When I first came to Turkey, I was barely 16 and had just earned my first driver's license stateside. That rite of passage meant nothing in Turkey. None of us drove. We went places by taksi, bus or dolmus. But now, I have experience driving in Turkey. It's not as bad as I thought it might be. We had arranged to rent a car from Budget in Istanbul. There was a problem, though. We didn't know where the Budget Rent-a-Car office was and the good folks at the desk of the Ambassador Hotel couldn't seem to help us much. The phone books only list phone numbers, they said, not addresses. A phone call got us an address but - in a city of 12 million - where would that street possibly be? As luck would have it, and we've had plenty, we took a boat ride on the Bosphorus our last full day in Istanbul and we just happened to spot the Budget place on the bus ride back to our hotel. Next morning, loaded into a cab, we pointed the driver in the right direction and - after a few false starts - finally found the place. Our car, a Renault, was ready for us. Getting out of Istanbul was the first challenge. You've all seen cars on Turkish streets, so I don't have to explain that chaos. There don't seem to be any organized lanes in the street, even if there are lines to delineate them. Drivers seem to operate on a first come, first served basis. If you get to a spot on in the road before the other driver, it is your spot, your lane, your right of way. It took us half an hour to locate one essential driving tool in our Renault - the horn. Honking seems to help, lots of honking. Eventually we got out of town, headed for the Black Sea to see the solar eclipse. Turkey has some wonderful freeways, as good as any in the states, only not as crowded. I'm not sure if there's a speed limit. We routinely cruised at 130 kilometers per hour and ate the dust of vehicles firing past us in the fast lane. Once in awhile, you have to stop at a booth and take a ticket or pay a toll. But the roads are great and there are servis alani stops along the way - gas, restrooms, food. We stopped at one and McDonald's was the main restaurant. It's all the same, only it's in Turkish. It looks a bit like we're headed for one world culture and that's too bad. It's off the major freeways that the real Turkey shows in the driving category. The literature warns about wild and unexpected actions by Turkish drivers, but I didn't find that to be the case. Sure, they pass on blind curves and hills, but the I-got-here-first rule still applies. No lane lines, so everyone just jockeys around and accommodates. It can get the adrenalin pumping but, after awhile, it's kind of fun. It's not the drivers that struck me as the most peculiar part of Turkish road life, it's the things in the roads. Through rural areas and small towns between Istanbul and the Black Sea, cows suddenly appear walking along, or just looking at you. Dogs and cats sleep in the middle of the roads through little villages. Everyone just drives around them without waking them up. And cars stop in the middle of the road. I'm never sure why. One of them was a police car, either taking on a couple extra riders, or dropping them off. I was too busy swerving wildly around them to get details. Gas costs somewhere in excess of $4 a gallon. The country roads aren't any more potholed than the water ravaged streets of the Pacific Northwest, where I live. The big difference is that over here, the drivers know to stay to the right except when passing. On the freeways north of the Oregon-California border, there is not a slow lane and a fast lane. There are two lanes. You pick whichever one you like best and stay there. I guess it's the American version of the I-was-here-first rule.

We were at Bozkoy Plaj - a beautiful, quiet little beach on the Black Sea - when the moon completely blocked out the sun for a couple minutes today. If there are words to describe a complete solar eclipse, I don't know them. This was the second total solar eclipse for me, the first for Judy and Susie. I hope you can all catch one some day. Next one is June 21, 2001, in Africa, I'm told. This last solar eclipse of the century is a lot of the reason why we are here. It was after the big gathering of Ankara alumni in New Orleans in July, 1997. There were 20-25 of us there and we had such a good time, we decided to get together every August from then on. After New Orleans, I rented a car on my own and drove down to Key West for about a week. It was a fun trip. When I got back to my home in Steilacoom, Washington, I started thinking about other places I might go. I was a freshly retired magazine editor - Outdoor California, published by the California Department of Fish & Game. I typed "total solar eclipse" into a search engine on the Web and - guess what?! Turkey, August 11, 1999. Everybody had decided they wanted to get together in August every year. And we'd all talked about coming back to Turkey someday. I sent a note to all the A-people, as we called ourselves, telling them what I'd found and asking if maybe it wasn't opportunity knocking at the door. Or fate. It didn't make much of a ripple. Nobody seemed to take it very seriously, so I figured I'd find a solar eclipse trip through Sky & Telescope magazine and go on my own. I'd always been something of an amateur astronomy buff. Then Judy said she'd like to plan the trip. Judy Scholes graduated with me from Ankara High School in 1964. We traded addresses when she left for the states, which was not uncommon. What was uncommon is that we wrote each other. For years and years and years. Both sets of our parents happened to retire to the Pacific Northwest so we eventually had a chance to see each other again. After our parents were gone, we still stayed in touch. She was in Washington, I was in California. One day she sent me this incredible list. I couldn't believe it. Half my class of '64 was listed, with current addresses and phone numbers.


Judy had taken over her parents' house in Steilacoom, Washington. It was a wonderful place with a million dollar view of Puget Sound, the Olympic Peninsula and lots of islands and ferry boats chugging around. Visiting her a few years back, she told me she feared she'd lose the house eventually because the taxes were too expensive. I thought that would be a terrible shame. When I found out that her basement, where I was staying, had windows and an unfinished fireplace in a darkened storage area, a bell rang. Duh. My fantasy had always been to retire to a house overlooking a cliff overlooking the ocean. Puget Sound ain't exactly the ocean, but it's pretty darned close. I tossed out the idea of retiring early, remodeling her basement and paying rent to help her with the financial woes. She thought it was a good idea, too. I know I'm straying from the point but there's just one more part of it. Judy's sister, Susan, lives next door with her husband, David Small. David did some high school in Ankara. Susan just lived over there but she's still an A-person. It is my contention that the four of us are the most geographically concentrated A-people anywhere on the planet. There are four of us within about 50 yards of each other. Back to the eclipse trip. Judy said she'd like to plan it and I encouraged her to go ahead. For nearly two years, she's been faxing and e-mailing Turkish hotels, rent-a-car places and travel agents. She's purchased a ton of books on Turkey. I think she even read The Iliad in preparation for the trip. It's almost been an obsession and we wonder what she will do now that the planning is over. And so there we were today, knee deep in the Black Sea, watching the sun get gobbled up by the moon through some eye-safe No. 14 welder's glass I got at some welding supply place. The eclipse just happened to be taking place in a country we wanted to see again. We spent last night - the night before the eclipse - in a couple bungalows in a sleepy little fishing village called Amasra. After Judy and Susie went to bed to be devoured by mosquitoes, I stayed up chatting with a couple from Germany. Rolph is a physicist and a hobbyist in astronomy. He was delighted to learn I was also a subscriber to Sky & Telescope. Ayetool (phonetic spelling) is a beautiful Turkish woman who moved to Germany when she was five and has lived there ever since. Rolph works now in what was East Germany. He told me East German scientists, before the unification of Germany, were quite free to travel around the world. But they were expected to deliver intelligence reports to the secret police upon their return. They had no choice in the matter. After unification of East and West Germany, anyone with any kind of tie to the East German secret police was removed from their jobs. About half the university professors found themselves unemployed.


West Germans were brought in to replace them. Very few have made any sort of recovery from that loss. And that's where Ayetool comes in. She's a psychologist. Many of her patients were displaced workers from East Germany who had ties to the secret police. I asked her what she tells them and she said she tells them change is normal and we have to find a way to adapt. If we have a stroke or a heart attack, we have to learn a way to live with the changes that will bring. It's the same with the displaced workers. After the eclipse, Rolph and Ayetool planned to return to Ayetool's place of birth, a Turkish village just down the road from Amasra. We'd passed through it that day on our drive from Istanbul. OK, let me take a stab at describing a total solar eclipse. The moon casts about a 50-mile wide shadow onto the earth as it passes in front of the sun. By some amazing quirk of circumstance, the moon is just the right size and the sun and moon just the right distance from the earth and each other that the sun's sphere is covered. If you arrange to be in that 50-mile shadow, the sun gets totally blacked out. Looking through mylar or welding glass, you can see the first edge of the moon nibbling into the sun. It takes a little more than an hour for the moon to completely obscure our sun. Depending on how much attention you've been paying to the world around you, it isn't long before you can see a slight difference in the quality of light where you're at. It's just not quite as bright as it used to be. And, of course, it just keeps getting dimmer. The sun's light is so powerful that you still can't look at it directly even when just a sliver is left. You have to wait until the moment of totality before you can drop your welder's glass and look with the naked eye. One of the things you see is what they call the "diamond ring." And it looks exactly like one. Just before totality, a last sliver of sunlight peeks out from the sun and speedily gets sucked into the shadow. If you are ready with your camera, you've got about half a second to shoot that one. Then there are Bailey's Beads. When totality is upon you, interesting spots of red appear around the moon. This is sunlight peering between mountains on the moon. And there is the corona - the sun's atmosphere. It's a faint, willowy light that stretches far out into the sky. At one time, scientists could only study the corona during a total eclipse. Now they have instruments which can create one for academic purposes. Around you, it's dark. The crickets in the bushes by Bozkoy Beach stopped chirping just before totality. Judy noticed some strange swirling shadows in the sand. I'm not sure what they were. Perhaps it was water vapor in the air that the full sun just cuts right through, but the dim sun doesn't. I'll have to ask about that. Can you see stars? I looked all around during totality and I could only see one. It was very near the moon and it was very bright. It may have been Venus, which is lost in the sun under normal circumstances right now. It's another thing I'll have to research when I get back to the land of the big PX. People howled during the first eclipse I saw, back around 1980 on the Oregon-Washington border. That night I watched TV coverage from Portland at the moment of totality. The announcers didn't say anything but I could hear people howling in the background there, too. I wanted to see if people howled everywhere. You can only imagine what primitive people must have imagined was going on. Alas, the closest thing I heard to a howl was Judy crying "Wahoo!" as the sun went dark. But there weren't that many people on the beach with us, just a French family of about 12 nearby. They gave us mylar spectacles, which was very generous of them. They didn't really understand our welder's glass. At dinner the night before, we ran into a small group of Americans who have been going to total eclipses for quite a few years. One guy claimed to have seen four. I asked him about the howling and he said he had seen one from the top of a hill in Baja California a few years back. His group got naked and howled, he said. It seemed a fitting way to celebrate the event, he thought.

I'm not sure how to tell this to my fellow Turkey people, but Ankara is gone. The place in Turkey we loved and hated all at once exists now only in the minds of A people everywhere. In place of the Ankara we knew is a sprawling collection of four story apartments and office buildings that spread far beyond the city limits as we knew them. The air hangs heavy with pollution. It lacks the charm and warmth of Istanbul. It is not a good place to be. After two nights there, we couldn't wait to get out. We drove down from the Black Sea the same day as the eclipse. We hit the outskirts of Ankara in late afternoon. The plan was simple and easy. We find Ataturk Boulevard and our hotel is just a couple blocks to one side. Ataturk Boulevard was the main street in town when we lived there three decades ago. Now, there are probably 20 boulevards as big as Ataturk's and they go off in every direction. We spent 95 percent of our time in Ankara lost. After two hours of driving around aimlessly that first night, we glimpsed Ataturk's tomb between buildings off in the distance. That's a familiar landmark, but we couldn't get to it. One way streets, no left turns, no right turns, crazed cabbies and other drivers invoking the "I was here first even if it's illegal" rule of the road. If there's a good map of Ankara, we never found one. It wouldn't have made much difference anyway. Street signs pop up no more than every 15 blocks. Judy lived in Gazi Osman Pasa so we tried to find her house. We found the street and a building with the same number, but it wasn't her building. On up to Cankaya, where I lived. Our apartment was just above the officer's club and it was the outer edge of town in 1964. Not so now. Cankaya sprawls way on out into the hills. The gulch we looked over to see the town back then is now a botanical park. I was kind of glad to see that. I guess it was too narrow and steep for them to build apartment buildings. We found the street I lived on but I couldn't remember the number of the building. There weren't that many buildings up that way when I lived there. Now they are crammed together with barely room to walk in between. And it's like that in every direction, for miles and miles. We didn't even try to find the old American schools. It was hard enough finding our way back to the hotel when we ventured out, by car or on foot. I stepped on my glasses the other night at the Black Sea and a bellhop walked me a few blocks from the hotel where a guy said he'd fix them for 1 million TL. They'd be ready in an hour. I went back to the hotel and then tried to go back to the shop on my own. At one point, just to prove something, I walked down the street and made six right turns and never did get back to where I started. The streets are serpentine. I finally had to go get the bellhop. The fix it man did a good job on the glasses.

The final disappointment in the Lost City of Ankara occurred last night. Judy has fond memories of eating Chicken Kiev at the Washington Restaurant. We took a cab, wisely, a wild and woolley ride that was one of the few familiar experiences. He showed us a couple new moves in the Turkish right of way rules (When you come to lines of traffic stopped at a light, drive down the gutter and start a new line of your own). We got to the restaurant in a flash. The maitre'd and waiters were so happy to see us. We got the big welcome. Then we got the menus. Yep, no Chicken Kiev. Our last sight of Ankara took about two hours as we drove all over town trying to find a way out. We accidentally drove by my street again in the process and I got one last look at what's left of the view. I don't think we'll be back here again. Driving south out of what's left of Ankara, we spent a couple nights sleeping in a cave. It's a little town called Urgup, I think. Put a couple periods over the U's. It's in the Cappadokya region of Turkey. It was formed from the eruption many years ago of a huge volcano. The volcano can still be seen today, with perpetual snow on its summit, if the air is clear. But it never is. I'm not sure why there is this perpetual haze.





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