Freight and Passengers

A freight train stops the traffic in Jakin, GA.  "The traffic" = me.

When I was first planning this trip and decided that I wanted to travel around by train, I thought that there was a connection, if somewhat tenuous, between my subject matter and my method of transportation.  Trains, after all, used to be the primary form of long-distance transportation.  It seemed reasonable that, as I tried to think about family history and the importance of place, trains would feature prominantly as a way to get to those places that became home.

To a certain degree that's true, and more recently than I had expected - my great-grandfather rode the rails during the Great Depression, and during WWII my grandfather and great-aunt rode trains back to Montana, for instance.

But that's mostly irrelevant.  I had it all wrong.  Trains weren't important because they were methods of transportation.  People got around however they could - mule, horse and wagon, car, truck, bus, hitch-hiking, trains, boats, walking... Trains made certain parts of the country easier to get to, but so did roads and canals.  New forms of transportation didn't really revolutionize the art of getting around.   There was always first class and coach, always some ways that were quicker and some that were slower, some that were cheaper and some that were more expensive, some people who could afford to travel and lots who couldn't.

Trains are important to my family history because trains brought money.  I was thinking about passenger trains; I should have thought freight.

When the railroad came to southwest Georgia, my great-great-grandfather, Bill Regan (the stingy one) convinced the company to build an extension of the tracks that reached onto his property.  He could shear his sheep and load the wool directly onto freight cars.  Having his own railroad tracks brought him lots of money and proved that he was a big-time businessman.  Meanwhile the presence of the main railroad allowed the creation of the sawmills, which turned acres of virgin timber into cash and provided jobs to the local young men.  What had been subsistence farming communities were suddenly swimming in cash.

I don't have any evidence that my great-great-grandmother Ida Huffman (a Montana farmer) ever rode a train.  But she would drive a team of mules, carrying a wagon full of wheat, to the Dooley grain elevators and turn that wheat into money.  As time went on the farm bought tractors and trucks, and four wheels and gasoline became their primary form of transportation.  Trains stopped passing through Dooley and the grain elevators moved to other tracks.  But the grain still went onto trains - and today, the massive farms of that region still make money by transmuting streams of golden wheat into dollar bills by way of a freight car.

I'm headed for California now, the end of the push for western expansion, and the end of the line for that first transcontinental railroad.  And I bet there, too, what mattered about trains wasn't that people had the freedom to carry themselves to California in a matter of days - it was that freight could make it back to the East Coast quick enough for the fruit to stay fresh and cheaply enough for everybody to turn a profit.  It wasn't that it made it easier to get to California, it's that it gave people a reason to go.  Profit whispers more loudly than the call of adventure.

Money, money, money.  Follow the money. Follow the train tracks.

Ruminations on Ruins

Looking at the ruins of a Chinese city, Paul Thereux wrote: "Nothing puts human effort into better perspective than a ruined city... It is very thrilling for an American to consider such a place, because we don't yet have anything that qualifies - only ghost towns and fairly insignificant small cities, but nothing like the monumental corpses of once-great cities that are known in the rest of the world.  Probably American optimism arises from the fact that we don't have any devastated cities." (239)

I have to agree with him, partly.  Stepping through the dusty remains of Dooley is not like looking at the ruins of a dead city, or fallen statues of a once-great civilization.  It doesn't inspire any mournful thoughts about the futility of human effort - quite the opposite.  It puts human effort into an entirely different perspective. 

The last human inhabitant of Dooley left twenty years ago, and for thirty years before that the town was essentially abandoned.  Fifty short years were all it took for the prairie to reclaim what once was a town.  And in that time a thousand towns continued on, hunkered down in this windswept land, waiting out each freezing winter and holding their houses up against the snow, thunderstorms and floods.  Dooley is what happens when everybody moves out.  Dooley is what would happen if the people who lived in this prairie gave up and stopped trying.  Dooley is proof that human willpower and constant work holds towns together - not masonry and certainly not inertia.  Human hands are the only reason every town in Montana doesn't look like Dooley.

The Crow Indians lived off this land for five thousand years.  Without stone foundations, their abandoned settlements must have vanished even more quickly and more surely than Dooley.  Their homes would have blown away in a year if not for human hands constantly fixing rips, rebuilding fires, gathering more wood, killing more buffalo, curing more skins, making more shelters  - the constant labor to hang on to the ground more fiercely than the wind could blow.  Build a home, keep it warm, keep it stocked with food, survive.  And then the Europeans came, bringing with them broken promises and slaughter.  The Crow were torn away from their land by guns stronger than the winds had been, and the U.S. government opened up these lands for homesteaders.  Once again, small settlements were waiting out storms and fighting to hold on to their lives.  Families built small houses and kept them together, kept them warm, kept them stocked with food.  A hundred years later people are still doing the same.

The earth can reclaim its territory quickly, at least in this part of the world, where the freezing winters crack wood and stone and the winds rip trees and houses straight off from the ground.  Everything we've built would crumble into dust if not for our constant effort.    Does that make human lives seem small and meaningless, or admirably powerful?

(Or pernicious, like a parasite?  Where are the woolly mammoths, the herds of wild buffalo, the endless prairie like an ocean? Our houses might vanish but some damage can't be wiped away by time.  There are many ways to put human effort into perspective - as easily indelibly catastrophic as doomed in its glory or noble in its determination.)

How Bill Regan Made (and Lost) a Fortune

Part One

William B. Regan was born in 1855 in a log cabin, one of Robinson Regan and Elizabeth Brown's many grandchildren. From his parents he inherited fifty acres of land and an almost unbearably stubborn nature, and from this inheritance little Bill Regan built an empire.

First he gained even more acres of family territory by marrying his cousin, Julia Regan.  They had nine children, all slim and small and stubborn, marked by a double dose of Regan genes - and then Julia died.  So since his cousin had worked out the first time, Bill went ahead and married his dead wife's younger sister, but soon she died, too.  Those days women's work was hard, and childbirth was harder, and women often died young.  So Bill married a third wife, a 17-year-old girl - unrelated - who bore him five more children.  While his wives were birthing and raising that small army of Regans, Bill was very, very busy.

Over eighty years, Bill Regan turned those first fifty acres into well over two thousand acres of Georgia farmland and forest.  Like his grandfather, he knew how to handle a herd, and he had sheep and cattle grazing all across the county.  Every year when the local farmers got together to round up those free-roaming animals, read their markings, and divide them up, he'd sell mountains of sheep's wool and fine beef, awakening envy in his neighbors.  He cut down some of the forest on his land and turned it into farmland, where he grew corn, cotton, and sugarcane.  Other acres he kept as valuable virgin timber, and in these woods he hid a still and turned out gallons of whiskey.  He had barns full of meat, cane syrup, moonshine, and hay, and pretty soon he had a serious fortune saved up in the bank in town.

Little Bill Regan truly was a little man, short and slight, even by Regan standards. But he was a proud man, and when he rode on his horse with his back ramrod-straight, he looked as tall as he seemed to feel.  He was a smart man, for all he'd had no education, and a determined and hard-working man.  But Bill Regan had a problem.  Some men have a drinking problem, some men have a womanizing problem, some men have a gambling problem, but Bill Regan didn't have any of these - he had a money problem.  See, he loved money too damn much.  He loved money more than he loved his wives, more than he loved his children.  He may have loved money even more than he loved his prize horse. He almost loved money more than he loved his life.

In 1929, Bill Regan had $35,000 saved up in the banks, and when the banks started to crash, he pulled that money out and stored it all in a giant safe in the corner of his house.  By then he was an old man, living alone with his grown son, Tony.  And at that time, during the Depression, when folks were desperate for money and there were no jobs to be had, land - good farmland, good timberland - could sell for fifty cents an acre.  If Bill Regan had only spent his money, his children would have grown up to live like kings.  They could have lived like the old plantation owners, like the men who ran the sawmills; they could have entered the legislature.

But Bill Regan wouldn't spend his money for anything.  He wouldn't spend it on his house, wouldn't spend it on his clothes, wouldn't spend it on a car, and certainly not on helping anybody else.  By the time he was an old man, he wouldn't even spend money on land anymore.  He was so tight with his money that when the winter grew hard and one of his sons came asking for a little bit of syrup, for his hungry children - William's grandchildren - William said no.  He had hundreds of gallons of cane syrup stored away, but he would not unlock that barn.  He was a tight man, a stingy man. And everybody knew it.   Everybody knew that William Regan's money rotted away in his safes, that it grew stale and never circulated, that he never shared it when others were in need.

One day in 1930 some strangers came in to town, and started talking to some of Bill Regan's neighbors, and pretty soon they heard that the old man had land and cattle and sheep and was tight-fisted with the money he earned off them.  And his neighbors whispered that the money was "dead money," that "Uncle Bill" never used it for a damn thing, and it was a damn shame he kept it stuck up in that safe, and these strangers pricked their ears up at that.

"What safe?"

And one neighbor, whom Bill had always counted as a friend, narrowed his eyes.  He thought of all of William's wealth, his beautiful horse, his endless acres; thought how if he'd had that wealth, he'd have treated a neighbor with generosity.  And his eyes turned an ill shade of green.  He looked at these strangers, who were all but licking their lips, and he said, "That safe he keeps in his house.  That house, right up the road."

And the men decided to pay old Uncle Bill a visit...

Part Two

How the Regans Came to America

"So... what are you actually DOING?"


Well, here's an example.  In 4 parts, here is the central story of the Regan family's collective memory - the one that pops up most often and is remembered most vividly.  The first part of the story comes from records and family legend, the last from living memory and observation - the middle two from an ambiguous blur of memory and second- or third-hand tales.  Sometimes different storytellers contradicted each other, or explained they were fuzzy on details.  And then I added a bit... I think this all happened.  But I wouldn't call it nonfiction, or history.  Call it what it is: a story.



How the Regans Came to America

Once upon a time there was a man named Richard Regan, who lived in the green hills of Ireland, and decided it was time to cross the ocean and start his life anew.  He moved to the new colonies in America to settle down on a patch of land he could call his own, in the area they called North Carolina, arriving to the New World just in time to take up arms and fight in the Revolutionary War.   Soon after the war was over, just as the Constitution was being written up by important men a little farther north, Richard and his wife, Catherine, had a son, Robinson, and a daughter, Olive.

Fourteen years after Robinson was born, Richard packed the family up to move to Georgia, where new lands had just been carved out from the Seminole Indians and split up into lots of red-clay soil and acres of virgin timber.  He'd brought from Ireland the inherited knowledge of a long tradition of sheepherding, and started building up a herd of free-roaming sheep, grazing beneath the pine trees.  His wool production, plus the food he and Catherine raised on their small patch of land, was enough to support their small family.  Of course, every now and again they had to run into the swamps to hide from the last remaining Seminoles, who rode around seeking vengeance for the theft of all their lands, but hey, that was a typical occupational hazard.

Robinson Regan grew up into a man in Georgia, and met a young woman about his age, by the name of Elizabeth Brown.  She was the daughter of Jesse Brown, who had moved from England and who, like Robinson's father, had fought in the Revolutionary War.  Jesse Brown and his wife, Delilah, were a prosperous couple, and when Jesse died he owned land, cattle, a house, and several slaves.  Jesse had done well for himself in his new life, and his children's children would later be prominent landowners and businessmen; the Regans owned half of Early and Miller counties, and the Mosely name can still be found across southern Georgia on storefronts and doctor's offices.  But while the Brown sisters, as much as Mr. Mosely and Mr. Regan, helped found these twin dynasties, and while Jesse Brown's wealth may well have been the kernel of these countless fortunes, the Brown name was lost to family history - save for some Mosely and Regan boys named "Brown," out of a family tradition whose origins nobody remembers.  Such is the misfortune of having daughters.

Jesse Brown left a third of his cattle herd to his daughter, and another third to his son-in-law, but although Robinson Regan had married well and inherited much, his family was not rich.  Maybe he just had too many children.  While their parents each had only two, Robinson and Elizabeth had ten children, and that's ten children that survived into adulthood, mind you. When theiur land and money was divided up - in true Irish tradition, split up among all the children, instead of just passed to the oldest son - there wasn't quite enough to go around.  So the Regan children carried on as subsistence farmers - prosperous some years, not-so-prosperous other years.  They were landowners but never plantation-founders, usually poor but rarely impoverished, occasionally well-off but never rich.

Never rich, that is, until William Brown Regan came along.

Part Two

the journey part one: Into the South

Riding a train down south, from Charlottesville to Atlanta, I didn't do an awful lot of thinking.  Mostly I slept - from mid Virginia to the bottom edge of South Carolina I stayed fast asleep, lulled by the rocking of the train.  And when I woke up, to a South Carolina landscape of fields and kudzu-covered forests, all coated in the golden light of a sunrise, I stared out the window in sleepy admiration.  And promptly fell back asleep.

But when I woke up again, well and truly in the deep South, I did start thinking, train-centered thoughts, about three things: cotton, textiles, and Petersburg.  Trains traveling from the South loaded down with raw cotton, trains traveling to the South bearing freshly-milled textiles, trains at the center of a bitter Civil War seige.

Then I chided myself for riding into the South and thinking like I was traveling into the past.  Such a stereotype, to associate a lower latitude with an earlier era.  Of course the South is not a time machine, no more than any other place with a history - off the train, driving through seemingly endless stacks of interstates, it was easy to remember.  But now, as I go deeper and deeper into the country, I realize I might have had it all wrong.  It's not that the South is a time machine, not that I'm traveling into the past.  It's that no matter where you are, the past can be a slippery thing, and it doesn't always know to stay put.  I wasn't driving back in time so much as driving into a place where the past lingers on like a mule-stubborn ghost.

Until ten years ago, the houses on these country lanes didn't have numbers.  Letters were sent to a name on "Route 1" or "Route 4," and the mailmen knew everybody's name.  The recently-invented addresses - "911 numbers," they call them, since they put them in for the ambulances - don't show up on my GPS, and I have to rely on an older kind of directions:

"Go down the road aways until you see a red brick church on the right - that's the church where your Aunt Judith's family is buried, you know, they were Baptists - and then the highway turns to the left, but you want to make sure you keep going straight.  Go about three miles, and look for the sign that says "Hay for sale..."

It's not that Jakin looks like a scrap of the past.  Sure, there are tiny old buildings on a quaint, ghosttown-like main street, but shiny cars and giant combines roll down that asphalt.  The more I learn about this place's history, the farther away the past looks.  Then, these roads were lined with tiny subsistence farms - now, farming is a multimillion dollar business.  Homemade wooden kitchens have been replaced with granite countertops, dirt floors with smooth-paved roads, and seemingly endless forests of longleaf pine with massive fields of cash crops.

But even if the houses and the landscape look very different than they once did, sometimes it feels like the past hangs thick and heavy in the air, so close I can almost smell it, sour and stale.  It smells like old smokehouses, hickory-scented, with a tinge of rancid meat.  It smells like lye soap and sweat.  Like pone bread straight out of a wood stove, fresh fish sizzling on a skillet, homemade sausages and just-picked corn on the cob.  Like mule shit, and houses burning down in the night, and bodies rotting on ropes.

And at dinner, as the farmer comes in from the fields and his wife pulls pone bread from the oven, and talks about how awful she thought it was of their neighbor to bulldoze that old slave graveyard into the ground, the past feels like it's right behind my shoulder, ducking away when I turn my head, leaving only the ghost of a smell to remind us it has never really left.

Chasing places, chasing the past

In my senior year of high school, for my pick-yer-topic college application essay, I wrote about Home - how I'd long felt like I didn't have a Home, a Hometown, a Homeplace, a Back Home.  I hadn't moved all that often, relatively speaking - I wasn't a military kid or anything like that - but often enough that where I was born, and where I was a little kid, and where I  grew up, and where I started to feel grown-up, were all different places.  Where were my roots?

A woman asked me once where I was from, and I started to cry.  That's the story I told in my essay, except then I added an ending to the story, saying I'd found a home in Harrisonburg.  Which is true, but that doesn't make it an ending.  Personal essays need endings, but stories don't always.

I don't know if our thoughts move in circles, or just the same straight line over and over again, but here I am again, back wondering about roots and homes and places.  This time I'm not thinking about one place I can claim as my own, though.  I'm looking back a little farther, to the  deeper roots laid by people born five generations before me, and here's what I'm thinking, in case you were curious:

My grandfather, and his parents, and their parents, and theirs, and theirs, were born in the Philippines.  We say that makes me 1/4 Filipino. We have a long and disturbing tradition of applying such mathematics to race.  Is it equally as problematic to quantify our cultural heritage like that?  Am I Filipino at all, or can I only fairly say that my grandfather was?

My grandmother, and her parents, and their parents, and theirs, were born in rural Georgia.  Does that make me 1/4 Southern?  Or does that make me 1/4 Irish, because my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was born in Ireland?  Or English, because another great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was born in England?  Or French, because etc.?  More to the point, do I have roots in Georgia, or am I as much a stranger there as anywhere else - Ireland, say, or England, or France?

My grandfather, and his parents, and their parents, were born in the frozen stretches of Montana.  Does that make me 1/4 Montanan?  Or 1/4 Polish, because my great-great-great-great-grandfather spoke Polish, and because of that I carry a Polish last name?  If I moved to Montana today - oh god, the winters, I can't even finish that thought.

My grandmother was born in Southern California.  Her parents were born in Tennessee.  But go back far enough and there I'm Irish, too.  So I'm 1/4... Californian? Southern? Irish? Something?

If you're sitting there asking what's the point of all this, well, that's the question I'm asking, too.  Maybe there's not much point to any of this.  Or maybe there is a point, in that our history and our heritages are somehow inescapable.

Or maybe, as a third option, the truths behind these lists of people and places and dates - marriages, christenings, deaths, burials, the tiny scraps of lives that stay behind on paper after everyone who remembers a person has died - maybe the data doesn't matter a whit, but family history does.  Not the facts, but the stories we tell about ourselves and our inheritances.

Maybe it matters less whether Richard Regan immigrated from Ireland in 1752, and more that the family says the Regans are Irish, a tiny bit of history passed down long after the name of that first immigrant was forgotten.  Maybe it doesn't matter that the Domonoskes and the Huffmans moved to Montana from Canada and North Dakota, but matters a lot that the family takes pride in being descended from hardy frontier homesteaders.

But then again, maybe the facts do matter, if only because facts can reveal which stories are more legendary than others, and because knowing what's untrue can be illuminating.  Oh, but maybe not.  If I knew all the answers, I'd be sleeping in my bed at home right now, so since I'm typing on a netbook in north Atlanta, you can tell that I'm clueless.

I find it best to start a trip by doing two very important things.  The first is to prepare really, really well.  After you've done that, the second thing is to acknowledge that you're still utterly unprepared.  So yep, I'm almost entirely unsure about how I feel about the role of family history and heritage in my own life.  And here I am, trying to figure it out.

I'm traveling around the country tracking down the places my family is from, staring at the horizons, smelling the air, stepping in the dirt.  And I'm interviewing the older family that's left, and asking for stories about the lost generations, and digging a little into genealogies and old photo albums.  And along the way I'm starting to come up with - if not clear answers - at least more questions to ask.

And that's at least 1/4 of a start.

visions of

I passed an apocalyptic landscape this afternoon.  It was a startling sight, one that made me stutter to a stop and step backwards to stare again.  Mountains of rubble, cold steel, concrete, wire, stormy sky - my warm and idle thoughts, of dinner and hot chocolate and cryptic crosswords, fell out of my head and landed in a heap on the cold pavement.

It's all quite easily explained.  They are building a biomedical research facility across from St. Pancras train station, and I know, because we've had the fliers slipped under our door urging us to stand up and protest before our children die from deadly viruses leaked into the air.  But to be precise, they aren't "building" it yet - the site is a messy, barren brownfield with some tentative jabs made towards flattening and cleaning.  Yellow backhoes and graders sit frozen in the of heaps of rocks and concrete chunks and dirt and metal.  2011 they think they'll start the foundations.

For now the field sits empty, except for the detritus and the unused machines, surrounded by a high fence of narrow bars with a few optimistic signs depicting a clean and glowing building.  But where I walked I didn't pass those pretty pictures - just the sharp steel fencing.  And behind this ugly scar, in the distance, a few squat, rectangular office buildings, dull gray in color, no warm lights twinkling from their windows at this moment, so that floor after distant floor looked absolutely empty.  And behind those blocks BT tower loomed: an alien, an unsettling shape.  It was hard to imagine humans building such a structure, surreal, cylindrical, studded with satellites and antenna - it seemed unfathomable to picture a human inside the windowless, neon-glowing tower.

And behind it all the sky.  I woke up this morning to a London full of fog, low and white and almost as thick as in the old paintings.  By this afternoon the fog was gone, but it left behind a slate-dark sky, swirling - no, frozen mid-swirl - with bilious clouds.

There were no people in this landscape, no warmth, no brightness of color, no sign of cheerful survival.  And as it happened, my personal soundtrack - that is, my ipod on shuffle - had through its dumb mechanical insight landed upon the Decemberists "When the War Came."  So as I was struck dumb by this stark vision, Colin Meloy was whining in my ear: "and the war came with all the poise of a cannonball," and I was shivering in the cold.

And war came to this city more than once, Boadicia burnt it down and the peasants tore it up and the bombers blew it up down and sideways.  And this could be a bomb site, here or anywhere. And even when wars the wars have been kept firmly abroad an infinite iniquities have passed along these streets, and this is a problem with living in a city too full of history - the charming cobbled alleys and noble monuments live beside a multitude of darker ghosts.  And how much does it help to remember these shades of horror, and how much more does it hurt?  Plague and conscription and executions and the gin-soaked destitute, and what can all our words do for you now?

And it's all quite easily explainable, because in my classes, this cold week in November, we are discussing death and brutality - trying and failing to remember how many millions died in the first world war, arguing with careful words around how and why and whether one should teach the Holocaust, debating whether evil ever arrives in the form of Black Dogs and what a single murder means and whether graveyard conversations with the dead fit former characterizations, watching on-stage cannibalisms and reading about failed revolutions, reading memoirs of massacre and rape and reciting the war poems and just this morning on the tube I idly memorized Dickinson, I learned by heart that

success is counted sweetest
by those who ne'er succeed.
to comprehend a nectar
requires greatest need

not one of all that purple host
who won the flag today
can tell a definition
so clear of victory

as he, defeated - dying
on whose forbidden ear
the distant strains of victory
burst agonized and clear!  (a cruel exclamation point, I think)

Ah, it's took the flag, not won -  but I was close, and defeated, dying was on my brain.

(And sometimes I long for the clarity of chemistry classes, where debating the nature of grief and death and the immutable logic of genocide never arises as an academic responsibility - but it's not quite that simple, I know, froth-corrupted lungs could tell us as much.  But for political science classes, then, sociology, or philosophy!  it might be quite as fruitless - discuss the historical causes of atrocities, why they happen, how we can prevent them, sure, as unanswerable as asking how we express them and how words can cope with the strains of our moral demands - but at least it might feel more productive.  because I still can't believe the right words will fix the world.)

So yes, perfectly explainable, quite easy.  With these broken worlds in all the words I've been feeding to my brain, and the discordant murmurs of warfare in my ears, and the cold, nasty weather and brutishly short day, so short at 4 pm the sun was already setting in a colorless haze; with the hulking machines in the midst of detritus, the squat buildings as empty as corpses' faces, the communications tower a gleaming robot outlasting all the rest - no wonder that I was arrested by a vision of destruction.

and I stopped and stared and shivered for a moment, lost and empty.  And then a mother and child passed, this kid in a stroller and a Gap jacket staring in exactly the same direction as I was, out at the broken field and foul sky.  And I wondered, does he see what I see, is he gaping in shared wordless horror? Or does he see three big-treaded yellow caterpillars with diggers lifted to the sky?


And I burrowed deeper into my coat and walked past leafless trees up to our flat.  And here I've sat, for whatever my words are worth.  And now it's time for dinner, and hot chocolate, and a cryptic crossword, and some scraps of happier poetry.

5. Timelines

I suppose, technically speaking, we all have the same amount of history... the billion-year-old-earth (or 6,000 years, if you like), the birth of humanity, the various exoduses, the rise and fall of cultures - as humans, I guess we can all lay claim to our collective history.

And the history of humanity in the Americas is, of course, a long one - nowhere near as long as humanity in Africa, of course, but still a long and fascinating and often tragic history.

But for me, personally, I have a sense that the historical context for my own life began sometime in the 1700s... maybe the 1600s, but no earlier.  Beyond that, it is the history of other people, and unfathomably long ago.

So I am having to adjust to the scale of history and time in this city, where CaerLudein/Londinium/London has sat at this spot on the Thames for thousands of years, and where a professor says casually "It wasn't much more than 500 years ago when..." and I miss the rest of the sentence for shock that a half-millenium is dismissed as barely any time at all.

(He also said, and I quote, "I have detained you for somewhat longer than I had expected.  I now recommend that we stop for 20 minutes or so."  Oh, British formality!)