travel
New York Stories
Submitted by John Lane on Mon, 02/25/2008 - 1:28pm. kudzu telegraph | memoir | new york | travelLast week we spent a few days in Manhattan. While I was there I had flashes of previous trips to the City. There have been few enough so that all six or seven journeys north are memorable.
In many ways a trip to New York City is about as different as life can get from living in the suburban upcountry of South Carolina. A trip there always feels like true travel to a foreign place. Strange things always happen. The energy comes in waves. There's the density-a million and a half people living in 22 square miles-but it's not the density that makes the air feel so different and strange in New York. It's the intense life of the island, the way the folkways and culture of the mythic place have developed their own rhythms and surprises. It's the power and the madness and the excitement.
Down Here Below
Submitted by John Lane on Fri, 02/08/2008 - 10:54pm. birds | hawks | kudzu telegraph | new york | pale male | travelWe just got back from Manhattan where we attended AWP, a big writers convention. There were 7,000 academic writers-mostly students, graduate students, and writers who teach-all packed into a two conference hotels in mid-town not far from Time Square.
Urban Alaska
Submitted by John Lane on Tue, 07/31/2007 - 1:22pm. alaska | kudzu telegraph | travel | urban planningWhen we landed in Anchorage it was near midnight, but it wasn't until we walked out of the terminal that "land of the midnight sun" really meant something to me. It was so light that we could see 20,000-foot Mount McKinley in the distance. Betsy pointed out that she could also see what looked like her worst far-north nightmare: a snowfall swirling in the air all around. Not snow, our Alaska friend Venable Vermont assured her, but millions of cottonwood seeds drifting on the summer breeze.
North to Alaska
Submitted by John Lane on Wed, 07/25/2007 - 11:58am. alaska | kudzu telegraph | travel | wildnessIt's five a.m. and I'm in Valdez, a small fishing town and the southern terminus of the Alaska Pipeline. When I walked outside before disappearing into the stuffy one-room business center to complete my weekly column I could see three hanging glaciers around the head of the Valdez Arm. It took us a full day to get here— two hours by car from Seward, and six hours on a slow ferry from Whittier, a town at the end of a 2-mile tunnel through high ragged mountains. We worried we would hate Valdez. An oil terminal, though an important part of Alaska's story, was not something we wanted to explore. We were looking for another part of the story: Alaska's legendary wildness. Betsy wanted to see a wild moose. I wanted to feel, as the painter Rockwell Kent once did, at the top of the world and miles from nowhere.
Cornbread & Sushi on the Road Again
Submitted by John Lane on Sun, 01/14/2007 - 12:47pm. interim | kudzu telegraph | travel | WoffordWhen you read this I'll be in the middle of driving around the upper South for ten days with my colleague Deno Trakas and 12 students in two rental vans. At Wofford we call January "Interim," and it's a chance to be innovative, a chance to focus, to explore one subject in depth for an entire month.
Riding the Hogback Highway
Submitted by John Lane on Sun, 01/07/2007 - 1:07pm. county council | highways | kudzu telegraph | planning | sprawl | travelThis week we drove U.S. Highway 176 north to Landrum three days in a row to watch our son play in a basketball tournament at the new District 1 high school. We could have driven faster, more sterile I-26, but taking the old highway has its advantages and insights.
Blackwater Paddling
Submitted by John Lane on Fri, 11/17/2006 - 10:55am. excursions | kudzu telegraph | Little Pee Dee | rivers | travelNovember's a good month to head east to the lowcountry to paddle. This time of year the leaves have dropped, the bugs have mostly died off, and the snakes have found shelter from the chilly nights and cool days. There's usually good water.
