The Big Tent

After the 2023 Duluth election cycle, I feel compelled to write an homage to the big tent. It is a nod to the power of candidates who avoid closing themselves off, the ones who have dialogue with people with whom they don’t agree. This year’s election was not an easy one: there was some blatant misogyny and an influx of outside money, from shadowy PACs to the crude but large arsenal of one state party, and an unsettled electorate made some moves. Those who cast their eyes widest were the ones who positioned themselves the best.

The power of the big tent is increasingly obvious in an era when so many people self-segregate into like-minded social circles and media bubbles. Duluth’s right is now so moribund that it can’t get candidates through primaries; its media echo chambers, while influential in other places, are useless in a city like Duluth. The hard left, after several election cycles of ascendancy, finally took near full control of the local DFL machinery and then saw its vote totals regress to their lowest levels in years, the power of those three letters unable to overcome rhetoric that only appeals to the already converted, especially in a year when it had no standard-bearer at the top of the ticket. Big tents are not exclusively the territory of moderates—figures left and right have figured out how to command them—but the edges of the spectrum are barely having the conversation these days.

The mayoral race illustrated both the allure of the big tent and its pitfalls. After eight years in office, Emily Larson suffered a crushing 20-point defeat. It seemed a shocking fate for someone who occupied the center of Duluth’s political spectrum, a firm liberal voice in a firmly liberal city. In theory she still commanded the big tent, and she had plenty of positive indicators on her side, and she spoke in sweeping terms about Duluth and its collective future. Even four years ago, though, as I knocked doors across the city, it became clear that having Larson as an ally was not a net positive for some similarly aligned candidates; something had gone awry in her relationship with many voters. It was never entirely clear who her sweeping ‘we’ included. Certainly not the right, which did not share all her values; only reluctantly members of the further left, which loved neither candidate but tended to prefer Larson’s messaging and frowned at Reinert’s conservative support. Not necessarily anyone who was struggling to make ends meet, since a two-term incumbent is in a poor place to highlight the things in a city that need fixing. After eight years of ups and downs through budget decisions, her labor allies were likewise lukewarm. She gave it her all after an ugly result in the primary, but two months cannot make up for eight years of people drifting out of the tents in ones and twos.  

Larson’s great strength is as an authentic communicator, and her ability to pull forth powerful rhetoric in the right situations was part of what made her seem like a rising star in the Minnesota DFL. This can seem like a contradiction for someone who was clearly not communicating as well as she could with a large swath of the electorate, but the flip side of authenticity can be a poor poker face. It was never hard for someone in a room with Larson to know when she was paying rapt attention or when she was disinterested, when she felt one’s pain herself and when her claim that she ‘heard’ or ‘saw’ her interlocutors felt pat. I experienced both myself over the years, and if I did as someone who had a modest but real working relationship with her, I can only imagine how that could feel for a rank-and-file city employee or a constituent who does not often speak to people in power. Her debate performance heading into election, in which she seemed to ooze disdain for the upstart on the stage next her, encapsulated her paradox: filled with pride in her record, hurt by the attacks lobbed her way, her time too short to engage in a true inquisition over what went wrong, powering ahead as best she could. It was a Greek tragedy in full, though I am curious to see her next act.

Into this drama stepped Roger Reinert, an empty vessel into which a lot of voters poured a desire for change. He attracted a right that despised Larson’s rhetoric and certain areas of focus, Democrats who’d felt slighted by Larson for one reason or another, people who saw in him a hearkening back to the less contentious Don Ness era when he built his political reputation, and some who just wanted something new after eight years. He stayed vague enough to bring them all in and he threw around some promises to claim more. This election felt intensely personal in part because there was not a lot of ideological space between the two candidates, though contra some narratives, I do think there were some differences between Larson and Reinert that genuinely matter, including their thoughts on what could be done about downtown Duluth, their stances on the Lester Park Golf Course, and the future of the library. Having opened up the tent to so many people and ideas, Reinert has set some lofty expectations; he now needs to stake the tent down into some core grounding so it can stand in harder headwinds off the lake. We’ll see if this peripatetic striver can muster it.

One group of candidates did seem to find that grounding this past election cycle. The clearest winners in 2023 Duluth were in the labor-backed council camp, which saw Arik Forsman, Lynn Nephew, and Janet Kennedy marched to victory by overwhelming margins, and Roz Randorf, who has her idiosyncrasies but is usually a fellow traveler, won unopposed. They, too, cast wide nets, but their campaigns still felt clearly grounded in certain visions. Reinert will need them to move anything forward as mayor, and they are here both to put the brakes on any riskier promises and to move the city in the direction of some sort of Duluth-centered consensus.

Late on election night, as I sat with a group of people from this camp at the Reef, I realized that we had, unwittingly, assembled the diverse sort of coalition many further to the left aspire to, a heterodox group of people sharing stories about how they became who they were: some raised in privilege and others in trailers, some grateful for the support of public institutions in their lives and others motivated to change it by the opposite experiences. Some have organized labor in their veins; others seem far from it, but are children of a lost majority in northeast Minnesota and know the sorts of voters their coalition needs to reclaim it. Everyone there knew that they could not move their own platform forward alone. They would need to negotiate and find some common ground.

The organized labor movement has had its failings over time, and it cannot put back together its 1960s coalition, or for that matter its Duluth area 2008 coalition. But its basic mode of doing politics, of inviting a lot of people into a sometimes rowdy room and collectively sorting out differences, has a lot to offer in an era when others try to live off high-flung rhetoric from a magnetic personality or a narrow plurality and sheer brute force. Somewhere in here lies the politics that can win the large majorities necessary to steer the ship of state. The election, of course, is the easy part: now it is time to do the work.

Let It Be

When we find ourselves in times of trouble, the words of wisdom come from the places we know best. I grew up on a block with only two houses, a triangular block in Duluth’s Lakeside neighborhood bisected by an alley that made sure the neighbors in those two 1920s mini-foursquares would know each other well. To my family’s immense good fortune when we arrived on the block in the mid-90s, those neighbors were Bill and Helen Sandwick, and that block was the cradle to which I returned time and again, a second home where we could always drift back into a childhood realm free from the burdens of a world. I knew things couldn’t stay that way forever—in fact I learned this at age eight, and the Sandwicks hosted me the night before that fateful day, with my parents at the hospital with my brother—but back on that block with the Sandwicks, it felt like it could.

It certainly won’t ever feel quite the same now, as Bill passed away this past weekend. Bill grew up in tiny Sandstone, Minnesota, but in his youth a band from Liverpool captured his imagination, and the world opened up to him. The Beatles set him on musical journeys, behind the Iron Curtain and into spontaneous conversation on an Amtrak from Chicago to Minneapolis, where he met the British girl he’d bring back to Minnesota. Bill and Helen raised Sara, three months my senior and a companion through all my school days, and Tim, four years our junior and always right in our neighborhood mix. Together with the Kleins from across the avenue, we formed a little community unit, five kids who turned out alright, helped along by a steady string of cookouts and movie nights and uproarious laughter.

And that is what I will remember most about Bill: his perfectly calibrated humor. He was a master of the dry one-liner, some ridiculous quip that would lead us all to pause before doubling over in laughter. He made an art of gentle mockery, laser-focused but never mean-spirited, an absurdist twist that landed just about every time. We all acquired nicknames, and I remained “Kowl,” as toddler Tim pronounced my name circa 1996, until the last time I saw him, a breakfast about a month before he passed in which I reunited with the whole clan for the first time since before the pandemic. Bill told naughty jokes, he drew marvelous caricatures, and he knew just how to press his kids’ buttons.

Beneath the endless good humor was a man who saw the world with fundamental decency and basic common sense. Their house was one with no hint of pretense: just a cozy place where I have always been welcome to stop by. For all his time on stages Bill was a homebody at heart, and the friendships he made were deep ones. He and Helen could laugh away with visitors for hours and hours, delighted and drama-free. What more could anyone ask for out of a neighbor?

For most of his adult life, Bill made his living doing what he loved to do, playing his bass for local bands, and though I am sure that schedule taxed him over time, it did nothing to diminish his joy in good music, from his beloved Beatles to Elton John to the Moody Blues to Rod Stewart and a long list of other stars (not all of them British!) who they’d play and see on tour. And even though the Beatles have been apart for over fifty years now, they still managed to put out a new song in the final weeks of Bill’s life, and his family was able to serenade him with “Now and Then” as they prayed for a recovery that would not come.

On Sunday afternoon the Kleins and I went over to clean Bill and Helen’s leaf-strewn yard, and suddenly the whole crew was out there again. One of us was missing and at first the words did not come easily, but we were and that was what in fact mattered, our numbers in fact swelled by Sara’s husband and Tim’s partner. Helen was a model of grace, laughing and telling stories, happy to be among friends, finding her way to peace. And if in the days that come that peace does not come so easily, Colorado Street will always be there for her, and for all of us. For though they may be parted, there is still a chance that they will see. Rest in peace, Bill, and let it be.

Grinding

Of course this wedding day must start with a run. We take a casual loop around Northeast, past the wedding venue and around a lizard sculpture, past Ecuadoran laborers at a bus stop and Somali men in thobes, down gentrifying streets and past industrial back corners with piles of gravel behind fences, the sun drying out a damp fall morning in this city that brought us together. The groomsmen and some fellow travelers gather in a boarding house of an Airbnb just off Lowry, and the group journeys toward formal dress in halting stages. In one corner there is heated debate on development design standards and in another an acoustic guitarist warms up; a romcom from our teenage years rolls on the TV, and we hydrate en masse ahead of the night’s scheduled debauchery. Honorary Hamm’s are cracked open and first toasts made; the Portland boys cannot tie ties. Our early strides are all in form.

Work and last second forgotten items intrude on my scheduled pre-ceremony Zen, but I know these runs well enough to adjust my pace accordingly. I take a lap around the neighborhood with friends I have not seen in years, gather a circle of the old guard, high-energy free spirits and intellectual heavyweights alike. Naturally an urban planner marries in a site of urban renewal, golden fall light pouring in through the spacious windows of a repurposed industrial space, a collision of Episcopalians and Latter-Day Saints and areligious philosophers of various stripes, brought together just as Northeast amasses something of everything Minneapolis has to offer. We eat, we drink, we party. We release the bride and groom back to their hotel and retreat to our house. Sometime around one some pizzas arrive and someone has put dish detergent in the dishwasher and I am sipping Liquid IV out of a martini glass, brotherly ties forming with kids I’ve only known for two weekends, each of us drifting off into a contented sleep at our own pounding rhythm.

Between now and May five good friends will pair off, a run that feels more significant than most in this matrimonial season of life. Their number includes my most frequent grad school correspondent, three of the four people I have ever called a roommate for any length of time, and my lead co-conspirator in the hockey world. These ones feel weightier than weddings past, a signal of some new brave new era, and there will be time to see what it all means. Minneapolis is a fitting place for this wedding sprint to start because it is here, ten years ago, that a cousin’s wedding on Nicollet Island gave me the platonic ideal of what one should look like, a weekend that in some ways set in motion my own move to Minneapolis to orient my life a year later. During that ceremony I had a moment of unseen panic, a crushing fear that I might never have a day like this. That day is not here yet but the paralysis is gone, the tools that killed it in 2013 the same ones I use to seize this moment. I dive in.

First up in this wedding relay is Kory, the college runner who, predictably, leads the pack. I could tell from a simple reading of a profile in a grad school mentorship program that this explosion of energy with a powerful sense of self would pair well with me. Our story has been burnished by serendipitous ties: he went to college in Oregon with the son of my parents’ best friends, and some members of the wedding party know this mutual acquaintance well; his wife’s parents live a block from my aunt and uncle in Irving Park, Chicago. He endured me as a mean TA in his first year of grad school, drank in bits of the Minnesota hockey gospel, and has even been receptive to my crusade to impose nuance and ambiguity upon his politics. Pre-Madeleine he spent nights on the couch in my Minneapolis apartment’s living room, plaintive after missed connections, our own bond growing as we hiked together, schemed career moves together, and took in marathon weekends together.

And then along came Madeleine, a fellow runner who also barrels straight into the breach, from Boston Marathons to her work in emergency rooms. They share a wavelength, an unrelenting pursuit, and yet Madeleine Era Kory is more able to modulate, settle into a chill ease that previously came only among us boys. The restless flame has not been quenched but instead channeled, paced into some version of the cycle through life that has always been my own aspiration. The grad school era sidekick has shown his sage old mentor how it’s done.

Before the ceremony, a few of us have been assigned a duty: make this dance floor rival that of any wedding I’ve ever attended. Mission accepted. The Vikings’ DJ dials up a long night of music. Cardboard cutouts of Kory and Madeleine’s cats bob about, and the mother of the bride tears it up to the end. I am at home here, able to unleash pure, unrestrained exuberance, bringing it with all I’ve got and one with the pulsing mass. My body may not have the stamina it had ten years ago but after any setback I can rally, and that is all that matters. I am, like the friend I celebrate on this night, built for marathons like this, here for runs both literal and metaphorical, ready to grind my way through whatever comes next.

Longer Trails

“The absurdity of a life that may well end before one understands it does not relieve one of the duty (to that self which is inseparable from others) to live it through as bravely and as generously as possible.”

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

The last time I backpacked the Superior Hiking Trail, I found myself rather done with it. I’d reached the point where I’d knocked out the entire trail between Gooseberry Falls and Judge Magney State Parks, save for a nondescript inland portion north and west of Grand Marais. Every campsite featured a crowd of tents, solitude elusive and prospective companions a complete roll of the dice. (The current leaders in the clubhouse are the crew of twelve on the Beaver River who brought their volleyball along.) I will always have a soft spot for the SHT and will revisit many of its high points again and again, but there are many trails to hike, and I have gotten most of what I needed out of the SHT, excepting perhaps a through-hike that will likely have to wait for retirement.

Retirement, you say? Along comes my dad, happily sailing forth in that era of life, and he has indeed set out to hike the norther half of the SHT this fall. I am pressed into shuttle duty, and on a weekend in late September help maneuver the logistics of a several-week expedition. We head for the far northern end off the Arrowhead Trail and stroll the short distance to the trail’s terminus at 270 Degree Overlook above the Pigeon River and the Canadian border. We have nailed peak fall colors here in the far northeast corner of Minnesota, and the weather this weekend, though grey and at times ominous, never unleashes the sort of rainfall that would bog down a hiker. The bugs are few and far between, though of course the lone mosquito at our site on the second night finds its way into my tent.

I am here as support. We perform a series of maneuvers, with me backtracking and moving my car to allow my dad to proceed with a lightened load through certain stretches on his steady march south. We plow through the forest between trail’s end and Andy Lake Road, its renaissance under way after logging some fifteen years ago. We push up Rosebush Ridge, host to the highest point on the entire SHT; the view is nondescript, but the maple forest in peak fall form is its own front-line attraction. Further south, the Hellacious Overlook, though much further inland than most SHT vistas, gazes down upon across beaver ponds and golden fall trees toward Lake Superior, and we squint at the lumpy blobs on the horizon, unsure if one of those clouds is Isle Royale. Even inland from its usual lake-lining ridges, the trail offers up its customary beauty.

These less traveled portions of the trail still feature a steady stream of people, and sometimes that companionship leaves something to be desired, as in the case of the young man who occupies the Hellacious Overlook to fly his drone, the name of these aerial intrusions never feeling more apt than it does when it intrudes on the final push up this mount. But for the most part, fellow SHT venturers are good company. Further along the dome at Hellacious we meet two Asian-Americans from the Twin Cities, out on their first hiking venture and gushing at the opportunity this new experience creates. At Andy Creek we share a campsite with Andy, a cousin of my seventh-grade science teacher; his frenetic pace up and down the trail matches his scattershot conversation and bear vault packing efforts. After a week on the trail said vault somehow still overflows with every backpacking food imaginable. At Caribou Pond we meet Ben and Hadey, a couple around my age on their first backcountry venture together, though both know a thing or two about the outdoors. They come to the rescue when my bourbon flask suffers an unfortunate incident and adds distinct new flavors to the contents of my bear vault.

Still, the SHT is wilder here than at points further south. In places the brush grows thick along the trail and the infrastructure could use some Biden bucks, with a profusion of tippy bridges and misaligned boardwalks. Less use means this stretch is spared the man-eating mud patches encountered at points further south, in spite of recent rains; aside from the obvious overlooks, my favorite stretch is a boardwalk-covered cedar swamp where I spend a good 20 minutes in contemplative silence as I await my dad’s arrival from the opposite direction. I realize how little time I’ve taken to do this lately.

The deep breaths beneath the cedars are a valuable reminder to maintain my pace on my own terms. This fall and winter will be a pause between an adventure-filled summer and a spring of 2024 that may put all previous travel to shame. I am that eager adventurer, yes, but I am also someone with defined Duluth winter cycles, a steady rhythm that can be my self-assured answer when life is more than a rattled-off list of the places I’ve been. Over these past few years I’ve achieved a new speed more in line with my ambitions, and yet I value this time to modulate, reined in and able to sit and read and write and think, and set a pace that matches the moment.

At Cariou Pond after the second night on the trail, I turn my dad loose. He heads south while I pick my way back across a beaver dam, back past a cloud-shrouded Hellacious Overlook to my car on Jackson Lake Road. The ride south on 61 is a slog through increasing traffic and fog, but any delay is inconsequential. This is what an autumn should look like: brilliant and yet portentous, darkness coming early but moderated by stark moonlight, a few final warm nights before the heavier sleeping bags come out.

Unlike me, my dad does not hike with pen and paper (or their digital analogues) with which to make sense of everything he sees; he simply brings a copy of The Snow Leopard, his guide on this and many other journeys. I have, through him, come to adore this little book as well. I could here unspool my thoughts on that bench in the cedar swamp into some greater personal meditation, but that might, I think, miss the lesson of the book. In the story of this weekend I am the supporting cast, grand plans on hold as a man sets off purposefully down a trail to the next phase of life. It is a role I am happy to play, and one all of us should from time to time, our authorship intact but bounded by our reality as social beings. My own next surge awaits. For now, my dad walks south, and I simply admire his freedom.

My Work in Other Places

I may not be writing much on here these days, but I am finding a few outlets to share thoughts elsewhere. This year, my work life has given me a few more opportunities to take a bit of a platform, and I link to a few of them here.

First off, I spoke at the August Duluth Lyceum on the history of urban planning in Duluth. I try to pack a lot into 25 minutes here, and longtime readers will recognize bits and pieces, but it’s a good, quick summation of how Duluth’s history meshes with, and sometimes differs from, major trends in urban planning thought.

More substantively, I completed a white paper on regional economic cooperation. It’s a bit of an insider piece for people involved loosely in economic development, but my broader audience still might find it interesting, or at the very least an explainer for what it is I actually do with my day job. It is available on the Northspan website at https://www.northspan.org/ecosystem-thinking-a-northspan-white-paper/. A much shorter version ran as an op ed in the Duluth News Tribune recently, too.

With the right combination of inspiration, free time, and luck, I should be back with more here soon.

Where I Was From

As I mark seven years back in Duluth, my mind is not back on my move home in 2016, but instead on an earlier return, the one some ten years ago that set me on my current path. It would be very easy to write off those two years right after college as misspent youth, and indeed I would not rank it as a time I lived a life I much wanted. I was underemployed, with no budget to feed my wanderlust or appetites, and for a time had no grand plan for what would come next. I churned out large quantities of fiction no one would ever read and hated most of it; I am now thankful I had enough discretion to spare the world these pained missives. My social circles, such as they were, primarily featured high school friends who happened to be around, many of whom have since drifted out of my orbit. My college friends barreled forward with life, but enough of them were in grad school or two-year public service programs that they had yet to accrue much financial advantage that would have put them on a visibly different trajectory. It was not an exciting time. My journey only looked rebellious if I told myself it was.

Which is exactly what I did. Those were heady days in my struggle to make sense of my world. For the first time in my life I had stepped off the meritocratic hamster wheel I’d inhabited in my school years, and I began to poke holes in the system, tread in more contrarian circles. In my early political writing at city council and school board meetings I fixated on the vocal minorities and appreciated the points they made, even if I often thought they made them poorly. My intellectual ferment, thanks to a few Georgetown influences, took on a few small-c conservative flavors as I gained more appreciation for limits and rootedness, two radical words in an era of overwhelming open-endedness that had, momentarily, paralyzed me. In my floundering writings, I wrote stories that reflected that sensibility, and through much disgust at my own words started to find my voice. As I have aged, I’ve drifted away from some of that strain of thought: at the end of the day that restless striver is closer to my core being than some staid, crochety agrarian soul. But that quest is now grounded in deeper core convictions, and with that foundation I can never spend too long drifting in the breeze.

I felt my own past deeply upon my return. Never was this truer than on meandering nighttime walks through Lakeside, when I went block by block pulling out some memory of a friend’s old house here, a passing adventure there, some acquaintance of my parents just beyond, my history spelled out in silent streets. They were once the world to me, but now they were shrinking, dwarfed by other adventures, those intricate details my mind has always had a talent for retaining made less and less relevant to my immediate needs.

And yet my life had broken decisively from that past in key ways, and as a result, my appreciation never romanticized my hometown or consigned it to some realm of paradise lost. I knew there was no going back to the way things had been, and I found new life in Duluth. At the time my mother, back herself after a brief stint away, settled into an apartment on Park Point, a first floor one-bedroom on the lakefront side two blocks past the Lift Bridge. Life on the Point had its drawbacks—the bridgings, the nonstop wind, the steady stream of people strolling through the backyard to borrow the ostensibly private gate down to the lakefront—but if I was to have a quarter-life crisis it may as well have come on a beach, a quick stroll from Canal Park institutions from which an apartment-sitting twentysomething could stumble home at the end of a long night. (Rest in peace, Sports Garden.) There was just enough forward motion to feed that latent ambition, enough for me to marry it all in my mind and create a path for myself that intertwined with that of a city.

Duluth at the time felt born anew after a long, inglorious Rust Belt phase; Duluthians tentatively poked their heads outward, skeptical this city could have nice things. Lincoln Park had new energy for the first time in decades, and there was new investment downtown. The housing market was reasonable. There was a visible, public win over the Last Place on Earth, a triumph of order and sobriety over a manufactured, life-ruining agent of chaos. City politics was a realm of relative consensus carried by all those good vibes; while some of the councilors had obvious broader political allegiances, they were often immaterial to the issues at hand, and not their lens for viewing all things. (The school board was another story, perhaps a canary in the coal mine for broader societal divisions to come.) Outside the national spotlight—and with occasional laudatory bursts in it—Duluth was going about making itself a better place.

The view from ten years later is a bit more complicated. The investment goes on, sometimes at rapid paces in certain places. Duluth’s housing market is spiraling upward while downtown hollows out, and I feel certain malaises intensely. I step around bodies sprawled in the skywalk on my way into the office. Out in Irving Park, a strung-out man screams racial epithets at his dog. A client who works in addiction treatment tells me the normal origin story for an addict has gone from “beers among high school friends in the woods” to “meth with mom at age ten.” Local politics, as a recent shocker of a mayoral primary shows, are unsettled, roiling with certain fierce currents but not cohering into anything like the consensus of a decade ago.

I could here try to put a neat bow on this essay by relating some personal frustrations with my time back in Duluth, sweep it up in some grand tale of youthful idealism lost. Such literary flourishes, however, would sacrifice truth for art. Yes, there have been challenges here and there in my seven years back, unexpected burdens and hockey trouble and underlying concerns about my project proven accurate, but nothing to challenge the foundational premises of the Duluth that made me want to build a life here. I went back knowing what those Ithakas are for, and am pleased by how well that younger self knew I was making certain sacrifices. (Too many of us, I think, are far too uncharitable to our younger selves.) I work a good job and I have a good house and any sources of great frustration seem fixable.

I can’t say that Duluth is worse off, either. Rising real estate can also mean rising wealth, at least for those of us fortunate enough to get in on the ground floor. Any memory of the Last Place on Earth days, with lines for unregulated synthetic drugs that cause overdoses by the dozen wrapped around the block, does rather dim the nostalgia for some earlier downtown Duluth. The truth is that Duluth has always had some rust on the underside, the spots where the salt eats away after a long, cold winter. They are all the more glaring in a Duluth where Park Point has teardowns and the east side has nonstop renovations and people speak of gentrification on the west side. The paths diverge, and people in my line of work have a lot to do. But this city retains its allure, and whatever ails me, I am only ever one quick jaunt along the shoreline away from a good mood.

There is certainly some intellectual malaise baked into my project: since I moved back in 2016, things have generally gone to shit for localists. Donald Trump’s election radicalized everyone and made every issue national, much to our collective detriment. Local media, already floundering, is now on life support, replaced by people yelling into online voids or a simple absence of coverage. Covid pounded away at opportunities for community gathering, all while compounding a housing crisis, lowering trust, and making it ever easier to drift into rootlessness. It strained schools, one of the deepest bedrocks of community, to a breaking point. Deaths of despair surged, with more lonely people making terrible decisions, often aided by ever more powerful drugs, and in general we seem to be drifting into the medication of problems instead of considering them with any semblance of reason.

And yet none of this makes me doubt that the solutions to the problems are all right here. They are not secrets, simply harder and harder for people to grasp. There are of course the technical corrections: community schools, community policing, a switch in our housing regime that lets us build things; good local reporting, and politicians who focus on the things in front of them instead of the talking points that trickle down from national movements. My work is not my life, and other areas of focus have also emerged relative to any political project over the past several years. (I’ll save that story for an upcoming post.) But more than ever I believe in this agenda, and am need of allies who will also try to enact it instead of nodding along and smiling at what they read but doing little else to get away from staring at screens. It isn’t easy work, but it is a clear enough road that I found, back on those meanders down Duluth’s trails in my early twenties.

The intensity of the feeling I felt in that era is something some people claim fades with time. I have not found this to be true. Maybe they are all fooling themselves and misremembering the long periods of monotony at that age; maybe I am just wired differently, or frozen in an arrested state that will someday pass. But I’m skeptical it ever will.

This past July, at a bachelor party for a grad school friend, two college runners undertook a passionate four AM dialogue on whether they could ever reclaim that shared team bond they once had. The lament was heartfelt, and the frathouse vibe may indeed fade some as we age into creakier bodies and somewhat better judgment. But losing the depth of that commitment, even when resurrected for just one weekend? Not one ounce. The gravitational pull of that homing instinct does not wane. I owe the strength of that pull to the intensity of feeling in those early twenties years, back when I learned where I was from.

Into the Western Well

It is August. After a social spring and summer, it is time for my annual retreat to a wilderness in the West. Bob, Rob, Amy, Ed, and I are ready to disappear into the mountains yet again. It is my fifth time joining this group on its yearly venture, and this time around I saddle the group with an itinerary in a new mountain range I’d seen from a distance and deemed worth exploring. We are off to the Cloud Peak Wilderness in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming.

The Bighorns stand to the east of the Rockies as a lonely outpost of high elevation, a prominent range separated from others by twin vast open expanses, the Absarokas by the Bighorn Basin to the west and the Black Hills by the Powder River Basin to the east. They sit far from any other major attraction, save perhaps a road tripper’s route to Yellowstone and the Tetons and the Little Bighorn battlefield. The two gateway towns, Sheridan and Buffalo, combine for about 20,000 residents (granted, a veritable metropolis by Wyoming standards) and little of the seasonal surge in population that descends on other high country access points we’ve visited in the past, such as Red Lodge in Montana or Leadville in Colorado. They feature no national park or monument, no 14,000-foot peaks, no iconic roadside attraction to lure in the I-90 road trippers, many of whom may now even take the Google Maps-endorsed bypass on US 212 from Spearfish to Crow Agency, thereby avoiding Bighorn country entirely. For that matter, the range’s namesake sheep, decimated by early white settlers, have only been reintroduced in one northern pocket of the mountain chain.

What the Bighorns are is a rougher edge of wilderness. Here we find more extreme weather, more creek crossings, more horse poop, and bigger boulder fields than we have seen elsewhere. We find both solitude and trails more traveled, and a smorgasbord of Western experience, from rough frontier edges to the encroachment of coastal cosmopolitan comfort, from wide open freedom to the memory of loss that lingers in places like the Crow Reservation we drive through on the way to the trailhead. These rocky slopes provide everything a good hike should.

The hike goes awry quickly. After a leisurely stroll from the Hunter Trailhead on a rough road used by horses and ATVs, we take the alleged scenic route on the Ditch Trail, whose name alone should have been a warning. It starts out clear but muddy, tracking a flume-like creek running down from the mountains, but after we cross it, we promptly lose the trail and end up whacking through a dense thicket of 20- to 30-year-old pines as it begins to rain and hail. GPS gets us back on the putative path, but it clearly had not been maintained in years, as we are left to circumnavigate thousands of down trees and miserable swamps that afflict the occasionally visible ditch that give the trail its name. We are lucky this is day one and we have the energy for this slog.

Once we get back another horse and ATV road, we can finally cook along through mid-altitude forests and across alpine meadows, past the graves of a few lonely frontiersmen and through variable precipitation before we land at a respectable campsite near a creek crossing. It clears up enough to enjoy the evening, and a large moose cow wanders by after dinner. Day two is day of creek crossings as we head higher up Florence Pass, a steady push upward with pauses to step gingerly through frigid waters. The rain and hail hits on an exposed stretch of rocky trail above 10,000 feet, and we take shelter in a cave just large enough for the five of us, where we wait out the worst of the storm and eat lunch. Rob’s garbage bag turned pack cover blows off down the canyon, Amy is quite done with creek crossings, and when we get to Florence Lake, our planned destination for the evening, we discover a rock-strewn, barren shoreline with near zero flat ground to pitch a tent.

Not enthusiastic to go any further, we scope out some halfway acceptable tent pads up a slope from the lake and make camp. Despite its obvious deficiencies, Florence Lake is a beautiful place to settle: stellar waterfalls tumble into the pristine waters, and the mountains glow golden at dusk as the sun finally emerges from the clouds. Across the lake are the wide arms of Bomber Mountain, on whose slopes a World War II era warplane’s remains lie; behind us is Florence Pass, the high point of our hike at 11,000 feet, and a commanding view of the lakes down the next valley is just a short stroll away. It is a chill night, frost on the tents and pack covers in the morning, and the need to thaw it all out becomes our excuse for our usual slow exit from camp.

On day three we descend from Florence Pass along a series of lakes before we come to the busier corridor that links the West Tensleep Trailhead (our exit point) with Mistymoon Lake and the trail up Cloud Peak. We have found the open high country at the heart of the Bighorns, and finally, the weather cooperates and gives us free sightlines of rocky peaks and tangled heath and a series of brilliant lakes. A giant bull moose hugs the shoreline of Mistymoon, and we score a prime campsite at the base of a base of a waterfall in a valley that serves as a staging bowl for assaults on Cloud Peak. All trails in the southern Bighorns seem to lead to this small stretch, and for good reason.

After two days of solitude, we know we’re in for a different experience when we encounter a herd of horsemen all conspicuously packing heat. On our other hikes, most of the people we encounter are typecast backpackers: young adventurers, veteran wilderness explorers, people who seem born to be part of nature. In the Bighorns, we find much a greater variety: a lot of families, some salt of the earth locals, a general excess of cowboy hats, and in one case a kid hiking in cowboy boots. We admire the dad from New Mexico with his three backpack-toting kids, ages nine, six, and five, all cheerily bearing their loads and off on fishing excursions in the alpine lakes. The fellow travelers we get to know best are Brandi, a Wyoming native whose parents have finally accepted her itinerant lifestyle, and Oliver, her Salvadoran partner with roots in Brittany. They met when Brandi signed up to crew Oliver’s sailboat in Grenada and they have since traded sailing for the van life, which has now led them to the Cloud Peak Wilderness. We share a site with them for a night, and suddenly we are discussing sailing and Salvadoran politics and migration and gang violence over our respective freeze-dried and packaged delicacies.

On day four, Bob, Amy, and Ed take it easy with a day hike to Solitude Lake, while Rob and I wait out a thunderstorm before we tackle Cloud Peak, the highest point in the Bighorns. While its summit at 13,171 feet doesn’t rival the Rockies’ fourteeners, this push upward is substantially harder than our conquest of Colorado’s Mount Massive a year ago. Part of it is a route problem: several people we chat with and a guide I’d read suggested that, on the way up, we should cling to the ridge on the right. This advice, in the words of a Scandinavian man we chat with high on the saddle who’d followed the same guidance, is “moronic shit.” It results in an extra hour of bouldering instead of a fairly straightforward surge up along a creek and an easy runoff ramp, albeit with some impressive views.

Even so, the bouldering is inevitable over the last 1,500 feet of the climb, up through crags and around crevasses and past the few snow fields that linger late into August. We summit around 2:30 PM, blasted by winds gusting up to 50 miles per hour, and begin the steady rock hop down. The slopes are relatively empty: besides Rob and I, the climbers on this day include the Scandinavian man and his Asian wife (plus their teenage son, who bails at the saddle), Brandi and Oliver, a family with a dog who make the whole affair look like a walk in the park, and three similarly sprightly young men, their footwork as they dance from boulder to boulder leaving me in awe. On the way back we cruise down the ramp but are still left with some rough scrambles as we sort our way through the haphazard cairns marking the route.

After a second night at the foot of Cloud Peak, we hike the eight miles out down West Tensleep Creek. The first half is a scenic stride past three lakes shimmering in the sun, but the final four miles are more of a slog through woods and mud, though they are livened up by an ongoing game of tortoise and hare we play with a group of teenagers and their handlers. Their antics at a final crowded stream crossing leave Bob and Ed, longtime guides of boy scouts on camping excursions, reliving old dramas. Finally we stumble out to a crowded trailhead, back to civilization and backlogged emails and requests for my takes on a shocker in Duluth’s mayoral primary.

We begin and end our journey in Billings, home to the nearest airport of substance. It is a regional center; on an east-west axis, it is the largest thing between Fargo and Spokane, and the spot where two major cross-country interstates meet. This status gives it some good institutions for a hub of its size, a crossroads of industry whose main draw is its proximity to other things. In my previous three visits I saw it only as a launch point, but as we spend some time here this time around, its culinary scene throws in some genuine surprise. Juliano’s, a converted old home with a Hawaiian chef, is one of those small city strivers ahead of its curve, brilliant but underappreciated. The Granary, in spite of its barnlike structure, provides a little window into Mediterranean basin fine dining. As a fervent defender of Billings-size cities, I applaud the progress here on the western edge of the Great Plains, though I am sure a few locals can only shake their heads.

I think back to three years ago, when I first drove these open roads around Billings. It was deep in the Covid summer of 2020, and the West felt like the land of restless freedom and sorrow that has formed its myth. This time, we debate several forms of life on display here. There is the gun-toting machismo, most charitably viewed as an extension of a brave frontier ethos and a can’t-be-too-safe caution in a land where crime is rare. On the flip side is a fetishistic continuation of a lone wolf myth, to say nothing of the solitary lives ended late on lonely nights on the prairie. (Wyoming has the dubious distinction of the nation’s highest suicide rate five years running, with Montana right behind. The correlation between firearms and the completion of a choice not to be is not hard to see.) And then it will always attract the Brandis and Olivers too, the free spirits who find, in its vast open spaces and its growing subcultures, a place where they can live cheaply and freed from societal constraints, at liberty to roam and shed obligations to the past. Is their way of life a bold pursuit, or a frivolous retreat from the commitments that give a life meaning? Opinions differ among the five of us, all urbanites with comfortable careers who make an annual escape; time may also render such questions moot. For now, the West accommodates them all, and at its best gives families like our New Mexican friends a playground to raise kids to explore and achieve away from the monotony of overprotection and screen life.

For us, however, it is just a snippet, a taste of the wilderness that can carry us through for another year. Before next time I have new gear to buy and routes to plan, and after a summer with a lot of time on the road, I am ready to settle back in to Minnesota life for a spell, too. Until then, the West will linger there for us, that allure eternal.

Europe 2023, Part IV: Our School of Athens

This is the final installment of a four-part series. Part I | Part II | Part III

A 42-person family cruise is no enterprise for the faint of heart. My Uncle Chuck and Aunt Monica, the organizing forces behind this whole affair, give us a simultaneous window into a different world while traveling with the people we’ve known the longest. (Fate is cruel to even the best-laid plans: Monica’s broken hip just before our departure leaves her living vicariously, though pictures of Flat Monica heads on popsicle sticks crop up in every destination.) Most importantly, a cruise ship is a vehicle that will allow 42 people with disparate interests to all come together and share in the same thing. Of course we go our different ways: I see some people almost nonstop and only here and there. A cruise ship works for the people who aren’t physically able to do much other than be on the boat, and it works for people like me and my cousin Rob, for whom rest is an afterthought.

We did a version of this in 2004, beginning and ending in Barcelona, and I was fortunate to join a smaller group for a British Isles and Norwegian fjords excursion the following year. I hadn’t been to Europe since. Returning outside of peak awkward teenager phase brings considerable benefits—freedom to roam, legal booze, full choice in activities—though being turned loose on a giant boat is hardly an awful fate for a kid, especially one like me who could appreciate history and culture. Even so, my most enduring memories of that first trip include the discovery of the bidet, the phallic graffiti in Pompeii, a trash Royal Caribbean lasagna meal in Florence, and an exceptionally attractive Roman tour guide. I was fourteen; what can I say?

My attitude on cruising didn’t change appreciably in the intervening years. There are few agnostics on cruises, and telling someone about an impending cruise is likely to inspire envy or disdain. But, unless one has a David Foster Wallace level of misanthrope or gets warm tingly feelings at the phrase “organized group activity,” most people probably land somewhere in between. Cruise tourism is like tasting a beer flight; you may not get to immerse yourself in Rome, but you have enough of a flavor to know what you may want to come back for on some future trip. The first cruise showed me enough of Florence to know that any return visit would have to be for more than five hours, full stop, so it was easy to sub in Cinque Terre for the Livorno excursion this time around. As someone who now, improbably, has status with Royal Caribbean, I’ve learned how to bend these trips to my style.

Our vessel for the week is the Enchantment of the Seas, one of the oldest in the Royal Caribbean fleet, and its age shows around the edges: a few brown stains, the finest in 90s décor, a fraction of the absurd features on newer Royal ships. After an early Freudian slip, I take to calling it Endurance of the Seas. And while our fates are far from Ernest Shackleton’s, the whole two weeks do start to feel like a test of fortitude, not because of anything imposed from the outside but because I, aided and abetted by Rob, don’t want to waste one second of this trip: we are ready to go every morning, off on some lengthy excursion every day, seeking out the best food and drink every evening, and the last ones to retire every night. Cruising is, indeed, a feat of endurance.

Though the ship has over 2,500 passengers, it rarely feels crowded except when embarking or disembarking at a busy time It’s not hard to skip shows and gimmicks and choose “on your own” excursions, if you, like me, get relatively little out of comedy acts or following a tour guide with a Royal Caribbean popsicle stick down the streets of Taormina. We have sporadic pool parties in the solarium and play some shuffleboard; as always with this family, there is some euchre and Rummikub. But most nights we stage a takeover of the Viking Crown Lounge and cycle through conversations with one another, with people drifting off from there to bed or to their own activities, which for a few cousins and me means tasting the contraband beers we’ve smuggled aboard the ship. (No, Royal Caribbean, we’re not telling you our methods for getting around your systems to force us to buy your underwhelming drinks.)

The one organized group activity in which I am a regular and enthusiastic participant are the periodic trivia competitions held on board. Our family descends on three of them, and one of our teams wins every time. One afternoon, my team is in a three-way tie for first with two others, and we are instructed to send up one person for the tiebreaker; my team sends me up, and the other two counter with ten-year-olds. They are no slouches, and I don’t elbow them out of the way to answer first as I might have with some of my cousins, but I dispatch of them as politely as my blood-seeking trivia instincts will allow. I claim my Royal Caribbean highlighter prize and beat a hasty retreat to the bar.

The most grating part of the cruise is the extent to which the boat, despite already charging its passengers thousands of dollars, tries to take more and more of their money. The costs of the onboard internet and drinks package are laughable enough to make them easy to turn down, even as someone who remained pretty connected to the outside world and was hardly teetotaling on the trip. (That said, how can a boat with this many passengers serve only one craft beer, a lonely Terrapin fruity IPA that doesn’t even appear on the menu in half the bars where it’s served?) Plenty of people find ways to part with their money in the onboard shops and casinos. There is also the matter of communication, which is this constant dance among us between the glitchy Royal Caribbean app, other messaging apps, and texts for those of us whose cell phone plans work in Europe. T-Mobile, you are a quiet hero.

And then there is the often obsequious service. It is unclear if the fawning attention of the on-board attendants is coached by Royal Caribbean or a cultural characteristic of the Filipinos who dominate the crew or some combination thereof. It would not be hard to lapse into some sort of guilt about all these mostly brown people from scattered island nations waiting on a mostly white American passenger base, but I have of late found myself in revolt against the eternal calibration of morals in situations beyond my control, not to reject awareness of these divides but to find la vita serenissima in the situations we have been gifted. I am here, and giving the crew anything other than the respect they deserve would only make a hash of things. Let us save that anxiety for another day.

In a group of 42, the opportunities to connect with fellow passengers beyond the family are limited. The best gem comes the night after Cinque Terre, when seven of us join two other unsuspecting couples at the Chef’s Table, a five-course meal with wine pairings in a small dining room. As we stuff our faces we get to know Fran and Ed Dorn, a couple from Austin who were both on the faculty at the University of Texas, a Shakespearean actress and the dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. That party goes deep into the night, and later, a few of us make it to the dance floor in the Viking Crown Lounge on Deck 12. Our fellow clubbers include a bunch of Spaniards demanding reggaeton and a clump of 18-to-20-year-olds who mostly stick to the areas by the bar as they revel in their newfound status. When the girl in the white dress vaults over a half-wall and pulls the boy in the “Please Drink Responsibly” t-shirt off down the hall, I drift off into some plaintive space of lamented lost youth that I never quite shake for the rest of the trip.

My catalog of small annoyances aside, a cruise ship offers a new perspective on may great cities, and even a few windows into great beauty. While the ports themselves are rarely scenic, I am of that obscure species that enjoys rolling through an industrial harbor to see the materials moving thorough and gawking at the massive container ships. At times there are stellar passages, never more so than on the day we set out through the Strait of Messina and pass the smoking volcano of Stromboli. The day at sea between Ravenna and Sicily gives a sense of how many other things share these waters with us, from ferries to oil rigs to ships in the night. After the Rome day the family gathers on the pool deck for certainly-not-contraband wine and watches a series of beastly cruise ships make their way out of port of Civitavecchia before we bring up the rear of the procession. As the Enchantment pulls out, the wind picks up and a lightning show kicks off out over the mainland. A near full moon lights up the night, and the sea begins to pitch. The late-night pizza run after what are of course legally brought on board beers brings a wobbliness unrelated to any beverages we consume. That night, the rocking ship soothes me into my deepest sleep in Europe.

We know we are lucky to live this way. We toast to the lives we’ve lived, we toast to those who can’t be with us, for whatever reason; we toast to our hosts and to the achievements of some of our party and to our freedom to revel in this escape. Nineteen years ago, it was easy to take this sort of opportunity for granted. Now, with my grandparents and an aunt and an uncle and a couple of cousins out of the picture and some others who should be here prevented by life events, it’s not hard to recognize what a treasure this is. I will forever hold close that unique joy of strolling through a completely foreign city and seeing my relatives scattered here and there around the corners, chance encounters on the streets of Venice or Ravenna or Barcelona as we devour everything the world has to offer.

And eat it up we do. It is not uncommon for the discussion to roll until 2 AM on stateroom balconies or over pizza in the solarium. Perhaps we are debating Supreme Court cases and housing policy, or perhaps we are telling bits of our own complex stories; perhaps we are comparing tasting notes on our contraband beer, or simply noting the absurdities of cruise ship life. We are here in this moment, free to forget lost bags or loves or other regrets or anxieties, riding waves with ease.

First and foremost, a thank you to Monica and Chuck for treating us to this adventure, and to Jim, who patiently comes along for my Ravenna shopping excursion and carts things back. Steph and Kyle perfect the art of smuggling beer on board and are Rob and I’s most frequent partners in crime; David is also a regular at our beer tastings, with his wife Monica joining on a few of our shore excursions; Alex and Meghan seem to perfect the balance of deep dives in with us and retreats into their own time. Becca likewise stays close as a stabilizing force, aided in her effort by Amanda, while Molly, now 18, comes out to join the party regularly, and Katie dips in her toes here and there. Bibs and Haley liven up the full day in Venice and any dinner or evening where they join the festivities; now we just need to get your partners out for the fun. A thanks to John and Megan for hosting me in the Twin Cities the night before our departure, and for finding a good blend of good life and retreats. Paul and Laura, it was a pleasure to share some dinners and drinks and see the world through the eyes of your kids. The next generation makes its imprint: Luke is well on his way to being a trivia force, Emma was the queen of the Flat Monicas, and Jack and Liam kept me plenty entertained.

On the last night, Uncle John and I bask in repose with cigars on the windy pool deck, though we stub them out a bit early so he can be back with his co-conspirator at the center of the party, Aunt Reen. Aunt Marge probably won the award for enthusiasm for the whole cruise beforehand, and she and Uncle Steve live it up and foot the bill as we clean out her shipboard balance on the final night. Aunt Mary Beth is forever at the core of things, and along for an uphill trek to a wine tasting too. A thanks to Aunt Lucy and Uncle Bob for letting me be a sort of appendage to their family as I room with their son, and to their help with Aunt Trisha, who we are delighted to see make the trip. Props to Aunt Kristin (and Chris and friend Casey, joining us in Barcelona) for giving their girls a trip of a lifetime after graduation, and for finding ways for Uncle Joe to be a part of it. My Mom and Doug put up with Rob and I’s pace through Madrid, and my abandonment of them in Newark, with aplomb. We Maloneys get to know the McQuaid side a bit: Bill, Rose, Dan, Jan, Stephen, Amy. That adds to forty-two, but we also need to give a shout to Uncle Mike and Aunt Chris, who show us a marvelous time when they come along for the ride in Venice and Ravenna.

I had one goal as a tourist on this trip, and that goal was to see the School of Athens in person. The rest was all negotiable. And when I gaze up at Raphael’s masterpiece in that fleeting rush through the Vatican Museums, I can’t help but think of this sprawling family, always in debate or relating tales, gesticulating toward the clouds or at the things we know, a cacophony of voices where one or two may raise higher from time to time but where we need all of the voices to make it what it is. A reproduction of The School of Athens hangs above my mantelpiece because I live for this conversation, at times a central player and times a peripheral figure but always there for the dialogue until the last bit of sand has run out of the glass at the end of a very long night. That, Raphael shows us, is the essential core of the human condition, seeking and probing and finding community amid all our eccentricities, all our strong beliefs, all these jumbled ways of living that nonetheless stem from a common root. May the project never end.

And yes, I am keeping track of everyone who said they’d pay a visit to Duluth.

Europe 2023, Part III: Out on a Peninsula

This is the third in a four-part series. Part I | Part II

After seven days at sea, the cruise ship disgorges my 41 family members and me in Barcelona. While our inevitable dispersal brings a magical week to a close, I am glad to be free from Royal Caribbean’s controls on my movements. A little more space, wandering back at our own pace, ready to explore two more cities that have set themselves up well for me to like them.

Barcelona is both the capital of the Mediterranean basin and the standard-bearer for modern Europe. Though there is some graffiti around town trashing tourists, it is certifiably alive in ways that museum pieces like Venice or straining old metropolises like Rome are not. It has reinvented itself dramatically over the centuries: Roman roots, a Gothic core, a grand City Beautiful charge from the 1800s embellished by Gaudí’s ornamental flair, and a cosmopolitan boom in recent decades that has it pulsing with young life, beaches and clubs plus art and architecture, enough Catalan ingenuity to keep it from becoming a stale playground for the wealthy alone. The buildings are stunning and quirky but functional, the trains run on schedules to the second, and the food and drink have little competition. The three Duluthians in our party stay across from the old cathedral on two pedestrian Gothic Quarter streets, a maze that loses none of its luster even after a week of meandering cities with similar appeal.

Barcelona is not without its warts. There are pickpockets afoot, and I have a bizarre interaction with a man who tries to scam me with a Metro ticket before I rather unwittingly turn the tables on him by only having five Euros in cash in my possession. The Catalan separatist struggle, while invisible on this visit, drives at the heart of the European tension between lofty universal ideals and local tribal pride. Even FC Barcelona, after reaching new heights in fútbol achievement a decade ago, now flounders in debt and corruption after overreaching as it tried to keep up with the Gulf and Russian oligarch money that has besmirched the sport across Europe. Barcelona is also a very raunchy place, which is not in and of itself a defect, but any edginess does rather wear off when one passes a tenth little shop selling t-shirts with the same trashy slogans in English. Some bits of culture are, alas, universal.

Grumbling aside, Barcelona is still a special place, the city a whole continent wants to think it can be. It also has some reminders of home, as I have a quick rendezvous with friends from Duluth who are also passing through and then visit Black Lab, a brewery owned by a Duluthian who makes some of the best beer we find in our wanderings. My cousin Steph and her husband Kyle lead me on a sampling of vermut at a quiet neighborhood bar north of the city center. A rooftop tapas dinner is the last 10-plus person family gathering on the trip, and the desserts, including the beet ice cream with a cake and the very cheesy cheesecake and the ice cream dish featuring a tray with several vats of the stuff with cones and toppings, are the winners. The next morning we make a circuit of Parc Guell, Gaudí’s experiment in a meandering pleasure ground where visitors have no real agenda other than to stroll its pathways and lose themselves in a mix of naturalism and neo-Gothic design. Tapas lunch comes a few blocks from the Sagrada Familia, the magnum opus of the architect who gave this city its flair, slow but steady progress evident in the 19 years since my last visit.

The group slowly disperses from Barcelona: many straight back to the States, some to linger here or nearby on the Balearic coast, a few back to Italy or off on lengthy tours. For my mom, her partner Doug, my cousin Rob, and me, it’s a ride on the AVE high-speed train across the Spanish plain to Madrid. The train hums with power as we shoot over the meseta at 300 kilometers per hour, through small towns with hilltop castles and churches, olives and grapes, and a lot of windmills that look unlike anything Don Quixote would have encountered in his wanderings here half a millennium ago. At times the landscape is so barren as to evoke, say, eastern Montana, but before long we are edging into Atocha station in one of Europe’s great former seats of imperial power.

Madrid will never quite match Barcelona’s underlying cool, but it is a delightful place. Even though the kings based here dominated most of a hemisphere for centuries, it lacks the consistent grandiose scale of a London or a Paris or even a Rome. The Palacio Real sits starkly alone on the edge of the city center, surrounded by gardens; the Plaza Mayor is one of Europe’s more cloistered central squares, with no 19th century grand avenues punched through its colonnades. The Parque del Retiro is sprawling, but its green cover likewise encloses a certain intimacy, and while there are other triumphant arches and plazas scattered about, they seem to blend with the city, opening up logically even when they may seem haphazard from a bird’s eye view. Quality urban form is, of course, one of Spain’s great triumphs and exports to its former colonies.

Spanish culture is, if not insular, decidedly peninsular. This will happen to a nation that mired itself in inquisitions and counter-reformations as liberalizing advances made their way across the rest of Europe, but the view from 2023 is one of a place distinctive in its flavor, a collection of fairly stable local cultures that share a political system out of Madrid but often little else. Modern Spain is much less unified than France or even Italy, the difference obvious enough even in simply visiting its two largest cities. Madrid and Barcelona feel like different countries, and then there are the Basques and the Galicians; our last dinner comes at an Asturian restaurant, a nod to the lush pocket of the northern coast where apples and cider reign supreme. And that’s all in the northern half of the country alone, skipping over the massive Moorish influence in sunbaked Andalucía.

We spend a chunk of our first full day in Madrid touring the Museo del Prado. The Prado, while massive, does not have the worldliness of the Met or the Louvre or the British Museum: here, Spanish masters like El Greco and Velázquez and Goya still reign, alongside some associated Venetians and a few Dutch masters who drifted through the Habsburg orbit. In the Prado, Spanish artists and imperial collectors gathered works of nobility and religious iconography, but little else. To tour the Prado is to view countless Assumptions and Immaculate Conceptions and Passions, alongside myriad temptations of saints and looming sin. And yet there is still incredible range on display, from the cluttered fever dreams of Hieronymus Bosch to the stark austerity of Velázquez’s Jesus on the cross, from the subtle mastery of Las Meñinas to the empathy in every Goya portrait. Another gallery stages El Greco next to Picasso, showing ties across generations between artists who, at first blush, have nothing in common. The Prado’s collection, more than any royal language academy or stuffy French defense of certain standards, is the epitome of a cultural patrimony.

Otherwise, most of our Madrid time is devoted to wandering, with stops in the Basilica de San Francisco, the cathedral, and in the Corte Inglés department store, where I buy a new suitcase. We find the statue of Cervantes in the Plaza de España and educate ourselves on the various Carloses, Felipes, and Alfonsos seated on horseback around the city. (I muse as to whether the Felipes could have prevented the decline of the Spanish Empire if they spent less time posing on horseback.) The streets of Madrid feel safer and better tended than Rome or Barcelona, though there is still an element of the absurd, with busking accordionists playing the same eight tunes or people dressed in giant panda or Mario costumes at nearly every attraction. (How they live in these things in 90-degree Spanish summer heat is beyond me.)

One could paint staid, imperial Madrid as a tired counterpoint to sexy Barcelona and its beachfront brethren, but when the sun goes down, Madrid shows out. The routine across three straight nights here is the same: after siesta, tapas and wine, with dinner extending through to midnight. Traveling with Rob means we have nonstop great food, and instead of sitting for dinner for hours as in Italy, here one can drift about for tapas, served almost immediately and savored slowly, a movable feast whose style I would gladly import across the pond. We continue our bold quest to find decent Mediterranean basin beer and have better luck here than anywhere else, including from a brewery named Oso whose bear-head-on-hops logo eerily resembles one in Duluth. My European culinary apogee comes at Juana la Loca, a tapas restaurant that was high on Rob’s list and turns out to be just one block from our Airbnb off the Plaza de Carros. The truffles, crab, and foie gras carry me away to a blissful place, and we walk off the meal with a stroll to a nightcap at a mezcal bar with the prettiest menu I’ve ever seen, with a detour for some people-watching at blocks-long line outside the one nightclub that apparently attracts every single Madrileño youth.

I am pleased to find my Spanish still perfectly functional once I kick off the rust, though plenty of Spaniards still open conversations with us in English, which I suppose is our blessing and curse as native speakers of tourism’s universal tongue. Still, there are moments of pride: at one dinner, Rob and I proudly order in Spanish before realizing there is an English menu if one scrolls further down; we sit between a loud British couple who demand the biggest beer available and a group of Indians who scandalize the waiter by asking for red pepper flakes. With competition like this, we are model tourists, blending smoothly into a country where I’ve scarcely spent a week.

Even model tourists must go home, however, and after three nights in Madrid, drained by rotating through my modestly sized Italian wardrobe and still anxious about my bag, I am ready for a return journey. If things go according to plan, I will be back on the Iberian Peninsula before long, ready to sample more of its diversity, more of its tapas, and more of its inviting streets before the siesta calls. I have no Spanish blood, but as the child of a Spanish professor and someone who studied in Madrid some 40 years ago, and this peninsula feels like a natural extension of my life.

Part Four is here.

Europe 2023, Part II: The Sea in the Middle of the Earth

This is part two in a four-part series. Part One is here.

Venice, Rome, Barcelona: these famed cities dominate this summer’s Mediterranean cruise. But many of the best days come in somewhat less famous towns, those cozy retreats that give these shores their glamour. Given the tight timelines afforded by any cruise tour, more than a few members of my large party conclude it is best to enjoy some quick samplings of beauty rather than deep immersions in the most renowned attractions, the vibes over the deep dives. We can, hopefully, return and immerse ourselves in the places that demand it when we don’t have a ship to catch. But for now, this is how we travel, and we are here to drink in the great beauty.

Venice has banned large cruise ships from its harbor, so our cruise starts from the port city of Ravenna two hours to the south. Ravenna has, quietly, slithered its way into world history: it was the Roman capital for a hot second after the sack of Rome, and it serves as the final resting place of Dante Alighieri. Most of all, though, it is known for its mosaics, and four of us make a circuit through the city on our first afternoon there, freed to move at our own pace through sparsely populated streets. We gaze at the art, stop by a café near Dante’s tomb, and pause beneath the cypresses at San Vitale, the cicadas droning in the midsummer heat. We gather ourselves at the Fargo Café, which serves non-Italian craft beer for reasons we will soon come to understand, and then cross paths with an aunt and uncle who aren’t cruising but are along for these first few stops. We endure an unfortunate tasting of Italian beer and then atone for this assault on our palettes with a dinner on a courtyard recommended by a local. The meal proves to be a four-hour affair, so it’s a good thing the cruise ship isn’t going anywhere tonight.

These long nights of food and drink are a staple of this venture, and one my extended family is delighted to inhabit. Moreover, for an American, Europe in 2023 is straight-up cheap. We repeatedly marvel at the cost it takes to feed a large group, all in a transparent price structure free from any pressure to tip. Somewhere in here there is a longer discourse on the relative merits of the high-stakes, higher-growth American economy versus its European counterparts, which are noticeably more sclerotic but nonetheless pay servers living wages and give people the leisure to enjoy nights like this. For a tourist drifting through, though, it’s not hard to eat up this lifestyle.

When I pull open the curtains on my sixth day in Europe, it’s clear I’m in a different land. The ship has nudged directly into the harbor of Messina, the city baked in a brown-gold tinge that blurs both its historic monuments and its newer apartment blocks. Messina clearly lacks Venetian wealth or even Ravenna’s calm, stately history. It does, however, command the strait between Calabria and Sicily, the only stop on this cruise where one can stroll two blocks off the boat and be in the middle of the city instead of some large working port. It is a gateway city, both to the Italian mainland across the whirlpool-filled strait and down the Sicilian coast.

The tour I’ve chosen for this day, Taormina by Land and Sea, is the best Royal Caribbean-organized shore excursion I take on this trip. A bus ride down the coast takes us just past Taormina to the quieter town of Giardini Naxos, the first Greek settlement in Sicily. The tour bus disgorges us into small boats with room for about ten passengers. Our guide, Pepe, takes us from Naxos along the coast, past beaches and grottos and exclusive hotels and villas clinging to rocky promontories over serene waters. He points out the spot where Naxos ends and Taormina begins (“to the left, beer five Euro. To the right, ten Euro”), explains the famous figures we may meet on these beaches (“football stars, movie stars, Pepe”) and acknowledges the most important house on the coast (his birthplace, of course). He pulls out a cooler of Messina beers, and when we look around, we realize our boat is the only one enjoying this perk. After cruising around a point we pause and jump into the cove for a swim, dodging jellyfish in the refreshing water before cannoli and prosecco back on Pepe’s craft. The man knows how to live.

From there the bus takes us up into Taormina, an ancient town fused to a ridge above the sea. This is paradise found: the touring crowds have descended en masse on its one cobblestone thoroughfare, and we hear thirty-six or thirty-seven times about how the city recently hosted a season of The White Lotus. To add to the fun, there is a film fest here this weekend. But the side streets are dead quiet, little stairways up to churches and tucked-away houses and a ruined Greek theater, with views down to the Ionian around every corner; lunch comes at a swordfish panini stand at a far end of the city. The Greeks knew what they were doing when they chose this bit of coast, a distant outpost that proved a Vietnam or Afghanistan for Athenian imperial ambitions.

Sicily’s blend of natural and human beauty sets a very high bar, but if anywhere can clear it, a few towns on the northwest coast of Italy may be the place. The bus ride from Livorno north to La Spezzia is an immersion in Tuscan and Ligurian countryside. The monuments in the Piazza dei Miracoli in Pisa rise up out of the morning haze in the distance, and the mountainous mines of Carrara marble loom below ghostly clouds. Hilltop fortress towns from the Middle Ages stand watch over the autostrade, and in the incredibly compact La Spezzia, the tour bus splits into two mini-buses that can handle the winding roads beyond. We are off to Cinque Terre.

Cinque Terre is a collision of land and water, a Big Sur with 1,500 years of history and an added lushness, lemon trees and flowering shrubs and grapes clinging to terraces at the steepest pitch I’ve ever seen. The wine comes from those very terraces, the pesto from Ligurian basil and pine nuts, the world fresh and alive. In each town, a narrow main road plunges from the highway down to the sea, with inviting side stairs and alleys opening on all sides, a Venice on a slope instead of a lagoon.

A few hours on a small bus can only scratch the surface of a place that demands day, and we see only three of the five lands. Reggiomagiore has the steepest slope down to a small harbor, Manarola has a contender for the world’s best swimming hole and paths that wrap around the cliffs, and Monterosso ends in a beach. I leave Cinque Terre calling it the most Instagrammable place on earth, and it is indeed hard to choose the right selection of shots from these few days to blast out around the world. Venice’s urban form may be unmatched and there are a few places on earth where the natural beauty includes some wonders beyond those of the Italian coastline, but for a combination of the two, I can think of no more impressive place I’ve seen.

Like Venice, Cinque Terre runs the risk of becoming a place no one lives. Our guides tell us that few young people stay here now, loath to cultivate these precarious slopes when more lucrative work abounds. We learn we are fortunate to visit on a day where just one cruise ship passes through, so the crowds are light. But even so, the winding road above the five Ligurian jewels has a fraction of the traffic of an American scenic drive. There is a train down along the water, often in tunnels through sheer cliffs, and most alluringly, there is a trail up and down the terraces that leads from one end to the other. Perhaps more than anywhere else on this trip, the siren song of Cinque Terre summons me back.

Italy is a conundrum of a country. It is a bastion of high fashion, and its people, in my eyes, are among the most consistently beautiful on offer. It is the inheritor and steward of some of the world’s greatest history. But now it shows its age around the edges, worn and creaking, an aging beauty who’s had a few too many plastic surgeries and is still trying to live like it’s 25 instead of 75. It is now a potential European canary in the coal mine as the continent tries to find its way, its great projects stalled out and a revanchist Russia at the doorstep, left to cope with a series of crises: a fumbling economy, a migrant surge, unstable governments lurching toward extremes, near-catastrophic birth rates. But I suspect some of its intangible qualities may help keep it afloat: what a beauty it is, even compared to France, where we spend one brief day on this cruise.

In Toulon, a port and naval base just southeast of Marseille, ten members of our party organize our own tour, which operates under the working title “Something Involving Karl and Wine.” After some momentary fumbling we acquire a motorcade of three cabs for a ride up through the dry Provencal coastal range to Domaine Fonts des Peres, a winery in the Bandol region. Here, the Mourvèdre grapes produce rosés at the bottom of the hill and the designated Bandol reds at the top. A vintner leads us through a tour and a tasting (including some of the best gin I’ve ever had, to go with the wine) before we are presented with picnic backpacks of quiches and focaccia and cheesecakes, and we select a few of the wines we like and stroll off for a leisurely picnic in the middle of the vineyard.

It seems fitting to complete our last shore excursion away from the clutches of the cruise ship, basking in Provencal sun, drinking in the wine and beauty with nine fellow travelers who are equally enamored with the whole enterprise. We’ve had our ups and downs, from travel annoyances to the grand sweep of this family history. But here, on the sea at the center of the world, gazing down at a vineyard and taking a sip of rosé, we have found that very heart of the good life. I suspect we shall return.

Part 3 is here.