Guatemala

There are a lot of questions still that do not have answers, which are curiously asked most in passing: where will you live and how long will you be down there and isn't that a dangerous place? These are the least interesting I find. Long live some sort of ongoing ambiguity.

The best things to know are just about everything else. Antigua was the Spanish capital of Central America for 200 years. The country has over 30 volcanos and four of those are active. The central highlands once harbored one of the most sophisticated civilizations in native america. There are plenty of expatriates, mixed with gripping poverty. There is a big volcanic lake that is supposed to be nice. These things alone are enough to take me somewhere I have not been.

The westerlies once guided wooden galleons and conquistadors from Gran Canaria to the present day Dominican Republic on a very treacherous journey difficult to picture today by any stretch. Guatemala would have been a strange place then, as it is to many now. A lot of people talk about lawlessness and danger -- words often substituted for anything unknown -- and I think back often to what Steinbeck said: that whenever we start feeling like real men, we just have to look at the entire 19th century Lewis and Clark expedition wrought with indian threats, northern winters, disease, mountain crossings, and turbulent rivers, and remember that not a single man turned around and decided to head home. I agree that those were real men and me getting on an airplane is little reason to feel important. It is however, a lot to be excited for, and it will be a place to create greatness.

Into December

When the year is written in firework displays and midnight kisses, one might look back and say it was 2012 I became a real reader. I read more books this year than any other in my life, and not just by a little. I probably more than quadruple the amount of any year prior. I never really kept track of books before -- a summary can be seen off to the right -- but here seems a delightful place to do some accounting. It is a very special way -- better than most -- to look back on a year and see what it was made of.

I sat out in the front of the Alhambra with a cute Australian -- February I think it was -- and finished Shantaram, a ridiculous story about a convict (also Australian) who escapes to Mumbai, joins a gang, and falls in love. As with other books that are supposed to inspire an Indian vacation (Life of Pi, Eat Pray Love), it did nothing of the sort for me. I still have no desire to go. I will enjoy a run around a Guatemalan volcano or sit along a beach in Nicaragua or play with a monkey in Colombia, but India doesn't resonate quite yet. Someone once told me people go there to kill their restlessness for awhile, but that is something I feel no need to kill just yet.

Sometime between my first and third visit to the Alhambra in Granada, I read Tales of the Alhambra, by American writer Washington Irving. He lived, researched, and fell in love with the place for a few months in 1829 as it was falling to decay. He traveled by mule who knows how long, from Seville to Granada, carrying a gun for protection from highway robbers. My train took a few minutes over three hours and cost 24 Euros. The Alhambra is one of the only places in the world I have ever been able to really imagine myself within a thousand year period. Somehow it is immune to the stains tourists bring hidden in their fanny-packs.

Months later before arriving in Pamplona I read The Sun Also Rises, the book that put the city and its festival on the international map. I was glad to not be there for the running of the bulls. Twenty years after his last visit, Hemingway was already fed up. He wrote in A Dangerous Summer about finding a peaceful place by a river in the woods, but not disclosing its location to the reader because he did not want to come back next summer and see 50 cars there.

I read Cloud Atlas, now a three hour movie covering 500 pages of literature, during three rainy days in Bilbao. Don Quixote was an adventure so long I can only remember reading it in Seville, a place Don Quixote never visited, but a place his creator spent time in jail.

A diary about the 1870 expedition that discovered Yellowstone, in Yellowstone. A Night to Remember around the Titanic's 100 year anniversary. An artistically written, now out of print book on Spain twice, before my first flight and after my last. Death in the Afternoon before my first bullfight. How to Be Alone when I was very much alone. Travels With Charley when I was traveling, without Charley. The Go-Getter when I was going but not getting anywhere.

What a beautiful way to define a year: adding content to a list, looking at the list and remembering the moments, looking at the moments and remembering the books. The joy, as any true reader will tell you, is not analyzing the characters and their dispositions, the authors and their pains and their gains. No, it is the hours spent alone with yourself, the wrestling with personal emotions, the rereading of passages because you know they fit somewhere, that make books a lifeline to a very real world.

I woke up unplanned at 4am one recent morning and finished the 23rd book of the year, Let the Great World Spin. The last lines stuck with me, even as I shut off the light two hours later, the sun only starting to creep in through the window.

"The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough."

And so on we spin and stumble into December.

Another Austin Interim

I found a renewed joy in the city of Austin by bike, bus, and foot. I loved the late night rides and the absence of cars on a dark road, unwinding after nine hours in a bar. I liked the rides at dusk too, speeding along a bike path blissfully as impatient faces inched ahead during rush hour. I enjoyed sitting down on a city bus alone, reading my kindle while a paid Capitol Metro employee did the driving. And I loved walking to Congress and Ceasar Chavez for a coffee, looking up at the skyline from a different angle, comparing the Frost Tower to the Giralda and a high rise set of condos to that strange phallic shaped building in Barcelona. This time, the pace of Austin was slower and it reminded me of times in my life where I walked through a city and loved it because it was new, and how you can also walk through a city and remember you love it though it is old.

But Austin wasn't what I wanted really. I came back unemployed, carless, and bar work looking hopelessly inevitable for an unknown amount of time. I worked five days straight around Thanksgiving, and it was one of the loneliest times I can remember, not because it was Thanksgiving or because I sat alone by a gate checking the identification cards of drunks young and old, but because I was surrounded be people who were much lonelier than me. Bars are terrible places, like they have been for centuries, and you see a lot by walking through them sober and picking up a dirty glass. I joked as I left this time (I have left and come back more than once now), but if I find myself there again it is for the wrong reasons and I have not done something I should have somewhere along the way.

After the Election

I sat on my couch the night of the US election, paying more attention to various Facebook posts than anything CNN had to offer. I knew Ohio had gone Obama not long after it was officially announced, ditto Colorado and New Hampshire. By adding those three together, it became clear Barack Obama would remain the 44th President of the United States.

The things people say are truly disturbing. Some become Nobel Peace Prize winning economists and talk about the coming competitive decline of America. Others suddenly become world travelers, expressing a desire for international job search, normally to countries twice as socialist as our own, as if those countries and their visa requirements would actually welcome them in at all (trust me, I know). If you want an accurate view of the world, The Economist speaks to this best in a luke-warm endorsement of our current president. Both sides had a chance to inspire a nation, and either a mediocre political system or faulty candidates, and probably both, led to the choice of one over another with a serious swamp to muck through along the way. It was messy, sure, but there was a correct choice in this election and we made it. Saying both candidates have faults, that you do not like either one, does not relieve you of a duty to decide.

I find the conversation around this election, and all the American elections I remember, to be quite sad, because the money saved between a 32% and 34% tax rate will not make you happy. Looking at government and its President has remarkably little to do with if we are better off, or happier, than four years ago. It simply doesn't. If I had to guess, I would say blaming those things are safe, they are distant, and we can talk freely about them, because actually addressing the issues that determine our happiness is something uncomfortable and best left locked in the attic.

But in so many minds, the issue is so much deeper than a tax rate. I sat up the night of the election reading messages insinuating that gays and freeloaders and the 1% and apology tours and Muslims and abortion doctors and big government and food stamps and Democrats and Republicans and the President are bringing this country down, and I want to hold up the biography of Jerusalem I am currently reading and pound it into their heads by osmosis and say, "no, my friend, history has shown that it will almost certainly be you and your obsession with your own exceptionalism, that will eventually bring this country, or any country, at any point in history, to its knees."

I am certainly proud, most of the time, to be from the United States. I defend its values to a reasonable extend abroad, will accepting its deficiencies. By most accounts, we are not the best country in the world. We aren't the richest, or the poorest, or the safest. We are just another country with freedoms, like many other countries with freedoms, that exist in the world and provide a place for people to live. The happy part is yours to create. That is that, and so, in terms of the election, now something historical -- get a grip, people.

Sleepless Nights

There are a lot of sleepless nights as of late, and there will certainly be more to come. It has always been a problem of mine, doing my best thinking when the lights are off, hyper-aware of the most curious tendencies of night. In the Mandan basement, for instance, I woke up to a glass case of hunting rifles and two deer heads mounted on the wall. My grandmother's small house in a small town is characterized by a motion-sensitive deck light pulsing rhythmically throughout the night. There were back-to-back cold nights in the back of my car, uncomfortably fitting a 6'3" frame into 4" of space, waking at morning light to the ethereal steam of a geyser basin.

Then there are my sleepless nights back in Austin. It is my city that feels like so no matter the changing nature of friendships or the lack of an automobile to get around. I get anxious these days, wondering what I have done and what I will do and how this is all going to work out and how I will get to an interview in the middle of a city I do not want to live in anyways and how practically I could have paid a loan or even a bill when I had the chance but didn't. Then somehow my mind finds its way back to a beach in Spain or a bridge in London or a damp forest in Germany. It always does this, and I remember I would not trade it for anything, and that my very light and agile life is going quite alright. 

Cleveland

I was awoken late one night to the sound of a train horn, distantly at first until it arrived, following that predetermined route underneath the old mill, passing the run down school house now used for storage, then out into the night. The walls shook and the floors rattled. The wind blew cold and dark outside my window, and I shivered, though underneath my covers it was very warm.

I had a fascination with trains in my youth. A Thomas the Tank Engine shirt pops up in most home videos; I always felt connected due to my middle name. I remember the wooden Brio tracks and trains to which I created my own Union Pacific line stretching from Atlantic to Pacific. I have memories of hearing the same horn, no different, and running through the same little house into the kitchen, propping myself up on a stool and looking out through that small screen window, the train rumbling by.

Cleveland has somewhere between one hundred and two hundred people, and sits off interstate 94 some 25 miles from Jamestown. It is practically the geographic center of North Dakota, which means it is not surrounded by much. It's God's country, my dad would say, and I always think how painful the life of a rebellious teenager would be in this part of the world. A hundred years ago, the train and the town and the mill meant much more to Cleveland, at least in an economic sense, but the train still rattles by at all hours of the day and night and in all kinds of weather. I am happy for this, because it brings me back to a time when the details of a train, the number of cars, whether it had a caboose, were of equal importance to a job and a salary and a loan.

I laid awake for a little while after the train passed, listening to the cold prairie winds of fall that would soon carry the blinding snow of North Dakota winter. The last time I was here, my great grandmother was alive and approaching one hundred years old. People come and go, and that leaves a hole, a certain kind of emptiness, but I couldn't detect any of it there in her old room. I felt comfortable and safe in the darkness, thinking of trains and their ongoing significance, a past piece of tangible importance. Really, I think it is the consistency I long for when most things just seem up for grabs.

Texas to North Dakota

I took my car 2,400 miles from Dallas to Bismarck on an especially scenic route because it was no longer my possession and because I wanted to explore a little of my own country under a different mindset than I did in my youth. Selling my car was of course a risk given my present circumstances, but what it has created at the cost of a possession is something I doubt I will regret later on in life.

We get this sense as travelers that our trips become more accomplished the further we go. There may be some truth there, as the greater the distance the more different and perhaps difficult our situation becomes, but we often forget the beauty that exists a day's drive away. I know I surprised myself, watching the places a few tanks of gas could get you. Having been gifted a viewpoint from the outside, I can say that Americans really have little excuse for our lack of domestic wanderlust. So with a sleeping bag and a deep sigh, with bottles of water and a copy of Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie, I set off into Oklahoma and Kansas knowing it would be the last time I put my hands behind the wheel of that small blue Versa I came to know so well over the ups and downs of five years.

The first leg of the midwest I can normally do to forget, only keeping a dose of perspective passing through Norman and Stillwater and Wichita, remembering how grateful I am to not have attended those strange secluded southern universities when a cultural hotbed like Austin exists. I arrived in Lincoln feeling especially proud of that Longhorn sticker on the back of my car, and the degree to which I had sent in paperwork the day prior.

West through Nebraska into South Dakota is worth doing once as you slowly watch the flat green breadbasket of the United States turn into the Badlands President Roosevelt loved so much. There is something about a full tank of gas and an open road, rain or snow or shine, from this point on that is good for the soul.

You are also exposed to the most peculiar arrangement of small town museums. The signs line the roads attempting to draw people into areas that just got missed and just could have been. I wondered if I made a terrible mistake by not venturing into everyone of of these, but I did make a list that grew progressively longer as the miles ticked away. They range from the questionable to the bizarre, and usually employ a very loose interpretation of the word "national."

National Wrestling Museum
Sandzen Old Mill Museum
Wizard of Oz Museum (Kansas)
National Orphan Train Museum
Republic Country Historical Museum
Museum of the Prairie Pioneer
Plainsman Museum
Heartland Museum of Military Vehicles
Robert Henri Museum
Fort Robinson Fur Trade Museum
Petrified Wood Gallery
National Presidential Wax Museum
National Woodcarving Museum
Texas Trail Museum (Wyoming)
Range Rider Museum
Frontier Gateway Museum
Dinosaur Museum (Montana)
North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame

One museum I did visit and that does speak to the American condition lies thirty miles outside Rapid City, South Dakota nestled in the middle of the Black Hills. The National Museum of the Native American will one day lie at the base of Crazy Horse, the carved mountain monument ten times the size of Rushmore. The distinction between the two is equally as great, and a pity to be overlooked in a way symbolic to the last 150 tragic years of American obliviousness and arrogance.

Crazy Horse was a Lakota warrior, largely responsible for the Indian victory at the Battle of Little Bighorn and thus commemorated today as a great American hero - at least in the sense that got him on a 13 cent stamp. He has a famous quote, said as a white man condescendingly asks where his lands are now. He responds, in a sort of beautiful sadness only native americans can muster, "my lands are where my dead lie buried."

The story of the monument provides further understanding. Shortly after the completion of Rushmore in the 1940s, the last surviving elders from the Battle of Little Bighorn approached a then well renown sculptor asking him to build a similar monument to "show the white man the red man has heroes too". Korczak Ziolkowski began work alone on a giant slab of granite, living out of a tent for the first few years, knowing the entire time he would not be alive to see such an extravagant piece finished. He twice turned down government funding in a tradition that still exists today, believing private interest alone should spur the project to completion. It also seems there might be a principle there, not accepting money from the catalyst to Indian destruction. Since his death in 1982, his entire family has kept up the work. Here shows a small statue depicting the finished product, along with current progress on the mountain in the background. By comparison, Mount Rushmore could fit in Crazy Horse's hair.

Lack of acknowledgement impedes the healing process, and in american history, that tragic inability to acknowledge the level of atrocity our government ordered upon its native population plagues us to this day. At Wounded Knee Creek, american calvary exterminated hundreds of women and children. Leaders, Crazy Horse and others, were stabbed in the back with a bayonet while in military custody. Formal treaties were promised and repeatedly broken -- the Black Hills for example, upheld simply until gold was discovered. The early 1600s saw around eight million Native Americans from Atlantic to Pacific, while today the population struggles along at 250,000. That is our holocaust, the Trail of Tears our Auschwitz, and while Germany hammers away their brutal past into its youth, we continue to bellow patriotic jargon about freedom and the greatness of our country at monuments like the four heads 11 miles up the road. If it could, a overly metaphorical country song plays in the background as we travel along the winding roads watching for deer.

I will never forget a National Geographic article about the Lakota Indians of the Great Plains. Their struggle to maintain the traditions of their elders, the spirit of Crazy Horse, in a hopelessly modern world, facing high rates of suicide, alcoholism, and domestic violence. One of the Lakota leaders spoke of Rushmore. "It's an insult," he said. "They came onto our most sacred land and carved the faces of those who broke every treaty and left us destroyed as a people." That is sure as hell a Rushmore we don't hear about.

It all reminds me of that day in Alice Springs, watching drunk Aborigines stumble around lost in their own true country. You wonder why we did the same things again and again on every corner of the globe; it's a very disturbing pattern and insight into human nature.

490 miles and one state trooper later (guys get warnings too), I arrived in Yellowstone National Park. The Black Hills flatten out at the border and the grass turns yellow for a time until you reach the snow capped peaks of the Rockies. You pass many of the small towns made famous by the iconic characters of western lore: towns like Deadwood and people like Sitting Bull and Sundance Kid and Buffalo Bill Cody. Then there is Emblem, Wyoming, population: 10. Those towns all ended with Cody and the mountainous buildup for Yellowstone began uninterrupted and with much anticipation.

Yellowstone is an active volcano, one of the largest on Earth, and I say that because I do not think many Americans realize the devestating time bomb a majority of the continental United States sits on. It last erupted 640,000 years ago and spread ash to Mexico. In some future generation it will do this again and I felt that subtle voice from inside the caldera, praying it would not be this generation on this day,  though the view will be spectacularly catastrophic.

Until then, the volcano makes its presence known with 10,000 steam vents, geysers, mud pots, and boiling pools, all heated from magma three miles below the surface. Science is mind blowing at times. I was tempted to dub the various attractions as fake, as man-made exhibits, the geysers all fountains with man made pumps. I had to remind myself at times of the volatility, the danger, and how it is a marvel we can fit so many people into this volcanic zone every season. People have paid the price for stupidity and neglect many times since the park's discovery by gold miners in the 1800s.

I had such a good day with myself in Yellowstone, a day of freedom to explore with a mind turned off in some ways and on in others, like the human the brain more active asleep than awake. I found the various displays of heat therapeutic, as if by watching the earth breathe and cough and sneeze we are somehow aligning ourselves with its natural pulse.

But perhaps the most humbling thing is that it is unpredictable. Even old faithful is not accurate to the minute, and over the last century it has progressively slowed down. One geyser erupts every 2.5 to five hours. Another depends on the eruption pattern of a nearby geyser since they share the same underground water source. There is another, my favorite, the was active up until the late 1800s, shooting water 300 feet high. There are only old sketches depicting it. Then one day it stopped, was dormant for almost a century, until an Earthquake in 1959 sent it roaring back to life.

I starred into a steaming pool for a long time, taking in my last few hours silently on a bench, watching the brightly lit blues and oranges and yellows highlighted by bacteria thriving in extreme and alien conditions. It was an ominous scene, straight from a prehistoric earth. Looking at primordial pulp, as it was for a billion years, makes a single human lifetime seem short and its trivialities that much more unnecessary. Humbling would be the best word to describe Yellowstone in the end.

And so I left the greatest of the national parks heading North into Montana, the mountains mellowing out into the plains of North Dakota, pro-life signs and meth help numbers lining the highway, thoughts of geysers and indians overshadowed by an excitement to see family I waited far too long to see again.

Another One, Again.

There came a time on my last night in Austin, where someone asked what I wanted to do. I didn't need anything dramatic, or cumulative, and don't much care for what the masses would do anymore. As long as three or four key people were there, I didn't matter how we passed the time.

Over my week I visited key areas, or those that once were: that intersection of Fifth Street and Lamar, always parking on one side and crossing over to the other; the tapping tapping tapping of my feet running along the gravel of Town Lake in the morning light as low clouds held on tightly to the tops of the highest skyscrapers. I did those things and more and realized that they just aren't the same these days; its a curious sense, like revisiting a dream.

Saying goodbye was hard this time around, especially when arriving in Dallas and walking up the stairs into a familiar room, but I have gotten used to goodbyes and hellos. There have been many over the past few months, and more over the past few years. If they teach you anything, it is that all has a beginning and an end and the comfort lies in knowing, even when not stated explicitly, that a new beginning comes without regard for our plans or our apprehensions or our fears.

The Little Prince is the best hundred pages I can remember reading. It is time well spent in those precious moments after a hug and a wave, feeling as though you have come from something and that you are going nowhere soon.

"Goodbye," he said.
"Goodbye," said the fox. "Now here is my secret. It is very simple. It is only with one's heart that one can see clearly. What is essential is invisible to the eye."
What is essential is invisible to the eye," the little prince repeated, so as to be sure to remember.
"It is the time you lavished on your rose which makes your rose so important."
"It is the time that I lavished on my rose..." said the little prince, so as to be sure to remember.

The Art of Leaving

I was once asked to say something I was exceptionally good at, one refined skill I had crafted that most people could not do as well. Some might say writing and others might say treating illness and others might say running a company and still others scrapbooking. Arguably not all skills are created equal, but I found it a fair question to ask because it offers another pivotal chance to be real with ourselves. Life provides plenty of opportunities to lie -- to say that a wasteful television program is only a television program, and that we all die of something so smoking is nothing -- and we can usually get away with it. Unavoidable questions that force a splendid moment of silence have a way of exposing it all in a flash.

I decided then my skill would be adaptation. It's a vague skill, yes, but it's the only way I am able to explain going from Spain to France to Germany and all the other little realities of my life with constant ease, feeling very much at home in all of them. That was the essence of my last few weeks, exiting Spain to the French Riviera, cuddling up with a dreamlike Argentine girl in Montpellier, hiking quiet green World War II battlegrounds on the German border, looking down upon poor Anne Boelyn's jail before her beheading, kissing a beautiful Italian under Big Ben to the sound of the Thames, and other seemingly chaotic impossible moments that happened as simply as they did. 

Landing in the United States after so much time away is always a peculiar feeling, and the silence then exists regardless of noise or commotion. Yet it was easier after leaving Spain in all its finality, its entirety, and I was ready to get the next part of life moving. Perhaps the skill is not adaptation but leaving -- the art of leaving, we'll say -- being ready, flexible, aching, excited, anxious, willing always for what comes next.

So Long, My Friend

There were moments as my time in Spain came to an end where I wondered who the hell I was anymore. I was going through all the same motions, having the same relationships, in every sense, exactly like I had my entire life, only sometimes now the words were different. Carlos and I would go to a discoteca and it could have been any night back in Austin long ago, except Spanish came out of my mouth and I was able to flirt and talk and do things. I said goodbye to my mother and father like I did my real mother and father eight months ago at a terminal in DFW International Airport. I sat there next to that Argentine girl  in Tenerife and talked about the same tough things -- why smoking is bad and sex important, and what's next in life -- and none of it was hard. If I am asked why Spain was important for me, I would say nothing of old buildings and far off lands; there are old buildings and different cultures everywhere. I would say that I can now live and operate in two different worlds like they both were mine to begin with.

When I think about eight months it feels both long and short, too much and too little. Leaving is always painful, but I have many homes now, many places to go, and I will come back if I decide to. The day before I left Spain, the cycle came to fruition: a new American arrived in the house. All of us ate lunch, and I watched him curiously. He struggled and did not understand as my family and I laughed and talked like Carlos and I had been fighting for mom's attention in diapers. I saw him sitting there with a blank stare, and it was me in a different time.

I think back often to Washington Irving's last words as he said goodbye to Granada. He was summoned back to the US in 1829 for a new job, and had to leave his paradisiacal escape. His words are tragic, and bittersweet, and show both gratitude and sorrow.

"The setting sun as usual shed a melancholy effulgence on the ruddy towers of the Alhambra. I could faintly discern the balconied window of the Tower of Comares, where I had indulged in so many delightful reveries. The bosky groves and gardens about the city were richly gilded with the sunshine, the purple haze of a summer evening was gathering over the Vega; every thing was lovely, but tenderly and sadly so, to my parting gaze.

"I will hasten from this prospect," thought I, "before the sun is set. I will carry away a recollection of it clothed in all its beauty."

With these thoughts I pursued my way among the mountains. A little further and Granada, the Vega, and the Alhambra, were shut from my view; and thus ended one of the pleasantest dreams of a life, which the reader perhaps may think has been but too much made up of dreams."

Teide: Revisited

I went back to Teide, and the Canary Islands for that matter, because it gave me something I knew I could not find in Rome, Berlin, or Vienna. I am not sure what that was and I might not ever know but at 12,918 feet above sea level, freezing in a high-altitude wind, wearing too few clothes, watching the sun rise slowly above ocean and clouds and islands, I managed to find something.

It was around five in the morning with sleep in my eyes and the darkest dark I had ever seen that I turned on a small black flashlight and began the last hour of hiking to the crater of Teide. There were a few people in front and many behind, but they grew farther behind as I went farther ahead. It was ominous, scary almost, hiking dried lava blindly with nothing but your light and the stars and a sliver of the moon. Sometimes a star fell, as part of the almost finished meteor shower and sometimes I shut off the light and just stood to catch my breath. Other times the movement of shadows behind lunar rocks startled me. It was a great place to embrace a feeling of vulnerability, knowing there is little you could do to prevent just about anything from happening, and then remembering that nothing will except the next step forward on a well marked trail.

Huddled together for warmth at the top, around fifteen of us sat under the stars until the first light crept up over the horizon and one by one the stars melted away. They were German, French, and Spanish, and not a single person spoke English well. We were silent anyways, listening to the wind and the sound of our own shivering. The common bond atop a dormant volcanic crater, watching a sunrise from another world, all went well beyond language. We all knew what everyone was thinking.

Thirty minutes below, at the first habitable point beneath the crater, there is a cable car station. Everyday at 9:08am sharp, the first round of people are brought up from 1800 meters below. I didn't stay long enough to watch this happen, and I don't think I could bear seeing five hours of sweat covered by eight minutes of technology. Things happen faster now but the fifteen of us who climbed the peak in the dark and climbed hours before to get there, we saw much more and it was not because we were in the right place at the right time but because we were in many places at many times.

I left the station promptly for a four hour trek down the other side of the mountain, through a landscape that could have been Mordor or Mars. I let nothing cheapen it and enjoyed the pain in my legs and the sun even more as it got warmer and my hands thawed. I enjoyed the small lizards who ran across the sand and under a dry bush, scared of by the sound of my footsteps. I enjoyed the rocks people stacked, outlining difficult parts of the trail for as far back as the trail existed. I enjoyed looking up at the peak and being amazed by how far we can go in a short time. I enjoyed all these quiet things a lot.

The lava fields of Siete Cañadas ended two weeks in Tenerife. By the time I arrived at the base, nine hours had been hiked, one hour had been slept, and four hours had been spent on buses. I thought about a lot of things during that time, but I often thought of nothing at all; it was good to get that break from myself. Sometimes I get caught up in the fact that if one thing does not happen, ten things never will, and every little decision will change everything, but it's silly to think like that. I met a stunning Argentine girl after our flight together, and five days later we fell asleep on the side of a volcanic cliff falling 200 feet to the ocean. A meteor shower lit up the sky above us and when we woke up tucked away in that small protected cave, hugging each other, the sun was coming up over the Atlantic. Some things are so perfect, divine really, and fit for a film, that you could not question them if you wanted to. Since those kinds of things are happening all around me it would be silly to think about anything at all.

And it would be silly to miss them. She got on a ferry and is gone, the road trips and beach time all behind us, and I hiked down the different colored rock, watching one prehistoric explosion overlap another, the boulders turn to rock and sand, until it all fell dramatically into the sea.

Sitting at the base of the mountain and looking up, a Spanish man from Tenerife sat with a coffee. His wife and mother sat with him in no hurry, watching the tourists pass. I asked him as we sat looking up at Teide, when it will go off again. He said he didn't know, but one of two things will happen. The island will grow very quickly, or it will go away completely, and it will all be very bad for you and I. Shortly after, I got on a bus and looked out the window at different parts of the volcano, at different angles, from further and further away.

Getting Drunk with Hemingway

In 1923 Ernest Hemingway visited Pamplona, Spain for the first time during the July festivals of San Fermin. The whole ordeal had such an impact on him that he would return many times for more than thirty years. He would get drunk at Cafe Iruña and stay at Hotel Perla and eventually would write about a series of experiences in The Sun Also Rises. Some might say if he visited the same spot today, he would not go back. There is, in fact, a line in A Dangerous Summer, that says he will not tell the reader the location of a special place he found in the woods because he does not want to go back next summer and find 50 cars already there.

San Fermin is the running of the bulls in the mind of the world. Every once in a while you look at the news and see something about someone being gored by a bull as they crossed the "corner of death" before reaching the plaza de toros. It does really happen; 15 people have been killed since 1925, the last in 2009. It is just a bunch of drunks feeling very brave with a red scarf.

I had big plans for Pamplona, being a Hemingway fanatic myself. I had dreams of getting drunk at his bar with a drink on his stool. I knew there was a statue, so I dreamed of staring into his eyes with every sip and him staring back approvingly with a nod. I had dreams of a Spanish newspaper and a pen and paper. It was a very authentic dream.


But things a'int like they used to be, and the people at Cafe Iruña are not pleased with questions about Ernest even though he is the reason why people come and spend money. One bartender said lamely, "he came here to get drunk," so with all this I packed up and went home with my own bottle of wine. I had my own Hemingway experience alone somewhere else, and that was as good as any.

Pamplona two weeks after San Fermin was wonderfully quiet, a steady place. I came out of the Pyrenees and the Tour de France like no tomorrow, and was greeted with a hug and a kiss in Zaragoza like we were still back there on a hill in Ronda. It's a wonderful thing in life to pick up where you left off like you were there all along. I was told one night laying there in bed, a few tears coming down her face, that I am going to live the most amazing life, and that was a bittersweet thing to hear because I think she's right, but to do that I must keep moving. I ran along the Camino de Santiago, out into the yellow fields beyond Pamplona, on my final afternoon in Navarre. Pamplona has been done, discovered, and saturated, for years now really, and so off we go to discover what's next.

I remember sitting down at that little cafe in a back alleys of Granada, and on the menu it said, "Hemingway was never here." I love Hemingway, and I will read more books and enjoy the simple honest writing about what he saw, but the fact he wasn't everywhere is probably a good thing. 

le Tour de France

It was a man from Bossost who picked me up off the side of the road early Wednesday morning for no reason other than the fact I had a Spanish flag pinned to my back. He had a wife at home and a child's car-seat in the back but I did not learn more, other than his desire for the calm and quiet of the Pyrenees. From Vielha to Bossost we went, and then about ten minutes further on winding roads to the top of a mountain. Where the road becomes flat, Spain ends and France begins. I shut the door with a thank you and when he was out of sight I walked across an invisible line. An old French cyclist greeted me with bonjour. I smiled and said in Spanish that we are in France now. He said oui and smiled also and then turned and descended without anything else. Shortly I followed him and this was my start to the Tour de France.

The Tour de France lasts three weeks and occurs in many cities and in countries outside of France itself. Most of it is in the remote countryside and so to spectate the Tour, at least any large amount of the Tour, is very difficult. It is because of this most people find themselves picking sections, times, routes and stages to which they will make the Tour a part of their lives and it is in this place a found myself from months ago up until the day of. It was the same strategic orientation of Bagneres-de-Luchon that brought me and thousands others to this small skiing village in the middle of the French Pyrenees for stages 16 and 17 of the 99th anniversary.

In Luchon, the Tour ends one day and begins the next - the only time this happens. It is the last two mountain stages before the entire race finishes in Paris. It is probably the best place in all of France to see what I wanted to see.

Stage 16 is one of the most grueling of the entire race, lasting 197km over four horrific climbs. I was situated on a downhill, 3km from the finish and when the peloton flew by it was not one but many and Cadel Evans had lost 5 minutes with a stomach bug. I still told him I loved him and waved my Australian flag but he probably had other things on his mind. The Frenchman continued to dominate with an impressive win, almost too good. What happened with Cadel, as one spectator put it, is what you would expect of someone who was not on some sort of performance enhancing drug. He is human. He is not perfect for three weeks straight.

Stage 17 was shorter (less than 100 miles) and I placed myself on a large incline, 15km from the finish. Cadel was doing better but it was a Spaniard I saw first, and he remained first until he crossed the line. That gave my Spanish flag value. These are the shortened technicalities of the Tour, and I will keep those at a minimum.

I camped out in Luchon with two Americans. We found a trailer park full of spectators and put down blankets and sleeping bags and talked for a little while until everyone was silent and I just looked up at the big sky that was very dark and full with stars. It was not very cold and when I woke up sometime early in the morning the stars were gone and it was very cloudy and a little colder but still not as cold as I expected. A French family in a nearby trailer gave me an extra blanket the night before and another one in the morning gave hot coffee and a cup. There was nothing I could say but merci and nothing they could say but cafe but I smiled and they smiled and I think we all knew what we meant.

The clouds remained that morning into the afternoon and the mountain stages felt much more like mountain stages because there was always a peak shrouded in mist. I saw Cadel Evans very closely that second morning before the race. Gilbert and the rest of the team also, as they descended BMC's bus and got on their bikes to warm up and do interviews. I saw Cavendish get driven to the starting line through the window of a Jaguar. Wiggins rode by at one point. I was ten feet away from a face of Australian sports television I remember seeing when I lived there but still cannot give a name. There were other important people too. There were thousands of dollars worth of beautiful bikes, tuned to perfection. There were buses with tinted windows. Police officers looking intimidating and some not so much. There was a lot. But the crowds remained very collected and calmly watched from behind the lines. Occasionally someone would yell something out and sometimes the riders would turn and look over and give a wave. My Australian flag joined me with lots of happy Aussies who were happy to have me join even though I do not speak like them.

Walking up a particularly difficult stretch of road, an Australian girl from Melbourne asked me if I had been following the Tour much. It seemed a strange question. I had traveled hundreds of miles to see the Tour. Of course I was following it. But I wasn't really, because one of the innate qualities in coming to these remote places is that you will lose track of the Tour at some point. Waiting hours on the side of the road, your favorite rider could have crashed out and you wont know. The riders could be ten kilometers or thirty and the only way you know it's coming is when a helicopter emerges from behind a mountain and you know it is close. Every major move of the stage passes by completely unnoticed to the people quietly lining the roads, standing poised and ready with flags and signs in hand.

Maybe not if you are like that man from Belgium, satellite television and all inside your trailer, but that is not me now and I would not want it to be. Maybe it will be in a different time. When I glanced at the flatscreen quickly and saw 50km to go, it was however, a little helpful.

It was a running joke among numerous others. We are standing in beautiful scenery that people all over the world watch on television every year and say to themselves how great it would be to see the Tour de France and meanwhile, we have no idea what the hell is going on. But it didn't matter anyways. We were there and people saw us somewhere in the middle of all the rest. And it was the thousands of other connections and conversations, not just the cyclists streaming by, that made the days what they were.

And so the Tour de France moves North while I go back South. The clouds have lifted a little with a few pockets winding through the passes. It was sure something to see. It was sure an experience. Next year I will probably be in a warm little house watching highlights each night, maybe alone and maybe with good company. I will think about the whole thing very differently. I will think about France differently too. I do hate the language gap. It still kills me. But when people are exceptionally and needlessly kind, that neither matters nor exists.

What's Happening Lately

When I arrived in the United Kingdom I had 50 euros in my pocket and I walked up to a stand run by three rather striking girls and exchanged it for 40 pounds. I always like the feel of a new crisp currency in my wallet. I look at the artwork and examine the coins I will fumble with later. It is exciting, like when a plane flies over a city and nothing makes sense yet but you know it will. Four days later at a different airport, I again had 40 pounds in my pocket and received 50 euros from an older woman not nearly as striking or pleasant, and this was the beginning and end of my visa run off mainland Europe.

My mother came to Spain, and it was her first time overseas, and that is where the fluid line began. It is special to be around someone during this time, and I remember often getting off a plane in Melbourne, feeling different air, the accents of people on the streets, the changed orientation of the stars at night, and the realization that entire little world's exist that we would not have known about or give a single thought to before. This is what traveling does the first time, and still the many times after, but never quite as profound as the first, and I was lucky to be there to witness it in another.

In Spain she met the family I had lived with for all this time, and teared up when they said goodbye. We watched a soccer game and she wore a red scarf that would later be defined by the little family who had made up and filled so full the last few months. We went to Granada and walked around the Alhambra, those haunting towers at night, the beautiful gardens during the day. It is a place that keeps you mesmerized and quiet. I stumbled across a beautiful poem one night in a dimly lit square, surrounded by balconies and draped in vines.

Y vosotros dormís siempre,
Y la muerte está lejana.

Then it was on to Toledo, that old mid-evil slow moving town built above the river and filled with shops selling old armor and axes and swords. Then walking out into the countryside, higher and higher for a better view of Don Quixote's la Mancha. Then back on a train up to Madrid to say goodbye.

And then I had days to myself in Madrid that were not really to myself because I was in a very large cheap hostel full of very large personalities that grew larger when they drank. People drank because they were in Madrid for its parties. There were pub crawls every night and people stumbling into the rooms every morning before the sun was out and there were large bathrooms with many showers and odd smells. You felt dirtier after those bathrooms than you did before, but Madrid was good too. I saw the best artwork I had ever seen at the Prado. Picasso and Goya and the rest were close enough to touch. Under Hemingway's advice again, I went to a Madrid bullfight in its beautiful plaza. I went alone and sat up front and talked bullfighting with the old Spanish man who had been going the past thirty years. The young Spanish girl behind me also was impressive with her knowledge and her tenacity, yelling at people for standing and other people for other things I did not quite get. It was as edge of your seat as I'd seen, especially when the third matador was gored and rushed off to an ambulance.

And then, for the first time in six months, it was all behind me. A plane took me out of the Iberian Peninsula and into Manchester and a train took me across to Liverpool. What a strange transition that is, when a country speaking your first language natively feels as foreign as one that doesn't speak your language at all. I was upon first instinct talking to taxi drivers and sandwich makers and people in the street in words they did not understand. And then a few additional things messed with my head, that I imagine will still cause me to put my face in my palms in shame for quite some time. I will remember walking down the rainy streets of Liverpool hand in hand with a girl from Seville, laughing and switching in and out of languages with great happiness. But life still has its moments of excess unfortunately, and the entire thing it retrospect feels something like a regression. That's vague, I know, but I can't write about these things anymore after thinking about it too much. It's not something to plead about out loud. It is something to man up and fix about yourself.

Later it all still hurt, going up in the plane and watching the buildings of Liverpool I came to know falling away in the clouds. I could follow the streets up from the cathedral and see where she was, probably sleeping, though maybe stirring in bed as the world lightened outside. Later there were more clouds and ocean and nothing and then I was in Barcelona around people who never knew a damn thing about me in Liverpool. As the heat returns along the roads in Catalonia, a hope a few other things return with it.