A Short Thought about the Loch Ness Monster

Bloody uncooperative thing.

Fish Below the Ice

It took forty-five mintues to drive out of Edinburgh this morning. Scotland is magical, beautiful, and with an utter disregard of the natural kindness of road signs. But drive in circles long enough--as long as you remember to stay on the wrong side of the road--and sooner or later, you can get anywhere.

Today, that meant a putting green at St. Andrews, the mecca of golf, where they don't actually seem to believe in left-handed golf clubs. I was using one shorter than I used to use on the putt-putt courses back in 1960s Florida, where the holes went through massive fiberglass dinosaurs.

Remember the days when Sinclair Oil had those dino exhibits that they brought to parking lots of big stores, back in the '60s? There were machines like Coke machines, and if you put a quarter in, it gave you this hot-wax injected dinosaur.

Of all the things lost from childhood, those are the ones I'd most like back.

I'm in a hotel right near Balmoral Castle now. The Queen hangs out at Balmoral when she's feeling Scottish, and it's easy to see why. This spot is gorgeous, all green, rocky hillsides and blooming gorse bushes that are like bright yellow accent marks.

The nearest town is the kind of place where you know you could buy a house with turrets, and be very, very happy.

Tomorrow, it's on to Loch Ness. We must always leave ourselves open to the joy of the possible. No telling what life is going to throw at you--and how surprisingly often it's something fun. Like the great band Shriekback says, 'We get it right sometimes/we shine a light sometimes/we see the fish below the ice sometimes.'

Lot of fish below the ice here. The endlessly possible.

As long as you don't need road signs to get around.

The Bangkok Bus Story

April, 1987. I had quit my job in a nasty industrial city in Japan, and had two weeks to kill before I started my new job, way out in the Japanese Alps.

So I did what anybody else would do in that situation: I bought a plane ticket for Thailand.

It was about midnight when the flight came down, and I paid 150 baht for a ride into town. The driver was a college kid with a red Camaro, and we went in, past all those palm trees that lined the highway, his stereo blasting the Eagles, "Tequilla Sunrise."

A couple days later, satiated on root beer (they don't have that in Japan, and I'd really been missing it), I got on a bus that I thought was headed downtown. Do the Royal Palace, I thought, maybe take a boat across to Wat Arun.

Wrong bus.

To this day, I don't know why I didn't just get off. It was clearly the wrong bus, going the wrong direction. Maybe I thought it would make a turn somewhere, get me where I wanted to be. Maybe I didn't see a good bus stop.

An hour or so later, we hit the end of the line, an alligator farm surrounded by the kind of faceless industrial park that lurks behind shopping malls.

I got out, looked around for a while. Not that there was much to see. Alligator snouts poking out from muddy water. Buildings shaped like shoe boxes.

And then I got back on a bus, headed into town.

And I thought, well, that was interesting. Never would have seen any of that otherwise.

Amy Hempel wrote a brilliant short story once about a man who was kidnapped. Took a long time for his family to raise the ransom money, and meanwhile, the kidnappers had to keep him alive, so they made him eat right, they made him exercise. When he was finally released, the doctors said being kidnapped probably added ten years to his life.

Amy's question, and mine with the Bangkok Bus Story are the same: How do you know the things that happen to you aren't good?

The Joe Moment

In the vastly underrated movie "Joe vs. the Volcano," Tom Hanks is on a raft--made of luggage--in the middle of the ocean. Meg Ryan is unconscious, and Tom is starting to hallucinate.

And then the full moon comes up, huge in a way that you really want to believe is possible.

Tom staggers to his knees and says, "Dear God, whose name I do not know. Thank you for my life. I forgot---How Big!"

Maybe, if we're really lucky, we get one or two of those moments a year. It's enough, though. It's like a battery charger for the soul--riding on the roof of a bus as it heads into the foothills of the Himalayas, watching a bear swim across the Stikine River in Alaska, or just taking a walk with someone, and they say the one exact thing that is what you most need to hear at that moment. It's when you watch the person you love open their eyes, it's standing in a place you never thought you'd be, and knowing that it's all much, much bigger than you ever dreamed possible.

Yeah, the moment is going to fade away, like a glimpse of satori. George Harrison wasn't kidding when he said "all things must pass."

But it's still the only reason a person needs to go out again.

Rilke Knows Everything

From Rilke, the Ninth Dunio Elegy:


But because truly being here is so much, because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

Border Crossings

A couple summers ago, I went back and forth across the Canadian border at a place without a customs post. The way life was working at the time, about once a week, I'd be in Canada for a half hour or so, then head back downriver, past the old border house--abandoned fifty years ago--past the station that measured river flow, out past the waterfall that actually moved in a zigzag, and then to the mudflats, where seals sunned themselves.

All along the Alaska-Canada border, there's a clearcut strip, no trees at all. Most people see this where the Alaska Highway moves from one country to the other, but if there are trees anywhere along the border, they've been taken out. Down into the landscape the river works through, this meant somebody hanging off cliffsides, cutting their way through countryside so thick it even turned back hopeful miners during the great Klondike gold rush--and nothing stopped those people.

But if you don't catch the clear cut, if you're looking up the river, or over to the glacier, you never know when you go from one country to the other.

That's one of the big questions travel keeps kicking back to me. How can you know exactly when everything changes?

A Solstice Prayer

From The Idaho Law Review:

“A venturesome minority will always be eager to get off on their own. . . . Let them take risks, for God’s sake, let them get lost, sunburnt, stranded, drowned, eaten by bears, buried alive under avalanches—that is the right and privilege of any free American.”

Talking with Jeff Greenwald

A while back, I was lucky enough to interview Jeff Greenwald, my personal idol in the world of travel writing. He's as good as it gets, and every one of his stories amazes me with its generosity and humor.

The interview appeared in Motionsickness magazine, but here's a little piece of it, something everybody should know:

JG: I think there are two ways to look at the world we live in. One is the view you get when you’re in your living room staring at the evening news, and from that perspective you almost feel like that Steinberg cartoon, where the nearest town is over the horizon, and a place like Iran is light years away.

The other way is to look at the earth like you’re in a space capsule. I think of the earth as a tiny, tiny place, a dot floating in this vastness. It always astonishes me how similar people are to each other all over the world. The way I put myself on good terms with a Palestinian in Hebron, or an Iranian in Shiraz, or a Moor in Mauritania, or a ranger in the White Mountains of Alaska, it’s all very much the same. It just involves a certain kindness, vulnerability, and a willingness to look them in the eye and treat them with respect. These things are not hard to do, and with these tools, the world becomes a very small place, and accessible to anybody.

I had a teacher once in India, who we affectionately called Papaji, and I’ll never forget something he did. A woman came to him with a question, saying, "I have a terrible fear of dogs, and it’s really affecting my ability to stay in India. What do you suggest?" He didn’t say anything, but the next day, he bought her a puppy.

By the same token, there’s no way the world is ever going to become less scary to someone who isn’t willing to leave home. But the minute you go out into it, you’ll realize it’s a place that will lick your face if you treat it kindly.

The most profound thing I ever wrote is the last line of the introduction to Scratching the Surface: "If there is anything I have learned in my travels, it is this: we must learn to ask for help when we need it, and offer help where it is needed. Once we have mastered this, the entire world will be open to us all."

Missing the Plane

My plane to Scotland should be taking off right about now. I'm not on it, but I'm hoping Scotland won't have changed a whole lot between now and when I get there next week.

You rarely deliberately miss a plane. There's a certain feeling of power there, an "up yours" to the FAA, the TSA, the long lines, the people herding their luggage about as if they were unsuccessful dogs in Australia. You don't miss the smell of Cinnabon, nor the feel of those chairs that would be more at home in a hospital waiting room.

Problem is, you find yourself sitting around at home, thinking of what a huge world it is, and how you could be out discovering it, right now.

Next week. Scotland can't change that much in a single week, can it?

The Best Advice Ever

We were on a bus, and two old British spies got on, asked us where the nearest bookstore was. We'd only been in town a day, but we knew, we'd been to all of them already. Priorities.

The spies told us about their travels, the bus went past cows and temples and other cars that seemed to be propelled by their horns.

And then one of the spies sighed, said, "Oh, you should have seen Albania before they ruined it."

Not going to Albania, but if the kidney stone that attacked yesterday is truly gone, I get on a plane for Scotland tomorrow.

Licking the World

In Jordan a couple months ago, we sat and ate bread cooked out of an oven that had been in use longer than my family has been in the United States. It was perfect bread, it was what the universe had in mind when it invented the whole idea of bread.

And then we broke open a jar of local honey, and it was even better; the whole desert landscape on the tip of the tongue.

For some reason, today, a piece of the Russian Orthodox liturgy is running through my mind--"the sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit"--and I'm thinking moments like that, a taste better than anything you could ever have dreamed of, like the look in the eye of someone you love, is the kind of moment you're given to rebuild on. Gifts of the landscape.

Two Quotes

"We are the bees of the invisible." --Rilke

"I believe the world desires to be a beautiful place." --Barry Lopez

Reading Rick Bass' Caribou Rising

Last summer, the arctic was on fire, at least most of it that I saw. I got a truck in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, and headed north, past the mammoth trap at Carmacks (think a series of giant rabbit snares strung high in spruce trees), and north to Dawson City. Last summer, more land burned in the Yukon than had burned in all of Canada the year before. Driving into Dawson, there were places where the smoke was so thick I couldn’t even see the front end of my own vehicle. It disappeared into a black cloud, and all I could do, while my lungs burned, was listen to the way the tires hit the road, navigating by sound.

At Dawson City, you couldn’t see the top of Midnight Dome; you couldn’t see across the Yukon River, or the Klondike, where the gold miners had pinned all their hopes in the great rush of 1898.

So I went further north, taking the road to Inuvik. The smoke finally cleared at the Yukon/Northwest Territories border, when, from the top of a mountain pass, the world fell away into a stretch of kettle ponds and tundra.

Caribou country.

Just a few miles away, across the border in Alaska, the Porcupine herd has its calving ground. Caribou are marvelous animals, better geared to migrate than maybe anything else on earth. There’s an extra ligament in their ankles that snaps the foot back up to the forward position, so each step only takes half the energy most animals require.

The Porcupine herd calves in the middle of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the place of George W. Bush’s wet dreams. There’s oil there, a whole six-month supply, and he’s anxious to drill. And as Bass writes, “if Bush and Cheney and the energy industry lobbyists succeed in opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, it’s not just the caribou that will vanish, nor the population of polar bears that winter there, but the Gwich-‘in culture, and perhaps even the Gwich-‘in people themselves, being snuffed out finally and quickly like tendrils of smoke rising from the tundra.”

Bass heads to ANWR to hunt with the Gwich-‘in, to try and understand what the caribou mean to them, and, perhaps more importantly, what this last wild place should mean to us.

“I think,” Bass writes, “that one of the things we might love most about the Arctic is the fact that it might—barely, now—be one of the very few places that still lies beyond our reach, beyond our control.” Is it, he says, “among the last places that exist still separate from our needs and desires.”

Forget the destruction of a culture that has lived on the land since before recorded time. Forget the declining caribou population, ignore the thousand miles of road that have already been cut through the arctic in the need for oil. Bass takes on the politics, but the central issue may be one raised years ago by Gary Snyder: “the world is watching: one cannot walk through a meadow or forest without a ripple of report spreading out from one’s passage. . . . Every creature knows when a hawk is cruising or a human strolling. The information passed through the system is intelligence.”

As Bass points out, we are the world’s consumers. Five percent of the world’s population using up a quarter of its resources. We owe it to ourselves to leave a corner untouched, a place where the clicking of the caribou ankles is the only sound.

Stay home one day a week. Read a book. The energy you save saves a caribou.

In the Northwest Territories, I walked out onto the tundra. A grizzly on a far hill looked at me only long enough to be sure that he had no reason to look at me. I picked up a rock that probably wasn’t a mammoth bone.

Right now, the landscape still goes on forever.

The Sound Tobikomu Implies

Furu ike ya
Kawazu tobikomu
Mizu no oto

Just seventeen syllables, written by the Japanese haiku poet Basho. Japan’s single greatest work of travel literature.

However, all the translations of this you’ve ever read stink, and that’s simply because of the second line—actually, the second word of the second line, tobikomu. In English, this line gets turned into “a frog jumps in,” but the real question is what sound does tobikomu imply? Splash? Plop? Kerplunk?

Doesn’t translate.

I was on pilgrimage in Japan, working the Saigoku 33-temple route, which starts south of Wakayama—the train ride there went past the only open, unused flat land I ever saw in Japan—then works its way up through Kyoto, Nara, around Lake Biwa (including a stop on an island inside an island), and on to the Sea of Japan.

Earlier that day, I’d met a friend of mine; we were going to hit four or five of the temples together, while catching up on what had been happening in the year since we’d last seen each other. This was a pretty standard gaijin-Japanese relationship: she spoke to me in Japanese, I spoke to her in English, and we got along just fine. And even though that night when we stopped for dinner, I didn’t understand everything the old man said to her that made her stand up and yell at him, before she dragged me out of the restaurant, my Japanese was more than good enough to get the gist.

The problem with traveling with a Japanese, though, meant that nobody we met believed I could speak Japanese. We came up to the temple, the priest came out and completely ignored me, standing next to her and starting to explain the large, concrete frog that overlooked a pond roughly the size of a kitchen table.

It was Basho’s pond. This is the old pond where the frog jumped in.

I asked the priest a question in Japanese. He looked blankly at me, so my friend repeated it, using exactly the same words. He answered her.

It’s a pretty little pond, some nice moss and good rocks around it. The concrete frog, though, is something of a problem. It had to weigh a good forty pounds; it was the size of a beagle.

If that was the size of the frog Basho watched, then the sound had to be something like the fat kid from grade school doing a cannonball.

All the best travel writing does two things: makes you think you’ve been somewhere; and makes you wonder what the place was like, what the experience was like. We hold a pond in our imagination. When we hear the poem, we have the picture. Seventeen utterly brilliant syllables, says everything you need to know, just like that wonderful single-sentence novel Italo Calvino liked to quote: “When I woke in the morning, I found the dinosaur was still there.”

So we have the picture.

And we are blessed with the mystery: what is the sound tobikomu implies?

Reason enough to go.

From the Beginning

This will be an occasional thing, an erratic thing, because it's a big, big world out there, and we shouldn't be spending all our time in front of a computer screen.

So here's the deal: a couple times a week, we'll meet here and see what's going on in the big wide world. I'll offer up some articles, some readings, whatever else comes my way that might interest you.

A simple motto for this, as with everything I write, and it comes from that great post-punk band Shriekback: "Free your ass, and your mind will follow."