by Deborah Fryer
Like many kids, I went to summer camp to learn to sail and ride a horse and tie a bowline. I whittled green boughs into perfect marshmallow-roasting sticks and stayed up way past bedtime reading by flashlight on my top bunk. I sang raunchy songs and played capture the flag, got poison ivy [...]
by Tom Bentley
Long ago, when I was still in high school, I took a road trip from Southern California with three of my best friends to Las Vegas. Naturally, we were too callow to gamble, drink or cavort like the stylish rogues that we fancied ourselves to be, but that was less the point than [...]
by Catherine Watson
In the physical and mental calm that follows whitewater, a friend and I, still dripping from the icy river, were relaxing on the front tubes of the raft, letting Nepal’s hot sunshine dry us off as the noise of the day’s first rapids faded behind.
”I never thought I would hear that sound again,” [...]
By Mary Patrice Erdmans
Ulrich, a robust 52-year-old pilgrim dressed in a red flannel shirt, told me, “I want to walk through the world without leaving footprints. It’s hard work to be silent.”
Sitting alone inside the walls of the convent of Santa Clara in Carrion de los Condes, Spain, I stretch out my legs under the [...]
By Tom Cheche
***
Shade kept us from seeing the sign. The narrow country lane, devoid of traffic, meandered through farmland of the Cotinten bathed in glorious autumn sun, highlighting roadside fields of squat, manicured apple trees but intensifying darkness in the occasional stretch through a palisade of looming shade trees. It was a rough board nailed [...]
By Ginny Horton
I have been Maria Von Trapp on many a mountainside. Isak Denisen eating on fine china
in Kenya by day. Ernest Hemingway smoking cigars and drinking warm scotch around the campfire by night. I have yet to be diagnosed as schizophrenic but have undergone distinct personality changes while traveling. It begins with the accent, [...]
By Elizabeth Galewski
My alarm went off and I shot out of the hard bed in my dingy Delhi hotel room, every cell in my body charged and eager. I was going to fly to London that day. I was going to pack up my bags, go to the airport, and fly to London. I was [...]
By Zack Kushner
Lost in the swirling dust, the sun scalding our scalps and our pursuers gaining, we go for broke. In order to escape Ethiopia, we resort to madness.
High above the Ethiopian city of Gondar, 17th century castles square their shoulders and face the sun. It is as if one of the exuberant potholes on [...]
By Michael Shapiro
What’s the worst that could happen, I asked myself, when an attractive young woman I’d met in Tiananmen Square invited me to dinner. Three hours later I was being held against my will in a dimly lit ground-floor room many miles from the heart of Beijing. I didn’t know where I was, a [...]
by Joel Carillet
I was thinking about paradise, a word so often flippantly tossed around in churches and mosques, at Club Med resorts and on Norwegian cruise liners. The word could be powerful, but we’ve made it soft.
It was 1:00 a.m., an hour before closing. A bottle of Heineken hung from my left hand [...]
