“This was the end of my thirty days in Russia: cows and tanks.” — MFB

km 0 – MOSCOW // ON BOARD MOSCOW TO GORKY

SIDESTEPPING through generations of Russians who stood with shopping bags of picnicware and bedclothes, we scrambled to the first platform at Yaroslavsky where the midnight train stood minutes before departure.

We rushed down to the third berth of the third car in the third platskartny class.

Outside the car, a final snapshot reveals my host’s fatigue from having carried my sack from his flat at Taganskaya to the railway terminal. A manly embrace and a hasty goodbye sealed our weeklong friendship.

km 0, provodnitsa. All photos: MFB

The provodnitsa, a stout old woman who shied away from my lens, hailed me aboard. The last passenger to arrive at the compartment, I awkwardly positioned my belongings, sat, and waited with my three estranged companions—all settled, all Russian.

I said almost involuntarily but perhaps intentionally to break the silence, “Ochen jarka!” (“It’s very hot!”)

The two men and the woman laughed at my sad attempt at Russian. Success.

“Where are you from?” the woman asked in English, hers being the better English, as the others eared in. I gave them my spiel, a two-minute performance basically outlining the contents of an online profile.

At the sound of my hometown of Los Angeles, the woman’s eyes widened and thought it kismet that we had met. It turns out that Julia had just returned to the Russian capital after working in PR at an addiction clinic in Baja California. A Russian doctor founded the project that catered to communities in Ensanada and Tijuana, but eventually closed up shop when funds had depleted.

After I mapped my eastward journey on the Trans-Mongolian, Dmitry, the older of the two men, who had been vague about his profession (something to do with chemical engineering), warned me in Russian to be careful not to take pictures of “secret places,” as Julia translated.

I asked her what he meant.

“He means that it would be very hard to explain to the police what you were doing here taking pictures.”

I felt uneasy by the suggestion. I didn’t know how to respond. The train rolled out and the air conditioning finally came on. We sat face to face in silence with Dmitry looking away whenever our glances met.

Dmitry

I pulled out my ration and was eager to share: chocolate wafers, dried herring, potato flakes, and a bottle of vodka. The guidebooks and other Trans-Siberian travelers I had met encouraged the onboard potluck. But was I wrongly advised.

When I proudly offered my ice-cold bottle of the distilled, clear liquor, they laughed and declined the invitation. Julia explained that the vodka-toting Russian is a false stereotype. I shrugged it off, realizing my mistake. I am a tourist, a real American tourist.

km 426 – DZERZHINSK // ON BOARD MOSCOW TO GORKY

“Syem, syem, syem, syem…” the provodnitsa’s repeated whispers woke me up as she separated and stuffed soiled linen into canvass sacks.

Dmitry and Julia All photos: MFB

6AM. The wagon car, nearly empty, was fast approaching Dzerzhinsk. My three berthmates were still asleep when the provodnitsa shook Dmitry’s arm informing him of our short arrival.

He and Julia were descending at the suburb 25 km outside of Nizhny Novgorod, while Sergei and I had one more stop.

When the train came to a halt, Julia handed me her contact information and wished me luck on my journey. Dmitry shook my hand, but as he stepped out of the car, he looked back and said inexplicably, “Dzerzhinsk is the chemical capital of Russia!”

I nodded and waved goodbye.

km 441 – NIZHNY NOVGOROD (GORKY)

Eastward from the Russian capital, former fishing villages, trading posts, and industrial small towns dominate the landscape. Towered by Soviet high-rises, dilapidated wooden houses are ubiquitous and suggestive of the region’s frontier history.

During the summer, Gorky families converge by the river Oka with fishing poles, beach towels, and trunks full of the customary Okskoe pivo (the local brew). But despite stereotypes of the parochial hamlet, my experience in the laidback river town of Nizhny Novgorod has been far from reactionary.

Skinnydipping in Gorky

Sasha, my bright-eyed host, and his gang of twenty-something co-workers and friends invited me to a soirée beneath the Kanavinsky Bridge.

The kickback was typical of Berlin or Venice Beach where pockets of brownfield are festooned with neon dream catchers, tie-dyed textiles, and feathers.

After guests imbibed glasses of a mystery cocktail that turned out to be equal parts of vermouth, vodka and cheap champagne, the evening naturally devolved into impromptu fire dancing and skinny-dipping.

km 820 – KAZAN

“Step slowly,” Eduard warned me from below. The next step could prove fatal.

My host in Kazan works as an ad man and spends his free time watching episodes of House and exploring the city’s wasted spaces. Today’s exploration: the former Hotel Kazan.

The abandoned structure stands four stories over Bauman Street, the main foot road in the city center. For the last twenty years, the edifice has been left in ruins. It is one of hundreds of abandoned buildings that stand as a testament to Kazan’s thousand-year history and the poor infrastructure of many post-Soviet republics.

Eduard

Today, metals sheets block the ghostly fortress shrouded with green, netted tarp. To enter, we crawled down to the sewer line from an indiscreet and unguarded opening opposite the hotel.

A calculated leap over the stagnant stream and a leg over a crumbling wall, I followed Edward into the damp cellars of the hotel. A light emanating through the rough cracks from above served as our guide.

Pulling ourselves upwards to the first floor, we reached a gutted hall that opens out onto a large courtyard. The scene reveals a site ravaged by an unnatural disaster: roofs split open for city birds to build nest, structural support spilled out onto the earth, fallen bricks and sodden planks strewn in piles across the overgrowth.

“What happened?” I asked Edward.

“Time,” he answered.

Finding the only stairwell left intact, we ascended. Each level contains vast salons gilded with patterned molding. But the once decadent interior now resembles a porous sponge with chips of paint peeling away, breathing with every gust of wind. Egg shells, glass shards, and empty bottles lie about, evidence of recent loitering.

Eduard paused. I halted in my tracks.

Cautious, he cupped his hand over his ear. We listened in for unexpected guests like ourselves. A rustling and a quick swipe against the dust echoed in the hall and repelled us from forging onwards.

“We’ll come back later,” Eduard motioned backward and we crept away back onto the main road.

km 1107 – ARGYZ // ON BOARD KAZAN TO YEKATERINBURG

The novelty of train hopping has faded.

In my third of ten trains towards Ulan Bator, I’ve become accustomed to the monkey gymnastics necessary to mount the top berths without grunting. I’ve memorized the toilet schedules, the release buttons and the physics behind the foldable berths and tables. I’ve perfected the etiquette of billeting, sheet distribution, seat sharing with your berthmates, the routine and the Russian for requesting cups and spoons from the provodnitsa.

But after all this, I am still too incompetent to engage with my fellow passengers. Language remains a barrier.

The scrutinizing eyes outweigh the accommodating smiles that acknowledge your presence. But perhaps I fail to consider the point of view of the lady visiting her daughter in Irkutsk; the salesman porting his briefcases of samples; the college student on his or her way home for summer vacation. Russian passengers expect comfort, amenities, and an expedient journey with no anticipation of encountering an uncommon, travel-worn face. The commodification of the Trans-Siberian railway is limited to the tourist’s perception of an exotic, “historical journey.” For Russians, it’s a normal part of life.

And so, sadly, a simple offering loses its welcome and becomes an obliging gesture. My berthmates continuously shun my wafer cookies and Lady Grey tea bags. Kein deutsch, aucun français, no “universal” English work. Where was my Russian education?

Thus, on my first daytime journey with no Russian willing to play, I left my berth and explored the train. I ventured out of third class and discovered the second-class kupe. The compartment doors were shut.

In the next car, a door opened to a man reading a paper and three kids playing with Legos on the carpeted corridor. The climate was much cooler. It had to be first class.

After five cars I reached an empty dining car. Three attendants sat around one of the tables. The void of customers precluded longer cigarette breaks. I sat in one of the booths. A waitress handed me a menu. With my index finger, I ordered the cheapest brew and a couple meat pies.

I munched on my six-dollar snack while watching the rolling countryside. “This is what people do on trains,” I thought.

Back at my berth, I read in my guidebook that a few kilometers earlier we had officially entered Asia.

Pu oo crater, Big Island. Photo: exfordy

I’M ON THE BIG ISLAND doing a story. Or rather, I’ve done the story, as best I could, have blown my entire accommodations budget on one muffled night at the Hilton Waikoloa (the Mauna Kea being closed for renovation), and am now over in Puna, on the wet side, in a rental car, with 36 hours to see what Hawaii is really all about.

And perhaps, I hope, to see some actual red-hot lava.

I’ve seen the crater and the fumes. Now I’m on my way to where melted rock is reported to be pouring into the ocean. I’m thinking I might stop off along the way at Kehana Beach, south of Pahoa, where I’ve heard there’s to be an after-dark event of some kind featuring, among other things, fire-juggling and naked women dancing on black sand. If I can find it. Then I pick up a hitchhiker and find myself agreeing to take him all the way to Hilo.

“See this scar?” he says, launching into a disquisition on the gangs in Pahoa, how one time he got stomped by five or six of the motherfuckers, how I shouldn’t go there at night. “Didn’t used to be like this,” he says, “the drugs, the ice.”

“Meaning crystal?” I ask, trying to sound like I have a clue.

He points across the road to a wall of concrete rising ten feet above the weeds along the shoulder. “I’ve seen a guy drive his car off that parking lot embankment, then get out and cross the road running.” Then he segues into a glowing description of mud-track drag racing in Hilo.

Suddenly it seems as if everyone around us is tweaking. People are driving over curbs, hanging out in cars in strip-mall parking lots at 2PM on a Sunday afternoon. There are vehicles in the Borders parking lot with skulls affixed to their hoods. One bumper sticker reads: “The Islands Are On Ice.”

Rainy day in Hilo. Photo: eye of einstein

I park at the edge of the lot. My passenger, poor abused waif, steps out into the drizzle. “It was sunny this morning,” he says. “It’ll probably be sunny again.”

I make my way toward the bookstore. I need a break from the road. I need some local tunes for the CD player, and caffeine. On the way in I cross paths with a father and his little girl. “That’s a messed-up car, Daddy,” she says, pointing to a low-slung mid-70’s Japanese mini-pickup done up in Bondo and matte-black primer. There’s liquid (water? gasoline? blood?) dripping onto the pavement from under the tailgate.

“Yes,” says the man, lifting his daughter into his arms. “That’s a messed-up car.”

I ask an old hippie in the Philosophy section what I should get by way of local music that would really embody the spirit of the place. He thinks about it earnestly and for quite some time. I nearly withdraw the question. “Iz,” he says, finally. “Hawaii, 1978.”

Which I will soon recognize, especially when I come to “White Sandy Beach of Hawai’I” and “Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World,” as the soundtrack I have already been subjected to more or less without pause since I stepped off the plane two days ago.

(On the plane, the fellow next to me was a fish and clam farmer on his way back from a wedding in Cabo. He told me about the asphalt shortage on the islands. Then he told me about the bottles of mescal and absinthe and tequila in his suitcase, and about the excellent sleeping pills he’d picked up in the airport in Mexico. We upended our plastic cups, chewed our ice cubes, then fell asleep.)

The road is four lanes out of Hilo, expensively canted with ample left-hand turn lanes and wide drainage median. Three sets of old power lines run across to what looks like an abandoned refinery, rust-colored stacks set against the gray sky. Everything in between is overgrown with mutant colonies of reeds and grasses and crazy flowering shrubs — all first-growth stuff fresh off the ocean breezes.

I drive through a subdivision called Hawaiian Paradise Park. At the edge of the highway, on Shower Drive, is a new spec home with a van parked in the yet-to-be-paved driveway. There’s laundry hanging in the dirt yard across the street. It’s spitting rain.

I pull into a lava-rock turnout in front of a tarpaulin pole-tent advertising a fairly cheap plate lunch. A banner proclaims “The Kingdom of Hawaii (the reinstated Hawaiian Government reinstated de jure March 13, 1999).” I park next to a Range Rover with a stainless steel skid plate welded to its front end.

The gentleman at the end of the spoon recommends the pork-and-peas and beef stew combo. I take my plate and sit in an empty chair at the only table, across from a man who will eventually introduce himself as Sam Kaleleiki Jr., District 1 Representative of the Lawful Hawaiian Government. People call him Uncle Sam, he says. He has a long white Fu Manchu, salt-and-pepper eyebrows, and a gold cap on his front tooth. He eats his lunch bare-chested.

He tells me about his time in the Marines, in Korea. How he learned to shoot and to read. How one time he fell in a binjo ditch when a piece of corrugated metal gave way. How he jumped in the ocean to wash himself off. How he bought a 3-bedroom house in Oceanside, California, in 1962, for $5,900. How his daughter sold it in 1988 for $178,000 (with the truck) then promptly lost all the money in Vegas.

“Daddy,” she said on the phone, “I want to come home.”

Marines in Hawaii, 1893

He explains the illegitimacy of U.S. sovereignty in Hawaii based on the overthrow of the monarchy by U.S. Marines in 1893.

He describes the drafting of a new constitution and the first “legal” election in 1999, which event he refers to as a bloodless coup. “It took us a long time,” he says, “but this is a lifetime trip.” He talks about how everyone’s welcome but only kanakas have full rights, how the Kingdom’s got some money in a Swiss bank, and how Hugo Chavez has expressed an interest in meeting with the Prime Minister.

I ask him if the constitution is online. He thinks it is. He calls the Prime Minister on his cell phone to make sure. He has to raise his voice to make himself understood. “Supposed to be,” comes the reply. “Sounds like they’re having a wild party over there,” Uncle Sam says to me with a wink.

A German woman comes in to renounce her E.U. citizenship and thereby join the Kingdom. There’s a test she has to take. “I’m nervous,” she says. “English is not my first language.”

“Let me give you an answer sheet,” says Uncle Sam.

The woman looks it over, chuckles to herself. “Some of the answers are really funny,” she says.

“We try to make it fun,” says Uncle Sam.

The Village of Pahoa is mostly clapboard churches, covered boardwalks, and bungalows sagging on stilts. Across the street in front of my car strides a young man in an Australian saddler’s hat and a full-length oilslicker. Another, with a baseball cap turned backwise, squats beside the Cash & Carry, waving at all passersby.

At the other end of town I pick up another hitchhiker, named Angie. I follow her directions down a dirt road to a clothing-optional community where she is living and studying permaculture. She gives me a tour of the hot house: peppers, elephant cilantro, edible begonia, green beans the size of cucumbers growing out of crushed lava rock. “The most we have to do is weed,” she says.

I join the half-clad community for a supper of wild pig stew and other home-blended sundries. I learn about how Rockefeller was involved in a program of eugenics, how oshos and christs move too much energy, and how rats have invaded the laundry room to get at the soap nuts.

By 7:30 PM I’ve threaded the car across several old lava flows and made it past the checkpoint to the end of the road. The rain has stopped. The night is dark and muggy. Signs warn of loose rocks, earth cracks and drop-offs.

I strap on my headlamp, stumble out past the porta-potties, past where a county employee in a reflective yellow vest is selling flashlights and bottled water, out along the spray-painted trail across a fresh-made, still-hot wasteland where not long ago there was a housing subdivision.

“This just popped up at around 6,” says the County Civil Defense agent at the end of the line, gesturing out toward a glowing-red surface flow in the distance. “You guys had excellent timing.”

I borrow a pair of binoculars and for a fraction of a minute watch as the latest sludge-pile of territory is added to the realm. Then I retrace my steps across the badlands in search of a place to sleep.

Photo: Man Bartlett

THEY SIT like saffron pigeons on the stone ledge across from the Bodhi Tree.

If I clap my hands, will they scatter? Or like the good Theravadan monks that they are, will they log the bare fact of hearing in minds polished with the spirituality of perception?

I find myself drawn to one young monk in particular. His lean bodyhas a more inhabited look than those of the older monks.

Noticing me eyeing him, he makes a space for me next to him.

Sunlight bounces off a gold front tooth.

Encounters with monks in Bodh Gaya usually consist of precise little bows and farewells.

“You are from?” he asks. Another staple of the encounter.

“The US.”

“Ah, the US.” He repeats after me, as if it is a brand name he can’t make up his mind about.

“And you?”

“Burma.”

I think of severe meditation masters and murderous generals. I think of the silence of the pagoda and the silence of the prisoner.

“How long have you been a monk?”

“Since I was twelve.”

His smiles indicates he knows how hard that is for a Westerner to absorb. The surrender of experience for experiencing.

“Even as a boy, I’d ask myself how is it possible to attain inner peace. In the monastery, I was taught how to meditate, I was taught the suttas.”

“What are you doing in India?”

He laughs. “I am studying Hinduism.”

A woman in a sari is approaching the monks with a pile of ten rupee notes so crisp and clean they look fake. She hands out four tens to each monk. I am thinking maybe she coaxed them out of the air like Sai Baba manifesting ash out of ether.

The Burmese thanks her with a deep wordless bow.

“I am not the first in my family to be a monk, but I am the first to study Hinduism.”

“Why Hinduism?”

“It is the religion the Buddha was born into of course.” He pauses.

Over our heads leaves are rattling around in the wind. The monk clears his throat. “It is also important for us to be open to what others believe.”

A question is kicking in my belly. I try to ignore it. But how do you ignore what is inside of you kicking?

“When Burma rose up against the generals in 2007, where were you?”

“I was. . .” the words come slowly “. . .in the street. My first time in the street over politics.”

“What happened?”

“The soldiers ran after me. No one ever ran after me before wanting to beat me.”

The monk laughs at the thought. I laugh because the monk is laughing, and because this isn’t Burma, and because here in Bodh Gaya only the Bodhi leaves get chased.

Suddenly, he falls silent, closes his eyes. Enough words for the day. I rise and begin slowly to circle the giant Mahabohdi Temple that the tree nuzzles.

Community Connection

For those interested in learning more about travel to India, here’s a guide to 10 Indian customs you should know about.

Photo: Jayel Aheram

THE POINT isn’t to dwell on the fact that I had ingested large amounts of hallucinogenic substances sold to me at the restaurant where I ate my pizza and drank my beer.

But just to get a solid grasp on the situation and the headiness of the coming machine guns it would do you well to know that I was tripping major balls.

I was lonely. Over a month and a half without my wife. On a shoestring budget in the middle of Laos at 10 PM.

There was the sound of crickets.

I was also a little bored.

I sauntered out into the night, pupils yawning.

Brushing my hands over roadside grasses, listening to the half drunk ramblings of a group of backpackers heading to their room with a fresh bottle of rum I found myself creeping from shadow to shadow until I reached the bridge that joins Vang Vien with neighboring villages.

I wandered across the bridge and down a muddy lane. Through the dark, sloshing in puddles, I rambled in delirium. A path widened to my right and led directly to a river illuminated by a nearly full moon. There was the rabble of a thousand frogs.

I waded in. When the water ran past my shins and began to wick up my trousers I stopped and gawked at the naked sky, humming softly.

My first thought when I saw the two men was that I recognized their guns. The first true assault rifle and perhaps the most prolific gun since the Smith & Wesson Model 10 Revolver, the AK-47 has been a ballistics icon since 1949.

Gun metal gray, sloping banana clip, polished wooden stock and grip, it’s been brandished by military forces, terrorist groups, and militias all over the world since WWII.

Now two were pointed at me. The moonlight reflected dully on the barrels.

Maybe they saw me wade into the river. Maybe they stumbled upon me while they were doing who-knows-what with their AK’s. Either way they whistled for me to turn around and with a gesture that is unmistakable – move and die.

From the far psychedelic reaches of the rings of Saturn I whiplashed back into my body.

Earth to Joshy, Come in Joshy; Fifteen feet away are two bogeys in matching yellow shirts pointing AK-47’s at your body. Do you copy?

Despite the pulsing wad of terror in my throat and my altered state I saw immediately that they were pointing their weapons at me, they are not aiming them at me.

When you are standing in a random Laotian stream humming “strawberry fields forever” this is a key distinction.

Without deliberation I lurched two steps forward, chuckled and pantomimed tipping a big bottle of whiskey down my throat.

I am a drunk tourist, harmless and stupid, you know the type.

Pushing past the men, who looked confused and a little scared themselves I saw the barrels of their weapons like the false eyes of a resting moth.

The men did not lower their guns as I brushed past them mumbling “ok, ok, ok.” They did not lower their guns and they did not call after me as I put one numb foot in front of another in the muddy jungle darkness, wondering just how far I had gleefully wandered from my hut.

They did not lower their guns as they tailed me for a quarter mile, 10 paces to my back toting 30 round clips crowded with slugs that could take half my head off.

I glanced back once to see them behind me.

I couldn’t sleep until dawn.

Community Connection

Have you had guns drawn on you while traveling?
What’s the sketchiest travel situation you’ve ever been in?

Chi Kung Health Balls. Photo by Chandan Singh

**Nb. If you missed Part 1, start here.

Thursday, June 18, 10:45 AM: Clubhouse Ballroom, Stanford University

I RECOGNIZE HIM FROM THE THUMBNAIL photo he runs every month alongside his Letter from the Editor. In it, his hands are featured as prominently as his well-lit cranium. He gestures as if juggling a pair of Bocce balls, joking with an off-camera associate about — I imagine — the extraordinary heft of his, or someone else’s, cojones.

He is dressed now as he is there: black suit, dark tie, starched white collar, cufflinks. He is the best-dressed man in the room. By a long shot. (Mind you, this is California in June. This is a room to which I nearly wore my caulk-and-chain-grease-enhanced cargo shorts, but ultimately, thankfully, thought it more prudent to go with the more conservative option, the old Levis.) On the screen beside the dais: the Esquire logo, projected large.

@browndamon: Esquire big cheese David Granger is about to keynote Future of Freelancing #ffrl #goat #hackshackers #journalism #esquire

@thestrippodcast: Never realized how straight out of Madmen David Granger of esquire appears to be visually. #ffrl

Esquire, Feb. 2010

He’s charming right out of the gate, ingratiatingly abashed and self-deprecating. He speaks in fits and starts, like a man whose mind runs too fast for the muscles in his jaw. He jokes. He makes light. He has a facility with PowerPoint. He drops names with ease, names I appreciate — Lyle Lovett, Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Christina Hendricks.

He trusts he’ll be misquoted on Twitter. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again. And chances are, however it goes, it’ll sell more magazines.

He promises to show this roomful of writers in this time of uncertainty why, in his words, “the magazine is the greatest medium ever invented.”

We don’t doubt he will. We hope he does. He fucking better, we think. For why else travel all the way to the edge of the continent, shell out our last few hundred dollars and spend precious long hours indoors on a gorgeous summer day, if not for salvation, or at the very least a way forward?

@thestrippodcast: As much as I enjoy the pos attitude of #ffrl, I worry that this is like democrats at an Alvin Greene rally, convincing themselves he can win.

And so he does — show us. Granger, that is. Sure, there are the gimmicks — the short story printed as marginalia, the hand-scrawled cover copy (in which we discover what George Clooney means to the future of the planet, etc.), the Augmented Reality experiments, Benicio del Toro heaving a $1200, 5-foot-long, Masonite Esquire logo into the L.A. River.

But it’s all born of editorial desperation, he explains, of boredom with the traditional parameters of “magazining,” of ceaselessly asking the question: “Shouldn’t it be more?”

The goal, he says, is to make the magazine — this one, at least, now more than 75 years old — not only more intriguing but “more essential.” And the most essential element of all? The writing. Good writing, he insists — the best — sexed up as required (given the market and the genre) with great illustration and cutting-edge graphic design and who knows what multimedia bells and whistles lately and later to be devised.

@bertarcher: #ffrl Esquire’s Granger: (Magazines at their best) take words, images and design and mash them together to make magic.

He gives a quick run-through of some of his favorite Esquire pieces of this still-new century. There’s Tom Junod’s unflinching portrait of The Falling Man (and ourselves) from 9/11. “Maybe he didn’t jump at all,” reads Granger with deep reverence, “because no one can jump into the arms of God. Oh, no. You have to fall.”

There’s Chris Chivers reporting from inside the crater at Ground Zero, then from the foothills of the Caucasus, then from the uplands of Afghanistan. Without the slightest nod of apology to the likes of, say, Thucydides or Michael Herr, without blinking, Granger dubs Chivers “the best war writer in the history of war and writing.”

And this, I realize (late in the game, as ever), is how the glossy magazine has survived as long as it has, by its ability to sell itself as essential, as the definitive arbiter of culture: Man at His Best, The Best and Brightest, The Best War Writing of All Time. Or, as counterpoint: The Worst. The Worst Beers in the World, The Worst Members of Congress, The Worst Movies, The Worst Masturbation Idea.

This is how it will continue to survive through the slow destruction of the planet.

But then there’s Tom Chiarella’s fabulously twisted investigation into what people will do for how much money: A Thousand Dollars for Your Dog. How does that fit the rubric?

These writers are “adventurers into the fringes of human behavior,” says Granger. And we can see it now: Granger is on our side. He’s doing what he can — everything he can and with great delight — to create defensible space for the written word. Hoorah!

And then he gives us Chris Jones on the long voyage of a soldier’s body from Iraq to Fort Knox. Nice one. And Chris Jones on Roger Ebert.

Ebert, as you probably know, has lost most of his lower jaw to cancer. In the portrait Granger puts on the screen, Ebert’s once-familiar face is crumpled like a melon fallen off the truck. The most famous movie critic of all time has lost the ability to talk. Fuck. But he’s a writer, Granger reminds us. He’s always been a writer (though we lost track of it for a while, thanks to his success on television). And now his writing — his online journal in particular — is his oasis, his redemption. And by extension ours.

“Now everything he says must be written,” Granger reads (from Chris Jones), “either first on his laptop and funneled through speakers or, as he usually prefers, on some kind of paper. His new life is lived through Times New Roman and chicken scratch.”

I feel the incipient welling of tears. It’s something that happens to me, especially before noon, when there’s a certain kind of news story on the radio and things are still a little raw. Maybe it’s all the coffee, or the lack of protein. Or maybe it’s the sidelong light. It rarely happens when I read something — no matter how good the writing is. But then I don’t usually read much in the morning, except my own half-formed sentences, over and over again, and the daily backlog of emails and googlealerts and random blogposts.

Ethan Hill for Esquire

I find myself wondering the extent to which real sadness can be transmitted by internet. I’m sure it’s possible. But it hasn’t got me yet. Not like public radio.

Anyway, here it comes, right here in the packed Clubhouse Ballroom with birdsong and the gush of the fountain through the open windows. It’s a fissure opening along a weak seam in a dam. There’s seepage. It could easily blossom into a full-on sob (it happens once or twice a decade), not just about Roger Ebert but re: the whole hopeless condition of the human race, our tragic, touching talent for denial in the face of meaninglessness and devastation.

But I get on top of it. And it passes.

Granger says he wasn’t expecting much from the Ebert profile. It was good, of course, but it wasn’t likely to sell too many magazines. Not like a decent joke and a well-photographed actress. But there it was: in 11 days the piece brought 800,000 readers to esquire.com. “There’s a power in writing,” concludes Granger, “not found in any other medium.”

@nijhuism: Chris Jones’ writing alone convinced me! RT @kellymcgonigal: #ffrl Granger keynote has convinced me to subscribe to Esquire.

And so it goes. Granger’s staked out an island and populated it with a handful of terrific writers. And there’s not a person in the room who wouldn’t like to be on it with them. It’s not impossible, he says. Even last year, in the worst year for print media in all our brief lifetimes, new writers broke in. So what’s it take?

1) Balls

Plain and simple.

2) Balls

You have to experiment, push the bounds of what’s been done, risk failing, risk being ridiculed. He quotes the unstoppable Mike Sager: “You’ll never get better if you’re not willing to be terrible.”

3) Sweat

Dimiter Kenarov, not a new writer by any means but new to Esquire, brought to the magazine not only good clips, and pre-arranged high-level access for reporting on the impossibility of withdrawal from Iraq, but also financing from the Pulitzer Center. How could Granger say no? (@cmonstah: Granger inadvertently described future of freelancing: writer has to cover their own expenses, mags simply pay writer’s fee.)

4) Sweat

“I like reporting,” he says. “In a world where people increasingly substitute opinion for facts, reporting triumphs. I ask the impossible of my writers: I want them to report the world so thoroughly they understand it like a fiction writer would. The key is the details.”

5) Blood

“I like writers who write,” he says. “Writing is not inevitable. It’s not inexorable. To presume any of us has something to say, that we can command an audience, is an audacious act, and a great responsibility. And the things that matter are the hardest things to do.”

6) Oh, and Surprise

If it sounds like a magazine story, if he can imagine it in the pages of The New York Times Sunday Magazine, fuck it: he’s not interested.

In passing, as illustration of just how much chaff there is — not just in the world at large but also from within — he mentions staff writer AJ Jacobs’ ongoing 770-ish pages of ideas. Of which a teeny tiny fraction will eventually make the pages of the magazine.

@erikvance: #ffrl – David Granger is a regular guy. A regular guy who will neeeeeever take my pitch. – Or the pitches of 99% of us.

To wrap things up, Granger returns to the notion of bells and whistles and the internet: it’s just a means to get the word out, he assures us. “The internet sucks and it’s been a blessing.”

12:26 PM

In the wake of all this, plus a Q&A that does nothing to dispell the numbing tension between all the glittering possibilities and the absolutely fucking impossible, it hits me (again, a little late in the game, and hungry) that Twitter might be used as a means to connect in the physical world with people I might like to meet.

For example, I think to myself, I could send a direct message to Michelle Nijhuis, @nijhuism, the prolific and ever hard-hitting investigative journalist, contributing editor for the High Country News now live-tweeting from this very same room, something to the effect of:

hey, really admire your work at HCN. buy you a free sandwich in the courtyard? meet by the lemonade tank?

Instead, I slide my computer back into its sleeve and head out as I was born — alone, that is, but slightly better clothed — to investigate the spread.

Next up, Part 2B:

In which our man revels in the non-native aroma of eucalyptus, pees on the hallowed dust of Stanford University, witnesses ceviche served like a scoop of whipped butter, makes note of a variety of fellowships and alternative funding sources for investigative journalism (links provided), dodges the California Highway Patrol, learns that his father has sliced off the tip of his right index finger in the drive mechanism of an irrigation pump, and also that bonobos experience self-doubt, is reminded (one more time) just how much uncompensated hard-labor is required to craft a successful magazine pitch, and, finally, begins to allocate warmth to the notion that the time has come — crazy though it may seem — to start an entirely new print magazine.

Stay tuned!

Photo: L*U*Z*A

1.

I’VE NEVER SEEN him in town. I’ve never seen him anywhere except walking to or from the fields. Either that or working in his yard. He never stops working. He always has something in his hands or over his shoulder: a bushel of kale, a wheelbarrow loaded with carrots, a hose, a water pump, a shovel, a roll of bailing wire, a machete, a stack of fenceboards.

Even New Years, standing with his sons drinking beer by the fire, it was like he was just waiting to fix something, to tie up the dogs if they kept chasing firecrackers, to twist one more loop of wire around a broken table leg.

2.

Since we’ve moved here¹ eight months ago the fields have been divided up for future neighborhoods. Two roads have been cut. A windbreak of 100 foot-tall poplars was chainsawed. (When they first started falling, everyone came out of their houses to watch, then later it just became part of the noise and activity in the barrio). Somebody from Buenos Aires started building the first apartment complex. Six of Abuelo’s grandkids and two of his kids moved out of the house, and so he portioned off that side, gave it its own entrance, and started renting it out to a woman who sweeps her concrete stoop wearing sweatpants and has taken in a stray dog with three pups that keep escaping through the bottom of the fence and crying for food at our door.

3.

Today I saw him walking back from town. I saw him from a long ways off. I recognize his walk. He’s super thin, super small, but seems very strong and walks with this super straight back. He had on hemmed bluejeans. He wasn’t wearing his mud boots. He had on a light coat that I’d never seen before. He had his hand in his coat as if warming it. As we got closer though I thought I saw a bit of white bandage around the hand that was in his coat. I thought: “He’s just come back from the hospital. That’s the only time he goes into town. Damn, what happened to his hand?”

But as if I needed to cover up what I was thinking, I just said “Que tal?” and then quickly added, “Pretty cold isn’t it?”

“Pretty cold,” he said. “Bastante frio.”

But it wasn’t that cold really. It had actually warmed up and seemed like it was going to start raining again.

I never really know what to say to Abuelo Colque.

But I use “usted” when I talk to him.

_________________________

¹ El Bolsón,  Patagonia, Argentina

Community Connection

For more narrative travel writing, check out Notes from the Road.

Image:  inti

IN THE CENTER of the plaza is a statue of General J. A Roca,¹ his face tagged with pink and green paint. Two pot-leaves are stenciled on his jacket, and the word “GENOCIDIA” is written in all caps across his horse (whose balls and eyes and nostrils are also pink). Spraypainted on the base of the statue, the side facing the wind, are the words “PUEBLO MAPUCHE.”

In what tense do we remember?

White headscarves, symbols of the Madres of Plaza del Mayo² are stenciled in a circle around the plaza. There are different messages by each scarf. One translates “we’ll never forget you.”

In what tense are we remembered?

Near the statue, a man has a Saint Bernard on a chain. Attached to the dog’s collar is a little whiskey barrel. They close in on two Asian-looking tourists. He says something and the dog hops up on a bench, then the tourists squeeze in by the dog. The man steps back and takes their picture. Nearby, along the top of a low stone wall, my daughter is walking, balancing (“both manos!” she always says when she wants to do this) and Lau is holding her hands.

How do you define “connection to place?”

The wind keeps gusting hard, the lake forming large surf. It seems about to snow. I ask the girls if they’re ready. On the way out I think about how Nazis³ used to live here and probably still do. If I had the chance to meet one, would I say anything? Would I paint PUEBLO JUDIO across his face? Just then a car speeds through a stone archway where we’re about to walk.  The driver honks at us.  I flick them off.  Beside the archway, at the exit, I see a cannon. Someone has jammed a plastic bottle into the barrel.

There are all kinds of war.

We walk holding hands across town to the movie theaters. We see Toy Story 3. After the movie it’s raining hard outside. We find a merry go round that’s inside a small wooden building. There’s a lot of music and noise, and when Lau says “back at the plaza you were muy ______,” I don’t fully hear / understand the last word but interpret it as distracted. In 20 minutes the bus is leaving for El Bolsón.  Tomorrow we’ll have to go up in the mountains somewhere. Over the sound of the merry go round, I hear Lau say: “She needs her papi. She need you to introduce her to the world, sabes?”

_______________________

¹Argentine army general and president, most famous for his “conquest of the desert” in the late 1800s, an extensive military campaign to “subdue” indigenous people from the pampas to Patagonia.

²Women whose children were “disappeared” by Argentine Military Operatives during the “Dirty War” of the 1970s and 80s.

³Including SS Officer Erich Priebke who was once the rector of the German School of Bariloche.

Community Connection

Have you ever tagged and/or ‘defaced’ a place?
Do you feel like dogs (and other animals) being used as props for pictures is a form of exploitation?

For more on Argetnina, please visit our Argentina focus page.

Image: Shayan

I THOUGHT THEY were praying. What else would they be doing in rural West Bengal, hands pressed palm to palm in the moonlight? This was India, after all.

But the row of men slung across the road left us no room to pass. I was too busy hoarding the night smells of ponds to be apprehensive at first. I don’t drive a car, or often ride in one, so inhabiting a vehicle puts me in an odd state of remoteness from the world.

Vinay, 26, brings solar energy to rural villages, and I bring my squares of writing paper. What did these gentlemen bring, hands fallen to their sides now, bodies pressing against glass and metal?

In their loose white trousers, the face of the night was darker than it had been a minute ago. Their spokesman’s voice was tense, not angry exactly, but held by an angry shadow that held me.

Vinay’s car was suddenly a bubble between villages. And I was a hive of tingly atoms known as fear.

Vinay did not raise his voice when he spoke to the head in the window, but he did not lower his shoulders either. The man was a poor villager, and Vinay was a friend of poor villagers.

“I try to follow the path of Gandhi,” he told me.

Really?” That is not something you hear many young Indians say these days.

“Really.” He shrugged, as if to say that if that made him a rare specimen it was fine with him.

Watching Vinay trying to keep ahimsa afloat in the darkness, I saw a man walking an invisible tightrope whose altitude pulled itself around him unseen. He just knew he had to keep walking.

“Give me the money in my bag,” he called to his driver sitting in the back.

Vinay handed the money over, and the circle of thieves fell away.

“Weird,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“It was a request.”

My fear fell away, as if, like the robbers, it had been dreamed.

Photo: Celso Flores

ARGENTINA is strong, too strong: whispered guilt from the hotel desk clerk as I step out into the whipping rain of tropical storm Alex.

One hour before the match alleys clang with the chugga-chugga-chugga of steel curtains drawing down over market stalls. Green jerseys everywhere, cuidad Cancun seems to be digging in for an athletic assault against the very concrete structures of Mexico.

The white and pale blue of Argentina’s jerseys is the armor of an invading army whose pre-game formations shake the foundations of the city to be sacked.

Alex whips palm fronds down a drizzly single lane. A crowd fills the patio in plastic chairs. Flat screen TV’s are pressed against the glass and the man at the taco stand is begging for carpal tunnel, feverishly hacking at pig meat to supply carnitas to futball fans who, as the game threatens to begin, can hardly contain themselves and so eat voraciously.

I can contain myself. I am good at containing myself, but I want to leak out into this crowd. I want the jeers and energy and tacos and booze to penetrate the leathery membrane of my ego.

I flag down the waiter who sneers at me like I smell like dog shit.

I don’t smell like dog shit but I need a beer if I am going to to to catch up with the crowd and not just gaze at the World Cup antics from the double paned window of sobriety.

I order one beer and the waiter brings me three beers and three tacos, best deal ever, period.

The ball is paced between the opposing teams and with a belligerent battle cry from the bar the game is afoot. Shots are fired on goal and women shriek. The ball sails between the two teams and we clap and curse and stand and sit.

The Mexican goalie tackles the oncoming ball but the Argentinean striker pops it from his grasp and in another second it is sailing towards the goal. The bar raises its hands, a woman releases a barn burning bellow as a clearly off-sides striker places the ball in the net with his head.

I don’t speak Spanish but the saliva being propelled from snarled lips could only portend the foulest of language.

The second and third goals come with diminished returns of agony from the bar.

It’s not like we thought we would actually win.

When the score was even at zero there was a magic in hoping that odds can be toppled and David can conquer Goliath.

3-0, Argentina

Nobody much is yelling anymore. Beer bottles tip upwards and limes are squeezed.

In the 71st minute of the match, on my 3rd beer, Javier Hernadez receives a pass in the penalty box and squarely places the ball into the net, saving Mexico the team and Mexico the country from a total shut out.

Goooooooooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaal!

The crowd doesn’t erupt, doesn’t cheer.

It detonates.

It sends a cloud of ash into the stratosphere that will circle the Earth for 3 years.

Hugs, shrieks, strained tendons cradling vocal cords that refuse to quit.

Tables tip over.

Women are groped.

Babies cry.

We are on our feet.

Demands for tequila come as soon as it is possible to be hear above the roar. The waitstaff move about the scene distributing shots.

Anything seems possible as chants of ‘Si se puede!’ from our bar are taken up by one neighboring bar, then another, until it seems that all of ciudade Cancun has found its rally call.

Well, anything but an actual victory.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

What are your favorite World Cup memories so far? Who is your team to take home the trophy?

West Bengal. Photo: Al Jazeera English

A FEW MONTHS ago, waves of trucks from rural West Bengal flying red flags spotted with hammers and sickles converged on the Maidan in Calcutta.

The India of adoration to Shiva, Kali, and Microsoft Word suddenly vanished. Was I in Nicaragua? Romania? Was I young again?

There was a picture in the papers when I arrived of a group of white-haired old men giving the clench-fisted communist salute to a white-haired dead man, their comrade, Jyoti Basu. Basu was for many years West Bengal’s Chief Minister.

The shot resembled a relic from some Communist Bloc archive. Or a still from a filmmaker’s political ghost story. But not a Bollywood filmmaker. Too grim for Bollywood.

Strange to think of the wintry clenched fist in West Bengal with its gentle ponds and coconut trees. The CPIM (Communist Party of India Marxist) has ruled West Bengal for the past thirty three years. I realize this is obscene.

There is something wrong with my feeling nostalgic for all the years I never even knew the CPIM was in power in Bengal. Communist parties with actual ruling Secretariats and cadre who know how to spit out the word “reactionary” from the appropriate place deep in the intestines, are not easy to come by in our post-red world.

The CPIM is widely expected to be defeated by Mamata Banerjee, India’s Minister of Railways, and her populist Tiranmool Party in next year’s elections. This doesn’t entirely please me. Bengalis hear this and say, “Are you crazy?” That helps ground me.

I hated the old Communist parties whose dreary exhortations on class politics fell on our heads like acid rain.

But I admit to a low-grade affection for the CPIM. I see them fussing over the grass in their ideological cemetery. Don’t they know they themselves are among the dead?

My apologies to the people of Bengal who under Communist rule have seen their state remain among India’s poorest. To be fair, the CPIM put through land reform in its early years, expanded education, made West Bengal India’s first state to have a Minister of Environment. But an eternity of incumbency has led, people say, to complacency, to the mislaying of its political compass, to incompetence.

Everywhere I go in Calcutta I am chased by hammers and sickles. What if Mamata, humbly assembled in a white sari and flip-flops in her posters, but said to be an autocrat, launches a campaign to change street names? Gone Karl Marx Street. Gone Lenin Street. Gone Ho Chi Min Street. Gone my sly smile of topographical vindication. Our victories have been few.

La Quebrada Cliff Diver, Acapulco, MX. Flickr photo, esparta

**Disclosure: In the researching of this post, the author, as best he can remember, received approximately the following material compensation from sources other than his publisher: one chicken salad sandwich, two chocolate chip cookies, two cups coffee, assorted cut fruit and chocolate, several glasses white wine, one sip champagne, one glass fresh-squeezed orange juice, free parking, sunshine, and wireless internet.*(see comments below for clarification)

Friday, June 18, 9:15 AM, Stanford Terrace Inn, Palo Alto, CA

I PARK IN FRONT OF A CLASSIC STUCCO MOTEL handsomely done-over in Euro boutique style (where I will pay the standard, slightly-discounted group rate of $155 for a room overlooking the ice machine, plus $3 for toothpaste and $4 for shaving cream). I’ve beaten the googlemaps estimate from SF by 14 minutes. I’m dosed up on NPR and coffee, and cheered by the dissolution of the fog.

There’s a waffle bar in the lobby. Guests are gathered around it like a hearth. At reception, two young girls who might be 12 or 14 or 18 (I find I can’t tell anymore) are on their respective smart devices, texting friends in distant lands while Mom works to secure a roll-away. I can’t help but read the latest missive:

top college in US and only 72 degrees!

If I had an iPhone, I might look up who coined the phrase “The future is now.”

I procure a hard-copy map of the campus and gain permission to ditch the car in the underground lot. Remarkably, despite Griffin Dunne talking to me on the radio about his father crashing the funerals of murder victims, I remember to remove the bike from the roof rack BEFORE entering the garage.

9:55 AM, Clubhouse Ballroom. Freeing Your Inner Entrepreneur: Reinventing Yourself for the Changing Media World

I’ve missed the free bagels.

Trudeau does tweeting journos (NPR)

The discussion is well underway by the time I get my nametag and slink over to an open window along the edge of the room. The place is packed. The mood is casual and upbeat, resolutely forward-looking. A fresh breeze blows in from the Pacific. I strain to hear the panelists over the clacking of laptop keyboards and the pleasant swashing of the fountain in the courtyard.

“Err on the side of disclosure…” is about where I catch the train.

From this vantage I can see no one else working with pen and paper. Beside me stands the mastermind behind the whole event, pert, blade-sharp, quietly organizing the world from the dashboard of her red-leather iPad.

Into my current ass-molded Moleskine, with a Mexican-made Bic secured second-hand from the Marriot in Irvine, I scribble:

# of trad notebooks: 0 (am I looking backward?)

On stage, full-time freelancer and whale lover Matt Villano moves from the subject of disclosure into the importance of diversification, of expanding one’s repertoire into new subject matter and new media, “like a stock portfolio.” Having just had a kid, he jokes (sort of) of “breaking into the parenting niche.”

There’s some consensus that writing for free is only a good idea — maybe — if you have something specific to sell, rather than just for the abstract promise of “exposure.” The exposure had better be real and worthwhile. “Writing for 10 cents a word, I don’t care who you are,” says Villano, “at some point it’s offensive.”

As for Twitter and Facebook and such, baseball and tech writer Dan Fost recommends staying off the stuff. Marci Alboher, journalist/author/speaker, describes social media as the freelancer’s water cooler, which draws a wave of nods from the audience. Villano, pulling from MBA theory, advises spending no more than 10% of your overall budget (read: time) on marketing (read: social networking). He does the math:

60 hrs x .1 = 6 hours max per week invested in the public persona.

Damon Brown, who writes about sex and technology for Playboy, says he uses social media to connect more directly with his audience. Then he adds: “if you cover Amish culture your audience might not be on Twitter.”

Meanwhile, on Twitter, #ffrl:

@cmonstah: Agreement in the room that Twitter is the great journalistic water cooler.

@JessicaDuLong: Can I just say how excited I am for the upbeat, forward-thinking energy here at #FFRL ? So refreshing. Looking forward to recalibrating.

@thestrippodcast: I love that we’re having a discussion about the panel during the panel.

@kellymcgonigal: I’ve started using a program called rescuetime, and find I spend ~1/2 my time writing. Feared it was less.

Simultaneously, back at the front of the room, Fost suggests that perhaps his most successful strategy as a freelance writer has been to marry a lawyer.

In the courtyard there is fresh-squeezed orange juice and sunshine. I chat with a former staff-writer for Time magazine. After her section was shuttered, her husband got a job in Modesto and they moved to California. She’s now angling for a future wherein Modesto, which may in fact have redeeming qualities, does not figure quite so prominently.

Next up (Part 2):

In which David Granger, rockstar Editor-in-Chief of Esquire, makes a strong case for The Magazine — his in particular — as the greatest medium ever invented. And then lays out just how much blood, balls and marrow-sapping dedication will be required to participate.

Our man goes on to sample oak-aged tequila at approx. $6/oz., refrains from joining a poker game in the motel lobby, agrees to pay $3 for a sample-size tube of toothpaste, makes note of a variety of fellowships and alternative funding sources for investigative journalism (links to be provided), learns that his father has sliced off the tip of his right index finger in the drive mechanism of an irrigation pump, and also that bonobos experience self-doubt, and is reminded (once again) precisely how much hard-labor will be required to craft his next successful national magazine pitch.

Read it now!

Photo: eonaxon

TWO SEMI-STRANGE things in the last couple days have occasioned me to think more about place than usual:

A. On a call with a group of travel marketing people, an executive said “position place” as in “there are ways we like to ‘position’ place” [doggy-style?]

B. One of my favorite writers posted a bizarre blog post that talked about a country music song and how the lyrics would lead you to think that the guy singing was from “the country, ” but then after researching the singer’s hometown (and posting statistics about education, jobs, median income there), his conclusion was “I’m way more hick than he is.”

Using these two examples (as well as several others that will follow), I’d like to examine some of the common ways people seem to look at place. It should be noted that I don’t look these ways in the context of “right or wrong” but more as reflections of people’s relationships with place that exist in certain points in time. I don’t think anyone looks at place in one of the forms below exclusively, but as a constantly changing and evolving mix.

14 WAYS OF LOOKING AT PLACE

We’ll begin with two main ways of looking at place, mythologizing and commodifying, and from there look at other ways, most of which are combinations of these two.

Mythologizing

Mythologizing place is looking at place as an abstraction. People mythologize place by (a) assigning some kind of abstraction [ex: virtue, nostalgia, chivalrousness, level of 'hickness' ] to it, or similarly (b) assigning some kind of abstraction or quality to themselves because of it (This is what the writer in example B above was doing).

Ex: “The South taught me how to be a gentleman.”

No, your parents did.

Mythologizing is the act of creating illusions about place. These illusions “exist” within the discrepancy between the concrete reality a person experiences in a place (examples: how long he/she has lived there, where he/she lives–downtown, suburbs, outlying areas, his/her role in the local economy, his/her community / friends) versus the “image” he or she has of the place.

Mythologizing often happens when people look back at where they grew up, or lived, or once traveled, and feel certain emotions that didn’t exist when they actually lived or traveled there.

Ex: “I’ve never been in a hotter place than a soccer field in North Georgia in the summer.”

No, actually it was much hotter when you were in Ecuador.

Commodifying [fundamental]

Commodifying (on a fundamental level) is reducing place into a singular context of resources in concrete reality. Examples would be looking at forests as “timber to be harvested” or rivers as “hydroelectric potential.”

Commodifying [common]

There exists however a much subtler and more pervasive form of commodifying where instead of concrete reality, the context of “resources” includes abstractions, associations, “appeal,” or “image.” This is how the marketing lady in the call above was looking at place–as an image which needed to be packaged a certain way, transformed into a product to be “positioned” in the market.

Most people seem to engage in this form of commodifying without ever thinking about it. For example, when I lived in Seattle, oftentimes I told people more or less “Seattle is good because you have easy access to the mountains.”

Here’s another example:

In one of Lola Akinmade’s blogs, a woman said: “I’ve just been back from The Gambia. . .Desperately poor country. Desperate. . .But they’ve got 500 species of birds!”

One of my bros once described San Francisco as having “culture and surf.”

This all reflects how people tend to reduce place into a few resources which may not even be resources in concrete reality, and then evaluate place within this context.

As terrain

This way of looking at place is a specialized form of commodifying that’s prevalent among surfers, mountaineers, kayakers, snowboarders, and other people who “live for” exploring place. The world may be seen in the context of “terrain” to be ascended, descended, surfed.

As “Inspiration”

This ties in both with mythologizing and commodifying: Some people may look at place within the context of inspiration. These are often writers, photographers, poets, filmmakers, artists, and others who travel or move to places because they have a positive effect on their work.

As “Escape”

This is similar to “inspiration”: Some people look at place as a potential “escape” from whatever they are experiencing “at home.”

Symptomatic of Suburbanization

For many who grew up in situations where they watched (as I did) their hometowns transform from semi-rural areas into congested suburban sprawl, it is common to look at place in the context of suburbanization. Examples of this are “evaluating” place on the basis of local economy (“mom and pop” stores) vs. “big box” retailers, and being hypersensitive to signs of suburbanization (Ex: gated communities, McDonald’s) while traveling.

Symptomatic of Environmental Impact

Similarly, many people look at place within the context of environmental denigration vs “purity.”

As Isolation

Some people look at place on the basis of proximity to other people. One may live “way out there” or, conversely, “close to people.” Throughout history, this way of looking at place has been used for setting up prisons, such as the location of prison camps in isolated regions of South Dakota during WWII.

As “First World vs Third World”

Some people look at place on a spectrum of “First World” vs.”Third World.” Once I heard a retired lawyer in Sarasota Florida compare two neighboring countries in South America based entirely on the local people appearing to be “Indian” vs. “white.”

As “One”

Certain people at particular moments (ex: religious or ecstatic experiences possibly involving hallucinogens, or situations of extreme fear / joy, such as witnessing death, birth, or other situations like getting tubed in some monster wave in Tahiti) may transcend “looking at” place and momentarily “fully inhabit” or “become” place. In my own experiences I’ve found certain moments to cause me to feel as if I were “one” with where the experience was taking place.

As “some other way that most of us having grown up in ‘modern society’ probably cannot comprehend”

I feel like all of these ways of looking at place listed above leave out an important other possibility, which is looking at place when you’ve never known anything else besides that place. I’m thinking about people like Indians in the Amazon who’ve never had “contact” with the outside.

It seems like all of the ways of looking at place above imply a disconnection with place. We “look at” place “in terms of” different things–abstractions, commodities–when there’s a layer separating us from being fully “there.”

I can only imagine how it would feel if everything about a place–the plants, animals, terrain–and the people who live there with you (and who’d died there) all share the same context / reality.

Community Connection

What other ways do people look at place?
How has your ways of looking at place evolved / changed over time?

Calcutta Metro. Image: PHBasumata

THE UNIFORMED woman at the Park Street Metro Station, with the standard issue black Indian braid, tickles my backpack to make sure I am not going to blow up the Calcutta subway system.

Then she smiles, a crescent of supernatural white teeth just inches from my face. Our fighting-terrorism-together moment is already behind us.

Her smile points me to the “booking” window, where the ticket clerk will throw my ticket at me. They have him sitting too far back from the window, so he has no choice but to throw the damn thing.

Before I do anything, I want to say something to this woman about her bag tickling. (I feel I qualify. I am a New Yorker, after all. I saw the twin towers melt before my eyes.) I am trying to imagine what instructions she got in her vigilance class about Westerners with backpacks. Wouldn’t our obvious innocence arouse tendrils of suspicion? Any traveler whose shampoo tube is confiscated at the airport will tell you there is no innocence left in our post-9/11, 7/7, 26/11 world.

Part of me wants Metro security to contemplate: what evil lurks behind this foreigner’s dopey smile? But her rebellion against the gray gong-crashers in our nest fills me with a secret joy. I like her style. Charming, horrifying, taking little holidays from gravitas.

I find myself hopelessly drawn to this uniformed woman. (I am usually allergic to anyone in a uniform.) I want to walk with her and her black braid and her white teeth along the Ganga, and tell her things I have never told anyone.

The further East I travel, the more vulnerable I am to the ripple effects of off-chance encounters like this. Once, at this same station, I was stopped by a young Indian man and asked if I was a writer. I said I was, and he said he had a job for me that would earn me good money. I immediately imagined abandoning my flat in New York and taking up residence in Calcutta. I never called him back.

I am tempted to share with the Security woman a sign in the Park Street Metro Station that I like to believe was written by a maligned surrealist poet who donates his work to the Metro Railway company. You shall not carry: skin, hides, dead poultry or game, fireworks, meat, fish, explosives.

Community Connection

What effect does traveling have on you?
Do you find yourself revealing things to people you might not otherwise?

The author, self-portrait, Lago Inferior, Patagonia, Chile. All photos by David Miller.

• Location: Sendero a Los Hitos, P.N. Lago Puelo, Patagonia
• Total distance covered: 36km
• Time: 2 days, 1 night
• Continuous hours hiking: 8 first day, 10 the second
• Creeks / rivers crossed: 24 (Rio Azul crossed by boat, all others on foot)
• Approx. distance trail itself was essentially a creek: 3 km
• Average temperature: 42 degrees F/ 5.6 C
• Approx. # of hours feet were wet: 15
• Passport stamps: 4 (2 entry / 2 exit, Chile / Argentina)

Km 0.0 - Finished packing. Realized fastex buckle on hip-belt was broken. Looked for replacement (none). Took this as possible bad omen. Visualized being unable to adequately tighten hip-belt and having pack kill shoulders for 2 days. Said “fuck it” then tied loose straps in square knot. Walked out of house. Looked at sky over cordillera (rainclouds). Thought about it raining almost continuously over the past 2 days.

Km. 0.1 - Got picked up by guy in rusted-out Ford Falcon. Took this as possible good omen. Thought about so many times trying to hitch on A.T (Appalachian Trail) when nobody would stop.  Said “gracias,” and the man said “porque?” in a way that didn’t sound like an expression, but literally “why?”

Km. 0.2 - Waited for bus to Lago Puelo. Thought about looking in fly-shop for replacement piece for hip-belt even though I realized shop wasn’t open yet.

Thought “this is how it used to feel ‘interacting’ with towns on the trail–wandering around looking for replacement gear, parts, food, liquor, showers, then hiking back up into the woods where you seemed to belong.

Km 0.8 - Walked from end of bus line at Lago Puelo to park entrance. Saw horses trotting down center of road. Felt urge to take morning shit. Saw that no rangers had arrived at park entrance even though it was scheduled to open already. Rested pack against hut. Bushwhacked 15 meters through mosqueta along roadside. Dug latrine with knife. Defecated. Decided against waiting for park rangers to show up. Entered park without registering / paying.

Km. 1.2 – Walked to edge of dock. Met Javier (boat captain) + kid. Was ferried by kid to other side of delta.

Lago Puelo + boat = huge backcountry access.

Studied three separate crossings that would have to be waded if you didn’t get ferried by boat. Looked at current entering Lago Puelo and threading through dock pilings,  forming last eddy on the Rio Azul. Said this to kid, “El ultimo eddy.”

Km 1.8 – Found campground / house on other side of headland was closed. Petted 3 dogs guarding house. Couldn’t find signage / directions to trail. Noticed footpath going up headland behind house. Climbed .5 km. Realized it couldn’t the trail. Turned around. Crossed campground, creek. Saw the trail on the other side. Felt sense of  “now I’m starting.” Ate dried figs, chocolate.

Km 3.5 - Climbed past sign of trail cut-off to pasarela (hanging-bridge). Made mental note for hike back. Overheated. Took off jacket. Drank water.

Km 4.2 - Entered super dense old-growth Cohiue forest. Crossed several small streams. Noticed very few tracks. Noticed very little birdsound. Wondered why there wasn’t more wildlife.

Thought about Lau and Layla at home waking up, having breakfast. Felt lonely. Thought “I should be ‘documenting’ this.” Stopped and took picture of forest (pictured here).

Saw mossed-over stack of logs. Wondered about the “viejo poblador” (original settler) who must’ve cut them. Felt stoked for some reason.

Envisioned new series on my blog (“things that make me stoked”). Tried to calm mind and just look at trail. Started getting cold. “Created” song in my head (mix of Deerhunter + reggae bassline?) that lasted 30 minutes and helped ascent of next hill. Tried to empty mind again and thought “it’s hard.” Began steep descent towards lake on super wet, loose rock.

Km 4.8 – Arrived at Gendarmeria: two large buildings, white with green roofs.  Saw young Argentine soldiers + paisanos trying to fix small dam that had flooded. Walked inside. Noticed crucifix on wall. Was questioned by an older (late 50s) white-looking officer in distrustful / angry way:  What was my occupation? Do I have family here in Argentina? Was questioned by young Indian-looking soldier who seemed to want to impress officer and began asking things in an aggressive way:  Was I just doing this to renew visa? How long was I planning to spend here?

Thought “jesus dude I’m just out here hiking, sort of.” Looked at pouches under white officer’s eyes. Visualized violent things he might’ve done as a young soldier during the dirty war. Told them: “Che, I’m trying to process my residencia but it’s taking forever for them to send the paperwork.” Thought how people are less alienated when you operate using same social / cultural cues. Thought “they don’t know / care about ‘being a writer,’ but they know about waiting on fucking paperwork.”

Km 5.8 - Continued hiking while thinking about white officer as symbolic of what men fear–not fear in the sense of being afraid of but something you feared becoming–old / soft / angry, trying to hold whatever power you could over others. Thought “let it go.” Thought “empty mind.” Hiked multiple ascents and descents, very steep, with much of trail essentially a flowing creek. Felt socks soaking through.

Reached creek that was too high to cross without wading. Searched upstream / crossed via log + semi-submerged rocks. Noticed sky was darker, but couldn’t tell if it was cloud cover or position of sun. Got cold. Started climbing again, then overheated. Reached higher elevation forest full of caña colihue. Broke off two stalks for walking sticks.

Mouth of Lago Puelo / birth of Rio Puelo.

Km 6.8 – Summited vista overlooking Lago Puelo. Felt lonely / cold. Ate peanut butter and oat cereal + chocolate. Took picture. Started worrying I was moving too slow. Felt feet begin to numb.

Km 8.4 - Reached border crossing / sign that said LIMITE CON CHILE. Thought about taking picture but hands were too cold / energy level too low. Thought about how people like to look at pictures of signs.

Km 9.8 – Reached dangerous creek crossing: water too high to cross in regular spot. Found pair of wet logs upstream spanning a steep constricted drop. Untied pack, threw walking sticks across, and butt-slid on logs. Estimated log-breakage / fall would mean 50% chance of death by entrapment and drowning / 80% chance of severe injury / 100% chance of hypothermia / extreme difficulty recovering gear / building emergency camp / fire.

Km 13.7 - Crossed several minor creeks. Noticed beginning of pain / inflammation in ligaments in left knee. Felt lower pant-legs / long underwear soaking through. Started getting panic feeling of “I’m not going to make it.” Thought “I haven’t really gone that far / what the fuck is going on with my body / am I just turning into an old fuck?” Felt need to defecate but didn’t want to stop / get cold. Passed good campsite, then thought “I should’ve stopped there.” Started feeling dehydrated. Filled up water bottle at creek. Thought “the terrain is brutal but at least the water is all good to go.”

Km 14. 7 – Began limping due to increasing pain in left knee. Continued worrying how I’d make it tomorrow. Wondered about transport options out of Lago Inferior.

Started slipping in various places on trail. Realized I had no energy left. Felt cold but then began long climb and started overheating. Felt uncomfortable pressure in bowels.

Km 15.3 - Reached abandoned farm. Defecated at edge of field. Burned toilet paper. Explored farm. Took pictures of Cerro Aguja Norte + outbuildings. Saw that sky had cleared somewhat. Noticed one outbuilding had dozens of wire hooks in ceiling. Realized this was where they kept sheep that had been butchered.

Set up tent. Took off wet gear. Got in bag. Felt legs / back almost completely immobile. Boiled water for miso soup. Opened wine (could only drink a couple sips). Looked at sunset. Took self-portrait and felt ridiculous.

Thought about having your days/nights “kept track of” in a passport. Checked water bottle (not enough for coffee in the morning). Took 2 ibuprofen + small swig of water. Started falling asleep.

Woke back up. Heard sound, a motor. Thought “someone approaching via motorcycle? (impossible), boat?” Then realized “generator at Chilean checkpoint .” Saw there was still a bit of color in the sky. Tried to lie back down. Heard a stamping sound. Looked out of tent: two horses. Thought “are they wild? (no, their tails are clipped–they belong to someone.)” Thought “isn’t it strange camping here, where a family or families once lived?” Thought “No, what’s strange is how almost every place has these stories, these places where other people once lived, it’s just that most of them have been covered over so long ago you forget you’re living on top of them.”

Woke up in morning to rain-sound on tent. Flexed knee (sore, but at least able to be flexed). Drank water. Fell back asleep again, maybe 30 minutes. Woke back up. Packed. Thought about so many mornings on the trail doing this, and the final move: putting on wet boots / pants/ jacket.

Km 15.6 – Reached Chilean checkpoint. Saw dilapidated structures, chicken house, horses. Walked into the building. Had passport stamped by a young Indian-looking solider. Smiled and felt stoked when I heard his accent.

Km 15.9 - Passed back by where I camped and saw the two horses from last night Felt happy. Stopped at creek below / filled up water bottle. Noted creek was significantly lower. Drank half a liter. Urinated. Noticed piss was very dark. Drank more water.

Km 24.6 – Felt for some reason I’d have trouble at the Argentine checkpoint. Visualized arguments / negative scenarios involving white soldier. Studied terrain / alternative routes for sneaking around if necessary. Noticed right calf / knee beginning to hurt from compensating for left side. Entered checkpoint. Saw paisanos waving at me approaching. Heard one yell out something.

Felt like they were watching me approach (after spending the night in cold / wet conditions) with certain air of respect and / or sense of “crazy gringo.” Had passport stamped by Indian-looking soldier. Saw white officer again, this time out of uniform, his eyes red, his nose watering–he appeared sick. Sensed that now these guys just wanted to talk. Answered their questions about trail conditions (flooded / very bad) and life in the US. Felt strangely relieved + emotional. Thought “why was I so worried about this?”

Km 28.1 - Ascended steeply 500 meters from lake. Reached old-growth forest / felt strangely alone again, same as yesterday. Ate last of cereal. Felt very cold + still. Found it difficult to put pack on + continue hiking.

Km 28.5 - Reached trail cut-off to pasarela. Visualized walking across bridge back into town, calling a taxi or catching a bus home.

Km 32 – Felt relieved that trail towards pasarela seemed to be roadway instead of trail through woods. Thought “it will be easier to follow once it gets dark.” Put on headlamp.

Km 35 – Night-hiked road until it dead-ended at the river. Thought “WTF? No pasarela?” Realized the trail must’ve cut off from the road somewhere but I’d missed it in the dark.

Started walking along bank but it became steep / impossible to follow. Shined headlamp through water and imagined fording at night (suicidal). Visualized camping and trying in the morning. Visualized girls at home (frightened b/c I didn’t make it back). Thought about walking back uphill and looking for missed trailhead but realized it would be impossible to find in dark + I was too tired.

Shined headlamp up slope. Started climbing ridge using animal trails. Continued downstream via animal trails. Ended up at chacra.

Km 36 – Saw hundreds of eyes lighting up in my headlamp beam (sheep). Heard dogs barking. Saw light on in farmhouse. Clapped my hands (in 2-3 clave, 1-2, 1-2-3) like the people here in the campo (no doorbells). Saw man my age come out / tell the dogs to hush. Said “Sorry to bother you. I got lost. I was looking for the pasarela,” then felt sense of flow occurring as he said “you want me to ferry you across here en barco?” Walked down to the river with him and got in a small rowboat. Asked his name (Juan). Watched him rowing us out of the eddy. Felt the boat enter the current. Cut off headlamp. Rested. Noticed for the first time that the sky was finally clear. Heard the sound of the oars in the water. Looked up at the stars.

Community Connection

What’s the strangest border you’ve ever crossed?
Have you ever snuck around a border?
Do you feel like you have to trick border guards or do you just “be yourself?”
What’s the longest you’ve ever hiked with wet feet?
Have you ever crossed a creek / river where you felt like there was a decent chance of dying?
Have you ever felt existential dread about dealing with your passport?

.

Photo of author in Bodh Gaya

I BREATHE him in. I breathe him out.

Under the Bodhi Tree in Bodh Gaya, one breathes first and asks questions later.

Everything loses itself in currents of breath, in small measures of sanity.

Where the Buddha sat, I can almost feel the calm waters that opened to yank his hiking feet (Swimming was another story. A one-sided love affair.), his mouth full of Psalms, into the deep. Inside my deep, there is a sharp sadness. Will it exhaust itself one day, being impermanent, as the Buddha said all conditioned things were?

I think of the ancient marriage between travel and death. The traveler arrives at a sun-drenched port with his baggage of absence. He finds awaiting him the off-center life of a new land. A strangeness that breathes.

Bodh Gaya, a place wisdom created, is a kind of safe house for people like me who awake in the morning with the non-living. (I did not know my brother very well when he lived. My love for him embraced me from behind one afternoon, when I found him loitering where my roots were. What touches it, is absorbed in it.

All around me sit the women of Sri Lanka, in whose country for over twenty-five years bushels of violent death fell everywhere. Brothers and sisters were shot, bombed, tortured, driven ruthlessly from their bodies.

The Bodhi leaves stretch far from the base of the tree. They make room for all the grief shapes below, each with its own story flag.

Community Connection

Please read Robert Hirschfield’s other reflection on the Bodhi Tree.

For an overview of the Bodh Gaya, please read 5 Sacred Cities at Brave New Traveler.

Texas Panhandle. brykmantra/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

IT WAS WELL INTO THE UNMITIGATED SEAR OF JULY when they finally came upon the first settlements of Quivira.

They were seventy-seven days out from the embers of Tiguex, give or take a few, nine hundred and fifty leagues from the City of Mexico, somewhere in what is now central Kansas. They were probably less than a day’s ride from the site where four hundred and sixty-four years later a retired financial services magnate by the name of Steve Fossett would set off on the first non-stop solo circumnavigation of the globe by aircraft.

They’d been expecting big things. Their guide, whom they called the Turk, “because he looked like one,” but who was more likely an expatriate (or ex-slave) Wichita or Pawnee, had said, sometime during the long winter holdover on the Rio Grande, otherwise spent besieging a mud-walled village, shooting crossbows and arquebuses, dodging arrows, setting fire to dwellings and people and being snowed on, that not so many days’ march to the east:

there was a river in the level country which was two leagues wide, in which there were fishes as big as horses, and large numbers of very big canoes, with more than twenty rowers on a side, and that they carried sails, and that their lords sat on the poop under awnings, and on the prow they had a great golden eagle. He said also that the lord of that country took his afternoon nap under a great tree on which were hung a great number of little gold bells, which put him to sleep as they swung in the air. He said also that everyone had his ordinary dishes made of wrought plate, and the jugs and bowls were of gold.

Which sounded pretty goddamn good. Worth checking out, anyway.

Francisco Vázquez de Coronado y Luján had left his native Spain for Mexico at age 25, there to be named governor and judge of the Kingdom of New Galicia. At 30, on the strength of what seemed like credible, if second-hand, reports of the seven great cities of Cíbola, wherein “there is much gold,” and where “the natives maintain a commerce in jars made from it, and in jewelry for their ears and spatulas with which they scrape themselves and remove their sweat,” he set off to the north with 1400 men, 1500 animals, arms, hard tack, wheat, oil, vinegar and “medicines.”

Cíbola, which turned out to be a collection of rather modest Zuni pueblos, the primary wealth of which, at the time, could be measured in pine nuts and functional pottery, was a bust. And so it’d been good news indeed, after a year on the trail and nothing yet happened upon, material or otherwise, to even begin to justify the extraordinary investment that had been made in the expedition, to hear of this place Quivira.

Coronado Sets Out to the North, Frederic Remington

Coronado followed the Turk nearly 800 miles across the Staked Plains (el llano estacado), across the sky-pressed panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma — across country, as Coronado described it, “with no more landmarks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea… not a stone, nor bit of rising ground, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by.”

It was one man’s duty to count steps as they marched, and to have them written down by a scribe, such that those same steps could eventually be retraced. They marked their way with piles of bison dung. At night they built great bonfires of the same stuff, shot off their guns, sounded trumpets and beat drums in order that those who had been lost during the day might find their way back to the group.

(On the return trip, a new guide would teach them a greatly improved method of navigation: that of shooting an arrow in the direction of travel, then, before reaching the place where it had stuck, shooting another — and so on throughout the day.)

They survived on bison meat smoked over bison dung. They cowered under hailstones “large as small bowls and larger” that dented helmets, shattered water gourds and injured horses. They drank mud, when they could find it.

Eventually they came to the Arkansas, where they saw their first native Quivirans, eaters of raw meat, clad, if at all, in buffalo skins — “as uncivilized as any I have seen and passed until now,” Coronado would write in his letter to the King. They swam their mounts across the silt, and so entered the fabled province. Nearly a week later they came upon the first assemblage of thatched huts along the banks of the Kansas River.

The men were tall, the women well-proportioned (with “faces more like Moorish women than Indians”). The dwellings seemed a slight improvement on the rustic, animal-skin teepees employed by the other Plains people they had seen. But there were no horse-sized fish, no grand sailing canoes, no gold bells swinging in the breeze.

“Immense Plains, where the bisons feed,” de Humboldt, 1804.

For twenty-five days they rode the length and breadth of the province. They found neither gold, nor silver, “nor any news of such.”

The Turk, under who knows what duress, admitted having made the whole thing up. In part, he said, because the Puebloans back on the Rio Grande had begged him to get the Spaniards lost — hopefully forever. And also because he’d wanted to get back home.

And so, not far from his home, those stinking, bearded men from another continent treated him to what was then the most up-to-date, most fashionable method of execution, the garrote.

One of the Quivira leaders wore a piece of copper hanging from his neck. It’d likely been mined and fashioned in Mexico. Coronado took this, or was given it, and also some small copper bells, to send along to the viceroy of New Spain as evidence of the only metal they’d seen in those parts.

And then, in anticipation of the coming monsoons, and the snows thereafter, and thereafter bankruptcy, divestiture of title, and death, and eventually, over time, the evolution of ever more complex financial instruments and man’s first solo unsupported flight around the globe (in 67 hours, 1 minute and 10 seconds, at an average 342.2 miles per hour), he turned his crew around and headed — one arrow at a time — in the direction of the Rio Grande.

All pics by Tom Gates.

I’M NOT MUCH FOR handholding. Or extended hugging. Or for feeling vulnerable. Ask the ex’s. They’ll tell you what caused them to kick me to the curb – my ridiculous independence and need to hold onto it, even in moments when I’m not supposed to be holding it all together.

This moment, though, finds me somewhere on the border of drama and melodrama. It’s a state of being that I can only call ‘away-sickness’, a term I’ve adopted for when I feel the pull to leave home and can’t. Most people want their down comforter and indoor plumbing – I crave a straw bed and a boxed hole in the ground.

I moved to Los Angeles three months ago, following a year of worldwide wandering, during which I lived in twelve countries over twelve months. The idea of the trip was to embrace the concept of slow travel on a level that many haven’t – going places and then planting my fanny for thirty days. What I didn’t expect is that this would leave me homesick for twelve countries, all of which adapted and adopted me.

The cracks in my everything’s fine persona showed themselves in February, when I purchased a 44 ounce bottle of Heinz Ketchup.

I looked down and realized that this wasn’t a pit stop on my trip, that I was buying at least fifty burgers’ worth of red stuff, and that even my disgusting eating habits couldn’t substantiate that much condiment craving for less than three months. I lived here.

I tried to fill the hole. I went on $14.00 trips to the salad bar at Whole Foods. I decided that I ‘needed’ to play Ghostbusters on an Xbox and lost a dozen hours attempting to annihilate the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man. While drinking.

I made out with guys I hardly knew. I played dumb Snow Patrol songs that made me feel weak and great Nada Surf songs made me feel the inverse of brave. I went emo on a Secret level, buying a big cork board and hanging reminders of my trip – a punched train ticket, a pack of dice from a German toy store, the Metallica ticket from Argentina, my Lothian bus pass.

I hit post-travel bottom after getting close and personal with a bottle of Malbec, doing what everyone does after downing a whole bottle of vino: I posted a pitiful song lyric on Facebook.

Immediately my friend (a jedi in world travel) called me. He knew what a twit I was being and wanted to spare me of my cached woe.

“What’s the matter?”

“I can’t explain.”

“It’s OK. You won’t ever be able to. Just stop posting stupid shit. You look like an idiot.”

“OK’.”

We started talking about how much I hated a rooster that hid under my hut in Malaysia, and how most mornings I wanted it dead in time for breakfast, on account of its need to begin cock-a-doodling just after I’d entered a perfectly buzzed sleep (you can get bootleg beer even in Taman Negara Park if you know the right people). I was trying to figure out how I’d become so nostalgic about something that bothered me so much at the time, and why it was something so inane that I kept coming back to.

Other things flushed from my brain. Like Neri, a student from a small town in Italy. He was assigned to my ESL classroom for month of “camp” that even the stupidest student realized was really school that involved monotonous songs and construction paper. To say that Neri tortured me would be an understatement – spitballs from straws, soccer balls tossed across the classroom and tantrums about any kind of accountability for these things.

His grandfather came to the school after the woman running the program finally realized that I couldn’t control this pinball child. The grandfather’s answer was swift and simple: He beat the tar out of the boy in the school courtyard while we all watched. The next morning Neri showed up with translated English sharpie’d on his palm and offered dutiful apology with tears and sincerity. One day later, he was flipping over desks and dumping paint on the ground.

I am sure that Neri is being rapped in the head right now for some poor behavior and that he has come to expect this treatment. I think about what would have happened if I had stayed in the small town in Tuscany. Could I have broken the cycle? Could I have helped him? Did I abandon a cause that was supposed to be one of my life’s biggest challenges? Or is this child simply an asshole?

And now I’m here, in the perfectly painted room with the washing machine humming, the pool outside, lit with underwater lamps and the smell of flawlessly maintained flowers wafting into my window. I have a great job and am surrounded by great people. Yet I question.

Last weekend I went to a workshop about how to connect with ‘kindred spirits’ and build community. As much as I was enamored by most of the other people in the room, I didn’t feel like they were my lot. How could I be surrounded with such evolved, cool people and not feel a connection with them?

It hit me on the second day. My kindred spirits are travelers.

It scares the hell out of me that I don’t know how to connect with my people unless I’m at a guesthouse in Laos or climbing a mountain in Chile. I don’t know why making a thrifty dinner with three new friends in Queenstown is more exciting than sitting down at a fancy restaurant in Beverly Hills. I don’t know why I need to meet people that I’ll never see again and why the time I spend with them is more powerful than many of my lifelong relationships.

Last night I tried like hell not to look at the photos from my trip.

I hadn’t given them a solid look since I’ve been back. But like anything, the more I told myself not to, the more I needed to see them.

If you’re a traveler, you get this. They made me feel everything at once. I felt sad, thrilled, joyous, festive, embarrassed, empowered, weak, lonely, powerful, doomed and unstoppable all at one time.

One other thing I keep coming back to is a Talking Heads song. One minute and fifty one seconds into “Once In A Lifetime” David Byrne declares that there is water at the bottom of the ocean. Just like that. “There is water at the bottom of the ocean.”

I keep thinking about how last year I found out that there is, indeed, water at the bottom of the ocean, and that you need only travel to find it. It’s one thing to logically process that there are amazing things in amazing places. It’s another to gape at them from two yards away.

This is the high I will chase as long as I live. I will do my best to remain in light.

Photo by Robert Hirschfield.

WHEN THE WIND MOVES through the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya, more than the leaves move. Pilgrims sitting in contemplation beneath the tree chase after the leaves like mad hens.

Sometimes monks will watch them and smile. Sometimes, sheepishly, they will join in.

I am against participating in mad dashes. My anti-social side is too well-developed. Once, riding the Number 2 train in Manhattan, two men engrossed in a gunfight, stormed into my car. Everyone exited, screaming and tumbling. Only I remained, clutching my copy of The Brothers Karamazov, putting privacy (relative as that was) over safety.

I had always wanted to visit Bodh Gaya and see the tree, where many centuries ago, a man got it straight about suffering. A shrine without a blood component.

The first time I saw the tree I fell in with a cluster of Sri Lankan women, all in white, like a delegation of swans.

Seeing it inside its protective gapped fence (I imagined it unenclosed, unlimited, like the mind of the Buddha), I felt deep inside me the immense marching feet of tears saved over time for just this moment. Not so much tears of devotion, I think, as tears of recognition. Recognition of my ignorance.

Gingerly, I seated myself beside the burgundy-robed Tibetans, beside the tangerine-robed Thai monks. I am sure they are all clairvoyant and can see they have an impostor in their midst.

I search for my first mindful breath of the day. It’s here somewhere. I know it is.

THE NEEDLE ON THE TEMP GAUGE pushed into the red. And then it kept going, like the needle on an old record player when the song ends. We were at the foot of the wash, just out of cell range, still 3500 vertical feet and ten long miles from the crest of the Inyos.

I wasn’t terribly concerned. We had eleven gallons of water, a twelve-pack of Mexican beer, ice, food, shade, propane, firewood, bicycles, sleeping bags, good shoes and hats, pens, notebooks, a new letter-stamp kit with red ink, and a library ranging from Babar to Blood Meridian.

Jasper was in the back, strapped to his booster seat, aged 4.99 and counting. The dog was curled up at his side. I’m gonna have to pull over, I said.

Jasper looked out the window, out across the sun-cracked arroyos of the planet Tatooine — deep Jawa country. He nodded and went back to his drawing.

From Jasper’s notebook.

To let the engine cool, he said.

We were on our way to his fifth birthday convocation out at the Eureka Dunes, on the northwestern fringe of Death Valley National Park. We’d had a pleasant morning, rolling down the Owens against the northward exodus of fishermen and boats bound for opening day — Fishmas, they call it. (Good for business, said the woman at the gas station in Big Pine.)

We’d picked up a hitchhiker on the way out of Mammoth. He was wearing a dark suit, a pressed white shirt and tie, and a porkpie hat. He held a document folder on which he’d written:

INDEPENDENCE (THE TOWN)

Independence is the county seat of Inyo, second largest and second least populated county in California, where in 1969 Charles Manson was arraigned and jailed for possession of stolen vehicles after a CHP officer found him hiding in a cupboard up in the Panamints. Aside from the Greek Revival courthouse (its fourth incarnation since the 1860’s, due to earthquake and fire), this roadside hamlet is also home to a terrific little historical museum, a charmingly weathered 1920’s motor hotel (for sale again), and an authentic Franco-Algerian bistro (open sometimes).

What, I asked, half-jokingly, you got a court appearance?

At 10, he said.

I looked at my watch. It was nearly 8:30. I think we might even get you there on time, I said.

He introduced himself as Robert. But most people call me Beto, he said. He slipped on a pair of Spy shades, settled in and told us the story of how he and his buddy’d been busted building a bike jump out at the far end of Sherwin meadow, at the base of Mammoth Rock, on public land.

We didn’t even get to building the thing, he said. A hiker had tipped off the Forest Service and for two days the rangers had watched and taken pics from above as Beto and partner worked to divert a stream so they’d have water to wet down the jump when it got too dusty.

He said he hadn’t known how things worked in these parts, that such a thing was illegal and so forth. But he didn’t harbor illusions his former ignorance would stand for shit in court. With a certain amount of pride — pride I could understand and appreciate — he showed me the official document:

United States of America v. Robert M_____

He’d been to court before; the reason he wasn’t driving himself on this particular morning was the DUI he’d garnered not long ago. He wondered what this judge would be like, and if he’d ever get his shovels back. Jasper, for his part, kept silent all the way to Independence.

On the Mojave, not traveling light.

We dropped the accused across the street from the courthouse. He thumbed my email address into his Blackberry so he could let us know how it went.*

We skirted Owens Dry Lake, the poisonous surface of which, courtesy of a century’s industrial-scale water diversion by the City of Los Angeles, was again in the process of blowing away to Nevada.

We retrieved the old aluminum fuselage from its winter pasture in Olancha, turned around, and began the slow crawl back upriver to Big Pine and our road into the Inyos. Coming back through Independence there was no sign of Robert M_____.

THE CAP ON THE FLUID RESERVOIR popped before I could find a reasonable place to pull the whole circus off the road. Steam blew out from under the hood. I poured a couple of gallons of good drinking water over the radiator, plus another gallon or so into the reservoir.

We sat for a while, enjoying a breeze like midsummer at the shore — and the silence. Eventually, the gauge crept back to normal. A local woman from the valley came by in a late-model Jeep and insisted on refilling my jerry can with water. I locked the hubs, shifted into 4-wheel low, and pressed on.

The worst that could happen, I figured, was that we’d have to abandon the rig a little ways up the road, there to consolidate our shit and hitch a ride with one of the truckloads of friends due out that way later in the afternoon. I could deal with all this steel and aluminum later, I thought.

But then I found that if I kept the heat blasting and the engine’s revolutions down around 1000 per minute — the speedometer flickering above zero like a cheap tealight in the wind, the truck barely ratcheting itself and its load uphill at about the pace a man might stroll beside a pair of oxen bearing his family and other worldly goods across a strange continent — I could keep the temp close to normal.

I was reminded of the time I drove from Tijuana all the way to Los Angeles in low gear, having shorn off my rear drive shaft in a late-night collision with an open manhole. And a certain long night’s gear-grinding bus ascent of Morocco’s Haut Atlas. And a slow climb from Batopilas to Creel with a French Canadian gambler, two Swedish girls, and a sick Tarahumara gentleman writhing atop the gear in the back.

There was time now, finally, to contemplate the whole great history of the wheel, the evolution from trail to road and beyond, the extraordinary technological leap in the newfound ability to ferry stones from here to there without necessarily resorting to slavery.

It was a fine way to travel, especially out here where there was no traffic. I came to appreciate the sear of engine-air on my toes. Jasper gathered his books and stamp kit and drawing implements and climbed up into the front seat (United States of America v. David Page). We saw a total of four vehicles on the road that afternoon. In about as many hours. I had to look at the road occasionally, in case we had to work around some topographic feature, but otherwise we got a lot done.

We took turns reading to each other and looking out at the world as it crept not at all inexorably by. By the time the spry little Volkswagen camper containing my wife happened upon us (we’d drifted enough to one side that they were able to sneak around us), still a long grind from the top, we’d done three rounds of The Tortoise and the Jackrabbit, had studied hundreds of what we took to be swallows’ nests in the roadcuts, had stamped out a thank-you note in red ink, had marveled at the Indian Paintbrush, the tufty grass poking from dry sand, the crazy chandeliers of pink and white flowers exploding from thornbushes, the cries of seagulls on their way to Mono Lake, the spun-silk cocoons in the mesquite, the lizards, the all-but-erased mining roads cut in switchbacks against great ribs of slate running upwise and canted like the backbone of some scoliotic dinosaur.

We’d seen rusted-tin pop-tab beer cans in the bushes, a sun-bleached squeeze-bottle of Parkay margarine, a refrigerator, and an ancient coil of barbless fence wire. We’d seen Jawa caves from various tribes, and a witch’s castle, flying monkeys bearing messages like passenger pigeons, and a herd of T-Rexes grazing in the Joshua trees. We’d relived the hunter shooting Babar’s mother four times over and every goddamned time felt the emptiness of it.

Do you want to go with those guys? I said to Jasper (meaning with his mother et. al in the Volkswagen). They’ll get to the dunes hours before we do.

Nah, he said. The birthday boy should always get there last.

* It went like this: the judge found him guilty on all three counts: (1) construction without a permit; (2) making false statements (he’d tried to give a fake name — it’d worked on another occasion); and (3) threatening, intimidating or interfering with a Forest Service officer. The prosecutor wanted $900 and 3 years probation. The judge settled on a $450 fine and 50 hours of community service.

Image: Tattooed JJ

IT’S LATE. The lucky fuckers settling into sleep in the hostel lobby won’t meet your eyes as the desk girl tells you she can’t let anybody else crash in the foyer.

She has to draw the line somewhere; right between you and a warm, dry, safe place to sleep.

Sure, you could check into a hotel and spend 4 days’ budget on a single night of satin sheets. You could also trade in your back pack for one of those wobble-wheeled luggage bags. You could also pull out your eyeballs and serve them speared in a martini. You could.

The good news is there’s a campground a mere 12 km away, and if you get walking you might just make it there before dawn.

Past the piazza and the fountain and the church and all the other things you come to Catania to do, past all these things, a little clearing overlooks the sea.

And this is where you reluctantly settle, under some scratchy old shrub, on a punctured water toy, in Sicily.

You gather all your shit: your backpack, camera bag, snorkel gear, anything you want to wake up with the next morning and hold on tight. You fitfully wake every 12 minutes, starting up and out of the nightmare that you lie concealed under a shrub.

You approach your temporary homelessness with the resignation that the sun also rises, and when it does you’re on your way.

A crazy-curly mop of hair is sitting there in stained linen rolling a doobie. A big lumpy doobie. You clear your throat and smile and that’s how you meet Luigi. Only he says, “call me Uncle Luigi.” Whatever, maybe a little pervy but he’s holding the joint like an Olympic torch coming home to Athens, so what the hell.

On the back of Luigi’s bike the night is a cat nuzzling your face. You ride down hills and back up, along the ocean and among the sloping cliffs that edge the Amalfi Coast. “Tonight is a very special night!” he yells over his shoulder.

Italian youth careen on scooters around you. You realize you’re all heading towards some common location, that everyone on the coast seems to be converging on millions of mopeds in Amalfi Town.

You look down on the little town lit from above fireworks celebrating the Assumption of Mary. You ditch the bike and swarm down to Amalfi Town. Drink and clap some happy cops on the back. Drink and you can’t find Luigi. Drink until you try to hitchhike back to…what was that town?

If you are stranded in Amalfi town after a massive public holiday with nothing but your t-shirt and flip flops, your only choice is to join the circle singing ‘Last Dance with Mary Jane’ and wait for the sun to rise.

So that’s what you do.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

For more on Italy, please check our Italy focus guide.

Image: ideowl

I DON’T THINK he ever had a rider. Maybe he didn’t want one.

He treated his rickshaw like it was his living room. He lounged on the high seat, took tea inside the pull bars, threw me his weird, sexy smile when he saw me coming, his black mustache puckering in the heat.

“Rickshaw?” he’d say as a kind of afterthought.

“Nah.”

He’d seem relieved. He was fat with swollen feet. Content, in middle age, to just be. An improbable round still point that everything moved around.

The other rickshaw guys were like broomsticks. They would bore into the rumps of the racked up traffic on Free School Street, maintaining their dignity as a Calcutta transport institution.

I imagined them flying over rooftops like those shtetl figures Chagall used to paint, made of air and pain, in need of release from the earth.

Their colleague was a plump root who had colonized his spot on Sudder Street without lifting a finger. I sometimes had the feeling his vehicle was just a prop. Some holy men carry long staffs, others carry rickshaws. His outrageous smile was always there for me, migrating from his polluted spot to my polluted spot. It was never refused.

Photo: s2art

YOUR THROAT SORE at first, and within an hour your eyelids hot, your eyes burning, and feelings of dizziness, followed by worry about getting sick.

The people behind you, their footsteps, and the reoccurring curiosity, awe, or horror about whether or not you’re actually going to be sick, on this street, with someone that keeps talking to you, that won’t shut up, and then at the market, where they’ve laid out on wooden tables whole raw chickens with flies and skinned cow heads, bladders, livers.

Walking briskly to your hostel with a worried facial expression and going straight to the bathroom, realizing that something is wrong, and the remembrance that pain is a real thing—that ‘suffering’ is really, actually suffering—and not having enough cash to get a single room.

Putting a trash can by your bunk in a room filled with 5 sleeping men, the air conditioner in the top corner of the dorm room, but not on, and unable to be turned on, because the person sleeping under it just complained it was too loud, and refused to turn it on, so you tell him, now, because you can’t imagine not having the air conditioner on, that you’ll sleep under the air conditioner—that you’ll switch bunks with him, that it won’t be loud for him that way.

You tell him that the sound won’t bother you, and he agrees to switch bunks with you, a facial expression like you’re being irrational, and you switch bunks with him, and turn the air conditioner on, and it feels incredible, and the sound isn’t anything compared to the relief you’re feeling, and you think that maybe you won’t get sick, and the person you just switched bunks with looks at you with an exasperated facial expression and throws up his hands and says “Ah, hace frio.”

He turns the air conditioning off, and you could swim in the foul air, and you’re worried that you’re going to be sick, then simply asking yourself “Am I going to be sick?” in a completely out of control manner . . .

But he’s in the furthest bunk away from the air conditioner, and you’re in a fucking tropical country—it’s sticky humid and mosquitoes and little crawling insects are everywhere, the bathroom attached to the dorm smells like shit, and you haven’t been this sick in a long time, and you say, “Oh, jesus, ok. Entonces queires cambio? Quires cambio? Dame veinte minutos. Veinte minutos,” and you’re too proud, or not wanting to seem like a pussy, to say “Please, but I’m sick, I need it,” and he actually does want to change bunks again, he actually takes you up on your political offer, but he’ll do the favor of giving you 20 minutes of air conditioning—he’s nice enough for that, the guy is nice enough to give you 20 minutes of air conditioning in a country about two hundred miles north of the equator, and you’re angry, because you’ve been traveling with this fuckface and three other assholes for a week, and you guys were supposed to take care of each other, in some way—you were supposed to carry someone’s bag a kilometer from the beach to the town, or miss a bus if someone didn’t make it on time, or sit, uncomplaining, in a crowded, hot minibus with their guitar on your lap and no leg room for 6 hours, and that kept things in balance, that was how you became close to them, because you all knew how it was, and how exactly that kind of comfort felt, and how that system could be relied upon—and you go back to your original bunk and feel fine because the cold air is great, the air conditioner is on, and you can focus on something other than your body again, and you start hoping that he’ll just fall asleep before the twenty minutes is over, so you can have all night with the wonderful air conditioner, muting the all the snoring and disgusting sounds emanating from the bodies of the humans around you, but, shortly, he says “Amigo,” and “Horrible fucking sound,” and you say “Okay,” and you both know that you are fucking pissed at each other.

He turns the air conditioning off, and you could swim in the foul air, and you’re worried that you’re going to be sick, then simply asking yourself “Am I going to be sick?” in a completely out of control manner, and you lose it into the trash can next to your bunk, and the sheer mass of vomit that comes from your face surprises you and quickly strikes you as funny, and you keep on retching, and you suddenly realize there’s a sound coming through the wall, and you release all the embarrassment you felt about getting sick in front of five other people, you give up trying to be quiet about it, and keep heaving—making demon-like noises now—concurrently realizing that you’re listening to a girl next door getting the shit fucked out of her, and this is where you become really detached, grinning—internally—about the harmony of the situation.

]]> http://thetravelersnotebook.com/notes-from-road/notes-on-getting-sick-in-an-equatorial-region-hostel-dorm/feed/ 14 http://thetravelersnotebook.com/notes-from-road/notes-on-the-jewish-cemetery-in-calcutta/ http://thetravelersnotebook.com/notes-from-road/notes-on-the-jewish-cemetery-in-calcutta/#comments Wed, 21 Apr 2010 12:54:48 +0000 Robert Hirschfield http://thetravelersnotebook.com/?p=8999 Robert Hirschfield visits the Jewish Cemetery in Calcutta, thinking of the last Jews left in India, and of last places.

Photo by author.

WE ARE driving up and down Narkeldanga Main Road looking for tombstones.

All I see are storefronts. The heat is roasting the car windows and my stubby pencil.

The driver is throwing up his hands, which I take as a good sign. In another minute, he will be heading back to Park Street in search of lunch.

But a man is waving to us in front of a locked gate. We have arrived at the Jewish Cemetery of Calcutta. I blink in disbelief when the gate opens. I am not expecting to see this thriving density of tombstones, many elongated, some upright, others tiny, the graves of little children.

Above ground, there are only about thirty-five Jews left, and most of them are in their seventies and eighties. I identify strongly with last places and last things and the last souls of dying communities. I may not be an observant Jew, but my spirit naturally gloms on to that which is scattered, to that which hangs on by fingernails over an abyss.

Finding myself in the physical manifestation of the abyss, I begin by looking for the grave of Shalom Cohen, Calcutta’s first Jew, the late eighteenth century court jeweler of the Nawab of Oudh, who will soon be greeting (in whatever way the dead greet the dead) Calcutta’s last Jew.

I can’t find where he is buried, but I visit with others who followed him, who were buried with him, who inevitably, I suppose, belong to him. I see where Jocelyn Raymond Leveroy, born on January 16, 1913, died on October 17, 1946. Why such a short life? What delighted her? Who loved her? At least she didn’t die in the heat of Calcutta’s wicked summer.

I think of another grave at the other end of the world. A grave that has seen every season, but only once. The grave of my brother, Reb Aryeh Hirschfield in Portland, Oregon.

He drowned in Mexico a year ago, but I still talk to him. Now even more than before. “What do you make of all these Jews dead behind a gate,” I say. “How does this pan out mystically?”

All photos by author.

Through loudspeakers connected to a van, a heavily synthesized voice belts out “Back to Sender, O! Back to Sender!”

These are the only English lyrics in the Muslim worship song he sings in Yoruba, a West African language. The once white rusty van is parked along the side of a one-way street yet traffic travels in both directions.

A poster of a deceased local engineer and “mentor” hangs next to a “Good Luck” sign, both pasted on the front part of a small bus designed for 12 passengers, but clearly holding about forty. Faces are pressed against its windows waiting patiently for the extra passenger the bus conductor is certain can fit in comfortably with the rest.

More buses roll past, emerging from a steamy bus park across from the music-blasting van. Stickers of “Adam’s Desire”, a sexual enhancer, are fixed to the bumpers and rear windows of some. Others have biblical quotes and references to God’s absolute might and protection. Patrons choose buses guided by how they spiritually feel on any particular day.

Okadas – motorcycle taxis – race up and down the street, buzzing and narrowly dodging cars as well as vendors selling oranges, phone cards, snacks, and other random items sitting close to the edge of the street with their toes within inches of rolling tires. The okada drivers don helmets, not because they want to but because of a newly instated law. Many helmets remain unbuckled or perched atop caps and geles — head-ties worn by women.

There is a constant sense of mortality. Pedestrians and vendors dart through oncoming traffic with mandatory cat-like reflexes. All senses are heightened.The sweltering heat so violates the mind that one retaliates with aggression to stay alive.

Not quite ready to jump into the maddening flow quite yet, I temporarily slip into the Nigerian daze to survive. A semi-conscious state where one stares with no facial expression at everything, not fully observing yet subconsciously aware of one’s surroundings.

Hours can be spent waiting, sitting, wandering, and relaxing within the daze. I had slipped into this daze to conserve my sanity only to be jolted back when a tanker-trailer sideswipes us violently. An intentional act which left me perplexed.

He’d cut us off and our frustrated driver had given him the “Waka!” sign – right palm open, fingers arched, and a quick flick at the elbow in the direction of the recipient.

This means “God punish your mother!”

The trailer driver had been ready to kill us for insulting him, and had rammed into our small car, shoving us off the road. Minutes earlier, a dilapidated tow truck had already cut us off and given us the “Waka!” sign at the sound of our frustrated horn. Personal insult is feigned as a way of bullying to get ahead. Just a few days earlier, another tanker-trailer had run over a woman who’d probably wandered into its path, crushing her until her entrails burst loose from her body along the side of the road in full view of everyone.

In the midst of it all, air-conditioned sedans, borderline airtight seem to glide through the frenzy. Uniformed schoolkids, their cargo, stare out windows, their noses pressed against chilled glass, observing the sweltering world outside. Wondering what it sounded like, as people, cars, buses all seemed to move by in slow motion to them.

Early afternoon meant they were probably on their way to after-school lessons. I watch them drive by with a sense of familiarity.

I could easily recount their day, hour by hour. They probably woke up this morning to either Christian or Muslim prayers, took a bath from a warm pail of water, scarfed down breakfast of bread and tomato-onion omelets, and got carted off to school.

They’d scream the national anthem at the top of their lungs as competitive juices begin to bubble to the surface. They’d compete to be first to ask questions in class, arms shooting up like referee flags on offside calls.

Compete to be heard and seen.

Life is lived day to day here. Most meals are cooked and completely consumed the same day as refrigerators are at the mercy of the local electric company and small generators. So open markets thrive. Sole proprietorships thrive. Daily routine pulsates at feverish pitches here and it needs to be. Nigerians are alive today and this fact is celebrated with noise, organized chaos, aggression, and a sharpened sense of “now”.

People exist vibrantly here and they need to. For any minute, they could very well be returned to their sender.

“You need just the right amount of madness in this town,” my little sister jokes as she skillfully steers a large SUV through thick Lagos go-slow traffic. “Give them the illusion that you’re ready to snap any second.”

One only spews from experience in this city and okada drivers remain the main traffic burn, whizzing by and squeezing between vehicles like mosquitoes oblivious to merging buses and cars switching lanes.

“Madam, wetin dey do you?!” one biker yells in Pidgin English after almost crashing head-on into her jeep in an attempt to squeeze by as she made a perfectly legal right-hand turn.

She quickly rolls down her window and lets out a crazed laugh.

“You want to die?! You want to die?!” she yells back vehemently. “ I go send you back to your maker!” She ends with a cackle.

The driver gives her the “Waka!” sign and speeds off.

As her maniacal laughter dies down, I turn to her. She’d been one of those little schoolkids wearing blue and white checkered gingham uniforms with large blue collars, taking in the world from the backseat, with her little snub nose pressed against a chilled glass window.

We’d both been.

The “Autumn Special,” a 6′8″ squash-tail, later given away.

ON THIS LAST MOVE to Patagonia we reduced our “worldly possessions” to 3 large suitcases, a duffel bag, a backpack, a snowboard bag, and carseat (for our daughter). This was after being married for 6 years.

I don’t feel proud of this necessarily; it’s just the reality of (a) not having enough money / motivation to ship other things we had–art / books / toys / furniture–down here via container, (b) having a natural aversion to accumulating things, and (c) effecting a transcontinental move via airplane.

But damn, now that we’re down here I’m missing a lot of our shit.

Or not really. Some of it I miss, I guess. Some of it I need. Either way, I’ve been thinking about it lately, all of this different stuff that I’ve spent time with as a traveler, stuff that in some cases got named.

Here are some of them:

1. The Autumn Special

A 6′8″ squash-tail bought for $75 in Pismo Beach, California. Later stored in friend’s garage in San Francisco, then taken down to Mexico, where it was surfed for 4 months, then given to Argentine surfer in Pascuales.

2. “The Land Speeder” aka the “Santa Cruz”

2. 156 cm Santa Cruz snowboard bought for $125 at a surf shop in San Francisco. Used for a season in Tahoe (Heavenly Valley), then mailed to Andy Vernor for usage at local ski-hill in Wisconsin, then later mailed back to me with Land Speeder sticker applied. Was later stolen out of back of jeep in Nederland, Colorado.

Me paddling Big Gun, Encampment, Wyoming.

3. The Big Gun

A creek boat produced by Riot around 2003.

Purchased from a paddler in Glenwood Springs Colorado for $250.

Never fit right, but was used during 2005-2007 paddle seasons in Colorado / Wyoming. “Sold” to dude in Nederland, Colorado who was supposed to send me a check but never did.

4.The “Music Collection”

CD + cassette library maintained from middle school through college (Athens, Georgia) containing, among other artists, Air, Agent Orange, Augustus Pablo, B52s, Billie Holliday, Bob Dylan, Coltrane, Dead Kennedys, Digable Planets, Digweed, DJ Spooky, Django Rheinhardt, Ernest Rangling, Gregorian Monks, James Brown, the JB’s, King Oliver’s Dixieland Jazz Band, Led Zeppelin, Lee Perry, Miles Davis, Neutral Milk Hotel, Nirvana, Outkast, Plastikman, the Porchhonkys, Quincy Jones, r.e.m., Suicidal Tendencies, Talking Heads, Velvet Underground + a whole bunch of 4-track recordings of early guitar / bass / drum played with friends. .

Sold at various music stores and / or given away / lost. [Notes: none of this feels like a "loss" now that we're in post-cd "world," except for a particular collection of tapes that I kept in a Vietnam-era ammo case given to me by my Dad that seemed to have disappeared in between graduating from College and heading off to the Appalachian Trail. ]

The Stealth Fighter

The Stealth Fighter

A squirt boat given to me in Seattle by a crew of squirtboaters from Pennsylvania.

Used in exploratory runs on Skykomish and Snoqualmie rivers. Later washed down the Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone River after I got worked in seam / subduction zone at Purple Cliffs and had to swim.

Special notes: This craft was unique in all possession-experiences in that (a) it was something handmade, and (b) never sold but given from one person to the next, as well as (c) “given” back to the river, which (d) came close to turning into a near death experience as I kept fighting to save it as we started washing into the next rapid, but then gave up and (e) as I sat up on the bank afterward it felt like the whole thing was actually kind of hilarious and I was only sorry there was nobody there to see it happen, which (f) gave me this strange energy that I used to (instead of camping there as originally intended) drive 13 more hours straight across to Colorado to meet up with my friends.

6. The “Library”

Book / magazine collection maintained from middle school and in several houses and states after college, with titles by Alexie, Borges, Bukowski, Carver, Camus, Cather, DeFoe, Dostoyevsky, Emerson, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Frank, Ginsberg, Golding, Hamsun, Harrison, Hemingway, Herbert, Hesse, Huxley, James, Jewett, Kafka, Kerouac, Kingslover, Lawrence, Lee, Lewis, London, Lorca, MacLean, Mann, Marquez, Melville, Miller (Arthur + Henry), O’Connor, Ovid, Proulx, Roth, Salinger, Sartre, Shakespeare, Snyder, Steinbeck, Storm, Thoreau, Tolkien,Twain, Walker, Williams (William Carlos + Tennessee), Wiesel.

Sold at (a) garage sale in Marietta, GA, (b) various bookstores in Athens, Georgia, Boulder, Colorado, and Seattle, Washington, and left in various places (1) Appalachian Trail Shelters, (2) the Dharma Shack, (3) parents’ house in Florida.

Note: like the music, there is no real “sense of loss” as far as not being able to maintain these possessions.

7. The “Wonder Bucket” and “Belt”

Tool-belt + paint bucket “organizer” used in construction work from mid 90s to 2009 including assorted tools: a worm-drive skillsaw, framing hammer, speed-square, chisels, cordless drill / impact, sawzall, chalkline, plumb bob, level. Given away to people (a) semi-unintentionally in Seattle, and (b) deliberately (as they had work going on and could use them) in Colorado.

8. The Egg

A 1992 Toyota Previa Van with standard transmission and all wheel drive. “Sold” to friends in Colorado, but then later gifted as it was discovered that years of using the Egg as offroad vehicle / Boulder Canyon commuting-machine had led to a “terminal diagnosis” vis a vis Colorado emissions standards vs engine repair costs.

Community Connection

What gear / things have you named in your travels / life experience and what is your relationship to it? Do you hold on to things or just give them away? Please let us know in the comments below.

Photo by author.

SOMETIMES, in the day’s white heat, you see them lined up a block long outside the Kali Temple.

They are faithful and meek before the Black Goddess, before the terrible Kali Ma of skulls.

I see Her by the scarlet shrine tree down the street, an unforgiving ebony statuette. She squishes the devotional impulse in me. Or what’s left of it. I am not, I admit, the devotional type. Not since being mugged in my youth by the God of Israel.

But being flung across oceans jeopardizes our fixed points. A Jewish agnostic from Detroit will rest his head against the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and find he has let his beard grow down past his heart, and is beginning to chant Kabbalistic formulas like the Holy Ari of Safed.

In disordered Calcutta, I feel a vulnerability that could lead me anywhere. Every morning, it leads me to the Kali Temple. I run the gauntlet of trinkets and pundits and pilgrims with blood red flowers, and the curious row of men with bindis and dhotis looking out into the deep distance like whaler wives while hundreds pass right before their eyes.

If I let myself be carried along by them, what then? What would await me at the end? A shiny new layer of spiritual skin? (What of the old layer? What is its color, texture? I keep trying to find out.) Kali Ma, Goddess of Attitude?

I long to be part of the spirit swell of Hindus. I imagine them entering an ancient river through a mysterious door. My mother’s shul didn’t do it for me. Even though our God was kind of like Kali’s paternal buddy, skulls and all.

It may turn out I have an allergy to Gods, but I definitely have a devotion to mysterious doors.

Community Connection

For more on India, please reference Matador’s Focus Guide to India.

Walter Mooney, U.S. Geological Survey

ONE COULD ARGUE that there is no experience more kinetic, more purely experienced with the body, than the earth suddenly becoming unsteady. I have a vivid recollection of the 1985 Santiago earthquake. Yet my memories – after 25 years – are almost entirely visual.

I remember being able to see the oscillation of the ground I was standing on, water coming out of a swimming pool in waves and tall poplar trees swaying violently and bending in the windless evening.

This past February 27th the quake hit in the middle of the night. The power went out. It was like reliving that old experience in absolute blindness.

I live in a canyon in the mountains overlooking Santiago, in an area called El Arrayán. Power did not return for five days. The whole communications system – land phones, cell phones, Internet – collapsed, so I spent the hours after the quake trying to contact my wife and kids – who were in California – and also my family in Chile, friends and colleagues, and listening to the radio in my car.

But I did not have a sense of the devastation in the South of Chile until I actually saw it on TV a couple of days after the quake. Once power returned at home, I kept watching.

Natural disasters tend to become human catastrophes, hitting the poor the hardest, and this was no exception. The earthquake and tsunami had shaken a sense of security, exposing the gross inequalities that underlie Chile’s macroeconomic success story. It became apparent that, in Santiago and other cities, several construction companies had creatively interpreted regulation codes in order to save a buck.

The official response provided a catalogue of ineptitude: the Chilean Navy did not issue a tsunami alert; the government hesitated before declaring a State of Emergency in Concepción and the port of Talcahuano, as looting escalated; rescue teams were not dispatched on time to areas where people were trapped under rubble; etc.

As I watched image after image of apocalyptic desolation, I became progressively horrified by the coverage itself, by the relentless drive of the media to raise the emotional pitch at whatever cost. The emotional manipulation and amplification ends up becoming its own corrective: it produces saturation, habituation and, ultimately, a measure of detachment.

A month after the earthquake and tsunami, things are getting back to normal. Chileans are focusing on other things, including the political transition: to the new conservative administration that has given the military a key role in keeping public safety, stirring old anxieties. And soon enough, all eyes will focus on the Chilean soccer team that will play in the World Cup in South Africa.

And yet, anxiety lingers. The demand for real estate — houses and apartments close to the ground — has multiplied exponentially. In the Maule Region, the hardest hit by the earthquake and tsunami, it is estimated that 20 percent of the population will have permanent psychological scars. In many coastal towns, people are still camping in the hills, their lives paralyzed by fear of the ocean.

After the initial shock and disbelief, there remains a vague but pervasive uncertainty, a mistrust in the stability of the earth, and a sense that the transitory works of reconstruction will become, as they always do, permanent. And that uneasiness, too, will pass.

By the time the Chilean footballers make it to South Africa, people in camps in the most devastated area will be enduring a very tough winter. While there has been a steady stream of donations since the earthquake, locals are still waiting for emergency housing and in need of basic supplies.

I’ll have some time off from teaching then and I plan to travel south to help out however I can and see things with my own eyes.

Community Connection

Have you experienced an earthquake? Please share with us in the comments below how it affected you.

Photo: Steve Weaver

NEAR A BUSY traffic circle in Calcutta, a man was sitting naked on the hot ground. His hair was matted, and his eyes were not where he was.

What to make of this man? I am beyond the point where a naked man on a city street in India gets badly translated in my brain as a holy man. No clothes equaling infinity. Man out walking with God. He is not a Naga Baba. He is as distant from their companionable nakedness as I am from him.

On this hot Calcutta afternoon, with my partner asleep in her studio in the wild snow of Connecticut, his desolation seeps into me, connects with my own floating black stone.

He reminds me that our existential ground zero is always closer than we think. He reminds me of my old anxiety dream, a classic: I am on a busy street, clad only in my underpants. I am trying to act natural. Inside me, shame, mystification, the need for a strategy. My clothes have to be somewhere. I am a branch on Kafka’s tree.

By comparison, his nakedness seems so empty. A cave covered over with matted hair, black skin, the long bell of his genitals.

I wish that I, like the Calcuttans, could just walk past him, eyes averted. Calcuttans are practiced averters. Their facial gestures get turned off like cell phones in movie theatres to cope with the mobs on the Metro, at street crossings, almost anywhere. A naked man in public is a solitary mob. A space plunderer. An accidental pirate.

I don’t like what moves inside me because of him. Feelings stripped of their protective leaves. I see myself stranded in this desert with its single dead tree containing parts of me.

Community Connection

For more , please check Matador’s Focus Page on India.

The look on that bro’s face, and always the local kid checking out your board. Photo: adobemac

[Author's note: all distances are approximate.]

From Mt. Katahdin, Maine to Front Royal, Virginia via the Appalachian Trail: 1,300 miles

I saw what happens to a hundred year-old bar when a television is plugged in for the first time. I learned how to think like a mouse. I got lost and ended up at a farm where they were harvesting cilantro. I went for 5 days without talking to anyone. I woke up one morning with my tarp crushed down to an inch above my face and a foot of snow on the other side of the plastic. I got a ride to town with a middle-aged rabbi who lived out of his car. I hiked with a bro whose mom had cancer.

I saw his face one night after he talked to her on the phone.

From Overflow Creek and the Chattooga and Tallulah Rivers to Athens, Georgia: 70 miles

I listened to a skinny raft guide describe his technique for guiding fat people down 7ft Falls as “hog-leg left.” I paddled by a 5,000 year-old fish-trap and saw a deer drinking from the river. I camped out with a girl by a shoals where we swam at night and then lay down by the fire. I eddied out above Singley’s Falls and told the first-timers “you just follow the water.” I cleaned an 80 foot drop and then pulled up to the bank and got out the safety-kit. I paddled Jawbone 100 times but was somewhere else on a day when someone finally went down.

I met up with all the kayakers before the funeral and heard someone call “safety?” and we all looked around for a second before one of us said “I think Tim would’ve wanted this to be safe, don’t you?”

Oceana, Tallulah gorge. Photo: Alex.

From Cotopoxi to Montañita to Esmereldas, Ecuador: 1,500 km

I camped at 15,000 feet in a summer-weight bag and puked from altitude sickness. I sat on the shoulder at la punta and waited for scraps. I spent one night with nowhere to sleep because of an Argentine girl whose nickname was smurf. I took a bus across the country with no money left in my wallet. I saw what happens when a large city has a total economic collapse.

I got a ride in a 4 x 4 that made it around burning barricades.

From San Jose, Costa Rica to Punta ______, El Salvador: 700 km

I paddled out in a 20-foot swell and learned how long I could hold my breath. I met a Canadian girl who seemed totally “free with her body” and wasn’t afraid of anything. I asked a fisherman if it was OK to camp out on the beach nearby and he took me to a storage room full of drying corn and told me to stay there if I wanted.

I got a ride in a US Army Humvee driven by a soldier who wasn’t allowed to swim in the ocean.

From Marietta, Georgia to Huntington Beach, California, (via San Francisco and Gardnerville, Nevada): 2,800 miles

I wore goggles at 6:00 a.m. while setting up cones at a ski resort parking lot. I saw a meth-head drive his 4 x 4 over a Ford Fiesta in his back yard. I kissed a Costa Rican girl on the dance floor of a $5-all-you-can-drink “beach party” at Harrah’s Casino. I saw Kevin Nealon in the back of a ski shuttle wearing the kind of snowsuit that ppl. used to call a “fag bag.” I spent a few days homeless in San Francisco and shaved in a Safeway bathroom. I carried sheets of plywood with a crew of Mexicans in Los Angeles who called the jobsite “Chinga City.”

Photo of camp in Cerritos.

I went to the beach after a three day rain killed all the smog, and saw Santa Catalina Island for the first time.

From Baja California Sur to Michoacan, Mexico to Boulder, Colorado (via Marietta, Georgia): 4,200 miles

I hiked up into the Cerritos and smoked Pitaya flowers. I cooked beans and rice over a fire for an Argentine girl (who later became my wife). I helped an old woman carry firewood and when we got back to her house she gave me a papaya. I sang songs at a summer camp I’d been to since I was 4 years old, and knew that it was the last time. I crawled out of a concrete bowl in a skatepark after breaking my femur.

I sat in bed watching icicles form outside the window and started writing about it.

Community Connection

Please send notes from the road to david at matadornetwork.com.

How do you remember the distances you’ve traveled? Please tell us in the comments below.

Photos by author.

REVERBERATING from around the corner, drumbeats become people and people become a procession.

Incense hangs down the adarve, the parapet into which wave after wave of people are crowding.

Less than 10 feet of space from wall to wall, close enough to concentrate the eye-stinging smoke, close enough to realize that there are only two ways out, and both would mean climbing over hundreds.

An uncomfortable and lasting claustrophobic moment until a snare drum ricochets around the corner, burying the closed in feeling and replacing it with a undefined musical memory.

Vague until a pinched minor trumpet note floats along with the haze…it’s Miles Davis.

The oriental sounding blues gives birth to Sketches of Spain. The ghosts of Miles and Gil Evans are suddenly added to those reborn here in Caceres every Easter.

Out of the clear sky, a tortured Christ hangs off a large silver crucifix held high, reflecting warm spring sunshine onto the upturned faces of those around who like me are pinned to the ramparts.

Penitents in immaculate white robes and capirotes, the conical hoods eerily reminiscent of radical right wing movements, solemnly carry their velvet and gold brocaded standards behind the leading cross. Streaming behind come troops of similarly dressed children doing their best to keep serious faces.

A procession is not only something to see, but a place to be seen. Impeccably dressed women deftly manage the cobblestones on five inch heels.

Their husbands, sober and almost boring in comparison, look as though they have stepped out of 1980’s Ralph Lauren ads, all corduroy and deck shoes with pink or baby blue sweaters hanging off their shoulders. Impossibly dolled up girls in pastel topcoats look like colorized wartime photographs.

Any other week of the year, Spanish churches are the exclusive haunt of the retired and the about-to-be-wed, but Semana Santa seems to bring people into the streets.

Pasíon in Spanish, passion in English. Similar enough sounding words, but ones that carry very different meanings for non-theological ears who have gladly forgotten Mel Gibson’s gory film. Etymologically, both words have their root in the verb to suffer. Dominatrices and their clients aside, few English speakers would find something in common with the root and today’s usage of the word.

What was once a visual display of biblical stories for the illiterate and non-latin speaking masses has turned into one of the most difficult weeks of the year to find a hotel that isn’t full. The wealthy no longer pay the poor to carry the images for them and the poor no longer participate as solely muscle.

The moving bible scenes are on top of everything popular, in the true sense of the world, for the people and enjoyed by them.

Even back in the heady anticlerical times of the Republic, before the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, processions continued to be celebrated.

One year the government banned them, and another the church did the same, but each time the people took it upon themselves to give the images their spring airing.

A break now in the train of people. A chain coolly rattles along the uneven stones. A lone man walks barefoot, dragging a heavy cross hooked over his shoulder.

The clinking draws my attention away from his unhooded head to his feet. The attached chains bring to mind the tapas bar habit that some Spaniards have of blithely ignoring even the closest garbage bin.

A leap of faith, or inherent trust that the toothpicks and broken glass won’t find their feet?

In either case, as the candles move on and the onlookers stream away, the street cleaners silently emerge to do their angel’s work.

Community Connection

Please check Matador’s Focus Page on Spain for more stories, blogs, and information.

Image: aayushgoel

THE WOMAN on Sudder Street in her yellow sari, with her little baby, with her hand outstretched, is tiny.

But she is many women.

She is waiting for me when I sneak out of Flury’s with my chocolate brownie.

Her voice rubs against my feet at night when I return home from visiting Bharat and Vinita, at Earthcare Books.

In Calcutta, the pavement speaks to you.

Where her body ends, a space begins that I leap through. Or try to. Inside the space is the border I packed without knowing it.

For a rupee or two, she will help me set it up. It is a lazy border. Completely without a philosophy. Pragmatic as toothpaste.

Actually, she falls away so easily. “No,” you say. And she is gone.

It’s dismaying. Why do I always say “No?” Even when I give her rupees, it’s always after first saying “No.”

Community Connection

Please visit our Focus Page on Travel to India for more.

The author in Sagres. Photo: Isaac Dunne

I WAS HAVING ISSUES. Even Edwin could see that from the beach. Every time the dark lines of the sets approached, I could feel my heart start to palpitate. Images of wiping out and getting pummeled underwater would flicker through my mind.

As the waves passed under me, I’d think: no not this one. The next one. I swear. It was happening more frequently every day, working so hard to get to the line-up, only to choke once I got out there.

For the previous few weeks, I had been living with Edwin Salem, a well-regarded big wave surfer in Puerto Viejo de Limon on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. It would be my final destination on a six-month trip around the world.

After years devoted to being a lawyer and then a non-profit director in demanding New York City environments, I had been laid off during the previous summer. I grabbed the opportunity to do what I actually wanted for the first time in recent memory, and with very little planning, bought a one-way ticket to Copenhagen.

I was venturing into the unknown, which I knew would be difficult (but maybe helpful) for someone as alpha as me. But it was that letting-go of all my previous certainties that seemed to bring me special experiences as well as unexpected practice in surfing.

While in Denmark, I stumbled on the windy fishing village of Klitmoller, where I discovered cold waves and year-round surfers who welcomed me into their homes and community. Then, during my drive across the northern coast of Spain, I fell in love with the intersection of artful cuisine, surf culture and Belle Epoque architecture in the Basque Region, where I extended my stay just to explore the beaches from Bilbao to Biarritz.

Experiencing countries with a surfboard seemed to both connect me with locals and also immerse me in the nature of autumnal Europe. Plus, it was plain fun.

But something changed in Lisbon. Almost two months into my solo traveling, the winter holidays began to approach, reminding me of home and the life that I had left there. I was staying with a pro-surfer and friend-of-a-friend named Ash, who urged me to come out to Costa de Caparica, certain that I would find Portugal’s breaks unforgettable.

Costa de Caparica. Photo: Jules Bal

This was true. The waves at Costa were unforgiving, the heaviest and fastest beach breaks I had ever witnessed.

The water temperature felt lower than the North Sea’s in Denmark. Gone was the turquoise peeling of the Bay of Biscay in San Sebastian. In its stead were the deep navies and grays of a part of the Atlantic that never felt the warm push of the Gulf Stream.

While I sat shivering in those late-November line-ups with Ash and his friends, the skies would split in orange and blue halves earlier each night. The shadowed bars of the waves would march towards me and I began to feel pressure in a way that I never had before. It was the same type of performance anxiety that used to give me insomnia during law school, but this time I couldn’t seem to meet expectations in the same way.

As the steep, hollow waves would roll in, I would scramble to get out of their way, sometimes getting tossed around. For every wave I would catch (and often fall off of), I pulled out of three or four.

My halfhearted attempts were met with halfhearted wipeouts. I felt wimpier every day, and at the end of each session, I’d pile myself into Ash’s backseat in silent frustration. We would drive without speaking for a while before he’d gently say that I was strong enough but that I had a commitment problem.

I had to agree, but I couldn’t pinpoint my issue. In so many aspects of my life, this trip included, I had thought of myself as adventurous and decisive. All of sudden I was crippled with fear and questioned whether I even knew what I was doing, and, more importantly, whether I was ever as brave as I had thought.

The author in Sagres. Photo: Isaac Dunne

When the humbling and cold experiences of Lisbon, followed by the coastal town of Sagres, were done, I decided to chalk it all up to Portugal—maybe surfing anywhere in that country was just not for me.

I felt guilty and secretly grateful that I didn’t have to deal with any of these questions until I got to the mellow breaks of Australia’s Gold Coast in January, where I was meeting my best friend. I could just ignore it and settle into my comfort zone without anyone calling me out or challenging me.

When I returned to New York, however, I was instantly thrust back into the hectic pace of the City as well as disapproving conversations with my family about my abandonment of them and my legal career. While some friends seemed inspired by my tales, others had become distant. I realized the gravity of the choices I had made during the past Fall—leaving behind a lucrative career and loving boyfriend—to be, I admit, selfish.

I carried the weight of those decisions to Costa Rica, and right into the home of someone whose very passion it was to challenge himself. After observing me at Playa Cocles, Edwin told me that he could see fear in my eyes, like I always wanted to bail. He suggested that maybe it was something personal that was holding me back and that I would need to confront it first on land and then in the water.

I told him he was right before bursting into tears, crying more deeply than I had in months. His comment made me admit (to both of us) that I had made a real gamble in the process of breaking free from my unsatisfying trajectory.

Of course, the gamble had been valuable: I was happier and healthier than I had been in New York, made new friends and rediscovered old ones, and, at the very least, had gained confidence in my writing.

But traveling also brought with it big risks—mental, physical and now aquatic. I had always met my academic and athletic challenges head-on, but in this case, I had hit a wall that seemed insurmountable on so many different levels.

Perhaps it was that I had been paddling out into greater uncertainty with every last-minute flight I took as I traversed the globe. Making all those big drops into the unfamiliar had been exhilarating on one hand but had also resulted in a lot of personal turmoil. I looked up Edwin through my tears and shrugged. “I’m just really tired.”

He responded, “Forging your individuality is a painful process. It’s scary and hurtful when those you care about question you and what you’re doing. Surfing is about the same thing. You have set aside your fears and grapple with what’s in front of you.”

Again, he was right. Traveling, and doing it alone, has and will always be net-positive experience for me—as will surfing. Both are fun and rewarding, if allowed, and both involve taking chances, taking some poundings and coping.

I nodded at him then wiped my face against a bare arm, promising out loud that I would work on it. I continue to go out on a daily basis since then. And although the dark lines and heavy lip of the waves are rarely less punishing at Cocles, when I swear I’ll catch the next wave, I have started to mean it.

Community Connection

Please check out some of Matador’s surf stories from Spencer Klein, Another End of the Road, and When Maximo was our Captain.

Photos courtesy of the Author.

[Editor's Note: The following story is taken direct and unedited from the journal of my longtime friend Segundo. After the earthquake in Haiti, he, along with several of his friends--all with medical and rescue training, spent 10 days volunteering north of Port au Prince. I debated asking Julie Schwietert to run this as a First Person Dispatch at Matador Change--as "people making a difference" is the central theme of that series. But the way these notes kept returning to the theme of "journey" made me publish them here. -DM]

2-9-2010

On a plane to Miami. Spent yesterday packing with a mid-day ski to allow the mind a rest from too much thinking. It was good to be in the quiet, the snow, amidst the pines. Japhy helped me load up the duffel bags with medical supplies in the eve. I think it was really important for him to take part in a process that has been emotionally charged yet kept under wrap for the 3 of us.

2-10-2010

Spent the day arranging travel for tomorrow and taking it easy. I think we are all a bit nervous. We really are venturing into the unknown. We will take a bus tomorrow at 7am that supposedly will have us arrive in Petion-ville (a suburb of Port-Au-Prince) around 2pm. From there we hope to find transportation for the 9 of us and our 17 bags full of supplies. There is a lot of concern about losing things along the way.

2-11-2010

St. Mark Haiti— today has truly been surreal! Rap music currently blares and the sound of continual traffic and horns completely dominate the air and it’s almost midnight. Sweat sticks to my body along with dust, smog and engine fumes.

I am inside my tent which is pitched on concrete behind concrete walls—it’s been a 19 hour day beginning on the streets of Santo Domingo waiting for our ride to the bus station at 5:30am. Next to our hostel is a museum dedicated to the Revolutionaries who risked and lost their lives to end the brutal dictatorship of Trujillo. Large portraits on the walls outside the museum of Minerva, Patria and Maria Teresa– “Las Mariposas”– revolutionary sisters who gave their lives to end tyranny. For justice. There is another haunting photo of a revolutionary in an electric chair—his eyes are bulging in terror. He was to be an example of those who tried to defy Trujillo. Their incredible bravery gives me courage.

8 hours into our journey and I am trying to navigate myself through the absolute chaos of the Dominican/Haitian border crossing. Thousands trying to leave in a swirl of dust, sun and fumes—like a scene from mad max or something. With the help of a savvy Haitian women we are stamped out of the DR and into Haiti as a team of Medicos.

There was something unnerving about walking around that chaotic scene with 9 passports and hundreds of dollars in my pocket. It was good to have a member of the team along to watch my back.

2 hours later we begin to see signs of collapsed buildings and thousands upon thousands in the streets—-walking, sitting, camped out and just staring at our bus as we drove by. Never have I seen such a concentration of people and vehicles in one area—it’s all a strange dream. Piles of rubble, collapsed buildings, tent cities, blaring horns, vehicles overflowing with people, aid trucks, police, military, motorcycles, bikes—yet there seems to be some sort of flow to this madness. People who have always dealt with the chaotic element.

I’m not really sure how to explain the intensity of landing in an unfamiliar city that is in complete crisis with seventeen bags of supplies and no knowledge of the language or any “real plan” other than you must take a complete leap of faith—which is not to say be naive—just that things will work themselves out in the end. You enter a disaster area you enter chaos! To be swarmed by folks just trying to put food in their and their families’ bellies anyway they can—hopefully by taking this group to where they need to arrive—is a nerve rattling experience. It is beyond description.

You have to believe in the goodness of people I feel in order to overcome the stress of being completely out of your element. You make your choice—and pray that the man who told you that the ones you have chosen will slit your throat and rob you the minute you leave the bus station—has only said that because he lost the opportunity to take this group of extranjeros to their destination.

And so with the help of a young “soon to be Haitian Doctor”(currently finishing his studies through the Cuban free medical school program) I met on our bus ride, we negotiate 400 US dollars for 2 vehicles to drive us and our 17 bags north to St. Mark.

The journey through Port-Au-Prince to St Mark was truly indescribable. I have no words—did I dream the last 3 hours? Did I really see, feel and experience the awesomeness of a city brought to the ground by Earths power! An exodus of people—thousands just walking north,east and south. There were always people walking no matter how far we drove. And the traffic was beyond the scope of reality. I’m not sure it was real.

Yet somehow, 4 hours later—after a nerve racking separation of our 2 vehicles, a complete loss of communication with half our team,after a tire rotation among the rubble on a side walk in the middle of the city, we made it the maybe 60 miles to St. Mark. My head so full I needed Excedrin to stop the pounding. And now 19 hours after waking up I will try to close my eyes and remember the smiles I saw throughout our journey of a resilient people who have known mostly suffering and poverty—yet exude a solidarity and strength seldom seen to me before.

2-12-2010

St. Nicholas Hospital—Shama is the name of the little six year old girl whose hand I held as she screamed in pain while they prepped her for surgery. My first face to face encounter with suffering in Haiti.

Somehow she was dragged under a truck that had hit her home and killed 2 others. She is the only one who survived. The driver was never caught—he kept on driving leaving her little body to die. She lost the majority of skin on her belly and some on her thighs. She was laying on a gurney in the pre-op room and I walked in caressed her little hand and looked into her dark eyes—held back my tears and smiled. She started to play with my arm hairs which seemed to calm her down.

I was asked to go into surgery and help in any way I could. The doctors skin grafted from her bum and the back of her thighs. Then sewed the skin onto her belly and legs. I’m not sure how long we were in the operating room—hours! When they were finished she was wrapped from her knees to her chest in gauze and bandages.

The Doctors said she would be in a world of hurt once the anesthesia wore off. I never thought that as an EMT, I would find myself learning the ropes of a surgical nurse assisting Doctors while they performed surgeries in what was described to me as “primitive” at best. I felt lucky to have a nurse feel compelled to show me “the ropes.” To teach as she had once been taught.

Today I saw wounds that I never would have imagined had I not seen them with my own eyes. I spent the entire day in the OR room, eyes wide helping in any way that was needed. This is what our team was doing throughout the hospital. Doing things we never would have imagined—but just jumping right in.

The suffering is incredible yet I still here laughter. It has been one month to the day since the Earthquake. “Misery has been Haiti’s companion for 200 years” is what Odson our host said to us last night. “Yet we still know how to laugh cause we are a strong people.”

2-13-2010

Another day in the O.R. For me. I couldn’t do it! I don’t really know how i’m doing it right now! To humble myself? To face fear? I am 100% out of my element—out of my comfort zone and am not sure how it will all process into my core just yet. I’m just trying to make it through each day as courageously as possible. To endure—like the people of this country have been doing for 500 years—like little Shama—like the young Haitian Dr.s who are doing their year of service after receiving a free education in Cuba.

2-14-2010

Hallmark is not making any money in Haiti today. This is survival here. The emergency department is completely crazy! People just pouring in—wounded–gaped open – its as if there is a perpetual cycle of trauma here. The Surgical team left yesterday and we are left to fend for ourselves for the next 4 days. We will change and clean out bandages Try to prevent any further infection. The post surgery infection rate has been near 100%. Each ward is filled to the brim with patients and their families. People are sleeping on floors. Families taking care of their needs—feeding,cleaning,changing clothes and sheets……helping others as well—a true coming together.

It’s feeling more overwhelming (if that’s possible) without the Boston team here. I think our team is doing exceptionally well but it was real nice to have the guidance of seasoned Doctors and nurses. Today I chose to spend more time focusing on Physical Therapy with Angeline. 11 years old with a broken femur and beautiful smile. More time on children than on gaping wounds and gnarly infections. That is not to say wounds were avoided—impossible!

Today while working with Angeline some young translators asked me to come and help with someone in the Emergency department. I arrived to find a large women with her shirt pulled up and her eyes closed. The family asked if there was something I could do. I checked her pulse—she was dead! They asked me to check again on her other side. I did—nothing….. I pulled down her shirt and told them i was sorry. There was nothing that could be done. They looked at me in a state of shock. I put a hand on someones shoulder and apologized again. Death was a big reality here. The morgue I hear was overflowing.

This morning while walking down the street towards the hospital a man stopped me and asked if I could take his blood pressure. I obliged and quickly a line formed in the street. For the next half hour Aron and I began taking blood pressures and heart rates for folks while Odson translated.

This place is continual noise—non-stop! Horns, voices, music, vehicles, mopeds, roosters, radios, feet continually moving, babies crying, kids screaming—somehow I manage to fall asleep and each time I stir in the middle of the night the noise is still there. Maybe there is a lull while I’m dreaming dreams I can’t remember. We are in a fish bowl here. 9 Americans who come from complete privilege. Something different to take the mind off the reality of their situation. A simple Bon Jour or Bon swa will bring a smile that will feel real good.

2-15-2010

Shama is beginning to have a systemic infection. We changed her bandages today and thank-God for narcotics—for the ability of Stacey on our team. She screamed quite a bit until the sedation started to kick in. Her goofiness towards the end of us working on her was enuff to make me laugh—so as not to cry.

As a team I felt we rocked today! We got done what needed to be done. What would have happened had we not been here to follow up on all the surgeries? What is to happen in the long run? How does this level of care, transfer over? I have no idea! What is happening, what has been happening, what will continue to happen is beyond overwhelming.

All day we worked on Earthquake victims and their wounds. Another woman died today. And I think it was for the best, yet who the hell am I to even think that? As I watched her family running around and screaming, wailing, throwing themselves to the ground, convulsing. Grieving for the last 500 years of sorrow. Somehow I feel that that is the gift of death here. To allow these incredibly resilient people to fully grieve for all they have had to endure and will continue to. This is a country that knows mourning.

I can barely keep my eyes open despite the chaos of noise around me. I think I will just have to plow through cause stopping might give me to much time to think about the enormity of this situation.

2-16-2010

Another day of wounds and screaming. beginning to feel less chaotic—are we getting used to this madness? We have been going all day non-stop for the past five. The last three have been just us working with the Haitian staff. I have become somewhat numb to the awesomeness of the wounds we are seeing.

The surgeons arrived this afternoon—and we are feeling relieved that these extreme trauma cases will be handled by Doctors. We are thinking of heading to the outlying communities.

Shama is febrile today—she needs more care than can be offered here. Angeline continues to improve. I am toast!

2-17-2010

The new team helped us clean up Shama today—she was a mess of urine and feces. We re bandaged her and left a bigger opening in her bandages to make it easier for her family to clean her. I spent the rest of the day helping orientate the new team to the way the O.R. works here. Nothing like the states as I could tell by their expressions. I was marveling to myself that here I am “showing the ropes” to experienced surgeons. They were thankful and I felt good “to teach as I had been taught.”

I was in the O.R. for an attempt at a skin graph when the electricity went out again. They put a plate into a young girls arm who had broken both bones in the earthquake and finished the day with a re-amputation of a leg wound that had become completely infected.—-to tired to write—lots of blood today

3:30 am if it wasn’t for some group snoring it would almost be quiet. Someone somewhere close by has a radio playing—i can actually hear the sound of insects humming. The road is actually quiet of vehicles, horns and motorcycles. I can hear roosters crowing all over the place. It turned out to be a long day yesterday with really no break. I missed working with Angeline and hope to see her today. An eleven year old smile goes a long way in this crazy place. I’m not really sure I should be in the O.R. today—but we will see what the universe has in store.

2-18-2010

It was only a 5 hour day because we left around 1ish. It got a bit hectic with the St. Louis team and I think the Haitian staff had it. I feel it was for the best because we are toast—spent. I think they need to integrate a bit more and use this as a teaching opportunity for the local staff.

7 days non-stop! it’s hard to believe the work we have been doing. Today I was asked to pack an open amputation! Solo! Just stuff gauze into that fish mouth—wet to dry OK” I’m so glad Leah showed up to land a hand.

So in the last week I have been in on operations, amputations, skin grafts, plates put into arms and legs, cleaned wounds as big as craters, done Physical therapy, watched people die and families mourn, heard women, men and children screaming in pain and have just plodded along like I am in some waking dream. Wake, eat, head to the hospital, come home, wash-off the day, wash my scrubs, eat, sleep, get up and do it again.

2-19-2010

7 am—the heat is in full force—been up off and on since 3:30 am. Sleep has become quite challenging-the first few nights it was easy to just pass out. Now i find myself waking—mind spinning and unable to fully fall back asleep. I’ve been watching two little girls playing happily in their dirt/rock yard. A mother hen with her chicks in tow following behind peeping and looking for anything amidst the piles of trash. The children continue to play tag. Every now and then one of them stops to love on the scrawny little puppy wagging its tail as they chase each other. Buckets of water are hauled in for baths.

I think of Japhy—think of kids in the U.S.–think of how simple we tried to keep it—how hard it gets with each passing year to keep it that way with the suffocating influence of modern society. Here among all this poverty and tragedy to see children happy—joyful, is humbling.

I’m realizing the only time I have really felt afraid for my life has been in vehicles driving on these chaotic roads. No longer do I have the carefree attitude that I had while hitch-hiking during my Peace Corps years. Here it feels as if every corner we round is a close call.

We headed out to the country today—to the village where Odson grew up. We drove a battered pot-hole filled road to a dirt one and in about an hour arrived to a cluster of mud and stone huts in the blistering heat and dust. It wasn’t long b/f we were completely surrounded. Wide eyes of all ages staring at the group of gringos before them. It was good to watch as Odson reunited with his 80 something year old grandmother, his nieces and nephews and cousins. He announced that we would be checking blood pressures and tending to wounds. Word spread fast and soon we were surrounded by hundreds of folks from the surrounding areas.

I never felt so closed in—I had to ask a man who spoke Spanish and was helping me translate—to please ask the people to allow me a little space. They would back up a bit and before I even finished with one person I would be completely enveloped in people. To feel this intensity while a language I don’t understand is being spoken emotionally around me as people wrestle to be the next in line is an experience in and of itself. For the next 3 hours or so we checked blood pressures, cleaned wounds and consulted people who had various health concerns.

In the EMS world the phrase “sudden onset” is used to explain how one might be feeling. And that is exactly how I felt has a dizziness came over me and the feeling as if an all out brawl was beginning in my stomach. I was done and only wanted to escape the constant eyes. I was relieved to finally head out and tried my hardest not to lose it on the bumpy ride back. At one point I heard Leah scream as we got awfully close to a large truck heading straight for us. Back at the compound I got quite sick. It is good to be traveling with paramedics and a nurse as 2 bags of I.V. and some meds had me feeling much better. I crashed early for another fitful night of sleep.

2-20-2010

It is hard to believe it was our last day at the hospital. The St. Louis team was definitely glad to see us back and it seems as if they have gotten into a routine of their own. I went to check on Shama and Angeline and was pleasantly surprised to see Shama sitting up and smiling with her Aunt. It seems as if she is on the road to recovery. I only pray that there is follow up on her dressing changes after the St. Louis team leaves, which is only a day after us.

I changed out Angeline’s Ace bandage and cleaned over her wound, the stitches have been removed and her leg is healing nicely. We did a loop around the ward on her crutches and some more leg stretches.

Afterwards I went back to the pre-surgery room and spent the rest of my time helping with patient care as they were being sedated in order to take of bandages and clean out wounds. Our time to leave had arrived and we made our rounds saying good bye t the many people we had formed bonds with—translators, doctors, nurses and most of all the patients.

It was truly bittersweet in that I am ready to be home—I miss my family and community—I am tired! Yet I know that this is only the beginning of a very long road for the Haitian people. A journey they have been on long before the earthquake occurred. It has been and honor for me to walk a small part of this journey with them—they truly are a people that embody courage and perseverance and they do it with grace and humility.

2-21-2010

Last night we played music and sang and danced and laughed with Odson and his family and community. We spent the late afternoon swimming in the beautiful Caribbean waters of Haiti—invited by a Haitian Doctor and his wife. And it was glorious! A perfect way to end an incredibly intense 10 days. To sing and dance—to laugh with with the people…….

We spent 11 hours on a bus driving back to Santo Domingo. We skirted around Port Au Prince and all sat staring out our windows looking at buildings that once were—tent cities, lost in our own thoughts. Horns continue to blare the air thick with dust and exhaust—people everywhere. I know we all leave Haiti changed—how could we not? I look forward to the quiet of 9000 feet. Of pine forests and aspen meadows. To the voices and feel of my family. Of some time to reflect on what has been an incredible journey .

Community Connection

For a perspective on how Matador’s Julie Schwietert organized a response to the earthquake, please read Organizing Matador’s Haiti relief effort.

Sara B. May, “After the Storm (with TTV framing props to seriykotik1970 on flickr)”

I’d snuck into Los Angeles from the west, over the water, in a twin engine turboprop piloted by professional madmen. They’d found a window in the storm and flown right through it. LAX looked like Costa Rica in the green season: standing water on the runways, weeds iridescent and blooming along the fence, air all black and gold, light coming in sideways under the sky.

There was a yacht beached between the breakwater and the airport, its starboard gunwale dug into the sand less than a mile from the marina, its mainsail still luffing off an abandoned port tack. Later, I would learn that the wreck had been there since some previous tempest, left as if to warn all foolhardy captains who would set out into weather.

Sara B. May

I’d spent too many long hours, years ago, running solo up the channel from Long Beach in fog thick as paste. I’d crossed the shipping lanes blind, no instruments, no GPS, nothing but the compass on the wheel to steer by — and the angle of the swell sloshing across the bow.

I’d motor for a few minutes, then cut it and drift, listening for the breakers off Point Vicente, or a lonely bellbuoy, or the chop of an inbound oil tanker set to run me over. Ultimately, it was the whine of jet engines coming into LAX that brought me home.

I’ve had enough black nights in rolling seas for my little lifetime. I’d be just fine with never again having to beat my way down a coastline in a gale, or to wrestle with the bowline on an errant skiff in a landscape of fifteen-foot combers.

But when the advisories go out, when the chairlifts shut down because of wind, and the chain laws go into effect, I still want nothing more than to suit up appropriately and get out into it.

I was on a simple mission to retrieve a car. It was my wife’s car, the family car, the one my boys call “Blue,” the one with the bad tires, the failing heater fan, the archeology of plastic animals, pistachio shells, and cheerios beneath the seats. The one with the leaky windshield, the duct-taped rear window, the occasional spoon-in-the-garbage-disposal noise from beneath the hood (except when we take it into the shop for diagnosis).

I found the thing right where I’d left it, beneath a sagging, overgrown arbor of bougainvillea. I shoveled the wet leaves and debris from the windows and drove to the beach. The city was quiet, battered, bracing for the next round.

Out at the sharp end of the Venice Pier I drank a bottle of wine with an old friend. We held the edge of North America all to ourselves, the far-from-peaceful Pacific Ocean roiling beneath us, the swell rising, gray fading into dark, the promise of something big coming in.

We quickly overcame our sense of propriety, rolled a twenty dollar bill (or was it a ten?) into the empty bottle, corked it, hurled it out beyond the surf. One day the earth would dry out again and some scavenger or city employee would come upon yet another piece of trash on the beach.

Was there something grand and momentous we could say to that person from our great vantage in the past? Not that we could think of. A simple greeting seemed sufficient, and an exhortation to — why not? — spend it all in one place.

The storm flipped SUV’s and lifted boats onto the beach, NASA

By the time I finally got on the road the next day, having spent the morning gaping at the epic swell, stocking up at Trader Joe’s, wading across ponds to and from the lunch buffet at Tandoor-India, the next wave was upon us.

A full-on winter storm warning was back in effect all across the Western United States. Interstate 5 was closed at Castaic because of heavy snow and whiteout conditions on the Grapevine. 395 was barricaded north of 203.

From the radio came warnings of dangerous water spouts as far inland as downtown, of power outages across the city, of imminent debris slides along the burned-out scarp of the San Gabriels. Animal shelters were flooded. Planes were being struck by lightning.

The advice was simple: batten the hatches, hunker down, do not go outdoors, do not travel.

All I was lacking, I figured, were my snowboots (which in my haste I’d left at home) and a roll of duct tape. Otherwise I was good to go.

Here’s what I posted on my Facebook Page, on my way out the door, quoting in caps from the NOAA weather advisory:

“Waves hitting 20 feet at El Porto. Heading back upriver now into a PROLONGED PERIOD OF HEAVY SNOW AND GUSTY WINDS…CREATING VERY DANGEROUS TRAVEL… in a car with bald summer tires, a bizarre sound coming out of the engine, and a rear window that’s taped shut. have chains, blankets, iPod and red bull. should be exciting.”

The comments, which I didn’t see until much later that night, after finally digging three feet of snow out of my driveway and pulling that godblessed old vehicle into the garage, were mixed:

“Danger. Keep clear of this person.”

“good luck!”

“Sounds stupid if you ask me.”

“Adventure!”

“I agree with Terry. Find a place to hunker down.”

“Keep rubber side down.”

Most of John Muir’s writings are far too mawkish for my taste. But the man knew how to find deep adventure in his backyard. “[W]hen the storm began to sound,” he once wrote of a fast-rising wind event in 1874, “I lost no time in pushing out into the woods to enjoy it.”

Not content to enjoy the spectacle from the ground, the scraggly naturalist climbed to the top of an old Doug Fir, a hundred feet up into the sheering sky, and for hours thrilled at the violent buffeting of the storm, tossing about “like a bobo-link on a reed.”

Whitewater tumbled down the highway in Soledad Canyon. I boated my way upward, against the current, counting wrecks along the road. The tires planed nicely.

At the old railroad town of Mojave, self-proclaimed “Gateway to Space,” slush came from the sky. The ceiling was low and black, as if pressing down on the roof of the car, but visibility was perfect.

Up into the Owens Basin the world was empty, save for me and the glistening road, the occasional Joshua tree casting a long shadow in the vivid orange light.

At 3:30 I got a call from my wife, in Mammoth. She’d managed to get the kids from school and was plowing over to a friend’s house in 4-wheel low. “Stay somewhere,” she said. “It’s insane.”

Past Coso Junction the rear window slipped free its sodden duct tape bonds. The air came in fresh and wet and cold. I found a pair of my youngest boy’s socks, stuffed them between the glass and the doorframe to hold the window in place.

In Bishop the snow was coming down in fist-sized flakes. I stopped at Kmart, bought a cheap pair of workboots and a roll of duct tape. Beneath a street lamp I wrestled snowchains onto the tires, then set off for the long crawl up the grade.

The last mile to the house is always the trickiest. I came up around the back way, in untracked powder deep as the car’s front bumper. A section of chain blew just below the entrance to Timber Ridge. Thwack, thwack, thwack it went against the wheel well.

But I made the crest, floated the last switchback home, the last downhill stretch like spreading frosting on a cake. I promised the next day to go out only on skis.

Photo: The Wandering Angel

THE BOY gets up to groan open the hotel gate for me. The same boy works at every hotel I ever stayed at in India. Thin, brown, silent, his smile besieged by a muscular frown.

I lean into the 5:30 darkness of a Calcutta morning. A rickshaw driver says, “Mother House.” A second rickshaw driver says, “Mother House.” I think of two clocks announcing the hour.

Inside their metal pull bars on Sudder Street, they want to take me to Mother Teresa’s Missionary Sisters of Charity House. My Jewish face, nose pointing towards leveled ghettos, is no impediment.

My face is linked to a pocket of warm rupees. Their empty bellies are beginning to turn in my pocket. Mother Teresa and the goddess Kali are the two female power spots of this city. The face of the old nun looks down at you from rotting walls, restaurants, the entrance to her home for the dying by the Kali Temple in Kalighat.

I once watched as some visiting American priests rolled out of their taxi, bodies low to the ground, running as if they had come under rocket fire. They were spooked by the mob of Hindu pilgrims with their blood-red flowers for Kali.

I will sometimes stand by the Howrah Bridge and notice how quickly every spare inch of space gets covered with people. I am sure if I don’t move fast enough, I will drown beneath Indian footsteps. In my mind, I write the lead for The Telegraph: Elderly journalist trampled to death. He was just too slow.

Which brings me back to 5:30AM outside the Diplomat Hotel. Between travel shops and biscuit and drink shops, shuttered, there is empty space. A phenomena as amazing as a Calcutta snowfall. Light-headed, I visit the awful plaster bust of Tagore. It seems he wrote some of his poetry at number 10 Sudder, my address.

The rickshaw drivers wait like well-mannered ghosts for me to finish up with Tagore. Then, maybe, I will be ready to rouse the nuns at Mother House from their chaste beds.

Community Connection

For more on India, please see a recent photo essay on Holi, the Festival of Colors.

Photo: edmondson photo

AS SOON as Bridget and I arrived in Chau Dok we were jinxed. Coming from Phnom Penh by boat we landed in the Mekong Delta with $24.

After catching two pedicabs and renting a room for the night we had only $15 left. The first order of business was to hit up an ATM.

In 2007 there were 3 ATM’s in Chau Dok. I know this because I went to all three. All day I swiped my card and pleaded with bank officers to no avail.

It was decided that the problem was likely isolated to Chau Dok and that I should try an ATM in Saigon, 6 hours away. We left that afternoon. If we stayed a night in Chau Dok, we might not have had enough money left to eat and buy two $5 tickets to Saigon.

The guesthouse refunded our room reluctantly.

We arrived to a rain flooded Saigon after midnight. The bus station is some ways off from the city center, of course, so we needed a taxi. The cabbies know they can charge us what they want so with no other options we threw our packs in the trunk and agreed to pay our last $10 for a ride into the city.

After we harassed a dozen ATM’s, we still didn’t realize that there was not a single cash machine in the country that would work for us. Our bank keeps a small list of countries that they will not allow transactions from, Vietnam is at the top of that list.

The taxi driver pulled up to Pha Ngu Lao, backpacker central. It was late and people were drunk and everything was loud and staggering.

Let’s get one thing straight: I wasn’t giving this cabbie our last ten bucks. No way. Not happening. The cabbie looked at me, me at him, and then both of us at the trunk, locked with our backpacks inside.

I sent Bridget to try more cash machines. While she scurried off I lay my face on the cool metal of the taxi roof and closed my eyes.

Welcome to Saigon kid; you’re fucked.

Across the street was Guns and Roses, a black fissure of a bar that blasts, you guessed it, Guns and Roses.

Two men, one tall, one taller, lanky and drunk, with large adams apples and twin smoldering cigarettes watched me from a table outside the bar. Their faces were angular and unshaven and bruised looking, like they had recently been punching each other. They both sported orange mohawks and soccer jerseys.

They were staring at me. Great.

They threw back their drinks, stood (steadying themselves on the table) and started my way.Great. Bridget made it back just as the drunk-punk welcoming committee reached the taxi.

“You guys need some money.”

Not really a question and the shorter one was already pulling bills from his jeans.

The cabbie pocketed the cash and unlocked the trunk. The two men walked us to their guest house and paid for our first night.

“Come back to the bar, let us buy a round. You look like you could use it.”

Later, much later, as the moon set and the sun was rising, as I watched with veiled fear and fascination as our benefactors smoked crack off a trembling piece of foil, I thought about old Sunday school axioms.

The Lord works in mysterious ways.

My savior’s eyelids flutter as a plume of rock-smoke escaped his smiling lips.

“Welcome to Saigon. Not everyone is as nice as us.”

We spent Christmas in a hotel in San Francisco. It was called the Edward II, which Dad, the scholar of English Renaissance theatre and history, found both be- and a-musing. We visited the MoMA, walked across the Golden Gate, and hiked the Marin headlands on an unseasonably fine afternoon. Christmas dinner was pasta and a bottle of Barolo in a North Beach restaurant.

A couple days later, we were in my Mazda Protegé headed south for Los Angeles. I was at the wheel. Which made sense: it was my car, and Dad was used to driving on the left. But it felt all wrong.

When I was growing up in Belfast, the understanding was I would make my own way to school unless it was pouring rain, in which case Dad would drive me. But if I kept him waiting in the car — because I was drying my hair or finishing my French homework — he would just leave.

On board, the rules were clear: I was to be at least minimally agreeable. Once, in a state of outrage about some or other injustice on Dad’s part, I decided to punish him by ignoring him. Before I knew what was happening, he’d pulled over and ordered me to get out — or apologize at once. I apologized.

He taught me to drive when I was seventeen. But the passenger seat was not a place he was accustomed to. His feet would instinctively reach for pedals where there were none. When I took a corner too fast, he would say, “That was appalling! Appalling driving!” Or he would press the back of his head against the head rest, close his eyes and murmur, “Oh God.”

The summer before I went to Oxford, he went away for a month and left me his car. One day, I took the entrance to our driveway at the wrong angle and smashed into the brick gatepost. It seemed like the worst possible thing that could’ve happened. Sobbing, I called my mum in France. “Tell him,” she said. “He won’t be angry.”

She was right — more or less. I reattached the bumper with duct tape and picked Dad up at the airport. He didn’t say much until we got back to the house, where he took a long look at the gatepost. Then he looked at me. “But it doesn’t move,” he said, finally. “I don’t understand how you could hit it, when it doesn’t move.”

I decided we should stop in Santa Barbara for lunch. We’d visited the redwoods and the elephant seals, and had spent the night in a grim motel in Pismo Beach. There didn’t seem to be an exit marked city center or downtown, so I picked one at random. Which might work in a small, concentric European city but is a recipe for disaster in American suburban sprawl.

We found ourselves in a maze of residential streets, like an experiment in house cloning. Finally we spotted a man washing his car. Dad got out and asked for directions.

Dad in Big Sur on 27 December, 2000

“Go down here and go right,” Dad said. Which brought us to another street identical to the last.

“You said ‘go right,’” I said.

“At the end of the street.”

“That’s not what you said.”

“Yes it is.”

“No it’s not, Dad.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!”

My dad didn’t belong in California. He liked European cities, long histories and short espressos, mastering the topography with a paper map and a strong pair of shoes. He was six-foot-two and unfailingly self-confident. But California made him seem small, even frail.

“If you don’t like it, you can get out,” I said, pulling over before I’d had a chance to think.

He got out of the car, very calmly, and walked away down the street.

I had no idea what to do. The sensible thing — backing up, apologizing — seemed out of the question. So I drove around the corner. And there my pride evaporated as quickly as it had flared. I did a U-turn and went back. He was gone.

There was nothing to suggest a means of escape — no bus stops, no taxis, not even any other moving vehicles. I drove slowly around the block. Then I returned to the place where he’d got out. Nothing. I pulled over, and proceeded, quietly, to lose it.

My mind constructed worst case scenarios: I’d wait and wait and eventually have to drive back to L.A. on my own. I’d get back, check my phone messages (I didn’t have a mobile), there’d be no word. Maybe he’d turn up late that night, or the next day. Should I call the police? What if he never showed up at all and we became the subject of one of those unsolved mysteries?

I could see no way out. Perhaps I would spend the rest of my life in a white Mazda, waiting for my father.

As I sat there, contemplating the possibility that I had just destroyed one of the most important relationships in my life, I saw Dad come out of a nearby house. He exchanged a few words with an unseen person, then walked quickly and confidently down the drive to my car and got in.

“Dad! I was so worried.”

He seemed surprised. “Were you? I had to use the lavatory, that’s all. A very nice man let me into his house.”

I drove on without a word. What was there to say? Clearly, what had loomed for me as an irreparable rupture in father-daughter relations was, for him, not much more than a well-timed bathroom break. We found the closest thing to a city center that Santa Barbara had to offer, and decided it was not worth the detour. Neither of us mentioned the incident again.

Photo:MelvinSchlubman

THIS FROM a relatively large, personable Israeli with a pony-tail and a face of graying stubble who was “26” sitting in front of a campfire in Pai, Thailand:

“Some women, they want me to love them. They want me to love them all day and they want me to tell them ‘I love you.’ They want me to take them to the cinema and they want to call me on my telephone and then they want me to fuck them. I love a bitch in bed. But after I am in the bed I do not love the bitch. The bitch calls me and tells me that she loves me. I tell her I love her because I know it is what she wants to hear and then she is quiet. But I do not love her. I love her in bed. It is because I am a man. You and me, we are men. Yes, We are men.”

We were alone drinking whiskeys, sometimes looking at the stars. It was the king’s birthday, apparently, and the Thais were setting off mini hot-air balloons and we could see 20 or 30 of them floating very high, still moving upward, and from that distance they seemed like floating candles, or UFOs, or something frightening.

I had the conversation a lot, usually after a ‘fellow traveler’ and I saw a man holding a girl’s hand, the two quietly walking through whatever tourist thing we were all ‘gawking’ at, or feeding money into.

“You and I both know that it wouldn’t be the same,” a Canadian said to me as we walked through Bayon, one of the temples of Angkor. “You and I both know that there would be little fights, and you’d always have to look out for her. You could never go out and drink. . . It’d be harder to meet people. You could only go out with other couples. You wouldn’t feel free. You’d feel like you always had to answer to someone, and you could never do anything spontaneous, because you’d have to check first. . . it just wouldn’t work.”

‘Across the board,’ the consensus was basically the same: it was not good to travel with a girlfriend. It was good to ‘do it’ with a girl, and travel with her for awhile, but to end it, preferably within 2-4 weeks. It was good to let the girl know of your expectations, and for everything to be clear, but if she ‘moved in’ on you, then you had to continue to make things clear. It was good to have these things with girls.

And it was bad to lead a girl on. Even to make a semi-permanent girlfriend while abroad. It was bad for the men and the women. It restricted freedom and caused unhappiness.

“I accidentally slept with the English girl last night,” was the one of the first things another Israeli said to me after we met. I had offhandedly mentioned that I was hungry to someone in the lobby of my guesthouse and he had volunteered that we get breakfast together. I had seen him and the English girl around but we hadn’t spoken, and I hadn’t assumed anything about their relationship. I expressed surprise at his statement and laughed.

“Yeah, it just sort of happened,” he said. “I wasn’t planning on it or anything. I didn’t even think about something like that happening until a minute before it actually happened.”

I said, “Damn.” He said, “Now I don’t know what the status is. . . I’ve been trying to stay out of things like this because I don’t want to have to take care of someone. I need to make sure that she doesn’t expect something. . .”

So it seemed that there existed a fear among men. An assumption that a relationship with a woman would lead to rules, restrictions, boundaries to which men did not want to be bound. An assumption that all women travelers a man ‘hooked up’ with wanted was to passively instigate a monotonous, long-term, emotional relationship.

The men had a fear of the women, and it was like playing with fire, and some had more control over the fire than others. If a man started any romantic thing with a woman while traveling then he had seen the first spark, and it was his mission onward to keep the flames at bay.

I’m not sure about any of this. I have not traveled with any girlfriend. I can understand what these men have said and I can empathize with their positions. I can understand how a romantic partner might be restrictive. From a distance, even I have observed the negative consequences of a man and a woman traveling with each other, and each other alone.

But I can also see the benefits of traveling with a companion that you’re involved with romantically, for the long-term. I can see the benefits of not needing to go out and ‘get smashed’ with some bros you just met. I can see how someone might not ‘be into’ Khao San Road (a place where it’d be strange to be a couple), and how it might be a relief to not rely on places like that. I understand why people are together. But I don’t know.

It seems complicated.

Community Connection

Brave New Traveler has published a piece on how to tell your partner you want to travel alone.

And for a different perspective, Pete Olson writes about traveling as a mixed couple in Asia.

Photo: andy castro

TRAVEL has always been for me on some level about trespass. In a world that has been picked over, trampled and bricked in, the (law-flaunting) intrepid spirit must look for signs that point the way to adventure. Sometimes those signs read: NO TRESPASSING.

Taormina, Sicily

From Taormina a steep walk leads to a vista overlooking the Ionian sea and the crumbled memory of a Saracen castle. Rounding the bend I come to a tourist couple facing a closed gate. Three times my height, the padlocked iron gate looks like it has been fasted shut for years. The iron rises in black stripes to decorative arrowhead points. The path winds on beyond the gate and into the ruins.

I slide my camera bag under the gate and King Kong up the warm metal, swing one leg then another over the top and slide down the other side. The impasse now separates me from the dispirited couple and who amble back down the trail to find solace in a day at the beach and a dozen pumpkin raviolis.

The ruins: a strong breeze disturbs the tall, dead grasses where crickets hop and click. The shriveled litter of enterprising local youth is scattered here and there in little piles. The hilltop view that has been settled and sought for 3,000 years is all mine. Scampering over the walls, snapping photos, feeling the exhilaration of the trespass, the secret world of the Saracen ruins grow into my own brief kingdom under a blue of a Sicilian noon.

Seattle, Washington

A city is a secret folded in on itself over and over and over.

We slink under sodium streetlights that make the asphalt look iodine yellow, into the shadows. We peek over our shoulders. Sometimes a cop is parked there, he points.

No cop. We move around the side of the four story brick structure that looks like everything else in Georgetown; old, storied, used and done.

Inside the abandoned Seattle Brewing and Malting Co. building it is all diffused light through dust-crusted windows and wrought iron and huge spaces where tanks of beer had brewed.

A central stairway is flanked by two tight spiral staircases that curl up three floors.
 Chalk graffiti glows perfect in the dim light. Where the tanks once bubbled the emptiness and the spaciousness of the dank air keeps you peering into the dark. Georgetown was Seattle before Seattle was Seattle. It’s old. And like Taormina, grime and gates keep most from breathing the musty air of its most secret spaces.

On the roof we look out at the rail lines that are wet tendrils of commerce running North to South. Another trespasser’s reward: silence, solitude, adrenaline, an inner narrative holding its breath around each blind corner.

Community Connection

Where have you trespassed? Tell us about it in the comments below.

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.

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.

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.

Some of the Colque grandkids + Lau and Layla.

12/31/09 4 PM

Maxi is carrying crates of beer down into a well-pit. I whistle to him across the fence and he grins back at me.

Maxi is one of Adela’s 80 grandchildren. He’s about 17. When the men are working on a car he’ll look under the hood with them for a few minutes but that’s all. Afterwards he goes back to playing soccer with the younger kids. He’s just the right age, size, and strength to carry the beer down to cold water in the bottom of the well.

7:15-8:15 PM

Maradona gets the fire going around 7. I still haven’t learned everyone’s name yet, but he’s the one son who still lives in the house with Adela, and is middle aged, maybe 46. He doesn’t seem to have a wife, but perhaps is Maxi’s dad. He has hair like Diego Maradona.

Around 8 he sets up the asado: two Patagonian lambs flayed on racks and tilted towards the fire, and dozens of whole chickens and sausages laid out on different grills with shovelfuls of coals slid underneath.

We see Fatima wearing a ballerina outfit. Layla goes in to tell Mamá. “Nena vestido!” she says. “We’re going over in just a little bit,” I tell her. She goes back to her room and gets her striped dress and lays it out on the floor “Ese vestido,” she says.

9:20 PM

Lau gets out of the shower and puts on a blouse. It feels like we’re ‘going out’ even though we’re just walking next door. We take the camera. We take two bottles of cider and two pan dulces. The kids meet us out in the street and Brisa takes the bag of food and drinks from us. Two of the girls, Abril and Agustina reach up to carry Layla in but when she squirms and climbs further up into Lau’s arms. Adela stands by the door of the house smiling at us.

Three weeks ago she asked me if we have any family acá. I told her we don’t, that they’re all in Buenos Aires or “allá” which means back in the place my accent comes from. But then, perhaps because of the way she looked at me when I said this I felt the need to add something so I said “But we stay in touch with them on the computer.” She nodded and then said “Well if you don’t have plans for el 31, come over and spend it with us.”

Cordero. Photo by author.

9:40 PM

The men are standing by the fire passing around liters of beer. I tell Lau I’m going over there. Noel and the others boys try to get me to play soccer with them instead. I tell them in a minute.

There are about 8 men by the fire, all Adela’s sons or sons in law. I’ve only spoken to Maradona before and I feel embarrassed walking up. I don’t really know how to introduce myself but then we’re all more or less the same age (fathers with young children) and I just nod to everyone and step into an open place by the fire. The beer bottle comes around and I take a pull and pass it on.

I look at the fire and then ask Maradona how long it takes to cook cordero (2 hours on the ribs side, then 20 minutes).

I tell them about how people back where I’m from have pig-roasts. For a second it makes me think about a certain time (late 90s) and place (The Chattooga River) and people (raft guides and safety kayakers, most beer-drunk and tripping on acid or mushrooms on top of raft busses), and how at that time I had a much more limited perspective of acá and allá. But I can’t really explain that here so I just say “yeah, we roast the pigs by burying them for hours in hot coals.”

The beer comes back around to me again and I take a swig and then pass it to Noel and Brisa’s dad then walk back to the house to see how the girls are.

9:50 PM

The Colque’s house is unfinished concrete and block construction with windows missing but little details like wooden swans in the dooryard. For a second I just stand in the entrance and look inside. The stereo is playing cumbia and reggeton at med-high volume. There are probably 20 different Colque women, both Adela’s daughters and grandaughters inside the small kitchen / eating area. They’re all talking and laughing and rapidly preparing salads and tending to the children.

I’ve only met a few of them and up until now have only seen them in long sleeve shirts and sweatshirts for working in the farm. Tonight they have on dresses and blouses and I pretend not to notice (and they pretend not to notice me noticing) several of the young women’s large and in some cases enormous breasts.

Then a kid, maybe 16, his hair cut in 80s (The Cure) style pushes through the doorway behind me then pats me on the shoulder and as if reading my mind says “don’t be embarrassed, go in!”

10:00 PM

Back at the fire I ask questions about the land here, the well-pit (you hit water here in 3 meters).

I ask if the nearby creek ever floods (no, but the river does.) Adela’s husband, a skinny man in his 60s, offers me a cigarette. He speaks in a crazy slang and accent that I can barely understand. I ask about what it was like here before there was pavement on the highway. I ask about the Indians who were here before. “The viejos pobladores live up by Nahuel Pan,” Maradona says.

The food is nearly cooked and the women call for some more tables inside. I’m standing opposite of where a table is so I grab an end and help carry it towards the house.

10:30 PM

. Photo by Laura Bernhein

Adela has saved us seats next to her at dinner. Lau is asking about how each person in the room is related to the other.

There are so many people that if you need something (like water) you just yell it out over the music and then people keep repeating it across the room until whoever is in the kitchen passes it out and it moves from hand to hand across the room.

I cut a piece of sausage and fold it into a roll with chimichuri sauce and a salad of bittersweet greens.

It occurs to me that everything on the table except for the drinks and the salt and pepper was either grown or raised here. The cordero is salty and wild-tasting, an animal that lived its life grazing Patagonian grasses and wild rose. Layla grabs a piece off my plate and starts chewing (she’s been, up until now, a vegetarian). Lau and Adela both notice it and smile. “Más,” Layla says.

11:30 PM -12:30 AM

After dinner the kids start lighting fireworks in what would pass in the US as basically unsupervised pandemonium. Five year old girls are holding Roman candles and 7 year old boys are launching bottle rockets directly out of their hands. I have Layla up in my arms the whole time but she keeps squirming to get down. The kids come over and give her a sparkler.

12:45 AM

We go back to the house to put Layla to bed. Lau and I talk about the party. I tell her that the whole fireworks thing is an example of how people like the Colques simply live with less fear and worry than other people. “It’s like, sooner or later, one of them loses and eye or a hand or whatever,” I say. “But then instead of worrying about it, it’s just like ‘si, si, pobre Pablito, one year he was holding a Roman candle and the puta cosa just blew up in his hand.’”

Of course this is just the kind of bullshit you say when you don’t want there to be silence or talk about things that will make you depressed. But then Lau mentions that while Adela was explaining all the different relationships at dinner she had said that one of her kids had died. “She didn’t really go into it though,” Lau said.

1:00 AM

Photo by author.

Besides being New Year’s, the 31st is also Adela’s birthday. Lau stays back while Layla sleeps and I go over back over just to say thanks and goodbye.

I see a few of the men still by the fire but most everyone is back inside the house. I hear them singing. When I walk back in Adela has a knife and is cutting a cake the size of a small table. I look at the way she holds the knife and remember how yesterday she explained how to slice the roots of the thistles in the yard to make them easier to pull.

It occurs to me that when Lau brought up what Adela had said about a child dying, she wasn’t saying this in and of itself but was also thinking about the baby she miscarried a few months ago. Right now Lau would be around 6 months pregnant and we’re both grieving this in our own ways. The candles on Adela’s cake say 61. Each year you get older you learn how it feels to lose a little more. Adela looks at me standing there. She gives a nod indicating she understands we put Layla to bed. Then she cuts a big corner off the cake. “Llevátela.” she says. Take it back with you.

Photo: ro gianesi

I MET MANY PEOPLE during my two months in Southeast Asia, and we all started off with, basically, the same conversation. If you’ve traveled for an extended period of time, you probably know what I mean. Here, I’ve listed what I feel are the main points of the ‘Typical Traveler Conversation’ and how I think they function.

Where are you from?

Question functions to place others into familiar categories, which enables access to pre-existing mental ‘reference points,’ which subsequently enable access to a familiar ‘system’ of perception, or another method of control over reality, and we feel more comfortable when we have control over reality. This question is so strongly ingrained in travel-conversation protocol that if the question isn’t asked, it becomes noticeable, and we sense a discomfort until we acknowledge it.

The question also functions as an innocuous, seemingly-judgment free way to start a conversation (seems boring, though), or exists because there’s nothing else to talk about. The answer is usually met with knowing nods and something like “Yeah, I thought so” or “I knew that, but which city?”

Ah, I’ve been to where you live. My aunt lives there. I was there for two weeks.

This point is often stated to extend the life of the conversation by logically ‘calling for’ more specific questioning in an attempt to detect points on which to have micro-discussions. Eventually we return to the ‘meta,’ allowing for others to re-enter the conversation with a change in subject or something relevant on the detail level. The claim enhances our identity as more ‘well-traveled’ (read: street-cred) and allows us to ‘relish’ in a piece of shared knowledge, thus creating or reinforcing feelings of similarity, ‘on-the-same team,’ and security.

Photo of author (center).

How long have you been traveling/ where have you been so far?

Questions are used to gauge where we stand in relation to the one being questioned – we place ‘street cred-like’ importance on how well-traveled someone is, and we use our perception of our own ‘street cred’ to make a comparative analysis. This analysis is then used as a guide for future interaction, e.g., the subjects on which to speak authoritatively and on which to speak humbly or the perceived relevance of specific changes in subject. The question helps to place others in a familiar category, which in turn gives us more control over reality. The answer often includes an account of where the traveler has been on trips previous.

What did you study?

Question acts as a ‘spring board’ for further conversation. It can enable the recognition of shared knowledge, thus creating or reinforcing feelings of similarity, ‘on-the-same-team,’ and security. It also allows for future reference, if related information is being discussed in a future conversation, creating a longer conversation (less silence), a shared history, and the appearance (to the outside world) of ‘on-the-same-team,’ which, when ‘self-perceived,’ creates stronger feelings of ‘on-the-same-team.’ Allows us to feel that when we talk about ourselves, someone is actually interested. Helps to place others in a familiar category, which gives us more control over reality. Often asked during a lull in conversation.

What do you do for money?

Question acts as a ‘spring board’ for further conversation. It functions to extend the length of the conversation. Like so many other facets of the typical traveler conversation, this question helps to place others in a familiar category, which provides us with more control. Allows us, if we take pride in what we do for money, to deliver the information without the appearance of pride, and instead with the appearance of self-deprecation or neutrality, which can help us believe that the other believes that we are humble and ‘good,’ which leads to us perceiving ourselves as humble and ‘good,’ which helps us to avoid cognitive dissonance and thus decrease discomfort.

My accent isn’t that strong. The people from [city in my country] have really strong accents. Even I can hardly understand them (said mostly by people from the UK, US, and Canada).

Directs the conversation to direct feedback toward a specific individual about the quality of their accent, and feedback is always positive – ‘street cred’ seems to exist for those without a strong native accent and those with a strong native accent. Those with a strong accent typically tend to verbally identify themselves with their national culture more than those without a strong accent. Those without a strong accent typically seem to take some amount of pride in lacking a specific culture, but understanding all cultures, as a kind of intermediary, which exist in their native land.

Do you have a boyfriend/ girlfriend?

Question is used, first, to indicate, passively, and in a non-committal fashion, romantic/ sexual interest, and second, to obtain information regarding the possibility of a sexual encounter.It is often uncomfortable to ask this question.

I once brought it up while practicing Spanish, in Spanish, with an Israeli girl; I felt that was a very good strategy, because it would have been difficult to simply ask if she had a boyfriend in English. However, the question does not often need to be asked: we sometimes ‘drop’ the boyfriend/ girlfriend ‘bomb’ on people to ‘clear the air.’ One of the only typical traveler conversation questions of which one of the main purposes does not include ‘extending the life of the conversation.’

What are you planning on doing when you go back home?

Allows for a sort of emotional feeling associated with the future experience of pining for the literal present. Creates the opportunity for a shared emotional experience, which in turn creates or reinforces bonds. Influences the other to ask you the same question, furthering the group nostalgia or emotional bonding. Answers often help you detect specific character traits, thus allowing you more control over the situation and a better idea of how to behave, increasing probability of being ‘not-alone’ in future group situations because you have proven yourself to be ‘one of us.’

According to this analysis, the main functions of the specific facets of the ‘Typical Traveler Conversation’ seem to be (in no particular order) 1) to extend the life of the conversation/ avoid silence, 2) to place one in a familiar category and 3) to create or reinforce emotional bonds via establishing shared feelings of ‘on-the-same-team.’

Community Connection

What do you think about typical conversations you have while traveling? Please let us know in the comments.

Rio Azul, just below confluence. All photos by David Miller.

SOMETIMES ALL IT TAKES is showing up. This occurred to me during the hike into the confluence of Rios Azul and Blanco near El Bolsón, Patagonia, pausing for a moment to rest the knees and study the terrain–the two rivers dropping out of steep notches in the cordillera, then joining in the valley where I could hear whitewater hundreds of meters below.

Today was a paddle day. I was coming to visit Shea Jordan and the crew at Lat42South for a Sunday run down the Confluence section of the Rio Azul. They were looking for another safety kayaker and I was looking for (after being down here pretty much solo for three weeks), my gente.

We let the world become more complicated than it needs to be. Know who your tribe is and you’re most of the way there. It doesn’t matter if I’m in Seattle or San Juan del Sur: my gente are the people who go up and down mountains and rivers and waves.

Just before reaching the bottom of the road I met up with a local kid, maybe 25, named Federico. He was going on the trip as a passajero (test dummy). We got down to the river, hiked upstream and then crossed a dilapidated footbridge. The river flowing below was totally clear.

Chacra on the road to the confluence.

This was my first time seeing any of this part of the Andes, essentially the base of the glaciated peaks I find myself constantly looking at from town.

Unlike the US and other parts of the world, there are no trophy houses built up on the mountainsides. Most of the population lives in the valley, in town.

There were still people back here but they were essentially gauchos, people who lived an agrarian life on small farms.

We ascended several more switchbacks, then the trail rounded off at a broad saddle of land above the confluence. Knolls of pastureland, gently sloping, rolled down to orchards and gardens with small outbuildings set into the hillside, the grass covering over the roofs.

Inside, Shea and and several other kids were sitting on the sofas. I was introduced to Claus and Manuel, two young raft guides who lived nearby. Omar, Shea’s business partner from Buenos Aires, was also there. We talked about the run today, the river level.

Cellar / outbuilding at La Confluencia.

I realized I was witnessing (and in some way, participating in) something amazing. After spending what seems like my entire youth hanging around different rivers and raft companies that had been in business for decades, here were these kids setting up a brand new one, on an essentially virgin stretch of river, a place that had been run so few times only a couple spots even had names.

Shea took me on a quick tour of the lodge. The building was shaped like a shallow V with dormitories on one wing and a private suite plus office / library on the other.

The two were joined via a common area with a deck overlooking the gorge. The lower level was all open with a kitchen plus huge walk-in pantry (stacked floor to ceiling with fruit preserves they’d canned themselves and herbs from the garden) on one side, then a lounge area with ping-pong table and TV on the other.

At the center was a massive wood-burning stove and sofas. Everything was made out of rough-cut native cypress, and the main level walls were straw bale with adobe. It was an ideal juxtaposition: you could hear the river down below, see the mountains all around, and there was WiFi.

Take out of Confluence section through local sheep farm.

We went outside then, past the parilla (grill), then up the hill to the spa, yoga room, plunge pool, and, at the very top, the hot tub. Shea showed me some of the mechanical rooms, and he explained how a small scale hydroelectric turbine powered the whole place, along with a methane processor that transformed waste materials into gas for cooking.

We didn’t go out to the fields, but Shea explained how guests were served food that was all produced here locally.

They also hosted WWOOF volunteers at different times during the year. There were two volunteers here now, both improbably beautiful girls from the Czech Republic.

The entire ‘operation’ was obviously something that Shea’s family had put decades of learning, experience, vision into. It was a working example of land-use, food production, and integration of local (and worldwide) communities and economies, all based on an ethic of environmental stewardship and sustainability.

Next we stopped at boat shed. Shea was taking down a Necky Chronic; I grabbed a Wavesport ZG + gear. (The rest of the crew would be taking down a high-performance raft called a Mini-Me).Then we waited for the Manuel and Omar to get back from running shuttle (they were leaving one of the trucks down at the takeout and coming back on a motorcycle).

Terminator. Classic class III/IV rock jumble with epic boof line.

While we hung out on the porch, Claus asked me the series of questions that inevitably ends with “why did you move down here?”

I told him:

“Es una cosa cultural. It’s not that we don’t like the US. It’s just that there’s something down here about the culture.

Take this for example. Two days ago I called up Cristian Ferrer [owner of a rafting operation on lower section of river]. I called him de la nada (‘out of the blue’) and told him I was a paddler who’d just moved to town and was hoping to meet some other boaters.

He was like ‘che, I’m heading into town right now, let’s meet up.’ And so we did. He invited me back to his house, and to go paddling that day. That’s how I met Shea and Omar. Then you guys invited me here. It was all one flow.

It’s not that this couldn’t happen in the US, but it’s just different. People back there have a million things to do. They need to check their calendars. They need to ‘check your references’.

The idea of operating on flow and buena onda still exists, but it isn’t part of the culture like it is here. People schedule dates for their kids to play with each other. We just wanted our daughter to grow up with a different onda.”

Claus nodded and looked at me in a way like he was really listening, really hearing this. I thought for a minute how strange it would be if the roles were switched, if I were back in the US listening to some Argentino explaining why he moved there.

A few minutes later Manuel and Omar came back and then we all suited up and carried down to the water. I couldn’t quite believe how, if you stayed or lived here, you could literally just wake up in the morning, whip up some breakfast, check the internet for a while, then walk down the stairs and go boating in water that was pure enough to drink.

Put in at Rio Azul. Water is totally potable.

On the beach, riverside, the raft crew had a safety talk while Shea and I got in our kayaks and ferried back and forth between two eddies. The river was clear and cold and different shades of blue and green that flowed through the Baldivian (mostly species of beech trees + cypress) forest.

I cupped my hand and drank right from the river, a first. Totally savoring this, a new home river. A new local crew. Stoke is an immediate feeling. Gratitude is stoke sustained. Somehow I was feeling both as we peeled out from the eddy and floated down to the first rapids. This was only the beginning.

Community Connection

For more information, please check Lat42South as well as the lodge’s site, La Confluencia.

Additionally, Shea’s dad, Mark Jordan is a co-creator of the exceptional CIESA, an ongoing educational and research project focusing on sustainable agriculture in Patagonia.

My new barrio (Arrayanes), Piltriquitron in backround.

Admittedly crappy photo (Malbec, cold hands).

AFTER 6 DAYS I feel like I know at least where the sun rises.

This time of year it comes up over the northern flank of Cerro Piltriquitron, just north of the most jagged comb ridge.

Arriving in a new place there’s that need to ubicar, to locate, and not just external things like where they sell homemade bread or empanadas or bed sheets, but to actually be ubicado, to feel yourself located in the place.

For me it always begins with place names and terrain features of the surrounding foothills and outlying ranges, any water–rivers, oceans–as well as prevailing wind or weather directions. In places where the urban or suburban landscape is so sprawled that none of these landmarks are available (Buenos Aires) getting located seems more an act of trust.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving. I woke up in a semi-funk, a new reality seeming to set in that (a) in all my time traveling (probably 3 years combined) I’ve never really thought of myself as an ‘ex-pat’ but I sort of felt like one now, and (b) I have no real emotional reference or precedent for any of this. My default reaction was to head up into the mountains.

Chacras below Piltriquitron. Image: Tetsumo

I took the road past our land then cut north on Camino de los Nogales. This is the most desirable land in all of Patagonia, and chacras, or farms (most of them organic) run along both sides of the road all the way to the foot of Cerro Piltriquitron.

Except for the Caranchos (Polyborus plancus), these kind of South American hawks that have wings shaped like condors’, there seemed to be no movement or people anywhere. I realized it was siesta.

Up the road were broad fields with rows of raspberry bushes and hops for the local breweries. All along the edges grew lupine and other wildflowers. It was hot enough, finally, that I took off my polypro shirt and moved under the shade of the Nogales (walnut trees).

After a while I found a horse trail which veered away from the road and along a forest preserve. At one point I saw movement, which turned out to be two horses. One had his head down feeding, then raised his neck up and transfixed me with ultra pale blue eyes. Then they both disappeared into the woods.

Another 10 minutes of walking and I found an easy place to duck through the fence wires. This wasn’t necessarily the high mountain access I was looking for, but then it seemed like this hidden patch of woods was actually better–out of the sun, out of view.

When I’m feeling depressed it helps to temporarily disappear (ideally inside a wave but that’s a different story), and I realized that in some ways this was as off the map as I’d been in a long time. In what guidebook or any book was this little patch of native Cypress forest?

Later I walked back to town and bought a couple folding chairs and my own little Thanksgiving dinner, a thin carving of bife de lomo with mashed potatoes, which I intended to prepare later with emotionally bolstering doses of raw garlic, fresh parsley, and Malbec.

That evening I was on my pre-dinner wine-stroll through the neighborhood, trying to get a good picture (seemed impossible), and on the way back, there was the moment, finally, where I officially met all the kids who live next door (13, somehow all under the ages of 15).

The way you interact with the local kids in a new place is probably the single most important (and revealing) situation you face as that privileged mofo now living in their neighborhood. No psychoanalyst or therapist can ever give you a more honest or dead-on assessment of who you are than the kids who seem to be playing all day in the dirt, but actually have their eyes on you all the time, and see through fronts.

What soccer in Patagonia looks like. Image: jaytkendall

Anyway, I had a cup of wine in my hand. The whole crew was in the area between our two houses, the two oldest boys with a soccer ball. One of them saw me coming and meant to get out of the way but then realized I was actually coming for the ball.

He tried to dribble past me then but I shot in and got the ball (saying something which came out, I think as, Huaa!) then dribbled around in the dust holding my wine-cup above our heads (both of us laughing) until he, of course, got the ball back. Little dude actually had on cleats.

“What’s in your cup?“ the kid asked.

“Wine,” I said. “Today is a holiday where I’m from [this seemed like a good justification] Thanksgiving.”

“Where are you from?”

“Georgia. Los Estados Unidos. Te ubicas? It’s the state right above Florida.”

The whole circle of the kids closed in then, three other boys, and four girls aged from 5 to maybe 10, each carrying on her hip a different dirt-faced and hugely-smiling baby.

I simultaneously thought (a) if only I could take a picture of these faces right now, of how stoked they are, (b) if my mom saw the picture she’d probably see first how dirty they are and then every other potential emotion / perception would likely be blocked out except for fear and anxiety over my choice to come down here, and (c) how stoked is Layla going to be to meet this crew?

The girls wanted to show off the babies to me. The boys wanted to know if I had a car (I pointed to my shoes.) I explained to everyone that my wife Lau and daughter Layla were coming next week along with our fat cat Lulu and our dog Julio.

I asked about their dogs, which one was the most bravo, and then as if on cue there was some kind of movement in the bushes down the street and all 3 of their dogs took off with their cat taking the opportunity to escape out the back of the yard. Immediately all of the boys started hollering and running after them.

After this I slid back home and skyped my parents for Thanksgiving. The stoke level which I had guarded rather shakily all day seemed to evaporate instantly as I listened to my mom’s plaintive voice describing the ‘concert’ performed by the cousins’ kids. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to listen to that, it’s just that the questions we should’ve been asking each other–how are you–were caught up somehow, unable to flow.

I know they’re suffering because to them I’m no longer ubicado. Seattle was far away from Florida but still essentially on the map. Patagonia is an abstract concept, someplace unimaginably distant (even if it’s not), even though we’re still talking right there on the phone.

The Sun is past morning angles now, high over the valley, although this house has yet to warm up. To locate and be located, not off in some dream or illusion but right at ground level, wherever you are when you finish reading or writing, wherever you are when you fall asleep or wake back, blinking there for a few minutes as you look out your tent or window: you just want to keep telling yourself, your family, everyone, “Don’t be afraid, be stoked! This is all of us together, just moving downstream, you see?”

Community Connection

How do you reconcile traveling in totally different directions than you your friends and family? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Photo courtesy of author.

“WE’LL GO get it.” I yawn when my mother says she needs an onion and butter from the grocery store.

She smiles and hands me a twenty. She wipes her face with a towel and turns up the AC. Mom does not like to delegate any task that could ruin Thanksgiving and we have already peeled the potatoes and set the table. Sending us to the grocery store is safe.

We borrow the Benz and my sister and I creep slowly out of the garage onto our tree lined street. Before we turn the corner onto Buckalew Ave, we wave at Mr. Scarpeti. He is sitting in a lawn chair in front of his open garage, smoking a cigar. “I hope that cute boy is working at the Starbucks” my sister says.

“Where is there a Starbucks?”

“At Stop N Shop.”

My family lives in the older part of town. I think I noticed a change, a creation of “older” and “newer” parts, as I entered middle school. It seemed as if there were a lot of new kids who lived in big new houses in developments named “Heritage Chase,” and “Deer Path.”

Our house was once the home of a legendary local gangster who disappeared in a plane crash in the 1970s and may or may not have left money or a body buried in the back porch. The home across the street belonged to a cop who was investigating him at the time. My siblings and I learned these stories sitting on the floors of pizza parlors and listening to our Dad talk New Jersey history with the owners.

In the early 1900s, a hotel, a railroad and the small town of Jamesburg grew up to accommodate tourists visiting a lake there. Homes grew out and away from that downtown.

When my parents moved here 30 years ago, they bought a home in Monroe Township a half mile from the lake. Everything beyond our neighborhood was farmland and woods then. The old residents didn’t like my parents for being young and “new.”

Now we are the old timers and Jamesburg is no longer a vacation town. I guess everyone discovered the Jersey shore.

“He is working!” my sister whispers under her breath once we reach the grocery store. We walk through the automated doors that I once saw someone get stuck in before Stop N Shop took it over and put in a Starbucks. “Buy something.”

“We only have a twenty but ok.”

I buy something sweet and expensive. My sister bats her eyes at the barista. We walk away.

“He’s not that cute. It doesn’t even matter; I’m getting out of this small town next year anyway.” I guess she’s right, but that feeling is coming back to me; It’s not a small town anymore.

We forget to buy the onion and butter and instead use what is left of the $20 to buy life size Pilgrim and Indian balloons. We can’t wait to show Mom.

Community Connection

Please submit notes to david at matadornetworkdotcom.

Photo .:: LINUZ ::.

IN NORTHEAST LAOS, on one lane roads, we swoop through foggy forests. The driver of the bus strains forward, breathing a little stain of fog on the windshield. Outside the rain falls on sullen cattle.

The bus pulls aside and while the men step out to liberate their bladders, the glint off the barrel of a large machine gun catches my eye. The weapon is protruding from a young man’s denim coat. I stand and stretch, only now I have an electric current running from my toes to my testicles.

The kid, and he looks all of 16, seems to be trying to be inconspicuous. No one seems to heed him or his alarming semi-automatic secret.

We board the bus and the driver gives the machine gun kid a little nod as he takes his seat among us. My eyes won’t leave the muzzle or the angular protrusion of denim or the way he holds the barrel beside his leg. From the size of the gun it could well be an AK-47.

This is my third day in Laos.

The bus is full of sedate travelers surely carrying cash and cameras and all kinds of expensive gadgetry. We are sitting ducks. Oh God please don’t let me be the guy with a black sack over his face holding a newspaper for the unsteady camera. Of nearly equal gravity is the thought of the machine gun kid tearing through my bag to discover $2,000 cash.

We stop at a string of noodle huts waiting for us. Among the scraggle of hungry tourists there is a big lad in a tee shirt that says Vancouver. I need an ally in this unfortunate knowledge.

“Yeah, right there, um, twelve o’clock. He’s packing heat big time dude! And he doesn’t want anyone to see! See?”

“Holy shit, no way man. Look at him, he’s gonna rob the bus, you hear about it all the time. Why else would he be hiding a machine gun? What do we do?”

“Well I don’t know about you but I’m going to the bathroom and getting creative with my dough. I’m carrying, like, a lot of cash.”

In the bathroom stall I rip into my money stash. I duct tape some bills to the inside cover of my portable Steinbeck, making it a $400 edition. I tear into my travel pillow and stuff a few hundred in. The biggest chunk of change is crammed under my junk. I button my jeans and dozens of Vietnamese notes crunch in my underwear. If this is a full on strip-search-jungle-shake-and-bake, well, at least the money they steal will have touched my nuts.

For the next two hours the kid looks relaxed enough. I am sweating through my shirt. The Canadian fingers a serrated plastic knife.

Finally, the machine gun kid slowly stands and turns toward me. He steps forward, shifts his gun and strides quickly to the front of he bus. The bus slows down, but doesn’t stop as he hops off and waves us on. The driver smiles and slams the bus into gear. A queer disappointment contends with my relief. I was so set on being robbed that I’m…a little bummed.

The big Canadian leans close, “I have a plastic picnic knife.”

“You’re a better man than I. I have a fistful of dollars chaffing my naughty bits.”

“Oh, me too. Of course.”

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Have you had a close call? Or at least worked yourself up into thinking you were having a close call?! I would love to hear your stories of danger, real or perceived, on the road.

Please send to josh at matadornetworkdotcom.

Crappy photos by author, who had had a few cocktail by the time he got to snapping.

THE EXPATRIATES of Buenos Aires all came together at a club called Sugar, for the purpose of seeing Barack Obama sworn in as the 42nd president. The dive-y club in Palermo was having a Moment, having marketed their venue as the only place to see the event live, with superior sound and on a big screen. As it turns out, the operation was really a jerry-rigged computer projector with a herky-jerky picture and intermittent sound.

Classic movie setup in Bs.As.

Anderson Cooper’s normally competent voice came through at intervals. “Arriving in the. And here you can see. For which we have all been waiting.”

Nobody seemed to care that they were watching the event on a setup that rivaled those found in most adult movie emporiums.

The room was filled with people who all had one thing in common; they had fled America, short term or long term. A majority of the permanent residents seemed to have left post-Clinton, none of them imagining then that they would eventually bump into a president who promised to unite the country, if not the world. They were Bush-haters, thrilled to have a big ‘ol target on which to blame their problems.

“America went the way of chain restaurants. It was McAmerica”, explained Bill, a former engineer from Georgia, who was slurping down an ethnic meal consisting of a Budweiser and chicken wings. He then broke into a diatribe I have heard many times. It involved him recalling things that he remembered before The United States had gone tits-up, things that were placed memories, romantic visions that existed for the purpose of justifying his geographic displacement.

Imagine, for a minute, an antique Coca Cola vending machine. The old-fashioned kind that dispensed small, adorable bottles for a nickel. We’ve had this image placed into our brains mostly through advertising, or at least from a film studio’s clever prop department. It is an image that feels incredibly American – an image that reeks of small town comfort.

The truth is that you may have probably only run into a handful of these in your life, most likely in a setting where they are intended to be flashback-y and kitsch. You’re not foolish enough to believe that the world would be transformed if we could still plop down a nickel for a miniature soda.

But I really think that this is the deluded, romantic vision that guys like Bill are holding onto. He needs to think that the Coke machine is still important. He left America in search of things that never even really existed in his life, things that he had convinced himself would make him happy. Bill wants a nickel coke and instead he’s gotten Barrack Obama.

I recently had dinner with a former New Yorker, who is now living in Buenos Aires. He rolled his eyes as he explained that many Expats were thinking of returning to the USA now that Bush was leaving office. As I began talking to more folks at Sugar, it indeed seemed this way.

Barbara left home after her husband cheated on her, leaving her a stockpile of cash awarded by an “asskicking judge”. In Argentina she found that her money went further, that healthcare was cheaper (often free) and that she could make money by fact-checking for a US based company.

Now, she said, things were changing. Inflation was approaching 35% a year and little things were starting to nag at her. “I miss salad dressing. I know that sounds stupid. But they don’t make it here – you cannot find a bottle in the grocery to save your life.” Obama and blue cheese were promise enough for her to consider a move back to Kentucky.

News cameras were present, looking for easy pickup shots that they would use to cut into the nightly news. Several seats were reserved for journalists; men in sandals and jeans who ate nachos with such ferocity that I could only imagine their first below-the-belt encounter with a female.

Behind me sat the two girls that I’ve been trying to avoid for all of my traveling life; sorority sisters from Tennessee. Their voices are always impossible to block. They mix eloquent words from AP English class with idiocy. “This is like, so monumental. All of my African American friends are like, so proud.”

The telecast proceeded mostly as I had anticipated it would. There was hissing when George W Bush was announced for his last puzzled-looking shot as a president. The crowd’s fury turned to pandemonium as Obama made his way to the screen. It felt more like watching Hulk Hogan enter a wrestling wring than it did a president approaching a deus. Then, thankfully, there was silence as he was sworn into office.

The moment did not provide the chills that I had wanted it to and I wondered if this was because I was not in America, surrounded by people who had no choice but to slug through the next four years of turmoil. I was surrounded by people who had made a life outside of The United States, yet still held some kind of buyer’s remorse with this decision.

Their quality of life had improved but they had traded their American soul in return. These were people who were constantly looking to justify their decision and maybe, just maybe, the man on the screen in front of them was going to make America a better place than where they currently sat. Which would make them very wrong about many things.

It felt like they all secretly wished it hadn’t happened.

Community Connection

Were you traveling or outside of the country during Obama’s inauguration? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Anjuna Traveler w/ Massage Ladies. Img: innacoz

She pointed to a spot in the sand. A spot like any other.

“That’s where they found Scarlett Keeling’s body,” Aimee Ginsburg told me. Ginsburg has lived for almost a decade in Goa. She is the India correspondent of Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest newspaper. I saw her as the all-seeing eye of videshi (foreigner) Goa.

We were walking on the beach in Anjuna. A heavy mist, like rolled iron, was banked over the Arabian Sea. A good day to contemplate young ghosts. Keeling, a fifteen-year-old British tourist, was raped and murdered in March of 2008. It inspired some in the Indian press to inveigh against the perils of hedonistic excess among Westerners who winter here.

I am interested in Goa because of its collection of strange ghosts. Jews were burned at the stake at Campo de Sao Lazaro during the Portuguese Inquisition in the sixteenth century. (Goa was a Portuguese colony until the 1960’s.) I personally am fond of the drug and bliss ghosts of the 60’s. Had I stayed on, I had the potential, I think, to be a good hippie ghost, discharging quiet sighs beneath coconut trees.

I was philosophical about the bare European breasts peering up at me lazily from the warm sand. Seeing them was in a way like seeing saddhus in Benares. They infused the beach with its particular character.

But sometimes the young girl’s shadow would make a noise, jamming my sensual signals. I’d walk on, saying her name under my breath.

Girl in Goa, India. Photo: Steve Weaver

Biting into my Mediterranean sandwich at Baba Au Rum (feta cheese, black olives, sun dried tomatoes spilling from the sides of French bread), I think of the party I went to last night at one of the Yoga centers around Baga.

A dressed-in-white party. No exceptions. Everywhere I looked, bleached figures were floating across the grounds like sleep walkers. It is easy to be cynical about Westerners in Goa.

I joke to Aimee Ginsburg, a Westerner from Israel: “A lot of people looking for the perfect spiritual beach.”

She is not amused. She has reason not to be. Israeli Goans, relative newcomers, are lassoed inside lazy clichés: burnt out cases, exiles from an endless war.

Baga’s winter guests, often heavyset blokes from the UK, here for the warm sun and drinks at the beach shacks, or maybe even visits with the healer Patrick at Nani and Rani’s, sail innocently beneath my radar. What is transitory, like this author eating his Mediterranean sandwich among Baga’s old-timers, does not demand to be taken seriously.

I am happy, momentarily, to be part of the legendary weave of Westerners in India’s smallest state, only recently pried loose from Portugal. (Indian Goans are said to see us more as a fungus than a weave.)

I see myself as exempt from the normal clichés that swirl around the spirit junkies and beach slaves. I have come to Goa for none of the things Lonely Planet can offer me. I admit I say this smugly.

The woman who lives two houses down from me is the reason I am here. Outside her house is her blue motor scooter with its head tilted, as if trying to make up its mind about something.

Community Connection

Please submit notes from the road to david [at] matadornetwork.com

For another interesting perspective on travelers in India, check out this piece at BNT by Rolf Potts.

In the Cambodian border town of Poipet, Bridget and I share a cab ride with an excitable and elderly Frenchmen named Pierre. Triumphantly old and traveling the world alone, he is strenuously hard of hearing and very happy to be in Cambodia. Climbing into the car he looks like a Parisian Mr. Magoo; squinting, holding his camera askew and always stepping accidentally over danger, not into it.

We zoom in a punished old sedan, jumbling about bumping heads on the dirt highway while Pierre shoots photos and shouts, “Extraordinary!”

Pierre, Bridget and myself were all told by the same smiling Cambodian that the bus had broken down. We opted to pay five dollars each for a ride to Siem Reap. Pierre’s camera clicks indiscriminately as the puddles and paddies go by.

“This is really something, huh? Cracker Jack! The quality of light is perfect. Extraordinary!”

I don’t think any of his pictures are going to turn out.

Photo three wolves

On our second day of mountain biking around the temples of Angkor we were stopped on the bike path when Pierre shouts from behind,

“Jason, Bernice! I made it! Isn’t this the something, huh? Extraordinary!”

His knees and the rusty rental bike creak towards us.

“I saw you yesterday but you were a blur Jimmy, to be young again…oh well. Isn’t this extraordinary?”

I couldn’t help but think that Pierre in his shambling persistence to see it all was putting that apocryphal adage ‘Do it while you’re young’ on its head. Might he have something sage-like to impart on the topic?

“Hey Pierre, what would you say to those who tell me to ‘Do it while I’m Young?’”

“Huh?”

“I said, um, in regards to travel, what do you think of the statement ‘Do it while you are Young’?”

“Huh? Wait.Where?”

“People are always telling you to do it while you are young. What do you think?”

“Oh, well, I don’t know Jesse, I don’t think so. You go on ahead though, I should head back. I move pretty slowly you know.”

His face mustering the balance needed mount his bike is all the answer I’m gonna get.

Community Connection

Is boots-to-the-ground travel for the young or the young at heart? Let us know in the comments below.

The thought of Dustin and I ascending moonlit scree slopes occupies my mind during the 4-hour drive from Seattle to Mt. St. Helens. I was born the year after Helens blew its top. Just missed it.

When I was a kid the eruption held a sense of monumental awe that folks just couldn’t shake. Every year around the anniversary Old Man Burtchett would point over the ridge of Douglas firs where the ash rose up and circled the earth. He heard it boom.

Who proposed to climb to the rim of the crater in the dead of night, I can’t remember. Dusty had made the relatively easy climb the summer before with no snow and no problems. But now it was February and we had snow shoes and poles if not our best interest in mind.

1:30am. We set off past the fleet of RV’s that hum gently with sleeping snowmobilers. After a few miles the trees break and the face of the volcano begins to pitch upward. Deep gullies slope away and great valleys open up to our headlamps.

Ridges of rock in sporadic slashes. The wind starts to shove. Left then right then up from behind into all the little chinks in my clothing. We hug the ridge now because 5 feet on either side is a sheer drop.

Now the angle of our ascent blocks all view of what lies ahead. It’s all just up. It’s all just dark. In the Big Drop Off little trees grow at absurd drunken angles. My light doesn’t reach the bottom. I have my concerns. I keep thinking that we are going to step right off the edge of the world and not know it. It is all up up up until bang, you’re there, but you don’t see it coming. At least that is what I heard.

I insist we hunker behind a slab of rock and make coco. There is a shy smear of gray to the east, just behind Mt. Adams and I want to sip coco as the sun comes up.

The summit is a tempest. The mountain levels off and then you realize you are standing on a 20 foot cornice that hangs off the edge of the crater. The wind sprays ice. I am so shaken by the wind speeds, the cold and the fact that I am literally hovering about a smoldering lava dome that my footage is scant at best.

Dustin and I crawl to the edge of the volcano like little boys and peer over.

Community Connection

Ever climbed a mountain before? Wanna try… 6 American Mountains to Climb for Big Adventure & 11 Most Dangerous Mountains in the World for Climbers

Juxtapositions in effect at Damascus Gate, Jerusalem.

Image: Chris Yunker

I find myself waking up before dawn at the Faisal to beat the backpackers’ rush to the communal bathroom. The sexagenarian’s need for whatever solitude he can get.

As Lonely Planet says, the Faisal, across from Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate, is a magnet for the low-end backpacker and pro-Palestinian zealot. A German journalist, with his own private room, makes the Faisal his permanent home, and eyes the rest of us as guests of dubious merit.

“I want a private room too,” I say to one of the hostel managers, a thickly-mustached Palestinian.

“You don’t need a private room,” he says. “You don’t have a girlfriend.”

A low-end journalist, I sleep with my piles of notes in one of the dorm rooms. The managers, who at night cook pots of rice for their guests, are interested in what I write about.

“Palestinian nonviolence activists,” I say.

They cluck their tongues and shake their heads. They don’t think non-violence will work, and they don’t think violence will work. They think I am naive. A point of view I find almost companionable. It makes me feel right at home.

Shortly before I checked into the Faisal, an Israeli security team descended upon the hotel to whisk away members of the pro-Palestinian ISM (International Solidarity Movement.) The sole remaining ISM member responds to my questions as if he is Tony Soprano and I am the Feds. But I always get a smile and a bow from the Korean Christian pilgrim who sleeps in the bunk beside me with his two small sons.

Community Connection

Please send notes to david[at]matadornetwork.com for consideration.

It’s a holiday today, the anniversary of the death of some general or another, so the street markets in Saigon have shriveled to a couple dozen hopeful vendors displaying baskets of veggies. The men drink beer and watch soccer. The woman do what ever women do when men drink beer an watch soccer, which typically is everything. I wander a few blocks from my apartment through side streets with my camera.

A woman slicing lettuce sees my camera and holds up a slack jawed, mostly naked baby for my appraisal. I snap a few pictures. She grins.

A man beckons me to photograph him and his limes. He squats and displays a winning smile, an onion in one hand, a lime in the other.

Down the block it goes. Take a picture of me! Now me! Wait- the baby too, look at this puppy, get all of us and the puppy!

I’m grabbed and shown a bulky Australian man as if to say -”Look! One of your own kind!” We shake hands and he asks me to sit for a beer and fried meat.

“They think we know each other. They think all the white people know each other. They’ve shown me four other tourists in the last half hour, your the first one that stopped.”

I want to say I’m not a tourist but instead I raise my camera to take another picture.

Community Connection

Where is your favorite place to wander about and snap pix? Refine your skills with Brave New Travelers Shoot Better Travel Photos With 5 Essential Travel Photo Tips and get some inspiration from Photo Essay: Trekking Langtang in Nepal.

Photo by the Author

I enter the Old City after dawn. Quietly, like I want to steal it. I pass through the Zion Gate and head along the sand-colored walls to the Jewish Quarter. The shops selling sweets and holy books are closed.

Beneath them are Roman columns that rise up from another Jerusalem. I want to say to each column, “Are you talking today? Do I get even one secret? One little Roman secret? Lonely Romans must have talked a blue streak around you.”

Long Jewish shadows flit by me on their way to the Wailing Wall. I find I have less to say to them than to the columns. The shadows I know. The shadows I grew up with.

Down the street, the eternally dark alleys of the Muslim Quarter belly towards distant patches of light. Nothing is really distant in the Old City. But the light, pushed away by the darkness, gives the impression of serious separation.

The shops are shuttered. Soon the tourists will come pouring into Arab Jerusalem through its many gates, and the shutters will lift, and even the Christians hauling their crosses to Calvary will be pressured to buy luggage, floor mats, Arab gowns a block long.

I will not awake the walled-in city from its sleep to remind it it is a contested city, the object of the wet dreams of three religions. I like it the way it is right now, sailing in its sleep beneath all the claims made on its behalf.

Community Connection

Please submit Notes from the Road to david [at] matadornetwork.com for consideration.

I don’t know why I came to Montagnana. Yes I do. It has a hostel. It has a hostel in one of the best preserved medieval walls in all of Europe. In the plains between Venice and Verona, Montagnana is a lush lawn lapping against a rise of brick.

As the restaurant begins to fill and yell and simmer over with bay leaves, mozzarella and garlic, I’m lost in self-pleased, melancholy reverie, sinking back into the wicker chair waiting for the waitress. Why did I come to Montagnana again? Oh, yeah, the wall.

Brown from a lifetime of Montagnana afternoons, she is tall, dark. She moves like a slender tree. The smile that breaks across her face and never fully retreats breaks my heart.

I love you

I want to marry her before she can take my order.

I eat a whole pizza, drink two beers and as the restaurant begins to fold in and clean itself I slowly nurse a third.

Why did I come to Montagnana again?

Oh, yeah, her.

The stars are sharp and low and loud. Her. I imagine her riding out of town with me on a ‘63 Desert Triumph. I see my life in a modest villa with Waitress Girl. I don’t want to leave the restaurant. Should I order another pizza? My beer is going warm.

I pay and force one foot and then another. I want to say something to her, just something to let some of this feeling out into the world.

Do you have a boyfriend, because I think I love you.

She flits in and out of view, carrying plates, pocketing change, looking tired. My foot sneaks forward an inch or two. I grind the gravel with my toes in little circles. She disappears with a load of dirty plates.
I walk away, like I hoped I wouldn’t but knew I would.

Community Connection

Have you been smitten while on the road? Did you have the courage to say something, or did you keep it bottled up? Either way, do you regret your choice?

All photos by author.

September 2003. We cross the border into Poland from Slovakia. Our party bus is pulled aside and a control officer hops on. He glides down the aisle, sucking air and grabbing passports. He must love his job.

He reaches me and pauses, peering down and pinning me to the leather seat with a glassy blue stare. I slip that worn out forest green passport into his long, lean hand. He flips through green tinted pages and studies the unfamiliar document.

“It’s a passport!” my inner voice yells back. It had already screamed twice that day.

Grabbing the foreign item from me, he slides it beneath the stack of blue and red already in hand. For easier access, I tell my seatmate. He grabs her blue passport and places it atop the pile.

He hops off the bus and summons his colleague. Draws his attention to that forest green book. Ten noses press against glass windows like school kids, observing their interaction below.

“Ooh ooh! Lola is in trouble again!” they chant. I smile. They pull me back into the fold but the officers win the tug of war. He signals up to me to get off. This means arriving into Krakow later than anticipated. I need to explain that green book in person.

Krakow is quite sexy beneath the veil of night. I wasn’t expecting her to be. She senses my dejection and steers us underground to Fusion with its labyrinth of lounges carved from rock, its magenta, cyan, and yellow strobe lights.

Hip hop night. I check out the dancing Poles. I feel out their vibe. I proceed to a corner to dance…and dance and dance until he approaches me, covered in black.

Tall. Head shaven. Eyes similar to those that had pinned me to my seat earlier that evening, demanding I explain what I wanted in his country…from his country.

We dance silently for fifteen minutes.

“Mikael,” he finally introduces. I nod weakly. I want nothing to do with him. We dance some more. He studies my face. I turn away.

“Where are you from?” he asks. I tell him about my green passport.

Blue eyes now dyed red from the strobes light up in recognition. He grabs my hand and pulls me forcefully. He drags me through underground caves. We sail through masses of sweaty people.

He plants me squarely in front of a group leaning against a wall.

I study their faces. My countrymen. “These are my friends!” he introduces. I turn to Mikael. The words never come but he hears them anyway.

He grabs my hand and gives it a kiss.

The author looking at old publications / notes with young assistant. Photo: Laura Bernhein

1. Damn. I just built more shelves at my parents’ garage. (There are no basements in Florida.) I don’t want to leave anything here but I’m not sure what to do with my boxes of old notebooks, newspapers, journals, magazines. My first publications. What do other writers do with this stuff?

2. I collected my first crate of this stuff in college. Early journals of creative writing, assignments from Coleman Barks’ class. Later I looked at it and thought ‘I hope nobody ever finds this.’ One day my parents asked if I could take a bunch of stuff to the landfill and I threw those early notebooks in there too. Thinking back now I should’ve burned them.

3. The family and I are heading to Patagonia in a couple months. We have a little piece of land in El Bolsón. We’re totally limited as to what we can bring down there, and for me the gear has to get packed first: tools, snowboard, wetsuits, boots, snowshoes, goggles. Maybe a few books.

4. It’s weird flipping back through some of these old notes and publications though. Some of them have aged better than I would’ve guessed. Others I can’t read. Things like this seem more about remembering where you were and what you were doing around the time you were writing them. How hard you thought it was then. And how much harder it seems now.

5. I don’t think I’d like to burn this batch of writing. Maybe something like shred it, then use as insulation for the cabin.

6. When I was first trying to get published it was like learning how to paddle. I wanted to publish so bad, and then after I finally got my first publication (It was in the Mountain Gazette), I thought, damn–you build it all up in your mind just like a rapid.

Oceana, Tallulah Gorge. Photo: Alex Harvey.

And then finally you just step up and fire that shit and once it’s over, all you want to do is run another one.

7. There was this one rapid, Oceana, on the Tallulah River. The thing dropped like 80 feet. I scouted it and couldn’t see exactly where to go, but I could definitely see where I didn’t want to go. I felt like an ant down there in the bottom of the gorge. People were watching from observation platforms hundreds of feet up the canyon walls.

8. A bro up at the Chattooga had told me “it’s good to go, just lean back when you hit the bottom.” The thing was ugly and beautiful and massive and it was time to run. A few paddle strokes then all white-out, then impact, then I rolled up.

9. You can take a picture or write a story and put it in a box, put the box up on a shelf, then take it back down (or someone else takes it back down) later. It seems anti-flow though. In the end you can’t take anything but the ride itself.

Community Connection

What do you do with all your old notes and contributors copies? Let us know in the comments.

Dudes. Hillary Harrison Photo.

At some point I’d decided I should go to the Lebowski Fest. Actually go and see what it was like, rather than just imagine it and then later look at pictures online and wish I’d gone—and then pretty soon forget about it entirely.

I was in those days balancing my time between writing, thinking about writing, thinking about other things, and trying to kill squirrels with a pellet gun. My wife had suggested on several occasions that maybe I ought to get a job. A real job. Like where you commute back and forth to an office and get a paycheck every two weeks and eventually work your way up to parking and benefits.

You just don’t seem happy, she said.

Of course I’m happy, I said. Why don’t I seem happy?

You don’t even bother to get out of your bathrobe anymore.

Which on some level I resented. Yes it was a bathrobe, but I had shorts on underneath and a clean T-shirt. I was not barefoot. I was wearing flip-flops, and on my eyes, against the glare of the sidelong winter sun, a pair of fine, expensive, protective eyeglasses. It was cold enough in the house, and cold enough outside too, that I wanted to wear a bathrobe. It was more pleasant that way.

The most I was going to do, as far as going out was concerned, was maybe to mow the lawn out front or do some cleanup in the back. I wasn’t planning on going beyond our property line. I wasn’t, for example, planning on driving to Von’s for a quart of half-and-half. Not in my bathrobe, anyway. I wasn’t, after all, Jeff Lebowski.

It’s a housecoat, I said. Not a bathrobe.

Sometimes, on Wednesday nights, before trash day, out on the sidewalk, I’d meet up with my neighbor. He was a half-Armenian, half-Georgian, ex-Soviet Air Force pilot who flew hundreds of passenger-jet sorties into Kabul during that particular Afghan war, in the eighties — bringing fresh troops in and taking dead bodies out.

These days he was working six days a week, two shifts a day, around the clock. By night he was a uniformed security guard at a hospital downtown, by day a plainclothes detective at a jewelry store in Beverly Hills. Twenty-five dollars an hour plus benefits.

So where’s The Dude?

I work like donkey, he’d say, grinning, as we wrestled our respective bins, me in my housecoat, he with his badge and gun.

I know, I’d say. You’re a good man for it.

And then he’d say: Any news regarding your job?

What job, I’d think to myself, what’s he talking about?

No, I’d say. No news.

I was interested in the idea of a community of fans, a community founded upon the otherwise solitary experience of watching a movie—which is of course not an uncommon phenomenon, especially in America. But this was not Star Trek or Harry Potter or Remington Steele.

This was The Big Lebowski, the Coen Brothers’ irreverent update of the Raymond Chandler/Philip Marlowe/mistaken identity tradition, in which Jeff Bridges plays “The Dude,” aka Jeffrey Lebowski—a hapless and amiable bum of the sort one sees often enough around Los Angeles, wandering the aisles of the local grocery franchise in bathrobe and sandals.

The character’s most obvious appeal, it seemed to me, was the way in which he, like Marlowe before him, redefined cool—Jesus-cool, postmodern-style—cool as the ultimate lack of aspiration.

The Dude was quite possibly, as the movie’s narrator puts it, the laziest man in Los Angeles County, “which put him high in the running for laziest worldwide.” That is, until someone peed on his rug and a certain amount of action had to be taken. And a lazy man forced into action is a surprisingly interesting thing to watch.

I wasn’t convinced that as a movie it was as good as, say, Raising Arizona, which had always ranked in my top ten, or even Altman’s The Long Goodbye, from which the Brothers Coen had here drawn inspiration. But I felt I understood the sense of humor behind the thing. So I figured why not check out the nature of the community it had spawned. See if it had anything to do with me. Or the state of the Union.

The audio files were deleted long ago, alas. But here is some of what I’ve been able to glean from the notebook:

9:45 PM, Friday. 7000-something Hollywood Blvd.

Live from the Westbound Pedestrian Detour in front of the Kodak Theater, two nights before the Oscars. Hollywood is closed from Highland. Gangs of production people adorned with all-access passes, bomb-sniffing dogs, clusters of photographers and newsmen trying to sort out how to approach Sunday Night.

Book by Founding Dudes.

I am standing on a spot that will soon feature prominently on TV.

Next door, at the pre-party for Lebowski Fest West, inside some kind of night club, not much going on: only a few people drinking White Russians; nobody, as far as I can tell, smoking pot. I see a few guys trying to be The Dude. But the thing you realize is it’s nothing to do with the costume.

The original Dude, the inspiration for the character, is supposed to be here tonight. I don’t see him yet.

Once I get it in my head that in fact I may be The Dude, everything starts to pick up.

Chris and Danna have been married three times and divorced three times. To and from each other, it seems. Chris is wearing a trenchcoat, calf-length Indian moccasins and black sunglasses. He is not the original Dude, he says. “It’s just that they made a movie about a guy who’s life mirrors mine in a way that’s crazy.”

I order another White Russian. The bartender explains to me how in this life the best thing to be good at is being poor. Which I am highly practiced at, but not at all good at.

There is some kind of raffle, involving the original Ralph’s checkout girl, who is there with her twin sister. You can tell which is which because one is dressed in a Ralph’s uniform.

They show the movie on a big screen over the dance floor. It’s better than I remember. Then I wake up in the back of my truck in the parking garage.

8:50 PM, Saturday. Cal Bowl, 2500 E. Carson

There are nihilists. There are Sam Elliot look-alikes with pristine white hats and real handlebar mustaches. There are any number of Maudes in red wigs and bathrobes. Most are considerably fleshier than the wispy Julianne Moore version.

There are three Jesuses, and three bars serving White Russians. There are lines to get drinks. Everyone waits with utmost patience.

There is a reporter covering the event for a Japanese magazine, and a crew from Spanish TV.

One woman has come as the ransom note, another as the coffee can that held Larry’s ashes. There is to be a costume contest. There are several Walters. One is pretty convincing. Another has come as Walter’s dirty underwear.

There is a bowling team called The Bums. They wear their gloves on their heads. They lose. I am disappointed this is not the actual bowling alley from the movie.

There are some admittedly dudely fellows in long cardigan sweaters and real beards. The Original Dude, the inspiration, is named Jeff Dowd. Jeff “The Dude” Dowd. He has no beard. He gets up to make a speech, starts out complaining about how hard it has been to get a drink. Then the mic cuts out on him.

Jeff “The Dude” Dowd. Jerry Duvall Photo.

Melinda and Ed are up from San Diego. Some people get it, they say. Some people don’t. They saw the movie together when it first came out, in San Francisco. They bought the VHS, wore it out, now they have it on DVD. Melissa is worried about her car out in the parking lot—in the hood, as she puts it.

I leave the bowling alley and go next door for some soul food. I try the chitterlings, which I’m told are pig’s intestines (“you have to eat them with hot sauce”), then opt for a pork chop and some mac and cheese.

Back in the action, I spot the original Liam. And Chuck E. Cheese, who is in fact, I learn, a marmot. One of the Jesuses walks out into the lanes to retrieve his ball. One of the Maudes bowls a strike. The Original Dude bowls a spare.

Says one onlooker: “This is the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

A Jackie Treehorn recommends I see the Albert Brooks movie Lost in America. He confides that Lebowski Fest Vegas is better than Lebowski Fest LA. Someone else argues for Austin.

Outside the bowling alley, the night winds down ever so slowly with an original Jeff Dowd look-alike (who is not Jeff Bridges) doing an acoustic-guitar workup of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing: hold on to that fee-layee-ya’ang…

And then, soon enough: it goes on and on and on and on…

Community Connection

Also check out Eva Holland on The Meaning of ‘The Big Lebowski,” all these years later. And this Matador photo essay from Louisville, where it all got started.

For more wild and wacky festivals across the globe, check out Matador Nights.

Got your own Lebowski Fest dispatches? Share them below…

Photo: mr. nightshade

Tonight the tents and RVs and camps are empty.

Tonight ice melts in unattended coolers. Filthy lawn chairs hold silent counsel over vacant plots of dust.

Tonight 43,000 burners gather in ever widening, concentric circles. The Man stands with neon and lumber arms stretched toward the sky.

This is what I have been waiting for.

Flicking a cigarette into the desert wind, a veteran burner tells me he could almost skip it. He says it has become a passe spectacle, that the Burning of The Man isn’t the point.

But I wouldn’t miss it.

And from the bursts of fire, a quarter mile distant, comes glimpses of the tens of thousands who wouldn’t miss it either.

Even the jaded old burners, a little bored, a little self important, wait restlessly for the fire.

Photo: william.neuheisel

We stoke the collective need for The Man to Burn with our upturned eyes and raised hands and dancing feet.

Firefighters in haz-mat suits and shiny beetle shell helmets hold a wide perimeter around the Man.

Are the firefighters apart of this?

Are they too feeding the fire, or merely waiting to clock off?

As the call comes through on the walkie talkie does their breath catch? Even a little?

Boooooom!

Ahhhhhhh…*

Red gold green works of fire explode above the Man. Downwind smoldering debris falls.

We scream.

For the joy, the slaked anticipation, for the thing that was built to burn, we scream and scream.

The fireworks conclude in an inferno, a torrent of flame curling in on itself in a roiling plume, breathing heat and light on the upturned (screaming) faces.

For a moment everything is fire.

The Man burns to the ground and we rush in, ignoring the commands of the firefighters to stay back. It’s not time! they shout. They only shout once then look on helplessly, shrugging at each other.

Counterclockwise we circle the fire.The air is warped with heat.

A perfect, naked pixie twirls her lithe frame before the curtain of fire.

Community Connection

Have you had an experience at Burning Man you would like to share? Please hit us up in the comments below.

Get your Burning Man fix all year right here on Matador: The First-Timer’s Guide to Participating at Burning Man, BNT’s Best Of The Week: Burning Man Roundup,13 of the Coolest Art Installations in the History of Burning Man.

Blue Sky. Image released by Dept. of Defense

It’s what we notice that hurts afterward. This year I’ll wake up on September 11 and think, as I have for the past seven years: “The sky was just so blue.”

It was the thought that played in my head all day, a ridiculous refrain. As if perfect blue could ward off what was about to happen. Or as if it would dissipate completely afterward, the sinister plumes powerful enough to blot out blue as far as the eye could see.

It was the sky I was thinking about, driving along the East River on my way to work in Queens, tempted to turn back and go home or anywhere else.

Just months into my new job as a psychotherapist working with mentally ill adults, I knew it wasn’t right. There was nothing therapeutic about a basement office with scuffed walls and no windows, an oppressive stale air hanging perpetually in the space. There was little we could achieve by listening to people tell the stories of their lives over and over again because that’s what Medicaid mandated.

I needed air. Open space to think. That blue sky.

Instead, I was in high heels, pressing gas-brake-gas-brake all the way to work until I found a parking place. You don’t notice time when you don’t need to, when nothing significant is going on. You think: “Coffee. Notebook. Pen. Morning staff meeting.” Having given in to the roteness of your days, you’re on automatic. You look back on these moments and think you should have been more attentive. You should, at least, have made a note of the time.

James was the most psychotic of my clients, constantly besieged by invisible torturers who delighted in making him miserable. “Get the knife out of my back!” he said as I shut my office door and put my keys and ID around my neck. It was too early to practice reality testing. “Sit down, James. We’ll talk about the knife later.”

“Not a knife. Not a knife. I’m telling you, get the planes out of those buildings!”

This was a new one.

James pulled the TV out of a therapy room and into the common room, tuning in to the only channel whose signal could penetrate the basement. The planes were stuck in the buildings. “What are you going to do about it?” James asked me, and I couldn’t decide if his tone was like a child earnestly asking a parent or like the part of him that scared me most– the part that challenged me because it touched a place deep inside where I felt entirely inadequate to help.

“I’m not sure yet,” I answered honestly, and shut the staff room door behind me.

We would evacuate the patients, sending them home to parents or caregivers who’d have to deal with the immediate terror of the attacks. We would be sent home ourselves, wanting to go but wanting to stay, too. Not wanting to go home to our small apartments, where we knew we’d be alone with our televisions, curled up on couches and watching the deliberate speed of the crashes over and over again without learning anything new, wanting to do something—anything—different, but not being able to.

U.S. Navy Photo by Jim Watson. (RELEASED)

The thoughts that occurred to me as the 30 minute commute home to the South Bronx stretched to six hours, most of which were spent sitting motionless on the Queensboro Bridge, where I watched smoke billow into the sky: I will never wear high heels again. I will always keep my cell phone charged (the battery was dead). I will always have gas in my car (the tank was empty and I was broke). The sky is still so blue.

In the weeks that followed, I’d sit in class at NYU and smell death in the air. I’d clean ash from the windowsills of my apartment—more than six miles from the Trade Center—every day. I’d look at posters of the presumed missing, one photograph of a fat man in a suit, standing next to an elephant imprinted in my mind.

I’d sit in meetings where we’d talk about emergency plans, contingencies for disasters that pushed the limits of our imaginations. I’d spend eight hours counseling clients at work. I’d be drafted to counsel colleagues in a strange ethical void of what people were starting to call the “new normal.” I’d be dispatched to counsel people in parks.

And finally—months later—I’d be asked to counsel Spanish speaking immigrant women. Either their partners had died or had been picked up by Immigration and carted off to distant prisons in states whose names they couldn’t pronounce, but either way, it was hell.

“I just can’t stop thinking about the stack of letters,” one woman told me, raising her hand above her head to show how high the bills and official notices piled up. “I understand,” I told her, breaking up inside, thinking, again, about that blue sky.

Community Connection

For another Matadorian’s memories of 9/11, please read 8:46 am, 9/11 Manhattan by Tom Gates.

My tiny digital camera weaves and bobs on the security belt. I am scanned from armpit to ankle. I tingle. Is it because I feel myself threatened, or because I feel myself a threat?

The Israeli policeman waves me through. I am cleared to pray.

The roar of prayer sweeping across the plaza from the Wall makes an angry sea sound. Jerusalem suffers from being a holy city on the bank of no river. It needs water. Water would wean it off words.  Would help wash down the tonnage of scripture that has gone into making this city.

The Wailing Wall sat on our kitchen table in the Bronx. Wrapped around the family charity box, it looked brittle from centuries of being touched and wept upon. It seems to have grown younger, stronger,  with time.

Hasidim quake like black-jacketed exclamation marks who have arrived at last at the end of days. I see a sign visible only  to myself: Only Those Serious About Their Souls May Enter Here.

It is early in the morning, and the other spiritually superficial  tourists are still asleep. I want to say a prayer for my mother who prayed here once, and who died, prayerless, of Alzheimer’s.

I am shy around strangers; it keeps me from talking to God. But here is my chance. The plaza is a landing strip for prayers, the Wall the Ganges of the Jews. It makes me uneasy. It comes wrapped in too much history for me. Wrapped and re-wrapped. A stone chronicle of destruction, lamentation, resurrection.

My prayer, still embryonic, needs a place scrubbed of grandeur.  Some place small. Some place I can whisper into. Smaller even than a charity box on a table long ago destroyed.

Community Connection

Please submit notes to david [at] matadornetwork.com

Interested in visiting Jerusalem? Check out the customs you should know about before going.

Jasper in Joshua Tree National Park, aged 13 mos. Photo by Author.

1. The Plan

When young Jasper, our first, came to that remarkable, frightening, and eminently enviable age of thirteen months, his manual dexterity having nearly reached a par with his appetite—and my wife too frequently finding her blouse unbuttoned (or rather de-buttoned) in public—I took it upon myself to cure the boy of his once-happy relationship with his mother’s glands. Thereby to introduce him to the wide world beyond. And to liberate us all.

Anytime after a year, said the pediatrician.

He’d successfully weathered his first slabs of dark-chocolate cake, had begun to stand on his own stubby feet for seconds on end, had shown a precocious interest in beer bottles and off-width crack climbing. Now seemed as good a time as any. Why drag it out? I remarked to him one evening while changing his diaper. All good things come to an end.

How is a boy to give this up?
Photo: Wikipedia Commons

But how to get it done? The experts are split on the subject. Today’s online chat community will generally recommend doing it gradually—taking away one feeding at a time over the course of weeks, or even months—the idea being: (1) to ease the physical transition for the mother; and (2) to limit emotional stress for both parties.

As for the first part, I can’t claim any expertise (it seems mothers over the centuries have developed ways of dealing either way—ask my wife: I know it wasn’t easy, but somehow she worked it out).

As for the second part, I’m not so sure: how can one gauge the relative stress on all parties resulting from the ongoing power struggles, the screaming child in one room, in the other the mother with her head beneath a pillow?

Versus, say, just cutting it short, using the whole episode as an excuse for the boy’s first real road trip.

The Zulu are said to dispense with weaning their children in a single day. A pair of researchers in 1956 observed 19 Zulu children “before, during, and after” what seemed to them a shockingly abrupt process. They expected all manner of trauma and other nasty Freudian complications. Instead, they found that the children quickly moved on to bigger and better things.

The plan was simple enough: a two- or three-day road trip in the desert, father and son, with plenty of distractions—and a copious supply of organic whole cow’s milk. Death Valley maybe. Or Baja. While Mommy got to stay up late with the breast pump, drink martinis with her friends, and sleep as late as she could.

A friend mentioned the Joshua Tree Music Festival. Perfect, I thought. He loves music. He’d been thoroughly pleasant at Coachella a week earlier. He’d been impressed with Los Amigos Invisibles, had enjoyed picking up cigarette butts in 100+ degree heat and crawling around the polo field amongst the empty plastic cups.

Even when the security forces wouldn’t let him into the beer garden, he’d kept his cool. It wasn’t until the Madonna set that he’d wanted to go home.

I hitched up the old aluminum fuselage: a 1954 Silver Streak Clipper, built by one of the Wright Brothers, and packed the truck with all the necessary safari equipment: canvas awning, solar panel, propane, Afghan rugs, rope, headlamps, firewood, multiple five-gallon jerry cans filled with water, red wagon, jogging stroller, beach towels, buckets, shovels, folding chairs, soccer ball, pack-n-play, sunblock, inflatable pool, beer, milk…

The fuselage in California’s High Desert. Photo by Author.

2. The Road

We snuck out before dawn. It was mid-May. The AC in the Land Cruiser had been out of commission since the latter days of the Reagan era.

The Department of Transportation’s Changeable Message Signs gave no indication of impediments to travel. Instead, they warned of a child abduction in progress: Amber Alert. Someone had made off with an 18-month-old boy and his aunt, who happened to be “the suspect’s estranged wife.”

Strapped into his torture chair, with the blue air of morning gusting through the cab at seventy miles an hour, my own boy slept—like a baby, they say (they who do not know better)—while I set a direct course for sunrise in the Mojave.

At Rancho Cucamonga, just before the 15, we hit a bottleneck. Jasper woke with a start, only to find the breeze stopped dead, the heat coming up faster than the sun. Ever since his inaugural automobile journey—the one from Cedars-Sinai east across town on Beverly—he’s had an aversion to traffic. He wanted to be moving. He wanted out. And he was not pleased to see the last curds of breast milk already long drained from his bottle.

He began to cry (like a baby, they say).

All around us sat suspicious commuters in enormous aerodynamically-shaped vessels worth more than perfectly habitable two-bedroom houses in Oklahoma. He began to scream. People looked. He began to make shrieking noises. One might have imagined I was peeling back his toenails. I rolled up the windows.

Magic Hour at the JTree Music Fest. Photo by Author.

Which was about the moment my wife called to see how we were doing (just fine, I said, over the howling), and to let me know that I’d forgotten the bag she’d packed (oops)—the one with his diapers, wipes, shoes, and all his clothes.

No problem, I said. We’ll work it out.

And so we did. We purchased some distressingly cheap threads from the sale racks at a department store in Yucca Valley, likely the handiwork of recently-weaned children in Malaysia.

We set up our camp along the barbwire fence at the edge of the campground, as far away from the stages as we could manage, and began to ferry water for the wading pool. By the following morning, with the desert heat rising once again, we awoke to find all manner of glass-eyed and benevolent hippies resting weary heads beneath the fringes of our shade.

After three days and three nights of curdling heat, cold pizza and applesauce, gale-force sandstorms, stinking porta-potties, impromptu drum circles, and all-night high-voltage folk-electronica—one cold six-pack from the trailer fridge traded late in the weekend for an extra gallon of 2%—the thing was done.

When his mother showed up on Sunday (her breasts, alas, still sore), Jasper, for his part, was thrilled to see her—no longer merely as a necessary and friendly appendage to those aching glands, but as a person: someone he could clink bottles with (plastic to glass), dance with, travel the world with. Someone who, for years to come, would be willing to cook him hot dogs and pancakes and Bengali lentils, would occasionally use psychological means to cause him to eat asparagus, and often, when conditions were mostly right, serve him ice cream in a cone.

3. Coda

Home on the road. Photo by Author.

Jasper survived the next three years rather admirably, I thought. He seemed as, er, well-adjusted as any of the other small animals I had met from his generation.

He wore underwear, dressed himself, skied without a leash. He knew his letters cold. And could occasionally be convinced to shovel toys onto shelves, or refrain from trying to squash his little brother’s fragile skull, in exchange for a small dose of sugar, or the promise of an extra story at bedtime (or the threat of one less).

Beckett, on the other hand, was just getting started. And so one day young Jasper and I, busy as each of us happened to be that early December, agreed to commit a full week’s time to introduce the little fellow, on the eve of his first birthday, to the wider world beyond the maternal comforts to which he had always been accustomed. And in the meantime give Mommy a chance to do some real skiing.

The plan: a 32-hour boys-only round-trip train journey from California to New Mexico—riding the old rails along Route 66, across the Great American Desert—for an early-winter visit to his grandfather’s garlic farm.

Photo by the Author.

A gray skeletal hulk in the middle of an alleyway in Colaba in Mumbai South, it is a place that will always belong to the past.

Even on this warm Sunday morning in March, with the neighborhood women in their red and gold saris passing Nariman House with mangos and chapattis, this structure belongs to November. The November of last year’s massacre.

I stand outside the house. It is hot. My body is stone cold. It is all those dark spaces inside the Jewish center, the boarded up windows, behind which the story unfolded that everyone knows: the break-in by the four Islamic terrorists, the slaughter of the six Jews by the terrorists, the slaying of the four terrorists by the Indian commandos.

An Indian man says to me sharply in passing: “Why are you looking? What is to see?” I don’t know what to say. I see an elderly Indian policeman sitting in a chair at the entrance to the building. His eyes are half-closed. His rifle is asleep in his lap. I like that policeman. I feel protected by his harmlessness.

Nariman House provides him with a few rupees and some shade. His gun is ornamental. November’s antidote.I consider the first man’s question. Why am I looking? I begin to see what he is driving at. He wants to forget. By looking, I remember. I am an insufferable rememberer. Chalk it up to my Jewish DNA. It’s a birth defect like a cleft palette. Only unlike a cleft palette, you can’t get rid of it.

Other Jews visit Auschwitz and Dachau. They stand very still and listen, as I am listening now. Maybe if they listen hard enough, creatures of rag and bone, yet enormous in their martyrdom, will float out of the barracks and say the things the listeners are listening for. What are those things?

For myself, I would want to hear the six as ordinary galumphing people complaining about in-laws and tight shoes and the hallucinogenic idols of India.

I am fascinated by who they were before they were bound, mutilated and hatched as immortals in the calamitous tree of Jewish memory.

A few blocks away is the Arabian Sea. I could go there and reinvent myself as a normal tourist. Victoria’s Gateway is there. I could board a a boat and head for the caves of Elephanta. But then I’d be crossing the waters the terrorists came out of that night. It wouldn’t be right to pollute the Arabian Sea with my morbidity.

Community Connection

Please comment on this story in the comments section below. If you have notes to submit, please send to david [at] matadornetwork.com

Image: NPCA photos

1. Horseshit

Attila had the stove lit early. We ate raw oatmeal and diced apples that we soaked overnight, and had coffee for warmth. The sun rose over the eastern ridge that separated the June Lake loop from Mammoth and it hit camp like the morning bell.

Then we set out. It was blue on all sides, but there was no breeze and that meant the summer sky would draw up moisture from the horseshoe valley of lakes to condense and fall. By mid-afternoon there would be a storm up high. By late afternoon the rain would begin to hit the valley.

“Fucking horseshit.” It laced the trail like brown buttons on a sandy ribbon. “I think I”m allergic to trails that allow horses. These are freshies too. What kind of a fucking—-” Atilla was a bit of an Edward Abbey type. He was the bearded man who always packed in whiskey and never missed an opportunity to illuminate the moral dissipation of America. All that and a topographic eye and razor sharp sense of humor.

We scanned the side of the mountain looking for the horses. Nothing doing. I pushed ahead of him. One foot in front of the other trying to breathe deeply without thinking of it. Three thousand feet in a few miles. And a good thirty five pounds on our back.

On a switchback I saw Atilla resting in the shade of a blue fir below. I went on. The silence was so much better for the both of us if only smudged by the shuffle of two feet instead of four. How could you ever carry along a good thought to its end?

Photo: Uncle Leo

Responsibilities dissolve at some point, save for the inherent finding food and drink, then letting them go. All the rest flies off with the osprey above the lake. Effortless on air. How do they become so involved in existence?

A marmot whistle caught my attention. Then a chipmunk erupting in primal fear across the trail. All hind brain, no frontal lobe. Animals these days. Shouldn’t they be able to cast me as the type that has no taste for meat?

Maybe I need a little more hind brain. Give way to the automaton within: movement, posture, balance, breath. Those are the things that will get you to the top. Not your wistful banter and romanticizing. Though the peak looked idyllic. And there’s no better metaphor than ascent. One foot in front of the other.

2. Damned Lakes

When the sun was high I stopped to rest and wait for Attila at Agnew Lake. Twelve hundred feet above the trailhead. The plan from there was to climb the steep trail up to Gem Lake, a highly touted slice of the Ansel Adams Wilderness Area eight hundred feet higher, and then move on up to Clark Lake and Agnew Pass, where we would make camp. But when we saw Gem Lake we lost faith in that plan.

“Do you think there’s any relationship between the words damned and dammed?” Attila asked. “This lake right here — does it make any difference which word I use?”

“I don’t know Atilla. You might have something there. We’ll have to take a look at the etymologies when we get back to a dictionary.”

“Goddammit we don’t need any dictionaries,” he said. ” That lake there is damned.” A good laugh in the mountains embodies innocence.

Photo: hojaleaf

Our plans changed because the lakes were dammed. The whole series was dammed: Agnew, Gem, and Waugh, all three of the biggest lakes in the canyon.

You go to Chicago to admire something man made. Not the union of the Ansel Adams Wilderness Area and Yosemite National Park.

“Let’s go up a different canyon,” I said. “Isn’t there a different pass over there to the north.”

Attila saw a trail heading up the granite wall on the other side of the lake. We got out the topo and changed the plans. Then we took off our boots and aired out our feet.

3. Whistles

We ate lunch and took off our shirts and put our boots back on. Then we had a swig of water and set off. It was a steep wall of loose granite. Rocks and boulders. I kept an eye and an ear to what was shaking overhead. I imagined death. Better to think of things like death. The leash to my teabag this morning had a quote: “The world is a tragedy to those who feel, and a comedy to those who think.” Not that all is a comedy.

“Wake up.”

Attila had gone ahead up the wall, all spry like a mountain goat. When I caught up to him he was lain out in a meadow in the shade of a cedar, his head resting on his pack.

“Just admiring the smell of the sage,” he said.

“Horseshit.”

“No, we left that behind. Didn’t you notice?”

“I did. They went up to Gem Lake, didn’t they?”

“How are you doing on water?” he asked.

“I could use a bit.”

We pumped from the small creek that ran from the meadow. It looked to be snowmelt as far as we could tell. Then we drank and had an apple and were off.

One foot in front of the other. Where are the dwarf huckleberries? Is it too late? We were climbing. From the meadow a dozen switchbacks took us through a dense grove of pines up another wall. From the clearing on the other side of the grove it looked like we were only a hundred feet below the pass.

Then a marmot sounded a whistle, and then another. Noise is ethereal in the mountains. Eleven or twelve whistles. I looked back and Attila had stopped to listen, fifteen feet down on the switchback below.

“Their whistles correlate with risk,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“The more he whistles, the more danger he thinks he’s in.”

“Maybe we’re between the mom and her pups.”

“Better pups than cubs.”

4. Colors

The top of the wall was a false summit. Another wide meadow and a thin creek that was colder than the last. I iced my hand and held it to the back of my neck. Another ridge to climb, but now the wildflowers are out in numbers. Color is power. The hell with money. Wear red on Fridays because it instills energy. And it’s an international symbol of peace. Pink lupines and white lupines and yellow and red lupines. But sometimes red is so unnatural. Then a purple thistle. Beautiful. Green is the new black. Oh, yeah, everything green; green cheerios, green oil. Super.

Blue skies, thanks to the breeze. One foot in front of the other. Then the bedtime songs start to repeat and that gets annoying. The little guy is three thousand feet below me right now. He must be ready for his nap. I hate how mothers get all the credit for intuition. I bet he’s just now getting tired. I know he is. Father’s intuition.

I dropped my pack at the pass just to the side of the trail so Attila would see it. Yeah, the hell with money. But I would use it for good things. We’ve been so many places where so little would go so far. What if we built a soccer field right up to the sand in that small village just to the north of Playa El Zonte? But then my friends would be mad if I spent it all on soccer fields. No they wouldn’t. Give them all huge birthday gifts. Or just fly them places.

Attila will see my pack, but I know he’s just as proud as I am. He won’t climb this peak today because I’m already going up it. He’ll probably have a drink and set up camp. Hopefully he starts dinner.

I’m not that far from the Pacific Crest Trail now. That would be reality. Mexico to Canada. But I don’t have any thirst for the desert. Maybe here to Canada. I would rather be on the coast.

I can see the Minarets cresting over the ridge like alpine steeples. Fine mountain air. I can see the whole Mono Lake basin, the drainage network; mindsurf the glacier that formed this canyon, down the steep granite wall, over Agnew Lake, and down again, across Silver Lake and the valley into the basin and beyond. A foot here. A foot there.

Then the silence.

Community Connection

If you have a Note from the Road you’d like to submit, please email david [at] matadornetwork.com.

Image h.koppdelaney

As a family we dug in for a fight to the finish that would last 500 long days. Slowly, the disease stole all my father’s faculties until he sat shuddering in a wheelchair, one arm limp around my shoulder as I hoisted him up and carefully walked him to the toilet.

Death hung in the rooms of my childhood like October fog and settled into the creases of our young faces like fine dust. After it was all over I had to get out. Out of the house, out of the state, out of the goddamn hemisphere.

Everyone deals with profound grief differently. There is no right way, but there are plenty of wrong ways. Only one thing occurred to me, Italy.

What I would do in Italy was beyond me, all I knew is that I had to go.

Photo Gret@Lorenz

Italy elated my mind, piqued my imagination and began to sketch for me what it could be to live again. I was twenty.

The stigma of death was never far and often while standing in a cathedral or trying to will myself to sleep, I was keenly aware that I was running. I knew behind my constructed guise of a carefree traveler I was a young man under a curse.

My grieving mind took to the natural wonders and the tumbled vestiges of earlier times with the frenzy of an addict. Each fresco, each statue, each bored Madonna was so far from the stale, malignant rooms I had dwelt in that I nearly worshiped them.

Photo tres.jolie

Verona: I climb the stairs to the height of the first hill and wash my face in the flow of a tiny fountain. Further and further up until I meet the ruined ghost of a castle, survived only by a great perimeter wall. I hoist myself up. I relish the final passages of a book that I had been taking my sweet time with. Reading the last line maybe ten times I shut the cover and look out on the afternoon.

Somewhere far but not too far a bell rings. Something good sneaks into my heart and I feel close to that good, held by that good and a part of the infinite sum of the good. Then, like an inspiration, I think of my father. An undercurrent deep within me stops, and my mind hitches at the change in velocity.

I feel myself stop running.

I stay on the ledge of the old castle wall for a good while. When I do finally leave it is with the unhurried pace of a man who strolls for pleasure, not runs for his life.

Photo above by jpereira_net.

Michael, from County Kerry, feeds Runtlin Rimpoche antibiotics through a syringe. The puppy seems unsure whether it’s worth the effort. The steep fan of bones looks bigger than the dog.

We are at the Krishnamurti Center, upriver. Maybe in Benares a dog’s death is also auspicious. When his time comes, Runtlin Rimpoche will not be wrapped in saffron, set down upon logs and ignited. But he already operates in us as part of the death consciousness of Benares.

Sitting up in bed at dawn, I hear the peacocks screeching in the grass. (Krishnamurti is colonized by peacocks.) From the old Shiva temple on the hill across the wall, Vedic chants are gusting into my space.

This is my third time in Benares. I awake to the strange feeling of having been stolen by the timeless from my New York routine of interviews and story deadlines. I open a book by Krishnamurti. He tells me, “In the light of silence, all problems are dissolved.”

The words help. The words don’t help. Judith hides behind the words. Right before I left for India, a cancerous nodule was discovered in her left lung. She never comes with me to India. She has a fear of being disabled by bacteria. An abstract expressionist painter, when she travels, it is Vancouver to photograph the stones and bones on her friend’s island.

Photo by Ahron de Leeuw.

“Sarcomas,” said Dr. Ari Klapholtz, the distinguished pulmonologist who examined her, “are funky.”

This one, like her bone cancer three years ago, originated in Judith’s uterus. An offspring of her leiomyosarcoma, the nomadic cancer that wanders the bloodstream until latching on to a liver, a lung, the bone of a bone-obsessed artist.

I go down the hill to photograph the Ganges. Bathers have gotten there first. The air rings with the sounds of hacking, water slapping. Energy that belies the hour. I am forced to remind myself that the Ganges was once part of the toe of Vishnu, or the brow of Shiva. The accordion of Indian mythology opens lightly around this matter.

The boatmen, gray smudges in the gray light, look up at me from their boats, and ask, “Boat?” I say, “No,” and they ask, “Photo?” “Photo,” I agree, charmed by their deft movement from livelihood to the next best thing.

They pose gravely for me in their worn shawls. They are not interested in my sending them copies of their portraits. Another Indian mystery. Is it possible that just the moment of being photographed is enough for them? That that alone will do? No need to store up and hand down images, maya being maya?

I have given up hoping to turn over a stone and find a spiritual teacher in flower.

That affliction exhausted itself a long time ago. My camera has transformed me from seeker to sought. Boatmen, dhobis, women sculpting dung patties, all call to me, wave me over, want what I have to offer.

Photo by Ahron de Leeuw.

They slow me down. In Benares, foreigners move too quickly, either towards something or away from something, usually the crabbed beggar, the public defecator. Nothing edifying is ever asked of them.

Raising high my Minolta, I catch sadhus with tridents marching past children with cricket sticks. All along the ghats, like roadblocks, are cows the size of boxcars. An Indian magical realist might write: “It took me three days to get around them.”

Obstacles are part of what makes this city holy. Its holiness may be its biggest obstacle. It is harder to get around than the cows. The laurel of Shiva chafes. How much sanctity can one city take?

The heretic in me is pleased when the young man at Nishad Ghat tries to sell me hashish in full view of the Ganges. My first time here, another young man showed me his stash at the Burning Ghat.

“Hashish from Manali,” he entreated. “Best hashish.”

I turned him down. He wasn’t happy.

Photo by jpereira_net.

“No photo allowed here.” He rapped my camera with his knuckles. “This is holy place.”

They are the soul mates of the rickshaw driver, who while trying to cheat me, offers to find me a prostitute, as I am a man alone in Benares. I don’t photograph him, even though he is a souvenir of sorts. A resident of the city who has forgotten its story.

Or if he remembers it, he’s banished it to an island inside his brain, where it is kept in quarantine.

Cutting through a slum by the Malaviya Bridge, the corner of my eye is assaulted by a ferocious ochre glare. A holy man is looking into a mirror, getting himself ready for the day. Dipping his fingers into a bowl of ochre paste, his brow bends to receive its trident.

I want that shot. The mirror is the key. It echoes the fastidious lady in New York, getting herself ready for the day. But my courage fails me. I don’t want the sadhu to think me crass.

The image I leave there on the ground tumbles around inside me like a hungry ghost larger than myself.

I try to stay away from the Burning Ghat, gaudy with death for all its holiness. I used to spend long hours hypnotized by the fires, the circling of families around the fires, lost in the steps of their slow ancient dance. What moved in me as they were moving?

Photo by paolo bosonin.

What dance was I doing? And to what music?

When I find myself, as I do now, amidst the hive of temples, the racks of logs, the acrid plumes of smoke that burn my eyes, I am chastened by the dislocating sameness of the place. Why does nothing here seem to change when change is why this ghat is here?

From the rise above the clearing, a corpse, newly torched, is spitting flames into the living air. It came mummy-wrapped in saffron. Who? I wonder. In India, I always wonder, “Who?” to avoid being sucked into the what of human free-fall.

Judith shakes herself out of a deep sleep to shoot me a cross look from her end of the earth. Are you looking for the meaning of death in red flames leaping like circus acrobats from saffron bundles? Or are you just bored?

I return to Krishnamurti, where the Varuna River empties into the Ganges. India calls holy any confluence of two rivers. Bathers in dhotis are wading out to where the rivers meet. I take a photo and think of Judith. I think of her two rivers.

Community Connection

For more on India, please check here.

The author. Not pictured–sticky notes above map.

My bags were greeted at the airport by two adorable drug dogs. They had taken to treating the carousel like a ride at Disneyworld, sitting on the conveyor belt for minutes at a time, pretending to sniff bags but really just slacking off.

I knew where the dogs were coming from. I went to Chile knowing that this was the moment I would really have to start writing a book, which was a rotten feeling. Little notebooks would have to be purchased, little notes would have to be inserted into them and little me would have to make sense of it all.

With this in mind, I did exactly what all writers do. I came up with distractions to put the process off even longer.

The first came in the form of a physiotherapist from The Netherlands, a man so in shape that I couldn’t even be attracted to him, knowing that if we got naked together I would simply leak fat onto his perfect frame.

Michael told me over a traditional Chilean meal why he was traveling. He had gotten into his career because he wanted to help people, realizing too late that his job would really consist of covering doctor’s asses against malpractice suits and filing paperwork.

Santiago, Chile.

He was taking some time off and trying to figure out how to actually help people, with the possibility of somehow working with war veterans. He threw it my way in plain clothes. “I am too young for this bullshit.”

Next I met up with Robert, a photographer originally from DC, who had started an entertainment-based English website in Santiago.

Robert had also become disillusioned with his job in America, which had something to do with Economics (not exactly a “party” career to begin with). He moved to Santiago and began taking pictures, mostly of student protests. His head was quickly split open by a rock, an event that he talks about the way some people talk about a delicious lasagna.

Cathy, a fellow travel writer, asked me to consume large quantities of beer and French fries with her. I accepted only because it was a foray into the culture of Chile, not because I follow French fries around like a cartoon character that drifts through the air after smelling a cooling pie.

Cathy was rather gorgeous and had men eyeing her from three picnic tables away. I attracted only the attention of those aghast at the amount of potatoes I could consume per minute.

We got to talking about Chileans, and South Americans in general. I brought up how unbelievably attached the couples around town had seemed, hanging from each other and gnashing faces, only seconds after exhaling a shared Marlboro Light. She explained that being attached is en vogue, en masse.

In Santiago, being mounted by a lover in public is a lot like showing off new sneakers or a Beemer.

The more make-outty you can be, the better for your reputation. It is for this reason that people hang out drinking beer until all hours, devouring Someone Special on the white plastic chairs that always adorn the curbs of the bars here.

I cautiously suggested that women seemed to suck face with a bit of buyer’s remorse, sometimes actually gazing at me while kissing their passionate boyfriend. She confirmed that I was not imagining this, explaining that it seems as if the women adorn the men out of some sort of duty. A woman may have somewhere better to be but it is her job as girlfriend to make a spectacle of their relationship.

The second item on my list of customs had been haunting me since Argentina. Never, in my life on this planet, have I seen mothers fawn over their children so much. It hasn’t been uncommon to see a mother kiss their son ten times in five minutes, even if he is fourteen and wants no part of a PDA.

Once I noticed this trait, I began to recognize that it was sort of creepy. The mothers seemed obsessed with their child’s every move.

My philosophy became that the mothers, who seldom seemed to have a husband in tow, have transferred the appalling affection that their husbands formerly gave them, before the zing went out of the thing. Children solve the problem, allowing for endless adoration. Until puberty when, like I said, the whole thing just gets weird.

Cathy’s take was also interesting. She felt that Americans put too much emphasis on “one moment” for affection (a birthday, a goodnight kiss), making that one moment mean everything in the world. The South Americans, she suggested, have completely flipped this premise, choosing a quantitative approach to showing their love.

I headed back to my dorm room, looking for more distractions. The only other inhabitant was a woman who would not stop talking, not for a second. She was about thirty and unable to be in a room with others unless she was chatting, yammering, expounding or cooing.

When others spoke, her eyes grew into saucers of interest, her breath held for the moment that she could pounce into the conversation with trivia about tree sap, Bolivia or meningitis.

Within minutes I was looking for any escape from her conversation flytrap, trying desperately to think of something –anything – that could be important enough to take me away from this lady. It turns out I had the perfect excuse.

I started writing the damned book.

Community Connection

Have a note you’re interested in submitting? Send it to david [at] matadornetwork.com

Photo: wikipedia commons

1. I woke up early the morning of August 29 in my friend Emily’s house, where I’d stayed for a few days while my college in coastal Alabama was evacuated. Sometime that morning, while I was trying to go back to sleep, a thirty-two foot wall of water slammed into the beach front communities of Waveland and Bay St. Louis in Mississippi.

The house my grandparents owned on that beach was where I’d spent summers sailing the sunfish with my dad or reading on the porch next to my mom. It was where I first looked at the water on empty nights, at the blinking lights of fishing boats off the coast.

2. All I knew was that Dad was stuck in the hospital, and the hospital was stuck under several feet of water. I also knew we couldn’t communicate with him directly. We had no idea what it was like for him, what it was like for the hundreds in that hospital and the thousands trapped in New Orleans just after Hurricane Katrina.

Photo: wikipedia commons

3. Days passed. Reports of looting, of suicides, crime and complete chaos went on during the long days without electricity at Emily’s home in Florida. School was canceled for a week. Calls to Mom in Houston were curt, hurried. I imagined alligators swimming down our streets.

Our home hadn’t flooded, she’d learned from a neighbor. But all those looters…did that mean someone was in my bedroom, stealing my things?

4. As we sat helplessly in front of televisions or radios for days while the water subsided, black mold crept down through the soggy roof or up the sodden sheetrock. Mud settled and dried on the floors and the tops of whatever furniture hadn’t been tipped over. Wood furniture and floors rotted and peeled.

Huge flies and maggots took up residence in rotting food left in refrigerators during the hasty exodus. Grass, trees and plants died with the infusion of salt water and they, too were covered with gray silt. At night, entire neighborhoods went dark. Bodies rotted in attics.

Photo: wikipedia commons

5. You never think it’s going to happen to you. Each summer, and with each approaching storm, meteorologists remind us on the Gulf Coast that this could be it. This could be “the big one.” But you never think it’s going to be your turn.

You sit through hours of traffic to get out of town, and then you stay in a hotel in Memphis or Houston or Atlanta until it passes.

You go home, clean up the yard, put the plants out again, and forget about it. Or you have a hurricane party—schools and offices are closed and you celebrate. You watch the waves break on the lake and the wind bend the trees but you never think it can happen to you.

6. Dad stood on the roof of the hospital, the place he’d spent his entire professional life. At night he could see more stars than he’d ever seen. In the distance, electrical or gas fires burned in unidentifiable buildings. He could barely see the top of his car under the tea-brown water. His skin was starting to turn raw from using Purell to bathe in and the muggy August heat was almost too much to bear.

Sleep was almost impossible. Patients required round-the-clock care and there were always people coming over in boats from surrounding houses. From the roof of that hospital he could see the bags they’d used when the toilets stopped working and the bodies that had floated out of from the morgue on the first floor. Finally, a few days after the storm, the helicopters came.

7. There are those watershed moments in life when you know nothing will be the same. It was easy to see that first morning in front of the television as images of flooded neighborhoods flashed by, that this was going to change everything. There was no one to lean on, no one to turn to who hadn’t been affected.

Photo: wikipedia commons

No one you could rely on to help you because everyone needed help. Even as reconstruction began, there were setbacks. A new roof meant a nail in the car tire and who knows if there was a shop that was open to fix it. People came back but the broken city meant crime, and crime meant soldiers were walking the streets.

The flood of new contracting jobs sometimes meant work poorly done, half finished, and always there was a waiting list. Years passed before my grandmother could hang a picture on her wall or sit in a chair in her living room.

8. Sometimes I freeze up when I remember. I’m still in shock that at one point, 80 percent of everything I knew was underwater. How do you get along with a memory like that?

Community Connection

For those still haven’t been to New Orleans, here’s Why You Should Visit New Orleans Now. And for more of Megan’s story, what she did after Hurricane Katrina, please read Losing my Travel Virginity: Americorps NCCC.

If you have a note from the road you’d like us to consider, please submit to david [at] matadornetwork.com.

Four busses in a row and none of them the one you want.

I’m lucky. I’ve got a seat. The stop after I get on leaves the majority of the new passengers standing, holding metal bars, bracing their legs to keep from being knocked over by sudden stops.

A woman has taken the vacant seat across from me. Her wardrobe is a demonstration of understated wealth. Flawless lizard skin boots, a stylish ostrich leather purse and an overcoat all in complimentary shades of brown swaddle a soft, round body I can imagine has enjoyed many an expensive restaurant meal.

Perfectly coifed blond hair has been toned and dyed with the attention to the most minor detail. I study the face. The woman looks very German to me and her eyes are unnaturally wide. Though she’s got plenty of wrinkles, I can tell she’s had some plastic surgery. As I’m looking for telltale signs and scars, I notice her hands are large and as I start to wonder if she’s transgendered, the elderly man in the seat next to her’s lets loose a low, rumbling cough without covering his mouth.

The woman’s head snaps to the right in a gesture of confrontation that goes unnoticed by the man whose bald, liver-spotted scalp bounces in time with the rhythm of his coughing. The woman looks around and catches my eye, her permanently astonished expression exaggerated as her eyebrows go up as if to say, “Are you seeing this?”

All photos: Kate Sedgwick

She digs the salt-free crackers from the pocket of her elegant coat and gets one bite in before the man starts to cough again.

She puts the crackers back in her pocket. Then she attempts to locate the back of the copper, metallic scarf that hangs aside her lapels before abandoning decorum to wrap it around her nose, decorative side down. I see her drop the scarf just in time for another coughing fit and see her replace it, exasperated.

Minutes have gone by – ten or more – and the sick man continues to hack and cough, oblivious to the woman on his left whose posture points to a slow, simmering rage she is barely able to contain and yet she says nothing and it does not seem to occur to her that she could just stand up and distance herself from the man who she clearly believes is contagious with Gripe A.

Finally, near my stop she says to him, “Tapa la boca,” and two full grown women towering over us giggle and murmur “Tapa la boca,” to one another. The woman throws her chin back in a defiant gesture that seems to mean that having said this was a sort of victory for her and as I get up to ring the buzzer, she lunges for my seat which she must deem as being a safe distance from the man and settles her rump into its black naugahyde.

Translation: Gripe A is the Swine Flu.

Tapa la boca means cover your mouth.

Bomb crater in Phonsavan, Laos. Photo by author

Phonsavan is a few straight lines in a valley that is fringed with soft green hills. On these few straight lines are a couple hundred concrete cubes; restaurants, guest houses, mechanics dens, pharmacies and vendors that stock sandals and machetes.

Massive artillery shell casings sit rusted on store fronts, home to shrubs and cigarette butts instead of shrapnel and explosives. A missile suspended on a chain, painted crookedly in red: “good, cheap food.”

The skull and crossbones and the hulking shells appeal to my piratical sensibilities and draw me in to the Mine Advisory Group Phonsavan office.

Mine Advisory Group painstakingly cleans up unexploded ordinance (bombs) from conflict zones of wars past. The litter of war that may sit for decades after arms are laid aside.

Lebanon, Gaza, Somalia, Chad, Sudan, Cambodia, Angola…MAG has worked in 35 countries since 1989.

Illustrations depict the mechanics of cluster bombs. 300 baseball-sized explosives fill the weapon. A few hundred feet above the ground the cluster bomb is split in two and its payload fans out to a 100 square meter radius and then destroys everything. Everything that does not die is taken apart to shrieking pieces.

I face pictures of unsmiling armless villagers. Children. Pictures of men digging around the flanks of a half exposed unexploded missile, 30 years dormant.

A little man walks out from the back of the office space.

MAG provides Mine Risk Education to villagers.

He was about to take his dinner, I can smell the broth, but now he stands a few feet from me smiling to himself, looking at the display in polite, mild interest:

Xieng Khonang is one of the most heavily bombed provinces in the most heavily bombed country in the world.

At least two million Tones of ordinance was dropped on Laos between ‘64-’73.

metric tonne= 2205 lb.

2 million metric tonnes= 4,410,000,000 lb.

I just have to stand here for a minute and bite my lip thinking about 4.5 billion lb. of bombs… what that might look like. Some monstrous emotion wraps around my skull and I’m not really reading anymore, just looking forward.

It is estimated that up to 30% of this ordinance did not detonate. Decades later, unexploded ordinance (uxo) still contaminates rural areas in over half the country. 2,000 lb. shells are sold for $60 at the scrap yard. $100 if they still contain the powder. For many people this is worth the risk.

I feel sick. We did this. Facing the wall of pictures and statistics I clench my jaw and focus on the spot directly in front of me. Still I feel faint.

author and bomb crater in the Plain of Jars.

It’s estimated that the United States dropped 1 plane load of bombs on Laos, every 8 minutes for 9 years.

“Excuse me, where you from?” I didn’t really notice him sidle up to me.

“uuuuh, ” I scratch my eye, and look somewhere. I’m really tired.

“Aah, um… Ameri-”

My body would rather sob than say it. He takes a small step forward.

“It’s ok.” he says.

Community Connection

Laos is an amazing place to travel and volunteer. If it is Laos lore you seek I suggest Big Brother Mouse: A Book for Every Child in Laos & Gonzo Traveler: Chasing The Dragon In Laos

Also, please check out the video “Conflict Resolution,” a profile of MAG, Mine Advisory Group.