The Stones

At 7:30 am, GMT, the alarm on my watch went off. I despise mornings. I have been nocturnal for as long I can remember. I must have driven my mother mad with nightly battles to put me to bed and daily battles to wake me up the next morning. But this morning was different. I had been waiting for this morning almost my entire life.

I got up and as usual the first thing I see is my flatmate. When I first arrived in London, I secretly prayed that I would not get a flatmate, or that the flatmate I was to be assigned had met an unfortunate end. But there was no such luck. No doubt he was a perfectly fine human being. I'm sure he loved his mother and that his father took great pride in him. But as far as I was concerned he was the fat, balding git who was infringing on my territory. I have an inability to live with people. I hated my family until, one by one, as my sister and brother and I moved out, I learned that they are actually rather interesting and intelligent people whom I enjoy being around, as long as we go to our separate homes at night. How my wife and I have managed to make it to a year and five months without bloodshed is a mystery to me. I supposed to him I was the fat, long haired moron who infringed upon his territory.

There were two main sources of contention between us, snoring and dishes. Each of the flats leased by the University for students in the Missouri-London program came with two sets of dishes and flatware along with a couple pots and pans. I decided when I moved in that I was going to clean dishes as I used them and keep from letting a mess pile up in our "kitchen", which was little more than a couple of cabinets, a sink, a range about the size of an EZ-Bake oven and a similarly diminutive fridge about three feet from the foot of my bed. My flatmate on the other hand came to the conclusion rather early on that we must have some new, high-tech, self-cleaning dishes, because he left them sitting dirty in the sink and came home to find them clean in the cabinets. I once attempted to discuss the dishes with him. He quickly and firmly informed me that my request that he clean the dishes when he was done with them was "immature" and then stormed out of the flat. That was when I decided to hide half the dishes, flatware and pots in my desk, and leave half for him to deal with as he pleases.

However, much worse than the dishes was the snoring. I snore. Having slept through most of my snoring, I can't tell you exactly how bad it is, but I am told it is pretty horrible. I truly feel pity for anyone who sleeps within a square mile of me. It turned out that my flatmate also snores. He also talks in his sleep. At least I think it was talking. It sounded more like he was invoking demons. I dealt with my flatmate's snoring in a simple and rational manner. I got ear plugs. I hate sleeping with ear plugs, but I hate not sleeping even more. My flatmate came up with his own solution, which involved yanking my covers off of me in the middle of the night, screaming at me to be quiet and telling everyone who would listen what a horrible sound I make. I attempted to point out that his snoring was equally obnoxious and that a compromise might be in order. Well, actually, I yelled back at him one night when he started snoring after waking me up, "Oh no you don't! Don't you even start snoring after waking me up like that, sonuvabitch!!"

But even the sight of that overstuffed carcass of his lounging in his bed was not enough to ruin this day.

I hopped into the shower. The shower itself had presented some interesting challenges. It was a smallish console shower with a curtain instead of a door. The curtain was about the most useless shower curtain I have ever dealt with. It either blew into the shower, or out, never staying where it should and always letting the bathroom get flooded. That is until I stumbled on to a brilliant solution to the problem. I bought a box of hinged paper clips and clipped the curtain to the console, keeping it out of my way and the bathroom unflooded. I never quite got around to explaining my solution and its advantages to my flatmate. I expect he continued fighting with the curtain and mopping up the bathroom throughout the semester.

After my shower, I quickly dressed and was out the door. Our building was the nicer of the two leased by the University that semester. The rooms where bigger and not so crowded together. Also, we were closer to Sainsbury's, our local grocery store. I loved Sainsbury's. I was there almost every day, even if only to grab a copy of The Independent or The Guardian. Britain isn't supposed to have particularly good food. But I really grew to love some of the food I got over there. A particular favorite was Super Noodles. They are a brand of Ramen. But unlike the Ramen you get here in the US, instead of the flavor packet forming soup, it formed a sauce. And the packages were a bit bigger than your average Ramen package, so they could actually serve as a meal. Also, there were the "long life" breakfasts. They were a store brand of pre-packaged hot breakfasts. Potatoes, eggs, cheese, sausage etc all came in a big, vacuum sealed pack that you just dumped out into a pan and cooked until the potatoes were brown. It was good stuff. There was also the spicy pizza. It was a frozen pizza with a chili sauce instead of tomato sauce. So instead of the sometime overpoweringly sweet tomato taste you often get on pizza, it had a spicy kick that I wish I could find here. I could go on.

Until my semester in London, a bus had always been a bus to me. Whether it was local public transportation, Greyhound or some charter, it was a "bus". In England a bus is the large, sometimes double decker, vehicle that will take you from one part of London to another for a pound twenty. It was public transport. The large vehicles that uses to take one to other parts of the country are in the UK called coaches. The coaches that we were to be boarding that day were waiting for us in front of the other building, just a block away.

It was a cool morning. They all were. I didn't much care for the freezing cold when I first got there in January. But the weather slowly warmed and the temperature started to hover around the 60-70 degree range rather quickly. And despite the stereotype, it didn't rain every day. We don't get too many of those crisp, invigorating days here in St. Louis. Too often the weather seems to go from very cold to very hot. It was on mornings like that one when I really gave serious consideration to moving to London permanently.

Outside of the other building, my fellow students were starting to gather around the two coaches. I quickly spotted and joined the group of friends I hung out with most.

"'ows it goin', mate?" Jason greeted me, with his mock East London accent. I met Jason my first day in London. I was worn out from the flight over. I spent most of the time in the airport in a daze. The flight had been about ten hours of sheer hell. I am not a small man. I am well above average in both height and girth. So, sitting in an average airline seat for any length of time is not a pleasant experience. Sitting in one through a two hour flight delay and an eight hour flight is torture. My body was telling me it was 3 am, my watch and the daylight outside said it was 9. Cramps, stiff muscles, fatigue and jet lag were not making for a good start to my London experience. All I wanted was to go to my flat and crawl into whatever passed for a bed. The people who ran the Missouri-London program had other plans. They were determined to help us overcome jet lag as fast as possible by forcing us to stay awake until that night.

That day is a bit of a blur. What I do remember is arriving at the flats, being given about 20 minutes to unload our possessions before having to get back on the coach and being dropped off at Hyde Park. The bleary-eyed lot of us where then lead through the park to a restaurant attached to Kensington Palace, where Princess Di made her home at the time. We didn't see Di, but were fed. Sort of. We had some sort of cold, greenish soup that we never managed to figure out the contents of. And we had some cucumber sandwiches that I could have lived without.

What I really remember was the people with whom I shared my table. Among them was Jason, one of the coolest devout Christians I have ever met. I immediately took a liking to him. Like me he enjoys a good debate and has a love for books that borders on a fetish. Despite being a Christian, he has a wicked sense of humor. At least, he did at the time. Despite all those 3 hour debates/conversations we had, despite 3 and half months of a rather close friendship we developed, we have since lost contact.

Also at the table was Joe. Like Jason he was a Christian. And like Jason, that cloak of Christianity failed to hide his wicked side. For most of the trip, he was a real laugh to hang around with. Then towards the end, he became a real prat. I think excess of drink and the lack of a sense of responsibility that can overcome one when traveling abroad blinded him to the fact that we stopped laughing at his increasingly obnoxious antics and tried to spend as little time with him as possible.

Finally at my table was Stephanie. At first glance, she is not exactly what I normally considered my type. She was short and slight and looked a few years younger than she was. But there was something in her eyes, a look that said that she would eventually become either a poet or a serial killer. That turned me on almost instantly. Unfortunately, she had a boyfriend at home to whom she intended to stay loyal. That of course did not stop me from flirting. I took it upon myself to remind her on a fairly regular basis that I was there to satisfy her needs should she ever decide three and a half months was too long to go without. And she genuinely enjoyed the attention. Had she ever expressed any disgust or displeasure at my only half joking advances, I would have gladly stopped. She preferred however to mock my pathetic attempts and revel in being worshipped as a sex goddess.

Amy I met my second day in London. She was Stephanie's flatmate. Unlike me and my flatmate they got on from the start and spent a great deal of time together. Amy was a little more my type physically, being taller than Steph and having more meat on her bones. Were it not for the fact that he face looked almost exactly like my sister's, I might have turned some of my attentions toward her. What was especially cool about Amy was that she speaks French fluently. London seemed be under siege by French teenagers. Most of them came over on the Eurostar for field trips with their schools. I always enjoyed it when some smart assed French kid would tell his friends, "Regard. Un groupe d'Américains en graisse et laids," she would come back with, "Je parle français vous fétide sentant peu de merde." For a little while, Amy had a bit of a thing for Joe. Fortunately for her, she learned what an ass he is before anything really happened between them.

We climbed onto the coach. Toward the back, there were four seats sitting opposite each other with a table in between. Needless to say, we claimed these as our own. For me, the coach rides were always a bit disconcerting. For the most part, I had no trouble dealing with the fact that the British drive on the opposite side of the street. This is mainly because I never drove while over there. The most contact I had with the roads was crossing them, and always made sure to look both ways just to make sure. I rarely missed driving while I was over there. Occasionally I got a bit of a desire to go tooling through the English countryside. But for the most part, I really enjoyed taking the Tube and walking to get around London, and taking the train when I wanted to get out to the rest of the UK.

That is one of the things I miss most now that I am back here in the US. Even before I went to London I had no love for the public transit system here in St. Louis. Between a few unreliable busses that take two hours to travel a distance that would normally take fifteen minutes to drive, and then only until the early evening; and Metrolink, our one light rail line that goes from the airport to a casino just across the river in Illinois and back, I am pretty much forced to drive to get around. I like to drive if I am on an open road without much traffic. But fighting my way down a crowded highway at 30 MPH to get to work every day makes me long for the Tube.

The Underground, or "Tube" as it is also known, is London's subway. There were few parts of London that did not have a Tube station within walking distance. Admittedly, my concept of walking distance was a lot larger back then. Simply because I had to walk a lot, I started to get into fairly decent shape. I still had a fair amount of girth, but my cardiovascular strength was the best it had been in years. Not only that, but walking around gave me a chance to see the non-tourist parts of London, where people live and work, allowing me to experience much more than I would have otherwise.

As part of the Missouri-London program, we took frequent field trips outside of London, as we were doing that day. But sometimes, I just felt like getting out on my own. Lacking a car was no problem, because all I needed to do was hop a train. Since coming back from London, I have often given serious consideration to trying to start a political movement to create a train system here more like the one in the UK. Only my realization of the futility of such an endeavor in our car obsessed culture keeps me from doing it. I truly love trains. I love being able to sit back and watch the countryside roll by. When I drive, I am too busy watching the road to look around. When I fly, all I see are clouds and undistinguisible chunks of ground. I wish we had better trains here so I could see America the way I saw England. Away from the interstates and airports, I think the US must be at least as charming as the English countryside.

So it was only on the coaches we took on field trips that I really spent any time on the road. Rationally, I knew that the coach driver knew what he was doing, that we were on the proper side of the road. But that was not enough to overcome nearly ten years of driving habits that kept screaming from deep inside my brain, "THIS LUNATIC IS GOING DOWN THE WRONG SIDE OF THE ROAD!!! OH, GOD!!!! HE IS GOING UP AN EXIT RAMP!!!! WE'RE GONNA DIE!!!!"

This time, I was still nervous. But my anticipation help keep my leeriness of British driving habits at bay. The four of us probably talked almost non-stop. I can't tell you exactly about what. No doubt we gossiped about who came home drunk again, who came home at four again, who failed to come home at all again. And I am sure we talked about our destination. I certainly was not the only one who had been dreaming of this day.

The coach trip took about an hour if I remember correctly. For all my faulty, foggy memories of that time, the memory of seeing the stones for the first time is clear as if it had happened today. We were still in the coach, mere minutes from our destination. We were coming to the top of a hill. They were to the front of the coach on to the right. I just barely glimpsed them before were started back down the hill we had just topped. That was the very moment a lifelong dream had come true. I saw Stonehenge with my own eyes. It wasn't a picture. It wasn't on TV. I had seen them, just over hill to the right.

The coaches pulled into the parking lot and we all piled out and headed toward the gate. That was the first thing that didn't seem quite right. I guess I had pictured Stonehenge as sitting out there in the middle of Salisbury plane. I knew they were a tourist attraction and the entry fees went towards keeping it up and the fences and gates kept it safe. But still, it did mess a bit with my fantasy.

One thing about the Salisbury plane is that it is incredibly windy there. That morning I had elected to just let my hair stay down. Only a minute or two after getting off the coach and having it whipping me in the face before I thought better of that decision. The wind was so strong and constant that to put my hair in a ponytail, all I had to do was face the wind. It blew my hair straight back and I could easily grab it and tie it up.

The next thing to ruin my fantasy a bit was a gift from some French teenagers. I really learned to hate French teenagers while in London. They had to be the single rudest group of people with whom I had the misfortune to come in frequent contact. Once I was at a play and had ended up sitting in the middle of a large group of them. Now, I know that around the world there are differing standards of hygiene, but the air around these kids was unbreathable. Not only that, but they talked through the whole show, kicking their shoes off and putting their feet up on the seats in front of them. And all I could think was, "Oh, yeah. France is the heart of culture and refinement."

Another time, at Warwick Castle, I was behind a group of these beasts. I was headed towards a part of the castle when they suddenly stopped, completely blocking my way. I guess they decided that was a good place to stop and chat. At that point, I was so sick of dealing with them that I completely lost it and yelled, "Either go in the damn room or get out of my way!!!" They looked at me as if I were about to pull a gun on them and quickly moved.

But the worst thing they did to me they had done a couple of years before I ever got to London. A group of those creatures were on a field trip to Stonehenge. It seems that it struck some of them that what Stonehenge really needed was a good coat of spray paint. Fortunately, the paint came off. Unfortunately, they were the last group of visitors allowed to walk amongst the stones themselves. Stonehenge was fenced off. We were limited to a path that came no closer than 10 yards from the stones. I had dreamed of actually walking up to them, touching them, feeling what a few millennia of history feels like. Instead, I was kept away, at a safe distance, because of some damn French teenagers.

Of course, I had been warned about this in advance, so I had worked through most of my disappointment already. By that point, I was ready to see the stones under whatever circumstances I could. It took me less than five minutes to completely use up all the film in my disposable camera. I ran up and around the path, snapping pictures, having fellow students snap pictures of me with the stones in the background. I was using a disposable because I had managed on only my second day in London to lose the camera my parents had lent me. The upside about losing it so soon was I didn't lose many pictures. The downside was I don't have many pictures from the first part of my trip. It was after using up that disposable camera that I knew I had to get permanent replacement for the camera I had lost. There were too many pictures that had already gone untaken. Stonehenge reminded me that I was going to want have pictures to look at as the years went by.

After I emptied my camera, I stopped running around. For the first time I really looked at the stones for more than just a couple of seconds, without a camera lens between them and my eyes. And I felt empty, disappointed. I had almost convinced myself that seeing the stones would allow my to somehow come into personal contact with all those centuries of history they had stood watch over. Of course, it didn't. I suddenly was overcome with the sensation that one of my lifelong goals was to come see a pile of neatly stacked rocks. I didn't like that sensation.

Maybe it was rationalization. Maybe it was hope overcoming reality. But as I stood there and looked at the stones, that sensation started to fade. I felt like, even if it wasn't quite the mystical experience I had hoped for, I was, in a way coming in contact with that history. It wasn't by making it a part of myself, but by making myself part of it. I had come and paid my tribute to the stones. I had made a pilgrimage to my personal Mecca. And though there will unlikely ever be a plaque erected there stating, "Max Dobberstein snapped pictures here, 1997," even though it will never really mean anything to anyone but me, I became a part of the story of the stone. I became a part of Stonehenge. And like that, a dream came true.