For editors: Lori Hein's published clips now online

Here's an easy way for editors considering me for writing assignments to view clips of my published work.

Visit LoriHeinClips.blogspot.com for a broad sampling of clips on a range of topics. From my 100-plus published freelance pieces, I've selected some that I believe show the high quality of writing I can deliver to your publication and your readers.

I'll add clips from time to time. The list below, with each clip's subject/topic/genre followed by article title, shows what you'll find now:

Travel: Nairobi by degrees
Essay/Inspiration: United we ran
Travel: Looking down on St. Moritz
Book review/Profile: Siddhartha Deb's debut novel
Travel/family: Into the fire zone
Essay/Inspiration/Family: Bumps in the road
Travel: Sky-high: The stone villages of Provence
Inspirational/Human interest: Art and optimism
Sports/Profile: McCormack is US cycling champ
Travel: Wonder alley
Culture/Human interest: Students' Peruvian adventure
Travel: Dead Sea: A day at the beach
Science/Leisure: Seeing stars
Parenting/Family/Travel: Eyeball to eyeball in Santa Rosa
Leisure/Human interest: Kid chess champs
Sports/Human interest/Topical: Marathoners race for cancer research
Family/Travel/Inspiration: Dawn Magic, in Chicken Soup for the Soul
Travel/Leisure: Climbing Pitcher Mountain
Topical/Events: Men unite against domestic violence
Sports/Human interest/Profile: Hawaii Ironman
Travel/Leisure: Bookshop bargains


Thank you for considering me for future writing assignments. I deliver great stories, with photography. And I always beat deadline.

Contact me: LHein10257@aol.com

A year after Katrina

A year has passed since I posted this story, and not much has changed in Katrina-ravaged New Orleans. Leadership, at all levels, is still lacking (it takes a year to hook up utilities for FEMA trailers?), but people create and cling to their own brands of hope:

A year ago I wrote:


Only today (would I have made it to today?) are bits of organized, effective, life-saving relief beginning to touch the tens of thousands who haven't had a piece of food or a sip of water in half a week.

Because I like harmony, I avoid, except when I simply can't, injecting opinions about politics and other divisive subjects into this blog. I'll get back to travel stories in my next post, but I simply can't, at this moment, avoid expressing my disgust at the ineptitude, inaction, finger-pointing and buck-passing at all levels of American government since the moment the levees were breached and New Orleans began to disappear.

Allow me this post to vent.

The epic failure to quickly and decisively deliver food, water and medicine to our fellow citizens in their time of crisis is a breach worse than a levee failure. It's a massive breach of faith. Like so many, I watched and listened, increasingly stunned, as people died, languished and pleaded, and no one took responsibility, no one took charge, no one took action.

If news crews, private relief organizations and country singers could get into and out of the city center, then why couldn't all the might of the United States get vehicles -- trucks, tanks, buses, vans, RVs, SUVs, jeeps, Hummers, airboats, rowboats, wheelbarrows, little red wagons -- laden with emergency rations that would keep people from dying into that same city center?

Something was made terribly, awfully clear in the past three days. We are, at all levels of government, unprepared to keep our people alive in the wake of a massive disaster on our soil.

When disaster strikes elsewhere, we look effective and heroic. But elsewhere, we're not in charge. We are not responsible for righting everything. We quickly send people, supplies and money, but our government doesn't have to run the show and make the decisions. Nor live with the consequences. We perform well in supporting roles.

The utter lack of leadership that forced American citizens to survive like animals in a hellhole while bureaucrats in suits talked and talked until I could stand their talking no more, scares me upright. I watched, on all the news channels, a reality show. The reality is that in the event of major disaster, we will, like our fellows in New Orleans, be on our own.

Perhaps we should let the Red Cross, magnificent and fast-moving in this as in all disasters, run homeland security. "Who's in charge? Where's the Rudy Giuliani for New Orleans?" cried one radio commentator.

I listened to a National Public Radio interview this afternoon with Kermit Ruffins, beloved New Orleans jazz trumpeter and vocalist and leader of the Barbecue Swingers. After each hometown performance, Ruffins would treat his audience to barbecue prepared on a pit rigged up in the back of his truck. "My truck's underwater now," he said. "I probably won't see it again." But, asked if he'd get a new truck and start singing and cooking again, he said he sure would, even if it took a year or two to get it all back together.

The jazz funeral is a New Orleans tradition. A ritual. A rite of ultimate passage. A blowout and grand farewell that turns death into a celebration of life. The interviewer, speaking of all the deaths and funerals New Orleans will have to bear in the near future, asked Ruffins whether jazz would be part of those, or whether it was inappropriate at this time because it's "too overwhelming." "It's too overwhelming," whispered Ruffins. "But," he continued, "once everybody gets back into New Orleans and settles down, there's gonna be a jazz funeral like you never seen."

If you've traveled in the South, you'll recognize in Ruffins's words and spirit and hopefulness the deep faith that's part of the fabric of life there, especially among the poor who need and use it as basic, everyday soul fuel and sustenance. This isn't in-your-face religion that's worn on the sleeve and shouted loudly from anything that might metaphorically be a mountaintop. This is the real thing -- quiet, abiding, tolerant, gentle and true. It's a beautiful thing to be around, and I saw and felt lots of it in New Orleans. People who have the least materially, are often the richest spiritually.

I saw it as the kids and I drove our van, New Paint, on the thin, levee-side roads that would carry us into the city. An excerpt from Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America:

New Paint meandered toward New Orleans on small roads dominated by oil and petrochemical plants and punctuated by sleepy towns, churches, cemeteries, antebellum plantations and sugar cane fields. Being Sunday, Pinnacle Polymers and Dupont Elastomers were quiet, but churches were open all day for business. We passed one in Ascension Parish about 3 p.m., and members of the congregation, dressed to the nines, were gathered in the parking lot, chatting and socializing. The same at Mt. Calvary Church, where the men wore pressed dress pants and crisp snow white long-sleeved shirts, buttoned up proper even in the stifling heat and humidity. The women’s dresses were jubilant statements in red and orange. The church sat near Pecan Street and looked directly onto the massive levee that hid and held back the Mississippi just beyond. You knew the river was there when a barge or tanker passed, showing only its top as it slid by.

I just watched the news and listened in awe as a young man, trapped for days in the horrific convention center and still with no way out of the city, sat on concrete steps in the sweltering sun and uttered a jubilant statement as he was handed one small bottle of water from the back of a just-arrived supply truck.

He tilted his head back toward the sun. "We'll do alright. We takin' it one day at a time. Thank you, God!"


www.LoriHein.com

Watch out for that fee

I was busy writing a post recommending Auto Europe, a car rental agency that I've used successfully a half dozen times, when the mail came. Some envelopes just exude bad vibes -- those with, say, a return address that reads "Internal Revenue Service" -- and in this mail pile I saw one of those bad-vibe envelopes. It was from the Budget car rental office in Zurich, Switzerland.

I'd used Auto Europe to rent a car for our recent trip to Switzerland and France. Auto Europe, which doesn't supply cars itself, acts as a broker and hooks customers up with deals offered through a variety of rental outfits. Our vacation vehicle, a sleek, black Saab wagon that practically drove itself, was a Budget car.

Using the Auto Europe Web site to book the car, I'd specified both me and my husband as drivers, prepaid the entire rental cost with a credit card, and printed out the voucher with the nice, round "$0.00" in the "Balance Due" column. We took that piece of paper with us to Zurich, where we presented it to the Budget agent and were handed the keys to the Saab.

Two weeks later we returned the dirty but otherwise perfect Saab, just filled to the brim with five-dollar-a-gallon gas, to the Zurich airport's Budget return lot. The agent inspected the car and the fuel level, pronounced both satisfactory, noted that we'd prepaid, and bid us a good flight home.

Why, three weeks after our trip, was I getting a letter from Budget? Given that we'd prepaid and had returned the car dent-free and full of some of the world's most expensive gas, Budget should be done with me and I with them. I doubted that the letter, which had one of those serious-looking wax paper address windows, was a customer satisfaction survey. Budget wanted money from me. I could smell it.

It was worse than that. They'd already taken the money.

Budget was writing to inform me that a $130 "Extra Driver Fee" had been charged to my credit card.

I've rented scores of cars in my day and been nickeled, dimed and blindsided in most of the world's major currencies, but this fee's a new one on me. Budget couldn't get us for gas or dings, so they reached into their magic bag of fees, that secret sack of sneaky ways to screw people, and pulled out this doozy.

"Buyer beware" just doesn't cover it anymore. Even if you read all the fine print, follow all the rules, and do everything right, they're gonna get ya -- maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe in three weeks...

www.lorihein.com

No-fly zone

A day or two after the recent dismemberment of the plan to bring down nearly a dozen U.S. passenger jets over the Atlantic, National Public Radio's Weekend America interviewed flight attendants about their vocational risks and the fears they carry with them on the job. One of the show’s hosts asked an interviewee what it would take to make her quit, and the guest, noting that many flight attendants she knew were "on the edge," said if terrorists brought down one domestic plane, that would be it. She and others would fold their wings and quit flying.

I thought the response of the flying public, airline and security personnel, and the British and American governments to last week’s alleged mass murder plot was well done. The intended victims (you, me and everyone we know) were patient and understanding, and the people with the hard task of protecting us were quick, efficient and effective.

Collectively, we delivered a great, global "up yours" to the thugs who spent big chunks of their time on this earth figuring out how to make bombs from Gatorade.

As admirably as we’re adapting to our world's sick craziness, it’s understandable that even veteran vagabonds now feel anxiety when moving about the planet. The statistical risk of being murdered by al-Qaeda or its clones or wannabes is minuscule, but mathematics are small comfort when you’re afraid or unsettled, and perception is everything. If my daughter perceives that our family will be in danger if we take a night flight over the ocean to Europe, should we make that flight?

After he’d interviewed the flight attendants, the Weekend America host asked listeners to consider a life without flying. The questions posed went something like, "Suppose you decided, That’s it – no more flying. How would you live? How would you live a rich life without air travel? What would you do? What would you do differently?"

I was listening to this show while driving to the supermarket. I looked like a mom in a minivan rolling through suburbia to buy milk, but as the host drew out the discussion, I morphed into my vagabonding alter ego. I kept my ear to the radio and my mind on the atlas in my head.

A life without air travel? What would I do?

It being a given that I wouldn’t stay home, I flashed an image of the Americas across my brain.

Why, I’d drive the Pan-American Highway from Mexico to Chile. Take a train across Canada, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Drive to Miami and board a boat to the Bahamas, where I'd island-hop for a sunny month. Make another road trip across America (and write another book). Hike the Appalachian Trail. Bike the old Lincoln Highway. Drive to a city I’ve never visited and coast my way through it on one of the kids’ old fold-up Razor Scooters. Take the ferry from Portland, Maine to Nova Scotia and run great, sweeping stretches of the Cabot Trail. Haul my pontoon boat to New York and cruise the Erie Canal. Ice-skate Ottawa’s Rideau Canal. Kayak down the Hudson, from upstate all the way to the Statue of Liberty.

I’d adapt.


www.LoriHein.com

Jordan: A simple act of kindness

Hatred continues to blow its bloody way through the Middle East and rain despair on millions. And that is all many people know about that part of the world.

In the current issue of The Traveler, I take you to Jordan, where, by being kind to a stranger, a young boy became the face I will always see when I think of the Middle East.

Click here to read the story.



www.LoriHein.com

Water, water everywhere, but is it safe to drink?

Ian Frazier has an entertaining article in the August issue of Outside. In "A kielbasa too far," Frazier recounts episodes of malady in foreign lands. Getting sick or not in a foreign country boils down pretty neatly to where you are and what you choose to eat and drink while you’re there. And we sometimes choose to eat skewered meat from street carts and drink neon-colored soft drink concoctions from women sitting under umbrellas, babies tucked into their bosoms.

Actually, when I say "we" I mean other people, because I don’t eat the skewered meat or the suspect drinks. I err, almost always, on the side of caution.

I carried pounds of tinned food to China so I could avoid eating the steamed wonton balls and roasted sweet potatoes from the hawkers – people that blow their noses into their hands and then touch the food – that line Beijing’s streets. (Folks I traveled with succumbed to the sweet potatoes and spent a Beijing night puking in their hotel toilets.) I packed a case of granola and Power bars when I went to India so I could walk past the skinny chickens and roasted nuts on offer along Delhi’s sidewalks. I look at fish, produce and meat markets in undeveloped countries as cultural stops and photo ops, not places to fuel my body. Click, click. Time for a Power Bar.

Young people on vagabond journeys with time to kill should try the local street stuff. Older folks with planes to catch and lives and incomes to get back to should graze conservatively.

I’m no gastronomic weenie. I’ve eaten snake, eel, monkey, yak, guinea pig, and eggs whose yolks had been jellied into a sinister mash of sick, gray-green softness. But trust your gut. If intuition says, "Don’t eat that," then don’t eat that. (I should have listened when it issued the snake warning. Talk about nasty...)

Water’s a tricky thing. You need it every day, in decent quantities. But is the water safe to drink? Sometimes, yes. Often, no. Again, trust your gut (the part of you that will take the hit if you get it wrong).

In developed countries, I take a few gargantuan sips of tap water on my first day. If I’m still standing on Day Two, I gulp some more. If Day Three greets me quietly with no gastrointestinal emergencies, then tap water it is. I proclaim the water safe for the family, and we stop buying the bottled stuff. I’ve learned how to order tap water in several European languages ("Leitungswasser, bitte," and "L’eau robinet, s’il vous plait..."), which shaves major bucks from restaurant tabs. When I was a literally starving student in Paris and ordered tap water with my cheap croque monsieur cheese sandwiches, the waiters sniffed down their noses at me and made me feel like a social pariah, a bumpkinish misfit. Now that I’m more well-heeled, the waiters’ looks border on admiration that I know what they know – the free tap water is just fine, and the pricey bottled stuff – a fountain of income for the restaurants – is unnecessary.

When we were in France a few weeks ago, we stayed in Thonon-les-Bains, a Lake Geneva spa town with its own signature water, Thonon. The town sits next to Evian-les-Bains, home of world-renowned Evian water, which is actually bottled in an ugly factory not in Evian, but in next door Amphion. We were in the epicenter of chic bottled water and drank nothing but tap water. I figured the stuff flowing from the faucets in these towns is probably superior to bottled stuff elsewhere.

In developing or undeveloped countries, I forego the tap water experiment entirely and stock up on factory-sealed bottled water.

If you’re traveling with kids, you need to make sure they stay hydrated. If you’re in a place with an undeveloped sanitary infrastructure, you train your kids not to drink from the tap as they’re used to doing at home. You lodge a bottle of store-bought water by the bathroom sink and tell them to rinse their toothbrushes and mouths with this, not the water from the faucet. When they get lazy or forget and come moaning to you in the night, you give them Pepto-Bismol or Immodium, pat them on the head, and tell them they’ll feel better in the morning, which they usually do. Every once in a while, you’ll pass a weird, perversely fulfilling night with a feverish kid wrapped around you, a kid who wakes up to the sun cool and healthy and spiritually quieted. If that breakthrough doesn’t come by morning, get thee to a clinic.

In Frazier’s article, he talks a bit about bottled water. He quotes a Toronto doctor who specializes in travelers’ ailments and who warns that even bottled water can be unsafe because it might actually be a literful of counterfeit faucet issue. Best to go for the carbonated stuff, he says, as carbonation is hard to fake. Frazier writes that when he used to travel in Russia, his Russian friends would laugh when foreigners ordered bottled water because it was nothing but a dupe, tap water packaged up with a label and a cap, just for tourists.

Is there fake bottled water out there? You bet your bubbles. Had I not seen a water forgery in action, I might not believe it. Now I know better: crack the seal yourself or drink at your own risk.

We were in Greece, at Tolo, a beach town on the Peloponnesean peninsula near Nafplion. While the family swam, I went for a run. In order to eke a decent number of miles from the town’s limited road network, I had to head uphill, away from the beach, shops and tavernas, toward a municipal dump and a series of dusty streets lined with hardscrabble little houses. I made repeated loops through these streets and kept passing a public well, a pump imbedded into a concrete platform roughly six feet square.

Two streets below the pump, closer to the beach and the main drag where the tourists hung out, was a taverna. It had inviting umbrella tables, arbor with shade-producing vines, rusty olive oil tins reincarnated as flower pots, and the day’s menu written on a chalkboard propped against a sun-glinty whitewashed wall.

As I ran by the taverna, I noticed an older man, presumably the owner, exit through the back door and make his way up toward the water pump. Normally, I’d have taken no notice, but the man carried something that piqued my curiosity – a big plastic tray filled with empty plastic bottles – bottles that bore the label of the water we’d been buying in stores and tavernas since we’d landed in Greece.

I hid behind a stone wall and watched this guy chug up to the pump and proceed to fill each of those tall "bottled water" bottles with the water from the public well, which sat about an eighth of a mile downhill from the municipal dump. Garbage trucks were busy up there on the hill, coming and going, discharging their loads then heading out to refill.

After he’d filled the bottles, the old man picked up the heavy plastic tray and carried it down to his restaurant, and I watched the tray of tap water disappear into the taverna’s rear kitchen door.

I didn’t stick around long enough to see it emerge on the taverna’s patio where it would be served to unsuspecting travelers, maybe to a family like mine. To watch would have made me sick.


www.LoriHein.com

South Dakota's temple to corn

A recent issue of Smithsonian carried a piece called “What’s Eating America,” adapted from Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore's Dilemma.

Corn, writes Pollan, is king of the American diet. Of the 45,000 items stocked in the average American supermarket, corn figures somewhere in more than a quarter of them. And, it figures in the very structure of the stores themselves.

Writes Pollan: “It’s not merely the feed that the steers and the chickens and the pigs and the turkeys ate; it’s not just the source of the flour and the oil and the leavenings, the glycerides and coloring in the processed foods; it’s not just sweetening the soft drinks or lending a shine to the magazine cover over by the checkout. The supermarket itself – the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built – is in no small measure a manifestation of corn. "

In Mitchell, South Dakota there’s a building that is nothing but a manifestation of corn. The kids and I were on our cross country journey and were headed east toward Sioux Falls, where I planned to hook a 90-degree left turn from I-90 onto I-29 and drive to Fargo, North Dakota just so I could hear the locals there talk. I was hoping they’d sound like Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson. (Enough of them did to have made the jaunt to Fargo worth my while.)

South Dakota's spare, beautiful, wind-whipped monotony can tax the endurance of the long-distance driver, so I pitstopped anywhere that smelled even mildly entertaining. (A real gem: Pioneer Auto in Murdo – for antique and classic car buffs, this funky, labyrinthine museum is worth the price of a plane ticket to Rapid City or Sioux Falls from just about anywhere.)

But Mitchell's Corn Palace took the cake. From Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America:


An architectural phenomenon is firmly planted in the middle of downtown Mitchell. The Corn Palace is an American artistic statement brilliantly rendered. In corn. Corn art. Art in corn. Corn-as-art. A building made of corn. Covered, embellished, inside and out, with cobs and kernels. A stationary, architectural Rose Bowl Parade in feed instead of flowers. I bought postcards and a corn-shaped candle from a gift shop cashier who told me this year’s exterior and interior corn murals “weren’t quite done because there hasn’t been much rain, and the grain is weak.” It looked done to us. Like nothing we’d ever seen. Artists compete annually for the honor of crafting a piece of the next year’s Corn Palace. Photographs of Corn Palaces of years gone by lined a lobby wall. The building’s skeletal shape stayed the same, but each annual Palace was a new work of iconic American art. Mitchell changes the way you look at corn.



www.LoriHein.com