The Weather Report for Old Crow

Weather.com doesn't seem to believe in Old Crow--the largest town north of the arctic circle in the Yukon. You have to fly in, and just for extra fun, when you fly out, the plane goes by way of Fairbanks, Alaska.

If nobody hears the weather report, does the sun still come up in the morning?

Well, that far north, this time of year, the sun probably comes up around 2 AM or so.

I'll be in Old Crow by Monday morning, and from there, getting into a helicopter and flying out to Vuntut, which is the Yukon side of ANWR. Same landscape, same caribou, no insane politicians thinking a couple months of oil is reason enough to bring about the end of this particular world.

Tundra doesn't look like much from eye-height, but if you get down on your hands and knees, experience the thing on its own level, it is amazing stuff. Two years ago, outside Nome, I counted forty species of plants in not much more than a square foot. Willow trees, a hundred years old and an inch high. Berry bushes smaller than the berries they produced.

It's like the world in the old Dr. Seuss book, Horton Hears a Who. Too small, too intricate for most people to bother noticing.

But it's there, and like everything else, we deserve it the respect of our time and attention.

Because I'll be in the considerable boonies--the bush, the wop wops--no updates here for a while. Maybe the first week of August, depending, as I'll be in the more wired climes of British Columbia that week, but the week after that, it's back to the arctic, to paddle a river in western Alaska, a place utterly free of the 60-cycle hum of electricity.

Falling off the map, in other words.

And here's the question for the day: are we really stupid enough to believe that the classic mariners simply drew sea monsters out there for their own amusement? They were too busy for that. They drew what they saw, what other people needed to know about.

Tips for Travelers

Never ride elephants barefoot. Their ears will rip your feet apart.

Two Stories from Iceland

Boswell used to say that Johnson liked to brag that he had memorized a complete chapter of some particularly obscure book on Iceland. And it was true, he had, but the chapter was only one sentence long: "There are no owls to be found throughout the entire island.'

And it's true, there are no owls in Iceland, although that seems kind of sad for the owls. They're missing one of the most beautiful spots on the planet.

Although there aren't any owls, there are an awful lot of what the Icelanders call the Hidden People. Elves, fairies, sprites, that sort of thing. There's a guy at the Ministry of Transportation who's job is to make sure the roads don't piss off the hidden people, and you can feel their magic everywhere.

I was hiking in the backcountry, found a lovely rock, orange, with a ring of obsidian around it like the rings around Saturn. Picked it up, started to put it in my pack.

But the rock didn't want to go. There was just a feeling, a very sure feeling that the rock belonged right where I'd found it.

It's my guess we used to hear this kind of voice, the world speaking to us, a lot more than we used to.

Of course, now we have iPods.

Everything comes and goes.

2 AM

Went for a walk last night around 2 AM. The last bit of the storm was moving through--a little rain around 11, a dust storm warning not long before that. Lightning still flashing off to the south as I walked through our neighborhood, quietly enough not to wake any dogs at all.

When I was in college here, the lightning would come so fast and furious that you could read a book by it. When I lived here when I was a kid, the monsoon rains would flood the streets, the thunder would shake every building for miles.

Now, the storms hit the edge of the concrete island and bounce off.

What you get, then, is a glimpse only.

Like watching the person you love walk away into a crowd.

And you're thankful for the beauty that's still there, but the sense of loss and nostalgia are almost enough to paralyze you.

1,279

Today I got a royalty statement--or antistatement--for my book Traveler's Guide to Japanese Pilgrimages. My favorite of my books. It was the third one published, but the second one I wrote, and nothing of the ten books I've written since then makes me nearly as happy as the pilgrimage book does.

I couldn't really understand why I was getting a royalty statement--the book has been out of print for a very long time, although sometimes used copies show up on abebooks.com or some other rare book site. I've seen them sell for as muc as $150, which is more than I made for writing the thing.

The interesting number on the royalty statement--other than the 0 copies sold in every column but one--was the lone column with a number in it. The book sold a total of 1,279 copies during its life.

That's it. Twelve hundred copies.

Way back when, for another book, I was invited to appear on Oprah. I turned the invitation down, because I'd written that book under a pseudonym for a reason. But according to my agent, an appearance on Oprah means at least 40,000 copies of your book will sell.

I'm not sorry I turned Oprah down, even though it was a very expensive no. That book has done okay on its own, and it has already sold well over 40,000 copies, and I didn't have to do anything at all to promote it.

I just wish more people had seen the book I loved. Travel is the only form of prayer I really understand, and that book was my prayer book.

First Trip

I doubt it's significant--hard to say what is, in the long run--but here's the very first thing I'm sure I remember, and it involves two themes that have kept coming back ever since.

It's two weeks before my second birthday, and I'm in the back seat of a red Plymouth Rambler. The car's red, the upholstery's red. My sisters or brother must have been in the car with me, but I don't remember them.

I remember the dog. It was a birthday present for Mom, and I remember the tiny puppy, and the way it filled the whole back seat, just by being a puppy.

Last night, we went to see Alanis Morissette in concert. During her song "Hand in My Pocket," with its chorus of "everything's gonna be finefinefine," she ran a film of her dog, in the car, face out the window.

And I think this is what I must have learned from my earliest memory that I can put a date on: all you have to do to be happy is put your face out the window and start moving.

If you're lucky, you wake up looking at the shoulders of the person you love, as she sleeps soundly. Here are some other ways i've woken up:

1. Cheap hotel somewhere in the desert between Phoenix and San Diego, mid 1980s: Rolled over, opened my eyes, and the first thing I saw was an enormous spider web, with a grasshopper still struggling.

2. Himalaya foothills, 1988. Woke in the middle of the night to the sound of rain on the tent. Then there was a frantic digging sound, as the porters and Sherpas went out to funnel the water away from us. Then there was a yelp from the trek leader, as the porters and Sherpas finished digging the trenches so that all the water led right into her tent.

3. Japan, 1986. Earthquake. The whole house shaking. I woke and felt strangely reassured.

4. Somewhere in France, somewhere around 2000. First thought: I love this woman.

5. Wrangell, Alaska, 2001. The bear woke me around 2 am, when he came to eat berries off the bush outside my bedroom. Not the first time, not the last time this was going to happen. But when I woke again later, around 6:30 or so, all I could think of was how lucky I was to be waking up in Alaska, to get to go outside and smell where the rainforest meets the ocean again.

6. 2004, New Zealand. My hotel room cost NZ $ 1700 a night. There was a view that absolutely couldn't be beat, there was a fireplace, a bathtub big enough to float a wallaby. I'd spent the day frantically driving to see the Bra Fence before dark came on, fell asleep fast and hard, like I rarely do. Woke in the night, stepped outside, and did not recognize a single star. Not one. Could have been standing on another planet.

7. Venice, 2005. Still dark out, the very fine click of high heels on the pavement outside, almost a doppler effect in incredibly slow motion: she approaches, she's here, she's gone, and although it would have been the easiest thing in the world to get up, take a look, see who is out walking alone this late at night, sometimes you just have to let the universe keep its mysteries.

Too Good to Waste

My much loved editor tells me that the following line is probably not going to make it into the printed version of my article on Scotland, apparently because we cannnot trust anyone to have a sense of art history. But I think it's too good to waste, so here it is:

The heather looks like the aftermath of a ten-day painball grudge match between Fauves.

Zipper Blues

I have the Smashing Pumpkins, "1979" on repeat today. Some days, all you need is one song.

In 1979, I was living in Alaska. One day, with my friends Bill and Mike, we decided to take a skiff and head up Nakwasina River. Took about an hour or so to get there, and then Bill--who had lived in Alaska the longest, and so was the one we trusted to know what he was doing--ran the boat a mile or two up the river.

The salmon were spawning, and there was that scent everywhere of dead fish. I don't know why we didn't see any bears--probably three teenage boys make enough noise to scare off every bear for a hundred miles.

We tied the boat, got the rifle out, and started hiking up the river. It was a beautiful Alaska day, cloudy sky but no rain, exactly the right temperature to be outside.

Mike had never shot a rifle before, so we got a dead salmon out of the river, stuck it on a log fifty feet away, and handed him the .30-.06. "Hold tight," we said. "It's gonna kick."

Mike still has a scar from where the scope cut him above the eye. When somebody tells you to hold tight, you've got to hold tight.

I fell in the river while crossing it--feet just swept right out from under me--and yet somehow avoided hypothermia.

A great afternoon.

And when we got back to the boat, the tide had gone out, and we were a couple miles up a dry river.

These things aren't problems when you're young and stupid and male. Just like, that same winter, when we managed to get my Jeep pickup stuck in the snow three times in a single afternoon--even Jeeps can't take six-foot snow drifts--we had time and energy to spare. We went into the forest, got some saplings, put them under the boat, started pushing. Took a couple hours, which gave us plenty of time to hassle Bill, but our only real worry was that we'd get back to town too late for the showing of Saturday Night Fever, which had finally, finally come to our town.

At last, we hit deep water. Fell back exhausted.

And when the current took the boat away, because we had been too tired to tie it down, it was Bill's problem to swim after it.

1979.

There's no moral at all to this story, no real point. It's not even a story, really, more like an anecdote.

It was just a very happy day. And those deserve remembering.

My Dinner with Arthur, part 2

While we were sitting in the Oyster Bar, downstairs in Grand Central Station, Arthur found out I'd never been to New York City before. And, as expected, he was rather surprised by that, and suggested that after dinner, we walk over to Rockefeller Center, so I can take a look at that.

Sounded good to me.

Let me say this again: Arthur is considerably smaller than I am, but moves at twice the speed. And we were on his territory.

So, I've been in New York something like two hours, and I'm walking the streets with Arthur Frommer. It's too good to be true. The man just takes charge of situations. When we got to the Center and the ice rink was closed--which would make me just go look for something else to do--he went and found out why.

There were tulips everywhere.

"We're only a block or two from Carnegie Hall," he said. "Would you like to see that?"

Of course.

We ended up walking as far as Lincoln Center, skirting the edge of Central Park. We talked about travel, we talked about New York, and we went inside a new building that had, as Arthur pointed out, one of the largest pieces of glass imaginable, what looked like several thousand square feet in a single pane, all watched over by a Botero sculpture.

At one point, he told me about his first guidebook to New York. There wasn't much time to write it, and he needed to put in restaurants, so he just put in the ones he went to all the time. A bit later, there was a review of his book, comparing it to a guide that specialized in restaurants. And still, somehow, they liked his picks better.

Outside his apartment building, he gave me very careful directions as to how to get back to my hotel. He'd pointed out the NYC grid system a couple times, and he was right: straight down to Times Square, hang a left, and I was pretty much there.

At no point did I tell him that the whole idea of walking alone in New York City had me a little tense.

We shook hands, and I started walking. The town was different now than it had been just a few hours before, when I'd arrived, following my friend Marie's careful directions on how to get from the bus stop to my hotel. Arthur had made the city understandable--the task of a guidebook writer, and of course, he's the best there ever was.

I walked through Times Square, walked past the lions on the library, all the while expecting to feel the same kind of waves of evil that I always feel in Los Angeles, and what really came out--so surprisng to my claustrophobic mind--was that NYC was actually pretty relaxed. Yeah, it's too crowded, yes, it could use considerably more sky.

But it was a place that was designed for people, not, like LA, for machines. It was a human city.

Before I left town, I did another walk, this time with Marie and another friend, Reid, who also wrote guidebooks to NYC. First Marie took me over to New Jersey, so we could take the train back up into the WTC site. Then we met Reid, and went down to Wall Street--Reid pointed out where the original tree had been where trading first took place--down to the Battery so I could see the Statue of Liberty, and past the Museum of the American Indian, where Reid pointed out the Tlingit-style raven on the back of one of the statues on the steps.

I told them about my dinner with Arthur.

And they told me about their city.

And here's the thing: I never would have known what they were talking about had I not gotten to go out with Arthur first. He made the city understandable to me. He turned it into a place, instead of a thing.

I've written guidebooks for more than fifteen years, and I'm pretty good at it.

But that's a lesson from the master.

More Proof Rilke Knows Everything

from "Dove That Ventured Outside":

Ah the ball that we hurled into infinite space,
doesn't it fill our hand differently with its return:
heavier by the weight of where it has been.

How to Be Very Japanese

I hadn't been in Japan very long when this happened, maybe only a month or two, maybe even less. It was all still new and strange to me, but over the four years I spent there, I don't think I ever saw anything as perfectly Japanese as this, not even the day the Denny's was stuffed with girls in kimono like frat boys in a Volkswagon.

I'd left my office building and was walking away from the train station. Don't remember where I was going--maybe to the Shinto shrine that was a block or two down.

There was, for reasons that never were clear to me, a tiny side street next to my office. Tiny side street, barely enough for a subcompact car to get through without scraping the wing mirrors. And for some reason, this side street, which never, ever had any traffic on it, had a traffic light.

Japanese traffic lights are slow. We once timed one at eight minutes before it changed.

A pretty young girl came running past me, her high heels clicking on the sidewalk. She was hauling, moving just as fast as she could, but when she hit the red light at this tiny side street, she stopped dead. Waited.

Waited.

No car came, of course. You could see way up the street, and it was obvious no car was ever going to come, that this chunk of road would die of sheer solitude and time itself would stop showing up for work before a car came down this side street.

But the girl waited.

And the light didn't change.

Any other day, I would have simply ignored the light and crossed. But I was watching this girl, who was breathing hard from her run, her eyes fixed on the red light.

Three or four minutes went by. Everything moved but us and the completely empty street.

And when the light finally changed, she started running again, like a sprinter out of the blocks.

Maybe that was the day I fell in love with Japan.

Travel Poem #3

Never walk on the beach barefoot:
there are puffer fish, stone fish, glass.
Water is, of course, always unsafe,
but make sure you have a rubber stopper
for the sink and the bathtub when the shooting starts.
The boats are crowded and do not leave on time.
Greeks vomit on your seat; Japanese
cry in the aisles like they have lost
Buddha's own protection.

Don't worry about clean underwear;
in an emergency, you'll have other concerns.
Besides, it's best to pack light.

Riding on top of a bus, heading up and north,
threshing grain farmers have laid in the roadbed,
you are perfectly, entirely happy.

Never stay in a hotel room that costs more
than the local per capita income;
small bottles of shampoo, conditioner, last for months
at home. At home, hotel towels are ineffective for drying,
and they carry the scent of a place you've left too soon.

Nepali incense. Gobi dust. The smell
bamboo gives off when slow breezes rub stalks together.

No fires are accidental. Plan an escape route.
Try to stay near the stairway at all times.

My Dinner with Arthur, part 1

In one of David Lodge's novels, a bunch of English teachers sit around and play a game called “Humiliation.” The object of the game is to admit to a famous book you've never read.

The travel writer equivalent of that game is to admit to a major city you've never been to. Up until April of this year, I always won, because I had never been to New York City. Hadn't been, didn't want to go.

But then Canada invited me to their annual Media Marketplace, a useful schmoozing event; and since I was on my way to Ireland right then, I figured having someone else pay for my plane ticket halfway would be nice.

I was nervous about going to New York. I don't like cities, I'm claustrophobic, and quite frankly, the idea of ten million people or so on an island barely big enough to make a decent park filled me with horror. My dear friend Marie, who lives across the river in New Jersey, kindly sent me very, very careful directions of how to get from the airport to my hotel, detail right down to “when you get off the bus, your nose will be pointing at . . . “

I got to the hotel at 7 PM. At 7:30, Arthur Frommer himself walked into the lobby, and we went out to dinner together.

Plain and simple, Arthur Frommer invented modern travel. When he was in the army in Europe, he put together a little pamphlet to show other GIs how to make the most of their leave days. This expanded into his “Europe on $5 a Day,” which expanded into a publishing empire.

What Arthur did that had escaped all other writers on travel was emphasize the local experience. Instead of traveling to pretend you're part of the upper class, Arthur showed how, by going cheap and going local, you get the most honest taste of the places you visit.

I first met him a couple years ago, at another schmooze event. He had just gotten off a plane from China, yet was somehow awake, witty, and very, very charming. A gentleman in the classic sense of the word.

In New York City, we walked from my hotel to the Oyster Bar, inside Grand Central Station, Arthur stopping to show me the constellations on the roof of the grand terminal. Simply lovely. The man doesn't miss a thing, and even though I'm quite a bit taller than him, I had a hard time keeping up with his walking pace. I'm not much more than half his age, but he's got twice my energy.

Over dinner, I listened. Arthur has stories. He's been everywhere, done everything, and he knows how to talk. It was one of those perfect dinners, where each moment was fascinating, and even though it would be hard to tell you what we talked about-everything from places in the world to the days when he was defending the novel Lady Chatterly's Lover against obscenity charges-there was never a moment when the conversation lagged, when I was less than fascinated.

And then we went out into New York City, his home, the place he loves.

My first time ever to the place, and I'm getting a walking tour from Arthur Frommer. Does it get any better?

Hardcore Zen

From Brad Warner's book Hardcore Zen, one of the best books I've read in years:

"The universe desires to perceive itself and to think about itself and you are born out of this desire. The universe wants to experience itself from the point of view of a tree, and so there are trees. The universe wants to feel what it's like to be a rock, and so there are rocks. . . . We don't know if rocks and trees have an idea of 'self,' and it doesn't matter one way or the other. But we do know human beings like you and me . . . believe in the existence of 'self.' And this belief is the root of all our problems."

Two months ago, I spent considerable time on the London Underground. That means nothing, nothing at all.

Just Wait 'Till the Bunny King Comes

Some years ago, I had a job in a bookstore. I was walking past the lunch room, when I heard Tash, on the phone, say what I swear was "When the Bunny King comes . . . "

And I started to think, well, what happens when the Bunny King comes? And i started to ask other people what they thought would happen when the Bunny King came.

And it became a movement. On a bad day, we'd look at each other and say, "Just wait 'till the Bunny King comes." People paged the Bunny King on the PA. Little Steve noticed people kneeling in front of bunny statues near the university.

There were Bunny King messages found in the pages of books.

I started using "Just Wait 'Till the Bunny King Comes" as the name of my publishing company.

We have been waiting for the Bunny King for a long, long time.

He should show up.

It's really time.

But in the meantime, keep this in mind: just wait 'till the Bunny King comes. It's all going to be different then.

The Speed of Sound Through Wood

It's one of the givens, kind of like gravity: sound, we're told from grade school on, moves at 1,092 feet per second.

No, it really doesn't. That's the speed of sound through air. But remember when you were a kid, underwater in the swimming pool, shouting at somebody who was at the other end of the pool? Speed of sound through water, that liquid shout getting to this other person-who, no doubt, you had a crush on, and had no way of expressing it-is much, much faster; in the fresh water of the Seine River, for example, it's been measured at 4,741 feet per second.

Air, it turns out, is a lousy conductor of sound. Shout the long way into an oak tree, and the sound moves at 12,662 feet per second; shout across the rings, it slows to a leisurely 4,229 fps, still four times the speed of sound through air. Don't have an oak tree handy? Try an aspen (and they'll all be the same in the same grove, because aspens are clones), and the speeds are 16,677 and 2,987 fps, respectively.

I've been thinking about sound a lot recently, for an article that's coming up. In Scotland, the dominant sound was the engine of the boxy Vauxhall I'd rented, and BBC Radio 1 and 2. By the end of the trip, I was buying CDs, and now I'll always associate Scotland with James Blunt and Moby.

But when I got out of the car to walk the highlands, the sounds changed completely. This is what we miss all too often. The sound of my cane (long, dull story about detaching tendons in my foot in Venice) against the rocks; the wind blowing through heather; the hollow sound the lochs make when the waves begin to push higher.

Two weeks ago, for the first time in nearly 25 years, I cut my hair. Even that alteration in my personal landscape has changed sound, because sound is the most dependent of all sensory inputs. Everything changes sound, from the material the sound waves pass through-my bass with the rosewood neck is infinitely richer than the one with the cheap neck-to the air temperature. Winter, we all know, in a cold place, is almost frighteningly loud, although one of my favorite memories of living in Japan was the sound of the sweet potato vendors, pushing their carts through the streets of town. It was a winter night sound, the song they sang, and I'll always associate the song with the smell of kerosene heaters and the slap of water in the sink, because we had to keep the taps running so the pipes wouldn't freeze up.

A couple months ago, in Prague, my cousin pointed out that the sound of horse hooves on cobblestones made the whole city fall backwards in time.

Silence is the shyest sound of them all. That's the sound I'm looking for now, but of course, perfect silence is painful-in an email conversation with Bernie Krause, he pointed out that in a seriously quiet environment, “it would literally drive a person to a state of madness if they stayed . . . longer than a few minutes. One hears the blood coursing through one's capillaries and that sound, alone, is a bit overwhelming.”

Jungles are noisy, the silence of the Alaskan tundra is punctuated by the sound of small planes, and even the most remote Pacific islands have generators and DVD players, too many of them offering the slur of Sylvester Stallone's voice.

This is how I'll be spending the next few months: looking for a place that's actually quiet, not only physically, but mentally as well-a place where all sounds are soothing, and the noises in my head shut off the way they do when the woman I love takes me in her arms.

It's a big world. There's got to be a place like that somewhere. Somewhere so quiet that sound itself slows down, even when it's moving through wood.

Folding Maps

My brother does origami. He's quite good at it, can take a piece of paper, and in a few minutes, make a crane, a turtle, a frog.

I can't even fold my maps back up right. Scotland sort of got wadded up and stuffed down into the bottom of my pack; and now it has that end-of-a-trip-desperately-need-to-wash-clothes scent, too. Loch Lomond is a fold, Glen Coe a wrinkle, the Isle of Skye is an idea for another time.

Map is not territory, but I remember fourth grade, the huge world map on the classroom wall. I stared at it until I had it memorized: Chad. Biafra. Czechoslovakia. All those extinct places.

My laundry is filthy, the map is a mess, and I only have two Hob Nobs--a lovely Scottish cookie--left.

And as best I can tell, my body is in a time zone somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.

The Bay City Rollers Trashed My Hotel Room

Last night in Scotland; tomorrow, the joys of modern air travel.

I had to check into the hotel late today, because the Bay City Rollers were in my room, and they would not get out. Apparently it is possible to milk 15 minutes of fame for upwards of thirty years. How's that for a sad thought?

Scotland has been beautiful, magical, like Iceland with trees. Not at all what I was expecting when I came here, and that's the very best kind of trip.

In three weeks, I'm supposed to be in the Yukon, traveling with the Gwich'in. Tonight, though, there's still one more Scotland sunset ahead. Last night, on the shores of Loch Lomond, the sun came down at the same time as a storm moved in. The loch kicked up waves the size of couches, but at the far end of the loch, it was pure sunshine, stabbing down in visible beams.

The truly strange thing is, this is my job to hang out and watch stuff like this.

Fun with Kilts

Gotta admit, kilts are great. Air circulates where you're not really used to having it circulate.

Spent part of the day on the waters of Loch Ness today, and the monster remained bloody uncooperative, so I ended up spending the afternoon at a holiday camp, throwing hatchets.

Which is surprisingly therapeutic.

Tomorrow, Ben Nevis, tallest mountain in the UK, or, for those of us from the western United States, a hill.

But it's a hill with weather. Serious weather.

Clouds moving in for the third or fourth time today. The light on the hillsides is amazing, and last night, at about 3 am, when the sun started to rise, the sky was the most delicate shade of blue I've ever seen.

And now out to try and find haggis. No, I don't really want to, but this is my job, and I have to take it seriously.