Jonathan Larson

A modern highway winds west from the palms of Jericho – reputedly the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth – upwards into parched hills.  But there is an alternative route: a pilgrim trail that disappears up the Wadi Qelt beyond the city ruins.  A rise brings into view the shimmers – was that a whiff […]

Our caravan of eight souls, riding a now sightly battered VW sedan with trailer, possessed none of the gait or riches of the camel trains that once plied the Silk Roads.  But we had gathered tales of our own, fought the pressures of time and the hazards of long-arc travels.  With those credentials we slipped […]

From the rarified air and drama of the Elburz mountains the road brought us down into a broad bowl embracing Iran’s capital, Tehran.  Second only to Cairo for size in the region, the city possessed an orderly air having risen almost from nothing in the course of a single century.  Unlike other cities we’d seen, […]

Ride down the valleys northwest of Mashhad (Iran) toward the Caspian basin and you find yourself rapping at the gates of staggering human dramas.   As the road turns south you see traces of that story: ruined ramparts of a great wall, sometimes called the ‘Red Snake’, rivaling in scale the Great Wall of China.  […]

Having long sauntered through the city bazaars of South Asia – the alleyways of open kitchens, of cobblers and mountains of turmeric, of sari merchants and blacksmiths – we regarded the outskirts of Mashhad as something like tomorrow-land.  At evening, haloes of neon illuminated service stations, stores sat in geometric order teeming with western goods […]

We met Dave ‘the Pie Guy’ Hulett at his unassuming south Minneapolis eatery.  In a region famous for autumn desserts, he’s perfected an apple streusel number that won him national notice sometime back. But if you think his pies deserve a Michelin star, you should hear him tell a salty story or two.    He […]

For many years there hung on our living room wall a bazaar scene from childhood. It featured a white-bearded man at the roadside in lotus position, before him a brazier crowned with a wok. In the wok lay a bed of sand upon which he stirred to roasted perfection the peanuts prized by passers-by. This […]

In the summer of 2013, my wife, Mary Kay, and I set out from Phoenix (AZ, USA) driving north into upland hills and forests that lead on to the vistas, the peaks and palisades, of Grand Canyon country.  A plume of smoke dominated the western horizon, a tell-tale sign we soon learned, of a wildfire […]

There is this expression once common in cultured discourse, ‘the law of the Medes and Persians’, used to describe what is immutable: like the Pole Star by which mariners steer their course.  A similar tautology heard during sports interviews would be, ‘It is what it is.’  There’s no changing this truth, say the sports stars, […]

You’ve seen the pictures.  Vast refugee camps of makeshift shelter shrouded in dust: Darfur, Gaza, Somalia, Syria, Pakistan.  About the most elegant thing one might call them is ‘tented hope’.  Given the misery, it begs the imagination to think how this could ever be seen as ‘refuge’.  Could they possibly have fled anything worse than […]

The hinterland of Asia and Africa remains largely, even today, a nighttime realm lit by candles, lanterns and oil lamps.  Sometimes just by open fires.  Far from the glare of city streets, life lived by such humble, primal lights retains a fragile beauty.  It hints at the vast darkness from which creation appeared and imparts […]

Sift the clutter of this festival season in the northern hemisphere, and a few things do answer the test of longevity.  They are elements recognized – claimed and treasured – by many of our global neighbors.  At some primal level it turns out, we do yet share ancient impulses, perhaps unawares, with kin distant to […]

I remember riding through the steam-vintage railyards of India and seeing the hopelessly sooty signs on lamp posts and station walls: Cleanliness is next to godliness.  The kind of thing Gandhi might have said at his ashram though others say John Wesley got there first. It’s a sentiment shared around the world.  Stop for a […]

During Africa’s struggle to be free, and as Angola’s Portuguese colonial system crumbled, a scramble brought rival forces into the field fighting for advantage in the independence that was sure to follow.  I ventured into that maelstrom from neighboring Congo to assess what relief supplies might be useful to the victims of that strife in […]

Hercules, the ancients say, in his wandering and labors came to the western limit of the Mediterranean where a great mountain, the Atlas, lay athwart his path.  Not one for nuance, some say in the fury of madness, he smashed a passage through the ranges, and so appeared the straits of Gibraltar, the headlands left […]

Is there any corner of Africa quite the equal of the Barbary Coast –  what the modern world knows as Morocco?  Its northern shore, a rocky buttress ‘gainst the turquoise tide of the Mediterranean.  Where Punic and Roman ruins sit astride the bluffs and valleys.  Where the High Atlas shelter the Amazigh, the Berbers, once […]

You will know that you have strayed from well-traveled routes when you arrive at a riverbank and there is no bridge.  Since ancient times, and especially in rainy backcountry, this is an epic scene: river landings with dugouts drawn up on the strand.  The figure of boat and ferryman is so central to human experience […]

Say ‘fireworks’ to most any soul on the planet – child or adult – and there will follow a fountain, a vivid geyser, of story.  The pyrotechnics celebrated in lore and poetry are rooted after all in spiritual struggle: their boom and flash created to drive away shades of misery and misfortune.  But they end […]

Somewhere between the jet set and the purist pilgrims who shamble along the Camino de Santiago are those who ride the ‘bus’, a shortened form of the more picturesque 19th cent. French term, ‘omnibus’.  It’s that ‘omni’ part that gives pause – omni being Latin for ‘all’.  Which explains a great deal about bus travel […]

Paul McCartney, so the story says, retreated alone to a farm in Scotland once where he sat at the piano gazing on the trace of a road meandering wild heather, the moors and lochs beyond – in short, his life – and penned a ballad: ‘The Long and Winding Road’. Were there a list of […]

Come September 11, 2021, by presidential decree, the last troops of a Western alliance will strike their regimental colors, stow their gear and board massive transports for rear bases in Europe, the Middle East, and North America.  They leave behind razor-wire perimeters, bunkers, the tangled wreckage of warfare, frightened collaborators, and trauma as far as […]

On the southern fringes of the Kalahari across the interior of southern Africa stretch ranches and dryland farming in all directions.  Here and there outcrops and hills break the monotony of the plain often overlooking seasonal streams and rivers.  Near such a ridge, in 1924 the unlikely settlement of Taung (‘lion’s den’) was the epicenter […]

Spring may be the season of daffodils and birdsong, but a shift in the jet stream also lifts a curtain on the annual drama of tornadoes.  We once sat enthralled while listening in disbelief to the nonchalance of friends in a Tulsa, OK suburb who described the ravages of a storm that passed within hailing […]

Not only the road to Mandalay, but city streets the length and breadth of Myanmar stream today with protestors flashing the three-fingered salute, with flotillas of motorcycles and scooters, monks in maroon robes, even the occasional elephant.  Unseen are the armies of government workers, railway staff, nurses and doctors, power plant personnel and bank tellers […]

Few cities in Europe can match Barcelona for its storehouse of cultural riches.  The tourist industry knows it only too well, sending 30 million visitors coursing its way every year.  Very nearly all of them were surrounding the famous Sagrada Familia basilica the day we arrived by train from Valencia. We’d been foresighted enough to […]

No darkness on earth can match the depth of a desert night.  No firmament of stars can rival the spectacle of a desert sky.  For the most part it is only the drifted face of sand and the beasts of the wild who are witness to such silent marvels. Except a small fraternity of herders […]

I traveled with a friend one day to visit a woman healer in a village at the edge of the Kalahari.  She received us eagerly as we chattered about her late father, a prominent bishop whose mantle she had taken up.  She set out some hand-crafted folding chairs slung with strips of cowhide of a […]

Make your way, as we did once, southeast from Marrakech up the Ourika Valley into the Atlas mountains of Morocco, and you could well find yourself on the second floor of a stone cottage, sipping sheeba, a hot cup of Berber hospitality.  With the roar of snow melt in the background, our host explains that […]

Proverbs, often referred to as ‘deep language’, are a ready mark of traditional societies.  And their absence from everyday discourse marks a shift away from ‘wisdom’ toward a knowledge, or information culture. I once heard a hacker say that creeping into a guarded digital domain is like breaking into a gothic cathedral; finding architecture replete […]

When we set out on travels to remote locations, I’ve made it a habit to carry in my satchel a small shortwave radio even in this age of the internet.  Deep in the Himalaya, in equatorial rain forest, or the desert interiors of Africa, a small hand set with fully extended aerial has permitted access […]

Those who scan the faith scene of the Western world continue to write obituaries for the forlorn churches of Europe, where a handful of stubborn faithful gather on appointed days to full-throated baroque organ and sonorous liturgy.  A wistful poet has named this scene ‘the threadbare brocade of a passing age.’ Some years ago I […]

A mail-in ballot has arrived at our address here in Durham, North Carolina.  It came with little fanfare: the clack of our mailbox lid as the postman made a noontime delivery.  I am aware that the ether is stormy now with quarreling about the transaction it represents.  And heavy clouds forewarn of what is yet […]

I have a fascination for islands.  It surfaced when this eight-year-old roamed Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’, castaway on the ‘Isle of Despair’. These penchants rise somehow from the depths of psyche, roused in me by childhood stops where island names ring like rhapsody: Hawaii, Formosa (now Taiwan), Honshu, Cebu, Penang, Java, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).  Then, […]

Picture a holiday charity fundraiser under chandeliers, the well-heeled rubbing elbows midst chatter about Christmas markets in Bavaria and the beaches of Bali.  My wife and I found ourselves there by some social accident last year, and, drinks in hand, worked our way to a quiet corner table where a 60-ish couple sat alee of […]

The river steamers of yesterday, with a blast of their whistles, would cast off hawsers from the Hooghly River docks opposite Kolkata, and drift gently with the current past the grime and smoke of an Asian city into a gloaming of the world’s largest river delta, the Sundarbans.  There the waters of the sacred Ganga, […]

The interface of the wild and the world of human settlement is dicey territory to be sure.  Whether the elephants of the Okavango, the orangutan of Sumatra or the pangolins of Asia, wild creatures everywhere face unfriendly odds.  Jacquie Oberg, now of small town Minnesota, should know.  Some of those creatures ended up in her […]

As nations flail now for want of sage, moral leaders even while stalked by ruin, it would be fair to ask where we might turn our eyes.  What moorings might serve as safe harbor for the fashioning of a hereafter?  What landmarks can reliably guide us though peril?  While the coordinates of that location may […]

Trapped in the talons of trouble, our impulse may be to search the horizon in hope of deliverance, a stroke of fate that would banish threat and summon back the bluebirds.  Such a pity!  Since the strength to prise open the grip of suffering might well lie unrecognized just over the back fence. It was […]

I sat listening in the courtyard of an elderly friend in the ramshackle outskirts of a Kalahari town.  He was giving his account of the origins of the HIV pandemic.  It went something like this: HIV has come to our country by design of ill-willed foreigners*.  We know that diseases native to this part of […]

As contagion stalks our planet, cities shuttered behind cordons militaires, cruise ships denied port or anchored in a sea of troubles, and hospitals ominous with taut, costumed creatures, a back story has been mass flight in search of safety.  An early report estimated that nearly half of Wuhan’s 11-million population fled as the handwriting went […]

          Pebble On The Tongue* “The longest journey is the journey inwards …         quest for the source of (one’s) being.”             Dag Hammarskjold, fr. Markings Almost 59 years ago, Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary General of the United Nations, his plane on fire, plummeted […]

I met John in a garret office just off Maryland Ave. in the Capitol Hill district of Washington, DC.  His tired, disheveled attire might have suggested life on the street, but spritely expression and chatter hinted at something beyond that.  We whiled away the time, and this is the story he told. Like many in […]

The treeless hills of South Africa’s Eastern Cape roll down to the Indian Ocean where they form the Wild Coast: the sea, the wind and spray pounding a rocky shore.  Here and there lie pocket beaches where rivers tumble down to meet the surf. That beauty has attracted seaside resorts and casinos for the well-heeled, […]