Last One to Leave, Shoot out the Lights

Entry #131, a nice prime number. My last posting. I seem to have no words of my own, so I shall use those of others.

Jim Morrison: “This is the end.”

Sign held up by Muslim protester: “Freedom of Expression is Western Terrorism.”

Lewis Carroll: "'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat. 'We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
'You must be," said the Cat. 'or you wouldn't have come here.'"

Adrienne Rich:

“I do not know
who I was when I did those things
or who I said I was
or whether I willed to feel
what I had read about
or who in fact there was with me
or whether I knew, even then
that there was doubt about these things."

My favorite piece of art I’ve ever seen. At a student exhibit, in a dark room, a piece called “Reassuring Future.” The guy had taken a large globe, bashed it with a hammer, painted it flat black, and put a tape loop inside that said, in a little monster voice, “Everything’ll be juuuussssst fine.”

I wish I’d seen Albania before they ruined it, but it's true, "Road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs."

Groucho Marx: "Hello, I must be going."

Lou Reed Knows Everything

The penultimate post:

Lou Reed: "Life's like mayonaise soda."

By the way, if you google the word "penultimate," ebay promises to sell it to you.

The Irony of Giving Something the Title "Untitled."

"Guilty and degraded. We've bastardized ourselves and lost our purity."

-"Circular Parade," The Beautiful Mistake

Atom Vampire

Watching this old movie called Atom Vampire, I think--I wasn't paying much attention at the beginning, and it's a little hard to follow now. As best I can figure, the vampire character dug too deeply into the bag of atomic secrets, and now the brave, handsome police captain will off him. Typical 1950s.

Still, better than Titanic, which I suffered through the other night. More realistic effects, too.

Out in the desert near the Trinity Site, a rock shop sells bits of rock that got slagged by the first nuclear blast. In Japan, one of my students lived over the mountains from Hiroshima (accent is on the second syllable, let's get that straight once and for all), and said she heard the blast.

My best friend in college once wrote a brilliant poem about her grandfather, who was supposed to watch the Trinity test, but was on sick call that day. So, the poem said, "he missed watching trees come at him at a million miles an hour," and so on. "So what I learned/was that you can avoid the end of the world if you stay home sick."

Where's the new frontier we were promised? Where's my flying car?

Nope. We're just all in duck and cover mode.

Three more of these, and then we're out of here.

And Because Amanda Whined

My dear friend Amanda (roadremedies.blogspot.com) has complained that these entries do not link together in any sort of normal structure. She wants chronology, she wants a sequence of events.

I have none to offer.

Amanda will just have to learn to suffer silently.

Only the Last Inch Hurts

Paul Theroux has always said he expects his death to come in some Appointment in Samarra way--he will have traveled somewhere at great trouble and expense, and then be done in by, say, faulty electrical wiring, which is what got Thomas Merton, after years in a monastery in Kentucky. He flew to Thailand for a conference, and faulty fan/shower did not mix.

I can't think of the man's name offhand, but the guy who wrote the definitive guide to the hiking and trekking in the Himalayas stepped off a curb somewhere very urban and was killed.

I've died three times, myself. It was quite peaceful all three. The first, in a lake in Alaska, was due to hypothermia. I remember sinking, I remember feeling very quiet, and I remember thinking it would be nice to wave goodbye to my friends. I have no memory of getting to shore.

The next two times were in the hospital. Not worth talking about.

My three favorite death stories are these:

A farmer was standing in his field in China, minding his own business, when a 900-lb hailstone landed on him. At least that's what it weighed when someone finally got around to weighing it, or that's what they told the police, or something. Nine hundred pounds is what made the papers. One minute, you're hoeing barley, the next you're done.

Along the same vein, here in Alaska, some years ago, a man caught a very large halibut, well over 400 pounds. That would probably make the fish maybe ten feet long, four feet wide. Big fish. A halibut a quarter that size responds to three bullets in the head by getting angry and diving again.

This guy, with the help of a crane and winch, got the fish on board, but it wasn't quite dead yet, and started to flop around. Man slipped in fish scales, and, as best they could figure some days later when they found the boat drifting, fish whacked man in head with its tail.

Finally, there was the ancient Greek, whose name I will not try to spell. He was walking along the beach one day and noticed birds picking things up, gaining some altitude, and dropping them. He went closer to see what was going on. The birds were dropping turtles, to break the shells.

Apparently, a turtle falling from great height is also enough to break a skull.

When I was in high school, I had a teacher who liked to talk about death during classes, especially during tests. Time after time after time, he'd return to a very simple scenario: if you're going to do yourself in, jump off something very, very tall. That way, you have the excitement of freefall--hey, people pay good money for that--and, as he would say,

"Only the last inch hurts."

Yep.

"I must now commit suicide."

The best passage I've read in quite a while, in the book, Emperor of Scent, about how people smell things. In this case, they're discussing a certain kind of very pungent cheese:

"Americans think, 'Good God!' The Japanese think, 'I must now commit suicide.' The French think, 'Where's the bread?'"

Unpasturized cheese is, of course, illegal in this country, because among urban poverty, illegal wars, a president who came to power through illegitimate means and who should be hung as a war criminal, I for one sleep better at night knowing that my government is protecting me from eating cheese that actually has flavor.

But that's a rant for another day. More, I was thinking about suicide.

When I lived in Japan, I studied iaido, which is an obscure and utterly pointless martial art, sort of like pantomime with fake swords. I used a real sword once, on old tatami that had been soaked in a bathtub for several days. They say that after the tatami is properly soggy, it has the same consistency of a human body.

The sword went right through it. Zip.

My teacher, who spoke no English at all, was getting up in years, sort of stuck in those glory day reminiscences you expect at a VFW post.

And, one of his stories went, he once was the second on a seppuku. Forget the word "hari-kari." Never once heard that in four years in the country. Seppuku.

So, the deal is this: the man (or woman, although it was traditionally more common for women to simply walk into the ocean) kneels, picks up a knife, and makes two cuts, one vertical, one horizontal, through the guts.

This, as you might expect, kind of hurts.

However, since we're talking a country with more than a minor death obsession, and that whole samurai ethic, you can't really show it hurts. You make the first cut, you make the second cut, you keep your face as calm as if you're watching a really, really boring television show.

Meanwhile, the second stands behind and just a bit to the side, sword poised. And it's his job to watch the face of the guy with the knives. At the first clue the soon to be dead person is showing pain, the second, in one cut, lops off the suicide's head.

Which may or may not make the whole thing suicide, but that's a different point.

Lopping off someone's head is not as easy as it sounds, not even with the best swords the world has ever known. If the cut isn't exactly right, the blade could deflect on a vertebrae, and with improper force, it could even get stuck.

Then there's the whole issue of the last flap of skin.

When I was in high school, my English teacher, Mr. Estrem, liked to discuss ways of killing oneself. He tended to do this during tests. His favorite, the one he always returned to, was jumping off something very high, because then "only the last inch hurts."

The second did not lop off the suicide's head. The second lopped off the suicide's head, stopping just short of a full cut. Ideally, a thin flap of skin was left, leaving the head attached to the body.

For some reason, they didn't bother to include this in the movie version of Shogun.

There's an article currently making the rounds of the travel writing community, written by Robert Kaplan, who says that in order to understand a place--and this, he says, is the failing of TV news and newspapers today--is that nobody stays around long enough to see what's actually going on. You go in for the sound bite, you get back out.

When we were upstairs in the dojo, the cicadas going off full blast, so loud it was almost impossible to think, there was all the time in the world.

Microwaving the Duck

Let me say this, for the eleventh time: I will never do this to myself again.

Earlier today, I sent off the fourth edition of Adventure Guide to the Alaska Highway. When Lynn and I did the first edition of this--our first book--back in, what, '91, I think, the manuscript came out to 220 pages, and we were stretching to get that much in. This time, I sent off 15 files, adding up to 636 pages.

I make more money for single magazine articles at this point in my career.

I don't know what draws me back to guidebooks, when, each time, I am quite sure this is the last time. Once or twice, it's been an offer too good to refuse: the fourth edition of the Inside Passage book came about simply because the very fine folks at Alaska Vistas invited me to join them on the Stikine River again. I'd done the river with them in '98, on the second edition (which I'd sworn would be the last), and it was one of the high points of my travel life. And so a third edition was born, to give me a reason to go up to Alaska for a summer--which stretched out to nearly six months--and another chance to float the Stikine. We'd pull the raft onto river beaches each night that were covered in moose tracks, and for the second time, on this moose-infested river, I did not see a single one of the things.

But in my tent, listening to avalanches break down the mountains of the Stikine Icefield, I was perfectly happy. It was worth writing another book for.

This one, the fourth time around for the Alaska Highway, was to pay for a trip to Europe. I had to go to Ireland, and while there, figured I might as well look around a few other places I hadn't been. I'm happiest traveling without assignments, simply showing up and wandering around and seeing what the story is, but that's an expensive way to go about life.

Flew to London, Prague, took the train to Budapest, finished off in Venice.

636 pages later, I'm done paying for that trip.

And yeah, it was worth it. Late night walking down by the estuary in Ireland, what I learned on the Charles Bridge in Prague, Budapest's main museum, so rich in masterpieces the Rembrandts were almost hidden, the sound of high heels very late at night in Venice.

But I'm never doing this to myself again.

The Light on the Flats

A few years ago, I more or less went blind. Oh, I could still see. Sometimes. If the light was right. And if I didn't have to blindfold myself because of the pain in my eyes. Went to every specialist in the city, they never did figure out what was wrong with me, and one day, my sight just started to come back. Except for night vision and peripheral vision, but who needs those, right? I have an Arizona driver's license. It's good until I'm 60.

At perhaps the most blind part of all this, I flew up to Alaska, rented a car, and drove a couple thousand miles. The first day, driving out of Anchorage, I rolled the window down, and just past Eklutna--not even 20 miles from town--I started to feel really lightheaded, sick. And I thought no, no way, not on the first day of my trip.

And then I realized it was oxygen. Pure oxygen high. Living in Phoenix, I'd forgotten what air was supposed to be like.

The trip was quite an experience, because there were frequent times when I couldn't tell the difference between the road and the trees along side the road, and I must have hit the brakes for a couple hundred stump bears.

Near the end of the trip, I was at Beluga Point, just south of Anchorage. Twilight--the time of day when I saw the least--was coming on, but there were maybe thirty belugas headed towards the point, and I wasn't about to miss that.

We could hear them from maybe a mile off, barking and calling to each other.

A young woman sitting on the rocks near me noticed I was having trouble and handed me her binoculars, wouldn't take them back once I told her what was going on. "A pleasure shared," she said, "is a pleasure doubled."

The belugas came right up to where we were, just feet from the rocks. Listening to them was like listening to a room full of hyperactive kids make balloons squeak. But there was also that exhale sound, when they came up to breathe, and once, just once, I saw a baby, neatly tucked in behind its mother's fin, as the two of them moved in perfect unison.

And I thought, okay. If I go blind after this, okay. I saw this.

Thankfully, I didn't go blind. And today, I drove, on a road that was pure ice, out to Dyea, over the bridge on the Taiya River, past the slide cemetery, past the campground, past the parking lot for the ghost town where there were once twenty or thirty thousand hopeful miners, waiting to head over the Chilkoot (that dreadful famous picture you see, insane people walking straight uphill in snow). I'd never gone past that before, but the road continued, over a one-lane bridge, and then out onto the flats at the head of the inlet.

Maybe two feet of snow on the ground--deep enough it rubbed against the undercarriage of the car sometimes--the "service 4WD" light blinking on the dash, and then the sun came out from behind the one cloud in the sky.

It lit the inlet on fire, turned the snow into a blinding spotlight, focused the mountain light like we were in the bottom of a giant parabolic mirror.

And I was, for just a moment, blind again.

And again, I was okay with it.

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.