A Few People Who Needed to Be Whacked with a Cane

Okay, I promise, this is the last entry that deals with whacking people with canes, but I really don't think I can resist.

First, the guy I met on the Trans-Siberian, back in 1989, who sent out a newsletter to over 300 people he went to high school with. Pre-internet days, so we're talking the guy bought stamps. He was, possibly, the second most boring person I have ever in my life met (no, wait, third), so it's easy to guess what those 300 people did with his newsletter.

The guy on the bus back from Wonder Lake, in Denali Park, who whistled the first four bars of "What Can You Do with a Drunken Sailor" for eight hours straight.

Very nice man in the train compartment, Canton to Beijing. But he had a tapedeck, an endless supply of batteries, and only two tapes: Michael Jackson and Bob Marley. We convinced him we were going to have epileptic seizures if we had to listen to Michael Jackson, so 48 hours straight of Marley. So much trouble in de world. Never listened to reggae again.

A particular Bavarian. Nobody needs to know why. He knows why.

Here's the thing. When people travel, they are not themselves. Ever. They are an image of themselves, sometimes a better one, sometimes a worse one. For me, one of the best aspects of travel is that there is no controlling it. Being a control freak by nature, I find this oddly relaxing. Things happen when they happen, the bus breaks, the train dies, the goat vomits on your shoes.

These people, though, brought themselves along for the trip.

Think of it as a failure of imagination. Failure to realize that all the world demands is attention.

One more: the smurf ass. Oh, he absolutely gets whacked with the cane.

Climbing into Bed with Evelyn

It's after midnight here in Skagway, the wind is howling, blowing a snow as fine as flour. Having once again given up on the idea of ever falling asleep--as soon as I close my eyes, a thousand obessions begin to play across the back of my lids, everything from the scent of orca watching in British Columbia to my absolute outrage that we live in a world where people use the word "microwaveable"--I've got to kill the time somehow (but only in self-defense, as Peter DeVries pointed out), and so have climbed into bed with Evelyn.

Waugh, that is. For reasons that escape me, the Everyman Library issued Waugh Abroad, 1064 pages of sentences like "Prostitution and drug traffic comprised their modest interests, and they were too dense to find evidence of either."

Probably the mere mention of prostitution and drug traffic will move this blog sky high in the Google rankings. Reporting on high school booty dance and teenage take-overs of Victoria's Secret stores certainly did wonders for my friend Amanda's blog, Road Remedies.

Having never been blessed with a lengthy attention span, at any given time, I'm in the midst of reading five or six books. In addition to Evelyn (who is, by page 216, in Abyssinia for the king's coronation), I've been reading Pierre Burton's Klondike Fever, which seems highly appropriate, as the vast majority of people who actually did make it to the Klondike during the 1898 rush came through Skagway. The lot for the house I'm in was laid out back then, and the Dead Horse Trail begins about a block away. Those who did not come this way came through Dyea, which is out at the end of the road. Good to know when you go stir crazy, you can drive nearly ten miles to a ghost town that has been completely swallowed by the forest.

Online, in addition to Amanda's booty call, there's my friend Marie's blog, No Hurry in Kuwait, in which she tries to write a book about Africa (In Search of the Wild Dik-Dik, due out from Seal Press eventually) while living in Kuwait, working on, of all things, an Islamic superhero comic book. Camels with capes? A report in the international edition of the New York Times did point out that one of the female superheroes would be wearing full burqua.

Think how the ratings for the old Wonder Woman TV show would have dropped had she been veiled. And here's an utterly useless bit of trivia: Helen Hunt played Wonder Woman's little sister in the show.

For those who think travel writing is the career of dreams, Carl Parkes has a dose of reality. We're underpaid, underappreciated, over edited, have to actually take things like new paint colors seriously, and whine, whine, gripe, gripe, and the problem is, only other travel writers feel sorry for us. But Carl is dead on right, calling the profession to task in a way not done since the wonderful Motionsickness magazine stopped publishing.

What's the old song? "Why do the wrong people travel, when the right ones stay at home."

Again, because I have a seriously short attention span, I also read a bit of Frederick Copleston's massive History of Philosophy each night. I'm up to Johns Scotus, who was not, as one might assume, Scottish, but rather Irish, and he really had a bug up his ass on a few points.

Finally, just as I'm pretty sure when I went to see Alanis Morissette in concert I was the only man in the place there of my own volition, I get the same feeling reading Mimi Smartypants, who my cousin Patty has decided she wants to marry. Or at least wants to be.

Now, if only I could get some sleep.

Regarding the Fine Art of Whacking People with Canes

Yesterday's post may have left the impression that I'm prone to fits of violence with my cane, whacking annoying teenagers on trains, etc.

This is only partly true.

I never whack anybody who doesn't deserve it. Unlike, say, L., who has been known to use balloons to assault perfectly innocent people watching animals at the zoo, I have never once used my cane to whack somebody who was not in bad need of being whacked.

The cane has been an intermittent necessity for the past 18 months or so. I'm not using it right now, but it is nearby, just in case. It's a good cane, which I bought near Osaka Station in Japan, about 17 or 18 years ago, when, for no clear reason, both of my knees had swollen to the point of being useless. If one has a pair of Vice Grips handy, the cane telescopes neatly into itself, and can fit into a carry on bag.

However, I've found the cane is wonderful in airports. You get on the plane first, security becomes entirely reasonable and solicitous, and, if you look otherwise reasonably young and healthy, like I do, people are actually weirded out enough that they leave you entirely alone.

Now, the cane comes most in handy in crowds. I probably whacked the most people with it in Venice, where the crowds were simply out of hand. Hey, I'm walking with a cane here--why did you just step right in front of me and push?

The lovely thing is, you can whack with great subtlety. Absolutely take out someone's ankle, and then simply smile and say, "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm just not used to this thing yet."

And they forgive you and stay out of your way.

Canes are highly useful in crowded elevators, plus you don't have to use your own fingers to push the buttons--who knows where those buttons have been.

In Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams says you should always travel with a towel, but I'd take the cane instead. It makes you respectable. It gets you to the head of every line. You get better tables in restaurants. With a little practice and some old Fred Astaire movies for inspiration the cane can be quite entertaining while you're waiting for a bus.

Fend off dogs, children, and other small animals.

And in crowds, you can whack people from quite a distance, and they'll never know it was you.

Never.

Because when they look around, you're there innocently leaning on the thing.

Travel, of course, is always a learning experience.

Victoria Station, 1 AM

On my way back from the Canary Islands, I landed at Gatwick around 11:30. Got the very last express train to Victoria, which still got me to the station too late to catch a train to Heathrow.

Which meant I was in for a taxi ride that cost 50 pounds. Oh, how nice to be on expenses.

Anyway, it was a Saturday night, and London had just changed the pub laws, so that there were no longer set closing times. This meant a considerable number of drunks running around, a considerable amount of stuff it's better not to think about on the sidewalk, and, perhaps, a later-night crowd than usual.

When I got into the taxi queue, it was about 1 AM. I was maybe fifty or sixty people back from the front of the line.

The train from Gatwick to Victoria had been crowded and very loud. The carriage I was in was invaded, right before the train pulled out, by a family of Spaniards, maybe a dozen in all, who had enough baggage to start their own circus, complete with tent. In the seats in front of me--I took advantage of my cane and sat in the handicapped and elderly seats--was a teenage boy and his girlfriend. All through the ride, he kept taking pictures of the two of them, holding the camera at arm's length and giving me a migraine with the flash. She was quite pretty in the kind of way teenage boys think is pretty; I did wonder, though, how she ever recognized him in a crowd, since to me he looked like every other teenage boy who is confused enough to think playing soccer is cool. He kept looking proudly at himself in the window reflection, flexing his muscles.

I really wanted to whack both of them with my cane.

At the far end of the car, actually in the space between cars, were a couple sitting quietly on their suitcases. They were probably in their mid-30s, looked like they were coming home from vacation. She had long, pretty blonde hair, and just a very kind face. And he looked like a nice guy.

Every now and then, they'd whisper something to each other, and then go back to their own thoughts. Obviously tired, obviously happy to be home, obviously happy to be sitting together.

As it turned out, they were about five people ahead of me in the taxi line.

The taxi line was a bit complicated, because, first of all, taxis were quite slow in appearing, and when they did appear, they frequently didn't want to go where ever it was the person in the front of the line wanted to be.

So it all took a while. And, having nothing else to do, I kept watching this couple between glances back over my shoulder to see if there were any taxis on the way in.

They told each other little jokes, they carried on a quiet conversation that probably would have meant nothing to anybody around them, because it was full of the language that couples speak, their own language. They held that last collapse at bay for each other with gentle touches and kind words to each other.

They got their cab about an hour after we all got in line. The man leaned in the window, told the driver where they wanted to go, driver nodded and popped the back door open. Woman climbed in, man handed her the suitcases--London taxi design is brilliant--they closed the door, the driver did what drivers do, and drove. The last I saw of them was a flash of her blonde hair as the cab rounded a corner.

Headed for home. They'd use their key, walk into a house where everything was familiar, where they could walk around in the dark, because they knew where everything was.

Lately I've been looking back at an attempt I made at a novel some years ago, and I think the single best line in it is "This is what marriage must be like, I thought: your whole world would have the happy smell of another person."

And when they reached their house, this pretty woman, this man who looked like a nice guy, that's what their world would be.

I got in my own cab about fifteen minutes later, took the long, expensive ride out to Heathrow, got to my hotel, got to my room, was in bed at close to 3 AM. That left me six or seven hours to toss and turn and curse my insomnia before I had to be back at the airport for the flight to the states.

And in that hotel room, thinking about the lovely trip I'd just been on, all the fantastic travel I'd had all year--the Canary Islands, Scotland, the arctic, the pink ruins of Petra--all the trips coming up, all I could think about was that couple, how calm they seemed, how perfectly at home in each other's company.

And all I could think was: I want their life.

The Weather in Skagway

At one point today, it was snowing one street over—that’s as many streets as there are, before you hit mountain—but not here. About once an hour, huge, wet, blizzard flakes fell, so I couldn’t even see across the street. This would last for ten minutes or so, then let up. When I went out for my daily look at the ocean, it was 38 degrees, and it felt absolutely balmy.

Somehow, my daily ocean time coincided with the incoming tide, so over in the Skagway River, it looked like the water was flowing backwards, at least as far as the bridge over to Yakutania Point. In summer, that’s a wonderful place to sit and watch the cruise ships pull out for the evening, all light and hopeless noise.

Twice I’ve gotten to go out on the tugboat that escorts the cruise ships out. We’d idle alongside, while passengers waved, ignored, or flashed us, depending on their moods.

Tonight, the sky is almost perfectly clear, only a few clouds to the north. I read a while ago that there are only about 2,000 stars visible to the naked eye, but nights like this make that seem a pathetic lie. I can only remember a few times seeing this many stars: last year in British Columbia, walking across the field of a farm where they raised water buffalo; the year before, in Hawaii, driving up from the volcanoes, and in New Zealand, overnight in Doubtful Sound, where I did not recognize a single star outside the southern cross, which was much smaller than it seems like it should have been.

Tonight, the Big Dipper is huge and pointing straight down on the north horizon. Orion’s belt stretches across the mountains to the west. At that point, we run out of constellations I can name, but one must figure Capricorn is out there, and my own constellation, Aquarius, which, of course, has nothing at all to do with my life, nor the lives of anybody I know born under that sign.

Remember when it was the age of Aquarius? Lost hope is a sad, sad thing.

In a minute here, I shall go back out and look at the stars again. It doesn’t bother me that I can’t name any of the arrangements; I tend to think names are given by people who are in places where they don’t really belong, trying to classify the world into “like home, not like home.” People who are where they should be, on the other hand, simply know what home looks like and don’t need all that differentiation.

Supposed to snow more tomorrow.

"Ex-cheerleader pleads guilty in bathroom brawl"

That was one of the headlines on Yahoo news today, apparently the seventh most important thing you needed to know on this January day, behind the usual political babble and a change in i-Tunes.

My immediate reaction, of course, is to hope a comet comes and wipes us all off the face of the planet once and for all. Clearly, if there are actually people out there who care about ex-cheerleaders fighting in bathrooms, our civilization passed the point of collapse long ago.

Remember when news was actually news? O.J. might have been the final nail in that coffin, one great orgy of pathetic voyeurism.

This brings up the question, then, of what does matter. Not the latest lies of politicians (which I equate to something my friend Dees said about TV: "There are clouds passing by in the sky all the time, too, but I don't feel a need to watch them"), nor the promise that running out and buying something will fill that emptiness you feel late at night.

For a couple reasons, I've been thinking about the space program lately. Okay, in the next ten years or so, space tourism will be a big thing, and I'm a travel writer, so I should want to go into space. I don't really, though, at least not until they get it so you're actually in space. High altitude doesn't excite me all that much. I want weightlessness and dark.

But I was thinking about my parents waking me up to watch Neil Armstrong make a grammatical mistake on the moon. The entire world was watching at that moment, everybody cared. I was six years old at the time. How many TV moments can you remember from age six?

In an amazing article by Jeff Greenwald that I was reading last night, in which he interviewed Buzz Aldrin (number two on the moon), it was pointed out that before the moon landing, people thought there were limits. This far, and no further. Then, putting people on the moon--go out and buy a GameBoy, it has far more computing power than NASA did in 1969--showed that pretty much anything is possible, no matter how loopy it may seem.

Much can be accomplished with patience and enthusiasm. Or, as a beachcomber once told Paul Theroux, you can go anywhere, if you're not in a hurry.

That's important. The elevation of human spirit--look what we did--is important, more important than a million cheerleaders bitch slapping each other in a million bathrooms.

And, for me, sitting here today looking around at the ruin of several parts of my life, nothing matters more than the trying. Patience and enthusiasm. Maybe, maybe, doomed to failure isn't quite doomed.

Now if we could just bitch slap Yahoo for its part in making the world an even stupider place, we could all sleep better at night.

We're better than this.

Death from Above

This has no doubt long faded from the collective memory, but in the early 1970s, Comet Kahoutek was going to end the world. Among the many theories was one--I really love this one--that the comet would be so bright no one would get any sleep and we'd all die from sleep deprivation.

There was a cult, the Children of God, who were quite sure this was the end. They were a splinter group from the Jesus People, and the founder, David Berg, later changed his name to Moses. California, he said, was going to be destroyed by an earthquake, and in January 1974, the rest of the country was going to get it from the comet. He was also a big proponent of "Hookers for Jesus."

He had a couple thousand followers, apparently. Google "Mo Letters," and you get more than twelve million hits, although most of them seem to be websites of right-wing religous groups railing against this obscure thing most people have never heard of.

Anyway. The point is, the world didn't end. Unless it did, and nobody has bothered to tell us yet. I do think that's possible.

The comet came and went. I remember getting up on the roof of the house to look at it through binoculars. This makes me feel sad and stupid that when Halley's Comet came around, I barely bothered to peek at it.

There are a couple points here, although maybe I'm stretching it with some of them. So let me just give you this:

back when there was such a thing as the music of the spheres, each planet had its own song. Earth was g, a flat, g.

The world didn't end, the comet didn't blind us, and today in Skagway, the finest, most powdery snow I've ever seen fell.

What are we listening to?

50 Miles Past the Middle of Nowhere

I remember one day in Japan--I'm thinking it was the same day a rat crawled out from under a vending machine and died on my foot, but maybe not--looking around and realizing that in all the time I'd been there, it had never once been dark, or quiet.

The first house where I lived, the people in the next house over played the same enka song, every night at 2 am. If you're not familiar with enka, go stick a cat in a garbage disposal; that would be the sound of Bach compared to enka.

And also in that first house, there was an alley that ran along one side. On day in February, they came and dug a six-foot hole in the alley, right outside my bedroom. Then that night, they filled it back up.

This went on until I moved out in April. Every morning, dig the hole. Every evening, fill the hole back up.

Meanwhile, they put up sawhorses with big blinking lights to let you know that, come daylight, there would be a hole here.

Paper windowshades and bright orange blinking lights don't go well together.

It was never dark, and it was never quiet.

I just stepped outside here to see if the light to the north was the aurora or the full moon hitting a cloud. I heard a dog barking, about three blocks away.

And that was it.

Light

Today was the first sunny day since I arrived in Skagway, and to call it sunny really isn't doing it justice.

This actually started last night, when the wind--freezing cold and howling--blew out all the clouds. I kept checking out the front window for northern lights, but the moon was just too bright, and the way it was hitting the snow on the mountains meant that end of the valley was like looking at a stage.

Most of the day, despite the perfectly clear sky, the sun was behind the mountains. Let me say again, this is a really narrow valley. But around the time I went to the post office, about 2 in the afternoon, the sun had come out, low, past the mountains to the south, so that it was hanging over the Lynn Canal.

For the first time since I arrived, I put my sunglasses on. Now, my sunglasses are not your normal ones. First, the colder it gets, the darker these get. I paid a fortune for that feature, to prevent snow blindness. Second, they already start off dark enough I could weld through them. When I bought them, the shop didn't want to make them that dark, said it would be bad for my eyes. I explained my eye problems, and they said, "oh, okay."

So: 29 degrees out, the glasses have darkened another 10% or so.

And still I was squinting in the light.

It was sharp, it was relentless, it was everywhere.

And what I suddenly realized was that I hadn't seen light this clean--no pollution, no dust, no nothing but air--in years.

The moon's still too bright for northern lights tonight, but I'm still going to keep going to the window to check.

The Silver Bowl

There's a Zen parable that talks about the reflection of the moon in a silver bowl. How do you know where the reflection stops and the bowl begins?

Of course, these guys were all seriously sleep deprived.

My favorite Zen story is this: two monks were walking along when they came to a river crossing, where a beautiful woman was waiting. The water was fast and deep, and she couldn't get across, so the senior monk simply picked her up, carried her across, and went on his way.

After a while, he noticed the junior monk was seriously pissed.

What's the matter?

Junior, clearly a dogmatist, started yelling, how could you defile yourself, how could you touch a woman, etc., etc.

And the senior monk said, Are you still carrying her around? I put her down back by the river.

The mountains tonight are pure silver in the moonlight.

William Dalrymple

There aren't that many writers who make me want to scream with envy, they're so good and I know I'll never write that well, but Dalrymple is the one who gets me every time.

A small excerpt from his book In Xanadu, which is probably the best travel book since The Snow Leopard:

“'What is “travel writer?”

In Turkish, travel writing sounds a very sinister occupation.

'It's a man who travels for his living,' I said

'Like a bus driver?'

'Yes, like a bus driver.'

The mullah translated this for the Afghans. This went down well too; perhaps Afghans have a special regard for their bus drivers. There was a gleeful chorus of 'Bussyman! Bussyman!' from their ranks.
'Come with us,' said the mullah. 'Our bus welcomes you.'

Now What?

Tomorrow morning, I send off the Quiet article to National Geographic Traveler. It's just under 6,000 words long, the longest article I've ever written, and, for comparison, roughly four times longer than the average magazine article.

In one way or another, I've been working on the thing for eight and a half months, since a day in Ireland on which much, much, much changed.

Everything has changed while I've been working on this piece.

And I've been working on it so long, I no longer see the words when I look at it.

Tomorrow it's gone, although iterations of it, echos of it, remain. It's a subject I'll be coming back to quite often.

I know where the quietest place in the world is.

But I have no idea at all what to do next.

Snapshot

Went down to look at the ocean today. It was snowing down in the Lynn Canal, but not here in town; back the other way, towards the Yukon, the sun was lighting the mountains a pure, pure white.

And in the silver water in front of where, in a couple months, there will be lines of cruise ships, were a couple of harbor seals, their small black heads cutting tiny, tiny wakes.

St. John Bosco

Hold on: this one's going to be a bumpy ride.

St. John Bosco, whose feast day is the last day of January, was known for his work with kids, particularly poor kids in bad neighborhoods. One of the ways he'd get their attention was to juggle--which has made him (although I'm not sure the Pope knows about this) the patron saint of jugglers.

When we went to get our dog, I woke up in the middle of the night the night before, and thought, "Bosco," before I went back to sleep. So when we got her, that was clearly her name. There was no reason for me to wake up and think "Bosco," but sometimes you just have to accept these unexpected gifts from the universe.

Bosco (the dog, not the saint) has always been a wee bit strange. She's a whippet/Aussie shepherd mix, and that means that her natural instinct is to round things up and then kill them. She was left at the pound much too young, and never learned many of the normal ways to be a dog, so she had to make up her own rules. She really likes rules, and once she has made a rule, she sticks with it. For instance, the rope with the ball on it has different rules than the rope without the ball, and if you play by the wrong rules, she'll stop and stare at you until you decide to behave.

Now, Bosco (again, the dog, not the saint; we're pretty much done with the saint) is a white dog, but she has light brown blotches across her back, as if someone spilled some Bosco over her (the chocolate milk, not the dog or the saint). If you're deeply interested in Bosco the drink, the appropriate website is www.boscoworld.com, and you can buy Bosco hats and t-shirts, etc. there.

Bosco (the dog) also, strangely, has always liked to juggle. This goes back to her strange genetics. She'd go into the backyard, pick up a few oranges that had fallen from the trees, bring them in and carefully place them on the antique Bokhara rug that she always thought belonged to her. She'd then put the oranges into a line, bat them back and forth, making them weave little patterns. Quite good juggling, really, for somebody with no thumbs.

And when she was finished, she'd kill them, ripping them to shreds.

Here in Skagway, there are three mountains visible out my livingroom window. The closest, about a quarter mile away (this is a very narrow valley) is maybe 1500 feet high or so. The one behind that is perhaps twice that high. The third is over 4,500 feet, and the way I know this is that the first two mountains are soft and rounded, the third is hard and spiky. During the Ice Age, the glaciers in this part of the world were about a mile deep, so round mountains are under a mile, spiky mountains are over a mile. Easy to remember.

Today, it has snowed off and on all day; first one mountain, then another, then another will disappear, and they'l reappear in different order each time the snow lets up. Sometimes I can see the spike of the tallest one; sometimes, all I can see is the one that's right here close.

And all I can figure is that the storm is juggling the mountains.

A nod to St. John Bosco.

And, much as I know how much Bosco (the dog) hates cold and wet, how much she'd hate it here--

there are few things harder than trying to make a new home when your dog is thousands of miles away.

Maybe It's Fun to Be Insane

Today I finished my morning's work, then drove over to Dyea. Skagway gets all the press as where the gold rush filtered through, but really, until the White Pass & Yukon Route got its tracks laid, more of the miners started in Dyea, a couple miles west of here, because it was closer to the Chilkoot Pass trailhead.

The big problem with Dyea is that the ocean there ends in a massive mud flats. Miners would get off the boats, throw their gear onto the mud, then run, back and forth, trying to get everything to solid ground, before the tide came back in. For a while there was a pier, close to a mile long, but it wasn't all that wide and it wasn't all that helpful.

Not a whole lot's left of Dyea: some boards where the warehouse used to be, a few other scraps of wood that were once buildings. Further up the trail, there were towns with 20,000 and more people in them, now vanished without a trace.

You had to get to Dyea in the winter, because you wanted to be at Lake Bennett, at the top of the pass, before the ice broke, so you could build your boat and be ready to take the Yukon up to Dawson City.

It was 25 degrees in the ruins of Dyea today. Everybody I'm meeting is telling me winter hasn't even started this year. The river was half frozen, there was a dusting of snow on everything, and the mountains north are huge and jagged and pure, pure white.

Now, imagine facing that in canvas clothes and with a ton of gear that you have to get over the pass.

Official estimates are that of the nearly quarter million people who headed for the goldfields, fewer than fifty got rich from gold strikes.

What Am I Doing Here

I have arrived in Skagway, Alaska. If I'd arrived here in the winter of 1898, when this place was a boomtown and the gateway to the Klondike gold fields, I'd have had to be carrying over a ton of supplies, enough to get me the rest of the way north and last me through a year.

But I brought one box of books, an electric bass, an upright bass, and two computers. Whereas the stampeders would have been carrying pounds of bacon and onions, I had a box of Poptarts.

Times change.

This is a small, small town, in a very beautiful place. The mountains are covered with snow, but the temperature is in the nice, low 30s. The grocery store is roughly the size of my house in Arizona, and prices are about double what you really want to think about paying. It's quite strange to drive around a corner and see train cars for the White Pass and Yukon Route Railway, but it's not only what got the miners up the pass, it's what has revitalized this place.

Right now, there are probably no more than five or six cars moving at any time. In summer, there will be a million tourists, crammed onto nine blocks of one street.

Right now, it's a normal Alaska town--when I stopped at the library last night and the librarian told me the grocery store was closed, she offered me her own dinner, just so I wouldn't have to go to bed hungry.

But I had my box of Pop Tarts, so I was okay.

There's today's lesson from Skagway. No matter what year, bring food.