In Miami Beach on Monday I met a Swiss woman who lives in a town of 6,000 people and no automobiles. Zermatt. She was in the U.S., along with representatives from other Swiss regions, to promote tourism to her country.
The woman from Basel showed a picture of herself swimming in the Rhine, which cuts her town in two. She held up a bag and explained that you put your clothes in it and then use it as a kind of floatation device as you drift down the river. I tried to picture Roger Federer floating through town with a bag full of clothes.
Federer, the woman had told me earlier, is on the city’s Walk of Fame. I asked who else is there.
“Herzog and de Meuron,” she said, then added, “they’re architects.”
“They designed our most famous parking garage,” I said. “It’s about five blocks from here.”
A commission they would not have gotten in Zermatt.
A quick weekend trip to a family reunion in Lancaster had me flying into Trenton, where I got my first newspaper job, and then renting a car and heading west. Friday evening I drove the back roads of Amish country, watching men in fields riding horse-drawn plows and women in bonnets hoeing in gardens. Saturday evening, strolling the streets of Princeton, I saw packs of people dressed in orange and black for alumni weekend. (One man sat on a bench on Nassau Street holding a ceramic tiger.) Last evening, arriving home, I drove from the airport to A1A and gazed at the women in bikinis and the men in tattoos. And I was struck not just by the variety of the world, but the variety of three worlds I know quite well.
I heard P.J. O’Rourke speak at Brown University in 1988. He had recently published Holidays in Hell, a collection of dispatches from the world's trouble spots. I had picked it up in a bookstore one day and turned doubtfully to the chapter on Poland. Then I stood in the aisle, awed and humbled, for the next thirty minutes. O’Rourke had dropped into Poland, without a word of Polish, and perfectly captured the spirit of the place, at least as a recalcitrant socialist state. He described things that for me, after two and a half years, had become commonplace but now, presented through his undulled eyes, appeared afresh in all their absurdity. He was funny of course, but with jokes that revealed truths while also provoking laughter. Which are the best kind.
The audience at Brown was made up partly of students who had found sections of the book insensitive and come to demonstrate their disapproval. They took up whole rows, many of them with white T-shirts over their blouses and long-sleeved shirts; a few carried signs.
O’Rourke walked onto the stage and, standing at the lectern, began his talk. He paid no attention to the protestors, who were impossible to miss, with their signs now raised. Not wanting to infringe on his right to speak, they didn’t heckle or harangue; they just sat quietly in pockets of shared hurt. Then, after about 15 minutes, they stood up, held hands, and, row by row, silently vacated the hall. When their exodus was about two-thirds complete, O’Rourke halted his presentation for the first time.
“They’re cute,” he said, looking out over the last of the retreating minions. “No, really, they are. In my day we would have burned the building down.”
Caskie Stinnett, former editor of Holiday and then Travel + Leisure, once said that it's never a good idea to look at a publication that one was once the editor of.
I ignored his advice Sunday and found, in the Travel section of the Sun-Sentinel, a lead story titled "Welcome to Florida." It included information on where to park for a scenic walk in Boca Raton.
I recently finished Tim Hannigan's The Travel Writing Tribe. He approaches travel writing as both a thoughtful critic and a clear-eyed enthusiast, and through his wide reading – not just of travel literature but also academic studies of it – and his penetrating interviews with a diverse group of practitioners, he shows how this sometimes disparaged genre sparkles and illuminates by borrowing elements from all of the others. It is a scholarly work written for a general audience - the first for travel writing since Abroad in 1980 - but unlike Paul Fussell, Hannigan focuses on the contemporary scene. So it's not just a brilliant book but also a hopeful one.