrated to us something he was holding in his hand, we did not buy it, and he left. Those two minutes, though, had a significant effect on my education, more than seeing the Forum itself.

What he had was a thin, hardcover book, lying flat in his hand. He opened the top cover to show a map of the area of present-day Rome around the Forum. But the map consisted of glassine sheets lying over the back cover of the book. He lifted the top sheet, which had just 20th Century buildings painted on it, and all of a sudden you were looking at the Forum as it had looked a century earlier. He lifted subsequent layers of sheets, lifting away additions over the centuries, until the original Forum was visible on the back cover. I've never forgotten that.

That demonstration by a street vendor made the abstract concrete for me. Now I can stand at home in Manhattan, look at the buildings as they are, and mentally lift away the glassine sheets of centuries one at a time until I can visualize the forested green island it once was, or any period in between.

This is how a theatrical device, along with imagination, helps one conceptualize movement in time, or, if you will, time travel.

A far more obvious theatrical device is, literally, street theater, as practiced in historic restorations. We've seen these restorations in North America, but never in Europe. I don’t know if they exist there.

In Canada, in the Louisbourg restoration in Nova Scotia and in Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts, people walk the streets in costume. It is however best when you interact with them.

I remember Bev and me talking to a "fur trapper" in the historic reconstruction within Fort Snelling in Minneapolis. He was building a fire, we asked him where he had been, he told us about his "adventures" out trapping, and "avoiding the Indians", and so on.

Of course the best of all this is the Williamsburgh Restoration, which is larger and on a more complete scale. Once, while we were waiting in line to get into a building, a "gentleman" in costume came up to us to chat. We told him we were from New York. He told us how much trouble it is for him to get from Williamsburgh to New York, changing stage coaches, crossing rivers, overnighting. It brings you back in historic time.

Our best experience ever, though, was on another trip to Williamsburgh. Behind one of the houses there was an open shed where a black woman was busy; maybe she was peeling potatoes. She had on a long dress and a bandana. She was slouching and kept looking down at her work and not at the spectators. She told of serving the family in the house and about her life and her family. She spoke in the appropriate dialect. This went on for about ten minutes. Everyone was completely transported back in time.

Then the most marvelous thing happened. She broke character.

She looked up at us, and sat straight. She started speaking in the nicest university English. She explained she was a college professor, possibly of Black Studies (but I'm not sure about that), and she wanted to make sure people understood the Black contribution to Williamsburgh and US history.

Everyone was flabbergasted. Her character and real persona were so incredibly different that it was hard to believe it was the same person speaking. Yet breaking character put an emphasis on the difference between Then and Now and strengthened the historic effect.

Now I have to get literary just for a moment. Bert Brecht called this theatrical technique Verfremdung/alienation. He used it regularly in his plays, so that once you got involved in the action, something would break the illusion and you were then able to better compare the story with reality. When we were in the Middlebury German School in 1961, we put on Brecht's Mutter Courage/Mother Courage. I had a bit part as a soldier with one line, Bev did makeup, but our friend Rita played a Herald off to the side of the action, commenting on what was going on, with big placards showing the passing years. Rita was our Verfremdungseffekt/alienation effect. The woman in Williamsburgh caused a similar effect by breaking character. In Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" the character of the Stage Manager performs a similar function.

All the above can take you back in time. But my main story involves other tricks of the mind.

Montevallo, 1946   The first part of this story takes place on perhaps three different dates in the mid- to late 1940's. Let's visualize the year as 1946, when I was 6, since the story ends in 1996, and that makes a neat half-century.

My Cousin Annie, now deceased, was eleven years older than I was. She was the first member of the family to go to college. For reasons I never quite understood, this young woman from Brooklyn (as the whole family was) chose a small, very distant Southern college, the Alabama State College for Women.

She travelled regularly by train for home visits between the Birmingham area and Pennsylvania Station in New York. On the perhaps three occasions I mentioned above, my Aunt Mary, her mother, took me by subway from Brooklyn to Penn Station to form a two-person greeting party. All these occasions were for arrivals, not departures for some reason.

New York's Pennsylvania Station, just over a half-century old, was horribly vandalized in the early 1960's when it was torn down in order to put an ugly reincarnation of Madison Square Garden on top of it (site of the recent Republican Convention). The huge colonnade along Seventh Avenue, the waiting room modelled after the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, everything went. The only consolation is that the death of Penn Station was the turning point in the Historic Preservation movement. Laws were passed after that shocking event, buildings landmarked, historic districts formed. Jackie Kennedy led the fight to save Grand Central Station, Isaac Stern similarly saved Carnegie Hall. We lost Penn Station, but that loss saved everything else. But I digress.

Not all of Penn Station was torn down, only the nicest parts. The basement was saved. Literally.

Let me explain. The Pennsylvania Railroad's contribution to New York was building a tunnel. Trains enter this tunnel in New Jersey, go under the Hudson River, stop underground at Penn Station, then can proceed underground all across Manhattan, go under the East River, resurface in Queens, and proceed to Long Island or New England. At Penn Station, there is a concourse level above the platform level in the tunnel. The concourse and platforms (the "basement") are all that's left of Penn Station to service the busiest railroad station in the US, the Gateway to New York. But I'm digressing again.

In those years around 1946, Aunt Mary would take this 6-year old up from the subway into the Baths of Caracalla, where the ceiling was so breathtakingly high, you almost couldn't see it. Then we'd go down to the concourse level to check arrivals. That was another great railroad experience. Having arrived on the subway, and with the railroad trains also underground, you can imagine my associating trains always with tunnels.

If you remember election coverage from the earliest years of television, there were no cute computer graphics, no red and blue states. There were chalkboards. Someone in shirtsleeves would get some newly phoned-in results from Omaha, and would go erase and chalk in the new Nebraska totals. That seat-of-the-pants way of informing the public was the same in Penn Station. Down on the concourse level, Aunt Mary and I would go look at the chalkboard with chalked-in arrival times. Then the man would come and erase that time under, say, the Magnolia Special (I'm making that name up; I unfortunately don't really know any of those wonderful old railroad names), saying the Magnolia Special arrived in Washington 30 minutes late. Later on we'd look again, and in Baltimore it was only 20 minutes late, so it had made up time coming up the line. Finally it arrived, and we'd go over to the escalator at the proper platform bringing travellers up from the Magnolia Special and shortly, Cousin Annie's smiling face would come rising up from below.

She always talked about coming up "from Birmingham". When I asked, she did say something like it was the Alabama State College for Women at Montevallo, but that didn't mean much to a 6-year old. Montevallo must have been part of Birmingham, right? I always thought Montevallo was such a beautiful name. It sounded Italian, but why an Italian name in central Alabama? It looks like it means Mountain-Valley, but the word for valley in both Spanish and Italian ends in E, so I don't know. It's just a nice name.

Also, as a 6-year old, I knew that the trains down in the tunnel hadn't travelled all the way "from Birmingham" in a tunnel, yet sometimes a long rail tunnel flashed in my mind anyway, connecting New York and Birmingham/Montevallo. Far away places. With strange-sounding names.

Montevallo, 1996   In the mid- to late 1990's Beverly and I were spending a lot of time in the winters in Tampa, and were missing a lot of family holdiday gatherings. In 1996 I had the idea to drive to our Nashville relatives for Thanksgiving. I liked the idea of driving North to our Southern relatives. We went up through Georgia and down through Alabama.

With "travelling to relatives" we also included "travelling for travel’s sake". On the way up we stopped to see President Carter's Plains, Georgia, and the Civil War Andersonville Prison Camp. Of course, we made a quick stop in Chattanooga. After a pleasant Thanksgiving, we were going to see Birmingham, the civil rights sites in Montgomery, and were going to eat oysters in Apalachicola, Florida, which is famous for them.

The day after Thanksgiving, we left Nashville in a downpour. Driving around Birmingham it slowed to a drizzle, and then a mist. We ended up at the famous statue of Vulcan, looking down at the city in the mists. It was already dark at 6 PM, and we were going to drive down the interstate to where we had reservations for the night, just before Montgomery the next day.

It was then that Montevallo occurred to me, from a half-century earlier. Where could it be? Was it a neighborhood of Birmingham? A suburb? Maybe there would be some street signs to it. When nothing showed up, I gave up and got on the interstate going south to Montgomery.

Bev was driving in the dark and swirling mists, and I was reading the map. At a point maybe a half-hour south of Birmingham I found Montevallo on the map, maybe a good 15 minutes west of the highway. So Cousin Annie's trip had started well outside of Birmingham. Of course, in those years many outlying towns were connected to larger cities by rail.

But it was dinner time; misting; hotel reservations were waiting for us down the highway; the town would be well off the road. And anyway, over the years handfulls of even famous colleges had folded. What are the odds that the Alabama State College for Women would still be around? Yet wouldn't you imagine that Cousin Annie, who had died in her mid-50's, would want me to check it out?

And then we saw the green interstate sign in the mist:

Look at that. We just had to try.

The road went through some back woods for a quarter-hour until we reached Montevallo. We came in on the college side of town. Later, when leaving through the town proper, we saw, I think, a grand total of about two people walking in town in the drizzle. But the college was a different story. This was about to be historical time travel of an almost mystical nature.

You may know the legend of the Flying Dutchman, a sailing ship that, when boarded by a party from another ship, was found to be totally abandoned. Not only that, candles were still burning, food on the tables was still warm, but for some reason no one was to be found.

The college/university had a beautiful Victorian brick wall completely around it, with several handsome wrought-iron gates. The name change was explained on a plaque on the wall next to a gate. We drove in through an unguarded entrance. Street lights were lit, and we drove up the campus past the illuminated attractive Victorian buildings in the mist. There was no one in sight. We even drove down to the power plant. Some workers must be there. No one. We stopped at the student union, all lit up. The reception desk was unattended. We looked at some brochures, and used the rest rooms. No one was in sight. We found not one single human being the whole time we were there.

The reason is obvious. It was the day after Thanksgiving. Students and teachers had gone home. Those that hadn't were maybe out to dinner, or working in their rooms. That knowledge didn't prevent this from seeming totally like a Flying Dutchman experience.

The Victorian campus, in shadows and mist, was much prettier than, say, some castle in Transylvania that may come to mind, but you couldn't help having just a bit of an eerie feeling. Imagination? Mist and darkness as a theatrical device?

Connected to that was the knowledge that after a half-century, I was at the dark, eerie opposite end of the route of that long rail "tunnel" (or maybe time tunnel?) that led to the northeast up to Pennsylvania Station in New York, with a 6-year old holding his aunt's hand at the other end, waiting for an arrival from far off Montevallo ... where we were now standing.

Back in Tampa, in the clear light of day, I decided to actively do something, in the realization that people did really exist at the University of Montevallo! From the brochures we had picked up I had contact numbers, and I faxed the University, as an act of closure for me and for Cousin Annie, that I was a cousin of Anna Tabolin (her maiden name), one of their alumnae, that, for their records, she was now deceased, that we had visited the campus over the Thanksgiving weekend, and requested some information. They were kind enough to send me what information they had: the dates of her attendance in the late 1940's, and what her major was. Additional information they sent showed that the actress Polly Holiday, who played "Flo" on television (with a Southern, perhaps Alabama, accent: "Kiss mah gri-its!") was also an alumna of the University of Montevallo. It was nice to be able to come back down to earth and put some of the eerieness of the Montevallo experience aside, and to tie disparate facts together into some sort of cogent historical memory.

Epilog   Having left Montgomery the next day on the way to Apilachicola, I looked at the map of south-eastern Alabama and saw a name that might have been familiar, Enterprise. I checked the guidebook, and I was right, so once again we turned off the main highway for a detour, a longer one that put in jeopardy getting into Apilachicola in time for our oyster dinner (we made it).

Way back once again in the second or third grade I remember reading in the Weekly Reader about a monument to a bug. The concept of such a thing intrigues the childish mind, and it has always stayed with me. That concept was about to reach fulfillment.

In the very early 20th Century the whole region was in the cotton-growing business, and suffered the fluctuations of that market. Then the crops were decimated by the boll weevil, and farmers were forced to plant other crops, most in this region going for peanuts, for which the region is still well-known. The region reaches over the state line into Georgia, where the Carters in Plains, where we had just visited a few days earlier, are famously in the peanut business. At about the time of the First World War, or maybe shortly thereafter, a monument to the boll weevil was put up in Enterprise, Alabama, in gratitude to a bug. Now, isn't that worth seeing?

Leaving the main route finally got us into the Enterprise area, but then, as a follow-up to the boll weevil plague years ago, that modern plague hit us, the bypass. They wanted in the worst way to get us around the town, and the route into town was unclear. I remember driving somewhat lost through residential districts until we came to the main street downtown. In contrast to the bypass area, downtown Enterprise had a classic look of the 1920's. The main street was arrow-straight, with low-level commercial buildings on both sides. Due to the bypass I'm sure, there was little activity here, but the late-afternoon summer sun gave the streetscape a warm glow.

In the distance we saw what looked like a fountain in the middle of the road, at an intersection. It wasn't a fountain. In a grassy circle surrounded by a wrought-iron fence was a statue maybe twelve feet high. Standing on a pedestal was the figure of a woman. In the fashion of someone balancing a large tray of merchandise on her head, her arms were raised to support the oversized figure of a beetle. There it finally was. A monument to a bug.

I don't understand what it is about Alabama that keeps on bringing me back to the second or third grade.

There is a decided moral to the Montevallo and Enterprise stories. Always--always--take that turn off the main road to see what that interesting little town is all about. And just hope that bypass doesn't get you.