FLORIDA, ISRAEL, THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS, the plains and prairies of the Midwest—these are some of the places I have roamed while writing nature and travel books. But they are certainly not all. For those of you who, like me, are infected with the urge to travel, to see what’s around the next bend in the Appalachian Trail or what the night sky looks like from the bed of a Utah canyon, I invite you to tour my website. For those of you who like to travel from the comfort of an easy chair, books are a way to do that.
Some of my travel experiences result in books. Some result only in vivid personal memories. In History Hikes of the Smokies, you won’t hear how my hiking partner and I had to claw our way up a muddy bank way off-trail, after the fourth crossing of Forney Creek in a raging thunderstorm. At the fifth, and last crossing, I cried: the creek was boiling whitewater over giant boulders, the far bank was far. Slipping and sliding from one slick boulder to another, tearing my poncho and breaking a hiking stick, I finally made it three-fourths across and looked down to where a log had lodged in an eddy between rocks. From the log, a fat frog stared up at me, goggle-eyed and gulping pleasedly as if to say, “Fabulous weather, wot?” I laughed, oh I laughed.
Crossing Forney before the going got rough.Nor will you hear about the snake coiled in the middle of the trail: a timber rattler, thick as a forearm, just molted with new scales shimmering a luminous bronzy green. Rattling like crazy, he warned us away so he would not have to expend energy striking and biting. We were clearly too big to eat. We accommodated, treading a wide circle around, made breathless by his beauty.
Traveling in the Nebraska panhandle, roaming grasslands for
Places of Grace, I pointed my car down a back-of-beyond road. The clay surface, freshly drenched, was a gumbo that sucked at my tires. The cell phone was beyond range. I had a meager bag of sunflower seeds. It looked bad.
Somehow I powered the car out and, as I got two wheels back on the blacktop, I noticed a drift of elegant evening primroses fluttering against blue-black clouds stacked like a wall on the horizon. Beauty and the beast. Or walking along the rim of Makhtesh Ramon, Israel’s “Grand Canyon,” I came upon a line of enormous sculptures, some powerful, some sinuous, all seemingly beamed down from who-knows-where and planted on the desert lip of this enormous crater.
Aren’t these the experiences that spur us to travel? The magnificence of nights in canyons, the views from the top of the Rockies or even a homegrown hill. The strange and wonderful experiences that cannot be duplicated. Experiences that make us feel original and alive. Experiences banked for future story telling, whether in books or just among friends.
Last updated 11/
06
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