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Europe For All

Europe For All

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This week saw the passing of Arthur Frommer, whose books changed my life. When I traveled to Europe as a student, it was with a wave of other budget-minded travelers whose bibles (and mine) were Frommer’s famous series that began as Europe on $5 a Day. Although that became Europe on $10 (and on up to $95) as the years passed, the philosophy remained the same.

You don’t have to stay in fancy hotels to see the Continent, Frommer told Americans. Stay in guesthouses. Grab a baguette for lunch. Forget about the private bathroom. Live like the locals, in other words. “I wanted to scream at people to tell them they could afford to see the world,” Frommer told the Houston Chronicle, as quoted in his Washington Post obituary.

Frommer was a U.S. Army lawyer stationed in Berlin when he wrote and self published The G.I.’s Guide to Traveling in Europe, which was the genesis of Europe on $5 a Day. By the mid ’60s he quit his successful law practice to concentrate on his guidebook empire.

Frommer, along with low-cost carriers like Icelandic and Laker Airways, made it possible for people like me to wander around Europe soaking up art, music and history. He democratized the “Grand Tour.” He convinced the American public that travel wasn’t just for the well-heeled. It was for all of us. You may want to curse him the next time you’re crammed into the middle seat of a fully booked 737. But as I read about his life this week, all I wanted to say was “thank you.”

Just a Bit

Just a Bit

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A class assignment has me remembering the trip I took to Bangladesh in August 2017. For more than two weeks I traveled around the country interviewing people, soaking up the atmosphere — and sometimes the mud, too. It was just an introduction to this marvelous country but I was so impressed.

I met men who were trafficked and returned home to start a business — so they wouldn’t be tempted to leave the country for work again. A woman who became a leader in her community, sharing new agricultural techniques, helping her family and her village improve their standard of living. People who had lost homes in a cyclone and were rebuilding the mangrove forests that protected them from tidal surges.

Everywhere we went — and we covered much of the country — there were people making the most of challenging circumstances. They were a resilient bunch, philosophical and open-hearted.

Now I want to share just a bit of what I learned. The “just a bit” … that’s the challenge.

Travel and Destination

Travel and Destination

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As I have so many days recently, I headed out this morning in a hooded jacket. The rain was so fine you could barely see it. There were no beads of moisture on my sleeves, but I could feel the dampness all around me.

I’d just been reading an academic article, and it felt good to stretch my legs. I wasn’t looking for much, just a break. But the ideas bubbled up anyway, as they often do when I’m moving. First the topic for this post, then an essay idea.

The mist may have made it harder to see what was in front of me, but it didn’t obscure my thinking. How to account for this phenomenon?

“Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart,” writes Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust: A History of Walking. And a few sentences later, she says this: “It is the movement as well as the sights going by that seems to make things happen in the mind, and this is what makes walking ambiguous and endlessly fertile: it is both means and end, travel and destination.”

And that’s what this morning’s walk was for me — travel and destination.

One Day or Many?

One Day or Many?

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Here in northern Virginia, weeks of swelter have been replaced by cool nights, warm sun and low-humidity air. 

I feel like I’m in Colorado again, where you dress in layers that can be peeled off or piled on as the day’s warmth waxes and wanes. 

It’s an interesting way to live, temperature differences of 30 degrees or more in a single day. Does one get used to it over time, or does one day feel like many?

Family Reunion

Family Reunion

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We gathered yesterday in Ohio, more than two dozen of us: brothers and sisters, kids and grandkids, aunts and uncles and cousins. Some of us traveled a few miles to be there; others flew or drove for hours.

There were burgers and brats, iced tea and lemonade, potato salad and jam cake. There was a poem, a song, a prayer and a hymn. And stories, of course, so many stories.

Most of all, there was connection — not just to each other but to those who came before, to the absent ones. It was as if in gathering we brought them back.

There was the spitting image of Dad in the face of my oldest cousin. There were his sisters in the eyes and smiles of their sons and daughters.

And then there was all the life and liveliness of the newest generations. They are the future. But it’s good to remember where they — and all of us — began.

Scent of Home

Scent of Home

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On a walk through my parents’ old neighborhood in Lexington, where I sniff deeply of the mown grass to see if I can detect the scent of home. 

It’s there, I know it is, though I can’t put my finger on exactly what’s different. 

Is it the bluegrass, full of calcium from the limestone-rich soil? 

Is it the way the light strikes the lawns and releases an aroma?

Or is it knowing that the bones of my ancestors lie in cemeteries just miles away? 

Copperhead!

Copperhead!

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Wednesday was to be a day of heat and humidity, record-breaking heat, and it would be just that. But it began with a snake-sighting. Not just any snake, but a copperhead. 

This deadly viper is, as I’ve noted before, “Reston’s only venomous snake.” Cold comfort when you reach down into your garden bed and one of them sinks its fangs into you — which happened to a friend who’d recently moved to the area.

That the copperhead I found was most assuredly dead did not totally dispel my discomfort. After all, I traipse through these woods often. What other dangers lurk beneath its calm facade? Does this critter have sisters and brothers, aunts, uncles and cousins? I imagine so. 

Having just returned from a place where coyotes call, mountain lions roam and bears break into suburban hot tubs, why shouldn’t I come upon a copperhead?

Gas Giants

Gas Giants

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When I think of the western states we just visited, I imagine the gas giant planets — Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. 

Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona (we didn’t stop in the latter, though we were within miles of it) have the same heft and proportions. Their landscapes are bare, alien, even dangerous at times (see yesterday’s post). 

Yes, they have an atmosphere, so I won’t take the metaphor too far, but there are similarities. They are near the outer edge of this continent, and are some of the last-explored places in the country. Their terrain can be hostile. Human effort appears puny in their vastness. 

Returning from a trip out west, then, is more like falling back to Earth, finding one’s self again on safe, familiar ground. 

Flash Flood

Flash Flood

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Back home now, remembering our adventures, one of which was a little too close for comfort.

It was Friday evening and we had just returned from a day of hiking and sightseeing in Canyonlands when our cell phones began to blare with warning messages of flash floods. Scary, yes, but hardly cause for concern, we thought, tucked away in our motel on Main Street in Moab. 

What hubris! We had only gone across the street to dinner, but decided to browse in a bookstore on the way home. Not just any bookstore, by the way. Back of Beyond was started by friends of the writer Edward Abby shortly after his death in 1989. Its selection of environmental and place titles was phenomenal, and I was absorbed, as I usually am in the presence of great books.  

In retrospect, we should have been alarmed by the sandbags we stepped over to enter the store; we assumed they were just a precaution. But no more than 15 minutes after I snapped the rainbow photo above, I looked out the bookstore window to find that Main Street had vanished — with a river of brown water flowing in its place. 

So much precipitation fell so quickly that creeks overflowed their banks and water poured off the mountains that surround the town. We couldn’t exit the front door of the store, but a helpful clerk let us out the back, where we walked several feet before finding that the side street we’d hoped to cross was just as flooded as Main Street. 

We searched for other routes back to our hotel, which we could see but couldn’t figure out how to reach. By then it was pouring again, and we had lightning to worry about as well as the swirling stream. It wouldn’t be pleasant to wade across, but we had no other choice. 

We took a deep breath and plunged into the water, which came halfway up to my knees. It was murky and brown, cold and deep. The current was brisk. Had the water been a bit higher the cars on the road would have been floating. As it was, I later heard there were people kayaking in downtown Moab. 

By the time we reached the hotel our shoes and pants were soaked. But we were overjoyed to be back on dry ground, and I have a new respect for flash floods. 

Taking the High Road

Taking the High Road

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There are two routes from Taos to Albuquerque. The first is via State Road 68, a straightforward approach through the valley.  It’s known as the Low Road or River Road because it parallels the Rio Grande. 

The second is a patchwork of lanes that weave through forests and hillsides, past small farms, galleries and old churches. Like any “blue highway,” you feel the lay of the land when you drive it. And if you’re prone to motion sickness, as I am, you’d best be behind the wheel.

At first we seemed destined for Route 68. We had a schedule to keep, after all, a flight leaving at 3. But the more I thought about it, the more the High Road called out to me. We wouldn’t have time to stop much, but we’d have time to absorb the scenery as we drove through it. 

I’m hoping that those sights, sounds and smells, like all the sensory riches of the last 12 days, will become a part of us.