Sliding off the Continent

It's always bothered me that Alaska is not considered part of the continental United States. It is kind of attached to North America.

On the other hand, the farther the state stays from everything else, the better off it will be.

Most common stupid tourist question in Alaska? Do you take U.S. money here. They get that nonstop.

I get on the Alaska Marine Highway this afternoon, and then it's three days to Skagway, where it will be dark and small and very quiet.

Which is pretty much just what I need.

Like the Counting Crows sing, "It's been a long December, and there's reason to believe/maybe this year will be better than the last."

Radio Charisma

Spent about eight hours today, driving from somewhere or another in Idaho to somewhere or another in Oregon. The weather truly, deeply sucked: it started raining about a half hour after I got in the car, was still raining when I checked into the hotel. Numerous times when I could barely see the road through the rain, the fog, the rooster tails coming up off the endless lines of semis.

When you can't see anything, you start noticing things missing from the landscape.

There have been so many extinctions over the years, things you wouldn't even notice had gone extinct. Okay, the Mom and Pop diner is on its last gasp--call it the endangered species list. But when was the last time you saw a cabin court? Or how about service stations with actual service? When I stopped to buy gas in Oregon, a guy came out and pumped it for me. Apparently, that's the law in Oregon, "to create jobs," but wouldn't time be better spent training in computers, or something less extinct? How mobile can these people be?

Roadside picnic tables not in rest stops. Burma Shave signs--although fake ones have made a comeback.

But what I was really thinking we're missing now is radio charisma. That's not my phrase--that comes from a book called Pictures from a Trip, by Tim Somebody. Rumsey, maybe? (A quick check on abe.com confirms: Rumsey. Apparently I didn't waste those 15 years working in bookstores.) Wonderful book, about hunting dinosaur fossils and true love.

To understand radio charisma, first, you have to be old enough to remember AM radio. Then you have to also be old enough to remember cars with radio dials, not "seek" buttons and digital tuning.

There was an art, now a lost art, to working that AM radio dial, pulling in farm reports from three states away, the last Dodgers game of the season--Vin Scully had the perfect voice for radio announcing (or was his name Vince Gully? Who knows, it was on the radio, we never saw it spelled out), "Radio Mystery Theater," where I remember the voice of Fred Gwynne, better known as Herman Munster.

You'd put one hand on the dial, take a quick glance at the sky, see what direction the clouds were, because AM, unlike FM, bounces. That's how you could listen to southern rock and roll from the Rocky Mountains, that's how you could pick up a small town's radio swap mart from three states away.

The furthest I ever pulled in a station was in high school, when I lived in Sitka, Alaska; late one night, I pulled in a Japanese radio signal. Heavy static, I worked the radio's knobs like a microsurgeon, trying to bring those voices, a different world, a little bit closer, closer.

Is there anything better than working a dial and finding out that the world extends so far past the horizon that there might as well not be a horizon?

Now you can just play your iPod through the car radio.

Radio charisma. Extinct. Another loss.

As Good as Venus de Milo's Ass

After waking up in 18-degree weather in Panguitch, Utah, this morning, took the long, dull drive--well, some of it was in white-out, which wasn't as interesting as yesterday's blizzard, but still better than watching 18-wheelers in the rearview--up through Provo, Salt Lake, Ogden.

And then it was time for a detour.

It's about 20 miles from the interstate to the Golden Spike Monument, where the two ends of the first transcontinental railway were joined. Not a lot to see there, even for an avowed train nut like myself.

But if you have a car that can make it, 16 miles past the visitor center is Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. Since he built the thing in 1970, it's spent most of its life under the waters of the Great Salt Lake, but it's visible now.

To get there, you have to first face down the cows. At one point, the cows made a box--maybe five cows on each side of the road, and then blocking the road, a line of cows four or five deep--and stared at the car. Clearly a bovine challenge.

Once you get past the cows, there's mud deep enough that my white car is now a brown car, and then the road gets really bad. The last half mile, you kind of have to choose which rock will do the least damage to you when you hit it.

You come around a corner, and there it is, down below, like a fern tendril stretching into the lake.

The sky was pure silver, the lake was silver, the jetty itself was black from the rocks, white from all the salt that has caked on it over the years. The mountains around are a gold shade, and it's all quite stunning.

To be honest, I had expected the jetty to look just like the pictures and be nice, but not especially impressive. But the best way I can describe it is to compare it to the Venus de Milo (digression: "she's better than Venus with all of her charms/better than Venus because she has arms," as my Chaucer professor liked to sing in the middle of class). When you go to the Louvre, the VDM is at the end of a long, straight passage, so you see it from quite a ways off.

And it looks exactly like the pictures. We've seen so many pictures, how could there be anything new?

But if you go to the back, check out her ass, it's a view you've never seen before, and the sheer genius of the carving leaps out.

Spiral Jetty is like that: a bunch of rocks stuck in the middle of nowhere, on the shores of Salt Lake. Shouldn't work. But it does.

It's what glacial moraines would look like, if they had a playful side.

I have no idea if it's allowed or not, but since nobody was around to tell me otherwise, and there were no signs, I walked the spiral. It was like walking the labyrinth in a medieval cathedral, only on a much, much grander scale, and the sky more impressive than even the stained glass in the cathedral in Leon, Spain (which made me fall to my knees and cry, it was so beautiful).

Robert Smithson was a bloody genius.

December 25, 1986

It was my first Christmas living in another country, and Christmas in Japan can be kind of a schizo experience, even at the best of times. One day, a speaker truck rolled past, alternating "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" with "Battle Hymn of the Republic." The most popular gift that year in Japan was salad oil--and I read a recent survey that still shows salad oil near the top of the list, although it has been bumped by gift certificates (well, now they're gift cards, as our language continues to decline; in Japan, of course, they'd be geefto caados, but that's another entry for another day).

So, first Christmas, we had the day off--a lot of people didn't, it's not a real holiday in Japan, as everybody gets ready for the big shindig of New Year's--and had nothing do to, so another guy from the school where I worked and I decided to go to Nikko for the day.

At this point, I'd been in the country for about two and a half months. Ken had been there maybe a month or so longer. Because Nikko was so close to where we lived--under an hour by train--we'd both been there before, but neither of us had gone up to Toshogu Falls, or to see the lake.

As it turned out, the best part of Toshogu Falls is the bus ride up, which takes the narrowest, sharpest, hairpin turn road I've ever been on. No way those buses should make it up that road, but they do. The falls themselves look like a small but reasonable fall, and the lake is okay. It killed the day, we had no complaints, and I vaguely remember seeing some monkeys along the way. I don't like monkeys, but those would have been the first wild ones I'd ever seen, so it was pretty cool.

We must have gone to the temples, too, that day, although I don't really remember. Nikko is where the Toshogu Shoguns are buried, and the buildings are maybe the height of Momoyama style, which is as gaudy as gaudy can get. Bright colors, endless carvings, nowhere at all to rest your eyes. That's not to say it isn't beautiful; just that it's overwhelming, and not really what you expect from Japan.

Anyway, what stands out most in my memory from that first Christmas abroad is this: Ken and I got on the train in Utsunomiya, the ugly, industrial city where we lived, and sat and waited for it to leave. Early morning, we had the carriage entirely to ourselves, but then an old man came in and sat right across from us. He stared at us for a while, then hocked up spit for a good two or three minutes--like he was bringing it up from his toes. Then he spat into the space between his seat and ours, and walked off.

We absolutely howled with laughter.

Things Never Finished

Every writer has stories that started off fine, and then had no second act. You promise yourself that some day, you'll get around to finishing the things, bother to figure out the next link in the chain, the next puzzle piece, but the trip starts to fade away in your memory, new assignments come in, and the stories are nothing more than dusty folders on the hard drive.

Here are two of mine, from Budapest and Prague:

Budapest:

At the foot of the hill, terns are fishing the Danube, hovering the way we usually think only hummingbirds do. But here, 640 feet above the streets of Buda-Pest is on the other side of the river-I'm relieved to see they haven't done anything with the bones.

Maybe it's a bone. Hard to say. It's a sliver the size of half a fingernail cutting, a scrap of something that looks like a bit of rubber eraser after you've fixed a mistake on the Sunday crossword puzzle.

And maybe I'm the only one reading the labels. Despite being held in an elaborate silver shrine the size of a good bottle of wine, this bit of whatever it is doesn't seem to be getting any notice. It's in a side room of the Mattias Cathedral, part of Budapest's Castle Hill, and obviously the other people who come this far are anxious to get back outside and look at the two-thousand-year-old city, walk the shopping streets (amber, lace, souvenir t-shirts that I'm pretty sure I've seen in a dozen other countries), or hang out in the revived café culture. Hungary's biggest city doesn't have the obvious appeal of other central European hot spots, like Prague or Krakow, but Budapest has a vibe all it's own.

And it has this bit of, according to the label, St. Francis of Assisi.

For centuries, Budapest was rich beyond imagination with the glories of the Austro-Hungarian empire. And during that time, there were men who made their livings stealing bits of saints from one church, and carting them off to another. Furta sancta, it was called, and it was an art form. The right piece of the right saint, and you could guarantee a steady flow of pilgrims to your church.

There are bits of a dozen saints in this room.

Prague:

Franz Kafka turned into a cockroach right about where one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen in my life stops to take a picture of Prague. Below us-although no doubt well above the level of a cockroach's eyes-the city sprawls, wrapped in the dark line of the river.

From up here, just outside the castle walls, you can see the people walking the Charles Bridge, the vendors hoping to catch their eyes. As best I can tell, somewhere in Prague there's a factory of artists, turning out thousands of quick watercolor sketches of the same five scenes: the bridge, the astrological clock, the castle, an open-air café, a cobblestone street.

These artists are probably thinking Kafka had it easy.

“I picture Prague all dark and Milan Kundera,” reads a note in my email. Ten years of economic boom, fifteen years being commie-free, Prague still can't shake off its image to a certain generation-my generation-of people. Just a little too young to remember Prague Spring, too young to remember the tanks rolling into the Old Town Square, but old enough to remember when the Soviet Union was the dark spot on the map and all those countries behind the Iron Curtain were eating borsht and wearing thick clothes.

We read the books-Kafka, Kundera, the marvelous The Good Soldier Sveck, where a patient in the mental hospital thinks he's turned into an encyclopedia, and someone must immediately look up “box stapling machine,” or he's done for.

The sun never shines in our Prague.

That's us, though. To the generation coming up behind us, the ones who always had cell phones and who are pretty sure wifi access is in the Bill of Rights, Prague is the promised land, where beer is cheap, absinthe is real, every meal comes with French fries, and from any major street corner, within fifteen minutes two dozen gorgeous members of the opposite sex are bound to walk by.

It's the traveler's lament: I'm here at the wrong time. Not the wrong time for Prague-this place hasn't been so hot since Charles II was king. But the wrong time for me. This is a place for twenty year olds to find out exactly how large the world is, and how full of possibilities.

Why It's a Bad Idea to Move the Day after Christmas

Moving has its own rhythm, its own requirements.

I'm way out of rhythm, and I seem to be getting none of the requirements taken care of.

But, to save other people hassle, here's what I've learned: planning to move the day after Christmas means going to the mall and other stores the week before Christmas, because, especially if you're going to move to a small, remote town in Alaska, there are things you know you'll need.

Don't do it. Put it off. Save yourself. Learn from my pain.

100

This is the 100th post. I should have something wise to say, but all I can think of is something I was told years ago. We were on a bus in Nepal, and somehow got into a conversation with two retired gentlemen about the best bookstores in Kathmandu. That led to stories of bookshops in other countries.

And then one of the men, with a great sigh, said, "Oh, you should have seen Albania before they ruined it."

Subterranean Homesick Blues

When I was a kid, we moved all the time, and I noticed, well into adulthood, that I simply expected everything in my life to change every three years. Long after I left Mom & Dad's, I kept moving.

Until we ended up in this house. Lynn moved into this house on December 13, 1994. I was in the hospital having surgery that day, so I moved in a week or so later.

Eleven years. That's twice as long as either one of us had ever lived anywhere, and it is, no doubt about it, at least four times longer than we should have stayed.

With only a week left to go in Arizona, I'm having those inevitable departure thoughts. What, other than family and friends, will I miss about the place? Yesterday, walking the dog in the park (lots of healthy coyote poop everywhere), I looked across at the zoo and was sad because I won't have a chance to go there again. I really like the rhinos and anteaters.

Saguaros in bloom. The way the light hits the red mountains some days. There's a restaurant, up near the bookstore where I used to work, that has incredible cheese steaks.

But that's about it.

Clearly, eleven years was much, much too long.

I Should Have Played the Flute

There's no escaping the fact: the bass is going to take up half the car. Bass players have, of course, long suffered from their choice of instruments. Okay, so the thing is six feet long and three feet wide. For decades, bass players have had to buy a second seat on airplanes, just for the instrument. But think about it for a moment: when an advertiser wants to make music look sexy, what's the first thing they do? They show an upright bass.

One good thing about the bass taking up so much room is it cuts down on what else I can take. When you have to strip your life down to the bare essentials, what do you need?

Well, the electric bass, too, of course. Both computers and printers. The scanner. A large box of notebooks. Maybe, living in a town with a tiny, tiny library, I really will get around to finishing St. Augustine's City of God. I can't tell you how many trips I've taken that on, and I don't think I've ever made it past page 80.

There's that wonderful old song with the line "going where the weather suits my clothes," and what I realize is that, after much, much too long in Arizona, I really don't have the clothes for an Alaska winter.

I have bought a huge, thick pair of gloves that will probably make everybody up there laugh at me. So what. I have to protect my hands so I can keep playing the bass.

Last Boat Out

December 30, on the boat to Alaska. Will actually spend New Year's eve and day on the boat, before disembarking in Skagway on the 2nd. New year, new place. And after all this time in Arizona, I don't really own any warm clothes at all. Could be interesting.

96

When I was in high school, my French teacher, Mrs. Markham, never gave grades higher than a 98. That was a perfect score on her tests, a 98. She said 99 was for the teacher, 100 for God.

I'm feeling like about the best I'm going to get today is 96 or so.

I don't know how this is related, except typing that last sentence made me think of this: a few years back, at Anan Bear Reserve, near Wrangell, Alaska (see my story Do Bears for full treatment of the place), I was sitting on the viewing platform, hanging my legs off. You're not supposed to do that, there are bears everywhere, but it was crowded that day, and this was the only way I could get a picture of a lovely bear standing on a log in very bright, dappled sunlight.

So I took that bear's picture, lowered the camera, and noticed there was another bear, about a foot away from my dangling feet. It was a young bear--the rangers called him Bobo--and he had a nice fish in his mouth, and clearly, all he wanted to do was get under the platform to eat it, but my feet were in his way.

And Bobo had the clearest expression you could imagine on his face: "What are those, and how did they get there?"

And aren't those just the $64,000 questions?

Oops

Have been working too much on the National Geo Traveler piece to write anything else of late. It goes well, very well, although it's coming in too long. This article started off as a 1500-word assignment, then was contracted for 3,000, reassigned at 5,000. I'm trying to keep it to 6,000, but may fail. One hopes this is simply the opening salvo on this subject, leading ultimately to a book. Already, the first spin-off from the research is done and bought, and there are other magazines sniffing around.

Not having as much luck on Japan pieces. Lousy time of year to try and sell these things. But Japan in winter is simply so very, very lovely.

Today's question: do I want to spend Christmas or New Year's on the ferry, headed to my new house in Skagway, a town four blocks wide and 22 blocks long, where it will be cold, dark, and the nearest junk food a 2-hour drive away, on roads that might not be much fun in the dead of winter.

Anything to get out of Arizona once and for all.

Death to Disney

Okay, this is not a travel-related subject, but we cannot sit idly by and allow the Walt Disney Corporation to get away with this. Yes, we all know that Disney has been a force for evil in the world for a very long time--I tried to teach my niece, when she was quite young, to say "Disney is the worst form of cultural imperialism," but she failed to cooperate.

But this time they have gone much, much too far.

They're replacing Christopher Robin in the Winnie the Pooh cartoons with a "six-year-old girl character."

And I had thought they couldn't sink any lower than when they put Pooh in that stupid red shirt.

Enough. If you have anything from the Disney Corporation in your home, take it out and burn it. Picket their stores in the malls. Use their DVDs as clay pigeons.

Big Business has made the world stupid and ugly enough as it is.

They cannot be allowed to get away with this.

Travelling Gods

The taxi driver in Japan asks me why I'm in the town. On pilgrimage, I explain. I'm following the route laid out by Kobo Daishi. I'm just another one of the thousands of people who've taken the path in the past eleven hundred years. The taxi driver bows slightly and turns off the meter. Settai, he explains. A small gift to make the pilgrim's trip easier. He looks at me in the rear view mirror. Pilgrim. Yes. Then he asks me about American contraceptives.
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In Hong Kong, the taxi driver turns around nervously at a red light, twists back to see us. Politely, he asks for my wife's hand. He has been studying to be a palm reader. The textbook lies open on the seat next to him, like the spread wings of a dream. The light changes, but we're soon stuck in traffic again. He twists, my wife offers up her hand. He checks the pages of the book, then makes several oracular pronouncements about her past. Every one of them is correct. He then talks about her future, and years later I wonder why I wasn't paying more attention.
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The taxi driver gets lost. Around us are open rice fields where pure white herons bob for frogs in the dark stubble. I know where I am. I've been this way before, on foot. I offer directions, but the driver doesn't believe me. Twenty minutes later and after much frantic crackling over the radio, he figures out where he is. The ride costs triple what it should, but at least he apologizes.
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The soldier leans in the window, his gun at port arms. He asks a couple of questions. Then he points to the taxi driver. "This man is cheating you," he says to me. "Do you understand?"
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The taxi driver in Nepal bends over his dead engine. The meter clicks from time to time, the price we pay for bothering to find an honest driver who will use the meter instead of bargaining at tourist rates. Looking at the silent engine, the driver has an expression of utter despair on his face. After a while, he points us down the road. The car is not going to move again. We are surprisingly close to where we want to be, and we tip the driver, stepping past a nursing mother whose baby never notices the dead car or the heart broken man staring at a dead engine, while color postcards of eight gods and three movie stars on his dashboard offer no help at all.

What's Next

It's jet lag day, an important part of any trip. I never quite got onto European time, but I'm not anywhere near Arizona time, either, so the day is moving by in a haze, with a frightening amount of work to get done, starting tomorrow. Book proofs to check, four articles to write--maybe more, probably more, I'm bound to be forgetting things--pitching for the Japan trip. I actually turned down an invitation to go to Antarctica this next week because I'm just too busy.

And I'm hoping to be in the house I'm renting in Skagway before the end of the year. With the hospital, the travel, all the rest of it, I've been paying for an empty house for nearly two months now.

The idea of home is pretty much meaningless to me at this point. I've lived in this house for eleven years, but my mind is elsewhere. Very bad, from a Zen point of view, be here now, all that. I wish I could be more like the dog: wake up, walk outside, find a sunny spot, fall asleep.

Actually, I just wish I could get some sleep.

While I was in the Canaries, my dear friend Rachel (rachelwoodburn.com) won both first and third in Art & Antiques magazine's annual photo contest. Hooray for her, to say the least.

As for me, today, it's sitting in the chair, watching dull tv shows, and wondering what time it is. Tomorrow, life starts again, and it's gonna be way busier than a lazy person like me can likely handle.

Last Tango in the Canaries

Plane leaves in about six hours. Before that, have to meet the photographer, explain why I changed everything I said the story was going to be about.

But this morning I wrote the ending, and it´s one of the best endings I´ve ever written.

I had set the story up as an end of the world kind of thing. Now it´s much, much better, and of course, that´s one of the beauties of travel, the improvisation, the surprise. That tropical storm turned out to be a very, very good thing for me, although there are parts of the island here that still don´t have power or running water.

What does one do with two hours to kill in Santa Cruz? Could go down and watch the container port. See if the photography museum is ever actually open. Hang out in the really beautiful church, which is almost chiguresque, but not quite. And yes, I probably spelled that wrong, but what are the odds spell check knows how to spell it right?

I only rarely remember dreams, but last night, I dreamed of bats.

No One Expects the Spanish Inquisition

And clearly, on Tenerife, they did not expect a tropical storm. The electrical line towers have been snapped like twigs, all along the coast.

Part one of the three-day trip home done, La Gomera to Tenerife. The short, easy part. Tomorrow, London--it´ll be 1 am or so by the time I get to my hotel there--and the next day, back to Arizona.

And the same thought keeps coming back to me: this is how I make my living.