Getting away – personal travel essays
Zippity Do Dah
Montezuma, Costa Rica—As my family donned unfamiliar equipment, a bare-chested teenager sporting flip flops and faded swim trunks emerged from a nearby shack in a blue cloud of marijuana smoke. We looked away.
Then the kid deftly strapped himself into a harness like the ones we were clumsily contending with.
“Great, we get ‘Cheech’ to send us to our deaths,” someone muttered.
The name “zip line” includes only two details about flying down a cable straight at trees encased by railing-free platforms about 100 feet above the ground. Cheech didn’t hand out release forms or offer any pointers. And he didn’t bother with a flimsy plastic helmet, though we dutifully fastened our chin straps.
“Careful!” my nephew Alex snapped as my husband helped him tighten harness straps around his waist and groin. Cheech grinned at their struggle with the safety belt.
“It’s like a giant jock strap,” I said as Cheech attached my belly hook to the line. He firmly held me with one arm, the cable with his other hand, and I felt his confidence. Then he looked into my eyes and smiled. A small wave of gratitude passed through me to him. He was in control.
He made two gestures about how to go forward and more importantly, how to slow down and stop, then he released me.
The line hummed loudly as I zoomed away, swooping through the air like a diving hawk. I screamed and whooped with a rush of adrenaline, high over the monkey-filled jungle as I passed too quickly through a corner of paradise.
— Kristen Gandrow
Highway of Memories
IOWA—East of Des Moines, you roll through gentle hills and occasional curves left by glaciers of millenia past on old Iowa Highway 6. The countryside sprouts scattered farms across the sprawling vistas of fields dotted by two-ton round hay bales and grazing black-and-white Holstein cattle.
An abandoned Stuckey’s restaurant now serves only memories since the namesake blueberry syrup that Aunt Gertie and Uncle Cy always bought for Dad has dried up, disappeared along with its brand name. The Ladora Stora, where smoking is still tolerated, sells candy bars and cans of pop that waft the stale aroma of cigarettes. An auto graveyard lies right alongside the highway, overlooked by a small pioneer cemetery under the pines on a nearby hill.
All along this road, you can spot other momentary images from your childhood. I always do, when Highway 6 takes me home.
— Kristen Gandrow
Honeymoon for the holidays
SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE—Despite the protest of our parents and the reality of the plummeting dollar, my wife and I skipped the holidays this year. We headed instead to the other hemisphere — Australia and New Zealand, where it is summer still and the sun sets later and later as you head south…
We traveled by plane (10 different flights), train, rental car, taxi, tram, bus, ferry, jet-boat and inflatable canoe. We hiked in the mountains until our calves were stone. We met koalas and roos and flying foxes and welcomed the New Year from Sydney Harbour. We snorkeled in the Great Barrier Reef, hiked to a glacier and watched too much of the fascinatingly silly game called cricket.
We toured Australia’s great cities, enjoying culture, architecture, shopping, food and drink, and were entranced by New Zealand’s magical landscape of ice-blue lakes, verdant vineyards and snow-capped mountains.
In the midst of this busy itinerary, only twice did my mind wander back to Bridgeland — once as I peered over the edge of Govett’s Leap, also known as Bridal Veil Falls, as it plunged hundreds of feet into the Grand Canyon of the Blue Mountains.
For the other occasion, I thank Bill Bryson, whom we followed — via his excellent and hilarious book In a Sunburned Country — through Sydney, the Blue Mountains, Queensland and Melbourne.
I thought of both Bryson and my dear, distant Bridgeland readers as I sat at a sidewalk café, reading Sydney’s City News, a weekly paper similar in size and scope to The Bridge.
“I can think of nothing more exciting,” writes Bryson, “…than to read newspapers from a part of the world you know almost nothing about. What a comfort it is to find a nation preoccupied by matters of no possible consequence to oneself.”
While the City News stories were indeed strange to me, I found something familiar and endearing in the parochial tone and focus. Here was a short article — and even a photo! — of a car that had been parked in a spot for six months and would soon be removed.
But finally, it was a letter to the editor that sent my heart home to Bridgeland:
Your rather dramatic coverage of drug busts and the police enforcing the ‘move on’ policy was read by local residents of Taylor Square, not with disapproval of police action. If you live around here you are subjected every weekend to the grossest behavior by nonresidents of the area … We can’t wait for lots of changes that make our lives a lot more pleasant.
— Jeremy Stratton
last revised: February 18, 2008