Europe 2026, Part VII: Split Wisdom

This is the seventh and final post in a series that began here.

I head home via Dublin, with a pause long enough only for a single Guinness. Two weeks of solo travel is enough, and I am ready to be back among my people, enjoy shared meals and more robust conversation in my own language. But as my flight soars over Greenland, provides that God’s-eye view of its snow-capped peaks and fjords, I find a powerful release, that sense of being carried to an unknown realm. I will never lose my hunger for the world, in part because there will always be somewhere to go next.

After two weeks away I am happy to head home, toward a land where public bathrooms are free and the showers are not higher than the bathroom floor and where people actually believe in regular hydration. I am ready to stick to a single currency after revolving through lira and forints and korunas and euros. On the flip side, I will miss truly walkable downtowns and regular trains and people who are not degenerates enjoying open containers. The Europeans do leisure so much better than always-hustling Americans, make it a part of life rather than some sporadic eruptions of excess and self-care. A vacation in Europe, while itself a burst out in that tradition, makes it so much easier to internalize a pace, to recognize different possibilities for how to live.

My agenda over these two weeks underscored split identities. Istanbul is a living monument to the pulls between Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East, while Budapest finds itself in a tension between Europe and governance styles further east. Vienna strives to protect a cultural inheritance in a world with outside pressures; in a distinct way, so does Prague. Berlin was torn apart by calamitous conflict and now builds back, at once trying to remember and move forward. As someone who so often feels these different pulls, I am at home in these borderlands and tension-filled phases. I am split between a love for home and hunger for the world, a desire to stay in and write and a thirst to close down the party, to class it up at the opera or belly up to a basement bar, to draw strength from both reason and faith, to restore myself in both moments of solitude and by feeding off others’ energy. Over time I have learned to sit in this blurry zone, even revel in it, knowing a full life can have it all.

Traveling in Europe is an immersion in history, something that Americans like me, raised in a city where “old” means 1920 and cut off from drama by two great oceans, know only marginally. It is also a cautionary tale against wanting too much such history: Europe’s past is a story of a thousand tragedies, some of the sort that recur every generation or two and some on the scale of the greatest barbarity mustered by humans. As the Renaissance altarpieces and Gothic spires and mosaic saints remind us, we are a fallen race. These reminders have dual purposes, both cautionary and inspirational.

The continent is at a strange crossroads. The last people with living memory of World War II and firsthand knowledge of its brutality are fading away. With them goes a lived appreciation for the postwar miracle of Europe, those moments when a continent that had bloodied itself beyond belief for centuries before two epic orgies of destruction between 1914 and 1945 consciously turned away and, like Athens in the myth of the Oresteia, put aside its arms and deep passions and found a way to coexist in peace. Now, over time, one of humanity’s greatest innovations has been made boring and sometimes even cruel in its institutional, bureaucratized power. There are very reasonable worries about how Europe can hold up as it stops reproducing and as the world’s other powers play by different rules.

But great European cities also show the triumph of people who pour their souls into beauty, build things to last, and, when the inferno comes, rebuild, brick by painstaking brick. Europe’s power comes in its endurance. As China rises and Russia rediscovers some old muscles and the United States drifts off on its own strange path, Europe will need to find new ways to cultivate that old strength. I suspect that movement may need some doses of Charles de Gaulle or Otto von Bismarck instead of just a litany of small-state nationalists or milquetoast social democrats. Maybe it looks like Péter Magyar, firm in national pride but still within the bounds of a larger liberal project; it is much too early to put any stock in him. The divisions between Europe’s cultures, so often drifting toward Balkanization, make nothing easy. But I wouldn’t bet against some of the world’s most persistent nations and their recognition that, out of idealism or necessity, they need to present a somewhat united front. When at its best, the visions of life Europe can offer are the envy of the world, and I hope we Americans who venture across the pond can bring back some of those bits and apply its wisdom where we can.

One of the better pieces of advice I’ve ever received is to take two-week vacations. This is enough time to truly forget obligations back home for a moment and turn loose. It works. My time in Europe fills me with a vital force, ready to be tapped at any moment when the reserves run low. I can flash back to any one of them. The romance of Topkapi, even in Istanbul’s melancholy rain, and a golden cruise across the Bosphorus to open a door to a new continent. Delighted turns down back streets of Istanbul, on to another Byzantine wonder. Drifting away in a Hungarian bath. The toll of the Pummerin; Parsifal rising toward its apex. A beer-fueled crowd in a Prague bar, and a serendipitous stroll home when I’ve had my fill. A final currywurst and a walk through the Brandenburg Gate on my last night.

It is another very American belief to think that one of these bursts outward can lead toward epiphany; to think that, because of some moment of awe or insight, things will never be the same again. Schooled on Europe’s eternal cautionary tales, I am not so deluded. But they can be useful signifiers of change, or plant seeds that, someday, grow into something. Unexpected side streets appear, new gates open; some old ones close, too, perhaps never to be seen again, and that is alright. It is the task of the traveler to sit down back at home to sort through these interruptions of all routine and decide how to remember these journeys, and which ones may come next.

Europe 2026, Part IV: Viennese Harmony

This is Part Four in a 7-part series that began here.

My journey continues. I board the 1:40 out of Budapest bound for Munich and make my way to Vienna. The train crosses the Austrian border, and while there is no physical barrier, the differences are immediate. Suddenly, it is all cleanliness and order, clean lines and fresh paint on every structure, even the duller apartment blocks and industrial buildings lining the tracks. I have arrived in an orderly society, as the woman who is upset that my suitcase has occupied the left side of the escalator in Hauptbahnhof station makes abundantly clear.

Even with Budapest as an interlude, the contrast between Istanbul’s chaos and melancholy ruins and Vienna’s crisp opulence is eye-popping. Vienna is all refinement, all religiously tended beauty. The monuments here are rarely to war; while the Viennese did twice hold off the Ottomans and thus safeguard the heart of Europe, the Habsburg dynasty was instead built on a long lineage of strategic marriages. (“Let others wage war; let you, happy Austria, marry,” says the famous line.) The Habsburg peace allowed them to build a capital that cultivated high culture, a comfortable home that, like many diverse empires, was more welcoming than many modern nation-states. “The genius of Vienna,” writes Stefan Zwieg in The World of Yesterday, his elegiac look back on his prewar Vienna childhood, “had always been that it harmonized all national and linguistic opposites in itself, its culture was a synthesis of all Western cultures…Nowhere was it easier to be a European, and I know that I have in part to thank Vienna, a city that was already defending universal and Roman values in the days of Marcus Aurelius, for the fact that I learnt early to love the idea of community as the highest ideal of my heart.” Vienna’s civic achievement is not all artifice, either: this city has, arguably, gone further toward solving the housing problem facing so much of the West than anywhere.

I live nearly my entire Vienna life inside the Ringstrasse, the former city wall now turned to a ring road with leafy biking and walking paths beside it. Over most of a day I make the circuit and fill my bingo card of the city’s greatest hits. I stop at this palace here and that composer’s statue there, past monuments to Habsburgs (mostly Franz Joseph), basking in its parks on a 75-degree day. Wiener stands offer lunches, and when I need a longer rest, there are cafes with coffees and sachertorte. As Zweig writes, “the Viennese coffee house is an institution of a peculiar kind, not comparable to any other in the world. It is really a sort of democratic club, and anyone can join it for the price of a cheap cup of coffee.”

It is Easter weekend in Vienna. I am too late to properly enjoy the Easter markets, but I join the string of the curious who peek in on the candlelit Saturday mass at St. Stephen’s Cathedral. St. Stephen’s great Pummerin bell, made from melted down Ottoman cannons after the Turks’ 1683 failed siege and reforged with additional such cannons in storage after it fell amid Allied bombing in the Second World War, tolls out the good news. It rings only a few days a year, and chills go down my spine as I lie in my hotel bed two blocks from the cathedral, winding down around midnight after a long day of exploration and travel, and suddenly hear its deep, rich booms.

Another rite of Easter takes place at the Vienna State Opera, where Richard Wagner’s Parsifal plays. Parsifal clocks in at five hours with its intermissions and so is a bold choice for a first-time operagoer. It is Wagner’s final opera, a soaring work of spiritual and philosophical complexity. Its composer called it a Bühnenweihfestspiel (because of course there is a German word for “sacred festival stage play”), a Good Friday sermon on innocence and compassion’s triumph over the will, a break from some past Wagner (much to the Nazis’ disappointment) and a turn toward redemption. The Vienna State Opera has reset the drama in a modern prison, a Sartre-inflected take on how us modern knights might win our grails.

“This is ugly. This scene is supposed to be in a garden,” mutters my neighbor, a regular at the State Opera. But the music, he says, is sublime, and indeed Parsifal builds toward resolution, resolves in images of the titular hero wandering in snow-covered woods to a ruined temple, where he lights a fire and a new faith burns forth, ambiguous but still edging toward that redemption story, a reach toward a higher belief.

The rest of my time in Vienna is less about transcendence and more about enjoying the good life. I climb 343 stairs to a tower inside St. Stephen’s for a commanding view of the city, the Alps settling downward to the west and the Carpathian Basin opening up to the east. I visit the State Hall of the library at Hofburg Palace, a sterling collection of old books and maps, and a display of manuscripts and works on the nature of love. I peek into the Karlskirche (Karl’s church!) at the right time in the afternoon to catch perfect beams of sunlight filtering through. I sip a few glasses of Grüner Veltliner, a crisp white wine native to Austria, and make do with clean but unremarkable local beer. I make sure I’m back in front of St. Stephen’s for the second ringing of the Pummerin at noon on Easter Sunday.

Vienna is a monument to Western civilization, a bastion that has held firm to protect some of its creative peaks. Its annexation by the Nazis in World War II perhaps showed the limits of Habsburg-style accommodation, but it has settled back into its role. The opera clientele, while still greying a bit, was substantially younger than any such crowd in the States; there seems to be a certain understanding that Vienna will continue to fill this function. Sure, many European city centers are museums to a cultural past with well-kept squares and quaint streets and expensive traditional food on patios alongside luxury shopping, but in Vienna it seems like what the city is meant to do, to offer up to us passers through. It’s just as Billy Joel said: Vienna waits for you.

Part Five is here.

Europe 2026, Part II: Pulled East and West

This is Part Two of a seven-part series. Part One is here.

The Ottomans are still the dominant force in Istanbul, a 500-year empire founded by Turks who came out of the east and, under Mehmed the Conqueror, deposed Eastern Rome for good in 1453. The Blue Mosque is the first mosque I have ever entered, and it is not a bad place to start, given its grandeur and intricacy; at the same time, there is a simplicity of form to these Ottoman mosques absent in great Christian churches, with no side chapels or grand altarpieces or recessed saints. The Blue Mosque is more a destination than a place of worship, though: the line of entering tourists is endless, dwarfing the handful who head to the front for prayer, and unprepared nonbelievers are forced into hijabs of shame labeled “Property of Sultanahmet Mosque,” using its official name. I am more contented after my visit to the equally massive but somewhat less intricate Süleymaniye Mosque: here I can observe a dome modeled on the Hagia Sofia and a massive space in relative peace, appreciate the leafy grounds in a concrete-filled city and pause to peak into the tomb of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman sultan at the empire’s apogee.

My rainy day at Topkapi Palace has me wondering about the origins of the gutter as a means to channel water and why one of the world’s most splendid empires did not bother to install them. (Later, in Prague, I gaze up at gargoyle waterspouts and wonder if they would violate Muslim bans on idolatry.) But the Ottoman palace for their first 400 years of rulership from Istanbul is a magnificent abode. Topkapi is a blend of glamour and grace, clinging to the hillside and unfolding as an acropolis worthy of Islam’s greatest empire, commanding it while still in the clear shadow of the Hagia Sofia and Blue Mosque, the earthly power nestling below God. Here and there the various sultans have left their own marks, adding on tasteful terraces and antechambers and a library, all of it conceivably master planned even though it evolved slowly over centuries. Here is a cloister for the eunuchs and there are the endless kitchens; in the harem there are spaces for everyone in the ever-evolving royal family. It is an airy space, open to catch Bosphorus breezes and give glimpses in all directions; on a cold, wet day it has a chill feel, but it doesn’t take a crazy imagination to picture fires roaring and luxurious baths filling and the sultan and his harem settling in for comfort. If I were to be gifted an empire, give me Topkapi as my palace.

By the 1800s, the fascinating east-west fusion that is Istanbul starts to thin into outright copying. Topkapi’s successor, Dolmabahçe Palace, is stunning, yes, a sprawling complex with graceful gates on to the Bosphorus, and its greatest trait is its embrace of the strait that gives Istanbul its lifeblood. “If the city speaks of defeat, destruction, deprivation, melancholy, and poverty,” writes Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul, “the Bosphorus sings of life, pleasure, and happiness.” But Dolmabahçe’s sequence of gilded chambers reaches levels of exhaustion in time; its attempt at a Versailles left the Ottomans broke. By the 1800s the sultans had their eyes firmly fixed on Europe, and their failures to hold up in that century’s intricate dance between great powers opened the door for intrigue in the Balkans, and, fundamentally, the First World War and its echoes for the next 100 years. Out went the Ottomans in the imperial collapse at the end of the war, and in came the Republic of Turkey.

Taksim Square is the heart of Republican Istanbul, a giant, modernist, and rather austere square (meydan, in Turkish) still somehow overshadowed by the requisite mosque. But even in this monumental state it feels like a center in retreat, a relic of the era when Ataturk swept in with his staunch secular republicanism. Homages to him are still everywhere, but the Islamic populist Erdogan likely has the father of the Turkish Republic turning in his grave. And yet these two Turkish statesmen are two sides of the same coin: there is still an air of imperial grandeur, an all-consuming national project in everything Turkish since 1923.

Since the abolition of the sultanate, Istanbul has grown clearer in its identity and diminished in its global stature all at once. Pamuk, as he beheld his city after Ottoman decline and a series of fires that burned through the old city and the Turkish nationalism that purged the Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, called Istanbul more Western but less cosmopolitan. Perhaps it is only natural that, stripped of its diversity and in the thralls of a lost imperium, Turkey now drifts into a more Muslim state under a strongman undertaking a pale imitation of the sultanate.

This distinctly Turkish reality is most on display in Fatih, the oldest part of the city, where a monumental mosque lurks around just about every corner. Even though it is tourism central, it is also dipped in amber, holding on to a certain identity Turkey wants to project outward. To snake through the Spice Bazaar and the Grand Bazaar is to shrug off a thousand vendors, admire myriad carpets and Turkish delight, jewelry and shawls, soccer jerseys and leather goods, and endless supplies of handicrafts. Twinned scents of spice and cigarette smoke hang over the narrow corridors, and for someone who is somewhat exhausted by a trip to Target, the claustrophobia sets in before long. My guide around the bazaars is a book by a Grand Marais resident named Ann Marie Mershon, though I can’t bring myself to pull out the guidebook every few blocks and settle for a general meander past stalls and mosques and the hans that form the trellis upon which contemporary Istanbul grows.

With such tight quarters all around, I look for little escapes. In Istanbul, meydans have fewer defined lines than European plazas, edges blurred and little in the way of the bars or even cafes one might expect. Instead, they are dominated by mosques, whose grounds offer sanctuary from the frenetic activity beyond their shadows, and free bathrooms to boot. After several days of wandering Istanbul I see how these houses of worship give the city a chance to breathe. The logic of Islam is never really subtext; everything is part of a project, a belief in a path for harnessing life amid chaos and marching toward greater glory. Regular calls to prayer echoing from competing minarets make sure even a relatively secularized city like Istanbul can’t forget these demands.

Pamuk is my Istanbul whisperer, but his city is a narrow slice of its existence: the Beyoglu district, settled by the Genoese in Byzantine days and a cosmopolitan hub basically ever since. Both Pamuk’s Istanbul and his Museum of Innocence, a physical accompaniment to his novel of the same name with 83 little displays matching the book’s chapters, are homages to life for the midcentury Beyoglu upper middle class of an emerging nation-state, the people who could best hold together a compound reality of Turkish nationalism and Euro-curious cosmopolitanism. The museum is a delightful collection of little vignettes that encapsulate one little place at one specific time, Pamuk’s statement on the stories worth telling in a museum. Since that midcentury era he captured Beyoglu has decayed and now rebounded, a gentrifying and cool landing spot that feels most comfortable to a Western outsider. In these districts the hijabs disappear and the complexions grow lighter; the liquor flows more easily, and no one is trying to sell me a rug. Most of my fellow guests at the Museum of Innocence are stylish twenty-something Turkish upper-class girls listening raptly to the audio tour, some clutching Pamuk’s novels. Now here is a culture I could enjoy.

Unlike Europeans, the Turks punched relatively few grand avenues through narrow alleyways of their central districts, and there is an endless allure of going around corners to find a relic of Byzantium or the sultanate or another themed shopping street (here some power tools, there some electronics) or a few quiet stretches with creaking old wooden buildings barely clinging to their verticality, the ubiquitous stray cats slithering about. The exception is on Beyoglu’s Istikal Caddesi, a (mostly) pedestrian shopping street with a cable car that meanders along the top of the hill. Istikal has some of the inevitable glitz and global brand sameness that always comes with any such destination street, but it also pulses with the European-oriented beat of the city, a through line since its founding.

The Istanbul craft beer scene is a work in progress, seemingly confined to expat operations, but a Turkish wine bar just off Istikal showcases a fine art off limits to much of this nation’s population that nonetheless well exceeds expectations. Perhaps my favorite site in the modern city is along the dessert-serving street below the Galata Tower, lit up and full of life like a good nightlife corridor of any great city but still authentically Turkish in its focus. At a bar recommended by an Istanbul-savvy friend I watch the Turks edge Kosovo for a berth in this summer’s World Cup, and frankly expected more flag-waving and honking horns than I got. Latin America this is not.

No, this is Istanbul: forever its own thing, perhaps the city that, more than any earth, captures all of humanity’s competing interests and hungers. Toward faith and worldly power, between natural beauty and centuries of accumulated urban form, a national culture and a home in the world. It may tip one way or another with the times, but it will go on, because it is a monument built both to and upon those grey zones we all occupy. After plowing through all its sites over four days, I sink to a rest my aching legs at a fountain beneath the Galata Tower and grin at the pace I’ve set so far. On to the next stop.

Part 3 is here.

Europe 2026, Part I: A Byzantine Quest

This is part one of a seven-part series.

My charge to myself over two weeks across late March and early April 2026: travel in through the Sublime Porte and out through the Brandenburg Gate. Meander across Europe (with an Asian cameo) for two weeks. Istanbul, Budapest, Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, all in quick succession. This trip is a push outward, away from languages I speak and the now beloved comforts of the western Mediterranean, to the very borderlands of the West itself. I undertake the venture alone, to better gauge where this thing I call myself is right now.

I can impose certain narratives on why I go on this journey, but in the end my destinations are a bunch of cities that are reasonably close to each other that may be able to meet my appetite in the spring of 2026. This trip idea survived the cut as others proved difficult for one logistical reason or another. I could say this stems from a unique restlessness; the past year has been an unspeakably weird one, professionally and personally, and it invites certain questions. But it’s just as much the case that I have more of the means to scratch an eternal itch now, and so I do.

I start on the east end, against the grain of old Orient Express fantasies; somehow it was dramatically cheaper to go this direction, but as the trip goes on, my ordering grows on me. I dive right in to the most radical destination first, settle into comfort and an easier pace as I tire. This journey follows a line through the history of Europe, from its pivot eastward after the fall of Rome on through Habsburg Austria and then into modern Germany, ground zero for the twentieth century’s greatest and grisliest dramas. Each stage tells a different tale.

I whet my appetite during an eight-hour layover in Amsterdam. A seamless trip through customs, a 15-minute train ride to Centraal station; walk out the doors and, suddenly, it’s Europe. I saunter along bustling shopping streets on a brisk spring day and then an afternoon strolling the canals. I was last here twenty years ago, as a teenager, and found Amsterdam edgy with its legal weed and red light district. Now it seems the edge has caught and surpassed the Dutch capital, and it is just a charming European city. It’s time to venture out to a different edge.

No city has straddled the line between East and West as much as Istanbul. It sits astride two continents, has been one of the great seats of both Christian and Muslim power. It was arguably the center of world for 1,500 years between the christening of Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire’s decline; even in late-stage Byzantium, after its sacking by fellow Christian crusaders in 1204, it remained a golden relic, the ultimate prize for the Turks as they tightened their vise. Today it tips between the first and third worlds, a bustling metropolis of 16 million, the capital in all but name for a state that is trying, stumbling, to understand how a glorious past can fit with a respectable but uncertain present.

I stay at the south end of the Beyoglu district in the Hotel Nordstern Galata, a grand old thing from the Ottoman gilded age. My room has a vaulted ceiling and extensive filigrees, and a rooftop terrace for breakfasts overlooks the Galata Bridge across the Golden Horn and the old city beyond it. Lively restaurants are up the hill by the Galata Tower, ferry docks are a two-minute walk away, and a tramway that heads straight for the Fatih district, home to the city’s greatest Byzantine and Ottoman wonders, is across the street. It is the ideal launch point for someone prone to wander, and for all Istanbul’s great sites, some of my favorite parts of this visit come from simply strolling about.

I begin my tours of Istanbul on a very wet day, which gives a character to the “melancholy of the ruins” Orhan Pamuk describes in his own wanderings of back alleys in Istanbul: Memories and the City, the Nobel laureate’s biography of his hometown. This is a city that has suffered a great fall from grace, and out of that picturesque ruin, writes Pamuk, “history has endowed it with an accidental beauty.” I gaze up at crumbling terraces, smile at the cats perched atop cars, peek down damp, chill side streets at Turks who gaze back, wondering if this white boy is lost. (He is not.) Istanbul is short on squalid poverty and has quality public transit; nowhere in my wanderings, which at times stray off the designated tourist routes, do I ever feel unsafe. But it also has that layer of chaos absent in the West, encumbered by both its deep historical trappings and the more recent puttering pace of development, spared the worst of the instability consuming its southern, eastern, and even northern neighbors but still understandably pulled toward the realms of its religious and ethnic roots as much as it is toward that cultured European dream it has sometimes sought out as well.

Now and then melancholy fades away, though: Istanbul can be resplendent, and never more so than when on the waters that feed its eternal power. I cruise the Bosphorus on ferries that snake their way through the steady traffic between the Mediterranean and Black Seas. By the second afternoon the rain and clouds have faded away, and the strait shimmers in the sun; a soft sea haze looms over the great mosques and gifts them a silvery sheen, and as the sun heads downward, the Golden Horn lives up to its name. I set foot in Asia for the first time and agree that it is, in fact, very crowded, though if I lived here I too would crowd down on a waterfront promenade on an afternoon like this.

I’ll take my tour through Istanbul chronologically. The Byzantines have, somehow, become the lost empire that most allures me. It is a fascination born on a hot summer day in Ravenna with a visit to the mosaics of San Vitale, and from there I have found myself diving down Wikipedia pages on the empire that is Western history’s forgotten bridge, the tie that binds between the Greeks and the Romans and on to the Ottomans and the Russians. For a thousand years after the fall of Western Rome, the eastern empire lived on, its line effectively unbroken in these Greek-speaking Christians. Their power waxed and waned but their imperial longevity was remarkable; perhaps the longest ever in years after Christ, depending on how one counts one’s Chinese dynasties. On their way out the door they planted the seeds of the Renaissance in Western Europe and the rise of a Slavic identity in the east, and even Mehmed the Conqueror, after vanquishing them in 1453, assumed the title of kayser-i rum, as did every Ottoman sultan thereafter. They deserve a bit more love.

The Byzantines’ great architectural triumph is the Hagia Sofia, Emperor Justinian’s temple that aimed to outdo Solomon. Today, I mutter, it is the Hagia Scaffoldia, its great floating dome and two of four minarets surrounded by supports, a massive temporary support structure extending up the central nave to the blocked off dome. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s re-designation of the great house of worship as a mosque after a period as a museum consigns us tourists to the second level, where we make a slow circuit of the gallery and gaze up at what we can see of the ceiling. Mosaics and brilliant frescoes, part lost to time and anti-iconoclasm of both Christian and Muslim varieties, peek forth and hint at past reaches toward heaven. Even in this constrained state it groans with the weight of history, the accumulated ascensions of emperors and sultans and holy wars launched from this site, the world’s largest house of worship for 600 years. Awe is the only appropriate response.

Look around elsewhere in Istanbul and the Byzantines linger. Below the acropolis sits the Basilica Cistern, an echoing cavern of columns over a dimly lit pool. Further west, the Theodosian Walls are arguably the greatest defensive structure in history, never breached even by the monstrous Ottoman cannons. (The only conquests of Constantinople were mustered by the Fourth Crusaders breaking the otherwise effective defensive chain drawn across the Golden Horn, and the Ottomans undertaking an arduous haul of ships over land to drop them into the Golden Horn behind the chain.) Even now much of these great defenses remains intact, still separating the original Constantinople from its later additions. A snippet of the old Byzantine palace complex along the walls at Blachernae, the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus, has only recently been restored. On a whim, I stroll in and climb the Theodosian Walls for a commanding view of the old and new cities, and learn how these ruins turned to kilns for pottery and fine craftsmanship in the Ottoman years.

In the shadow of the Theodosian Walls is the Chora Church, identifiable as Byzantine by its red brick walls and buttresses, and its wealth of frescoes can be measured both in volume and in intimacy. Like the Hagia Sofia, the Chora has been converted by Erdogan and is now the Kariye Mosque, but here us nonbelievers are still allowed into the back of the nave, and I can sit on the carpet and look up at the handful of frescoes (with screens that come down to cover the icons during services) and pet the stray cat that wanders up and purrs in my lap. Perhaps my favorite day on this entire trip is this one, where I spontaneously wander Istanbul’s back alleys to find these old Byzantine gems.

Byzantine Constantinople is not fully dead, either. A block behind the thoroughfare along the Golden Horn in the Fener district, easily missed by the unfamiliar, is the Patriarchal Church of St. George, home to the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, the nominal head of the Orthodox church. The current structure is only 200 years old but oozes history, has the feel of living, breathing space that hides secrets, some mysterious truth deep within its liturgy. Here presides Bartholomew I, head of the third-largest church in the world, though his defense of Ukraine has caused a schism with his Russian counterparts. I saw Bartholomew speak when I was an undergraduate, and the gravity of his remarks has lingered, even after 15 years. The Patriarch is a throwback leader who remembers the postwar years, knows loss and the value of fragile cooperation across cultures. Now that I have seen Istanbul, I understand why the Patriarch holds such things so deeply.

Yes, my Istanbul post is so long it had to be split into two. Part Two is here.

Island Vignettes

I. Peregrinations

Climb aboard a plane. Shoot over a snow-dusted heartland, over the brain coral of the Appalachian hills and the long, aged spines of its mountains, over the Carolina coastal plain with its tidewater veins and then a long, sun-kissed expanse of ocean spackled by the shadows of clouds. I am off to St. Thomas again, hosted by Uncle Chuck and Aunt Monica at L’Esperance and joined by my mom and her partner and cousin David.

The actuarial tables of travel catch up with me again. Do it enough and things will go wrong, and this time, bad winds for landing cause a diversion to San Juan. Sun Country hotel vouchers are a fiasco and we wind up in a gated ground floor of a spare apartment in the city, a few blocks from a street shut off by police cars and a canine unit. It’s enough to sketch out most travelers.

A few ladies hold a casual party at the apartment next door, and it pulls at something deep within. I am eleven years old at a compound in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where a group of Minnesota college students study abroad and I am in the room next to the kitchen where I wake every morning to that same pitter-patter of Spanish chatter and laughter, those clattering dishes, those nourishing smells of baking food. Later, as a college student myself, I stumble down cobbled Mexican streets with an eclectic crew of kids from around the world, in search of a hostel and hear those same giggles, that same gentle teasing; later again they are reborn along the narrow lanes of an old Spanish city core. This easy soundtrack echoes through memory, puts me at peace. I am in good hands, perhaps only ever truly content as an object in motion.

II. Big Boats

From a perch at L’Esperance above the harbor, we watch the traffic come and go. Somewhere between one and five cruise ships visit Charlotte Amalie every day. They have grown in size over the years, disgorging ever more tourists, the islands left in a strange lurch of activity that settles down each evening. The long-term visitors go out for dinner and the locals party the night away. The carnivals of leisure cycle through, less the fresh joy of discovery in a European port of call and more of a drift through bars and shops that could, with some choice exceptions, be anywhere. Paradise, Incorporated.

On the Thursday of my week on St. Thomas, the USS Stockdale powers into port. This AEGIS destroyer has spent recent years guarding commerce on the Red Sea from Houthi rebels, though it recently joined the Caribbean buildup that accompanied the ouster of Venezuelan despot Nicolás Maduro. It sits in Crown Bay next to Royal Caribbean’s Independence of the Seas, dwarfed by the pleasure cruise craft. The twin faces of empire, a reminder of the force that makes possible the leisure on St. Thomas, and the reason the U.S. collected these islands from the Danish during World War I. That treaty forsook an American claim to Greenland, and while I cannot comment on the relative value of any rare earth metals, I will say the beaches that treaty brought beneath the stars and stripes are much better than the alternative down the road not taken.

III. Billionaires

Laurance Rockefeller purchased most of St. John, the third-largest of the Virgins, in 1952. He later donated nearly all of his holdings for the creation of Virgin Islands National Park, and he developed a hotel on Caneel Bay on land leased from the National Park Service. The Caneel Bay Resort was a world-class gem design to be one with the coastline, an eco-conscious masterpiece that shunned technology and rightly revolved on one of the most beautiful stretches of sand in the world.

Hurricane Irma demolished the resort in 2017. Ever since it has been trapped in development hell, swiftly swallowed by fast-growing trees and gnarled vines just like St. John’s old slave plantations before. Myriad questions from the NPS lease to cleanup from 60s-era building materials loom over its future.

Jeffrey Epstein purchased Little St. James, an islet off Pillsbury Sound between St. Thomas and St. John, in 1998. For over 20 years it was the base of his most lurid operations, a steady procession of gilded elites and underage girls funneled through, his crimes an open secret among the islanders. In 2016, he added Great St. James to his collection.

Since Epstein’s death and disgrace, another billionaire, Stephen Deckoff, has purchased the islands from Epstein’s estate for $60 million. A proposed luxury hotel is trapped in development hell, unable to get off the ground despite its backer’s resources.

Some of the Virgin Islands’ billionaires aspire to preserve a natural and human heritage for posterity; some use its covers to hide the greatest depravities they can engineer. Others, like Deckoff, just try to profit from it, a money man doing what a money man does. But in the end, it seems the islands always win.

IV. Rituals

We enter the battle with the islands for a day of brush clearing on St. John, as we always do on Tuesdays here. Uncle Chuck is in his element with the Friends of the National Park, chatting botany and pointing out the monkey-no-climb he told fellow volunteers to spare several years back that has now shot up and become a healthy tree.

On this day we clear out the Reef Bay Great House, a sugar plantation relic now enveloped by a scourge known variously as coral vine and Mexican creeper. We hack back the jungle and restore some of its complex grandeur. Such as we can: a lintel along the portico now dangles in the breeze, its threat to pull down one side of the façade held only by a single strand of rebar. There is little chance of any stabilization from NPS, and a tragic fate for the Great House’s tragic legacy. But for now there is an easy satisfaction in passing on this privilege I enjoy, to cut out windows on to memory and beauty in a place where people come for joy and escape.

Later in the week, David and I return to St. John. We hike around Lind Point and up Caneel Hill, achieve commanding views of Cruz Bay and a descent to the ruins of Caneel and a splash into the ocean at Salomon Beach, a slice of white sand accessible only by trail or boat. Along the whole way the trail shows the fruits of the volunteer labor. A few cuts from catch-and-keep are a small price to pay, a little blood left to feed that lifeblood.

The other routines are less taxing: open up the villa, let in the breeze, wake to the sun’s long fingers creeping over the hill and in through the glass door to the balcony. Lay in sand and play in waves: Lindquist Bay, Hull Bay, a stroll down the streets of Charlotte Amalie. Make the circuit through the bars, order a Booty Call and get lei’d at Duffy’s, meet the same Minnesota waitress at two establishments, encounter the Islands’ finest purveyor of hose.

After long days on St. John we return to L’Esperance, where happy hour is a sacred rite. The sun plunges to the horizon and bathes Charlotte Amalie in a hazy sheen. The bell dings, the bottles pop open, ice tipped into glasses and drinks mixed. We set aside our books and our phones and hold forth: the day’s details, adventures past and future, the vagaries of island life. That happy hour bell is a call to drink, but it also breaks down that retreat into self, separates spaces for quiet and for community, both necessary in a well-rounded life. Pour me another, please, and again find that ease.

V. Inflection Points

My last time in the Virgin Islands my work life was in the process of blowing up as a regime change reoriented how things could be done. The previous time was deep in a pandemic. This time there are fewer lingering worries, easier roads to bliss.

It is thus to my great annoyance that I find myself facing writer’s block on the Hull Bay beach. I should be basking and letting my pen flow and yet the block nags, irks, makes one wonder if this is maybe too perfect or if I am just too easily knocked off my game. Things should flow naturally but they do not. I cannot absorb what the beach offers, assume that oneness that comes with the territory here. Distractions too easy, desires too fierce? Paralysis in the face of challenge? Nah. I just have to remember what the islands have already taught me.

I think back to my pandemic era escape here. I recognize now that it was a line in the canyon for me, a moment in which, when isolation anomie threatened to grind me down, I chose not to let it and instead struck outward. That journey put me on path toward being the world wanderer I long wanted to be, began infusing within me the self-assurance I always wished to have. In recent years I have looked at times for other lines in the canyon—a work life shift here, a memorable trip there; even that ultimate canyon line, a long-term relationship—and realized that all of those things, while attainable, are found somewhere along this rugged, sweaty, hunger-fueling hike on St. John. I embody the pursuit. Follow the path and the rest will come.

On that trip I read Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet. For reasons unclear to me I had previously thought I was not ready to read it. (These deep intuitions, I have learned, are things I should trust: even if they do not work out, I do not regret them, and they have delivered for me more than ever in the past year.) By that trip, I was indeed ready.

True it is I have climbed great hills and walked in remote places.

How could I have seen you save from a great height or great distance?

How can one be indeed near unless he be far?

At the end of The Prophet the poem’s namesake sails on from the city where he preached, on to the next adventure. I pick up a book on Byzantium and get ready for my next journey, too.

Gateways and Arrivals

Arrival in Florida feels like one prolonged wait. Upon landing in Miami, my mom and I undertake an arduous trek to the rental cars. A four-hour drive means our entrance to the Keys comes in darkness, a journey across suburban strips and swamp and long, lonely bridges into the night. We are on a journey to celebrate my mother’s retirement, freed from city politics and social service provision after many long years at the Duluth Public Library. We’d planned a version of this trip in April 2020, but after the world intervened then, we are now free to do it well.

At the end of the bridges sits Key West, a land of tasteful bungalows and grand verandas, the whole island colored by a tropical languor, the stately repose of a retreat at the end of the road. Grey skies put it in a sense of slumber, a promise not quite fulfilled upon arrival. We are here midweek in the offseason, but the party goes on every night at Sloppy Joe’s and Captain Tony’s and a few dozen other tiki bars along its main drag. Duval Street is a Bourbon Street for middle aged white people, live guitars in every bar and beer and cocktails around every corner. A power boat race is in town this week, with souped up trucks to match; just about every man looks like he is here to fish. Here there is some risk of paradise as a commodity, a repeat soundtrack of Bob Marley and Jimmy Buffett, endless references to the drinking that will happen here. I am not here to fish. I am here to have a few drinks, but we are not exactly set on shutting down the bars, either. I am not really here to escape, but instead to take a pause that lets me write, be with the companion I’ve traveled with more than anyone.

We take up rooms at the Eden House east of the city center. The rooms themselves are tight ground floor spaces, but I am of the camp that doesn’t much care about the interior of a hotel room beyond the basics: it is a launching point to go do other things. The Eden House’s pool deck has seating for all types, and a second story veranda is the hotel’s steal, one of those venues for Southern graciousness that is too often lost from later architecture. I sit out here and write three ways at once, this post and a possible follow-up and some musings on where my fiction goes from here. This town has punched above its weight as a retreat for writers for over a century, and I can only dream to catch a hint of that inspiration.

The Hemingway House is the highlight of Key West. The 61 cats prowl about and the writing studio sits in repose, books and typewriters and trophies from a life without limits, mementos of boxing and bullfights and fishing trips and safaris far afield. Here I find some of that awe, this time at that masculinity unleashed: the women and the parties for a warrior and a thinker, a man drawn to the questions of his time and the places where the action was, his pursuit straight up to the edge and then straight over it because what other way is there to live? Here the old man met the sea, fought it at times, churned out many of his greatest hits. He produced a legacy that smashes the underlying tragedy. The cost may or may not have been inevitable but it is a reality and it does just boost the mystique.

Ernest Hemingway’s crisp clarity defined modernity, his simple precision that can lead a 21st century reader to swoon about trout fishing in the hills above Pamplona or bring a pack of Two Hearted Ale to the mouth of the Two Hearted River in Michigan. (Yes, I have done this.) Joan Didion taught herself to write by copying down his sentences, and I have taught myself to write by toying with Joan Didion’s work. Of course from certain lenses Hemingway’s life can now be judged or even canceled; artistry with prose faces some headwinds in a flattened world of AI summaries and messages dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. Moreover the Hemingway mystique can swallow the human tale beneath, the depression coursing through his work turned into some tragic heroism that satisfies a certain narrative of tortured genius. As a writer whose instincts are not all that depressive I wonder if I’m missing some key ingredient that I would prefer to never have, but I decide I can make do with that tradeoff.

The cherished home of a long-departed author underscores the permanence of words. Sure, the novel may lack the cultural power it had in Papa’s prime. But fifty years from now no one will be watching TikToks made in 2025. They will still be reading Hemingway. Putting down words creates a record, both in print and in type, that the ephemeral world of live video does not. Of course there are some snippets that will last, but the power to both capture and interpret, provide witness and critical distance, will remain all the stronger.

It would be easy to look around at the denizens of Key West and draw a harsh divide: us few, proud people of words who stand athwart the vapid party, immune to the siren call of the anomie of endless swipes. On a certain level I do believe some version of this argument: that is the point of a conviction. But there can still be pathways in for anyone, and pulling up the drawbridge to hold on to a snooty high culture isn’t going to change it. I instead prefer to own it, sit on a beach reading or writing and make it look good, share the best snippets here and there. And for anyone looking for a way in, Hemingway’s deceptively simple prose and chasing of great adventures isn’t a bad place to start.

Slowly, Key West shows more as we scrape beneath the surface. We visit Judy Blume’s bookstore, wander in search of beers and a spot on the beach beneath a soft curtain of an Australian pine’s wispy needles. Truman’s summer White House is here, and the ferry to Dry Tortugas beckons for a future visit, perhaps when the campground facilities are not shuttered thanks to a government shutdown. We tour the Audubon House, never visited by its namesake but a keystone for the preservation of Key West’s grace, a spendy preservation movement that nonetheless keeps it a step removed from sinking into the tourist trap ensnaring much of the rest of the Keys. The Conch Republic puts in the effort to maintain its independence.

After three nights on Key West, we are on the move again. This, I think, is my style of travel: a meander up an island chain, flashes of both wilderness and city, parts unknown and the center of the action. As we drive up the Keys we stop at a state park for halfhearted snorkeling, a bit of beach time, a stroll up the old railroad bridge that first knitted the islands together. Later we pause at a roadside carnival show named Robbie’s, where we feed some tarpons and see some manatees and dodge the scavenging ibises and pelicans. From there we are off through the wet lowlands and back to Miami.

In Miami the skyline glows as warmly as many of the well-toned bodies, but for all the glaze it cannot quite hide how it is paving over a swamp. On our second to last day in Florida we immerse ourselves in that swamp and shoot up the Tamiami Trail, a 1920s causeway that colonized the interior of the Everglades. Even now, it is a wild place, the kind of locale an ambitious xenophobe would set up a migrant internment camp. (Sure enough, loud signs announce the presence of Alligator Alcatraz.) South Florida’s history is a series of battles against the rising waters, a desire to tame them and cut back that thick, oppressive brush to replace it with orderly rows of palm trees. This region’s boosters sought to roust the beasts who live in these swamps and the last people who hid away in these refuges, or at least tame them into a roadside attraction.

A circuit on the Big Cypress National Preserve’s loop road is a safari through a menagerie of birds, a few dozen alligators, and a slow roll through everything from dense watery forests to reedy cypress savannas to a tangled mass of endless scrub. It contains a wildness and a secrecy that the open West cannot match, the eyes only so much good in trying to explore it. Even a short hike on a nature trail leaves a little claustrophobia, a question of what might lie around the next bend, the mosquitoes rising up and some mysterious scat marking territory in the middle of the trail.

On the way out we visit the Miccosukee, a Native tribe that battled the U.S. government beside the Seminoles and later retreated deep into the swamp to retain some independence for as long as they could. Their roadside attraction of a village is sleepy today; the expected tour guide never appears. But the camp is well-tended, the museum behind carved alligator doors tells the story well enough, and a show demonstrating how to properly tame one of their rescue gators is a window into a different world.

Out of this landscape rises Miami, one of the nation’s largest metros. Miami’s story is an updated version of a very American story, a gateway city haphazardly absorbing immigrants. It has all of this country’s greatness and all its flaws: a rush of development, a hunger for freedom and parties and sexy bodies, out with the old and in with the new. It was famed for crime and coke in past generations but is now more of a place where people instead seek to properly model their bare chests or sports bras. With its borderland status comes tension as culture remains stubborn and ties to old countries complicate the politics. (Miami is one of the very few American cities that can still reliably elect Republicans to higher office, thanks largely to the particularities of the Cuban diaspora.) The beach gives it an allure that other Sun Belt cities cannot match; its closest analogue is LA, though it is more niche than LA, lacks its cultural power beyond the Hispanic community.

Within that community, though, Miami is everything. In my travels, I’ve learned that Latin Americans aspire to Miami as much as any American city. The heart of the allure is of course in economic opportunity, in political freedom, in glitz and glamor on the beach. But old ties are hard to break, and a visit to Little Havana is an object lesson: this neighborhood is home to a court in exile and a continuation of pure Cuba, of salsa rhythms and cigars and dominoes over cafecitos. Even with a collection of people branded with Royal Caribbean stickers strolling the streets, it feels alive, something carried forward and a place where a Hispanophile can feel very much at home.

Miami is a city of gleaming beachfront towers, but it is also home to graceful Art Deco neighborhoods from an earlier era, that great triumph of American architecture serving as the perfect backdrop for this modern-day white city. Beneath the gleaming façade, color explodes, and never more so than in Wynwood, where we spend two nights. Wynwood is gentrification central just north and west of downtown, the inevitable boxy apartment blocks and trendy restaurants crowding out the bedraggled old concrete single-story homes and empty lots. I linger on these grungy old homes, wonder what stories they have told over the decades, which immigrant lives may have launched from here. Even as Wynwood changes there is an easy drift between Spanish and English here, a dance between two worlds, and I wonder how well it will hold on to its art. Miami is strongest in the places where it keeps the tension alive.

This trip is a perfect escape to celebrate a retirement, to find some well-earned rest and adventure all at once and think about what might come next. For my part, I am not sure how high Florida is on my list for a return visit. It is a land of leisure, but not one of awe, and as a pursuer of awe this easy luxury will never quite be me. I am not drawn to resorts or creature comforts, the overly sanitized or scheduled trip. Vacations should be a little bit hard, and I don’t mind a little snow, I think as the season’s first snowflakes wander down on the drive north from Minneapolis.

On the beach on Key West I read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” This short story was the first Hemingway piece to capture my imagination, and like all good fiction, it tells us something that we do not know that we know. “Snows” is a writer’s lament for the things he has not yet written and may never write, a call to me to get to work. It is a confession of the fumbles with women drawn in by the Hemingway-style pursuit, with Harry in the tale pushing Helen in ways that both give her new meaning and wound her, Harry at once proud of her but still questioning the whole exercise. And it closes with a drift away from even the heaviest of earthly concerns on to greater heights, to beauty, to the white snows at the end of the line. There are so many worthy goals here, so much to unpack and to reach for. And with that, I write.

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.

A Patient Cycle

Karl Schuettler on Culture, Politics, and High School Hockey

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