Are You a Birthday Tourist?

Birthday candles, flickr, creative commons by DavidInc

"REYNOLDS! REYNOLDS!"
Lincoln turned 200 this year, so did Poe. Woodstock's just 40, but Santa Fe's cake fits 400 candles and the University of Leipzig's 600. Later this year the Manhattan Bridge and Queensborough Bridge in New York City click into triple digits at 100 years old. And Ovid wrote his hit poem "Ibis" 2000 years ago. Next Wednesday.

Round numbers are easier to add up and remember, but should the notion of "birthday travel" affect our itineraries?

To me big birthdays -- like Hanoi's 1000th next year -- signal enough of a milestone that it at least invites witnesses to reconsider the place/person in question. "Oh, Poe is 200? I haven't read Poe since I was 12... Didn't he die puking in a gutter? Maybe I should know more." So that's good.

But for actual tourism -- going to Paris on the 200th anniversary of Bastille Day -- sometimes strikes me like hitting a Spanish beach in August. Too busy to enjoy.

In other occasions, there's just too many birthday-specific activities to ignore. Like this Poe character, who turned 200 on January 19.

"A birthday basically gives us an excuse to do more than we usually do," Chris Semtner of Richmond's Poe Museum told me by phone. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime chance to learn more about him. Like with Rembrandt's 400th birthday a few years ago, when all sorts of international celebrations were held." (Visits are up by about 100% on the year.)

One of the things planned -- and sign me up for it -- is a recreation of Poe's death.

"Most people think he died drunk in a gutter, but he actually was in a hospital surrounded by physicians," Semtner said with a miffed sigh. Apparently Poe's last moments were spent speaking with shadows on the wall, yelling "Reynolds!" over and over (unlike Citizen Kane's "Rosebud," Reynolds' identity remains a mystery). On October 3, the museum will re-create the scene continuously in one of the museum galleries.

One of the staff members plays the author. Semnter said, "Yeah, he's skinny and has a moustache like Poe."

Travel Poems? Yes, Travel Poems!

Stumbled on this on YouTube and, maybe I'm a cynic, but it kinda cracks me up. Poems collected from a one-time stoner's trip across north Africa, the Middle East and into Southeast Asia in 1971. It's from poet Richard Krech's 1972 book "Poems from Free World," named for his observation of pool players in sarongs in Mandalay. It's not altogether uninteresting.

Of travel

"The acquisition of a ticket enables you to travel more than geographically."


Of Libya

"I am a stranger among strangers.
Here there are no women, no drugs, no beer, no wine, no amusement
I have found companionship in the Tunisians
Who come here to work because the pay is better...
Habib and his illiterate brother
Who shares a bong with me because we both have tattoos."

Of bus ride into Afghanistan

"Drink chai, smoke, take showers.
Several hours later Linda and I asleep on the rooftop
The stars brilliant in the windy sky
The horse cart in the galloping street
The opium dreams going on forever
So real I can reach out and touch them"

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I actually tried to make an EP a few years ago called "I Like to Travel," which was largely dumb and unmelodic, and completely unfinished. My favorite song, probably, was "Fistfight at the Union of '90s Expats" which imagined expats sharing tales from the road a decade later. In Pennsylvania.

It goes:

"At the union
Of '90s expats
Held at
A swank
Philadelphia lodge
Hunter's speech
Called The Beach
As the very Dylan
Of our broken
Wayward generation
Some Keralan res
Threw off his fez
And said 'spit on this son'
That's revisionist raj'
We spray and spread in the sun
Till darkness comes
With a punch"

[enter synthesizer solo]


OK, maybe travel's best left outside verse.