Saturday night I attended the “Ooh, La La, Lucie!” birthday party for a French-Canadian friend, formerly of Montreal, who flew back to California from Paris last Wednesday after spending three weeks in France. Lucie, of course, speaks French fluently. And English. And Italian. But you say to me: “What about you, mon petit cheri? How [...]
{ 6 comments }
“White Only.” “Colored.” What did these signs above the restrooms in the train station in the Deep South say to me? And what did they say to America? Separate, but equal? Fifty years later I revisited those questions.
{ 0 comments }
In the 1950′s I watched Tom Corbett, Space Cadet and Space Patrol on TV. And when I gazed up at Sputnik winking its way across the heavens in the dark October skies over Seattle two weeks before my eleventh birthday, I had no doubt that I, too, would soon be rocketing to the stars on [...]
{ 0 comments }
As a kid growing up in Seattle, I watched prototypes of the Boeing Airplane Company’s 707 jet passing over the city on test flights. Although a few years earlier I had flown from Seattle to Vancouver, B.C. aboard a United Airlines DC-6 propeller driven aircraft, my first ride through the skies on a jet would [...]
{ 0 comments }
I made my first two trips to Yosemite National Park in the winter or 1968. In the years that followed, I rambled around the edges of the Sierra Nevada range, and occasionally into the backcountry, on day hikes. For many moons, Ansel Adam’s haunting photo (at left) of the mountains that rise up just west [...]
{ 0 comments }
A few years back I began taking a new companion with me on my travels: The New Yorker. Not a denizen of, but the magazine that takes its name from, those who live in “The Big Apple.” Since then, The New Yorker has become one of my favorite “travel publications.” Here’s why, and how it [...]
{ 4 comments }
To Atlatl Bob, what makes humans different from other creatures is the ability to throw things. To his friend, travel writer Tim Cahill, it’s the ability to tell stories. They are both right. Here’s what I got from Tim’s remarks about travel writing, and the story he told about Atlatl Bob at the recently concluded [...]
{ 1 comment }
