A Walker in the Suburbs

No secret that I love to travel. But I also love to talk about travel. Yesterday a friend and long-ago roommate called to share tales of our recent adventures. She had just explored South Africa and Namibia. I had seen France, Belgium and the Netherlands since we last talked.

She had warned me about the bicycles in Amsterdam. I told her that now I understand. She tried to explain the grandeur of game drives. I tried to describe the charm of an Alsatian village.

At some point in our conversation I realized that it’s not the travel itself, it’s the way it makes us feel — or at least the way it makes me feel, which is alive and free.

Once, my friend and I trudged down snow-packed Chicago streets to buy groceries as we started our careers in a cold and busy city. Now we have different destinations.

It’s not that trip talk satisfies as much as travel itself, but it certainly brightens up a cold winter evening.

It happens often after a get-away: I may have physically returned to hearth and home (and the endless to-do lists that accompany them) but I’m still half-anchored to the places I just visited. In this case, to 47 and 48. That would be New Mexico and Arizona, the 47th and 48th states to enter the union.

I hail from the 14th state, Kentucky (1792), so to contemplate the 47th and 48th, the last of the continental additions, is to be in awe of how recently they were admitted — only a month apart, in 1912. My parents honeymooned in the American West only four decades later.

Do these states feel new? Not really. They feel old, even timeless. The parts of them we visited were beautifully remote. The closest gas station was 25 miles away, the nearest grocery store double that.

Lack of services means neighbors rely on each other. That, plus the wide-openness of their spaces and the darkness of their skies is a magnet for birders and researchers and people who chafe at boundaries. I admire the hardy souls who make 47 and 48 their home. I don’t think I could.

Though the view out my window is of the Virginia Piedmont, I’m remembering the sweeping plains and pointed peaks of the Basin and Ridge. At a windswept clearing on Historic Route 80 is a monument to Geronimo’s 1886 surrender, which effectively ended the Indian wars. It did not end the hostilities, however. The massacre at Wounded Knee, for example, took place in December, 1890.

After numerous chases and escapes Geronimo and his band of Apaches formally surrendered to General Nelson Miles on a bluff near this lonely spot. Geronimo ended his days imprisoned at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, after appealing unsuccessfully to President Theodore Roosevelt to “cut the ropes and make me free.”

Geronimo died of pneumonia, the old man’s friend, in 1909. On his deathbed, he confessed to his nephew: “I should never have surrendered. I should have fought until I was the last man alive.”

Imagine sister cities (sister hamlets is more like it) only miles apart but often separated by a one-hour time difference. That would be Portal, Arizona, and Rodeo, New Mexico. Arizona does not observe daylight savings time; New Mexico does. From March through October, folks lose or gain an hour every time they mail a letter or pick up a coffee.

It couldn’t have happened to a mellower crowd. People are drawn to this cloud island because they love sunshine and open spaces. The locals we’ve met are friendly and easy-going. They laugh about the inconveniences and rave about the natural beauty.

When we pulled up to this vintage post office yesterday, we were greeted by a friendly postmistress with a Great Dane named Mac. She kept the place open so we could buy postcards, then hand-stamped them for us.

Portal and Rodeo are places that the world has passed by. I’m glad we stopped here for a few days.

It’s not the oldest library in America, but it is the oldest library in Arizona, and a few years ago it was named the best small library in the nation. Bisbee’s Copper Queen Library offers literacy services, chess boards, even a seed library. (This innovative program allows borrowers to take up to ten packets of open-pollinated or heirloom seeds a month.)

In this gracious two-story building, you can find newspapers on sticks, chess boards on tables and an elegant stairway to a bustling second floor.

Visitors are encouraged to sign a guestbook and mark their hometown locations with a pin on the map. We did the former, but there was no room for a pin on the eastern coast of the U.S. It was the most high-density region of all. At least from what I’ve seen, though, it has no libraries like the Copper Queen.

I’m writing from a bungalow on a hilltop in Bisbee, Arizona. The town is spread out below us and fir trees frame the view.

To reach this special place we flew from Dulles to Denver to Tucson, picked up a rental car and drove 100 miles southeast through the old west town of Tombstone. The road curved around mountains that caught the lowering light in their folds.

After we arrived late yesterday afternoon, I sat on the porch and watched the sky redden above the dark, wrinkled hills. I had seen the sun rise in Virginia from the airport tarmac, elevation 313 feet. Now I was seeing it set in an old Arizona mining town, elevation 5,533.

Sunrise, sunset. With a lot of traveling in between.

If the airlines cooperate today, we will be winging our way west and south, out to the desert southwest. Bisbee, Arizona, is our destination. A family celebration is the excuse. Not that I need an excuse to travel. I was packed three days ago.

We’ve been to Bisbee before and found it highly likable. We’ve walked its streets and climbed its stairs, toured its museum and its mine. That was in April, this is November. I’ve never visited the desert at this time of year. I’m wondering how it will look and feel.

I expect no blooms. But I do look forward to the big sky, the limitlessness, the pure majesty of the Basin and Ridge.

We’re still six days away from Standard Time, but Europeans “fell back” over the weekend. This means that Europe is one hour closer than it was last week — or will be next. I’ll take that hour and savor it, let it remind me of all I saw and hope to see in the future.

One hour closer to Amsterdam’s canals and flower market and bicycles and bustle.

One hour closer to Paris’s boulevards and cafes and museums and monuments.

One hour closer to Alsatian villages, vineyards, steeples and hills.

One hour closer … but still worlds away.

For the last few days I’ve been living on the edge. The edge of memory capabilities, the edge of “Storage Full.” My dear little phone, which has been with me for nine years, is striving mightily to keep up with the flow of bits and bytes I throw its way … but it is losing the battle.

I’ve added storage, deleted all but the most necessary apps, even purged some conversations. It’s still teetering on immobility. This morning, afraid the thing would stop working entirely, I began to delete videos. This led me into a strange netherworld of old footage from a 2016 work trip to Myanmar.

I must have flipped on some strange setting back then because many of the still photos I thought I took were actually three-second videos — not “live” shots but actual videos. Sorting through them has taken me back to that warm-hearted and wondrous country, a place transformed since the 2021 coup.

There was the ginger farmer we interviewed, the walk I took from my hotel into the village of Kalaw and its market, poinsettias blooming, motorcycles zooming. All was hustle-bustle in preparation for the Fire Tower Festival and parade that evening. A moment in time, captured in data.

I’m glad to be home, to fall asleep in my own bed and wake up in familiar surroundings. But I wasn’t away long enough for homesickness to set in. This wasn’t true for the 19th-century traveler to Paris. In those days it took long and often torturous weeks at sea to reach the continent, so trips were longer.

As we traveled in France this summer I was reading David McCullough’s The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, which is not about the “Hemingway generation” of expats but about an earlier group of Americans bound for the City of Light, beginning in the 1830s. For them, this was the trip of a lifetime, and it was not just for pleasure but for study. Writer James Fenimore Cooper, painter (and later inventor) Samuel Morse, educator Emma Willard and poet and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes.

These and other Americans thrived abroad, but they did get homesick. In fact, it was an American in Paris, John Howard Payne, who wrote the song “Home, Sweet Home.”

“Be it ever so humble,” he wrote, “there’s no place like home.”

(My last glimpse of France as our flight departed from Orly early Tuesday morning)