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It was an unassuming storefront with a killer name: the Albion Beatnik Café.  And, on an unassuming drizzly morning, that café watched this drowned American rat step through the door to the premises. The Beatnik Cafe was the kind of place to peruse, pursue, and, hopefully, purchase for just the pleasure of language. My eyes swept the cubicles of literary wonders from the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s . . . though I found no works by Nelson Algren (such as Man with the Golden Arm). I had wanted to read this Chicago author’s books after thumbing through Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins. Simone and Nelson had loved each other across Paris, Chicago, then Paris, and back again. Were they Beatniks? Their outrageously good writing and world-war auras certainly put them firmly in that era.

Dennis, the proprietor, appeared, appropriately unhinged (the hair helped), with a French press. This was the kind of shop that might convince me to linger in Oxfordshire a few more weeks. Travelers are reluctant buyers of actual books, but I did buy the coffee and fully appreciated reading about the Beatnik reading group and open mics. Choosing your own coffee mug from the narrow shelves was also a lovely touch. This perfect, quirky establishment off the beaten path is a place where someone could discuss writing and weather, Algren and anarchy, poetry and deals made with devil Amazon.com.

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Written around 1977 after hearing stories from Isabel Bridget Montague, mother of Eileen Montague Brown, my mother’s best friend. Izzy left for Canada with her sister Anne in 1911. She later returned to Ireland to visit, but her father had been lost at sea. She never saw him again.

Well, someone should go and tell Montague

That his daughter’s at the agent’s door;

And that means that she’s goin’ to America,

And she won’t see Ireland no more.

Well, someone has gone to tell Montague as he’s loadin’ up boats by the sea;

And he’s wearily put his big box down, and said, “I wish this her coffin would be.”

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I think we’re the only guests in the Redcar Hotel in Bath. We do hear other people from time to time, but they only seem to stay one night at a time. And, for some reason unknown to us, these guests are housed right next door. Why the staff can’t put at least one room between us and these nightlies, I do not know. There was the guy with a bad cough, the two girls who arrived at two a.m. and talked loudly till four a.m., and last night the guy who yakked on his phone. On our last night, it would be great if everybody else on our floor has already checked out.

In January when I booked this room, I must have been looking only at price and location, because otherwise this is a tired old dump. The basics are here: beds, carpeting, toilet, shower, hook on the bathroom door. But modern amenities are absent. I had failed to read Tripadvisor before the booking.

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On my first trip to England in 1971, I stayed at a hostel in central London where all the guests were college students, college dropouts, recent college graduates, or draft dodgers like my boyfriend. They were from several different countries, and we called each other by our places of origin. I was “California.”

Some of us banded together for tourist excursions, and we enjoyed sharing information about cheap food, interesting sites to visit, train and bus schedules, and our thoughts about Vietnam and President Nixon. Breakfasts were cheap and simple, and tea or coffee were about the only things I remember being offered by the hostel itself. My “cooking” was noodle- and rice-based dishes with the occasional bag of digestives or ginger crisps shared with everyone.

I took trips with fellow hostelers, including to Oxford with a Swedish student, a day at Buckingham Palace and various parks with some other Americans, and a day at the British Museum with some Germans. The whole hostel experience had been stimulating, collegial, and fun.  It was a unique period of my life. I’d saved some money from my preschool job and now had no job, no family around, and no responsibilities of classes, papers to write, and deadlines.  But, oh boy, the education I was getting was phenomenal.

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On a moist and breezy morning in 2012, Rachel and I rattled along the motorway in her Toyota. We were leaving the Cambridge fens for the river heathlands of East Anglia and Sutton Hoo. The 625 CE ship burial was excavated in 1939, its chamber packed with treasures: Byzantine silverware, gold jewelry, a feasting set, and an ornate iron helmet. The helmet was highly corroded and broken into hundreds of tiny fragments. A replica of the helmet was fashioned in the 1970s by England’s Royal Armouries and is now housed in the British Museum. My favorite detail of the helmet is that the eyebrows are lined with garnets.

Reading about the ancient Norse burial site Sutton Hoo had first caught my attention in high school. The oldness of it. The death of a foreign king of it. The odd, wonderful name. The haunting and glorious iron helmet found there.

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The British occupation, the potato famine, and Dillon family migration to the United States were factors throughout our trip to Ireland in 2006. These factors weren’t discussed outright, but their shadows, both horrific and hopeful, followed us throughout our three weeks in County Clare.

Potatoes were the diet staple of the poorest Irish, and County Clare in far western Ireland, would have been one of the hardest hit by the Great Hunger, An Gorta Mór in Gaelic.

Ireland was Britain’s first colony and had been part of the English and then British Empire for over 700 years. And those British occupiers only made things worse when the blight hit the potato plants. What the hell happened?

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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book set on this island, was read by perhaps every book club in the United States, including mine in Salt Lake City. Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’ book, published in the US in 2007, is set during the occupation of Guernsey by Nazi soldiers starting in 1940. Various monuments along the island’s waterfront commemorate the liberation of the island in 1944.

A grim and true part of the book was the description of the Todt workers (named for engineer Fritz Todt, shown at left) brought to Guernsey by the Nazis. These conscripts were an assortment of 16,000 men and boys from Germany’s Occupied Territories, political prisoners, Russian prisoners of war, and 1% of the German men who could not pass the physical. They were often worked to death as part of Heinrich Himmler’s plan of “Death by Exhaustion.” I saw no memorials to them.

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I had thought it would be on display on a wall in the great room

Along with the tanks, medals, cannons, uniformed manikins

patriotic photos, letters, weapons, maps

But no.

The painting was hung in a smaller room up the stairs

all to itself in the Imperial War Museum

 in a corner of this former mental hospital.

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She was a woman I’ve admired my whole life. Her first name was Helen, like mine, and her mother’s name was Helen, just like mine. She was called by her middle name, like I am. And boy could she draw.

She collected fossils and enjoyed categorizing them. She also drew several hundred paintings of mushrooms, lichens, and other botanicals.  Her paper, “On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae [now known as Flammulina velutipes], proposed her theory of how fungi spores are reproduced. It was presented at a meeting of Linnean Society in 1897 by a man, since women were not allowed at meetings.

Potter’s family often stayed in the Near Sawrey area for their holidays, and their coachman would lodge at a nearby farm, Hill Top (shown at right). The house is an example of “Lakeland vernacular architecture” with random stone walls and a slate roof.

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Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean. – John Muir

The Muirs must have been a pretty sorry sight when they first arrived in New York in 1849. The father Daniel, two young girls, and a young boy carried their belongings off the ship that had left Glasgow six weeks earlier. And the 11-year-old son, John, may have been the most bedraggled of the lot. Tall, skinny, in old clothes, his sharp, gray eyes observing everything. And, if anyone asked him a question, his Scottish brogue would have clouded this shy boy’s answer. He probably watched everything keenly during the family’s next leg of the journey to Marquette County, Wisconsin: the oak trees, the meadows, the sunflowers, fields of wheat, and water lilies in the glacial lakes. His mother and younger siblings had been left behind in Dunbar, awaiting word to travel to the New World.

In 2011, my companions and I drove into the town of Dunbar, southeast of Edinburgh. This American was looking for John Muir’s birthplace. Identified with the American conservation ethic and a co-founder of the Sierra Club, Muir is an icon in the United States, but his Scottish origins were not well known to me. Driving along Dunbar’s main street, the American flag gave the site away.

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