Where in the world to go next?

By Caitlin Kelly

I’ve been lucky enough, from infancy, to travel the world. My parents, then living in Vancouver, B.C. where I was born, removed a car’s back seat, put in my crib, and drove to Mexico. Raised as an only child, I was also lucky enough to be affordably portable in later years.

Aqueduct City of Mexico (Photo credit: SMU Central University Libraries)

No wonder I’m at my happiest when traveling and/or in motion! One of my favorite smells is the distinct aroma of jet fuel. Takeoff!

I took my first solo airplane flight at seven, meeting my mother in Antigua.

Since then, I’ve visited 37 countries, some of them alone.

I’ve visited some with my mother, father, friends or boyfriends/husbands: England, France, Mexico, Sweden, Montserrat, Jamaica, Colombia, Peru, Fiji, Ireland, Thailand, Venezuela.

I’ve also traveled widely on assignment for magazine and newspaper stories and while researching my books. In those instances, I’m almost always alone, whether in a tiny hill town in Sicily, small Texas towns like Waco, San Angelo, Fredericksburg or Silver City (aka the middle of nowhere!) or navigating major cities from Bangkok to Rome to Istanbul.

Favorites:

I dearly love and miss Mexico, a place I lived for six months at 14, in Cuernavaca, with my mother. I love everything about the place and have been back many times, but not since May 2005, when we toured for three weeks to Mexico City, Queretaro, Patzcuaro, Oaxaca and Cuernavaca.

English: View of Jardin Juarez in downtown Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico. This picture makes me homesick! I used to buy licuados here when I was a teenager! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I cry with relief and excitement when I return each time to Paris, a city I lived in at 25 for eight months on  life-changing journalism fellowship. I’ve seen a bit of the south — the Camargue, the Cote d-Azur — and Normandy. Corsica is one of the loveliest places on earth!

London, where we lived when I was little for a few years. I love Spitalfields, where silk weavers settled in the 17th century.

But there are still so many places I’m dying to see, including:

— Returning to Thailand, France, New Zealand, Ireland, Tunisia, Italy, England, Denmark, Austria and Sweden

– Exploring the fjords of Norway by boat

– Riding across the plains of Mongolia

– Budapest

– Gros Morne National Park, (A UNESCO site), in Newfoundland

– The Galapagos

– Bryce and Zion National Parks, Utah

– The Maldives, Seychelles, Madagascar and Zanzibar

Venezuela and Brazil: Stamps (Photo credit: Sem Paradeiro)

– The Hebrides

– Berlin

– Exploring Brazil

– Croatia, especially the island of Hvar

– The Greek islands, especially Paros and Corfu

– South Africa

– Morocco, especially the Sahara

– Japan — all of it! I love classic Japanese art and design

– Jordan (Petra)

– Lebanon

– Switzerland

Here is a round-up of reviews of eight new travel books – seven (sigh) written by men — from The New York Times.

And seven more, from their 2011 round-up, also with only one book written by a woman.

And, if you’re hungry for serious adventure, here’s an essay naming some earlier writers who really traveled far and wide, often alone, like Freya Stark.

What are some of your best-loved places and fun/interesting things to do there?

How dangerous is it for women to travel alone?

By Caitlin Kelly

Travel Guides (Photo credit: Vanessa (EY))

And, the latest rape in India of a foreign tourist.

Is it safe for a woman to travel alone?

Maybe.

Depending where she is, and if she is aware of her surroundings, sensitive to the local/regional culture, stays sober and alert and exercises good judgment.

There is no defense, ever, for rape.

But this recent American victim — who was hitch-hiking and chose to accept a ride from three men — could probably have made a wiser set of choices.

I would never hitch-hike, alone, nor would I ever accept a ride from three men. Certainly not in India. Not anywhere!

It’s very tempting to simply turn off your brain on vacation.

We’re desperate to relax, to get away, to shed the daily routines of paying attention to everything all the time. We want to be taken care of, to “get away from it all.” Especially if you’re a single woman bored or frustrated by dating, travel alone can offer a chance to flirt, to test out our mojo, far from the tedious local talent or the disapproving stares of people we know.

But we may well do so at our peril.

I recently spent five days alone, traveling by car through Arizona. It included drinking alone in a hotel bar, staying alone in that small hotel and camping alone in a crowded campsite.

Was I scared? Never. Nervous? Only occasionally, late at night, wondering if the slithering sound of my tent tarp was, instead, some stranger who meant to do me harm.

And so, inside my tent, I also had a heavy rock, small enough to fit into my hand and heavy enough to inflict serious damage.

I was also terrified of locking the keys inside my rental car. I did bring a cellphone and charger, had a rudimentary first aid kit, always had water and a cooler full of fresh food. I had multiple flashlights and a headlamp.

I am strong and fit enough to run fast, if necessary, and unafraid to shout or scream if I truly feel threatened. I was also camping mostly around fellow Americans, whose behavior I could fairly safely predict.

Not the same for other places, and I am extra cautious there — i.e. countries where a woman in public is almost always accompanied only by a child, parent, male relative or husband.

But I’m also vigilant enough to try and avoid trouble in the first place. And one of the scary/creepy facts of life is that, as an open-hearted, curious traveler/tourist, observing and taking photos, we, too, may be observed, noticed or worse.

I traveled alone to New Orleans, rural Texas, rural Ohio and a rough town in Massachusetts while reporting my first book, about American women and guns. Some of the people I met were pretty sketchy, many of them male, some of them macho. Sometimes I had to keep my guard up to stay safe.

Being aware of the potential dangers of your surroundings — whether rape or rabies — is simply wise and prudent. Given how much information sits at our fingertips, through the Internet, there’s no excuse for remaining ignorant. Consulates and embassies can also offer plenty of current data before you leave. (I did not realize — ooops! — until I’d bought my airfare to Caracas that there was a Canadian embassy advisory out about how crazy dangerous the city was.)

One of the very best sources of real-time travel intel, in the most granular sense, is The Thorn Tree, part of the Lonely Planet; I used it when I went to Venezuela with a female friend in 1998. Ask its globe-trotters pretty much anything — no matter how unlikely and obscure — and you’ll probably find someone with a helpful, accurate answer.

If you have never ventured out alone, or do not know anyone who has, it can look fairly terrifying.

I’ve traveled alone — young, female, clearly alone, from my early 20s to today — in such far-flung spots as Kenya, Tanzania, Turkey, Mexico, Thailand and many European countries. Plus the United States and Canada. It’s totally do-able, and often highly enjoyable, as long as you don’t zone out.

For example, hotel and motel clerks have been trained now — and if not, yell at them — never to hand you your room key while announcing your room number out loud for others to overhear and note. No one but you should know it.

Don’t let fear keep you at home, or chained to family/friends/tour groups. Traveling alone can be a fantastic way to see the world and grow your self-confidence.

Here’s a recent fun essay about the many joys of solo travel — albeit written by a man:

I love a solo holiday. It tends to refresh the part of oneself that is most depleted by modern life — patience. I once went to Germany on a 10-city expedition…I was actually moving slower than I had when I was back at home. I was taking my time, giving things their due, and the solo holiday had in some way increased my reserves of contentment…My travels in Germany left me quite refreshed with thoughtfulness.

I’ve had solo pints of Guinness in the pubs of County Kerry and County Cork. I’ve walked across the sage- and juniper-scented maquis of Corsica on a spring day, where you can still find the world of Napoleon’s childhood. More than once I went to the Isle of Iona in the Scottish Hebrides, the burial ground of the early Scottish kings, and watched darkness descend on the Sound of Iona while evensong came from the old monastery. I wasn’t on these travels for visions or transformation, but simply to feel the force of the world, for a day, for a night, as it operates outside the chatter of commerce or media or mass psychology.

Some of my very happiest travel memories, like O’Hagan’s here, are from solo journeys:

– five days traveling through Corsica in July by mo-ped, (including a date with a local mason with a very large boars’ head mounted on his living room wall.) Here’s The Wall Street Journal story I wrote about it.

– dinner on the beach by moonlight in Ko Phi Phi

– picking strawberries in a Scottish field the summer I was 12

– jouncing for 12+ hours a day along rutted, dusty roads in Kenya and Tanzania, the dust so thick on my forearms by day’s end I could carve a furrow in it

Here’s a link to one of my earlier posts about traveling solo and female, with specific tips.

And another.

Have you traveled alone as a woman?

How did it turn out?

My Grand Canyon photos — and some stories to go with them

By Caitlin Kelly

The Grand Canyon is 277 river miles long, a mile deep and up to 18 miles wide. It was declared a national park in 1919 — and today receives five million visitors a year. You can visit the South Rim, (the most popular), which is dotted with hotels and two campgrounds, restaurants and shops, or the North Rim, which is 1,000 feet higher — and therefore even cooler. Altitude is about 7,000 feet, which can leave you breathless from even simple activities.

At the bottom lies the Colorado River, along which veteran boatmen take brave souls.

Many visitors, though, never venture below the rim, preferring only to snap a few photos or walk around the rim, which is easily done through a system of free buses allowing you to walk as little, or as much, as you like.

In 1994, I hiked down Bright Angel Trail to Plateau Point — stupidly, doing the last, unshaded section, alone at noon — by then 100+ degrees. It was the first time I truly understood hyperthermia, how the body literally cooks. In desperation, I began pouring my bottles of water over my head. I sat in the creek at Indian Garden for 30 minutes, soaking my clothes completely and trying to cool my core temperature.

Then I looked up at the rim and thought, “Not possible.” Eight hours later, I emerged, the straps of my backpack crusted white with the dried salt of my sweat. I would urge every visitor to hike into the Canyon, intelligently. Nothing compares to the experience of being inside it, not just looking at it from a safe, noisy, crowded distance.

Note: all images here are mine, and copyright!

If you are afraid of heights, don’t stand close to the rim! The edges are rocky, slippery and unprotected.  People have fallen to their deaths.

The canyon is the result of billions of years of erosion, with multiple layers of rock. The white layer is Kaibab limestone.

This is Bright Angel Trail, on a nice, flat bit! It is the most-used trail and is also used by people riding on mules, so look out for fresh dung! Hikers must step aside when they meet a mule and give them right of way. I shot this image late afternoon, in late May, so there is some shade. Hiking in direct sun, and 100-degree temperatures — the temperature rises as you descend into the canyon — is doubly tiring. Drink a lot of water!

I didn’t take as many photos as I thought, but Jose and I like this one the best of all. Several challenges make photographing the Canyon difficult — there is often dust; the scale is enormous; it’s hard to pick a spot that includes some sense of scale (which is why I framed this with weathered, gnarled branches.) The small silvery curve on the left-hand side is the Colorado River, far below.

This sunset image was taken from Hopi Point, one of the overlooks on the South Rim. It is one of the two most popular spots for people to congregate, and the views are excellent. But too many people are rude, noisy and distracting — if you really want to savor a sunset in solitude and silence, do not pick that spot! The sun sets around 7:30 (late May) and rises by 5:00 a.m.

One of the most amazing and lovely aspects of the Canyon is the terrific abundance of wildlife. This shot was taken with a small Canon G7, not a telephoto lens — i.e. I was barely a few feet away from this squirrel. But — very serious warning! — the single most common injury here is squirrel attacks. If you are bitten, you will need five injections from the lovely folks staffing the GC Clinic: plague, tetanus, rabies and two others. Do not feed the damn squirrels!

The youngest (!) part of the Canyon is 270 million years old. There are many free guided walks/talks — I saw this fossil, and many more, thanks to a Fossil Walk given by a ranger. The hour-long tour was fantastic and made us really appreciate how ancient this place really is….that we are walking across a former sea bed and the remains of shells, coral and other creatures.

This exquisite wildflower is Munro’s globemallow, which blossoms May through August. One of the many pleasures of hiking the Canyon is discovering the delicacy and variety of the plants and flowers clinging to the dusty, rocky earth, from tiny brilliant flowers like this one to thorny cactus to juniper and pine trees.

Related articles

• Planning a Grand Canyon Hiking Trip (epicatravel.com)
• The Grand Canyon: North Rim (briclev.wordpress.com)
• Grand Canyon at Sunrise (johnrobertsphotography.me)
• Grand Canyon Village: Tips on What to Do in Grand Canyon (daydaily.com)
• Grand Canyon Helicopters Are Best for Touring The National Park (grandcanyondude.wordpress.com)
• Incredible Photo Of Lightning Striking The Grand Canyon (dailymail.co.uk)

A few post-vacation epiphanies

By Caitlin Kelly

 

My hotel room in Flagstaff at the Hotel Monte Vista, completed in 1927.

Here are a few of the things I realized while away for two weeks:

I need to spend time alone

I work alone all day every day. How could I possibly need more solitude? What am I — a hermit manquee? But I also live in an apartment building filled with neighbors I have known for decades, work with dozens of editors and fellow writers and spend a tremendous amount of time and emotional energy, every day, interacting with the world, often doing my best to find, woo, please and keep paying clients for my writing.

It wears me out!

Silence!

Few things are as nourishing as total, profound silence: no beeps, buzzes, cars, kids, pets. A silence so thick your ears feel blanketed. Step below the rim of the Grand Canyon onto one of the trails and just sit still for minutes, even an hour, surrounded by milennia, in silence.

Aaaaaah.

Being in nature/the outdoor world is deeply and profoundly healing

I can’t explain why this is so deeply affecting to me, but it is. On this trip I saw: rabbits, deer, elk, ravens, condors, road-runners, jays, robins, lizards of several sizes, squirrels, chipmunks. I did not (whew) see a rattlesnake or mountain lion, both common in parts of Arizona.

My favorite natural sound in the world — the wind sighing through pine trees. My favorite natural scent? Dried pine needles. The ponderosa pine forests bordering the Grand Canyon are, in this respect, heaven on earth.

The hell with “the news”

I read no newspapers, watched no TV, did not listen to the radio for five days. No access to the internet unless I paid for it. When, in fact, so much “news” is not new at all and is often telling me something stressful, distressing and/or something over which I have absolutely no control.

It is wearying to listen as much as I do, try to process it and make sense of it, whether the latest tornado devastating Oklahoma or the riots in Istanbul.

No technology

I spend much of my time processing/refining/producing, and most of my time is spent staring at a screen or tapping a keyboard. Ca suffit! I was thrilled when I “lost” the bit of my cellphone charge cord that plugs into the wall — giving me days of being truly out of touch. (Turned out it was buried in my duffel bag the whole time.)

Vanity is a time-suck!

In my tiny hotel room in Flagstaff, I dropped my Sephora brush, shattering the mirror. So much for worrying about my looks! A week without makeup, perfume, even deodorant — bliss! (I may be an 1860s rural bachelor in disguise.)

In dismay, I watched young women at the Grand Canyon showers flat-ironing their hair, applying mascara and generally fussing way too much about their appearance. You’re camping!

Traveling alone is key

I really like being out on the road by myself. I like relating to strangers as me — not “the wife of” or “the writer for” — and just roaming about spontaneously. I read maps, on paper, old-school. I like having to figure shit out on the fly, alone. I just love to travel, and it’s a great luxury to do exactly what I want, when and where and how I choose.

My husband is a protective sort of guy, forever worrying about me. If he’d seen some of the paths I was walking on…oy.

The Grand Canyon is missing (!) 1.5 billion years of geological time — called The Great Unconformity – which does rather put one’s own life into perspective

My brain shuts down trying to fathom a thousand years. Now, try a million. Now, a billion.

To walk across rocks and touch fossils 270 million years old is a terrific/sobering reminder how utterly insignificant we are, and what a blink we each represent in time.

I like learning new stuff

I love to learn new things — how old a cotton-tail is when it abandons its babies (three months, I was told); or how to avoid a mountain lion or what to do when you see/hear a rattlesnake. Or how to pitch a tent (and re-fold it. Hah.) All too often, at home, everything I learn is work/income-related. I am very very bad at hobbies. Travel, de facto, forces you onto a learning curve, especially solo and somewhat rugged travel.

It’s good to remember, and use, a bunch of stuff I already know

As a new friend said — competence! I bought 40 feet of cord at a hardware store and a small, sharp knife, with no plan but a sense I’d need both. And I did — to string up a tarp over my tent, to attach to my glasses frames so they could not fly off while horse-back riding through the desert. To attach all those ropes meant making figure-eight knots and clove hitches, stuff I learned as a kid and used as a sailor.

Horseback riding meant remembering (ouch!) how to trot, how to guide a horse, how to not fall off and how to mount and dismount.

It’s great to leave the husband behind once in a while

It’s great to miss him — and be missed!

Most people are rushing-around-in-an-insane-non-stop-noise-producing frenzy. WTF?!

Tell me, please, the point of going somewhere as mind-blowing as the Grand Canyon, then never, once, not for a second, shutting the hell up and appreciating its beauty and mystery – in silence. Not sketching or drawing (which takes time and contemplation), but quickquickquick snapping tons of pix. It was exhausting listening to them all shouting at their unruly children or barking instructions at one another in French/German/Japanese.

It made me want to put Xanax in the damn water supply. Good God, people. Can you just sit still for 10 minutes?

Doing less, more slowly, is not a sign of weakness or defeat

This was a first. Sigh.

This week — June 6 — I hit yet another birthday and, for the first time, feel (ugh) a little bit my age. The last trip I made to the Grand Canyon I was 39, had just fenced sabre at nationals in Salt Lake City and had thighs of steel with stamina to match. I hiked four hours down and eight back up to the rim.

This time? Not so much.

With my left foot injured, walking a lot seemed unappealing. The altitude — 7,071 feet at the spot where I watched one sunset — left me a little breathless when ascending a steep trail.

So I just said the hell with it, something that would have been impossible for me to admit a few years ago. I watched everyone biking and hiking and striding with great purpose and intensity — and yawned. I sketched and took photos and sat still. I walked the rim, and did only one 1.1 mile walk on flat ground, albeit at noon, which was way too hot.

Pretty fucking geriatric!

Whatever. I had a great time.

There are some amazing women out there!

I’ve so enjoyed some of the women I’ve met in Arizona, from the nurse and doctor who treated my foot injury to the 27-year-old esthetician/ barrel racer who drives 18 hours one way with her horses and dogs and young son from her home in Wyoming to her childhood home in Tucson.

Talk about a skill set…

Then there were the two lady park rangers, in Stetsons with badges, patrolling the desert on horseback. What a neat job!

I miss being around women whose highest priority is not being thin/rich/powerful (New York) but being strong/cool/competent and fun. I like a woman in spurs! Maybe, one day, I’ll be one as well.

Back from the Canyon — tired, happy, injured!

By Caitlin Kelly

South end of the Grand Canyon with Plateau Point and Bright Angel Trail…The last time I was here, I hiked all the way out to the of the bottom of the trail you can see here at the outer edge of that plateau; 4 hours down; 8 hrs back up! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m back in Tucson again — after a 5.5 hour drive from Grand Canyon: 90 minutes south to Flagstaff; two hours south to Phoenix then another two hours southeast to Tucson, to rejoin Jose and the NYT Institute students and staff for fond farewells tonight and the final banquet tomorrow.

So this post is just a quick hello and a place-holder.

I’ll put up a few detailed posts from the three days I spent alone there, with lots of photos. (Even Jose said ‘Wow!”, nice praise from a  pro photo editor.)

It was a fantastic time, a badly-needed break from the daily stranglehold of the computer and the cellphone and the telephone and the daily newspaper. It was such a relief to not have to talk to anyone, or listen to anyone, or look at anyone. To not have to be polite or cheerful or attentive.

To not pitch editors or follow up or come up with any ideas or write or revise, (or cook, shop or clean.)

To be alone, and self-reliant and have to figure it all out by myself, without the protective help of my lovely husband. To remember how to be a woman out there, solo, in the wider world.

To just be.

I had no idea what was happening in the rest of the world — even though (sigh) there are newspaper boxes with daily papers all over the Park.

All that mattered was making sure I could put up my tent alone (yes) and not lock my keys in the car (no.) I ate out of the cooler I borrowed from a local friend and went to sleep early; it was dark by 7:30 p.m.

All those stars!

The injury — gah! — was self-inflicted when I was putting up the tent for the first time ever, and barefoot and filthy, jammed a tent peg into the middle of the bottom of my left foot.

Shit!

Thank heaven I had a bottle of water to wash off the dirt, and soap and antiseptic cream and a bandage. But, just in case, I went to the clinic…and they wisely gave me a tetanus shot. No puncture, no stitches, just a nasty scrape.

So much for all the hiking I had planned!

Tomorrow morning at 8:00 am, I head off for a two-hour private horseback ride. Perfect way to end a fantastic vacation; we fly home to New York on Sunday.

Here’s a pic of me on the Bright Angel Trail, taken by a man with his daughter who — of course! — turned out to live all of 20 minutes’ drive away from my home in New York.

How to not get eaten by a mountain lion

By Caitlin Kelly

It was only after we saw this sign that we turned to one another — cool New York City journalists who are expected to know a lot about the world every day — that we asked each other: “What is it we’re supposed to do?”

We had started our hike through Sabino Canyon, on the edge of Tucson, before reading the warning signs. You do not run. You do not turn your back. You try to make yourself larger than before (eat a doughnut? Eat a dozen?) in order to scare it.

Yeah, right.

We did not, luckily, see a mountain lion.

English: This is a view of Sabino Canyon, northeast of Tucson, AZ, nestled in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We did see three white-tailed deer, a bunny (might have been a jackalope), doves and about five different sorts of lizard, one so tiny he was the width of my middle finger and would easily have fit into my palm. They would pause, virtually invisible against a small rock or a tree trunk, waving their frond of a tail back and forth. They were impossibly lovely, so perfectly designed for their environment. One was striped in rust, white and brown, reminding me of a chipmunk.

I love the desert. It is such an elemental place, filled with a beauty that is specific and subtle. Cactus have a cartoony presence when fleshy, green and alive — but their bones, as it were, are an astonishing interior architecture, when dried and brittle and gray, that looks like coral. Every student of art, design and architecture needs to spend hours, days, weeks, studying this landscape.

As we walked, flakes of mica winked up at us from the rocky path. I picked up three of them. If I found a really big one I could use it as a mirror and flash it at the sky for an SOS signal. (If I knew Morse code. Oooops.)

Aren’t they gorgeous?

We started our hike at 8:00 a.m., although the sun had been up since 6:00. I knew there are rattlesnakes and my friend asked me to make the sound they make but I am not very good at imitating it. I did know enough not to stick my hand beneath any rocks or to sit down without looking around very carefully.

One of the reasons I so love being out in the desert is the necessary reminder that, out there — as in our every urban day, deceptively cocooned by labels and technology and fast/fine food and taxis and buses and jobs — we are merely one more species on this fragile planet.

We are poorly adapted, too. Our skin is fragile, easily punctured or torn by the spines and thorns of the plants out there. We will quickly overheat and char if we do not drink a lot of water and wear a wide-brimmed hat and sunscreen.

It is a deeply powerful, humbling reminder how silly and small we are in the greater scheme of things. As we walked through the landscape, I realized how much I don’t know about the natural world. What’s the name of that tree? Why are those rocks darker than the others? How can trees grow so high and healthy in so arid a place? (Snow melt and monsoons, a guide told us later.)

Bombycilla cedrorum Sabino Canyon, Tucson, Arizona (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

And the silence! Doves coo. Wind rustles leaves.

But ego and time melt away in a landscape clearly indifferent to our human presence. Is it 2013? 1813? 1513?

Who knows? Who cares?

Which landscape most moves or touches you?

Metro, boulot, dodo — ras-le-bol!

By Caitlin Kelly

The French say it so much better, as usual — subway/train, work, sleep. (Enough already!)

That’s what “normal” life too often devolves into, a steady and numbing routine that continues unbroken, sometimes for decades.

The past 10 days’ break have been a blessing indeed, with a deliciously indolent rhythm of eat/sleep/repeat. Shop, visit a museum, see friends, read for pleasure, sit in the sun on the dock and listen to gulls squawking. Just slooooooooooooow down to whatever pace is ours alone.

Both of the friends we stayed with, both long-married couples with empty nests, are people we’ve known for many years, welcoming and gracious hosts who fed us well and stayed up into the night talking. Both have cats and large, affectionate dogs who would come and nose us awake in the silent mornings.

The husbands get along beautifully and the women, like me, love to make stuff, whether sewing or art or calligraphy — one is a fellow writer and the other is a graphic designer who teaches and runs her own firm. She helped me make this amazing bag with fabric I bought years ago in Toronto and a vintage watch face I found in Richmond and attached with a button — with a $ sign! — she just happened to have in her stash of antique buttons.

It’s the perfect bag for a freelance writer: time, words, money.

It was deeply refreshing to just not have to do anything. (That’s not entirely accurate, as two of my editors wanted more work on two stories I thought were fully tied off, but you ignore clients at your peril.)

This week back home in New York is a bit of the usual whirlwind — meeting a friend in from San Francisco Tuesday for a drink, an event at a local library for my book “Malled” on Wednesday, and Thursday night will join a group of New York Times staffers at a trivia contest — we won last year, so it’s time to defend our title against The Wall Street Journal, Fox News and a room filled with ferocious journalism competitors eager to prove who’s smartest.

It will be the usual blur of meetings, calls, emails, pitches, errands, follow-ups.

The silhouette of a large saguaro stands at sunset in Saguaro National Park on the east side of Tucson, Arizona. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

But next Saturday we fly to Tucson, Arizona for two more weeks where Jose will be working long days teaching the New York Times Student Journalism Institute. I’ll be giving a lecture on freelancing, but the rest of my time there is pure rest and relaxation. I’m hoping to hike the Grand Canyon again — the last time was June 1994 — alone, as last time. I can’t wait to go horseback riding through one of my favorite parts of the country.

Our time off has let us feel human again, not just weary industrial cogs in machines moving far too quickly. We laughed a lot and slept deeply.

Have you been able to take a break recently?

Did it help?

Live turkeys, dead possums and a very vocal Tea Party

By Caitlin Kelly

Welcome to Virginia!

It’s most definitely not New York.

We’re staying with friends for a few days and exploring the area. Yesterday I drove 90 minutes to Richmond to visit the Tredegar Civil War Museum, on the site of the ironworks that supplied the Confederacy with munitions.

“Ruins in Richmond” Damage to Richmond, Virginia from the American Civil War. Albumen print. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I didn’t know that much about the Recent Unpleasantness, as some Southerners still call it, but I learned a lot. I did know, and included in my 2004 book Blown Away: American Women and Guns, that women served in the Civil War as soldiers, being small and slight enough to pass for teenage males. I used a terrific history of this issue, They Fought Like Demons, in my research.

A One Hundred Dollar Confederate States of America banknote dated December 22, 1862. Issued during the American Civil War (1861–1865). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Interestingly, and not surprisingly, I did not see a reference to this in the museum, although it might be there — it’s interactive and highly detailed. One of the most compelling sights was the green velvet lined surgeon’s kit, complete with amputation saw, and a battered metal post he would have used to prop up a leg before a soldier was to lose it to surgery.

Another artifact was a black striped silk dress and its wearer, in a daguerrotype, with her husband and baby — four years later she was dead in childbirth. And heavy metal shackles, worn by slaves.

It is one thing to read about this in books, or see it in movies, but to read the words of soldiers and their wives was also sobering.

Made in China, of course!

I ate lunch at a great old diner, Millie’s – a pulled pork sandwich on a cheddar biscuit. I skipped the grits in favor of salad. Each table had its own jukebox.

Then I visited Carytown, the funky part of Richmond, and scored a handful of antique treasures.

Two of my found treasures

It’s an odd place for someone like me. Every church — and there are many, many churches here — is United Methodist or Baptist, with a few Episcopalians. I have yet to see a Catholic church or synagogue.

The highways are lined with very large trucks driven by farmers in caps. We ate dinner at a local restaurant and 14 men, most of them Hispanic farmhands, came in for $4 taco night. The fields are filled with winter wheat, and the new corn crop is just starting to show.

As I drove, I passed two dead possums and many live turkey, in the fields, on the roadside. They’re big!

The Tea Party has many large signs in bright yellow posted just outside of Richmond — past the Battlefield Elementary School — asking “Are you a Patriot?”

In March 2012, the Virginia legislature passed a bill requiring women who want an abortion to have a sonogram:

The legislation has proved ideologically polarizing, with many Democrats decrying the bill as an invasion of privacy aimed at shaming women out of having abortions, and Republicans heralding it as a way to provide women with as much information as possible about their pregnancies prior to having an abortion.

“This law is a victory for women and their unborn children. We thank Gov. McDonnell and Virginia’s pro-life legislators for their work to ensure that women have all the facts and will no longer be kept in the dark about their pregnancies,” said the conservative Family Research Council President Tony Perkins in a statement.

Any woman choosing an abortion is hardly “in the dark” about her pregnancy. She’s pregnant and doesn’t want to be.

I wonder where (if/when) we’ll retire  — and which part of the world we’ll choose.

Our friends have chosen this part of the United States, and it is lovely to look at. But politically and religiously, not my cup of tea.

In search of silence

By Caitlin Kelly

Have you ever visited a place so quiet you could hear yourself digest?

For me, it was a ranch in southern New Mexico, land owned by friends of ours, land so wild we ended up confined to quarters because a mountain lion was on the prowl nearby.

We’re now in a spot almost as quiet, the “northern neck” of Virginia, about two hours’ drive southeast of Washington, D.C., a city where the sound of airplanes seems almost constant.

I sat on the dock in the sunshine here and heard only gulls squawking, a dog barking, a distant lawn-mower and wind in the trees.

Heaven!

English: SHO “Little Wonder” leaf blower in action, Washington, D.C., USA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We live in a town 25 miles north of New York City where two specific, unwanted and frequent sounds drive me mad — the leaf-blowers and the constant buzz and roar of helicopters and airplanes taking off from a nearby airport. They’re constant, the routes changed since I bought our place, making our top-floor balcony less restful than it once was.

I’ve lived in much noisier places — downtown Toronto, (constant sirens from a nearby fire-hall), the edge of Paris (right on the peripherique, ring road, constant traffic) and Montreal (snow-plows in winter.) Then I moved to small-town New Hampshire and enjoyed the change from non-stop noise.

My appreciation for silence really blossomed after an eight-day silent retreat that Jose and I took two summers ago. Like everyone there, some 75 people of all ages from around the world, we were forbidden from speaking, and only occasionally whispered a bit in our room. Mostly we wrote on Post-It notes to one another and shut our traps.

It was a very powerful way to realize how exhausting it is to be chatty and charming and social, (even civil), with the many people we typically encounter every day in normal life. Here’s my post about the sounds I heard there when everything else was still.

The retreat also showed me how pleasant it is to remain silent while surrounded by others equally committed to a break from wasted words. Try it for a day and you quickly realize how much we speak, yet how little we really say, (some of us), that we truly feel or need to communicate from the depths of our heart.

Here’s a story I wrote about that experience that ran in Marie Claire.

Here’s a brief, recent lovely post from Beijing – with photos — by an American copy editor living there, describing his search for peace in that crowded and burgeoning city.

What’s the quietest place you have ever visited?

Did you enjoy it?

Slut-shamed at the American border

Welcome to the United States of America (Photo credit: Kai Strandskov)

By Caitlin Kelly

This is one hell of a post, by University of British Columbia student Clay Nikiforuk, from rabble.ca:

What do you do when you’re detained by powerful officials, everything you say is presumed deceptive, arbitrary “evidence” is held against you, and you’re treated like a moral deviant? And what if its 2013, you’re a woman, and the “evidence” is that you possess condoms? It happened three times in two weeks — being detained by U.S. border officials on my way to or through the States…

I was detained, yelled at, patted down, fingerprinted, interrogated, searched, moved from room to room and person to person without food, water or being told what was going on for what seemed like forever. Just as I thought they were tiring of me and going to refuse me entry but at least let me back into Aruba, a ‘Bad Cop’ type took me to a distant, isolated office and yelled at me that I was full of shit. He had found information online that in the last couple of years I had been modelling and acting. This, he concluded, was special code for sex work, and I was never going to enter the U.S.A. ever again. I tried not to laugh and cry at the same time. I told him I’m currently writing a book on the sociology of sexual assault.

“Are you looking to be sexually assaulted?”

I blinked at him. I couldn’t breathe.

“Was that meant to be funny?”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Ah, no. I’m definitely not.”

“Well, it sure seems like you are.”

“… How so?”

He wouldn’t elaborate.

This post raises a whole host of questions about power, sexuality, female agency and abuse of power. I also had my own issues with it because she admits — brave? foolish? — that she was traveling with her lover, a married man. Not my thing. I hate adulterers, frankly; my first husband was one, as was his partner (now his second wife.)

She had initially entered the country by bus. Bad choice!

But the larger point remains: whose fucking business is it, when women cross the U.S. border, who we’re fucking, when and why?

Are young, unmarried men subjected to the same sort of interrogation?

I’m betting that’s a “no.”

ARIZONA BORDERS AND CITIZEN SAFETY… (Photo credit: roberthuffstutter)

I’ve also lived through a much milder version of this, as a young, single Canadian regularly crossing the American border for a year or so to visit my then beau, (later first husband), an American I had met when he was at med school in Montreal and who was then doing his residency in New Hampshire.

I did not then know how to drive, at 30, nor did I own a car. I did not understand that, in the United States, traveling anywhere by bus shrieks — at least to border officials — of poverty, desperation and an apparent lack of any economic choice.

To me, as I’m sure it was to Clay, also a well-educated Canadian woman, it was just a damn bus, an affordable, efficient mode of transportation, with no coded message implied.

Wrong!

The offices of The Gazette newspaper on Saint Catherine Street, Montreal, Canada. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was also making, for a young journo, a healthy wage as a staff reporter at the Montreal Gazette, a large regional newspaper. I had a laminated press pass with my photo on it. No matter!

Every single time I crossed the U.S. border and showed it to prove my full-time, staff job in Canada I was subjected to nasty and aggressive interrogation by U.S. border officials — surely the only reason I was dating an American man was to marry him, rightaway so I could escape my hideous, unemployed life in Canada.

Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.

I climbed back into the bus every time shaken, crying, humiliated and angry. This bullshit was sexist, ugly and routine, and — luckily — something I’d not been subjected to before.

This was the country I’d be moving to to marry? Jesus!

Like Clay, I was young, single, female. These interrogations scared the shit out of me. How could they not? Would I lose the right to see my sweetie? Lose the privilege of crossing that border then, or forever? What records were they keeping and how could they affect me?

I moved to the United States, with a green card as a permanent legal resident, in July 1988 — after submitting to an AIDS test.

And yes, I learned how to drive and bought my first car, stat. The hell with the bus.

Have you ever faced this sort of experience?