South to Charleston

Posted on June 28, 2011 by tsraveling

When I finally get my computer back in order, time passes quickly. The nearest bus into D.C. is a couple miles away, and the heat and my heavy workload keep me holed up, and I never make it into the city.

Instead, I stay in Herndon, taking walks when it cools in the evening to the grocery store, or to the surprisingly picturesque downtown area. Now and then I’ll step outside and the upstairs neighbors are out on the patio, and they usually invite me up for a beer or two. Friends of theirs stop by in ones and twos seemingly at random; one guy, Sham, spends hours telling elaborate and possibly apocryphal stories about his extended family — an eccentric old grandmother sitting on a mansion with cash bricked into the walls. Another set of grandparents’ gets married in India complete with elephants from Jaipur and an offer from husband to wife of the heads of the three men that had murdered her father. The wife sets them free in a fit of magnanimity, and later that night two of them are stoned to death by the villagers who had gathered to watch the wedding. The other is never heard from again. “He must have been the fast one,” says Eric, one of the permanent upstairs residents.

Early on Sunday, Storm sacrifices a good night’s sleep to drive me into the metro, and I head in to D.C.’s Union Station. Built as welcoming portals to the cities in an age when grandiosity was to be expected, the station here is as imposing and marble-faced as its equivalents in New York and Chicago. Statues line arching walls, and thick panes of glass let in the morning sun. Also like its counterparts, though, the closer you get to the actual trains, the dimmer, grayer, and more underground it becomes.

This time, the line is short and so is the wait. I board and settle into my window seat, and the world outside begins to move. The Washington Monument rises in the haze behind a sea of parking lots and anonymous office buildings, and then we’re crossing the Potomac, headed south. In Alexandria, we pass through the backyards of a red brick wall of town houses, partitioned by windows and adorned with patios and bare grass lots and old cars parked in tiny yards for lack of any streetside space.

Just past the Alexandria station there’s a building like a Phoenician lighthouse, a narrow cream-colored ziggurat amongst its more contemporary neighbors. It strikes me that there are some similarities between Salt Lake City and D.C. — both were built in inhospitable environs, desert and swamp, with grandiose vision and an unwavering faith in their respective futures. In Salt Lake, that vision was religious, with architecture and terminology coming from Christianity and Judaism; in D.C., it’s political, inspired by the great dead civilizations of the western world.

The city fades into low forests and swamps broken by the occasional field or swollen brown river. With little further variety in the scenery outside, I turn to my book — Paul Thereoux’ The Great Railway Bazaar. As Thereoux rolls through the dense jungles of Vietnam, the dense forests of Virginia and the Carolinas pass outside my window.

North of Charleston we rattle out onto long elevated tracks that pass over the widest swamps yet, punctuated by raised wooden platforms and rusty ladders ascending out of the muck.

Nine hours after leaving D.C. the train pulls into the little station ten miles north of Charleston. Stepping off the train is like walking into a sauna; the wall of heat and humidity makes me catch my breath. On a Sunday evening the buses into the city aren’t running this far out, and I get a ride in one of the waiting taxis. My cabby’s a talkative connoisseur of the city, who keeps a laptop on the passenger’s seat to take online courses when he’s not driving. He gives me his recommendations of restaurants and things to see in the city, outlines a basic walking layout, and drops me off at my hostel with a wave.

The NotSo Hostel is a surprisingly quiet place in the student district northwest of downtown, with public radio playing in the lounge, a kitchen (with free bagels and coffee in the morning), and un-air-conditioned but quiet dorm rooms upstairs. In classic southern style — it used to be a private residence — it has a wide balcony and front porch, both empty in this heat.

I spend the next full day in Charleston, stopping at cafes and libraries to work for a few hours at a stretch between exploratory walks. Venture off of the main drags and you find the coffee shops that serve the students here: you can tell a local place by its conversation. Someone comes in, joins, someone else leaves, voices hush, and the person who just left is discussed briefly: “did you hear she just moved in with …?” In the background, sounds of porcelain clinking and the hiss of steam.

In the evening I walk down along the Battery, a stretch of walkway that fronts the bay. It’s lined with ornate antebellum mansions and palm trees, and out in the harbor you can see the blocky shape of Fort Sumter under wheeling flocks of gulls. The Civil War started here: they say that when the first shots were fired the citizens of the city watched the opening hostilities from the their balconies and cheered. A century and a half later, their descendants sit as elderly and dignified as their houses, drinking and watching sailboats trace across the water.

I stop in at a place called Toast and order a platter of shrimp and grits, drenched in a buttery cream sauce, and an ice-cold glass of Belgian beer. It’s the first time I’ve had grits, and I can see why they’re so popular here in the south; they make the perfect compliment to an otherwise rich cuisine.

It’s dark when I walk back to my hostel, and it’s only then that one of the other charms of southern living is noticeable. The lights here are dimmer and warm, the buildings lower, the alleyways more frequent; here and there you see lit candles or old lanterns hanging from wooden beams on slanted porch roofs. Laundry on lines serve as privacy curtains, and look down a dark alley and you see a pool of warm light at the end, with quiet music or conversation drifting out into a night filled otherwise with only heat and cicadas. You never see more of the speakers than an occasional silhouette or movement of a head.

Tomorrow, if all goes well, I’ll board the Hanjin Palermo in the Charleston container port and begin my first transatlantic journey by sea. With the unpredictability of freighter travel, though, who knows; maybe I’ll be here another week. One way or another, I’m happy.

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New York, New York

Posted on June 21, 2011 by tsraveling

I step out of Penn Station in New York to a warm evening almost twenty-four hours after the time I boarded my train in Chicago (for an account of that journey, check out my guest post, coming soon over at Trains on the Brain). The air smells of gasoline and hot cement and recent rain.

There’s something about New York I’ve yet to really find anywhere else. I’ve now been here more than half a dozen times, coming for a few days or a week at a stretch. The first time was a cold November a few years back, with homeless men huddled around barrel fires and bundled shoppers staring at the Christmas displays in the windows of Macy’s and a gruff older gentleman who offered me a cigarette as I stepped of the bus and said a genial, “Happy Thanksgiving, motherf*cker,” as he walked off into the night.

To outsiders, New York has a reputation for rudeness, especially when coming from a background like mine. In the small town where I grew up, you waved at people while driving past them on the road, nodded at people you happened to make eye contact with across the street, and said “how’s it goin,” or “mornin” to people you passed on the sidewalk.

Here, you don’t make eye contact except by accident, and anonymity on crowded subway rides where you’re pressed in from every side can become an art form. But it’s not some inherent coldness that makes New Yorkers this way: it’s logistics. You take the subway down twenty blocks to hit your favorite grocery store and you pass maybe four hundred people on the way. Take it at rush hour and those numbers climb to the thousands. To stop and greet each one would take a lifetime.

Get past that unavoidable facade of impersonality, and you’ll find people just like you’ll find anywhere else: people who want to tell you about their kids, who want to show off their city to visitors, who want to apologize for the weather or maybe just say hello. As I ride the One train uptown to Columbia, backpack tucked under my seat, an older woman standing with a hand on the rail enthusiastically tells two British visitors her favorite hangout spots in Manhattan. Fifteen minutes and ninety blocks later when I get off at 116th, she’s still talking.

I’m staying with friends in Columbia Law, who are working in the city over the summer. Even now, at nine pm in the middle of summer vacation, the campus is full of students, lounging on benches or on the steps in front of the big marble library. It’s comfortably warm, moist but not muggy, and a perfect night to be outside. I drop my pack and head out with Kyndra, a friend from college, and Houston, her boyfriend and my host. We go to a hole-in-the-wall Mexican place a few blocks away, where I try to reverse-engineer a stuffed pepper in cream sauce and Houston makes a futile assault on a burrito the size of his head.

I have work to do in the city, and over the next few days I mostly hop from one wireless spot to another, from the small cafes and bookshops around Columbia and NYU to the chains like Starbucks and Argo Tea to New York’s big public spaces like the library on 40th and 5th avenue, home to the famous Rose reading room, made more famous by being the site of that famous scene from Ghostbusters. Outside one Starbucks bathroom on Broadway, a man in cowboy boots and a nice suit, who’s either a junkie or really has to go, dances nervously and apologizes under his breath until the door opens and he ducks inside.

I go out to dinner with my friend Marc, who I met as my couchsurfing host in Paris a few years back, and his girlfriend. We hit a truly excellent burger joint (bacon, sauteed onions, bleu cheese, spicy mayonnaise) and they tell me the story of how they met, which involved a Costa Rican beach bonfire, an insane and temporarily homeless Frenchman, and the discovery that they’d soon be living across the street from each other in Queens. Marc’s apartment is on the sixteenth floor of a high rise on the river’s front, and at night from the balcony the lights of Manhattan glitter out across the water.

On my way back, I take the ferry down the east river, passing under the Williamsburg, Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges, past a tugboat steaming for the harbor, and finally docking in South Ferry, on the edge of Wall Street. After a requisite photo of the Bull, I head back north, putting more grimy sidewalk miles underfoot. Already I can feel the soles of my feet blistering, healing, turning tough and leathery, can feel my calves hardening up. It’s good to be walking again.

I drop into a used bookstore on Prince St. and am unable to resist buying a copy of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, which I read on the subways and in a park here and there, struck and inspired by his cleanness of prose. I stop for an evening with my friend Kate, who I also met in Paris. She helps me pick out a present for my sister’s birthday, and then I’m on my way again. My last night, I have drinks with Houston and Kyndra, say my goodbyes, and sleep soundly.

In the morning I head back to Penn Station to catch the bus to DC. It’s about three hours into the drive when my computer makes a hard crash and doesn’t recover. It stays that way for the next couple of days, until I finally bring it in to a Mac Store in northern Virginia to get it fixed. The repair is free, but my hard drive is gone, wiping out all of my photos and some of my old work in the process. Fortunately, I still have all of my second-best New York pictures on my camera, and I pick through these for ones suitable for posting. My writing and important work is all backed up online, and at the end of the day, everything’s more or less back to normal. My moment of panic when I thought I’d have to blow my bank account on a whole new machine has passed.

I’m now in Herndon, in the DC area. I’m solvent, I’m working, and I’ll be here until Sunday, when I head down to Charleston to catch my freighter. Tune in then for news of old friends and explorations of the city I lived close to for three years but rarely really saw.

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Greyhound Buses and a Deep-Dish Pizza

Posted on June 14, 2011 by tsraveling

That night in Salt Lake City, there’s a point where I’m sure I’ll have to spend the night on the sticky station floor.

As of a few days before, my Amtrak ticket to Chicago had been canceled due to severe flooding on the tracks in the midwest. And so I’m here, in Salt Lake’s dingy Greyhound station, in the middle of a long line that stretches around blue plastic seats and a broken vending machine and through the gated waiting room entrance.

The man ushering people through the doors and onto the bus is big, with a crooked grin and an eastern European name, and waves passengers through one by one: a group of laughing black guys, one of whom is wearing a brand new cowboy hat on top of a faded blue baseball cap, a large woman with three wild kids, and a dour old man who, two spaces in front of me, is certain we’ll be left to fend for ourselves until tomorrow’s bus.

Outside, the idling greyhound fills, person by person, until even from the outside it looks crowded. As the girl immediately in front of me gets to the door, the big man holds up a hand for her to stop. The bus’s driver leans out, looks at the line, and shakes his head. In front of me, the girl curses under her breath.

As my mind starts working, wondering if I can change my train ticket out of Chicago, if I can sleep here without getting robbed or stepped on, the doorman grins and tells us there’s a second bus.

Laughing with relief, the remainder of the line piles on board. There are few enough of us that each of us gets our own seat. By this time it’s already late, and I sit and read as we roll out of Salt Lake and east towards Wyoming.

By the time I wake up, stiff and bleary-eyed the next morning, we’re rolling into Denver. I contemplate calling an uncle who lives here, but it’s early and the line for the transfer to Omaha is already forming.

The wait isn’t long. Soon enough, we climb onto the bus — and then sit. And sit. It seems the driver’s expecting another bus, and it’s forty-five minutes before we finally leave the station.

It’s a full day between Denver and Omaha, and in the space of that time transient communities spring up along the length of the bus, brief friendships formed by shared circumstance and proximity. I work through the morning, but by lunch start talking with the girl in front of me and the big guy in the cowboy hat to my right.

The funny thing about these kinds of short acquaintances is that you can hear a lot about a person’s life before you even learn their name. The girl is from Wisconsin, and is on her way back from dropping off her son, Kalihon (a thousand pardons if I mistook the spelling), with her parents for the summer while she works in Wisconsin transcribing phone conversations for the deaf. The guy in the cowboy hat is a truck driver, genial despite being diverted 500 miles out of his way en route to Fargo to pick up a semi. I’m struck by the fact that drivers like him easily cover in a month the distance I’ll travel over the next year.

The man behind us, with a thick voice and hangdog eyes, speaks up occasionally, telling us about his girl, who he met online and has been planning to visit for more than a year. The reason he hasn’t yet is that she got into a fight with “some foreigners” and was put in jail, and his ticket money went to bail her out (“Expensive first date,” says the girl from Wisconsin). Now he’s finally scraped up enough to buy another ticket and is going to visit her, and help her sue the foreigners for, he says, half a million dollars. The story calls to mind a quest, Quixotic or not, with villains and damsels and a pile of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Through it all, I never learn any names. It’s only later in the day, as we’re crossing Nebraska, that I learn that the girl from Wisconsin’s name is Shannon.

Shannon and the trucker get off the bus at Des Moines, and I settle in to sleep til Chicago. We pull in early, despite running late the night before, and I make my way out into the city on a cold gray morning.

By the time I’ve found the train station, a grand old building just a few blocks away, the mist is clearing and the sky is blue. I lock up my pack and head out into the city. My first thought is to find a cafe, but it’s six in the morning on a Sunday and everything is closed. Instead, I walk through the city to the lakefront, than along the shore out to the Navy Pier — an impressive location that, in entrepreneuring practicality, has been turned into the city’s most touristic spot, complete with ferris wheel, tour boats, and a super-McDonalds. It does, however, make for a good view.

By the time I’m walking back through town, the city’s come alive, with the sorts of things you only see in cities — enterprising homeless people selling advice and copies of The Onion (available free from stands on streetcorners), lines of tourists in front of this sight or that, and, at one point, an elderly black couple shrieking with laughter while roaring down the street in a brand new banana yellow Mustang. Above it all, the Willis (née Sears) Tower, with a line out the Skydeck entrance a hundred yards long.

No trip to Chicago would be complete without a ride on that fabled El train, so I make a circuit round the loop and walk another line through the city, enjoying the ache in my legs and the feeling of ground underfoot after thirty hours on the bus.

There’s a blues festival in town, and in the lakefront parks visitors swarm to the sound of bass guitar.

I stand and watch for a while, being a fan ever since I discovered Mark Knopfler and Gov’t Mule, but my stomach is whining for attention after a day and a half of nothing but sparse bus fare, and I realize that it’s time. Time for the thing I came here for, the main reason I was glad for a 15-hour layover in this city:

Deep-dish pizza. Cooked in a cast iron pan, with crunchy crust and thick white cheese, with smoked sausage and fried mushrooms, with big chunky tomatoes, with nothing in my stomach from the last couple of days but a fast food stop in Nebraska.

It was heaven.

Note: Even though I’m in New York as I write this, I’ll be covering my Amtrak trip in my next post. Meanwhile, keep an eye out for my guest post on the Lake Shore Limited from Chicago to New York over at Trains on the Brain.

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The Rubber Hits the Road

Posted on June 10, 2011 by tsraveling

And so it begins.

Early on the morning of June 4, I climbed into the family car with my two sisters and parents for a week of camping in southern Utah and, for me, the start of a three-year journey around the world. Despite my mind’s clambering about the portentous nature of the occasion, though, my body just wanted to go back to bed, and I ended up sleeping for the first few hours of the drive.

I awoke as we drove into Salmon, Idaho, under clear blue skies. A cluster of arrows protruded from the second story sideboards of the Owl Club, presumably fired by  revelers the night before from the saloon across the street. But this was Saturday morning, and the town was asleep. We stopped for donuts, bagels, and coffee, and headed south.

The forests, mountains, and prairies of Idaho and northern Utah began to fade after Salt Lake City into the arid desert and monolithic rock formations of the southern part of the state.

As the sun began to set, we turned off I-15 and drove into Springdale, the gateway town to Zion National Park. The gray asphalt of the interstate changed to the deep orange-red of roads made with redrock gravel and tar. The buildings, low and stocky to cope with the heat, were small against the towering sandstone cliffs.

With the last of the sunlight glowing on the rock walls of the canyon, we set up camp, had supper, and went to sleep.

We were up early the next day, eager to get on the trail. I’ve been coming down to Utah with my family since I was about eleven years old, and hiking seems to be in our blood. Jenny (above, right) and my dad were training for a marathon until Jenny hurt her knee, Abby (above, left) is endlessly energetic, and my mom, despite reminding us that she’s now over 50, kept a pace that would have exhausted quite a few 30-year-olds. As for me, my legs burned from unaccustomed exertion — working on a computer, it seems, isn’t all that good for your walking legs. After months of sitting, even the burn felt good.

On our first day, we climbed up to Hidden Canyon, on Zion’s east wall. Though the stream was mostly dry, the canyon was still green with trees and brush, in the way only a wet spot in the desert can be. In the evening, we climbed to the Emerald Pools, where we were greeted by the sound of hundreds of frogs in mating season, their deep croaking resonating off the surrounding cliffs.

The star hike of Zion (when the river’s too high for the Narrows, at any rate) came the next morning, when we made the three-mile climb to Angel’s Landing, a high spire of rock jutting out from the west wall, and accessible only by a frighteningly narrow bridge that arcs out from the flat at the top of the switchback trail (called whimsically, Walter’s Wiggles).

From the flat, you climb up and out across the bridge, holding on to chains set in the rock, until finally you come out on top. From there your position commands the view up and down the main canyon, and the Zion shuttle-buses are nothing more than bits of white on the thread-thin road. Hikers, if visible at all, are only moving points of color in the desert.

I first climbed Angel’s Landing at the age of thirteen or so. Though I didn’t let on about it to anyone at the time, I was afraid of heights, and I remember laying awake the night before imagining the vast space between those thin chains and the valley floor over a thousand feet below. When the time came I steadied my nerve as much as I could, and ventured out — to find that the climb was not so difficult, and that whenever a sure foot or handhold was available, there was no danger of falling. I haven’t been afraid of heights since.

We had only two days in Zion before heading east through the desert to Kodachrome Basin State Park, where we found (oh wonder of all wonders) a campground with showers and beautifully clean bathrooms, things which only inveterate campers can really appreciate. While not so spectacular as Zion, Kodachrome was nice in its own quieter way, and the colorful rock was especially pretty in the sunset.

We finished our hiking within the park on our first day, passing some old fence-lines, rock pinnacles, and a rather underwhelming overlook called “Panoramic Point.”

Nearby Paria Canyon was better, traced with cracked dirt roads and dusty trailhead markers and old creekbeds. We hiked down one of these on our second day, with a trickle of brown water running through high-walled slot canyons and arid gulches that seemed right out of the old west.

At the end, where the creek met a wider riverbed at the base of a high cliff, Native American petroglyphs were cut into the walls: antelope, stick-man hunters, plants, spirals, glyphs that clearly had some meaning once, but were indecipherable now. On one half of this wall was a long line that looked for all the world like a map of the canyon, with markings along it for food plants, game, and shelter.

Around these were petroglyphs of newer mint: graffiti from 1986, 1943, from a few years ago, names and dates and hearts with arrows. Humans, like dogs, feel more inclined to leave their mark on a place where someone else has already done so.

We hiked a few more trails, drove out to see an arch, and got briefly lost in a bone-dry canyon. We spent our nights playing games or reading around Dad’s propane lantern, then bundled into tents and sleeping bags as the hot desert days turned into cold desert nights.

And then it was done. Yesterday morning, we packed up camp and drove north for Salt Lake City, deciding against stopping en route at Timpanagos Cave, but stopping instead at the (still cavernous) Cabelas store south of the city. While driving I got the news, just a day old, that my train ticket had been canceled due to “service interruptions.”

Suddenly thrown into uncertainty about my transportation options to the east coast, I quickly called Amtrak, and found that their tracks are underwater in parts of the midwest between Denver and Chicago due to extreme flooding. After some quick ticket-hustling, I rebooked for the same times on a Greyhound to Chicago, and a train onward to New York.

I was thrown briefly out of sorts by the whole affair, but then it occurred to me that this is what my trip is all about. Icelandic volcanos aside, air travel is rarely affected by the quirks of the planet it moves across. As it is separating by nature, it is also separated; in an air-conditioned compartment at 30,000 feet, floods can never be anything but abstract. On the ground, they can change everything.

Tickets sorted, we arrived in Salt Lake and checked into a rather ornate hotel (the Little America) across the street from a very ornate hotel (the Grand America). The knowledge that this was our last night together before my return to Montana in a few years did little to dampen mine and my family’s spirits, and we headed into town to see the sights. In Salt Lake City, that means Mormonism, and the Temple square was unavoidable (if pleasant; Mormons are clean, friendly, prosperous folk, rather like Canadians, if Canadians wanted very much for you to also become Canadian).

More interesting to me, though, was the rest of the city. The main public library (above) is truly wonderful, with wide open spaces, sweeping architecture, a rooftop garden, and elevators so fast and smooth they almost seem to be From The Future. And then there was the bookstore (seeing a pattern?): Ken Sanders’ Rare Books, just a few blocks away. I had to remind myself that my backpack space was limited, and that I couldn’t buy anything. Had I still an apartment, I would have come out with an armload.

Then dinner, our last together as a family until I get back: excellent brick-oven pizza and, for my dad and I, a dark microbrew. We walked back to the hotel happy, and watched a movie in the room as night fell.

This morning, we woke up and said our goodbyes. I love my family, and leaving them is one of the only real downsides to this trip. We’ll have Skype and phones to talk, and I can’t help but wonder what it must have been like a century ago, when a trip of this length meant occasional letters and no other contact. As romantic as the travel of 1900 seems to me, there are plenty of reasons I’m glad I’m traveling now.

On my own for the foreseeable future, I’m spending the day in Salt Lake. Tonight I board a bus for Chicago, and on Sunday, a train for New York.

Until then.

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Eastbound

Posted on June 4, 2011 by tsraveling

Early tomorrow morning, I’ll leave the town I’ve called home since I was four years old, and I won’t see it again for the next three years.

The business of wrapping up work projects, packing, and condensing my life has occupied my mind for a couple of weeks now, barely allowing me a moment to think about just what it is I’m doing. When I do, it’s flashes of thought, panicked, excited, doubtful, questioning: I walk into a gas station and suddenly say to myself, I won’t buy anything here again until 2014. I watched the sun set behind the mountains tonight and thought: that’s something I’m not going to see again for a very long time.

Add to that the knowledge that the person I am now will never be here again. Travel changes you, matures you, expands you; when I see this place again, I’ll see it through different eyes.

And then there are the little things, like choosing between two shirts in limited backpack space. Or deciding how many pens to bring, or whether or not to bring Hesse’s Siddhartha in German (will it really force me to learn?). But one by one, these things are decided, and the pack coalesces within a halo of detritus, piles of trash, piles of “give to siblings”, piles of thrift store donations.

Goodbyes: repeating, over and over again, that awkward admission that no, I won’t be back here for quite a while. Easier with acquaintances; harder with friends. But one by one, goodbyes are said, and fewer obstacles remain to departure.

Finally the sun goes down, my pack is loaded into the car, and my things are laid out for tomorrow morning. Whatever isn’t in my pack or my work bag isn’t coming. Phone numbers for travel are set up, bank is informed, and minor tasks are taken care of.

And with them, my final worries, final second-guesses, flicker out. Replacing them is only a single word, a single concept, rising above all else:

Eastbound.

Hells yes.

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Up Kootenai Creek

Posted on May 19, 2011 by tsraveling

The Bitterroot valley has gone from a colder-than-average April to a May in the 70s. Those warm temperatures, occasional thunderstorms, and a twice average mountain snowpack, mean that the creeks are roaring out of the canyons and the river is rising dangerously close to flood level.

Over the weekend, I hiked up into one of those canyons, along a stream called Kootenai Creek (that’s “Kootney Crick” to a native Bitterrooter). Normally a clear mountain stream running down from a series of lakes farther up in the canyon, Kootenai now was almost entirely white water, crashing down around sculpted rock bends and against boulders piled up in mid-stream.

I had to work until almost 6PM the day we left, so I drove to the trailhead separately, with the intention to meet them a few miles up the trail at our campsite. After crawling through road construction on the highway, I got on the trail around seven, just as the sun was sinking low enough to cast golden light and plenty of contrast on the cliffs and forest of the canyon.

Never one to let a good photo opportunity pass, I stopped twenty feet up the trail to pull out my camera, and about every five minutes thereafter as new and interesting views opened up on the creek.

As a kid growing up in these mountains, my friends and I explored almost every canyon in a forty-mile stretch of mountains north and south of Hamilton. We’d hike up to the snow line, to a lake hidden in a fold of the mountains, or just hike in a few miles and attempt to build a log cabin. Walk up Blodgett a mile or two, cross an old log fallen across the creek, and drop into a forest-fire-burned hollow, and you might still find our two-foot-high abandoned foundation, and nearby, wooden sleeping platforms in the closed-in shadow of a granite slab the size of a house.

We’ve swam in half the lakes, climbed over half the ridges, and once even terrified a mountain goat by nearly dropping on it from above. Somehow, though, we never made it up to Kootenai. That’s a shame, because Kootenai is one of the prettier in a range of very pretty canyons, with cliffs along the creek at the bottom and a soft, low, glacier-smoothed south side that makes for plenty of sun exposure and earlier snowmelt.

Dark clouds rolled in behind me as I hiked, and as I climbed the short rocky distance to our camp, big drops began to scatter down. I said hello to John, Connie, Timothy, Laura and Taylor, and set up my shelter — and none too soon. It was the first time I’d used the shelter since my 2009 trip, and it worked as well now as it had in Scotland.

Then rain soon grew from a scatter to a hard downpour, just as we were cooking dinner over the fire, and I had a chance to test out the waterproof-ness of my Coat of Many Pockets. It came through with flying colors, though my $5 stocking cap wasn’t so lucky.

The rain subsided quickly, though, to a widening blue sky as evening fell.  We settled in to talk around the fire about old memories, hiking destinations in the valley, and John and Connie’s upcoming trip to Italy to see their son, Daniel, who’s currently stationed in Vicenza (the same one I met when I passed through there a couple years back).

The fire died down and the stars came out and one by one, we headed to our tents. I, on my deadline-induced sleep schedule, read for an hour or two in my shelter before falling asleep.

The morning came too soon and it was time to go. I said my goodbyes to John and Connie — I’ll likely not see them again until I finally get back to Montana, in a few years — and hiked down with Timothy and Laura.

We parted ways at the trailhead and headed home. With less than three weeks left now until I leave, I doubt I’ll get in another backpacking trip around here. I’m glad I got to go at least this once.

-

P.S.: Here is an entirely cold and calculated attempt to build site traffic by including a picture of adorable puppies (my sister’s seeing-eye-dog-in-training and his friend).

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Sometimes Home is Awesome Too

Posted on May 11, 2011 by tsraveling

I’ve been living back in my hometown of Hamilton, Montana now since October, and honestly, it’s been great. With less than a month to go until my trip begins and I leave this town behind me for the next few years, I thought it’d be a good time to show you a little bit about why I’m always happy to come back here.

First, of course, it’s always good to see my family and friends here in the Bitterroot valley. I’ve been in and out for the last few years, rarely spending more than a few weeks here at a time, so it’s nice to settle in for a little longer.

We had a highly fluctuating winter this year, with temperatures hovering around zero or below before jumping up for a few days to forty, and then back to zero. The result was ice thawing and freezing in the mountain rivers, breaking up every few days to flow down into the main river.

The result was flaky, treacherous ice piling up in the river bottom, two or three feet deep in some places, and for a couple of weeks, covering an entire section of river. Walking past, you could hear the ice still in the water flowing along under the surface, a constant growling of ice and water pushing up the crusty surface from below.

That didn’t do much to stop my friend Timothy and I, though, who headed down to the river once a week or so to practice our fire-starting skills with old fashioned flint and steels. Once we got to the point where we could start a fire with a strike or two, “practice” became “start a fire, drink beer, and roast hot dogs.”

When March came around, the snow and ice began to melt off, leaving a few stray ice sheets in the shadow of the riverbanks and clearing off the first thousand feet or so of elevation on the mountains that rise just west of town.

With the beginning of May came our first seventy degree day, and corresponding first mountain scouting trip. At higher altitudes and in the shadows of the pine forest, though, crusty snow still covered the ground only a short distance from the trailhead.

There are a lot of things I’m going to miss about this place. The mountains, the easy access to real wilderness, the people, the venison and other wild game, and yes, the profusion of local microbreweries.

I find myself wondering how much will change before I’m here again. My sister is celebrating her high school graduation in a few weeks; by the time I get back, she’ll be halfway through her bachelor’s degree. My other sister, two years younger, will just be entering university, and my brother will just be graduating. The valley’s growth, explosive before the housing collapse, may well restart, and fields full of alfalfa or cattle could be housing developments.

There are few downsides to a trip like mine, but length of separation is certainly one of them. That aside, though, when I look around, at my town, at the mountains, I know one thing: this, at least, is a place I can be glad to come back to.

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Read These Travel Blogs Now

Posted on May 4, 2011 by tsraveling

This is not a top ten list. This is not a “best of.” This is just a list of some of the other travel bloggers I’ve been reading lately in order to get ready for my own trip and to get some ideas for Good and Lost.

What it is is a list of some great travel reads for those times between trips, when you’re just trying to pass the time to the next one. Enjoy.

Vagabonding by Rolf Potts

Let’s start with one of the big names, shall we? Vagabonding was one of the first blogs I turned to before I took my first international trip a few years back, and it’s still one I return to frequently. He’s also got a pretty cool book, which I sneakily gave to my brother for Christmas last year in order to get him addicted to travel too.

Nomadic Matt by Nomadic Matt

Another blog that helped me prepare as a beginning traveler, Nomadic Matt’s site is especially useful for aspiring travel bloggers and writers. If you’re interested in building traffic and making money blogging, make sure to give his site a look.

A Dangerous Business by Amanda Williams

If you’ve been New Zealand or ever want to, this is the blog for you. Stop by in the next few weeks to hear about Amanda’s upcoming trip back there. A Dangerous Business is also a good place to find other bloggers to read and guest posts by other writers — including yours truly.

Johnny Vagabond by Wes Nations

Wes is one of the funniest travel bloggers I’ve read, and his blog is worth it for that reason alone. Read the latest post and BAM, an hour later you’re neck deep in archives, chuckling, and empathetically angry at a douchebag monkey with a thing for Danish beer. Also, the photography is fantastic.

Adventurous Kate, by Kate McCulley

This is one of the blogs I point my female friends to when they’re wondering about the safety of solo travel. Well written, put together nicely, Adventurous Kate’s been focused lately on Thailand and Indonesia, though she’s currently heading back to the States for a bit. Oh, and one other thing: this blog contains a real life account of a real life shipwreck. Seriously.

Go, See, Write, by Michael Hodson

Another person who’s interested in overland travel and keeping out of the sweaty clutches of the TSA, Michael’s already made one circuit of the world without flying, and is currently writing about one of my favorite places in the world: the Levant (including one of my favorite cities). He also has a series of interviews with other travel bloggers, which always make for good reading.

Odysseus Drifts, by Melanie Ehler

Though she’s currently living in south Korea, Melanie’s latest posts cover her trip to India. Already an eloquent writer and a gifted storyteller, Melanie also earned the title of “confirmed badass” when she decided to ride a camel despite having a broken leg at the time.

Jack and Jill, by Jack and Jill

A traveling couple currently in Columbia, Jack and Jill manage to combine good writing with great stories and evocative photography, resulting in a sudden urge to head down to Cartagena that had been more or less dormant since last I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

ConnVoyage, by Connie Hum

Stories lately set in India and Nepal. She’s a great storyteller, and also publishes a handy recap of the weekly #TTOT talks on twitter. Also, likely the only blog on this list that will make you go “awwwwww.”

100 Miles Highway, by Katherina

“Born with a German passport and a Spanish heart,” Katherina blogs about western Europe, and does so well. One of the main things about it that caught my eye, though, was the design — it’s among the cleanest and most elegant I’ve seen, and something to aspire to for travel bloggers new and old alike.

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And that’s it for now! If you’re not featured on this list, it’s probably because a) I haven’t read your blog, in which case leave a note in the comments, b) I’m lazy and decided to chop off the article before I got to your blog, in which case leave a note in the comments, or c) I have horrible taste and a spastic attention span and didn’t look at your blog as closely as I should have, in which case leave a rant in the comments.

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The Actually Quite Pleasant Lightness of Being

Posted on April 15, 2011 by tsraveling

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Yesterday I sold my bed. Today, I sold my sofa, my keyboard and amp, and my kitchen chairs. At some point next week, I’ll be packaging up my books for storage and selling or giving away the rest of what I own.

I’ve always preferred and advocated a few-possession lifestyle. Even so, it’s amazing how much stuff can accumulate when you let it. I remember loading my car, back when I had a car, to make the drive here to Montana from the East Coast. It felt good that everything fit into one small vehicle, but it still felt like too much.

But you get used to it after a while. You get used to the idea that you can’t leave for too long, because you have to pay rent for your apartment, because your apartment is full of too many things to move easily, because what’s the use of an empty apartment? “Stuff” in general seems to exert a sort of gravitational force; the more you have, the more you get, often without even noticing.

That doesn’t mean I’m a complete ascetic. I like my gadgets as much as the next tech-savvy traveler, have a great backpack, and love my new Coat of Many Pockets. So what’s the deal? It’s easy enough to loudly criticize America’s rampant consumerist lifestyle (before our travels end and we succumb to it ourselves, at any rate), but why is having fewer possessions in any way better?

The answer, discussed at greater length on my other blog, is one of freedom, a.k.a. “utility.” You can love a brick as much as you want, but it will never be more than dead weight; a toolbox of the same size, however, expands the spectrum of your possible action. A sofa increases your ability to host guests, a work bench opens up a whole new range of things you can create; both decrease your ability to travel at will. A plasma screen TV is purely consumptive, while a shelf full of books contains power unheard of throughout most of human history.

So your possessions define the range of actions available to you. As most of the actions I prefer involve travel, most possessions aren’t, for me, very useful. Some are: my sleeping bag, for example, lets me sleep out in a field in Scotland if I feel like it, and save money that can instead be used on food and transportation. A light pack lets me cover further distances by foot, including, say, hiking a four-day chunk of the GR20 in Corsica. Carrying a laptop lets me work on the road, carrying a camera lets me better share my experience with you fine people, and carrying a notebook lets me sit down and write whenever I feel like it.

That, at least, is the rational explanation. All that explanation really is, though, is my attempt to explain the feeling I get from owning very little: lightness. Every piece of furniture, every valuable but bulky piece of electronics, every bundle of wires or set of dishes that leaves through my apartment door is like another anchor-line snapping, and every night I sleep a little easier.

Maybe I’m just young and naive, pushed by my biology to explore my environment before acquiring a mate and raising progeny.

Or maybe this nomadicism is simply how I was made to be.

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The New Plan

Posted on April 4, 2011 by tsraveling

As some of you already know, I ran into some problems with my first freighter ticket — namely that my ship got moved to ply the coasts of an inconveniently non-adjacent continent.

But fear not, dear readers; my plans have been only mildly delayed. I’m now going to be shipping out on the Hanjin Palermo, another container ship, from Charleston, South Carolina on June 29th, and making port eleven days later in Antwerp. This changes my plans somewhat. For one thing, Kurdistan is no longer on the summer itinerary. I’m looking into possibly visiting Iceland and Norway during the summer months, and heading southeast toward the end of August or early September to revisit Georgia and, depending on the political climate, head down through Syria to Egypt.

Beyond that, plans remain more or less the same. Thanks for reading, and keep checking back!

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