Rowing to Baikal, the book

I would call myself a slow writer but that feels willfully understated. The 2018 Baikal Headwaters Expedition took place a scant five years ago. My first book, Principles of Navigation, was begun in 1983 and published in 2013. (I’ll trust you to do the math.) My second, The Coconut Crab, originated as a story told to my daughter in 1999—and was released in 2022. Rowing to Baikal ships on December 5. So at least I'm getting faster with age.

Though not really. It still takes a maddeningly long time to scribble out the sentences, identify their weaknesses, fix their faults, cobble their connections.

This one happened more quickly because if I’d waited twenty years to get the paragraphs right, the river might have been gone. And with it, so many things that have sustained me and countless others. Things worth loving. (For the record, 50 percent of the royalties from this book have been allocated to the International Taimen Initiative.)

Elsewhere, you can find my story about the pleasures of friendship in issue 15.1 of The Flyfish Journal, while issue 15.2 will include a brief musing on mayflies—or, in other words, youth and fragility—and the epic of Gilgamesh.

And the most recent issue of Destinations, a publication of Fly Fisherman magazine, features a description of a revelatory moment with the guides of Salvelinus in the foothills of the Pyrenees, arranged by my friends at Orvis Travel—with art by Rob Benigno—while Fly Fisherman’s annual Gear Guide closes with the origin story of my guiding career, which began way back in 1979.

But this year, the book has been the focus of most of my waking hours, even on the river in Mongolia, where I made some pre-dawn edits using my phone and then, thanks to the miracle of LTE, passed them along to the publisher before getting down to the more serious business of catching taimen on the fly. (Thanks to Matt Koerber for the pic.)

Lost and Found

In the Summer 2021 issue of Sport Literate, I wrote about a group of feral dogs in Tangier, Morocco, who had welcomed me as one of their own: “They were not really stray dogs but street dogs. Unrestrained and untended. Of all the pack members, current and former, only I am truly a stray. None of my dog friends actually wandered away from her proper home or lost himself in transit from one place to the next. But I have, over and over and over.”

At the time, I’d been living in Morocco for seven years. And now, in the winter of 2022, I find myself on the Portuguese island of Madeira. Though perhaps find is too strong a word. You can read about that transition in issue 14.2 of The FlyFish Journal.

While I was looking for a place to land, a handful of other stories also found their way into print. 

Issue 13.3 of The Flyfish Journal features my story about the most endangered species of trout on the planet: “The Ocean Under the Mountain.”

The spring 2022 issue of Guidefitter Journal offers a look back at my first visit to Mongolia. 

The March 2022 issue of High Country News published my essay, “Hard Lessons from Poker Joe.”

“The Necessity of Success,” in Strung magazine’s spring issue, once again paired my words with the images of artist Frederick Stivers.

Another excerpt from my upcoming book about the 2018 Baikal Expedition appeared in Plants & Poetry Journal. Oddly enough, it is not about a taimen but a porcupine fish. (If you click on this link, be forewarned that it takes a long time to load and you must scroll persistently to find the story.)

And the summer 2022 issue of The Montana Quarterly includes my tribute to the dog who underlies my appreciation of all dogs . . .

Trading a Pair of Oars for Pen and Keyboard

 During the 2018 Baikal Headwaters Expedition, the easiest thing for me to do on any particular morning was to get in the boat. After all, it’s what I want to do on nearly every morning, what I would choose if water, especially new water, was always and everywhere available. The relief I felt on picking up the oars some days was palpable, as if a dark sky had perceptibly brightened or the load on my shoulders had shifted to a more comfortable position.

Since March 2020, however, my opportunities for rowing a boat on a Mongolian river have literally dried up. For consolation, I’ve been telling myself stories, some of which have since found themselves in print.

More than one describes the expedition itself: “Rowing to Baikal” appeared in the fall 2020 issue of The Drake, while “The Messenger from Heaven” was published in Politics/Letters in May 2021.

“The Ocelot and the Caiman,” set on Tsimane Lodge’s Sécure River, appeared in the February–March 2020 issue of Fly Fisherman. 

“On Safari, Fly Rod in Hand” ran in the summer 2020 issue of Strung and describes my stay at African Waters’ Gassa Camp in Cameroon.

Two stories can be found in Volume 12 of The Flyfish Journal: “The Word for ‘Fish’ in Speyside” in Number 2 (Winter 2021), with some fantastic art by Frederick Stivers; and “On the Way to Dragon Island,” set in Morocco’s Dakhla Bay, in Number 4 (Summer 2021). 

Moving closer to home, “Solace of the Pack”—about my friendship with an athletic gang of Tangier’s feral dogs—appears in the most recent issue of Sport Literate. 

And more work is forthcoming before the end of the year, including another story about the expedition in Litro’s nature issue, along with a novel for children and adults from Green Writers Press . . .  

 

 

 

 

The Sixty-Second Martini

At the end of any busy day, I love nothing more than a sixty-second martini. And by this I do not mean the martini that follows the sixty-first. I mean a drink that takes less than a minute to make, from your hand’s first contact with the olive jar to the bracing cocktail’s blessed intersection with your parched lips. With nothing to clean up afterward.

I didn’t become an expert on this topic by doing research or writing a book. I did it the old-fashioned way: by drinking. For weeks, months, years, decades. Through many trials and some near-grievous errors, shaken, stirred, and on the rocks (me, not the martini).

 

 

This recipe bears no relation to what you may have previously encountered in hotel bars or James Bond movies. It requires neither a jigger nor a two-piece shaker. Though fastidious, it is not fussy.

This is what I believe: martinis should be cold and they should be sipped. They should not be blasphemed with vodka or water. One is enough to get you to dinner. (Most of the time.)

I call it the sixty-second martini not because I am in a rush to drink it, but because that’s all the time you need to prepare for its charm. My motto: gin without haste, enjoy in leisure, no repentance necessary.

 Ready to begin? Then reserve a place in the freezer for your bottle. That’s where it should live. Always. Store the olives and the vermouth in the refrigerator. I prefer fresh, green, unpitted olives, each about the width of a thumbnail, and extra dry vermouth. (Later, to reinforce some sense of self-respect, you may wish to experiment with other vermouths, a twist of lemon, or even a slice of cucumber.) You’ll also need a martini glass, preferably stemless.

 

Now things start to happen fast. Place an olive in the glass. Tip in just enough vermouth to cover the olive. Firmly grasp your freezing cold bottle of gin. Pour slowly and steadily, aiming a thin stream of gin at the olive’s rounded edge. (This is easy with the built-in flow regulator that comes with many brands.)

See how the differing viscosities of gin and vermouth conspire to turn the olive like a little green pig on an invisible spit? That’s Bernoulli’s principle in action—and all the stirring your drink needs. Continue pouring until the liquid reaches a polite distance from the rim of the glass.

That’s it. Your first sip will be a revelation: cooling, healing, and invigorating all at once.

Please Help Me Find This Book

Last summer, on a rare visit to our home in Montana, I took pains to investigate each and every one of the dozens of boxes of books stored in our garage. None of these boxes had been opened in a decade. 

I was looking for a paperback with a yellowish cover, published in Great Britain, by a woman whose name escapes me. The book is about a character who travels alone by train, drinking and smoking and pondering the big questions. As far as I can recall, it was bought in London in 1983, from a used bookshop in Marylebone. 

I can remember loving the sentences, feeling like their author had somehow toured the inside of my haphazard brain. But I can’t resuscitate the details necessary to purchase another copy. Note: It is definitely not the late, great Jenny Diski’s Stranger on a Train, which wasn’t published until 2002.

I have thought about this book a lot, even dreamed about it, recalling the feel of the paper between my fingers, the jolt of recognition I experienced with every resonant scene. I have tried to find it by searching key words and phrases online, such as “favorite novel about train travel.” Frustratingly enough, it is easy for my entangled neurons to summon a hazy image of the cover, but the title and author just won’t resolve into clarity.

Illustration by Russell Chatham from Guy de la Valdène’s Making Game (Clark City Press, 1990)

While I was hunting for this maddeningly crucial and yet somehow forgettable book, I set aside some other titles to bring back to Morocco: Richard Nelson’s The Island Within, Jim Harrison’s Just Before Dark, Guy de la Valdène’s Making Game. And Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, now 53 years old.  

Perhaps the problem is that my memory storage device is even more of a museum piece than that . . . .

Trying Not to Count the Days

This is the math I do in my head: 1,500 divided by 25 equals 60. That’s the length of the Selenge River and its uppermost tributary in kilometers, divided by an anticipated average distance per day, meaning that after 60 days, I’ll be rowing an inflatable boat atop the biggest body of fresh water on the planet: Russia’s Lake Baikal.

Because 60 days is only 2 months, which does not seem long at all, I redo the arithmetic, starting at the river’s headwaters in the Ulaan Taiga, a sparsely populated region well-known among Mongolians for its shamans and reindeer herders, then continuing downhill, to that unknown place where the initial trickle will gather first into a brook and eventually become a navigable stream. 

At this point in my calculations, the expedition should be barely a week old, though no doubt our forced reliance on horses and camels will make it feel like a much longer span. Seven days, perhaps, before we can climb into the boats, before it’s all riffles and pools and very few bridges: the floating, Russian army-surplus monstrosity below Bayanzurkh, the concrete model near Mörön, the highway span north of Bulgan that I know only by hearsay.

Here’s another bit of math: of the river’s 1,500 meandering kilometers, I am familiar only with about 10 percent, a mere 100 miles or so. By that reckoning, embarking on this expedition from Mongolia to Siberia is akin to setting out on the road from Paris to Budapest and only knowing the way to Reims.

That is, it would be like that, if we were riding bicycles instead of rowing boats, along a route liberally populated with restaurants, hotels, and other travelers’ conveniences. But we’re not—and for that I’m grateful.

 

Instead of sampling roadside cafés, we will collect data on water quality, mayfly populations, taimen genetics, and angler effort, among other things. And my obsessive calculations? A symptom, perhaps, of both anticipation and anxiety, like a rookie guard mentally rehearsing plays before tip-off, or a teacher counting heads before a field trip.

For more information on the 2018 Baikal Headwaters Expedition, visit baikalheadwaters.org. To donate, please go to fundrazr.com/baikalheadwaters.

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In Defense of Orwell’s Toad

In April 1946, as Europe was recovering from the second war-to-end-all-wars, George Orwell published “SomeThoughts on the Common Toad.” Though an avowedly political piece, Orwell’s essay is neither a discourse on a vanquished Ubermensch or a treatise on future oppressors (at least, not on the surface). Instead it offers—and here I claim joyous use of the present tense—a defense of the human urge to find solace in the natural world and its unrelenting beauty. Faced with an urban landscape scarred by Hitler’s campaign of bombs—more than a million homes were damaged or destroyed in London alone—Orwell chooses to focus on the “vivid green of an elder sprouting on a blitzed site.” 

Less than a month later, the recently widowed Orwell would leave London for the Scottish island of Jura, where he would write 1984, the novel that evokes the battles of our current spring like no other. The book is about much more than Newspeak and doublethink, of course, but how can one not feel terrified at the prescience of sentences like these: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” And not simply terrified, but saddened too, a sadness approaching despair. 

Yes, we have given ourselves an unhealthy dose of Brexit and Trump and Wilders and Le Pen. But in some simultaneously parallel universe, the world has returned a veritable feast of migrations and blossomings, everything from ducks to daffodils. Now it is our responsibility to choose among them, to honor some and embrace others. As Orwell writes, “I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and—to return to my first instance—toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable.

 

Not likely, you understand, he wouldn’t go as far as that. But we must nourish hope where we find it, as strange as that may seem. At some moment between 1946 and 1948, during repeated bouts with tuberculosis, Orwell had this thought: “In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result being that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked upon as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favored groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.” (The architects of President Trump’s 2017 budget blueprint appear to have taken these words as gospel.)

Sounds crazy, yes. Crazy and plausible. Which is much preferable to crazy and hateful, or crazy and demonstrably false. Both of which have been in depressingly abundant supply.

And by crazy and plausible, I don’t just mean Orwell’s reference to “deliberate policy.” I mean the notion of looking to dystopia for hope. Before inventing Winston Smith, Orwell created another hopeless nostalgist, George Bowling, the anti-hero of Coming Up for Air. This George admits, as a first confession, “that when I look back through my life I can’t honestly say that anything I’ve ever done has given me quite such a kick as fishing. Everything else has been a bit of a flop in comparison . . . . And the other confession is that after I was sixteen I never fished again.” Which was not true of Orwell himself; he fished and caught lobsters while in Jura and—so sure was he of his imminent recovery—his favorite fishing rods were leaning against the wall of the hospital room where he died at the untimely age of forty-six.

George Bowling explains his deprivation like this: “Because that’s how things happen. Because in this life we lead . . . in this particular age and this particular country—we don’t do the things we want to do.” But we don’t live in Bowling’s age (the late 1930s), Orwell’s prophecies are not yet a done deal, and neither is the previously unimaginable convergence of Russian plutocracy and American idiocracy.

Orwell would have disliked the idea of himself as oracle; he rather preferred the role of “pamphleteer.” In other words, he wished to move his readers to action, even if that activity was no more revolutionary than enjoying a strong cup of tea or another pint at the pub. Such things, after all, are what remind us of our truly common heritage, the bonds we share as creatures who live and yearn and die. If we want to raise the odds of that “peaceful and decent future” ever more slightly, then all of us in this particular age and this particular country need to do those particular things that we want to do. Now—before everything is, as George would say, “cemented over.”

I don’t advocate the sharing of inconsequential pleasures as a source of distraction from the news cycle or a respite from active resistance; I do it to prime the well. The small is not the enemy of the good. Without raindrops, there would be no river; without yeast, there would be no beer.

So enjoy a walk in a chestnut wood. Listen to the trilling song of a common blackbird. Plant a few nasturtiums in your window box. Me? I’m going fishing.

Another 36 Hours in Lisbon, Revisited

Thanks to the vagaries of budget airline itineraries and the American holiday schedule, we’ve found ourselves arriving in Lisbon again and again and again. Roundtrip from Tangier, one-way via Casablanca, on a forced layover from Rome—you name it.

If you are indeed lucky enough to have a night or more in the city, make your way up the hill from the Martim Moniz station to Santa Maria Maior, where Marília Silveira of Chez’L Lisboa Mouraria will greet you with a welcoming glass of port. Once a psychologist, Marília turned to innkeeping as a more direct way of “making people happy.”

After dropping your bags in the attic room, descend to No. 1, Avenida Almirante Reis, where you are likely to encounter a line of not unhappy people outside the venerable Cervejaria Ramiro. Join the eager crowd, who will be talking animatedly, shifting their weight hungrily from foot to foot, doing their best to balance that ticklish combination of patience and expectation.

Judging by the name alone, you might guess that this place is a family beer hall, but that represents only a small portion of its DNA. On the night we first ate there—Thanksgiving 2015—we sat at a large table with strangers from as near as the next Metro stop and as far as Taiwan.

Although you could order beef, what you really want is shellfish: oysters, shrimp, cockles, and so on—they’re all fresh here and prepared in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the individual flavors. If you’re feeling flush, splurge on a plate of carabineiros, an unusually large scarlet prawn that tastes richly of lobster.

The next morning, set your sights on the sixteenth-century tower of Belém, about five miles south and west from your room chez Lisboa.

The pleasant two-hour walk along Lisbon’s waterfront will provide both grand views of the River Tagus and sufficient appetite for an expansive breakfast at Pastéis de Belém. (Hint: Get there early to avoid the sometimes insanely long lines of tourbus passengers.) Though the throngs rightly gather for a taste of the iconic custard tarts, it’s worth experimenting with the bakery’s savory options as well. Both pair well with coffee and Moscatel de Setúbal, a fortified wine with the winning flavor of sunlight and raisins.

But what if you have only a three- or four-hour layover? In the afternoon or early evening, ride the Metro to Cais do Sodré, then find your way to the chefs’ counters at the Mercado da Ribeiro, where some of Lisbon’s best culinary talents serve fine-dining plates at takeaway prices.

To give yourself time to eat, you’ll want to make your choices quickly. We particularly recommend Marlene Vieira for her tempura green beans and duck-and-asparagus risotto, but you really can’t go wrong.

And if your brief layover is in the morning? Then you should forget about eating at the Mercado, because most of the restaurants won’t open until noon.

But you might still want to make the trek to Cais do Sodré, about forty minutes from the airport.

Your reward? Repeated iterations of painter António Dacosta’s “I’m Late,” an homage to Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit. (Perhaps because I’m no longer a commuter, I find myself increasingly appreciative of subway art.)

A few steps away, you’ll find a wide range of cafés—some adjacent to the Mercado, others by the river—where you can fortify yourself against the next flight . . .

Note: My earlier post on Lisbon appears here.

The Forecast for Taimen

One of the best things about taimen, the world’s largest and most idiosyncratic salmonid, is that they are related to trout. This is a bit like saying that one of the best things about tigers is their kinship with tabby cats, but the connection is undeniable.

When you see one coming full length for the fly—the green jaws, the broad shoulders, the red tail—the conflict between what you think you know about trout and what you are about to learn provides an excruciating tension.

As you might guess, taimen prefer wild rivers and wild country. One of the rivers where I work, in the valley where Genghis Khan was born, is as undomesticated as they come. By long-term agreement with local, provincial, and national governments, there are no hatcheries, no hotels, no dams, no mines, no commercial logging, and no motorized boats along its banks.

In September 2013, when Sage Flyfishing’s technical service manager visited the river, the weather was far from tame. A series of cold fronts had frog-marched across northern Mongolia, and the leaves on the currant bushes gleamed damp and red. Although the once-in-a-generation flooding had mercifully subsided, the water was still high. In fact, a resupply vehicle from the capital Ulaanbaatar had become bogged down many miles from our first camp, while attempting to ford what is usually a shallow tributary.

On the atypically muddy steppe, upland buzzards, saker falcons, and marsh harriers hunted the mice that had fled their soggy burrows. And yet, after the second day of our trip, I wrote this in my journal: “An ordinary day of fishing. Meaning fun—with lots of action.”

Our log for the day shows that eight anglers hooked twenty-seven taimen, landing eleven. (This count does not include missed strikes, which happen more often than many anglers like to admit.) Of the sixteen individuals that escaped a photograph, one extremely large fish fought downstream for at least five bends of the river before the hook pulled. Another taimen, not nearly as large, was landed after the rod exploded into three pieces on the hookset. (Yes—it was a Sage.) We also were graced with a trio of Amur trout—an endemic species with thick, coppery flanks—and a solitary Amur pike.

In the dining ger that night, Handaa, our camp manager, presided over appetizers, dinner, and dessert. Between courses, she instructed us in the ritual style of toasting, in which each invocation is punctuated with a dip of your ring finger in the vodka: one for the sky, one for the earth, one for the winds, and one for yourself.

Later, some of us sipped red wine, while others (who should not remain nameless) indulged in extravagant concoctions like apple-tinis and lemon drops. Out of the din of conversation, I heard this twosome wisely dubbed “a hangover sandwich.”

A few guests at the table had been friends for many years, while some had just met. But the world of international flyfishing is small enough for coincidences to become routine. Because the guy from Sage has worked in Chile, he and two of our Chilean guides had several acquaintances in common. And because his father had been an industry rep, it was no surprise that one of our other guests, a former New England flyshop owner who has come to the river nearly every year since 2004, recognized the family resemblance.

We have a minimum of four guides on every trip and, in the service of fun, each guide tries to fish with every angler at least once during the week. On the day that I rowed for the Sage guy, he cast a 400-plus-grain sinking head and a huge epoxy fly that, together, cut through the wind like a ballpeen hammer and crashed the water like a depth charge. That rig drew strikes from two healthy taimen and we managed to coax both into the net. His fishing partner began with a floating line then changed to an ordinary sinking tip and went without a strike. By the end of the day, the wind was strong enough to drive the boat back upstream and the current lines were filled with willow leaves.

That unpredictability is part of what makes taimen fishing addictive. Like humans, they can be close-mouthed and sulky one minute, then irrationally exuberant the next. No matter what the weather conditions.

And though weather can sometimes feel like it’s happening specifically to us, cruelly and personally, it can also remind us of our collective smallness in the larger and more mysterious world. What does it mean when, on a morning so warm that you sit as far as possible from the woodstove, someone else says that he can feel snow coming?

Perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, that season’s unusual weather will be a net positive. The surge of water tumbled many willows and poplars from the banks. More wood in the water means more nursery habitat. And more nursery habit could eventually mean more trout and more taimen.

To put it in geek terms, the flood was an outlier: a stray point in an expansive data set. As the planet warms, the resulting effects on individual drainages can vary considerably; given our current failure to foresee the bigger picture, I plan to devote myself to further close observation. The river is ancient and ever-changing. All I can say after ten seasons in Mongolia is this: it never gets old.

On the final afternoon of the trip, six days and many dozens of miles downstream, a harrier stooped on a mouse pattern just as the leader unrolled on the forward cast. The bird stuttered above the river, attempting to snatch the fly from the air. The angler exclaimed with surprise and I shouted with delight. Neither of us really wanted to hook a harrier, but we needn’t have worried—the bird made one last, half-hearted stab as the mouse hit the water, then wished itself back into the sky.

Pretty in Print

Two recent publications that can’t be read online: the first in Gray’s Sporting Journal’s fortieth anniversary issue, the next in Songs of Ourselves, from Blue Heron Book Works.

If you can’t get to a newsstand, here’s what the opening spread of the Gray’s story looks like on an iPad.

 

The painting is by Alberto Rey and—in case you were hoping to add it to your collection—is already owned by the University of Virginia.

The story itself is set in Mexico and Montana. Although it’s absolutely fiction, the narrative roughly chronicles the puzzlement I feel both when stalking bonefish on the flats and trying to understand the so-called new economy. (Remember Touch America?)

My contribution to Songs of Ourselves, on the other hand, feels like a big departure from my usual work. Subtitled America’s Interior Landscape, the book wants to identify an idea that I’ve been searching for from Morocco to Mongolia: “the thing that makes us American.” As I was telling my sister today, my bit—which I called “The Journal of Infectious Diseases”—is “basically a memoir in the form of a collage.”

According to the Journal of Infectious Diseases, the most common reason for travel among tourists who contract cholera is—you guessed it—a visit with the relatives.

The River in Books, Books on the River

Following on the spate of media coverage inspired by the 2013 Nobody’s River Project, the Amur basin and its headwaters have now found their way to National Public Radio, which reviewed Dominic Zeigler’s Black Dragon River this past weekend.

This isn’t the first book to chronicle a long journey down the Amur. I’ve read at least two others—one was published in 1860, the other in 2005.

NPR’s review was a bit garbled on the topic of fish: “The river’s waters swarm with life. The Amur is home to a hundred-twenty fish specimens, ‘a primal soup, thick with wanton life and death. Myriad fish gorge on the tapioca pears of fish eggs caught up and down by the current.’”

My guess is that they meant species, not specimens, and pearls, not pears. But who knows about “caught up and down”?

For more on Amur fish and fishing, I recommend two books available free online: Fishes of Mongolia, underwritten by the World Bank, and Amur Fish: Wealth and Crisis, published by the World Wildlife Fund.

More Things We Can Learn from the Bottle

While preparing lunch one day on the river, I couldn’t help but notice the desire of these moths for our bottle of wine. (An imported Argentinian red but, then again, all wines in Mongolia are imported.)

 

Turns out that a technique called wine-roping is well known among moth enthusiasts. If any of you are reading this, would you kindly confirm that these specimens are Red Underwings?

The View from Tangier

Since moving to Morocco last month, we have spent many hours contemplating the view from our third-floor perch. White storks often fly above the clay-tiled roofs, sometimes landing on nearby television antennas, where they exhibit a remarkable sense of balance in the fickle winds.

Like some fortunate humans, they are migrants, able to cross between Europe and Africa at will.

According to James Edward Budgett-Meakin, author of Land of the Moors: A Comprehensive Description (1901), “As a slayer of serpents the stork is held sacred, and if he fails to return any year to his accustomed haunt, some evil is feared.”

In The Land of an African Sultan: Travels in Morocco (1889), Walter B. Harris wrote this about storks:  “They are men, say the Moors, who have come from islands far away to the west, to see Morocco. Like all the world, they know there is no other land to compare to it, and so they even abandon their outward form of men to come and see it.”

Why I Haven't Quit My Day Job

Whenever I’m away from my desk, it seems that the world is determined to show me strange and beautiful things. An albino sea turtle, for one, gleaming like white gold beneath the blue water. And a brown booby, who nabbed a flying fish off a wave-crest as I watched from the kayak.

When a juvenile frigate bird tried to steal the booby’s fish away, I paddled over to offer support. The frigate fled, and then the booby enjoyed its meal, as well as (apparently) my company, eventually settling on this buoy to pose and preen.

A few days later, doubting my vision of the gilded turtle in the middle of copyediting a book about J. Alden Weir, the American Impressionist, I took the time for a quick search online (our family calls it, “consulting the oracle”). As it turns out, albino turtles, while uncommon, are not unheard of, although it’s more likely that the one I saw was leucistic. That’s one of my favorite things about the Web: what you might, in some less enlightened age, have been tempted to call hallucination can now be labeled as probable sighting.

Another of the fun things about the Web is that it brings nonstop news of success: the glad tidings of friends and acquaintances, as well as the exploits of impossibly lucky or talented humans who you will never meet.

On the other hand, if you are one of the untold millions striving to find a voice (and a paycheck), the continuous awareness of other folks’ book deals and movie options might leave you feeling like a chronic underachiever. At those moments, it can help to remember that the mere attempt to create carries its own rewards (sometimes long deferred, sometimes completely unfathomable).

Though it’s scant consolation, I try to remind myself that each rejection letter means that I now have one more reader than I did a minute ago. Not a satisfied reader, but hey, you can’t please everybody. The important thing—for my own sense of being a person among other people—is to keep plugging away. I don’t insist on becoming Meb Keflezighi every time I set out on a morning run, so why feel unhappy about not being Jim Harrison whenever I sit down at the keyboard?

The fact is that only a rare few get paid to play. The rest of us, as Gillian Welch sings, “do it anyway.”  Here are links for a handful of stories that found publication this spring, none of them in print, and none for pay . . .

• a few thoughts on aspirational flyfishing photography at Tail magazine

• tips for making the most of a trip to Mongolia at On the Fly magazine

• an update on our conservation work in Orvis News

• humor for proofreaders or mathematicians (your choice) at the Science Creative Quarterly

• and a brief meditation on zen and the art of nonrefundable airfares at We Said Go Travel.

Another 36 Hours in Lisbon

At first, Seth Sherwood’s recent guide to Portugal’s capital city left me feeling as if I’d missed out on something. After all, our family had enjoyed several days and nights there in December—without experiencing many of the author’s designated highlights. In fact, we only managed two: the riverside running path that passes through the grand Praça do Comércio, and the gallery at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga that contains Bosch’s mind-altering Temptations of Saint Anthony.

Upon further reflection, however, I wouldn’t have missed any of the treasures that we bumbled into during our walks around the city. Here’s an abbreviated version of our visit.

Friday / 4:00 p.m.

To get a good view of everything Lisbon has to offer, begin your visit at Miradouro da Nossa Senhora do Monte. A miradouro is the Portuguese version of a scenic viewpoint, and Lisbon’s hills provide several great ones.

Friday / 8:00 p.m.

Our home base was a third-story walkup in the Alfama District, the oldest part of the city. There are many interesting-looking places to eat between the castle and the river, but after strolling up and down a few cobblestoned streets, we chose Bistrô Gato Pardo, at Rua de São Vicente 10. It’s an intimate and comfortable space, and each plate manages that rare achievement of disarming simplicity: beautiful to contemplate, wonderful to taste. We felt perfectly content to linger through a long dinner, two bottles of wine, dessert and coffee. Ask Mario and Werner to tell a few stories about the Sardine Festival (when the restaurant closes in the interests of self-preservation).

Saturday / 12:00 noon

After a morning run or walk, make your way to Portugalia’s cervejaria, a brewery turned beer hall at Rua São Caetano 4. Although the menu offers a number of the usual suspects, we recommend the house specialty: Bacalhau Bras (the half portion was enough for two of us). Its robust flavor of salt cod, potatoes, and olives is accompanied equally well by a glass of Bohemia or Imperial Branca.

Saturday / 2:00 p.m.

Confronted with a daunting list of worthwhile museums, we chose the one that seemed most emblematic of Lisbon itself: the tile museum. The Museu Nacional do Azulejo, Rua da Madre de Deus 4, is housed in a former convent whose sixteenth-century buildings provide a suitably meandering home for a wide-ranging collection. Although some taxi drivers may insist that the word azulejo comes from the Portuguese for “blue,” it more likely derives from the Arabic al zuleycha, which means “small polished stone.”

Saturday / 8:00 p.m.

Mini Bar Teatro, Rua António Maria Cardoso 58, is one of chef José Avillez’s five restaurants in Lisbon. We found the place on Friday, when it was already fully booked for dinner, and literally begged for a reservation for the following night. The food is inventive and showy, with foie gras masquerading as a Ferrero Rocher and a brilliant green sphere that transforms itself into a caiparinha in your mouth. The theater theme also extends to the traditionally liquid cocktails, which have names like Godot and Hairspray. After a few of these we laughed so hard that one of our party fell from a chair.

Sunday / 10:00 a.m.

By now you’ve probably tried at least a few of Lisbon’s many distinctive pastries, including the egg tarts known as pastéis de nata or, if you go directly to the source, pastéis de Belém. One of the city’s better versions is served at Versailles, an atmospheric café at Avenida Republica 15A. Although you’ll see locals happily standing and eating at the long counter, it’s worth waiting for a seat under the elegantly high ceiling.

Sunday / 1:00 p.m.

If you can’t leave Lisbon without at least a few souvenirs, then stop at A Arte da Terra, Rua Augusto Rosa 40. The shop is housed in the former stables of the city’s cathedral, just downhill from the Roman ruins, and the cobbled floor beneath your feet has been trod by both humans and horses for what has no doubt been donkeys of years. Individual displays of fine handicrafts are arranged in the stone mangers, and the retro tins of Portuguese sardines seem even more appealing when viewed beneath a centuries-old vault of brick.