Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuścinśki
A Vintage International paperback
288 pages, June 2008
4.5 stars (out of five possible)

The world-traveled Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuścinśki had a special affinity for the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. Herodotus, in Kapuścinśki’s estimation, was himself a world-traveled journalist by the time he wrote his famous Histories. It’s an audacious move to write a memoir in parallel to such a venerable book, but that, thankfully, is just what Kapuścinśki has done in Travels with Herodotus.

Travels with Herodotus is a marvel of concise, open-ended insight—or “outsight,” more accurately, since both Kapuścinśki and Herodotus are concerned more with anthropology than psychology. Travels is also that rare book that teaches writing as it entertains. For teachers, Travels is a curricular field day, bringing structure and focus to a wide array of subjects, from science to art, from the ethics of violence to the perplexities of love. For lovers of travel writing, Kapuścinśki has created an engine of armchair transportation that moves through both time and space. For students of the reporter’s craft, Kapuścinśki is patient and profound.

“We depend on others,” he writes: “reportage is perhaps the form of writing most reliant on the collective.” Travels is an unpacking of this idea through a reading of Herodotus, of “how he gathered his raw material and then wove from it his immense and rich tapestry.” This is “precisely the point worth delving into,” and Kapuścinśki’s years of experience as a foreign correspondent give him an immense and rich perspective with which to draw lessons of concise imagination from Herodotus.

What I most admire about this book is the way in which Kapuścinśki doesn’t just respect difference but actively engages with it. Until he died in 2007, Kapuścinśki studied dozens of languages, literatures, folk ways and political systems—cultures—and developed a mature, rational, soulful style capable of bringing the masses to the particular.

Here’s an example from “a small Congolese town” where he reported on life under the gendarmes who practiced “all manner of villainy, brutishness, and bestiality.” Conducting interviews with a group of gendarmes, he thought about what else was present: “a huge swath of world history, which already set us against one another many centuries ago.” Slavery and colonialism have left scars “passed down for years in tribal stories, and the men whom I am about to encounter would have been reared… on legends ending with a promise of a day of retribution.” What happens? Kapuścinśki whips out a pack of cigarettes and they “smoke the entire pack, right away, until not a puff of smoke is left!”

Kapuścinśki writes for learners and with the faith that art, as writing, has the power to transform lives through empathy and shared experience. Such persons are rare, though: “The average person is not especially curious about the world.” The world is a “condition” best dealt with with as little effort as possible. “Whereas learning about the world is labor, and a great, all-consuming one at that.” Whether it’s by way of “curiosity,” “a hunger for experience,” or “an addiction to wonderment,” Kapuścinśki weaves two worlds together, his own twentieth century with Herodotus’s fifth-century B.C., and brings them both to life.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book.

[Note: In "The Harrowing Highway," part one of the DJ's odyssey, he tries to ride the bus from Pullman to Spokane without being molested.]

I stumbled around the city of screams, determined to spend the two-hour layover somewhere other than the bus station. Riverfront Park looked inviting enough, so I explored it for a while and was solicited yet again – alas, only for spare change this time. Thank goodness. I called a friend who lived nearby, and worked even nearer. He agreed to meet up before going to work.

“Excellent,” I said, “I have a crazy story to tell you.”

That all went according to plan. He agreed that the tale I related was indeed unusual. We caught up until it was time to go our separate ways.

By this time, I figured, someone with a four-and-a-half-hour layover would have gotten the hell out of the bus station. And with only about twenty minutes left before my bus was supposed to arrive, I was sure I could return for the short wait without much chance of running into my new “friend.” I was partially right.

But what luck! We just so happened to cross paths again. Fortunately, she was just leaving the station. “I got hungry” she explained. Then she expressed her surprise at seeing me again. “I thought this was your stop and you’d be long gone.” I could only wish.After tactfully extricating myself from the situation – which wasn’t difficult, since after all, she was hungry – I felt considerable relief, thinking I’d never see her again. Please don’t misunderstand me: I’m not making any judgments about the quality of this woman’s character. In fact, I found some of the things she said rather surprising, and in many ways she wasn’t so different from me. I would just rather not run into her again.

The interior of the bus station in Spokane is quite boring and very forgettable. I was also incredibly anxious to leave. The minutes ticked slowly away. 11:20, when the bus to Portland was supposed to arrive, came and went. I went to the ticket counter and (politely) inquired if it was running late. The attendant said “Well, it’s past 11:20 and there’s been no boarding call: What do you think?” I didn’t tell her what I thought. Instead, I wondered what exactly I’d done to warrant such a hostile and rude reply, said “Thank you” with the smallest hint of sarcasm, and walked away. “It’s a little delayed,” said the attendant, presumably to the back of my head.

Shortly thereafter, a voice over the intercom informed us that the bus had been delayed and that another one was being rerouted and would be at the station in two hours. Two hours. That’s far from being “a little delayed.” The ticket counter wasted no time closing up. The agitation of the patrons was palpable. I’m a relatively easy-going person, and even I was mildly upset. Not without good reason, mind you. I had invested a significant sum of money (for me, anyway) into the weekend, with no way to get it back at that point, and I didn’t want to miss what I’d paid for.

Not having any desire to become acquainted with any more strangers that day, I wandered over by the arcade games. A young boy was sitting inside some spaceship shooting game, playing with the controls and making “Pshoo! Pshoo!” noises.

“Have you played this game before?” I turned to face him, momentarily confused. Was he talking to me? He wasn’t looking at me, but there was no one else close by. “I haven’t,” I admitted. He regarded me with a suspicious look, as if wondering why I was talking. Then he said, “It’s awesome.” “Have you played it before?” I asked. It was his turn to admit that he hadn’t. “But I can tell just by looking at it that it’s fun.” “Cool,” I said.

Hunger was starting to get the best of me. I walked to a less populated area of the station where there was a food counter and candy rack. My stomach was a little queasy, so I didn’t feel like eating much. I must have been subconsciously hoping for a break, because I purchased a Kit-Kat bar. Perhaps not the best thing for a sour stomach, but it was pretty good.

I’d been sitting on one of the many benches, resting my tired feet for maybe ten minutes, when an unfortunately familiar face walked into the station. A face that lit up when its eyes found me. She sat down beside me and probably said something. I really can’t remember. I asked if she’d managed to get a hold of her aunt. “No,” she answered, holding out her hand expectantly. I reluctantly put my cell phone in it. She dialed and got through, finally. To an answering machine. She left a message, saying that she could be called back at this number. Who the hell does that?

A wrinkly old dude who worked (and I assume still does) at the bus station came over and started chatting the woman up. They were obviously familiar with each other. It was a disgusting display of humanity; at least I found it to be at the time. It also provided me with the break I was waiting for. I slipped away while they were too engaged with one another to notice and went down the stairs to the lower level.

There, it was much more peaceful. No riders infuriated by a two-hour delay. No one at all, actually, except for the little boy I’d seen earlier in the spaceship arcade machine. This time, his attention was held by a first-person shooter. He had the gun in his hand, and was “Pow! Pow!” shooting at his virtual antagonists. I had some change from my Kit-Kat purchase, so I offered him the quarters I had. He gratefully took them, asking, “Do you want to play too?” I dug into my pocket for the rest of the change, revealing only pennies and nickels. “Naw, that’s okay. I can just watch.” And so I did, until my phone rang. I recognized the number as “Auntie’s,” swore under my breath, and walked quickly upstairs.

“It’s your aunt,” I interrupted, handing her the phone.

“Oh!” she said. The wrinkly old guy, who’d been kneeling in front of her, got up. He must have decided this would be a long conversation and, I’m assuming, went back to work. I sat down a respectful distance away, and of course eavesdropped on the entire conversation. Well, the one side of it that I could hear, I mean.

She hung up. “I suppose you heard my story.” Since it wasn’t really a question, I didn’t really answer. She started to retell the story as I took my phone back. In summary: “We (her boyfriend and she) were going to have a child, but I miscarried. That’s why he beat me up.”

We sat in silence for quite a while.

“Many people come through here, and they all have stories. Some probably worse than mine.”

I was going to see a concert in Portland, when suddenly–

“I saw Tim’s work well before I met him,” Nisi told me later. “I moved to this neighborhood the same year I moved to Seattle, 1996 or so. The Central District is one of the city’s ‘historically black’ areas. People had warned me against moving here, and yes there were crack hovels and mattresses on the lawn but also BBQ restaurants and beauty parlors and other signs–for me–of home.”

Tim was home, we saw, and Nisi called out, “Hi, Tim! Is it all right if my friend takes some pictures?”

Tim stepped up out of his house, grinned, and said, “Snap away.” I immediately liked this man: trim, handsome, and clearly of the warm-souled persuasion.

He remembered meeting Nisi previously, saying, “I think I was under one of the cars,” and gestured at the street where several old timers sat. They looked in dubious condition to me, but Tim said they all ran.

He was on his way to do a roofing job somewhere 15 miles north of the city, and was planning to ride his bike. But he took time out to show us around a bit.

“I moved here 20 years ago,” he said, “when this house was just a shell.”

A bombed out shell, from what I gathered, as the neighborhood had been ruled by gangs. But now, from roof peak to fence line, the place was a sculpture park in a green riot of summer overgrowth. A Mariner baseball player (or maybe a railroad worker) maniacally aimed a bat-mallet at a panicked-looking lizard crawling down the side of the house, while a red devil leered from a gable nearby, and a ceramic giraffe serenely nibbled the encroaching greenery.

“For me,” Nisi said, “Tim’s place was another kind of familiar, different from beauty parlors, the kind of familiar you find in dreams. It was Ogun I saw erupting fiercely from the garage roof, the West African orisha sacred to truck drivers, smiths, and trailblazers, brandishing wrenches beneath a multi-colored flying motorcycle. After a few years of occasional walks by–long, lingering looks as I passed–I spotted Tim’s legs sticking out from one of his vehicles and got permission to tour the yard. Since then, I’ve had the good fortune to find him home when I came by with my friend Eileen Gunn, and again when walking out with Brian.”

What a sense of humor and wonder in these pieces. Their maker seems surely blessed by Brigid, the Irish goddess of smithies, weavers, and poets, as Tim’s sculptures take up themes of making, as in music, stuff and art.

“Tim likes to let the greenery grow thick around his works,” Nisi said. “Besides smiths and poets, fabers in some other tongue, Brigid is associated with wells, and midwifery, and herbalism. A culture goddess, she’s on the interface, like Ogun, of the seam joining civilization with the wild. Art with nature, grown and made.”

Along these same lines, I think of the Greek verb, poien, “to make,” and root of the word “poet.” Tim is a poet.

His current project, he told us, was building “the Great Wall. First build the ceramic army and then build the Great Wall.” Like the one in the old People’s Park in Berkeley, Tim’s wall wouldn’t stop a horde of wombats much less one of barbarians; it clearly has other intentions. It was certainly going to make groovy nesting for all sorts of birds and other denizens of the wild city, and one more marvel to gape at when walking by Tim Fowler’s home.

A ceramic army? Of angels?

A wall or a series of portals?

Carved wood, ceramics, car parts: these are things that begin with “C” that Nisi and I saw in Tim’s sculptures.

Cars from back in the days when they were called flivvers and drivers were pilots.

The devil plays the drums.

Out walking with my friend Nisi Shawl recently in Seattle, she took me by the home of Tim Fowler somewhere on East Howell Street. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling.

Out walking with my friend Nisi Shawl recently in Seattle, she took me by the home of Tim Fowler somewhere on East Howell Street. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling.
Out walking with my friend Nisi Shawl recently in Seattle, she took me by the home of Tim Fowler somewhere on East Howell Street. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling. Out walking with my friend Nisi Shawl recently in Seattle, she took me by the home of Tim Fowler somewhere on East Howell Street. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling. Out walking with my friend Nisi Shawl recently in Seattle, she took me by the home of Tim Fowler somewhere on East Howell Street. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling. Out walking with my friend Nisi Shawl recently in Seattle, she took me by the home of Tim Fowler somewhere on East Howell Street. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling.

building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling. Out walking with my friend Nisi Shawl recently in Seattle, she took me by the home of Tim Fowler somewhere on East Howell Street. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling.

I boarded the bus in a slight hangover haze and sleep-deprivation daze, looking forward to snoring my way through the ride that awaited me. As soon as I settled into a seat next to the window, however, those hopes were lost. Between the seat’s build and my own, it was impossible to get comfortable enough to nod off. In retrospect, I should have given it a try and at least pretended I was sleeping, because by the end of the trip I would find out just how uncomfortable that particular seat could be.

I gazed out the window through the enormous sunglasses that were hiding more than my eyes until I couldn’t stand it any longer. The young man who had gotten on the bus at the last stop was half my age, but even so I was attracted and couldn’t help but entertain carnal fantasies about him. I decided to break the ice. “There’s no need to remain silent.”I turned to look at the woman addressing (undressing?) me (with her eyes?) from across the aisle, thinking “Oh, there may very well be.” “What’s your name?” she inquired. I leaned toward her in an almost confidential manner and answered: “DJ Skrotekkki.” She introduced herself and asked if I was going to Spokane. I said yes, although I was just passing through. “I’m going to Coeur d’Alene,” she commented, as if I’d asked. After an inward sigh, my politeness got the better of me. “Why are you headed there?”

Without hesitating, I told him: “Husband beat me up, so I’m running away.”

“That’s as good a reason as any, I guess.” I’m often not as empathetic as I should be.

Despite myself, I laughed. Then I took off my sunglasses, a tear rolling down my right cheek. “He hit me here,” I said, pointing at a bruised bump on my right temple, “here” – a scuff on my left temple – “gave me a black eye,” my left eye, “and kicked me in the shin.” I rolled up my left pant leg and pointed at the welt on it. “My heart… is breaking,” I confided, wondering why I found it so easy to share such information with this person.

I never thought of myself as particularly approachable, and wondered why people find it so easy to share such information with me. “I imagine so. That’s terrible, I’m sorry to hear it.” She made a noise and shrugged, as if to say “It’s not your fault,” put her sunglasses back on and turned back toward the window. I looked out my own window, thinking that was that. But she was far from done.

“I called my cousin in Coeur d’Alene and said ‘I’m in big trouble… big trouble’ and she said ‘come live with me, I’ll take care of you’, so that’s why I’m going there.”

“That’s very kind of her, your cousin sounds like a good person.”

“Do you have a cell phone?”

After struggling for a moment to get it out of my pocket, I handed it to her. She dialed, held the phone to her ear, then with a sigh of frustration said, “It says I need the area code.”

“For Coeur d’Alene? 208, I think.” Curious… shouldn’t she know that? She dialed again, held the phone to her ear again, then turned, dismayed, and said, “It says I’m out of the service area.”

“That’s okay, you can try again later,” I said reassuringly. It seemed to work. She flared up again after a short pause.

“Why do men think they can beat me up?” He shook his head and shrugged. “I’m smart and brave and strong. And educated! I’m a registered nurse. I can show you my credentials.” I dug into my purse, pulled out a large collection of cards and paperwork, and started sifting through them. “Social security card… driver’s license… ah, here it is. Registered nurse, see!”

I had no doubt that she was a nurse, but knew that saying so wouldn’t have stopped her. Nodding, I asked, “Where do you work?” By now, our conversation had garnered the attention of a man sitting two seats in front of me. He slowly turned his head to better hear. “St. Joe’s in Lewiston.” Lewiston. I should have known.

The man ahead of me chimed in: “Are… you… Lap… wai?”

Alright. Frankly, this is getting a little boring and it would take forever to write the whole story anyway. So I’m just going to summarize the interim shit and skip to the good stuff. She isn’t Lapwai, she’s Northern Cheyenne, the tribe responsible for Custer’s death: a fact she was rather proud of. I got to see the paperwork verifying her heritage as well, even though I didn’t doubt that either. She showed me a nickel-paper help-wanted ad for a job she intended to take after settling down in Coeur d’Alene: a driver bussing campers to and from a campsite. “Because I have a perfect driving record,” she said. She served her oppressor – country, I mean – as a marine during Desert Storm. She’s a mother of two and a grandmother of one. She’s Catholic.

Also, she may have been suffering from a concussion, or may have been missing some marbles to begin with, because she tended to repeat things (a lot) and asked the same questions many times.

Unsurprisingly, her being a registered nurse was bought up again. I asked where she went to school. “What?” She asked loudly. “I’m a grandmother – hearing not so good.” As if one led to the other. I repeated my question. She decided it would be best to sit by me.

I answered the question and decided to show my credentials in case there was any doubt that I was, in fact, a registered nurse. Filing through the many cards and papers tucked away in my purse, I was distraught when I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

“It has to be in there somewhere, you showed it to me earlier.” She acknowledged the truth in my statement, but it neither calmed nor stopped her. “Here’s my birth certificate.” If I had any doubts that she’d been born, they were now soundly put to sleep. She came across an old, worn article clipped from a newspaper. Handing it to me, she explained, “An accident I was in.” I quickly read over the clipping: she’d fallen asleep at the wheel while driving somewhere in Montana and flipped the car, nearly killing the passenger. “I keep this to remind myself that I almost killed my husband with my ignorance, my stupidity,” she said as I handed it back to her. “It’s uh… good reminder.” Hmm… didn’t she claim to have a perfect driving record? A near-fatal accident seems far from perfect to me.

Eventually I found my nurse’s card. “Why were we looking for this, again?”

Hadn’t the slightest. “I asked where you went to school to become a nurse,” I said. She laughed and answered again, then playfully patted my knee. Not the kind of thing that would normally bother me, but I had started to pick up some strange vibes from this woman.

“You’re very special.”

“…Thanks”

“Does God let anyone love?” I asked. “I don’t know,” was the answer.

“You’re lonely, too.” she said. Am I really that transparent? No, I can’t be – not to this woman, anyway. “A little bit,” I said. “Why?” she inquired. I made something up, mixing in a few half-truths.

She just looked at me for a moment.

“I just want true love. To love and be loved. Someone to have an intimate relationship with. Someone to make love to every night and to cook me breakfast every morning. Sausage and Eggs. I just want true love… with sausage and eggs.”

I suppose that’s all anyone can ever ask for. I said as much, and realized she was looking into my eyes. Can’t say I cared for it. I turned away and looked out the window.

“You have beautiful eyes,” she said, resting her hand on my knee. “Thank you for being such a good listener and friend.”

“Oh… yeah, no problem.”

Taking her hand away, she said, “I’m very blunt.”

I hadn’t noticed.

“I think you’re very nice, and I find you attractive.” He remained silent. “I would like to rendezvous with you.”

Whoa, hold on now. I often think it would be nice to have sex with women younger than myself, but it never goes farther than that (mostly because it would be illegal). And I certainly don’t broach the subject with them! And who says “rendezvous” anymore? I just sat there, awed. Finally, she said, “You’re very shy.” True. “I’m too old for you.” Also true. “You’re the same age as my son. I shouldn’t think these thoughts about you, but I do. You’re very sexy.”

She clearly had me confused with someone else.

“And look, you barely have any whiskers.”

Okay, lady, that’s it: No one makes fun of my facial hair. “Yeah, it’s a little sparse in spots.” She laughed, I pretended to. She tried another strategy: “When I make love to my boyfriend… he’s not really my husband, we’re not married.” Wait, wait. Another change to her story? Or was she making this up so I would think, “Oh, you’re not married? In that case, let’s screw!” If so, it didn’t work. She continued, but I’ll spare the grisly details. Honestly, I didn’t want to hear it and have since purged it from my mind. I will say, however, that if she was trying to convince me to “rendezvous” with her, it wasn’t working. Not at all.

“You seem uncomfortable,” she noted, finally through bombarding me with details of her more intimate affairs. No kidding. “Yeah. These seats, huh?”

We were nearing Spokane, so in an effort to get her to shut up, I handed her my cell phone and said, “Here, it might work now.”

“Oh, yes. Auntie won’t like this call, but oh well.” Auntie? Wasn’t it her cousin before? And hadn’t she called her already? I began to wonder how much, if any, of her story was true.

Again, she failed to get through, but at least the effort took some time. Returning my phone, she said, “I think we should be friends. I’ll give you my name and address and you give me yours?” I didn’t like the idea, but she began writing her details down before I could protest. What was I going to do? She tore off her info and gave it to me along with the pad and pen, so I could write my own down. After a quick calculation, I figured what the hell, and jotted down my current address. I’d be moving in two weeks anyway, probably just enough time for a crazed husband or boyfriend or whatever he was to come kill me.

Mercifully, the bus pulled into the station a few long minutes later. I politely bid her farewell and promptly left.

The only problem was that she had a longer layover than I did.

If you don’t know “Michigan Girls” by Califone, I hope you’ll check the song and the band out.

Broke heels and bare legs
Pink waterline gave up on your twisted code
God’s eyes are crossed maybe just like yours. (“Michigan Girls” by Califone)

Not that I haven’t met some lovely women (and, oh yeah, sure, some nice guys, too) here in Traverse City. Today, for instance, I went hunting for bookstores in hopes of finding a book of poems by Lorine Niedecker (nee-decker), in hopes of gifting a new friend of mine back in Washington who grew up in Michigan and loves the Lakes.

I found several used bookstores up and down the coast. “Do you have anything by the Michigan poet Lorine Niedecker?” I kept asking. My association with Niedecker goes back some 25 years when someone, maybe Dorianne Laux, said I should read her. Niedecker is a poet of wonderful compression, often described as “domestic,” a rather insulting designation considering the fact that bearing a uterus doesn’t make a poet (or any woman) any more domestic than it did Emily Dickinson. In her collected poems, which I don’t have at hand, Niedecker has a long poem about the rocky Upper Peninsula. I got blank looks from several bookstore keepers, all lovely women. As was Niedecker.

Niedecker was born in 1903. Trouble is, at least for my book hunt, she wasn’t from Michigan. She was from the other side of the Big-Sea-Water, Wisconsin. Her she is with her beloved Lake in the background.

Like I say, I have her poems at home, but didn’t think to bring her with me. Fortunately, the Electronic Poetry Center at U. Buffalo has some of her work online. Here’s a fairly typical poem:

Along the river
wild sunflowers
over my head
the dead
who gave me life
give me this
our relative the air
floods
our rich friend
silt

Niedecker, according to Wikipedia, “was the only woman associated with the Objectivist poets and is widely credited for demonstrating how an Objectivist poetic could handle the personal as subject matter.” I’m not so sure about that, as her friend and correspondent, Louis Zukovsky, could get pretty personal. In any case, Niedecker wrote about the natural world around her without recourse to blatant romanticism. I’ve long been attracted to her as she was something of a hermit, wandering the bends of bay and swerves of shores “looking clearly at the world” while writing with “sincerity [and] intelligence” (Wikipedia again).

Speaking of pretty women, I met two at Chateau Leelanau. Michigan has a small but interesting, if young, wine industry. I’m no wine connoisseur, even though I regularly write about the Washington wine industry. But my interest is in the science and I eschew, and am otherwise no damn good at, the obfuscatory adjectival style of most wine writers. I do know I like big reds with a lot of “mouth feel” (tannins, to a chemist), and the few I’ve tasted here are pretty small (typically 12% alcohol compared to 13.5 and above for Washington and, yeah, that other place south of the Evergreen State). I bought a couple bottles from these nice ladies as gifts for friends back home.

Michigan is, of course, famous for its cherries. The airport here in Traverse City is called Cherry Capital. I was surprised to see old-school orchard systems. You’ll note how far apart and tall the trees are in this photo. Probably hard to get a sense of scale, but these trees, older ones, are about ten-feet tall with crowns as wide as the trees are tall, meaning they require a lot of labor to harvest; you have to climb a ladder to harvest the fruit in the crown, which is a pain in the ass, and a little dangerous, too, especially if you’ve been working in the humidity and heat all day. Just down the road from this older orchard are some much more recently planted trees, also not on dwarfing rootstock and in a low-density configuration. Maybe I’m just seeing the “for fun” orchards and not the serious, high-volume production ones, but these orchards take a lot more inputs to sustain (water, pest treatments, and so on) than do high-density systems, so I’m puzzled. You’d never find low-d systems in Washington, which is also pretty serious about its cherries (they don’t call the pink-and-yellow crown jewel the Rainer for nothing).

As I cruised around in my rented Kia (not a bad little car; plenty of head room, always a good thing for a not-so-bendy-anymore bean pole), I was listening to WNMC, a public radio station out of North Michigan College here in T Town. This is an awesome station, playing lots of jazz, blues and American roots music, as well as classy “world” music. The DJs are smart and low-key. We’re pretty starved for good radio back in Pullman, so this was a bit of bliss to go along with the lovely scenery… and the Kia’s air conditioning.

The last bookstore I stopped at was back in Traverse City, a place called the Bookie Joint. The owner was sweet as pie, and helped me paw through the Poetry and Michigan sections looking for, ahem, “the Michigan poet,” Niedecker. Hope she doesn’t read this! Well, actually, I hope she does, because she was smart and friendly, even if, like every one else (and Neidecker truly is one of our great but neglected poets), she’d never heard of my beloved Lorine. I ended up buying a handsome 1996 edition of Samuel Delaney’s Dhalgren, with a sharp, if mystified (honestly so), foreword by William Gibson.

The Kia safely parked, I walked down T Town’s trendy shopping district on Front Street for a solo dining experience at Poppycock’s. (I’m in marketing, but somebody ought to round us all up and smack us smartly about the head and shoulders for coming up with such names; I’ll stand in the back, if you please, so I don’t get too bruised.) I’m not much of a meat eater anymore (I work in ag, remember?, and know too well what chicken, pigs and cows go through on the way to our tables) but ordered a salad with (what else?) cherry- and jalapeno-glazed chicken breast on local greens with a (what else?) cherry-lemon vinaigrette. That, and a glass of a California Central Coast Syrah, went straight to my head. By the time the spinach-basil ravioli arrived, I was through Gibson’s foreword and into the first few pages of Delaney’s exquisite prose and remembered why I so loved this novel (or novel-like substance, more likely) as an adolescent. The first thing that happens is a sex scene:

With her fingertips she moved his cock head roughly into her rough hair while a muscle in her leg shook under his. Suddenly he slid into her heat. He held her tightly around the shoulders when her movements were violent. One of her fists stayed like a small rock over her breast. And there was a roaring, roaring: at the long, surprising come, leaves hailed his side.

Good dinner and good wine with an old friend. Probably a sacrilege of some sort to be reading that while eating, but I’m never short of heresies, and the meal was at least close to being as rich and complex as the prose. And thinking of that “recombinant city” (as Gibson manages to describe the scene of Dhalgren), I thought of cities of the heart I’d left behind in the ’90s and how Traverse City is a travesty in perfect synch with post-industrial America. Then I shrugged, paid my bill, and went walking in this charming, self-absorbed city, happy to be alive and not nearly as old as I once thought I was, welcoming the ghosts of the past. I tend them like a garden, with care.

As for my new friend back home, I’m still going to give her some Niedecker. Wisconsin, Michigan, big deal: water means the world to both of them and that’s enough for me.

The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories
Pantheon, Nov. 2007
1024 pages, cloth
5 of 5 possible stars

Herodotus – where would we be without him? The fifth-century Greek writer is known as the Father of History, and although the sophistication of writing history has certainly changed in the intervening centuries, the overall shape and method have not. Herodotus is a landmark in the history of civilization.

Herodotus was the first (at least in the West and as far as we know) to systematically collect documentary materials to form the basis of what he wrote and to arrange those materials in a narrative that captures the reader’s imagination. He even made some effort to verify his sources, a practice that led more or less directly to the rigors of the modern academy. In The Histories, Herodotus also set another standard: history is to be written by the winners.

That last bit has changed, thankfully, in recent decades, as history’s underdogs and losers get their day in the sun and in court. That Herodotus set a history-writing habit that lasted twenty-five hundred years is no mean feat. Still, it’s easy to be captivated by the story he tells about the Greco-Persian Wars that ended (around 480 B.C.) when Herodotus was at most ten years old.

The story of those wars is fascinating because the Persians, with their mighty armies capable of eclipsing the sky for minutes at a time with their showers of arrows, were defeated repeatedly by the weak and fractious Greeks. As Jared Diamond points out, the mountainous landscape of the Greek peninsula, with its population-separating barriers, is a natural breeding ground for city states. The alliances necessarily formed by the wily Greeks in order to beat the Persians, and the battles themselves, form the warp and weft of the historian’s weave.

So much for background on a name every serious reader already recognizes. What makes The Landmark Herodotus great is that it is a landmark; the book is so thick it would likely be instantly recognizable in satellite photos of your bookshelf. And it’s not fat that bulks this book up to the size of a well-fed satrap. It’s the maps and useful annotations that illustrate and elucidate every step of the way that make this book a heavyweight.

Herodotus is not easy going, and he flings names of people and places around like candy to kids at a parade. What a boon to have maps, at long last in one volume, to put a face on the place. With editor Strassler’s annotations and Purvis’s lucid translation, Herodotus at last becomes accessible to and referenceable by the average serious reader. (Strassler, by the way, already hit a home run with his Landmark Thucydides, the latter being another big-warmongering ancient Greek historian.)

There are a Sagan’s number (“billions and billions”) of translations of Herodotus available, and some are slim enough that you really can curl up with them. But the problem with less comprehensive volumes is that your divan or bed is soon covered with secondary books in order to understand the skinny one you’re intent upon. The Landmark Herodotus is a serious, and seriously affordable, piece of work worthy of any reader’s reference collection.

Of related interest: Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuścinśki

Originally published at Curled Up with a Good Book

Don’t miss the exciting first episode of Dr. Sullivan’s Science.

“The Oregon coast, adjacent to a coastal mountain range, is part of a relatively narrow continental margin where three tectonic plates converge: the Juan de Fuca plate, the smaller Gorda plate, and the North American Plate. The continental margin consists of the continental shelf, continental slope, and submarine canyons along the coast. Much of this area was above sea level during the last glacial period when coastal rivers cut into the land and delivered sediments to the deep ocean,” says the Oregon Coastal Atlas.

Sea stacks, basaltic mounds which refuse to erode, are everywhere.

“Stacks are formed when part of a headland is eroded, leaving a small island. They also form when a natural arch collapses due to sub-aerial processes and gravity. A stack may collapse or be eroded leaving a stump. Stacks form most commonly on chalk cliffs, because of the medium resistance to erosion. Cliffs with weaker rock such as clay tend to slump and erode too quickly to form stacks, while harder rocks such as granite erode in different ways,” according to Wikipedia.

Further south, toward Tilamook (cheese, Gromet), we found this lovely view:

“The name “Tillamook” is Coast Salish word meaning “Land of Many Waters”, probably referring to the rivers that enter the bay. At the time of the arrival of Europeans, the area along the coast was inhabited by the Tillamook and other related Coast Salish tribes. Historians believe they entered the area around the year 1400 and Lewis and Clark estimated the population south of the Columbia River along the coast at approximately 2,200,” says Wikipedia.

The nicest place we stayed and, as it turned out, the least expensive, was the Old Wheeler Hotel in tiny Wheeler, Oregon. This two-block-long town has a great thrift store with incredibly low prices and they still manage, we learned, to donate about $5,000 per month to a local hospice. Just up the street is Garbo’s, a vintage clothing store, run by Lynn, a charming woman who, before Katrina, used to collect folklore in Louisiana. The Old Wheeler Hotel, run by a man named Winston and his wife (whose name escapes me), is a great place to stay with a very decent breakfast (more than your typical “Continental breakfast” of weak coffee and sweet rolls). I don’t usually do free PR, but the Old Wheeler is irrepressible and the price is right. Our room, #2, looked out across the street at the Nehalem River and an island.

We rented a kayak (really, more of a canoe) and paddled around the island for an hour. The many other hours we spent in Wheeler mostly involved staring out at the river and its denizens, including blue herons. Winston said he frequently saw elk on the island, too.

And that’s pretty much it, except to say that we shot enough material for at least a couple more episodes of Dr. Sullivan’s Science, so look for those soon. Another perfect country mouse vacation!

We shot an educational science video which we hope you enjoy.