Ribbons of Highway meets Chicken Soup for the Soul

In March, when Chicken Soup for the Horse Lover's Soul II hits bookstores (and Amazon), a little piece of Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America will go worldwide.

Chicken Soup editors selected an excerpt from Ribbons of Highway from 1,000 stories submitted for the Horse Lover's title's second edition.

The Chicken Soup series has sold over 80 million copies worldwide, and students in China use Chicken Soup to learn English. I'm having fun imagining a classroom full of kids in Beijing reading about the magical morning Dana and I spent rolling along Lexington, Kentucky's Bluegrass Driving Tour and watching the dawn thoroughbred workouts at Keeneland Racecourse.

(At the time of our trip, I thought we'd seen everything Lexington has to offer. Turns out we missed a yummy attraction -- Lexington's Jif factory, the world's largest peanut butter producing facility. )

Here's a tiny spoonful of the Ribbons meets Chicken Soup story:

At Keeneland, we stood at the rail of the fabled oval, the only spectators, and watched trainers lead horses from the misty rows of silvery stables and onto the track. Light, lean, blue-jeaned trainers, one with dreadlocks flying from under his helmet, put pounding, sweating thoroughbreds through their paces. The trainers wore helmets, and most wore chest pads. They carried crops, which they weren’t shy about using. Some stood, others crouched. Some made their horses step sideways. The men and animals took the track’s bends and straightaways at breakneck speeds. Old Joe, tall and gaunt and wrinkled, in jeans and western shirt and a helmet with a pom-pom on top, sat astride his horse, Frog. They sat at the track rail, inside and on the course, ready to go after runaways. That was their job. Joe’s eyes were peeled, and he was ready to ride Frog to the rescue of any trainer whose trainee decided he’d rather be somewhere else.

A good number of the riders took note of Dana. A little girl with a beautiful brown ponytail who’d risen before the sun to stand at the rail. Like this morning’s desk clerk, they recognized her as a kindred spirit. They smiled, waved, and slowed down when they passed so she could look longer at their horses. Dana had brought her little plastic camera, and some of the trainers posed for pictures.

One trainer with a gentle face and shining eyes assembled himself and three others into a parade formation. They passed us, four abreast, at a slow, regal posting trot, like palace guard presenting the colors before the queen, each rider smiling down at Dana. I thanked them with my eyes. That they took note and took time turned this special morning into magic. These were busy men with hard work to do. Some were watched by the horse owners who paid them, and they weren’t paid to be nice to little girls. But they were, and I’ll always remember them with fondness.


(Book cover photo copyright HCI Books, 2006. Used with permission)

LoriHein.com

Peru: Puttin' on the Ritz

A river cruise from my tourist camp on Peru's Momon River, an Amazon tributary, took me to a Yagua (Yahua) indian village.

I didn't enjoy the tribal dance staged by the men in the village because their body language told me they didn't enjoy it.

The Yagua danced, sold paintings on bark, and passed around cups of a thick, beige, beer-like brew that bubbled in black cauldrons suspended over wood fires so that tour companies would keep bringing money-toting visitors. These intermittent interruptions by outsiders earn the Yagua enough income to let them stay put in their rainforest, away from the tumbledown bustle of Iquitos, the large, faded city upriver that was once home to Dutch rubber barons.

I left the dance circle and found a thatch-covered porch on stilts. On it sat the village's grandmothers, mothers and babies.

I always travel with food, usually a stack of Power Bars. They're flat, compact, they don't melt, and you can live on them if you have to.

On this day, for some reason, I had a stash of Ritz crackers in my pack instead. With their mothers' permission, I gave a cracker to each baby. They licked off the salt and gummed the crackers and bounced their legs and feet happily up and down.

That day's food supply proved fortuitous, as I doubt the babies would have known what to do with a Power Bar.


LoriHein.com

Elephants assume the throne

I cut a photo from a recent issue of This Week magazine and hung it on my refrigerator. It’s a picture of a great, gray Asian elephant sitting on a massive concrete toilet, and it bears the caption, “Don’t forget to flush.”

The accompanying story shares the news that “weary trainers” at a Thai animal preserve have taught seven pachyderms to poop in a giant potty. Whenever bits of their hundred pounds each of daily food start knocking, the elephants plop their rears on the throne, do their business, then use their trunks to pull a cord that flushes what is likely the world’s largest loo.

I’ve seen an elephant sit, and it’s a rare thing to behold, especially from behind. (Sorry. It's hard to resist wordplay when it stares you full in the face.)

I could have, should have, popped off a better shot (photo above) of this African elephant’s rump, but I was momentarily pollaxed by what I was looking at and missed capturing the exact moment when the geometry of his big booty was perfectly square with the stone culvert he was scratching himself on.

We were in Amboseli, on the last of our Kenya game drives, and Herbert, the Star Tours driver who’d shared his land with us over the course of a sublime week, was determined to find final, marvelous things for us to see before we said goodbye. He delivered.

The clouds parted, revealing Kilimanjaro and her vanishing snows. We’d already seen, thanks to Herbert’s knowledge and skill, all of the Big Five, including the elusive leopard, but on this last day, we found our first hippo and studied his bulbous face through Herbert’s binoculars. We watched a herd of giraffe, legs splayed, as they sucked salt from a powdery white lick that ran next to a sparse stand of acacia trees. A lioness, on her back with legs up and white belly exposed to the sky, played with her three babies.

All this was enough, but then came the young sitting bull. He sashayed toward us, gave us an elephant-may-care look, turned, sat down on the concrete, and, with great effort and purpose, scratched away that African day’s bugs, dust and other indignities.

Then, business done, he got up and walked away.

LoriHein.com

Venice tailgate party

There'll be a Rocky Mountain-size tailgate party tonight in the parking lot at Denver's Invesco Field at Mile High, where our New England Patriots , under the capable (and cute) leadership of quarterback Tom Brady, will take on the Broncos in the playoffs. People will circle their suburban wagons, break out beef, buns and beer, and party until kickoff time.

In the Venice lagoon, tailgate parties are staged on the water. It was a broiling July day, and we were making our way by public vaporetto from Venice to the island of Burano, famous for lace-making and crazy-colorful houses that line the island's canals like upright crayons.

The trip took about an hour, and we called on various lagoon islands before reaching Burano. The ports of call were interesting, but the real action was on the water, where we watched thousands of Venetians at play.

Motorboats of all colors, sizes and types, including some magnificent mahogany craft, plied the lagoon and zipped around in the hot, humid haze. Most boats' bows were adorned with sunbathing babes. (Nobody swam. The lagoon may look inviting, but Venetians know not to stick more than their tootsies in the dirty water.)

Just before we reached Burano, we saw a quarter-mile-long string of anchored boats, many tethered together in little groups and star-shaped clusters. People ate, drank, kissed, played music, laughed, danced, preened, posed, flexed, spread suntan lotion, and hopped from one boat to another. A reedy sandbar ran behind the scene, and on it people had pitched portable cabanas and bright, plastic umbrellas.

Tailgate party, Venice-style. Pass the Campari.


www.LoriHein.com

Moneglia: Apricot sunshine

The tiny Ligurian town of Moneglia on Italy’s Mediterranean coast had a sandy beach, rich history, and ancient streets lined with colorful houses, regal shade trees and charming shops.

But we pretty much stayed put on our perch high above the hamlet and spent the week looking down on everyone.

We’d rented the best-sited of the apartments at a small hilltop complex called Residence Le Marine, an aerie suspended above the Ligurian land and seascape.

We had three floors of living space, two bathrooms, and a massive, tiled terrace that yielded soul-stirring views of the town, sea, mountainous coastline of the Riviera Levante, and the setting sun's nightly dance to below the horizon. The performance opened with deep peach and blood-orange and closed a few hours later with burgundy-grape before fading to a beautiful black.

Other than to buy food, we saw little reason to leave our lofty piece of paradise.

We bought our wine right on the property, from the hands that picked and pressed the grapes. The brother and sister who owned the complex sold their homegrown vintages, red and white, for about four dollars a bottle at the reception desk. When we emptied a bottle, we brought it back to the lobby for a refill. That’s customer service.

If we could have lived on fruit alone, we wouldn’t have even had to leave campus for groceries. On several late afternoons, we found plastic bags filled with fresh-picked apricots hanging on our front doorknob. Who had left these delicious gifts?

A German family was renting the apartment behind ours. (Their rent was half what we were paying, but they had no terrace, no view and no idea what they were missing. I’m frugal, but in this setting, going for the upgrade not only added to the vacation, it was the vacation.) Each morning the Germans set out for long, hilly hikes (probably because they had no terrace and no view so, unlike us, no reason to stay home).

After the second or third apricot appearance, I hypothesized that the Germans went fruit-picking on their hikes and were sharing their bounty. They were a friendly, outgoing clan, so this theory seemed plausible. I’d practiced my German on them a few times, and, unlike some Europeans who've shown impatience with my clumsy attempts to connect colloquially by lobbing perfect English back at me, these folks enjoyed my linguistic forays into their land of umlauts and guttural stops and even encouraged me to keep sprechen-ing.

One day I passed them in the parking lot and thanked them for “the fruit.” “Danke sehr fur die Fruchte.” (I had to use the general term, as I didn’t know the word for “apricots.” Babel Fish just taught me it’s “die Aprikosen.”)

“Ach, nein!” laughed the father. “Nicht von uns.” No, they hadn’t hung the apricots. The sun-colored fruits, explained the father, were gifts from “der Bruder and die Schwester,” the Marine’s sibling owners.

That evening, as we watched the golden orb sink into the sea, we opened the day’s sack of apricots, paired the perfect fruit from our landlords’ orchards with a crisp white from their vineyards (and lobby), saluted the sun, and toasted la dolce vita.

(Note: We rented our Residence Le Marine apartment through Interhome, an agency I’ve used several times with excellent results. In preparing this post, I searched Interhome without luck for a Residence Le Marine listing. I then Googled the property name and found it listed with Sologstrand, a Danish holiday rental agency.)

www.LoriHein.com

The bear and the seven Sioux sisters

The Black Hills, Sioux homeland stolen from its stewards when white men found gold, spill from South Dakota into Wyoming and offer geologic marvels like Devil’s Tower.

Like many visitors to Devil’s Tower, we stayed in Sundance, Wyoming (where we were dazzled by hard-charging teenage rodeo riders at the annual Crook County Fair). You can also nab a bed in nearby Hulett or camp at the Devil’s Tower KOA, down the road from a feverishly busy prairie dog community.

An excerpt from Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America, Chapter 10: OPEN SPACES: Northeast Wyoming, the Dakotas:

To attract tourists, white men gave an astonishing east Wyoming monolith, with a flat top immense enough to host the mother ship of Spielberg’s aliens, the name Devil’s Tower. The Sioux call the rock column Bear Lodge.

In Sioux legend, this pillar of land thrust itself from the earth in time to lift seven frightened maidens beyond reach of a hungry bear. The great earth column rose, and carried the maidens to safety. The bear clawed at the monolith as it rose, and the long, vertical claw marks now run from Bear Lodge’s flat top to its wooded bottom, and around its entire circumference.

The Sioux also explain the genesis of a piece of night sky through the Bear Lodge legend. The column of land that held the seven frightened maidens rose higher and kept climbing until the maidens were delivered to the heavens, where they became the constellation Pleiades – the Seven Sisters.

The crowds hadn’t yet rolled in when we made our one mile-and-change hike around the base of Devil’s Tower through a landscape covered with boulders and rock pillars heaved over eons from the tower’s sides to the Ponderosa pine forest below. Six climbers had secured permits to pass beyond the boulder field at the tower’s base and try for the summit, and they were part of this singular scene. There was a moment in the sylvan forest that hugged the green, lichen-tinged monolith when I looked on two worlds at once.

Up and to my left, I watched a tiny figure, clad in and hanging from new technology, inch his way up the tower’s vertical wall. I looked down and to the right, and saw a tree hung with Native American prayer cloths and prayer bundles filled with offerings of cedar, sweet grasses, and sacred tobacco. On my left, people said, “I’m human. I respect but can conquer you.” On my right, people said, “I’m human. I respect and worship you.”

LoriHein.com

When tomorrow comes

The first sunrise of the new year presents itself today.

In some places, like Spain's Costa Brava (above), the sight will be hopeful and glorious, with the sun seeming to take wing.

In other places, the new dawn brings despair and distress.

We see the same sun, yet twists of fate we can neither control nor take credit for cause us to see it differently.

Our friends, Rickie and Ray, and their kids, Jaclyn and Parker, wrote a poem for the new year that gives fate its place but asks us to consider how what we can control colors our collective sunrises, today's and tomorrow's:

When tomorrow comes:

(Jaclyn)

May our hungry be fed

May our enemies become friends

May our world become peaceful

(Parker)

May we face fewer natural disasters

May our world be cooler

May we get along better

(Rickie)

May our cars be smaller

May our leaders be larger

May our voices be softer

(except when speaking for those with no voice)

(Ray)

May we learn new things

May we make new friends

May we continue to find wonder in the world