Paul Souders | WorldFoto

Svalbard, Norway

2011-11-14T14:08:00.001-08:00

Photographed at Sallyhamna on Spitsbergen Island July 8, 2011 with Canon 1D IV with 600mm f/4 lens at ISO 200

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London Calling

2011-10-27T16:29:00.000-07:00

The last time I wore a tuxedo was in for my junior prom in 1977. It was green and had ruffles. And I had a full head of hair, parted right down the middle.

The BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards ceremony, held under an enormous dinosaur skeleton in London's Museum of Natural History, was significantly more dignified.

And I didn't have to drink in the parking lot.

I was flattered, honored and insanely lucky to pick up the first two prizes in the Underwater World competition.

My favorite memory of the entire week? Standing off a little bit away from the backlit photographs, and watching the museum visitors slowly walking past, their faces aglow in the blue green light from the backlit images.

Sabi Sands Reserve, South Africa

2011-06-23T08:52:00.000-07:00

In the 13 years since I first traveled to Africa, I have always resisted private lodges and safari guides. Mostly, because I'm cheap. But I'm also stubborn.

I've always believed that you remember a lot better when you learn the hard way. When I stepped off the plane and into Cape Town's airport, I didn't know a thing about going on safari that I hadn't learned from Marlin Perkins on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. In 1969.

So I set out to learn, by driving across Southern Africa at reckless speed in a rented VW Polo.

There was a steep learning curve.

The 27 hours I spent digging myself out of a swamp using nothing but a sauce pan wasn't even the worst of it.

Which is a roundabout way of saying how delightful it was to enjoy a couple of (free) nights at Sabi Sands Game Reserve. Brilliant trackers and guides shared their encyclopedic knowledge during game drives where you actually spotted game, large and small.

It slowly dawned on me that sometimes it pays to work with professionals.

We stopped to photograph a pride of hunting lions, driving off road in the private reserve and working late into the night. And then we went back to camp, enjoyed a lovely meal under the southern stars and slept in a Hemingway-esque safari tent.

Eating tinned curry and sleeping in the dirt will never be the same.

Summer Solstice, Alaska

2011-06-21T06:02:00.001-07:00

On this, the longest day of the northern year, the sun never sets at the Arctic Circle. It loops around, kissing the northern horizon and casting an otherworldly orange glow before rising again.

In 1996, I drove north on Alaska's Dalton Highway, past the Arctic Circle roadside pullout, beyond Atigun Pass in the Brooks Range and down onto the broad open plains that lead to the Arctic Ocean. I parked in an old pipeline gravel pit and set up my tripod.

At 175 miles north of the circle, my compass wasn't much use. I took my best guess at true north, put the sun on the left side of the viewfinder and started clicking. Using an old panoramic film camera, I only had one shot at this. In the days before digital intervalometers, I used my watch to time the intervals. Every 15 minutes I brushed off the bugs, cocked and clicked the shutter, and sat back down.

At five in the morning with the sun climbing back into the sky and the mosquitos gathering strength, I packed it all up and went looking for somewhere to catch a bit of sleep.

Hallo Bay, Alaska

2010-08-27T13:30:00.000-07:00

I hate this part. The waiting.

All the endless planning and packing and prep and schlepping mountains of crap to the edge of the continent. And now the boat is packed and ready to go, and I am filled with the gutsick certainty that I have forgotten something very, very important.

I fuel up with $407 worth of unleaded. At least I didn't forget my wallet. The boat settles in the water under the weight of 125 gallons of fuel. That should be enough to cover 400 nautical miles. Give or take.

It's about 50 miles to the end of Kupreanof Strait, and I slowly motor along the northern edge of Kodiak Island through flat, protected waters under a t-shirt sun.

The final 27 miles are another matter. Shelikof Strait divides Kodiak from the mainland Alaska Peninsula. It is a narrow passage of water the stirs all manner of exotic tides, currents and Aleutian storms in an ill-tempered cauldron. I can see the mountains across the strait, their glacial peaks glistening, but te prevailing southeast wind sets up a steep chop against the running tide and the boat starts to buck and slam into the waves. It's feels like some sick rodeo ride. As I try to decide whether to wait or go, a pod of Dall's Porpoises start to play in my bow wave, racing through the water just beside me.

It seems as good an omen as any.

I've done this crossing enough times to remain zen, stare at the distant mountain peaks and try to ignore the battering. Still, the sea scares me more than a coastline full of bears. Which is where I'm bound, Hallo Bay and the Katmai Coast.

In a little more than two hours, I motor into the sheltered waters of Hallo Bay. The afternoon sun turns the verdant coastal slopes an electric green, and the water glows turquoise. It's like Hawaii. With bears.

I love this part.

By the time I make my way to shore, low clouds have rolled in and the tide gone out. I take my dinghy to shore and in the gathering summer dusk walk out into the Kingdom of Bears.

Yasha Island, Alaska

2010-08-24T17:28:00.000-07:00

Even before the cold water started to settle around my crotch, I knew this was a bad idea.

I'd been trying to photograph Steller's Sea Lions swimming underwater for the better part of a day, and it was slow going. The novelty of a boat bobbing on its anchor a mile from their haul out had quickly worn off, and I stood for long hours with my underwater camera stuck in the water, photographing precisely nothing. The sea lions were idly playing all around me, they just couldn't be bothered to come visit.

Other pinniped watchers may have packed up and moved on, but I am made of sterner stuff.

As soon as I dragged out my scuba dry suit and started flailing around on deck, the sea lions perked right up. By the time, I got ready to step off the boat and into the water, all of us were palpitating. Them with eagerness for a new plaything and me with something approaching mortal dread. I was five miles from shore, 20 miles from any other boat, swept by currents and surrounded by wildlife of unknown temperament. I tied one of the boat's mooring lines around my waist as a sole concession to safety and dropped into the water.

In spite of their curiosity, the sea lions kept a wary distance. I told myself to relax, at least until I noticed the trickle of water coming in around my poorly sealed wrist. The cold water slowly worked its way up my sleeve, across my chest and created a cold, decidely unpleasant pool around my nether bits.

Even in summer, the water temperature hovers in the high 40's. In spite of that, it is filled with a very busy aquatic community in the form of massive plankton blooms. Great for plankton eaters and the circle of life that feeds upon them. Crap for pictures. As I bobbed soggily about, I stared into cold green murk and watched the shadows of sea lions flit past.

It's one thing to try something radically stupid, get cold and wet and scared, and at the end of the day have something to show for the trouble. This was some other thing entirely. I climbed back out of the water, devoted an hour to wringing out my clothes and gear, pulled up the anchor and moved on.

Frederick Sound, Alaska

2010-08-09T10:45:00.000-07:00

The whales are talking to me. Or maybe about me. It's hard to say.

Listening in through a hydrophone dangling down into the water, I hear a trippy chorus. Equal bird chips, armpit farts and creepy satanic music.

Half a hundred humpbacks have gathered in a slow motion feeding frenzy in Frederick Sound, feasting on a massive plankton bloom that has turned the cold water here a cloudy green. They breathe in loud exhalations and gasps through blow holes, then take one final gulp of air before arching their backs, gracefully lifting their tails and diving. They swim down toward the sea floor 300 feet below, then circle back up, blowing circle of bubbles to concentrate the phytoplankton and krill. In the mirror calm sea, you can see and hear the bubbles percolating on the surface. They emerge with a sigh, their massive gullets filled with greenish goo.

Given the whales' bulk, strength and speed, I feel like they're not really living up to their potential here. The graceful ballet is lovely and serene, but I miss the dramatic of humpback group feeding, with whales lunging out the water in a massive hurling sprawl. Then again, subtlety is often wasted on me.

After an hour or two of eavesdropping on their underwater conversation, I start to imagine I understand what they're saying.

"Affordable health care is a fundamental right."

"Glenn Beck is a doucebag."

"You're our favorite photographer. This week, anyway."

I knew I liked these guys.

As more hours pass and dark clouds roll in, their voices turn needling and nagging.

"You call that a job?"

"When was the last time you called your mother?"

"That's a nice boat you got there. It would be a shame if anything was to happen to it..."

Before things turn menacing, a pod of orcas swim past, pinging the krill eaters with their sonar. The scare sends one of the lazily playing calfs into a fit of breaching.

Jumping whales? Now we're talking. It might not be subtle, but it works for me.

Freshwater Bay, Alaska

2010-08-05T12:42:00.000-07:00

I came for the whales. I stayed for the jellyfish.

There have been days when the whales have gone wandering, the sea lions scattered and the eagles elusive. But during the short Alaska summer, life abounds below the ocean surface as well.

While sheltering in a small bay from the afternoon winds that turn Chatham Strait into a lumpy, quease-inducing mess, I looked down and noticed an enormous red jellyfish. And another. Cool. They were softly swaying, trailing long translucent filaments.

I quickly dragged out the underwater housing for my camera. There's not much science involved in this. I haven't dropped the requisite thousands on a remote video viewing system, so it's strictly spray and pray. You stick the camera underwater, point it in the general direction of the jellyfish and start snapping.

Even in sheltered water, there's always some current or puff of wind moving the boat. Generally speaking, and I do so from experience, it's a good idea not to run the object of your photographic inquiry through the propellors.

I was feeling very pleased with myself, showing initiative and a bit of macho toughness, spending a couple hours with my arms plunged into the cold water. It wasn't until a dozen thin red welts started rising on my arms that I started having second thoughts.

Icy Strait, Alaska

2010-07-25T13:25:00.000-07:00

I hate boats.

I hate the smell, the damp, seasickness, the cramped spaces and the marginal personality types all found out on the water. I'm not the first to say that going to sea offers all the benefits of prison life, with a better odds of drowning.

And yet here I am, charging around the Alaska panhandle in a 22-foot C-Dory cruiser. My living space extends no bigger than a six foot cube. I've been in larger phone booths. But it has all I need for a summer exploring the wild corners of coastline here. I have a bunk, a stove, some heat from time to time, an icebox for the beer and a steering wheel that takes me in whatever direction I'm foolish enough to point it.

The fact that I know fuck-all about boating is not the hindrance you might imagine.

Boat life means having all of the adventures that saner souls leave behind upon departing the cub scouts. Imagine a cross between dorm life and homelessness. Avoid bathing for weeks on end. Crap in a bucket. Sleep on the sofa. Drink alone and to excess. Jabber to yourself and try to avoid law enforcement types.

I finally understand why guys go fishing. It's not about the stinkin' fish.

One more upside? Stuff to buy. And new words for everyday household items which, due to their maritime provenance, have an extra zero tacked onto the end. You need maps (charts), lots of rope (line), a GPS (chartplotter) and several truckloads of additional silly shit. It's like learning a new language, but it's still English.

When I first bought the boat I wandered the aisles down at West Marine with eyes glazed in retail narcosis. It's easy to go a little crazy at first. How else can I explain three zodiacs, four anchors, an arsenal of flare guns and the entire chart set for the Northwest Passage.

But the thing I love most is a chance to go off on my own, into an entirely new wilderness, and explore. Mercifully, there are still places in this world without an RV hookup or Walmart. Riding around in the boat offers the chance to scare myself witless on a regular basis, see cool new stuff and never be at a loss for something to complain about.

They might be a normal person's definition of heaven, but it's pretty close to mine.

Alaska Highway

2010-07-10T16:59:00.001-07:00

I first drove the Alaska Highway 24 years ago. I can't even say why.

It's not like I set out looking for someplace cold and remote, lonely and expensive.

It might have been as simple as looking at my untidy romantic situation, looking at my road atlas and figuring out how to put as much distance between the two as possible. I took all of my accumulated vacation, comp time and sick leave, stuffed my car with snack food and borrowed camp gear.

With credit cards in hand, I set off for the wilderness.

I covered more than 11,000 miles through Canada and Alaska in less than three weeks, and my little Honda two-seater was never the same. Neither was I, for that matter. Within a couple years I uprooted my city life and flagging career prospects and moved to Anchorage.

I'm setting out again this summer, towing a 22-foot C-Dory boat behind my overstuffed truck. I leave town in an attention deficit flurry, my orderly packing list devolving into a final shoving match of random crap into already occupied corners. The rear suspension sighs in disbelief.

I drive north, dragging two tons of maritime expenditures and unrealistic expectations. I plan on chasing humpback whales in Southeast Alaska, swimming with belugas in Hudson Bay and mingling amongst the grizzlies along the Katmai Coast. Even the most perfunctory reading of a roadmap belies the lunacy of my ambitions, but I drive north cloaked in a familiar air of denial.

It's a quick run to the Canada border, but I forget the enormous expanse of geography that British Columbia occupies. Just reaching the Alaska Highway's start is 800 miles hard driving. I wind slowly up the Fraser River valley, cross the Rockies and continue rolling north through more than 1000 miles of boreal forest.

Too cheap to get a hotel room, I slept fitfully in the boat at a roadside pullout, jarred by passing trucks and the unfamiliar bunk.

At dawn Emily, the British voice inside my GPS offers the briefest instructions. "In 679 miles, turn left."

It's going to be a long day. On the upside, I won't get lost.

The highway unwinds like an endless repeating loop of two-lane asphalt and scabby spruce forest. The scene is enlivened by an occasional moose, beaver dam or foraging black bear. The FM radio scans the ether without catching a signal for hours.

It feels like I'm driving to Godot, getting 11 miles per gallon.

Favorite Places: Patagonia

2010-02-16T08:47:00.000-08:00

Favorite Places: Patagonia - Images by Paul Souders

It's a strange and not always wonderful thing to finally arrive in a place you've dreamed of for years. More than once I've taken stumbled off the plane, looked around, and started shaking my head. There are times when it just isn't worth the trouble.

I had long admired images of Patagonia's windswept mountains. Like Yosemite or the Grand Canyon, Chile's Torres del Paine stand as one of the world's iconic destinations. I arrived in the park after crossing a continent and a half, then flying the 3,000 mile length of Chile and finally driving six more hours on dusty and rock-strewn roads.

I was not disappointed.

Patagonia loosely applies to the region where a vast South American continent dwindles to a windswept and forbidding point at Cape Horn, "Behold the terror of mariners…" was what my first Antarctic skipper gravely intoned over the howl of a 70 knot squall, before he returned below deck to his bottle and psychotic tendencies.

Battered by storms that circle the globe, Patagonia offers weather at least as dramatic as the scenery. I have worked my way through a thesaurus' worth of descriptions for the winds there. Expletives too, now that I think about it. I have been lulled to sleep by the banshee wale of gales ripping through Andes peaks and awoken to the eerie, unnerving silence when the earth caught its breath. And only gone back to sleep when the familiar roar resumed.

Several grand national parks grace the continent's southern reaches Argentina's, including Glaciares and Tierra del Fuego and Chile's iconic Torres del Paine. The explosion of 'eco-tourism' has brought boom times to once sleepy towns like El Calafate and Puerto Natales. Now tour buses are filled with seniors in sensible shoes clutching their Chatwin paperbacks.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

My last Patagonia trip came on the heels of icebreaker 'expedition' to Antarctica, photographing emperor penguins there. And as much fun as that was, I was done with industrial tourism and traveling grannies for a while.

So I rented an new if entirely unsuitable car and set off up Argentina's Ruta Cuarenta, a gaucho version of Route 66. Without the cool teepee motels. Or very little else in the way of services, either. I spent a memorable night swaddled in the front seat with windblown gravel pelting the windshield, the nearest hotel room hours distant. By the time I finally reached my destination at Peninsula Valdes, the windshield was cracked, I'd angrily kicked in a door panel and the muffler remained attached only with the help of a coat hanger.

Among all the tour buses and commercial whale boat operators, I stumbled across a small dive shop that let me charter their zodiac and go exploring. Which was how I found myself some days later sitting on the ocean floor sucking up the last of my oxygen staring up at the silhouette of a Southern Right Whale and her small calf. She was the size of a locomotive, but they fell toward me no faster than an autumn leaf.

They settled in the sand beside me, her immense eye staring into mine. It felt like looking into the eye of God.

At the end of my week on the peninsula, one of the pretty Spanish expat girls asked me, "Why don't you stay here and be a hippie with us."

I had a ticket in my hand and it was time to go home, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted.

Best Bits: Patagonia offers astounding landscapes within easy reach. There's a wide range of backpacking trails for either day trips or more ambitious circuits. Peninsula Valdes offers crazy cool wildlife, including the calving and breeding grounds of most of the world's Southern Right Whales in the austral spring, and hunting Orca whales in February or March.

Worst Bits: The weather can beat you like a junkyard dog. Rental cars are expensive. Distances are long and roads can be treacherous. Taking a rental across the border from Chile to Argentina is theoretically possible; I've managed even with my terrible spanish. The other way is almost impossible. Driving from Ushuaia into the rest of Argentina is similarly difficult. The cross-border bus service is supposed to be comfortable and reliable, but where' the fun in that?

What to Bring: It's windy and it rains. A lot. Bring the obvious stuff for hiking in crap weather. And prepare to be pleasantly surprised when the sun pops out. A good spanish phrase book will come in handy for the monolingual among us.

How to Get There: Fly into Punta Arenas on the Chilean side. If you're heading onto Antarctica, Ushuaia is your departure point, but further exploration by car is restricted to Tierra del Fuego. You'll need to take an international bus to cross the border into Chile and back to Argentina if you want to go north to Glaciares. You can now fly into El Chalten or El Calafate from Buenos Aires.

When to Go: I've only ever gone in January and February, which is the high season. I'd love to see this country in the southern winter.

Who to Call: Don't be a wuss. You can totally do this on your own. Learn a bit of spanish (helpful phrases like "the car was like this when I picked it up") and go for it. Call up LAN Chile and get moving. If you're in Ushuaia, I always stop at Kaupe, my favorite restaurant at the end of the world.

Favorite Places: Galapagos Islands

2010-02-09T07:36:00.000-08:00

Favorite Places: Galapagos Islands, Ecuador

Favorite Places: Galapagos - Images by Paul Souders

Some places on this earth offer the perfect answer to my vanishingly short attention span. I find myself sitting in front of the computer, doing something ostensibly useful when some random synapse fires and I feel the need to flee the office, the state, the country.

If Africa's too far, China's too confusing and Europe is too expensive, there's always a week in the Galapagos. It's a (relatively) short flight. No jet lag since it's nearly due south. Decent weather. Not too spendy. And since you're living on a boat the entire time, there's a finite amount of trouble you can get into.

You're there for a week and then it's back to Quito and an altitude-induced headache and home again before the creditors even notice you're gone.

The islands are quite a magical place as well. Outside of the high arctic and Antarctic, it's one of the only places on earth filled with naive wildlife. And generally speaking, wildlife photography is a lot easier when the stuff isn't running away from you.

The animals there simply have not yet learned to hate and fear us. Watching the hordes that come to gawk and natter, they may yet come around to it.

On the Galapagos, it's a chore not to stumble over the abundant birdlife and reptiles there. And the critters themselves are astonishing. Blue-footed boobies and red throated frigates and marine iguanas basking on the black lava shore like dinosaurs in miniature.

The downside of all this Darwinian fauna is its overwhelming popularity. More than 150,000 tourists visit each year, and all those sensible shoes would reduce the islands to dust if not for stringent guidelines. Every island tour group is escorted by a trained guide and must keep to the prescribed paths and landing sites. It's all perfectly sensible, unless you're me and bristle a bit at all the adult supervision.

Best Bits: I love Marine Iguanas. Can't get enough of the evil looking bastards. Swimming with the sea lions is a very close second. Diving with schooling hammerheads and whale sharks are pretty frickin' cool, too.

Worst Bits: Expect a lot of adult supervision. Outside of the immediate environs surrounding Puerto Ayora, there is not much in the way of independent travel on the Galapagos. You will spend a week with a dozen or more strangers with varying levels of fitness and curiosity. I found I needed to adjust my enthusiasm level down a few notches. The presence of a bar onboard helped markedly.

How to Get There: It's a simple matter to get to Quito and Guayaquil and then on to the islands' airports at Balta and San Cristobal.

When to Go: (Pinched from a travel company website) June to December is generally called the "dry season", and usually offers blue skies and mid-day showers. During this season, sea mammals and land birds are most active. This is a good time to observe sea birds' courtship displays. The waters of the southern flowing Panama current warm the Galapagos waters again around December.

The time period between December and May are considered the "warm season". During this warmer season, the Galapagos' climate is more tropical with daily rain and cloudier skies. The island birds are especially active during that season. Also, the ocean temperature is warmer for swimming and snorkeling.
My trips were in April and December, and were pretty much the exact opposite of conventional wisdom. April was hot and sunny, December cool and cloudy. Go figure.

Don't Forget: Two words. Knee Pads. The black lava is murder on unprotected flesh, and given the vanishingly small amount of time you have in any given setting, it's handy to plop down and blast away.

Also, I love shooting with a 1:1 150mm or 180mm macro lens. The critters aren't shy, but they're not stupid either. Even the most serene iguana gets tetchy when you stick a camera lens inches away from its eye. A long lens gives everyone some breathing room. I use a 90° angle finder attachment on my Canons, an overpriced but invaluable tool for shooting at ground level.

Finally, some sort of underwater camera is ideal. Nearly all of the trips allow some sort of snorkeling and swimming excursions, and the opportunity to swim with Sea Lions is simply brilliant.

Who to Call: I enjoyed a week-long scuba trip with Peter Hughes Diving in 2007. Decent boat, good staff, a surprisingly fun group of fellow divers and amazing critters.

For shore excursions, I don't have much advice on specific boats to charter. Going on a photo specific trip might be helpful, but it's generally more expensive and the thought of spending a week with scrumming with a dozen photo enthusiasts makes my stomach hurt.

I'd strongly advise going with one of the smaller boats though, no more than 15 passengers. I sailed on the MV Beluga in 2005, and had a lovely time of it. Not perfect for photo work, but I decided to avoid being a bigger pain in the ass than strictly necessary.

The times I went, I looked online for last minute cancellations. My first trip involved a Tuesday email inquiry, a Wednesday confirmation and scoring a cheap plane ticket and a Thursday departure. I was on the boat Friday feeling very pleased with myself.

Favorite Places: Kenya

2010-02-04T09:00:00.000-08:00

One question I'm often asked is, where is your favorite place?

I should have a quick and easy answer, but it always feels like picking your favorite child. They're all different, and special in their own way. Maybe I don't need to go back to visit the kids hurling rocks at me in Gaza, peel off another affectionate drunk in Nome or scrape any more shit off my shoes in Manila's slums. But those are all treasured memories.

Over the next few weeks, I'd like to share images and musings from some of my preferred corners of the world.

First up:

Masai Mara Game Reserve, Kenya

As I packed up the rented four wheel drive and nervously edged out into Nairobi's morning traffic, a tall and lovely Austrian blonde waved goodbye. Whether to me or her beloved truck I didn't really know.

I first ventured to Kenya in February of 2001, brimming with a confidence unfettered by caution, wisdom or experience. Somehow, over a course of many slow and dusty hours I made my way toward the Rift Valley and into the Masai Mara Reserve.

I stared in wonder as I drove into the park, gaping at families of big cats, herds of grazing gazelle, endless plains of tall grass. In the ensuing years, I've spent nearly 150 days there, driving the mud tracks, getting lost and stuck, making some new friends and becoming marginally less stupid along the way.

But it is the chance to spend hours and days watching African wildlife at close range that is the greatest gift the Mara has offered to me.

Best Bits: Big Cats. I know of other place with such densities of large, hunting predators. My first visit, I witness no fewer than 14 cheetah kills in three weeks. Top that off with several dependable lion prides and a healthy population of leopards.

There is an upside to all those other safari trucks, and that they're a whole lot easier to spot than critters. If you see a circle of trucks, you'll want to head that way.

Worst Bits: Crowds. Teaming hoards of safari trucks and minivans filled with tourists swarm over the park. In constant contact via radio and cellphone, they converge on a lion kill or river crossing in minutes. Be prepared to share a cheetah hunt with 80 or 90 of your closest friends.

There are also steep park fees, tsetse flies and malaria, and tracks that turn impassable in the rains.

Getting There: To my knowledge, there are no direct flights from the US to Kenya. KLM, British Airways and Air Kenya all offer flights from Europe. Americans require an entry visa, but you can purchase it upon arrival at the airport.

Normal people book a complete safari package from any number of vendors. I prefer to hire a four wheel drive with roof tent and go camping. The roads are terrible, the traffic perilous and navigation difficult.

And that's just the four hour drive to the park.

Inside you'll find an unfathomable network of four wheel drive tracks with little in the way of signage. I carry a GPS with the camp sites marked and over the course of a few days I get my bearings.

Finding the critters, without a guide, is a matter of patience, skill and luck. For any but the most dedicated or stubborn, hire a guide. They work in the park and know the habitat and the wildlife.

When to Go: The annual wildebeest migration peaks in August and September, and the short rains arrive shortly afterward. I've also visited in February, ahead of the long rains of April and May.

Who to Call: Contact Gabriele at Sunworld Safaris for package safaris and four wheel drive rentals. She and her husband David, along with their staff are knowledgeable, endlessly patient and helpful.

Prins Karls Forland, Svalbard, Norway

2009-09-26T08:11:00.000-07:00

We sail slowly down the coast. Traveling south, the air and sea grow warmer, and when I stand up on deck I can actually smell...life. A humid green scent missing from the high arctic ice.

We travel to Crossfjorden and its' glaciers, hanging from ragged mountain peaks. They're all but lost in low gray cloud cover, but when even the smallest ice breaks away, the fjord echoes with thunder. In the gray light at the end of our trip, everyone seems subdued.

I don't recognize the man in the mirror. Gray stubble, baggy eyes, face slack and jowly as a depressive basset hound. My clothes smell of dead whale. It is so time to go home.

As we sail past Prins Karls Forland, a thin strip of island that protects this coastline from the North Atlantic swells, winds rip the fabric of cloud cover to let in beams of sunlight over the peaks. We are here late in the summer season. The mountain peaks have shed last winter's snow from all but the most shadowed and protected clefts. Brown dust coats the glaciers in streaks. Within a few weeks, autumn snow storms will return, coating these peaks in white, freezing the sea and putting the land back to sleep.

Sometime after midnight, the sun emerges tentatively through a break in the clouds. Glowing orange and low on the horizon, it sends a pale glow across the mountains lining Isfjorden and onto the boat. We put down the last dregs of our celebratory wine, scurry up on deck and take one last round of pictures before we go.

August 20, 2009 - Spitsbergen Island, Norway

Sallyhammna, Spitsbergen Island, Norway

2009-09-24T08:03:00.000-07:00

Polar bears are blessed with an extraordinary sense of smell. It's critical to their survival on the arctic ice. A whiff of seal, the scent of fresh prey, mean food and survival for the bear.

When a 40-foot Fin whale carcass washes up, stinking and bloated in the late summer sun, it feels a little like cheating. Still, it was an opportunity too good to refuse, either for us or the bears.

We motored for six hours to reach Sallyhammna. The bears had to walk, but it seemed worth the effort. The table was set and the guests have arrived.

Our first mistake may have been anchoring downwind of the carcass. We had a lovely view of a parade of bears swimming out to feed on the whale which lay grounded in the shallows, floating on the tide. The boat, already rank with the scent of wet socks and unwashed long johns and dubious cooking skills, now stank of cetacean road kill too. We smell worse than a fish monger's dumpster. During a sanitation strike. In August.

But the bears seem to mind not one whit.

We count as many as twelve in the surroundings hills, though it's hard to keep track as waddle off into the snow to sleep off their blubber hangovers. They swim out to the whale one or two at a time, ceding their spot to any bigger bear that comes along. It looks like tough going though. The blubber has gone slimy and fibrous and soupy and the bears struggle to get a purchase even with their sharp teeth. All but the smallest loner cub, who comes out during the small hours of evening and scuttles away at the first sign of competition, look well fed and glossy. They gorge, then go off to swim and play in the 36° water.

It's not a bad life if you can suppress the gag reflex.

August 18, 2009 - Sallyhammna, Spitsbergen Island, Norway

Pack Ice, Latitude 80° 40', Svalbard, Norway

2009-09-22T07:51:00.000-07:00

In life, there's the hard way and the easy one. The path of noble purity, and just getting the job done.

In our quest for the perfect polar bear image, the noble white lord of the arctic on the pristine polar ice pack, we spent long hours on the righteous path, sailing to the edge of the pack ice, then motoring slowly for more then 50 nautical miles of constant critter hunting.

I climb 35 feet up the mast, straddle a cold, metal slat half a butt cheek wide, then tie into a safety line and scan the horizon through my binoculars from a uniquely uncomfortable perspective.

The trick to spotting polar bear on the ice is looking for their subtle color difference. Sea ice is white and blue. Polar bears fur shades toward cream or yellow. Under the high arctic midnight sun though, every patch of snow and ice within a hundred miles was bathed in a golden glow. Lovely to be sure, but it lent every hump, nook and hollow a distinctly bear-like appearance.

It made for a very long night, and by seven we were all bleary eyed and hallucinating. And the total bear count? Zero. Nada. Zilch.

We turned to each other, shook our heads and said "Screw this," and headed for the dead whale.

Sometimes you just need to get the job done.

August 16, 2009 - Latitude 80° 40', Svalbard, Norway

Hinlopen Strait, Svalbard, Norway

2009-09-20T09:39:00.000-07:00

I am alone, forty feet down, under the ice.

I told the people who love me that I wouldn't do this. A massive iceberg looms above me, blocking out the sun, cutting me off from the surface. One more broken promise. There might be a rule in the scuba diving canon that I'm not breaking at the moment, but it's not for lack of trying.

If I swim close enough, the iceberg's surface is a finery of ancient frozen bubbles and gentle melting curves. From a distance, it seems a hulking beast. The sea, flirting with freezing even in the height of summer, is cloudy with life of an almost primordial nature. Hundreds of small jellyfish float past, their tendrils fragile enough to dissolve with a touch.

Above me, there is light and air. Below is 1200 feet or more of cold, still water. I hang suspended, listening to the pop and crack of ice, my hard breathing, blood rushing in my ears, the weight of my conscience.

I am alone and adrift in a cold sea, looking hard into the darkness. Below me, the green fades to a lifeless black, but I don't have the courage to go deeper, to plumb the depths in search of judgement or redemption or finality.

I turn instead to surface, swimming back toward the light, the sun and the world of the living.

August 16, 2009 - Hinlopen Strait, Svalbard, Norway

Malmgren Island, Svalbard, Norway

2009-09-18T09:19:00.000-07:00

The big bear stands atop the island like he was king of the hill. He was certainly lord of this square mile or two of weathered dolomite rock, filled with bird nests in summer and surrounded by endless seal-populated acres of ice as far as his beady little black eyes could see. It doesn't look like a bad life, all things considered.

He was easy enough to spot as we motored through the archipelago in the zodiac in a morning of fog and cold. A small cream-colored spot on the ancient brown rock. He glared down at us from his perch, but soon grew bored and went back to sleep. The big boat joined us, but we had to wait until nearly midnight before the bear finally woke and deigned to visit.

A quick bank of fog arrived at the same time he did, and the six of us jockeyed for position on deck, shooting into the misty half-dusk. I finally slipped down into the zodiac for a better angle, and Heinrich hopped in top paddle me closer.

Steve practically leapt off the deck to get into the boat, like it was the last lifeboat off a sinking ship. Smart boy, that.

August 13, 2009 - Nordaustlandet, Svalbard

Nordaustlandet, Svalbard, Norway

2009-09-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

Today we played a game called "Let's Sneak up on a Enormous, Shit-smeared Pinniped."

It went about well as you'd expect.

The prospect of a break in the weather on Lågøya Island in Nordaustlandet got us moving early. The rising sun made some small effort to burn through the fog, and we gulped down scalding coffee and headed for the walrus haul-out here at five in the morning. Two dozen of the brutes were heaped on the black sand beach, belching and farting with contentment.

We slowly worked our way up to within ten yards of the nearest set of tusks, then five, and finally it turned into some sort of low-grade contest of machismo. I was the last man left, approaching within a yard or two of an enormous bull. I knelt carefully beside him, photographing the herd at rest. As he breathed, I was enveloped in a calming, warm cloud, and I felt an almost benevolent tolerance of my presence.

When I tried to swim with the walrus later, the greeting was a bit cooler. Sliding into the water, I slapped my fins like a playful brother walrus, and one big bull with two young acolytes circled me, taking my measure, before approaching. The enormous male swam a bee-line for me, not stopping until he gave me a single, hard head butt with his snout and tusks. They could hear the crack of ivory tusk on my glass camera dome back on the boat.

That was enough of a warning for me. I scurried back to the skiff, crawled in and unceremoniously announced my retirement from undewater pinniped photogtgraphy.

August 11, 2009 - Lågøya Island, Nordaustlandet, Svalbard

Nordaustlandet, Svalbard, Norway

2009-09-14T08:52:00.000-07:00

They could almost be sleeping.

Lying in this cold island, blanketed in fog, two polar bear cubs lie within a few yards of each other. Abandoned, starved, silent in death.

It's about the saddest thing you could ever see.

Lågøya, Low Island, is a flat slab of crumbling dolomite somewhere north of 80° latitude, in Svalbard's Northeast Lands. A few dozen runty reindeer call it home, a marginally less inhospitable home than the surrounding bleak wastes at the northern edge of their domain.

Walrus haul out on the beach here too, a mountain of flash and ivory tusks. Maybe that's what drew the cubs' mother here, in some desperate attempt to pull down some larger, stronger prey. If she had died on land, the cubs would have stayed by her side, mewling and crying until they fell still. She may have died on the ice, or simply walked away when the cubs faltered. There's simply no way to know what happened.

In the end, the cubs had only each other.

An arctic fox may find them soon, or another polar bear sniffing for carrion. This is an unforgiving, unsentimental land.

For now, they lay almost untouched, their eyes closed, fur coats damp with the mist, sleeping on.

August 10, 2009 - Lågøya Island, Nordaustlandet, Svalbard

Nordaustlandet, Svalbard, Norway

2009-09-12T08:47:00.000-07:00

After 30 hours of staring into the mist, she emerged without a sound. Her steps were more confident now, but she still took a slow, wandering and cautious course toward the boat.

The ice around us continues to melt though the temperature hovers near freezing. She now wades through pools, leaps over narrow leads and once punches through the rotting ice and has to swim through the frigid sea.

We now have a sense of her routine, though I gathered half a dozen noise grenades and loaded three rounds in the 30-06 rifle.

Just in case.

She sniffed her way around the boat's waterline, tasting and rejecting bits of washed up trash.

We scrambled around on deck, photographing her reflections in the icy pools. Bearded seals pop their heads up nervously in the open water and she scurries off to hunt for real food. Settling in along an open lead, she curls herself into a ball and waits.

We watched and waited, praying to see a true hunt. I could already see it in my mind's eye. The hapless seal surfacing, a powerful lunge, the brief struggle and then blood on the ice.

Of course, precisely none of this happened. Heinrich returned with the zodiac from an excursion and motored into a nearby open lead. The bear stared, looked faintly put out, and returned to sniffling around the boat some more.

Curious about all the frantic to and fro on deck, she reared up and placed her paws up on the bowsprit, staring back at us. She didn't seem all that impressed, since after that she simply walked away, ambling across the broken ice as if down a city sidewalk before vanishing again into the swirling fog.
August 9, 2009 - Sabine Bay, Nordaustlandet, Svalbard

Nordaustlandet, Svalbard, Norway

2009-09-10T08:37:00.000-07:00

For two days and more, we sit in the ice, starring out at a world of snow and ice and fog, all in gradations of gray.

When the clouds deign to lift, we can make out specks of black; ringed seals and the occasional yellow blob; distant polar bear.

I pace the 30 feet of available deck space, growing anxious, bored, depressed, subdued, achy, resigned and back again over the hours. We divide the day and night into two hour shifts, sleeping and eating at strange and uncertain intervals.

Beyond the slow, inevitable melting, the view does not change.

The boat and the ice begin to feel like a prison.

Powered by two bracing cups of coffee and more anxious dreams, I scramble up the mast and survey our surroundings. Ice, mountains, snow. At the edge of vision, I can still make out one large polar bear, walking along the shore, on patrol. Not exactly walking away, but not venturing any closer, either.

Soon the fog descends, and steals him away as well.

August 8, 2009 - Sabine Bay, Nordaustlandet, Svalbard

Nordaustlandet, Svalbard, Norway

2009-09-08T08:18:00.000-07:00

I wake from the deepest of sleep, like swimming up from deep water. Steve is shaking me, saying "Dude, it's show time" He growls, bares his teeth and waves his fingers like claws for effect.

We've got a bear.

Anchored in the ice along Sabine Bay near Scoresby Island, a young bear swims stealthiy up to the ice edge, then nervously walks across the ice, circling closer.

All this happens while I roll over in my bunk and drift back toward sleep. I finally force myself up on deck, tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth and immediately stumble over someone's tripod.

The bear is equal parts curiosity and caution. She nervously yawns, dropping to her knees and crawling in the snow. Finally, she makes up her mind, hops over a small patch of water and sidles over to the boat. She stands up on her two hind legs, rising nearly up to the boat's deck, and peers in at us. Soon she's leaning on the bowsprit with one paw on the anchor, three feet away from me.

With one good leap she could be on deck with us, and then we'd have some excitement.

August 7, 2009 - Sabine Bay, Nordaustlandet, Svalbard

Nordaustlandet, Svalbard, Norway

2009-09-06T08:09:00.000-07:00

The moment you see one is electric.

Amidst the endless miles of broken ice and snow-covered shoreline, there are two black eyes staring back, and it hits you with a jolt of recognition. We have a bear.

We have sailed for days through two days of fog and mist and bleak, barren landscapes north of 80° latitude with little to show for it. Steve and I stood staring through binoculars for hours on deck. Suddenly there he was, clear as day, a polar bear resting on a patch of steep snow, perched high enough to survey the surrounding miles of ice for his next meal. We stopped and watched, and the bear grew curious, sniffing the air, catching the scent of unwashed men and mouldering laundry.

Finally, he sits up on his back legs like an eager dog. There must be something dead to smell that bad.

August 6, 2009 - Nordaustlandet, Svalbard

Nordaustlandet, Svalbard, Norway

2009-09-04T07:54:00.000-07:00

It might have been the garlic that finally did it.

We knew there was a polar bear out there. The carcass of a young bearded seal lay on the ice, stripped to the bone. Close by, a shattered vertebrae, the stripped and creepy fingerlike bones of flippers, a brilliant red chunk of frozen bloodsicle.

It felt like stumbling upon a particularly nasty crime scene.

Another tribute to the polar bear's prowess turned up on the ice lies a few yards away; a nearly complete seal skin, peeled away and left in a heap. This bear was well fed. Fastidious, too.

Heinrich sailed the boat into pack ice at the mouth of Lady Franklin Fjord, we got ready for dinner and waited. The boat filled with the smell of Italian cooking as Steve labored over a Norwegian variation on chicken parmesan.

Steering clear of the steam down below, I sat in the wheelhouse, glassing the empty ice. The white fog ebbed, and out of the blankness I saw movement; then the shape of a young bear striding purposefully toward us.

Tripods clattered and gear quickly assembled on deck as the bear walked to within 100 yards of the boat, sniffing the air, curious but cautious, circling and approaching us until someone knocked over a tripod with a clattering thud.

The spell was broken and the bear grew guarded, less curious, more aloof. He ambled off, and we sat in the wheelhouse staring at the white on white landscape for hours. He kept a good quarter mile away, rolling on his back, playful and tormenting us before finally vanishing into the fog.

But we had our first bear.

8/4/09 - Nordaustlandet, Svalbard

Nordaustlandet, Svalbard, Norway

2009-09-02T07:36:00.000-07:00

Locked in the melting sea ice, I am surrounded by white fog, white snow, gray seas. I stand watch on deck, waiting for the ice bear to emerge from the mist.

I'm feeling foggy myself from lack of sleep and painkillers. Washing down my Percocet with Glenfiddich has done nothing for my cognitive skills. I stand woozily looking out in to the half light of arctic summer. We've sailed beyond 80° North and shoved into the ice hoping for bears, but for now there is nothing but breathless calm and an utter absence of color.

I start to imagine that the ice itself has started slowly breathing.

Sounds travels far in this stillness. I can make out walrus grunts, the distant calling of geese and ducks, the whirring wing beats of passing gulls.

I imagine shapes blending with the ice, shadows emerging from the fog. But the only certain signs of life are two black snouts swimming across the bay. I grab my binoculars and stare dumbly, watching them moving silently, breathing and then quickly submerging. Finally I realize they're bearded seals, looking for a safe patch of ice to rest upon.

They slowly roll over and dive deep, disappearing into the icy gray sea as the fog rolls in.

August 3,2009 - Nordaustlandet, Svalbard

Prins Karls Forland, Svalbard, Norway

2009-08-31T06:43:00.000-07:00

Swimming up to the walrus didn't seem like such a bad idea. Clumsily approach an unruly marine mammal with flesh piercing tusks and bad temper. What could possibly go wrong.

I put on my drysuit, played the tough guy and went out to go hang with the big boys. But when the first bulbous and whiskered head popped up between my legs, I started having second thoughts. When he head-butted my camera, I was in full retreat, and wanted very badly to be somewhere else. Not that you do anything quickly in a drysuit, fins and mask. I swam in reverse and then thumped the walrus on the snout. He thumped back, much harder this time.

The walrus seem to be thinking, "So you like the rough stuff, eh..."

Every time I slapped my flippers swimming back to the boat, they swam up to investigate, checking out the fins and the wild-eyed mouth breather at the opposite end. Then they said something that sounded like "You want another piece of this?" before whacking me with another tusk.

The guys on the boat found it endlessly diverting and good for pictures. I was pretty much ready to call my mom on the satellite phone to come take me home, but they seemed happy for me to stay out there all morning.

With friends like these...

August 2, 2009 - Prins Karls Forland, Svalbard

Isjorden, Svalbard, Norway

2009-08-28T06:27:00.000-07:00

Somehow, I hoped this year it would be different. We all managed to get here in one piece and nobody had thrown a punch yet, so that's a good start.

But provisioning for six souls on an arctic expedition? Three meals a day times twenty days. Enough food at least to avoid the Donner dinner party.

It's surprisingly hard to guess what all that entails, so we attacked the only food market in Longyearbyen like starving and well-funded refugees, hoarding piles of meat and pasta, frozen fish and fresh cheese and loaf after loaf of bread. We formed a small shopping cart parade by the end of it, and were $2500 the poorer for our efforts.

We had boxes filled with pasta, another with chunks of Jarlsburg, and pretty much an entire cow, frozen and processed into sausages, fillets, chops and luncheon meats. We've already decided the single pack of diced ham will be the final meal should we find ourselves drifting lost and doomed in the pack ice. The survivors shivering and starved, allowing one small chip of diced ham to dissolve on their tongue each day...

The liquor shopping is only slightly more proscribed, and that more by state alcohol rules than common sense. I splurge on a fifth of Glenlivet, some girlie Bailey's, half a dozen bottles of red wine and a case of Heineken. I'm not at all sure what I'll drink the second week though.

We pile all the food, then case after case of our gear onto the Heinrich's steel-hulled yacht. The boat settles visibly in the water and seems to sigh with the burden of it all.

We have one final burger and beer on shore and loiter back to the harbor, sleepy in the warm evening sun. Pulling away from the harbor, we set sail without fanfare. A group of five photographers, all American save Fanus who's more fun than any of us and Heinrich who's the only one who knows what he's doing. We're all guys and there are no discernible prima-donas or psychopaths among us.

On the other hand, as Fanus points out, if you can't figure out who the asshole on the boat is, that's because it's you.

By the time we depart, I'm sore and exhausted and wander off to my bunk to rest my eyes. I sleep fitfully most the way through the calm, sunny evening voyage. I toss and turn with back and leg pain, feeling miserable and overwhelmed and anxious. At one point, it settles on me like a thick dread that I don't want to be here. But there's no turning back, and when I wake at four, the pain is still with me, but most of the dread has gone.

The morning sun is shining on barren, ragged mountains covered with glacial ice and last winter's snows, all mirrored in the glassy calm fjord. I put on water for coffee, light the stove and wait for the fun to begin.

August 1, 2009 - Isfjorden, Spitsbergen Island

Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway

2009-08-26T18:22:00.000-07:00

The terns were waiting for me. It had been a year, and they'd had plenty of time to nurse their sense of outrage over the many times I sauntered along the edge of their nesting grounds, photographing them in dramatic wide angles as they dive-bombed me again and again.

Now it was payback time.

After an entire day's flying from Reykjavik through Oslo and Tromso and finally into Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen's sole population center, I was shattered. But a restorative walks seemed in order. So after a medicinal beer, I walked along the Isfjorden shore.

Arctic terns have migrated thousands of miles to nest of these barren shores, but it seems a poorly chosen spot, the only site of human activity in a thousand kilometers. But here they are, in the Polar Institute parking lot, by the boat rental shop, beside the sled dog yard, dive bombing any passerby with a ferocious maternal defensiveness.

I walked along, bathed in the warm glow are the arctic midnight sun, and was happy to see my old friends, their graceful swept back wings, the scree-scree call. Walking along the pavement, I wandered too close for their comfort. One tern fluttered for a moment, then dove and delivered a little pink payload of contempt, directly into my left eye.

I staggered, swearing and laughing in equal measure, trying to get the tern poo out of my eye, managing only to smear it all over my hands and face even more. I've never actually heard a Tern laugh before, but if this one had pants, he would have peed them.

After that it was like a some sick walk of shame, little showers of pink and white dropping from the skies as I made my way grimly down the road.

I read somewhere that having a bird crap on your head is good luck. If that's the case, by the evening's end I felt truly blessed indeed.

July 31, 2009 - Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen Island

Reykjavik, Iceland

2009-07-30T08:11:00.001-07:00

The first day of Icelandair's non-stop service from Seattle to Reykjavik featured flowers and music, champagne and fanfare. The second day was business as usual, with the full menu of petty indignities that modern air travel has on offer.

Extortionate baggage fees? Check. Ten bucks for a pastrami sandwich? Got it. Seven hours in a cramped tin can? Coming right up.

It's been exactly two weeks since I limped home from my lap around America. Two weeks of doctor's appointments and acupuncture and endless whining about my aching sciatic nerve bundle, whose very existence I was blissfully unaware until 19,000 miles of driving brought it to my attention. I spend my waking hours in a narcotic haze; a walking, talking (or limping, mumbling) advertisement for the unpleasant side-effects of animal tranquilizers.

In reality though, nobody wants to listen to you bitch about how much your ass hurts, so maybe it's just as well I can no longer string a complete sentence together.

There was, however, the matter of preparing for four weeks of arctic travel in the midst of Seattle's glorious Mediterranean summer. I dig through piles of smelly expedition weight fleece and gore-tex while the sounds of summer echo through my open windows. I somehow cram it all into my cases, carefully weighing each one on my bathroom scale and then making my way onto the plane with nerve bundles dancing with excitement.

Once on board, I pop a couple more Percocet to change the subject and hours later, somewhere over the high arctic, orange light fills the cabin as the sun skirts the horizon. I sit there half-baked in the warm midnight glow, speeding over Greenland's melting ice sheet and toward the volcanic island beyond.

I land as evidence of civil unrest is being cleared from the downtown streets. Turns out it's just the broken glass and debris from another wild Reykjavik Saturday night. The Icelandic economy might be on it's knees, the once-proud currency a cruel joke, but none of it is slowing down the hard-drinking sons and daughters of Viking blood.

The upside of all the economic turmoil is that suddenly, the whole country's on sale. The downside is that hordes of cheapskate Europeans know it, and have descended in noisy crowds to this rugged arctic wilderness. Last time I visited here, I was surprised to share the nation's waterfalls and geysers with the country's Vice President as his security entourage of one napped in the parking lot.

This I'm elbowed aside by a knot of French backpackers and trampled underfoot by busloads of ill-mannered Italians. I try to remain philosophical. The VP didn't seem all that thrilled to see me, either.

Seattle, Washington

2009-07-16T06:40:00.000-07:00

I follow a parade of RV's wallowing up the winding highway passing Oregon and Washington's coast. From time to time I pull over and walk across the sand to the ocean's edge, and reach down to touch the cold sea.

I'm getting close.

I arrive ten minutes after the Bremerton ferry sails, so I have an hour to kill. Walking up to Starbucks, I see a big "Welcome Home" sign in the window. How thoughtful, I think, until I see it's dedicated to returning sailors aboard the USS John Stennis.

The Hyak sails away from her dock right on time, and we share Puget Sound on a summer afternoon with a bevy of powerboats and yachts under sail. A lone jet skier romps in our wake.

Mount Rainier rises above the haze, and the Seattle skyline slides into view from behind a headland. We sail closer and I can't imagine a better way to approach home than from the sea. In truth, I've spent the past week thinking about this moment, closing the circle I've made around the country.

I'm shooting and shooting, waiting for some epiphany to bring it all together for me. Just as the city fills the frame, my camera batteries fail.

Sigh.

Welcome home.

Coos Bay, Oregon

2009-07-15T06:18:00.000-07:00

I breathe deep the evergreen and ocean scent of my beloved Pacific Northwest. But my reverie is broken by the whine of two-stroke engines, the smell of exhaust and the bully's spray of sand in the face.

To some I guess, nothing says appreciation for the wilderness quite like donning Mad Max body armor and helmet, hopping on an unmuffled four-wheeler and racing like a banshee across miles of coastal sand dunes.

I admit that I sometimes forget my little tribe of tree-hugging, latte-sipping NPR listeners share this little corner of paradise with other, less effete types.

And I find myself squarely in their midst here at SandFest.

Becky Selby drives log truck during the week, but for now she's leaning back on her ATV, blond hair spilling out like her rich, warm laugh. She sizes me up pretty quickly. "You're hanging out with dirty, stinky loggers now. I hope you're not traumatized."

Well, maybe just a little. But I start to wonder if we don't have time to go for a quick spin around the dunes before Prairie Home Companion comes on.

Yosemite National Park, Califonia

2009-07-14T06:00:00.000-07:00

WWAAD?

Arriving in Yosemite Valley, I find myself asking that perennial question, "What would Ansel Adams do?"

The landscape pioneer was, at the very least, a lucky guy. To be part of the first generation of artists to discover the high Sierra and create a body of work that defines the place to this day. It feels like we all spend a lot of time looking for the old master's tripod marks.

Now, of course, everyone is a photographer, dangling iPhones and digital slr's, spouting megapixels and dragging tripods through the woods while wearing the obligatory khaki photo vest. What would Ansel make of all this? The park's change from wilderness to amusement park?

The landscape itself is unchanged, unchanging, but I wonder if the spirit isn't slowly leaching away, tiny parts of its soul stolen with each mindless snapshot.

I arrive in the valley long after dark and drive to the classic Yosemite Valley overlook. It's now a parking lot, with overflow across the busy highway. Even at 11:00pm, a half-dozen tourists cluster around digital cameras trying to capture the vista lit by a rising moon. I join the throng, watching ghostly light on El Capitan and the valley beyond. I drive the park road and hike around for hours, watching the summer stars circle overhead, the landscape gone spooky and leached of color by the full moon's glow.

By four, I'm fading and desperate for sleep. WWAAD? Maybe he'd gut it out until that magic sunrise light. But whatever he did, I'm pretty sure that he would be smart enough not to wind up sleeping curled up in the front seat his car.

And even if he did, I bet he never woke up as I did to a family taking snapshots while he drooled in his sleeping bag.

Death Valley, California

2009-07-13T08:45:00.000-07:00

I walk off into the desert like any good poster child. 109°. No compass. No water.

I wonder how long I can go before my tongue swells, the hallucinations start, my brain begins to shut down, the vultures circle, flare their wings and descend.

I'm guessing it will be at least a few minutes longer than it takes me to walk the 200 yards back to my air conditioned car.

Death Valley in July is hot, no denying it. But it's no worse than a Vegas parking lot, and the scenery is better.

I walk through the sand dunes here, sweat evaporating into a thin salt crust as I wonder at the sun-bleached vegetation and sand. A gaggle of German guys hike in one dune over. They strip to the waist and make one abortive attempt at creating sand angels.

From the sound of it, the noonday sand flays the skin from their bones.

I smirk and shake my head at the foolishness of youth all the way back to my car. Up to the very moment when my I sit down in shorts on the black teutonic leather seats of my sun-baked car.

Las Vegas, Nevada

2009-07-12T08:14:00.000-07:00

I leave it to a roadside coin toss to decide. Heads it's Ely. Tails I go to Vegas.

Tails.

Okay, two out of three.

I tell myself to cowboy up, but it's no use. I am just not a Vegas guy. My vices are furtive and small-bore. That is not the Vegas way.

There's a big neon sign out at the desert's edge, flashing the city motto.

"Gamblin' and Whores! Whores and Gamblin'!"

They say it's visible from outer space.

I walk from my hotel up to the Strip, and realize quickly that only losers walk in Vegas. Car exhaust combines with cigarette smoke and cheap perfume into a hot, acrid cloud. On the upside, I make faster progress than the snarled traffic.

Carrying a tripod and wearing dirty cargo shorts and a baggy shirt, I look like a cross between a Danish backpacker and a skate punk gone to seed. It is not a flattering look.

I make it as far as the Flamingo. The crowds are moving thickly between refrigerated casinos. An 80-foot portrait of Donnie and Marie Osmond stares down from the hotel billboard, distracting me from the dozens of nude call-girl trading cards littering the sidewalk.

The lights, the crowd, the noise, the frickin' Osmonds...This is not my place, and these are not my people.

I turn and walk back to my hotel, stopping just long enough to buy a six-pack. By the time I get there, I can't even be bothered to decipher the pay-per-view menu.

I stop on my way out of town just long enough to take a parting snapshot. The flipside of the famous "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign offers some sensible advice.

"Drive Carefully. Come back soon."

Um...I'll do what I can on the first bit. But don't hold your breath otherwise.

Bryce Canyon, Utah

2009-07-11T07:46:00.000-07:00

My guidebook says the Bryce Canyon is not the place to come looking for solitude. Spectacular landscapes to be sure, but with Vegas just over the hill, you should expect company.

But I think it all comes down to timing. Roll in sometime around midnight and you beat the crowds and can skip the park entrance fee to boot.

An added bonus is a total absence of adult supervision. The signs warn of dangerous, unstable cliffs. But you want to hop the fence? Go for it. Scramble along perilous, crumbling rock walls? ¡No problema! Fall and shatter a leg and die a slow, agonizing death on the lonely canyon floor?

Knock yourself out.

Under the light of a full moon, sandstone spires and hoodoos fill the chasm beneath me. In the ghostly half-light, they look like miles of melted stone walls, the remains of some ancient cathedral forsaken by an indifferent god.

It is starkly beautiful, and after an hour of walking around in the utter silence, spooky as hell. The only sound is the gentle rustling of the cool desert wind and my own breathing.

I walk down along steep canyon trails, surrounded by an army of stone sentries, imagining movement in the shadows. It occurs to me you're never too old to be afraid of the dark.

Monument Valley, Arizona

2009-07-10T07:20:00.000-07:00

When movie director John Ford changed Marion Morrison into John Wayne, dressed him up in a cowboy outfit and stuck him out in this arid, forbidding corner of the Arizona desert, he created the defining image of the American West.

The first time you come into Monument Valley, you're enraptured. It's instantly recognizable; the red sands, the soaring mesas, the impossibly blue sky.

Taking pictures, you feel like a genius. Every click of the shutter is remarkable. It only slowly dawns on you that it's all been done before.

I still stare out at this landscape with a feel of awe, but I despair at the prospects of creating something truly original here.

I maneuver the VW truck down a rough track to the valley floor, passing more economical compacts as they scrape and gouge oil pans in a manner directly in contravention of their rental car contracts. The sun burns the desert hot and dry, and open wheel Navajo Jeep tours pass by encased in clouds of dust. I stare at the changing geometry of light and shadow, sand and rock.

Sunset ignites the red mesas to the color of flame, and with dusk the color leaches away like a coal growing cold. The moon rises full and fat behind the cliffs. I return to the overlook, watching the twilight fade to moonlit night.

There are no cowboys and the Indians have all gone home for the night. It's just me, standing on a cliff, staring out at the desert.

Holbrook, Arizona

2009-07-08T07:55:00.000-07:00

Holbrook lies along old Route 66, the mother road from Chicago to the California coast and all-purpose symbol of the American love affair with the open road.

The town was once home to a bevy of motels and cafes catering to early cross-country drivers, and a dozen or more garages dedicated to nursing post-war Chevrolets across the desert wastes.

The Petrified Forest National Park lies just outside town, and the area was once home to herds of dinosaur and, rather more recently, Navavo tribes. Neither have exactly prospered.

A pile of mineralized wood, disaffected Indians and a dead highway seem slender threads to hang an economy on, but you play the cards you're dealt.

The town looks sun-bleached and dusty, like a faded snapshot of itself, circa 1958. It is kept on life support by nostalgic motorists and the meager cash they drop at the gas station, Navajo gift shops or the Wigwam Motel. I do my part at the West End Liquor Store, buying a six-pack of Corona from the owner, who sits tethered to an oxygen tank while chain-smoking Marlboros. I know there's a metaphor here somewhere, but I hope for a fire extinguisher, too.

Most of the other non-chain stores have gone to seed. Pow Wow Trading Post, Crossroads Saloon, J & J Cafe, all gone. Only the dinosaurs seem to be thriving. They're everywhere in town, outside all the gift shops opened or closed. I think they outnumber the ambulatory human population.

At the edge of town, there's an large billboard proclaiming "Land Available." It advertises a small patch of desert, and is surrounded hundreds of identical square miles of absolute wasteland.

Maybe the dinosaurs can get financing, but I sure don't see anyone else lining up.

Las Vegas, New Mexico

2009-07-07T07:40:00.000-07:00

Vegas, baby! Vegas!

Hours of driving through a sun-baked desert, but this is my exit.

I am so money.

Hmmm. I have to say, Vegas doesn't look like I remember it. What's with all the adobe? The empty storefronts? The ample on-street parking?

Can anyone tell me where the Bellagio is?

Judging from all the turquoise and the absence of high-roller asshole types, I may have miscalculated. And I'm okay with that.

I grab lunch at a great little Mexican cafe and then walk up to the street fair filling up the central plaza. There's a small crowd dancing to a tejano band's spanglish version of Mustang Sally. There's not a slot machine or an Elvis impersonator or anybody singing "My Way" within a hundred miles.

And I'm okay with that, too.

Viva Las Vegas. At least this one.

Amarillo, Texas

2009-07-06T07:02:00.000-07:00

There's dust blowing in off the scorching Texas panhandle, and the smell of spray paint on the wind.

Just west of Amarillo, the landscape gives up any pretense of topographical variety and adopts a Cartesian pancake aspect. And what better place to sink ten vintage Cadillacs nose down in the hardpan?

Located just off I-40, Cadillac Ranch is hard to miss, and hundreds of tourists pull in and stomp out through the dusty wheat field to reach the cars, spray paint in hand. This is public art at its interactive best.

Think of it as America's Stonehenge, with graffiti.

Pretty much everyone who makes the trek paints something; a name, their home town, their dogs' names. And ten minutes later someone paints over it with something new. I find the whole enterprise cool and fun in many different ways.

And it's not just the artistic, body-piercing set. Whole families are out there tagging. That is just so much better than any family vacation I ever took.

I drop to my knees to shoot from a low angle, my butt high in the air, which is enough of a spectacle to stop four Japanese tourists in their tracks. They take turns looking through my camera and then take snapshots with me in situ.

I'm just happy they didn't paint their names on my ass for good measure.

Chillocothe, Texas

2009-07-04T08:25:00.000-07:00

A man walked up to me and asked what I was doing.

He said, "I was in the post office and was wondering what this idiot was doing standing in the middle of the street taking pictures."

But he was curious, not hostile or suspicious. His name was Cotton and he spent his whole life in Chillicothe, and he was eager to talk.

We look up and down the barren main street and he says, "These towns are all dryin' up. The kids get out of school and they're gone. To Dallas, Lubbock, Amarillo. There's just no work here, no jobs."

"We're hanging on, but it's gettin' pretty thin."

We're soon joined by April, an older woman who's finishing up at the post office, and as soon as she sees my cameras offers to show me the old Methodist Church. I accept out of politeness, but the church is beautiful and sad all at once.

Built more than a century ago, the pulpit stands in one corner, dark wood pews arranged in concentric arcs. Fine old German stained glass glows in the windows. It speaks of generations of pride and hard work and reverent faith.

April tells me, "On a good Sunday, we're lucky to get 35 people. The say that pipe organ is worth $165,000. We don't even have anyone to play it any more. Our organ player moved away."

She and Cotton chat for a while before he finally lets it slip that he's putting his place up for sale and moving down the road to Electra.

April looks up, surprised and stricken. "You're moving? Really...?"

"I finally give up."

She sighs, "Chillicothe's gonna' be smaller."

Fort Worth, Texas

2009-07-03T07:25:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the shortest cattle drive in Texas.

In spite of its status as the (almost) biggest state in the union and home to more self-applied superlatives and boundless boosterism, twice a day a small group of cowpokes move 17 Texas Longhorns past the Hyatt and through a tourist gauntlet for two whole blocks in the old stockyards of Fort Worth.

Let's just say that it is, on the whole, rather less daunting than the Chisolm Trail.

The stockyards themselves have seen more robust days. Once renowned as Hell's Half Acre, the whorehouses and acres of cow shit are long gone, though there is still a fair bit of bull. Wooden cactus sprout from flower pots, and you can pay 50 cents for a pony ride or a couple bucks to either straddle a bored longhorn or get tossed around by a mechanical bull. There's a number of perfectly reputable museums, an indoor rodeo and Pawnee Bill's Wild West Show and and an admirable number of watering holes and BBQ joints.

But I came for the cattle drive, so I lined up with the sugar-hyped kids and sweating parents and watched the show. Traffic was blocked, cowboys who wouldn't look out of place at a pride parade rode out into the broiling sun and escorted their bovine charges down the cobblestones. Kids darted about but I was disappointed that no stampede ensued. In eight minutes the cattle were on their way back to the feedlot, and the cowboys rested in the shade.

I chatted with one of the cowboys after the show. He has traded the cowboy life for a rather more refined career as city employee. "I used to work up at a stockyard running 8000 cattle a day. That was work. I took this job 'cause I loved the horses. The people...well...it gets too much and I can say my horse needs waterin' and ride off."

We chatted for a bit longer, then he mumbled something his horse seemin' a tad thirsty, and off he rode into the noonday sun.

New Orleans, Louisiana

2009-07-02T06:47:00.000-07:00

The afternoon sky goes dark and ominous. Lightning hits somewhere close and I start to count. One one thousand, Two...and the thunder explodes. I can see the rain coming, a gray wall approaching fast; dust and street trash blowing out in front of it.

In a moment, the storm swallows everything, and it feels like Judgment Day itself.

I try to imagine four summers back, when the world came to an untidy end here. The raw fear to watch the monster coming and be swept up in its furious power. Katrina lumbered in off the gulf and drowned this graceful old city.

Many words have been spilled about what followed, and I'm in no place to add to the tally. Driving in, though, the scars are everywhere to see. Boarded up shopping malls, stripped and gutted houses, an emptiness still hangs in the air. But life goes on, if only for lack of any options.

I drive out along the levees as the storm ebbs and find myself out among the refineries. I spot a cemetery crucifix in the cracking towers' shadow. They call this Cancer Alley. A dull roar fills the air, as steam and gas flares rise from the stacks. A cracked marble Christ hangs from the cross, head bowed. It's a easy metaphor, and I'm not the first to find it. Life is hard out on the delta.

Slidell, Louisiana

2009-07-01T07:22:00.000-07:00

"I am 100% Cajun, coon ass, swamp rat, red neck and I will be your captain today," announced Cap'n Jack by way of introduction.

It was 8:37 in the morning and both temperature and humidity were bounding past 90. I hadn't even made it to the boat and I was soaked through.

The guidebooks all said that if you wanted to see the bayou, visit the folks at Honey Island Swamp Tours. Normally, I'm not a big fan of group activities, but the idea of walking around some half-collapsed dock in the delta, draped in cameras and proffering cash to wary locals seemed like more drama than I could face without a drink in my hand. So for $23 I signed on for two hours in a shallow draft mud boat hurled downriver by a 200 horsepower Honda.

As a long-time Seattle resident, I've muffled most of my once over-abundant personality in a heavy blanket of emotionally-repressed Lutheran civility. I now shake hands with small babies and last raised my voice in anger sometime in 1998.

Jack doesn't have that problem. He hollers a welcome to all his passengers. He yells into his cellphone about a busted air conditioner. He bellows apologies for the delay and roars full throttle out into the bayou.

Jack spends a lot of time on 11.

But the man could work some magic with the alligators. "You want to get their attention? Throw 'em some marshmallows. Then poke some hot dog on a stick. Gators love them wienies."

I had no idea that alligators had the same eating habits as my cousins. It's not exactly textbook wildlife ethics, but it works wonders. An eight-foot alligator swims out, snarfs down the campfire fare and swims closer.

Jack raises an eye as I hold my camera down to the water's edge. "She gets ahold of your hand, it'll be somethin' gettin' it back."

I imagine the tug of war between me, Jack and the 'gator and edge a wee bit closer to the boat.

Gulfport, Mississippi

2009-06-30T06:15:00.000-07:00

In Gulfport, it's the simple pleasures. Like driving faster 'n hell on a dirt track Saturday night. Turning left was never so much fun.

For every Nascar race with millionaires driving in circles like they were looking for parking, there are dozens of small tracks out in the hinterlands where regulars guys (and the occasional high-threshold-for-abuse woman) toss together a car out of spare parts and wishful thinking and indulge their inner hell-raising, moonshine running, full throttle demons.

Out here, it's all backyard mechanics. No fancy corporate sponsors or factory-trained pit crew (your dad's here, and your girlfriend and your slightly retarded cousin), and you're out there with a flashlight in your teeth and sweat running in your eyes trying to figure out why she's missing on that third cylinder.

Not that you can't spend money on this sport all the same. One guy brags he's got more money in his car than his house. I joke, "Your wife must love that."

"We're separated."

Oh.

I take one look at the racing, watching the guys run flat out down the straights then kick the ass-end loose and run through the banked turn in a barely controlled full throttle slide, spitting mud and bashing metal, and I think...damn...that just might be fun.

Mobile, Alabama

2009-06-29T08:18:00.000-07:00

I wonder sometimes about our love affair with the tools of war. Throughout the South, fighter planes and old cannons keep keep popping up in the oddest places. Stuck awkwardly above a highway rest stop near Pensacola, there's a Blue Angles jet with a stick up its ass. Mobile's primary tourist distraction is the decommissioned USS Alabama battleship.

I suppose if I longed to spend the day tromping around several acres of battleship steel in the midday Alabama sun, and was willing to pay $12 for the pleasure, I would have followed the masses up the gangplank.

But I don't, and I'm not, so I didn't.

Instead, I walk down to a nearby pier overlooking muddy Mobile Bay. A small knot of families has pooled together an admirable collection of fishing gear, and is hard at it.

They're using fat local shrimp for bait. Personally, I'd be just as happy to pop a beer, cook up the shrimp and call it good. But they throw in their lines with determination from a spot overlooking the battleship and distant city skyline, while ignoring both completely.

The afternoon passes with cheerful banter among the grown-ups and gentle lessons for the boys. No one gets too excited when the kids tangle lines, they get the help they need and I watch as their casting grows more confident, even if the results are roughly the same: Fish growing fat and happy on an inexplicable supply of shrimp floating in from on high.

On the other hand, Dee Dee, one of the few women on the pier, is killing 'em.

She excitedly hollers "I'm going to break it!" as her rod bends against a struggling fish. In the excitement, her chair is hurled over, beers are spilled and everyone laughs as she lands a five-inch Croaker. Someone snorts "That's baby jaws..." It's her first time fishing, and the guys laughter becomes only a little less enthusiastic as she lands fish after fish.

A breeze cuts through the stultifying noon heat, and distant storm clouds build and trap the humidity without offering any relief. I walk back to my car past the assembled tanks, mortars, jets, choppers and even a submarine. None of it really captures my interest. Off in the distance, though, I can still hear laughter.

St. Petersburg, Florida

2009-06-26T05:13:00.000-07:00

Florida has a lot to answer for. Nascar. Real estate swindles. The 2000 elections. Even if you balance that against Jimmy Buffet music, fresh citrus products and Poodle-eating Alligators, the state would do well to be mindful of a righteous God's wrath.

Even with killer hurricanes and a collapsed housing bubble, it still feels like they're getting off easy.

I spend hours driving between two endless walls of identical strip malls. Can there possibly be enough people to buy all the useless junk, eat all the crappy food and hire all the shyster lawyers from billboards along the local highways? Judging from the number of vacant storefronts and foreclosed shops, perhaps not.

The landscape is one vast, unbroken plain, showing the same weary succession; swamp drained, citrus grove abandoned, housing and retail development thrown up and sold at extortionate profit, post-bubble slow decay. Everything was built with one eye on the next hurricane that will surely take it all out to sea. Why knock yourself out?

Heat shimmers off the pavement and thunderheads boil. Even the black buzzards look defeated as they pick over some over-ripe scrap of road kill.

For lack of a better plan, I head for the beach. Crossing a scalding quarter mile of blinding white sand, I stand looking out at the sea. I know it's too early for hurricanes, but I stare out anyway, watchful for any sign of the coming storm.

Savannah, Georgia

2009-06-24T05:36:00.000-07:00

On a moonlit night, could there be a scarier place than Savannah's Bonaventure Cemetery? One hundred sixty acres of Spanish moss dripping from ancient oaks. Angels blank eyes following you. Cherubs growling and sprouting hideous fangs. Grasping hands emerging from the sandy loam, zombies hungry for human flesh....

To my great disappointment, it wasn't like that at all. It's not Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. More like an exceedingly pleasant walk down memory lane. With dead people.

Angels peer down from their marble pedestals as I wander amidst the Confederate generals, depressive authors and garden variety drunks and notables. An unlikely cheerfulness finds me. The morning sun grows hot, but a gentle breeze stirs the air and the tendrils of moss. Last night's passing storm front has drained the swampy humidity and the sky is a deep blue.

Though I'm in no special hurry, I can imagine worse places to pass on to my reward. To spend eternity in a gracious old city filled with a reverence for its past and possessing a cheerful willingness to overlook, and even celebrate an impressive range of character flaws. When my time comes, find me a quiet spot in the shade of some ancient oaks, out by the drunken poets and ladies of unsound morals and let the cool sand take my bones.

Georgetown, South Carolina

2009-06-22T05:40:00.000-07:00

Georgetown, South Carolina seems to embody the bipolar extremes of the South's economic reality.

Jazz drifts out from one of the bars lining the boardwalk, open to the night breezes stirring along the Sampit River. The setting sun sets the clouds alight above yachts and fishing boats anchored in the calm water. "Do Not Feed The Alligators" signs hang along the dock, where couples walk hand in hand in the fading light, the night air finally losing some of the heat, but none of its sultriness. The tourist trade seems to keep the lights on at half a dozen restaurants and bars, and the waterfront breathes a comfortably seedy prosperity.

Across the river, an International Paper mill looms spitting smoke and steam in to the sky. I caught small, inexplicable whiffs of it on the way into town, smelling like something threw up on my engine block. The plant's lights and billowing stacks dominate the western horizon, glittering almost prettily against the sunset sky.

Driving up to the gates, the smell doesn't get any better, but the light show grows ever more dramatic. The factory looms steaming and clanking above a dismal trailer park, and a warm, foul mist falls from the night sky, stinging my eyes.

The only signs of life beyond the swarming mosquitoes is the procession of cars lining up at the car wash across the street. As a concession to the town for fouling its air, the company does offer a free hose down for your car. After standing downwind for half an hour, I'm tempted to burn my clothes and walk through it myself.

Driving out of town and fiddling with the radio, I accidentally run over something in the road. Out of the corner of my eye, I can tell it's already dead, looking like a pile of white feathers or fur. A gull maybe, or a dog. I look back in the rear view mirror and an old man is slowly walking out from the road side. He stoops to pick it up, but before he does, I look away, ashamed.

Gatesville, North Carolina

2009-06-19T06:00:00.000-07:00

Loblolly pine. Chickory nut. Sassafras. Cypress. There is a sweet musicality to these Carolina woods. A canopy of green tangles and grasps, swallowing the landscape whole. Bird song and insect buzz fill the space between warm, humid breezes.

I follow the canoe rental signs, in spite of a number of unpleasant previous boating attempts. Forget my chronic inability to master the J-stroke. I'm happy if I can make it through an afternoon without awkward riverine camera recovery attempts and unpleasant phone conversation with my insurance company.

Merchants Millpond, separated from the vastly better named Great Dismal Swamp by an escarpment, drains 80 square miles of forest into a tea-dark lake. Duckweed covers the water like a green blanket, and Cypress trees stream Spanish Moss in the still heat of late afternoon. A distant thunderstorm stirs the air, offers a menacing rumble, but keeps its distance.

I paddle slowly through the haunted landscape. A snapping turtle dives with a surprised splash. I regularly snag the paddle on barely submerged....something, and try not to levitate out of the boat. A park service poster helpfully suggests viewing and enjoying the local alligator population from a safe distance.

It's good to know I won't drown in here. The gators will make sure of that.

Rehobeth Beach, Delaware

2009-06-18T05:08:00.001-07:00

Each summer, we packed mom, dad and the four of us kids and all our earthly possessions into a 1972 Chevrolet Impala for our annual vacation. Though the trip was barely 200 miles, it took longer than some of the Crusades.

Our destination, selected for reasons lost to time, was Rehobeth Beach, Delaware. Though the date was determined months in advance, my father would procrastinate until the morning of departure. At the appointed hour, he would adopt a murderous expression and find a number of household and automotive repair tasks that suddenly required his undivided attention.

We would watch, bags packed in nervous silence, waiting for the storm to break. After a barked shin or bashed knuckle, he'd explode with a fearsome shower of temper and strong language. And then we'd load up the car and hit the road.

Though he repeatedly sailed across the submarine-infested North Atlantic in World War II, he wasn't much of a navigator on land. One summer we towed the family boat on a lively tour of Baltimore's public housing projects. The story is still passed down through generations, to great hilarity at the Lafayette Courts and Lexington Terrace, of the six goggle-eyed white people dragging that trailer around in circles, driving off in a huff, then returning for one more lap half an hour later.

Upon arrival at some mildew-scented rental, my father would take his surf fishing rod and a cooler full of beer and walk purposefully to the sea. That would be the last we would see of him. He would return, days later, sunburned and crusted in salt and happier than I ever saw him.

The rest of us would find some patch of sand on the crowded beach, wade out into the waves and set out with dogged determination to drown ourselves. I wasn't much of a swimmer, and and never had more than a farmer's tan. At the beach, I went for the major first day full-body burn, cooking myself until the flesh came off in satisfying translucent sheets a few days later. My sister slathered herself in cocoa butter and slowly baked in the sun until her skin was the color and texture of an old piece of Samsonite luggage.

I visit now with SPF 35 applied generously to forehead and nose, in spite of low clouds threatening rain. There's a cold wind blowing in off the Atlantic and both water and sand seem grubbier than I remember. But families spill out onto stolen hotel towels and kids frolic in the choppy waves. Dolle's Salt Water Taffy still stands as a cornerstone on the boardwalk, but I resist the sugary urge to pull out my fillings.

I've never been much for fishing, or vacations for that matter. Too busy. But what I would give to be out here, drinking a beer and casting out into the surf with my old man.

Washington, DC

2009-06-16T05:36:00.000-07:00

To spend a pleasant spring afternoon in Washington, DC, escaping both invading tourist hoards and swampy heat is a rare and special treat. To do so with free and ample on-street parking shows evidence of divine intervention.

I make my way down the Via Dolorosa of tourist sites. The Capitol, attended briefly by a parade of dorky Segue riders and then quiet again. No sign of Clarence Thomas or his RV at the Supreme Court. The Washington Monument, encircled by flags and hosting a small jazz festival in the late afternoon sun. The Jefferson and Iwo Jima memorials across the water. But for me, nothing beats the solemn grandeur of Lincoln. It stands as a secular temple to the goodness that this country can achieve.

Lincoln sits in his outsized club chair like a father figure to the nation, he maintains a quiet dignity despite the swarming throng, their chatter reduced to a surging echoing murmur inside the cool marble walls. Cub scout troops and Indian families and school field trips pose for snapshots at his feet, a paparazzi swarm sputtering flashes. A "Quiet. Respect Please" sign goes clattering over in the crush.

What would Lincoln have made of all this? From his feet, before being elbowed aside, I look up at his stern countenance. He stares evenly out on the city he governed and the nation he saved, revealing nothing. I walk off to his left past a row of columns and into the airless cool shadows. Standing beneath the words of his second inaugural address, delivered to a nation exhausted by war. Barely a month later, he would be dead.

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right...let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds...to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

Looking at his profile, I think I can make out the hint of a country lawyer's wry and weary smile, but it sure feels like there's work still to be done.

Mechanicsville, Maryland

2009-06-15T06:00:00.000-07:00

Is there a more quintessentially American sport than Demolition Derby? Take some perfectly serviceable old cars and smash them into each other repeatedly for the viewing pleasure of paying spectators.

Any sensible soul might feel unease at such a debased gladiatorial spectacle. It's loud and dangerous, wasteful and stupid. And fun.

There may be some things offering more reckless excitement than a full-on derby, but you'll have to take your clothes off to do them. After the first round, with ears buzzing and clods of mud stuck to my cameras and hair, the only thing I wanted to know was where do I sign up?

The cars, stripped of glass and with doors, hood and trunk welded shut, enter the arena in single file and line up. After a short countdown, it's mayhem. Engines howl, smoke billows, metal crumbles with a sickening thud. Stomp the throttle into the floorboards and keep hitting 'till the tires come off. Then run the sumbitch on the rims. Last man moving wins.

This is a sport for guys who think Fight Club is for pussies.

The night's big winner was Austin Davis, all 5' 3" of him. Driving a white '68 Imperial with nothing short of murderous intent, Austin is barely 16 years old and doesn't even have a driver's license. His mom was absolutely beaming with pride, especially when he t-boned some poor bastard hard enough to knock him over the concrete barrier.

She says he is making good progress toward getting that learner's permit.

Skyline Drive, Virginia

2009-06-13T11:48:00.000-07:00

"These mountains were made for a road," President Herbert Hoover said after a horseback trip through the Virginia. He didn't get much right as he steered the country off a cliff and into the Great Depression, but here at least he wasn't far off the mark.

The Skyline Drive winds for 105 miles above the Shenandoah Valley from nowhere much to nothing in particular. And with a 35 mph speed limit it does so in no special hurry.

It's just as well that I waited until late in life to drive this road. In my younger and more impetuous years I can imagine growing weary of all this senseless beauty and racing to determine the terminal velocity of my go-cart Honda through the hairpin turns. They might still be searching, in desultory fashion, through the endless forest hollows for my remains to this very day.

Fortified into a post-prandial haze by a hearty plateful of chili verde, I serenely cruise the narrow two-lane over mountain crests. I stop at each overlook and survey the misty panorama of mountains receding like waves on a blue ocean to the very edge of the earth. It fills me with some of the awe and wonder that must have all but overwhelmed the first white settlers to this region.

I can just about imagine looking west upon mile after mile of trackless forest unfolding below. You turn around and and look east at an identical tableau from which you have just emerged, then shaking your head and sighing in exhaustion and trudging on.

My trip is rather less fraught. I spot a smattering of wild turkey and one shy black bear. It's not exactly the forest primeval, but as a dozen or white-tail deer descend to graze at random intervals on roadside grass, I search warily for their twin gleaming eyes, glowing spookily in the gathering darkness at the forest's edge.

Mount Storm, West Virginia

2009-06-11T05:00:00.000-07:00

Crossing into West Virginia, banjo music plays in my head and the cruel dialog from Deliverance burbles up from somewhere deep. The roads go narrow and winding in the green hills, and the dogs look mean and bark at my passing, turning in furious circles against their chains. Coal trucks race past, and the massive smokestacks of a distant power plant rise in odd conjunction with a new wind farm in the Allegheny Mountains.

Outside the town of Mount Storm, an artificial lake provides fresh water for the power station's turbines. Steam and smoke belch from one tall stack, and the plant dominates the landscape. There's a knot of pickups in the parking lot, along with some tents. Three boys walk down to the water's edge with scuba masks and fins and ease in.

My first thought is, you guys are nuts. But they insist it's not bad. "It's okay today, but it's beautiful when all them boilers are going. It's like bathwater then." The boys are there with family on a week-long vacation camped out in the parking lot. In the tepid power station runoff, they swim like sunburned otters.

It would be easy to caricature these people, and to mock them. The state suffers a reputation for grinding rural poverty and a fondness for handguns, shitty pickup trucks and Mountain Dew. But it's also a state of uncommon beauty, fearsome independence and a resistance to being just like every other damned place in America.

These young boys were utterly without guile and the family welcomed me, a stranger with unknown intentions and provenance, into their circle. A traveler can ask no greater kindness.

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

2009-06-10T05:05:00.000-07:00

Back in the 7th grade, I wrote a 12-page report on the Battle of Gettysburg. I suspect and fear that my father's proudest memory of me was the "A" I received for that paper, the entire contents of which I plagiarized from the history books lining his bookshelf.

He was deeply devoted to Civil War history, and we regularly took trips to old battlefields and re-enactments throughout the mid-Atlantic. He would carefully explain how Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia pushed north into Pennsylvania and came within a day or two of capturing Washington and ending the war and the Union. Gettysburg was the battle that crushed those Confederate dreams, a charnel nightmare that left 50,000 dead in three days.

My dad took us to the battlefield as kids, and would explain all the moving parts of the machine of war, units of two armies clashing in an overlapping series of skirmishes and battles around the sleepy farm town. He would tell the story and I would forget it as soon as the words left his mouth. I just wanted a hot dog and to get back to throwing rocks at my little brother.

On a sunny and nearly perfect spring afternoon, I drove my mom the 45 minutes down to Gettysburg for a return visit. Recent rains have left the rolling farmland lush and green, and we walk past Boy Scout Troop 241 in uniform at the end of their day, sunburned and exhausted and scarfing down gift shop candy.

The battlefield was utterly peaceful, not much different from a serene July morning almost 150 years ago before the two armies collided. The silence now is broken not by firing cannons and musket shots, but the roar of fat men on motorcycles and the honking of ill-tempered Garden State motorists.

I try to imagine the noise and blood, the gut-sinking fear of watching waves of men sweep over the landscape toward your position, fighting in close quarters, swinging muskets like a club before a bayonet slides home.

But not too much.

I drive with my mom around the park, looking for the places where we picnicked as a family four decades back, and let the ghosts of battle sleep.

Seaside, New Jersey

2009-06-09T07:00:00.000-07:00

I was just about ready to put the Jersey shore behind me. In truth, I already had. But there in the rear view mirror, a blinking twirl of ferris wheel lights shimmered blue and red by the rising moon. As with all things sparkly, I was drawn like a moth to flame.

It was just like I remember from 1976. The glaring, flashing lights, girls’ screams drowning out crashing surf, the slightly creepy carnies running rides that threatened to kill or maim with cruel indifference. Rip-off games and crappy prizes. Knots of menacing kids from other towns. Bikinis and suntans, budding sexuality and teen lust.

I am 15 again, only with a lot less hair.

I could ride the Tornado and the Cliff Hangar. The Speedway and the Arctic Circle. Plus try newer thrills like mechanical bull riding and the Tower of Fear. I could fill up on taffy, pizza and ice cream at the Midway Cafe and chuck it all up inside Starship 2000.

But I don't.

I content myself watching a knot of youngsters take over the bumper car ride. As soon as the power came on, high voltage sparks fly from their aerials as they swerve and collide, cut each other off and hurl verbal abuse.

It was like everything I'd seen on the Garden State Parkway, only with better manners.

Bennington, Vermont

2009-06-08T04:54:00.000-07:00

I owe a lot to Robert Kincaid. The famous, albeit fictional National Geographic photographer improved my romantic stock through much of the nineties.

On assignment to photograph the Bridges of Madison County, this wandering loner found, and then lost his one true, if inconveniently married, love. The book itself was one very small step above a pulp romance novel, but many women adored it. If they could stop laughing at the stupid bits.

Driving through rural Vermont, an entire state that looks to have been decorated in the same style as my mother's living room, I too am photographing covered bridges.

From a creative point of view, it's been a patch of rough sledding. A tired cliche, the bridges are squat, dark barns above stream banks covered with dense vegetation and abandoned tires. At random intervals, murderous rednecks roar through them at high speed with tourist blood on their minds.

I admire Kincaid for even finding the time for his affair. I was way too busy getting lost, clawing through poison ivy or beating my head against those stout and ancient bridge timbers in sheer frustration.

By day's end, I'm done with bridges.

Or perhaps not entirely. There's a young woman working night shift at the Knotty Pine Motel, tan and blonde and smelling faintly of blueberries and the maple forest. I work the Bridges of Bennington County angle for all it's worth. She is having precisely none of it.

I gather that a night of adulterous passion is not to be. I sit alone, washing down my filet-o-fish sandwich with warm beer, and raise a lonely toast to the sustaining power of bad fiction.

Acadia National Park, Maine

2009-06-05T05:26:00.000-07:00

Smack the alarm clock, struggle out of bed and head for the summit of Cadillac Mountain early enough, and you too can be among the very first people to greet the new day dawning on these United States. That's the theory anyway.

As I drive up a winding park road, a thin ribbon of rose light kisses the clouds. A vast puzzle of islands and the Atlantic spreads out to the east. My more immediate foreground is soon filled with parked cars and chattering, shivering tourists. Couples cuddle up close, wrapped in blankets against the cold wind, and pretty much everyone is thinking about the warm bed they've so recently left. For no discernible reason, some jackass is wearing moose antlers.

People stand watching as the color fades from the sky. Clouds roll in like disappointment and someone finally mutters, "Dude, it's definitely getting darker."

It dawns on pretty much everyone that it's not happening today. Still dazed from the early hour, we shuffle back to the parking lot and make our way back down the mountainside to embrace the new day, however gray.

Warren, New Hampshire

2009-06-04T05:00:00.000-07:00

Deep in the Asquamchumaha Valley, It rises inexplicably from the Warren village commons. Taller than the Methodist’s steeple and towering above the freshly painted Historical Society and Little League ball field, a 1960's era Redstone rocket rises through the meager cover of a young maple tree.

Driving past, my head swivels nearly to the snapping point.

It seems that four decades ago, as Ted Asselin was serving his country in the humid wilds of Alabama, he noticed a field filled with surplus Army missiles. He came to the only conclusion possible, that what his humble hometown, nestled as it is in the bosom of the White Mountains, needed more than anything was a 60-foot tall rocket. It's bigger than a puppy, but you don't have to clean up the mess.

I cannot begin to imagine the conversation that followed as young Private Asselin cajoled, wheedled and begged a spare missile out of the United States Government, but I can only assume his powers of persuasion were formidable.

But I do try to picture a simpler time in America. When it was still possible to load up the truck and drive an intercontinental missile through a dozen states with the window rolled down, the radio turned up and a smile on your face.

Hyannis, Massachusetts

2009-06-03T05:53:00.000-07:00

My vision of Cape Cod is one big J. Crew catalog shoot. Willowy and tanned Ivy League blondes, warm sun on lighthouses and Kennedy's behaving badly. I guess if you know where to look, it's all still there, but there sure seem to be a lot of extras wandering into the corner of the frame.

There's still a kind of suavity and glamor clinging to this place, and it must be very nearly heaven to a certain class of white people. The kind of guy with casual ease and grace and just a touch of careless cruelty. Jay Gatsby in polo shirt and docksiders. The kind of guy I always hoped to become. And never even came close.

In Hyannis, I look for a spot to park and walk to the shore, but every lot is blocked by someone richer, better looking and smarter than me charging admission. There's one empty lot and I duck in, but a guy saunters over and tells me it's for residents only. I need to use the visitor's lot. For twenty dollars.

I look up and sputter..."Um, is there a place where I can just go and...um...kind of like out west, where we have this big ocean and pretty much anybody can drive up and just hang out and admire the scene...Is there a place like that around here someplace?"

He looks with me with thinly disguised contempt and asks "You gonna' be long?"

"Five minutes, I swear."

I have come to accept that I will never be as suave as Gatsby. But it hurts that I’m not even as cool as his parking lot attendant.

Newport, Rhode Island

2009-06-02T05:09:00.000-07:00

I enter the Gilded Age summer retreat of Newport under a steady blanket of cold rain. Traffic crawls through narrow streets lined by two solid walls of retail excess.

There are urgent repairs underway on a broken sewer line and the air is filled with the distinctive smell of...it's not money and I'm pretty sure it's not roses...it's the faintest whiff that maybe the very rich aren't so different from you and me after all.

Grand mansions line Bellevue Avenue, but it soon becomes apparent that vast wealth and good taste do not easily mix. I make my way down the avenue in a downpour, and simply cannot force myself out of the car to visit and photograph the palaces. Many are now open to the vast unwashed public as historic artifacts, tourist destinations and cash cows, but I don't want to satisfy their desperate craving for attention.

Instead, I venture down to the Cliff Walk, a rare point of public access to the rocky ocean shore. No Parking signs and tow-away threats line both sides of the street, but I take my chances and walk down to the cold, gray Atlantic.

I almost put a hand in, to dip my tongue into the ocean salt like when I was a kid, but then I remember that broken sewer.

The money from the Second Gilded Age, so recently passed, has gravitated to this rocky coast. Though there is no evidence of foreclosure, no piles of Jimmy Choo shoes and plasma TV's picked through and soaking on the sidewalk, but there are enough Sotheby's For Sale signs in evidence to give hope to the baying mob at the gates that their pain is, to some small extent, shared.

Mystic, Connecticut

2009-06-01T06:46:00.000-07:00

She's flirting with me. She's definitely flirting with me.

The way she circles past. How her eyes follow me. Finally, she works up her nerve and stops. Through the glass, our eyes meet and her face reveals an enigmatic smile. She opens her mouth and seems ready to speak.

And then she bares her sharp teeth, pops her jaw a couple times and starts rubbing her gelatinous melon head against the glass.

Such is love at the Mystic Aquarium. She's a beluga whale who, having traded cold arctic waters for more refined surroundings and a steady diet of frozen herring and head scratches, now swims laps inside this oversized fish bowl for our entertainment.

It's easy to anthropomorphize these whales. I sit in front of the thick acrylic wall and watch as the beluga circles past again and again. Each time, she stops, looks me over rubs against the glass before moving on.

She's so hitting on me.

A guy with the aquarium staff tells me not to get my hopes up. "That's Inuk, the old male. He likes to be dramatic. He's like that with everybody." He was brought in seven years ago with hopes of breeding with the two females here, but he has shown no great interest.

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure he's flirting with me.

Hartford, Connecticut

2009-05-30T06:49:00.000-07:00

Hartford is certainly a town not lacking in pretension. A city built on stolid insurance premiums grown glossy and sleek on nouveau riche investment swindles.

There are grand boulevards...devoid of traffic. Vast public spaces...abandoned. Towering skyscrapers...seemingly vacant. It's as if the Rapture came and it turned out that God's chosen were insurance adjusters and derivatives traders. And the bees of course. Which if you kept them all in a smallish enclosed space would be okay by me.

Granted, a cool and drizzly work night might not fully capture the bustling energy of the place. And on the plus side, there's plenty of on-street parking.

Still, it all feels a little Potemkenish, a city built for a population that had other ideas entirely. After Manhattan’s crowded vitality, this feels a little like Pyongyang without the whimsical dictatorial lunacy or nuclear ambitions. Just that creepy insurance watchtower lighting up the night sky.

Sitting for what felt like an hour at an abandoned four-way stoplight left me feeling like the last man on earth. Stopping on the yellow, I watched as the lights cycled through one...street...at...a...time. Then a leisurely wait for nonexistent pedestrians. As I near retirement age my turn finally arrives, and a lone jaywalker appears from the mist to amble out in front of my bumper before stopping to check his laces. I race through under the yellow, drive a block and stop again while the remaining minutes of my life tick....slowly...away.

Brooklyn, New York

2009-05-29T04:23:00.000-07:00

Hoping to further cultivate my melancholia, I go for a walk in the rain at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. To be honest, few things cheer me more than walking past people who, however celebrated and happy and full their lives might have been, are now dead.

And I’m not.

There is peace here, away from the manic energy of the surrounding city, but rather less permanence for the 600,000 residents. Angels grace many of the graves, but their features are slowly melting in the toxic mist. Site of the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Brooklyn and home to legions of Civil War dead, many of the names are all but lost.

A bust of Elias Howe, Jr., looking quite pleased with himself, lords it over a corner of the cemetery’s rolling and verdant hills. Beloved father and husband, brave in battle and successful in business (he invented the sewing machine), he passed at the tender age of 48 years, 2 months and 24 days. After a fair bit of mental gymnastics, I realized that though I have thus far achieved exactly none of those things, I have managed to outlast him by three solid weeks. And counting.

So there.

New York, New York

2009-05-28T04:56:00.000-07:00

In the 4th grade, Billy NIchols told us that if you threw a penny off the top of the Empire State Building, you'd kill somebody. The penny would go right through their head and out their feet and an inch into the sidewalk. If you threw a quarter, you could wreck the subway.

Billy Nichols was possibly the biggest liar I ever met.

By the time I got to the top of the Empire State Building, I was ready to take his theory up a notch and hurl myself off.

Upon entering the fabled building, I stood in a winding line to go through a security scan. Then I stood in line to pay $20 to stand in another, much longer series of lines, that in the fullness of time took me to a stifling elevator, into which I was crammed with 30 of my closest friends and taken 80 stories skyward. Emerging slightly stunned and with popping ears, I could opt to stand in another line for upwards of half an hour. Or climb the final six flights.

I take the latter in the hopes of saving time and restoring circulation. And after the 29 minutes it takes for the geriatric ward ahead of me to make the ascent, I stand in a scrum on the observation deck along with the entirety of humanity peering over the abyss.

Don't get me wrong it was very nearly worth the effort. It's an amazing view, peering out across the Manhattan skyline, the Hudson River, the Kansas prairie, Los Angeles shimmering in the distance.

It's just that I saw the line for the elevator heading back down.

Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania

2009-05-26T15:06:00.000-07:00

For the majority of the citizenry, Memorial Day is an abstract; an extended weekend at the beach, beers around the barbecue, and checking out the sale at Home Depot. Most years I'm no different.

But passing Indiantown Gap, I pull off the highway and drive past rows of flags honoring the recent war dead and and into hundreds of acres of manicured lawn and identical stones. Their numbers astound, flowing over the gently rolling Pennsylvania landscape.

A line of Vietnam vet bikers rides through up the quiet lane. Bellies and beards overflowing, they stop and stand in a quiet circle around a small grave marker.

I stop at random and study the names, most men of my father's generation, veterans of WWII and Korea, passing after their long, productive Greatest Generation lives.

An old woman walks past me, carrying a bouquet and accompanied by her daughter and grandson. The boy empties the watering can on the flowers, then swings it overhead already bored. Her daughter looks away distracted and soon walks back toward the car calling back, 'Take all the time you want." The old woman stands alone, stooped and lost in memory.

When she walks past, I'm kneeling, photographing a small graveside flag, trying not to intrude on her privacy. When I look up, our eyes meet. Hers are rimmed with tears, and the sight unleashes a wave of grief inside me. In a moment, I'm choking back sobs.

What am I mourning? My father, gone these six years? Row after row of dead old men I never knew? Some ideal of honor and service that I'll never measure up to?

A hot spring sun beats down, and I walk through the rows, wondering what these tough old men would have to offer in the way of fatherly advice. It's a little late to ask, but I'm all ears.

Carlisle, Pennsylvania

2009-05-21T07:20:00.000-07:00

I wrote the early chapters of my autobiography behind a four horsepower Briggs and Stratton lawnmower. Growing up on three acres in Pennsylvania farm country, the only responsibility my father entrusted to me with was keeping the grass under control. Walk 150 yards east, shift 18" south, and walk 150 yards west. And try not to cut your damn toes off. It offered me ample opportunity to envision a life more grand than my immediate circumstances might indicate.

Say...playing right field for my beloved, benighted Philadelphia Phillies.

“Hank Aaron connects. It's going deep. Souders races back...he's to the warning track...he leaps and...it’s amazing,,,he steals a home run away from the champ. Only 13 but that boy can really play some ball....

Riding the Tour de France.

"The peloton approaches the Champs Elysee. Souders breaks away. He's sprinting hard. It's unbelievable, but a kid in cut-off jeans and tube socks is the first American to ever win..."

Seducing my 7th grade mathematics teacher.

"Paul, what the hell are you doing out there? Will you just mow the goddamn lawn already...That boy, Louise, I swear...."

I had a lot of time to think about the amazing adventure my life would become just as soon as I got out of Carlisle.

I'm home again for a short break from the road. My mom still lives on those acres as she has for more than 50 years, keeping old age and infirmity at bay with a steady diet of fresh air and gardening. I help out with the lawn while I'm here though.

Walking back and forth in the cool spring evening, I marvel at the verdant beauty of these Pennsylvania woodlands. There is a brief window between the brittle mid-Atlantic winter and long months of humid summer torpor. A week of blue skies, gentle sunshine and the vision of the genteel life of a gentleman farmer.

There's as much chance of that happening as I had with Miss Bixler.

But I walk back and forth through the soft fields of bluegrass and dandelion. The sun sets, and twilight descends, and I spend a lot of time wondering if I shouldn't come up with a higher class of dreams.

Cleveland, Ohio

2009-05-19T09:35:00.000-07:00

It's all here at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Lyrics in a cribbed, nearly illegible hand scrawled in school notebooks. Black cowboy boots from a forgotten tour. The 501's and white t-shirt from the Born in the USA cover. On the screens an endless video loop ranging from early shows on the Jersey shore to polished and dull arena concerts.

Bruce Springsteen wrote the soundtrack of my youth, and it can't be a good thing for either of us that he's now a museum piece.

Walking past these artifacts, it's like trying to understand a fire that raged through your life by staring at a pack of burned matches. In an acrylic display case.

None of this stuff touched me. It wasn't until I walked up a spiral staircase with the opening lines of Thunder Road written on the walls, spiraling up with me. It's probably the only song I know start to finish, and one I've sung to myself across three decades. A paean to youth and longing and possibility.

The screen door slams
Mary's dress waves
Like a vision she dances
across the porch as the radio plays
Roy Orbison singing for the lonely
That’s me and I want you only...

Born to Run, two sides of vinyl that formed the philosophical framework for a generation of confused, awkward guys growing up in the seventies. We were all struggling to break free from our small lives and embrace some grand dream that was waiting for us just beyond the horizon.

That was a long time ago and a lot of miles back. You eventually figure out that beyond the horizon, there's just more road. And ourselves. And there's isn't a one of us who can drive fast enough to outrun that.

He's a dad now, nearly 60 with three kids and some marital complications if you believe the tabloids. He pretty much jumped the shark at this year's Super Bowl. I walk past his old Harlie here, polished and sleek, but looking strange and sterile and a little sad behind velvet rope. It's a memento from a 20 year old road trip.

I wonder if he doesn't wake up nights and dream of throwing it all in. Grabbing the keys and hitting the open road, driving hard one more time toward that ever-receding horizon.

Detroit, Michigan

2009-05-18T05:28:00.000-07:00

If you're looking for symbols of Detroit's utter collapse, you need look no further than the old train station. The shattered remnants look like something out of ancient Rome. Vandals have managed to break every single window throughout seventeen stories. You could almost admire the sheer determination.

In some nearly forgotten era, passengers alighted from their trains, setting off in topcoats and fedoras through the monumental station and into a city bustling with industrial might. Now it stands abandoned and destroyed, home to vagrants and urban wildlife, and awaiting the wrecker's ball.

The class of visitors hasn't improved much either. I drove into the city and straight into the Downtown Hoedown, an annual country music festival in the shadow of GM's bankrupt but shimmering corporate office headquarters. Every redneck in a 150-mile radius was there in a cowboy hat, drunk, and yee-hah-ing in traffic before going off to piss on a parked car. I haven't seen so many white people behaving badly since the last Republican National Convention.

All of which made the click of handcuffs around my wrists that much more unexpected.

I photographed the depot as the sun set and was intercepted on my way back to the car by Harrison, a overly friendly but harmless local who described the tragic wonders inside. I couldn't help but notice the cyclone fence and concertina wire that rings the building, but he knew a spot.

We ducked under a hole in the fence and made no more than 20 feet before the siren and flashing lights. In surprisingly short order I was spread-eagle on a police car, then cuffed. In the fullness of time I was issued a trespassing citation for venturing onto Canadian Pacific Rail property.

I looked at the young cop, shook my head in wonder and could only laugh. "Wow. That's quite the welcome to Detroit."

He looked down and stifled a smile that seemed to say "Trust me, it only gets better."

Madison, Wisconsin

2009-05-16T09:14:00.000-07:00

No body search. No metal detectors. Citizens and visitors are free one and all to enter. How strange that this should feel a special privilege.

There is something more than a little bit inspiring about walking into a good state capitol. Wisconsin's is a lovely marble and dark wood replica of the DC prototype. Towering and spacious and echoing, it feels like some temple of democracy.

Mobs of school kids on field trips file in, then scatter like excited molecules under the rotunda, taking snapshots and running in ecstatic circles. Their yelling and laughter echoing through the halls.

I sit and watch the multitude pass through, an Indian family, the nose-ring mohawk dude, overworked school tour guides and overpaid lobbyists and lots of sturdy-looking midwesterners. It's nearly enough to thaw a cynic's heart.

The dome towers in classic geometric perfection. At its apex, a romantic vision of liberty herself. She is draped in a white robe and bedecked in flags and 11 lovely maidens in various stages of entanglement and undress. The maidens represent the states'..um..attributes. It's all a bit sapphic, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I was informed later that the mural was in fact Edwin Blashfield's "Resources of Wisconsin." For one, I can’t fault the man for taking a dull task and running with it.

Minneapolis, Minnesota

2009-05-15T09:49:00.000-07:00

I hate Frank Gehry. I've hated the world-renowned architect ever since he added a crashed spaceship monstrosity to the Seattle skyline. He built it for the city's second richest billionaire, and I watched it materialize outside my apartment window in the late 90's. I hate the narcissistic, egomaniacal design philosophy that seeks to plop a shiny new toy in whatever city some gazillionaire ponies up the requisite bankroll.

Minneapolis, Minnesota has one, the Weisman Art Museum on the University campus. It stands on the banks of the Mississippi River, surrounded by a sea of nondescript buildings that fill the campus. I walked around, thinking of all manner of clever insults to hurl. Imagine the illicit spawn of a medieval castle's one-nighter with a mobile home. I studied all the playful angles, the audacious steel shell, the clever windows, the play of light against the flawless blue of a spring morning.

I was utterly entranced. So much so that on my second lap I walked off the sidewalk and painfully wrenched my ankle.

I sat on the campus lawn, gripping my throbbing boot and held onto my one remaining reason to hate Frank Gehry.

Highmore, South Dakota

2009-05-13T22:01:00.000-07:00

After filling up on five cent coffee and a small five dollar slice of pie, I set out from Wall Drug, South Dakota and head east. I skip the interstate and head out on state two-lane.

An enormous thunderstorm forms over the prairie to the north, growing dark and angry. I parallel it for miles, listening in on AM radio reports of baseball-sized hail and 60 mph before the station plays a set of the Carpenters' greatest hits.

I finally give in and drive toward the storm, helped along by a 30 mph tail wind as the cloud begins to spiral upwards and suck in air at its base. The radio blares a civil defense alarm warning, then returns to playing the Eagles.

The sky grows creepy dark as I drive under the enormous cloud. I head into a wall of rain as lightning starts to crackle above me. A bolt hits very close, blinding me for a second. Not that I can see much to begin with as the wipers struggle to keep pace. Hail hits the car like a bucket of rocks, and this starts seeming like not such a great idea after all.

The radio reports the storm moving at 50 mph east, and there's no way I can get out ahead of it. I drive for an hour buffeted by wind and sheets of rain before breaking away and trying to find a hotel for the night.

Just because I'm done doesn't mean the storm is and I slog through waves of rain, hail and wind. I look at the silver lining; at least I won't have to wash the car.

Mount Rushmore, South Dakota

2009-05-13T10:05:00.000-07:00

I drive through towns in South Dakota where junked cars outnumber the resident population by an order of magnitude. The highway runs off like a perfect expression of the Cartesian ideal. There's an unnerving geometric perfection to it, a line bisecting the entire visible world. I pass a sign that warns "Next Gas 40 Miles." If you squint, you can just make out the next station's lights, at the end of that long, perfect asphalt ribbon.

Thanks to a detour in Wyoming for more scenic splendor, It is close to midnight before I reach Keystone in the Black Hills. I obey the alarm clock's summons, and trudge off to meet my country's makers. I arrive before the parking garage staff, so I avoid ransoming my car to the concessionaire. Instead, I surprise a small herd of deer hiding out in the garage.

I climb the stairs and four familiar faces stare back.

Almost immediately, I start to see Mount Rushmore as a Rorschach, you see what you want to. Founding father or imperial hypocrite. The man who saved the Union or the bastard who crushed the flower of Confederacy. Genius of democracy or slave-shagging libertine. And can someone explain what the hell Teddy Roosevelt is doing hiding in the back?

But as I sit and think about it, maybe that's the point of democracy. You make what you want of it. You can see the country as the hope of nations or a tyrannical empire in decline. Or a bit of both.

The old men peer out of the mountainside as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa and as silent as the Sphinx. I guess we'll have to sort this out for ourselves.

I duly photograph the mountain, and then its reflection in the visitor center's windows. Looking for a different angle, I'm soon sprawled on the sidewalk, eye to the viewfinder and ass in the air. I hear tittering laughter and look up to see an Amish family looking down at me, before politely returning their gaze to the Presidents.

Watford City, North Dakota

2009-05-12T10:21:00.000-07:00

I have a soft spot for the prairie, this land gone lonesome. It helps that I don't spend a lot of time here. But if nothing else, if you've got troubles, you can see them coming from a long way off.

I heard on the radio this morning that North Dakota attracts fewer tourists than any other state in the nation.

Inexplicable, I know. I think it's just a problem of perception. You say "North Dakota" and people think blizzards in winter. Tornadoes in summer. Locusts and Dustbowl Depression year round.

Maybe they need to think re-branding. Start with a new name. How about "South Manitoba?" And stop calling them Badlands. They're not bad, they're just misunderstood.

Driving east from Montana, I followed the Yellowstone River for hours, the land opening up, but getting a harder edge, too. I stopped to admire an eroded moonscape near the Dakota border and fell in with a skinny young kid taking his wife and baby out for a Mother's Day excursion. With a mini-bike. He pretty much ignored the two of them, and we looked off into the Badlands all around, dead-end canyons and eroded hoodoos stretching to the horizon. A distant storm cloud spat lightning, but we were too far off for thunder.

He looked around and said, "These are some of the harshest lands on earth. Jesse James, the bank robber, used to hide out here. He hid a whole bagful of silver dollars out there. He came back looking, but he never could find 'em. They say they're still out there somewhere."

He looked like he wanted to take that mini-bike out for one more look around. And if he found the treasure, the first thing he was going to do was buy a bigger bike.

Big Timber, Montana

2009-05-11T10:03:00.000-07:00

Big Timber lies in the rolling ranchlands north of Yellowstone, with a mountain range called The Crazies looming white and jagged to the west. Bull-a-rama marks the unofficial arrival of spring in these parts, and folks come in from throughout the surrounding counties.

Sturdy looking men and women walk into the Sweetgrass County Fairgrounds carrying six packs of Bud or Coors in cans, making steady progress through the evening's festivities.

Bull-a-rama is rodeo for the attention-deficit generation. Sort of the monster trucks for the agricultural set. Strip away all the barrel racing and horsey crap and you're left with a guy on a bull getting the shit beat out of him.

Rodeo cowboys are professionals in a sense, though the circuit is short on glamor. Bullfighters follow the competition from town to town, driving hundreds of miles across the west, paying entree fees and hoping to bring home enough gas money to keep going.

Each cowboy carries his duffel bag to a shared corner of the stockyard. Most everyone dresses there, stripping down to boxers and putting on Wranglers and cowboy boots with raking spurs. Some stretch and limber up, others practice the wildly jerking moves of the ride's first seconds. Fans stand and gawk. A knot of fat girls titter at the sight of grown men in their underpants. Everyone else lines up at the burger stand twenty feet away.

As sports go, Bullriding rules are basic. Sit down and hang on. The particulars are a little more problematic. You're climbing onto the back of two thousand pounds of irate beef that will do nearly anything to get you off. If he does, there's an excellent chance he'll try to pound the stuffing out you for good measure.

The bulls are led into a series of rough wood chutes. This angers them greatly. The cowboys sit on their backs, which does little to improve matters. Cattle aren't generally known for their acrobatic propensities, but rodeo bulls leap, lunge, pirouette and spiral with surprising speed and agility. The effect is only enhanced by cinching the bull's testicles with a leather strap. As one cowboy put it succinctly. "You put a strap around my balls, I'll jump too."

When the chute's gate flies open, the next seconds fill with almost unimaginable violence. You can watch damn near anything on television and it won't spoil your supper. But seeing these bright eyed young kids hurled, thrown and trampled tears at your heart. Still, folks pay ten bucks and drink a beer while they watch it.

And truth be told, I had a blast.

After the final bull, the dust settles and the crowd ambles toward the exit. Prize money and the winner's prize saddle and belt buckle are handed out. In dust and headlights, cowboys limp out to their trucks. Beers are cracked in the parking lot before the long drive to the next show.

Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

2009-05-09T09:53:00.000-07:00

Generally speaking, I like to think wildlife photography requires equal measures of stealth and patience, guile and skill.

But not always.

Sometimes you’re fiddling with the radio and minding your own business when a herd of large, brown ungulates pops up in front of you, altogether unexpectedly. After the requisite swerving, braking and swearing, the rest of the job is fairly straightforward.

I had crested the Continental Divide, the highway topping 7,000 feet with a howling squall at my back. Both the wind and temperature were somewhere in the 30’s, and dark clouds spat rain and then pellets of sleet before settling on horizontal snow.

Yellowstone in the off season is not without its charms. Chief among them the relative absence of tourists. More than three million tourists flock each year to the park, but the vast majority swarm like locusts during the short summer. Weeks before Memorial Day in the teeth of a spring blizzard, traffic was merely annoying, not yet rage-inducing. A minivan full of chain-smoking French tourists did try to ride an elk, but it was strictly a pre-season exhibition.

When the bison appeared, everyone formed up in an orderly queu and we made our evolutionarily improbable way down the narrow park two-lane.

Bliss, Idaho

2009-05-08T09:55:00.000-07:00

“You want fries that? Or tots?” It’s not a question I get a lot of, but this is Idaho after all. And for the first time since the fourth grade, I had Tater Tots with my lunch.

I stay off the interstate, winding through small towns. New Meadow. Brunneau. Hammett. Buhl. Bliss. Two hundred miles before noon.

I pull over to photograph the Koffee Kup Motel, seemingly closed and abandoned since the Nixon years. A young girl of seven or so materializes out of the weeds and tells me about her day. I look around nervously. Middle aged stranger. City fella’ from the look of him. With a camera. Out of state plates on that fancy pants ess-you-vee. Chatting up that poor little girl.

This couldn’t look more suspicious if I put on clown clothes and start handing out candy.

Sure enough, dad emerges from the old motel. He wants to chat. About cameras, fortunately, though my choice of a plastic Holga toy doesn’t inspire confidence. Soon enough, he scoops up the girl and carries her back inside. He stares out the window until I drive away.

These are strange days to be a traveler.

Eastern Washington

2009-05-07T08:58:00.001-07:00

Due to a clerical error, I departed Seattle under blue skies with the cherry trees in bloom. Birdsong filled the warm spring air, and sunlight filtered through a canopy of ancient dogwoods. I’m not one for omens, but I’ll take what I can get.

I climbed the Cascades and crossed the Columbia River before sunset, and the land seemed alive with possibility. Though snow is a weeks’ old memory on this side of the range, the days are already midsummer long at this latitude. Twilight lingered until past ten, and both the sun and I were up before 5:30. Only one of us desperately needed coffee to get moving.

I took a long drive up the Columbia to see the Grand Coulee and Chief Joseph dams, the jewels of FDR’s New Deal public works efforts. They turned this high desert green, helped win the war and kept the northwest if cheap, subsidized electricity. it also drowned a great river and are slowly but surely killing off one of earth’s great salmon runs. But there you go.

By noon, dark clouds rolled in over the Cascades and it started spitting rain. The rolling fields, some planted in wheat, some fallow, turned bleak and ominous, and I drove for hours through driving rain. So much for omens.

Coulee City, Washington

2009-05-05T09:50:00.000-07:00

At the end of a long day of driving, I stood at the counter at Big Wally’s. It was rumored to be Coulee City’s finest restaurant, though the title is not hotly contested. It also doubled as a Shell station and liquor store. I ordered my burger and gently inquired about an adult beverage to go with it. The lady at the till looked me over, slowly shook her head and said, “You can buy some beer, but you’re gonna’ have to drink it out in the parking lot like everybody else.”

The American Road

2009-05-04T10:03:00.000-07:00

My first car was a 1964 Chevrolet Impala. I used to steal my parents' keys and go joyriding up past the chicken farm before I was legal. The car was blue and sported a crushed left fender, but beneath the rusted hood lurked a massive 327 V-8 engine. As soon as I got out of sight, I stomped on the gas, swerved to avoid a manure pile and headed for the open road.

The ensuing 30-odd years have largely played out as an extension of that theme. I have inflicted grievous mechanical and emotional damage on a dizzying array of cars, trucks, scooters, boats and the occasional snowmobile. I have driven them all with more enthusiasm than skill and not infrequently with one eye on the rear view mirror looking for flashing lights.

Truth be told, my wild driving days are behind me. Towing a boat trailer up the Alcan is not exactly the stuff of Smokey and the Bandit. I haven't driven 700 miles through the night buzzed on No-Doze and howling a Springsteen soundtrack into the darkness since early in the Reagan administration.

Upon reflection, that might be such a bad thing, either.

Still, I've decided to go for a drive and see what life is like in the country I’m forever leaving. I'm setting out without destination or deadline, just the self-imposed goal of traveling to each of the lower 48 states, make some pictures and tell a few stories from along the way.

The truck is packed and it's time to go. I can pick up some No-Doze and Bruce cd's on the way out of town.

Seattle, Washington, USA

2009-03-31T09:02:00.000-07:00

There's something a little off about paying thousands of dollars for a state of the art 22 megapixel digital camera, then shopping around for the crappiest plastic lens you can lay your hands on.

The Holga, a twenty dollar Chinese plastic toy, was long one of my favorite cameras. In the old days of film, I'd come home with hundreds of rolls of Velvia and a dozen or two poorly wound 120's of Scala or Tri-X. When it all came back from the lab, I went straight to the Holga film. With color slides, I pretty much knew what was the box. The Holga suffered from light leaks and blurry nonsense when it wasn't falling apart in your hands, but still. But once in a while some magic creapt in. With the twilight of film, I left my beloved toy behind on most trips.

But the nice people at Holgamods.com have found time to glue those crappy, blurry plastic lenses onto Canon lens caps.

My version has a tendency to fall apart in my hands when I try to focus, and every time I pick it up out of the dust, the lens gets a little softer, picks up a bit more flare and I love it that much more.

Final Tally - Australia

2009-03-10T12:37:00.001-07:00

Final Australia Tally

Days Travel: 27

Number of Digital Frames: 39,554 (including tedious time-lapse frames)

Number of 35mm Film Frames : 3

Kilometers Driven: 10,692

Maximum Speed: 161 km/hr

Number of McDonald's Receipts: 16 (curse you, free wi-fi)

Total hours flown on Qantas: 27

Total hours slept on Qantas: 0.25

Total movie watched on same: 9

Total Books Read: 1.7

Total Equipment Casualties: Two lenses dropped, one tripod...misplaced

Sydney, Australia

2009-03-07T16:28:00.000-08:00

After a few thousand miles of solitary Outback driving, popping out of the tunnel and into Sydney rush hour traffic was a shock I was ill prepared for. The last of the sweet sunset light was already fading, and I struggled to navigate across the Harbour Bridge to photograph the city skyline before dusk faded into night.

Facing an airport deadline, I covered more than 1000 km of country roads today while maintaining autobahn speeds and a serious iced coffee/meat pie buzz. Rushing over Circular Quay in the middle of eight seething lanes of rush hour traffic was just a little too much stimulation.

The vast distances here have frustrated me again and again. The notion of driving from Sydney along the Tasman and up to the Top End and thence to Queensland was always ridiculous. Imagine driving from Atlanta to Houston and then up to Banff for the day before setting off in the general direction of Quebec, checking out the Chesapeake and then dropping off the rental car by noon in Georgia.

To my eye, this is a vast, wondrous country with some seriously pissed-off weather. Half the country is in flames, the other half under flood water. Shark attacks on the coast, Dengue fever in the tropics, dust storms and locusts in the middle. If I see four guys on horses asking directions to the apocalypse, I’m heading the other way.

I call the final score Large Antipodean Continent - 1, Overambitious, underfunded Photographer - 0.

I’m looking forward to the rematch.

Ivanhoe, Australia

2009-03-06T16:26:00.000-08:00

I walked into the pub and asked the bartender, “Is it always like this outside?”

It must have been something in my eyes, or maybe the orange hair, face and clothes, but I diverted his attention from pouring beers long enough to peek out the front door.

He called back into the bar, “C’mon and have a look, it’s the end of the world.”

I fully intended to push on from here, a dying town in the northwest corner of New South Wales. This used to be sheep country and prosperous, but that was before twelve years of punishing drought. Ivanhoe is now a town of one pub, two gas pumps and no small number of sun-faded For Sale signs.

With the grass long grazed to stubble, the red Outback dust takes flight without much provocation. I had watched the sky turn brown and strange through the day, as strong winds fanned by 105° heat gathered in the face of a passing weather front. I’d hoped to make two or three more hours before dark, but folks just shook their heads.

A guy at the gas station looked up and laughed, “It ‘asn’t gotten bad yet. The ‘roos aren’t even out.”

I made no more than five miles before a red veil blotted out the sky, swallowed my headlights and covered the road. I stopped the car and stepped outside to get my bearings, and immediately wished I hadn’t. Dust filled the space between molecules with forty knot blast furnace gusts, and the power lines buzzed with weird static.

When I turned around and found my way back to the pub covered in orange, I asked for a beer and smart-assed, “You get much of this?”

One of the locals slowly looked me up and down and smiled, “Dust? Yeah mate, a bit.”

Woomera, Australia

2009-03-05T16:23:00.000-08:00

He popped up in the middle of the road, out in the middle of absolute nowhere. I only saw him at the last minute, and turned hard, almost swerving into an oncoming car. The other driver’s eyes went wide with fear, but HE didn’t flinch. Flap-necked lizards are known to be, well, unflappable.

I pulled a U-turn and slowly drove back. He remained unmoved, basking in the morning sun like the king of the blacktop. I pulled out my gear, and it was only the clattering of a dropped lens hood that sent him scurrying into the desert. Luckily, the only cover was a pile of dead branches, and once wrapped into those he adopted the ‘If I stand perfectly still you can’t see me’ defense.

From his perspective, it must have been a trial, remaining motionless while a smelly, hairless, middle-aged beast crawled around him sweating and swearing, probing with clicking metal bits and flashing lights. The spectacle of me down on all fours, cargo short clad butt in the air, genuflecting to a pile of dead shrubbery, caught the attention of the few passing motorists.

Everybody slowed down, but nobody stopped. You see some crazy shit in the desert. Best to lock your doors and just keep moving.

Kings Canyon, Australia

2009-03-04T03:38:00.000-08:00

I open my eyes and the alarm clock says 5:40. There are days when I bound out of bed eager to see what the world has on offer, but this isn’t one of them. Gray light filters through the blinds and I ask myself, not for the first time, “What am I doing here?”

I drive the trailhead at Kings Canyon for my morning death march. Eight kilometers of rugged hiking over sandstone that glows with a furnace heat in the morning sun. I climb and sweat and swat at flies. The pictures I’m making bore even me. I am so completely done with this place.

My old girlfriend had a name for me when I get like this. Mister Miserable.

I overhear bits of the tour guide narration. Blah blah 330 million years...Sandstone....Tectonics....blah blah...I can see for myself that rainwater, when it comes, collects in the canyon pools, sustaining an oasis of life. I read somewhere that the Aborigines who hunted this valley hold its headwaters sacred. A nearby line of hikers take a more secular approach.

Descending toward a verdant pool dubbed the Garden of Eden, the hikers merrily chatter, eat their breakfast and some strip down to go swimming. A group of German girls emerges laughing and dripping in lacy brassieres and panties.

Even that doesn’t cheer me up. I climb out of the gorge alone, away from the merriment and back toward the parking lot miles away.

But every once in a while, when I deserve it least, the world offers a gift.

I glance down and see a smaller pool, still as glass. Framed by ancient sandstone, it forms a perfect mirror, reflecting the palms, the vertical canyon walls and the deep blue sky. I climb back down and frame, then re-frame the scene. The youngsters pack up to leave, and one of the Germans offers me the last of her chocolate chip cookies.

I stay for a long while, watching the play of wind and light on the water. Mister Miserable will have to go on ahead without me.

Ayers Rock Redux, Australia

2009-03-02T16:28:00.000-08:00

As a traveler, I am hostage to the vagaries of human nature. Most times I am well fed, treated kindly and released unharmed as soon my hotel bill is paid. But sometimes that blind faith gets bundled off in the boot of a car and vanishes without a trace.

During my visit to Ayers Rock, I have struggled to photograph the night sky here. This requires one small part technical wizardry (put camera on tripod, press shutter for exceedingly long time), but also a bit of ethical flexibility when it comes to park rules. There’s a big of strategic fence hopping involved, along with the whole question of the park’s nightly closure. Finally, you have to hope that no one stumbles upon said thousands of dollars of unattended hardware and makes it their own.

Having scurried 200 feet into the brush to hide one camera, I felt safe in leaving it unattended as it automatically took a picture every 40 seconds, and I wandered off to shoot the sunset. I didn’t return until nightfall to change batteries and bid the camera a successful evening. With no one in sight, I hopped the fence. In the darkness, I heard no clicking, saw no tripod. Everything was gone.

My mind raced. Did a dingo snatch my baby? I only remembered one car parked nearby when I left, but who would just wander off into the bush following the sound of a clicking camera. Must have been the dingo.

After a sleepless night conjuring implausible explanations for my insurance adjuster, I went out to half-heartedly shoot the dawn and keep an eye out for that car. Which I found parked and unattended at a crowded trailhead. I sat down and waited for an hour in the flies and heat for someone to show. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to say, but I saw a lot of different possibilities, all of them bad, Angry denials followed by a thrashing. No stolen gear after all leading to legal unpleasantness and deportation hearings. Screeching tires, a high speed police pursuit, a ranger shoot out. .

Maybe I watch too much television.

As it was, three young hikers emerged from their lap around the Rock. All wore headnets against the flies, and a hatchet-faced young woman sat down in the shade to light a smoke and take a long drag through the mesh. With an hour of preparation and rehersal behind me, I still couldn't think of anything better than, “Did you guys happen to see a camera and tripod last...”

“You’ll have to ask my husband about that,” she snapped.

So I did.

“Aw, right. So that was yours then.”

“Well. Yeah.”

“We reckoned someone had left it.”

“Really....hidden in the brush...while it was still taking pictures....”

“Crikey mate. Japanese tourists, you wouldn’t believe the stuff they do. Sheila, where’d you put that stuff?”

It eventually came back to him, and he retrieved my camera from the bottom of his duffel bag in its protective wrapping of dirty underwear, dug my carbon fiber tripod out of another bag, and rummaged somewhere else entirely to unearth the finder and timer cable.

“We were gonna' drop it off with the rangers...”

Normally, I would chirp in something helpful here to break the tension, about not wanting to bother anyone, thanks for keeping an eye on it. But for once, I just kept my mouth shut as he handed over my gear, piece by piece.

There really wasn’t anything to be said at all, at least nothing that wasn’t going to lead to a beating by a large man in a bug net. I took my gear, walked back to the car and drove off, trying to figure out what the hell just happened.

Ayers Rock, Australia

2009-02-25T15:40:00.000-08:00

Stars glisten overhead in an obsidian sky as the convoy sets out. A line of headlights; camper vans and tour buses, park service pickups and hired cars, rumbling in single file across the desert. In the east, the first gray hint of twilight outlines The Rock.

Uluru, Ayers Rock to the sunburnt, half-starved latecomers who stumbled in a hundred generations after this land’s Aboriginal founders, stands as one of the world's largest monoliths. It rises 1000 feet out of an ocean of red sand, its imposing presence drawing your eyes like a magnet.

A quarter mile of park road turns into one massive parking lot for the spectacle of dawn. Half of Tokyo spills out of one bus, an entire Boca Raton retirement home hobbles out of from another, joined by an army of dusty euro backpackers and campervanning Brits.

Dozens of LCD screens glow in the dark and a hundred pop-up flashes evaporate into the desert night. The sky lightens and the clicking reaches a crescendo. At 6:37 the sun casts the first orange light onto the Rock. At 6:39, the buses start their engines. By a quarter to seven, I have the place to myself.

The flies seem happy enough for me to stay on. Most everyone here walks around with ridiculous looking mesh headnets against their onslaught. I chucked derisively at first. I tried toughing it out, but it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to get anything done while waving both hands about your head and swearing furiously.

As the sun spins overhead, color suffuses the Rock. Dawn's warm glow gives way to a rusted brown under scalding midday light. In late afternoon, with the temperature pushing 105°, the Rock seems to burn in the colors of rich flame. At sunset and into dusk, it glows like an ember of coal before slowly fading into utter blackness on a moonless night. Its absence cuts a hole in the sky, and the southern stars glow brighter beyond its hulking shadow.

I wait until the last of the day’s cars, trucks and buses have gone home and stand in the desert, savoring the warm wind and the southern stars circling slowly overhead.

Stuart Highway, Australia

2009-02-24T14:56:00.000-08:00

Emily, the British voice inside my GPS, chirped the directions. Turn Right...Continue...636 miles.

If I’m going to make Ayers Rock, it’s going to be a long day.

I take a look at the seemingly endless highway, the red sand and scrubby brush, and step on the accelerator. In the absence of authority figures or the judgment that age is said to bring, I take the car up to 130 and keep it there. Okay, it’s kilometers, but still.

Eighties all-hit weekend and classical music fade, leaving only Aussie Rules Football scores burbling into the static. I punch the scan button and numbers roll through the entire radio spectrum again and again. In the shimmering distance, a mirage appears, taking the form of a monster road train, 189 feet of truck and three trailers barreling down the highway. As we pass, we give the outback salute, a single index finger wave. A sudden buffeting of wind and noise, then I’m alone.

Around noon, I pass Coober Pedy. Opal mining dreams are heaped in a thousand piles of tailings and dust. I once stood in front of a line of passengers boarding the day’s only departing plane with a $100 bill in my hand, trying to buy a seat out of there. For three long days I couldn’t find a taker.

I keep the engine running as I fueled up. No sense taking chances.

After eight hours, I hit my left turn signal. Emily says it’s 147 miles to the park entrance. If I step on it, I might still make it before sundown.

Flinders Chase, Australia

2009-02-22T19:41:00.001-08:00

There comes a point in every trip where I pull out the map and make a considered judgment of time and distance and how to cover as much as possible before heading for home.

I reached that crossroads in Adelaide. I could turn north (Ayers Rock and all the cool stuff in the tropics), west (go for a complete lap of Australia, stupid but kind of cool in its reckless ambition) or south (a small pissant island that has managed to flummox me on two prior visits). All the really cool stuff was north, so I duly signaled a left turn and headed south for Kangaroo Island.

In its ability to disappoint, the island once again did not disappoint.

I watched as the day’s blue sky gave way to clouds gathering to the south, sighed as they gained momentum while aboard the car ferry across, and mumbled darkly as they settled in for the long haul upon arrival. About then, I also remembered that this is a bloody big island. Flinders Chase lies at the far western tip, nearly 100 miles away. A newly paved two lane promised highway speeds, but I tried hard not to add to the roadside marsupial slaughter.

I reached the park boundary and headed for Remarkable Rocks, sandstone boulders carved by howling ocean winds. They are nice rocks. Perfectly lovely rocks to be sure. But remarkable? That struck me as a bit of a stretch. Still, as twilight descended and the cloud deck dropped, they were the only rocks I was going to get.

Port Campbell, Australia

2009-02-21T04:17:00.001-08:00

Can someone please explain to me the universal human urge to take the world’s most beautiful icons, our most sublime landscapes, and turn them into an Atlantic City boardwalk?

When I first visited the Victoria coastline 15 years ago, I parked along the road and made my way down a dusty track to the cliff’s edge. Scrambling down to the edge of a 200 foot drop into the Tasman, the view of limestone pinnacles emerging from a stormy sea greeted me. Known locally as the Twelve Apostles, I could never make out more than six, but with the setting sun, the ragged coastline, the prospect of falling to my doom, I was not one to quibble.

When I arrived this week, I was greeted by Wal-Mart sized parking lot, a new ‘interpretive centre,’ and a tax-funded paved pathway to fenced-in boardwalk winding along the cliff. Two hundred yards of platform may struck some as excessive, but only until the RV’s and tour buses started to pile up.

I showed up early enough to grab a spot for my cameras, but only just. As the sun dipped, an invading army joined me to meditate on nature’s spectacle. Their reverence took the form of jockeying for position, making out with their travel partners, and using cellphones to take pictures while yelling into the cellphone “I’m taking a picture...” And then the summer school camper bus rolled up and things livened up considerably.

I understand, in my darker moments, that I play some tiny part in this. I go to a place and take nice pictures. Those pictures are (infrequently) published and turn up in magazine advertisements that seduce a generation of armchair travelers to hop on a plane and see it all first hand. Even though the world might be a better place if they just stayed home and watched reruns of The Simpsons.

After a while, the sun set, the crowd cleared and silence returned. Stars appeared out of the gathering dark, and a lone wallaby appeared out of the shadows. We silently eyed each other and after a while I tried to apologize. “Dude, I swear. I had no idea...”

Great Ocean Road, Australia

2009-02-18T22:57:00.000-08:00

The Great Ocean Road winds up, over and around the corrugated Victoria coast. I was on a mission, which as usual meant I was driving too fast through lovely country to arrive ten minutes too late at my destination. But a mission nonetheless, and I was not to be distracted.

Then I saw the koalas.

There might be something cuter than a koala, somewhere, but in the absence of seal pups or unicorns, they would do. While rounding a corner along a winding stretch of narrow two-lane, I nearly drove into rear of a line of cars, stopped, and onlookers, gawking upwards. Like children at the zoo, they were spellbound by a gathering of herbivorous cuddliness.

I need to state for the record that Koalas are not bears. A real bear, a proper American Bear, raised on the Protestant work ethic and a steady diet of Fox News, gets up early each morning and goes out to hunt and eat and kill.

Koalas are instead marsupials, whose life mission is to sleep, chew on eucalyptus leaves, sleep, mate, and then take a much needed nap. If there was ever a vision of contentment, it can be found in the crook of a tree, dozing in the sun with a full belly and brain half-baked on eucalyptus fumes.

A local peered up as one nipper dozed off with a mouthful of leaves in mid-chew and grinned proudly, “That’s the Aussie spirit.”

Murramurang, Australia

2009-02-16T17:29:00.000-08:00

Like any television-reared child of the 60’s, I watched Skippy. Yet in spite of that training, I was still doing something wrong.

Every time I sidled up to one of the kangaroos, stepping quietly, avoiding sudden movements and murmuring in a reassuring tone, they grew tense and did the whole hopping away in blind panic thing. Finally, I saw how the other tourists did it. The preferred method includes running straight up while screaming with delight, offering a handful of potato chips and trying to hitch a ride on their backs.

The funny thing is, once I stopped with the stealth crap, the ‘roos relaxed and we got along just fine. One even curled up for a nap and I was all but spooning him, down in the sand and grass and the nuggets of dried poo like everybody's best mate. As in Australian for buddy, not in any unhealthy cross-species sense.

I only found this place because of the ‘Prize-Winning Pies”sign. It sounded like a welcome break on the drive south from Sydney’s rains. I gambled on the spicy beef curry and quickly got to chatting with Michael and Ian, two blokes sitting one table down. I mentioned I’d been hoping to find kangaroos. They knew just the spot.

“It’s just past Wolongong, on the way toward Murrmurang, hang a left at the dead wombat, pass Kalgoorlie on the track through Wagga Wagga around Oodnadatta and bob’s your uncle you’re there.”

Or something like that. My eye glazed over after ten or fifteen minutes of directions and a laundry list of other sites demanding my attention. My meat pie grew cold, I began to collect social security. The earth ceased to spin on its axis and the sun turned supernova before slowly fading to a black cinder.

“...and you’ve got to check out Woolloomooloo, just head across the Nullabor and you can’t miss it. Bloke carved a perfect replica of every man, woman and child in the shire using nothing but a chainsaw...”

That’s one thing you can say for kangaroos. They really don’t have much to say at all. They’re just happy to share your potato chips and a shady spot on the beach.

Sydney, Australia

2009-02-14T13:03:00.000-08:00

They call me Weathermaker. Wherever I tread, droughts break, the skies open and the good rain falls upon the earth.

Good for the crops, crap for photography.

After a long morning walking Sydney’s sodden streets, dodging umbrellas and puddles, I retreat to the Aquarium. It was on my list anyway, and six inches of acrylic separate me from the deluge. Standing in the winding queue, I sense I wasn’t the only one with this idea.

After coughing up my $30, I wandered past endless tanks of critters grand and small, saltwater and fresh. Sometimes, if I waited long enough for the screaming toddlers, field-tripping school kids, sullen adolescents, impatient parents and doddering pensioners to clear, I could even see them.

They save the best for last of course, but I eventually fight my way to the shark tanks. In a crowded, airless tunnel, a throng stands shoulder to shoulder, stroller to shin, staring up and taking snapshots. I join in the scrum, but my heart really isn’t in it.

The Aquarium reminds me of all the reasons I love scuba diving. They share a vast array of marine life and pleasing aqua-themed colors. But with scuba, there’s all that cool gear, an absence of small children, and above all, quiet.

Underwater, no one can hear your annoying cellphone ring tone.

Still, the variety of life astounds. And the fish are cool too. After some hours of this, I emerge blinking into daylight. Or at least the gift shop. In the interests of economizing, I make my way to the cafeteria, and think about lunch.

What’s on special? I hear the fish and chips are nice.

Enroute Sydney, Australia

2009-02-12T14:42:00.000-08:00

For ten hours, the view out my window does not change. Silver wing, blue Pacific, white clouds. At least I have time to focus on work. The sum total of my research material, an outdated Australia Lonely Planet, sits thick as a phone book on my lap. I read and underline and scribble notes of anything that might make a decent picture.

The blue sky vanishes as soon as we near Sydney. The city lies under a thick deck of purple clouds, and rain slashes the window. It takes hours to sort out rental car, cellphone and hotel, thanks to a small miscalculation of arrival dates. What’s with the whole dateline thing anyway?

Emily, the high-borne British woman inside my gps, seems flummoxed by Antipodean navigation, and starts sounding cross as I weave up and down one way streets in downtown rush hour traffic. Even the cabbies give me a wide berth.

For $35 I park the car in the hotel’s bowels and consider leaving it there for the duration. My four star room looks out on an air shaft, and I gently nudge a roach back into the hallway. Lacking the requisite power adapter, I recharge my laptop in the shaver outlet, grab camera bag and tripod as darkness descends and hit the streets. Time to get to work.

The further I walk from the hotel, the harder it rains, until a monsoon hits at Circular Quay. Soaked and sullen, I manage to hail a cab and slink back to the hotel. I smell smoke in the room. The outlet is blistered and smudged black from the small electrical fire I've set. The roach is on its back, waving its little legs.

I'm worried it might be smoke inhalation, but least someone seems happy to see me.

Kailua-Kona, Hawaii

2009-02-10T01:19:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking some about the significance of birthdays. Their meaning, what omens they might portend, and the fact that I seem to be accumulating ever more of them.

For a long time, I’ve made a point of fleeing the country during mine. A February birthday is one of life’s little jokes. Happy birthday, here’s some sleet. And maybe a side order of existential dread. Last year, I spent the big day chasing lizards in South Africa. Other years have been spent sweating through Kalahari lightning storms, shunning prostitutes in Manila and cruising New Zealand’s fjords. This year the arrival of my baby brother’s text message, “Wow, you’re sure old...” woke me from a sound sleep in Kona, Hawaii.

I looked at the message on my phone, sighed and then took a snapshot of the palm trees outside my patio at dawn, sending the picture back as my reply. I may be getting older, but by God I’m going to do it with a tan.

Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica

2009-01-31T12:39:00.000-08:00

A lone Howler Monkey stares balefully from the forest canopy. All around me, primates of a distinctly lower order are looking back up. They are Michigan frat boys, and they’re on a nature walk. And nothing says wilderness adventure quite like standing under a tree and making monkey noises while engaging in witty banter.

“Somebody give him a banana.”

“You see that? He’s giving me the finger.”

“Dude, it's black, I can’t believe it’s black.”

“That’s okay man, so’s the president.”

And people wonder why monkeys hurl shit at them.

These guys are like overgrown children, big but soft, loud and demanding of attention. I used to think it was a good thing that Americans get out and see the world. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe it’s just as well if the world only gets to see us on TV.

I’m headed for the airport today, a three hour drive away from the ocean, through the rainforest and back into the volcanic bowl of San Jose. I'm more than a little sad to leave a country that has managed to preserve such a significant portion of its wild places, along with its dignity and grace.

Rio Tarcoles, Costa Rica

2009-01-30T20:26:00.001-08:00

I looked up, arched an eyebrow and just had to ask “¿Peligrosa?”

Is this dangerous?

“Un poco.” A little...

Standing knee deep in swamp goo with a crocodile eying me while crawling up the river bank, that seemed an optimistic appraisal. On the other hand, I wasn’t the one holding a chicken.

In the mangrove swamps where the Tarcoles River empties into the Pacific, crocodiles thrive, and a nascent tourist industry has been born. Half a dozen boats now offer river trips, and all advertise pictures of their boat captains dangling poulets in front of oversized, airborne crocs.

Foregoing a group tour, I sprung for a boat of my own and showed up at sunrise to go chase Scarlet Macaws around the mangroves for a while (a process that reminded that while it’s easier to photograph exotic birds in a zoo, it’s also more dignified, cleaner and less expensive). After that, we went looking for crocs. it wasn’t all that difficult, since the low tide mud flats were pretty much lined with the evil looking bastards. But at one particular river bend lives an old friend. Slapping a chicken in the water is the traditional calling card, and soon a 15-foot long croc sidled up at the river’s muddy bank.

With that walnut-sized brain, multi-tasking isn’t a crocodile’s long suit. And apparently a small but dead chicken is just a lot less bother than 180+ pounds of flailing, mud-covered photographer. At least first thing in the morning. Once the sun gets his the old reptilian blood flowing, all bets could be off.