tag:leodisanto.com,2005:/blogs/test?p=2Blog2019-02-05T10:47:43-05:00Leo DiSantofalsetag:leodisanto.com,2005:Post/52170122017-10-06T11:33:17-04:002023-12-10T12:13:06-05:00100 Years of Denali National Park<p><img src="https://abrightunsteadylight.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/img_1402.jpg?w=908" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="IMG_1402" /></p>
<div class="_5pbx userContent _3576" id="js_c">
<p>Autumn lasts about two weeks in the Alaskan interior; at least, that’s what I’m told. As he has so often, the Patron Saint of Movers turned his benevolent smile my way and landed me here in Denali National Park and Preserve by chance at the apex of brilliant fall color- the pale gold of the willow thickets (moose’s favorite delicacy), the variegated deep reds and magentas of the dwarf birch, the evergreen of the spruce forests, and the unbelievable everycolor technicolor of the myriad species of moss and lichen that carpet the muskeg bogs and open tundra. In a week the leaves and the snow will fall; at least, that’s what I’m told.</p>
<p>From the sprawling entrance complex, with its lines of cars and wifi networks and mercantile shops with 10$ ham sandwiches, Denali looks like every other over-developed national park in the US system. But the similarity ends in the front country, which is only the gateway to a wilderness that for exactly 100 years (happy birthday Denali Park!) has been managed so as to balance visitors’ enjoyment of a wild holy place with preservation of the natural state of that wilderness and the creatures who inhabit it.</p>
<p>My favorite thing about Denali and, I believe, its crucial distinguishing feature among our country’s most popular national parks is this: at mile 14 of the 92 mile park road (the park’s ONLY road), the pavement ends, and private vehicles may go no farther. Access to the backcountry is provided by an excellent system of shuttle buses. Some of the shuttles are designated for ferrying tourists as far into the park as they care to venture, the drivers offering narratives on the park’s natural history and stopping for photo ops when wildlife appears beyond the windows. Other shuttles called camper buses transport hikers with backcountry permits or those bound for the backcountry campgrounds to any point on the road where they wish to jump off and strike out, trails be damned (there are very few trails in Denali), into the bush of one of the world’s most pristine mountain wilderness habitats.</p>
<p>For 3 days I based myself out of a small, 7 site campground miles behind the reach of automobiles, hopping shuttles to whichever area I’d picked out to hike each day on my topographic map. It is a very special and unique kind of thrill to strike out into a vast, trail-less wilderness full of large alpha predators with no trail to follow other than the ridge lines and drainages and contours of the landscape. After setting camp I immediately charged off into the hills of the taiga like a giddy child, aiming for the auburn and gold-colored slopes of what my map identified as Primrose Ridge, and it was here that I learned my first lesson about visual perspective in vast open areas. As I left the park road and bounded up the trail, what had appeared from a distance to be short tundra mosses (I hadn’t yet learned about the varying bio zones in the park) turned out to be dense, shoulder-deep thickets of willow and dwarf birch, which made for a slow, brittle uphill slog with very low visibility. Thick brush with low visibility in grizzly bear country is a problem, as griz are historically not fond of being surprised at close range by hikers. For this reason I’ve adopted the habit of carrying one of my harmonicas to herald my coming when hiking in Alaska. When I play my harmonica for human audiences I try my best to play it well. When I play for bears, I try to play terribly, the more gnarly, sustained note bends the better. To my way of thinking, though I have no evidence beyond the fact that I’ve not yet been mauled, there are few things that would knock a griz out of his day bed in the willows faster than a sadistic Dylan riff, one of the ones that make you hold your ears and scream in your car. Bear bells are stupid, incessant, ineffective, and irritating, but a little music in the blind spots might save you some skin.</p>
<p>If you’ll allow me a weird interspecies metaphor- in Denali, bears are the elephant in the room. It has been my experience that a majority of conversations in Alaska at least touch on the subject of bears; in Denali, that percentage is probably around 90. On a single shuttle bus ride to the jumping off point for one of my hikes, I saw 7 grizzly bears. If you don’t think this sort of prelude colors the sensation of a walk in the wilderness, try it out. Here the grizzly is both the rock star and the boogeyman- everyone wants to see a grizzly bear, but everyone also has firm convictions about exactly where they DON’T want to see a grizzly bear. Judging by its official taxonomy this magnificent beast, king of whatever domain it inhabits, clearly made quite an impression on early naturalists- Ursus (Greek for “bear” + Arctos (Latin for “north”) + Horribilus (duh) = “Horrible Bear of the North.” As I type this up in the Wilderness Access Center, I can hear a group of backcountry permit holders being subjected to a bear safety video in the adjacent room. Here’s a bit of perspective- in the lower 48 United States there are an estimated 1,200 grizzly bears. In Alaska the estimated griz population is around 31,000. Have you gotten my gist? Lots of bears.</p>
<p>Bears galore, but so much more! In the park people talk a lot about the “big 4,” which include bears, moose, caribou, and wolves. One of the great thrills of my life hit me when, walking back to my campsite, I came upon a set of wolf tracks nearly the size of my hand along the park road about 200 yards from my camp. A young couple from San Francisco who were in camp that night had actually seen the animal from the bus, and I spent the rest of my stay at the campsite fervently praying I’d cross paths with it. The freedom to play in a great and rare wilderness is a beautiful treat. I spent days hiking around the high tundra, looking to creep up on a herd of Dall sheep at close range but finding only sheep shit. I went for sunset walks along the Sanctuary River that runs beside the campsite, following moose tracks and moose poop in hopes of running into that beautiful behemoth. I walked the Toklat River drainage, making for a break in the timber to climb into the hills, when something at the water’s edge caught my eye- huge, deep paw prints in the river mud, going my way. The mud was still squishy and wet as can be, its surface not yet dried by two days of constant warm sunshine. This mud had recently been under water, which meant the bear who left these tracks had even more recently passed this way. I decided I wasn’t married to that particular route after all. Willingness to change direction is a sign of mental agility. Ahem.</p>
<p>Other park wildlife includes the Alaska state bird, the snowy ptarmigan; the capering ground squirrel, who selflessly serves the ecosystem by being eaten by nearly every animal in the park; the snowshoe hare who, in the process of turning white for winter, looks like a large gray rabbit wearing white socks; and the wood frog, lone amphibian of Denali, whose special cellular mechanisms allow it to over winter by actually freezing solid, thawing out in the spring very much alive. There squirrels, hawks, golden eagles, and, and…</p>
<p>I find it impossible to live in a tent without the company of good books, and the book I brought with me into the park was _Grizzly Years_ by Doug Peacock (a few of you will know what I mean when I say Peacock, a close friend of Ed Abbey’s, was the inspiration for George Hayduke), a beautifully written true story of how the author, a green beret medic in Vietnam, began to heal himself by studying grizzly bears in the wild when he came home from the war. I had the good fortune, while lying in my tent late at night in Denali National Park, to come upon the passage wherein the author describes predatory grizzly attacks on people in tents. Finishing the book on a clear, cold night, I decided it was time to venture outside and look for the Northern Lights. I coaxed myself through the tent flap into the sub-freezing night by promising me a forbidden swig of tomorrow’s ration of cheap Canadian whiskey. Fetching the bottle from the campsite’s bear-proof locker, I turned my eyes skyward and saw a faint band of numinous, pale green light forming on the northern horizon. Trembling with excitement, I switched off my headlamp and dashed up to the river bridge on the park road for a clearer view. As I watched, awestruck, the display expanded and intensified, luminous ghost-green fingers reaching over the horizon, eerie tendrils extending right through the center of the Big Dipper, emblem of the Alaska state flag, which I had tattooed on my wrist last month on my birthday. Within 15 minutes the Aurora Borealis had waxed and waned, somehow perfectly, magically synchronized with my finishing the book and looking to the sky. As I celebrated with a few more pulls on the whiskey bottle, it thrilled me to imagine the massive wolf standing nearby, just out of sight, watching me watch the northern lights.</p>
<p>I had a magical time here in Denali National Park, one of the great wilderness experiences of my life. If you’re thinking this all sounds a little scary, you’re right! It’s my belief that doing things that scare you can be very good for the soul. I think of it as an expansion of being, knocking at new doors to cross new thresholds. If you’re thinking the whole thing sounds mortifying, unpleasant, and altogether unnecessary, that’s wonderful! Please don’t visit. The fewer people who enter wilderness areas, the less pressure on natural systems and stress on their inhabitants. If this sounds like something that would lift your heart as it has mine, I can’t recommend it strongly enough. Go!</p>
<p>It is a very strong and long held opinion of mine that all of America’s national parks should be required to adopt the Denali model of wilderness preservation and access; anyone who has experienced the endless, ant-like processions of cars along Skyline Drive in Shenandoah or Grand Canyon south rim might find at least a little sympathy with my point. Leave your cars in the lots at the park entrance, hop a shuttle, and enjoy the fresh clean air and unharried wildlife. If you can’t bear (hoho!) to be parted from your automobile and wish simply to experience wild beauty as seen through a sheet of glass, please consider staying home, renting a few good nature documentaries, and leaving unspoiled wilderness for those creatures, human and otherwise, for whom it is essential.</p>
</div>
<div class="_3x-2"> </div>Leo DiSantotag:leodisanto.com,2005:Post/52170132017-10-06T11:30:11-04:002023-12-10T13:57:44-05:00On Walking Into and Back Out of the Wild<p><img src="https://abrightunsteadylight.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/img_4403.jpg?w=908" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="IMG_4403" /></p>
<p>On September 11, 2017, eight people from five different countries congregated at a deserted campground behind a gas station in the small town of Healy, Alaska. Most of us had traveled by thumb from various points north or south along the George Parks Highway, the major artery of the Alaskan interior. Only a few of the group had ever met, but all shared the common goal of traveling 20 miles down an old mining road called the Stampede Trail to a broken down Fairbanks city transit bus- number 142- where 25 years ago a 23 year old man named Christopher McCandless lived and died his fantasy of living off the land in the Alaskan wild.</p>
<p>Chances are many of you have read the book or seen the movie version of Into the Wild, which brought McCandless posthumous international fame and a cult following of passionate, idealistic youths who identify with the life and character of Chris McCandless as he has been presented to them. I’m not going to provide a Cliff Notes-esque version of the Into the Wild story here. If you’re interested, read John Krakauer’s excellent book, an impressive feat of journalistic sleuthing that rightly belongs in the canon of outdoor adventure literature. See the Sean Penn-directed film version, an entertaining and powerful piece of cinema, though it seems to me at times to portray more a quasi-messianic hero than the real person only Chris’s friends and family know. I’ll go on record at this point as admitting that McCandless is not a hero of mine, although he seems like someone I might have enjoyed having a philosophical conversation, a hike, and a beer with. To me, Into the Wild is a fascinating story about a brave, reckless young man who succumbed to the classic hubris of the young and passionate. But for a single spin of the Great Wheel, the risks he knowingly took and the foolish mistakes that killed him might belong to any of us who choose to play our lives close to the foul lines. McCandless played for higher stakes than some, sure enough, but to my way of thinking, the choice to ante up with the Big Poker Chip of mortality is one of the most basic rights of all freedom-loving people.</p>
<p>I’m still not entirely sure why I decided to follow McCandless’s one-way trail to the “magic bus,” as one of his journal entries has caused it to be known. Posing for a photo at the Hollywood replica bus now parked outside 49th State Brewing Co. on my first pass through Healy, I began to realize that reasonable or not, I was going to wind up making for the actual bus. I have a taste for adventures involving some degree of mortal risk, am incurably morbid, and will go to inadvisable lengths for the sake of a good story. When asked in 1923 why he would attempt to climb Mount Everest, mountaineer George Mallory, whose frozen body was only recently identified on the mountain, replied, “because it’s there.” I’m gonna borrow that. You can consider that my reason for doing almost anything I do.</p>
<p>Bus 142 still sits where it did when Chris McCandless’s emaciated body was found by moose hunters in September of 1992. The vehicle, one of several outfitted as mobile living quarters by employees of a mining company, was dragged down the stampede trail and eventually abandoned in a clearing when an axle broke. The 20 mile trek to the bus through boreal forest is anathema to many locals, who have been known to use lies and scare tactics to divert the steady stream of McCandless “pilgrims” who attempt the journey every year. Smashed windows and scores of bullet holes in the bus also attest to these feelings, which are partially because they don’t understand the idolization of McCandless but mostly because they’re tired of having to rescue his fans. Troopers around Healy say they send around a half dozen rescue teams down the Stampede Trail every year, almost all of which owe to the 2nd of two river crossings, the dangerous Teklanika. Indeed, it was the Teklanika crossing that stamped McCandless’s passport to the netherworld as he attempted the return trip in July, when snowmelt made the rapids rage, preventing his crossing. Chris hiked back to the bus and died of starvation. Since then, many hikers have been trapped or swept away by the Teklanika; in 2010 a young woman drowned when she made the mistake of tying herself to a rope spanning the river.</p>
<p>Researching the hike, I didn’t have much confidence in my ability to distinguish a safely-crossable Alaskan river from a fatal plunge into a dastardly drink, so I connected through a social media group with a fellow who has become a sort of go-to guy for info on the hike and who accompanies a group of anyone who cares to tag along to the bus each year. His name is Mike, and he has appeared on numerous occasions in media stories about the bus trip. One filming a few years ago documented his trip with McCandless’s sister, Carine. Last year a television crew followed Mike’s group “into the wild,” where they were all forced to turn back by an unmanageable Teklanika crossing. This year he declined the Travel Channel’s request to accompany him, and I’m very grateful to him that I was able to enjoy the adventure without a camera or boom mic up my arse. Mike is an interesting character. He really hates the government- ALL government- and enjoys talking about that a whole lot. His policy is that while the group will of course help each other in any way possible, each member is solely responsible for his own decisions, preferences, and safe passage.</p>
<p>I’m going to respect the privacy of my hiking companions and say only that they were all friendly, fun, competent, and brave, and I look forward to visiting them when traveling in their respective countries. Good company is critical- I’ve now heard a number of first-hand accounts of meltdowns on the trail. One young lady sat down, crying hysterically for rescue, although they’d not yet reached the river and she was in no ostensible danger. One hiker we met had to abandon some of his gear and chase his friend back towards the road when the friend freaked out, wailing that he was “going to die out here.” A group we met near the trailhead had aborted their trip before the first river crossing, insisting they had “smelled bears.” I personally witnessed a young man who declined our invitation to cross the Tek with us plunge straight from the trail into the waist deep rapids without even pausing to scout the banks for a safer crossing point. He hadn’t made it half way before the current overwhelmed him and he froze in mute panic; I doubt I’ll ever forget the expression of terror on his face, staring up at us wide-eyed as we shouted to him to turn back. He was knocked down twice, struggled back to the bank, fell to his knees and babbled thanks for his life. He never made the bus, turned back the next day. I have heard of people who attempted the hike with no food, no gear. Perhaps the fact that McCandless dove headlong into his adventure without sufficient experience or provisions inspires some of his young fans to be similarly impetuous. Perhaps in their enthusiasm they lose sight of the fact that Chris never walked back out.</p>
<p>Through a combination of good sense and good fortune we all made it safely to the bus and back, and to balance the previous scare-agraph I should mention that this can be easily done. If it is important to you to visit bus 142, the hike is very doable with the caveat that the Teklanika will ultimately determine whether you succeed. There is very little elevation change along the entire route. If a visit to the bus isn’t particularly high on your bucket list, consider doing something else. As hiking trails go (and I’ve seen quite a few), the Stampede is rather miserable. You will spend at least 50% of your hike slogging through ankle, calf, even waist-deep water punctuated by pits and fields of black mud that can suck the shoes off your feet. The Teklanika crossing should be taken very seriously- my return crossing with two other guys who’d decided to hike out ahead of the group was very, very scary. Like Mccandless, we returned to our marked crossing place to find the water deeper and faster than the day before. We scouted the bank until we found a less terrifying (though not confidence-inspiring) spot, linked arms, and carefully waded into the waist-deep rapids that had come only to mid-thigh on our first crossing. Pausing after every step, shouting instructions to each other, we worked to suppress and conceal the fear we all later admitted we’d felt. We let out loud victory whoops on reaching the opposite shore. Looking back out across the river, we saw that moose hunters on ATV’s had been watching our crossing, most likely waiting for us to eat shit. They grinned across the river at us, no doubt relieved we hadn’t ruined their day by requiring rescue, mounted their 4 wheelers, and motored off in search of giant ungulates.</p>
<p>Yes, if it is important to you to see the bus, it’s still there. Or perhaps you’re like me, and the fact that it’s there is reason enough.</p>Leo DiSantotag:leodisanto.com,2005:Post/52170152015-11-06T00:34:26-05:002023-12-10T12:30:54-05:00True Adventures in Aviation<p><img src="https://abrightunsteadylight.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/img_0568.jpg?w=908" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="IMG_0568" />Our Himalayan trek came to a close yesterday evening as we limped triumphantly into the village of Lukla through a ghostly fog. There were high fives and glasses of Khukri rum mixed with hot mango Tang (a cocktail we have dubbed the “Mango Tango Bango”). Dinner. Sleep. A Kathmandu-bound flight to catch in the morning.</p>
<p>No one can ever say if or when a scheduled flight will leave Lukla’s Tenzing-Hillary airport, named for the Sherpa and the Kiwi who first summited the mighty Chomolungma, aka Mount Everest.</p>
<p>I thought it best not to leak this bit of trivia to my folks back home until after the flight, but the T-H airport has earned itself an infamous reputation that comes with a charming nickname: “The most dangerous airport in the world.” I’m not kidding- Google that phrase.</p>
<p>The aforementioned unpredictability/ unreliability of the flights is due to the fact that the Lukla airport, closed in by steep, mountainous terrain, is subject to dense fog and rough weather, which makes takeoffs and landings quite hazardous given that the runway is not quite as long as my suburban backyard. There is no margin for error.</p>
<p>Our departure was charmed: we were in and out of the airport in less than an hour. This was due in no small part to the efforts of our superhero guide, Ang Dendi Sherpa, who expedited the baggage and ticketing processes with his usual unstoppable, Tasmanian Devil-esque energy.</p>
<p>The Tenzing-Hillary airport is a dizzying study in efficient chaos. Crowded, dirty, tiny, looking more like the Amarillo bus station than the sole transit gateway to the Everest region, the T-H is a somehow functioning free for all, merging throngs taking the place of the usual organized lines. Security is lax at best: two members of our group absent-mindedly boarded with knives on their persons, an oversight that would have earned them iron-fisted cavity searches in any conventional airport. Planes come and go every 5 minutes or so, landing and taking off on a thin dime, passengers jumping to the frantic shouting of flight numbers for boarding.</p>
<p>We climbed into the small, twin engine propeller plane under beautiful, blessedly clear skies, all of us acting on Jerry and Dendi’s recommendations that we choose right side window seats for the best views.</p>
<p>Takeoff is the meat of the experience, a full-throttle, ten second thrill ride. The pilot cues up at the start of the unbelievably brief runway, revs the engines to a roar, and hauls ass towards the edge of the sheer cliff where the runway runs out. There is no lift off: the plane simply plunges off the cliff. It is fantastic. We all cried out and laughed in wonder as the pilot leveled the plane, revealing gorgeous views of high peaks; Everest, Manaslu, Annapurna. Disembarking in Kathmandu felt like climbing out of a roller coaster. I wanna go again.</p>
<p><span class="img_container" id="img_container_06FB4B18-7F78-4DB7-A900-B30F4B4E500C"><img src="https://abrightunsteadylight.wordpress.com/var/mobile/Containers/Data/Application/D2E441D1-3E8A-49DE-8E9D-AC96EFA442DF/Documents/Media/IMG_0567.JPG" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="" /></span></p>Leo DiSantotag:leodisanto.com,2005:Post/52170162015-10-27T12:33:37-04:002022-05-11T12:05:02-04:00The High Road to Lawudo<p><img src="https://abrightunsteadylight.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/image2.jpg?w=908" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="image" /></p>
<hr><p> </p>
<p>The night we arrived in Namche Bazaar- an ancient Nepalese center of trade with Tibet now a hub of the trekking industry- a young Buddhist monk appeared at our lodge, radiating a peace, joy, and kindness that cannot be explained by simple adherence to a religious creed. His name is Pemba Tenzing, a lama of Lawudo Monastery, and he was to be our guide the following morning over a high, obscure route to the monastery; he told us we would be the first westerners ever to take this path. Pemba Tenzing stayed in the lodge with us that night. He spoke uncommonly good English, and over dinner he showed us photographs he’d taken of the route, some of which I found rather gruesome. It wasn’t scary, he assured me. “Some parts are difficult, but we will go together as a group. Make it a walking meditation: focus on each step.”</p>
<p>The following morning, with the bovine sluggishness typical of humans filled with breakfast, the members of our group who had elected to go to Lawudo left Namche Bazaar via the steep, switchbacking steps leading out above town. Our swashbuckling guide, Ang Dendi Sherpa, and a couple of our Sherpa porters- by now beloved members of our sort of transitory nomadic family- came along. Just outside the little village of Khunde, we were surprised by clear, gleaming views of high peaks, big kahunas like Everest, Lhotse, and Ama Dablum. There was a lot of lollygagging and photography. Pemba Tenzing stood patiently waiting, holding the plastic bag containing the only provisions he had packed: several strings of prayer flags he had blessed with mantra chanting and rice sprinkling at breakfast. When I asked him how he could walk in the mountains without water, Pemba replied,chuckling, “we are the camels of the Himalaya.” Passing through Khunde- low stone walls plastered with drying patties of yak dung, a plentiful fire fuel; old men fingering worn wooden prayer beads in small dirt courtyards; yaks busy hauling cargo and producing more fuel – we were invited into a yard for tea. Dendi emerged from the house with a plate of Champa porridge, a barley cake, which he explained was a blessing for us from the village monastery. Enamoured of the taste and ever eager for any blessings available to me, I ate two pieces.</p>
<p>As we headed out of town, I inquired about the route, and Pemba Tenzing casually replied that “we must go over that small hill,” pointing up to a high pass atop a steep mountainside that topped out around 14,300 ft. above sea level, higher than almost any place in the contiguous USA. We followed the “trail” straight up the ridge to the pass, which was festooned as usual with colorful prayer flags flapping furiously in the high altitude winds. The Sherpas, with their usual assortment of merry hoots and shouts, strung our flags- blessed by Pemba Tenzing- between the boulders, adding to the interconnected web of blessings. How could prayers fail to reach the gods with such fierce winds in their wings, at such fierce heights?<br>The vistas of the high peaks were staggering, though the sheer precipice on the other side of the pass made staggering seem inadvisable. Elated to be soaring amidst such hard-earned beauty, a few members of our crew, some of them mountaineers and climbers comfortable with tenuous holds up high, hopped up onto precarious rock perches to take it all in, thus scaring the living sherp out of our good, protective Sherpas: “Oh, take care, take care!” Dendi headed back down the hill to take care of some business back in Namche, and we turned to Pemba Tenzing, ready to embark on the next leg of the journey. Wearing a serene but serious expression, the monk told us, “now is the time when we must go slowly and focus on every step,” and vanished over the pass. Gazing around the bend, I saw a thin, jagged dirt line cut into the side of the mountain with sheer drops of 1 or 2,000 feet- what walker carries a ruler long enough to tell?- down to the valley floor and roaring river.<br>At this point, friends, I will offer a reveal that will brutally stomp my petty machismo, of which my girlfriend tells me I’ve got quite a lot: Perhaps the greatest thrill of my lifelong passion for bumbling around high mountains and canyons derives from the game of trying to grin down my queasy acrophobia, my terrible fear of the abyss. Tracking my widened eyeballs over this little ledge trail- just wider than my boot-that would suffer no bumbling, I struggled to recall that thrill. “This is the kind of shit,” I thought to myself, “that really gives me the creeping willies,” and I cursed myself for having consented to be led to the literal edge of my doom by a puckish mountain goat reincarnated as a Buddhist monk. For a moment I wasn’t sure I could command my legs to walk that way for several hours, and I said so out loud to Jerry. The fearless leader was characteristically reassuring: the trail probably wouldn’t be so bad for very long; go slowly; take your time.” I went slowly.<br>As soon as I stepped down onto the ledge, that intense thrill of commanding every muscle and nerve into concerted focus in the Now overwhelmed the petty phobia. That’s survival zen, buddies, and it’s a rush. Kami Dendi, our elder Sherpa porter and one of the strongest people I have ever seen, must have noticed my trepidation, and gently took hold of my jacket sleeve as we walked. While I had little doubt that this mighty man- whom I have watched bear on his back loads the size of compact cars over treacherous Himalayan trails- could pluck me from the abyss with those three fingers, I was now intent on relying on my own unrestricted movements. Jerry spoke to Kami in Nepali, and he let me go, but remained close.<br>Before I give in to silly, superfluous melodrama, let me say that most of the trail wasn’t so terribly scary, but there was enough razzle-dazzle to make it a real adventure. To walk with grace and heightened awareness in such a wild, high, ferociously beautiful place seen by so few was a true gift. But as gifts go, it was a real ass kicker. If you’ve never walked in steep places above 13-14,000 feet, you may not understand the laborious, clownish symptoms that greatly reduced oxygen levels can inflict on an otherwise sound human. The brain goes slightly loopy and cattywampus, iron thighs and buns of steel are transformed into inert sacks of meal, and breathing becomes difficult enough to induce a mild panic, especially in a kid who suffered crippling asthma until mid adolescence.<br>And then there is Pemba Tenzing. Always at the head of the group, occasionally allowing us to catch up, I never saw or heard him emit a huff or puff. I can’t remember ever having seen an animal more agile and graceful in his native environment. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that at times I saw Pemba Tenzing levitating 2 inches above the stony ground. And I don’t know better.<br>The whole trip was ineffably gorgeous, stunning, exciting. At our highest point, up the Kyajo Ri valley, we reached around 14,900 ft., higher than any place in America outside Alaska. When we came limping and stumbling into Lawudo Monastery- the trip had taken us nearly twice the estimated 5 hours- Pemba Tenzing sat us down on cushioned benches and served us delicious Dhal Bhat, the fuel on which Nepalis run (“Dhal Bhat power 24 hour,” our Sherpas like to remind us). A brief tour of the meditation chapel and library were followed by the part I had been most anticipating: Pemba Tenzing led us in a short breathing meditation in the ancient and sacred meditation cave. Seated on cushions in the beautiful, colorfully ornamented cave, we followed Pemba’s instructions: focus gaze on tip of nose, count breaths to hold your attention there, breathe in good and exhale bad.<br>“This cave has great power,” Pemba told us, “because many high lamas meditate here for many hundreds of years.” I absorbed a little, awoke a little. “Now wherever you go, always have good heart. All Dharma (religion; truth) is same- Buddha, Jesus, all same. When you have good heart, all comes from there.”<br>On the night walk by headlamp back to Namche I had time and rhythm for reflection. I signed on for this trip during a strange, tough, transitional year, because I believed the experiences I’d bumble into would expand, illuminate, stretch and light up my heart a little. Adventure stretches the horizons and boundaries of the possible and tolerable worlds. A stretched heart becomes a big heart, and there’s more of a big heart to fill with good. I tend to agree with my new friend and teacher, the levitating lama: all comes from there.</p>
<div class="wp-caption alignnone" data-shortcode="caption" id="attachment_159" style="width: 235px">
<a href="https://abrightunsteadylight.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/image4.jpg"><img src="https://abrightunsteadylight.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/image4.jpg?w=225&h=300" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="Pemba Tenzing blesses prayer flags in Namche Bazaar" height="300" width="225" /></a>
<p class="wp-caption-text">Pemba Tenzing blesses prayer flags in Namche Bazaar</p>
</div>
<p>(For info on taking a trip with Skychasers, visit <a href="http://www.skychasersworld.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.skychasersworld.com</a>)</p>
<p> </p>Leo DiSantotag:leodisanto.com,2005:Post/52170172015-10-22T12:30:22-04:002024-03-25T07:34:21-04:00The Sherpas Of Hill<p><img src="https://abrightunsteadylight.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/image.jpg?w=908" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="image" />“One hour more, straight up,” shouted our guide, the real-life superhero known as Ang Dendi Sherpa, indicating with a straight- upwardly hand gesture the pitch of the last bit of “trail” (I use quotations because describing the route as a trail is extremely charitable) to his native Hill Village.</p>
<p>Dendi had explained hours earlier as we negotiated narrow jungle ledge trails across vertigo-inducing hillsides that Hill Village is not a trekkers destination. The teahouses, lodges, and shops found along the major trekking routes throughout Nepal’s Solukhumbu region are not found here, and only locals walk these dizzying, beautiful trails.</p>
<p>We started noticing the leeches shortly before Dendi announced the ass-busting, lung-bursting home stretch. Team members were pulling them from their socks two and three at a time. Rinsing the blood out of their socks, my companions seemed utterly unamused by my excitement at the prospect of attracting and documenting my first-ever leech bite. About halfway up the final, quad-pulverizing ascent I felt a sting in the back of my right calf and spun around, beaming at the two bewildered young Sherpa girls behind me: “My first leech! Who’s got a camera?? Wait, I do!” I snapped a quick leech leg selfie, flicked the bloodsucker off into the brush, and continued up the path feeling like a bona-fide hiker.</p>
<p>We were headed for Hill to offer some earthquake relief work rebuilding their small schoolhouse. As we topped the ridge, a group of schoolchildren from the village, uniformed in light blue shirts and navy pants, appeared on the steeply terraced hillside, prancing about excitedly with the effortless grace and artful abandon of mountain goats. Sherpas are world-renowned climbers, and I could fill an entire post with the seemingly superhuman feats of strength and footwork I have seen them perform on treacherous Himalayan trails. But for the moment, let me set another scene:</p>
<p>At the top of that gluteus-maximizing hill, in front of the schoolhouse, appeared a vision reminiscent to me of the beautiful, impossible mirages that torment men dying of thirst in the Sahara: beside a flower bedecked welcome arch stood a group of the village elders at a table covered with large bottles of beer. As we approached, the men would hand over a full cup, urge you to chug it on the spot, then fill it for the next trekker. Hint: this is foreshadowing.</p>
<p>On the other side of the arch all the schoolchildren lined up to drape our necks with ceremonial scarves (khata) and garlands of marigolds. We were each obliged to line up numerous times so no child would be deprived of the chance to properly welcome someone. Speeches in English were attempted, thanking us for the help we had come to offer, and then the adults lined up to perform the welcome dance for us.</p>
<p>Let me make this clear: Sherpas are awesome. Their warmth, merriment, ancient traditions, and peerless hospitality made for one of the peak cultural experiences of my life. In Hill there are no businesses, no cars, and no electricity, so folks tend to be sociable; a more welcoming welcome I have never received.</p>
<p>As far as I could see, the Sherpa welcome dance looks a lot like the Hokey Pokey, except you drink a whole lot of homemade rice/millet beer (Ch’ang) and rice/millet wine (rakshi), and every once in a while everybody stomps their feet and emphatically chants something that sounds like “Shoosh Shoosh shoosh.”</p>
<p>Sherpas are so much fun to dance and drink with, and they spend so much time doing those things, that it’s a wonder we ever got down to work, but over 3 or 4 days we managed to tear down the damaged schoolhouse so the village can begin work on a new one this month. About 5 minutes into our meeting on how to safely remove the dangerously unstable stone, wood, and tin structure, the Sherpas interrupted to call a meeting of their own, which consisted of the ceremonial consumption of more ch’ang and rakshi and the bestowing of more khata. Here’s the thing: when a Sherpa starts pouring ch’ang and rakshi, he doesn’t stop until ain’t no more ch’ang and rakshi. The Sherpas would fill our cups and continue to stand in front of us with the pitcher, often actually tipping our cups into our mouths while warmly murmering, “che, che” (“drink, drink”). Refills are manditory, and because the cups are never allowed to fully empty, you never can determine how many you’ve emptied. As those of you who know that merry-making is my Achilles heel will have guessed by now, this proved to be my literal downfall.</p>
<p>One evening after dinner I began singing and playing my mandolin and a wild, merry dance party broke out. Eventually my performance gave way to Sherpa folk songs and even wilder dancing; my memory fades out on whirling around as Sherpas literally dumped glasses of rakshi into my mouth.</p>
<p>The accounts given by my comrades of my nocturnal adventures suggest that I fell down a steep stone staircase in a tipsy attempt to reach the outhouse in pitch darkness, which tidily explains why I awoke with my right kneecap so badly contused that I could barely walk unaided. I wondered if this time, this vivid and ludicrous episode in a lifetime of vivid and ludicrous misadventures, I’d managed finally to drop the hammer on myself. To be crippled in a land so remote and impossibly steep that walking is the only possible mode of evacuation was a morbid prospect. Our Sherpa guides and porters had informed us that the next day’s route was very old and disused and very bad, a steep, narrow, treacherous route through the jungle. When a Sherpa tells you a trail is very bad, you can bet it’s as hairy as a yeti’s arse.</p>
<p>I’ll spare you the melodrama: the bum knee held to the trail, which provided us with adventure stories I’ll be happy to tell you over a beer some evening. No rakshi, please.</p>
<p>On the way out of Hill, less than 10 minutes into the journey, we were summoned to “tea breaks” in several homes, where we were served glasses of morning rakshi (this is typical of tea breaks in Hill), the glass rims dusted with Champa, barley powder, a blessing of good fortune. In the last village we visited before entering the jungle, we were told we were the first white people ever to visit, the first they had ever seen.</p>
<p>Ah, they filled my cup, warmed my heart, blew my mind, those Sherpas of Hill.</p>
<p>(For info about taking a trip with Skychasers, visit <a href="http://www.skychasersworld.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.skychasersworld.com</a>)</p>
<p> </p>Leo DiSantotag:leodisanto.com,2005:Post/52170182015-10-15T08:20:38-04:002023-12-10T11:47:18-05:00All You Kathmandu is Kathmandu What You Must<p><img src="https://abrightunsteadylight.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/image1.jpg?w=908" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="image" />My first morning in Kathmandu looks down from a guesthouse rooftop garden on the grand opening day of Dashain, the country’s greatest and holiest festival, observed by both the Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist spiritual traditions that flourish here.</p>
<p>I watch with wide but sleepy eyes as vast flocks of pigeons fill the spaces between Heaven and Earth while Buddhists reverently circumambulate the intensely holy, quake-crumbled Boudha Stupa, reaching out their right hands to spin the prayer wheels set in the temple’s outer wall.</p>
<p>The Stupa’s pinnacle (“Sendok” in Sherpa language) that once reached skyward from the temple roof is gone now, shattered by the massive Earthquake that clobbered this monetarily poor but culturally and spiritually rich country last spring, but as with all things that go- which is to say: All Things- something new will soon take its place. We are privileged to be guided today through the holy places of Kathmandu by a Hindu scholar named Manohari, who explains that the new materials used to restore the Stupa must be sanctified through Prana Patrishka (my phonetic spelling): ceremonies and mantras to imbue ordinary objects with life and spirit.</p>
<p>Our team of intrepid relief trekkers embarks on a potholer coaster ride over the chaotic, chassis- rattling track of Kathmandu’s roadways, which are lined with buses, cars, and motorbikes waiting 24 hours or more for the few liters of gas allotted them by a government grappling with a crippling fuel shortage. Some blame India, claiming that unofficial border blockades are responsible, and India in turn is pissed off about the finger pointing. Relations are a bit strained.</p>
<p>There is sightseeing, eating, and last-minute shopping for trekking and mountaineering gear in the Thamel district. There are raggedy rickshaws; poor, toeless beggars; and an endless street cacophony. Within 30 seconds of walking out of the currency exchange I receive the honor of becoming the first (and so far only) member of our group to be gritted by a local when I follow a woman and her small boy into a little store to grant her request for powdered milk to feed her hungry baby. I pay the shopkeeper 475 rupees ($4.75) for the formula, irritably refuse the woman’s additional request for a new baby bottle (she has already brandished one at me during her pitch), and wander back to the street asking myself if mother’s milk could possibly be a scam. Of course it could, I answer me.</p>
<p>I ask Jerry if Kathmandu has a black market for baby formula and am not even a little bit surprised when he tells me there is. Err on the side of caution, I guess. I can reason that I was swindled to the tune of $4.75, or I can understand that a woman in a very poor country tricked me into subsidizing her black market baby formula career because to her I am a Rockefeller and a Vanderbilt walking down the street in a single pair of pants. C’est la vie.</p>
<p>At sunset we find ourselves watching cremations across the Bagmati River (“Bagmati means “tiger’s mouth,” because according to Hindu tradition this holy river, which merges with the Ganges, originates from that orifice of that animal.</p>
<p>Manohari has brought us to Pashupatinath, a vast, rhesus monkey infested, smiling Sadhu haunted Hindu temple complex. Looking out across the river on the cremation yard, I watch a son, dressed all in white, lovingly and dutifully feed the purifying fire beneath his father’s charred, smoking corpse as a rhesus monkey capers on the red tin roof overhead, raising a ruckus as only a monkey knows how. Close by another white clad family is preparing a loved one for the pyre, washing his feet in the holy river. All of Kathmandu’s Hindus will take their final foot baths here.</p>
<p>Later, over pizza and beer back in Boudha, one of our crew mentions how he felt for the families at the cremation yards, enacting their personal death rituals for the audience of tourists across the river. As I listen, my mind’s eye pans back and forth between the scenes at the cremation ghats- a son soaking straw in a holy river to facilitate the slow burn necessary to transform a beloved form into a heap of ash- and the memory of saying goodbye to my own father’s body still on his deathbed, leaving him to be carted off by a faceless undertaker I never met.</p>
<p>In America we don’t usually send each other off with foot washing and marigold strewing and fire tending, and it’s ok that we don’t. We generally observe life’s greatest transition with strict privacy, squeamishness, excessive lamentation, and a good deal of whistling past the graveyard, and we don’t much like to put on a show for the folks across the river. I will underscore this cultural contrast by admitting how hard I had to work to overcome the feeling that merely mentioning my father’s death here is a breach of family privacy.</p>
<p>It’s time for bed. Things are getting different for our group: we are heading for the hills, trading chaotic streets for high Himalayan passes, funeral smoke for cumulus cloud. I’ll write when I can.</p>
<p>(For info on taking a trip with Skychasers visit <a href="http://www.skychasersworld.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.skychasersworld.com</a>)</p>
<div class="wp-caption alignnone" data-shortcode="caption" id="attachment_165" style="width: 310px">
<a href="https://abrightunsteadylight.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/image5.jpg"><img src="https://abrightunsteadylight.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/image5.jpg?w=300&h=225" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="Rhesus monkeys running amok at Pashupatinath" height="225" width="300" /></a>
<p class="wp-caption-text">Rhesus monkeys running amok at Pashupatinath</p>
</div>Leo DiSantotag:leodisanto.com,2005:Post/52170192015-09-11T12:12:25-04:002022-08-18T01:40:32-04:00A New Notebook for a New Adventure<p style="text-align:left;"><img src="https://abrightunsteadylight.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/img_0482.jpg?w=908" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="IMG_0482" />For thousands of years colorful Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags have beaten like birds’ wings in the lofty breezes of the high Himalayas, vivid expressions of hope that windblown blessings might flutter down over the myriad creatures and vast country below. The prayer flags in this photograph were given to me by a friend years ago, were unfurled yesterday, and now hang motionless in the still air just below the ceiling of my reading and writing room a scant 315 ft. above sea level in rural Pennsylvania. It’s a far cry from here to the Himalayas, but as I reverently open the covers of a virgin notebook to begin this travelogue, I too hope for blessings to drift down upon the open, undiscovered country of these empty pages. For an empty notebook is a magic mirror waiting to reflect the vast, unexplored lands of worlds both “external” and “internal” (if such designations seem meaningful to the reader) that the pages will one day document, containing in its emptiness every possible story. A filled notebook is absolutely irreplaceable.</p>
<p style="text-align:left;">“To lose a passport,” the great British writer-adventurer Bruce Chatwin once wrote, “was the least of one’s worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe.” Chatwin, who was partial to the same sort of small, black, pocketed notebooks I prefer to scribble and scratch around in, only ever lost two of them, and he got sexy, evocative stories about Brazilian secret police and ill-fated bus rides through Afghanistan to show for his losses. So far I have lost only one notebook. It was picked up by a poor, troubled woman in a tiny Pennsylvania river town who, in a fit of angst I will probably never understand, cast my notebook out into an alley behind her home because, she claimed, the notebook was causing her repeated anxiety attacks. A thorough search of the alley several days later turned up nothing but asphalt and weird vibes. C’est la vie, I guess.<br>And so, dear readers and pals; and so, kind (and hopefully somewhat relaxed) finder of this notebook, please let me assure you that this perfectly innocuous notebook was purchased by me in broad daylight in a perfectly non-hazardous little book shop in the almost wholly propitious little town of Woodstock, NY, just 10 miles or so from where an enormous gaggle of hippies once had themselves a big ol’ famous field day in a big ol’ famous field. I did not buy this notebook from a caiman-headed voodoo priestess in some bone-bedecked, back alley wall hole in the French Quarter of New Orleans; this notebook has never been to the tomb of Marie Laveau. Likewise, this notebook was not purchased on my sojourn last year in Transylvania and taken out for greasy pepperoni slices to the vampire-themed pizza joint at the foot of Bran (aka “Dracula’s”) Castle. In other words, this notebook more or less grew up in a nice middle class family and is neither inclined nor able to harm you in any way, unless boredom and confusion can be considered harmful. No, this fledgling notebook has taller fish to fry.</p>
<p style="text-align:left;">The fact is, this certifiably non-anxiety-inducing notebook (Oh finder, please take note!)is bound for the distant city of Kathmandu, Nepal, which my friend Jerry Lapp, owner of Lancaster PA-based adventure travel company Skychasers Trekking and Tours, refers to as a “living museum.” From Kathmandu the notebook will travel to the Mount Everest region of the Himalayas, coming to rest for a week or so at 7100 feet in a tiny village named, with endearing understatement, Hill. There myself and a team of fellow intrepid trekkers organized and led by Jerry and local guide (and two-time Everest summiting mountaineer) Ang Dendi Sherpa will do our best to embody the maxim that “many hands make light work.”<br>Those of you who allow at least one eye to wander occasionally through the world news headlines may remember that in the sweet departed springtime of this year, while we were smelling flowers and making love and tossing hamburgers onto barbecue grills, Nepal, one of the poorest countries in Asia, was dealt a titanic tectonic wallop by two blockbuster earthquakes in late April and early May. The quakes registered at shattering magnitudes of 7.8 and 7.3 respectively (according to USGS data), and some of the aftershocks were nearly as severe. More than 9,000 people were killed, more than 23,000 were injured, and entire villages were leveled in the world’s highest mountains, where rebuilding supplies are scarce and must be carried up the steep mountain trails on human backs.<br>In response to the need for rebuilding Nepal’s devastated homes and tourist infrastructure, Skychasers has organized a not-for-profit October relief trek, for which costs have been kept as low as possible to encourage the presence of more helping hands and trekking feet. A cruel irony of this disaster is that many people fear it would be inappropriate or callous to trek for recreation in the wake of catastrophe, the very time when tourist dollars brought in by Nepal’s vital trekking industry would prove most crucial. Our trip will include hands-on, hammers and nails reconstruction work in Hill Village followed by several weeks of high adventuring over the numinous ridges and passes of the Himalayas and will be (literally) capped- for a small team including your humbled and eager correspondent- with a summit attempt on a real deal, glacier capped Himalayan peak that scratches the beards of the gods at 20,000+ feet above sea level. Skychasers has asked me to act as chronicler of this once-in-a-lifetime adventure, and as those of you familiar with my kamikaze verbosity might have guessed, a team of wild Himalayan yaks couldn’t drag my pen-clenching fist away from the pages of this sanguine, serene, mood-stabilizing new notebook (Oh book finder, be brave, and you will probably make it home alive and in time for dinner!).</p>
<p style="text-align:left;">And so, friends, as we await the end of the Himalayan monsoon season to begin this Next Great Adventure, I extend to you a warm invitation to clamber aboard my latest travelogue, which will shove off with the usual clank and clatter of busted rudders and loose canons one month from today. Stay tuned, feel free and encouraged to share, and if by chance you stumble upon this (now just slightly less) new notebook, lost and alone like a disoriented child on the dark side of Disneyland, please try not to get all worked up about it. There are people in the world with much more earth-shattering problems.</p>Leo DiSantotag:leodisanto.com,2005:Post/52170202014-11-09T17:46:24-05:002023-12-10T12:27:12-05:00Sometimes You Eat Your Losses<div class="wp-caption alignnone" data-shortcode="caption" id="attachment_91" style="width: 1546px"><img src="https://abrightunsteadylight.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/img_1805.jpg?w=908" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="IMG_1805" /><p class="wp-caption-text">Foggia, Italy</p>
</div>
<p>The Lonely Planet Guide, which I have come to understand is written by and geared for a very different sort of traveler than I am, has this to say about Foggia, Italy: “Other than the 12th Century cathedral, there is little to detain you here.” Be that as it may, I paid an inconveniently steep ticket price and traveled 11 straight hours on an overnight bus to wind up being detained here. Foggia is located in the heel of the Italian boot, way down south in the Puglia (or Apulia) region, which I have heard referred to as the “bread basket” of the country. Apparently Puglia produces more olive oil and pasta than all the other regions of Italy combined, and waking up just after dawn following a night of weird, semi-conscious quasi-sleep in my bus seat, I gazed out the window upon endless, silvery groves of olive trees reaching down towards the edges of the sea as the bus rolled south through Molise into Puglia.</p>
<p>For me, Foggia is an obscure way station on a pilgrimage to an even more obscure destination. About 25 miles north of here is a small, little-known (even to Italians) village called San Paolo di Civitate. 85 years ago, a teenaged lad named Guiseppe De Santo left San Paolo with his family to set sail for America by way of Ellis Island. In America, the lad would be called Joseph DiSanto, and he would eventually have a grandson who would grow up to be me. As far as I know, nobody from my grandfather’s line has visited his home town until- if the Fates and Furies allow- tomorrow, but that’s a yarn the world has yet to spin, and as usual, the my verbal cart is getting ahead of my rational horse (the most insufferable kind of horse, incidentally).</p>
<p>The buses don’t run to San Paolo di Civitate on Sunday, which left me a night to spend in Foggia, where I honestly get the impression that I am the only tourist in town. As I trudged through narrow alleyways between peeling stuccoed apartment houses festooned with hanging laundry and window-boxed rosemary plants, dragging my guitar and cartoonishly large rucksack, the few townspeople who didn’t look right through me regarded me as they might regard some slobbering, tentacled mutant loosed in their quiet streets, their only recourse being to remain vigilant and make sure the beast isn’t an immediate danger to their children or pets.<br>The absence of tourists equals the absence of tourist infrastructure equals the absence of cheap backpacker lodging, so I was forced to savagely eviscerate my poor, anemic wallet to spring for a room in a little bed and breakfast in the old market square, one of only a handful of accommodations for miles around (good thing the passers by in tourist-infested Florence tipped me so generously yesterday). This is a somewhat embarassing thing for an enthusiastic tent dweller to admit, but after 2 1/2 months of tramping all over Europe, I’m bone-tired enough to really appreciate the comforts of a nice room with my own queen sized bed and coffee with biscotti and a private bathroom and not having to bunk dorm-style with a bunch of snoring, farting dudes or- mixed dorms being common on a continent still striving to reach the bar we Americans have set for sexual neurosis- with a bunch of young girls who might class me with the bunch of snoring, farting dudes.</p>
<p>With a day to spend in a town where “there is little to detain you,” I went ahead and did what I normally do, which is wander aimlessly around with my guitar on my back, gawking at things. Foggia on Sunday afternoon seemed not so much sleepy as ghostly. I wondered if the Roman Catholics had been Raptured just before I arrived, relieved but befuddled by the discrepancy with their own doctrine, never suspecting until they were hovering ass-over-halo that some gazillionaire American Evangelical writers of pulp fiction had been right about the end times all along. 90% of the businesses were locked and barred and gated, and though I could hear the lively, noisy sounds of Italian family life spilling out of doorways and shuttered windows, there were very few people on the streets. I played my guitar for a little while in one of the piazzas with my case closed, just for fun- the idea of busking seemed absurd- and returned to my cushy room for a few hours before dinner.<br>Friends, please believe this: if I never return, it is not because I don’t love you or America. It is because Italian food made my guts explode and I am very, very dead. I’m not exaggerating when I say that since arriving in this country, I routinely count the hours between the time I finish one meal and the time I can sit down to the next without fear of being damned for a glutton, ironically by the same Almighty Gourmand who created the humans who created Alfredo sauce, gelato, and prosciutto crudo. If you’re reading this, please send help, napkins, and several jars of decent peanut butter, for fuck sake.<br>I had noticed that many of the restaurants in town seemed to open after 8pm, which would seem odd on a Sunday but for the fact that the Italians eat dinner much later than most Americans do (especially in my home, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where tradition holds that if you haven’t finished your last bite of shoofly pie before ante meridiem time rolls over a river witch will place a bowel-obstructing hex on your livestock). I stepped out of my room at 8 hoping to find something cheap and delicious and nearly leapt out of my pants at the sight of the tumbleweed- haunted streets of a few hours earlier now inexplicably teeming with literally thousands of people out on the town. I looked around for a circus or a carnival to tie the whole scene together, but there wasn’t one. The farther down the street I walked the thicker the crowds became, and since a busker sometimes has to make hay while the sun don’t shine, I dashed back to my room for my guitar and tambourine, threw my hat down on a street corner in the middle of the throng, and played for 45 minutes while crowds formed and dispersed and hyperactive little kids jumped spastically around, slam dunking coins into my rumpled, crumpled straw fedora.<br>Since the citizens of Foggia had been kind enough to pay for my dinner, I decided to pay them back their money to cook it for me. I had been looking forward to tasting a regional pasta specialty called orecchiette, and I found a nice restaurant with layered red and brown burlap tablecloths where I swallowed pasta and red wine with the heedless, happy abandon of a guy who hadn’t spent the afternoon counting change to make sure he could swing a bus ticket back up north.<br>Sometimes, friends, you have to eat your losses. Other times you have to eat your wins, and I’ll raise a glass to spending a night someplace where “there is little to detain you,” and where the people who are busy with the business of living there might just as soon you not be detained.</p>Leo DiSantotag:leodisanto.com,2005:Post/52170212014-11-02T09:33:56-05:002022-01-06T04:16:15-05:00The Paper Game<p><img src="https://abrightunsteadylight.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/img_1749.jpg?w=908" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="IMG_1749" />In the past few months busking my way across Europe, my performances have been shut down by permit-obsessed cops more times than I can count. I no longer wonder if it will happen, but when, and whether I will have time to make enough for the day’s food and bed and train ticket before the jig is up, or if I’ll wind up digging deep into my case for a handful of coins to buy myself a couple beers upon which to float my sense of humor back into port.<br>It’s not that I’m unwilling to play by the rules: it’s that these permits one always seems to need never seem to be available until one no longer needs them. The cops are always telling me I can apply for the papers tomorrow or, in the event that I’ll still be in town tomorrow, the next day. Once, in Brasov (Romania), I turned up at the city offices bright and early with my permit request neatly written out and translated into Romanian. “How long are you here,” asked the bureaucrat, shuffling forms. “One more day,” I replied. “Ok. The permit will be here in 5 days.”</p>
<p>I suppose I should consider myself lucky: A warning with no consequences seems standard on the first encounter, but I’ve heard stories about buskers being issued citations, belted with heavy fines, and even having instruments confiscated (you touch my guitar you’d better have your other hand on that nightstick, Kojak). In Prague an officer told me I could be fined 1000 Czech crowns for playing without a permit. “Maybe,” he said with a shit-eating grin, gesturing at my case, “maybe there is 1000 crowns in there.” (It was 600). Here it comes, I thought, here comes the old street corner shakedown. It didn’t happen, but it could have. It has happened and does happen.</p>
<p>This kind of thing really jams my giblets. I used to wonder aloud if Lancaster Central Market should institute audition-based permits for street performers (the Italians say “artista di strada,” which, like so many of their sayings, is a little song in itself) to keep apathetic street kids, mumbling junkies, and unwashed, untalented strum bums from keeping the good spots from hard-working performers (nothing against beginners- they should be welcomed and encouraged at any open mic night in the land). But I say unto you: fuck permits and the forms they rode in on. Buskers can work things out among their own ranks with a little bit of basic honor and courtesy (I find that if you tip a performer and then politely ask when he’ll be finished, he will usually give you a time, sometimes even hold the spot for you), and passers-by can vote with their money on who they prefer to support. To paraphrase Robert Hunter, “Let there be songs to fill the air and change to fill the hats.”</p>Leo DiSantotag:leodisanto.com,2005:Post/52170852014-10-17T12:58:45-04:002023-12-10T12:58:35-05:00Open Letter from a Busker to a Passerby<div class="wp-caption alignnone" data-shortcode="caption" id="attachment_65" style="width: 2058px"><img src="https://abrightunsteadylight.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/img_1390.jpg?w=908" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="IMG_1390" /><p class="wp-caption-text">Prague, Czech Republic</p>
</div>
<p>Howjeedo, Passerby, thanks for passing by. If not for your by-passing ilk I’d have nobody to play for, which would be a bummer.<br>Your bewildered look is well understood- chances are you had no idea I- or anyone else- would be here on the street wangin’ away at an old guitar and wailing to wake the dead. Perhaps this alleyway has historically been populated only by garbage men and amorous, one-eared cats. The element of surprise is one of the things I find so exciting about street performing: it’s unexpected, unsanctioned, guerrilla music (as opposed to gorilla music, which I imagine is even more surprising).</p>
<p>Busking descends from an ancient tradition of performance art practiced for millennia by various gypsies, minstrels, troubadours, snake oil salesmen, tap-dancing dwarves, fortune telling cats, horse cart magicians, bible pounding fire-and-brimstone damnation preachers, unicycle-riding bear wranglers, graybeards with natural disaster-predicting bunions, circus people, star-divining monkey jugglers, organ grinders, Delta Blues singers, and train-hopping, bindle-sticking, matilda-waltzing vagabonds of every imaginable stripe.</p>
<p>You don’t have to tip me; I’m not even asking you to, but my guitar case is open, and you’re invited to tip me if the spirit moves you. If you just want to throw a grumpy, surreptitious, sideways glance at the cardboard sign in there that says who I am and where I’m from and then move along, no hard feelings. If you want to walk by and execute a few goofy dance steps and/or smile at me, I’ll smile back; smiles are free. If you buy one of my albums I’ll be honored and excited to send my songs with you, wherever you’re bound.</p>
<p>Please know that no tip is too small to elicit my sincere gratitude. You’re supporting my ability to live in one of the most inspiring and exciting ways I can imagine, and I don’t have words potent enough to properly thank you for that.</p>
<p>I’ll admit that I get a kick out of imagining where the thousands of photos and videos taken of me on the street will wind up. For all I know, I may be the Elvis of Borneo or the Sugarman of Guam. I don’t mind the snapshots- I realize I look homewreckingly handsome in my red worsted vest- but I humbly suggest that if I’m interesting enough to be clicked into posterity, I might be interesting enough to toss a nickel at; you know, just a little contribution to help keep me so damn photogenic.</p>
<p>I understand, too, that some tourists think it’s cool to snap a souvenir photo of themselves posing with a street musician, some exotic city providing a dazzling backdrop as we both stand there looking as tickled as baby chimps at a petting zoo on fat camp field trip day. I’m happy to pose with you. Common sense and basic etiquette suggest that in this situation, you make a token donation (amount unimportant) and indicate that you’d like a photo with me. I’ll then smile and nod my assent. But listen: If you don’t plan to tip me, it could ostensibly be considered rude as hell to sneak up into my personal space like we’re bosom chums and stay frozen there until your girlfriend snaps a picture of me ignoring you while you give the thumbs up and grin like a refugee from Goon Island. This is especially egregious if you seem to come from a region in the grips of a devastating soap famine.</p>
<p>Souvenir hunting aside, though, I’ll reiterate that I don’t mind if you don’t tip me. But unless YOU are going to sing ME a song, dance the Lindy Hop on the curb, or sketch one of those adorable and utterly tasteless caricatures depicting me cruising down the Champs Élysées in a funny little clown car, I sure as shit don’t have to tip you either. This is a friendly way of saying that I dislike being robbed and will consider you discourteous if you try to steal money from my case.<br>Like the woman in Paris behind the art museum who, offering me a much-needed 2 Euro tip, accepted 8 Euro in change for what turned out to be a counterfeit 10 spot.<br>Or like the guy on the Damrak in Amsterdam who in passing reached down and scooped up a handful of change. This poor dingbat actually believed he had slyly and successfully pulled off a feat of slight of hand, the consummate skill of which would leave me with the illusion that he had added coins to my case.<br>This dazzling David Copperfield wasn’t smart enough to speed up or duck down one of the city’s many dark alleyways when I stopped mid-song and jumped down from my platform, nor was he macho enough to take a swing at me with his free arm when I grabbed his wrist. “No, I give YOU,” The thief trailed off impotently, still trying to salvage his trick like a sweaty, low-rent stage magician caught at an 8 year old’s birthday party with a dead dove down his pants. He made no resistance as I pried the coins- his heroic heist had probably netted him less than a Euro in 10 and 20 cent pieces- from his limp, mollusk-like fingers.<br>I could happily hammer out a book’s worth of pages on this subject with my inept and laborious single-middle-finger typing technique (I suspect it’s my noisy, ignorant inner Luddite that dictates the unconscious preference for this particular typing finger, a futile, anachronistic “fuck you” to a form of writing that doesn’t involve ink and pulp), but I’ll save myself the cramps and you the eye strain by bringing this letter to a close, saying once again, thank you, thank you for continually scraping the moss off of this ragged rolling stone. I’ll meet you in the square, or on the bridge, or on the corner this afternoon. If you please, bring along a little jingle-jangle, and I’ll bring along a little razzle-dazzle.</p>Leo DiSantotag:leodisanto.com,2005:Post/52170862014-10-09T19:28:33-04:002023-12-23T12:04:52-05:00Fear und Wurstliebe Behind the Iron Curtain<p><img src="https://abrightunsteadylight.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/img_1319.jpg?w=908" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="IMG_1319.JPG" />“Beep beep BOOP bedeep bedeep BWOOP ticka Umph-chit-chit-tic beepbeep BWOOOOoooooowwww.”</p>
<p>They’re out there somewhere in Kreuzberg: those beepity boopity kids on the techno skids. They’re wearing skinny jeans and piercing plugs and tank tops the same way our homegrown hipsters do, but they’re… German mostly, I guess, and they’re out for what the witty and informative Berlin CitySpy tourist map calls “teenage kicks; disko.”</p>
<p>I’m under strobing lights myself as I type this report, but my mood lighting is provided by a malfunctioning fluorescent ceiling unit in the kitchen of one of the lousiest, most run-down hostels I’ve ever stayed in, located in the Neukolln area, which is apparently the current frontier of cheap, non-gentrified living in Berlin. The grungy kitchen in which I write has one functioning electrical outlet for all appliances, so guests preparing meals are obliged to plug in and unplug the toaster, electric teapot, microwave, and hot plate in a complex, menu-dependent sequence, trying to keep a grip on their orientation while tripping out Strawberry Alarm Clock style on the ceaselessly strobing fluorescent.</p>
<p>It’s a weird vibe. As far as I can tell, the kid in the corner bunk in my room has not left his bed in two full days, slouching bulkily over his laptop in sagging jockey shorts and a t-shirt that says “Latin Lover,” earbuds apparently hard wired into his canals. Still, I haven’t seen any rats or roaches or bedbugs yet and I guess I’m comfortable enough, though the kitchen’s ambient lighting overwhelms me with the urge to go out and grab one of the “hip shave head girls [sic]” promised in the CitySpy map’s description of local nightlife and give this beepity boopity dance party shit a whirl (*note: the morning after I wrote this passage, one of my roommates, a Spanish busker whose act involves a unicycle, a compact speaker, and the unrevealed contents of a large black trunk, warned me that his bag had been ransacked and his cash stolen during the night, meaning that there had been a thief in the room while we slept. In light of this event, I am downgrading my rating of the Rixpack hostel from “gritty but acceptable” to “bona fide shitshack”).</p>
<p>Tuesday night I arrived in Berlin knowing nothing about any part of any of it. I wandered into a small bar with wifi and used my phone to book a bed in one of those huge, modern, party dorm-style hostels, The Heart of Gold, which I chose mostly because the website boasted a “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” theme and a bar that’s open 23 hours a day. I know that sounds really cool, but it isn’t.</p>
<p>It took me quite some time to get my bearings enough even to find the place. My usual method of orientation is to figure out the direction of the town center and keep walking until I stumble in to it, but Berlin has no center. It’s a conglomeration of different “villages” (in the sense that Greenwich Village is a “village”), and as in New York City, you could easily spend an hour driving from one part of town to another. It’s the kind of big, sprawling machine that makes a Pennsylvania riverbilly start to question his trajectory while easing into a mild panic attack, and my heart sagged a little as I slithered through the bowels of the city on the S Bahn train toward my bed.</p>
<p>Damp, drizzly gloom had been chasing me through Germany for the past few days, and having spent those days and nights entirely outdoors, my lungs were starting to rattle and scrape a little. I woke up in my bunk at The Heart of Gold a few hours before dawn in the throes of painful coughing fits (Guten morgen, Herr Hackencoughen) and searing pain shooting through my sinus cavities, intense enough to keep me unhappily conscious for several hours. “Spare me, just SPARE me,” I grumbled, which is a new thing I’m into. It’s a catch phrase of the disastrously shallow male model/ NYC glam scenester protagonist in a Brett Easton Ellis novel I’ve just finished reading, and saying, “Spare me, man, SPARE me!” with feeling and a touch of melodrama when I’m a little bummed out invariably leads to giggling. In that moment, though, I was sure this big machine of a city was going to eat me alive like a hunk of curry wurst (wait for it). Too soggy to busk, too congested to sing, too broke to keep my pitiful bank account from bleeding out into the storm drains, it’d be curtain time.</p>
<p>But it didn’t happen that way. The weather provided some clear windows, and busking in Berlin was decent. The city has plenty of cheap food and beds if you poke around enough, and it didn’t eat me. Berlin doesn’t eat penniless Pennsylvanians- it eats currywurst. If there’s one dish Berliners are most proud of as their own very special food, their most loudly proclaimed culinary identity, currywurst has to be it. After you’ve snapped your obligatory photos of famous border crossing “Checkpoint Charlie” and visited the adjacent museum with exhibits on the horrors of the Iron Curtain era, you can stroll across the street to the Currywurst Museum (no kidding), where tourists can sit on sausage-shaped couches, sample “virtual currywurst” (in case you aren’t ready to commit to the 2$ investment and the leap of faith required to try the real McCoy), and cut it up with a capering sausage man mascot.<br>The Berlin CitySpy map has this to say about currywurst: “It is cheap, satisfying, meaty, smooth, it is hot, strange, somehow don’t fit together [sic], never the same as it was before. It does go best with beer and you can do it standing up on your feet. Of course, as with any sausage, you don’t want to know what it’s made of or where it comes from.”</p>
<p>Of course, my “When in (blank) do as the (blank)ers do” travel philosophy demanded that I eat some of this concoction even though no part of the name or description sounded even a little bit appealing. Currywurst (and beer) can be purchased and consumed on pretty much any street corner in Berlin. The corner where I purchased and consumed those things was just a sausage toss away from Checkpoint Charlie, pictured above. The photo illustrates how the oppressed people of Soviet-controlled East Berlin were forbidden to dine at this particular MacDonalds, forced instead to patronize the much less nice one down the street. Carefully following the instructions on the CitySpy map, I ate my currywurst with beer, did it standing up on my feet, and enjoyed the hell out of it.</p>
<p>For me, one of the conundrums of travel is how best to experience the true flavor and pulse of a place you’ll only be inhabiting for a few days. Is the flavor of Berlin the flavor of an improbable variety of sausage? Is its pulse the persistent, pounding throb underneath all that beepity boopity shit blaring in the clubs? I was kicking that philosophical can down the drizzly sidewalks of the hip Kreutzberg district late one night, photographing some of the city’s incredible street art, when I decided to walk down to the river Spree and gawk at one of the longest remaining sections of the Berlin Wall. I hit the river and turned westward, looking for the wall and snapping shots, when I realized with awe and a tinge of embarrassment that the concrete surface under the paintings I was photographing WAS in fact the Berlin Wall. The Wall, THE wall, one of history’s most potent symbols of tyranny, the concrete realization of the architecture of oppression, is now an outdoor art gallery, frescoed with brilliant images of beauty and freedom. Maybe that’s the flavor of Berlin. Or maybe it’s currywurst.</p>Leo DiSantotag:leodisanto.com,2005:Post/52170872014-09-27T12:20:30-04:002022-05-30T03:42:47-04:00Au revoir, France; c’est la vie, Paris<p><img src="https://abrightunsteadylight.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/image2.jpg?w=908" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="image" />It probably goes without saying: tweaked out Pennsyltuckian buskers are not the only creatures working the nighttime alleyways of Paris. The above photo shows a counterfeit 10 spot (there is no watermark, the number 10 is the wrong color, and if you look at the white border around the edge you’ll see that the width is irregular from side to side and top to bottom) used to bilk me out of 8 Euro in hard earned tips. I say “hard-earned” because the folks on the streets of Paris last night were largely apathetic to my Yankee Doodle warbling, ham-handed strumming, and foot tambourine-ing. This was exactly what I expected from the city of light, or would expect from The Big Apple or any of the mega bullmoose metropolitan icons. Paris sneered at my antics as if to say, “We had Victor Hugo and Napoleon Bonaparte; take that hillbilly shit to Wichita or something.”</p>
<p>The dearth of tips (one CD sale and a generous 5 spot rescued me from taking in a single digit hat) probably explains why I wasn’t inclined to analyze a strange woman’s request for 8 Euros change of a 10 so she could tip me 2 bucks. It was a shitty night and I had taken a 3rd degree ass whomping on the price of my train ticket to Paris after the bus company wouldn’t let me pay the driver with cash in the pre-dawn chill of Rennes- I wanted that 2 bucks.</p>
<p>By the time the bill forgery was discovered this afternoon, I’d had a couple beers and a long, beautiful night of oblivious sleep and was able to laugh and enjoy having been grifted. Last night, zombified with fatigue and sleep deprivation and grouchified by lack of audience appreciation, it wouldn’t have been such a knee-slapper. My goal for this journey is to live and move entirely off of what I make busking, or as nearly as possible. The reality, though, is that if I want to enjoy myself and see as much as my time abroad allows, I’m gonna have to take a vicious rabbit punch to my anemic bank account from time to time. Paris- like most big cities- was happy to slap me upside the wallet.</p>
<p>I am invariably repelled by posts or narratives wherein the writer bitches and vents about a litany of petty gripes, so I want to make clear that this isn’t one of those. Travel is a spin of the looking glass to get a different view; it’s a vigorous stirring of the stewpot of personal existence. It’s therefore unavoidable that in travel as in all of life the negative polarities are going to exert some influence, and to some degree your yin is gonna get yanged around a little. If you can’t embrace this inevitability, you may as well stay home with your door bolted until the fates bust in with their ass kicking boots on.</p>
<p>No, I ain’t complaining. This is a happy story, because as always, hilarity, wonder, the beauty of place, and the goodness of people outshone petty financial troubles and sucker punches to my pride. I got to absorb Paris’ legendary romance, her unmatched architecture, her gargoyles (which chill my bones and thrill my soul in a very similar way to the pack of howling gray wolves I once heard from my tent in the deep woods of northern Minnesota). I also enjoyed the sort of kind hospitality that perpetually affirms my faith in the generosity of the human spirit (Dana, Clem, Richard, if any of you are reading, thanks for being road angels to me).</p>
<p>This morning I had a lovely time playing at an open air market in the Paris suburb of Houilles, earning enough money to pay for my bus ticket out of France. Listen here yall: France is beautiful, and don’t ever tell me French people are unfriendly without first protecting your nether regions. The folks here showed me such kindness as you’d be lucky to find anywhere in the world. Of course, a few of them are assholes. I guess they’re a lot like Americans that way.</p>
<p>I’m typing this report on the bus that is taking me off to the next merry-go-round, and I have a feeling that arriving there at 11 on Saturday night is gonna make for one f $&@ed up ride. To borrow a lyric from my friend, the amazing Nathan Rivera, “I won’t say where it is I’m going; I’ll tell you that I’m going there soon.”</p>Leo DiSantotag:leodisanto.com,2005:Post/52170882014-09-24T18:52:54-04:002024-03-25T07:34:21-04:00The Best Groomed Men and Dogs in Rennes<p>-Rennes, France</p>
<p>On the road again, and back in Rennes, I buckled under the weight of my own vanity and paid a frivolous amount of money to a male French hairstylist in a flamboyant pink scarf to shave my head and beard. When language failed us- which was immediately- I pointed to my passport photo, passed my fist over my head and chin, and said, “buzzzzzzzzzz.” He nodded and obliged. When busking ones way across a large landmass with very little in the way of financial reserves, it’s probably bad policy to spend money just to feel good about the way you look. There will be time for looking sharp and trimmed when you aren’t schlepping your home around on your back like a turtle with a gaddam 50 lbs. shell. Still, when it was done it was done, and I felt little if any buyer’s remorse. I felt sleek and in control, like an otter at a junior high school swim meet. I hadn’t busked in a few days , just played around some small village bars and parties for my new friends, and I was missing the ring of the cobblestones. I found a lively corner and went to work.</p>
<p>Here’s the thing about the haircut: apparently it made me more approachable. I wasn’t counting, but I’d swear the tips came much more frequently, the passers by lingered longer, the kiddos smiled more and flinched less. I was offered two paying bar gigs, and a nice college girl took me out for a drink after my set. Maybe there’s something to be said of a busker making the effort to differentiate himself from a rabid, gibbering bum, even if the difference is only skin deep.</p>
<p>Of course, there is a flip side to appearing approachable and unbumlike, which is that the bums you are now more unlike also find you more approachable. A couple of street kids loitering in a grocery store parking lot with about 4 disconsolate looking dogs tied to the guardrail hit me up for some cash, “for my dogs.” I told them no, pointed to my rucksack and explained that I wasn’t exactly railing gold dust myself. My dog was 6 time zones away and presumably well fed. I walked off, but made it only a few steps before circling back and into the grocery store. There can be no peace for the Dog Hearted people when they know that some place close by dogs are disconsolate and hungry. I bought a box of bone shaped dog treats and a 5 piece package of au pain chocolate, a French pastry that robs me of all self restraint. I went back to the street kids, giving them the box of treats and one pastry per kid. Then I devoured the remaining 3 pieces like a hungry, well-groomed dog. I had a sweet little farm vacation and now I’m back in circulation. This morning, almost on a whim, I changed my intended course by a couple thousand miles. Stay tuned; I’ll tell you about it.</p>
Leo DiSantotag:leodisanto.com,2005:Post/52170892014-09-22T14:18:46-04:002023-12-10T11:45:49-05:00Broceliande: There’s Wizards in Them Woods<p><img src="https://abrightunsteadylight.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/image1.jpg?w=908" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="image" />I’ve noticed this about travel: most of the truly knock-down incredible experiences arise when spontaneity is encouraged to take the wheel. For this to happen, a would-be adventurer has to get his or her itinerary-hugging ass out of the way; i.e., avoid making too many (or in my case almost any) plans or designs.</p>
<p>Case in point: yesterday as my farmer host, Louis, was giving me a walking tour of the fields and animals and wooded pathways around his beautiful farm, we wound up in a conversation about the importance of preserving some of the wild places that benefit everyone just by being there. During our talk Louis casually mentioned that a few dozen kilometers to the south lie the remnants of the ancient Bretagne forest of fairy tales, Druid lore, and Arthurian legend. When something fires up my imagination and cranks the curiosity dial up to 11 I tend to fixate, so I immediately chucked my plans to return to Rennes the next day and began researching this exciting new wrinkle in my wanderings.</p>
<p>The Paimpont Forest, which engulfs the small village of that name, is widely believed by literary scholars and country folk alike to be the remnants of Broceliande, the mystical forest of legend. The long-horned stag once hunted for sport by royalty and noblemen stills runs and is hunted here, but most visitors these days are hunting other sorts of weirdness. Bizarre tales of Broceliande have circulated in literature and folklore for 1000 years, perhaps most famously in the tales of King Arthur and his knights of the round table. The mythic figure, Merlin the sorcerer (wizards, dude), is said to be buried in the forest in a wizardly sort of way, which according to legend means imprisonment for eternity inside a stone by the spell of a vengeful sorceress. I guess wizard life can be a 1st class bitch some times, and apparently so can a vengeful sorceress. Others believe that Merlin actually lived, was an arch Druid, and is really buried with his wife under the monolith known as “Tombeau de Merlin.”</p>
<p>When I announced my intention of making the 25 mile round trip to Paimpont on foot, my good, kind hosts were not fans of the plan. Concerned about my being out on the hilly, winding rural roads at night, they urged me to accept a ride. Mule-brained beast that I am, I refused, begging them to let me have a bicycle to indulge my fascination with getting to amazing places via the forces of my own muscle and bone and butt cheeks. Paragons of classic French countryside hospitality that they are, they tweaked up an old mountain bike for me, extracting my promise to be off the roads before nightfall, and I lit out across the gorgeous, rolling countryside of Brittany, a pedal-bound Evel Knievel bound for the forest primeval (DiSanto, you shameless bastardizer of your mother tongue…).</p>
<p>(Not long into my ride, I learned there are campsites in Paimpont Forest, at which point I would’ve been gone like a turkey in the French corn if not for the facts that 1) I’d left my camping gear in the caravan and 2) I’d left my hosts stoking a wood fire over a great iron cauldron for the purpose, I was told, of dispatching- with deepest gratitude, respect, and humaneness – a couple of the farm’s duck denizens on that Last Great Ride to the dinner table).</p>
<p>After pedaling around the slumbering village of Paimpont, digging the ancient Abbey, and eating lunch at a creperie that was one of maybe 3 open businesses, I explored Broceliande, focusing on these 2 storied sites:</p>
<p>1) “Fontane de Jouvence” (The Fountain of Youth )</p>
<p>Used by Druids for baptism rites, the waters were purported to restore youth to anyone willing to swill this (now) stagnant murk. Being as I am a specimen in the vigorous prime of its animal dynamism, I didn’t bother even to dip a toe. More interesting to me was a strange site adjacent to the fountain, a clearing surrounded by high, reddish, naturally occurring stone walls. On the floor of the clearing visitors had built hundreds of small, cairn-style mounds of stones, and inside almost all of them were buried slips of paper with messages (Wishes? Prayers? Dirty limericks about horse-hung men and deep-throated women?) scrawled on them. It was spooky. Curious, I unearthed a bunch of them; I won’t be surprised if tonight in my caravan I am visited by a delegation of pissed off Druid ghosts hell bent on settling my hash and whomping my wagon. I couldn’t translate the inscriptions from the French, but one of them was clearly a prayer for the recuperation of the writer’s father from illness. A few of them mentioned the name, “Merlin.” Which brings us to</p>
<p>2) “Tombeau de Merlin” (Merlin’s Tomb)</p>
<p>I tried to sketch it. It didn’t work out. Don’t ask to look at the sketch. You can’t. Look at the photos.</p>
<p>Bouncing the mountain bike back over the stony trails and deeply rutted, ass-walloping logging roads, I got to thinking about the medieval chronicler quoted in the Wikipedia article I posted yesterday who, unconvinced and disappointed by his visit to Paimpont Forest, wrote, “I went as a fool and came back as a fool.” Me too, but I don’t think that was his problem, given that in this life every one of us comes and goes in that same damn way. The chronicler went and came back, maybe, as the wrong kind of fool, the kind who designates and dismisses certain modes of reality as “foolishness” and then grumbles, sulks, and generally gets bummed out when he finds them that way. But myths are more than just stories about things that probably never really happened anyway: they are important. They did happen. They are happening now.</p>
<p>The great mythologist Joe Campbell, one of my heroes, taught that (forgive my clumsy paraphrase, Joseph) myths are forever animated, sort of living maps of human experience, of the archetypal hero’s journey through life that each of us signed up to go waltzing Matilda through the day we were conceived (The Big Boink Theory). I think of myths as multi-faceted, prismatic crystallizations of the human journey, reflecting back at us our many roles in The Great Holy Hullabaloo and World Variety Show Revue (whew).</p>
<p>Besides, I’m not at all convinced there isn’t some genuinely weird presence hanging out in those primordial thickets. As I sat on a stump beside Merlin’s Tomb, hacking away at my doomed sketch, a couple tourists approached with a beautiful white dog; I think it was one of those Alaskan kinds. As soon as they walked it near the monolith, the dog began to whine desperately and strain at its leash to get away from that place. It’s owners made several attempts to approach the site, but the dog reacted the same way every time, and eventually they gave up and left.</p>
<p>A few minutes later, still ham fisting my way through my Hindenburg of an illustration, I was startled by a deep snuffling and grunting sound in the trees, the kind of noise a large mammal might make, which is the kind of noise it was. An older gentleman and his female companion emerged from the woods, the man grunting, stomping the earth, and sniffing the air like a bear. He had long, straight white hair and a long white beard and carried a walking stick. (Friends, I shit you not). I chuckled and smiled at them, and they responded the same way. Still snuffling, grunting, and stomping, the man rounded the tomb and approached me, speaking en Francais in a rich, mellifluous voice: “Do you speak French,” in response to which I got to bust out my best-used French phrase, “I do not speak French.” He nodded kindly and indicated that he’d like to see my sketch, and I balefully agreed, then lowered my head to erase one of the drawing’s many tragic lines. When I looked up again, I was alone in the clearing. Wizards, dude.</p>
<p>-LD</p>Leo DiSanto