Tag Archives: travel

Spain 2025, Part IV: Against Dereliction

This is the fourth and final piece in a series that began here.

Sated on San Sebastián and ready to head the province of La Rioja, Andrew and I pick up a rental Cupra, which is Spain’s effort at a sporty car. We roll down a winding Basque tollway and up into the Cantabrian Mountains, where we seek out the Salto del Nervión. In wet times this is the highest waterfall in Spain, but today, it is just a pretty cliff. We chat with two older ladies who are taking a new car for a spin and get some sense of how it should look. The forests are lush, the karst formations jarring, and a few toros wander on to the road. We are back in rural Spain.

The number of elderly people who get out for this several-mile hike is a statement on Spanish superiority. The life expectancy in this country is 84, between second and sixth in the world depending on the source and inclusion of micro-states, even though booze consumption per capita is not low and smoking remains more ubiquitous than it is across the pond. The culprits would appear to include a lot of walking, a lot of olive oil, and a densely knit lifestyle that keeps people enmeshed in social networks long into old age. On the streets of Briones, the small town where we spend the next two nights, the average age appears to be about 70. But everyone is still shuffling about in their little friend groups, gathering on squares, no one warehoused away or struggling much beyond the inevitable physical toll. Almost no one is overweight, and the drinking seems like a steady social activity instead of a lonely or perpetual rush to blackout. There is an art to living well to a ripe old age here, and it comes not through self-denial but through keeping everything in its place.

Speaking of old, the Monasterio de San Millán qualifies: the twin monasteries of Suso and Yuso date to the sixth century, and we stop by Yuso, which is open for tours. The first recorded writing of Spanish (and of Basque) took place here, an attempt by a monk to bridge the Latin of the church and the vulgar Latin of a Visigoth-ruled Iberia around the year 1000. It is also home to one of the few complete sets of giant books of Gregorian chants for each day of the year, all stashed in a specially built chamber to control their humidity. Yuso’s 11 remaining Augustinians honor San Millán, a hero from that area who, like St. James along the nearby Camino de Santiago, got drafted into slaying some Moors on behalf of the Reconquista. A few pilgrims have made the side trip up here, including a Spaniard who started in Barcelona and a couple from Iowa City for whom we translate the tour. I feel the pull to don a pack and start walking.

As it is, however, driving around Rioja is a beautiful way to spend a few days. Roads swing their way around ridges and vineyards, a view off to the next hilltop town or castle always somewhere in sight. Clouds hang over the mountains to the north, much closer in person than they appear on a map, and the valley of the Ebro River drinks in the sunlight that filters through them. Briones, where we stay at a restored old stone manor named Santa Maria Briones, is a quiet hilltop town that feels frozen in a different era. Once upon a time it was an outpost in competition with the even larger castle across the Ebro in San Vicente de la Sonsierra, a contested zone between the kingdoms of Castile and Navarre. Now, it feels about as far from war as a place can be, basking in wine country sun as the bell on the great old church tolls out the quarter hours and its residents shuffle into their later days.

We are of course in Rioja to drink wine. We schedule three tastings, and the two on day one are contrasts in the scale available here. First we visit Miguel Merino, a small producer that we can walk to in Briones, where it’s just us and Lorena, one of the five people employed by this operation founded by an exporter and carried on by his son, relying on small batches and doing some experimentation as they get into many Michelin-starred restaurants. Later, we tour the Marqués de Riscal, an industrial-scale pillar of Rioja complete with a Frank Gehry hotel reminiscent of the Guggenheim, with a dash of wine purple added to the color palette here. The place is massive, a winemaking machine in full force, though the Marquis himself still sits in a corner with some friends sampling the product. Up in Haro, one of the larger towns in the region, we stroll past some of the other big Rioja names in its neighborhood of bodegas and do lunch on a convenient patio at Muga.

Our two nights here, meanwhile, are a marked contrast. On the first we eat at Allegar, the restaurant at Santa Maria Briones. Seventeen small plates come out through the course of the tasting menu, each with a major element from Rioja itself, along with wines to match. The three-hour tour is a culinary peak of a trip of nonstop great food. The next night, Andrew, a diehard fan of Tottenham Hotspur, must find a spot where we can watch Spurs’ Europa League final against Manchester United in Bilbao. We wind up in an Haro sports bar surrounded by large, booze-fueled Spanish men. They approve of our allegiances (“fook Mahnchesta”) and provide some high-fives when Spurs, one spot above relegation from the Premier League, improbably hold off United in a fairly disgusting soccer game. The aesthetics do not matter to Andrew, who is giddy, and I am amused as we watch Spanish sports talk into the night.

We have one final wine tasting on our way south back toward Madrid. When we pull up in the town of Sojuela, I’m worried I’ve made a mistake: the address for the Ojuel winery takes us to an unmarked door on a nondescript house in a town much further off the beaten path than Briones; the website is down and the phone number we have doesn’t work. But an ancient lady calls down to us from the upper floor and says someone is on her way, and before long Mila, the daughter-in-law of our greeter and the mother of the winemaker, is taking us on what is, by several orders of magnitude, the most memorable wine tasting tour I’ve ever had.

Mila takes us in her car up to a vineyard. This is an all-natural, all-organic operation, and all Ojuel bottles feature a different butterfly in honor of these pollinators. The contrast with the neighboring field is striking, these gnarled smaller vines with weeds tangled around their bases separated by a wall of vegetation from the monoculture beyond. (Grapes from the first few rows are sold to other winemakers who don’t care as much about purity, lest any pesticides have drifted in.) This plot’s history is deep, as a stone set here traces its owners back for generations and lists the varietals grown here, though two of the nine are not listed because they have been effectively lost to time. We learn of how Mila’s son Miguel did some oral history work, pulling out old wives’ tales of the supurao wine made for holidays and special celebrations in the youths of some village elders, and reproducing their methods by hanging grapes to dry to produce that rare beast, a delicious sweet wine.

For the tasting, Mila throws a few bottles in a tin pail and takes us on a walk to a couple tiny old bodegas dug into the hill, a gathering place where locals would create their own stocks back before mass commercialization, where people would gather for a few drinks in the climate-controlled holes slowly dug out with pickaxes. Those not associated with Ojuel are now rotting away, but these have been lovingly restored and put to use aging barrels. Ojuel rebels against the Rioja control board, experimenting with new things; at one point, Mila pulls out a turkey baster and dips it into a barrel so she can draw out some wine and offer it to us. This is deep winemaking, pulling on old tradition in ways that can now feel radical, experimentation and rejuvenation and daring to let things be different. Long live the Ojuels of the wine world, in firm revolt against the unthinking present and the decay of rural Spain.

After Ojuel, it is time to return to Madrid. Our Spanish road trip is smooth sailing, packing a lot into a few hours. Just south of Sojuela the N-111 winds along red cliffs dotted with green reminiscent of the American Southwest; soon, it climbs up a long cut through the Sierra de Cebollera, where spring is still in its earliest stages. We descend to the plain, try to figure out how the city of Soria functions when every single road is under construction, and then cruise easily across Castilla y León and Castilla-La Mancha, that rolling open green country that could have been dropped in from the Great Plains. Spanish highway etiquette is immaculate, everyone weaving in and out of appropriate lanes based on their speeds. Over four days of driving Google Maps has the occasional misfire where it sends us down some very sleepy, bumpy back lane and the narrowing of streets through town centers is at times harrowing, but all in all I enjoy my time behind the wheel in Spain.

Andrew and I get to do a circuit of central Madrid together and share one final meal before my very early flight out the next morning. Unfortunately this is where I hit the wall, so I do not have my reflections in good order that evening, but it has been a joy to take this trip with Andrew. We survived a two-week road trip together as we both shifted between phases of life in 2016, and we are able to jump back in and seamlessly do it again now that we have attained some modicum of professional stability. Of course sharing tight European lodging with even a good friend for ten days will reveal some neuroses and see us both cycle through moments when exhaustion or annoyance catches up with us, but we share a commitment to the pace, a hunger to eat and drink it all up in short order, and that can power us both through anything that might drag us down.

We are a funny pair here, more capable in Spanish than the vast majority of tourists, one who could pass for a German and speaks like a Mexican alongside a half-Filipino who speaks like an Argentine, and I am amused by how often we confuse people. At Ojuel, Mila tells us Americans are the best tourists they get, respectful and curious about experimentation and eager to spread the word to their friends. It is not hard to juxtapose us against the loud, boozy British who make no effort to speak Spanish and the famously insular French. The Spanish resignation to bad tourists is at its worst in San Sebastián, where some waitstaff continue to talk to us in awful English even when we demonstrate some Spanish capability, but when we show that clichéd American enthusiasm for taking stabs at new things in Rioja, the people we meet are delighted. Of course the American tourists who get to second-tier European destinations clutching Rick Steves guidebooks and lists of Michelin-recognized restaurants are unlikely to be of the same demographic as those who go to Gulf Shores for spring break; this filtering is not present among the British, for whom Spain can be a quick weekend jaunt. But I do think there is something uniquely fetching in an American hunger to absorb the European deep histories and cultures that our imperial reality so often buries.

I am on that nonstop search on this trip even though I don’t think I am ever quite at one hundred percent. I develop a gross nagging cough early on, while my back does not seem to like the backpack I wear; bad sleep, a sporadic but lifelong scourge of mine, returns at times. For a second straight trip I make a dumb mistake with my writing tablet, this time losing its stylus (replacement cost: a disgusting $150) on the first plane flight. Because of that I never hit the reflective rhythm I aspire to, don’t have my thoughts organized the way I should when Andrew the lawyer probes me about our trip or our world beyond us. I worry I am too much a chameleon, am not reflecting as thoroughly as I should on recent developments in work and in the personal sphere, am only barely scratching a few deep yearnings I find welling up within.

But that is alright. These annoyances show I know I have work to do, and I will do it at whatever pace I can. For now, I can smile easily as I think of two weeks well-lived, of a drift down Spanish streets, of good art and good food, a drive up the coast and a sip of special wine. A hearty gracias (and an eskerrik asko) to this country I have come to love, though after three straight years it is probably time to try somewhere new next. We have so much to explore.

Spain 2025, Part II: Basque-ing in Finery

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

Northeast of Burgos the Spanish countryside grows more picturesque. My train cuts through passes in granite crags with old cities clinging to hillsides, all robed in fog on this wet day. The train slows for twists through thick trees and night swallows the scene quickly. A weird new language I cannot understand at all joins Spanish and English in the train’s announcements. I am approaching my destination: Basque Country, the Euskal Herria, the autonomous community on Spain’s northern coast and along the border with France, at the elbow of the Bay of Biscay. I’ve previously knocked out two of Spain’s regions with their own languages and complicated histories with Madrid (Galicia and Catalonia), but the Basques are in a league of their own, their mother tongue bearing no relation to later-arriving Romance languages and their separatism punctuated by violent militancy well into this century. In the far north they have carved out a state with immense national pride, Spanish flags almost universally replaced by the red, white, and green of the Basques. It is here that my friend Andrew and I have chosen to spend some time exploring in May.

Northern Spain is not the stereotype of dusty windmill-strewn plains nor of Moorish architecture nor an excess of loud British tourists chasing some cheap sun, though they are still around. It is a lush, wet land, its regions relatively small in area, cut off from much of the rest of Spain by a wall of mountains. The Moorish advances trickled out here, and the Reconquista began in places like Asturias and Cantabria and Northern Castilla y León. By Spanish standards the north is relatively affluent, the birthplace of several national banking giants and home to a respectable industrial base and such darlings of local control as the Mondragón Cooperative. And while there is good food everywhere in Spain, Basque Country is its peak.

The Basque cultural capital is Bilbao, a metro of one million and in many respects an ideal type European city: tight winding historic old town, newer grand promenades, a famous museum, a fancy old train station, a gaudy new soccer stadium, apartment blocks in rings around the cool stuff, a few discordant office towers, and a river winding through the middle. Its twist is the national pride for a nation that spent long parts of history hidden away in these rugged hills along the sea, speaking their obscure tongue punctuated Xs and Ks and Zs and Ts. (Andrew and I are curious to see the point values in Basque Scrabble.) While Spanish remains the dominant tongue, Basque is present, from a dignified group of elderly diners at the nicest restaurant we visit to a flock of teenagers slurping Aperol spritzes on the patio where I grab a late-night snack upon my arrival. The rebellion against the crown continues, subtle but persistent.

Our hotel sits on the Albiako Lorategiak, a placid square whose towering sycamores rise high above our fourth-floor balcony. Andrew misses a connection from Madrid to Bilbao (he spends his delay at the Prado, the poor soul), so I go back to my wandering routine on the grey, drippy sort of day that is common here in the Euskal Herria. I stroll the Gran Vía and meander the tight streets of the Casco Viejo, grab a pintxos (Basque tapas) lunch, ascend to a basilica on a hill. The city is in the preparation stages for a British onslaught, as Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur will meet here in a week for the Europa League final; soccer balls dot the city, and a new wrap is going up on the sparkling San Mamés stadium. On the way down from the basilica I lose myself briefly in apartment block Spain, that dense, urban reality that is more representative of contemporary Spanish life than a tapas crawl on a historic street. In the US this sort of neighborhood would prompt some nervous looks from outsiders, but here it just feels like a normal Thursday afternoon. Kids pour out of a school, people reel in the laundry from beneath their umbrella-covered hanging spots out the window. The shops are a bit grittier but the fundamentals of Spanish urban life are unchanged.

When Andrew arrives, the pintxos tour begins in earnest. We nail our first two stops, octopus at Gure Toki and mussels with good wine at Taska Beltz. There is quality craft beer at La Ley Seca, a mediocre Mahou to end the night on a pedestrian street a block from the hotel. It continues the next day with breakfast at the Café Iruña with its stunning Moorish interior, lunch at the vast Erriberako market, more good beer at Bihotz, and a dinner at Casa Rufo that slowly builds: white asparagus from Navarra, a well-salted cod, a gaudy steak, and a divine Manchego cheesecake for dessert.

Bilbao’s great attraction is the Guggenheim Museum, the striking Frank Gehry-designed eruption of molten titanium lava flows that takes on to the shifting moods of Basque Country weather. The tour starts on the outside along the riverfront promenade, with Anish Kapoor’s giant pile of reflective balls and a giant spider (its effect somewhat reduced by the crews buffing it on the day we visit) and a towering flowery puppy by Jeff Koons. The titanium-clad exterior somehow turns to an airy glass interior, cavernous and at times vertiginous on its catwalks, able to hold ten thousand French schoolchildren with ease. Its three immersive exhibits are its best, and it wins me immediately with Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time, a series of giant pieces of iron that invite exploration as if they were a series of southwestern slot canyons. Next is Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room, a trippy house of mirrors and flashing lights meant to invoke the artist’s hallucinations. Finally there is Refik Anadol’s in situ, a room covered in a nonstop flow of AI-generated images of Frank Gehry architecture and its influences that occasionally hallucinates and goes wrong. Beyond that there is a collection of modern art’s greatest hits: a Warhol, another Koons, some de Koonigs, none of which are my cup of tea but are welcome enough as a summation of a movement. (The one I do enjoy: Cy Twombly’s nine-part descent of Emperor Commodus into insanity.) An exhibit on the Brazilian painter Tarsila do Amaral also opens new worlds, a blend of modernism and Cubism and Brazilian color. The Guggenheim is a triumph of urban renewal, a peak many cities chase but achieved successfully by Basque leadership that saw the creation of monuments like this, not just another European micro-state, as the path forward.

We rent a car for a day to drive the coast from Bilbao to San Sebastián, guided by a Siri whose command of Basque leaves something to be desired. The trip is just over an hour by freeway but over three and a half by our route, and while Siri takes us on a few rides, our road is well worth the time it takes. Our first stop is Gaztelugatxe, a medieval monastery and the site of Dragonstone in Game of Thrones, sitting alone atop a rocky isle just off a sloping cliff, its caves withholding any sign of fiery priestesses. We pass through little surfing towns like Bakio and Bermeo and Mundaka, and the coastline evokes Big Sur, complete with the road washouts requiring detours; this, I think, is what the California coast could have felt like several decades back, before history overtook California. It is stunning country, beautiful but not overpopulated, issuing a summons to stop and explore each small town, if one can possibly find any parking. Perhaps it is better that they do not build more.

A quick turn inland takes us to Guernica, the spiritual center of the Basque Country, home to a meeting hall for their centuries-old republic (admired by John Adams as he studied forms of government for the United States) and the oak tree beneath which the province of Vizcaya still gathers to elect its ceremonial leader. This history is part of why Francisco Franco and his Nazi allies selected it in 1937 as a test run for the first carpet bombing of a town, though the oak tree (and the actual military targets, like an arms factory and a bridge) withstood the bombing while the city center went up in flames. Today, Guernica is a bustling, pleasant town with regular reminders of a dark past, and the Peace Museum gives eyewitness accounts of the devastation, ponders questions of what exactly peace means. As anyone with a memory of Guernica’s carnage passes out of time, I wonder how well a world increasingly interested in reviving great historical struggles will remember its lessons. We are left with some museums and one raw, great Picasso to help tell the tale of what that era’s escalations wrought.

After Guernica it is back to the coast, back to weaving roads through maritime pine and eucalyptus, my steering wheel hands and break pedal foot growing sore. Ondarroa makes me gawk. We stop off at a beach sliced up by Flysch, sharp cuts of sheer sedimentary rock near where tectonic plates met at some point in time. The beach here in Zumaia is populated entirely by locals, blissed out on the Basque coast. Next we curve over to Getaria, a fishing town on a narrow finger of a peninsula, though we have mistimed its fine food scene. Driving up a coast never grows old, I say to Andrew, and as we turn toward San Sebastián I understand why the Basques cherish their homeland so much.

Part 3 is here.

Virgins Revisited

Give me a beach, a little pocket of beach, alive with a congenial crowd but far from where the cruise ship tours dump their loads. Give it a white sand apron, a few reefs off the shore, some swells further out to tempt the surfers. Give it a little open-air bar or two, a place to grab a beer as the smell of barbecued meat wafts down to the water. A couple trees to hang a hammock, a gentle breeze to sway it; let me melt into the beach, suspended in paradise.

I write these lines in a hammock on Hull Bay on the north shore of St. Thomas, in the United States Virgin Islands. The world intervenes to befoul an attempted cousins week here, but cousin Rob and I join Uncle Chuck and Aunt Monica for a few days at L’Esperance. I have been to St. Thomas seven times now, and my last time here, an extended stay, gave me some lay of the land. I am now a capable left side of the road driver, comfortable running the one stoplight all the locals ignore and no longer in a state of terror shooting up Flag Hill on a one-lane, two-way road with no guardrail between the rental car and a dramatic plunge. I know the ins and outs of some of the beaches, and I almost know where to find the dishes in the L’Esperance kitchen. These islands have become my most regular destination outside of my usual Upper Midwest haunts.

The Virgin Islands are predictable in their unpredictability. This time, here with the villa’s owners, I get a sense of just how much work it takes to keep up L’Esperance in a place where island languor seems so very real. Refrigeration is a struggle, repairmen do not show; the invasive plants slither inward. The power cuts, the solar panels and battery walls pressed into service. A venture to the grocery store takes on an air of intrigue: just what will be in stock today? But every glance at the view is a reminder of why we do it.

Paradise comes with a price, as all fine things must. A spin through the center of the island drives home how much the territory remains a colonial outpost, an outside world dropped on to hilltops and beaches and the rest put to its service. The locals are agreeable but operate on their own timetables, by their own values. The continentals who have settled here bear a sun-weathered satisfaction, resigned to their fates as things move slowly and break and occasionally get wiped off the map by a hurricane, but content with where they are. The siren song of tropical bliss echoes across the hillsides, audible often enough to sustain an eternal dream. That lotus-eating life would leave me restless on a longer stay, but over a week I find just the right level of contentment here.

Neighboring St. John remains a garden of beauty, a reason I would return here even if I did not have L’Esperance in my life. On our first full day on the islands together, Rob and I ferry over and do part of the hike that most mesmerized me four years ago: Leinster Bay, Windy Hill, and up over the sharp ridge on the Johnny Horn Trail down to stellar barbecue and a beer at Johnny Lime in Coral Bay. The sweat pours out on the return march over the ridge, and we take the plunge at Maho Bay to rinse it all away. We are waylaid by goat herds in both directions on our hike, including a dozen lounging at the start of the climb up from Leinster Bay and a leisurely family chewing its way along the lower reaches of the Johnny Horn on the return journey. New meaning for running on island time.

On a second visit to St. John we fill a 14-passenger van with people who think getting scratched up by catch-and-keep while sweating in the tropical sun is fun. Our crew has signed up to clear out the ever-advancing tropical brush on the Bourdeaux Mountain Trail, a path running from the island’s high point to the sea down the hotter, drier south side of the island. Frank, a sharp kid from Colorado and a volunteer coordinator with the Friends of the Virgin Islands National Park, appreciates the weirdness necessary to aspire to such action, and we hack away to free future hikers from encroaching thorns. Rob and I chat up some younger women who have traveled here together, spending a week in a camp at Cinnamon Bay to follow Frank’s commands. The talk fixates on adventures past and future and Rob notes our shared masochism, this pursuit of sweat and exertion to uncover new paths under the tropical sun.

Trail work is my only labor during my time in the islands, and I otherwise succumb to island routines. I burn my skin, apply the aloe, rinse in the pool. The happy hour bell dings and we assemble in the great room for cocktails or wine as the sun plunges into the horizon beyond the Charlotte Amalie harbor. We alternate eating in and venturing out to some restaurants that deliver the goods: Mims, Oceana, Cuvee, with special credit to those who offer elevated cuisine and good wine in a place at the end of the supply chain. Conversation winds down and we turn to books or word games or a few rounds of Rummikub. Stay up late, sleep in a spell, use the exercise room or swim some laps to avoid total sloth. I get some time to think, to write out some stray lines, to ponder how best to meld passions and realities.

On my final full day I head to Hull Bay a second time. Through some great failing I have left my writing tablet back in Minnesota and so I am consigned to pen and paper, allow my thoughts to drift in slowly like the bay’s gently lapping waves. I return to past writings and mantras, write them anew, wonder if I can distill them into some sort of credo or code for moving through the world. I feel like I am circling a destination on a windy island road, sometimes driving on the wrong side but nevertheless getting closer, ever closer.

Over lunch at the bar, unenthused by the prospect of talk with my neighbors who have taken one-way tickets to Margaritaville, I find myself on the Wikipedia page for Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog and fox analogy. I am of course a full-on fox, fascinated by many things and a skeptic of simple theories, content to hold a whole heap of complex thoughts within me and marvel at all of it, even the pickled retirees of Hull Bay. I can, through words, continue to pull things together. In due time. For now I finish my beer, pull my cap into place, tug off my shirt, appreciate the progress my gym time has coaxed out, and reassume my pose as a boy on a beach.

Olympian Distances

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.

-Joan Didion, Commencement Address at the University of California Riverside, 1975

2024 approaches its close and I am aloft again, flitting this time to San Diego. I stay at the Diamond Head Inn at the head of Diamond Street in Pacific Beach, close enough for a sliver of an ocean view and to be lulled by the soothing crashes of giant waves through the night. I am not sure I prefer San Diego to some other haunts on the California coast that are becoming repeat destinations, but it is certainly the right place for this escape to cap a year of great escapes.

I run north through La Jolla, where the streets teem with the economy necessary to keep up the opulence of this headland: gardeners, renovation crews, cleaners, pest control. I run south along the length of Mission Beach, past miles of volleyball and beach bums and rows of vacation retreats, winding through the steady march of a three-day breast cancer walk whose path crosses mine on each of my days here. I grab a car for a day and venture down to the commanding views of Point Loma and up to spend a few hours with a college friend and his ever-expanding brood in Oceanside. But mostly I drift between the hotel and the beach and the clump of establishments along the Pacific Beach streets named for precious stones. Even with the Third Fleet looming in the harbor and Camp Pendleton to the north, San Diego feels removed from any great national dramas, a place where ambitions settle into yoga studios and waves and IPAs, a paradise now a bit overcrowded and at times a bit vapid but still holding to its beach life core.

A few people ask me if a beach escape was an election reaction, but it isn’t. Over the past few years I have found myself drifting out of political obsession and toward Joan Didion’s way of being in the world, not to forsake that realm but instead by finally internalizing the oft-neglected aspirations of my earlier self. My happiness is not ideological. I try not to let politics get me down, and through both an intentional effort and probably the simple passage out of youthful fervors and into my petite-bourgeois 30-something world, I am more or less there now. State and national affairs still matter to my moral universe, still matter to my job, but the privilege of not living in a state of anxiety over the world is, indeed, a privilege in the old-fashioned sense of the term, something one is lucky to have. To live in a place where anxiety does not drag one down, and where righteous anger does not consume one, is not in and of itself a defect.

This privilege allows me to seek to understand many ways of being while stripping away some preconceptions. It conveys a certain power: the ability to drink in experiences, to assume full presence in a particular moment, to say why not and just do things. To be always intrigued, ever nimble, always questioning, sometimes explicitly but also sometimes just in my mind so those around me can just be themselves. And it is not a realm of frivolity and luxury: the Olympian distance it can provide is the wellspring for reflection and insight that is hard to manage when wearing certain blinders.

Such distance can leave one in a lonely place, and it has taken time to embrace it as a real path when others are more clearly trodden. I can be a man in the arena, have perhaps even strengthened those skills considerably over the years, but I am not sure that doing so is the greatest use of my ability to come at stories from different angles, deep in the nuance. I am not by nature a fighter in the trenches, and I am drawn to realms upstream of politics, to places of culture and group dynamics and the deeper pulls of the human psyche. And I also now know that none of this is a binary choice, that I can step out for reflection but then dive back into messy human affairs in short order. (My stay in Pacific Beach also involved its share of time at beachfront bars, which are the definition of messy human affairs.)

My main method for my reflection has been writing. I gave up on a writing life after sweeping rejections from MFA programs over ten years ago, settling for sporadic posting on this blog instead of chasing any writing income. That failure has, on the whole, been a gigantic win for my mental health and financial security. But the itch has never died. The truth is that, if I have something resembling a vocation, it is not in anything terribly related to the job that earns me my income (though it is good work) but instead in being someone who has some useful things to say. I know that, in both triumph and crisis, I can sit down and come up with words that will both commemorate and help heal. People seem to like my stuff, if and when they find it.

I say I go San Diego to sit on a beach, but there is an ulterior motive: it is a retreat to begin compiling the episodic story collection on this blog into a manuscript, and I will be seeking professional feedback on it. This may seem like the ultimate Olympian turn, a retreat into fictional clouds at a time for engagement with reality. But this decade-in-the-making story is nothing but a response to questions about meaning in a fluid world, about coming of age, about masculinity and complicated family and coping with loss. I can think of no more urgent project for the skills I have.

I do not know what this story has to tell a broad audience; unlike everything else I write on here, the only feedback I’ve ever really gotten on it is from random people on the internet. But it is a story that is mine to tell, so I may as well tell it, take a chance on my attempt to get the picture and take pride in it. Progress may not necessarily be part of the package, but its possibility, whether sweeping or only in a few stray lives, is still a victory.

Cono Sur, Part IV: Lejos de Casa

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

Mood shift, for the third time this trip: I head to Mendoza, a two-hour flight to the west of Buenos Aires, a city tucked in the shadow of the Andes. Mendoza gave the gift of malbec to the world, and it remains a great wine-growing region, so roughly a dozen wedding guests have made their way out here to continue the afterparty. We are strewn about between downtown Mendoza and the placid towns heading south toward the Valle de Uco, and I crash at a small bed and breakfast a block off the main square in Chacras de Coria.

Chacras is a quiet town of low-slung, walled-off houses and unassuming quality restaurants. The smell of grilling meat drifts through the air and settles over my patio seat outside my room at the B&B. Thick sycamores and elms in fall color line a network of drainage channels called acequias, a legacy of the Huarpe and Inca that break up an otherwise dusty landscape. A wine country dry heat hangs over the foothills of the Andes, and the mountains above us shiver with a strong wind pouring down, a sign snow is falling on the slopes of Aconcagua, the highest point in the Americas, some 200 kilometers to the west. By the third day the winds stop and the temperature plummets over twenty degrees, a sign of deep autumn here in Mendoza.

My B&B is the pet project of an American named Bruce, a Vietnam era fighter pilot who later flew commercial planes. Bruce has electric blue eyes, a long and scraggly mane, and is one of the more astonishing humans I have ever met. His global travels have taken him to every continent and just about every ski hill on offer, flitting from place to place, adventures in motorcycle racing, a home in Giza, a German ex-wife, and even some time in Minnesota. After decades of an itinerant life he landed in Mendoza, the house choosing him, or so he says. He is now the pilot of this little B&B, a labor of love going on 20 years.

We spend my first night in Mendoza in conversation over meat and drink, though most of it flows in one direction. He diagnoses extreme stress in me, which is both right and wrong; yes, I can be a bundle of nervous energy, these surges often a fuel and sometimes a crutch, a tension no doubt heightened in a place far from home. The lone wolf struggles to understand the chameleon, forever calibrating himself to his surroundings, but the chameleon can come to understand the wolf.

If Bruce’s goal is to give me an escape, his scattershot volleys certainly don’t help the cause. He speaks so softly that I strain to hear, and while he peppers me with questions, only rarely do I sense he is really processing my answers. He grills me on my work and its value and shares his idiosyncratic takes, sometimes insightful and sometimes leaning toward cringe, a jumbo jet on a set path that I cannot alter, and I am intrigued to just watch him fly as far as he can. Here is a man who chose the radical freedom, gave up a family and everything he knew, and now here he is on a Monday night in Chacras de Coria, Argentina, guzzling down wines and holding court for an American kid who thought he was going to have a quiet evening in to recharge his battery before exploring the vineyards. I am fascinated by him, and he has clearly done some good for quite a few locals. But I would not choose to be him.

In spite of everything, Bruce is bullish on Argentina’s future. If Uruguay is a country that just works, Argentina is one that should work but too often does not. It has a world-class capital city of 16 million people, rich agricultural and mineral resources, beautiful countryside from Patagonia all the way up the Andes. Like the United States it is a European settler society, its indigenous peoples generally wiped out or pushed to obscure corners, a tragedy that has left it on a trajectory apart from some of its Andean neighbors. Waves of immigration from Spain and Italy crashed up on its shores in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with a land rush to rival the opening of the American West.

Its modern history, however, is an absolute jumble. The country has managed to escape its long run of military coups over the past 40 years, ever since the hapless Falklands War discredited the last junta, and this is a real achievement. The economy, however, is a different matter, thanks to runaway inflation and the populist patronage machine that is the Justicialist Party, Argentina’s dominant political institution since Juan and Eva Perón showed up on the scene. Putting up the Economy Minister in a nation with rampant inflation did not work out well for the Peronists in the 2023 elections, and Argentina is now running an experiment with Javier Milei, a Trumpy figure with no legislative support and five cloned dogs named after University of Chicago economists. The drama goes on, though the early returns suggest one of his ideas, the dollarization of the economy, is doing some good to stabilize prices and rein in that inflationary scourge that Argentina needs to solve before it can make good on any other promise. That promise, as these next few days show, is considerable.

Dollarization also makes Argentina an even easier country for American visitors, and for us revelers, Mendoza is a land of bountiful excess. Given the difficulty of winery logistics—here is an industry that is just begging to be disrupted—we go off on our own or in small groups, and we share an entertaining group chat. Five or six courses into my seven-course paired meal at Alta Vista (a visit arranged by Bruce and his staff; he is nothing if not a connoisseur of good taste from the whole world over), I report a state of general bliss. One wedding guest who is on a guided tour of the Valle de Uco shares he has just been served his fifth filet mignon of the day; another makes the mistake of counting how many glasses she has consumed. “We need the anti-Ozempic,” our bride writes as she ponders her dinner reservation with dread. Indeed, after a siesta and plenty of time to digest, I can only stomach a small salad for dinner in downtown Mendoza, while a tablemate pokes feebly at her eggplant. Three of us end up at a rooftop bar overlooking Mendoza’s gentle grid that night, shivering a little at the coming cold and marveling at what we are a part of here.

The next day we do manage to get a healthy group together for a tour and tasting at Kaiken, where the aging barrels are serenaded by Gregorian chant to create vibrations. (As with Dante in the Palacio Barolo, here is that credulous Latin American melodrama, a feature of a society less beset by the all-knowing cynicism that can plague educated Americans.) Guided by a sommelier, we try an array of malbecs to test the differences between them, and we eventually close the place down. I join Jess and Phil back at Entre Cielos, their sleek spa resort for their mini-moon, and we bask in the hot tub beneath the Southern Cross and hold a scattershot bilingual chat with a man from Chile and a woman from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, who have settled here together. Later, we peck at a dinner with two more friends at the resort restaurant. We order as much tea as we do wine. The body can only endure so much here.

I return to Buenos Aires for one final night in Argentina, though the energy for greater exploration has diminished now toward the end of near-constant moves from place to place. I content myself with another night at the Miravida Palermo Soho and stroll around the neighborhood, with visits to the charming Japanese Garden and the rather moribund Ecoparque zoo. One unattached fellow Hoya remains, and we sample a bumping craft brewery named Strange. The beer is superb, and the blasphemous raccoon logos are, well, something.

Once it is time to head back to the airport, I am ready to leave Argentina. I am ready to speak fluent English again, ready to sleep in my own bed; at least for two nights, that is, before the last adventure of my mini sabbatical. In the days that follow I reflect on the juxtaposition between my hunger for that freedom to wander and my natural homing instinct; my embrace of Uruguayan anonymity and my rejection of Bruce’s retreat from all prior commitment.

Is it truly a tension? I’m not so sure. They are both parts of a well-lived life, paces adjusted and waves seized. Here is yet another way to be free: to find the ease of knowing one has found one’s home in a certain place, among certain people, desire and roots aligned. This trip is all a good dream, yes, but I have work to do when I get back home. I couldn’t ask for much more.

Cono Sur 2024, Part II: Tranquilo

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

My adventure to the Southern Cone begins, as half my trips anywhere these days seem to do, with travel issues. Ten minutes before I leave my door, Delta informs me the flight from Atlanta to Buenos Aires will depart nine hours later than planned. While they feed me, put me up in a decent Atlanta hotel, gift me some miles, and are night and day better than United was to me through comparable past incidents, I am still left lamenting lost time that I can never make up.

I confess that I am spoiled. Any regular flyer knows the absurdity of travel scheduling, the absurdity of our expectations, and the ability to schedule things out so meticulously can crimp the traveler’s mind. On our recent Camino, my dad reflected on his post-college backpack tour of South America in 1981, when there was no way to plan much of anything and he went with just one heaping guidebook to carry him through the whole continent. He would just take a bus to some city, wander until he found adequate lodging, and then stay there, and he came away from all of it just fine. As a millennial I got the slightest snippet of this unplanned life, most notably during my college semester in Mexico, which was just before functional smartphones for trips abroad were a thing. Now, such spontaneity feels like a borderline irresponsible relic, or at best a quaint dream of a different era.

This line of thinking trips an old hunger. On the plane, I break my usual rule about not connecting to the internet (the irony does not escape me) to wistfully reread Roger Cohen’s “Ways to Be Free,” the op ed column that has stuck with me more than any I’ve ever read.

It resonates so fully because the desire it expresses is deep in my bones. I can see my dad in Cohen’s van trip. William Finnegan’s writing on surfing triggered an artistic flourish from me, a fictional project that set re-oriented my trajectory some. I too asked the question Cohen’s son did, without ever quite settling on an answer. The appetite for freedom is inescapable.

I was not in a position to take some grand adventure right after college (or at least I didn’t think I was), but I am now in a position to make up for some lost time. Any annoyance at the delay is forgotten as I drink in the rare experience of a full international flight in the daytime. I love this: over the ten-hour flight I can gaze out my tiny window at the Florida Keys, Cuba, the Panama Canal, the Andes over Ecuador and then Peru and then Chile before sweeping over the pampas and into the sprawl of Buenos Aires. This god’s eye view opens up the possibility of the world, shows how many more places there are to explore.

The contours of the earth always have fascinated me. From the youngest age I was enraptured by atlases and globes, tracing routes across nations I did not know and may never know. I recall some kid on the school bus early on—this must have been first grade, the only year of elementary school I took a bus—asking why I always stared out the window. Because I want to explore every inch of it, I probably would have said if I had the maturity to do so. Now, blessed with some modicum of disposable income, I dispose of it by visiting some of those places. Even with the travel delay, this feels right, some sort of trip I am meant to take.

An odd feature of my mini sabbatical: between my dad’s retirement trip and three weddings, all this travel is because of someone else. Of course I am pleased to go to all these places with all these people, and I had some input in crafting some of the itineraries. But I have just one snippet that is truly my own, for more than a few stray hours: my two-night detour to Uruguay.

The journey from Buenos Aires to Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital, takes just over two and half hours by a ferry named Francisco, which bills itself as the world’s fastest catamaran. It cruises smoothly across the Rio de la Plata, the views rather unfortunately blinded by bright string lights all around the windows. The travel delay has cost me my night in Montevideo, and from cab and bus windows it feels a bit tired, the changing fall leaves adding to the general sense of a drift into lost time. From Montevideo it is a two-hour bus ride on to Punta del Este, where I have decided to hole up before I return to Buenos Aires for the wedding.

Uruguay is a remarkable little country wedged between Argentina and Brazil. On the surface it resembles Argentina immensely, with its loves for beef and maté and wine and soccer; like its neighbor, its population is dominated by Spanish and Italian immigrants from around the turn of the 20th century. Its early history was tied up in wars involving its larger neighbors, whose residents still descend on its beaches en masse in peak seasons. But here is little Uruguay, tame as its neighbors overflow in excess, as boring in its politics as its neighbors are bombastic, comparatively affluent and low in crime. It is, perhaps, the most chill country on earth.

Uruguay earns this status not by exuding the painfully orchestrated cool of California or that “what, me worry” style of, say, a Caribbean island where people just expect things not to work. Uruguayans just seem to ease their way through life, living out small dramas, refilling their matés from the thermoses they carry around all day, and channeling any aggression on to the soccer pitch, where they might just bite you to get what they need. Uruguay is not rich, but it does not pretend to be. It works with what it has, and its infrastructure and institutions are the class of Latin America.

Riding out from Montevideo, the suburbs bustle with healthy life and don’t feel too far off from the parts of Portugal or Galicia I toured a few weeks earlier. In the countryside there is some poverty, but it feels stable, like these tiny cobbled-together homes have some staying power the shacks of a slum or dusty Mexican outpost do not, rooted into this pampa sand instead of living each day on the edge. The landscape starts out as plain grassland; cows and horses graze about. A few humpback mounts rise in the distance and grow thicker as I head east, and occasional forests offer pleasant mixes of pines and palms and the great ombú trees of the region. And then, finally, my bus rolls over a hill and reveals South America’s foremost beach resort.

Punta del Este juts out on a snippet of sand where Uruguay’s southern and eastern coasts meet. Its center is more Miami Beach than modest Latin American resort, with clusters of towers and other prime real estate, while further out it drifts into graceful modernist homes settled beneath the pines. As this is fall in South America, it is now the offseason; the towers are mostly quiet, and the trendier clubs are closed up until the next major vacation. I putter around the peninsula and take a minute to appraise the iconic mano of Punta del Este, the hand that rises from the sand. Punta’s style is modern but tasteful, built to drink in the full surroundings, to provoke a few creative thoughts without disrupting the beachfront cool.

Some stray raindrops convince me it’s time to cab up to La Barra, a small beach town across an undulating bridge from Punta’s towers. It is still built up, still very much a destination, but has more of a town feel than Punta itself. I settle into a private room in an otherwise fairly dead, quirky hostel a block off an inlet, an easy walk from everything I will need for my stay in Uruguay. It all feels very assured.

I stroll along the beach at sunset. It is quiet, just a few stray couples and dog-walkers, and a lone surfer who puts in the brutal work out through fierce waves for one long, brilliant ride in. The sun disappears into glowing clouds and a full moon rises up through the marine layer, a resplendent yellow orb shrouded from time to time in a drifting oceanic haze. Everyone on the beach stops to watch. Later, I eat a chivito dinner at a casual restaurant named Chill Out and chat up the kid at the bar, an easygoing townie with a dream of an escape to Miami.

On day two, I fall deeper into Punta’s trance. It is grey, on the chilly side, but the surfers are out in force. Sixty or seventy of them ride off Playa los Cangrejos, and scattered others take on additional stray points along the unending beach. I amble my way to Manantiales a few miles up the shore just to drink it in. Sitting and watching the crashing waves appears a perfectly acceptable pastime in these parts. My guidebook calls Playa Bikini a “flesh cauldron” in the high season, but for now it is placid in response beneath a colorful row of those large-widowed modernist homes, all nestled beneath shapely pines and ombús. It is hard to square the Punta I see with the ubiquitous cranes putting up more towers, and hard to remember over lunch in a swanky beachfront joint that this is not in fact a rich country. I eat the seafood of the day, drink fernet, and the waiter provides a heavy blanket so I can get cozy in my seat. Rain arrives while I dine, and while I wait out the worst of it, the walk back is damp. Time for a siesta.

I dine at El Papu, a bohemian chic spot up the road, stone floors and the ubiquitous floor-to-ceiling glass, all lit by candle. They serve local craft beer; the eggplant parmesan is the best I’ve ever eaten, tender as can be, drizzled in a green salsa with nuts. A bassist and a keyboarder settle in to serenade us with jazzy tunes, all improvised, the bassist working wonders in the higher registers. The other patrons are local hipsters and surfers, at ease among one another, an easy night taking shape. The vibe has met the moment.

In Uruguay I am free to pursue a radical freedom, to re-create myself in a country where not a soul knows me as I am. It is an opportunity at once both tantalizing and impossible. I could expand on certain tales from my stay here, perhaps, but some things are best left unwritten. And sometimes fiction, in the words of Walker Percy, tells us what we know that we do not know that we know. After Uruguay, I know what possibilities exist, but I also know the extent of my reach. I can head home a wiser man.

Part three is here.

Europe 2023, Part I: Rebirth

This is the first post in a four-part series.

A simple fact of travel is that things will go wrong, and one’s enjoyment of travel is directly tied to one’s ability to adapt when things go wrong. Alas, when forty-two members of an extended family travel to Europe for a Mediterranean cruise and some offshoot adventures, there are bound to be a few victims. On this venture, I am one of them. Parts of this trip feel like they are designed as a test of patience, and it starts on day one, when the Newark airport decides to keep my plane from Minneapolis, already late in departing Minnesota, sitting on the tarmac for 40 minutes before pulling up to a gate just long enough to miss the connection.

There is no indignity quite like airline indignity. A delayed arrival in Venice is the definition of a first world problem, and there is the bizarre shared ritual of ten despondent people who have never met throwing their bags down when the gate agent, possessed of a robotic soullessness, closes the door to the jet bridge and informs us it cannot reopen. Thankfully, a United representative manages to get me on a Swiss Air flight via Zurich that arrives in Venice only five hours later than planned. Not helping the airline’s cause is the Newark airport, a poorly connected, poorly signed cesspool where some light drizzle renders 80 percent of the flights on the board delayed or canceled. (This was not my first such experience in Newark.) As of this writing 23 days later, my checked bag is still there, its location known both to United and me, yet they are in no rush to return it: no matter how politely or angrily I address them, I can be safely assured anything they tell me about its progress toward me is a lie.

So of course, my first hour and a half in Europe are spent trying to locate my lost bag. Of course, when my number is called at the lost luggage counter, some Italian marches in front of me so he can carry on some pointless argument with the staff. Of course I get the woman with the employee-in-training badge, whose look of sheer defeat when she learns United had no record of my bag because it was switched to Swiss Air will be forever burned in my memory. And of course, the driver who takes me from the airport to the water taxi stand gets in an argument with the water taxi guy before he audibles and decides to just drive me across the causeway into Venice before securing a different water taxi. My arrival in la serenissima calls for a serenity prayer.

And then I see the hotel room I am sharing with my cousin, for which only a picture can suffice.

And yet, while mildly loopy after my travel ordeal over 30 sleepless hours, I am smitten by Venice. I get the taxi to myself up the Grand Canal and stand in the back, feeling vaguely James Bond-ish as it flies along. The hotel room is ridiculous enough to be a point of endless fun for our two nights in Venice, and the bed is in fact big enough to sleep two adult men with four feet between them. The room opens out onto a tiny balcony with a view of San Giorgio Maggiore, St. Mark’s Square is just a few minutes away, and tucked behind our waterfront base camp is a byzantine world of canals and alleys and invitations to wander.

After seeing other global tourist destination cities, I was expecting more garbage, more hawkers and homelessness, more general chaos. And yet here is Venice, reasonably clean, religiously tended, the nuisances kept to a minimum. Yes, the crowds do swamp St. Mark’s and the Rialto and the main pedestrian and gondola thoroughfares. But the attractions of this city are not confined to a small historic center like in so many of its peers, so it isn’t too hard to escape the crush. Across the Accademia Bridge, the Dorsoduro neighborhood offers up some rare greenery; a looping water bus trip takes a few of us to the narrow streets of the world’s first Jewish Ghetto before a chill lunch along a canal and a gradual stroll back. I do not have one bad meal here, octopus and lobster squid ink pasta and more classic Italian fare filling every menu. Every square foot of this city offers up something worth a second look.

There is no point in pretending otherwise: Venice is now a giant playground. But it is the best of playgrounds. If any city deserves to get preserved as a cultural treasure for the rest of humanity to explore, it is this one. Here the Roman world’s inheritance intertwines with the Byzantines and influences further to the east, the legacy of a great maritime republic that ruled half the Mediterranean through both trade and war. No city on earth has a built environment like Venice. Its streets and canals are an alluring maze, an invitation to lose oneself and reappear, serendipity with every step. I’m sure some Venetians would find such a take rather glib as they reflect on what has been lost in the slow museumification of their city. The slogan for rebuilding the Fenice opera house after it burned in 1996 was dov’era, com’era (as it was, where it was), but as John Berendt relates in The City of Falling Angels, the way it was had already made it subject to myriad rebuilds and renovations, a jumble of history with no clear point of return. Venice is a living monument, straining under pressures from both the sea and the crush of tourism, but it is worth saving and visiting because the life it brings out is like no other.

It is after dark that I most fall for Venice. On the first night, a group of my cousins and their spouses connects on the streets and we pick our way to St. Mark’s, the crowds unremarkable, the square aglow in the night. Later, we wind up sprawled on the flagstones along the waterfront, an array of mediocre European beers from a nearby kiosk on hand as we watch the nighttime water traffic, including a mock Venetian galley, cruise by. Several times we play a game where we identify a destination and then try to find our way without looking at maps, over a bridge and through a little arcade, past closed-up bars and lit-up ATMs, here a false turn down a dead end, there the sudden discovery of a church that in any other city would be a stunning monument but here is just some quaint afterthought tucked away on a backwater canal for our discovery and delight. When my fellow wanderers grow restless on a 2 AM retreat from Venice’s finest craft beer bar, I volunteer no details, even though I know the way. I could have wandered these streets until dawn.

I say I could have walked endlessly even though the only footwear in my possession is the same pair of boat shoes I’d worn on the plane, sometimes worn with the one increasingly gross pair of socks I have and at others occupied just by my bare feet as they slide around in a sweat-coated shoe. I am surrounded by beauty and feel disgusting. The next day, resigned to the fact that I will not reacquire my luggage before the ship cruise ship sets sail, I shop for a new wardrobe on Ravenna’s main streets. When life (or a terribly managed airline) takes your luggage, buy an Italian linen suit on their dime.

From there, the trip goes off without any major hitches. The only other real trying day is the one in Rome. Rome is big. Rome is hot. Rome is crowded. After the pleasant surprises of Venice, the Eternal City is frenetic, loud, stuffed with street vendors and pickpockets and garbage. In a city that peaked 2,000 years ago, the fraying seams are clear, and my party is in a state of collective exhaustion by the end.

For this day, I’ve booked myself a non-cruise tour through the Vatican Museums. (I did see the Colosseum, the Forum, the Spanish Steps, and the Trevi Fountain on a visit 19 years ago.) The pace through the collection is never leisurely: the whole time we are swept along through an unending stream of people, all baking in the midafternoon heat. The current tugs us from one gallery to the next, and at one point security diverts our flow through an Etruscan gallery to relieve the pressure on the Gallery of the Candelabra. The Sistine Chapel, the culmination of the tour, is awe-inspiring when one looks up; if one looks around, on the other hand, one gains the perspective of a herd of cattle shuffling through a pen toward slaughter while its Italian handlers around the edges demand silencio and scold the denser cows incapable of reading the ‘no photography’ signs. And yet there are marvels: the stunning Greek and Roman collections, the papal history, an unexpected modernist gallery, the sexy hall of maps, and my own pilgrimage destination on this trip: The School of Athens, Raphael’s great triumph, all philosophy and art distilled into one giant fresco. I am transfixed, and I wish I could linger.

I cannot linger, however, because we are on a cruise, and the boat must leave. We get just five hours to see Rome, controlled by tour guides even for this on-your-own venture. We still nearly lose one member of our party at the end, and my cousins who skipped the official tours and took the train instead also had their share of misadventures amid a few highlights. Between the time necessary to wait for my two-hour tour and the half hour it takes to actually get into the museum, the only other thing I really see outside of the Vatican is the Castel Sant’Angelo; I cross the Tiber only briefly, to meet with my mom and her partner Doug for a quick drink. For someone who reads a book titled Rome as a Guide to the Good Life on this trip (a recommendation by a reader and correspondent) and re-watched La Grande Bellezza (one of my favorite films of all time, in which Rome is a character unto itself) just before it, a day like this one can be something of a letdown.

To fixate on these troubles would miss the point. The message of Rome has never been of straightforward beauty (though it has it all over), but instead of staying power and reinvention, of finding panache amid ruin, or at the very least amid some unexpected chaos. No city can hold all of that complicated history in simultaneous tension as well as Rome, and I have a choice as to whether I fixate on the Sistine Chapel cattle pen or the wonder I find in The School of Athens. In the name of my Renaissance, I choose Raphael.

Part II is here.

Up in the Air

It is with some regret that I choose to fly for this year’s western hiking venture instead of taking to the western roads yet again. Rereading the account of my brooding deep-pandemic self in 2020 or my more mundane appreciation of such roads during my 2021 jaunt has me yearning for some of those cliches about western travel that are true because they are real. A recent Ross Douthat column whose sentiment I support seemed to scold my decision-making: “If you do not drive your country’s highways and byways, what path do you have to a nonvirtual experience of the America beyond your class and tribe and bubble? If you have strong answers to both questions, good. But lacking them, you should give the open road another look.”

A Saturday spent shuttling my dad from one end of northern Minnesota’s Kekekabic Trail to the other only renews this hunger for ribbons of asphalt and gravel. It is a nine-hour dive into the wilds of Minnesota’s north, and I bob and weave along two-lane highways through small towns, some humming with midsummer tourists and others fading back into the woods. Isabella has become a ghost town, while the cluster of bustle on the central Gunflint Trail could use a name on a map, and Ely straddles two worlds. Car travel frees me to eye the wreckage of the Greenwood Fire and drink in the cool lake air of Grand Marais, and to swing off to Sugarloaf Cove, where I can meander down the beach and flip open a notebook to record a few stray ideas. We writers are suited to modes of motion with spontaneous spurts and chances to suck up little details; it is only from these mined nuggets that we can later create grand arcs and sweeps.

While much of America has retreated from air travel, I have spent more time on planes over the past year and a half than at any point in my life. A healthy chunk of that was work-related puddle-jumping to Milwaukee, but I’ve found my way to destinations across the country, too. For the seasoned veteran, air travel is both simpler and more refined, inspiring in its God’s eye view but sapped of the details that allow for immersion and meditation. By plane I give no mind to the fortunes and failings of the towns along the highway, to the Native American reservations I skirt, to the stray roadside attraction that may worm its way into my mind. I bliss out, catch up on some reading, and flip the mental switch to begin living in the world where I’ve landed. It is a simpler, more self-absorbed way to travel, any interactions bounded by the metal tube we share and devoid of any relationship to the landscape around us.

Nor have I ever known air travel as a venture of true leisure and opulence. I have only dim memories of flights before 9/11 and its subsequent security cattle pens, most of which involve my nine-year-old self vomiting into a bag on a bumpy flight from Duluth to Chicago. I’ve had only brief brushes with business or first class, and while a free drink or two is nice, it is hardly a signifier of great luxury. For most of my plane trips, I join the unwashed masses in crunching my knees into ever-shrinking spaces and hoard my bag of nuts and cup of juice. Air travel is also prone to occasional great indignities when the plans go awry, whereas the driver will simply audible and find a detour or sub out a cranky rental car.

I romanticize the road trip, of course. This year’s hike is in Colorado, and somehow the tamed fields of Iowa and Nebraska do not inspire the same sense of frontier freedom as the Dakotas or Montana; time, scarcer and more precious amid a series of new pushes in life, has me settling for the two-hour hop to Denver. I will not miss the zombified state brought on by the eastern Great Plains, nor jockeying for space with long-distance truckers, nor the increasingly antsy push toward home of a final day on the road. These ventures have resulted in two busted windshields in the past three years, and at times I am left with a choice between splurging on an uninspiring roadside hotel or setting up a tent in a campground where I will be serenaded all night by the dulcet droning of RVs. But this decision is more profound than any convenience-seeking or aesthetic impulse: on my last solitary venture I decided that it would be my last one of that nature for a spell, and that is that.

Taking to the air seems a fitting way to head for some of the highest peaks in the lower 48 states. This year’s hike, on the Colorado Trail west of Leadville, will take place entirely above 10,000 feet in elevation, in the shadows of Mount Massive and Mount Elbert, Colorado’s two highest points. It will be a test of the lungs, and if we do indeed try to summit both peaks, a test of the legs as well. I will achieve a new cruising altitude and see just how hungry I am to reach new heights. Off I go, a new adventure beckoning.

My Year of Imaginary Thinking

Travel is useful; it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength.

– Céline, Journey to the End of the Night (lifted from the credits of La Grande Bellezza)

I began 2021 with the particular belief of a convert to a new faith. It was hard not to, since I started it by diving into a pool at a mountaintop estate on a Caribbean island, my crash into its depths a burst through the din of jungle fauna and steel drum bands echoing in the distance. A couple months later, I received my second stab of Moderna and penned what I hoped would be a victory essay over the virus that had disrupted the previous year of life. I had grand travel plans, I would see family again, work would move away from the misery of Zoom, and I would find undying love.

I wasn’t so naïve as to think it would be that easy, which is good, because it wasn’t. New variants surged, a dream of optimism curdled into an air of mystery, the general malaise lingered, and while I generally went about my life, the world did not. I certainly have no judgment for those who continued to take strong precautions for various reasons and would always work to reach their levels if need be. But to sacrifice any more of my rapidly dwindling youth to a climate of fear that was unlikely to afflict me in any serious way seemed a high price to pay, and trying to negotiate a world in which everyone was on a different page on this issue added another layer of complexity. To be a conscientious friend in 2021 was to live in a state of hyper-aware caution, and the escape of obstinacy grew ever more attractive.

I proceed with family and friends more or less as I did before the pandemic, but my social circles have not grown much, and arranging anything with anyone feels like a considerably larger chore than it used to, the serendipity of stray days together now a rare occurrence. My friend group is a busy one, and a lot of them have been pairing off and reproducing while I have not, a divergence that both keeps them occupied and is wont to drive me to brood. I field questions about my house as if contemplating the excitement of a new garage door is a comparable life step to having a child. For that matter, I have been traveling too much and too caught up in my day job when I am home to get around to acquiring the garage door.

The year took its tolls. I lost a grandmother, an aunt, and a cousin, and endured a funerary marathon for all three of them over one week in July. Somehow, this was not the most draining stretch of family time in 2021; that dubious accolade instead goes to a visit, two weeks later, to the other side of my family, on which I will not elaborate much out of respect for my relatives except to say that no human should ever be allowed to own more than three cats. The less weighty but still disruptive milestones mounted: in the hockey world, a man who was an ordering principle for my drive in life lost his job, a complex but significant era drawn to a close; at work, my colleagues and I were too good at our jobs, in short order overwhelmed by requests for help and pushed to the brink by a taxing schedule, a herd of Sisyphean retrievers forever chasing the ball. It took me until some time after that to see that I was slipping into those same dragging tendencies that had annoyed me about the rest of the world, and another period of time after that to correct course.

I sought my freedom from days of exhaustion and low-grade dread through bursts out into different worlds. It started in the Virgin Islands, made its way to some wilderness retreats in my own backyard, wound its way through another grand western road trip, and popped off to New York and St. Louis and Tucson for punchy weekends. I kept the pace going right up until the end: a week of professional development in Minneapolis featured not only full days of classes, but a different form of scheduled programming each evening as I caught up with family and friends, then topped the whole thing off with a 48-hour jaunt to Chicago for the Christmas party that, every year, manages to put every other party I attend to shame.

All this travel is dangerous. At times it makes me ponder other realities, roads not taken and potentialities looming within a kid who is still capable of quite a bit when he puts his mind to it. I come home from these trips a jumbled mess, always in need of recovery, at once enlivened and invigorated and yet sapped by long hours on the road and disappointed by the return to routine and possessed of a poorly directed energy. The magic does not necessarily last. But how I lived on these trips: sweating up slopes and treading blissful waters, fine dining and good drinks, revelry till the end of the night in the presence of delightful people who, consciously or unconsciously, understand what I mean when I quote Joan Didion and say I want not a window on the world but the world itself.

Didion has been my muse for pandemic era reckoning, and 2021 delivered one final blow when it stole her away this past week. Her death saddened me as much as that of any person I never met in the flesh. No contemporary writer had a greater influence on how I think about the art of prose, or gave me a better sense of how to frame my view of the world. Didion learned to write by copying down Hemingway sentences, and I have learned to write by copying down Didion sentences. An essayist adoring Didion is about as original as a classical music buff lauding Beethoven or a hockey person saying there’s something worth emulating in that Gretzky dude, but sometimes greatness is so plainly obvious, so transcendent of subjective standards, that it can stand up even amid the rush of cliches that inevitably pursue it like fame-hungry paparazzi.

It was amid the rush of Didion homages, all consumed breathlessly this past week, that I realized that what sustained me through 2021 was not the travel itself but the opportunities the travel gave me to write. “Her work was her own answer to the question of what writing and living is for. It ought to be ours, too,” wrote Nathan Heller in a New Yorker obituary. There is no personal crisis I cannot resolve, no looming burden I cannot overcome, by taking a moment to jot it into one of several notebooks or clattering away at a keyboard. The act itself, whether it resolves into a single flowing tale or disjointed marginalia, is enough. Through it, I am made whole at the end of every day, and increasingly in the middle of days when I need reminders to escape the tunnel of the mundane.

From a mesmerized gaze at waves on a beach to the solemn donning of a funeral suit, from the hubbub of a brewing party to curling up with some essays as a wintry wind howls outside, here is to the power of the written word. Here is to their power not to exact immediate results but to create the pieces by which, over time, a new idea can assemble itself, word by word and line by agonized line of authorial reflection and search for just the right turn of phrase. The words may or may not capture my reality in full, but that was never the goal. The goal was to change it.

Symposium

I started 2021 with a midnight splash into a pool, a dive both literal and metaphorical: after the caged life of 2020, 2021 would be a year where I jumped in. I am not ready to pass final judgment on that goal, as certain limitations have not exactly disappeared, but in one way this year has matched the hype. I traveled more than I ever have, a steady stream of escapes from daily toil, and this past weekend, a final excursion outside of holiday family time took me to Tucson, Arizona, a new place with a lot of very familiar people.

I liked Tucson. I found it somewhat less sprawl-happy than its larger northern neighbor, Phoenix. The Presidio neighborhood, where I made my home for two days, had a dash of Spanish colonial charm, its homes quaint and bright and the landscapes one with the desert around it. I visited the weekend of the University of Arizona homecoming, which brings its large campus to life. Tucson’s food scene is good enough to earn a UNESCO designation, and the intensity of the Mexican influence gives it a genuine sense of a borderland, a mash-up that brings together the poverty and migration and logistical challenges with the immigrant grit and rich cultural creation and re-creation that takes place when two worlds collide.

My summons to Tucson came for my college friend Mike’s wedding with Lizette, a union of Irish- and Mexican-Americans that underscored this syncretism at every step. Mariachis in the cathedral, Irish dancers at the reception, and a couple of Georgetown Jesuits to tie the ribbon; a bagpiper to herd us to dinner and a Mexican ballad crooner at the post-boda party the following day. Now that I have seen his city I sense that I know Mike a bit better, and know why he helped found Georgetown’s Kino Border Initiative alternative spring break program that continues to run today. No matter how far he ventures he is a child of his hometown, a sentiment I know all too well.

I will here embarrass Mike by calling him one of the most impressive humans I know. I dole out such praise not only for his considerable worldly achievements from his presidency of the Georgetown student association to his Cambridge fellowship to his burgeoning education career, but also for his capacity for introspection and his ability to change his life for the better. We have both come a long way since we were two eager kids stumbling around Mexico City together for a semester, each restlessly seeking out callings that reflect who we have become every step of the way. For him, this weekend was a moment of triumph, a rush that ties those disparate threads of life into one, and while my own such moment remains somewhere further out beyond those cactus-studded hills, seeing another achieve it only fuels me.

Recently I’ve been reflecting on my objects of love, most notably the city that my time at Georgetown led me to conclude was the place I should be. After Duluth, however, comes that institution. An inordinate number of my formative moments came between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. Georgetown was the apotheosis of my childhood striving, though its central role has never been an unambiguously positive one. Not long out of undergrad I penned a somewhat cynical account of my time there, and I when I read critical takes here and there on institutions like Georgetown, I find my share of truth. I have struggled, sometimes mightily, to weigh my place amid and against everything that Georgetown represents.

But anytime I am back on its campus or among its people, it is an object of ever-growing love. This Tucson weekend, spent primarily among friends I liked in college but have not kept up with religiously since graduation, was a liberation of sorts. In short order any anxieties over class or money or my strange post-graduation path melted into nothing. My story remains a curiosity to this audience, but it earns respect, and as we roll into our thirties, we are collectively easing into our own skin and into healthier relationships with the meritocratic pressure-cooker we have all inhabited to greater or lesser degrees. We all still share a hunger for knowledge and a thirst for rich lives, this belief that we really can have it all. It was also refreshing to be back in circles where not every 31-year-old is married, perhaps with a kid or two, that status a source of growing annoyance but not unnatural. These are in so many ways my people, and as I kill time in the plaza of the Tucson Presidio the morning after the wedding, I appreciate once again that I am who am, formed by my own peculiar jumble of circumstances just as Mike has been formed by Tucson, a new pride stirring within me.

Each morning since my return, I’ve begun my days with a brief reading from Plato’s Symposium, a search inspired by a speech from a member of Lizette’s bridal party. Perhaps Socrates and friends can be guides to my own loves; perhaps Tucson is only another meander on this strange path I tread. But with each dive I grow a bit more comfortable in the water, a bit more content to ride the waves, whether they come in a Caribbean pool or a November gale on the greatest of lakes. And between each one, may I continue to have symposia with Hoyas, my fellow travelers for life.