Notes From A Bear's Journey

     There's a lot of great writing out there: descriptive, captivating, ingenious, even imaginative and transformative, at least in the nonfiction books I read.  Take this one example from Kevin Fedarko's  A Walk in the Park  about his (mis)adventures hiking the Grand Canyon ... it unfolded during a time of day that I had come to despise more than any other, which was the hottest part of the afternoon when the fleeting freshness of early morning was nothing but a distant memory, and evening's reprieve lay far too off in the future to even start dreaming about.  A period of such incandescent misery that it felt as if a cackling, fork-tailed demon had flung open the door to the furnace of hell itself.  The sun stood squarely overhead, straddling the canyon's rims, pouring a column of fire directly into the abyss and driving the shadows into the deepest recesses of the rock while causing the cushion of air that hovered just above the surface of the ...

     Our cruise, and thus these "travel" posts, were coming to an end.  We had seen a lot, from France to England/Ireland/Scotland and now, the remaining southern coastlines of Norway.  The variety was immense, not just in watching the peoples and hearing the languages, but even among the storefronts of food and fashion that changed before our hungry touristy eyes.  Gone were the magnets and (gasp) postcards, as if declared relics from a distant time capsule, one that held sweep-second wrist watches and ballpoint pens.  And just a few tee shirts and hoodies were visible, but not many, perhaps because of their $60 price tags.  But overall, shops were open for business as normal because our ship would generally dock quite close to actual towns.  Cruises came in now and then but apparently not so often that sidewalks and roadways were overwhelmed.  For many of us in our ship, waiting tour buses quickly swallowed us up and whisked us away fo...

     While I mentioned that I would spare you readers the travelogue, a few articles caught my eye as if tugging at me not to forego this part of history.  Nothing specific, mind you, but...well, you'll see.  Now I have to mention that while many of my friends are fascinated by history and  tend to put its timelines together in an interesting way, this was never my strength.  Take the entire history of this area we were in --from Great Britain to much of western Europe and Scandinavia-- and I can remember one part of its history: the Norman Conquest in 1066.  That said, I couldn't tell you much more about it.  Who was involved and what was it about?  Were they before or after the Vikings and the blue bloods?  Heading east and south, how did the Persians and the Dutch, much less the Russians, fit into the timeline?  And did Nordic relate to Norman (yes, at least linguistically).  So, see what I mean?  Dare I say that I...

     There was a gale heading our way, announced the captain, and it would be a good idea to secure whatever glass or bottles we may have had laying around our rooms. The swells we would encounter later that night would be in the 15-foot range.  It was Lillian, a gale making its way across the Atlantic (Gale was yet another name you rarely hear these days, but one which was commonly given to young girls back in the day).  Our minds were fresh with the sinking of the mega-yacht, owned by the controversial Autonomy founder, Mike Lynch; but surely such winds wouldn’t be enough to threaten a ship as large as ours, likely the same thoughts of those billionaires on that yacht.  But the harbormaster had already ordered the port of Waterford closed, as a precaution.  That happened at 2 in the afternoon.  It was now 5 PM and we were just leaving Cornwall on our way to the coast of Ireland.        The swells would hit while we were ...

     St. Malo basically has no "t" when you pronounce it so the sound you hear is seh'-Malo, which was the first stop of our visit.  Home to François-René de Chateaubriand,* he not of the cut of steak people so love, but rather a strong defender of the Catholic faith.  As reprinted in the Paris Review , he wrote:  In a society that is dissolving and recomposing itself, the struggle of two spirits, the clash of past and future, the intermingling of old ways and new, makes for a transitory concoction that leaves no time for boredom.  Passions and characters set at liberty are displayed with an energy unimaginable in a well-regulated city.  The breaches of the law, the freedom from duties, customs, and good manners, even the dangers intensify the appeal of this disorder.  The human race on holiday strolls down the street, rid of its masters and restored for a moment to its natural state; it feels no need of a civic bridle until it shoulders the ...

                                        Map:  InfoPlease.com       Think of a "river" of chalk, one nearly as wide as a small city and one which starts halfway up the eastern coast of England, heads inland near London them splits east to become the white cliffs of Dover before exiting south of Southampton.  Said the article in  National Geographic :  Chalk is a pure type of limestone composed of tiny shells of marine organisms.  Deposits are found worldwide, but in England the geological ripples from the rising of the Alps 40 million years ago brought a wide swath of it to the surface.  It's porous and fractured, with up to 40 percent of its bulk made up of spaces between the rock grains.  Rain that falls on chalk sinks into the ground, sometimes taking months to percolate through the hills...Rainstorms produce no floods, and in drought th...