Finally, something to bring us all together – the searing pain of wintry weather. It seems like just about every part of the United states is experiencing some form of frostbitten misery this week.
It’s enough to make even the most self-indulgent winter-smug Minnesotan finally feel understood. And while we’ve been trained not to say it, the temptation is irresistible. Especially if it can be sung:
Though the weather outside if frightful.
Winter suffering’s insightful.
Don’t believe us? Well now you know!
Told you so, told you so, told you so!
While it’s true we don’t get typhoons here,
and we’ve just a few baboons here,
there’s calamity in the snow!
Told you so, told you so, told you so!
Though we surely complain enough,
You’ve reacted like you didn’t care.
Mother Nature has called your bluff.
Now there’s frostbite everywhere!
Feeling sympathy’s not verboten.
We are all part Minnesotan.
Hypothermia leaves a glow!
Told you so, told you so, told you so!
On what must be the busiest travel weekend of the year, I was tickled by this L.A. Times article about two Brazilians on a modern day hippie road trip across Latin America in a VW Bus.
The car is unsafe by today’s standards, of course. But what it lacks in functioning crumple zones it makes up for with it’s approachability factor. It’s a much better head-turning and friend-making car than, say, a Camry. But then the ability to get strangers to smile isn’t usually designed into modern cars, and Volkswagen has announced it’s discontinuing production of the microbus at the end of this year.
Thus we all will receive, for Christmas, a succession of news articles featuring people telling us their VW Bus stories.
Here’s one about a couple that has made a business out of giving people tours of San Francisco in a VW Bus. San Francisco is always interesting, but it seems this business is built mostly on the feeling people get around the car, especially in that historic hippie setting.
Well OK, not everyone is cheerful. But many of the people speaking up seem to be happy about it. And the problem is – they’re so loud, it’s hard to know what the quiet types think. I suspect that in this age of marriage equality and marijuana legalization, the decision will go in the permission-giving direction, and people who see air travel as an opportunity to read and/or sleep are going to have to learn to live with it. Either they will learn to sit near the engine where no one can hear anything anyway, find a comfortable pair of earplugs, or resign themselves to serving time for Seat Mate Murder – a new category of homicide that will exist as soon as people discover a handy weapon to carry it out. How drunk does someone have to be before you can you smother them with a Delta Snack Mix bag?
Perhaps the best solution would be to segregate air travel by personality type, putting all the loud, verbal people on one flight and all the quiet non-engagers on another. The crew might also be assigned based on social inclination, so Extrovert Air captains would be on the intercom pretty much constantly, blathering on about wind direction and travel time while the Introvert Air flights would sit on the tarmac, their pilots quietly fuming over the way those gabby ExAir crews chat up the tower.
Until we sort this all out, everyone could benefit from learning how to de-code a one-sided conversation, because we’ll be hearing a lot of them. I recommend lots of Bob Newhart videos.
It isn’t too often that we get to pin a name on something new since everything here has pretty much been seen already and called something-or-other by somebody.
But a new opportunity may have emerged with the mapping by radar of an amazingly extensive canyon in Greenland. Accounts say that to behold the still-unseen geologic feature is an experience that is breathtaking, in that you would have to be under two miles of solid ice to see it.
That’s exactly the sort of detail that can take all the fun out of tourism. Scientists say the Mammoth Furrow is not as deep or as wide as the Grand Canyon, but is much longer (470 miles to 277). But it would be worth the trouble of burrowing and shivering and enduring the bone crushing pressure of the ice sheet above to be able to stand on the rim of this frozen wonder and give the thing a name.
In the one story I read about the feature, it is repeatedly called “the canyon”, which is undeniably an accurate description but it lacks poetry. I think we can do better, so here’s our chance. Let’s name it! Less is more. Let’s keep it short – five syllables or less. “The Grand Canyon” has an undeniable power that comes from a magical combination of brevity and majesty. The bigger a thing, the shorter its name should be, I think.
I’m a sucker for alliteration so of course I’m attracted to “The Great Gulch”, “The Greenland Gap”, “The Terrific Trench”, “The Deep Divide” and “The Swell Swale”. But it’s important to speak to a modern audience, so there’s a lot to be said for something like “The Totally Awesome Valley”.
Let your mind roam to sights you have seen (or wish you’d seen) and names that have made you want to visit a faraway place. Because at the rate our climate is warming, we may get a chance to gaze on this thing yet.
What would you name Greenland’s vast under-ice canyon?
Whenever I want to break out of the rather familiar and predictable world I’ve constructed for myself, I visit Paul Salopek’s Out Of Eden Walk blog.
With the assistance of National Geographic, Salopek is on a mammoth journey – an ambitious 7 year walk from the Horn of Africa to Tierra del Fuego – tracing the path of our ancestors as they set out to explore the world on foot.
The most recent post uses digital mapping technology and video to chronicle a portion of the walk – traversing Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
I used to fancy myself a world traveler. I imagined that I would see the world and feel at home everywhere, meeting and befriending remarkable people in exotic places. That was before I actually went anywhere and found out how uncomfortable travel can be for an introvert who is picky about food. Facing reality and acknowledging personal some limitations had the effect of shrinking my options.
Instead, I decided to ruin my footwear by puttering around the yard. My favorite shoes used to be gleaming white and spiffy, but pulling weeds, digging holes, picking up after the dog and mowing the lawn have given them a greenish-black tinge that could have been earned more quickly in some other, much more adventurous and tale-worthy way.
Alas, I will probably never make it to Jeddah. But following Salopek has given me something approximately like a real experience of being in a place. Of course it would be better to actually GO. But absent that, this will do.
Today’s post comes from Tamara Kant-Waite, past president pro-tem of the Future Historians of America.
All the hubbub about last Friday’s meteor called attention to an alarming video documentation gap.
We are losing the dash cam race to the Russians.
It seems that dash cams are rolling constantly in many Russian automobiles because drivers are concerned about being victimized in crashes, scams, and road rage. Video proof of the actual sequence of events could be your only insurance against careless and unprincipled fellow travelers.
I hesitate to embed any of the actual images here because they could be disturbing for some of our more fainthearted readers. But if the sight of reckless driving, fistfights, and cars crashing into one another is your idea of great entertainment, you can spend quite a long time looking at it courtesy of the Russian dash cam fad.
Now we know why our parents taught us to be afraid – clearly Russian drivers are unhinged. Or at least a surprising number of them are going down the road with their doors swinging open and their hoods up, unable to stay between the lines and mad as hell. Not that we don’t have our own highway problems – we do. But they’re beating us silly in raw footage.
As a Future Historian, I must sound an alarm. The undocumented peoples of the Earth will surely be forgotten. And among those whose activities are recorded, the ones with eye-popping antics are most assured of a lasting place in the great story of time. Right now, the day-to-day video record of life in the United States is tame compared to the smash-bang wild west rodeo going on in Russia.
Who knew that when Khruschev said “We will bury you,” he meant they would bury us under hours and hours of high speed slapstick and real-life mayhem? Are you going to stand for this?
And if you ARE going to stand for it, could you at least stand for it in the middle of a busy street with tape rolling? Historians who have not been born yet are already hungry for raw footage, and the most compelling stuff being produced today has a distinct Russian flavor!
Yours in the fullness of Time,
Tamara K-W.
She could be right. Perhaps we need something akin to the space race to inch back ahead of the Russians in the video race. Would you put a dash cam in your car if it meant we might close this growing clip gap between the American Eagle and the Russian Bear? Would you wear a helmet cam? Or consider this – with current trends in miniaturization and personal adornments, the most ubiquitous camera of the future might be mounted on a nose ring.
How are you documenting the story of your time on Earth?
As I’ve mentioned on the Trail before I have a fabulous job – some days.
Part of my job is to accompany clients to destinations that have been earmarked for incentive travel trips. Over the years I’ve been to some really fabulous places: New Zealand, South Africa, Hawaii, Russia, Belgium are just a few.
The downside to this is the speed with which I sometimes have to see some of these wonderful places as we are often trying to fit in as much as possible in as short period of time as possible. Once in Switzerland we drove four hours to eat lunch and walk through a museum at breakneck speed only to drive four hours back. Another time we visited four historic castles in one day in the Loire Valley.
But the funniest of all my fast trips was in Paris. The incentive program was going to include three days of optional activities and the client wanted to see as many of them as possible in one day; one of those activities was touring the Louvre Museum. Our guide for the day was a small, but extremely feisty French Vietnamese woman, who clearly knew her way around and wasn’t going to waste any time by just wandering around looking at random art. When we hit the museum, she dragged us quickly from one spot to another; in no time we had been from one side of the Louvre to another to see the Winged Victory, the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo and the moats of the medieval Louvre. We were in and out so fast that I had to catch my breath.
So the upshot is that I’ve spent 20 minutes in a museum that most people want to explore for two or three days!
No, it’s not the title of a futuristic cartoon series set in Poland. I’m talking about a highlight of my family vacation last week in Key West – a rash bid by a group of novices to quickly circumnavigate the island on rented personal watercraft.
Yes, I was surprised to see myself attempting this on such a powerful machine. I’m slow at virtually every activity I attempt and I’m much more of a canoe traveler, speed-and-noise-wise. Even when I’m driving the car, there’s a lot of coasting and enjoying the scenery. But Key West is all about loud, raucous, obnoxious fun. So when Gus (age 22) gravitated towards the jet ski tour, I decided to go along and give it a try.
This, despite the fact that playing in the ocean is always risky. I think James Cameron had a better idea of what he was getting into, and was probably safer in the process of doing it.
We signed up for the first group of the morning, leaving the dock at 9:30 for a 90-minute spin. You can rent individual machines or pair up and ride double with no increase in price. In the best father-son tradition we opted for solo water rockets, which turned out to be a wise choice. Four others who approached this as a couples event endured emotional trauma at the launch point, with one reluctant young woman storming away from her boyfriend with these parting words – “I HATE You!” The ever- helpful tour guide said “You’re better off going without her, dude. She wouldn’t have enjoyed it.”
No kidding.
Another couple had the opposite problem – once they were informed that the trip would not be taken at a leisurely pace (It’s a big island, dude), she seemed plenty willing to let him go it alone.
Him: “If you don’t want to come along, I’m OK with skipping it.”
Her: “No, it’s fine. You go and I’ll wait here.”
Him: “We can do something else instead.”
Her: “No, I’m perfectly happy to stay behind. You go.”
Him: “I don’t want to go if you’re not going.”
Both wanted to back out without ruining it for the other, so they rode together. Miserably.
No, those aren't my feet.
My victory? Aside from not dying? I didn’t fall off, hit a dock, a rock, or get run over. Which is remarkable when you consider I was deafened by the engine and blinded by the spray for most of the journey. Keeping up with the guide was a white-knuckle experience, and I couldn’t slow down because I knew there was a single file-line of rookie pilots right behind me, all of them as oblivious to their surroundings as I was, or else fully engaged in arguing with their partner about whether or not they should even be there.
The only part that was more terrifying was the moment when the guide went back to retrieve one member of a two person sled who had tumbled into the water, telling we three individual survivors that we should “just mess around in this area here”, meaning we were supposed to zig-zag around a bit, keeping a sharp eye out for boats, obstacles and each other. Sitting still in the rolling waves presented a strong risk of capsizing, but “messing around” meant we could wind up colliding at high speed. Hmmm. Which would be better?
We chose random skittering about and got so turned around we mistakenly took up with another tour group as they cut across our playground. Oops. My excuse? When you’ve got a snoot full of briny foam and are feeling desperate to be back on land, every passing water jockey looks like Our Dear Leader.
And yes, in spite of it all, the jet ski experience was a definite highlight of the trip. But the next day (and even today) every muscle felt the strain of hanging on for dear life.
I’m glad I did it, and I’m glad it’s done.
Trail Baboon 