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Travel
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Capturing The Moment
It may not matter anymore where any of us have actually been. We can now visit our national parks by videocassette, in which, as one company offering such tapes promises, “the remarkable sights and sounds are preserved for you.”
February 1995Fiction
The Window Seat
The man was coming down the aisle, swaying to and fro and knocking passengers with his simple bag as though he were on a subway rounding a curve.
February 1995Readers Write
Maps
An overwhelmed train traveler, an Interrail passenger using a Third Reich map, a map aficionado
February 1995Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The End of the Road
Last year, after Norma and I visited Costa Rica at the invitation of a friend, we vowed to return with our three children. We were certain they’d be as enthralled as we were by this rugged, beautiful country, its tropical rain forests and steaming volcanoes and crowded markets. Mistake number one.
August 1994Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Off The Map
Last fall, after two years of escalating entreaties by my girlfriend, I finally agreed to move from the city to the country. More precisely, from San Francisco to northern New Mexico, to a desert of lunar silences and nights so black that I rediscovered my childhood fear of the dark.
August 1994Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Map
The scholars think they’ve got it figured out, or at least that one day they will. What a laugh! I feel like grabbing them all by their collars and shaking them, until they realize there’s nothing mathematical about the moon, nothing psychological about sex, nothing atomic about flesh. Look into a girl’s eyes and tell me she is just atoms.
July 1994Fiction
Chautauqua
Zeke’s too good. It isn’t healthy. You need vices to let go of when you get a problem — things you can drop, like a tail on a kite, when the breeze gets light and you find yourself falling.
July 1994Fiction
Cabin Pressure
Ted stares blankly at the seat before him, wondering how his travel agent could have construed his standard request for more leg room as a request for this miserable seat. His legs are cramped, his neck tense.
May 1994Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
India: In The Eyes Of A Stranger
The irony of refusing to bathe in order to stay clean ceased to amuse the crew after two days. I was more than dirty. I was becoming one with the relentless grime of India — the smog, dust, and dirt that hangs in the air all day and all night.
March 1994Fiction
The Necessary Plane
Cherokee had worried that Johnny’s top hat might attract terrorists, but they were lucky. He rode out of Lima with money in his pockets. He even gave Cherokee a fifty to hide in her bra.
January 1994
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