In Japan, where you have to remove your shoes for so many things, you don't have to at airport security.
The large screens at the departure gate were showing sumo wrestling, perhaps the one sport I'd rather not see in high definition.
My seat was in the third to last row of the plane. The man across the aisle one row behind me had a cough like a bark, which he unleashed at regular intervals, usually just after I'd managed to doze off.
My personal screen was stuck on the movie Bandslam, so I read the last chapters of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. When I had finished, I tried to turn the overhead light off but the remote was not working. I went back to tell a flight attendant, who tried rebooting the video system without success. Then she sat in my seat and tried to turn off the light, also without success. With American (Airlines) ingenuity, she draped a cloth under the light - like an upside down tent - and taped it to the ceiling. There were seven more hours until we reached Dallas.
Somewhere over Idaho I got up and stood by the emergency door window in the back. Snow-covered mountains stretched for miles.
The line at immigration was surprisingly short (especially for the day before Thanksgiving.) "Welcome home," said the female officer, perusing my passport. With no bags to pick up, I exited and then came back in through security. Taking off my shoes I felt very nostalgic.
"There's nobody here," I marveled to the TSA people.
"Don't jinx it," one woman said. We wished each other a Happy Thanksgiving.
The terminal was unexpectedly quiet. "Is there a store with a better selection of magazines?" I asked a newsstand cashier. "Would you like my Vanity Fair?" a woman paying for gummy bears asked. "I've finished it." And she pulled the thick December issue out of her bag and handed it to me.
Finally, the flight to Miami was announced. I presented my boarding pass and the attendant said to me, "You've had a long day."
Long but gratifying.
Tomorrow I'm flying to Japan (a country of good manners) to walk the Kiso Road with my friend Bill Wilson. It's an eleven-day hike along a section of one of the old highways that connected Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto. In the tradition of the travelers of old, I will not be carrying a laptop, so this will be my last post until after Thanksgiving.
I leave you with a passage from Ikku Jippensha's Hizakurige, the classic comic novel of two bumbling gentlemen from Edo who walk the more famous Tokaido to Kyoto:
"The proverb says that shame is thrown aside when one travels, and names and addresses are left scrawled on every railing. ... Naturally, one is curious about the people who are traveling the same roads, and those whose faces are linked together at the public inns do not always have their marriages written in the book of Izumo. They are not tied to convention as when they live in the same row of houses, but can open their hearts to each other and talk till they are tired. On the road, also, one has no trouble from bill collectors at the end of the month, nor is there any rice-box on the shoulder for the rats to get at. The Edo man can make acquaintance with the Satsuma sweet-potato, and the flower-like Kyoto woman can scratch her head with the skewer from the dumpling. If you are running away for the sake of the fire of love in your heart, you can go as if you were taking part in a picnic, enjoying all the delights of the road. You can sit down in the shadow of the trees and open your little tub of sake, and you can watch the pilgrims go by ringing their bells. Truly traveling means cleaning the life of care. With your straw sandals and your leggings you can wander wherever you like and enjoy the indescribable pleasures of sea and sky."
Tuesday afternoon I drove back into Philadelphia in search of a book. I parked on Sansom near Joseph Fox Bookshop (est. 1951) and was told that, because the book was soon coming out in paperback, they had not ordered any new hardcover copies.
I dashed around the corner to Barnes & Noble on Rittenhouse Square, where I heard the same story. I got back in the car and headed east across Broad, parked on 13th, and checked at Robbins Bookstore - a shadow of its former self but still alive. They didn't have it either.
My spirits remained high. I wasn't finding the book, but I was finding the bookstores, which was an improvement on my visit to New York the day before. On 5th Ave. I had looked up and seen the Scribner's lettering still brightening the south wall of its old bookshop - a sight that has made me wistful for decades. In a convenience store I had asked the location of Gotham Book Mart and received a look from a man buying chips that seemed to suggest I had wandered in from another planet. (And, from a Manhattanite's perspective, I had). He told me it had closed several years ago. Even the wonderfully cramped French bookstore in Rockefeller Plaza - a cherished pocket of France in the heart of Manhattan - had disappeared.
Back in the car, I drove to Olde City. It had been a while since I'd driven in a city not planned for automobiles, and I rolled carefully but purposefully down narrow one-way streets full of lunchtime cars and buses. At Book Trader they told me to try Joseph Fox.
More impressive than my driving, I thought, was my parking, as I managed to find a space within a block or two of every bookstore. I crossed Market and headed into Queen Village where - voila - an empty space sat waiting for me at the corner of 2nd and Bainbridge. A few doors up 2nd stood Head House Books. I walked in and saw, sitting on a display shelf, the object of my desire, its cover facing out and filled with the title: The Lost Art of Walking.
When word arrived that Robert Benchley's older brother Edmund had been killed in the Spanish-American War, his mother's first grief-stricken words were: "Why couldn't it have been Robert?"
Similarly, when I heard that Conde Nast was killing Gourmet, my first thought was: Why couldn't it have been Traveler?
Both are high-end magazines, but Gourmet exuded a passion for its subject - food - that Conde Nast Traveler doesn't. Instead of a passion for travel, you get a love of luxury. It is impossible to imagine Jane and Michael Stern traveling the country and reporting for Traveler on down-home inns. (Even though they're as plentiful as diners.)
Gourmet was edited by a writer, Ruth Reichl, and the language (like the dishes it discussed) was something to be savored. Traveler is edited by a translator, Klara Glowczewska, but the writing is dry and more concerned with amenities than it is with atmosphere. (A huge disappointment, considering that Glowczewska was the American translator of Ryszard Kapuscinski.) Space is sometimes given to well-known authors, who upgrade the property, but the majority of stories are bland, unambitious, forgettable rambles along the surface of some attractive place inhabited by people you rarely meet. The perspective is always that of the tourist, never the local.
Both magazines bulge with consumer information, but Gourmet's was something most cooks could use. Traveler's front of the book is filled every month with briefs about expensive and frivolous accessories that seem more geared to advertisers than to actual travelers. Which explains both the magazine's inferiority and - sadly - its survival.
Drove back down to Jet's Florida Outdoors on Friday because they'd called to tell me my knapsack had come in. My first knapsack. I was never a Boy Scout, and when I started traveling - in the age of backpacks - I didn't roam but settled down in places. With a suitcase.
The woman behind the register went and got the sack, which looked exactly as I'd hoped it would, which is to say, smaller than a backpack. (The very name would weigh me down.) In fact, I may actually start calling it a rucksack. The staff seemed happy at the sight of my happiness, and I don't remember if I told them what a momentous day this was for me. I know I didn't mention that I felt like a young Patrick Leigh Fermor, ready to walk from Holland to Istanbul.
V.S. Naipaul turns 77 today. I discovered him in Poland in 1982, when I checked A House for Mr. Biswas out of the British Institute library. For several weeks, the drab streets of Warsaw filled with the colors and sounds of Port-of-Spain.
I was taken by the cast of characters - Naipaul seemed a kind of Dickens of the tropics - and the rich language he used to describe them. (I began making a list of new words to add to the much lengthier one in Polish.)
When I returned to the States, I read more of his fiction - discovering him to be more of a modern-day Conrad - and his numerous travel books. An aspiring travel writer, I was encouraged that he was continuing the mostly British tradition - exemplified by Trollope, Lawrence, Huxley, Greene, Waugh, Orwell, Durrell - of great novelists who not only also wrote travel but took the genre seriously. Later, when I became a travel editor, I visited in Charleston one of the people he wrote about in A Turn in the South, and then, years later, met another at a book festival in Nashville.
I have never met Naipaul, and after reading Theroux's memoir of their friendship, I don't really care to. But I will always admire his writing, and be grateful for his elevation of the literature of travel.