Browsed by
Category: travel

On the Border

On the Border

Comments 0 Comment

In southern Arizona a border wall is not a vague threat; it’s a reality. Or at least a border fence, a dark, menacing one that I spotted first from an overlook and then from a few hundred yards away.  A fence that people here call “the wall.”

Built to block the flow of humans and contraband, it’s doing a good job of containing animals, too. So Mexican wild turkeys like the one in yesterday’s post are less likely to be up this way now. And the lone male jaguar who’s said to haunt Ramsey Canyon will never find a mate.

The borderlands are rich in animal species that need to cross and recross in order to flourish. The wall has been hard on them. It will be hard on us, too.

Birders’ Heaven

Birders’ Heaven

Comments 0 Comment

Ramsey Canyon is birders’ heaven, home to 14 species of hummingbirds — compared to the one or two we have at home — and plenty of other bird species that have crossed the border, like this Mexican wild turkey. He was courting the ladies and strutting his stuff.

He, of course, was an easy photographic target, large and slow-moving. Most birds are quicksilver flashes. To spot and identify them takes time, knowledge and patience — skills that I lack but skills that birders have in spades.

In fact, I wish I had a birder with me now to identify the flap of wings in the Emory oak, the source of the lovely song I’m hearing. Is it a hermit thrush? I’ve heard they live around here. I grab a bird book, look it up. Yes, it’s possible. It could be. And there’s just enough of the fudger in me to say, what the heck, let’s just call it a hermit thrush and call it a day.

Thanks to the birders we’ve met I can verify that I truly have seen an acorn woodpecker: hepatic tanager; calliope, blue-throated and broadbill hummingbirds; a white-winged swallow; Mexican wild turkey; Cooper’s hawk; a road runner; and a painted redstart, a “life bird” for many.

So from musing on birds, I come to musing on birders. What impresses me most about them is their dedication and gladness. They notice life around them. They savor its sights and sounds. They recognize its beauty.

Making Change

Making Change

Comments 0 Comment

One of the things  I like about my job is talking with people on the other side of the world. It’s an instant way to get perspective.

For one thing, they’re just ending their days while we’re just beginning ours. For another, they are dealing with problems we can barely imagine, problems like trying to keep food cold to prevent spoilage. (Pakistan loses almost 50 percent of its crops after harvest.)

I just heard a man who’s on the leading edge of change in that country, someone who tries to convince people they don’t have to do things the way they’ve always done them, describe walking into a cold storage facility filled with rats and mold. “I almost vomited,” he said.

But he saw the potential and made the connection that created change. These are not huge shifts. They are pebbles tossed into streams.

Toss enough of them, though, and you change the flow.

Perpetual Motion

Perpetual Motion

Comments 0 Comment

A walk yesterday to Long Bridge Park, which is a bit of a misnomer since there’s not really a bridge and barely a park. But who’s counting when it’s 70 degrees on February 7?

What Long Bridge is, though, is window on the perpetual motion of a busy American city.

The walk adjoins the train tracks, and yesterday, in just 10 minutes, I saw a freight train, Amtrak and the Virginia Railway Express commuter express all chugging along.

East of the train tracks is the George Washington Parkway, where I would later spend close to an hour inching my way home. But at 1 p.m. the traffic is moving, and the cars are like flies skimming the surface of a pond where stately swans (the trains) hold the eye.

Finally, there are the planes taking off and landing at National Airport, just across the way. The low jets fill the sky as they roar heavenward.

It’s an invigorating stroll. I’m moving, the trains, planes and cars are moving. I try to catch all three in my gaze at the same time, to savor their motion and amplify my own.

Letter from Sumba

Letter from Sumba

Comments 0 Comment

A few months ago I traveled around the world — a trip that came together so quickly and with so many appointments and interviews packed in that I have to pinch myself now to believe that it really happened.

I have the photos to prove it, though, and, as of late last week, I also have a story about it on the Winrock website: Letter from Sumba. 

It’s the first of several stories based on reporting from that trip, I hope. And it’s gratifying because it translates the long flights and disorientation into words and photos.

It doesn’t capture everything, of course: how muggy it was that day, how storm clouds rolled in but the rain held off, how the ocean looked on the night drive back to our hotel. But it chronicles some of it. Enough, I hope.

Mind Picture

Mind Picture

Comments 0 Comment

No time to snap a photo of last night’s full moon, so I tried to snap a “mind picture,” as Suzanne would call it.

I remember when she first talked about mind pictures. It was on one of our family vacations, can’t remember which one. I’d smiled, reminding her that she couldn’t share mind pictures the way she could real ones and that her mind wouldn’t always be as clear as it was then. That there might come a time when it would be as jumbled as mine — mind pictures tangled up with old phone numbers, Associated Press Stylebook comma rules and all the other bits of information and trivia I’ve remembered through the years.

But I have come around a bit. As long as you don’t take too many, as long as you are mindful when you snap that lens open and closed … who’s to say that, in the end, mind pictures aren’t better.

I can still remember with great detail a mind picture I took more than two decades ago. I was visiting Kay in Paris, and had forgotten my camera. It was April, early evening, and as I walked along the Seine, the towers and spires of Notre Dame were set off against a perfect late-day sky.

I’ve taken tens of thousands of photographs since then. But that’s the one — without film or any other form of capture — I remember best.

Walking in Silence

Walking in Silence

Comments 0 Comment

I’m thinking back to last week’s trip to colonial America. In eighteenth-century Williamsburg, most people walked. They walked to the fields to work, they walked to the Capitol to debate the Stamp Act. They walked to the tavern and the milliner and the tinsmith.

Yes, they had wagons and carriages, and sometimes they rode in them. But mostly, they walked.

I think about the walking and the silence, the combination of the two. Then I think about my own noisy, clattery world.

Yes, I enjoy antibiotics and flush toilets and central heating. But oh what I would give for the walking and the silence, for the time it would give to collect thoughts and mull over the future.

Time Travel

Time Travel

Comments 0 Comment

Here I am, back from the 18th century and (despite yesterday’s snarky post) feeling a little bereft, truth be told. It was nice back there. It was quiet. A world without cars and sirens and power tools and amplified music.

It was inspiring, too, with talk about the republic and the founders’ ideas and ideals. In fact, there was so much to see and do (and so much exercise running and walking around the place), that I happily gave up Pilates fusion.

This morning’s organ concert in the Wren Chapel featured an instrument as old as the carols being played. To sit there with the music swirling around, natural light pouring in the high windows, was to feel as far away from my suburban life as I could possibly feel three hours from home.

It was more than space travel; it was time travel, too.

18th-Century’ish

18th-Century’ish

Comments 0 Comment

A trip to the 18th-century today. To a time without cars and television and gender-bathroom issues.

This would be Williamsburg, Virginia. Only three hours down the road.

You can stay in historic houses there (we will) and have a hot buttered rum and a rasher of whatever it is they have rashers of.

You can also (and I have my eye on this) take a morning abs or Pilates fusion class at a decidedly 21st-century spa. Oh, and did I mention that there’s now a Williamsburg app?

Let’s just call it 18th-century’ish.

Stairway to Paradise

Stairway to Paradise

Comments 0 Comment

I wake early on normal days, even more so since the Asia trip. Trying to catch up with the other side of the world, giving up sleep for quiet time, plunging into a new morning that vanishes like a puddle on a hot sidewalk.

Time and place. In a long-distance flight they come together. Not in an elegant, theory-of-relativity way, but in a stuffy, jarring jumble of humanity; torn wrappers and crushed water bottles; headphones and paper slippers.
Here we are, defying time and gravity, and all we can think about are what movies are being offered and whether we’ll be seated next to a crying baby.
There’s a message here somewhere; I’m sure of it.