All photos © Ron Dubin

He was ready to get away. His year had been trying: He’d moved from California to Florida, spent six weeks living in a hotel, and experienced the illness and death of his mother. He was ready for something different.

The assignment, two months of photography in Bolivia, led to Dubin’s new book, Bolivia, A Journey. A professional photographer, Dubin’s work has been featured in publications around the world. I had the opportunity to speak with him regarding his Bolivian expedition, travel photography, and his favorite shots.

Tell me about yourself. Who are you? What have you done?

I’ve been working as a photographer for four years. I’ve done primarily travel and food photography for a variety of local, regional, national and online publications. I love landscape and wildlife photography.

Besides Bolivia, I’ve shot in Peru, France, Italy, Switzerland, The Netherlands, and have traveled and worked extensively in the U.S., from covering rocket launches in Florida to surfers in California, which will be in the next book. When in Los Angeles, I shoot headshots for up and coming performers.

You admitted you knew little about Bolivia before you arrived: How did this affect the way you saw the country?

Bolivia to me, was a blank slate. I did some research once I accepted the assignment and I spent some time online looking for other people’s work to get a basic idea of what I was getting into.

Beyond that, it was let’s go and figure it out on the fly. I had a translator/guide, Daniela, who set the itinerary and took care of all the details, which meant all I had to think about was shooting. She is fantastic.

How long did it take you to adapt to your new environment?

Surprisingly, I didn’t have a problem with the altitude at all. Prior to leaving, I was sent some altitude sickness pills and started taking them two days before departing. Once I arrived in La Paz, everything was fine.

The night I arrived, we went to dinner, then a wine bar and ended up at a place called Karaoke America, which kind of set the tone for the entire trip.

It was late and there were only a few people left in the place, among them these two rugged looking guys in three piece suits.

As soon as we sat down, one of the guys starts shouting over the music towards me, “Griiiiiingo.” After he tossed a few more gringos my way, the guys’ song came up and they began to sing… Air Supply…. I’m thinking to myself, “This is kind of weird.”

After they finished, they came over and sat down. They were nice enough and Daniela, her friends, and myself figured they were too drunk to worry about. The one guy kept going with the “gringos” until he finally started a question with one.

“Gringo? Do you know why this is such a great fucking city? Do you know?”

Without waiting for a response, he continued. “Because you can piss in the fucking streets, Gringo, that’s why this is such a great fucking city, Gringo.” I nodded, we laughed, and he and his friend went back to singing love songs.

So, to answer your question, it took about six hours. I had a harder time adjusting to the altitude in Telluride.

What goes into a great travel photograph? What do you look for before pressing the shutter release?

I would say the same thing that goes into any great photograph. Does it convey a sense of place, of the environment? Does it do it in a unique way? Does it make the audience feel like they want to go there? I usually try to look for something different or unusual in addition to trying to anticipate something happening.

For instance, the cover image that I shot while we were on the Salar. It was a set shot with the Land Cruiser in the foreground, with Daniela further away, her back to the camera.

After several frames, getting what I originally envisioned, I saw another Land Cruiser coming from my right, and to me, that Land Cruiser, crossing in front of her made the difference in the image and the setup.

Your Bolivian landscape images are striking: What do you look for when setting up a landscape shot?

Thank you, that’s very nice of you to say. I try to work from the top down. I like interesting or contrasting cloud patterns combined with some central focus on the ground, a weird tree or color that stands out. I’ve been told more than once that I’m big on isolationism.

Bolivia is unique in that it has such a wide variety of terrain, from the high altitude desert mountains of Tupiza and the Altiplano to the low altitude jungles of Rurrenabaque and San Borja.

Because of the tight schedule we were on, it was really “run ‘n gun”, I didn’t really have the luxury of saying I want to be here at sunset or sunrise. I can count on one hand the number of times I even set up with my tripod, which runs counter to one of the basic tenets of landscape photography.

What tips would you give to people wanting to take better travel photos?

Shoot for yourself, first and foremost. Don’t let the camera get in the way of enjoying your trip.

It’s difficult at times to appreciate the experience with a camera pressed to your face all the time, and you’re wherever you are for the experience. Let that be your guide into what you shoot. Your overall memories will be better and your photos documenting the trip will be better because of it.

What is your favorite shot from your Bolivian expedition? What’s the story behind it?

Interesting question. Difficult, too. Strangely enough, my favorites are sorely lacking in backstory for some reason. There are several.

The market in Coroico, with the sleeping dog, underneath the pig’s head, underneath the chickens with the women talking: The photo tells the story. I was just fortunate to be able to see it and capture it. The walking tree in Tupiza was taken almost as an afterthought.

One of my favorites with some semblance of a story is the Sunset Over Sal. It was the first time I ever had difficulty shooting a sunset. I like big sunsets. I like the sun to look big and round. I needed this shot.

We were behind schedule, rushing to make up time and it was getting colder. Freezing cold. It was windy, really windy, windy enough that I was able to lean backwards with my full weight and not worry about falling over, and I’m not a small guy.

Because of the wind, I couldn’t get my tripod off the roof so trying to stabilize the camera, all 6+ pounds of it. Catching wind while trying to get the correct exposure was a lot of fun. Although salt and dust were whipping around, the altitude (3,673 meters) and lack of pollution gave me a hard time.

There was nothing to diffract the sun like the smog in L.A. or general moisture in Florida. It took me a while to get a shot that I was happy with.

What gear are you using? Did the altitude or climate affect your camera or lenses? What should someone take on an extended expedition?

I shoot Canon. The altitude wasn’t a factor and thankfully through dust, salt and rainstorms, the gear held up just fine. If you are going on a long expedition, make sure you bring everything you think you will need, and then add to it. Extra memory cards, spare batteries, and at least one portable hard drive.

As I mentioned earlier, there is such a wide variety of terrain in Bolivia, not to mention cities and towns and people that I needed to shoot. I brought everything with me. I knew that the way our schedule was, I’d really only get one bite of the apple and didn’t want to miss a shot because I was too lazy to pack a lens. I had coverage from 16mm to 400mm in my bag, along with two bodies and a P&S.

My camera bag, which I bought specifically for this assignment, sans notebook and tripod, weighed in at 27 pounds. When we were spending the night, if they had electricity, I would offload the day’s images onto the notebook and two portable drives which I kept in separate bags.

What advice would you offer to people visiting Bolivia?

Bolivia is a truly beautiful place which is off most people’s radar. Unfortunately, it’s also a country that’s in the midst of political upheaval. On the practical side, if you go, give yourself a day or two to acclimate to the altitude and take the altitude sickness pills. They make a difference. You can also chew on coca leaves (I skipped that remedy; my gums are still numb from the 80’s).

There’s an awful lot to see, places that will make you go “Wow,” but keep in mind, it’s the poorest country in South America; there’s an awful lot of things that will make you go how?

Community Connection

Dubin’s book, Bolivia, A Journey, can be purchased at blurb.com. He also maintains a website, Ron Dubin Photography.

Mining the Fagaras Range, Transylvanian Alps, Romania. Photo by mountain guide Iulian Cozma.

During a lull in last week’s storm we took it upon ourselves to hike up a mountain—and by hike up a mountain I mean put traction devices on our alpine touring skis and set out from our cars in a generally, then quite seriously, uphill direction for several hours, breaking trail through a thick, waist-deep accumulation of el-niño caliber snowdump, in exchange for a few minutes’ dreamlike turns on the way back down. We weren’t sure what to expect. We were the first-ever travelers to lay tracks in that newmade landscape.

Pioneering in the Sherwins. Photo by Dan Patitucci.

It was, as pro shooter Dan Patitucci had promised, hard labor. But we took turns doing the heavy lifting, with one or two proudly doing the bulk of it while the rest of us, toward the back of the line, chatted away about food and the state of publishing and such. We went up through the old-growth trees. We stayed clear the chutes on either side, so as to avoid dying a slow, horrible death by asphyxiation beneath thirty or forty feet of avalanche detritus.

On the way up I couldn’t help but re-tell an old Jack London story about breaking trail, about the guy who invests his fortune in eggs in Chicago on the notion that he will be able to sell them for a tremendous profit in the Yukon. “What he suffered on that lone trip,” wrote London, “with naught but a single blanket, an axe, and a handful of beans, is not given to ordinary mortals to know.”

This was during the Klondike Rush, just before the turn of the last century. When fresh food was worth more than gold dust, and news, like hard supplies, traveled not on the ether but overland, passed from person to person, from mortal to mortal.

“The name and fame of the man with the thousand dozen eggs began to spread through the land. Gold-seekers who made in before the freeze-up carried the news of his coming. Grizzled old-timers of Forty Mile and Circle City, sourdoughs with leathern jaws and bean-calloused stomachs, called up dream memories of chickens and green things at mention of his name. Dyea and Skaguay took an interest in his being, and questioned his progress from every man who came over the passes, while Dawson — golden, omeletless [and internetless] Dawson — fretted and worried, and waylaid every chance arrival for word of him.”

It was tough going. Being the first in over the ice that season, it fell to this unfortunate fellow (and to his dogs and Indians, whom he drove onward at gunpoint) to hammer out a trail across half a thousand miles of snowy waste. His progress was slow. Behind him, in the brief twilight at either end of the days, he would often see a trickle of campfire smoke on the horizon. He wondered why whoever it was back there didn’t just overtake him. He didn’t get it.

“How hard he worked, how much he suffered, he did not know. Being a man of the one idea, now that the idea had come, it mastered him. In the foreground of his consciousness was Dawson, in the background his thousand dozen eggs, and midway between the two his ego fluttered, striving always to draw them together to a glittering golden point.”

The golden point, of course, was the fortune he stood to make with those eggs.

I paused to catch my breath, perhaps even took a turn in the lead for a few exhausting moments before once again ceding the glory to the harder men (and woman) among us.

“Well, did he make it?” asked Patitucci.

Oh yes, he made it, I said. And when he was not far out from his destination, he finally came to understand the slow progress of those who had for all those long, dark days been following in his track. Now that word had spread back down the Chilkoot that that trail had been broken, the rush was on.

“Rasmunsen, crouching over his lonely fire, saw a motley string of sleds go by. First came the courier and the half-breed who had hauled him out from Bennett; then mail-carriers for Circle City, two sleds of them, and a mixed following of ingoing Klondikers. Dogs and men were fresh and fat, while Rasmunsen and his brutes were jaded and worn down to the skin and bone. They of the smoke wreath had travelled one day in three, resting and reserving their strength for their dash to come when broken trail was met with; while each day he had plunged and floundered forward, breaking the spirit of his dogs and robbing them of their mettle.”

There remained for poor Rasmunsen one last tragic revelation upon arrival in Dawson City—to do with his eggs and the price they might fetch—but I’ll leave it to old Jack to tell you the rest.

Starting for the Klondike. Alaska State Library.

My concern here is more to do with the onslaught of other plunderers that poured in in his wake.

At the top of the ridge the sky cleared briefly, giving us a view of the valley and the ranges beyond. Then some good orange light. Then the snow came in again.

The ride down was not much of a ride at first, the snow being too deep to gain any momentum. But then the aspect fell away and we went with it, dropping through the trees, floating, soaring, the only sound that of steel edges cutting through a pile of delicate crystals—a pile soft as goosedown and deeper underfoot than a man is tall. And the occasional hoot-hoot of our fellows through the woods.

Even before we’d made it back to our cars we came upon another skier gliding fast and easy up our hard-won skintrack.

Later that evening, Patitucci posted an entry on his very popular blog and from there it spread to Facebook and Twitter, and by the next morning the whole mountainside was fairly overrun with powderseekers. Perhaps I exaggerate. But in any case the sense of solitude and discovery that is the golden egg, as it were, of adventure travel—which we had tasted for a day—was gone.

Patitucci, whose livelihood is based on selling photographs, as mine is on selling stories, wondered if in this case he should have kept it to himself.

It’s an age-old burden for the travel writer (older and heavier than today’s ethical quandaries about who should pay the bills): like the trailbreakers of yore, you beat your way to the next great “undiscovered” village, the last “lost” culture, the ultimate “secret” beach. You write about the wonder of the place. Maybe you give it away for free on Facebook. Maybe, if you’re scrappy, or lucky, you get two bucks a word for it. But in your wake the wonder, such as it was, is gone.

The place will never be the same again.

We justify it to ourselves in various ways: This is what we do. This is what people want. If we don’t do it someone else will (and maybe we can do it better, more responsibly). If pushed up against a wall, we take the anthropological tack, or that of the museum curator: we say, hey, we’re just trying to document this stuff before it goes away—we’re saving it (even as we track it up). Oh yeah, and we need the money. And what’s wrong with change anyway?

Pave It and Paint It Green, by Rondal Partridge

“I don’t think I ever ruined Calcata,” writes David Farley in his fine essay, On the Perils of Travel Writing, confronting the effect he may have had upon a particular Italian village simply by writing about the place. “If anything, I only ruined it—or at least half of it—for one person: myself.”

And let us not forget Simon Winchester on the wounds he re-opened by sharing stories about the people of Tristan Da Cunha. “It suddenly seemed to me,” he writes, in retrospect, “that my very being on the island, and my later decision to record my impressions of that visit and the impressions of earlier visitors, had resulted in a series of entirely unintended and unanticipated consequences—consequences that were as inimical to the islanders’ contentment as if I had plundered or polluted there.”

Sicilians, surfers, fly fishermen and keepers of mythical, undiscovered hot springs have a code they call omertà, a code of silence. You don’t talk to the cops—even about your least favorite neighbors. And you don’t tell strangers about your favorite stash.

Not long ago, a fellow contributor to The New York Times wrote a nice piece in that paper about one of my favorite places on the planet. The place—a hot springs, as it happens—was no big secret; it’d been written up before; it was once a favorite of Charles Manson’s; I’d even mentioned it (briefly) in my own guidebook. Besides, if you knew what you were looking for, everything you needed to know about how to get there was on the internet.

Still, I was disappointed to see it splashed across the venerable pages of the Gray Lady. And though I’d done as much for places I cared less about, I couldn’t help but call the author on a breach of code.

“Don’t go looking for Yankee caps at the springs anytime soon,” he replied, and then went on as follows:

“When Nat Geo did that story about fifteen years ago with the enormous photo, I was horrified. “There goes the neighborhood,” I thought. It didn’t have the slightest effect on traffic. I don’t really think all the news stories that have been posted and broadcast the years since have had much effect other than reminding the National Park Service that the springs, as they stand now—and there are many people who don’t believe they should be standing now—has some mainstream support beyond the perceived “fringe element” of rednecks and stoners. National stories extolling The Way Things Are help keep things that way.”

On some level, I guess he’s right. John Muir figured he was saving Yosemite by writing about it. And of course he did save it—from mining and logging and all manner of voracious industrial plunder. But how now do we save it from the 3.9 million of us who take our bootheels to the place every year—and from those who profit by selling us eggs and popcorn along the way? Hard to say.

Again, Simon Winchester:

“Students of tourism science can and do construct elaborate theories from physics, invoking such wizards as Heisenberg and the Hawthorne effect and the status of Schrödinger’s cat to explain the complex interactions between our status as tourist-observers and the changes we prompt in the peoples and places we go off to observe. But at its base is the simple fact that in so many instances, we simply behave abroad in manners we would never permit at home: we impose, we interfere, we condescend, we breach codes, we reveal secrets. And by doing so we leave behind much more than footfalls. We leave bruised feelings, bad taste, hurt, long memories.”

So should we really just stay home, as Winchester suggests? Of course not. But as we go out into the world, as we forge new paths to newmade places—or places new to us, anyway—it seems worth considering which part of our experiences we ought share with our fellows. And which, perhaps, we ought keep to ourselves.

Image: juhansonin

EARLIER THIS WEEK I needed to put together either a resume or CV (Curriculum Vitae) for review by a university.

I hadn’t updated my resume in at least 6 years and basically created a new one. Perhaps because I wasn’t under pressure of having to use this for getting a job, I found the process of creating it strangely gratifying. It almost seemed like editing a story.

Here were some things I learned:

1.Utilize a CV format instead of a resume.

The standard resume format forces you to begin with your employment or professional history, starting with the last thing you did. I could never keep track of the exact start / finish dates of all the different gigs I had. And I always hated how it felt like I needed to ‘cover’ various gaps of time where I was basically traveling or surfing or whatever.

Think about it from the point of view of the person reading the resume. This is the first thing they come to after your name and personal info: the last thing you did was work for 6 months as a parking lot attendant at a large corporate ski resort where your “ending salary” was $8.75.

Perhaps even worse is beginning with an “objective statement” explicating how you’re the “perfect candidate” because of cliches x, y, and z.

The CV format saves you from all of this because you start with your academic history. At least the first thing the person reads is that you graduated from high school (hopefully), college (better), and that you majored in something that is either relevant to what you’re applying for, or is something you can make seem relevant via the way you present your work experience.

2. Utilize a “Summary of Professional Experience” written in a smooth, almost narrative style.

After listing your academic history, go on to professional experience, but instead of bullet points and dates, write it all out like a story. Show the person reading it that you have skills to put sentences and paragraphs together. A summary also gives you a transparent way of ‘covering’ gaps in employment in a way that seems positive. Take this paragraph from my CV:

After graduating from the University of Georgia in 1995 I spent 5 months hiking the Appalachian trail, then returned to Athens, Georgia where I was hired by the Athens Montessori School as a middle school teacher. I helped innovate an experiential education curriculum for adolescents based on teambuilding and utilizing travel and “place” as springboards for learning. I resigned my full-time teaching position in the summer of 1999 (due to travel), but continued to work as a trip leader and teambuilding facilitator for both the Athens Montessori School and High Meadows School and Camp until relocating to Colorado in 2002.

Notice how there are essentially three years’ worth of employment that are ’skipped over’? It’s not that I wasn’t working; it’s just that I kept traveling and doing various gigs (read: parking lot attendant) that I didn’t want to mention.This isn’t necessarily hiding anything, it’s just that these things aren’t directly relevant to my experience as a writer or educator.

3. Continuously edit each sentence until it contains only what you did and nothing more.

Take another paragraph from my professional experience summary:

In the winter of 2006 I began contributing articles to the newly-founded Matador Travel Network, and later that Spring was hired as editor. Over the next year I worked with hundreds of writers and helped cultivate a supportive community for aspiring writers, photographers, and filmmakers around the world.

In the first draft of this paragraph I’d written “Over the next year I worked with hundreds of writers and helped cultivate what has become known as a supportive community for aspiring writers, photographers, and filmmakers around the world.”

Anything that inserts something essentially subjective or just straight up unnecessary like “what has become known as” is anti-flow. Trying to make something ’sound’ a certain way always comes out sounding false. Just state what you did or are doing, whatever it is.

4. Leave out jobs and experiences that are irrelevant to your writing goals or future career.

Take this paragraph from my summary:

In the fall of 2002 I was hired by Wild Bear Center in Nederland, Colorado as an environmental educator and teambuilding facilitator. At this time I also began working as a freelance writer, contributing to alternative weeklies such as the Flagpole as well as the regional western publication Mountain Gazette. I was hired as a reporter and columnist by the local Nederland paper, The Mountain-Ear in Fall of 2003, and in the Spring of 2004 I also became a staff writer for the Boulder Weekly.

The main things I’m trying to express in this CV are that (a) I have numerous skills and experiences as a writer and (b) I have numerous skills as an educator that tie into the way I write and work with writing students.

Therefore, it doesn’t matter that also in the during the time outlined above I also worked in construction. Or, if I was going for a different kind of job, lets say a technical writer, I would consider putting this information in.

5. Include only your most relevant publications and awards.

After the summary of your professional history, list any relevant publications. You don’t want to fill pages’ worth of urls and titles, only put the best ones up there. Afterwards (or before) add a quick note stating that you have a blog and that your archives can be accessed there.

Here’s how I started my Publications section:

Publication Credits

Matador:

Note: Because I write and publish on a daily basis at Matador, I’ve listed only a selection of work. For a more complete listing, please visit my author profile at the Traveler’s Notebook as well as my author page at Matador.

Notes on Celebrating New Year’s with Los Colque narrative nonfiction on life and culture in Patagonia

Notes on 2 Transparent Responses to Current Economic Climate for Writers  analysis of writers’ innovations in new media and community building

Writing by Remixing: Gordon Lish and Raymond Carver literary criticism and analysis of Gordon Lish’s edits of Raymond Carver’s story “Beginners”

[etc.]

Recent print and online publications outside of Matador:

Fodor’s Patagonia (Random House, 2009) Contributed chapter on Atlantic Patagonia.

Poem in Drash literary magazine, Summer 2009

[etc.]

Special Archived Selections outside of Matador:

“How to Rebuild a Paddle” Short Story for Mountain Gazette Fall 2006

Note that it isn’t necessary to link to every single piece. All that matters is that the CV transmits a sense of what you’ve done as a writer.

5. Try to end on something strong.

Depending on if you’ve won awards or not, you can choose to end your CV either with an awards section or a section on “Ongoing Projects.” Any awards you’ve won can leave whoever’s reading your CV with a positive impression of you. Don’t forget that college grants and scholarships can all be considered awards. Here was some of mine:

Study Grant awarded by Mountain Forum for Peace in Winter of 2005 to fund travels / research in Argentina for profiling the Madres of Plaza del Mayo.

“Three Fires” winner of the 1000 words contest in Mountain Gazette, November 2003

If you don’t have anything to put up as an award (or you have something, but you don’t want to end on that ‘note’), then close your CV with your current projects, whether they be blogs or any other major writing projects.

Quick Recap:

1. Start with your Name, Address, Phone / Fax / Skype, and email, each piece of info given its own line, centered and doublespaced. After this section, everything else is left-justified.

2. Educational History

3. Summary of Professional Experience

4. Publication Credits

5. Awards

6. Ongoing Projects

Community Connection

We’ve compiled lots of our notes on writing in a single page that covers everything from crafting narrative scenes to writing bilingual dialogue.

Also, be sure to visit NomadicMatt’s classic piece How to Make Travel Look Good on a Resume.

Ho Chi Minh Portraits from Todd Brown on Vimeo.

Street Portrait Photo How To from Joe Bloggs on Vimeo.

MOMENTARY STATES from Dave Mitchell on Vimeo.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

What inspires you to shoot photos or video? Landscapes, people, action shots or still life? Share your shutterbug stoke in the comments below.

Panoramic view of Tegucigalpa, Honduras. All photos: Global Medical Brigades

Hours on the plane, round-trip, including delays: 16

People seen and treated for medical concerns: 1,000

Medicines brought by volunteers.

US dollar value of medications dispensed: 5,000

Hours spent packing and organizing medications: 10

People seen and treated for dental concerns: 200

Times physically winced while watching tooth extractions: 5

Number of volunteers: 38

Doctors on site: 2

Gol!

Paramedics on site: 2

Dentists on site: 1

Orphanages visited: 2

Highly competitive soccer games started between volunteers and kids at the orphanages: 1

Age range of kids: 1.5 to 16

Reminders to avoid drinking or brushing teeth with tap water: 3

Times panicked because water got in eyes and mouth during shower: 1

Plantains, pre-slicing and deep frying. Mmmm.

Anti-parasite pills taken after touching down in Miami: 1

Anti-malarial pills taken before, during, and after trip: 16

Bags of plantain chips consumed: 5

Bottles of Chilean wine enjoyed: 8

Pounds lost: 0

Candid conversations with roommates about bowel movements: 14

Cold showers taken: 7

Group photo before going home.

Fantasies about having hot water: 7

Taking first hot shower after getting home: priceless

Hot lady cop escorts: 1

Political graffiti spotted: 4

Collective photos taken: 459

Bags of coffee bought: 3

Total mosquito bites on me: 0!

ARTIST Daniel Worth wrote this about the following journal pages:

Since leaving Australia for Europe around the end of 2008 I have made an effort to document my travels in my art/diaries almost everyday and I am now up to my 6th [journal] in around a year and a half. I think having a journal is a special way to record personal ideas, experiences, visions and an invaluable source for my artwork. I now fantasise over having bookshelves full of my art journals when I am older and having an illustrated story of my life to look back on.

1.Notes: ‘Things to Paint in London – “I need to push and focus more or flake and get a job!”

2.Notes: “Painting note- more rhythm and distortion.”

3.Notes: “27/11/09 This Journal entry was done at a cafe in Amsterdam while sheltering from the rain, enjoying a hot chocolate and watching lots of people with and without umbrellas running around in the rain.”

community connection

To see more of Daniel Worth’s artwork and journal pages, please visit Daniel Worth Art.

Please send journal page submissions to david@matadornetwork.com

ANNOTATIONS allow you to display messages, thought bubbles and most importantly, add links to other YouTube videos. Adding links lets you guide your visitors to other videos and create interactive games, improving your viewer experience and getting you more views.

Anyone with videos on YouTube can add annotations to their vids. Annotations come in three flavors; Notes, Speech Bubbles, and Spotlights. Spotlights can be used as links that allow viewers to go directly to the video you link to. Annotations can be layered and placed anywhere in the viewer with multiple annotations appearing on the screen at once.

Annotations are free, easy to use, and well worth the little time they take to implement.

NOTICE MY USE OF ANNOTATIONS IN THIS MATADORTV VLOG.

WATCH THIS VIDEO FOR A TUTORIAL ON ANNOTATIONS

Now that you know how to use annotations, start experimenting on your videos right now. When it comes to using annotated links to create an interactive game, their is virtually no limit to what you may create!

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Image: See-ming Lee 李思明 SML

1. Jason Paul living off Craigslist

Jason Paul has started living off Craigslist. In his own words:

… Jason Paul, a recent graduate from American University attempted, like many from the 2009 class, to secure a job. After applying for over 180 journalism jobs in over 35 states, Jason decided to pursue a blog/book idea of his own.

Right now, unless he is sleeping, Jason is doing something related to Craigslist.org. For those of you who do not know what Craigslist is, it is basically a classifieds page from the newspaper. The site is in 570 cities in 50 countries and allows users to post ads, with the exception of a few categories, for free.

Essentially, Jason is living off Craigslist.

This means food, housing, jobs, entertainment, friends and anything else you can possibly imagine.

So far he has traveled from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco, found housing, found a job and is beginning to make friends.

Jason blogs about everything he does in a transparent way. He includes the texts of emails within his blog posts. He blogs about training to work at Denny’s. He blogs about living in a basement.

The concept of livingcraigslist reminds me of thru-you in that Jason Paul is able to construct his artistic ‘product’ based strictly on different elements of social media and online communities.

2. Stephen Elliot Do It Yourself Book Tour

Stephen Elliot is the author of The Adderall Diaries, and half a dozen other books. In recent NYT essay, he explains how, instead of an underfunded, depressing, cheap hotel room-style book tour to “large coastal cities,” he put together a DIY book tour that took place at people’s houses.

He explains:

Before my book came out, I had set up a lending library allowing anyone to receive a free review copy on the condition they forward it within a week to the next reader, at their own expense. (Now that a majority of reviews are appearing on blogs and in Facebook notes, everyone is a reviewer.) I asked if people wanted to hold an event in their homes. They had to promise 20 attendees. I would sleep on their couch. My publisher would pay for some of the airfare, and I would fund the rest by selling the books myself.

What is most interesting to me about this is the effect the readings had. As venues were not bookstores but people’s homes, and audiences were not typical literary crowds but just friends of whichever reader hosted the event, the readings became long and intimate discussions. Stephen found that “In a weird way the readings began to feel like an extension of the book.”

Notes

1. Both writers / bloggers are using the internet to coordinate their ‘offline’ life, whether it’s promoting / organizing a book tour (S.Elliot) or ‘everything’ (J. Paul).

2. Jason Paul is essentially transforming his offline life into his online ‘art’.

3. The way they are leveraging their work on and offline represents an ethic of transparency.

4. Both writers’ responses facilitate the building of community both on and offline in ways that wouldn’t have happend had they followed traditional paths.

Community Connection

What other transparent responses to market pressures on writers and journalists have you heard about or experienced? Please share in the comments below.

Image: HikingArtist.com

AT MATADOR we usually avoid bigging ourselves up too much, but there have been some hardworking ninjas behind the scenes creating some great resources for writers and bloggers. I wanted to share some of the following:

How to Write

This page includes everything from how to write narrative essays using scenes to techniques for writing bilingual dialogue.

There are also lots of resources as far as magazines and websites you should know about.

Blogging Tips

Blogging tips is probably our fastest growing section of articles. There are resources here that can take you step by step through how to start a WordPress blog and finding a good WordPress theme.

If you’re already have a blog, this page also has good info on how to deal with content scraping and what to do with out of control comments.

Social Media

This page still has a lot more to add, but there are some really good resources here already on things like how to promote your photography online and utilizing retweets to become a twitter ninja..

Additional Resources

I also wanted to mention just a few of the other resources and communities outside of Matador that I visit at least on a semi-regular basis:

*New Pages – comprehensive listing of calls for submissions and literary magazines
*Practicing Writer – blog and site with focus on academic opportunities / discussions, and good market resources as well as interviews. Good newsletter.
*Brevity – blog on ‘creative nonfiction’, has good commentary, essays and news in the nonfiction ‘world’.

Community Connection

These are some of the resources out there for writers. What other ones do you use? Please let us know in the comments below, and thanks for visiting and sharing our focus pages.

Photo: dubiella

CARNIVAL ~ just the word summons visions of otherworldly floats and sparkling, feather-clad Brazilian beauties. Considered one of the greatest festivals and spectacles on Earth, Carnival holds my fascination firmly by the neck.

What traveler hasn’t imagined themselves surrounded by the famed samba schools who compete with pomp and splendor for top honors?

As a blogger, video junkie and shutter bug, Carnival represents the ultimate kid-in-a-candy-store travel fantasy.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Have you experienced Carnival? Do you have a blog (or pix or video) to show for it? Where else do you want to visit and write about before you kick the bucket?

Bus ride in Bangkok. Photo: K.rol2007

“SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED,” said a white person in the lobby of my first hostel as I walked through the door.

“Shit,” I said. The group at the table laughed, all looking at me. One stood and got a beer from the mini-fridge in the corner.

“Where are you from?” they said. They asked me to take pictures of them with their digital cameras.

I said, “Well, goodnight,” and went to my room. In my room I thought about how I wouldn’t normally hang out with those people if I was in Seattle.

The next day I was sitting on a curb eating a banana pancake. One of the travelers—a mildly obese, sunburned man—turned his body gradually as he passed me. He stopped and looked at me. I looked at him. He moved slowly forward. I wasn’t sure if it was him.

“Good morning,” he said, “is that your breakfast?”

“Hi,” I said.

“I’m going to the Grand Palace,” he said, “where are you going?”

“I’m going to the park down that way,” I said. I didn’t think to ask him if I could come with him before he left. It didn’t occur to me until days later.

That night in a new guesthouse in the Silom area I was ordering large Changs at the bar and moving back to a table where I sat alone. If I sat there long enough I thought someone would approach me. A group of three Americans appeared and interacted with each other as if they had been friends for years. Eye contact was not established with any of the members of the group. I ended up in the corner on a couch writing in my notebook until the bar closed. The next morning the bartender, who also worked the reception, saw me and said “large Chang” and grinned.

The following night in the same guesthouse bar I was at a table where a lot of people sat drinking. I was seated across an English girl.

“Where are you from,” I said.

“How long have you been traveling for, and when will you go back,” she said.

“Where have you been since you started traveling,” I said, “and long have you been traveling?”

“You’re from the States, right,” she said, “where in the States?”

“Oh, you’re from Seattle? My cousin lives there,” the person next to me interrupted.

“Yes,” I said. “And where are you from?”

“England,” the new person said.

“I thought so,” I said. “I have such a hard time lately telling if people are English or Australian. Sometimes I even think Germans are English. One time I met this guy from London and I thought he was German for like two days. It was very strange.”

“I have such a hard time telling the difference between Americans and Canadians,” the new person said, “that I just ask if they’re Canadian because I don’t want to offend them.”

“But you guys have Obama now so it’s okay,” the English girl said

“Obama is very good,” the new person said.

“Obama is a lot better than George Bush,” the English person said.

“Yes,” I said.

“You must have been embarrassed to be an American when George Bush was president,” the new person said.

“No, I wasn’t,” I said.

“All the Americans I have talked to have been very embarrassed about George Bush,” the new person said.

“I don’t think I was embarrassed,” I said.

“But you must have been embarrassed,” the English said. “I was embarrassed that we were both a member of the same species.”

“I was embarrassed for the Americans,” the new person said.

“No, I wasn’t embarrassed,” I said.

“Do you like George Bush,” the English said.

“I do not like George Bush,” I said.

“Then, truly, you must have been embarrassed to be an American,” the new person said.

“If a person generalizes my personality or how ‘good’ I am based on my nationality, or who presides over the country in which I was born,” I said, “then that person is no better than George Bush, or even Nazis. Nazis generalized personality and how ‘good’ people were based on religion and then killed a lot of them. In Rwanda genocide happened because people were judging other people’s intellectual characteristics based on what tribe they came from.

“I never felt embarrassed because if a person judged me for being American and subsequently didn’t want to be my friend, I wouldn’t want to have that person as a friend, so I remained unaffected.”

The new person turned to the position she was in before she interrupted. I turned back to the English.

“So, what do you do for money,” I said.

The next morning at the reception we saw each other and she made a small wave then turned her face.

“Your bed’s infested,” I said that day to a Canadian girl that had just come in and put her bags down on one of the bunks. “That was supposed to be my bed, but someone told me there were bedbugs, so I moved to this bed. . . You should change beds.”

Later I had the same conversation with her that I had the night previous with the English, minus the genocide speech.

That night we went to the Loi Krathong festival together. We ended up back at the guesthouse on the balcony talking to two English people who gave me a lot of information about what to do in Cambodia.

The next day I went to Cambodia.

Community Connection

Brandon recently published an Analysis of the Typical Traveler Conversation. For more of his narrative writing, please check out this story at Muumuu House.

Photo: Pink Moose

THERE’S AN old phrase Brian Eno supposedly said about the Velvet Underground. It goes something like “when the first Velvet Underground album came out, only about 1,000 people bought it, but every one of them formed a rock and roll band.”

I’m not sure what the sales of Raymond Carver’s first books were, but on a level of artistic influence you could apply a similar statement. People read him and want to become writers. Or they read him and it totally influences their style.

The way we internalize an artist’s work is what ultimately matters. It’s more important than the “truth” about a writer’s life. How can learning about Lou Reed’s adolescence possibly compare with hearing “Candy Says” for the first time during your own?

This is why when I found out that editor Gordon Lish is responsible for much of what I love about Carver’s short stories, it didn’t affect how I felt about him as a writer. If anything it makes him seem more real.

In December 2007, the New Yorker published the original version of Carver’s story “Beginners” overlaid with Gordon Lish’s edits so you can compare the draft with the final version of the story published as “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

The story is about a group of friends in their late 30s sitting around drinking and recounting different relationships, accidents, and people who committed suicide. Like most of Carver’s work, there is minimal plot / action, but instead a kind of tension (and weirdly powerful sense of compassion) that seems to drive everything forward.

Here are several notes about the way the story was edited (and in some cases, rewritten, by Gordon Lish). In the quoted examples, I’ve preserved the formatting as it was printed in the New Yorker, with Gordon Lish’s strikeouts + edits / writing in bold.  

1. Temporal references or references to backstory are cut or significantly reduced.

Ex: The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. It was Saturday afternoon. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink.

Ex: He said When he was young he’d spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He He’d left the Church at the same time, but he said he still looked back on to those years in the seminary as the most important in his life.

Throughout the story, Lish cut references to specific moments in time and specific backstory. This has the effect of making the story seem “truer,” as when we look back in time we rarely remember the exact day (or if we do it doesn’t really matter), but instead tend to organize our memories by “periods.”

If you imagine the story as a film, removing the backstory (where you’d have to cut to a different scene or flashback) and references to time also make the whole narrative move faster,  with more tension. It gives you the feeling that you’re speeding towards something (probably bad) happening.

2. Each sentence containing two simple clauses connected with the conjunction “but” is broken into two separate sentences.

Ex: We lived in Albuquerque, then. But but we were all from somewhere else.

This, one of the most characteristic elements of Carver’s style, wasn’t actually the way he wrote the drafts; it was the way Lish remixed it. Although this is a very subtle linguistic element, it’s notable (especially considering the time in which it was published) because (a) it “violated” the rule that you don’t start a sentence with a conjunction, (b) it went against the decades-old prose style pioneered by Hemingway of created long compound sentences with clauses often having little to do with one another but joined anyway by a conjunction, and most importantly, (c) it gave the text this fragmented and on-edge feel as if the narrator was incapable of just letting go (or something) but had to keep backing up everything he said with some other thought or emotion.

3.  Any dialogue that doesn’t sound like how people actually talk is changed to vernacular.

Ex: That old couple who had this car wreck got into an accident out on the interstate? A kid hit them and they were all torn to shit battered up.

Ex: I’d like to just knock on the door and let loose release a hive of bees in the house.

There are other effects that Lish added or emphasized such as parallel construction, repetition of certain phrases (“what we’re talking about”), and also changing the ending, however, the notes above are the easiest ones to pull from the story and explain.

Overall, I feel that Lish didn’t so much apply his own vision of what he thought the story should be, but more identified certain aspects of Carver’s style that could be condensed and magnified so that it was even more “Carver” than the original. I think this represents the ultimate work of an editor.

For writers (even travel or nonfiction writers), the obvious lesson here is that whether you work with others or just continually self-edit, there are infinite ways to remix the phrasing, sentence construction, amount of background info / temporal references, and dozens of other elements to achieve specific effects with your story.

Community Connection

Another closely related topic to editing is translating. Please see Leigh Shulman’s Notes on Iranian Translation, with an excerpt of her translation published at Guernica Magazine.

Faces of modern Iran. Photo: Hamed Saber

THIS TRANSLATION began five years ago over a coffee with my friend Alimorad Fadaienia. I’ve known the man for years. We’re good friends. He’s read and commented on much of my work, but I’d never read anything of Ali’s because his work is predominantly in Farsi. That day, we began translating The Book of Shapur.

What an opportunity! Not only would I have a chance to work with one of my best friends, also a respected Persian author, but we also bring this unique piece of Persian literature into the English language

What is The Book of Shapur?

The Book of Shapur describes what it’s like to be an Iranian exile. You feel the confusion, loss and pain of the main character as he navigates his way through an unknown city trying to complete an unknown mission. Reading this piece of writing is probably the closest you’ll ever come to knowing what it’s like to be in exile without actually experiencing it for yourself.

Read an excerpt from The Book of Shapur at Guernica Magazine. Or download and read the entire novella by going to my website The Future Is Red.

The suggested price is 10USD, but you can pay what you wish. Anything above the suggested donation price goes directly to support the International Rescue Committee, an international organization dedicated to feeding, educating, finding freedom and healing people and places around the world.

Do you speak Farsi?

This is the first question people ask when I tell them I’ve been working on a Farsi translation. The answer is no. I’ve learned a lot of Farsi over the years, but speak it? Not even close.

First rule of translation, though, is the translator does not need the same level of fluency in the original language as the target language. We take the language, culture, ideology and thought process and pour it into the mold of the language we know best.

Photo: Shahram Sharif

How Closely Does the Translation Represent the Original?

Some say a translation must adhere to the original as closely as possible. Other translators believe the goal is not simply to shift words and phrases from one language to the next. You are instead transposing the soul of a piece from one place and time to another. I tend toward the second view.

“Translation is like dancing with chains,” says Ali, echoing the words of a famous Persian translator. “You must stick to the original, but at the same time you must also be free to create something new.” It would be impossible to create the exact same experience in two languages, but you can capture the essence of a piece of writing.

What was our process?

The first step was to create a very raw and literal word-for-word translation of the piece. I sat in front of the computer typing out exactly what Ali told me. The product of that first step was completely incomprehensible, impossible to read.

Then step two. We smoothed the rough English into a real working English. Again, Ali and I sat side by side in his apartment in New York City. As we went through the sentences, I used my western United States view of the world to ask for specifics and clarification.

What changed? What remains the same?

Language takes its culture along with it, so where ever possible we remain faithful to the original. Punctuation and sentence structure – which you’ll notice are often incorrect and misleading — follow the exact pattern of the Farsi. Alimorad designed the text this way intentionally to confuse and distract you as a reader, mimicking the way an exile feels while navigating a new land.

Idioms do not translate well.

“It is like flies and the wind. They run away from each other,” Ali uses to describe two people in the novella. But flies and wind carry a significance in Farsi they don’t seem to have in English. No matter how we rearranged the words, the meaning would not carry through. We finally decided on the following: People these days are like oil and water. They run away from each other.

Sometimes a minor change changes everything.

The original text is completely in past tense to show how the narrator lives in his memory. He is constantly tied to the past. And again, it is meant to confuse. You are meant to question and wonder if you understand correctly. Past tense in English, though, left us with a piece of writing so painfully tedious and boring we almost gave up.

One day, though, I picked up the text and started fiddling with it. Just to see what would happen, I changed a few sentences from past to present tense. When I made the change, I didn’t really expect much, yet it made all the difference in making this translation publishable.

Where is the politics?

This is what makes Ali’s story so different from almost everything else I hear related to Iran. Everything else is politics. Ali says, no, this is not just politics. This is real people. People have died, been put in jail, families destroyed. This is not just something you take and plaster on the radio or TV or Twitter.

This is the truth of being in exile.

Many of us know what it’s like to move to a new country as an expat. It’s not easy. You feel misplaced. Everything is just a little bit off. Food, language, clothing. It’s all just a bit different and often difference presents itself as discomfort.

But while an expat can go home, an exile cannot ever. An exile has no choice.

The Book of Shapur leads us to a conversation between the main character and an old acquaintance. I call this other man an acquaintance, not a friend, because the exile has no friends. People from the past belong to an old world that no longer exists. Time, experience and loss has remolded them into people who no longer recognize each other. Their conversation is in a kind of code where everything seems normal, but it is not.

And when I go to pay, he gets the check.

I say, It’s not good to argue about money, even if for the sake of my age, you shouldn’t pay.

He says, you are a guest here.

I say, when we go out tonight, I’ll be your guest, let me pay this cheap one.

The same smile comes. It is beatific.

He says, when we moved the books, we found tons of money in them with the God-ble’.

I didn’t want to hear the rest.

Those of us not in exile understand the words, but we’ll never fully understand. For that reason, I thank Ali, my good friend and mentor, for giving me just this small look into this strange and unknown world.

Community Connection

To read The Book of Shapur for yourself, download it directly from The Future Is Red. The suggested cost is 10USD and half goes to support the International Rescue Committee. Any amount you wish to pay beyond the 10USD goes directly to the IRC.

Photo: mknobil

I STEP from my permanent residence at the MiMi guesthouse in District 1 of Saigon and for once I greet the endless propositions for a ride from the loafing motorbike men with a hearty ‘Youbetcha’!

THE NEGOTIATION

“How much for an hour?”

“50 thousand Dong.”

“You’re crazy, 20 thousand.”

we feign hurt feelings and squint at each other

“40 thousand, good price. Let’s go now, thank you, OK?”

“30 thousand, let’s go, I got English to teach!”

And were gone.

Through the delirium of traffic we scoot, merging and negotiating the manic flow of motor bikes. He doesn’t seem to know where he is going. The city is a nightmare of urban development, but I expect more out of a man who does this for a living. This is before I have my dedicated driver, Joseph, before I rent my own bike and certainly before I crash it. The city still feels huge, which it should, and a grin is pasted across my face.

The first school is deserted. The next place is closed. The next is full up. There are over 400 language schools in Ho Chi Minh City, there are bound to be plenty of schools who are just a little bit desperate for my services.

Each time I dismount the motorbike to proposition another school with my resume (the resume is a hastily concocted exercise in bullshit) I clap the driver on the shoulder like he’s my best mate and I say,

“Be right back, wish me luck!”

He’s probably getting sick of that. But he should be glad I haven’t fired him yet. He has spent more time circling, head scratching and map checking than driving. Approaching the door of the primary school I flatten my wind wild hair.

The English school is run by the Turkish government. The headmaster is a short hairy man that says I can start the following day, teaching twice a week.

We haven’t visited half of the schools on my list when my driver answers his cell phone and hands it to me. The driver looks stricken with angst. A snarl of broken Vietnamese gibberish and decidedly English cursing squawks from the phone then *click. The driver pulls a U-turn and heads back the way we started.

“Sorry, sorry mister!” He shakes the cell phone, which is ringing once more.

“Hey! Wrong way…where are we going? What the hell!?”

We pull up to where we started and a gargantuan African man comes bearing down on us before we even come to a stop. My driver hops off as the Goliath in the Bad Hawaiian Shirt begins to bellow.

“Where the fuck have you been! What did I tell you? Huh, huh? Off that bike, gimme the fucking money, how much you got?”

My one time driver is groveling in Vietnamese and English. He is rummaging through his pockets with his head hanging like a wet sack and I’m still sitting on the bike, looking very much like little Jack Horner. A few dollars fall into the black man’s palm and driver sulks away.

Slap my ass. Saigon motorcycle pimp… looks like my rides over.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Photo, alan2. Feature photo, kretyen.

1) HODR Haiti: This is a New Challenge by Hancocjb

This post by a traveler who volunteered in Haiti does a good job of describing the challenges that relief workers will face while trying to help the quake victims and take care of themselves.

Generosity and goodwill do dry up at some point. But not the homes; they were inundated with water as recently as Tuesday.

2) Haiti: Sun, Sand, Sea – and Poverty by Tony Wheeler

Writing in 2008, Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler describes Haiti as a safe and colorful destination for intrepid travelers.

From balcony views of the Caribbean to streets lined with art galleries, Mr. Wheeler does a wonderful job of painting Haiti as an appealing tourist destination while still paying tribute to environmental devastation and crushing poverty.

3) Desperate Passage, by Michael Finkel

In my humble opinion, Michael Finkel is one of the 5 best travel writers of our time. His story of attempting to cross the Caribbean in the cargo hold of an overloaded boat of Haitian refugees is a stunningly courageous portrait of desperation that nearly ended in tragedy.

4) Haiti Soil, by Joel K. Bourne, Jr

This brief National Geographic article gives a new dimension to the old phrase “dirt poor”.

“Tè a fatige,” said 70 percent of Haitian farmers in a recent survey when asked about the major agricultural problems they faced. “The earth is tired.”

5) Haiti’s Angry God by Pooja Bhatia

A heartfelt dispatch from the crumpled streets of Port Au Prince, this New York Times editorial poses the agonizing question of why the Haitian people “turn to a God who seems to be absent at best and vindictive at worst?”

The answer, of course, is that they have no other option.

Please Help Haiti!

Matador is spearheading a major effort to get relief supplies to Haiti. For details, please read How You Can Help Haiti.

Photo: donricardopezzano

MY ADULT LIFE has been largely defined by my travels. Travel, I’ve found, is what I do best. Whether it is through Washington’s forests or the jungles of Laos, I am happiest and at my most creative when I am traveling.

But now, two years since the last stamp has dried on my passport I pace the room with a melancholy restlessness. It feels like nebulous grieving. The turning of the decade set my desire to get lost somewhere, anywhere, snapping photos, climbing trees, blogging and drinking with locals.

First the longing made me angry. This is bullshit! I protested, I am traveler, not some laptop jockey on a coffee binge! Depression followed anger, moping. Slack faced I pitied myself and riffled through old travel journals and scrapbooks. Digging through my closet, I pull out backpacks, pocket knives and dog-eared phrase books, surrounding myself with the stuff of travel.

Today the sun breaks the monotonous Seattle cloud cover. As I set my feet to soggy pavement something about steam rising off 1st avenue prods me to shed the travel doldrums.

I can still travel. I am traveling, right now. I don’t have to leave the hemisphere or a national boundary (it would nice), I just have to leave my preconceived notions of what travel is and isn’t and step out with traveler’s eyes. There is a strong argument for local travel and god knows I have much to discover about Seattle and the rivers that flow from mountains in three directions.

A feeling this strong can be a very powerful agent for action. But I had to run through these emotions to reach a place of resolve. The longing is still there, stronger than ever. But now I claim it and wait with bags packed.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

How long has it been since you last traveled? How do you deal with the longing to travel? Share your experience in comments please.

Across Death Valley, bound for the Panamints. Photo by Christian Pondella.

[Author's note: for the glossy mag version, check out the February issue of Men's Journal, the one with Mel Gibson on the cover, or read it online here.]

1:05 AM; 1,609 feet above sea level; 1,891 feet above Badwater

I’ve been asleep for maybe twenty minutes when I smell coffee. The lights are on in Boyer’s camper. Orion is still midway through his long, slow face-plant over the tail of the Panamints. We’re into the second hour of March, at almost nineteen hundred feet above the lowest, hottest, driest basin in North America, and it’s a balmy 65 degrees. A warm wind sweeps down-canyon bearing only the faintest memory of winter.

It’s been an hour since John Wentworth arrived Paris-Dakar-style out of the moonless desert night, fresh from a day of mid-winter “pow” in the High Sierra backcountry. (Later, he will show us pictures on his phone, as if to reinforce the depth of our folly.) “Where’s the snow?” he asked.

Dry camp, Hanaupah Fan. Photo by Christian Pondella.

If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, hadn’t seen Ryan Boyer (our token redneck tele guy) and Bernie Rosow (our token jibber) posing with fat skis on their shoulders — at Dante’s View, at Zabriskie Point, on the boardwalk at Badwater, after breakfast yesterday, with the mercury already pressing ninety degrees, the tourists looking on disbelieving, the snow-dusted crest of the range painted above our heads like some ineffectual wisp of cloud (“How do you get up there?” asked one; “What if someone breaks up?” asked another) — I wouldn’t believe it existed, or that we might be able to ski on it.

Telescope Peak, at the summit of the desolate Panamint Range, is the highest point in Death Valley National Park, two dry ranges into the rain shadow of California’s Sierra Nevada. By the Köppen Classification System its summit — rising as it does from below sea level and only barely grazing the troposphere, somewhere up there in the night sky — is but a tiny oasis of cool “Mediterranean” climate (read: occasional snow) marooned atop a much larger island of so-called “arid mid-latitude desert,” floating, in turn, in a vast sea-bottom of “arid low-latitude desert (hot)” that stretches deep into Mexico.

“Telescope towers above the land at its foot as does no other peak in the United States.”

— W.A. Chalfant, Death Valley: The Facts (1930).

Early in the winter of 1849, a hardy Wisconsinite by the name of William Manly, scouting for a ragtag, dehydrated, half-starving convoy of California-bound emigrants, followed the distant vision of “the lofty snowcapped peak” for two months, like the North Star, across the wasted basins and hard-rock ranges of southern Nevada, across what is now known as Area 51, across the unrelenting flats of the Amargosa Desert, through the Funeral Mountains to the springs at Furnace Creek.

“A hoard of twenty dollar gold pieces could now stand before us the whole day long with no temptation to touch a single coin… We would have given much more for some of the snow which we could see drifting over the peak of the great snow mountains over our heads like a dusty cloud.”

— William Lewis Manly, Death Valley in ‘49 (1894).

Zabriskie Point. Photo by Christian Pondella.

The day after Christmas — celebrated with boiled ox and coffee — he awoke to find the mountain, and the good water it might represent, still more than twenty miles away across the barely-passable surface of one of the largest salt pans in North America. And even more of a barrier than he’d imagined.

“Nothing could climb it on its eastern side,” he wrote, “except a bird.”

2:15 AM; 3,200 feet

We’ve crawled our two hardiest vehicles into the gutted, dust-dry larynx of Hanaupah Canyon’s South Fork, in the dark, abandoning them when they could go no farther.

We’re on foot now, picking our separate ways up the wash, eight men into the warm katabatic breeze, into the tangle of willows, into the riot of frogs up-canyon, on and up, headlamps bobbing and dipping across the night like drunken fireflies.

We’ve foregone the park service-recommended ice axes and crampons, have left behind our avy gear — shovels, probes, beacons — in the interest of traveling as light as possible (which is not very light, alas, with skis, skins, ski boots, food, winter clothing, and nearly a gallon of water each on our backs).

My brother-in-law, Devin McDonell, whose headlamp is all but dead, claims the first spill: a turtle-dive flat on his face beneath the full weight of his pack. Joe Walker, ex-pro ski racer, accomplished world traveler, ski tuner for the World Cup, has forgotten his hiking shoes — but is happy as ever dancing over cactus thorns in a pair of self-draining river moccasins. Rosow, with no headlamp at all, proves nimble enough in his low-top skate shoes.

3 AM; 3,400 feet

Dave Schemenauer — “Shimmy,” they call him, a big-mountain skier who has made a point of skiing something every month of the year, all twelve months, for the past fifteen years — has the map (the entire quadrangle) graven on his brain. He sniffs out something of a game trail, a timeworn Shoshone path, leading straight up from the springs. He and Boyer angle for the ridge, trotting like a pair of wild goats.

“Bulge on bulge rose the bold benches, and on up the unscalable outcroppings of rock, like colossal ribs of the earth, on and up the steep slopes to where their density of blue black color began to thin out with streaks of white, and thence upward to the last noble height, where the cold pure snow gleamed against the sky.”

— Zane Grey, March, 1919, from Tales of Lonely Trails (1922).

The rest of us clamber after, as best we can, the world now canted precipitously upward, the silhouette of the mountain rearing before us, an immense blue black wall against the sky, against that ancient configuration of distant fires now and then shot through with a satellite, or a blinking jetliner on its way into or out of Los Angeles or the Bay Area or Vegas.

Vegas spreads and grows behind us, like a stain, like dawn ever about to break. The track disappears into shale, then reappears. We make our way across broken fins of rock. The distant trickle of the springs, the cacophony of frogs far below, give way to silence — to the delicate clink-clink of gear, the scrabble of feet on scree, Rosow’s whistling, and the general singing of bowels.

Wentworth does 10-plus miles in ski boots.

Photo by Christian Pondella.

3:20 AM; 4,400 feet

The moon sneaks up behind us, a quarter moon, illuminating rabbit pellets, bleached coyote scat, carcasses of well-traveled party balloons, the tracks of some big ungulate — a deer, perhaps, or a bighorn.

3:35 AM; 4,930 feet

“Probably too early to say this,” says Boyer, strolling along a flat ridgeline through sagebrush and half-dead juniper, “but this is downright civilized.”

3:50 AM; 5,202 feet

An old fire pit on the ridge, the ground wet in patches where once, not long ago, there was snow. There are mosquitoes, and piñon pines, and mysterious bird-flutterings in the bushes.

I think about Manly and his buddy John Rogers, marching 250 miles from Death Valley to what is now the edge of Los Angeles, in early 1850 — no GPS, no maps, no real idea where they were or where they were headed, setting off with “seven-eighths of all the flesh of an ox… a couple spoonfuls of rice and about as much tea… [and] all the money there was in camp” — and then back, another 250 miles, to bring a little ration of flour, yellow beans and hope to their compatriots.

Manly was 30, Rogers 27 or 28. What did they talk about? Did they have as nuanced a sense of humor as ourselves? Could they as deftly work from the notion of ice on the planet Uranus all the way to Reinhold Messner, solo, shitting into the hood of his one-piece on an exposed face at 27,000 feet, then slopping the hood on his head and climbing two more days to the summit?

Eleven years later, in April of 1861, a Dr. Samuel George and one W.T. Henderson — prospectors for precious metals — were the first to climb to the summit of the Panamints. Mr. Henderson, who also happened to be no slouch at killing Indians, is said to have been the one who shot the horse out from under Joaquín Murrieta, who cut the bandit’s head off to show his friends, then sold it for $35.

Upon making the summit of this peak, the aging vigilante “looked off over such a landscape as can be seen nowhere else on earth,” reached into the deep well of his creativity, and “because of the vast space which the eye could cover there” named the mountain after a telescope.

Boyer gets onto how many kids we have between us — just the right number, we agree — and from there to his recent vasectomy. “Felt every sixteenth of the needle going into my nutsack,” he says. And then he pitches headlong into a shrub, garners what he describes as a “fresh vagina” on his knee.

Ansel Adams, Sunrise, Bad Water. Ansel Adams Gallery.

4:20AM; 5,453 feet

Snow! We begin to see tiny atolls of the stuff, scabbed-over like bits of discarded Styrofoam caught in the bushes. The ridgeline drops, rises again.

5 AM; 6,165 feet

Still crunching across brief allotments of wind-dried crust: five or six ginger steps across the surface, then punch through to the knees. Then back onto dirt and rock. “This is awesome,” says Bernie, only half sarcastically.

“Only six grand to go,” says Pondella, working through a bag of dried Tropical Fruit Medley, disappearing here and there to leave yet another gut-processed offering to the mountain.

Joe trades river shoes for ski boots, then goes back to river shoes. Wentworth puts on his ski boots, disappears. We assume he’s decided to sidehill down into the gully for good snow. We stay high.

6 AM; 6,950 feet

Daylight coming up fast. A vertical mile and a half below us the Wrangler Café is opening for breakfast. The first pack of die-hard cyclists is setting out on the spring installment of the Death Valley Double Century.

The Ansel Adams aficionados are in place on the boardwalk at Badwater, cameras on tripods, poised to get the shot: the first crack of sun across the snow-dusted wall of Telescope, more than 11,000 feet into the sky, reflected in the stagnant pool at the bottom of an extinct Pleistocene lake, 282 feet below sea level.

Somewhere up there, invisible to the naked eye, maybe two-thirds of the way up, where the vast alluvial mess gives way to a peppering of trees and the first allotments of snow: that’s us, with skis on our backs.

Men’s Journal, February 2010.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been this awake for sunrise,” says Bernie. “And sober!”

“This is what they invented chairlifts for,” says Devin, only half kidding.

11 AM; 11,049 feet

“Look yonder,” shouts Wentworth, gesturing into the rising gale — the grand northward march of the Sierra sixty miles away; dust storms brewing across the China Lake Naval Weapons Station to the southwest; the innumerable ranges lined up to the east like islands in a great sea of clouds. Below us — 11,300 feet down now, and some seventeen ragged miles overland — lies the barely-fathomable Valley of Death, and our cooler of cold Tecates.

“It was the picture of a desert, but if it be true that a picture is masterful in proportion to its power to stir the emotions, then the picture from that peak of the Panamints is not to be compared with any tawdry scene that needs the colors of vegetation to make it attractive.”

— John R. Spears, Illustrated Sketches of Death Valley and Other Borax Deserts of The Pacific Coast (1892)

We strip our skins, make fast our packs, make a brief series of calls home on Joe’s satellite phone. Then, without any great ado, we drop in.

Community Connection

For more far-out destinations across California and beyond, check out this photo essay of California’s Most Spectacular Deserts, or The 8 Best Treks in California, or The 5 Best Places to see Ancient Rock Art.

What’s the unlikeliest place you’ve ever skied? Tell us about it below.

COMMUNITY FUNDED reporting. I like this idea a lot. Their domain name is sweet too, Spot.Us

Spot.us is, as stated in their elevator pitch-

a nonprofit project to pioneer “community funded reporting.” Through Spot.Us the public can commission investigations with tax deductible donations for important and perhaps overlooked stories. If a news organization buys exclusive rights to the content, donations are reimbursed. Otherwise content is made available through a Creative Commons license.
Read More

The basic concept is that you can donate $20 (or other amounts) to help fund currently accepted pitches, and you can also register, which enables you to submit your own pitches for consideration and funding.

Just to get an idea of what kinds of pitches are currently being funded, check out some of these titles:

*Who Benefits from the Legalization of Medical Marijuana

*American Apparel’s Firings: A Canary in the Immigration Policy Coal Mine

*New Depression in LA

Admittedly, I’ve only just briefly checked out this community, but I love what I see so far. There appears to be a very clean and straightforward system of submitting pitches, having work peer reviewed as well as work on stories in collaboration, something I believe will become more and more common to journalists working in 2010.

What really stokes me though about the concept of Spot.Us is that it’s locally-based (currently in the Bay Area and Los Angeles) yet scalable worldwide.

With current freelance writing rates bottoming out last year, Spot.Us gives writers a chance to make a decent rate for their work, and most importantly, pursue stories they might otherwise be unable to afford researching or going after. I would love to see this blow up around the country.

For more info, check out this slideshow:

Community Connection

What do you think about community funded reporting? Please let us know in the comments. We’d especially like to hear from any community members of spot.us.

Unsuspecting bystanders? Photo: Emilie Raguso

If Yehuda Amichai were alive, he’d write a poem to them: “Psalm For a
Secular Couple From Spain Exploring Jerusalem Like Ordinary Civilized
People”.

Their interlocked hands made for themselves a home away from home.

The sleeves of their plaid shirts were rolled up in leisurely folds that could have risen beyond themselves were it not for their shoulders.

I watched their eyes ranging ecumenically from the Wailing Wall to the
gold-domed Dome of The Rock. Why couldn’t Jerusalem be more like them?
I thought. Tame, untroubled, their lazy agendas taking in the sun.

Then, I noticed History, in the form of a heavy, ground-scraping brown
skirt approaching them from the Jewish Quarter. I should have shouted,
“Danger!” But what chance do two grazing deer have with the shadow of
the lioness already upon them?

“Welcome to Jerusalem,” the woman from History began. “The holy city.”

The couple recoiled a bit. But only a bit. You could tell they were resourceful.

“You look like intelligent people, so I am sure you have read the Bible.”

The couple was non-committal.

A sinister heat was rising in my cheeks. I felt I was guarding a border that was on the verge of being witlessly crossed.

“The Bible says Jerusalem is the city of the Jews that God gave to the Jews. Not the Arabs, the Jews.”

The couple looked at each other with good-natured horror. The woman had come flying out of the nightly news to hang out. Magical tourism. Their laughter froze on my lips.

community connection

For the last 2 years, Brave New Traveler has been publishing stories about travel and culture in conflicted places. Check out How War Shapes the Culture of Israel, an agnostic’s visit to the homeland of her family, or this guide on How to Respectfully Visit Holy Places Around the World.

Photo : HotuMatua

I HAVE a special fascination with Easter Island; the gigantic, solemn, stone face sentinels fire up my travel blog impulse. To wander the island, snapping photos, shooting video and writing in the shade of the silent giants is high on my travelers bucket list.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Is Easter Island on your travel blog radar? Where else do you want to visit and write about before it’s all over?