Friends of a Long Year is a private mailing list bringing stories to your inbox like it's still 1995. It's written in the spirit of Mary Austin. It was originally called Place Without a Postcard, which does a better job of summarizing what I like to write about. Friends is delivered roughly twice a month.
Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado, U.S. – Dinosaur National Monument was poorly named. The best parts of it are not the fossils in the quarry (which is closed for 2010 anyway) but the canyon country — some of the best, most remote canyon country you'll find in this part of the world.
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, U.S. – There is wilderness in Yellowstone, even if it's just inches from the boardwalks that transport thousands around the geothermal pools.
Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, U.S. – Hiking into the wilderness empties your mind. You fall into the silence of the mountains and you can relax in a way that's very difficult to do in the midst of civilization. The white noise that surrounds us in our everyday lives, that noise we don't even notice as it adds thin layers of stress that build up over days, weeks, years, does not seem capable of following us into the mountains.
Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado, U.S. – Something about the desert inspires me to get up early and watch the sunrise. The cool mornings seem worth getting up for out here in the high plains of Colorado, especially when there's the chance to watch the sunrise from the largest sand dunes in North America, here in Great Sand Dune National Park.
Comanche National Grasslands, Colorado, U.S. – To say the Comanche National Grasslands is off the grid would be an understatement. With the exception of Highway 50 in Nevada, I've never driven through such isolation and vast openness anywhere in the world. And it's easy to get lost. There are no signs, no road names even, just dirt paths crisscrossing a wide, perfectly flat expanses of grass.
Amarillo, Texas, U.S. – There are many reasons, but here's the one I currently consider most important: National Parks never close. Take Palo Dura State park outside of Amarillo, Texas. Were it a National Park, I would be there right now. But it's not, it's a state park and so I'm sitting in a hotel room in Amarillo because everyone knows nature closes at 10PM.
Hico, Texas, U.S. – History rarely offers neat, tidy stories. But the messier, more confusing and more controversial the story becomes, the more it works its way into our imaginations. The legend of Billy the Kid is like that of Amelia Earhart or D.B. Cooper — the less we know for sure, the more compelling the story becomes.
New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S. – New Orleans is it's own world. So much so that's it's impossible to put your finger on what it is that makes it different. New Orleans is a place where the line between consensus reality and private dream seems to have never fully developed. And a wonderful world it is.
Gulf Port, Mississippi, U.S. – It's travel time again. This time I'm driving my 1969 Ford truck out west, to Texas, Colorado, Utah and more — a road trip around the western United States. The first stop is Gulf Port, Mississippi. It's hard to believe, sitting here on the deserted beaches of Gulf Shore, watching the sun break through the ominous clouds, but soon this beauty will be gone. The BP oil spill is somewhere out there, blown slowly ashore by the storm hovering over us, waiting to drown the beaches in crude.
Los Angeles, California, U.S. – Los Angeles is all about the car. Shiny, air-conditioned comfort, gliding you soundlessly from one place to another without the need to interact with anything in between. But I have discovered that if you abandon the car for the subway and your own two feet, the illusion that L.A. is just a model train set world — tiny, plastic and devoid of any ground beneath the ground — fades and you find yourself, for a time, in a real city.
Death Valley, California, U.S. – Watching the sun rise over Zabriskie Point in Death Valley National Park, wondering why I have never been here before.
Okefenokee Swamp, Georgia, U.S. – A canoe trip through the Okefenokee Swamp down in the southern most corner of Georgia. Paddling the strange reddish and incredibly still waters. Begging alligators, aching muscles and the kindly folks of Stintson's Barbecue all getting their due.
Athens, Georgia, U.S. – How do you make the leap from cubicle daydreams to life on to the road? You want to travel the world, but, like me, you have a million excuses stopping you. How do overcome the inertia that keeps you trapped in a life that isn't what you want it to be? Here's a few practical tips and how tos designed to motivate you to get off your butt and travel the world.
Athens, Georgia, U.S. – We mythologize trains because they harken back to an age of community travel, a real, tangible community of travelers, not just backpackers, but people from all walks of life, people traveling near and far together in a shared space that isn't locked down like an airplane and isn't isolated like a car; it's a shared travel experience and there are precious few of those left in our world.
Birmingham, Alabama, U.S. – A few pages from Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks make a rare trip outside Italy, to Birmingham, AL, of all places. But the Birmingham Museum of Art is home to far more alarming works of art, works which depict the eventual, inevitable, bunny takeover, after which all the elements of our reality will be replaced by bunnies. Seriously. You heard it here first.
Great Smoky Mountains, Tennessee, U.S. – Pigeon Forge is Myrtle Beach in the mountains. Redneck weddings cascade straight out of the chapel and into the mini golf reception area. Pigeon Forge is everything that's wrong with America. But we aren't here for Pigeon Forge, it just happens to have a free condo we're staying in. We're here for the mountains. Smoky Mountain National Park is just a few miles up the road.
Mountain Cabin, Georgia, U.S. – Two weekends ago we went up to the mountains, just outside of Dahlonega GA, and floated the Chestatee River using inner tubes, various pool toys and one super-cool inflatable seahorse. Unfortunately, proving one of my travel mottos -- you can never go back -- a return trip proved disastrous.
Athens, Georgia, U.S. – Why all the vitriol about a seemingly innocuous concept -- that traveling doesn't have to cost a lot of money, isn't all that difficult and hey, you can even go right now? People like us, who feel tied down by responsibility, find the suggestion that we actually aren't tied down patronizing and yes, elitist.
Athens, Georgia, U.S. – The trees are in full technicolor swing. The land is slowly dying, and not just because it's Fall, we're also in the middle of a prolonged drought and this year the leaves are opting for a James Dean-style, leave-a-good-looking-corpse exit. If you're a leaf and you've got to go, do it with class.
Catalina Island, California, U.S. – Consider what would happen if your house were tilted 30 degrees to the left, how this would complicate ordinary activities -- like say walking. Now throw in a bouncing motion that lifts the floor five or six feet up and down in a seesaw-like motion on a perpendicular axis to the 30 degree tilt -- things become more like riding a seesaw that's attached to a merry-go-round which is missing a few bolts. That's sailing.
Myrtle Beach Airport, South Carolina, U.S. – Myrtle Beach does not exist. Nearly everything in Myrtle Beach is a paltry derivative of some original form. For instance, most of the country has golf courses, in Myrtle Beach there are endless rows of putt-putt courses, where most towns attempt to draw in big name musical acts for their tourist venues, Myrtle Beach is content with impersonators.
Charleston, South Carolina, U.S. – The rumors are true. I moved back to the south; Athens GA to be exact. But I hate staying in one place for too long, so after a month or two in Athens I headed up to Charleston to visit a friend. The south is curious place. If you've never been here I couldn't hope to explain it, but it's not so much a place as an approach. A way of getting somewhere more than anywhere specific. Perhaps even a wrong turn.
Los Angeles, California, U.S. – It's strange how you can plan something, go through all the motions of making it happen without ever really understanding what you're doing. I've been doing this for the better part of three years now. I realized recently that I have no real idea how I came to be here.
Los Angeles, California, U.S. – I don't know if I'm just overly paranoid but when I call up memories in the dark hours of the Beaujolais-soaked pre-dawn, I see a collection of mildly amusing, occasionally painful series of embarrassments, misunderstandings and general wrong-place, wrong-time sort of moments. Which isn't to imply that my life is a British sitcom, just that I'm not in a hurry to re-live any of it.