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. […]
Mother of All Road Trips (XIII): A Caliph’s Descendants
Mother of All Road Trips (XIII): A Caliph’s Descendants
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 […]
Mother of All Road Trips (XII): Hiccup in No-Man’s-Land*
Mother of All Road Trips (XII): Hiccup in No-Man’s-Land*
Having left the Silk Road city walls of Herat (Afghanistan) in our dust we trailed west toward the frontier with Iran coming to the Afghan border post at Islam Qala. There we cleared exit formalities with authorities who regarded with side-eye our saucy-red VW sedan, its makeshift rooftop carrier accommodating three additional passengers and a […]
Soweto Ruffians: Emissaries of Mercy
Soweto Ruffians: Emissaries of Mercy
There is a bleak stretch of road north of the Maluti mountains in South Africa where a local bus dropped me one chilly evening. I was lucky to find shelter at the crossroads where a landlady with a lantern showed me to a spare room. Before the sun rose the next morning, I stood with […]
Story of a Piano: How Far Is It To Manzanar?*
Story of a Piano: How Far Is It To Manzanar?*
The Three Flags Highway (US Hwy 395) stretches 1300 mi. (2100 km.) virtually from the Canada border south, along the backbone of the USA’s western mountains nearly touching the Mexico frontier. It must surely be one of the most sweeping and storied stretches of road in America while escaping almost entirely the monotony of her […]
Keyhole at an African Bus Station: Insight Into Climate Dilemmas
Keyhole at an African Bus Station: Insight Into Climate Dilemmas
As climate conferences come and go, as pledges are made and forgotten, there is conversation – earnest, bewildered searching – in the alleys of drowning coastal cities, around failed wells in the interior, midst the ruins of storm-flattened villages, and in the camps of the misbegotten who have fled terror spawned by clamor for thinning […]
Golden Age of Air Travel: Gimpy Plane on a Rainforest Airstrip
Golden Age of Air Travel: Gimpy Plane on a Rainforest Airstrip
There is a certain nostalgia these days for what some have called ‘the golden age of air travel’. During much of the ‘50s and early ‘60s, before wide-bodied jets whisked hordes of tourists to the Azores, to Cancun and Chiang Mai, air travel meant piston-engine propeller planes with unpressurized cabins that took as long as […]
Lumberjack Redemption: Blue Ribbon Pie (part deux)
Lumberjack Redemption: Blue Ribbon Pie (part deux)
Though all of us have some acquaintance with career meltdown, Dave ‘the Pie Guy’ Hulett, set the standard for humiliation the day he dropped a conifer on some high-tension power lines not far from the headwaters of the Mississippi. He might well have assumed that his prospects had been sold down Ol’ Man River, as […]
Northwoods Lumberjack: Ah-nold and Human Fallibility
Northwoods Lumberjack: Ah-nold and Human Fallibility
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 […]
Posthumous Story: Passion for Peace, Restless Pang for Justice
Posthumous Story: Passion for Peace, Restless Pang for Justice
In the bad old days of apartheid, before the gates of Pollsmoor Prison swung open releasing Nelson Mandela into the sunny streets of Cape Town, South Africa in February, 1990, hope for change was as scant as water in the Kalahari. Across the face of central and southern Africa scattered resistance groups held out against […]
Pebble on the Tongue*: Quo Vadis?
Pebble on the Tongue*: Quo Vadis?
In a season of bewilderment like our own, a word from African tradition may prove useful: When you are not clear on a destination,You do well to remember whence you came. That is, recall Such recollections can whisper where to plant next steps. *Travelers in desert lands, facing prolonged thirst, have learned that a small […]
Pebble on the Tongue*
Pebble on the Tongue*
Two lines from a classical Chinese poet whose experience of ‘traipse’ touches on travels occasioned by work, fancy, family or even, duress – two lines that may anticipate some great, ultimate move, for which present ‘traipses’ are but rehearsal. The sorrow at leaving my city fades before the old joy of being in new mountains. […]
Unsuspected Depths: Of Tuna Fish Sandwiches and OceanTrenches
Unsuspected Depths: Of Tuna Fish Sandwiches and OceanTrenches
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 […]
Wildfire: There Are Ashes and Then There Are Ashes
Wildfire: There Are Ashes and Then There Are Ashes
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 […]
Plum Jam: Law of the Medes and Persians
Plum Jam: Law of the Medes and Persians
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, […]
Gift of the Termites: Evensong Dismantled
Gift of the Termites: Evensong Dismantled
Across the belt of Africa below the Sahara, on grassland sometimes swept by fires, a searching eye might come to rest on homely mounds of earth dotting the landscape: castle-like dwellings of termites. Humble though they appear, a wealth of lore and discovery attaches to these modest features. That these mounds and their termite builders […]
Kalahari Long Shot: A Mother’s Day for the Ages
Kalahari Long Shot: A Mother’s Day for the Ages
It is the season of posies, bonbons and extravagances like breakfast in bed. Or a child’s endearing drawing. None of that is to be sniffed at. Any token of affection offered when the world’s afire is a sign to cling to even if it means a few crumbs in the covers. With customary tulips and […]
Loss and Winsome Sanity: A Refugee Saga
Loss and Winsome Sanity: A Refugee Saga
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 […]
Thaba Bosiu (Lesotho): Mountain Stronghold in the Night
Thaba Bosiu (Lesotho): Mountain Stronghold in the Night
Trace the twisting course of the Orange River eastward across the face of southern Africa, and it will bring you to the roof of the sub-continent: the sandstone crests of the Maloti mountains. Rugged land of ponies and round stone cottages, the country of Lesotho (le-soo-too) possesses resources the world craves: water and clean energy. […]
The Cedars of God: Crown of the Lebanon
The Cedars of God: Crown of the Lebanon
As the airliner banked westward over the Lebanon mountain range seeking the approaches to Beirut’s airport, we caught a glimpse of dark, wooded patches on the higher mountain slopes and valleys, all that’s left, a fellow passenger explained, of what were once the ‘Cedars of God’. So hoary were those cedar forests, he said, that […]
Mt. Hoyo: Ituri Cave Find that Beggars the Imagination
Mt. Hoyo: Ituri Cave Find that Beggars the Imagination
Just north of the Mountains of the Moon, gazing down on the waters of Lake Albert, the Nile, and Africa’s Rift Valley, stands a Blue Mountain peak its head wreathed in cloud. Mt. Hoyo (1,450 m, 4,760 ft.) cloaks its flanks with the Ituri rainforest, sometime home of the Mbuti forest people. Neglect and civil […]
Northern Afghanistan: Warlord Embraces in Silk Road Country*
Northern Afghanistan: Warlord Embraces in Silk Road Country*
Travels in epic Silk Road country come with hazards even in the best of times. Dan Terry, a life-long friend and humanitarian, hopelessly besotted by the beauty of Central Asia, moved with his family to northern Afghanistan during civil war: wild country, wild times. Crossing Balkh province solo one day, his jeep marked by a […]
St. Croix (VI): Woodshop in the Rain Forest Hills
St. Croix (VI): Woodshop in the Rain Forest Hills
Just off a gravel road waiting under a rainforest canopy in the interior hills of St. Croix (US Virgin Islands) stands a barn-like workshop. It shelters an ancient collection of wood lathes and saws and pieces – many unfinished – long ago fashioned from their clatter. Birds call from the surrounding trees that drip now […]
Homemade Lanterns: Procession of Beauty and Prayer
Homemade Lanterns: Procession of Beauty and Prayer
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 […]
Cinnamon: Drug of Choice for the Pharaohs and for a White Monkey
Cinnamon: Drug of Choice for the Pharaohs and for a White Monkey
Before there was licorice, pistachio lozenges, halwah or baclava; before horehound, molasses taffy or any of the most ancient forms of sweets, for me, there was cinnamon. In our blufftop village above the sacred Brahmaputra river in northeast India they called it ‘dal seyni’ (bark sugar). I would pull weeds in the yard for hours […]
Goldsboro, NC: Billiards With a Thermonuclear Edge
Goldsboro, NC: Billiards With a Thermonuclear Edge
The threat of backseat hypoglycemia pulled us off a highway to the coast and into the town of Goldsboro, North Carolina. Pizza ordered, we began to size up the Flying Shamrock Irish Pub, taking stock of the front windows full of gaudy sports trophies, and the Thursday night procession of folk walking by with cue […]
Pebble on the Tongue*
Pebble on the Tongue*
It may well be in the course of a traipse, even a pious pilgrimage, that a wild flower will trump St. Peter’s Basilica itself. When I Returned From Rome A bird took flight.A flower in a field whistled at me as I passed.I drank from a stream of clear water.And at night, the sky untied […]
Monuments to Love: the ‘Taj’
Monuments to Love: the ‘Taj’
Romantic love announces itself, whispers itself, in a profusion of forms: by poetry, token gift or ballad, by photographs, paisley tales, portraiture, beguiling sculpture, weavings, sometimes by regretted tattoos, or clutch of flowers, by initials notched in a handy tree or desktop, by an altogether extravagant meal. All are deeply invested signs that cannot fail […]
Asia Highway #1: A Truth Beyond Bloodletting
Asia Highway #1: A Truth Beyond Bloodletting
The Pan-American Highway can still lay claim to being the longest road on the planet (see earlier blog piece). But Asia Highway #1 running from Istanbul to Tokyo (12,774 mi./20,557 kms.) has no rival for the vast landforms, the spectacle and depth of human story it gathers on a single strand. Unlikely sinew that spans […]
Pebble on the Tongue: Idle Chatter Over An Iris
Pebble on the Tongue: Idle Chatter Over An Iris
Pausing in Osaka along ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ with his travel-worn satchel,having taken in the cherry blossom temples, the wild coasts and stately mountains, Basho, the forebear of Haiku writes of his meanders, To talk casuallyAbout an iris flowerIs one of the pleasuresOf the wandering journey. Yes, one of many small – […]
Straits of Mackinac: The Wonder – and Fear – of Bridges
Straits of Mackinac: The Wonder – and Fear – of Bridges
I have stood helpless, as have many others, beside wild, swollen rivers gesturing madly to figures on a far bank, voice all but drowned by thrashing water and distance. It is a primal scene as old as humankind, one that we have for millennia fought to remedy with rafts, dugout canoes, ferries but most emphatically […]
The Upper Peninsula: Sisu, Superior and the Spaceport
The Upper Peninsula: Sisu, Superior and the Spaceport
You could do worse than to tiptoe into Michigan by the back door of the Upper Penninsula (UP), afloat as it is in a lake-world gift of ancient glaciers. So near is the time of the Ojibwa and Menominee that the call of a wild north – the loons, the deer and rush of streams […]
The CIS Waiting Room: Where a Light Shines
The CIS Waiting Room: Where a Light Shines
Some time ago, my friendship with a lovely Vietnamese family brought me to the Citizenship and Immigration Service (CIS) offices in Atlanta. They came hoping that an interview would finally clinch their status as citizens after a harrowing story that involved war, flight in a flimsy boat, camp life in a detention facility in Hong […]
Pebble on the Tongue: Always a Backstory
Pebble on the Tongue: Always a Backstory
If traipsing teaches nothing more, it beckons the traveler to wait for a backstory (apologies, Derrida!) in every encounter or first impression. Consider a haiku by the Japanese master, ‘Issa’, d. 1828 after a life of misfortunes. So hospitably waving at the entrance gate the willow tree. – trans. H. Henderson It paints a brush-and-ink […]
Quiet Pride: Power of a Cherokee Medicine Pouch
Quiet Pride: Power of a Cherokee Medicine Pouch
She calls herself Trish, though, on reflection, that may well have been a gesture toward drowsy travelers in the Florida motel where she tidies up the breakfast counter and replenishes coffee urns. She moves among the tables deftly clearing away clutter and resetting furniture. As the room falls silent, she asks us, the last of […]
Night Manager: Burger Joint at the Corner of Club and Guess
Night Manager: Burger Joint at the Corner of Club and Guess
A brake job you can no longer ignore might well take you to a part of town that is otherwise drive-through country. Just so, the New Year has led me at the crack of dawn to a garage beside a once trendy mall, now wintered by the caprice of fashion and market. I dropped off […]
Pebble on the Tongue*: A Lyric Pause to Recollect
Pebble on the Tongue*: A Lyric Pause to Recollect
Now and again it is cleansing for a writer to reckon frankly with his or her craft. A few lines from Edna St. Vincent Millay (1939) will serve my purpose well: Song II For you there is no song, Only the shaking of the voice that meant to sing, The sound of the strong voice breaking. Strange in […]
Yuletide Story: Soup Ladle as Weapon
Yuletide Story: Soup Ladle as Weapon
Among the Iroquois tribes of eastern North America a story is told about a time of internal enmity – and of stumbling into peace through the innocence of a little child. During this outbreak of bloodshed, one of the tribes laid plans to wreak vengeance on their rivals. To that end they sent out spies […]
Of First Things: Winter of Vigil, Spice and Song
Of First Things: Winter of Vigil, Spice and Song
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 […]
Pebble on the Tongue: Fork in a Brazilian Street
Pebble on the Tongue: Fork in a Brazilian Street
A BBC reporter on the street in Brazil as national elections approached, asked a clear-eyed passerby what he made of the choice before him (the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, or Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva). He replied: “Lula is certainly not the gateway to Paradise, but he is the way out of Hell.” The traveler does […]
Cemetery Poetry 4 – Flaming Maples in an Ozark Mountain Town
Cemetery Poetry 4 – Flaming Maples in an Ozark Mountain Town
Few rambles can rival for fall splendor the hills and deep valleys of the Ozark mountains that impose a breathless silence as the roads wind through one scene of hardwood glory after another. Humble villages and towns care little for the renown and bustle of distant cities as they bask in a spectacle that lays […]
Cemetery Poetry – 3: Laying To Rest A Shade And Its Transport
Cemetery Poetry – 3: Laying To Rest A Shade And Its Transport
The care of burial grounds is not everyone’s cup of cardamom tea. There are, after all, those stories about resident wraiths in midnight gloom. About skullduggery, bad juju and unrelieved, tortured lives. About white-knuckle secrets taken in silence to the bitter end. This is ground awash with tears, sewn with regrets enough to make even […]
Cemetery Poetry (2): Hunger for a ‘Vaya con Dios’
Cemetery Poetry (2): Hunger for a ‘Vaya con Dios’
We were standing in the street loading last bundles for a road trip when our good neighbor, Patrick, ambled over to bid us a ‘Vaya con dios’. But before bestowing his godspeed he offered an aside. It is these casual asides that turn out to be treasures of insight. He had been to a memorial […]
Cemetery Poetry: The Place Where They Sleep
Cemetery Poetry: The Place Where They Sleep
You can’t traipse very long on this mortal coil before encountering end-of-life truths. A friend in Atlanta, in the Delta Airlines master operations room on 9-11, tells with restrained panache her version of such an encounter. Driving blithely about town one day, she came to a familiar intersection marked by a traffic light (robot). Since […]
That Other Dream: The Power of An Infant in Arms
That Other Dream: The Power of An Infant in Arms
A well-known healer in West Africa was visited one day by a tortured soul haunted by a dream of turmoil in the spirit world. Having heard a full account of these experiences, the healer responded: This is the wrong dream. Now you must return home and dream a dream of goodness and harmony. Happily, this […]
Pebble On The Tongue*: The House of Tears
Pebble On The Tongue*: The House of Tears
Every language has some register of expression at which it excels. These powers tell a great deal about the social history of each community: its origins, the tenor of its story, even its physical context and values. Languages of the global South often have unusual capacities for commiseration; this from deep experience in struggles for […]
The ‘Guest Room’: Of Cowsheds and Nightjars
The ‘Guest Room’: Of Cowsheds and Nightjars
Anyone with history of traipsing on a budget will have ample impressions of the phenomenon known as the ‘guest room’: sometimes kitted out in Victorian luxury, sometimes spare as a jail cell. But always a relief. The backstory is an ancient admonition that households do well to welcome strangers since heavenly visitors arrive in just […]
Howrah Rail Station: Singular Scene of Human Drama
Howrah Rail Station: Singular Scene of Human Drama
Sitting on the banks of a sacred river beside a massive Asian city, preens in splendor a rail station without peer in the world. At the Howrah rail complex, largest in India, 600 trains pass through daily transporting one million passengers. In many countries, this single rail station would be denoted as a city unto itself. But […]
‘Special Military Operations’: A Question In the Aftermath
‘Special Military Operations’: A Question In the Aftermath
During the last gasps of apartheid South Africa the surrounding countries that had taken in refugees and exiles from the townships suffered from car bombs and commando raids by special forces who suspected that ‘runaways were likely up to no good’. Quiet towns would shake with random explosions. Or letter bombs would send bloodied and […]
Strasbourg: The Stork’s Tenderness – and Its Failure
Strasbourg: The Stork’s Tenderness – and Its Failure
Take a north-south European land journey and chances are good that your route will follow for a time the Rhine Valley whether by rail, road or river cruise. (Though, of late, the river option has suffered from low water levels that play havoc with the passage of vessels.) The cathedral spires and castles, the cities, […]
Trans-Siberian: Rivers, Steppes – the Endless Steppes – And Sometimes Sorrow
Trans-Siberian: Rivers, Steppes – the Endless Steppes – And Sometimes Sorrow
If there is a soundtrack to traveling the Trans-Siberian railroad it must surely include Ravel’s ‘Bolero’. Its relentless minor key motif captures something of an exhausting traverse; the hypnotic percussion striving against featureless steppes and forests, and just so, the sturdy settlements buttressed against weather and loneliness. Our family, intrigued as we are by epic […]
Figure for the New Year*
Figure for the New Year*
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 […]
Salt of the Angolan Earth: Strange Grave, Brilliant Witness
Salt of the Angolan Earth: Strange Grave, Brilliant Witness
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 […]
The Pillars of Hercules: Tangiers’ Brocade of Beauty and Struggle
The Pillars of Hercules: Tangiers’ Brocade of Beauty and Struggle
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 […]
Train to Marrakech: Epic Grandeur, Sharp Tutorial
Train to Marrakech: Epic Grandeur, Sharp Tutorial
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 […]
Pebble on the Tongue: Can Filigree Strings Yet Carry Us Aloft?
Pebble on the Tongue: Can Filigree Strings Yet Carry Us Aloft?
While meandering home from the Canadian Maritimes some time ago, we stopped at the suggestion of family by the College of New Jersey in Trenton to view an art exhibit about the beauty and travail of Afghanistan. There we stumbled on the video of an extraordinary scene composed by Lida Abdul, who, exile that she […]
Pani Ram: Of Dugouts and Ferrymen
Pani Ram: Of Dugouts and Ferrymen
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 […]
Pebble on the Tongue: “If You’re Lucky …”
Pebble on the Tongue: “If You’re Lucky …”
To say that travels will move you, is a tautology, self-evident on the face. But Kate Daniels, lyricist of the gritty, personal truths of the American South has penned a line that captures the traveler’s rarest take-away, the most powerful gift of a ‘traipse’: If you’re lucky ….It will bring you to your knees. Kate […]
Pyrotechnics: There Are Fireworks, and Then There Are Fireworks
Pyrotechnics: There Are Fireworks, and Then There Are Fireworks
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 […]
Pebble on the Tongue: ‘Luckiest Woman Alive!’
Pebble on the Tongue: ‘Luckiest Woman Alive!’
Some years ago, I was dinner guest in the home of an Ethiopian woman in Winnipeg, Canada. We sat on haunches in her kitchen as she made coffee in the ceremonial way, roasting beans over open coals. The strong aroma suffused her life story. Years before, she had married for love a Muslim man back […]
Pebble on the Tongue: From the Basement of Suffering
Pebble on the Tongue: From the Basement of Suffering
Given the loss and suffering that marks these days, here is the sense of a moment recounted by Sadako Kurihara, poet of Hiroshima: In Hiroshima, in a basement, mid stench and death, a young woman goes into labor. A woman, herself moaning with pain, steps forward. “I can help with the baby. I am a […]
Omnibus: It Doesn’t Quite Mean ‘All’
Omnibus: It Doesn’t Quite Mean ‘All’
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 […]
The Long and Winding Road: Mythic Highway, Honeymoon Beach
The Long and Winding Road: Mythic Highway, Honeymoon Beach
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 […]
The Die Is Cast: No Friends But the Afghan Mountains
The Die Is Cast: No Friends But the Afghan Mountains
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 […]
Lion’s Den Discovery: Pushback on a Eurocentric World View
Lion’s Den Discovery: Pushback on a Eurocentric World View
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 […]
Pebble on the Tongue: Gift of the Gulag
Pebble on the Tongue: Gift of the Gulag
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is not known to have written much about his epic, and often painful, travels – to Kazakhstan and his years in the gulag, to Germany when exiled and made stateless by the Soviet authorities, later around the world as a celebrated Nobel laureate, and eventually back to Mother Russia. But he did write […]
In A Potato Cellar: Beneath the Sign of a Ropey Tornado
In A Potato Cellar: Beneath the Sign of a Ropey Tornado
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 […]
Myanmar: The Road Beyond Mandalay
Myanmar: The Road Beyond Mandalay
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 […]
Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia: Beware the #30 Tram
Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia: Beware the #30 Tram
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 […]
Traipse: Consolation
Traipse: Consolation
During the harrowing years of the AIDS pandemic in southern Africa, a saying was frequently heard at memorial gatherings. It went something like this: a In this sea of sorrow, we must not be strangers.
Kalahari Yuletide: A Cattlepost State of Mind
Kalahari Yuletide: A Cattlepost State of Mind
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 […]
Minimalist Safety: Story For a Cluttered World
Minimalist Safety: Story For a Cluttered World
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 […]
Souvenir: Wormwood and Mint in the High Atlas
Souvenir: Wormwood and Mint in the High Atlas
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 […]
Trekking To the Polls: Proverbial Wisdom on Leadership
Trekking To the Polls: Proverbial Wisdom on Leadership
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 […]
Truth-Telling in the Darkness: Grief Turned To Delirious Joy
Truth-Telling in the Darkness: Grief Turned To Delirious Joy
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 […]
Birmingham (UK) War Vet: Prayer in Burnt-Over Country
Birmingham (UK) War Vet: Prayer in Burnt-Over Country
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 […]
Electoral College of One: the Case of Malawi
Electoral College of One: the Case of Malawi
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 […]
Isle of Charms, Isle of Despair
Isle of Charms, Isle of Despair
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, […]
Beneath Holiday Chandeliers: What Westphalia Offers Magnolia, Mississippi
Beneath Holiday Chandeliers: What Westphalia Offers Magnolia, Mississippi
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 […]
Tiger-Widows of the Sundarbans: Who Is Eating Whom?
Tiger-Widows of the Sundarbans: Who Is Eating Whom?
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, […]
A Poacher’s Tears and Gratitude
A Poacher’s Tears and Gratitude
Alarming scenes are coming in from game-rich northern Botswana this week, where the carcasses of hundreds of elephants are strewn across the lush plains having perished from some mysterious cause. This is not the work of poachers – the tusks are all still intact – and there is ample water and foliage available. Early speculation […]
Two Cubs – and a Tiger Queen
Two Cubs – and a Tiger Queen
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 […]
Du Fu: Pebble On the Tongue
Du Fu: Pebble On the Tongue
A handful of lyrical lines can whisper to the traveler – how vast is the sea of creative beauty – how deep the wistfulness of soul – how strong the yearning in our sojourn – how paltry our grasp of the great yonder – how precious to find company midst ‘silent peaks’ _____________________________ Written On […]
Contagion: A Leader Named Patience
Contagion: A Leader Named Patience
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 […]
Contagion: Backyard Answers, Humble Remedies
Contagion: Backyard Answers, Humble Remedies
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 […]
Contagion: Foreign Origins, Distant Remedies
Contagion: Foreign Origins, Distant Remedies
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 […]
Contagion: Resilience of the Backcountry Elders
Contagion: Resilience of the Backcountry Elders
A saintly friend who ‘squandered’ much of her life caring for the disabled in the Kalahari once described to me what the HIV/AIDS pandemic had done to her settlement. ‘We are punch-drunk with sorrow and loss,’ she said, ‘as though pummeled by a heavy-weight fighter round after punishing round.’ This nun had no interest in […]
Contagion: What Pandemic Hath Wrought
Contagion: What Pandemic Hath Wrought
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 […]
Hammarskjold: The Longest Journey of All
Hammarskjold: The Longest Journey of All
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 […]
Hacker Comeback: Survivor From the Streets
Hacker Comeback: Survivor From the Streets
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 […]
Mandela* Moment of Truth: Rite of Passage to Calling and Glory
Mandela* Moment of Truth: Rite of Passage to Calling and Glory
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, […]
Mother of All Roadtrips XI: Herati Hookahs and Heady History
Mother of All Roadtrips XI: Herati Hookahs and Heady History
In a class by itself as historical crossroads go, within Herat’s crumbling walls and precincts hangs a brocade of culture with few equals in the world. Where else might you find cheek by jowl a citadel of Alexander the Macedonian, records of Nestorian evangelists, tombs of Timur’s martial descendants, traces of Persian poets and philosophers, […]
Mother Of All Roadtrips – X: Majesty of Tower and Tunnel
Mother Of All Roadtrips – X: Majesty of Tower and Tunnel
National Highway 1 from Kabul to Kandahar, will bring you under the walls of the storied, but now humbled, city of Ghazni. Its ramparts once sheltered brilliant Persian poets the likes of Hakim Sanai, the ‘eyes of Sufi poetry’ and inspiration to Rumi. The memory of that elegance now in tatters, the city suffers one […]
Mother of All Roadtrips (IX) – Mirage on the Road to Kabul
Mother of All Roadtrips (IX) – Mirage on the Road to Kabul
There is a traveler’s proverb in southern Africa, “Tsela e kgopo, ga e latse nageng.’ (The crooked road will not leave you sleeping in the wild.) It applies on the road to Kabul just as readily as elsewhere. True to the proverb’s implied wisdom, the tarmac – but, gated – highway at Surobi (see previous […]
Mother of All Roadtrips (VIII) – Khyber: Rite of Passage and Prayer
Mother of All Roadtrips (VIII) – Khyber: Rite of Passage and Prayer
High in the Maluti mountains of southern Africa, there is a pass for ponies and trekkers called ‘Molimo O Nthuse’ (God help me!), the prayer of mountain travelers everywhere. Thin air, vagaries of sleet and snow, rude slopes, snake-like footpaths, solitude; all can conspire with lethal effect. Prayer is sometimes the traveler’s only recourse. Such […]
Mother Of All Roadtrips – VII: Qissa Khwani, Old Quarter Peshawar
Mother Of All Roadtrips – VII: Qissa Khwani, Old Quarter Peshawar
If you should think the city of Peshawar is just another edge-of-the-mountain town, dust-blown, tattered and gusty with bluster and intrigue, consider this: the very heart of the old quarter is called ‘Qissa Khwani’, the Storytellers’ Bazaar. Not the bazaar of carpets or of silks, not of walnuts, spices or dried fruit, not of camels, […]
Mother Of All Roadtrips (MOAR) – VI: Grand Trunk Road
Mother Of All Roadtrips (MOAR) – VI: Grand Trunk Road
On the cusp of summer monsoon, but still swirled in dust and heat, our caravan assembled in the town of Raiwind outside Lahore. Behold! a three-passenger, improvised roof-rack atop the little red VW station wagon, a small trailer with hitch, an assortment of personal and camping gear, four school-leavers, two adults, their young daughter and […]
Mother Of All Roadtrips (MOAR) – V: Darshan in the Indus Valley
Mother Of All Roadtrips (MOAR) – V: Darshan in the Indus Valley
Northeast of the power-stepping guards at the Wagah crossing (see previous post, MOAR IV) there is a telling scene about what borders born of duress can inflict on a populace. Punjab is the cradle of Sikh faith, home to the great majority of its faithful who now live in India. On a clear day, from […]