Transcript

Dog Days · Letter to America

0:02
SPEAKER_00: Windows and doors are open twenty-four hours a day.
0:05
SPEAKER_00: Keys hang from locks that haven't been used in weeks.
0:08
SPEAKER_00: There's a steady hum in our ears of fans moving hot air out and cool air in.
0:15
SPEAKER_00: Shades down, white noise, cool breeze flowing, warm sun when you want it.
0:21
SPEAKER_00: It's Istanbul at its best.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: Hot European summers kept in check by the cold depths of the Black Sea nearby.
0:32
SPEAKER_00: The weather reminds me of San Francisco, another climate where you can kind of choose your weather by moving from one side of the house or the bay to the other.
0:41
SPEAKER_00: Seasonal heat or cold available, but seldom imposed.
0:47
SPEAKER_00: An unintended consequence, no real lines between us and nature.
0:53
SPEAKER_00: Outside and inside, blurred across doorways and windowsills.
0:59
SPEAKER_00: No real bugs, but the occasional fly or bee that got lost or blown off course.
1:06
SPEAKER_00: The night air is refreshing.
1:08
SPEAKER_00: The steady hum, generally very forgiving, not noise canceling so much as muting.
1:14
SPEAKER_00: It's almost perfect.
1:17
SPEAKER_00: Like a tent in the forest meets the creature comforts at home.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: But then there are the creatures.
1:24
SPEAKER_00: The street dogs and cats each has their own alarm system and trigger.
1:29
SPEAKER_00: Like the security cameras along the streets, the perimeter monitoring overlaps, and more than adequately covers every perceived threat, from down the road or the forest's edge.
1:41
SPEAKER_00: Some animals actively patrol, like Buddy, and others aren't really fussed, but still keep one eye open, just in case.
1:50
SPEAKER_00: This stack of overlapping alarm systems, each with different triggers and sensitivities, come together.
1:57
SPEAKER_00: Some protect us from garbage trucks, the dogs that follow them, to taxis dropping people off, the cars turning around at the dead end where our house sits.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: Food delivery scooters, boars from the woods, a hedgehog or tortoise, lizards, with and without legs.
2:16
SPEAKER_00: Has anyone else heard of legless lizards?
2:18
SPEAKER_00: Apparently not to be confused with snakes?
2:22
SPEAKER_00: At any given moment, some trigger is tripped, some alarm sounds, and then they all join in.
2:28
SPEAKER_00: A bark at one gate is answered at every gate.
2:33
SPEAKER_00: No dog asks whether the alarm was warranted.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: Every dog on the street joins a thunderous chorus of barking, growling, and general alarm.
2:43
SPEAKER_00: It's usually only a few minutes, but when the two dogs in the house join in, no amount of weight noise will do.
2:50
SPEAKER_00: In short, summer nights are heavenly until all hell breaks loose.
2:57
SPEAKER_00: Breaches of the perimeter security are a particular caliber of trigger.
3:01
SPEAKER_00: When a stranger approaches the gate, canine or human, no difference, it's DEF CON 1 on a hair trigger.
3:08
SPEAKER_00: Threat imminent, teeth bared, hair raised, growls, barks, gnashing jaws.
3:14
SPEAKER_00: And then I open the gate and the threat actually comes inside our territory.
3:19
SPEAKER_00: And then sniffing and tail wagging, false alarm, friend, not foe.
3:25
SPEAKER_00: Dog happily leads our guests to the door.
3:28
SPEAKER_00: The whole storm in a teacup, exposed in a split second.
3:32
SPEAKER_00: Scared puppies, scare puppies.
3:35
SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, Storm undrung are descending on Turkey from the sky this week.
3:40
SPEAKER_00: President 47 is flying here on his recently security enhanced handme down 7478.
3:46
SPEAKER_00: He's coming to discuss security with NATO, war on its borders in Ukraine and Iran.
3:53
SPEAKER_00: Thirty-two nations with overlapping threat vectors, spanning three continents, with inadequate coverage, trying to achieve something that's easier said than done.
4:02
SPEAKER_00: Sleeping like a baby.
4:05
SPEAKER_00: My three nationalities in a room together.
4:08
SPEAKER_00: One oasting, two of the three barely able to share that space, and struggling to renew a trade agreement that once felt like a formality.
4:17
SPEAKER_00: Two others once held each other at arm's length, and now embrace with open arms.
4:23
SPEAKER_00: A mixed bag of leaders and relationships, allies for over 75 years, suddenly sounding alarms about threats posed by each other to the alliance itself.
4:33
SPEAKER_00: Nobody looking forward to this gathering, but at least relieved that it was still gathering.
4:38
SPEAKER_00: Return flight on the trusty 35-year-old Cold War veteran Air Force One?
4:43
SPEAKER_00: It's hard not to feel tension.
4:46
SPEAKER_00: It's unsettling that this alliance covers the national security of my whole family and me, from Toronto to New York to Istanbul.
4:55
SPEAKER_00: We had our own informal security summit just the other day, planning logistics for my sister and her family to move to Canada, and my father's plan to follow them soon after.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: My son may even head up there to spend some time with them before the cousins have to start school.
5:10
SPEAKER_00: With all the excitement, I was surprised to feel what a friend calls rising dam.
5:16
SPEAKER_00: I felt down, even a little abandoned.
5:20
SPEAKER_00: The irony wasn't lost on me.
5:22
SPEAKER_00: I was the one who left home at eighteen and only returned in my mid-fifties.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: I was always the one on the opposite end of the world.
5:30
SPEAKER_00: Why did I suddenly feel alone?
5:32
SPEAKER_00: Nobody had even left yet.
5:34
SPEAKER_00: My wife and I will be here together.
5:36
SPEAKER_00: We've already experienced this when our youngest went to college, our first nights in an empty nest.
5:41
SPEAKER_00: And yet, my parents and sister had been in Istanbul pretty much since 1990.
5:46
SPEAKER_00: I came and went, but they always stayed over those thirty odd years.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: I was always the one who left, and now, oddly, I would be the one left behind.
5:57
SPEAKER_00: It's easy to laugh out loud at the childish, even silly notion that I was a kid suddenly left home alone, his family flying away without him.
6:06
SPEAKER_00: The movie version was hilarious, but Kevin was eight.
6:09
SPEAKER_00: I'm fifty-seven.
6:11
SPEAKER_00: Whatever the rational truth, my feelings were that I was suddenly going to be alone in Turkey for the first time.
6:18
SPEAKER_00: The funny thing that dawned on me, slowly, was that for thirty-six years, I'd been alone and never felt remotely abandoned or lonely.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: I felt free.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: I would come and visit, they'd give me a ride to Istanbul airport, and I'd wave warmly, and they held back their tears.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: I was always the one departing at departures.
6:38
SPEAKER_00: Heading through passport control.
6:40
SPEAKER_00: I was heading home, not leaving it.
6:43
SPEAKER_00: Suddenly, I'm on the other side of the fence.
6:46
SPEAKER_00: This is my home, and I'm staying.
6:49
SPEAKER_00: I'm the one at the passengers only gate, holding back my tears.
6:53
SPEAKER_00: They're the ones waving and departing, passport in hand, on a grand adventure.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: Our kids also come and visit Istom.
7:00
SPEAKER_00: We do the same in New York.
7:02
SPEAKER_00: And yet, no matter what airport or which side of security I'm on, it always feels like they're leaving me behind.
7:10
SPEAKER_00: In my senior yearbook, we chose quotes to have below our names.
7:15
SPEAKER_00: I selected a line from Robert Frost's poem Mending Wall for my entry.
7:19
SPEAKER_00: From page 65, beside my optimistic smile, I quoted, Before I built a wall, I'd asked to know what I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offense.
7:34
SPEAKER_00: Something there is that doesn't love a wall, that wants it down.
7:39
SPEAKER_00: Our school had been caught, literally and figuratively, in the crossfire of political unrest and riots a year prior.
7:47
SPEAKER_00: We were never a target and weren't in imminent danger, but there was gunfire in the street in front of our school, and the fence around the campus suddenly made some feel that we needed a taller wall to protect us.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: To my mind, the wall was what made us a target.
8:04
SPEAKER_00: The fence was a marker, the stone wall, a barrier to separate us from them, whoever that was supposed to be.
8:12
SPEAKER_00: It made me feel vulnerable, not safe.
8:16
SPEAKER_00: One day as we sat on the field during lunch, the grass tickling between the toes of my bare feet, we noticed a CNN camera crew on campus and asked what they were shooting.
8:26
SPEAKER_00: They told us it was just file footage of the school.
8:30
SPEAKER_00: Not being born yesterday, we immediately understood what that meant.
8:35
SPEAKER_00: Before footage for the broadcast that would come after whatever that wall was supposed to protect us from happened.
8:57
SPEAKER_00: A$250 million epic shot entirely on IMAX.
9:01
SPEAKER_00: Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey with Matt Damon in the role of Odysseus.
9:07
SPEAKER_00: The story of the king's long, hard return home, after ten years of battle and a frightful ten-year journey, where he had overcome every obstacle the gods and mortals could throw in the way of his homecoming.
9:19
SPEAKER_00: He finally arrives in disguise to get past the defenses and slip past every wall and gate, and fools everyone in Ithaca.
9:28
SPEAKER_00: He sees his old dog, Argos, dying in a trash heap.
9:33
SPEAKER_00: Unlike everyone else, Argos recognizes him immediately, even after twenty years apart.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: He drops his ears, wags his tail, and dies.
9:43
SPEAKER_00: Obysseus, still in disguise, wipes away a tear and walks past.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: Finally returning to his house, his wife Penelope isn't convinced it's him until he shows that he knows a secret no one else would.
9:58
SPEAKER_00: That their bed is built into a living olive tree, rooted in the ground.
10:03
SPEAKER_00: Lying here in our big bed, I imagine them reunited with each other, windows and doors open, a breeze keeping them cool, and lying close, safe, and sound.
10:16
SPEAKER_00: This is Hondalin.
10:18
SPEAKER_00: From his stomach.