June 2009 Archives

Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented. This incident took place in Guatemala...

Guatemala City lay far below me, shrouded in the valley's pre-dawn silence, as I wound down the corkscrew highway from the highlands. My head hung in half-sleep, swaying with the motions of the van. I dozed on and off until the bright lights of the International Airport finally blazed me into wakefulness. The other two passengers climbed out. I moved to follow.

The driver shook his head. "Not you."

We left the airport and drove through smaller, darker roads. He stared straight ahead in tight-lipped silence. I wondered briefly if it might be another attempt at robbery, a predator's skilful culling of one sleepy straggler from the herd. I doubted it, and anyway I was too tired to care. It was pointless to worry.

We finally turned down a narrow street and drove past the hangars of several small air companies. It was a normal road with painted lines and street signs, except that small planes were parked in the driveways as though in some sort of futuristic subdivision.

There were no people in the buildings we passed. No lights. The driver stopped in front of a hangar and got out. I got out too. He took my pack from the back compartment of the van and set it on the ground, then drove off without a word of explanation. I stood in the pre-dawn silence of the deserted neighbourhood and watched as his cracked taillights faded into the empty night. White showed through red where the broken plastic had fallen away.

I seemed to be in the middle of some vast industrial wasteland. As I stood there in the dark, I felt time wobble and reality loose its grip. I sensed the beginning of another surreal experience.

I walked into the hangar and looked around, seeking a clue that would tell me what to do next. Two twin-engine planes were parked with their doors and luggage wells open. I debated firing one up and heading off on my own, but finally decided against it. A light was on in the office but no one was there. I spotted an electric kettle on the table beside a jar of instant coffee. I filled it from a bottle of water on the floor and plugged it in.

Just then tires crunched on gravel and headlights swept the hangar. I walked out with my hands in my pockets and leaned against the edge of the big doors to observe this new development. As in Nicaragua, I fully expected things to get a little stranger.

It was another shuttle van. A stout American woman in matching Tilley clothing was unceremoniously abandoned in the same way I had been. She stood watching in confusion as her ride drove away, looking remarkably like a herd animal caught in the open, sniffing the air for lions. I stepped out of the shadows. She sucked in a quick startled breath before tentative signs of relief crept to the edges of her face.

"Is this... is this the plane to Tikal?" she asked.

"I think so," I said, with the slow cracked voice of morning. "You must be my copilot."

She stopped in mid-stride. "What did you say?"

"I think it's do it yourself. Kinda like a rental car. Anyway, there's no one here."

She flinched as a shrill whistling suddenly came from the office. "What's that?"

"Coffee's ready."

Passengers trickled in as we prepared our drinks. The staff eventually arrived. We milled around sipping coffee as they weighed everyone's baggage on a rusted old hand scale.

"Are you going to Tikal?" the woman asked me.

"Yeah. Are you?"

"I'm on a package tour. A guide is supposed to meet me at the airport."

Most of my fellow passengers looked to be on package tours. They had an aura of timidity about them. As Martina would say, there were a lot of White Legs around.

A worker leaned out of the office door. "Please to come in."

We formed a line in front of a chipped wooden desk and handed our tickets to a secretary, who typed a passenger manifest with our names and passport numbers on an old black manual typewriter. Sharp cracks echoed through the hangar as she henpecked the keys and struggled squint-eyed with the spelling of foreign names.

"I haven't seen one of those for years," I whispered.

"Is that carbon paper?"

I gave her my ticket. She handed me a boarding pass with my name freshly typed in smudged ink.

There were fifteen passengers. The staff must have known us all by sight. Even so, a stewardess would wait outside the door of the plane to tear the stub of my boarding pass when I climbed in. Things had to be done in a specific, established manner, and that was that. Like the Keeper of the Bathroom Door on the long distance bus in Panama, they took it all very seriously.

It was nearing departure time. The closest plane had been loaded with luggage, but it was still sitting in the hangar. A long bar had been attached to the nose wheel. I waited for one of those little electric carts to come and move it. Needless to say they didn't have one. Three burly guys in t-shirts lifted the bar and pushed the plane out onto the road. Looks of surprise turned to mild horror when the workers jump-started the plane with a car battery.

"I've flown all over the world and I've never seen anything like that," the woman said.

I scratched my chin. "You know, I'm surprised those guys weren't instructed to hum like an electric car as they pushed. So that we could all pretend to see one."

We boarded the plane and it trundled down the road in a roar of propeller wash. Thankfully it was too early to encounter other traffic. I thought that we might take off from the street, but we drove to the international airport and borrowed a runway.

We climbed to cruising altitude and leveled off. Far below, rugged mountains gradually gave way to jungle flatlands. The Petén stretched as flat as a dinner plate all the way to the bejeweled Caribbean--a tangled wilderness threaded by nothing but a couple lonely dirt roads. From so far up, the trees looked remarkably like broccoli.

The American lady was seated across the aisle. She reached over and nudged me. "I think this plane's Russian," she said.

The plane looked new but she was uneasy, as though "Russian" were synonymous with the safety record of Aeroflot.

I pointed at a button beside the overhead reading light. "Did you see that?"

"Push to summon crew."

"It'd be easier to just reach up and tap them on the shoulder."

We were interrupted by the pilot as he turned around to pass out drinks. He was sitting at the stick preparing coffee.

I'm 31 feet below ground at the Delta One (D-01) launch facility, standing in a reinforced concrete tube, behind a foot-thick steel blast door. A loop of Cold War tunes plays in my head: The Final Countdown, followed by 99 Red Balloons (the English version, with that sexy accent). I'm facing a grey metal control panel with several bakelite telephones and a number of switches--but only one of them matters.

I've got my hand on the key. And I have to admit, I'm tempted.

What if I could switch the targeting? A list of all those who have ever wronged me flashes through my mind. Noisy neighbours. Overbearing border officials. The Japanese postal service (who once held up a shipment of fadge my father had sent me at great expense, and which arrived a month late festering with mold). Egging the homes of these people would be one thing, but 1.2 megatonnes of thermonuclear annihilation would send another message entirely.

I turn the key, and it clicks home.

Nothing happens.

"Hey! I told you not to touch anything! Get away from there!"

I'm being scolded by the tour guide, who has been provided exclusively for my photographer and me.

That's when I remember I'm in a museum.

Road Wisdom represents a way of travel, a way of seeing the world.

Road Wisdom is an absence of preconceived agendas, short of going deeper.

Road Wisdom is the collection of lessons imparted by the all-knowing road, if only you loose your grip long enough to get out of your own way and simply follow wherever it might lead you.

Road Wisdom has no time for the mundane, the 9 to 5, or the tick-tock world. It doesn't exist in the corporate. It seeks the distance, the time, the space, the essence--unapologetically.

Road Wisdom is firmly "Romantic" in the literary sense.

Road Wisdom embraces the inscription carved in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: "Know thyself".

Road Wisdom recognizes that once you set out upon this course, there is no turning back.

If you follow my News page, you'll have heard that my latest feature article was just published in the current issue of Outpost magazine (July/August 2009). You can find it on newsstands for the next month and a half, or if you're not in Canada or near an international magazine store you can read it right now on the Articles page of my website.

It's always nice to see a piece I've worked so patiently on finally go into print and take on an independent existence of its own. For me it's a letting go, a time to move on to something new. But for my friends and family, seeing me on the newsstand is always a reminder of what I do for a living.

I'm often asked what it's like to work as a professional travel writer. Is "the world's best job" all it's cracked up to be? What's it really like on those assignments? What happens behind the scenes, when the "camera" is off?

I reply quite honestly that all travel consists of endless waiting, long tedious flights, and days of monotony broken by that one fleeting experience when it all comes together and you glimpse something larger than yourself. But they never believe me. I'm sure you won't either. So instead of boring you with lofty thoughts, I'll share one of those experiences from the Ireland trip that didn't make it into the article...

I was traveling with Toronto-based photojournalist Colin O'Connor. We were staying in the lovely seaside hamlet of Port Ballintrae, on the coast of Northern Ireland, five minutes from Bushmills and west of the Giant's Causeway. We'd just enjoyed a quiet meal of steak and Guinness pie at a pub where we were the only patrons. We sipped a glass of whiskey by a peat fire and read from the books on the shelf above the mantel. And we walked by the seaside and talked in low voices while Colin photographed the magical Irish light. The soft silence of the town seeped into our bones, and we decided to call it an early night.

It doesn't often happen that I'm treated to plush five star accommodations (okay, it sometimes happens--but most of the time I sleep in a tent). This time I'd been given the best room in the hotel. I was determined to enjoy it. My room had a sitting area with a big bay window overlooking the harbour. I drank a cup of strong Irish tea there and read from a volume of Yeats, brushed by the glow of that fading Irish sky. I thought deep thoughts and I scribbled them into my notebook. Later, I decided to enjoy the Jacuzzi that the hotel had so thoughtfully included in my room.

I sighed gratefully as I sunk deep into its soothing warmth, allowing the cares of the journey, all the miles we'd put in, the pressures of the assignment--even existential angst--to slip away. I dozed in contented stupor, my thoughts a void. It was only much later that I realized I'd gone blind.

I don't know what caused me to open my eyes. At first I didn't even know I had done so. It was as though a screen had descended, washing away my vision. Everything was white.

I went through all the stages of grief quite rapidly--denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. I had already begun to wonder how long it would take to read a book in Braille when I saw something move.

I heard a grunt from somewhere deep within the water, like a large predatory animal clearing its throat. And something moved again.

I sat up quickly and started groping for the phone, but I no longer had any need for it. I could see.

The bathroom looked like an explosion in a cloud factory. A tower of foam had spilled over the side of the tub and begun to creep across the floor. It hung from the toilet paper dispenser. It reached up to touch the knobs of the cupboard. It had even begun to approach the door with the intention of invading the living room.

I knew that now would be a very good time to panic.

I did the only thing I could do. I stood up and bailed frantically, scooping up armfuls of foam and throwing them over the glass partition into the shower. After five minutes of frantic effort I'd managed to fill half the stall, but still it grew. Every four seconds, like clockwork, I would hear that angry grunt. And it would swell another foot.

"What the hell is wrong with this thing?" I said it aloud, gasping, short of breath from my efforts.

It was then that I noticed a small piece of paper laminated to the wall, right next to the two empty bottles of bath foam. I knelt down beside it and squinted until it came into focus. "We've tested this foam in these Jacuzzis," it informed me. "A little bit goes a long way. Please use sparingly."

I'd emptied the entire contents of both bottles into the water, because everyone knows that foam stuff never works. The air from the jets had obviously combined with it, according to the same scientific principles which create a nice fluffy meringue. And they had kept on creating it.

I was horrified by the thought that this might harden exactly like meringue, trapping me there until morning, when I would be found by Housekeeping and they'd have to chip me free with a hammer and chisel. I quickly pulled the plug and got the hell out. There was nothing relaxing about this.

The next morning the shower stall was still half-filled with foam, and most of the bathroom was flecked with it.

I never said anything when I checked out.

You're alone in the middle of Algeria. Your entire library of irreplaceable and out of print topographical maps has been confiscated by the military, and they suspect you of being a spy. It's all just a bizarre misunderstanding of course, but they're talking about deporting you. If they do, you'll probably never get another visa to the country. This may be your one and only chance to undertake your trip, the outcome of an entire year's planning. What do you do?

Tom Sheppard set off alone on a 700 mile journey through uninhabited desert, entirely off track, without maps, without a guide, and with only the fuel and provisions he had carefully loaded into his Mercedes G-Wagen. The only information he had to rely on were detailed notes from prior overland trips, vague memories of satellite photos he had studied, and GPS waypoints from the trips in his logs--they could point the way, but they said little to nothing about the terrain he would encounter on the new route he hoped to pioneer.

Sheppard's wonderfully written account describes the extreme hazards of his journey with a modest tongue-in-cheek humour that belies the dangers he faced. His passion for Saharan landscapes and his admiration for the people of Algeria are evident in every line of his thoughtful, well-observed prose. The photos alone--233 jaw-dropping full-colour images--are enough to recommend this volume to any traveler's library.

Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented...

I had finally come to grips with my task. I pondered the question of how to turn living into something more than just existing.

Time is our worst enemy. Youth seldom considers time; it seems so endless. But youth is characterized by hopes and dreams, and old age is too often the realm of unrealized hopes and dreams. What's in between? Is that where I found myself at that moment? Or is there in fact no in between at all, just the sudden shock of realization that it's all ending and you haven't even begun?

With knowledge of the name and nature of one's adversary comes the power to take direct action. Here is the fork in the road. You can throw up your hands in despair -- it's all for nothing so why bother -- or you can grab Time by the throat and squeeze as much as you can out of it by way of experience. Both choices are equally valid. In the end it's all for nothing. Time is the predestined winner. The game is fixed. But I think the path of Experience is the more heroic of the two.

To pursue the path of Experience is to squeeze the most out of Time. The time-obsessed have no patience for triviality. I'm constantly amazed at how we nickel and dime our lives away on useless details and inane things: obligations, manipulations, pointless babbling phone calls, make-work projects for the sake of form. We bleed ourselves to death with a thousand tiny paper cuts. Refusing to drag around those anchors is a significant step towards finding freedom. Cut away the sandbags and your balloon will soar.

Busywork obscures the important things in life. The meaningful gets lost among the trash. Like a sculptor, we must cut away the unnecessary to reveal the minimalist core within. This includes cutting away unnecessary people: those relationships that drain you, those people who pull you down. In doing this, some will call you selfish. They want something from you. Their method is manipulation through guilt. You assume obligation; it isn't automatic.

Western society has lost touch with the vibrant core. We live our lives at second hand, through movies and TV. We've become middle class people made cowards by our possessions. Our lives are geared towards comfort, swaddled in narcoleptic routine. We've become afraid to live deeply, and so we live vicariously through fictional characters instead, and through the exploits of others. But that isn't living.

Leave the papers in the pile unshuffled, unstapled. Someone else will do it. And if no one does and they slowly turn to ash, their true importance will be revealed because not a fucking thing will change. The world won't end. But when Time is judged the victor of your lifelong duel, your world will end. It's your choice what to make of it. Do you leave a legacy of paper in tidy piles, or a rich store of experience that vanishes when you do? Only you can decide. You have only yourself to answer to. In the end the clock will win.

Life can't be lived by other people's rules, not society's and not religion's. The great philosophical discovery is that there aren't any answers. We put too much import on the questions anyway. We die and the dream dissolves with a hiss. We have an interval and that's all. All our moments, both significant and insignificant, will be lost in the mists of time. The Judgement Day question has nothing to do with morality. It is, in fact, "Was your life meaningful?"

This life is so tragically short, but we let so much pass by. We obsess over trivialities. We take on guilt and unhappiness through self-imposed judgements and labels. None of those things are real. Judgments and labels are so much smoke in the air. In the end nothing really matters much. You'll regret the things you didn't do more than the things you did.

The heroic path is to live! No regrets. No apologies. Roar at the top of your lungs and punch a hole in the sky! Cry hot salty tears and pull out your hair at the sheer cruelty of time! Laugh and love like a thousand Zorbas! When your light goes out let it end with a flash, not a fizzle.

'Live' is an active verb, not a passive one. Don't plod through life in the Third Person. Claim this brief life as your own and live it.

Sometimes opportunity really will knock only once.

A Postcard from Celeryhenge

Deep in the forests of a rainy northern isle, far beyond the cities and the moss-choked walls, lies one of our most enduring mysteries: the world's largest primitive megavegetal site.

Who or what piled these stalks in such deliberate patterns, and why? Was it an observatory to track the movements of the bowels? Was it an ancient site of worship? Was it just a giant culinary make-work project? What the hell was it for? We'll probably never know for sure.

There's a strange energy about the place; a fork in the road of reality. It's like a hunger. It just sorta grows on you and scours you out ... You relive your salad days in a crisp series of lucid flashbacks, but they fade and leave a bland taste in your mouth.

The wind as it whispers through the stalks sounds like voices. Animals become uneasy. The back of cat's necks bristle. I feel I'm being watched--as though the Vegetalista or some other herbaceous spirit were hovering just over my shoulder.

The weirdest thing is that the monument changes. During a dry spell it almost seems to wilt and go limp. Then, as if overnight, it seems to stiffen and regain its shape--almost as though it knew it had rained...

Enormous trees with wide buttressed roots propped up the canopy: giants draped with vines, mosses and epiphytes which hung in tangled green confusion. All the way down to the impenetrable jungle floor, life grew upon life in one symbiotic Gordian Knot.

The forest floor absorbed our footfalls: mine and two Embera hunters from a tiny village deep in Panama's Darién Gap. The jungle crouched around us in rain-deadened silence. We slipped through it like wraiths, ghosting around branches and drifting over logs in the gloomy green shadows, stopping to hold whispered conferences about the uses of some plant or the sighting of an animal. These stealthy excursions were our regular dawn ritual.

Back in the village, we greeted the sun with the sweet healing water of green coconuts as the village slowly came to life. Muted conversation and the crackle of twig fires drifted from nearby stilt houses, and the smell of wood smoke filled the air.

It was easy in Darién to see the influence that place has upon time. There's something antediluvian about the jungle. Time becomes thick like the heat. It clings to the place. It doesn't resist change but exerts a molasses quality that sludges it.

Other places have their own time-influence. Deserts bake in a strange absence of time: they're rarefied, a place of mental journeys and memory-trips, a place of mad philosophies. A city like Tokyo accelerates time exponentially and leaves you haggard and exhausted, forever trying to catch up. Jungle time doesn't foster metaphysical wanderings. It's sticky, and it glues one entirely into the physical.

If you decide to venture into the world's fetid tropical zones, there are a few things you should know. Jungle travel is wet and venomous. Seal up everything in zip lock bags. You'll never manage to keep your clothes dry--best get used to everything being wet. But double bag your documents, journal, and papers.

Despite the heat, it's smarter to cover up than to shed layers. The forest contains much that will sting, bite or otherwise try to poison you. Wear long sleeves and tuck your pant legs into your boots. Boots should be lightweight and drainable. Insect repellent and mosquito netting is a must.

When walking through the jungle, be aware of what you reach out to grab for support. Many plants can cause painful stings or burns. Insects, spiders and snakes may be hidden just out of sight. In a world that's painted in shades of green, it takes a discerning eye to spot a cleverly camouflaged creature.

Extreme heat and humidity place the jungle traveler at great risk of dehydration and heat stroke. Travel slowly and irrigate often.

Finally, get your shots and buy your prophylaxis before you go. Mosquito-borne diseases like malaria, yellow fever, and dengue are rife in the world's tropical zones. Take a well-stocked first aid kit, which should include plenty of antibiotic ointment. Be vigilant about cuts and scrapes. Insignificant injuries turn septic almost immediately in jungle climates.

Finally, don't let such warnings frighten you. The jungle simply has its own set of rules, just as deserts and mountains do. These habits will soon become second nature, and you'll be free to focus your attentions on the incredibly vibrant world around you--for the jungle teems with fascinating and bizarre forms of life.

In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

In 1999, as the 20th century came to a close, beloved Dutch journalist Geert Mak crisscrossed Europe to retrace the history of its last hundred years and to take the pulse of the great European experiment on the cusp of a new century. Along the way he spoke to the survivors of some of the most significant events of our times, allowing them to tell their stories in their own form and fashion, bringing history to life with gut wrenching vividness and personal immediacy.

It's easy to forget just how pivotal the twentieth century was. We went from horse drawn wagons to automobiles and passenger jets. We fought in the muddy trenches of WWI, reduced entire cities to rubble from the air in WWII, and witnessed the genocidal implosion of the countries of the former Yugoslavia. Half a continent experienced the sudden rise and abrupt fall of communism as a social system and as an organizing principle for their way of life. But the turbulent century also brought with it great triumphs, including the end of war in Europe and the great social and political experiment that has become the European Union. It is on that cautiously hopeful note that the book and the century ends.

In Europe is a masterpiece of history, travel and sociology that reads like an epic novel. It will remind you of your past, provide some explanation for the present, and attempt to predict the future.

Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented...

From The Philosophy of Zachary Peoples:

 Page 12: "I dunno, man. Philosophy's interestin', but I think that what you believe has to come from inside yourself, ya know? No one can teach you how to examine and make sense of life. Anyone who thinks so, well, I feel sorry for 'em."

Page 23: "I believe this is the only life we can be sure of. I live my life as best I can, I treat people respectfully and try to experience all I can or all that appeals to me. If this is it and I spent my life as an accountant and got a pension, I'd feel pretty shitty about myself. Of course there's reincarnation, 'cause matter and energy are never destroyed, right? But as far as me living again as a hedgehog so I can think about how I fucked up, I doubt it. I hope there's an afterlife and a heaven where I can play ping pong with Jack Kerouac all day, but I doubt it."

Page 34: "I don't see my life as any more valuable than that of a drunken bum. I can see a bit of him in me and me in him. If you look closely you can see that kinship in everyone. Some people on this rock really need to try that."

Page 40: I try to live a righteous life, I don't bother anyone. I help folks when I can and try not to cause any major trouble. I think I'll get through those pearly gates anyway, if they exist. And if God doesn't wanna let me in 'cause I didn't do it all in his name, then I don't wanna be hangin' around the arrogant bastard anyway. Besides, all the good conversations'll be going on in hell."

No matter where I am in the world, I feel immediately at home in a library. Oriented in space by the catalog system and the temple-like, almost ritual regularity of checkout desk, reference section, fiction and nonfiction. I also feel oriented in Time--through the mathematical chronology of the history section, and in terms of the linear development of human thought through the eras of literature and poetry contained in the vast, sprawling fiction section, ordered only by the author's last name and the alphabet.

But more than that, the library also orients me immediately in the timeline of my own life. I remember when I first read a book--what age I was, what I thought, how I saw the world, and how I felt. The history of old discoveries, of my development, is contained in its walls, but only I hold the key. The map, the thread of this path through the words contained in those books, exists only in my memory and is entirely personal. It is the chronicle of my growth into the person I have become.

Each reader is their own patchwork quilt of memories and stories, and each accumulation is unique. So much depends upon the age at which we encounter a particular book. What came before it--in terms of books, but also in terms of the experiences of our lives. But the past is also altered by the books and experiences that came after. Nothing is fixed in Time. The future can and does alter the past.

Our personal pasts can be chopped into distinct phases of chronology, just as an archaeologist sections a slope of soil. But they can also be chronicled developmentally. The developmental chronicle is never complete, because each moment--each new experience or book--changes it. Each impact ripples out to earlier and earlier stages, changing things to a depth dependent only upon its weight, its specific density in terms of personal importance.

The fundamental question is whether or not we can ever accurately picture the chronological past. Can we truly separate out what we know now, and remember what we thought and how we saw the world at a given moment?

One way in to these slices of a life is through someone's writing. The writing of a particular time period provides a glimpse into that person's past--a version of that person from a distinct slice of time--a character-ological cross section that is gone forever with every passing moment. In that sense, we are each our own repositories of knowledge.

A 'self' is nothing more than a collection of memories--a living library.

Photo: The author at Alexandria Library, Egypt by Jason George

To me, a library has always been a sacred place. I went there as a child in search of silence and reflection, just as others seek the dim solace of a church. I went there to find answers to my questions, just as others might seek a priest in times of distress. Sometimes I went there simply for the atmosphere--the smell of the books, the soft tread of shoes on worn green carpet, the weight of the silence. The smell of old books takes me back there with the same immediacy that the smell of incense and candle wax has for the Catholic.

Libraries are the accumulated storehouse of our collective memory, containing more volumes than you could ever read or even leaf through in a lifetime. The sum of all our parts: the hardcover stacks of our past, the crinkling present with its smudge of fresh periodical ink, and the paperback shelves of our most distant sci-fi future. They contain our collective consciousness; our deeds, hopes and dreams, and all that we have ever done or thought, both good and bad: nothing less than the thread of our collective growth as a species.

It is in libraries that the incredible miracle of the human race is contained, not in crumbling stones, because it is only in libraries that the story of the human race can come alive. And so, to visit the modern reincarnation of the Library of Alexandria, once the font and seat of all Western knowledge, was for me a form of Hajj, a religious duty.

Photo by Jason George

In the Black Hills of South Dakota, not far from the patriotic visage of Mount Rushmore, the curious traveler can find the growing realization of one man's dream.

In 1939 Chief Henry Standing Bear of the Sioux asked Bostonian Korczak Ziolkowski, already a well-known sculptor, to come west to carve a mountain. Standing Bear wanted him to tell the story of his people, "So that the white man will know that the red man has great heroes also."

Korczak accepted that invitation seven years later, upon return from military service in WWII. He knew the story of the North American Indian was an epic that could only be told on an epic scale. He decided to carve the entire mountain, rather than just the top 100 feet as had been originally discussed. Further, he would carve it in the round--in three dimensions. That decision shaped the rest of his life.

The Crazy Horse Memorial will be the largest sculptural work the world has ever known. When completed it will measure 563 feet high and 641 feet long. All four heads of Mt Rushmore will fit into Crazy Horse's head, with room to spare.

It was obvious to Korczak that a project of such colossal ambition would never be finished in his lifetime. Skeptics derided him as a dreamer and a madman; they didn't think it could be done at all.

Korczak wanted more than just a famous statue. "I'm not interested in a tourist gimmick," he said. He intended to tell the story of the Indian by preserving examples of Indian cultural heritage, the growing collection of which is now displayed onsite in the Indian Museum of North America. His legacy to future generations would be the creation of a formal educational institute and medical center. None of it would be publicly funded. Korczak believed that, to be meaningful, the entire plan must be funded privately, from the donations of visitors.

He started the project in 1947, living in a tent at the base of the mountain with $174 dollars to his name. Over the years he twice turned down $10 million dollars in potential federal funding. Sixty years later the project is still going strong, funded only by those who believe in it.

In many ways Korczak was a man born after his time. Or perhaps better to say that our present time was too small for him. Such a selfless vision died out with the great cathedrals of the middle ages. Or perhaps it is we who have changed. Crazy Horse is a dream too big for the hand of one man; it will take generations, a family.

It was a project that seven of Korczak's ten children and several of his 23 grandchildren would take up at some point in their lives. Ruth, Korczak's wife and lifelong companion, continues to direct the project and still lives at the site. She's been there since 1947 and has been the driving force of the Crazy Horse Monument since Korczak's death in 1982.

"The blackest mark on the escutcheon of the American people is the story of the Indian," Korczak said. "I'd like to think that our country is great. I'd like to think that we are capable of righting a wrong. This is my purpose. I want to right a little bit of the wrong that we did to these people."

Crazy Horse has become much more than even Korczak's grand vision. It has become a testament to human perseverance, to dreaming great dreams. We need that in an age when our ambitions are so small and so personal, when success is a matter of purchasing power.

Find out more about the Crazy Horse Memorial by visiting www.crazyhorsememorial.org

Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented. This incident took place in the highlands of Guatemala...

Something had been nagging at me during my entire interlude in Antigua. I wasn't sure what it was, and so I waited for it to reveal itself. I did magic tricks for the children of the vendors, the tricks Zack had taught me on Ometepe. I read books and wrote in my notebook in the sun. With my dark tan and Nica shirt, I blended in well enough that a tourist with a Spanish phrasebook asked me for directions to the post office. I simply waited like that until, one day, I finally realized what it was. I cannot abide time.

Time is the measurement of our consciousness of approaching death. As I sat there in the plaza surrounded by all those stone reminders, I realized in the depths of my being that death was approaching me at a relentless, unstoppable rate of sixty seconds each minute, sixty minutes each hour.

This realization didn't frighten me; rather, it solidified my resolve. The Road had taught me that I could slow down the approach of death by packing more into each moment. Full moments are timeless. When in their thrall we're outside of time, no longer measuring our death, staving it off. It struck me that this was the true meaning of eternal life. Eternity isn't a function of adding an infinite number of years. It's a result of slowing time, of lengthening those moments in between and learning to live there.

Every time I heard the ticking of my watch it reminded me of my heartbeat--that when it stopped my life would be over. But I knew if I stopped time instead, if I learned to live in those moments "between ticks", my life would truly begin.

As we cling to the past, we feel the death of the world.

I threw my watch away and I resolved to live.

In 1955, just out of university, the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski made his first disoriented forays into the world outside the Iron Curtain. He had only dreamed of the simple act of "crossing the border". Instead, he found himself sent to India, then China, and then Africa as a foreign correspondent. Untrained for the job and unsure of himself, he takes along a copy of Herodotus's Histories, a gift from his first boss. As that multilayered work gradually opens to yield its secrets, the methods and means of Herodotus teach Kapuscinski his trade, and the world gradually opens to him as well.

Kapuscinski does us a great service by reminding us of what a joy it is to read Herodotus. But in writing about the author of The Histories, Kapuscinski is actually writing about himself. "I was quite consciously trying to learn the art of reportage," he writes, "and Herodotus struck me as a valuable teacher." For Kapuscinski, Herodotus was "the first globalist" and "the first to argue that each culture requires acceptance and understanding", and he always strove to embrace those qualities himself. In the end, the greatest lesson he drew from the book and from his own work was that "the cultures of others are a mirror in which we can examine ourselves."

Kapuscinski died in 2007, and this poignant book, which returns to the first travels of his youth, brings his work full circle. We celebrate that life as we turn the pages, but we also mourn the fact that we have lost one of our most gifted writers of travel literature.

Some people travel as a vacation: to decompress from life's stresses, to shut down and escape. Others view travel as a vocation in itself. I'm one of the latter.
 
Every journey is like a life in microcosm. At the beginning we're energetic and naïve, filled with wonder at the strangeness that surrounds us. By midway, experience has dulled our shine; we see a little less, perhaps gripe a little more. At the end we're weary, a little wiser, ready to go home.

Time thickens on the road: years of experiences are crammed into a few weeks or months, while back home life plods along and nothing changes. Growth is also accelerated: you live a lifetime in a moment, and you come back changed.

The first journey is especially momentous. I'll always hold a soft spot in my heart for Central America, because it was there that I looked intelligently upon myself for the first time. It was there I first saw myself unencumbered by the filters of the social boxes and mental constructs of my structured life back home.

Travel teaches us there's more to life than tick-tock, nine to five, television on weeknights and Hollywood on Friday. Life looks different on a sandspit island in the middle of blue nowhere, or on windswept dunes at the edge of a great desert. Primal screeches from the heart of the lowland jungle resonate deep within in a way TV never does. A long life is not a question of years.

But travel also comes with a hidden danger. Once you've set out upon that path you can never turn back. You can't "un-have" those experiences. Nothing will ever look the same again. If you've been bitten badly enough, you'll despair at the workaday shallowness of the life that's foisted upon us: manipulative duty, hand-me-down moral codes, life goals chosen by someone else. You'll be unable to tolerate it, and you'll ease yourself off to the margins of your society. You'll realize in a visceral way that all our lives are just footprints in sand. Better to live them to the full.

The choice is yours.

This life is short and it's the only one we have. Jack Kerouac, Beat Generation Bodhisattva, envisioned "a great rucksack revolution" where people walked away from the system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume. They grew tired of living lives of "middle class non-identity" in "rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time..." They picked up their packs and voted with their feet.

While I don't suggest everyone become Dharma Bums and go off tramping, I do suggest you shut off the TV, or better yet kick it in. Stop vicariously living other people's lives. Time is short, and you can't get it back.

It's up to you to find your own path. Travel is only one possibility. Just choose a path with meaning. It's the process that matters, not the arrival, and the journey is in the meetings along the way.

So tell me, why do you travel? What makes you set out on the road?

The tortured sounds of the alphabet song drifted across the lobby for the fifth time that day. From the next room, rising above the muffled voices, I heard, "Teacher, what does it mean, 'feces'?" I sighed and rubbed my eyes, fighting sleep.

"What is.... what is surprise?" Tomio, the pudgy bald Japanese salaryman sitting across from me, jiggled a leg beneath the table and looked up from his textbook. "I don't know this word 'surprise.'"

Without blinking an eye I nailed the table with my fist. Pens and pencils leaped to the floor. Tomio bleated like a startled sheep.

"Yeah, that's it," I said.

"Bikkurishita! I am scared!" Struggling to control his fluttering heart, he twitched and squirmed and adjusted his tie. "You are mean! Ryan is mean!"

"Well, you won't forget 'surprise' again, will you?"