Paralyze The Mind

The Season in Pictures

2011-12-06T02:04:00.000-08:00

This year's client list featured many talented anglers, including Australia's Philip Clement, Maine's Fred Clough, North American rep of the Lax-A Angling Club, and London's Matt Harris. The photos below are mine, but Matt's album from the river includes some truly spectacular images.

What's the Knock on Lenok?

2011-12-05T16:36:00.000-08:00

None, in my opinion. Although some Russian scientists carp about the "damage" they inflict on salmon fry in the lower Amur basin, lenok rise enthusiastically to the dry fly and fight well. Our endemic species is the blunt-nosed lenok, Brachymystax savinovi, better known as the Amur trout. They are less common than the sharp-nosed variety—and grow bigger—so we naturally value them more. In other publications, I've described them as closer to browns than rainbows, but they are really their own fish, with their own habits and personality. Here's a brief video of one during the release. Take a good look at the predatory jaw and the coppery-colored background for those beautiful spots.

"We could not calculate directions between Noord, Aruba and Dadal, Mongolia"

2011-08-25T17:09:00.000-07:00

Headed for Mongolia tomorrow so that must mean the earth has traveled completely around the sun again. We've moved since last August, of course, but only a few miles, toward the northern tip of the island.

A few publications on the horizon: a story about marlin and Cabo San Lucas in the September Gray's Sporting Journal, another selected for an anthology from Fly Fisherman magazine, and a brand-new work, set in Shanghai, forthcoming in American Fiction, volume 12.

The anthologized piece is one of my contributions to "The Seasonable Angler," originally published in 2002. It's called "On the Flats," and is about the joys of not catching bonefish.

The Snail's Pace

2011-01-12T03:11:00.000-08:00

While trying to find a name for these Aruban land snails (possibly Diplopoma crenulatum), I stumbled across a 1971 article by the late Stephen J. Gould, "The Paleontology and Evolution of Cerion II: Age and Fauna of Indian Shell Middens on Curacao and Aruba." Gould makes a number of interesting observations, including the odd fact that snail shells found in the 4000-year-old middens are larger than any alive today. He guesses, logically enough, that past conditions might have been much wetter (and hence more favorable for land snails) on these now dry islands, but also notes that there was no other evidence for this change in climate.

Three decades later, biologist Kees van Nooren has found support for Gould's conjecture. By analyzing pollen and spores from deep sediments, he discovered that desert Aruba was once a lush garden with at least seven different species of ferns, and that the departure of fertile soil coincided with the arrival of European colonists.

I used to imagine that, like most humans, I learned quickly but now recognize that illusion. In those days I would have overlooked these snails and the beauty they are capable of, thanks to persistent (slow) motion and a hard shell.

Home from the River

2010-10-13T04:34:00.000-07:00

October 6 marked the end of an inspirational season, with excellent conditions for sighting fish and only one day of snow. The biggest taimen measured a very conservative 55 inches, caught by Jim Hickey of Worldcast Anglers on a sculpin pattern.

After 14 hours on the so-called road, the guides and I rolled into Ulaanbataar looking forward to enjoying our first electrically chilled beers in more than a month. Because it was nearly midnight, the first half-dozen restaurants we entered were either already closing up or out of food but, finally, on the west side of Sukhbaatar Square, we found a place with the words "art" and "pub" on it, where the waiter was willing to bring us six plates of french fries and many cold bottles of Altan Gobi and Tiger (the tap for GEM, our favorite Mongolian brew, was sadly dry). Note: If you find yourself in the city at a more reasonable hour, I recommend the steak with roasted peppers at Veranda, the second floor of a restaurant called Silk Road, with a fine view of the monastery of the Choijin Lama.

Country Cookin

2010-08-19T18:47:00.000-07:00

Back in the States again for a roadtrip: South to Midwest to Northeast. Have parked ourselves in Ocala, Murfreesboro, and Galesburg so far but the hands-down highlight has been Country Boy's Cookin (no g), exit 121 from Interstate 75 in Unadilla, Georgia. The ribs are moist, tender, with great flavor that only improves with a few shakes of sauce. (I recommend the hot and spicy.) The beans are sweet, the cole slaw is sweet, and the atmosphere is unironic Bassmaster Classic. I wrapped a few leftover ribs in foil and enjoyed them several hours later—truly enjoyed them—despite a motel room with no outside windows and the faint reek of filtered cigarettes.

On your way out of Country Boy's, do not miss the opportunity to buy a bag of freshly boiled peanuts—"the country caviar"—from Hardy Farms across the parking lot.

I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.

—Carl Sandburg

At Sea

2010-07-30T07:42:00.000-07:00

One odd thing about dislocation as a way of life is the whirlpool of memory. Whenever I am tempted to consign the past to a predictable current, like an oarsman on a favorite river, or to a periodic ebb and flow, as comforting as the tides, the gyre returns, spinning.

And so the air is warm as breath again, with the faint hint of frangipani that we loved in Thailand and Malaysia.

And there are geckos here too, but the locals call them pega pega instead of chee chak. Like us, they are not natives to the island, but transplanted foreigners who have taken to their new home.

Our street is named after an obscure French author and alcoholic who did not die soon enough to escape Rimbaud's assessment of him as constitutionally incapable of true "vision."

Here, at least, he intersects with Byron, is only two blocks shy of Victor Hugo, and resides within shouting distance of Shakespeare.

Surely that is consolation, if consolation there might be.

Across the way, our neighbors fly a yellowfin tuna from their windmill and keep noisy parrots on the patio.

Which reminds me both of the Maldives and of my first island home in the Florida Keys, where two of my dearest friends served a nightly highball to their chihuahua.

Happy in Print, If Not on the River

2009-03-01T10:13:00.000-08:00

The first week in March is no time for flyfishing in Vermont. Back in Montana, however, some of the year’s best hatches are just beginning, coinciding with the release of Big Sky Journal’s annual flyfishing issue. I have a work of fiction in it called “Happy Is The Man” but I am true-story happy to see my work in the same pool with many writers that I admire, including James Prosek, co-founder of the Yale Angler's Journal, and Yellowstone's Paul Schullery.

Spring Broken?

2009-02-05T17:47:00.000-08:00

In the battle for a dwindling reservoir of tourists, Mexico has left the Caribbean high and dry. My family voted with our frequent-flyer miles and the winner was Cancun. (There were no seats available to any other destination.) We’ll rent a car in March and head south along the coast. With a group including one tween, one teen, and my walker-wielding mother, we wanted multiple rooms with at least one on the ground floor.

None of us has been there before, but the so-called Riviera Maya is second-home to rafts of expats, and hence numerous opportunities for villa rental. I contacted several online agents. One of them—Janice Spate—actually called me at home to talk potential properties. I could tell from her area code that she lives in British Columbia but I didn’t ask for her story.

There are many fine and expensive possibilities on the Yucatan coast but we did not choose any of them, opting instead for a three-bedroom Akumal condo through an outfit named Cancun Steve.

Steve’s website is goofily charming, one of those artifacts of the Internet that disarm and discomfort simultaneously, complete with mouse-over magic tricks. I was curious enough to request his story, and here are the answers I received.

Q: Are you a one-man operation?

A: we have a team. a girl up in New York. 4 of us here in Cancun.

Q: Is your name really Steve?

A: my name is Steve

Q: Do you live in Cancun, or somewhere else?

A: I reside in Cancun

Q: Has the economic downturn affected business as much as it has in the Caribbean, where flights were cut 15%?

A: the recession has effected us all friend

Catch and release in the home of the Khan

2009-02-01T10:39:00.000-08:00

Many globetrotting anglers release all their fish as a matter of course. But acceptance of this conservation ethic varies significantly by country and culture. In Switzerland, for example, voluntarily releasing a legal-sized fish can leave you liable for prosecution. And in nearly all Asian nations (with the possible exception of Japan) catch-and-cook is the order of the day.

Thanks to an unusual coalition, however, catch-and-release has established its first stronghold in the land of Genghis Khan. Mongolia’s lakes and rivers provide habitat for many rare and unusual species, but the taimen, an extremely large and long-lived member of the salmon family, is the country’s most prized gamefish.

In April 2008, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) announced that local governments along a 200-mile stretch of an Amur River tributary have established the Asian continent’s first taimen sanctuary. Developed in cooperation with Montana-based Mongolia River Outfitters (my employer for the past three seasons), the agreement seeks not only to conserve taimen, but to protect an entire watershed. The new regulations allow international anglers to flyfish with single, barbless hooks, but restrict riverbank development and prohibit the use of motorboats.

Of Taimen and the River

2009-01-31T08:39:00.000-08:00

Fly Rod and Reel’s Adventure issue (March 2009) includes my feature on Mongolia with photos from that country’s first taimen sanctuary. The piece hasn’t been posted to the magazine’s website yet, so look for a copy on the newsstand. Here’s how it opens:

If you’ve seen the pictures, then you might already be lost. The angler kneeling in bewildered devotion, smiling with an awkward joy, behind a fish so impossibly large that two hands provide an insufficient cradle. Because as soon as you can imagine it, the dream begins. Your boots in that unfettered river, your eyes blinking in the boreal sun, your hands reaching into cool water, your arms bearing that implausible weight. It’s a wonderful dream, infused with just the right blend of beauty and impracticality, and alternately enhanced and encumbered by facts. Because like Paris in the spring, a taimen’s heart-rending strike exists in a specific time and a far-off place, a location so remote that the experience requires (for most people) a week’s leave and a month’s salary.

Winter and Its Malcontents

2008-11-14T18:15:00.000-08:00

Today’s New York Times included an editorial about snowmobiles in Yellowstone, a situation that, over the years, has devolved from a clash of interests into a cloud of exhaust. And yet, despite the years of wrangling (some legal, some illegitimate), Yellowstone remains one of the most beautiful and complicated places in the world. Here’s what I wrote about it in 2005 (originally published in Carve magazine, a supplement to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle).

A Quiet Weekend in Yellowstone: Old Faithful Without Snowmobiles

If I’d known that the shutter was frozen, then I wouldn’t have bothered with the camera. But there was my 7-year-old daughter, Marina, in a bright pink parka, skiing beneath a brilliant blue sky, while Old Faithful boiled and billowed, white steam over white snow. And I wouldn’t have bothered occluding my eyes with any sort of lens—telephoto or not—as two gray wolves sidestepped a shaggy herd of bison, moving with an uncanny blend of speed, grace, and nonchalance.

But I didn’t know, so I kept framing and focusing and shooting. Pictures—or, at least, what I thought then were pictures—of my wife Sarah gliding through a forest of lodgepole pines, the powder breaking around her knees. Of my son Dave watching a pair of elk feed along the Little Firehole River, the water gone gold in the dusk. Of a flock of Canada geese silhouetted against a geyser plume. Of a svelte coyote sitting expectantly before our cabin, attracted by the aroma of leftover prime rib.

I have visited Old Faithful, the ersatz metropolis of Yellowstone National Park, many dozens of times over the past four decades—but never in winter, when the venerable Inn is silent and shuttered, the asphalt parking lots shrouded in snow. And though I generally dislike cameras, everything looked so different on this occasion that I didn’t resent the strap around my neck. Too bad I was still using film.

Twenty-five years ago—back when electronic cameras stored their images on floppy disks—you might have found Sarah and me strolling the boardwalks under an August moon, sharing champagne from a bottle. In these more sober times, you’d be more likely to spot us escorting nieces and nephews from the soda fountain to the now-faded Morning Glory Pool, our smiles wilting under the August heat and the relentless crush of vacationers. We are still having fun, still in awe of the geysers’ gush and rumble, but it’s a sweltering sort of pleasure.

On an average summer day, Old Faithful plays host to 20,000 people, qualifying it as the fourth-largest city in the state of Wyoming. In winter, that daily average plummets to a small fraction of the fair-weather horde. There are, after all, only 100 rooms and 34 cabins at the Old Faithful Snow Lodge, the only available accommodations. And since the roads are closed to ordinary vehicles, every other would-be geyser gazer must arrive by snowcoach—think of a passenger van with tank treads—or by snowmobile.

During our visit, a few days before Christmas, the number of snowmobiles entering the park was far below the current season’s daily limit of 720. We had heard horror stories of smog and bedlam from past winters, but saw little evidence of either. (We did, however, overhear a hotel employee delivering a stern admonishment to one wayward rider: “Excuse me, sir. Nearly flipping your machine is not funny.”)

The conventional wisdom contends that uncertainty keeps many would-be sled-jockeys away. One federal judge banned unguided snowmobiles, while another overturned the ban. Since a new (and temporary) winter-use plan is the target of at least two competing lawsuits, uncertainty is likely to dominate this season as well.

For skiers like us, any decline in the swarm of snowmobiles is an unmitigated blessing. Dave and Marina skied from our cabin—the one farthest from the main lodge—to breakfast. They skied from breakfast to Geyser Hill. And on our most ambitious day, they skied from the Divide trailhead, along Spring Creek, to the Lone Star Geyser Trail, past the Kepler Cascades, and back to the lodge—more than 8 miles—all without the background roar of internal combustion engines.

Of course, we would have done this trip anyway, even without a judge’s ruling. I understand the appeal and the utility of both two- and four-stroke motors. And I have no illusions of Old Faithful as wilderness, unsullied by human presence. That coyote, for example, pleading for prime rib, did not perfect its shtick in solitude. Since feeding park animals is expressly banned, it had help from a parade of innocents and scofflaws. (The next day, another guest observed the beast astride a snowmobile’s luggage rack, tearing into a lunch cooler.)

For me, the astounding thing about Yellowstone—summer or winter—is the relatively easygoing interplay between the human and the wild. On Geyser Hill, four bison graze within a ski-pole’s length of the boardwalk. Our children watch respectfully, then remove their skis to cross a stretch of bare pavement. Safely past, Marina races from one thermal feature to the next, renaming them with her own fancies—Elephant Head Pool, Bubblegum Creek, Little Frodo Geyser. Just in front of the General Store, closed until June, we spy a wolf track, the paw bigger than my palm.

Back in the cozy lobby of the Snow Lodge, we drink hot chocolate, write postcards, play rummy and cribbage, knowing that the elk and bison and wolves are still out there, that the hot springs continue to bubble and boil. It’s a comfort to know that all of these wonders are just a short ski from our upholstered chairs, that we can enjoy them any time we want, without crowds or congestion.

A few days later, after receiving the condolences of our local photo processor—two full rolls of Fuji Velvia, completely blank—we all agree that winter is the best time to visit Old Faithful. And that we would like to repeat the experience, to begin stockpiling the same store of memories that we have for other seasons in Yellowstone. And that, maybe, just maybe, we might try to capture some of those images—but not on film. In this new year, I resolve to go digital at last.

Goodbye, My Absentee

2008-11-10T17:19:00.000-08:00

I’ve been home from Mongolia for a month now, enough time to cut some firewood, find a new job at the University Press of New England, and vote in a gratifying presidential election—the most gratifying, by far, of the eight in which I’ve had the hard luck to vote.

Here’s Barack Obama back in January of 2008, standing a short block from the Press’s Lebanon office, speaking intelligently and in full paragraphs before losing the New Hampshire primary to Hillary Clinton.

We spent the previous two debacles abroad—in Japan, then China—feeling disconnected if not actually disenfranchised, so it was hard to shake off that uncertain sense of doom, the fear of going to bed whole and waking up in fractions, unrecountably diminished.

The Melting Pot, on Vacation

2008-05-10T07:19:00.000-07:00

Last week’s New York Times contained an interesting story by Vivian Toy about the Chinese fascination with mixed-race children. Or perhaps it was more about the protectiveness of American parents in foreign lands. After reading the piece several times, I’m still not sure. The writing is thoughtful and its judgments hidden in plain view.

Our family has encountered similar situations over the years—Chinese tourists who ask for their picture with us, Nepalese porters who can’t resist patting our daughter on the head—but I’d never attributed this attraction to the mix in races.

On the one occasion when race came to mind, the attention we received was hardly benign. The incident occurred in Tagbilaran, the so-called “city of peace and friendship” on the Philippine island of Bohol. This is what I wrote about it at the time:

I didn’t see what happened next, nor did I see it coming. I heard Sarah cry out, and I followed her shocked gaze to her attacker. The woman was not much more than five feet tall, with streaks of gray in her black hair, and tanned skin nearly the same color as my own. She had used her clenched fist to deliver a low blow, and now she stood glaring at us. There was a challenge in her expression, along with something like hate, or defiance.

“What was that about?” I asked inanely, but the woman did not respond.

Meanwhile, Sarah grabbed Dave by the hand and started across the street.

“Come on,” Sarah said. “Don’t confront her.”

I picked up Marina and followed.

We fled several blocks in the general direction of our hotel, before slipping into the friendly confines of a Chinese restaurant. One wall displayed a banner congratulating local students, and several celebratory dinners were already in progress. Over roast duck and pan-fried shrimp, Sarah and I tried to decipher what this incident meant. But we could not. There was no identifiable provocation—or motivation. The woman did not have the unfettered look of a lunatic, yet she had acted purposefully, with malice aforethought.

The explanation that I did not want to consider was racial hatred. Had the woman looked first at my black hair, then at Sarah’s white skin? Had she contemplated our children’s features before striking at the offending womb?

I don’t know. After all, such a reaction would not have been impossible here in North America, at least within our parents’ memories. As recently as 1950, fifteen states, including Montana, Maryland, and California, prohibited marriage between whites and Asians.

From this perspective, communal affection for mixed-race children seems like a good thing.

Trials and Trillium

2008-04-28T17:33:00.000-07:00

It’s always painful to leave Montana, even under a spring snowstorm that slickened the interstate with a wash of cold gurry, a crystalline mix of sand and salt and ice that froze in a dark rime on the truck, stalactites on the fenders, pinwheels on the lug nuts.

But what I saw were sandhill cranes in the pale sky, antelope and mule deer in the whitened fields, streamers of cloud trailing from the gleaming peaks of the Crazies.

Five days later, having successfully navigated the hazards of Bad Route Road (Montana), Motley (Minnesota), and the 8614-foot long Mackinac Bridge (Michigan), I found the hills of Vermont newly green.

Bloodroot bloomed along the brook and, beneath the beeches, a red trillium.

Half a Mind to Ramble

2008-04-20T22:42:00.001-07:00

There will be a forced break from reports of Singapore while I attend to a different sort of travel, freighted with more boxes, bundles, and baggage than can be fit into any overhead compartment. This spring’s west-to-east migration requires a rental truck, from Montana to Vermont. It’s a familiar story with us, one that I tried to describe in 1991, as you can read below. At the time, I thought we might have found a permanent home. Since then, however, we’ve lived three years in Japan and two in China, occupying a grand total of seven different houses.

Bass, Coots, Pimbling, and the Graft

Sarah and I stayed home this summer. For the first time in more than a decade, in a house of our own. After years of rootless migration from apartment to apartment, from one metropolitan area to another, we struck land in Missoula, Montana. We bought four rooms shaded by maple trees, within walking distance of the university. Not our dream house by any means—not the lonely cabin on a hill of pine and fir—but when we walk out into the alley, Lolo Peak looms above the garage, and a thick hedge lends the illusion of privacy. When school ended in June, we sanded the old boards beneath our feet, then refinished them with an ether-based epoxy that lent the hardwood a dizzying shine. We planted peas and tomatoes, painted the walls inside and out, entertained relatives from both coasts.

This was our second year in western Montana—after long stints in Los Angeles and Boston—and we enjoyed ourselves. Two teachers on vacation, confined to a budget but otherwise free. We harvested vegetables from the backyard, dined on elk steaks and fresh trout. During the high-water weeks of early summer, we kept our canoe wet in the rivers and lakes around Missoula. When July came, we rode down the Clark Fork in inner tubes. Not Cordura-covered float tubes, but the simple truck-tire variety that forces your head low and your knees high, like a lounge chair with the seat blown out.

I took my fly rod along, and learned to adjust my backcast to that odd angle. The long, drag-free floats fooled rainbows big enough to frighten me with their enthusiasm. I’d hold the rod in my teeth, paddling furiously for shore as the backing disappeared from the reel. Then I’d splash out of the tube and into the shallows, facing the current, keeping the rod high. Some fish you just have to fight standing up.

Sarah’s summer expired in August, according to the Montana public school schedule. Mine survived another month, past Labor Day and the first frost on the tomato vines. I should have been repairing storm windows, insulating the attic, or otherwise fulfilling my duties as a mortgagee. Instead, I devoted every day to the river. And was rewarded disproportionately. With trout, and golden eagles. With the shadows of osprey, moose, and mule deer. With my forehead warm in the sun and my toes chilling in a riffle, I knew how the black bears must feel in the huckleberry patches along the west slopes of the Flathead Range, snuffling mouthfuls of leaves and twigs and fruit against the lean days to come. A winter’s hibernation has its own appeal, true, but it’s not like spring, and it’s certainly not like late summer: warm and bountiful and urgent. You know such days can’t last. In fact, you begin to suspect that they must end in catastrophe: a September blizzard, right leg broken in a gopher hole, the tip of your favorite five-weight snapped clean off in the screen door. I wondered when I’d look up finally and see the piano falling from the sky, like those cartoon characters who are smiling and whole in one frame, flattened and sheepish in the next.

As the town began to fill with college students, my mood became more frantic. Compared to Sarah’s, my teaching schedule is a piece of cake. She is the sole administrator for a rural elementary school, both principal and secretary. She also teaches math to fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. And art to seventh and eighth. I sit behind a desk with a view of the mountainside and talk to adults about their writing for fifteen hours a week. But I resented the end of summer anyway, felt guilty for my resentment, and resigned myself to punishment.

On a warm and windless Friday, I spent an hour stalking a big native cutthroat feeding in a shallow finger of frog water, then jerked the fly from his mouth. His gill plates flashed an angry crimson. I threw the hopper to him again, but the leader landed in a heap and he high-tailed it back to the main current. Driving home from the river, I fretted insanely—all sorts of inane and anxious worries—that the house had burned, or the university shut down, or the cat run over.

Sarah suffers my addiction to water. After all, I’ve spent half my working life fishing for pay—as a guide, a mate, a deckhand, a diver. But she shares the attraction too. She knows what a relief it can be to float, to paddle, to navigate free from land. By the third week in September, she could feel the demands of her school—students, teachers, and parents—overtaking her hours. This was her second year as supervising teacher. She’d learned the deadlines and faced the expectations once already, and this time around they lacked the charm of surprise. On the Sunday before the university opened—my last day of refuge—we swung the canoe onto the car and drove north, to the Flathead Reservation. We turned east at Ruby’s Café and put in at Kicking Horse. The trout fishing had been good; I figured the bass would be feeding too.

Kicking Horse is a water-control reservoir tucked into the base of the Mission Mountains. When we fished it last, in June, the meadows around the shore were flooded. Geese brooded on their nesting platforms, daisies bloomed a foot underwater, and the bass—transplanted Easterners, hungry to spawn—slipped along the new shallows, hunting. Since then the nestlings had fledged, and the level of the lake had fallen several feet. The weeds lay folded on the surface in green and brown mats. The big patches of open water were thick now with coots, thousands of them swimming with that peculiar pumping movement of the neck. On take-off their big feet flapped comically.

Coots are one of the few birds that look ridiculous in all three elements: on the water, in the air, and especially on land. At the Los Angeles County Botanical Gardens—where we would feed crusts of bread to golden carp and pilfer oranges—I used to spread my arms and charge hooting at the resting flocks, just to see them fly. Or stand fifty yards off and fling a Frisbee into their midst. Sarah dubbed me “The Big Blue Goose”—a coot’s worst nightmare. There’s not much fun of that kind to be had in Los Angeles, and we took what we could get.

In Montana we don’t have to rely on botanical gardens for wildlife. That’s part of the reason we moved here. Back in Boston, hatching plans in our third-floor walk-up, Sarah and I pointed fingers at the map and considered our options. Where could we be happy? Alaska? Oregon? Maine? While our friends and siblings were starting families, we were ready to hit the road. Neither our thirtieth birthdays nor the prospect of hauling our furniture down three flights of narrow stairs could daunt us. We liked the thrill of relocation—closing-up shop, shedding worn-out possessions, arriving unknown and strange in a strange town. Even when we finally decided on Montana, we hedged our bets. It’s not forever, we said. If we don’t like it, we can always move.

But we do like it. We like the confluence of rivers and ranges, the intersection of migratory paths: U.S. Highway 93, Interstate 90, the Pacific Flyway. If Boston is the cradle of liberty, then Kicking Horse is the cradle of waterfowl. Here and there among the coots, the more graceful ducks—mallards and pintails, redheads and canvasbacks—congregated in small groups or paddled aloofly in pairs. The eastern shore of the lake was white with gulls resting on one leg, and some of the grassier knolls held geese. The weedy shallows were crowded with great blue herons. Some fishermen on foot scared a half-dozen croaking into the air, their bodies visibly rising and falling with each beat of their tremendous wings.

We unloaded our old spinning rods, five-foot fiberglass relics matched with Mitchell reels, made of metal. I brought my fly rod too, and a sandwich bag of poppers with rubber legs and gaudy paint jobs. The Missions were silvered with an autumn snow. We slogged with the canoe through yards of soft mud to the water’s edge, used our paddles to push off.

Just as in June, we found the bass in the shallows—in groups of two or three, but skittish this time. We might coax one to strike, but not more than one, and never the biggest. I hooked a ten-incher on a black Woolly Bugger, watched him swim up slowly and breathe marabou into his jaws. Sarah caught a few small fry on a tiny Panther Martin spinner. We put them all back. I had visions of a three-pound bass baked with black bean sauce and garnished with scallions and ginger, of the fragrant steam rising from the dish, the white meat flaking from the bone.

We continued to fish purposefully for a few hours, but by late afternoon, the bass still wouldn’t bite. They’d lost their enthusiasm and so had we.

The ducks had something to do with it. They were all going somewhere; their splashing muddied the water. They circled and squawked and beat their wings against the air, and we thought, oddly, of Paris, Amsterdam, Bangkok, Beijing. Places we had seen on our big-city salaries, but could not look forward to seeing again.

We thought of Africa too. Of those wildlife films in which the bodies of birds fill the lens: flamingos and storks, ostriches stampeding over the veldt. For once Sarah and I weren’t journeying anywhere in particular, weren’t heading south with our offspring like some far-ranging terns—Montana in September, Mexico by October, Chile come Christmas. We just watched, like two more of those folk who sit idly while the world passes them by. We had dreamed of living in northern Thailand, southern France. Of stalking the Nepalese tigerfish in the foothills of the Himalayas. Suddenly such places seemed far removed from Montana, way off at some great and regrettable distance from our lives.

As always, I did not want to stop fishing. I like to stay until sunset, until the light fades from the water and all hope is gone. Sarah was ready for home, a hot supper, the necessary preparations for the workweek. I was cranky. I wanted to push tomorrow into another season, to hook a bass big enough for a meal.

We stayed, but we didn’t talk much. Sarah sat in the bow with her back to me, wrote a long letter to her father on a legal pad. I cast randomly, without much expectation, stripping line to keep the fly above the weeds. We kept drinking and eating: bourbon from a plastic flask, cherry tomatoes from our backyard garden and trout smoked with alder chips. I paddled enough to keep us off the windward shore.

We drifted among the coots and greenheads. On a shallow bank littered with goose feathers and flat stones, we found the delicate trails of crayfish in the mud. It was a simple matter to track them down. A crayfish huddled under a rock believes that it is safe. I caught two, and Sarah held them behind the claws while I sawed through the top of a beer can with my knife. Before dropping them into the can I tore off their pincers, so they couldn’t fight.

If I say it one more time, perhaps I’ll convince myself: Sarah and I like Missoula, and our house, and the people here. The townsfolk trust you to pump your gas before you pay. That’s no small thing—in Boston and LA we grew used to paying first, to the grave assumption of dishonesty that implies. Still, we are nomadic by nature. The average American packs his duffel thirteen times before he finds that final resting place. My own family moved nearly every summer during my elementary years. By the time I reached ninth grade I’d been enrolled in seven different schools: urban, rural, Midwestern, public, private, Catholic, Lutheran. Sarah’s father was a diplomat, then an international banker. She’d seen New York, London, Paris, and Helsinki by age twelve. Before she became a teacher, she sold airline tickets to college students. If they had money to spare, Sarah encouraged them to go far, stay away as long as they could stand.

Perhaps it’s understandable then, that when September comes, our pinfeathers itch. We get half a mind to ramble. We fall into motion like flat stones skipping across a pond, or those thrushes who rise and fall in their flight across fields. We descend, struggle to regain the air, finally touch down. This behavior threatens even our mundane choices—so that the question might easily become not Where should we live? or Where could we be happy? but also Where should we go for breakfast?

Driving back to Missoula from Yellowstone Lake in July, after visiting with old friends from my days as a fishing guide in the Park, we decided against breakfast in the Lake Hotel, or at the restaurant in Mammoth, or at any of the cafés and diners in Gardiner. It’s not that we really said no to any of those familiar spots, we just never stopped the car and got out. Sarah’s maternal grandmother, Isabel Stephens—herself a great traveler who’d settled at last in central Vermont—called this behavior “pimbling.” Pimbling doesn’t involve decision-making, rather you hem and haw until the choices have been reduced by attrition, until you are left with a sole option that is almost always less desirable than the one you might have had, had you managed to make up your mind like a reasonable person.

It was almost eleven, and we’d been driving for two hours—through an elk crossing and a buffalo jam and then out the north gate of the Park. The lack of bacon and coffee was nearly stupefying. Yet we pimbled on, opting by default for another half-hour’s drive to Chico Hot Springs—where the local honeymooners say that the food is the best you can find in Montana, the best you can eat anywhere without changing out of your shorts and sandals.

As we motored north, following the Yellowstone River, my eyes hunted for pools and seams, holes where the trout might rest or feed. Sarah has said that fishing has ruined rivers for her. She can’t walk one now without reading it. Instead of water and stone, she sees eddies, pockets, and lies. I envied the driftboat sliding along a riffle, the anglers in the bow and stern, the guide at the oars. When we looked away from the river, the gray peaks of the Absarokas added teeth to our hunger. I drove almost recklessly, calling out license plates as we passed: California, Connecticut, Indiana, Vermont. We glanced into the windows of the vehicle from Vermont—a Jeep Wagoneer dusty with yellow dirt. Nine-tenths of Sarah’s family still live in the Green Mountain State, and we miss them. We didn’t recognize the young couple or the golden retriever with them, but we might have, and we applauded their industry. They’d made it this far.

We left the Yellowstone at the town of Emigrant, in the shadow of Emigrant Peak. I suppose it’s really more of an intersection than a town, but the name is good enough for an entire country. Emigrants leave, immigrants arrive. In 1982, the year we graduated from college, thirty-seven million Americans changed their addresses. Sarah’s sister Kathy, rooted in a brick home built in 1815, reproaches her: “You’re always leaving.” Sarah responds, “That’s because I always come back.”

Down the homestretch towards breakfast. The access road to Chico doubles as an airstrip. There is a windsock along the shoulder, and two arrows painted on the asphalt. The lawns were green that morning, the buildings white, the parking lot full. I slipped four quarters into a vending machine for the Sunday paper, thinking: strawberries and cream, salmon en croute, a currant scone.

Chico serves breakfast until eleven. It was a quarter after, but we weren’t worried. The hostess was friendly; she said she’d check with the cooks. But our luck failed us. Usually they have plenty of food, but that morning had been busy, there was nothing left. We walked away empty from the dining room, wandered into the saloon. Inside, two carpenters were pounding nails into the stage. No one was minding the bar. We looked longingly at the gleaming bottles, listened to the sound of hammers hitting home. Without speaking, we both fixed on the same image. In Thailand, a brand of beer touts their brew with English-language billboards: Klöster—Happiness You Can Drink. We got back in the car. And went on another twenty-five miles, to Livingston, for lunch.

I picked a crayfish out of the can and hooked him onto a bead-headed woolly bugger, by the tail. Was our urge to move only indecision, merely pimbling? We are so easily lured by what is out of sight, so hopeful that the next spot will prove a better one. We think that if we could just start afresh one more time then surely we would get it right. Two coots swam nearby, chuckling kuk-kuk-kuk. We paddled the canoe back towards the car. The crayfish danced on the end of the line. No bass took the bait.

I honestly can’t tell you what we had for dinner. After the dishes were done, Sarah graded the rest of the week’s math papers, and I shuffled my notes for a lecture on revision. We turned in at ten, set the alarm for six. The next morning, a band of elk grazed within sight of Sarah’s school. They were gone by the time the kids got there, but the teachers who arrived early to prepare lesson plans were rewarded with their bugling calls.

The week passed as we thought. The math classes learned place value and set theory while the art students tried their hands at perspective. Two daredevils broke arms swinging on the new playground equipment. I delivered my lecture, led a couple of workshops, and commented on a hundred and twenty essays arguing against rainforest logging in Borneo.

Saturday came up cool, threatening rain. A good day for yard work. We drove out to the greenhouse a few miles west of town to invest in a new hedge, replacing the one that had been sacrificed during a sewer hook-up. Whatever grows the fastest, we thought. Who knows how long we’ll hang around. Except junipers. Years of pulling junipers out of her grandmother’s pasture had soured Sarah on bushy evergreens.

The nursery was in the middle of a fall clearance. The owner said that he’d lost quite a few plants in last winter’s cold snap. He didn’t want to make the same mistake twice. He could give us a break on Siberian pea, cut us a deal on lilacs. We had some of each in the backyard already. The pea is thorny, voracious. The lilac shades our back door, perfumes the air in June. We appreciated both in their way, but they were too familiar. What else would make a good hedge?

In France, said the man, they train apple trees. Weave the branches together until they make a good, tight screen. He showed us a small stand of potted apples, mostly Spartans and Galas grafted to a hardier root stock. Their spindly trunks were no thicker than kindling.

Sarah’s grandmother had apples around her house. We keep a photo of one of her Macintosh trees in our bedroom—a confusion of pink and white blossoms. We asked how fast they would grow; when we could expect fruit.

Hell, he said. They’ll grow a foot a year if you treat them right. Might be five years before they produce a bushel, but if you’re lucky you’ll get an apple or two next year. He showed us a Spartan that had done just that—produced one apple. It hung from the pencil-thin branch like a Christmas ornament.

Sold. The nurseryman advised us to plant two trees, a yard or so apart, to mix some peat moss with the gravelly Missoula soil, to bury the roots right up to the graft. I nodded, wrote out a check. Sarah did a little dance in the parking lot. We laid the two trees in the bed of the pickup, alongside a forty-pound sack of peat moss, and drove home.

Our garden tools hung on nails in the garage. We hadn’t used them since the tomatoes went in, an entire season past. The blade of the shovel had rusted brown, the handle of the pickax shrunk inside the head. I put the business end of the pick in a bucket of water. Sarah marked off the spot for the trench. When the ax-handle had swollen tight again, we dug ourselves a hole.

Flying under (and over) the Urban Radar

2008-04-08T18:07:00.000-07:00

Although Singaporeans are devoted preservationists of traditional recipes, they have done less well with the flora and fauna. According to National Geographic, at least 28%—and perhaps as much as 73%—of native species have undergone local extinctions in the past 200 years. The casualties include tigers and other mammals, birds, butterflies, fish, and plants.

Best therefore to experience what’s left while you can. We were lured to one of the city's several rainforest preserves by one line from the Times’ Joshua Kurlantzick: “Watch out for the flying lemurs.” As it turns out, these creatures are primarily nocturnal, cannot fly, and aren’t—biologically speaking–lemurs, but that’s journalism for you.

The actual beasts, also known as colugos, are superb gliders, however, and perhaps the closest known relatives to our own taxonomic group: the primates. (In Kurlantzick’s defense, I don’t think “Use your flashlight to spot the superbly gliding primate relatives” would have made it past the copy editor.)

Our morning walk near MacRitchie Reservoir revealed—among much that was both beautiful and unusual to North American sensibilities—one python, two monitor lizards, three tree nymph butterflies, and numerous long-tailed macaques.

If you go, don't neglect the Tree Top Walk, a 250-meter suspension bridge above the forest canopy.

Last Meal First

2008-04-07T17:42:00.000-07:00

Our Singapore meals ran the gamut from hawker stalls to hotel brunches, with intervals of conveyor-belt sushi and Shanghai-style soup dumplings.

We reserved our last supper for the peranakan Blue Ginger (97 Tanjong Pagar; +65 6222 3928), where we’d eaten once before, perhaps ten years ago. The dish we remembered was ayam buah keluak, or chicken with Indonesian black nuts, and it remains memorable.

Both flavor and texture are unusual, reminiscent of the traditional Mexican mole, but distinctively oily and addictively fragrant, the South Pacific offspring of a truffle and a brazil nut. Absolutely worth the extra S$1.50 each to add a nut for every person at the table.

This site offers some rudimentary botanical information about buah keluak.

Another source reports that “The dusty grayish seeds . . . have already been treated to remove the poisonous effects by being thoroughly washed and boiled, then buried in the ground with layers of ash, banana leaves, and earth for 40 days.”

Which might explain the hint of truffle.

Though becoming a guidebook staple, Blue Ginger doesn’t seem to have backed away from its nonya roots. Each member of our family proclaimed a different favorite. My mother’s choice was the fish-head curry, which featured the meaty noggin of an enormous red snapper. Our daughter’s pick was the unreservedly flavorful deep-fried chicken with ginger and soy sauce.

Singapore: all the comforts of home, but with better food

2008-04-06T16:31:00.000-07:00

We enjoyed a family vacation in Singapore last week, a rare assembly that included my mother, older brother, younger brother, sister, wife, daughter, aunt, and two cousins.

Safe, friendly, and English-speaking, Singapore should be a favored destination for Americans and recent media coverage reflects that outlook. Since 2005 the city has been profiled in Budget Travel, Smithsonian, the New York Times, and—by Pico Iyer—in Conde Nast’s Traveler.

My mother hadn’t left her home in San Diego since a riding accident in 2001. In a sense, we planned this trip to revisit the flavors of her childhood: simple pleasures like mangoes and papaya, along with such complicated indulgences as fish-head curry and the heady mix of Chinese, Indonesian, and Malaysian that Singaporeans call nonya cuisine, after a Malay word for “auntie.” It’s a term of endearment, and for good reason.

Over the next few days, I’ll post restaurant reviews and descriptions of favorite dishes. This picture shows a layered dessert called santan agar agar, which—I must admit—is more fun to look at than it is to eat.

Skiing (and Eating) in Quebec

2008-02-27T17:24:00.000-08:00

Last week we drove north to Quebec City. We didn’t plan on paying our respects to this bust of Gandhi but he did look cold.

The skiing at Mont-Sainte-Anne—downhill, telemark, and cross-country—is all good, and the views of the St. Lawrence in winter will help redefine your notions of the eighteenth-century frontier.

We stumbled into two memorable restaurants. One, we discovered later, also is mentioned in Bill Pennington’s story in the New York Times.

Les Frères de la Côte (1190, rue Saint-Jean; 418 692 5445) effortlessly accommodated our unruly party of two tweens, two teens, and four adults. We’d been wandering aimlessly for hours, set adrift by an unseasonable spate of rain. Two of the adults ordered the all-you-can-eat mussels, and each ate through three bowls with three different sauces. The good-natured waiter justly recommended the beer-and-mustard sauce, but the pesto was our favorite, followed closely by the poulette.

Closer to the mountain, Restaurant Colette (2190, avenue Royale, Saint-Ferréol-les-Neiges; 418 826 0722) offers astonishingly fine food that seems even more impressive when you’ve driven to the parking lot from rural Vermont.

Proprietor Cyrille Beaudoin has cooked for both Queen Elizabeth and Charles de Gaulle, among other dignitaries, and you would be wise to add yourself to that list. We enthusiastically recommend the vol-au-vent and the filet mignon à la forestière.

Weekend in New York

2008-01-31T09:31:00.000-08:00

A New Yorker by birth but not by temperament, I’ve now traveled twice to the city since December, following an absence of perhaps a decade. Drawn back by food and family, of course, and in our family it’s hard to know which comes first.

We had a fine Cantonese meal at Fuleen (11 Division Street; 212-941-6888), across from Chinatown’s statue of Confucius. The packed room vibrated with the clatter of teacups and chopsticks while we ate our way through several of the house specialties: baked scallops on the half shell, crispy chicken with soy sauce, Dungeness crab with ginger and scallions, a casserole of seabass filets and tofu.

And thanks to Seth Kugel for recommending the hot chocolate at tapas bar Boqueria (53 West 19th Street; 212-255-4160). We walked from Union Square on a brisk Sunday afternoon, just as the sun was lighting the brick facades on Park Avenue. There were three generations in our party, and each was captivated by the combination of crisply fried churros and smoothly fragrant chocolate. Some of us sipped gratefully from a glass of rioja between bites.

A Recipe for Wild Geese

2008-01-23T16:31:00.000-08:00

Here's a story that I sold four years ago but which has never made it to print. I thought of it because it's cold out and there are geese in the freezer.

The four of us lean our backs against the bank of a dry ditch and gaze into the blue skies above Montana’s Treasure County. We don’t have to look for geese, since they are everywhere. Canada geese, with their white cheeks and raucous voices. Bane of golf-course groundskeepers and balm to the earth-bound, to all those who find solace in such grand evidence of the migratory urge.

Some geese rise from the Yellowstone and fly purposefully over the beets and the corn. Some leave the fields and make for the river. Others seem merely to be wandering from one gravel bar to the next, one furrow to another.

We watch and wait—Mark, Tom, Pat, and I—admiring the grace and power of these birds, the way their wings seem to carve air, understanding that when one of their number commits itself to our company, we will kill it.
Speaking for myself, there will be awe and pleasure in this act, regret and satisfaction. And, whether I have pulled the trigger or not, a certain species of bliss, as my big yellow Lab bounds forward at the report of shotguns, to recover the dead.

The geese wheel and call above us. Some flighty birds leave their family groups for another flock, mortally inconstant. Their relatives try to call them back, and so do we. Despite some practice, our honking varies in its authenticity. To my ears, it is sometimes sickly, sometimes strident, sometimes insincere. But the geese don’t seem to mind.

They turn at our pleadings, examine our motley spread of decoys, and make their decisions using other criteria. One more bite of corn—or a nice billful of water? Rest for a weary wing—or the society of fellow travelers? Join the crowd at the feast—or is that a gun barrel in the grass?

Indifferent geese pass far overhead. Indignant geese circle provokingly low, then fly off. But the indiscriminant cup their wings to alight—and we greet them with fire.

This is how the morning proceeds, a stirring succession of singles and doubles, short retrieves and long jaunts across the corn stubble. Although I am aware of the bag limit on geese, I have never threatened it.
Until now. On those infrequent days when the heavens are generous, I am much more likely to be gazing down at the glossy feathers of the bird in the hand than looking up for my next target. Nevertheless, we four are embarrassingly close to a limit by noon.

Mark is by far the most seasoned hunter in our group, since Tom, Pat, and I can reckon the sum of our waterfowl experience in the life of a single dog. True, that dog is becoming an old hound, who appreciates a regular aspirin and the occasional lift into the truck, but the gaps in our knowledge remain enticingly large.

So we turn to Mark for answers. Isn’t this amazing, we ask? Isn’t this wonderful? And, upon reviewing his own fund of memories—in several states and on more than one continent—he has to agree. These few hours in a sun-warmed ditch near Hysham, Montana, have been as good as it gets.

Soon afterwards, a pickup truck approaches on the dusty access road. The driver leans from the window, inquires loudly if we would like to move our decoys into his field, where the shooting is much better. Doubtful of our abilities to endure much better, we decline.

Weeks later, I am still enjoying this hunt. Just as much—if not more—than the three opening-day grouse without a customary miss, the fine cock pheasant taken just as it cleared a thicket of head-high willows, and the seventeen-pound steelhead that succumbed to the fifty-first cast of the fly. This persistent pleasure derives partly from the rush of wings shearing air, partly from the affection I have for the friends who shared it, and partly from the neat stacks of goose wings, breasts, legs, and thighs in our freezer.

As Tom will tell you, I bring the same passion to eating that Chicago Democrats apply to voting (early, often). I certified the results of this recipe the morning after returning home, and again a week later. Like most stews, it practically invites adaptation. You can substitute duck or grouse carcasses for the goose. In place of barley, you might try lentils. And if you’re feeling unusually prosperous, toss in a handful of fresh basil, or add a heaping tablespoon of pesto to the pot just before serving.

Triple Goose and Barley Stew (serves six)

legs and thighs of three geese, skin removed
1 cup red wine
1/2 pound mushrooms
1 cup baby carrots
2 cups tomatoes (or one 15-oz. can)
1 medium onion
4 cloves garlic
1 cup pearl barley
2 teaspoons dried basil
2 bay leaves
1 tablespoon flour (optional)
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
salt
pepper

Dump the legs and thighs in a large pot and cover with water, about 8 cups. Add the wine, which need not be particularly drinkable. Any leftovers will do, including white, rosé, or even cider. Bring the stock to a boil then simmer for at least two hours. Fish out the goose pieces and place the pot outdoors to cool.

Remove the meat from the bones, keeping an eye out for shot. (Steel pellets are hell on dental work.) I also like to trim the tendons from the meat on the drumsticks, although they will eventually soften with cooking. Slice the mushrooms and carrots, dice the tomatoes and onions, and mince the garlic. Rinse the barley well.

Skim the congealed goose fat from the pot, then strain the liquid for any stray shot that may have fallen free during the initial simmering. Return the stock to a low boil. Add the deboned meat, mushrooms, carrots, tomatoes, onion, basil, bay leaves, and barley. Simmer for at least another hour.

If the stock seems insubstantial to you, mix flour with cold water to make a thin batter, then stir the batter into the stew. Add the balsamic vinegar, salt, and pepper to taste. I like about 1/2 teaspoon of salt, slightly less than that of pepper. Simmer for another half hour, or just enough time to fix a salad and some garlic bread. Uncork a better bottle of red wine (when I get the rare choice, I choose dry Portuguese varietals) and prepare to fortify yourself against all ills.

Not that Iceman

2008-01-16T16:37:00.000-08:00

Winter has been inconsistent so far, alternating freeze and thaw, but we’ve been grateful for snow.

I’d forgotten how pleasant it can be to watch the snow accumulate, sometimes slow, sometimes not, as capricious as memory.

Is it such a wonder that, when humans regard the world, they see themselves reflected in it?

No matter how many times I circled the stone, the smile remained.

Obama in Lebanon

2008-01-07T18:33:00.000-08:00

Dave and I arrived 10 minutes late for Barack Obama's question-and-answer session in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and got stuck a block from the Opera House when the police shut down traffic in front of the village green.

I parked in the gap between two legal spaces and we went and milled with the overflow crowd: a mix of high-school students, moms with strollers, and retirees in ski jackets, with a few Japanese tourists thrown in.

Senator Obama came out and gave a brief speech and shook a few hands before returning to the audience inside. I think the words were probably ordinary but the impression was hopeful, even substantive.

We lived in Shanghai in 2004 and Tokyo in 2000, so it's been a while since I've shared any geography with a presidential election. When you're that many time zones away, the primaries seem like nothing more than the prelude to an abstract sorrow.

But in person, Obama is anything but sorrowful. He is the kind of guy I would vote for on gut instinct, neither an ugly American nor a quiet one. Just before he appeared, a man was hauled off the steps in handcuffs, muttering to himself. After Obama left, you could hear people talking about how glad they were to have been there.

Pumpkin Pie, Revisited

2008-01-07T18:16:00.000-08:00

Last night I tried that recipe again. There was only a half cup of pure eggnog left, but there were a few swallows remaining in another bottle, fortified with rum, and then I topped off the 12-ounce measure with heavy cream. The result was an even better pie: tender yet firm, a steady companion in times of need.

Pie for Breakfast

2008-01-05T09:07:00.000-08:00

We cooked together this morning, in a kitchen with a counter the size of a smallish cutting board. Sarah fried bacon on the stovetop, turning each slice with chopsticks until it reached the superbly-crisp-but-not-quite-burnt stage that our son prefers.

Then she used the leftover cubes of Italian bread from last night's dinner of fondue to make morsels of French toast, scented with cinnamon and served with maple syrup from our neighbor's trees. They were very good. So good in fact, and so appealing on the plate, that we predicted that someone would soon be offering them on a menu—or in a frozen-food aisle.

I carried a bowl of pumpkin to the table, a reminder of a warm October afternoon and our brother-in-law Alex Maclennan's generosity. (He grows them for market, along with corn, raspberries, and asparagus.)

We'd roasted the pumpkin, pureed the yellow-orange flesh in a food processor, and frozen it in two-cup batches.

This bowl had been defrosting in the refrigerator, in close proximity to a bottle of leftover eggnog, another gift, from Sarah's brother John. He and his wife make a much-admired organic cheese called Tarentaise. But their eggnog is not half bad either.

So this morning's breakfast represented a complicated convergence of good fortune, culminating in this recipe (with a nod to Libby's, in the can). The pie is fragrant, creamy, not too sweet, and intensely satisfying, with or without ice cream.

Pumpkin Eggnog Pie

one-half cup sugar
one-quarter teaspoon salt
one teaspoon cinnamon
one-half teaspoon ginger
one-quarter teaspoon cloves
two eggs
two cups pureed pumpkin
one and one-half cups eggnog

one waxed-paper package of graham crackers
seven tablespoons butter

Use your fingers to crush the graham crackers inside the package (if the paper seems fragile, dump the crackers into a sturdier bag first). Melt the butter, then mix with the crumbs and press firmly into a nine-inch pie pan.

Mix the spices with the sugar and the salt. Beat the eggs, then add the eggnog and beat some more. Stir in the sugar and spices, and finally the pumpkin.

Pour into pie shell and bake at 425 degrees for 15 minutes, then reduce heat to 350 for another 45 minutes, or until a knife in the center of the pie comes out clean.

After Mongolia

2007-12-18T08:01:00.000-08:00

I read this paragraph in the Style section of the Sunday New York Times:

“From where I sit,” said Nancy Novogrod, the editor of Travel + Leisure, "traveling to Mongolia now is almost cliché. Last summer, it seemed like everybody was going to Mongolia. The bar keeps getting higher.”

The story is by Allen Salkin, and he gives a thoughtful account of the climate in which we travel.

It does little good to wish that our vacations were not merely another set of indicators, social markers that enter our conversations for the purpose of conferring status, as if one could display an experience like a brand.

In this overheated atmosphere, where any voyage less exotic than Melville’s Typee risks relegation to the lesser ranks of adventurers, the truly irrelevant among us must find our way, unaided, to other sorts of journeys.

Nearer, slower. Less distant, more peculiar.

Places both familiar and strange, to be enjoyed rather than consumed: around the corner, the end of the block, the top of the hill, the other side of the river.

Christmas in Vermont

2007-12-14T06:12:00.000-08:00

According to old custom, newcomers to Vermont are called “flatlanders.” Because our family recently moved here from Montana, where the elevation of many riverbanks is a good deal higher than the peak of Mount Mansfield, I consider that a peculiar term. But, since I’m undeniably an outsider, I’ll save that discussion for another day.

This is not our first attempt to set up house here. In 1988, a few months before we left New England for the second time, we scanned the real estate ads with eager eyes, looking for anything within 30 miles of Woodstock that might prove affordable on a teacher’s salary.

As you might expect, we didn’t have much luck, although one enterprising agent did show us a derelict farmhouse with running water in the cellar. It was more of a brook, actually, and made a pleasant sound as it burbled through the foundation stones.

I was tempted by the prospect of flyfishing from the basement steps, but we couldn’t manage the mortgage. Even then, average property values near Woodstock were unrelated to average income.

Not that the place wouldn’t have made a good investment property. Although you can’t eat the scenery, there are plenty of folks willing to pay for it. By 2005, Woodstock’s median home value was $335,800, nearly twice the figure for Vermont as a state.

What do these residents get for their money? In December, it's the annual Wassail Parade: a cable-ready spectacle of horses, costumes, and costumed horses, in sizes from barndoor to wee beastie.

Still Burning Bright

2007-11-28T11:22:00.001-08:00

I am partial to stories of people who triumph over long odds, writers who succeed after decades of rejection, no matter how small the triumph, how secret the success. Then, of course, there are the grand tales of genius unrecognized.

According to one authoritative website, the poet and engraver William Blake worked so hard that, for one two-year interval, he left his home only to "fetch his beer."

Whirlwind of Lovers (Illustration to Dante's Inferno)  Birmingham Art Gallery

Blake’s work will repay your consideration many times over. Few clear memories remain of my visit to London in 1982, but I do remember reading these words on a page in the British Museum:

“Some say that happiness is not good for mortals, & they ought to be answered that sorrow is not fit for immortals & is utterly useless to any one; a blight never does good to a tree, & if a blight kill not a tree but it still bear fruit, let none say that the fruit was in consequence of the blight.”

Christmas in China

2007-11-27T07:00:00.000-08:00

If you live in Shanghai, the scent of Christmas comes alloyed with that of diesel exhaust and fermented tofu. You won’t lack for Christmas lights or Christmas sales, and you can buy Christmas decorations exactly like those for sale in any North American discount chain at your local Carrefour.

But if, like our family, you can’t abide an artificial tree, and were disappointed by the peculiar selection of conifers at the flower market in Hongqiao or the landscaping center on Cao’an Lu, then His Royal Highness Prince Joachim of Denmark is your man.

Never mind the environmental impacts of shipping Danish trees to China. At this time of year, you really don’t want to ponder all the thorny issues of globalization.

What you need is the crisp odor of fresh-cut fir, the caress of branches as you hang your new ornaments, a scattering of needles on your living room floor.

Call Maggie at Shanghai Blue Fish Trading (021 5045 4088 or 135 6442 3727). I met her last December and was impressed with her efficiency. She’ll arrange for delivery to your home, and even pick up the weary twig when the season is over. Prices range from 490 to 2360 yuan, depending on size.

Shanghai Update

2007-11-12T06:39:00.000-08:00

The Complete Residents Guide to Shanghai is now available at Amazon. My assignment included the chapter on exploring the city’s neighborhoods, parks, tourist attractions, and historical sites. Most of what appears on pp. 168–194 and 204–224 is my work.

If you're in China now or going soon, see my post for Friday, June 29, 2007, which describes our favorite route for circumnavigating the Bund.

Still Life with Water Buffalo

2007-11-05T08:16:00.000-08:00

When I look away from my desk, I can see a red barn, a weathered split-rail fence, one green corner of the upper pasture, and the gray stones of a small cemetery. It’s a traditional postcard scene, and appeared at least once on the cover of the L.L. Bean catalog.

This morning a quick movement caught my eye: our Shanghai cat, proceeding up the hill with all due speed, a limp mouse clenched in his teeth. And behind him—four water buffalo, looking as if they had just escaped from a Balinese rice paddy instead of a nearby dairy.

I don’t know anything about the practicalities of raising water buffalo on granite hillsides, but can report that Woodstock Water Buffalo makes real mozzarella and a densely creamy yogurt.

It took three guys holding big sticks to chase the four animals into a trailer, a tricky task that I complicated further by trying to take pictures. From the few words exchanged, I learned that water buffalo are not only headstrong and powerful, but naturally curious and easily distracted. In the end I was instructed to hide behind a truck.

Halloween in Vermont

2007-11-02T08:37:00.001-07:00

After living in Tokyo and Shanghai, our family knows how bizarre and attractive our American holidays can appear to other cultures. You dress up in costume and ask strangers for candy? And they smile when they give it to you? Happy Halloween indeed.

There is something characteristically American about the trust required to ask, and the generosity necessary to give. Not to mention the penchant for disguise and the taste for sweets.

This year we celebrated in Woodstock, Vermont. It’s a beautiful town, with a traditional village green, an elegant and expensive resort (the Woodstock Inn), and an unusually high density of gift shops, real estate agents, and art galleries.

The elementary school’s afternoon parade was well attended and exceptionally good-natured, with much admiration exchanged from both sides of the curb.

What the Man Said

2007-11-02T06:31:00.000-07:00

"I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks." —Daniel Boone

The Limits of Landscape

2007-11-01T09:11:00.001-07:00

Last week, looking north from Vermont’s Mount Ascutney, I really didn’t know what I was seeing. There were trees with leaves, trees with names that are hardly mentioned in Montana: maple, beech, ash, oak, and hornbeam.

From above, the landscape looked cozy and inhabited, with quilted patches of woodlot and pasture. It was a pleasant perspective, without the constant reproach of “No Trespassing” that I experience on the ground here.

Open space is better than urban sprawl, but I’ve been spoiled by Montana’s 32 million acres of public land—more than five times the area of the entire state of Vermont. An unfair comparison, I know, but consider these more impartial statistics: public land accounts for almost 35% of Montana, but only 8% of Vermont. No wonder I feel hemmed in.

Many locals seem to cultivate a healthy sense of ownership that extends far beyond the boundaries of their personal property. As a newcomer, I'm not there yet.

Meditation and Metaphor

2007-10-15T10:34:00.000-07:00

On my last day in Ulaanbataar, suffering from a spectacular abscess on my back, I walked to the Gandan Monastery. Like many monasteries throughout Mongolia, it was partially destroyed during the Soviet era, while its monks were forced out of service, jailed, or killed. This standing image of the Bodhisattva of Compassion—almost 90-feet tall, cast in copper, and covered with gold—was completed in 1996, a half-dozen years after the Soviet departure.

As a personal metaphor, an abscess takes the cake: a festering from within, a little haven of infection that your body nurtures and grows.

Slightly delirious with pain, I entered the Dechengalpa Datsan, where the monks awaited their noon meal. They sat on raised platforms, with their shoes attending faithfully behind them, a sundry assortment of sandals, athletic shoes, and cavalry boots.

In their chants I could hear a blend of the mature and the childish; some of the robed figures looked as young as seven or eight. In the air I could scent the faint tang of sandalwood.

Each monk received a flat oblong of bread on which was piled a package of cookies, another of candy, and then a layered procession of other small snacks. I watched, straight-backed on a low bench, famished and grateful.

More about Mongolia

2007-10-14T09:21:00.001-07:00

One of the things I dislike about the New York Times’ travel magazine, T: Style (I mean, other than their disregard for my work) is its focus on getting and spending. They even call one of their regular departments “The Get.”

According to the Fall 2007 issue, “Greenland is the new Mongolia,” which means, I suppose, that Mongolia has been officially relegated to “last year” among travel destinations. As it happens, I did go last year, to work as a flyfishing guide for Mongolia River Outfitters. I returned this year, to the same magnificent—and therefore threatened river—along with scientists from the Taimen Project, the World Wildlife Fund, and a crew from AEG Media, also known as the Trout Bums.

Last year, I was able to bottle what I learned into a single story, which will appear in a forthcoming issue of Gray’s Sporting Journal. This year, the confusion has so far resisted all of my attempts at distillation.

Chatav Ectabit's own website

2007-10-04T14:33:00.000-07:00

I posted a long story about Chatav Ectabit, a creative partnership between my brother Cliff Fong and Sandy Dalal, over a couple of weeks in April and May 2007 (see archive). In a world where fashion—according to author Dana Thomas has “sacrificed its integrity, undermined its products, tarnished its history and hoodwinked its consumers,” their clothing provides a thoughtful remnant of luxury.

Shanghai, revisited

2007-10-02T17:43:00.001-07:00

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I wrote most of a chapter for Explorer Publishing’s Complete Residents' Guide to Shanghai. Most of what appears on pp. 168–194 and 204–224 is my work. As far as I can tell, the full Residents' Guide is not yet available at Amazon.com, but you can order the Shanghai Mini Explorer, due out this month.

Home from Mongolia

2007-10-02T10:57:00.000-07:00

Now that the taimen season has ended in Mongolia, I’m back in Vermont sifting through notes and photographs. After each long day on the river, I didn’t read as much as usual, but two books deserve your attention.

David Malouf’s novel, An Imaginary Life, offers the sort of sentences that you’ll quote to yourself in times of trouble, such as: “What is beautiful is the way one thing is fitted perfectly to another, and our ingenuity is also beautiful in finding the necessary correspondence between things. It is a kind of poetry, all this business with nets and hooks, these old analogies.”

The other book, Harry Middleton’s The Earth is Enough, was taken on loan from an old friend. It’s nominally about flyfishing but rather more concerned with family, and memory, and the escape from memory. I found it frustrating to read, almost maddeningly in need of a close edit, and peculiarly moving.

Gone fishing

2007-08-17T20:18:00.000-07:00

For the next five weeks, I’ll be working in the headwaters of the Amur River in northern Mongolia. If you’re curious about this odd interval of good luck, visit the website of Mongolia River Outfitters.

“Anyone would think I was Tolstoy, the value I put on writing, but it hasn’t amounted to much.” –Philip Larkin

Looking Back

2007-08-17T08:08:00.000-07:00

10,000 copies of Explorer Publishing's guide to Shanghai will be given away to registered attendants at September's Expat Show. I wrote the chapter on exploring the city, which was a bit like writing a condensed version of War and Peace. If I neglected your favorite spot, please post a comment here.

For a good read, set in Shanghai, try Qiu Xiaolong’s When Red Is Black. If you’ve lived there in past decade, you’ll find plenty of illuminating detail about the city. If you haven’t, you’ll still enjoy the distracted manner in which Inspector Chen, the poet of the police bureau, solves this case.

Yellowstone yet again

2007-08-06T14:17:00.000-07:00

As artist-in-residence, I curated an exhibit at the Madison Museum: letters from three eras of Yellowstone visitors (on foot, by horse-drawn carriage, and by automobile), a range of writing implements from the quill pen to the laptop computer, and a display of photographs by Mode Wineman, taken while he was a member of Calvin Coolidge’s party, in 1927.

I also wrote letters every day, to family and friends, and hung a different one on the wall each morning alongside the historical artifacts. It was fun to watch tourists come across the new letter amidst the old ones, then glance around guiltily as they realized that the personal details they were reading corresponded with a person who was living in the same moment as themselves. Twice my own letters were stolen from the museum, which I considered a gratifying critical response.

Here’s the most important sentence from the first recorded letter mentioning the Yellowstone region, from trapper Daniel Potts to his brother in Philadelphia, July 8, 1827 (courtesy Yellowstone National Park Archives):

“Write me immediately on the receipt of this . . . giving me the price of Beaver.”

More about Yellowstone

2007-08-01T07:35:00.000-07:00

Like almost every former Yellowstone employee, I think of the park as a shrine and a haven. I worked there as a fishing guide and a woodcutter many years ago, then returned in 1994 as the Moran artist-in-residence. The following story was a runner-up for the Robert Traver Award, and appeared in the September/October 1997 issue of Fly Rod & Reel.

Letter from Yellowstone

I remember Yellowstone in 1978 the way the snake remembers Eden: like a good dream shortchanged, heaven in flames, a paradise ruined through my own corruption. So you of all people should understand why I have to go back every year. You knew Laurie then, loved her too, I suppose, though we never spoke of it, never negotiated the right or honest approach to love. You stood beside me on the sun-warmed dock at Grant Village, in our Y. P. Company uniforms, and watched her dive into Yellowstone Lake to swim with the otters, the water barely fifty degrees in July. And you watched her bite the head off a wriggling twelve-inch cutthroat and casually spit the head into a bucket, the way an ordinary person might spit out a watermelon seed. And you watched her climb the last few hundred feet of Avalanche Peak in a lightning storm, then dare us to follow her by flying her shirt from one outstretched arm, like a signal flag. You might even have married her had I not been desperate enough to quit the best job of my life three weeks early to drive with her to New Jersey for her sister’s wedding. But after sixty-four hours in a borrowed Volkswagen, listening to her rave about the splendor of rugby and the sanctity of marriage and tarpon on a fly, I forgot all about friendship. When it was my turn to drive, I spent most of the time stealing sidelong glances at the passenger seat, admiring the play of headlights in her hair, watching her face grow softer with sleep, and making plans to transfer three years of credits to the university in her hometown, Missoula.

And now she’s gone to Costa Rica with some Orvis-endorsed guide from Livingston, to stalk permit on the flats and—as she says—to wander her options. Isn’t it sad that after fifteen years of more-or-less congenial divorce, it still hurts that she didn’t ask me first? It’s been that kind of summer in Missoula: a late June frost, then an early August one. The tomatoes turned directly from green to black, and the snap beans produced only one meager crop. I couldn’t seem to find time for the river, or when I did was so frantic to catch trout that I pulled the fly from their mouths. Laurie’s phone call raised a welt like one of those interstate bees that crashes into your bare forearm at highway speed, bumbles weakly inside the cab for a few seconds, then recovers just enough to sting you under the chin before escaping into the slipstream. She was cheerful as always, as sure of her good intentions as on that April morning when she announced that she’d bought a house in Livingston, and would be moving there with Marina the following week, and that it would probably be easier on me if I didn’t help them pack. I put down the phone and walked to the Clark Fork to catch my breath. At the confluence with the Bitterroot, two sandhill cranes lumbered over the bare-limbed cottonwoods—necks up, legs down—struggling like swimmers past their depth.

I haven’t recovered. For fifteen years, I’ve been trying not to prepare for the death of hope. Every few months we have a family dinner at Chico Hot Springs or Sir Scott’s Oasis. Every August we fish together on a favorite stretch of the Madison just inside the park boundary, and on those river days I can almost forget that we share only a family history—no present, no future, no geography. But her recent cheerfulness had a new lilt, an unnerving musicality that reminded me of our honeymoon in Alaska, the note of triumph as she’d set the hook in a steelhead bright from Prince William Sound: I’ve got a fish. I was already facing the prospect of winter without my stock of beans canned with dill weed and jalapeños, without trout in the freezer, without tomatoes dried on the picnic table and bottled in olive oil. If Laurie was in love again, and not with me, then where was I to go?

So I called Marina, the daughter we named after the old boatyard at Grant Village, a sophomore now at Montana State and seasonal waitress at Roosevelt Lodge, where you and I used to sit in the big rockers with our feet on the porch rail, sipping gin drinks and looking out over the sagebrush until the smell of barbecued ribs and baked beans almost overcame us. I asked her to meet me at Chico on Friday night so that we could drive into the park together, and she agreed with all of the cheerfulness inherited from her mother, and then I closed my eyes and saw two twenty-year-old shadows close together under the lodgepole pines: the shadow that might have been you, and the shadow that almost certainly was Laurie, her face lifted for a kiss.

Arrived Chico at midnight Friday, bearing two hundred miles of hunger and a hectic month’s worth of exhaustion. The kitchen had closed promptly at ten, and the dining room staff had just finished eating the last of the night’s unordered desserts. They looked pleased with their work—and only mildly apologetic. Happily, Marina and her friends had saved a few morsels from their plates, wrapped in aluminum foil fashioned into the shapes of swans. A medallion of beef, a sliver of venison, four miniature spears of asparagus, the wing and breast of a quail.

That held me to morning. After breakfast, we turned south underneath Emigrant Peak and headed for the park, Marina beside me in the pickup and a present from her affixed to the inside of the windshield—an employee’s entrance pass, silhouette of a white pelican beneath the word Yellowstone. As we hit the curves for Yankee Jim Canyon, I felt that familiar dizzy feeling—a sort of vertigo almost—when the truck seems to be rolling downhill, while the road is most definitely moving uphill, against the falling river. I only feel that way in two places: on Highway 191 from the Gallatin Gateway to West Yellowstone, and on U.S. 89, from Livingston to Gardiner. Perhaps it’s because I know that I’ll soon be in the park, a sort of premeditated giddiness that goes along with any return to a beloved place or person.

On that day the Yellowstone was running dirt-brown from a thunderstorm in the Lamar Valley and the sky was filled with pelicans, wheeling like oversized gulls in a great flock above the road. We craned our necks to see them as they passed over the windshield, their enormous wings flashing silver against the blue. They seemed drunk with flight, with the power to float unhindered on thin air. When we reached the stone arch outside the north entrance, a pronghorn skipped across the pavement as if possessed with that same power, each long leap more like a prelude to flight than an earthbound gait, the whole meadow like a runway.

I was sorry that you weren’t there, really I was. Sorry that you couldn’t feel the insane satisfaction it gave me to pass through the gate with an employee’s sticker on my windshield. To shift into second gear for the twisting climb to Mammoth that we made so many times with Laurie between us. Each switchback in that road was like a pleasant surprise—a surprise because I had memories for each one, and a pleasure because I remembered.

We fished Slough Creek that afternoon, taking turns with the one rod that I brought from Missoula, an old five-weight with a willowy mid-section that’s just right for daydreaming your way through a reach of pools and riffles. I dropped Marina at Roosevelt in time for her evening shift, then headed south towards Lake Hotel, brimful with the good fortune that is my daughter.

On the way up Dunraven, I got caught behind a motor yacht trolling for scenery at a leisurely fifteen knots. Instead of trying to pass, I laid off the accelerator and rolled down the windows. The hillsides below the summit of Mount Washburn were already tinged with the red of autumn. At eight thousand feet, the air smelled of fall, crisp and cool and faintly dusty, without the scent of growing things. To the east: the hulks of Druid Peak and the Thunderer glowering in the smoke of a late-season fire. To the south: forests of pine and fir like a ragged pelt on the flanks of the mountain, meadow grass gone golden with August, the Yellowstone River meandering through the Hayden Valley, and, creeping alongside the river, the glint of aluminum travel trailers in the setting sun.

Their sheepish procession reminded me of another day of fishing with Marina, on a stretch of the Madison that runs alongside the highway to West Yellowstone, when she was still in diapers and her mother still kissed me awake in the mornings. It was a warm, breezy afternoon and I was wading wet, flipping a big caddis nymph into the deep runs, while Marina watched over my shoulder from the safety of the baby pack. As we worked our way downstream, a cow elk walked out into the water below us, her neck and ears twitching with flies. She dipped her muzzle in the water, tossed her head at the shimmery surface, scratched at her neck with one sharp hoof. In minutes, the road was lined shoulder to shoulder with license plates from Illinois and Washington and California. Camera shutters shirred like locusts. The cow took a couple of prancing steps toward the far bank and shook with annoyance. Marina and I turned our backs to the crowd and kept fishing. I heard a splash nearby and to the right, like the swirl of a trout, and pivoted on the mossy rocks. Did you hear that? I asked her. Was that a fish? No, she said, then fell silent. I cast, letting the fly drift under a bathtub-sized patch of river weed and into a dark hole of water.

I was picking up the fly to cast again when Marina whimpered: My sandal. I repeated the word dumbly—sandal, sandal—before remembering the nearby splash. I reached behind me and tickled her right foot. It was bare. When I finally looked downstream, her sandal was bobbing twenty yards away and gaining speed, on a collision course with a fully grown and fully aggravated cow elk. I tried a couple of quick shuffling steps in that direction, then sent the fly out after it. But the beloved sandal was a small, rapidly dwindling target that changed course with each little finger of current. I threw a couple of big mends into the line and still missed by a foot. Marina’s whimpering was more insistent now—Get sandal, get sandal. I took another look at the elk and decided she wouldn’t much appreciate two humans churning downstream into her bath. So I made for shore and the camera-wielding tourists, charged up the bank, then shouldered my way onto the path that parallels the river. The wind was blowing up and across the current, slowing the sandal’s progress enough for us to pull ahead, but also angling it into the deeper water midstream. Fifty yards behind the elk, I picked a gravelly spot and splashed in. The river was belt high. Frightened trout fled for cover as we thrashed through ribbons of weed. My feet had just reached the lip of a dark trough when the sandal floated into arm’s reach. I leaned over and gathered it in like a catcher pulling an outside pitch back towards the strike zone. Marina thrust her hands into the air and cheered loud enough to turn a few cameras from the elk. I cheered too. The nearest onlookers gave us those benign and disconnected smiles that most folks reserve for fools and crazy people. But what did we care? We were flush with success, proud conspirators in a small but significant victory.

I remember wishing that Laurie could have been there to share it, but she had decided to work upstream with a brace of dry flies, toward the junction of the Gibbon and the Firehole, and later only rubbed Marina’s head in a distracted sort of way when we tried to describe the scene. Then she asked about you, wondered aloud why you never wrote, and said that she could never come to the park without thinking of that summer we met.

Hard to believe that we came here in 1978 with nothing but our fly rods and a jar of tartar sauce, two college roommates from Philadelphia, babes in the woods. Is it guilt that makes me scan the faces at every fishing hole and geyser basin, looking for the wisps of blond hair feathered shyly over those raptor’s eyes, your shoulders hunched slightly, as if preparing for flight? I looked for you in the fall of 1982, when a September snow blanketed our favorite camp at Heart Lake; in the smoke of 1988, when that tangle of lodgepoles upstream from Tower Falls burned right to the bank; and in the drought of 1994, when the river showed its bones—smooth black rock and water-polished deadfalls left gleaming three feet above the ordinary water line.

If you had been here then you would’ve noticed the changes. The marina at Grant Village is long gone, only the two breakwaters to remind you of otters swimming sleekly from dock to dock. The tackle store where Laurie played cashier is now a waterfront steak house, and the meadow above the lake has been replaced with a hotel and restaurant complex, where you can order herbed chicken breasts and chilled Chardonnay. Our favorite stretch of the Yellowstone River, above Tower Falls, has become a certified hot spot, recommended at fly shops and touted in guidebooks. On a typical summer day the parking lot overflows with rental cars and motor homes for at least a hundred yards uphill of the Hamilton store, forcing traffic to a crawl. The trail to the base of the falls has been redone with post-and-pole fences to keep over-enthusiastic sightseers from cutting switchbacks. What you might remember as a claustrophobic stand of lodgepoles crisscrossed with down timber is now mostly open, with tremendous views of sulfur-tinged canyon walls and blue-green water. There are no longer enough shadows to hide the bears that we imagined lurked in wait for college students, and no longer enough privacy to entice those students to roast trout on a stick over a small, smoky fire. There are still a few trees left, of course, as well as some charred snags and tangles of wild roses, but a two-foot wide path now parallels the bank for miles upstream. At every obvious pool, other paths split off the main trail and head for the river’s edge. The last time I walked it, the water seemed as blank and lifeless as a mirror. I would cast, the fly would drift aimlessly with the current, no trout would move to break the surface, then I would cast again.

I let that pattern of failure repeat itself for several hours, thinking of Laurie gone and the trout too, thumbing through my book of failings like a sorry preacher with his Testament, snatching the fly from the water lest a fish hook itself and break the spell. As had become my habit in the months after Laurie took Marina with her to Livingston, I told myself that I deserved every blow that bad luck could deliver, that I had no right to expect something good to come from the way I’d acted, although of course something had. Did you know that I was in love with her—not afterwards, I’m sure that you guessed afterwards—but before? On that night of her farewell party, that night when I saw the two of you underneath the lodgepoles, just beyond the reach of the firelight, when I announced that I suddenly needed to go back to Philadelphia and would catch a ride with Laurie if she didn’t mind? What matters, I suppose, is that I knew—or thought I knew—that you loved her, and that I waded in anyway, and now that river has washed me here, a thin stick of dead wood drifting in the current.

I continued to flog myself with those thoughts all that long afternoon, and to flail pointlessly at the water, until at last a little gray caddis flew up underneath my sunglasses and I had to stop to wipe my eyes. After that, I could no longer ignore the hordes of caddis on the bankside willows and thickets of wild rose. I tied on a caddis emerger and turned back downstream, this time paying attention to all the little pockets and eddies that others might overlook. I lingered a while in each one, steering the fly through the deeper cuts and then slowly raising it to the surface, like a swimmer nonchalantly looking for air. More often than not, the shadow of a trout rose after it—looming into view like a ribbon of gold in the green water. No monsters came to the fly, but the action was steady and the fish beautiful—with sleek flanks and a certain firmness you could feel in your hands, a limber strength that trout raised in warmer, slower water can’t pretend to own.

Back at the confluence of Tower Creek and the Yellowstone, I looked longingly at the sharp, steep bend in the canyon wall, no trail visible in the soft earth. Since the river was low, I figured I could sneak along the ankle-deep ledge and get downstream to the more lightly fished water. But the afternoon sun was wearing on into evening, and the back of my throat was dust-dry, and the image of a double-dip ice cream cone suddenly appeared in my head and remained there, perfectly frozen. I snipped off the tattered emerger, stowed my reel in a vest pocket, and started up the hill.

On the canyon rim, two mighty tour buses had just pulled into the parking lot and disgorged their charges. The trail was flooded with tourists: mothers, fathers, children, grandmothers. Judging from the conversation, they were mostly Americans, though I also caught snatches of accented English that reminded me how little I know of the world. Inside the Hamilton store, the line for ice cream wound up and down the aisles like a New Year’s parade. I swallowed hard, and bought a six-pack instead.

Drank dinner last night in the high-ceilinged lobby at Lake Hotel, gazing out the picture window while a string quartet sawed away at the evening. Do you remember the time some park service employees dug a charcoal pit in the gravel beach near Fishing Bridge, buried a whole pig in the hot coals, then got too drunk to eat and just left the carcass roasting in the sand? By the time we stumbled onto the scene, only a half-dozen stout souls were still awake, lounging against two unopened cases of barbecue sauce while the stars spun in their orbits. I can still see you and Laurie pulling the succulent meat from the bones, as soft and sweet as cotton candy, while white-winged pelicans ghosted across the full moon like pterodactyls.

For some reason, that memory made it impossible for me to eat or sleep. I lay awake all night remembering how happy we felt, how impossibly lucky to roam the beach of Yellowstone Lake under a full moon in July and catch the scent of keg beer and slow-cooked meat. At that time I thought that it had everything to do with the three of us together, but now I recall that Laurie had rousted us from our beds after midnight, just to share the moon, and neither one of us could resist her.

In the morning, I checked out before breakfast and drove southwest along the lake shore, then turned west along the Grand Loop Road to cross and recross the continental divide. A cold front had blown the smoke out of the park and the western horizon looked sharp and blue. I fought the urge to turn in at Old Faithful for a bloody mary at the Bear Pit, stopping instead at the Lower Geyser Basin, taking the bridge over the Firehole and making my way through the crowds to the end of the boardwalk. As I peered into the crater of Fountain Geyser, an old man in a soft canvas hat, a disposable camera dangling from his leathery neck, croaked It’s gonna blow. Sure enough, several standing waves appeared in the turquoise pool, then a tidal surge, and then the sky filled with steam and water, great blasts that frothed thirty feet into the air, splashed onto a floodplain of white sinter, then ran downslope to pool about the hooves of grazing bison. Above the slosh and grumble of the geyser, I could hear the shouts of children, cheering with each burst of water as if they were riding in the front seat of a rollercoaster. For a moment, I wished that Marina was small again, riding in the backpack with her warm arms around my neck, until I remembered the deft motion with which she unhooked a sixteen-inch rainbow without lifting it from the water, then stood straight-backed again and smiling, a loop of line already rising into the air. Maybe next year, I thought, we would take our own trip south—to Belize maybe, or the southern Yucatan—we’d even invite Laurie, if she wanted to go, and I could watch the two of them stalk bonefish and marvel at both the one who used to love me and the one who always will.

By the time the geyser roared itself dry again, I was hungry. I drove straight into West Yellowstone and bought a bag of cocktail shrimp, a hunk of blue cheese, a loaf of sourdough bread, and a flask of bourbon. I spent the rest of the afternoon prospecting the Madison, fishing offhandedly upstream until I encroached on another angler or strayed too far from the bourbon and the shrimp chilling in the cooler. By sunset, I had worked my way to within a mile of the junction, where the river meanders weedily through a broad meadow of sedge and thistles. As soon as I parked the truck, two cow elk and their calves crossed the river above me and bent their necks to graze. I had an hour of twilight left and knotted a black marabou fly as long as my thumb to the leader. Big fish or no fish. I dropped the fly alongside the shadowed banks and inched it leechlike towards the main current; flipped it behind boulders and under deadfalls; cast it into the current and pulsed it back towards the bank. No sign of trout. As I splashed through a backwater to the next bend, a ten-inch rainbow fled before me, pushing a small wake that creased the fading light. Twenty yards farther downstream, a frightened minnow skittered into the air and fell back again. I watched for the telltale swirl of a big brown but saw nothing, gave the pool a couple dozen careful casts just in case. Still nothing. I stood in the middle of what seemed like a lifeless pool while the water broke behind my knees and rejoined below them, a soft sound that I suddenly wished would drown the endless thrum of cars on the road to West Yellowstone, travelers turned away from the park’s chockfull hotels, or employees out for a night on the town. I fished hard for a while, casting steadily, moving two steps downstream with each cast. The dark crept into the water first, so that slick moss and shallow gravel and shoulder-deep holes all began to look dimly alike. The rush of engines grew louder and the glare of headlights brighter. I snipped the fly from my tippet and wound the leader onto the reel. When I shuffled at last to shore, the elk had worked in behind me. If you will forgive me, I thought, I will abstain from fishing tomorrow, and from catching and killing fish, and forgo the satisfaction of watching that delicate orange meat of a Yellowstone cutthroat flake from the bones. The nearer cow picked up her head and turned her big ears toward my sigh. Not the worried, ready-to-bolt look of elk in hunting season, but a gesture of interest. Her calf took two bouncing steps then melted in behind her, aligning legs with her mother’s so that they seemed to become a single alert and yet unconcerned animal. I spoke to them, quiet reassurances and words of small praise. They were beautiful. A half-mile upstream, I could see the bleached shell of the pickup glowing in the pale light of the moon.

Looking Forward

2007-07-29T08:31:00.000-07:00

In mid-month we set out for Maine, leaving Montana as parched as it has ever been in July, the rivers too warm to fish.

We took with us our ice skates and our winter clothes, two bicycles, a turkey call, and a circular saw. Also our noisy, bent-tailed cat, fresh off the plane from China, who had become very much attached to Montana after just a few weeks of mouse hunting in our ungrazed pasture. He mourns his loss daily, hours of low- and high-pitched keening, which reverberates from the car windows like the sufferings of souls in hell.

The warm weather limits our visits to parks, diners, and other roadside attractions, because it is too hot to leave the cat in the car. But we drove through Yellowstone from west to east, and made a quick tour of the boardwalks that surround Fountain Paint Pots and Clepsydra Geyser, where I once taught a writing workshop as the Moran artist-in-residence.

For dinner along Interstate 90, we can recommend the Winchester in Buffalo, Wyoming (117 Highway 16 East, 307-684-8636), which offers good steak dinners and an iconic chicken pot pie, and warn against Emiliano’s in Appleton, Wisconsin (3025 West College Avenue, 920-739-6186), where the linguine was overcooked, the pizza bland, and the salt shaker must have fallen into the lasagna.

Before I Went

2007-07-03T10:26:00.000-07:00

After two years in Shanghai, I'm back in Montana. But, only temporarily, as the mail reminds me. Another letter from an editor, expressing regret, for not publishing a story that I wrote just before leaving here in 2005. This piece was written on assignment, lost in a shuffle of editors at one magazine, landed (safely, I thought) at another, then fell from the calendar like a leaf from a beech, tenacious but not, in the end, enough.

Before You Go

What will you do when your time runs short? Let's say three months—and you're out. Not dead exactly, but gone away from the landscape you love. Gone from Montana.

Because it was spring, I drove east on Highway 12 after a late snowstorm, the road dark under the dawning sky, and darker still where black ice sheathed the asphalt. Between Harlowton and Ryegate, I could see the slim silhouettes of sandhill cranes stalking in the fields. A few miles farther east, in Musselshell County, I could hear the gobbling of wild turkeys.

That was one of the things I knew I wanted: to walk through open stands of ponderosa pine, among white phlox and purple vetch, sand lilies and shooting stars. To lean my back against a genial tree as the day warmed, with a shotgun resting across my knees, and—with the help of a wooden box call—scratch out the peculiar yelping cry of a hen turkey.

Two weeks later I headed north on Highway 191, to a muddy bend of the Missouri River in the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, where a series of rain squalls doused my plans for an evening out. I slept instead in the passenger seat of a compact station wagon, with the resident mouse scrabbling periodically over my feet. At sunrise, I rigged an old surfcasting rod, relic of my former lives on various coasts, with four ounces of lead and a treble hook the size of an osprey's claw. Then I holstered a pair of pliers to my belt, and slipped the wrist-loop of a short-handled gaff around the holster.

All that in preparation for the second experience I did not wish to do without: the crisp taste of fresh caviar, made with my own two hands, from what some call North America's oldest big-game animal.

As individuals, paddlefish can live more than 50 years; as a species, they haven't changed much in 300 million. They are smooth-skinned and otherworldly creatures, and by far the most substantial fish in Montana. Because they feed on plankton, paddlefish cannot be lured to the hook with the ordinary deceptions. They are not enticed like trout but ensnared like interstate tourists.

In my opinion, their first powerful surge compares favorably to that of tuna or tarpon, while the firm white meat is quite as tasty as swordfish. But the grey-black pearly roe is the real prize. Unlike my harmless attempts at turkey hunting, this pursuit ultimately required a killing, and I made two—relatively runty specimens of just under 40 pounds each—affixed the appropriate tags, and turned towards home.

Which, in fewer days than I dare to count, will become our former home. Not permanently, but for at least two years, and perhaps longer. In the metropolis where we will soon take up residence, everything will be different: the faces, the food, even the language. I am decidedly not looking forward to the move but am admittedly fascinated by the dislocation.

It is possible, I have learned, to love a place so much, to feel so confidently at ease in it, that one is forced to leave occasionally, else be overwhelmed by smugness. I don't mean that I fit in here in Montana, but—as the wise guys say—there's such a fine line between a groove and a rut.

Perhaps that's why my next excursion had nothing to do with hunting or fishing. I wanted something to shake me up, a destination where I could not hide behind the familiar cloaks of silence and solitude. Mark Twain found an enthusiastic audience in this city's Grand Opera House—"compact, intellectual, and dressed in perfect taste"—while Jack Kerouac wrote that his whole concept of On the Road "changed and matured" there.

On the weekend of my visit, the same town, though not perfectly desolate, appeared so unpopulated that my eyes were drawn to any agglomeration of people: a foursome of travel writers laughing beside a rental car, a throng of grim-faced men quitting the Independent Order of Odd Fellows' Hall, a girl's 400-meter relay team in the window of the Uptown Café, each with a plate of chicken cacciatore.

This was Butte, of course, and the object of my pilgrimage was the M&M. Sam Martin and William Mosby opened the landmark saloon in 1890. Until just a few years ago, its only recorded closure had occurred in 1989, when the flow of alcohol was interrupted for two hours during a gambling raid orchestrated by an attorney general named Marc Racicot. Kerouac paid his respects in February of 1949, after checking his bag in a bus-station locker. He called it "the end of my quest for the ideal bar."

There was a time, as a childless couple in Missoula, when my wife and I truly enjoyed going to bars. We would lean our bicycles against a downtown parking meter and, depending on the mood, proceed from the Rhino to the Iron Horse, from the Bodega to the Boardroom, from Charlie's to Al and Vic's. At the end of the evening, suitably primed, we would ride no-hands along the leafy streets, a trick that I was too stiff to perform sober. Since those years, we also have changed and matured. We have children now, for instance, as well as mortgages: two of each.

Our third-grader, a daughter, accompanied me to the M&M. We enjoyed breakfast there one morning, then went back the next for a beer (me) and a Shirley Temple (not me). After a Chapter 7 bankruptcy and a Hollywood makeover, the M&M is nothing like it was in bygone days. Kerouac described "hundreds of men play[ing] cards in an atmosphere of smoke and spittoons" and declared that, on a Sunday night, in sub-zero weather, "everyone in Butte was drunk."

In Wim Wenders' 2005 film, "Don't Come Knocking," the M&M is transformed into a coffee shop, with Jessica Lange as its sober owner. I haven't seen it (who can find time for Cannes these days?), but Wenders' website bills it as "a farce, a family story, a road movie." Which means, I suppose, that the plot should resemble our daily lives—if our daily lives include entanglements with Sam Shepard and Eva Marie Saint.

The actual owners, though new to the business, are not new to Butte. Bud Walker is a county commissioner and self-described "Butte rat." Both he and his wife Vina stood behind the bar on the days we stopped by. The atmosphere was subdued, with not much smoke and absolutely no spittoons. In an interview with the Montana Standard, Bud remembers the M&M as "a security blanket." And that's what it felt like to me.

Behind the stainless steel façade—an Art Deco embellishment of the original brick—the talk was of education and politics, history and real estate. For example, did you know that Butte once boasted more than a dozen newspapers, including at least three dailies, as well as the Croatian World and Montana Socialist? Or that, two decades before statehood, by official census, the population of Montana territory was no less than ten percent Chinese? Or that the lot now occupied by a franchise pizza parlor was once home to Blonde Edna's House of Ill Repute?

To my mind, such stories are as integral to the Montana landscape as sagebrush and riverbeds. I cannot set foot in a high meadow without scanning the grass for elk sign, nor can I approach the water without searching for riffles and seams. In Butte, no matter how I try to locate myself in the here and now, I can't stop myself from contemplating the past.

The ghosts are everywhere: in a jumble of dusty adding machines, or an array of tinsmith's tools; in a faded sign painted on dry brick, and in the warm dank air that wafts from the mouth of the Orphan Girl Mine, 2700 feet deep. For some reason, I find the ghost signs particularly affecting. I don't know why they should seem any more emblematic than all the other artifacts of lost commerce: the black iron headframes, or the cracked glass of the Mai Wah Noodle Parlor, or the rising, purplish waters of the Berkeley Pit. But they do.

Looking out the ballroom windows of the Finlen Hotel, modeled after New York's Hotel Astor, you can see the mark of the friendly Miners Union Bar. The bar is long gone, and what few miners remain toil in a non-union shop. But there is something jaunty about the sign, defiant even, as if the present burden were no more than a veil.

It cheered me just to see it, in the same way that a sincerely sad song can lift you from despair. Our absence, after all, will be no more permanent than labor solidarity, a vein of copper, or the red-gold flash of a western tanager. With any luck, we'll be back with eyes hungry for the familiar and the changed, with far-fetched stories of far-off places, and with a fresh appreciation of the word urban.

If it is possible to make a career of itinerancy, we must be at least halfway there. Montana has never been our exclusive residence, only our favorite and most steadfast home. In spite of my sniveling, there can be no homecomings without leave-takings, no departures without returns. I am looking forward to this flight.

But first, I think I'll go back to the M&M. Not for the last time, but one more time, on the way to the airport if need be, one more slow beer safe behind that old façade, a tonic against homesickness, a fortification against forgetting.

Before You Go

2007-06-29T11:44:00.000-07:00

What should you do on your last evening in Shanghai? Circumnavigate the Bund. Which means see its inscrutable mix of architecture from as many different angles as you can, from various elevations, and from both sides of the Huangpu River.

You can begin wherever you like (it’s a circle after all) but don’t start until sunset, when Shanghai’s lights and shadows are at their best. Use the elevated crosswalks over Yan’an Lu and Zhongshan Lu. The view from both is panoramic. The former Bund meteorological tower, a museum for many years, is now a bar named Atanu (3313 0871). Climb the circular staircase to the third-level deck for a cocktail or two. They don’t stint on the gin.

Back on ground level, walk south until you see the turnstiles for the Huangpu ferry. The ticket office is behind you, in a little booth by the road. Exchange 2 yuan for a blue plastic token and you’re on your way. The ferry is airconditioned but the most urgent views are outside, leaning against the rail, where the neon reflects from the glistening surface of the river. The captain will dodge freighters and barge traffic on his trip across the current.

You will dock just south of the Citigroup building, then walk north, toward the Pearl Tower. You can turn into the gate for the Riverside Promenade, or make a brief detour into the elevators of the Shangri-la Hotel. The uppermost floor of Tower 2 houses Jade on 36, an atmospheric bar and innovative restaurant, with floor-to-ceiling windows (and really cool bathrooms).

Continue north along the river, past the Super Brand Mall, to the entrance to the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel (35 yuan), one of the world’s oddest forms of urban transport, with a seizure-inducing light show and cryptic narration.

Emerge somewhat dazzled, then take the underground passage near Nanjing Road, and stroll south again. You have any number of choices for a celebratory dinner in 18 on the Bund, 5 on the Bund, or 3 on the Bund. The food at Laris is wonderful, but the winelist is annoyingly overpriced. For reasonably affordable extravagance, my pick would be appetizers in the bar at Jean Georges (6321 7733), the Shanghai outpost of New York’s celebrity chef, Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Ask to see the dining-room menu, and don’t neglect either the crunchy tiger prawns or the foie gras brulée.

Dreamscape, with formaldehyde

2007-06-19T10:52:00.000-07:00

For years I have had a recurring dream that takes place in an old museum of natural history. Not one of the new and shiny temples to technology, but a musty building with wooden starircases, peeling paint, and open windows. As it turns out, this place exists in Shanghai. The Natural History Gallery on 260 Yan’an East Road houses a well-seasoned collection of the taxidermist’s art in the former Cotton Exchange building, built in 1923. If you go, be prepared to share the dinosaur bones, neolithic dioramas, and jars of snakes in preservative with groups of shuddering schoolgirls. Don’t miss the stuffed whale shark suspended in front of aqua blue curtains, or, nearly hidden in a second-floor gallery: two deadpan mummies, chastely draped.

Another Break in the Wall

2007-06-13T14:15:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the long silence, but the Chinese censors have been more effective than usual the past two weeks. I'm back in the States now, so will post this old message:

On Wednesday, while running down addresses for Explorer Publishing’s Complete Residents Guide to Shanghai (due out in September), I visited the only remnant of Shanghai’s old city wall. It’s part of the western gate, built in 1553, a tower where archers could take aim at the sort of Japanese invaders who didn’t come armed with credit cards.

The rest of the wall was demolished in 1912, according to a Shanghai government website, because it had become “an obstacle in the city’s economic development and communication.”

The address is 269 Dajing Road and the entry fee is 5 yuan. On the second floor of the Dajing Pavilion, a stone bears an inscription that translates as “His majesty’s good faith lasts eternally,” referring to the Ming emperor, I suppose. The ground floor houses a small historical exhibit, including a scale model of the old city.

Outside the wall, in the small park that adjoins the splendidly developed and exceedingly communicative Renmin Road, an old man hung his cap and cane on a fencepost, then commenced his silent practice of tai chi.

In Olde Shanghai

2007-06-01T03:08:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, I followed freelance photographer Gangfeng Wang on a tour of the Shanghai neighborhood where he grew up. The aging blocks of shikumen housing are slated for demolition by the end of 2007. He introduced us to several residents, and also took us inside a grand building that I’ll describe below.

The central staircase, as wide as the lane outside, winds upward to the former ballroom. Above our heads, the day’s laundry dries on bamboo poles slotted between the balusters. On the second-floor landing, the judge’s widow is frying her lunch: a platter of small headless fish, each no longer than a teaspoon.

Eleven judges once shared this dwelling, a mansion that its Concession-era owner intended to house a single family. But the Party liberated it for the judges—and now the survivors and descendants of judges, three of whom stand side by side at their stoves at this very moment, each tending a single burner.

Their collective spirit came to a halt with the advent of utility bills. Each resident has designated gas, electric, and water meters, with separate switches and taps. Although for the first 50 years, they all took turns in the lone bathtub and toilet.

The judge’s widow has lived in this place since she was 25 and that’s what she wants us to know. Last year, she and her housemates were finally rewarded with private bathrooms.

Steam rises from the widow’s wok and I follow its path upward, to a decorated plaster ceiling, once pink and gold and perhaps green, but now the tactile brown of five decades of cooking grease. One resident tried to paint it white, the widow says, but we think it looks better this way.

P.S. This entry emerged from a brief exercise with the writing group that I am now (sadly) leaving. Thanks to all of you for your stories and your friendship.

Annals of American Hegemony

2007-05-29T17:18:00.001-07:00

How can you tell when your brand has achieved market saturation? Consider this pocket-sized candy tin in Mumbai, India.

Why Stories Matter

2007-05-25T19:36:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back I mentioned environmental psychology but a recent article in the The New York Times introduced me to another, even more interesting subgenre of the field: narrative psychology.

According to the author, Benedict Carey, "Every American may be working on a screenplay, but we are also continually updating a treatment of our own life — and the way in which we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but how we behave, new studies find. By better understanding how life stories are built, this work suggests, people may be able to alter their own narrative, in small ways and perhaps large ones."

I find this a lot easier to believe than the so-called Secret, although I think it also explains part of the Secret's appeal, along with its individual stories of success.

Photograph (and Memories)

2007-05-22T23:22:00.000-07:00

In the name of research, I’ve recently permitted myself to order from several atypical menus. Yesterday I ate something unexplainable. Not sickening or repulsive, just baffling.

The restaurant was La Villa Rouge, housed in the former EMI Recording Studios. The place has made more than one “best of Shanghai” list over the years, and is reported to boast a team of Japanese chefs. The setting is stylishly retro, overlooking Xujiahui Park, complete with music memorabilia. The prices are utterly modern, if not exorbitant.

I ordered ceviche, expecting something that would go down well with a cold beer and got this instead: four blandly boiled shrimp, and a few specks of caviar, served in a martini glass, on a bed of what looked like pudding and tasted like instant mashed potatoes. No hint of the advertised lime vinaigrette.

Just thinking about this disappointment makes me want to remember some of my favorites, and there have been many, in places as far apart as Los Barriles, Mexico, and Tokyo, Japan.

Halibut ceviche at Alaska’s Double Musky Inn in 1989. A Filipino version, called kinilaw, at Balicasag Island Dive Resort, near Bohol. And conch salad, made dockside in the Florida Keys, before the U.S. ban on conch harvesting.

Here’s that recipe, if you ever find yourself in an appropriate spot. Catch six conchs and pack them overnight in crushed ice. After the grip on the shell loosens with the chill, pull the animal free. Trim away the guts and peel off the skin. Dice the conch meat into a punchbowl along with two sweet onions, two green peppers, and a quart of cherry tomatoes. Season the mix with cilantro and jalapenos and cover with fresh lime juice. Refrigerate for at least several more hours, or as long as you can stand it.

An Updated Guide to Shanghai

2007-05-22T07:46:00.001-07:00

In Shanghai, the more things change, the more they continue to change. It’s hard to overstate the pace of transformation in this place. For anyone who plans to visit the city in the near term, here are some guidebook regulars that no longer exist or are currently under renovation:

Hengshan Moller Villa. One of Shanghai’s so-called boutique hotels. To picture the larger setting imagine Hans Christian Andersen meets the Pasadena Freeway. Knock on the gate if you desire a conversation straight out of the Wizard of Oz. No, you can’t look inside, but the hotel is scheduled to re-open in the fall of 2007.

Peace Hotel. The adjective legendary means Noel Coward wrote “Private Lives” here in 1930 and the same jazz band was still playing last year. (At least they sounded like the same band.) The Jinjiang Group has joined forces with Saudi and Swiss companies for two years’ worth of remodeling.

Ohel Moishe Synagogue (and its museum of the Jewish experience in Shanghai). Completely shrouded at the moment. Should re-open to the public by late August or September. Mr. Wang, the 88-year-old volunteer docent, who grew up in the ghetto himself, holds court now at Huoshan Park, a block away.

Ohel Rachel Synagogue. Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright visited in 1998. When I tried last week, the security guards wouldn’t let me in the driveway. No lengthy explanations, just a sheet of paper whose words I can’t quite recall. Something like, “Private business. Closed to viewing.”

Xiang Yang Market. Although cash is still king, the emperor’s favorite source for fake brand-name goods has been gone for almost a year. Several pretenders to the throne have emerged, most notably the Fenshine Fashion Accessories Plaza, at 580 Nanjing West Road.

Mao in Love

2007-05-20T03:10:00.000-07:00

Last week I visited the restored lane house where Mao lived for nine months in 1924 with the second of his four wives, Yang Kaihui, their two young sons, and Yang’s mother. He was thirty-one years old. The Chinese Communist Party was an infant of three.

Many historians now estimate that Mao could be held responsible for 70 million deaths.

Yang might be included in this number. She was arrested in Changsha by a local warlord, and executed on November 14, 1930. Mao, who was by then a leader of the Red Army—and involved with another “revolutionary wife”—made no move to save her.

Some of this information, of course, is not mentioned in the exhibit. The official text, in Chinese and English, is properly fawning. For example: “Although from 1927 to 1949 Mao Zedong was unable to come to Shanghai personally . . . , Mao Zedong timely gave instructions to point out the way forward for the struggle of the People of Shanghai.”

The setting is benign, approaching somnolence. On the morning that I went, there were no other visitors. Without any sense of historical perspective, you might imagine yourself at a shrine to the love-nest of some long-forgotten martyrs.

Note: Although at least one guidebook lists a Weihai Lu address, the entrance is around the corner at 120 Maoming Lu.

To restore your sense of Shanghai’s reality, enter the gate at 590 Weihai Lu and walk north toward the Nanjing Road West Metro Station. I revived considerably by watching the lane’s residents hanging laundry and washing vegetables.

Brief Message from the Universe

2007-05-18T16:50:00.000-07:00

"You want your mind to be boggled. That is a pleasure in and of itself. And it's more a pleasure if it's boggled by something that you can then demonstrate is really, really true." —physicist Saul Perlmutter

Family History

2007-05-17T19:28:00.000-07:00

My middle name is my father's first name: Warren. I'd always assumed that the typical explanation was the correct one, until my mother mentioned that they'd made the selection in honor of Earl Warren, the former Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

In yesterday's Writer's Almanac, Garrison Keillor had this to say about the Warren Court:

The legal basis for segregation came from the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, which had established the precedent that separate facilities for black and white students could be constitutional as long as those separate facilities were equal. When Brown v. Board of Education first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, most of the justices were personally opposed to segregation, but only four of them openly supported overturning such a long-established precedent.

But in September of 1953, just before the rehearing of the case, Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson died of a sudden heart attack. For the new chief justice, President Eisenhower chose Earl Warren, then the governor of California. As governor of California, Earl Warren had helped to intern many Japanese Americans during World War II, and most historians believe he felt deep regret at having done so. Ever since the war, he had devoted himself to the issue of civil rights. So when he became chief justice, he was the ideal person to argue for declaring segregation unconstitutional.

Warren's vote alone could have given the court a 5-4 vote margin overturning segregation, but Warren decided that he had to get a unanimous decision for such a controversial case. Warren had never served as a judge in his life. But he was a master politician, and he used his art of persuasion to bring the last few justices around to his point of view. The final holdout was Justice Stanley Reed, from Kentucky. Warren finally persuaded Reed that a lone dissent from a Southerner could have an inflammatory effect on the nation.

Once he had all the votes, Warren drafted the decision himself. To announce the decision, he read it aloud to a crowd at the court on this day in 1954. He said, in part, "Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race ... deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does." Justice Stanley Reed, who had been the final holdout, wept as the decision was read.

Onward and Upward with the Arts

2007-05-17T06:52:00.000-07:00

Don't know who coined the phrase but I like it at least as much as The New Yorker.

I admit here that it's time to leave Mumbai as a setting and return to Shanghai. Anything approaching coherence in that narrative would require the time for a thoughtful revision. Considering my workload and our imminent departure from China, that luxury is unavailable at the moment.

Although I have been enjoying Shanghai in a way unknown to longer-term residents, and was detained briefly by the traffic police last week. At the corner of Nanjing Road and the Bund, by a cop with dark glasses who had perhaps watched one too many Clint Eastwood movies. He closed his fingers around my wrist and kept asking me what I'd expect if I'd broken the law in America.

The peak of his cap came up short of my chin but by the time I thought to break away we had attracted an encircling crowd of onlookers. I made the cowardly bid of pretending that I knew no Mandarin, but a saintly woman stepped in and interpreted for us, preventing an international incident and convincing him, somehow, not only to let me go without a fine, but to pretend as if he had never seen me before.

And that's the end of the Mumbai story, for now.

One Sentence after Another

2007-05-16T16:31:00.000-07:00

Note: This story began on April 25.

To misquote Marlon Brando, I am neither my brother’s keeper nor his executioner.

I don’t know how the Mumbai story swerved from fashion to immigration but I think it does, in the end, have something to do with the coincidences of birth.

When traveling in Asia, I am sometimes struck by the union of blue and brown: blue American passport, tanned brown skin. Their convergence on my person allows me to cross borders with relative ease, to mingle in crowds like a distant cousin.

Living in close proximity with millions of striving people, you can’t help but entertain the old questions of resemblance, advantage, and inequity. What if you were born to a family of peasant farmers? Or migrant laborers? To a mother who sells bootleg DVDS on a dusty bridge and a father who scavenges cardboard and Styrofoam in his bicycle cart?

Favored with the benefits of the American systems of economy, justice, and education, what have I made of myself? A bewildered onlooker.

The Economics of Champagne, Revisited

2007-05-16T05:44:00.000-07:00

For more on the social and economic significance of expensive Champagne, read Floyd Norris, who argues that overpriced bottles represent another form of wealth redistribution, filling the void left by the demise of the progressive income tax.

Procrastination

2007-05-14T18:10:00.000-07:00

“I despise all I see of progress, except anesthetics.” —Lesley Blanch

Excuses Come to an End, Almost

2007-05-13T18:38:00.000-07:00

Note: This story began on April 25.

I haven't been able to log on for several days, thanks to the Chinese censors. Wish I could use that as an excuse, but that would be dishonest. What with guidebook research and other duties and distractions, I’ve neglected to cobble even a counterfeit ending for the Mumbai story.

I wanted to focus somehow on that feeling of continuity and wonder that Cliff and I felt walking late one night in the Bhindi Bazaar, an ancient and predominantly Muslim quarter, drifting and surging with the tides of shoppers and shopkeepers.

There were men pushing wooden carts laden with crates and boxes, porters bearing woven baskets atop their heads, teenagers murmuring into cell phones, smaller children crowded around stone basins of fish, a merchant demonstrating a wind-up Victrola to a crowd of men in dusty robes.

I felt like I could hear the sounds of centuries overlapping.

I've traveled alone and with family but this moment was different somehow, maybe because Cliff asked if I could ever have imagined that we would be walking together in this strange place and I had to say no, this was beyond imagining on any sort of personal level.

No individual mind could have imagined that we would find ourselves at Decent Corner, two Chinese-American brothers who last shared a bedroom in a town best known, if known at all, as the childhood home of Chester A. Arthur.

The 21st president of the United States, nicknamed the Gentleman Boss, succeeded from his elected post of vice-president after James Garfield’s assassination. By most accounts, he was a better statesman than anyone had the right to expect. Even the deservedly cynical Mark Twain admitted that, “It would be hard indeed to better President Arthur’s administration.” It was during his term that Congress first passed the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882). Immigrants of Chinese descent would remain ineligible for U.S. citizenship until 1943.

Have Faith?

2007-05-09T06:26:00.000-07:00

For anyone who has been following these posts, I promise to bring the Mumbai story to a close. I don't promise the last words on luxury, fashion, Bombay, or brotherhood, but I do want to end that narrative and move on to something else.

Just agreed to write a chapter for Explorer Publishing's guide to Shanghai, so I have incentive.

In Praise of Wild Mushrooms, Old Friends, and Tenth Birthdays

2007-05-06T06:35:00.000-07:00

Note: I wrote this story in 2002, when we lived in Montana's Paradise Valley. It originally appeared in the Park County Press.

Until I met Olen, I never thought about what to do in my spare time. If there had been any questions, the answer would always have been the same: fish. Deep in the mountains or back behind the gravel pit, along head-high willows or through foot-thick ice. Just fish.

Olen loves to hunt trout too, but his expansive definition of fair game opened my heart to other pursuits. Deer and elk, of course, grouse, fossils, huckleberries, sapphires, mushrooms. Especially morel mushrooms–those wrinkled, pitted beauties whose flavor has come to represent everything fresh and fine about the spring.

Our favorite variety grows along rivers, streams, and ditches. They are sometimes the drab color of a dried cottonwood leaf or an overwintered pine cone, sometimes an almost luminescent orange or gold. These latter ones gleam like lanterns in the new grass. Finding them inspires a greedy sort of joy, the grabby happiness of a child collecting Easter eggs.

Although we have found them in late April and early June, May has been consistently our best month. I associate the taste of these morels with the scent of lilacs in the backyard, the sight of arrowleaf balsamroot on sunny hillsides. The flavor is both elegant and unrefined. In a bountiful year, we like them with eggs at breakfast, with elk at dinner. When havests are meager, we parse them bite by bite, savoring each morsel like a kiss.

On the day that Olen and I struck the mother lode of morels, my son Dave was born sixteen weeks prematurely. We found the mushrooms in a section of floodplain owned by a local veterinarian. They sprouted so thickly that you could fill a bag without leaving your knees. Olen alternately picked and cheered, cheered and picked, or maybe that was me who did the shouting. In any event, we were back at the house by noon, leaving the most abundant patch intact on the forest floor, for Sarah.

But Sarah wasn’t at home. In her place, the answering machine blinked. I met her at the hospital in Missoula that afternoon. Before midnight, Dave would be airlifted to the neonatal intensive care unit in Seattle, a boy not much bigger than a trout.

None of us ever tasted those particular morels. I went with Dave on the Learjet, strapped in like a smokejumper alongside the portable incubator, with its mystifying array of lights and monitors. Sarah remained at the Missoula hospital for a few more days, her fever spiking at 105 degrees. I don’t know why Olen didn’t take the mushrooms, but I can guess. Some other friends eventually claimed the treasure. By all accounts, they were very good.

Dave is ten years old now, and his birthday still reminds us of morels and other things. We spent six weeks in Seattle, learning the ABCs of prematurity: apnea, bradycardia, and cynanosis. Apnea means that the lungs stop breathing, bradycardia that the heart stops beating, cyanosis that the skin turns blue. During that time we occasionally saw wild mushrooms for sale in the Pike Place Market, but they were stale, shriveled remnants of their former selves, and at fifteen dollars per pound we were scarcely moved to buy them.

This spring it snowed on Dave’s birthday. And again the following week—which explains why we waited nearly until Memorial Day for our first morels of the season. Even then we found only three, after hours of searching. But if the streambank was unproductive, the stream itself was not. We fried the mushrooms in the same pan with five rainbow trout, collected by Dave and his younger sister. The fish were compact little battlers, densely spotted, still in spawning colors. The kids rejoiced with each capture, and Sarah and I did too.

Together, the trout and mushrooms and a brace of dry martinis made the kind of dinner which should not be repeated too often, lest you grow numb to its beauty.

Digression, with Champagne

2007-05-04T21:33:00.000-07:00

I don’t begin to understand how we decide to allow or deny ourselves the various gradations of pleasure or of luxury. Marketers remind us that only a select few deserve the very best but is it really a question of worth? Is there a tiny accountant in your head who suspects that your inimitable self is worth a bottle of Bollinger, but not the Blanc de Noir?

I doubt it. Consumers don’t engage in this sort of math; corporations do. According to Nick Passmore at Forbes.com, Champagne prices are “controlled not so much by the production cost as by what marketing executives believe the market can bear.” For some brands, higher prices are not a barrier to sales; they can actually boost sales.

In explaining the resurgence of Saks, the American department store, its chief executive notes, “Consumers want brands, and we are all about brands.”

So there you have it. The calculations described here do not involve worth, they invoke status. By buying the most expensive item in a particular category, you broadcast a range of signals to yourself and others. Your choice might indicate your membership in a particular group; it might imply a certain discrimination in taste. Depending on the context, it could display frivolity, individuality, availability—or all three.

Most of us are awake to these clues, even if we prefer not to name them explicitly. In polite conversation, a little bit of sociology goes a long way.

Sandy and Cliff are trying to do right by themselves. Like most of us, they would prefer to maintain their artistic integrity while reaping the rewards of financial success. I think that explains their aversion to the ordinary logic of branding, and their coyness about the brand’s derivation.

It’s hard to find fault with Sandy’s fundamental economic philosophy: “Buy our clothes—and then we’ll buy stuff too.”

Relativity

2007-05-04T01:29:00.000-07:00

Note: This story began on April 25 and has no foreseeable end.

In Mumbai, Cliff and I shared a room at the Grand Hyatt which—if you ignored the central air-conditioning, television, minibar, shower and bath—was somehow reminiscent of our family home at the corner of Lake and Center streets. Maybe it was the two single beds, but more likely it was the two of us.

While my attention was elsewhere, Cliff has become the most successful of our siblings. And I’m not thinking in terms of wealth or celebrity. Instead, I am measuring by the admittedly subjective standard of dreams. Cliff, among the four of us, is closest to making satisfactory use of his talents.

Watching him and Sandy work together—the nods and murmurs, the pins and tape, the continuous small adjustments and readjustments—I experience a jealous thrill. Here is something he can do better than almost anyone: the mysterious and judicious application of creativity and connoisseurship.

Cliff knows more than I will ever learn about any number of subjects—modernist furniture and architectural pottery, for example—but, by that strange calculus of time and family, I am still his older brother, still in possession of a few mysteries myself.

“So,” he asks, as we drift side by side on the Hyatt’s twin boxsprings, 7000 miles from our former bedroom, “what happened that night the police brought you home?”

Understanding the Difference

2007-05-03T19:10:00.000-07:00

It is a historical fact that I have never tried on a $2000 jacket. It also might be true that I had never wanted to, before, but I don’t know. I do own a tux, and I was married in a linen suit from Yves Saint Laurent by way of Keezer’s, the venerable used clothing store in Cambridge. As I recall, I purchased both on the same afternoon in 1989, for a grand total of $100 (not including tax).

In the nomenclature of niche marketing, I am a cheapskate. Not for plane tickets, you understand. But it would’ve been hard to convince me to spend more money on clothes when I was saving for travel: a dream trip (as yet unrealized) to the Seychelles.

Because Chatav Ectabit aims for a different niche, Sandy and Cliff are not convincing people to spend; these folks already want to spend. In the luxury market, shoppers don’t have to weigh a $500 sweater against $500 in food or even $500 in gold. The trade-offs, if any, occur on a level unfamiliar to Fitzgerald’s “you and me.”

I don’t suggest that everyone who buys from this collection is rich. But I suspect that Tom Cruise, Ellen DeGeneres, Keith Richards, and Meg Ryan (to name a few) might take offense if I hinted that they were short on lunch money.

Here are the facts: these clothes require many hours of skilled labor and are available only in exclusive retail shops, and even then in small quantities. They are therefore expensive, and thus to wear them is undeniably a luxury, requiring at least a minimum amount of wealth, or great thrift and a flair for budgeting.

As demonstrated by my experience at Keezer’s, designer clothing (with some exceptions) has little residual value. Some few might be able to consider such purchases as an investment in image, but the majority are buying a feeling, and at that price, they want something out of the ordinary, something a little bit different even from the adjacent item on the rack, something which, like a striving, human self, feels unique.

Of course, I did not understand any of this until I talked with Cliff. Really talked with him, in a way that might not have occurred in our lives before. When we were kids, we shared a bedroom. Two single beds in a room that bubbled with fish tanks and looked out over a Mobil gas station, marked by the red image of a winged horse, made iconic by Jayne Ann Phillips’ Machine Dreams, published in 1984.

Chatav Ectabit, Revisited

2007-05-03T05:32:00.000-07:00

Design has to begin somewhere, and Cliff and Sandy have begun with the favorite clothes in their closets. It’s a personal stance: they don’t make anything they wouldn’t want to wear themselves.

The silhouettes are easygoing and persuasive, the fabrics friendly to your skin. The clothes do not strive or aspire, except to be the one you wear all the time, the one you turn to in moments of need or crisis, the one that sees the most sun and rain and soap.

The cut is the same for men or women, idiosyncratically sized from 0 to 6. The emphasis is on craftsmanship: hand-made buttons of bone or silver, satin piping, individual dyeing and over-dyeing. Both Cliff and Sandy are partial to hidden embellishments, an inch or two of vintage trim stitched discretely beneath a flap, something only the owner can know, a small but cherished secret.

Here is a jacket, tossed onto a desktop after a fitting. It is made of velvet, poplin, and silk. Each panel has been cut by hand; each stitch performed by a thumb and forefinger. Its architectural drapes and folds remind me of a Renaissance cathedral. This one I want to try on, but sadly it is not my size.

But What Does It Mean?

2007-05-02T23:17:00.000-07:00

Note: This story began on April 25.

Here’s one regret: during my week in Mumbai, I did not try the street food. I did stop once before a chaat walla as he prepared pani puri for an impatient crowd. The sweet sharp scents of lime and tamarind held me for a few minutes, and then I drifted timidly away. If you have access to the New York Times’ archive, both Somini Sengupta and Julia Moskin have written temptingly about these little snacks.

For a working lunch, Sandy and Cliff often order north Indian food for delivery (Caravanserai  Golden Orchid, Waterfield Road, Bandra, phone: 26411802). I can say with conviction that I would gladly taste any of these again: tandoori chicken, pomfret koliwada, mutton biryani, or palak paneer.

At one such meal, I paged through a lustrous stack of fashion magazines, searching for something like enlightenment. Julie, Sandy, and Cliff are all manifestly beautiful people, so maybe I was feeling a bit insecure. After all, I’d been watching them try on clothes for days, samples that they’d be taking to Paris to show.

In looking at these samples, I recognized the impoverishment of my critical vocabulary. Nothing in my closet has flared sleeves or three-button cuffs. I might be able to comprehend a cashmere T-shirt, but these other details were communicating in a foreign language. As Cliff remarked, their stuff is a little more “directional.” In its intimations of the future, directional implies that the clothes will look even more fashionable months from now.

From my readings, I contracted the impression that designers speak cryptically as a rule. In the luxury issue of GQ Style, for instance, Rick Owens explains that what he does is “try not to make people look like fools.”

An admirable goal, for certain, but there’s obviously more to it than that. Otherwise, how does he explain the fall 2007 season’s fuzzy slippers?

Chatav Ectabit

2007-05-02T17:08:00.000-07:00

Sandy, his wife Julie, and their son Satya sleep across the stairwell from their second-floor atelier, housed in an otherwise nondescript concrete structure in Mumbai’s Santa Cruz district. The lane teems with the life of the suburbs: curbside hairdressers, betel vendors, short-haired dogs, children in their school uniforms.

The ironwork displays multiple representations of the Sanskrit om. The balconies are shaded by a tamarind tree, indifferently festooned with wayward kites. The building across the way bears the shingles of an advocate of the high court and a “maternity surgical home.”

Through the open windows, I can hear music, horns, shouts, the accelerating rasp of two-cycle engines, the raucous calls of crows. It is the end of January, and the air vibrates with falling leaves.

Sandy paces in and out of the room, on and off the balcony. Even when his feet pause in a doorway, his hands are in motion. He and Cliff are talking about details—buttons and zippers, invitations and order sheets—but they don’t shy away from philosophy.

Instead of communicating status by brand or emblem, they want their clothes to generate an inner sense of confidence and composure. Although Cliff says “I just like the idea of wearable,” I can tell that his notion of wearable incorporates hints of subversion as well as comfort.

At first, Cliff and Sandy resisted the idea of a brand name at all. Just a piece of red thread would be enough, they thought.

Enough for art, perhaps, but not enough for sales. If you don’t give people a name, how can they ask for your clothes?

So now the collection has a name, although it still isn’t sewn onto a traditional label. Instead, the words have been hand-carved onto a polished oblong of bone, a hefty bauble designed to be cut loose after purchase.

It's Not About Guilt

2007-05-01T22:10:00.000-07:00

Most clothing companies manufacture in third-world countries to achieve economies of scale. They entrust the production of identical items to low-overhead factories and their low-wage assembly lines. That's not the case here.

As noted in the International Herald Tribune, Sandy and Cliff set up shop in Mumbai in order to produce limited quantities with a higher level of craftsmanship.

Over the past few years, they’ve developed working relationships with a handful of relatively well-paid artisans. This allows their personal involvement in each step of the transformation of linear and monochromatic thread into something with hue and dimension.

Sandy can rework the contours of an awkward seam before dinner. Cliff can hover beside a pot of color at the dye shop, request an earthier gray, or a more essential blue.

I don’t argue that inequity is inevident, just that it doesn’t seem like my subject here. One afternoon in Mumbai, while I was walking alone and without destination, a white-robed itinerant raged towards me, and then past me, waving a stick at an adversary I could not see.

Housekeeping

2007-05-01T20:59:00.000-07:00

You might be wondering where I'm headed with this story. To tell the truth, I'm curious too. I went to Mumbai without assignment or outline, and I'm still looking for an opening, that first sentence on the journey to coherence.

If you'd like to read the posts in chronological order, begin on April 25.

If you'd rather read about fishing than fashion, try Scratching the Surface in Borneo, on the travel networking site matadortravel.com.

If you're a fan of Marilynne Robinson's 1981 novel, Housekeeping, then buy Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

"They Are Best Dressed . . .

2007-04-30T18:35:00.000-07:00

. . . whose dress no one observes." —Anthony Trollope

Before that week in Mumbai, the word fashion occupied the same page in my personal dictionary as trend, style, or celebrity. (A back page, unread.) My everyday attire hasn’t changed much since high school: buttoned-down shirts and straight-legged jeans. My father-in-law graciously shares the same sleeve length, collar size, and color preference. He wears the shirts until the cotton is sufficiently frayed and comfortable, then he presents them to me.

I know how lucky I am to be on the receiving end of this arrangement. I also know that I’m purposefully oversimplifying the extent of my wardrobe. In what no doubt constitutes a surfeit of good fortune, Cliff has given me some clothes too: suits by Gucci and Dior and Romeo Gigli. They fit well after some minor alterations and, when the occasion arises, I enjoy feeling appropriately dressed.

So there you have it: I am subject to that common desire for camouflage, the urge to blend in, a sparrow among sparrows, a crow amidst crows.

You Might Have It Too

2007-04-28T18:52:00.000-07:00

According to the Journal of Infectious Diseases, the most common reason for travel—among tourists who contract cholera—is a visit with the relatives. Although spared this ailment, I am not immune to that desire to claim kinship.

I don’t mean that Cliff and I were estranged; we just haven’t spent as much time together as we might’ve liked. He moved to Los Angeles in 1987, the year I left. Since then, we’ve managed a series of approximately annual reunions, but rarely for more than a day or two. Through phone calls and emails, we’ve kept up a relaxed sort of connection, in which I can recognize the names of his good and loyal friends, and piece together a rough chronology of his meandering career.

He worked in an art gallery that favored Dali and Miro, turned his eye to fashion at Fred Segal on Melrose Avenue, then eventually became the men’s buyer at Maxfield. Along the way, he freelanced as a stylist, costume designer, interior decorater, landscaper. (I also recall that he appeared as an extra in Ridley Scott’s Black Rain, an action movie starring Michael Douglas that bears little relation with the novel of the same name mentioned in my first post).

He must have met Sandy while working for Maxfield, at fashion week in Milan or Paris.

A Preface to the Introductions

2007-04-26T20:47:00.000-07:00

The American designers I mentioned in the previous post are Sandy Dalal and Cliff Fong. I had never met Sandy before, which is not at all surprising, considering the lack of convergence in our histories.

By the age of twenty-one, Sandy had earned the Perry Ellis Award for Best New Menswear Designer and been named to People Magazine's "Most Beautiful" list.

At a similar age, I was working for the Copper River Fishermen’s Co-op in Cordova, Alaska. I’m sure there were some beautiful people there, but it was hard to tell under all that fish slime and raingear.

Cliff and I, by coincidence, are brothers. Nine years separate our birthdays, which means that in the month he entered kindergarten, I left our upstate New York home for boarding school in Ohio. After our parents divorced, Cliff moved with our mother to Utah, increasing the geographical distance between us.

What’s my point? I’m not sure at this moment in the story, but perhaps this: Although the facts of our births are similar, the accidents of our upbringings are not.

The Beginning of a Long Story

2007-04-25T17:14:00.000-07:00

At the end of January, I fell asleep in the biggest city on the continent and awoke in the biggest city on the subcontinent. The miracle of the red-eye, as performed by Air India. The true populations of both Shanghai and Mumbai are hard to count, but it's not the figures that impress, or the rankings. Either place contains more than enough individuals to overwhelm all sense of proportion.

Although I know nothing about fashion, I went to Mumbai to watch two American designers prepare their collection for Paris. (More on that in posts to come.)

I also walked around a bit, sometimes with a destination in mind, sometimes without. The crowds in Mumbai seemed very different from those in Shanghai: more dense, more vivid, more intractable.

On a Sunday afternoon, the causeway to the Haji Ali shrine seethed with a relentless parade of humanity: babies with Kohl-rimmed eyes, frail men leaning on their middle-aged sons, black-veiled women, and women in bright scarves—-saffron or pomegranate or lime—-each new color turning your head like a greeting.

Built in 1431, the white-domed mosque occupies the rocky islet where Haji Ali distributed his worldly wealth to the poor. Or where he drowned on his way to Mecca. Or possibly where his casket washed ashore after drifting all the way from what is now Pakistan. I don't know the real story, but I do know that the causeway is submerged at high tide, and at the hour I visited, it was dry.

One group of maimed men had linked themselves together in a sort of collapsed circle. They chanted, faces pressed to the stone, stumps in the air, waving in unison like some ruined troupe of synchronized swimmers, bereft even of water.

Before You Go

2007-04-22T01:28:00.000-07:00

I used to think that the best way to visit any city was to approach your stay like a relocation. That by trying to make yourself at home, you would open yourself to a wider range of experiences than the typical hotels-and-hotspots tour.

But a contrary strategy works just as well. If you want to rediscover the place you call home, treat it like a tourist destination.

After two years in Shanghai, our family of four is packing again, this time for Vermont. With the weeks counting down until our summer departure, we’ve begun asking ourselves what we haven’t seen or tasted yet. And what we want to do one more time, before the inevitable downturn in our personal boom-and-bust economy.

Here are two of the definitive responses, one at each end of the cultural and culinary spectrum. Strangely enough, you have to carry your own plates at both of them.

First, the splurge. Thanks to a convergence of business travelers and pleasure seekers, many of Shanghai’s five-star properties offer extravagant Sunday brunches. Three hours of more-or-less wholesome dissipation at the Westin Bund Center can include caviar, foie gras, lobster, and a river of Champagne (Piper Heidsieck, if you’re so inclined). There are serving stations on two floors surrounding a grandiose atrium, a genuinely diverting stage show, and, as you meander between the mushroom risotto and the roast duck, you’ll overhear conversations in German, Italian, and Finnish, among others. A pleasantly hallucinatory experience for about $70 per adult, half that for children; reservations essential.

You’ll leave satisfied, but not necessarily fulfilled, because fulfillment requires awareness. Brunch at the Westin is a transitory cocoon. Fine and silken, but also soporific.

On another Sunday, we’ll wake and breakfast at home. A debate will begin over the relative merits of Shanghai’s two principal varieties of soup dumplings. The English name is misleading. These delicacies are not served in soup; rather, they contain soup: a little burst of hot and fragrant broth, along with a mouthful of ground pork or minced crab, encased in a wheat-flour wrapper.

Maybe we’ll make the short drive to Nanxiang Town, original home of the steamed xiao long bao, where several blocks of dumpling restaurants flank the entrance to Guyi Garden, a classic Ming Dynasty maze of ponds, rocks, and bridges.

But more likely we’ll opt for the pan-fried shengjian mantou at Yang’s, on Wujiang Road. Until last week, this side street near the Nanjing Road West Metro Station hosted an untidy throng of pushcart vendors, hawking everything from barbecued oysters to bootlegged movies. These freelance capitalists have been displaced, however, in the name of public order, municipal cleanliness, and copyright protection.

Because Yang’s occupies two legal (and nearly identical) storefronts, our meal will be unaffected by the crackdown. And for that we’ll be thankful. The miraculous price—about 50 cents for a plate of four—doesn’t begin to explain their appeal. These dumplings are simultaneously crisp, succulent, tender, and savory.

The long lines might have something to do with our anticipation. All that sizzling and steaming, along with the white-aproned task force churning out fresh dumplings with astonishing precision. Then there’s the cheerful throng inside, on three levels linked by a narrow staircase, and the eager hunt for a few stools at one of the communal tables.

In a world of perfect fulfillment, our dumplings are just cool enough to taste by the time we find our seats. After that, it’s all a matter of technique. Our preferred method involves a judicious lift with the chopsticks, a prudent nip in the wrapper, then a pensive slurp—all before taking that first bite. You can spot the amateurs by the soup stains on their shirts.

Enough about Happiness

2007-04-21T01:28:00.000-07:00

Flaubert argued that there are only three requirements for happiness: selfishness, stupidity, and good health. "Though if stupidity is lacking," he said, "all is lost."

I was happy to watch the Red Sox score five runs in the bottom of the eighth, so there's hope for me.

Clarification

2007-04-19T19:08:00.000-07:00

I don’t necessarily endorse Csikszentmihalyi’s theories, although I think I understand what he means by flow. Intense absorption in a task is a real pleasure. And, thankfully, that pleasure seems to have little relation to one’s level of skill or ability.

For instance, I am middle-aged and of middling height; I can’t jump, or drive to my left. I also have one bad knee. And yet I have enjoyed (brief) states of flow on the basketball court, moments in which I do only what is absolutely right and beautiful in the game.

Can people be taught to enter this state of happy absorption at will? Or any of the other myriad happy states of which humans are capable?

In January 2007, D.T. Max published Happiness 101 in the New York Times. In this article, Mark Linkins, curriculum coordinator of a school district that mixes positive psychology with ninth grade English classes, says, “it’s preferable to be happy than not, even if that means the potential for creative output is diminished.”

I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who flinched upon reading this statement. This is Orhan Pamuk in his 2006 Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

"I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can't quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy."

Elaboration

2007-04-18T17:50:00.000-07:00

The "paralysis of the mind" that I enjoy is not a species of stupor. Fishing can do it for me, of course, but so can a long walk or a cold dawn, a well-written novel, an unexpected road trip, a stained-glass window, a cattail marsh.

What I seek is not relief, precisely, although it does feel good to forget that part of your brain which is responsible for fear, doubt, and expectation. Environmental psychologists (they exist!) describe this as "attentional restoration." Which might be related to what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who studies the state of being intensely absorbed in a task, calls flow.

According to the Edge Foundation, the name is pronounced "chick-SENT-me-high."

Disclaimer

2007-04-17T22:08:00.000-07:00

I stole the title of this blog from a passage in a favorite novel: Masuji Ibuse’s Black Rain. At least I think I stole it. After a few initial readings, I began to cherish this line: “Fishing paralyzes the mind so the soul can rest.”

How profound, I thought. What genius! I even quoted these words in a work of my own, a story that won second prize in the 2005 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest.

But when I went back to the book last month, I could not find that sentence.

In John Bester’s translation, Ibuse writes, “While one was fishing, one’s powers of thought were temporarily paralyzed, so that it had the same effect in resting the cells of the brain as a deep sleep.”

The right idea, but not nearly as elegant as I remembered.