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The Concord Manse
The Old Manse is one of the most extraordinary houses in America. It saw the birth of two revolutions and was lived in by a string of some of the most exceptional Americans every to grace a town noted...
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Giverny in the fall
The Seine river loops northwest out of Paris into the rich, green French countryside of Normandy. The river is contained by low parallel ridges of hills on either side that form a kind of geologic...
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Driving across Texas
Two things about Texas: It’s big and it’s empty. For most of us, crossing Texas along the interstate, it is two days of tedium, flatness and gravel, waiting to get from the desert West to the humid...
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Driving an arc of a planet
To see the world, you fly around it; to learn about your neighborhood, you walk through it; but to appreciate something about the country you live in, there is nothing better than an automobile. A jet...
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Paris at night
The first time my wife remembers being aware of the night was when she was a little girl and thought the darkness was a liquid, a flood tide overtaking the world. “I was afraid I would drown in it,”...
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With Dante in Vegas
I know my idea of hell: eternity in Las Vegas. Heck, even a weekend. Now, I am aware that many people love Vegas, and I’m not here to quarrel with them: De gustibus non est disputandum, as they say....
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Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in
It has been nearly 50 years since I first saw Linville Falls in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Back then, getting there meant finding an unmarked gravel road and an unmarked dirt parking...
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Remembering the desert
I miss the desert. The gravel, the dust, the prickles, the skin-shriveling heat, the raking shadows, the beige mountains turned pinkish in the afternoon, the buzzards hanging overhead, the greasewood...
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61 miles to Toroweap
I’ve been to the Grand Canyon enough times that I couldn’t accurately count. But sometimes familiarity makes us lose the magic. If I’ve been to Mather Point once, I’ve been a dozen times, at all hours...
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The idea of Alaska
Call me Wordsworth. When I was in my 20s, strapping and idealistic — i.e., an idiot — I lusted after this landscape. I knew it only in the photos in the Sierra Club coffeetable books, thinking how...
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The lower 48
When I was growing up — in the Antediluvian Age when everyone smoked Lucky Strikes and cars all had clutches and carburetors — the maps in my grade school rooms had 48 states on them. Those classroom...
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Circling the middle
I have lived in the four corners of the U.S. I was born in the Northeast, lived in the South, the Southwest and the Pacific Northwest. And yet it is somehow the vast middle of the nation that most...
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A la recherche du Hushpuppies perdu
In this week’s New Yorker, Calvin Trillin writes about North Carolina barbecue and the efforts by the only slightly facetious Campaign for Real Barbecue to maintain the traditional standards for the...
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Going continental
I am not watching Downton Abbey. I reached my quotient of British TV drama with Upstairs, Downstairs 40 years ago. Since then, it has been rehash on rehash, and I no longer feel any connection. It is a...
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Paris 2002 Part 1
PARIS 2002 Days 1-3 The Flight In the spring of 2002, my wife, Carole, and I went to Paris for the first time. Some friends had just got back from Rome and waxed effusive over the experience and they...
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Paris 2002 Part 2
When we visited Paris for the first time in 2002, we felt like yokels: Everything was new and we gawked. Now that we have been there often enough to feel at home on its boulevards, and have visited its...
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Paris 2002 Part 3
In a corner of the Fifth Arrondissement, next to the Gare d’Austerlitz, is a public garden that has come to be one of our touchstones of a visit to France. We go back each time. It is not one of the...
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Paris 2002 Part 4
For as often as we’ve been to France, we still have never been to the Eiffel Tower. We’ve walked past it — and were nearly hustled by a team of pickpockets. The first, meant to distract us, walked...
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Paris 2002 Part 5
Stories rise to climaxes, and our first trip to Paris reached that point on Sunday, when we accidentally stumbled into one of the most profound experiences of my life: seeing the Gothic cathedral in...
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Paris 2002 Part 6
When we first came to Paris, we didn’t know what we were doing, and because of that, we did everything right. We didn’t know where the best hotels would be, and we wound up in an unremarkable...
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