Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (48 page)

I promised that next time I was back in Ohio I would return to the spot where I first learned to drive. I would visit my father and thank him again with new eyes.

I could give dozens of examples, but over and over, what I’ve found almost everywhere looks so much like home.

On a hillside in Thailand, a Theravada monk named Yut sat atop a golden-domed temple that looked like a big Hershey’s kiss. This was high-test exoticism, as good as it gets. Yut and I sat with the Buddha nearby. There was much playing nice, and no stabbing at all.

Over the doorway to the stairwell, in British English and with no intentional sense of irony, a small sign said
MIND YOUR HEAD.

So I try.

At a Ping-Pong table in a rural Indonesian village, where the only phrase I know is “thank you very much,” which lasts all evening long.

In the ocean off Rarotonga, splashing with strangers in a night so dark we never even see one another’s faces.

Lost in the streets of Cairo, suddenly surrounded by children who appear out of nowhere and even now are still helping me find my way while we imitate famous soccer players to pass the time.

IT’S THE ONE COMMON COMMODITY YOU CAN TRADE IN EVERY CULTURE IN THE HISTORY OF HUMANKIND

What is friendship?

Not very far from those places, I once met a man who was an icon in his own wealthy country and yet has donated his time to assisting Christian humanitarians, visiting some of the world’s poorest children, volunteering his time to their aid. There is no self-promotion, and he rarely discusses it. The only attention he calls to it is in promoting the charity when asked.

Who is Alex Trebek?

Even buildings start shouting long tales.

In my notebooks, in all of them, is a place called the Hagia Sophia. It’s listed as a museum. And a church. And a state building. And a monument. It’s in Istanbul, which before that was Constantinople, which before that was known as Byzantium. This is a hint of Trebekistan already.

The Hagia Sophia—“St. Sophie’s” in English—is as high as a stadium, a football field squarish in size. In the year it was built, it was the greatest cathedral in Christendom, the St. Peter’s Basilica of Byzantine Greece.

A few centuries later, it became Roman Catholic. Two hundred years more, and it was a mosque. One timeless tribute to holy ideals, its details rearranging with each shift in time.

As more lifetimes passed, things changed once again. Secular Turkey arose. The Hagia Sophia was declared a religious museum, with all traditions to be celebrated inside.

So you enter this football-field stadium of godness and see the names of Allah and Mary and Jesus all merging, as one holy place where peace is called many names. People are studying and learning and talking and listening. History matters. It teaches humility.

Trebekistan here smells of candles.

Not far down the road, near a town called Çanakkale, is another small hill called Hissarlik. This is where a man named Heinrich Schliemann invented the science of bad archaeology.

Schliemann was a head case of epic proportions, whose massive Athenian tomb portrays him as an Olympian demigod, all for his fine work at Hissarlik. In 1870 he came to believe that this hillside was once ancient Troy. Since that meant fantastic treasure and Schliemann loved wealth, he hired dozens of Turks to act as a massive nineteenth-century backhoe.

CRUNCH
went Hissarlik, or at least a big chunk. And with it went priceless antiquities, shards of uncountable number, even more uncountable now that they were smashed down to fragments.

But Schliemann was right, at least in one sense. The Troy of the Iliad may or may not have been real; Homer wrote centuries later, at a time when fact-checking was impossible, unfashionable, and hardly the point. But sure enough, under the
CRUNCH,
in Schliemann’s great trench, was a town, and a people, and a civilization long gone.

And another.

And another.

And another and another and another and another and another.

All stacked up like pancakes over several millennia.

More-responsible people with tiny fine brushes now clamber and crawl, armed with tweezers and trowels and small air-puffing syringes. Each fragment is indexed, the story unfolds, and Schliemann is praised and cursed in each audible breath.

So on the side of a hill in what was once Asia Minor (which, as it happens, is a fine place to vacation), if you stand on one spot and look down in the trench, you can see at least
nine
different histories,
nine
different places,
nine
different times, all cultures now gone, in one bewildering glance.

It’s the hillside in Virginia, Bull Run and Manassas, transcendent Trebekistan, re-looping over thousands of years.

A people came. They grew. They had their own sports and their gods and their fashion designs. They were in charge. They loved their kids, ate their food, kicked somebody’s ass, and curled up when they cried. And then they screwed up. They forgot to build walls or they ran out of fish or they didn’t quite plant enough food. And poof. They were gone, with a
gone
kind of goneness that might terrify you to think hard about.

It couldn’t happen to
them,
of course. This was fact. They knew how things worked. As they always had for as long as anyone really knew. And then.

Gone. Unremembered. Their gods are all dead, their dreams nonexistent, as if they had never been born.

Then, a few centuries later, it happened again. The whole thing.

And again.

And again.

The end of the world isn’t some distant supernova off far in the future or a strange philosophical construct.

It’s in front of your face. It’s as real as your eyes.

There’s a spot on this Earth where it comes nine times at once.

I hope, for their sake, they had dances we’ve also lost. I hope they were glad for their time.

Maybe one day some grad student with an air-puffing syringe will discover they all died from
giggiggiggigg
ling.

This would be a comfort to know.

In Finland you find a great tubular structure that sings Aeolian songs in the breeze. It’s the monument to our old
Jeopardy!
friend Jean Sibelius, whose music helped his nation gain freedom. (He might not be pleased that the wind, in his monument, can sound more like
ah-ooh-gah
than anthems, but still, it’s a singular sculpture.)

Across the Baltic, you’ll find a spot up in Tallinn, Estonia, where 300,000 people sang away the Soviets. If you stand on the slope in this big concert area, their voices are almost but not quite still floating above you.

Robben Island, in Cape Town, is where Nelson Mandela was caged for much of his life. You know who won. But you can still visit the prison and see what he faced. You glimpse what each day he must have kept overcoming. Or you can still stand on the steps of the courthouse, as he did on his release, dreaming of a world of peace and equality, and try to barely imagine the people he saw. (It helps if you sit down then, and simply start asking. The folks are still there. The answers come flooding. So wear your galoshes.)

In Prague, there’s a cell in an old secret prison, where Vaclav Havel, a playwright, was imprisoned as much for his thoughts as his actions. Havel eventually became the Czech president. The prison became a hotel. You can sleep in a cell down the hall, staring up at the bars that are still in the window, letting Trebekistan seep in.

THIS IS THE ONE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN TREBEKISTAN; FORTUNATELY, IT’S ALSO THE EASIEST THING TO FIND

What is hope?

There’s no shortage of horror and sadness on Earth, much of it our own bit of doing. I offer no wisdom. I know no solutions. I’m still trying to learn what questions are even worth asking.

But I do know that
them
is a flexible concept. It causes much trouble. It is very widespread. Play nice and don’t stab—except for
them,
go the rules, if we’re honest about it. And for
them,
we’re soon
them.
And those other guys—
them.
And then all hell breaks loose.

Six billion of us, seeing
them,
not the mirror, not
us,
not six billion of
us,
can only give Troy one more layer for others to find.

It can’t all be that simple, of course. Unless it is. And in practical terms what this means I don’t know. Very smart people might have some ideas.

Very kind people will have better ones.

I do know, for certain, that some random guy right this second in Bhutan would be your best friend if you and he were both dropped in Bulgaria. And the Bulgarians, in general, would be happy to see you. Soccer would happen. (It usually does.) So would beer, or perhaps butter tea. Someone would think your shirt was cool. Something would taste like walnuts. There’d be nothing on TV, but you’d have it on anyway. Something good would come on. An old dog would fall asleep. Pretty soon you’d start feeling at home.

This, at least for me, is where Trebekistan leads.

Someday I will be old. I will have a poor memory.

This will be the one thing I have learned.

I was reminded of this, as a matter of fact, in a small hotel room in Hobart, Tasmania. I was reading about why blue fairy penguins barf.

Blue fairy penguins, it seems, spend their days out at sea, with their offspring all hidden in nests on a hill. The adults travel great distances in order to hunt and eat, all so they can bring home food to their young. (Not unlike my own father, omitting the beak-to-beak transfer of food. Even penguins, it seems, never quite leave the Snow Belt.)