"Where is that, anyway...Montana?"

It didn't win ("competition was particularly fierce this year..." said the official letter), but Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America earned wonderful judges' commentaries in a recent Writer's Digest book contest. I entered Ribbons in both the nonfiction and "life stories" categories, and two judges read the book. This was my first contest, and Writer's Digest is the real deal, the writer's bible, so I exhaled with satisfaction when I saw these critiques:

"It read like a friend sitting in my living room, telling me about her trip. There's a friendly, flowing writing style. This book reminded me of a book I read a few years ago, in which a young woman walked the Appalachian Trail. It wasn't meant to be an exhaustive study of the route or an historical masterpiece. It was just her encounters and salient thoughts. Enjoyable!"

and

"The author did what most of us would like to do -- take off across the country with no real plans. With kids, family or good freinds, or alone. It's a very appealing premise that is chronicled...with flow and interest...And, most important, the results -- discovering the U.S., plus who they are themselves, what they mean to each other. Ms. Hein captures the flavor of the various regions they visit, their own personal feelings, emotions -- and the reader enjoys the ride!"

Both judges loved the cover, giving it 4.5 out of a possible 5 points: "Very fine cover especially" and "Nice cover photo on front!" I took the cover shot, so this pleased me, also. (And, an aside to my kids, I earned a 5 for grammar, so please DO let me edit your research papers before you turn them in...)

Many people have picked up the book and asked, of the cover photo, "Where is this?" But a striking number have picked it up and said, "Where is this...Montana?"

It is. I was standing in Wyoming, looking into Montana when I made the picture. We were in Yellowstone, and we'd overnighted at Mammoth Hot Springs, a fairyland of steaming, multi-hued travertine terraces. Wanting to go off-campus for dinner, we left the park via the North Entrance with its grand stone arch. On our way to Gardiner, Montana, where we'd find a restaurant with Dana-pleasing barstools shaped like horses' hindquarters, we stopped at the head of the Lava Creek Trail. Mike had flown from Boston to join us for a few days, and he and the kids bounded down the trail toward the Gardiner River rushing far below.

I took the photo that would become the book cover and jotted notes about the panorama I'd later write about in Ribbons:

“You traveling?” I asked the young guy sitting next to us in Gardiner, Montana’s Yellowstone Mine restaurant. To get to Gardiner, where the Yellowstone River rushes through the center of town, we drove through the Roosevelt Arch at Yellowstone’s North Entrance on the Wyoming-Montana border. In a 1903 speech, Teddy Roosevelt had dedicated the dark stone arch, saying, “The Yellowstone Park is something absolutely unique in the world…This Park was created and is now administered for the benefit and enjoyment of the people…It is the property of Uncle Sam and therefore of us all.” “FOR THE BENEFIT AND ENJOYMENT OF THE PEOPLE” is chiseled across the top of this first gateway to the world’s first national park. Yellowstone was the first place on earth to celebrate democracy by setting aside land to be kept free from settlement or development.

We’d driven down into Montana for dinner from our Mammoth Hot Springs hotel, which sat five miles away from Gardiner.

Five miles of such astonishing mountain beauty it was impossible to keep driving. I pulled off the road at the Lava Creek Trailhead, which overlooked a soul-stirring panorama, a view that reached wide and deep and long into both Montana and Wyoming. Montana stretched away in undulations of burnt-gold velvet mountains, hummocks carpeted in rich sienna pile, smooth and treeless, shaped like great, soft-furred bison sleeping under the pink evening sky. I sat on a rock and let the velvet bison and the pink sky become part of me, while Mike and the kids bounded down the steep Lava Creek Trail. They reached the creek bed, hundreds of feet below where I sat on my rock, and they ran alongside the green, rushing water. They became specks, but the wind kept us connected. It carried their voices up the mountainside to my rock, so I could listen to their joy.

Please join me at BoomerWomenSpeak.com, a major online community, where I will be the Featured Author during the month of May. I'll discuss my book and, of course, travel. I'm looking forward to it and hope you'll stop by and chat. Anyone wishing an "instant" copy of Ribbons can download an inexpensive e-book version from Booklocker, the publisher.

Another donation is on its way to UNICEF, and I will continue to donate book proceeds to tsunami relief through the month of May. Details on the Jan. 2, 2005 blog post.

Comments or questions? Email me.

Eau de Caernarfon (with apologies to Prince Charles)

As I rode through Snowdonia, the rugged, mountainous piece of northwest Wales, a spectacular rain dropped from the sky and soaked men, sheep and mountains. Hikers ran for cover. Sheep stood stock still in their high, vertical pastures, and, looking like precision military units at attention, all faced the same direction, away from the worst bite of the whipping wind and water. Mountains that weren’t grass-covered and green were black, their wet slate slopes gleaming like polished onyx.

I was on my way to Caernarfon (Caernarvon) to see the country’s greatest castle (photo above). Wales is peppered with castles, brilliant and inspiring, and any one of them – Harlech, Pembroke, Conwy – would qualify for superlative status if they didn’t have to compete with Caernarfon.

As I drove through the rain, I saw a round castle keep on a hillside above the road. It was singularly beautiful, and I knew I had to explore it. I pulled off the road and looked at the storm clouds. They were moving fast, and I could see a clear patch sailing along behind them, so I sat in the car for the 15 minutes it took for the clouds to pass, then walked up the stony hill to the gray, graceful ruin. There was no sign at the site to tell me the name of this wonder I stood in. Not until I returned home and did some research did I learn it was Dolbadarn, built by Llywely the Great, Prince of Gwynedd, prior to the Edwardian conquest of Wales.

Many, I’m sure, in their haste to get to famed Caernarfon not far down the road, must miss or decide to miss this small castle keep. I recommend not missing it. Stand on Dolbadarn’s high hillock and take in the view of Snowdonia’s mountains and lakes and contemplate what must have gone on in the 13th century in this Welsh-built castle so close to where England’s Edward I would soon build Caernarfon, a mind-blowing castle – a conqueror’s castle— and a walled city that said to Wales, “We’re here to stay. This place is ours.” When Edward’s son was born in Caernarfon, he became the first Prince of Wales. Nearly three-quarters of a millenia later, Elizabeth II would use words first spoken in medieval times to introduce her son, Charles, to the public: "When he is grown up, I will present him to you at Caernarfon."

I’d seen a bright red and white sign near where I’d parked my car that advised, in Welsh and English, that it was lambing season. The sign was punctuated with exclamation points, driving home the fact that lambs ruled the roost until the season was over. A shepherd and his sheepdog came down from the Dolbadarn keep as I made my way up to it. They left, and I had the place to myself.

I picked my way over a sea of black slate chunks and explored the ruin. Then, time for Caernarfon. I got in my car and headed down out of Snowdonia, Eryri in Welsh. After five minutes, I smelled something pungent. After 10 minutes, I gave the smell some thought. What was this? Of course! It’s lambing season! It’s going to smell like sheep around here! I found it incredible that I could smell the lambing and the sheep and the pastures from inside my car, moving at 40 miles per hour with the windows rolled up.

I drove for a few more miles, then realized this wasn’t the sharp smell of Welsh farming and grazing pervading my vehicle. “LAMBING!!” on the bright red and white Dolbadarn sign had really been code for “Entering a Sheep Patty Minefield! Watch where you step!” The shepherd and sheepdog should have clued me. They weren’t at the hilltop castle to take in some culture or history. They’d been working. Those black slate chunks at Dolbadarn? Sheep doody. I had a literal crapload of sheep dip stuck on the bottom of my shoes.

When I got to Caernarfon, I sat in the site where 20-year-old Charles, Prince of Wales, delivered his 1969 investiture speech (in Welsh, after a crash course in the language at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth) and contemplated the powerful mass of the great castle while scraping what seemed like pounds of sheep chips from the soles of my favorite black traveling flats. These shoes had walked me around half the world, and I owed them a good cleaning. I’d scored a cache of slide film back in the Snowdonia resort town of Betws-y–Coed, and the Kodak boxes made fine manure removers.

Reasonably excrement-free, I walked the medieval walled town. Two boys swung on a tire over a muddy bulge in the River Seiont, and I asked if I could take their picture. “Where are you from?” they asked. When I told them I was from Boston and that I’d love to take a picture of two Caernarfon boys back to the US, they gave me the photo go-ahead and swung their tire out over the muck. As they swished by me, one leaned excitedly toward the other and said, “We might be in the newspaper!”

At the end of the day, I found the extraordinary Black Boy Inn, built in 1522. A labyrinth of half-timbered rooms and hallways, the place, hard by the medieval walls that surround Caernarfon, is a journey back in time. I was in awe as I checked in under ceiling beams so low they almost grazed my head. The owner laughed when I told her that where I come from, something 200 years old is considered remarkable, something to crow historically about. I must have smelled okay, because she gave me a primo room that overlooked 700-year-old ramparts.


Add Ribbons of Highway to your summer reading pile

Reviews and excerpts at LoriHein.com

Copito de Nieve: Remembering Barcelona's sad Snowflake

Today is the last day of April school vacation. Adam’s home from Greece. (He bought me a white stone Cycladic goddess to join the other two goddesses, Greek and Maltese, atop the green marble table in our living room. He read the “Fat Lady of Malta” post before he left. Cool kid.). He and the other high school Argonauts had a fabulous journey. (Cruise the March archives for 10 posts about places the group visited on their Greek odyssey.)

While her brother was in Greece, Dana hung out with friends, went to the mall, spent a weekend on Cape Cod with pal Emily, had a sleepover, listened to music, watched TV, ate macaroni and cheese, jumped and cantered her way through a riding lesson. And went to the zoo.

For weeks, she’d been telling me how much she wanted to go to the zoo, so I took her and friends Alyssa and Micaela to Boston’s Franklin Park Zoo, dusted up, refurbished and proud of its place in Franklin Park, the first jewel in Frederick Law Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace, a string of green places that run from Boston’s heart to the Charles River. Ten years ago, the area was dangerous. Today, the Olmsted and Vaux-designed park is an active urban space that attracts golfers, track teams, walkers, runners, birdwatchers, sunseekers, picnickers, hikers, history buffs, families and zoo-goers.

The girls took off to find giraffes and, probably, 13-year-old boys, so I ventured into the Tropical Rain Forest, a soaring white structure that looks like two sails of the Sydney Opera House welded together. I came to the Western Lowland Gorilla exhibit and watched a new mother cradle her baby and drag it along the floor as she rustled through straw and grass looking for food tidbits. Spectators stood three deep trying to catch a glimpse of the newborn lying cupped in his mother’s great hands. He looked up at her with love and awe. Most of the time, mom had her back to us, as if hiding her baby from our prying eyes.

In the far right corner of the exhibit, which tried, like all well-meaning zoo exhibits, to be a comfortable, happy place for its prisoners, I saw another gorilla. Maybe he was the dad, maybe not. I stepped away from the crowd and stood near him. He turned his head and looked deeply into my eyes. He radiated a sadness that was utterly human. For seconds that felt like minutes, we stared at each other, he telling me something, I trying to tell him that I understood.

The sad gorilla reminded me of Snowflake, Copito de Nieve, who was euthanized by the Barcelona Zoo in November 2003. Snowflake, the world’s only albino gorilla, had been suffering from melanoma since 2001. Taken at age three from Equatorial Guinea, Snowflake, who died at 40 – 80 in human year equivalent – spent 37 years in captivity in his Spanish zoo-jail.

Adam, Dana and I visited Snowflake before he died, and we came away sad. I felt guilty at having paid to see this magnificent creature penned behind glass in a small space. I felt guiltier at having taken my children to see him. There was nothing happy about Snowflake. When he looked at us, it was with scorn, but most of the time he didn’t look at us. He sat, with his back to the “audience.” I wondered how early in his 37 captive years he’d learned that response to his situation. And I wondered whether I could be as strong as Snowflake, were I to lose my freedom as he did. I think I would long since have beaten my head silly against my cage’s Plexiglas walls or found a way to break through them.

I dislike zoos. Especially zoos in old, world-class cities like Barcelona that brim with rich cultural, historical and artistic treasures. Barcelona doesn’t need a zoo. There’s too much else to see and do there. Wild animals don’t belong in downtown Barcelona. If someone released them tomorrow, I venture no one would miss them.

Dana, as those who follow this blog know, is a true lover of animals. She relates to them and they to her. I've seen it scores of times, and it's uncanny. On the day we visited the Franklin Park Zoo, I bet the animals sent a secret message through the place, letting all the residents know that the girl, Dana, the animal whisperer, was in the park. I think Dana would be an awesome zoologist because she feels what animals feel. As long as we have to have zoos, perhaps she could work to make captivity, whether in Barcelona, Boston or elsewhere, a little easier for gorillas – and giraffes, leopards, lions, bats, tapirs, warthogs, wildebeest, ibex, camels, zebras, kangaroos, lemurs, prairie dogs, snakes, mandrills, peacocks, turtles, cockatoos... all the sad Snowflakes.

Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America

Pope in a snowdome

I first met them in a chasm no wider than four feet. It was my second day inside the glorious, ancient city of Petra, the archaeological wonder that was the reason for my trip to Jordan (related posts: An egg in Baghdad; Mt Nebo). I was on the thin, rocky path leading up to the High Place of Sacrifice when I came upon the spry, elderly couple clambering among the boulders.

We three stood in the narrow defile, taking up most of it, and gazed up at the Lion Fountain, a leonine head sculpted into live stone, the open mouth a faucet for the ingenious, life-giving water duct and channel system the ancient Nabateans carved into this desert world.

We talked for a bit. They were from England’s Lake District. When I said I was from Boston, they said, “Ahhh! We thought we detected that proper new English accent!”

I’d see these intrepid seniors all day, full of vim, smiling, exploring every inch of Petra on their own steam. I hoped I’d be like them when I came to be their age.

I saw them for the last time at a souvenir stall run by Bedouins who live around Petra. I was considering a tar-sealed sand bottle containing a carefully crafted scene of palms and camels, sun and desert layered in pink, black, white, olive and ochre sand. I hesitated, thinking the bottle was a bit pricey and too heavy to carry back to Amman and, eventually, home. I know better. When you see something in your travels that intrigues you, buy it, on the spot. It will be gone if you wait, and you’ll sigh and think about it for a long time if you come home without it.

I needed a push, or pushes, and there they came. “These really are quite interesting,” said Mrs. Lake District. “They are,” I said. “A year from now, when Petra’s a beautiful memory, this sand bottle would look lovely in my living room. If I don’t buy it, I’ll probably think, ‘I should have bought that unusual sand bottle from Petra...’”

“How true!” exclaimed the Lake Districts, almost in unison. “When you see something that catches your eye, you should get it!" And they told me about their pope in a snowglobe.

“We were in Rome, and we found a snowdome with a picture of the pope inside. You shake it, and the snow flies. We didn’t know what we’d do with it, but we liked it, so we bought it. We use it as a centerpiece. We put it on the table at dinner parties."

Not only had they just convinced me to take the gorgeous sand bottle back to Boston, but they had me imagining fun, funky dinner parties in England’s rolling Lake District. I laughed. “Who needs flowers on the table when you can have the pope in a snowdome?”

“Exactly!” chimed the Lake Districts. I bought my sand bottle, and they bought one, as well.

The world has a new pope, but somewhere in northwest England, John Paul II smiles from a snowglobe atop the Lake Districts’ dining table at people gathered to enjoy food, drink, friendship and the adventure that is life.

www.LoriHein.com

Taj Mahal: The tomb that swallowed my husband

Mike and I took a crowded public bus from Delhi to Agra, India and were deposited outside the high-walled entrance to the Taj Mahal. Before our feet hit the dirt parking lot, our faces were full of tiny Tajes – postcard images, plastic and metal die-cast trinkets, snowglobes – thrust into our faces by souvenir hawkers desperate to extract a few rupees before we disappeared to commune with the ghosts of Shah Jehan and Mumtaz Mahal. I have an impressive postcard collection, so I spread some joy and bought a few cards from each vendor.

We bought our tickets and passed through the site’s dark, ceilinged entrance gate. When the Taj appeared, framed by the gate’s red limestone arches, wonder coursed over and through me. I had never seen such ethereal beauty. The white marble colossus, conceived by Shah Jehan, the Mogul dynasty’s most ambitious builder as an everlasting testament to his love for Mumtaz, his favorite wife, who died shortly after bearing the emperor his fourteenth child, is floating stone.

One approaches the domed wonder slowly. Contemplating it is everything. Entering it is a sidebar. Indeed, we took what felt like hours to make our way from the entrance gate to the white walls of the fantasy tomb. We stood with groups of Indian sightseers at the base of the oblong reflecting pool that creates a second shimmery, liquid Taj. We sat on the the ground or grass beside the pool. We’d look, consider, sigh, then move a few feet and sit, look, consider and sigh again. We rested under trees, taking in the exquisite structure from different angles. When we changed position, the altered play of light would turn the facade from white to pearl, pink or purple. When we finally reached it, we marveled at and touched the intricate, lacy carvings and the brilliant patterns of inlaid stone that played like jewels on a fine lady’s porcelain neck. We circumnavigated the Taj, looking straight up at the delicate minarets that poked cool white holes in the blue-hot Indian sky. From the back of the Taj, we looked across the Yamuna River at Agra Fort, Shah Jehan’s home, which became his prison when his ambitious son, Aurangzeb, placed his ailing father under house arrest in the massive red stone bastion in 1658.

Shah Jehan spent the last years of his life gazing from his opulent prison to the Taj Mahal, just across the river but beyond reach. When Shah Jehan died in 1666, Aurangzeb installed him in the Taj next to Mumtaz. Shah Jehan had, historians say, planned to build a second Taj in black marble to house his own remains, but this dream was part of his undoing. The Taj Mahal, built from 1632 to 1648 by 20,000 laborers and craftsmen, had bankrupted the treasury, and Aurangzeb imprisoned his father partly to prevent such a financially insupportable ego-project from happening again. The white Taj had caused a hemorrhage of red ink. A second black Taj would, thought Aurangzeb, kill the dynasty. Better to lock dad up in the fort.

When we’d taken in as much sublime beauty as we could handle in a day and were fairly overdosing on artistic and architectural perfection, we turned to the more prosaic Taj-tourist activity – going into the burial chamber to view the imperial sarcophagi. I didn’t really want to go. I hate small, dark, crowded places, but in I went, Mike just ahead of me.

The press of humanity inside the hallway that became a shallow ramp sloping downward into the cavernous room where lay the sculpted, bejeweled marble coffins was more than I could bear. The temperature outside was near 90 degrees, the sun blinding and unrelenting. Here, in this thin passageway crammed with pilgrims and visitors in saris and silk, chiffon and cotton, the coolness of the structure’s marble was not enough to provide relief. We were sandwiched, hundreds strong, in this small space, padding slowly forward as a clammy, sweating, human unit. I lost Mike. His head of thick black hair was indistinguishable from the Indian heads in front me. I called out, “Mike! I can’t go down there. I’ll wait for you up here.”

I took up a position in a corner only a few yards from the point where viewers would walk up the burial chamber ramp and reenter the hallway. I couldn’t miss Mike. He’d have to walk right by me. After five minutes, I became annoyed. What was he doing down there? Was he playing with me, taking his time so I’d have to sit longer in this unpleasant, claustrophobic space? That would be unlike him, but everyone has weird moments, and India assuredly does interesting things to one’s brain. After ten minutes I became concerned. How long does it take to walk past a few coffins? He should be out by now.

I started to think about what to do. Should I go down after him? What if he came out just as I disappeared down the chute? He wouldn’t know where I was. I looked toward the door to the outside. Two Indian security guards were waving their arms at me, pointing out the door. I became indignant. They were trying to shoo me away! My husband was stuck somewhere in this dank maw of a tomb, and they wanted me to go sit somewhere else! I was hot, angry and unyielding. I shook my head at them and firmly sat my ground. For the next 10 minutes, they stared at me, cocked their heads toward the door and pointed the way out. I crossed my arms over my chest in the universal pose of defiance and continued to monitor the exit ramp. If they wanted me out, they’d have to drag me out.

After about an hour, I’d crossed from alarm to tears. Something had surely happened to Mike. I had to get help. I had to find the police. I imagined Mike had fallen and been trampled. Or robbed and left in a dark corner of the crypt. I picked myself up and made my way past the two pointing security guards. The second I stepped outside, I saw Mike sitting on a bench by the door. “Where have you been??!!” he shouted. “I’ve been sitting here waiting for you for over an hour! I thought you died in there!”

I turned to the security guards who were watching our reunion with lazy amusement. I shook my head at them. “You could see both of us from where you stand, yet you couldn’t walk a few feet to tell one of us where the other was! Shame on you.” My words made no impression. I like to cut people slack if there’s any hope of its being justified, so I walked away reasoning that perhaps their superior had commanded them not to leave their posts, and they were simply carrying out orders, to a ridiculous extreme.

We had tickets on an evening bus back to Delhi. If you’re a solo traveler in India, securing or confirming train, bus or plane tickets can be a day-long endurance event, and once you have your papers in hand, you don’t challenge the cosmic order by trying to change, return or otherwise mess with them. So, we had hours to kill. We spent the time in Shah Jehan’s quarters at Agra Fort, contemplating the view of the back side of the Taj from his perspective. It must have been heartbreaking to be him at the end of his life.

It was dark when the bus pulled out of Agra. I was still a bit keyed up by the inexplicable behavior of two grown men who’d watched Mike and me for an hour, yet had chosen to stand fixed in a doorway and do nothing more than point, but as soon as the bus turned the corner onto the trunk road to Delhi, I was soothed. By lights. A world of little, flickering lights.

It was Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights which, historically, welcomes King Rama home after his battle with the demon king of Lanka, but which, in modern times, has also become a celebration of happiness, prosperity and wishes for a good future. People shop, eat, give sweets, sport new clothes and jewelry and ask the gods to send good stuff their way in the coming year. Diwali is one of the longest festivals of the Hindu year, and it celebrates new ventures and good things ahead.

The most arresting and poignant symbol of Diwali is the diya, a small oil lamp, symbol of an illuminated mind. When the sun goes down, every household lights the dozens of diyas arrayed on and in doorsteps, windowsills, rooftops, garden walls, verandas, yards, driveways, walkways and courtyards. These are not the brash, artificial lights of an American Christmas. These are individual licks of live flame, held in tiny pots that spread across the countryside and turn India into a land of magic. The day’s chaos, dust, poverty and frustration evaporate in the yellow glow of millions of points of light.

(Know someone who celebrates Diwali? Check out this site, your one-stop shop for Diwali gifts. Some tempting sweets...)

Putting your summer reading pile together? Add Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America

Argentina: A gaucho's gift

When we arrived at the Estancia Santa Susana in Los Cardales, some 70 kilometers along the Pan-American Highway from elegant, pulsing Buenos Aires, the ranch’s gauchos were busy. Not riding or roping, but tending to the chicken, fat sausages and huge slabs of beef that lay dripping and sizzling on a flaming, twenty-foot outdoor grill. The smoke from the asado, Argentina’s signature barbecue, smelled rich enough to cut and eat. Servers balancing trays of robust Argentine red wine weaved among the tourists who’d come here to the Pampas, the dry, nearly treeless grassy plain that hosts Argentina’s cowboys and cattle industry, for an afternoon of food, folklore and horsemanship.

Mike passed on the wine because he had a date with a horse. I’ve been thrown and stepped over in Arkansas and taken straight into a thicket of thorny bushes in Belize, so I’ve sworn off horses completely. But they are Dana’s consuming passion, so when we travel and she wants to ride, Mike assumes the role of mounted escort (leaving me to enjoy more wine).

A small group of gauchos led Dana, Mike and about 30 others on an easy amble across the estancia’s flat, dusty reaches, and I could see Dana’s smile as she loped along in the saddle, talking to her horse, Clarita, and stroking her neck. When the ride was over, Dana stood at the fence and watched Clarita trot past with other guests on her back.

The asado done to perfection, we were called to lunch. Rows of long tables filled the dining pavilion, and a small stage rose in the center. We enjoyed a folklore show and swayed to exquisite tango performed by some of the same dancers we’d seen the night before in Buenos Aires’ famed restaurant-theater, El Viejo Almacen.

A grinning bear of a man in leather boots and chaps, brimmed hat, vest, bolo and blowsy shirt appeared next to Dana. He held a tray next to my semi-vegetarian’s little face, pointed to it and said, “Blood sausage!” The only thing that kept my plant-eater from recoiling in horror and trying to hide her head in the nearest salad bowl (a rare commodity in this country of beefeaters) was the knowledge that she was being addressed by none other than Cirilo, who, it had been whispered from the moment we’d entered the property, was “one of the most famous gauchos in Argentina!”

We passed on the blood sausage but shared, in Spanglish, Dana’s love of everything horse. We pulled out the Polaroid photo of Dana atop Clarita that someone had given us, and Cirilo signed it with his name and the horse’s. The Argentine cowboy took Dana’s hand, pressed it warmly, then resumed serving blood sausage to the table’s other diners. He came to Mike, and I watched my husband fork a chunk of Cirilo’s chorizo onto his plate, point to Dana, and whisper something into the great gaucho’s ear. Then glances, nods, a handshake. A favor asked and entertained.

After lunch and tango, we went outside for the day’s highlight, a presentation of gaucho horsemanship. Both graceful and gritty, it was a vibrant, thrilling spectacle. The gauchos turned galloping horses into art, herding them in groups according to their color. From a stand of trees, they’d run a herd of bays before us, then duns, then grays, in forceful, fluid circles. Like the tango dancers who’d left us breathless, the horses moved with intense but supple power.

The day’s final event was a contest among the cowboys. High speed rodeo, Argentina-style. Silver rings hung from the center of a wooden arch placed just on the gaucho side of the rail fence separating cowboys from spectators. As each gaucho approached the arch in a full-tilt gallop, he’d throw the reins into one hand and, with the other, reach up and grasp for a silver ring. Many failed, but enough succeeded to make it a heady contest.

Cirilo charged toward the arch, eyes set, jaw fixed. He reached up and snared himself a silver ring.

After the show, most of the gauchos dusted themselves off and focused their energy on tending to the horses who’d performed so brilliantly. Cirilo came looking for Dana. When he found her, he pressed the silver ring into her hand.

Zydeco, gators and hamburger buns

No Atkins foolishness for this Louisiana gator. That's his tenth hamburger bun in half as many minutes.

BootsNAll Travel recently published an excerpt from Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America . Boots' editors introduced the excerpt with "Lori Hein knows she's in for an adventure when her alligator tour operator claims they don't keep track of the toursits they've lost in the murk." Click here to enjoy the excerpt. And keep your hands in the boat.



(Charlie, a blog reader who lives in Texas but hails from Cajun country, sent me this note about the excerpt: "I enjoyed your story so much I had to thank you. One correction: the man from California [that's John -- you'll meet him in the excerpt] was only partially right. Man, i.e. the Corps of Engineers, keeps the Mississippi River on its present course so New Orleans won't go dry. The town that would be flooded would be Morgan City, which sits right on the Atchafalaya, which would be the course the river would take if it weren't for the lock and levee system near Morganza, Louisiana. I was raised in New Roads, which is about ten miles from Morganza and am well-acquainted with the system. My brother just retired as an engineer with the Corps in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where most of the research takes place for not only the Mississippi River, but for all the river systems and estuaries in America." Thanks, Charlie, for all the great info!)


And, my race went well. Thanks for asking and for sending your good wishes. My knee felt perfect, the park was glorious, the weather was brilliant, and I turned in a 4:17, a time I'm very happy with. Let's wish the Boston Marathon runners a great day next Monday. I'm going to enjoy watching that one on TV, legs up, feet nestled in cozy slippers...

Tour de Central Park

Tomorrow I head to New York to get ready for Sunday’s MORE Marathon. My left knee has been making itself known in the last few weeks, so I’ll take it slow and hope for the best. I may be running on Gatorade and Tylenol.

I hesitated before signing up for this race because it’s a loop course, not most runners’ favorite. Marathon courses come in four flavors: point-to-point (start somewhere and run 26.2 miles to somewhere else); out-and-back (run 13.1 miles to a turnaround point then run the same 13.1 back to the start, the direction change providing new scenery); single loop (move in a relative circle for 26.2 miles until you hit the place you started); multiple loops (anywhere from a few to a whole bunch of circuits over the same terrain until you’ve accumulated 26.2 miles). Because one’s mental state is a big factor in marathoning success (or bonking, runspeak for failure), and because passing the same stuff over and over and over again can make you, well, loopy, runners don’t generally go looking for multiple loop courses.

But this is no ordinary loop course. This is five and a half loops through the greatest public space in the world, Central Park. It’s also roughly the New York City Marathon’s original route before its founder, Fred Lebow, convinced the city to let the New York Road Runners Club (NYRRC) run its race through all five boroughs.

There should be plenty to relieve the mental exhaustion of seeing the same things five times (six for the stuff in the park’s southern tier). First, this is New York. It changes every nanosecond. I’ve been exploring New York for years, and I have scores of slides each of the same bridges, park benches, churches, water towers, gardens, plazas, statues, green spaces, street corners, hot dog vendors, intersections, rivers, tenements, museums, courtyards, apartment buildings, skylines, neighborhoods, train stations, theatre marquees, skyscrapers, wrought iron fire escapes, departments stores, flower stands, hotels, avenues, alleys, college campuses. No two photos of a place are the same.

And the changing pageant of park visitors should keep my mind from turning to jelly, too. Early joggers and cyclists; powerwalkers, dogwalkers and catwalkers (trust me. I captured it on film); chic, thin women pushing strollers; families eating ice cream and playing ball; kids hooting in playgrounds; birdwatchers and nature-lovers; tourists visiting for the first or the fiftieth time; horse carriages toting some of them about; rollerbladers; couples young and old; soda vendors and pretzel sellers; boat rowers and football throwers. The scene is sure to be peopled over the four-plus hours of my journey with enough human variety to keep my brain from shutting down.

And finally, there are the sights. There are enough great things to look at in and on the periphery of Central Park to keep anyone busy for years. Surely, they can occupy me for a few hours. I will look at the collection of wonderful natural and manmade attractions that my eyes will take in during my circumnavigation (and circumnavigation and circumnavigation and…) of this Olmsted and Vaux masterpiece as a visual feast. Fuel, like the PowerGels I’ll be inhaling.

Some of the sights I’ll digest as I travel the park include:

*** The gleaming new twin towers of the AOL Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle
*** The Dakota, San Remo, Beresford, Majestic and the rest of the Central Park West line-up of ornate, gargantuan apartment buildings. Running between the first truly stellar one and the last will take me 60 city blocks. The twin-towered Art Deco beauties are my favorites, and when I hit the spectacular Eldorado at W. 91st Street, it’s only eleven more city blocks to the 102nd Street Transect where I'll cross the park to begin the southern piece of the loop
*** The Tavern on the Green. I’ll wave to the topiary in the courtyard and remember the night we ate in the Crystal Room (thanks to blog reader, Monica, whose brother works at the restaurant and pulled some strings to get us a last minute prime table for four). New York likes to have its marathons finish at the Tavern on the Green, and this one does
*** The 22-acre Sheep Meadow, now a sunny, green space for lounging and Frisbee-throwing, but once home to the park’s resident flock who were led twice a day to the Sheepfold, where sits today’s Tavern on the Green
*** The American Museum of Natural History, where I will focus my gaze on the original 1869 Romanesque core and try to ignore the uninspired, sprawling additions tacked on later
*** Quaint Swedish Cottage, built in 1876 (by Swedes), headquarters of the park's 50-plus-year-old puppet and marionette company. I won’t have time to see a performance, but if you’re ever in the neighborhood, check out the schedule and bring the kids
*** The dirt ballfields of the Great Lawn, which hosted a half-million strong audience for Simon and Garfunkle’s 1981 Concert in Central Park
*** The Reservoir, the path around which is a favorite city running venue. Dustin Hoffman ran around it in the 1976 film, Marathon Man, before his painful encounter with Laurence Olivier’s mad Nazi dentist, Szell. The NYRRC maintains a kiosk near the Reservoir at Runner’s Gate on the east side, where I’ll wave to the statue of Fred Lebow (again and again and again...)
*** Sixteen-acre North Meadow and its newly-restored playing fields and recreation center
*** Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim, sitting like a wonderful, whimsical white snail smack on Fifth Avenue
*** The backside of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Cleopatra’s Needle, a granite obelisk from ancient Egypt. To me, it will be an exclamation point that says, “Keep going! One foot in front of the other! You can do it!”
*** The Loeb Boathouse, where, perhaps not on the first, second or third loops, but certainly by the fourth if the weather is fine, I will see people rowing happily around The Lake

No, I'm not afraid of this loop course. With so much to look at, my mind should be fine. My knee on the other hand...

www.LoriHein.com

The Fat Lady of Malta

We pulled into the small dirt parking lot that sits near Malta’s Neolithic temples of Hagar Qim and Mnajdra and handed our money to a man who looked like Popeye. His face was grizzled by sun and sea spray, his teeth were several short of a full set, and his sailor cap sat high and to one side, calling attention to his large walnut forehead. He was delighted to see the kids, and he dug around in the pockets of his baggy pants and produced two fistfuls of hard candy, which Adam and Dana sucked on while listening to his tales of the mystical structures we were about to visit. Before we headed off to the temples, he promised to personally guard our car and pointed us to the free toilets. “Don’t use the toilets in the Hagar Qim Restaurant. You have to pay fifty cents each.”

After we saved a dollar and a half, we headed over the rise and were greeted by the magnificent sight of Hagar Qim and Mnajdra sitting on a sweeping hillside above the sea. Below the massive, 5000-year-old limestone ruins, terraced vegetable plots ran to the cliff edge, and ship-shaped Filfla, Malta’s smallest island, floated in the near distance. The temples are splendid, the setting glorious.

The kids took off down the path that led to the temple complex, a place older than the pyramids at Giza. Malta, which sits in the Mediterranean northeast of the Tunisian coast and some 50 miles south of Sicily (Maltese travel agencies offer quick trips via high-speed hydrofoil to both places) has a rich, remarkable history, and even before the peripatetic Phoenicians found it as they cruised their world, Malta was home to an organized society of temple-builders who worshiped the Mother Goddess and erected complexes like Hagar Qim, Mnajdra and Ggantija on Gozo, the second largest island in the Maltese archipelago.

The island nation of Malta is peppered with spectacular megalithic temples erected by the ancients to venerate their goddess of fertility, and some of the complexes are, themselves, shaped like robust, pregnant women. “This room is the belly,” I said to the kids as we explored Ggantija, Gozo's "place of giants.” (They didn’t say “yuck.” My kids are cool.) The people who built these temples also carved statues and statuettes of healthy, round women, and seven of them, including the famous (and tiny – just a few centimeters high) “Venus of Malta,” were found at Hagar Qim, which means “standing stones” in Maltese (Malti).

The statues and figurines are poignantly beautiful and simple. Like the Maltese landscape, stark and unadorned. Unearthed from their temple homes, most of the statues of ancient Malta’s “fat lady culture” now rest in the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta, Malta’s capital and a World Heritage Site. The museum, which boasts a vivid central ceiling fresco, was built in 1571 as an auberge for the Knights of Malta. As you make your way through the building to view the exquisite fat ladies, you can walk atop sections of floor that have been peeled back and replaced with Plexiglas to afford views onto stone steps and vaulted chambers that run below street level.

In a souvenir shop near the museum, I bought a cheap copy of a Malta fat lady. White, pure, basic. She sits in the sun by my living room window on a green marble tabletop that she shares with two other small, simple, white objects I’ve collected in my travels – a slab of antique Chinese white jade the size of a deck of cards depicting a bustling family scene (pre-one child policy days), and a knock-off of an ancient Greek Cycladic sculpture of a serene, hairless, goddess, sleek and chiseled except for her pregnant middle. I have the two goddesses facing each other so they can dish and enjoy some girl talk.


(A warm hello to Robert Micallef, a Maltese economist who found my blog and enjoyed a November post about horse racing in Marsa, Malta, Robert's father's hometown. Robert's blog, Wired Temples, is about all things Maltese. Check it out. One of the joys of publishing this blog is "meeting" people from around the world. I love opening my emailbox and finding a message from a faraway reader. Since starting this blog in October, my book website, LoriHein.com, has been visited by people from China, Iran, Mexico, the UK, Germany, the Philippines, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Canada, Greece... I continue to be amazed at the combined power of words, pictures, travel and the Internet to bring people together. Thanks for letting me share my stories with you. Where shall we go next?)

The Hitching Post of the Sun

These days, I have to spare my old bones and joints some wear and tear if I want to survive marathon training and make it to the starting line in one piece. (Seven days to go. Please point your telepathic antennae my way and send all the good karma you can muster. I’ll need it.) So, a few times a week, I trade road or trail running for pool running. I look pretty goofy as I slide, encased in bright blue Styrofoam, into one of the fitness center pool’s two swim lanes. My aqua jogging belt is nearly as big as my entire torso, and my Styrofoam booties look like blue bricks strapped to my feet.

There have been occasional glory days during this New England winter, when our piece of the world was pure and hushed, draped in glistening white, adorned with crystalline icicles and tree limbs transformed into elegant, lacy works of art. But for the most part, our winter was long and mean. And dark.

I go to the pool in the morning and, for months now, have been doing my laps while gazing out the pool area’s windows into an inky sky still peppered with the last stars of the night shift. There were mornings when the moon looked in at me as I pushed my way through the water. Being in the pool with the other early risers, nearly all senior citizens, was like being in a secret, liquid club. We took our exercise under fluorescent lights, gazing out at a twinkly black world that would just start to wipe the sleep out of its eyes as we hit the showers.

A few weeks ago, something changed, and we all felt it. The power of the sun. Tina, the lifeguard, turned the fluorescent lights off, and the pool was lit only by golden morning rays. Fingers of light. The sun’s long, radiant arms stretched through the windows and into the water and onto our grateful faces. In the pool that day, exercise became universally secondary to tilting one’s face into the sun, eyes closed, and savoring the heat of the embrace. “It’s so wonderful!” cried one woman in a flowery bathing cap that protected her hairdo. “It’s like being on vacation in the Caribbean!” Her friend nodded and laughed, “It is! Let’s enjoy it, then, because it’s probably as close as we’ll get!” The two women left the circle of seniors doing aerobics to the Beach Boys' Help Me Rhonda and stood still, smiling, in a shallow corner of the pool, bodies turned toward a floor-to-ceiling window, savoring their quick trip to the sun.

That day was a herald. The sun was telling us he’d be back soon to warm our corner of the earth. We were to get more snow – we still might – but that day, we were on the receiving end of a promise that spring was making its way back to us.

For eons, humans have waited, yearned and prayed for the sun’s seasonal return. They’ve made offerings, built temples, devised formulas and calendars foretelling its reappearance and apex in the sky. They’ve organized their lives, planted their crops and undertaken their voyages according to its place in their heavens.

I thought of a great granite altar I’d seen atop Machu Picchu in Peru. Machu Picchu is a place of a lifetime, and every inch of it fascinates and brings wonder. But this gray slab of rock sitting at a cliff edge had particularly touched me. It seemed to be reaching beyond its stone roots into the atmosphere, trying to communicate with the sky. Indeed, its ancient Inca carvers intended nothing less. The rounded stone spur that rises from the altar’s base is the Hitching Post of the Sun, Intihuatana in Quechua. Here Inca astronomers performed ceremonies to ensure the sun’s permanence and predicted key times of year and planting seasons. During equinoxes and solstices, Intihuatana’s edges align with significant geographic features in the surrounding mountain landscape, hinting at the Incas’ broad awareness of and reverence for the world they inhabited.

In June, at the summer solstice, the descendants of the Inca will celebrate Inti Raymi, the festival of the sun, and ancient places like Cusco and Machu Picchu will fill with natives and visitors gathered to thank the sun for continuing to shine. Many will stand beside Intihuatana, "the place where the sun is tied," and contemplate the invisible tether that hitches a life-giving orb to silent rock.

Perhaps I’ll be in the pool that day, lifting my face to the rays reaching through the windows and into the water.



Where shall we go next?


Book proceeds are still going to tsunami relief. The next donation will go to UNICEF, but I will investigate other organizations needing assistance in the wake of the March earthquake and will keep you informed by updating the January 2 post. Thank you.

www.LoriHein.com

Food for thought for an April Fool

I've been had.

This morning, I and fellow members of the online BootsnAll Travel Community received an email announcing Boots’ “new direction.” The email told us that endless reports and news flashes about “death, danger, fear and destruction overseas” had finally led Boots’ founders, who for years had “resisted these warnings and encouraged travelers to set out and explore the world on their own terms and judge for themselves," to stop promoting travel and start carrying out their “moral obligation to educate people about the serious risks involved in stepping out your front door.” BootsnAll felt it could not, “in good conscience,” continue encouraging people to explore their world. “The world is a dangerous place,” wrote the editors, “and traveling is only going to expose you to it." The email ended with a link to “Don’t Go,” a new website focusing on "all the reasons not to travel.”

The email was, of course, an April Fool’s joke, but my initial, visceral response to it bothered me, and I posted this reply on the “new direction” thread that appeared immediately on the Boots’ Members Forum:


"After I read Boots' email, I sat and thought, "Okay, folks. We've really done it. We've gone and messed up this world so badly that even diehards like the BootsnAllers are throwing in the travel towel. This is it. The beginning of the end. I know it's not the same world it was when I started traveling 30 years ago, but how did we humans let things spin so far out of control? We're doomed. We'll all sit home, insulated and isolated, until the whole darn thing just blows up."

I took that sick feeling with me to the hairdresser and made plans to write a rebuttal-plea-sayitain'tso-theseguysarewrongandtotallynutsdon'tlistentothem post on my world travel blog. I made plans to pull the Boots link from my blogroll. I made plans to email a new Cajun friend a link to a zydeco and gators book excerpt I'd let Boots publish, before the Boots site disappeared, taking the link with it.

I'm thrilled that this joke turned out to be on me, but I find it sad that I, an inveterate vagabond who's visited some 60 countries and whose kids have been globetrotting since they were in the womb, could have considered, even for an instant, that Boots' "new direction" might be for real.

There's a lot that needs healing in the world today, and traveling in, around and through it does carry more risks and entail more "work" than it did even a few short years ago. But rather than scale back or slow down or stick close to home, today's April Fool's joke increases my resolve to get out there every chance I get, as an ambassador, thoughtful observer and citizen of the world. We're all in this together. "