Shimagunikonjo

That´s a wonderful Japanese term, which means¨"island nation consciousness." If you´ve ever lived on an island, you´d know how different things are on them.

And this one is . . . quite different. It was clear in town, pouring rain and there was so much fog I could barely see the road at the top of the mountain, and then half-naked people on a very uncomfortable beach, at the other end of the road.

What´s the line from the John Mellancamp song? Something like "This might not be the end of the world, but you can see the place from here."

Which is true. Face away from the black stones of the beach and the people gingerly walking over them. Off in the distance, under a couple clouds, is El Hierro, one of the many ends of the world in ancient times.

Glycon the Elder said,¨"For surely, if it were not an evil thing, God would not have placed it at the end of the world." Maybe true, maybe not. I´m headed the other direction tomorrow, moving to Tenerife, then London, then home, no doubt cursing British Air the whole way, now that they´ve managed to corner the market on the most uncomfortable airplanes in the world. Never again. I´ll swim before I fly British Air after this trip.

Sheer entropy. They used to be so good.

I stopped on the side of a cliff--the road hugged the edge, buses looked like they were about to pitch over--and watched a bird with red wings fall off the slope, hover in the wind, dive, swoop, hover again, dive, and fly into the distance, all without beating its wings a single time.

Tormenta

Arrived in La Gomera just in time to see the first tropical storm in the history of the Canaries come ashore. 100 mph winds, driving rain, the works. Apparently, hitting Florida wasn´t good enough for this storm.

So it buggered my plans to go to El Hierro, a traditional end of the world. I´m okay with that. I´ve been to other ends.

Where I am now is the last place that Columbus knew where he was before he got lost.

The storm is moving through, my hands are killing me from 90 minutes of answering emails--what happens when a storm knocks out the connection and you can´t get back to the world for a while.

Richard Burton would howl with laughter at us.

How to Become a Skull

At the museum here in Santa Cruz, on Tenerife, there´s a large display of skulls, and how they got that way. Some were bashed by rocks. Some were stabbed, and a couple look like they were drilled.

Okay.

It looks like Hawaii here, only maybe a little less so. More rounded, less sharp.

Tomorrow, on to La Gomera. Right now, time for that wise Spanish custom, the siesta.

Thanksgiving in London

And I'm off to stare at the Rothkos in the Tate. It appears tonight that I'm going to a restaurant so famous even I've heard of it, which frightens me, more than a little.

Clouds. Scarf weather. And the Rothkos are waiting.

Gone Down to London

It's chilly in London, the keyboards are not made for someone who never learned to use the shift key on the right side, and scattered on the sidewalks are leaves the size of dinner plates.

A haunted city, in many, many ways.

And now I have to go meet someone at the Ritz. Perhaps I should have polished my hiking boots.

Marie Leaves Africa

While I've been off playing reindeer games and staying in a grossly expensive hotel, my dear friend Marie (mariejavins.blogspot.com) has reached the end of her months in Africa, where she went to work on her forthcoming book, No Hurry in Africa, which Seal Press will publish next year.

Because tonight I'm too tired to have a thought of my own, I offer up one of her thoughts:

So, am I ready to go home? I’m ambivalent. Sure, it kind of sucks to live alone and have no friends on an entire continent. . . . But there is still something so gloriously appealing about living on the road, carrying all my possessions from bus to bus, and trusting total strangers to take care of me. Some people simplistically call this lifestyle “freedom.” I’m not sure what I call it. I associate “freedom” with the inability to articulately think beyond a 7th grade level about personal responsibility. So let’s not call it freedom. Let’s just call it fun.

First Trip

Where does the bend come that separates those who travel from those who don't? No telling.

But: my very first memory, which is easily datable to a couple weeks before my second birthday, is of being in the car.

It means nothing, but would anything be different if my first memory was of, say, sitting on the couch?

In Jordan

Yesterday, Amanda (a truly fine writer, check her out at amandacastleman.com) and I were emailing back and forth, trying to figure out if we had been in one of the hotels in Jordan that got blown up. Finally--and this is kind of a sad comment about how forgettable so many things on press trips are--we figured out we'd had dinner at the Hyatt. We sat together that night, as we did at most meals on that trip, and when we came back from the buffet table--we were really, really sick and tired of buffets at that point in the trip--she had a nicely arranged plate of vegetables and such, while I had bread and chicken.

Jordan, I have to say, was one of my favorite places I've ever been. From the first morning when we woke up next to the Dead Sea, to the trip down to the shining red stone of Petra--where Amanda saved us from having to listen to the guide tell us facts that were mostly wrong--to Wadi Rum, which is just one of the glory spots on earth, it was a trip full of kindness and surprises and endless beauty.

Sometimes it feels very hard to justify spending endless hours on a plane--and as I said the other day, the flight to Jordan was the single worst plane ride I've ever had, as there was a Smurf ass in my face for fourteen hours, the flight attendants were actually screaming at passengers, and by the time we got off, the plane looked like a tornado had swept through it--just to spend a week somewhere.

Okay, that sounds bad, most people work all year for a week of vacation, and here I tend to think leaving home for less than a month just seems like a lot of hassle.

But, no matter, Jordan was worth the pain of getting there, and would have been for a single day. It's that good.

The first morning, we went to the Jordan River. There are the ruins of a church there, about the only Christian church you'll ever find that faces west, because it led to where the river used to be. And that, they say, is where Jesus was baptized. Across the three feet of water that flows in the river, the Israelis have a different idea, apparently thinking that, over the course of 2,000 years, a river that floods regularly would not have moved at all, so where they claim the baptism site was is still quite wet (and conveniently close to parking), whereas on the Jordan side, the river is quite a ways away. Guess whose version I believe?

We went to the place where Moses saw the promised land, but could not go across--in Dante's version of hell, remember, one of the worst torments is to see what you want and know you'll never reach it. And on the last day of the trip, we went to Jerash, where they made bread on an open fire, and once it was adorned with a bit of the local honey, was one of the most wonderful things I've ever tasted.

Jordan, it seemed, was the Canada of the Middle East. Before I went, everybody said, aren't you afraid? And I'd always say the biggest risk was being drowned in tea while people were trying to be nice to us. And that's exactly how it turned out.

They're marching in the white streets of Amman today, protesting the pointless violence. And, as for me, I'm mourning the abrupt and utterly senseless destruction of beauty--nothing is more beautiful than those rare places that feel right because they are very much themselves.

Amanda's going to be here in Scottsdale next week. I think she and I owe it to that trip to raise a glass in salute. And then I think we both need to find a way to go back.

Eliminating Possibility

In March, we went through customs--lovely passport stamp, even had a real stamp added to it--and loaded onto the bus. We each had about a hundred bucks worth of dinars in our pockets, Amanda had no luggage because it had been left on the runway in Seattle, and Amman was dark outside the airport, almost relaxing after coming off what we all agreed was the single worst flight we'd ever been on.

Jordan isn't a big country, but it's a beautiful one, full of surprises. Petra, the red stone city, turns out not to be just the one building they show in all the movies, but several square miles of cave carvings, facades, and marble pillars. Wadi Rum has sand as soft as baby powder, and atop a rock formation there, I found a white crystal, perfectly heart shaped, that was exactly what I needed to find for my friend Rachel. And there are few things more entertaining than walking down a Middle Eastern street behind two beautiful women and watching the local men nearly break their necks.

In the morning, the Dead Sea bounced a hard light off the blackout curtains in my room that did very little to black out the light.

I don't know what I expected when I thought about the Dead Sea. I guess I wasn't anticipating the kind of surprise that came a few days later, when we were driving through the desert and I realized--this is the Wilderness, forty years of biblical history and nothing growing bigger than a couple blades of grass.

Walked down to the sea, watched people float, pack themselves with mud. One man said that if you have eye problems, and open your eyes in the water, they'll be cured, but that struck me as being along the lines of pouring gasoline over yourself and lighting it to cure acne.

But here's the thing about going to the Dead Sea, what ultimately stuck in my mind: once you've been there, you can't go any lower. At least not and stay above the surface of the earth. You are as far below sea level as you can get, and you can't get any further down.

So now what?

I don't know what the maximum altitude I've been in was. Probably a mountain pass somewhere in Colorado, even though I've been in the Himalayas and the Alaska Range. So there is still plenty of up to go.

But after visiting the Dead Sea, a possibility was removed from my life. I can't go any lower, I can't follow the curves of the earth any deeper below sea level.

And I don't know what to do with that thought at all. It sucks when something is no longer possible.

Boswell

Johnson--of Boswell and Johnson fame--liked to brag that he could recite chapter 30-something of a particularly obscure history of Iceland, in its entirety.

Just so you can pull off the same trick, here's what the chapter says:

"There are no owls to be found throughout the entire island."

That's it. Like that lovely chapter in Something Wicked This Way Comes that says "Nothing much else happened, all the rest of that night."

Saw no owls in Iceland. One day near Vik, though--a place famous for shipwrecks, for the jagged rocks that were black and huge right off the coast--I watched the fulmars go out when the wind was so strong the only way I could get back to the car was to wait for the moment between gusts, run, and then when the next gust started up, turn and brace myself against it.

The birds flew like kites on acid.

Happy Birthday

Today is my friend Atsuko's birthday. She made the first few months I lived in Japan bearable, and in quite a coincidence, today I found out I'm going to go back to Japan in the next couple months.

I was trying to think of a favorite moment in Japan, something that defined the four years I spent there, and all that keeps coming to me is the sound of the sweet potato vendors, singing their song--like wolves howling Albinoni--and pushing their carts through town in the dead of winter.

And the smell of the temples. Off-hand, I can only think of one thing that smells better than Japanese temple incense.

It's way past time to go back.

Fun with Elves

Iceland has elves--well, they call them the Hidden People there--everywhere. There's a guy at the Ministry of Transportation whose job is to make sure the roads don't piss off the elves. They're real, they're all over the place, and they're a force to be reckoned with.

I was off hiking through a field of obsidian boulders the size of small cars. The ground was a weird orange color, and off in the distance, there was smoke coming from a volcanic vent.

Iceland is maybe the most beautiful place in the world. The light there would make Rembrandt dig out his eyes with a dull spoon, because he'd know he could never paint it.

Along the way, I saw a small, orange rock, with a perfect ring of obsidian chips around its equator. Think a kid's dream model of Saturn.

I picked it up, started to carry it away. It told me, in no uncertain terms, that it wanted to go back where it had come from. I can't explain this, but it happened. The rock didn't want to go.

There are, oddly enough, a lot of stories about this kind of thing in Japan. People moving Buddhist images, and then the image becomes too heavy to move, because it has reached the place where it wants to be.

Everything knows its place. Screw entropy. Everything knows.

So I put the rock back down.

A couple days later, I was on Mt. Hekla. Cool place, a traditional gateway to hell, the volcano they used in the movie version (not the book, though) of Journey to the Center of the Earth, which was highly influential to me as a kid. Both book and the Pat Boone movie.

So, on the mountain, I reached down, picked up a small piece of pumice, stuck it in my pocket.

That night, back in Reykjavik, I emailed a friend, told him what I'd done. Next day, his reply said, "Oh, I wish I'd known you were going there, I would have had you pick up a rock for me, that was my favorite movie when I was a kid."

So I thought about it for a second, wrote back, Look, I was there. That's enough for me. You can have the rock I picked up. I don't need anything but the memory of a perfect day.

Let me repeat this: I picked up a small piece of pumice. That was it. One. Small. Piece. Of. Pumice.

And a week or two later, when I reached into my pocket to send it to my friend, there were two there. No, the one didn't break. Two quite separate and distinct pieces of pumice.

All I can figure is, the second one--which sits on my desk now--was a thank you from the elves for putting the first rock back.

I don't have any other way to explain it.