But because I’m getting close to exam time, I’m trying to concentrate more on the reading, with less time for writing about the books as I go. So, these will be brief:

Bryson, Bill. I’m a Stranger Here Myself. (1999) — A little glib goes a long way. That’s how I felt by the time I reached the end of Bryson’s collected columns, written for an English newspaper after moving back to America following a 20-year sojourn abroad. Any one column was great, and Bryson frequently made me laugh out loud. The book was chucklicious. But it was also a little much, perhaps because the columns were short and, by their nature, jumped from topic to topic, which made the overall feel of the book a little manic. Had I spaced the book out over a few weeks and read just a few entries at a time, I’m sure Bryson’s charm and droll humor would’ve worked for me much, much better (because, let’s face it, the guy is hilarious!). I can see myself giving the book one of those “It’s not you, it’s me” speeches.

Gilman, Susan Jane. Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven. (2009) — I picked this up because it was a travelogue about two college graduates who decide to backpack across China in the mid-1980s. “Hey, let’s be Odysseus,” she and her friend decide. “Let’s be Byron. Let’s be Don Quixote, Huck Finn, and Jack Kerouac all rolled into one—except with lip gloss.” Their story turned out to be funny, tragic, interesting, and gripping. Gilman pulled me in quick, and I didn’t want to put the book not (not that I had the leisure to even if I wanted to). Gilman’s book has pitch-perfect pacing, and it reads like a good novel even though it’s nonfiction. “God knows I couldn’t make this up,” she says in her author’s note. Her post-9/11 perspective as a writer (and a more experienced traveler) gives the book extra resonance.

Kingsolver, Barbara. High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never. (1995) — This collection of essays was so good I don’t even know where to begin with it. Only a few of her essays focused specifically on place (my reason for reading), but those that do made me feel like I was in the crater of Hawaii’s dormant volcano Haleakala or in a crowded village in the African country of Benin or along the banks of Horse Lick Creek in the mountains of Kentucky. Cumulatively, Kingsolver captures what it means to be human—or should mean, anyway. “It’s starting to look as if the most shameful tradition of Western civilization is out need to deny we are animals,” she writes. The book is a paean to curiosity and wonder. “I have taught myself joy, over and over again,” she says. I constantly found myself highlighting passages, making notes, copying quotes. Kingsolver’s essays are so rich. In the final accounting,” she writes,” a hundred different truths are likely to reside at any given address.” A hundred different truths—and more—reside in this collection. Kingsolver might be the great discovery of this entire reading project.

After feeding twenty-six books into my head in thirty days, I’d like to say that I’m letting my brain decompress, but I’ll be honest: I’m still reading. In fact, I have two books going right now, Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself and Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tucson. I want to hit up Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams and Wendell Barry’s agrarian essays, too, and I want to spend some time with David Cushman’s book on The Wilderness, Bloody Promenade. Maybe then I’ll be done. Maybe.

But there’s David Gessner’s Sick of Nature. There’s Susan Jane Gilman’s Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven. There’s George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier. And there’s still John Muir looming over everything, a backdrop to much of what I’ve read, as significant as the Sierra Nevadas, as significant as Thoreau and Walden.

So many books, so little time.

I’ve been cramming books into my head at an alarming rate–so fast that I literally lost count. Only after I finished did I realize I’d counted two books at #14 and so had, unbeknownst to me, finished a day early. My effort to jam in a final book before midnight on the last day turned out to be gravy, and I didn’t even know it. (I’ve since gone back in true Orwellian fashion and corrected the record–a little ironic since I didn’t get to Orwell yet, although he’s on the list.)

I’m a voracious reader, but even by my standards this reading endeavor has been grueling. But it’s also been intellectually rewarding and, just as important, fun. I even had the author of one of the books I reviewed write to say he was “pleased to see such a
thorough understanding of what I was getting at vs the BS I’ve seen in other reviews. Please pass along my kudos….” That was gratifying.

As I read these books, I was looking, specifically, at the way creative nonfiction writers write about place. So what did I learn?

Upon first reflection, there seemed to be three different ways to approach the notion of place: One could travel through it, one could be in it, or one could piece it together indirectly. For purposes of simplicity, I’ll refer to travel writers and nature writers. As you might guess, the travel writers travel through a place; nature writers exist in a space. I’ll hold off on talking about the third category for a few minutes.

Travel writers and nature writers tended to write about place in much different ways:

1) For a travel writer, a place is something to be experienced. For a nature writer, a place is to be reflected on. Certainly a travel writer may try to figure out what his/her experiences mean as he/she passes through. A nature writer might, indeed, have very meaningful experiences to reflect on, but it seems the real objective is to figure out what the place means.

2) Travel writers tend to weigh their travel experience against what they know about home. They contrast the new with the familiar. In doing so, they frequently learn something about both places, and they learn something about themselves, too. Nature writers tend to examine humankind’s relationship with nature and their own place within that larger scheme. They contrast the natural with the man-made. In doing so, they learn something about the relationship.

3) Travel writers tend to get energized by their experiences, as exhausting (and sometimes scary) as travel is. Nature writers tend to get inspired by nature but then get frustrated and/or depressed when they realize how unrelenting humankind is when it comes to pillaging the planet.

4) Travel writers tend to “show” by recounting experiences; nature writers tend to “show” by evoking mood and wonder. I didn’t read many “poetic” travel writers, but I read lots of beautiful nature writing. Likewise, I didn’t read a lot of humorous nature writing, but I read a lot of funny travel writing. (Bill Bryson falls into both categories, I think—and he’s freakin’ hilarious.)

5) Nature writers tend to value place for its intrinsic worth, while travel writers tend to value place for the experience they can get out of it. That comes across in the ways in which various writers interact with a place and communicate their reflections about it.

Those are all, of course, generalities, and they’re based on a sampling of twenty-five or so books. I’m noting the patterns that jumped out at me, but any other collection of twenty-five books read under saner conditions would, no doubt, produce different patterns for different readers.

The third category of writers I encountered created a sense of place through travel and occupation, and through experience and reflection, but the journey was the destination, so to speak. They created cultural landscapes. I’m thinking of Andrew Ferguson’s Land of Lincoln—what is Lincoln’s America and who is America’s Lincoln? Or Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself—what are these crazy, quirky everyday experiences that comprise the experience of living in America? Or Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic—what do “North” and “South” look like today? Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tucson is shaping up to be that kind of book, too.

I think of the definition of “creative nonfiction” offered by Philip Gerard, a writing prof at the University of North Carolina and author of Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life. He says a creative nonfiction piece must have an apparent subject and a deeper subject—that is, what’s the story about on the surface and what’s really going on, what does it really mean. It’s like plot and theme in a way. That’s exemplified in the relationship between fact and truth. The “apparent subject” might include the history, geology, geography, and ecology of a place; the “deeper subject” might turn that place into a metaphor or a symbol that relates to the writer’s inner journey. Successful pieces balance the two.

Travel pieces worked best for me when they didn’t just overload me with the apparent subject (the trip) and all the factual information that went with it. For example, Maarten Troost’s Lost on Planet China was obviously a travel book, but the focus of Troost’s trip always came back to his quest to understand the potential impact China’s awakening was going to have on the world—and on him.

Other books, like Julian Smith’s Crossing the Heart of Africa gave lip service to the deeper subject (“Who am I?”) and emphasized the apparent subject (getting from this place to that place and offering background about the places as he goes).

Nature books that were most effective used the apparent subject (life at Walden Pond, the travails of a flooded wildlife refuge) as a way to contextualize the deeper subject (self-sufficiency, coping with loss).

Linda Hogan’s Dwellings almost entirely abandoned the apparent subject (the natural world) to reflect on the deeper subject (how to redefine our thinking about our relationship with the natural world). John McPhee’s grounded his Pine Barrens in the apparent subject (the pine barrens and the people who live there) and let largely left it to readers to find their own deeper subject (the importance of the barrens as a unique landscape).

As I mull over these things, I realize that they’re just convenient constructs for me to organize my thinking. I could easily look past these conveniences and set these books into conversation with each other (and with me) in other ways. For instance, I could reframe my thinking so that I could look at how writing about place helped these writers understand the human condition.

I will spend the next week and a half mulling over these and other connections between the books. I’ll step back and, like Tom Hanks’ character from The DiVinci Code, wait for more patterns to materialize for me out of thin air. Then I’ll write a long, long paper about it for my doctoral program and see if I can make some cohesive sense out of all of it.

And then I’ll start reading another book.

————

For anyone keeping track, here’s the original list I chose my books from. I’ve indicated which ones I read, and I’ve made note, too, of any book that got added in after I compiled the initial list.

Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire.

Berry, Wendell. The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry.

Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail.

Bryson, Bill. I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away. (In progress!)

Carson, Rachel. The Edge of the Sea.

Carson, Rachel. The Sea Around Us. (added)

Carson, Rachel. The Sense of Wonder. (added)

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring.

Casey, Susan. The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks.

Cushman, Stephen. Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle.

Dennis, Jerry. The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas.

Elder, John. Reading the Mountains of Home.

Elder, John. The Frog Run: Words and Wildness in the Vermont Woods.

Ferguson, Andrew. Land of Lincoln. (added)

Gilman, Susan Jane. Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven.

Gessner, David. My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism.

Gessner, David. Sick of Nature.

Heinrich, Bernd. A Year in the Maine Woods.

Hogan, Linda. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World.

Horwitz, Tony. Confederates in the Attic.

Junger, Sebastian. The Perfect Storm.

Kingsolver, Barbara. High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never. (In progress!)

Kohnstamm, Thomas. Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism.

Lopez, Barry. About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory.

Lopez, Barry. Arctic Dreams.

McKibben, Bill. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

McPhee, John. selections from The John McPhee Reader and The Second John McPhee Reader.

McPherson, James. Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg.

Muir, John. Nature Writings.

Orwell, George. Road to Wigan Pier.

Smith, Julian. Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Life and Adventure.

Tayler, Jeffrey. Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness.

Thomas, Emory. Travels to Hallowed Ground: A Historian’s Journey to the American Civil War.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Maine Woods.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden.

Troost, J. Martin. Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Finding Beauty in a Broken World.

I don’t know much about Brazil beyond the fact that the Creature from the Black Lagoon lived there on some branch of the Amazon. I also know that a different branch of the Amazon, the River of Doubt, nearly killed Teddy Roosevelt. And I know Rio is there, but what happens in Rio stays in Rio, so I don’t know many details.

So when I stumbled across Kohnstamm’s book about being a travel writer in Brazil, I thought it would be a good chance to learn something about the country. The book looked interesting, too, because it implied a good ethics lesson: Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?

Well, I didn’t learn much about Brazil, and I didn’t get to ponder writerly ethics so much as a get a pretty explicit lesson on what not to do, but Kohnstamm kept me entertained with his Thompsonesque antics. This was “travel hedonism” at its gonzoest.

Paul Theroux once said that travel writing is really about the person who’s traveling. If applied literally to Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?, then this is a book about Hunter S. Thompson. Kohnstamm’s life seems to be an unending stream of sex, drugs, and rocky roads. In fact, he has a self-declared black-belt in long-distance bus travel, “hauling ass at double capacity on potholed highways full of oxcarts, rickshaws, and other buses laying head-on games of chicken in our lane; [peering] out the window at the burnt wreckage of other buses…in mountain valleys below….”

He doesn’t mention Thompson by name, although he does invoke Kerouac, Hemingway and Bruce Chatwin. “They were true writers coming to terms with the struggle of the people, the living history, the challenges of their generation—all while reflecting on the universal human condition with nothing but a journal, a drink, and pen in hand,” Kohnstamm says.

He starts the book trying to come to terms with his own existential crisis. He’s in his mid-twenties and restless. Is it him? Is it his generation? Is it Americans? “Escape is our action of choice,” he says: “escape through pharmaceuticals, escape through technology, and plain old running away in search of something else, anything else.”

He chooses escape of his own, ditching a cubicle-bound life at a Wall Street law firm to answer the siren song of the travel bug. The trip, right from the start, swells with the Thompsonesque quest of Fear and Loathing: the so-called search for the “American Dream.” “It could also be called the New American Dream,” Kohnstamm says. “Fuck the simple pursuit of financial stability. Here’s to finding fulfillment in novelty, excitement, adventure, and autonomy.”

Long story made short: He careens across eastern Brazil, city to city, town to town, hostel to hostel, restaurant to restaurant in a mad dash to cram in as much information as he can for a guidebook for Lonely Planet, eventually resorting to just making shit up because he can’t cover enough ground. His hijinks lead to hedonistic misadventure after misadventure, and in the end, he’s left with just over a week to try and produce a manuscript.

“I must be some kind of masochist,” he admits. “But in the end, I really loved all of it, every triumph and every setback—at least in retrospect. Experiences were had. Repertoires were expanded. Boundaries were pushed. Beverages were consumed. Ladies were bedded. And several hundred pages were written, all of which potentially affected some local economies and several thousand travelers’ itineraries.”

By that definition, chok-full-o good intentions as it is, then Kohnstamm is going to hell, indeed. After all those same good intentions make for great pavement. But damn if it wasn’t a gonzo trip.

If I want background on Brazil, I guess I should get his travel guide—or maybe not, knowing now just how much of it is made up of bullshit. “There is a huge gap between what is required of the author and what the author can realistically do with the alloted time and budget,” Kohnstamm writes. “Is this due to weak editorial direction, or willful ignorance on the part of the travel publishers, who choose to disregard how underpaid and overstretched the writers are in order to keep production costs down? I cannot say. A little of both, I guess.” Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? offers the behind-the-scenes results of that disconnect. It’s not a book about Brazil, it’s a book about writing a book about Brazil.

As a memoir, its veracity is also highly suspect, but Kohnstamm lays out the groundrules right up front. “In order to distill the chaos of life down to a clear narrative, it was necessary to omit certain events, rearrange and compress chronology, and combine a few of the characters,” he says in the author’s note. “I have changed most of the names and identifying details of the characters in this book to protect their privacy. Much of the dialogue and many e-mails have been recreated, but all are based on real conversations and correspondence.”

However, if I want to look at how writers write about place, Kohnstamm certainly provides a useful, entertaining lesson.

“The majority of travel books fall into three basic groups,” he says:

1. There are earnest writers who become enlightened…. A more holistic approach to life is discovered and the universe is balanced.
2. On the opposite side of the spectrum are the smug writers who mock how backward plumbing and transportation are anywhere outside North America…. Such writers should give Orlando or Long Island a try for their next vacation, as both have abundant new cars and functional flush toilets with soft two-ply paper.
3.  Last but not least are the…guys who attempt solo ascents of mountains without telling anyone where they’re going, are forced to amputate their appendages with a spork, and then expect us to appreciate their triumph of human spirit.

Kohnstamm’s falls into a category of its own. It’s a triumph of human…something. Perhaps the New American Dream, discovered by whirling like a dervish across the globe, living life to its top. Thompson, I suspect, would approve of the comparison.

#24

“Historian travels to battlefields and writes about his experiences.” Sounds right up my alley. After all, I do a lot of that for Emerging Civil War, and my dissertation is going to take me in that direction, so it’s always interesting to see how other people do it.

That’s how a professional colleague of mine described Emory Thomas’s Travels to Hallowed Ground. He recommended it to me particularly because Thomas takes his son on some of his journeys, and my colleague knew that I got into battlefielding because of my daughter. Thomas’s book, then, might potentially offer some interesting ways at looking at the fields.

Thomas has a long career as a Civil War historian, with biographies of Confederates Robert E. Lee and JEB Stuart as his most notable books. He’s retired now, and to the best of my knowledge, hasn’t made a cottage industry out of tour-guiding the way a lot of the other “lions” of the field have done. If he had some thoughts inspired by visits to battlefields, I figured they’d be worth reading.

I was disappointed with the last such book I looked at, though: James McPherson’s Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg. It turned out to basically be McPherson’s excuse to write about the battle—which was, no doubt, an excellent account. But as a first-person presence in the book, he didn’t add much in the way of personal reflections or insights. He was almost superfluous in that respect (his history, and his narrative were great, though, so my disappointment only stems from what I was expecting, not from the quality of McPherson’s work).

Thomas does no better, although rather than take an extended look at a single battle, he provides shorter explorations of several battles. Each chapter is the length of a typical magazine article (and, indeed, some appeared in Civil War magazines in the mid-80s). There’s no real common thread that connects the chapters, though, other than the fact that Thomas visited there.

And for the record, his son goes on only one journey—so any hopes I had of father-child bonding experiences were pretty much shot. They travel to Roanoke Island—home of the infamous “Lost Colony” of English settlers who vanished long ago. Thomas and his son went there, though, to check out Burnside’s successful capture of the North Carolina coastal defenses. They discovered that not much had been preserved (such is still the case today). “What did you expect?” his son asks at the end, the long set-up to joke that’s not as clever as it thinks it is. “When you go looking for the remains of a battle like Roanoke Island, the most appropriate thing you can find is nothing.”

Thomas arranges his essays in chronological order, but there are such vast gaps in the chronology that their order seems almost moot. He skips most major battles­, which I kind of liked, and visited some out-of-the-way places, which I also liked.

He doesn’t quote much primary-source documentation but rather just synthesizes it all into his narratives, which read like summaries. It might, therefore, seem like the book would then lend itself as a good source for a beginner who wants a general overview of things, not too in-depth, but because Thomas leaves out so many of the war’s biggest events, his book wouldn’t be too useful for the novice. The buff, meanwhile, is going to know most of this already. The one thing he could bring to the table—his own insights and reflections—must’ve gotten left in the car as he was driving around.

The one exception is his second-to-last chapter, which focuses on an ethics-related issue from Petersburg. A photographer took a picture of a Confederate soldier’s corpse, with entrails hanging out, and copies of the photo because widely popular as a stereoscopic image in parlors across the country. Basically, a camera with two lenses, side-by-side, snapped the same picture, but because of the slightly different angles, when viewed through a stereoscope device, the images created a 3-D effect for viewers. They were all the range in the 1860s.

“That the dead young soldier and his three-dimensional entrails became items of entertainment only adds obscenity” to the lesson that “war is meaningless butchery,” Thomas says, obviously disturbed by the episode. In the 80s, with threats of nuclear annihilation still hanging over us, Thomas wondered if people would ever learn. “The human experience of history seems to show that if we are to survive, to avoid nuclear holocaust, we must do something more than watch television,” he says.

While that piece provided an excellent takeaway, the rest of the book was modest. I’m not sure it was worth the effort to track it down (since it’s out of print).

————

cross-posted at Emerging Civil War

#23

I’ve written before about my fascination with the Congo and Africa’s mythical “dark heart.” Conrad. Tarzan. Mkele-Mbembe. Stanley and Livingston and Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner. “Mistah Kurtz. He dead.” Oh, the horror, the horror.

Beyond all the myth is a country torn by war, wracked by poverty and tainted by the overexploitation of colonialism. It might hold allure as an exotic place to go for adventure, but really, it’s a place to die—or nearly so, as Jeffrey Tayler chronicled in his book Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey in the Heart of Darkness.

“With its sonorous o’s, the word Congo resonated with the power of a village drum to conjure up visions of jungles and thrashing crocodiles along a great African river,” Tayler thought, falling for the romance of it much the way I always have. He was living in Moscow and, entering his thirties, facing an existential crisis. “I needed to know who I was and what I was good for. I did not,” he said.

Tayler decides to make a descent by pirogue—a kind of dugout canoe—from the upper reaches of the river to the capital of Kinshasa. The route would in part, recreate Henry Morton Stanley’s journey in the 1870s. “[O]ur days are numbered and our time runs out,” Tayler wrote. “I hoped that the expedition would settle once and for all my doubts about who I was and what I could accomplish.”

If the premise sounds vaguely familiar, it’s similar to (but more exciting than) Julian Smith’s Crossing the Heart of Africa. Smith traverses the continent south to north, following the route of explorer Ewart Grogan. Smith’s book, published in 2010, ties together his own adventures, written as a travelogue, with Grogan’s story, and he weaves in a whole bunch of the continent’s history and natural history, too.

Tayler’s book, published in 2000, is almost pure plot. Yes, he weaves in some of the Congo’s recent history—in fact, one of the themes of the book is that he cannot escape the recent history—and he uses Stanley’s experience as a sort of touchstone that he comes back to now and again (nothing like Smith does with Grogan’s story, though). But overall, Facing the Congo is gripping narrative, written like an adventure story. And what an adventure.

Tayler considers his plight as it unfolds—and “plight” is probably an understatement because, it turns out, his life is in almost constant danger from bullying soldiers, hostile tribes people, civil war, the weather, crocodiles and hippos, and the river itself. “It’s very dangerous,” one tribesman tells him, “We Bangala don’t care for life. If we see a mondele [a white foreigner] many of us think only to kill him and take his things.”

Even sleeping becomes an ordeal along the danger-fraught river. “The moon hung a giant pale orange orb,” he writes,

the forest echoed with hoots from monkeys, with the tumultuous splashings of hippos in the shallows somewhere behind us. We had bivouacked early in a malodorous and desolate bight of palm and rubber vines. Biting ants, fat and black, infested our camp, scuttling over our legs, chomping away before we could scrape them off….

Compounding his travails is his inability to understand his guide, Desi—not linguistically but, rather, psychologically. “For me, everything here was new and urgent and unique,” Tayler writes; “for Desi the Congo was a harsh and ancient waterway out of which to wrest a meager living while he battled constant fatigue from worms or fevers or whatever it was that was afflicting him. He would not hurry because, danger or no, this river was his home and he lived by rhythms that allowed him to conserve his strength, enjoy himself when he could, and go on.

Only later does he realize “that I had exploited [the Congo] as a playground on which to solve my own rich-boy existential dilemmas.” He adds that his “drama of self-actualization proved obscenely trivial beside the suffering of the [people] and the injustices of the past.” Ah, to follow in the well-worn footsteps created by a hundred years of European exploitation….

Tayler comes to nothing more profound—or less powerfully obvious—than “time will always be show, and there is always much to be learned from living.” Oh, and “value what I have and…strive to preserve it.” I’m not really giving away the ending because, honestly, his flashes of genius felt underwhelming and anticlimactic following his journey.

It’s an excellent book overall, though. It truly is an adventure through the dark heart of the continent—one I’m glad I can take on the page and not in the pirogue.

In my piece this morning about Bill Bryson’s Appalachian Trail book, A Walk in the Woods, I mentioned that a friend of mine was going to be hiking the AT today. She happened to read the piece before she set out, so she decided to send us back some pictures. (Photos by Caity Stuart)

Caity and two of her coworkers were hiking in Shenandoah National Park. Most of their hike went along Shenandoah’s trail system, but for a three-mile stretch, between mile markers 46 and 43, they hiked the AT.

It was a clear day with blue skies and lots of sun and just a touch of wind. Temps along the base of the Blue Ridge rose to 40 degrees or so, but they only barely cracked 25 along up on the crest. There were still plenty of signs of winter up there.

As cozy as my office was on this first day of classes for the semester, I wished I was out on the trail. Even painted in browns and grays, mottled with a dusting of white, the forest looks beautiful.

#21

I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s read Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods and had a burning urge to go hike the Appalachian Trail. Of course, that might also have something to do with the fact that my girlfriend is heading there today to hike part of it. But whatever.

My experience with the AT is pretty limited, although the few places I’ve crossed its path are places I’ve crossed it a lot. The spot that comes to mind most is a foot bridge that crosses over I-90 in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. I’ve never stepped on that leg of the AT, but I’ve driven under it about a thousand times.

By foot, I’ve encountered the AT most frequently at Harper’s Ferry, WV. The trail crosses the Potomac River and rises up to Maryland Heights where it vanishes into the woods before climbing even further to run along the crest of South Mountain. In fact, my favorite stretch of the AT heads into the woods at the northern border of Gapland State Park several miles north of Harper’s Ferry. I remember a misty afternoon that cast a primeval air around the trail as it climbed into leafy greenness. Rain dripped from everything. The mud glistened.

I’ve intersected the AT at the top of Mount Washington in New Hampshire. I’ve always wanted to follow it to the top of Mount Katahdin in Maine. I’ve wanted to avoid it in Duncannon, PA, where a double-murder took place in September of 1990. Because I grew up in that area, the town’s name jumped out at me when I heard about the crime on the news. It struck me with such foreboding that it still sticks to me like a bad superstition.

My girlfriend and I hiked several hundred yards of the AT over the summer at Shenandoah National Park. We were, in fact, hiking up the impossibly never-ending trail to Hawksbill Mountain. The AT ran along the top of the ridge, so we made a point to walk out to it just so we could say we did the AT—only to discover that it also ran right by the parking lot where we’d left Caity’s car. For principle’s sake, we walked the trail there, too.

It was on that jaunt that I discovered an important truth about hiking, which Bryson so perfectly articulates:

The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill. The thing about being on a hill, as opposed to standing back from it, is that you can almost never see exactly what’s to come…. Every time you haul yourself up to what you think must surely be the crest, you find that there is in fact more hill beyond, sloped at an angle that kept it from view before, and that beyond that slope is another, and beyond that another and another, and beyond each of those more still, until it seems impossible that any hill could run on this long…. Still you stagger on. What else can you do?

Bryson’s book is at once clever, engaging, and chock-full-o information. I’ve read some of Bryson’s other works before—his A Short History of Nearly Everything is one of the more brilliant books I’ve ever read—but I’ve not read any of his more memoirish stuff before.

It’s not for lack of wanting to. A former NPS colleague of mine tried to get me to read A Walk in the Woods a few years ago. I wanted to, sincerely, but knew I didn’t have the time just then. She urged me to take her book; I reluctantly did so only because I knew it might be a while before I could get to it. It has sat there ever since (right next to the John McPhee reader I’d mentioned the other day, in fact).

Oh, my, am I glad I finally had the excuse to read this book. I have laughed out loud over and over.

Bryson discovers the AT almost by accident when he moves to a small town in New Hampshire after years abroad. He decides to check it out. “Running more than 2,100 miles along America’s eastern seaboard, through the serene and beckoning Appalachian Mountains, the AT is the granddaddy of long hikes,” he writes. “From Georgia to Maine, it wanders across fourteen states. Through plump, comely hills whose very names—Blue Ridge, Smokies, Cumberlands, Green Mountains, White Mountains—seem an invitation to amble.”

Bryson decides to take up that invitation, and the story of that amble becomes the premise of the book. Accompanying him is an old high school buddy he hasn’t seen in years, Katz, who is woefully overweight and underprepared. But Bryson soon discovers he’s not really ready for the mission, either. “I had never encountered anything so hard, for which I was so ill prepared,” he writes after being on the trail just a few short days. “Every step was a struggle.”

He doesn’t help his case by psyching himself out with horror stories about bear attacks, either.  “What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp?” he frets after seeing a four-bear photo. “Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children’s parties—I daresay I would even give a merry toot—and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag.”

Aside from liberal doses of humor, Bryson weaves in a lot of biology and ecology and a lot of history. He’s particularly damning of the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service—both so underfunded that their management borders catastrophically on negligence. Best of all, though, his removal from the modern world and immersion in the natural world provide ample opportunity for juxtaposing one against the other, resulting in rich, rich reflection.

The trail itself, he says, serves as a symbol of that contrast. “If a product or enterprise doesn’t constantly reinvent itself, it is superseded, cast aside, abandoned without sentiment in favor of something bigger, newer, and, alas, early always uglier,” he writes. “And then there is the good old AT, still quietly ticking along…unassuming, splendid, faithful to its founding principles, sweetly unaware that the world has quite moved on. It’s a miracle, really.”

Bryson finds miracles all along the way, too. His sense of wonder never shuts off even when his body winds down and his spirit flags. One of my favorite descriptions comes in the Shenandoah National Park, not far from Hawksbill Mountain, in fact. It evoked my own sense of awe being in those same woods:

a broad, ancient-seeming, deeply fetching glade cradled by steep hills, which gave it a vaguely enchanted, secretive feel. Everything you could ask for in a woodland setting was here—tall, stately trees broken at intervals be escalators of dusty sunshine, winding brook, floor of plump ferns, cool air languidly adrift in a lovely green stillness….

Caity will walk through that same terrain tomorrow, although winter will have stripped the lush forest down to its bare brown bark. All the bears will be hibernating. Most of the tourists will be home, waiting for spring to invite them back to the park.

I’ll cross paths with the AT later in the week, where it crosses I-66 outside of Linden, Virginia, on its way northward towards Harper’s Ferry. I’ll be driving east on the highway, on my way south to Caity’s. She’ll show me pictures from her hike, and I’ll tell her about my favorite passages from Bryson’s book, and we’ll both want to go hiking together. We’ll wait for spring, I suspect, but when we do finally go, Bryson will come along as company—it’ll be impossible to ever hike the AT without him.

#17

If there’s one book I’ve wished I’d written, it’s Confederates in the Attic. Of course, Tony Horwitz already wrote it, nearly two decades ago (I can hardly believe it’s been that long). Here’s a guy who wandered around the South, talking to people about the legacy of the Civil War. He asked questions, had conversations, observed, listened, and explored the landscape for himself. He immersed himself in the story.

This, I tell my students, is what good feature writers do. They take the time to do the story justice—and a story as complex as this one requires a lot of time if you’re going to be thorough and fair. That’s what I respect most about Horwitz’s work on the book: he takes the time to make an honest attempt at trying to understanding that which, I suspect, can never fully be understood.

Horwitz had a lifelong interest in the war, but it had lain mostly dormant throughout most of his adult life. Then, one morning without warning, he awoke to the sound of gunshots in the street outside his home. A group of Civil War reenactors were filming a TV documentary on the battle of Fredericksburg, and during a break in the action, they collapsed in Horwitz’s yard. Horwitz brought them fresh coffee, and that’s when the questions began.

The “hardcore” reenactors “didn’t just dress up and shoot blanks,” Horwitz discovered. “They sought absolute fidelity to the 1860s: its homespun clothing, antique speech patterns, sparse diet and simple utensils. Adhered to properly, this fundamentalism produced a time-travel high….”

One reenactor brags about soaking his brass buttons overnight in a saucer filled with urine, which oxidized the brass to make it look like a button from the 1860s. “My wife woke up this morning, sniffed the air and said, ‘Tim, you’ve been peeing on your buttons again,’” the man told Horwitz. (Reenactor friends of mine have since told me urine doesn’t really work, but it sure makes a colorful story.)

What makes these men tick, Horwitz wondered. Why does the war hold such sway over them. In fact, he thought, why does the war hold such sway over so many people?

And thus begins one of the oddest of odysseys. Horwitz submerges himself in the South, since that’s where most of the war was fought, to find out for himself. The resulting exploration of place turns into a memorable cultural portrait of the South.

Horwitz decides to start in Charleston, South Carolina, at the site of Fort Sumter, where the war’s first shots were fired, but the War waylays him well before he gets there. On his way south, through North Carolina, he’s sidetracked into the world of the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy, some of whom attend Civil War-related meetings seven nights a week. To commemorate “Lee-Jackson Day,” a holiday once widely celebrated across the South that combined the birthdays of long-dead Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, the folks play Civil War trivia games.

At times, Horwitz acts as a fly on the wall as he takes in the things going on around him. But at his best, he is a full-blown participant, taking sides in the trivia games, dressing up for a reenactment, and offering his unique, submerged perspective on what he sees and experiences. Best of all, he strikes up conversations everywhere he goes, asking, asking, asking.

Horwitz tracks down the legend of Tara from Gone with the Wind. He meets the last living Confederate widow. He rushes through Virginia with a hard-core reenactor, Robert Lee Hodge, hitting as many Civil War sites as they can in a week, what Hodge calls a “Civil Wargasm.”

In one of my favorite encounters of the book, he talks with Shelby Foote, the Memphis writer who penned the sweeping three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative, and who gained national exposure as a kindly grandfather-looking “Voice of the South” in Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary. “It’s the sort of experience we never forget,” Foote told him. “I was in a lot of fistfights, maybe fifty in my life. The ones I remember with startling clarity are the ones I lost.”

While Horwitz discovers that the Civil War is very much alive throughout the South, he also discovers that it’s a Cold War. The lines are no longer just geographic, either: they’re racial, social, and economic, too.

That’s what helps make Confederates in the Attic more than just a fascinating collection of eccentric people—although that is what makes it so captivating. Horwitz manages to write an intensely thought-provoking book. Every eccentric brings a new shade of meaning to the discussion. For every hardcore reenactor like Hodge, who can lay on the ground and “bloat” to look like the dead Confederates in wartime photos, there’s a Michael Westerman, the nineteen-year-old victim of a racially motivated murder, killed while flying a Confederate flag from the bed of his pickup truck. Citizens of Richmond who debate the placement of a statue to the late tennis great Arthur Ashe bring up incredibly nuanced arguments that transcend notions of mere “pro” and “con.”

Horwitz doesn’t shy away from any of it. Confederates in the Attic astutely explores racism, political correctness, national and regional identity, and the relevance of our own history as a way to understand ourselves. Like any good journalist, Horwitz doesn’t pretend to have any answers, but he lays out as many sides to the story as possible so readers can think for themselves.

Horwitz does get a few facts wrong, and sometimes his interpretation is shaky (I take particular exception to the way he tends to portray Stonewall Jackson as a total crackpot). He leaves a few things out, and he stirs up trouble, too. I know some of the people involved in some of the stories, so I have the inside scoop on a few things. Horwitz commits no unpardonable sins, though, and I can forgive much because of the earnestness with which he approaches his quest.

“The present is just a split second,” Hodge tells Horwitz. “The past lasts forever. You can keep going back to it.”

Indeed, Confederates in the Attic is much the same. This marked my fifth or sixth time through the book. It stands as a landmark piece of feature journalism and was  easily one of the best books of the 1990s. Although almost twenty years old, I can keep going back to it, over and over.

————

Cross-posted at Emerging Civil War.

#16

Walden is one of those books everyone’s heard of, but I frequently wonder how many people have actually read it.

It is, of course, the very stuff of high school English classes. I still remember by eleventh grade teacher, Mrs. Cummings, tell us that Thoreau lived what Emerson preached. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the great American philosopher of his day, advocating a simpler lifestyle and harmony with nature; Henry David Thoreau lived a simpler lifestyle in a small log cabin next to Walden Pond, outside Concord, Massachusetts, where both men live. Together, they made up the Janus of American Transcendentalism.

“I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately,” Thoreau wrote of his experience, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

His book, Walden, has since become part of the American literary canon, part of American myth, It’s a seminal work of nature writing.

But has anyone actually read it?

The first time I hit up Walden, I was studying for my comprehensive exams for my master’s in English at the University of Maine. On an early-autumn Saturday, I pilgrimaged to Walden, a four-hour drive, to read the book on the shores of the pond. I bought a copy at the bookstore there, read several chapters, then decided to hike around. Swimmers frolicked at the small beach near Walden’s east end. Canoeists drifted across the pond’s center. A train rumbled along the far ridge. This was hardly a natural setting of silence and solitude.

A hiking path rings Walden’s shores while another runs the crest of the ridgeline that circles the pond. Footpaths criss-cross between them like cobwebs. I always took the route that let me be as close to the water as possible. I wanted to see the pond’s nooks and crannies. People were tucked into almost every one. At least one couple, figuring it was “private enough,” were getting it on in the water a few feet offshore.

In later years, the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation would string barbed wire sans barbs along most of the footpaths as part of an erosion control project. So many feet trammeled the pathways that the hillsides themselves were getting packed and beaten. The fencing gave the woods a kind of concentration camp feel, if you can believe it. No one seemed to give the fencing any heed, anyway, though.

I spent so much time exploring on that first day that I didn’t have time to finish the book. Instead, I dipped it in the pond. I made sure it was sopping wet. Gingerly, I carried it, dripping, up the sloping paved walkway to the parking lot and tucked it into the truck of my car.

I’ve repeated the drenching only a few times since, giving away Walden-soaked copies of Walden as special gifts to a few dear friends over the years, people who’d “get it.” For such folks, the gift is a treasure.

I’ve returned to Walden several times over the years. On one early trip, my daughter talked me into swimming with her, although I’d not anticipated it at all. I waded into the pond with her and let her splash around, and I lifted her high into the air. My wife took pictures. Thereafter, my daughter always loved to return to “The Pond.”

I’ve returned to Walden, too, although I’ve never made it all the way through the book. I’ve read snippets. I suspect a lot of people can make that claim, at least. It helps that Thoreau virtually speaks in aphorisms—“to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely”…”a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone”… “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them” … ”Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”

When I graduated from high school, Mrs. Cummings gave me a dictionary as a gift. She inscribed it with what has become my favorite Thoreau-ism: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” I post that quote on my office door every few weeks.

Thoreau’s aphorisms are as rich as the maples along Walden’s shores as they flush gold and red in autumn. He gives himself over to a (mostly) self-sufficient lifestyle in the woods, and he finds delight in it. “I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself,” he says. He spends most of his days carrying out the daily business of living—building his cabin, tending to his beans, cutting firewood, fetching water—or exploring his surroundings. “[F]or I was rich,” he says, “if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly.”

I love, love, love the way Thoreau revels in the world around himself. It is enough to just be: “It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.”

Thoreau spent two years in the woods along Walden Pond. During that time, he frequently walked into town, where he had his mother cook for him sometimes. He took the first of his trips to the Maine woods during that time, too. So, he wasn’t the reclusive hermit history has sometimes led us to believe—an image he himself cultivated. “I love to be alone,” he wrote. “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

After his two-year sojourn, Thoreau returned to civilization. “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there,” he wrote. “Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time on this one.”

Yet, for the rest of his life, Thoreau seldom ventured too far away from his home in Concord. He went on trips—most notably to Cape Cod and back to Maine—but his tie to the lands around Concord bound him tight until his death in 1862.

Walden has never been out of print, so someone must be buying it—but I wonder if it’s one of those books that people have even if it’s one they haven’t necessarily read. Much of Thoreau’s mid-nineteenth-century style is cumbersome for modern readers, and parts of the book are downright preachy. Much of Thoreau’s prose is beautiful, too, though.

“[A]s the sun rose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was reveled, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle.”

To know such things exist in the world is reason to get up every day. That’s why I’ve come to believe that the idea of Thoreau, the idea of Walden, are what really matter most. “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature,” Thoreau wrote. “It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”

My return to Walden this week—all the way through the book for the first time ever—has been a treasure. It’s not that the book awed me, even if Thoreau’s legacy certainly does. Rather, it was good to be reminded why Thoreau is worth knowing. I, like so many of the writers I’ve spent time with over the past two weeks, owe him a tremendous debt for leading the way, for showing us how, for walking to the beat of his own drum.

“I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go on before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains,” Thoreau said. “I do not with to go below now.”

#15: Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation by L. Maarten Troost (2008)

The first time I landed in Shanghai, I couldn’t believe how big everything was. The terminal stretched off to some Whovian vanishing point. It was like that driving through the city, too—mile after mile of skyscraper, each as interesting to look at as the last. This was a city that wanted to be Manhattan but bigger, richer, busier.

But the bus windows showed me something distressing, too, as we rumbled across the coastal plain from the airport to the city: muddy canals choked with floating garbage, heaps of garbage and rubble scattered in back lots and side yards, an armada of small blue flatbed trucks jockeying for first place in a race that wasn’t even happening.

China turned my brain into an Escher landscape, constantly challenging me at every turn. I found new things to be amazed about, new things to wonder about, and new things to worry about.

China, I suspect, feels Escher-esque itself, thrashing about in the throes of an identity crisis as it lumbers out on the world stage: ancient and modern, beauty and squalor, opulent wealth and crippling poverty. Everything you can imagine about China is true—and so is its opposite. And everything is go, go, go.

I blogged extensively about my trips to China both times I was there (in 2009 and 2010), so I was eager to see what fellow traveler J. Maarten Troost had to say about his adventures, just a couple years before me, in Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation.

“I had been to dozens of Chinatowns. But this was the mother of all Chinatowns…” Troost said after arriving. “I understood nothing, a sensation that disturbed my psyche. I felt profoundly out of my element.”

In China, it doesn’t take long for a first-time visitor to realize just how very delusional he has been in terms of his assumptions about the country. If nothing else, traveling through China is a profoundly humbling experience, no more so than when you realize that nearly everything you thought you knew about the country, all your presumptions and book learning, your opinions, turn out to be utterly, completely wrong.

At times, I felt like Troost and I lived the same experience. People drive “as if to kill,” he says. He cringed at the unearthly haze that hung over the landscape and “swirled in gray and brown and yellow plumes.” He was trampled in the scrum-like surges that turned standing in queue into “a forum for physical sport.” Most of all, he was stunned by the number of people.

“From the outside, 1.3 billion people is simply a statistic,” he says. “Inside China, the enormity of the country’s population colors everything.”

For example, consider the limited number of names people can choose. “There are 88 million people in China named Zhang. There are more people called Chen in China than there are Canadians in Canada,” Troost writes. “It’s become so problematic that no one knows Hu’s Hu in China.”

Troost’s sense of humor drives much of the book. He is, quite honestly, hilarious. I’ve not laughed my way through a book like that in years. But his humor is witty and intelligent, often the result of his sharp observations. It’s also a way to make some of his insights go down a little smoother because, let’s face it, there’s much in China to worry about.

“[I]t’s difficult to spend a moment in China and not be utterly awed by the scale of the ongoing environmental catastrophe,” Troost observes. Together with India, he says, there are now 2.5 billion people in the global economy that just weren’t there fifteen years ago. “The consequences for the environment are alarming.”

The sky itself serves as a constant reminder. It’s “apocalyptic” in its smogginess. He has a buddy who lights up a cigarette so he get “clean smoke.” I, too, had heard of China’s legendarily bad pollution, although by the time I got there, I could see all the way into Beijing from the top of the Great Wall, some fifty miles distant. Apparently, in preparation for the Olympics, the Chinese government cleaned up the air—not by reducing pollution or instituting pollution control measures but by simply closing down thousands of factories and moving them elsewhere.

The water, too, usually seemed on the verge of bubbling into an open cesspool. “One third of all the freshwater in China—that is, all the rivers and lakes in this enormous country—is considered unsafe for industrial use,” Troost discovered. “When the water is so vile you can’t even use it in a lead paint factory because it’s too dirty, I’d say you have a water problem.”

Later, when he sees how sparse the once-snowy Himalayas have become, where much of China’s (and India’s) water comes from, he gets worried: ‎”and I tried to squelch that gnawing feeling that we are on the cusp of unsettling times.”

With 1.3 million people, who all need food and water and jobs and space, there aren’t a lot of options. “There is not vast empty hinterland in China capable of sustaining a huge population that isn’t already sustaining—barely—a huge population,” he says.

Add to that his “creeping awareness that there are no rules in China, that so much of life in China is essentially a flirtation with anarchy,” and you might understand Troost’s unease.

I always thought of China a little like the Wild West, but as Troost observes, China is getting impatient for the West to get the hell out of the way. “The general attitude among the Chinese toward Americans is similar to that of a young, hotshot quarterback waiting for the tired, banged-up veteran to step aside so he can lead the team,” he says.

My own experience with the Chinese was a bit different. I generally found them to be warm and friendly and intensely curious about us. I didn’t travel as freely or extensively among them as Troost did, so I didn’t get the breadth of exposure he did.

Impatience and disdain or not, part of the Chinese identity crisis stems from their fierce pride in being Chinese coupled with their hunger to embrace a Western standard of living. “Not everyone can have everything in China, not yet, but every day there are more who do,” Troost says. The future looks sunny (“okay, smoggy,) for China—“barring a complete societal collapse as environmental degradation undergoes devastating feedback loops.”

Alas, the burden of responsibility for China’s catastrophic environmental practices lies squarely on us.

In the United States, we squawk about shoddy goods, poisonous toothpaste, contaminated toys. We bemoan the lost jobs. We point to the slave labor in China, like the unfortunate people, kids even, snookered or kidnapped to work in the factories. Or we lament what China is doing to the environment…. But do we decide to buy domestically made, high-quality goods manufactured in a well-regulated environment that ensures humane working conditions? We do not.

My own travels over two years were limited to Shanghai, Nanjing, Xi’an, Beijing, and a couple smaller cities (although in China, “smaller” is relative). Troost goes far and wide, including a foray into occupied Tibet. By the end, at nearly 400 pages, the book feels long, although it doesn’t ever drag; I was just feeling travel fatigue, I suppose. Troost was, too, I think. For instance, he goes to Chengdu to see pandas but then hardly writes about what he sees. He starts to get a little perfunctory by the end, finally conceding, “What is here cannot all be seen by one man. Not in a lifetime.”

I’d agree. China is just too damn big, too larger-than-life. Too magnificent.

We need to pay attention. There’s more at stake than we could possibly imagine.

#14: The Living Great Lakes: In Search of the Heart of the Inland Seas by Jerry Dennis (2003)

Lake Erie taught me how important it is to watch the sun set. It was the summer of 2010, and I was in the middle of my divorce. The semester, my worst ever, had just ended, followed immediately by a whirlwind trip to China. I had a younger woman giving me the yo-yo treatment. I needed to figure out a way to calm the tumult in my life.

So for nearly a week, in early June, I found myself a spot along the breakwall that stretches out from Walnut Beach toward the lighthouse that guards the entrance to Ashtabula’s habor. I watched the sun, bright as a blood orange, dip to the horizon and vanish into the lake.

My son loved to come to this same beach when he came to my mother’s to visit. He’d play in the surf for hours, letting it bump and bat him around as he splashed against the waves and fought off sea monsters.

One day, as I watched him play, the lake chose to brand me. I was sitting in a lawnchair just above the waterline, my feet loosely tucked into my deck shoes. The sun, reflecting off the water, hit with extra intensity and burned the tops of my feet in an arc that matched the lip of my shoe. The near-blistery red eventually cooled to a walnut brown, but my toes, protected by my shoes, remained white. That tanline stayed with me for almost a full year. The lake didn’t want me to forget.

Another day, the sand itself burned by feet. Sand can get up to thirty degrees hotter than the air temperature, and on one 90-degree day, the sand got hot indeed. It didn’t sink in until I was already halfway to the restrooms—far enough along on my trip that I was committed.

But that June, I returned each cool evening to sit on the breakwall to watch a repeat performance of the sunset. I watched a lot of sunsets that summer. I learned a lot.

Other than sunsets, I’ve not had much connection with any of the Great Lakes. I’ve seen Lake Ontario a few times driving along its western horseshoe from Niagara Falls up to Toronto. As a mid-teen, I caught a glimpse of Lake Michigan during a trip to see a Cubs game back when Wrigley Field only had day games. And that’s it.

So when I saw Jerry Dennis’ The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas, I was quick to check it out. I know little about the lakes but wanted to know more; furthermore, they constituted a distinct geographic area not yet represented on my reading list. That the Outdoor Writers of America chose it as its “Best Book of 2003” seemed to suggest it would make a good addition.

Dennis lives along Lake Michigan and so has had a lifelong connection with—and passion for—that lake. It triggered in him a larger interest in all five of the lakes: Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario (from west to east, as the water flows, although as a kid I learned them by the acronym HOMES: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior). “All five shape the land and alter the weather and define the journeys of those who live nearby,” Dennis says.

Like a mariner called by the sea, Dennis heard a call from the lakes. For years, he’d been studying their stories and histories, their geologies and hydrologies, their people and places. “I had the love, I think, but not the perception,” he says. “I couldn’t see far enough. And I couldn’t unite what I saw with what I already knew.”

So Dennis secured himself a position on a 104-foot schooner sailing from Lake Michigan through the lakes and out to the sea, where it was eventually bound for Southwest Harbor, Maine (near the spot where, last week, I sat along the seawall with Rachel Carson’s books). Dennis uses the boat trip to frame the larger story of the lakes in what turns out to be a fascinating book—part natural history, part travelogue, part memoir. It’s exactly the kind of book I wish I could write.

Dennis is a great storyteller and a great researcher. His adventure, which lasts a month and takes him through Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario, gives him the chance to unite all those things he knows about the lakes.

The only lake he doesn’t get to visit is Superior because it lies to the north, off-course. “Superior has always reminded me of charismatic people, the ones who dominate a room by their presence,” he says. “Superior is larger, deeper, cleaner, colder, less developed, and less traveled than the other Great Lakes. It is also more deadly. At 350 miles long, 160 miles wide, and with a surface area of 31,700 square miles, it is capable of swallowing oceangoing vessels with shocking ease.”

Yes, he does spend time talking about shipwrecks in the lakes—thousands and thousands of ships have met their doom there, it turns out—and yes, he gives appropriate space to the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I suppose that’s another connection I have to the Great Lakes: Gordon Lightfoot’s famous inland-sea ballad about the 1975 shipwreck. I was seven when that song came out and have loved it, it seems, all my life. It’s so forlorn.

Dennis writes an amazing biography of the Great Lakes, and he’s full of surprising information. As an example: “For most of the twentieth century more tons of cargo were shipped every year on the Great Lakes than in all the American ports on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts combined.” As I think about it, that boggles my mind.

But I guess it shouldn’t. I have sat on that breakwall and watched cargo-sized lakeboats, as big as overturned skyscrapers, scudding back and forth along the horizon. Sometimes one drifts into the coal yards that flank Ashtabula’s harbor, where it unloads its cargo onto waiting train cars.

This is the Lake Erie I typically think of, one whose shoreline is bespotted with bubonic piles of coal and iron ore, where chemical factories churn out sour-smelling steam and pungency and blighted factories and warehouses crowd out trees.

Industrial abuse, which stretched back decades, made the lake a cesspool. “Until the early 1970s,” Dennis says, “it gave off a stench of human and industrial garbage that could be smelled many miles inland. Not much lived in the lake then except trash fish, algae, bacteria, and sludge worms.”

He explains that “[t]he ecological devastation that struck Erie in the 1960s was caused by an influx of nutrients from fertilizers, detergents, and municipal and industrial waste that essentially made the lake old before its time.” Scientists estimated that the lake had “aged” fifty thousand years.

But as Dennis and his crewmates discover as they sail into the lake from the Detroit River, Lake Erie today “is blue and clear and smells of clean water and beach sand, with a hint of approaching rain. It smells healthy.”

Stringent environmental regulations, prompted by a strong public outcry to protect the lakes, have had surprisingly effective results. “Erie’s return to health is now recognized as one of the greatest environmental victories in North America,” Dennis says. Erie in particular and all the Great Lakes in general still face several serious problems, though, including continued industrial pollution, invasive species that have impacted fisheries, fluctuating water levels that have impacted shipping, and the possible exploitation of oil, natural gas, and the water itself.

“What of their future?” he asks. “Will people a century from now see a motherlode of clean water or a wasteland?”

“One of the consequences of the degradation of the environment is a vague but undeniable cultural despair,” he says. By the end of his journey, he lays out a clear case for the need for stewardship.

He comes to other self-discoveries, too, which give the book a deeper resonance. Long nights under the stars and bright afternoons with the wind blowing his hair prove to be effective teachers. “People crave a quieter, slower life,” he realizes, “but have no idea how to achieve it.”

But what if it does damage? What if the pace wears insidiously? Maybe it beats us down. Maybe we don’t notice the damage until we step away from our normal life and experience a slower, quieter, less demanding one.

“Living on the boat made all that seem clear,” he says.

I understand what he means about the need for a “quieter, slower life.” These days, as I plow through this doctoral program while still teaching, too (not to mention parenting and writing), I constantly feel balls-to-the-wall—moreso than usual. It’s invigorating, but it’s also exhausting. I crave that quieter, slower life.

Because that’s a lesson Lake Erie taught me, too. As I sat along that breakwall and watched the sun set those evenings, I appreciated what it meant to take a time out from whatever I was doing so I could just take time to watch. A sunset is one of the most beautiful wonders on earth; just because it happens every night doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be deliberate about enjoying it.

“It’s our spirit that makes us encounter the wonders of the world and know that they are wonders,” Dennis says.

The Great Lakes, it seems, have been good teachers to us both.

#12: About This Life by Barry Lopez (1998)

The pieces collected in Barry Lopez’s About This Life profess to be “journeys on the threshold of memory.” They take the shape of essays, travel stories, and memoirs, although Lopez firmly plants them all in the first-person perspective. Most relate in some way to a specific place. At the heart of the book, though, his essay “The American Geographies” speaks most directly to the importance of landscape—and how people continue to misunderstand and even misrepresent what that really means.

“The real American landscape is a face of almost incomprehensible depth and complexity,” he says.

We profess “a sincere and fierce love” for the American landscape, Lopez says, yet we continue to get farther and farther away from our own geographies. “Year by year, the number of people with firsthand experience in the land dwindles,” he says…. “[I]t has only been in the last few hundred years or so that a people could afford to ignore their local geographies as completely as we do and still survive.”

People only able to venture into the countryside on annual vacations are, increasingly, schooled in the belief that land will, and should, provide thrills and exceptional scenery on a timely basis. If it does not, something is wrong, either with the land itself or possibly with the company outfitting the trip.

We expect purple mountains and amber waves of grain, grand canyons and dismal swamps. In other words, we expect the idea of a landscape, not necessarily the landscape itself. We tend to collapse America’s complex calico of geography into a single idea of “America.”

“It’s always been a romantic’s landscape,” Lopez says, which means geography gets treated like a commodity. Lopez describes it as “the packaging and marketing of land as a form of entertainment.” It appears, he says, in advertisements, as the background in movies, and on patriotic calendars.

“On reflection,” Lopez realizes, “this is an appalling condescension and a terrible imprecision, the very antithesis of knowledge.”

Ignorance of the land has another, more sinister result, too. “What is true,” Lopez says, “is that man has a power, literally beyond his comprehension, to destroy.”

The lethality of some of what he manufactures, the incompetence with which he stores or seeks to dispose of it, the cavalier way in which he employs in his daily living substances that threaten his health, the leniency of the courts in these matters…, and the treatment of open land, rivers, and the atmosphere as if, in some medieval way, they could still be regarded as disposal sinks of infinite capacity, would make you wonder…if we weren’t bent on an errand of madness.

As Lopez ends the essay, he introduces an idea that seems to contradict, at least in part, an idea put forward by other writers I’ve encountered. He says:

A testament of minor voices can clear away an ignorance of any place, can inform us of its special qualities; but no voice, by merely telling a story, can cause the poisonous wastes that saturate some parts of the land to decompose, to evaporate. This responsibility falls ultimately to the national community, a vague and fragile entity to be sure, but one that, in America, can be ferocious in exerting its will.

Gessner, Williams, Carson, and in a somewhat different way, Thoreau, have all suggested that it will require individual effort, and individual storytellers, to affect change. While I agree that no one writer can undo damage that’s been done, I do think they can prevent damage from continuing or from happening again. (Carson is proof positive of that!) I don’t want to read too far into Lopez’s words and would be eager to read something of his that expands on those themes.

Of all the pieces in Lopez’s book, “American Geographies” is perhaps the least personal. He’s constructed the essay more as a treatise than a memoir, revealing much about what he thinks without necessarily getting too personal about it. That’s okay. Other pieces in the book are highly personal, such as the morning of his mother’s death or the afternoon his childhood dog was run over by three Navy men in a green convertible—both stories of deep grief for their times, in their ways. His essay about his connection to the Grand Canyon and other landscapes of his youth is also a standout.

The book opens with a series of travel pieces where Lopez, the nature writer, acts more as a reporter than a memoirist. Still, even there, the pieces resonate so strongly because he allows himself the luxury of commentary. In my favorite such piece, he explores the air-freight industry by flying on air freighters for weeks straight and then writing about all the crazy freight he’s traveled with, all the geography he’s observed from above, all the ways time has warped for him as he’s jumped around the world.

One other significant point worth noting about the book: As a craftsman, Lopez stands out from other writers I’ve read so far in this project because of his vocabulary. Perhaps it seems pedestrian of me to even mention something like that. However, not a page went by that I didn’t find delight in an unusual word or a familiar word used in an unusual way. In the book, he threw maybe five curveballs at me that I actually had to look up (and I’m not ashamed to admit it), but what amazed me is the facility with which he used his impressive vocabulary.

I know there’s research out there about the difference between the vocabulary a person knows and the vocabulary a person regularly uses, which is much smaller. As someone who labored so long under the professional requirement to write for the eighth-grade reading level (hurray, journalism!), my own writing style comes across with a pretty conversational tone. It’s always requires conscious effort for me to stretch beyond my traditional stable of words into the deeper well I have at my disposal. I admired Lopez’s ability to that.

About This Life is a marvelously eclectic collection of pieces, journey after journey through landscape and memory with a writer thoughtful enough to appreciate where he’s going, what he’s seeing, and what it means to him—and, hopefully, to us, as well.

#7: Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey (1968)

Once more, I feel late to the party. I had no idea who Edward Abbey was, yet nearly every nonfiction writer I’ve read so far has referenced him. The only one who hasn’t was Thoreau, and that’s because Abbey hadn’t been born yet—and wouldn’t be for another sixty years after Thoreau’s death.

Abbey and Thoreau still share a connection, though: Novelist Larry McMurtry has apparently referred to Abbey as “the Thoreau of the American West.” Even the dead guy has a link to Abbey. Damn.

I stumbled on Abbey completely by accident. A blurb on his book Desert Solitaire described it as “an account of Abbey’s seasons as a ranger at Arches National Park.” Having just spent this past summer as a National Park ranger, and contemplating a similar writing project, I thought Abbey might be of use.

Boy, was he.

Published in 1968, Desert Solitaire recounts Abbey’s experiences as seasonal park ranger in 1956 and 1957. The Park Service gave him a trailer to live in, smack-dab in the wide-open desert of Utah. Abbey considered in paradise: “What better sinecure could a man with small needs, infinite desires, and philosophic pretensions ask for?”

Much of the book recounts his adventures—and misadventures—in the rugged landscape. “The desert is a land of surprises, some of them terrible surprises,” he concedes. “Terrible as derived from terror.”

Abbey proves himself up to the challenge of capturing the desert’s beauty and wonder. “And the desert—” Abbey later asks as he considers his surroundings, “what does the desert say? The desert says nothing. Completely passive, acted upon but never acting, the desert lies there like the bare skeleton of Being, spare, sparse, austere, utterly worthless, inviting not love but contemplation.”

Abbey takes full advantage of the opportunity. “Taking my meal outside by the burning juniper in the fireplace with more desert and mountains than I could explore in a lifetime open to view, I was invited to contemplate a far larger world, one which extends into a past and into a future without any limits known to the human kind,” he writes.

Things prove to be far from idyllic in the shadow of the Arches, though. “[T]here is a cloud on my horizon,” Abbey forecasts. “A small dark cloud bigger than my hand. Its name is progress.”

Even as Abbey revels in his job, the NPS is trying to open up Arches to wider audiences by making “improvements” to visitor services. Abbey finds himself at odds with his employer.

Lee’s Ferry has now fallen under the protection of the Park Service. And who can protect it against the Park Service? Powerlines now bisect the scene; a 100-foot pink water tower looms against the red cliffs; tract-style houses are built to house the “protectors”; natural campsites along the river are closed off while all campers are now herded into an artificial steel-and-asphalt “campground” in the hottest, windiest spot in the area; historic buildings are razed by bulldozers to save the expense of maintaining them while at the same time hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on an unneeded paved entrance road. And the administrators complain of vandalism.

“Progress has come at last to the Arches, after a million years of neglect,” Abbey says. “Industrial Tourism has arrived.”

To this day, the Park Service wrestles with the twin engines that drive its mission: it’s supposed to preserve and protect our natural, cultural, and historical resources, but it’s also supposed to make those resources available for public enjoyment and education. I know from experience that it is a hard, hard mandate to balance.

Abbey will have none of it. He falls squarely on the side of “preservation and protection,” believing that wild places should be left wild for their own intrinsic value and not because they’re of “entertainment value” to the public. “We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it,” he argues. “We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there.”

He has scorpion venom for interests that seek to exploit the wild—including oil companies, mining companies, and even the NPS. “There are some who frankly and boldly advocate the eradication of the last remnants of wilderness and the complete subjugation of nature the requirements of—not man—but industry,” Abbey says. “Original sin, the true original sin, is the bland destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us—if only we were worthy of it.”

Hell, Abbey even hates the fact that more people want to visit the park, which in itself would make the wilderness less wild.

Parks today place a huge emphasis on the economic impact they create for local communities. In an age when landowners and businesses speak in dollar signs, it’s sometimes the only way a park can make itself a priority. This is especially true in instances where development and preservation opportunities butt heads. Abbey, writing fifty years ago, experienced a different reality. He saw the tourism industry as a soul-sucker:

industrial tourism exacts a spiritual price from those dependent on it for their livelihood. The natives must learn to accustom themselves to the spectacle of hordes of wealthy, outlandishly dressed strangers invading their land and their homes. They must learn the automatic smile. They must expect to be gaped at and photographed. They must learn to be quaint, picturesque and photogenic. They must learn that courtesy and hospitality are not simply the customs of any decent society but are rather a special kind of commodity which can be peddled for money.

Throughout the book, Abbey comes across as someone who likes people but hates People. He’s paradoxically social with individuals but antisocial—and quite cynical—about groups. “I discovered that I was not opposed to mankind but only to man-centeredness, antropocentricity, the opinion that the world exists solely for the sake of man….” His realization, late in the book, was an important articulation for me.

Abbey’s uncompromising view made him a folk hero for the nascent environmentalist movement. It’s that influence that has sent Abbey rippling through the work of Terry Tempest Williams, David Gessner, Bernd Heinrich, John McPhee, and others. And now me.

“Thank God for Edward Abbey,” a friend wrote on my Facebook page when I mentioned that I’d finished the book.

Abbey’s story, considered one of the first modern works of creative nonfiction, has the definite tone of a curmudgeonly idealist. “The romantic view, while not the whole truth, is a necessary part of the whole truth,” he contends. After all, it’s the romanticized view of something that will best make people fall in love with it.

We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national larks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places. An increasingly pagan and hedonistic people…we are learning finally that the forests and mountains and desert canyons are holier than our churches. Therefore, let us behave accordingly.

Abbey’s struggles reflect many of my own, not only as a park ranger but also as someone keenly concerned about the natural world and humankind’s (and my own) place in it. I’ll look for ways to follow Abbey’s example, finding opportunities for contemplation, for finding my story, for exercising my voice—and for enjoying the wonder of the world around me.

#6: The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau (1864)

Katahdin, some twenty miles to my west, looks like a sketch done in chalk, set against the winter-gray sky. Its ever-present clouds hover today down where its knees might be if the great mountain had them. Katahdin always has clouds. Henry David Thoreau described Katahdin as “a cloud-factory.”

“I entered within the skirts of the cloud which seemed forever drifting over the summit, and yet would never be gone, but was generated out of that pure air as fast as it flowed away,” Thoreau wrote.

The great hermit of Walden is much on my mind today as I read his book The Maine Woods and, by happenstance, retrace part of his route.

My father and son and I have driven up to Oakfield to fetch a black-bear hide from a one-man tanning operation. I-95 North took us to the east of Mount Katahdin, the second-highest mountain in New England and the northernmost terminus of the Appalachian Trail. When I was my son’s age, my father took me and my brother to the roots of Katahdin on many moose-watching excursions.

Oddly, Thoreau saw no moose on his Katahdin expedition in 1846, although he saw plenty of sign. It wasn’t until his return in ’53 that he finally saw one (witnessing a moose hunt provides one of the most thoughtful passages in the second part of Thoreau’s book). He Made a final trip in ’57, drawn back by “the continuousness of the forest.” He combined the accounts he wrote about the three trips into The Maine Woods, published in 1864 two years after his death.

“[N]ot only for strength, but for beauty, the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger’s path and the Indian’s trail, to drink at some new and bracing fountain of the Muses, far in the recesses of the wilderness,” Thoreau wrote.

He arrives each time in Bangor, easily accessible at the time—but it was the last metropolitan outpost on the edge of Maine’s vast hinterland. As he travels up the Penobscot River, he passes through “Oldtown” (today, Old Town), past the Sunkhaze Stream where my father’s farm sits, through Passadumkeg, Lincoln, Mattawamkeag, Molunkus. The road Thoreau followed eventually became modern-day Route 2. I am heading south along that very same road, Katahdin now behind me.

I’m intentionally reading The Maine Woods now, while I’m in Maine, not only in the hope that I’ll somehow draw some kind of spiritual inspiration from the land but also because I want to read the book in conversation with Bernd Heinrich’s A Year in the Maine Woods. Heinrich’s book rooted me in one small area for a year; Thoreau’s, it turns out, is less a meditation on place than it is a travelogue.

It is a travelogue that takes place over eleven years, though. The Thoreau who undertakes the incredibly arduous canoe trip down the Allegash River—some 325 miles—is a more mature and less idealistic Thoreau than the Walden resident who traveled to Mount Katahdin more than a decade earlier.

His trip to Katahdin takes on a spiritual cast:

The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on our humanity. Only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there.

But Thoreau, known as a stylist for his wonderful sentences, “keeps it real,” too, so to speak. He balances his transcendentalism with real-world perspective:

The mountain seemed a vast aggregation of loose rocks, as if sometime it had rained rocks, and they lay as they fell on the mountain sides, nowhere fairly at rest, but leaning on each other, all rocking-stones, with cavities between, but scarcely any soil or smoother self. They were the raw materials of a planet dropped from an unseen quarry….

At times, Thoreau’s travel accounts deteriorate into dry recitation of where he went, who he met, and what he ate. Elsewhere, though, his descriptions shine. He describes moose as “great frightened rabbits” and Katahdin’s summit “veiled in clouds, like a dark isthmus in that quarter, connecting the heavens with the earth.” Elsewhere, he writes: “The spruce and cedar on [the lake’s] shores, hung with gray lichens, looked at a distance like the ghosts of trees.”

He also captures first-hand accounts of the lives of the Penobscot Indians through a sympathetic portrait of his Allegash guide, Joe Polis. It’s a valuable anthropological snapshot of their culture.

I love the country Thoreau writes about and have spent much time in those very same woods. I’ve lived on the Sunkhaze, “said to be some of the best deer ground in Maine on this stream,” as Thoreau recounts. My glimpses of Katahdin from the barren windswept hilltops outside Oakfield, along with my drive down Route 2, give me just the faintest connection to Thoreau on a day when I’m reading about his adventures, and even that’s enough to help me feel greater affinity for the writer’s work.

Why, just today I had an experience in the woods that Thoreau captured, exactly, nearly 150 years ago:

Who shall describe the inexpressible tenderness and immortal life of the grim forest, where Nature, though it be mid-winter, is ever in her spring, where the moss-grown and decaying trees are not old, but seem to enjoy a perpetual youth; and blissful, innocent Nature, like a serene infant, is too happy to make a noise, except by a few tinkling, lisping birds and trickling rills?

With woods still covering some 85% of the state, Maine remains the most forested state in the lower forty-eight. But it’s not the wilderness Thoreau experienced by any stretch. When Thoreau and his five companions paddled up the Penobscot past Millinocket, they entered a land where “[n]o face welcomed us but the fine, fantastic sprays of free and happy evergreen trees, waving one above another in their ancient home.”

Route 2 takes me today past a patchwork of farms and homesteads carved out of that once-vast wilderness.

To the east, the wilderness still sits in evergreen stillness; to the west, beyond the sketch of Katahdin rising out of the forest, the wilderness erupts again, stretching out toward the Canadian border.

My kids and my father and I will plunge back into that wilderness tomorrow. I know already—have known for decades—its power as a “bracing fountain of the Muses.” To see it with Thoreau’s eyes will nonetheless be a treat.

#3: Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Love and Adventure by Julian Smith (2010)

To prove himself to the woman he loved and her skeptical stepfather, Ewart Grogan traversed Africa, four-thousand miles from south to north. It took him two and a half years. The year was 1897.

One hundred and eight years later, Julian Smith retraced Grogan’s path in an effort to prove something to himself—although he was still trying to figure out what that “something” might actually be. In Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Love and Adventure, the heart Smith needs to cross is his own.

“Even though our personalities, our lives and times were vastly different, Grogan and I were really after the same thing: lifelong happiness with an incredible woman,” Smith writes. “Perhaps crossing Africa as he had would help me find peace with this radical new direction my life was about to take. Maybe some of Grogan’s mojo would rub off on me.”

Africa always seems ready-made for interior journeys. Heart of Darkness. Stanley and Livingston. You get the idea. “Africa has always been a concept as much as a place: an exotic backdrop for outsiders to have ennobling experiences, a land of theatric extremes of violence and beauty,” Smith says.

Crossing the Heart of Africa combines history, travelogue, and memoir, although Smith never seems to get any of them quite right. His own journey intertwines with Grogan’s; a third main thread about his relationship with his fiancée, Laura, braids into the mix.

The book’s travel segments usually turn into straight narrative, chronicling event after event after event without spending much time reflecting on those events. The book could’ve benefitted from more sensory description, at the very least, and perhaps a more literary style, at best. Travelogues are most effective when the writer puts the reader there—and Smith didn’t always do such a great job of that.

His memoir segments, meanwhile, often feel contrived. He undertakes his trek as his last hurrah to freedom before his pending marriage. Within the context of that knowledge, Smith still tries to build suspense in the retelling of his relationship with his fiancée: Will he ask her out? Will they get together? Will he ever be able to commit? He creates little cliffhangers to end those sections, but it’s melodramatic pabulum. There’s nothing extraordinary about their relationship to make me care, and I already know how it’s going to turn out. If he’s trying to make himself seem like a sympathetic, three-dimensional character by showing his inner conflict, all he’s really doing is making himself look like a tool.

His history sections work best. The early part of Grogan’s story get a little dry, but as he plunges into the heart of Africa, and life gets interesting for him, the narrative picks up. Smith doesn’t quote a lot of primary sources but, instead, paraphrases several biographies (including Grogran’s autobiography).

Smith’s book is at its best when it recounts the history and recent past of particular places he visits. In those segments, Smith’s history and travelogue components play off each other well. Readers get treated to background information on the work of naturalists like Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey, the horrors of the Rwandan genocide, the ongoing civil wars of the Congo, the exploitation of Africa’s big game, the environmental degradation of the snows of Kilimanjaro, the dark legacy of the Arabian slave trade on the rest of the continent, and so on.

I read Crossing the Heart of Africa because I wanted to get a sense of place. I got the history of the place, but I didn’t feel any kind of emotional connection to it, no sense of wonder about it.

It’s Smith’s movements through place, not place itself, that allow him to make his discoveries and decisions. I’m not convinced his tale couldn’t have happened elsewhere so long as he had time away from Laura in an environment that stressed him out a little. I don’t know that Africa, per se, was intrinsic to his self-discovery the way it was for Grogan.

Crossing the Heart of Africa is no jewel of the Nile. It has some worthwhile content, but overall, it’s the most pedestrian “big adventure” I’ve ever read.

#2: My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism by David Gessner (2011)

David Gessner’s journey down Massachusetts’ Charles River may not be Marlowesque in its scope or scale, but it’s nonetheless a trip into his own heart. He undertakes his canoe trip as a way better understand his own connection to the natural world, which he hopes will help him clarify his own conflicting ideas about being environmentally conscious.

The result: My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism. He writes:

most issuers of manifestos begin with their conclusions concluded, their concrete hardened, and their intentions, motives, and views firmly in mind, or in hand, fit to bash you over the head with. I began, on the other hand, with nothing more than questions—questions as numerous as the sources of the Charles River, and as meandering as the river itself. But trust, dear reader, that though these questions do wander, they also reach the sea, moving toward answers if not the answer.

Gessner loathes the label “environmentalist,” it seems, not because it’s loaded with baggage so much as it’s loaded with angst. “Why does environmentalism, much of which is just common sense, so often sound like nagging?” he asks. “Many of us understand that the things environmentalists have long told us are right. Though we don’t actually do it, we know that we should eat and drive less.”

So why don’t people act on the knowledge they have? Do they feel like they’re being nagged? Do they feel like the problem’s too big for any one person to make a difference? Do they feel hopeless? Do they feel patronized? Gessner explores all these possibilities.

“What continues to bug me, when it comes right down to it, is the sheer earnestness of environmentalism, the conviction that the world is doomed and the compulsive need to share this cheery news,” he says. Such gloomy talk tends to have a single result. “Human beings, most of whom are really not very good at dwelling in hopelessness, turn away…. We are not very good at fighting apocalypses. We are better for fighting for our neighborhoods or for sections of river we’ve grown up on.”

Therein lies the seeds for Gessner’s new vision. “[B]eing environmental isn’t about education or politics. It’s about what Thoreau called ‘contact.’ Falling in love with something—a place, an animal—and then fighting for it,” he says. “I am interested in what makes someone, particularly a young someone, begin to fight for the environment.”

“Find something that you love that they’re fucking with and fight for it,” he says. “If everyone did that—imagine the difference.”

He holds up as his model Dan Driscoll, an urban planner for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, who accompanies Gessner on much of the trip. “There is something of the true believer to Dan, as there has to be in anyone who will take on the sort of fight he has,” Gessner says; “but that intensity is leavened by a certain regular guy-ness and sense of humor.”

Driscoll has almost single-handedly built a coalition that helped rehabilitate major sections of the Charles since 1990. “Let’s have these green paths that run through urban areas,” Driscoll explains. “Let’s re-plant native plants to bring animals back. Let’s reconnect people to nature.”

Driscoll fights blight and bureaucracy in his rehabilitation efforts. Gessner’s canoe trip down the Charles becomes a literal show-and-tell of Driscoll’s successes. Gessner also uses it to illustrate the failures of the environmental movement. “Actually getting something done in the world always trumps theory,” Gessner says, eager to share the story of Driscoll’s work. “We don’t need more theory, disembodied from the world. We need stories, told outside, told in a way that links activism to beauty, wild beauty.”

The environmental movement Gessner rails against becomes embodied in the book Break Through by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger. He has a running conversation with the book, which serves as a foil for his own ideas in Green Manifesto. He finds, by the end of his trip, that he has more in common with Nordhaus and Shellenberger than he originally wanted to admit, but Gessner still believes in a practicality that the other authors don’t seem to demonstrate. They talk the talk but Gessner, telling success stories, seems to be walking the walk (or paddling the canoe and writing about it, as the case may be). They are Emerson; Gessner is Thoreau.

Gessner comes back to Thoreau time and again along the journey. He does so because—“other than his great sentences”—the allegory of Thoreau’s life “provides the template for almost all who either write about, fight for, or simply love being in nature.”

He looks at the legacy of other great environmental storytellers, too:

Rachel Carson: “who, by retreating to the Maine coast to closely observe her tidal pools and eel grass, gave us a book that led to some of the most significant environmental changes of the last century. Carson reminds us again of the necessity of retreat…that, by continuing to return to our most private places, we can deeply engage the world.”

Edward Abbey: “until you figured him out, if you ever did, surprise was on his side: What would this hairy, bearded, cigar-smoking, beer-swilling barbarian do next?”

Wendell Berry: “one of the most influential environmental thinkers of our time” who writes about “the need to return for caring for our local places; the need, in fact, to marry those laces instead of having strip-mining flings with them.”

Berry’s notions of localization or, at the least, regionalization, resonate strongly with Gessner. Maybe environmental apocalypse is too big for anyone to do anything about, but rehabilitating a stretch of river through your hometown, or establishing a green space, or starting a recycling program or a farmer’s market—those are all things people can do to make a difference in their own little patch of the environment.

“Imagine the difference,” indeed.

“Don’t forget hope,” Gessner says. “Of course there is every reason to be hopeless but what fun is that?”

For more on My Green Manifesto, check out Gessner’s book trailer:

So I was thinking the other day about the number of times I thought about buying a plane ticket home. I would say it probably happened once every 2 weeks or so. As I was thinking about each of those instances I realized how happy I am that I didn’t actually follow through. I’m down to only 5 days left in Rwanda until I board a plane home, and for the first time, I can’t actually believe I’m going back. It seems really surreal.

There have been a lot of really rough times on this trip. The memorials were really emotionally trying, but on the flip side they’re what brought our group together because we were able to help each other through it. The homestay was not an easy adjustment either, but it was probably one of the best learning experiences I’ve even had. Being stared at no matter where I went and knowing that everyone perceived me as a foreigner was really trying. But now I know what it’s like to be an outsider and how to cope with that.

I feel like I’ve changed a lot on this trip, no matter how generic that sounds. And I know I haven’t become a new person entirely because I’m still me at my core. But I feel like I’m me with some new bells and whistles. I think after this trip I will be more honest in my day to day life, especially with all of those around me. And most importantly I think I’m going to be honest with myself. Rwanda has helped me to understand my limits, but also recognize that I can push my limit- both physically and emotionally.

And I haven’t even mentioned the incredible people that I’ve met here. I consider every single person on this trip one of my best friends, and I’ve told them all 8,000 times that they are all pre-invited to my wedding (in approximately 15 years, of course). They have been the ones to push me and also to inspire me. It has been so incredible to hear everyone’s stories and watch them all grow. And I can’t even begin to think about what my life will be life without them because basically that just makes me cry a lot. I’m really afraid of going back to the states and not having this support system all the time. Who is going to ask me how I’m feeling on a scale of negative 3 to 11? But seriously, I’m so grateful for having gotten the opportunity to get to know some truly incredible people. And I’m so excited to see what our futures are like together. Even when I’m not just two bus rides and a moto away from all of them.

My brain is so scattered right now. I’m excited and terrified and sad an angry and elated and nervous and tired and just overwhelmed. But I think this is all normal even if it isn’t really fun. It’s time for me to go home, but I don’t really know ho to say good bye just yet.

But on a happy note, I’m freaking going to see GORILLAS on Monday!! I’m not anticipating blogging again (for my final blog) until I return to the U.S. so I won’t be able to report on gorillas until then. But on Sunday we’ll be traveling to Musanze in the north and then going to the Volcano National Park, and we will be doing a gorilla trek. Basically there are three separate trails, each of which are varied levels of difficulty. We’re hoping to do a more challenging one so we get more time to see gorillas. We will see. But this is truly a once in a lifetime opportunity and I can’t even express how excited I am. Tarzan’s got nothing on me.

Tilikum, a massive 22.5-foot-long orca whale living in captivity at Sea World Orlando, has been involved in three fatal incidents. The most notorious of these, the death of 40-year-old trainer Dawn Brancheau, occurred on Feb. 24, 2010.

Brancheau’s death garnered copious amounts of media attention and sparked numerous debates about the humanity of keeping killer whales captive.

Humans began capturing and putting orcas on display in the 1960s. In 1985 a female named Kalina became the first captive-born orca to survive more than a few days.

Tilikum, captured at the age of 2, off the coast of Iceland, has been living in captivity since November 1983. But since Brancheau’s death, Tilikum has been kept in almost total isolation from the other killer whales captive at Sea World Orlando, according to its representatives.

Killer whales are social animals. In the wild, killer whales move in pods, traveling up to 100 miles a day, sleeping and hunting together.

In captivity, killer whales lack the stimulation and space available in the wild. Tilikum spends most of his time in a pool 100 feet by 50 feet and 35 feet deep, according to Sea World representatives. That’s an unfortunate change from the oceans that cover 70 percent of the planet he once called home.

Many of the whales’ pools, including Tilikum’s, lack the shade and depth needed to protect them from the blaring Orlando sun.

In March 2011 Tilikum returned to performing in Sea World’s killer whale shows. He typically performs four or five times a day in the 35-minute shows. He spends the rest of his time floating listlessly in his pool with no toys and limited human contact.

In captivity, whales forget how to forage for their food and ward off predators. They forget how to be wild animals. Thus, Tilikum, now 30 years old, is doomed to live out the rest of his life in captivity because he will not survive if integrated back into the wild. Although, with the reduced life expectancies of killer whales in captivity, it is likely Tilikum won’t live much longer.

There has never been a recorded killing of a human by killer whales in the wild.

Most of the knowledge scientists have about killer whales comes from studying them in the wild. No useful information can come from studying an animal removed from its habitat, its family and its normal hunting grounds.

The stress of captivity harms the whales’ psyche. No good can come from keeping such large, wild animals pent up in unnatural habitats.

Society needs to stop using these creatures for entertainment and allow them to live freely in the wild without human interference.

Melissa Wood is a junior journalism and mass communication major at St. Bonavenure University.

This time it was Panama City Beach, which has a reputation as an “easy” Ironman, easy being a relative term of course. In this case “easy” means times are usually fast because the course is flat and the temps are usually cool, but there is still an ocean swim and always wind, and that means that as with all Ironmen, many people do not finish. So we spent the two days before the event in our 13th floor condo watching the chop on the water and nervously studying the flags along the beach. You know the winds are going to blow in Panama City, usually 10 to 20 mph. But the direction it blows from is very, very important. South is bad, northwest is OK, east is very bad.

I was here because this should be the perfect course for me. Despite lots of work, I am not a good cyclist and this course is flat, flat, flat. It is also traditionally cool. I want to break 12:30, forty one minutes faster than my time at Lake Placid, and this course is my chance to do that. Ms. Otherwise is much more blasé—last year she did not do the time she wanted, but this year because of an early season injury she is undertrained. If it’s a good day, she plans to try to chop an hour off last year’s time. If not, que serah. Next year she ages up to sixty, and will compete in a much easier group, so this year is as much training as anything else. This is the first time Ms. Otherwise and I have tried one at the same time. Usually we support each other during the race. This time we are doing it together, so our friend Bill is here for support.

Ironmen are, like marathons, strange sports to begin with. They really exist to provide those of us with little natural athletic ability a chance to participate in a high level athletic endeavor, complete with whippet-thin pros, fantastic logistical support, and extreme intensity. But recreational sport or no, Ironmen are not to be trifled with. As one coach has said, “You can soldier your way through a 70.3 (half Ironman—mile swim, 56 mile bike, half marathon). But if you make a mistake in an Ironman, it’s a long, bad day out there.” The truth is it’s a long bad day whether you make a mistake or not, but if you make a mistake in an IM, it can be a short, bad day, because you can end up in a tent with a needle in your arm.

Ironmen are three day events. You check in on Thursday (for a Saturday event,) drop off your bike and bags with all your gear on Friday, and do the event on Saturday. There is a bag that contains your bike gear that you use when you leave the swim and one that holds your shoes and hat for the change from bike to run. There are also two bags in case you want to drop off special foods or additional clothes or a flashlight or something halfway through the bike and the run.

The night before an Ironman is a nervous, tight time. Going over the race plan, checking the weather, mixing food bottles, and in my case, taping my legs. I have just begun using KT tape, that brightly colored stuff, because I think it helps prevent shin splints and knee pain. I never know how much of this is placebo and how much of real, and of the real part, I am not sure how much is simply moving the pain from one spot to another. At any rate, I go to bed with long blue tape lines running up and down my leg, and look like I should be in a hospital, not a race.

RACE DAY

Ms. Otherwise gets up at 3 and I get up at 4. We choke down 1000 calories, not as easy as it sounds, and make ourselves drink glass after glass of water. It will be a miracle if we manage to get down to the garage without having to come back up to pee. We check the weather just before we leave. It’s from the northeast. That’s very bad.

Every early morning start is the same. Dark, cold and surreal, with too much traffic, much of it nervous people doing their first event. Often competitors bring entourages, who drive in caravans behind them erratically, peering through car windows soaped to say “You go Dad” and “You are my hero” and such. Finally, we make our way through the gauntlet to the corral. Only athletes are allowed in the bike corral for final preparations, pumping tires, putting water and food bottles on the bike, checking to make sure the gel packs taped to the cross bar of the bike are on securely, and just generally fidgeting. We leave Bill behind and go in. The entourages hang on the fence awkwardly, not sure what they are supposed to doing.

We get done checking the bike, exit, hand Bill the pump, and because it is cold, 51 degrees, go into the hotel lobby hosting the event and crouch on the floor waiting. At 6:40 or so, we make our way down to the starting corral. The water is flat and smooth, but there is a current running. At 6:50, the cannon fires and the pros start. The current quickly pushes them inside the buoys. We edge down, one foot in the water and one foot on the sand, and at 7:00 our gun sounds.

It is a miserable swim. Sighting is difficult because of the chop and the glare from the sunrise, and the 2,500 of us spend the entire first loop banging into each other. The water is 70 degrees, which isn’t that cold, but in my sleeveless suit and with my low body fat, after an hour it takes its effect and my head begins to throb. I try to kick and because of the cold my left calf seizes up instantly. I rarely cramp, and never in the calf. After that I swim with just my arms, dragging my body behind. I have trouble finding the buoys, frequently swimming well off course and having the lifeguards in the kayaks blow their whistles to get my attention and tell me I am swimming sideways.

The second loop is easier than the first because the swimmers spread out a little bit, although about halfway through I get seasick and swim the last half mile fighting the nausea and praying for the shallow water. I get out of the water and the clock says 1:29, which would be slow, but it turns out I am looking at the pro clock, and my time is actually a personal best, by a handful of seconds, 1:19. Ocean courses can be fast because of the added buoyancy, but I did not expect to do this well. So far so good. Ms. Otherwise swims the same time as last year, but had a pretty comfortable go of it.

At the end of the swim, I am sick, almost hypothermic, and disoriented. I stumble up the ramp like a drunk, lurching from side to side. The first transition is a nightmare. The transition tent is a huge dirty clothes hamper—crowded, dark, and hot, and for some reason, people have decided to just leave their bags by the chairs once they are done, creating huge piles of debris everywhere. Even worse, I am in too bad shape to get dressed. I pull on as much of my clothes as I can and stumble outside. I find a volunteer and say “I can’t zip up my jersey. Can you help?” She looks at me and says, “It’s on inside out. You’re shivering and ice cold, you poor thing. Are you OK?” She helps me switch the jersey. Without answering, I thank her and stumble out. In my shabby state, I don’t want her to call over an EMT, who might well pull me off the course and put me in the medical tent until I warm up. It is as bad a moment as I have ever had in an Ironman, and the only time I have ever felt helpless.

For the first time ever, I have a slower transition than Ms. Otherwise, who is always methodical and deliberate while I tend to just slap on my helmet and shoes and go, often missing the occasional piece of equipment. This transition takes almost 15 minutes. It’s barely into the event, and my 12:30 is already in danger, due to the fifteen minutes I think I have lost on the swim and the ten minutes I know I have lost in transition.

The bike is better, and I recover my composure. It’s a comfortable sixty degrees on the bike, but for the first 30 miles we have a strong headwind. No exaggeration, thirty miles of riding straight into a booming wind without a break or a tree to hide behind. Then a small break as we jog south, then ten more miles of wind. I ride well, staying low in my bars and managing about 16 or so miles an hour. Some people pass me and I pass more. I pass one young man who is very muscular and huge. He’s already struggling twenty miles in. Later he will pass me, part of a huge and illegal draft pack, but then I will pass him again and never see him again. The first half of the ride is long and hard and slow, 3:07.

After the turnaround, the bike back in is fast, over 20 miles per hour, and we are all feeling great until we make the final turn and ride the last five miles directly into the wind. They have lots of complexes on this road that have high rises on either side of the road with a covered walkway bridge spanning the road. The wind funnels through these holes. When we hit these it is like a salmon fighting its way upstream. We slow to a crawl, maybe 12 mph and grind our way through. Finally, we turn into the bike chute, hand our bikes off to volunteers who will re-rack them, and run for the run gear bags.

I manage a 6:09 on the bike. It’s my best ever in an IM, but worse than the 5:45 I’d hoped for. It turns out though, that it’s still respectable. On average this year, the bikes were around a half hour slower than last year, and in my age group the winners were almost an hour slower. Ms. Otherwise did 20 minutes slower than last year, but her entire age group was on average 20 minutes slower. At the end of the bike, she is roughly an hour behind me.

I start on the run after seven hours and fifty minutes, which not only means I am on track for my 12:30, but I have a good chance of doing even better if I can manage my target run pace, 10:15 minutes per mile, that is a 4:30 time for the marathon—four hours and thirty minutes. Even if I do a little worse, like 4:45-4:49 as I did in my other two Ironmen, I should still break my personal record, 13:10 in Lake Placid last year. Ms. Otherwise is a little behind her time last year, but just, and she’s in much better physical shape this year than last. This course is flat and cool, so I am hopeful that I will actually do much better than I did in hot Louisville or hilly Lake Placid. I am even dreaming of a 4:10.

I deliberately am not looking at time on the run, but instead running only by watching my heart rate monitor. So at the halfway point, I am not sure how I am doing, but it feels fast. (It turns out it is—10 min pace.) But unlike both Louisville and LP, where I began walking at mile 16 and mile 20, respectively, this time I am determined to run the whole way (except while drinking.) I see Ms. Otherwise starting her first loop as I finish mine, meaning I am about 2 hours ahead of her. I stop to talk for a few minutes when we pass and she tells me she is quitting after 13 miles. She simply does not want to struggle in at 11 p.m. again.

My dream may be a 4:10 marathon, but Ironmen are not kind to dreams. And the second half of the marathon is where those dreams all come undone. It’s getting dark when I start my second loop. I pull on arm warmers and run on. People on either side of the road are laughing and cheering, some in costumes and waving beers, but I am not into it this time and the noise irritates me. I smile, thank them anyway, high five some children and run on.

In my back pocket I have a pill bottle full of electrolytes, ibuprofen, and caffeine, and that rattling noise drives me crazy too, so I empty it out, spilling the pills into the shrubbery in front of a hotel. I try to stuff the bottle into my back pocket and instead drop it. I stop to pick it up and stumble and almost fall, reeling sideways, unable to regain my balance until I bump up against a post. Another runner picks it up and brings it to me. At the 20 mile turn I know I am in trouble for my 12:30. I am still running rather than walking, unlike Lville and LP, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference. No matter how I do it, my marathons are just slow. Again, slow being relative. The final numbers aren’t in yet, but it is likely that well over half these people out here tonight will run slower than I do.

The real pain—physical or mental– always starts on the second half of the marathon. Usually it’s my shins and knees, but this time, maybe because of the tape, it’s not my shins or my knees but my quads and my feet. Some of the pain in my feet is blisters—I can feel the wet slickness in my shoes as they pop. I will lose four toenails tonight. But something else is going on, because for some reason half my right foot goes numb at mile 23. There’s nothing to be done for it, so I run on, hoping I haven’t broken something.

I promise my legs, “If you can make it to the next aid station, Legs, I will let you walk for 30 feet while I drink water. Just hang on for that.” Then I get to that station, walk and drink, then start the mantra again. I also have a terrible pain under my arms, and at some point a volunteer gives me a glob of Vaseline and I smear it on. It turns out the repetitive swing of my arms has worn the sides of my chest raw. That’s never happened before, and I wonder if it’s something to do with salt water or perhaps three years of swim training has given me muscles where I did not have them before and I am rubbing those. By mile 25, I do the mental math and I know it’s going to be very close. If I can just sprint a little in the finishing chute, I can make it.

But I can’t. I ask my legs to sprint. They refuse.12:30:49.

At the end I am completely knackered. Worse than I have ever felt before at the end of a race. I stagger across the line. A catcher grabs me and asks if I am OK, “Yes,” I say, then as she lets ago, “Not really.” She grabs me again and helps me to chair where another volunteer wraps a space blanket around me. Eventually, I am strong enough to walk to the end of the chute and meet Ms. Otherwise, who is fresh as a daisy. She helps me to the food tent and gets me a Coke and a piece of pizza, and, after awhile, I am all right. Again, all right being relative.

I gave it everything I had out there, and some days that has to be enough.

Since my return from Uganda, I’ve had some time to reflect upon a lot about my travels here in Africa. I was thinking it might be useful if I came up with a sort of “advice column” blog just this once in case anyone is hoping to travel to East Africa at any point in the future.

First, I call this “My list of practical things that you should bring.”

1. Mosquito nets are a must-have. If you think you will not be bitten while you are asleep you are terribly mistaken, no matter how much mosquito repellent you use. And on that note, do take malaria pills. I recommend Malerone because I haven’t had any issues with it thus far, and some of the other ones come with concerns such as making people psychotic and causing crazy dreams. Even if you plan to sleep under a net still take the pills because the mosquitoes will find you! I have slept under a net in a bed coated with bug spray with all of the windows closed and I still woke up with bites.
2. Related to that, bring anti-itch cream. And bring the good stuff because the generic brands probably will not suffice. Actually, bring two. God, I hate mosquitos.
3. If you are a woman I recommend bringing tampons. You can’t buy them here. And related to that, if you know what a go-girl is then invest in one! I don’t have one but they’re awesome because they allow you to pee like men, which is rather useful in those icky squatting toilets with bugs all buzzing around.
4. Wear comfortable shoes. But don’t bring shoes that you don’t want to get dirty or wet. I brought a pair of Keen sandals that have been super useful for me. You do a lot of walking here, so comfort is more important than style! (I know I say that and don’t always adhere to it…but it’s the thought that counts, right?)
5. I suggest bringing snacks such as power bars or granola bars. I personally did not do this, but a few people in my group did and they have been very useful. People eat meals at different times here so a quick American snack is nice every once in a while. Also, comfort food is never overrated. I spend more money on chocolate than I probably should. If you like chocolate, bring plenty.
6. Make sure you have more than one adaptor! You will probably lose one if you plan to stay for a while. Also, some are better than others so it’s never bad to have options.
7. Make sure you have hand sanitizer!! Random children WILL come up and grab your hands. And babies put their mouths all over the seats in the public buses, so make sure you sanitize often.
8. Have extra hair ties and hair pins if you have long hair. It’s Africa; it’s hot. You will not want hair in your face. If you don’t mind shaving your head, that’s not a bad idea either. That way you don’t have to pack as much shampoo! Win-win. Actually, that’s a really good idea. Go bald to Africa- way easier.
9. A rain coat and an umbrella are necessary, especially if you will be visiting during the rainy season. And travel with both on you at all times, because it will always rain on the day you don’t have your raincoat. This is a proven fact.

Next, I call this list “The stupid stuff that I brought and definitely didn’t need.”

1. My hair dryer and hair straightener. Who the hell does their hair in Africa? Why would you straighten your hair when the heat will make it curly in an hour? And you’ll likely blow out a fuse if you use a hair dryer with an adaptor. Stupid idea. Waste of weight and space.
2. I brought a lot of nail polish to Rwanda. While I don’t entirely regret this, bringing five different options probably wasn’t really necessary. Two would have been sufficient. For normal people, none is probably plenty.
3. I brought iodine drops for water in case I needed it. While this isn’t a terrible idea, I still haven’t used it at all. I think buying bottled water is safer all around and it’s very easy and cheap to get. Definitely a better option.

Here’s my final list. I like to call this the “Stuff that everyone told me was stupid but were actually awesome ideas” list.

1. MY SNUGGIE WAS THE SINGLE GREATEST THING I PACKED. No lie. I use it every night and it is perfect for the nighttime weather here. If nothing else, it will spark up a really interesting conversation with the Africans you meet about American stupidity and materialism. And they will have a good laugh when you show them how to wear it. (“No, I swear it’s not a robe! Don’t you see? You wear it the other way!”)
2. Thirty pairs of underwear. No one likes washing clothes by hand. So why not wait a month to do it? Okay…yeah, I see the flaw in this argument…but it works for me.

Now for some basic advice:

• When a child comes up to you and forcefully says “give me money,” you really shouldn’t give them money. They are likely asking for one of two reasons. 1) It’s the only phrase they know in English and they don’t actually need money at all. 2) They are actually begging for money, but any money you give them will not go to the right place. If you have food or stickers or something that will be fun for them that is a far better option.
• Do NOT be alarmed when giant swarms of children chase after you shouting “ABAZUNGU!!!!!!!!” They’re just excited. In all likelihood they do not intend to attack you.
• If you walk past a pack of people and you hear the word “mzungu” and/or people start laughing, it’s true – they are definitely laughing and talking about you. Don’t be offended. You’re white and likely confused. It’s funny.
• Try your best not to look confused. If you look confused, everyone will notice, and they will try harder to rip you off. I once had the money collector on the bus try to rip me off by 200 rwf because I looked like I didn’t know where I was going, and those are supposed to be fixed prices.
• You better like rice and bananas. Because that is all you will eat here.
• If your bag is overweight you probably don’t need half the crap you packed. You don’t need to learn that the hard way because I already did for you.

I suppose that’s it for advice. If anyone plans on traveling here I assure you this information is useful even though it sounds ridiculous. I would have laughed at anyone that told me half of these things before coming here, but you’ve got to trust me on this one. Seriously, bring a snuggie. You’ll thank me. Don’t own one? Get one.