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Around the block a few times

July 11, 2026
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I’m now 78 and I’ve done a few things in my life. Probably most people have. Things they can list that few others have managed. Places visited; people who have impacted their lives; adventures to recount to grandchildren. 

And so I think back to recount my own experiences, those particular to my own past. Maybe others have similar lists. This is mine. 

I’ve been charged by a bear, for instance. How many people can say that? I was hiking the Appalachian Trail in Smoky Mountain National Park with a few friends. By late afternoon, we reached a lean-to shelter and I walked out onto the path with my camera, when a black bear — maybe two or three years old — crossed the trail about 30 feet from me, spotted me, didn’t like what he saw and turned and charged at me. He was no more than five feet away when he veered off to my right and chugged off into the woods. I was stupid enough that while he came at me, instead of running back to the shelter, I took photos, so at least now, I have the evidence. If it’s a tad fuzzy, I’m sure you can understand. 

Certainly the bear makes my list. But I tried remembering other things that would make the list of things peculiar to my life, that few people are unlikely to have shared.

Almost no one now crosses the Atlantic on an ocean liner. I did, in 1966 aboard the MS Oslofjord from New York to Norway, when I accompanied my grandmother to the Old Country where she was born. I was a high-school student at the time, and I remember standing on the ship’s deck watching the Orkney Island lights at midnight, bright points on the black horizon as we sailed past. 

There’s a lot of travel in my past. I’ve crossed the U.S. twice by train. Once when I moved from North Carolina to Seattle, taking the Southern Crescent from Greensboro to New York, the Twentieth Century Limited from NY to Chicago and the Empire Builder from Chicago to Seattle. 

The Southern Crescent

I recall the dreamlike lights of Toledo factories as we passed after midnight; the 10-below zero air when I stretched my legs at the station in Minneapolis; the vast empty spaces between farmhouses in South Dakota; and the track-side elk watching the train pass by near Yakima, Wash. 

The second time was more luxurious: Working for the Phoenix newspaper, I was assigned to write a story about the then newly-launched Sunset Limited route from LA to Miami that passed through Phoenix, bringing the first rail service to the city in decades. 

The paper flew me to Los Angeles where I boarded, and flew me back from Miami when finished. In between, I had a sleeper compartment and ate my meals in the dining car, which Amtrak had fitted out initially with a first-class galley and real chefs. That didn’t last long after my trip, before cost-cutting turned steak into saran-wrapped bologna sandwiches. 

Mississippi at Cairo, Ill. 

One of my beats at the newspaper was as a travel writer and I got to choose many of my subjects. I have driven the length of the Mississippi River from its source at Lake Itasca in Minnesota to its end in the Gulf of Mexico. So, I’m one of the few people who have ever visited Cairo, Ill., which is a largely deserted town, at the tip of the state where the Ohio River pairs with the grandfather of all American waters. 

I have also driven the Pacific Coast Highway from Tijuana, Mexico to Vancouver, British Columbia. And as part of that trip, I got to stop off at Point Roberts, that tiny exclave of the U.S. that can only be reached overland by driving through parts of Canada. Virtually nobody visits there, because there is nothing to be seen or done, and the only reason to go there is to be able to say you had done so. 

Back before the wilder parts of the road were closed to traffic, I drove the length of Mulholland Drive and Highway, across the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains, from its beginning at the Hollywood Freeway over Cahuenga Pass, past all the film stars’ extravagant homes into the brushland wilderness, with its dirt roads, and finally down to the Pacific Coast Highway at Leo Carillo State Beach, some 55 miles later. 

I pitched a story to my editor about the Hundredth Meridian that traditionally divided the East of the country from the West — the line that separated the land that got more than 20 inches of rain per year, from that which got under that amount. I drove from Laredo, Texas to the Canadian border, writing stories the whole way. And when I got back, I conspired with a page designer to take over an entire Sunday travel section with my pieces — all without telling my editor. “If you had told me, I would never have permitted it,” she said. “But I’m glad you did it. I looks great.” Easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

Clearing storm, Mont St. Michel

I have been many places in my life. I’ve been to Mont Saint-Michel in France, that island abbey on the coast of Normandy, where the tides come in at such a speed that anyone walking on the mud flats at low tide is in danger of drowning. I’ve been to see the Bayeux Tapestry in its current home. I’ve listened to the organist at Notre Dame de Paris play a recital of Messiaen. 

Two views of gargoyle rainspout at Chartres Cathedral

I’ve climbed to the top of Chartres Cathedral, where I could look down at the gargoyle rainwater drains and see their channels and spouts. For that matter, I’ve visited most of the major gothic churches of northern France. 

I stood at night on the banks of the Rhine River in Dusseldorf, German, where the composer Robert Schumann had lived and written his deeply romantic Rhenish Symphony. The rushing current of the mile-wide river, catching moonlight in its waves, seemed the essence and power of  nature. 

Cape of Good Hope, South Africa

I had always had an interest in the remote and isolated places in the world, and I got to visit the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, which is as remote and isolated as you can pretty much get. While in that country, I also got to taste grilled mopane worms. Few Americans have managed that, or would care to. 

I’ve been to Hudson Bay in Canada, to Percé Rock on the Gaspe Peninsula, to Glacier Bay in Alaska, to the Yukon, and to the Cape Verde Islands (although that one hardly counts, since it was a layover on the flight to Africa; I didn’t get to see much; bragging rights only). 

I have been to all 48 contiguous states many times. I used to say “I’ve been everywhere, man, I’ve been everywhere.” And indeed, I can bore my wife when watching some film on TV and I recognize locations I’ve been. “I’ve been there,” I say. She gives me the side-eye. 

I’ve canoed with alligators in the Okefenokee Swamp. Driven through Death Valley in July in a car with no air-conditioning — nearly collapsed from dehydration and had to drink a full gallon of water to revive.  

Zabriskie Point, Death Valley, Calif. 

I have driven the length of the Blue Ridge Parkway I don’t know how many times, and the continuing Skyline Drive, also. There are notable roads, often over mountain peaks, such as the Going-to-the-Sun Road in Montana’s Glacier National Park, the Beartooth Highway from Montana into Wyoming (we drove in the summer, but it still snowed in flurries), the Tioga Road over the Sierra Nevada. Or the roads in the East like the Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire, the Natchez Trace from Mississippi to Tennessee, and the Colonial Parkway that runs from Jamestown to Yorktown in Virginia. Many more with no special names.

Richard Avedon

I took photographer Richard Avedon out to lunch at my favorite  Salvadoran restaurant in Phoenix. I interviewed Duke Ellington’s son, Mercer, when he brought the band to play in Phoenix. I talked to him only about his own music (sure that he was tired of repeating all the chestnuts about his old man), and at the concert, he dedicated a performance of his  Blue Serge to me, saying the band hadn’t played it in 20 years, but they brought it out and spiffied it up just for me. I knew Frederick Sommer, the reclusive Surrealist photographer who lived in Prescott, Ariz., and visited his home several times, where we talked about things that would have made no sense to anyone listening in. 

I’ve fired guns a few times over the years, once when I was training to be a security guard (a low point in my career), and several times at black-powder gatherings. My wife had a flintlock carbine that I had the pleasure of firing. A lot of smoke and a loud, brusque “whoosh” rather than a cracking “bang,” and a .50 caliber ball blew out the barrel at the target. 

Yes, that’s me, ca. 1981

I worked at the zoo in Seattle, and most days, when the place closed for the public, I would accompany the bear keeper to the back alleys behind the exhibits and feed leftover food-stand hot dogs to the grizzly bears. We were behind the enclosure, about 20 feet above the bears. They would stand up, open their maws and we would toss the franks down their gullets. No swallowing, just straight down the chute to the stomach. 

Behind them was the back entrance to the tiger cage, with a small barred door to get in when the keeper needed to clean up. When a tiger came to the door, I saw what felt like the most enormous thing I had ever seen, its giant head, bigger than my imagination could hold, and when he “purred” the ground shook. I would rank that the single most impressive thing I’ve ever encountered. 

That zookeeper was my friend, and he once commented to me about the crowds, “You see all those kids, don’tcha just want to run them all over?” 

There were many more zoo stories, but most are not suitable for family reading. But more animals: I once had a six-foot boa constrictor wrapped around my neck. I visited the grave of Hopalong Cassidy’s horse, Topper, at the Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park in Calabasas, where you can also find Rudolph Valentino’s dog, Kaber, Petey, the ring-eyed dog from the “Our Gang” comedies, and Tarzan’s chimp Cheetah (real name Jiggs). 

I might also mention driving to Maine in 1963 to see the total eclipse of the sun, or having crossed the equator twice, and in Africa, seeing the Southern Cross and the constellation Orion in the night sky standing on his head, with his sword pointing straight up. 

Which reminds me of the night camping in the Outer Banks of North Carolina with my friend Sandro, and discovering that someone had forgotten to close and lock the door to the Hatteras lighthouse, and so we snuck in, climbed to the top, heard the roar, and watched the black surf below us catch the light. 

Or the time I climbed Roden Crater in Arizona with artist James Turrell, who was reshaping the extinct volcano to make an earthwork piece of art from the mountain. We were standing at the top as the sun set. “People talk of nightfall,” he said to me. “But they should call it nightrise, like sunrise.” Because, he pointed out, the night doesn’t descend, but rises, as a mass of dark sky climbs from the horizon in the east up into the sky, eating away the dusk. You can actually see the borderline as it rises, until all is dissolved in the general night. It is a startling effect that we don’t notice, because our horizons are generally blocked by trees or buildings. The phenomenon is a stunning revelation. I have looked for it — and seen it — many times since then. We walked down the mountain in the gathering dark. 

Bursting joy’s grape against the palate fine

March 22, 2021
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I opened the front door and stepped outside, where a choir of birds twittered and chirped. There must have been scores of them up in the still-bare trees of early spring, all blasting at once, and a kind of joy crept up in my chest at the sound, a sense that this was beautiful in a way that almost justified existence. 

It is another spring. I have seen 73 of them and the number I have left is dwindling. Now there is a sense, like Takashi Shimura at the end of Seven Samurai, talking to Daisuke Kato, saying: “Once more we have survived.” 

Another spring, another year. I see the bud tips on the maple tree spread and burst out in the million tiny sprays of maroon maple flowers. It is a moment I wait for each year. Another small moment of joy. Those moments are of immense importance. 

I want to avoid sounding like a Hallmark card here. For much of existence for much of the world is misery. People continue to bomb each other; children continue to die; famine spreads; refugees live by the thousands in makeshift tents; ethnic minorities are hounded and enslaved. Even in our so-called First World, otherwise comfortable people face death, betrayal, hate, disappointment and the hounding sense of their own meaninglessness. 

For much of history, we have lived through plagues, wars, superstitions and “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

And yet, you see children in those refugee camps playing soccer in the dust. They are laughing. Mothers find great love in their children. Above the camps, birds still twitter and peep. I don’t mean to downplay the misery being suffered, but to point out that even in the midst of suffering, there are sprints of joy. It is so to be human. 

What affords those moments of joy — which come upon us unannounced always — is that they give us a glimpse of connectedness. To our kin and childers, to nature, even to the larger city in which we live. 

I was reading in Ezra Pound’s Cantos a few days ago, through the Pisan Cantos section of that monstrous, abstruse, inchoate mass of culture-shard, written when Pound, after World War II, was imprisoned in Italy for having given intemperate radio broadcasts lauding il Duce and fascism. He was a cranky, possibly insane old man and he was kept in an outdoor cage with a concrete floor for a bed. He wrote the bulk of his Pisan Cantos there, full of the usual blatherings about economics and world history, mixed with bits of incomparable poetry and the language gave even the most pathetic of imbecilities brief moments of majesty of utterance. But, like most of Pound’s verse, it is almost all literary, with little sense of the poet’s actual life, at least outside of books. 

But in the middle of Canto LXXIX, there appear, popping up in the jumble of classical allusion, several birds on the power lines strung above his cage. “With 8 birds on a wire/ or rather on 3 wires.” They make a melody on the music staff of those wires. And later, “4 birds on 3 wires, one bird on one.” Further on, “5 of them now on 2; on 3; 7 on 4.” The real birds keep breaking into his phantasmagoria of theory and the poet’s tirades about ancient China and Tallyrand seem vaporous in contrast with the physicality of those birds above his cage. Philomel and the Nachtigall give way to pigeons and starlings. 

And you sense, behind all the immense brickwork of culture and reference, that moment of real connection with an actual world. And in the misery of that cage, open to wind and rain, a brief moment of joy, left fleeting and unprocessed. 

Such moments are epiphany — the rending of a veil to see what is most essential. Joy is the ephemeral product of such an insight. 

Such moments come in a flicker; they cannot last long. No one is joyful all the time. We are not living in some Pepsodent commercial, skipping down the sidewalk with teeth so shiny they blind passersby. Indeed, we live the bulk of our lives in neutral, neither miserable nor happy, but plodding on. But then we have that glimpse, periodically, of a bliss that transports us from our own toad-like passivity. It is a seed waiting to sprout in our psyches. 

These moments don’t always stick, but sometimes they do, and inform the rest of our lives. I remember a visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in the 1970s. In the basement at the time, there was a small exhibit of Cezanne still lifes. I had never much valued Cezanne, but I had only seen his work in reproduction or on slides in art history class. But here was the real thing. Who knew there were that many greens in the world? Infinite seeming gradations of blues and greens that glowed almost like fire, “fire green as grass.” And it was, for that moment, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I’ve since been to the big retrospective of Cezanne at the Philadelphia Art Museum in 1996 and was bowled over. The color alone, glowing like neon, gave me intense pleasure.

Another time, I heard the Philadelphia Orchestra under Wolfgang Sawallisch play Strauss’ Don Juan and the palpability of the sound, especially from eight horns playing in unison and making the seat under me vibrate, let me feel the sound as a physical presence. Jericho would have shuddered. I know I did. 

Art has been at the root of much of my own experience of joy and epiphany. I could name dozens of concerts and hundreds of art exhibitions that have brought me to this afflatus — for that is what joy is. 

Other sources are family: my twin granddaughters when they were three, riding bouncy-horsey, each on one of my knees and laughing the way only three-year-olds can. Even such a trivial thing as one of them asking for seconds on the pot roast I have cooked for them. Seeing them enjoy what I have prepared is a constant source of joy. I imagine the same for some Syrian refugee in a tent making dinner for her children. These moments come to us as gifts. 

Nature is the third great source. I remember standing on the top of Roden Crater in Arizona, an extinct volcano being reshaped by artist James Turrell. It was dusk and the sun was setting. Turrell pointed out the now-obvious fact that night doesn’t “fall,” but rather, it rises. And you can see the edge of the shadow of the earth cast by the lowering sun against the sky forming a boundary between the light and the dark and as the sun drops, the line of demarkation rises until the night swallows all. It is an effect you don’t get to notice in the cities or suburbs, where the horizon is blocked by human busy-ness. 

I stood by the Rhine River in Dusseldorf at night, with the reflection of city lights flashing off the dark current like firesparks. The river flowed broad with a swiftness and power that felt almost as if it must be a god. This was the river Robert Schumann felt was worthy of writing a symphony about. 

On the plains of eastern Montana, at the Little Bighorn, I stood on a hill — one hill like a frozen wave peak in the ocean among many such peaks — and watched the wind curl the long grass in moving ripples across the landscape. The manifestation of Wakan Tanka, the great spirit that animates the cosmos. I had to stand very still among all the motion to absorb it as a moment of eternity. 

In the early ’70s, I visited Gaddys Pond, just east of Charlotte in North Carolina, which was home to tens of thousands of Canada geese, a midway stop in their annual migrations. And the sound of all of them honking over each other, the din of chaos, remains the single most joyful sound I have ever heard. Ever since I have sought to recapture that moment, my hound, bay horse and turtle-dove.

We talk about joy being an emotion, as if it were some abstract titillation of the neurons, but it is a physical effect: the chest swells to almost bursting. You can feel the inner pressure of the joy wanting to escape the confines of the meat that is your body. And you feel something rising in your throat and your eyes begin to tear and overflow. The experience surges inside you. It may last only a second, or even a fraction of a second, but in that moment, you know you are alive. You know that everything is alive, and that to be alive is everything.