steps

Photo by: goodpie

My employer rotates travel junkets among the editors and writers of our publication. The junkets have been increasing to the rate of one or two a month.

A few weeks ago I was asked if I was interested in taking one. Interested? Ecstatic and in heaven, is more like it.

I love travelling. The opportunity to combine travel and writing, as the opportunity to combine eating and writing, has always been one of those dreams I kept for an imaginery life. A dream that doesn't actually happen in the real world.

Many journalists scoff at travel and food writing as light, unimportant. Perhaps it is. It is not likely to change the course of history. But both can enlighten and expand minds, and that's not such a bad thing.

As Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, many years ago:

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel
for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

I travel when I open a book; I travel when I walk through my neighbourhood; I travel when I go to the cinema or watch TV. I travel when I listen to a person's story. Sometimes I travel in the same places through different seasons with the same people, themselves travelling, too.

And, in about a week and a half, I will be going on a junket to Manchester, England and Wales.

Pinch me!

ada blackjack

Photo by: okta'lonli

This past long -- and hot -- weekend I settled in my lawn chair on my 15th floor balcony and finished reading about an Inuit woman who was the sole human survivor of an Arctic expedition to Wrangel Island in the 1920's -- Ada Blackjack.

I say 'sole human', because the expedition's cat Vic, also lived.

Because of her heritage, this might not seem such an unusual event, but Blackjack went on the four-man expedition as a seamstress and was raised in the city of Nome with no experience in living off the land.

The author, Jennifer Niven, has painstakingly crafted a fine recreation of events, based on diaries, correspondence and documentation of the time.

Blackjack's story of survival on a piece of frozen tundra is remarkable. She was left alone with one of the men who was sick with scurvy as the other three men set off across the ice in search of aid after a promised relief ship never made it through the ice-packed waters.

She spent almost five months fending for herself and a dying man (and a slow, agonizing death from scurvy is about as hard as it gets.) She spent another two months alone, except for the cat, before a rescue ship appeared out of the icy fog.

A quiet, unremarkable woman in many ways, her story is fraught with underlying racism and sexism. She, and the four young men who lost their lives on the trip, were caught up in the ill-planning and self-promoting of a famed Arctic explorer. Her life after Wrangel Island was hard too, and mostly undocumented and sketchy, but the author found resources in Blackjack's surviving son. Blackjack emerges as a woman who kept going against all of the odds.

After her rescue she was vilified and taken advantage of by men -- and women -- seeking to make their name and fortune. The follow-up to her rescue is just as frightening and sobering as the time spent on the island -- in a different way. The dangers afterward lie in human manipulations.

Yet Blackjack, even if only out of rightful fear, survived their clutches as she had earlier survived being a hungry polar bear's next meal -- and always returned to her sons.

A story well told and worth telling.

day tripper, yeah*

Photo by: birdfreak.com

* (on a much less carnal track -- sigh -- than the Beatle's muse)

Went trippin' in my car again last Saturday through Durham County. It was the Civic Holiday weekend, so my empty roads were not empty.

But the fields and ditches and sides of the road were filled with Queen Anne's Lace nodding and swaying. Small yellow flowers and clover in bloom patched among the grasses. I wanted to get out of the car, find a field and lie down in the lacy fields, smelling the pungent, carrotlike ferns, as I did often as a child. Scents, even through the car windows, brought back childhood freedoms as children today often never know. Sitting, lying in fields, still, watching the sky and clouds above, the grasshopper on a nearby blade, a ladybug on another, and the earth at the height of its summer heat buzzing before the shift to autumn.

I drove a little too much this time and didn't get out of the car enough. Still haven't found a wild place to call my own.

The grain, two weeks ago at its height, had been harvested and baled in rectangles and rolls, across hills. I picked up some fresh corn and broccoli, but, it doesn't compare in sweetness to corn in Essex County.

On Scugog Island, found there are many, many roads to explore. The summer homes and water access are hidden there, away from the main road through working farms.

Another trip, another day ... yeah!