Anatomy of a Travel Story

As someone said, "Travel writing is a great way to ruin a vacation." True sometimes, but not always. The following three entries describe a day exploring the tiny beach town of Drake on Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula, perhaps the wildest, most authentic region in Costa Rica.


LANCHA - (n.) A small boat with the motorized agility of a water puma. Lancha captain from jungle town of Sierpe has many large gold rings on his fingers and more gold around his neck. He steers with confidence when the brown Sierpe River meets the big, wavy Pacific Ocean. It's like a Six Flags ride without a shut-off valve. Lancha arrives to Drake Bay safe and sound.

RAIN FOREST BEACH WALK - Flip-flops and sandals work great on the cocaine-white sands of Miami. Down here, there's Amazon-like forest on the left and tan, coarse-grained-sand beach nooks surrounded by sharp black rocks on the right. Big trees curve over the scene. I slip on their roots repeatedly.

Henry + Public Service Announcement

Henry was sitting exactly like this when I passed him on the Drake Bay beach. He was very still. The light was nice so I asked if I could shoot his portrait and interview him. He said fine.

Henry Perez Jimenez, 31
Lives in: Bihagua, Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica (born in San Jose)
Profession: Groundskeeper at Aguila de Osa Inn, Drake
Favorite part: Working in the gardens with the flowers
Least favorite: Nothing. It’s very nice.
Free time: Ride horses, work with chickens, see the wildlife, the Tucans
Travel: Running of the Bulls in Spain
Last meal: Rice, beans, pork, juice
Book: About the Osa Peninsula
Religious: Yes, Catholic


Henry lives 45 minutes away by horse. He and his wife and children live in a tiny village. He has no electricity and must sometimes swing on a rope across the rain-swollen creek that separates his mud floor house from the road to Drake Bay. He works as a groundkeeper for the Aguila de Osa Inn. Henry cannot read or write. I met a young Costa Rican woman who works for Metropolitan Sociometrics Research Institute (MSRI). She knew Henry's family because MSRI studies the need for education and health resources in remote towns such as Henry's.
Their website is (the longest in the history of the world wide web)...

www.thegladysishidastonetropicalreserve.giving.officelive.com

Ricardo,$1 Canoe Captain, Purveyor of Fine Seed Jewelry

After a two hour hike the Rio Claro interrupts the beach-jungle routine with a torrent of standing waves tearing down the middle of a beach. The thigh-high waves look hungry for fresh digital cameras so I decide not to attempt a hero's crossing. I whistle for Ricardo.
Ricardo paddles his teal canoe across a slow pool behind the beach. He drops off one passenger and picks me up. Four strokes later we've crossed the Rio Claro. I sit at Ricardo's picnic table as he makes beaded necklaces. I buy one. He does not talk much. He paddles me back across and I return from whence I came.

A Waterslide Proposal

A BEAUTIFUL WATERSLIDE COURTESY OF WORLD WIDE WEB

Back in the little town of Drake I look for Sergio who promised to show me the rapel course he is building over a waterfall. He's nowhere to be found, but David, a 22 year-old enterprising gringo from Florida is lying in his hammock overseeing two men cutting wood for David's soon-to-be sushi restaurant. It will likely make Drake the lowest per-capita-sushi-eating-town-with-a-sushi-shop.
David saddled up his four-wheeler and took me on a tour of the forest where we found Sergio in the midst of building his zip-line and rapel course on David's step-father-in-law's farm. (David married a Costa Rican woman, Rebeca and they have a baby boy. Like I said, he is a very enterprising young man.) On the way back, David and I have a beer in his favorite jungle-perch cantina. The bar's deck pokes out over a steep slope with views to Drake Bay. David explains his dream of building a children's waterslide park right here off this deck. A few slides here and there, pools at the bottom, a sandwich and drink bar up here. For $15,000 I could get $2,000 a month once it's up and running. I consider the current economic climate - also a slippery downward spiral - then run a quick cost-benefit analysis. I finish my beer and pass on the Great Waterslide Proposal of Drake Bay.

EX-PATS WAY OFF THE GRID - The day ends as I paddle a sea kayak across silvery, calm Drake Bay with Sean in a boat beside me. Sean and his wife and daughter paddle sea kayaks a half mile up a clear, canyoned river to their simple home in the jungle. They've lived up the Aguila River for years and raised Star there. Sean is a surf and kayak guide and leads unique free-dive excursions into the marine-rich Pelagic Zone (where the continental shelf drops off and the big fish hang out). Their jungle life shocks me on one hand with its raw extremeness and on the other with its normalcy; I realize that despite the kayak commute, river baths, thatch-hut kitchen, and no electricity, it is a life far more routine and predictable than mine.

Back in Action, Heroes Never Quit

Things have been happening. One day I flew to San Jose, Costa Rica for a story in Cottage Living. A week later I was on an island made by two volcanoes in a Nicaraguan Lake the size of Rhode Island. I rode a bike with one pedal to a thatch cabana to get internet. Two English guys watched Sex and the City on a TV sitting atop the bar. My email told me Cottage Living had shut down. Damn.

The next four chapters of Blog Amazingness should tell a bit of the happenings in Central America.

Lostine, Oregon

Bona-fide characters drink at the Lostine Tavern. You must have a definitive, long-established personality and you need a favorite beer. It’s like a name-tag or a birth mark. John, the horsepacker, drinks Hamm’s. They cost $1.50 in a can. Peter, the British mining engineer, drinks Moose Drool draught. Jim, the large man who talks a lot and very quietly – an odd combination, come to think of it – usually doesn’t drink much but today is his birthday so he’s having a beer, red. That’s Budweiser with tomato juice.

I’ll take a Moose Drool. I’m just visiting, but Pat and Dianna, the mother-daughter barkeep and cook, welcome me in, personality or not.

Lostine is in the northeast corner of Oregon where few people go and a few distinct mountain ranges swell out of the rolling landscape of golden farms and ranchland. The Wallowa Mountains rise south of Lostine, home to the Eagle Cap Wilderness and its alpine lakes and 9,000+ foot granite peaks. Nearby Joseph gets more attention for its chalet-style buildings and postcard perch beside Lake Wallowa. It’s also where Dianna is heading after closing down the tavern. She’s the third-ranked poker player in the state of Washington (originally from Spokane) and there’s a game in Joseph tonight.

The Lostine Tavern opened as a pharmacy and creamery. It evolved into a soda fountain and deli in the 1920s before becoming a tavern in the ‘40s. The original icebox cabinets sit prominently behind the beer taps, chilling the mugs and pitchers. The tavern stays open 363 days a year, seven days a week from 7am until the last customer leaves.

Pat says folks will call from hours out and order their ribeyes for an 11pm arrival. Pat obliges. She hand-cuts the meat and the potatoes for French-frying. She has twelve great-grandchildren and has lived from Lostine up to Wasilla, Alaska, having worked in a post office, logging yards, as a longshorewoman, motel maid, and cook. (Yes, she met Palin, when she first ran for mayor.) Dianna and Pat stand side-by-side, elbows on the bar, smoking cigarettes like professionals.

I eat a 16oz rib-eye and drink my Moose Drool. As the night winds down, Peter and I stack stools on the tables and help with trash clean-up. Dianna gives me another beer for my effort. The following day I wake up early in my truck parked in Peter’s driveway. I spend the day hiking a long loop in the Eagle Caps, a foot of new snow in the valleys and only deer, elk, squirrel, and cougar tracks ahead of me.

John is loading his horses into his truck when I make it back to the trailhead. He’s returning from two nights setting up a winter camp high in the mountains. He gives me a lift down the hill, cursing the son-of-a-bitch icy road threatening to slide us and his towed trailer full of seven horses into a mess of horizontal pain-in-the-ass shitshow at the bottom of a son-of-a-bitch ditch. We make it down to the Lostine Tavern. Dianna welcomes us with a Moose Drool and a Hamm’s.

DIANNA and PAT

: :: : standardized :

coffee : memory :: hairspray : perm

cowboy hipster : mullet :: coffee shop : cupcake

elation : balloon animals :: concussion : algebra

video surveillance : sweaty pits :: jello wrestling : rashes

wool pants : underwear :: airplane : cocktail


I took the GRE today. I am incredibly average.

And I saw a cowboy hipster with a mullet in the airport.

Spin the Globe

When I meet people and ask them where they’d travel if they could go anywhere, occasionally someone will say “Nowhere. I been everywhere I can go.” (Meet Clem, below…)

Back in the days of my youth (the mid 50s, early 60s, probably) I would have thought how silly – not travel anywhere? Now, I am impressed by these folks so deeply content in their place.

I am not like them. Not yet. Even the postcard-sized map on the back of the airplane seat before me – our plane’s red stripe inching toward the southeast – gets me fired up.

There’s a map in my office and one in my hallway. I donated a bunch of old colorful ones, wrinkled from use, to our decorating editor, Heather. She glued them onto a sleigh bed and shot it for the magazine. I wanted my maps back so she gave me the whole frame and I slept in a huge map-covered sleigh bed for years.

Now I wonder who bought that frame after I dropped it off at the Salvation Army. Maybe that someone’s rolling over in bed right now, her pillow up against the light green Marin Headlands, a strand of hair passing across the Golden Gate Bridge, over the gray-gridded streets of San Francisco, and off into the eternally pale blue, dead-calm Pacific as her big toe sleep-walks down the Dordogne Valley, back and forth over a ridge-top castle marked with a tourist destination star.





CLEM NELSON, 68
LIVES IN: Hurtsboro, AL (born there). “Lived near Hatchachubbee all my life: 2 miles east, 2 miles north, 2 miles west, 2 miles south.”
PROFESSION: Professional dog trainer
FAVORITE PART: “Workin’ dogs. Been doing it from 12 years old til now.”
LEAST FAVORITE: “Ain’t nothin’ I don’t like.”
FREE TIME: “I like to go to church. And I like to fish sometimes. Most of the time I cut grass – I do a lawn service.”
TRAVEL: “Nowhere. I been everywhere I can go. I used to run circus training. Just about all over the south. I stayed in motels. I liked it then. I don’t like it now. I don’t care nothin’ about travelin’.”
LAST MEAL: Breakfast: bacon and eggs, coffee.
RELIGIOUS: “Yeah. Baptist.”

House as Architecture: Class 1

VITRUVIUS - Greek architect, circa 1 A.D.


This fall I'm taking a University of Washington extension course called "House as Architecture." It's intended for the general public interested in building a new home or remodeling/adding on. I fall into neither of those catagories, but it's a good opportunity to learn some basics. Someday I will build something and for now, I can write about it. So that's what I'll be doing from 6-9pm every Wednesday. There are no grades, so I will certainly pass, hopefully at the top of my class.

For those of you planning construction on your new or existing cottage, I will provide weekly reviews. Each class will feature a Seattle architect or engineer who will share experiences on topics such as: Writing your "program," site selection, kitchens and baths, coding-zoning-permitting, working with builders, cost expectations, etc.

Meeting 1: Introduction
The first class stuck to the poetic, discussing how the best architecture speaks to the best personality in the home owner. Or, perhaps, it brings out the best personality in the homeowner. It's a bit like "You are what you eat." The Cottage Living crowd, of course, knows this.

Our instructor, Seattle architect Bill Zimmerman, used the teachings of Vitruvius, a Greek architect from the 1 A.D. time period, to break the craft down into three parts.

Mr. Vitruvius, break it down...

FIRMNESS - Designing a body that can sit on the ground (and deal with the local environmental stresses)
COMMODITY - Basically, the balance between form and function - how much value do you put on the various components of your structure. Where do you spend your money?
DELIGHT - It must have beauty and symmetry to create delight.

Blog Clogs Arterie

I am new to the almighty Blogdom, yet I am already feeling its power. This weekend I went to the small logging town of Forks, WA to look into a story on the source of wood and paper products. Forks' main street begins and ends where Highway 101 slows down for one blinking light and one traffic light. Despite its proximity to the nation's most rugged, arguably most beautiful coastline (20 minute drive to La Push) in one direction and the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve Hoh Rain Forest in the other, the town remains a pass-through kind of place. Its residents depend on the ever-shrinking logging business. There aren't many places to eat. The Forks Cafe works fine.

I didn't feel up for steak or a burger (last night) so I jumped on the breakfast-all-day option. Oddly, though, it offered four main items: Canadian ham, bacon, corned beef hash, or hamburger steak. Each served with two eggs, hash browns and toast. I like eggs and bacon so I ordered the bacon. A few minutes later, a plate came to me with six slices of the thick-cut, well-cooked stuff. Six slices all tangled up in one another like an unruly litter of puppies. To the side sat my eggs over easy, toast, and hash browns.

Six slices.

That's when the blog tried to kill me. I told myself not to eat them all... I'll wake up sweating, parched, perhaps lethargic in the extremities. But the thought of writing about having eaten an entire plate of bacon as my dinner entree was irresistible.

I strategically placed one piece on an egg sandwich. Repeat. Eggs down.

I tried to sop up yoke with the third slice and it worked about as well as cleaning a paint spill with a wet shower curtain. But I ate the yellowed slice and it was good, too.

My final two toast halves enwrapped four and five like broken-zippered sleeping bags around boy scouts.

The sixth sat alone, ignored by me, the proud, healthy, disciplined diner. But the waitress dallied and the bacon remained, an island of savory temptation. I tried to keep my eye on the televised football game. But it wandered, following my mind.

The blog, David. Think about the blog for once.

Bacon VI went down smooth and naked, nothing to compete with the buttery fat edged in salty crispness.

Blog: +1 | Blog CEO's Life Expectancy: -1

Sidewalk Reunion

BRODY IN AUSTIN, TX

I’m sure it’s been explained in the world of physics – some formula about the more things move around the more likely they are to collide – but I just had a full-circle collision with a complete stranger.

Brody Douglas Hunt was born in the wrong half century. He should have popped up in the 1940s. That way he could have spent his early twenties traveling with Cash and Waylon and Willy. Or maybe he’d have fit in with Kerouac and the Beats as the honky-tonkin’ yodeler in black.

Instead, Brody lives with us, in the 21st Century. Sort of. He calls his home “Travellin’ Through” and he wears black cowboy jeans, boots, and a black cowboy shirt, sometimes with a red stripe or white lines down the buttons and around the chest pockets. He carries a guitar in a black case and his dog Jacko is black. Brody makes music on the street and it’s good. His voice, like his look, is vintage, sounding old and youthful at different times. He sings forgotten tunes from the Old West. He’s a music buff and not one who panders for money with a guitar and a Jimmy Buffet song.

I met Brody last April in Austin, TX. The light was dusky and he was packing up his guitar near a wildly decorated costume store. Students flooded the college-district streets for first-Thursday partying. I asked Brody if I could photograph and interview him for a collection I’ve been accumulating over a few years.

Here are his responses to my standard interview questions:

LIVES IN: Traveling through (born in Springfield, OR)
PROFESSION: Timber feller and yodeling country singer
FAVORITE PART: I like the yodeling. I love it. And for timber work… there’s nothing like being covered in tree blood at the end of the day.
LEAST FAVORITE: Chainsaws and working in woods – the vines, the blackberries, getting hurt. Hung-over mornings. And my least favorite part of being a musician is when I’m a broke musician.
FREE TIME: Pinball. I hunt wild mushrooms. I drink a little bit of beer.
TRAVEL: If I could travel anywhere, anytime, I’d like to do a mountain of cocaine and play pinball with Waylon Jennings.
LAST MEAL: Bean and pork quesadilla – something that somebody gave a friend of mine. The price was right.
BOOK: It’d be an autobiography and it’d be called “Roadie’s Booty: A Tale of the Hunt.”
RELIGIOUS: No. I would not say so. I got some ideas about some things but I don’t tend to spread them around.


And that was it. I went my way, a plane back to Birmingham. Brody went his, hopping a train bound for New Orleans, I think.

Two weeks ago, six months after Austin, while walking down Port Townsend, WA’s Main Street during the Wooden Boat Festival, I heard that old yodely voice crooning a far-away country song. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a tall man in a black suit. Brody stood between two other instrumentalists, his sideburns hinging to the lyrics, a crowd of five or six listening. He finished and I shook his hand. He remembered me. I wanted to buy him a beer but he quickly started picking and howling away. So I listened and walked on, amazed at the physics of it all.

BRODY IN PORT TOWNSEND, WA

People Watching with a Destination

Why travel if not to see other people in other places? Ask seasoned travelers their favorite spots to people watch and you’ll likely hear a Parisian café, a Central Park lawn, the Hollywood strip. My friends would likely cite the Talladega racetrack infield or Burning Man, but it’s all the same – a stationary spot amidst a mass of eclectic movement.

I’ve recently discovered a more efficient, productive form of people watching: Public transportation. And I don’t mean airlines; no one counts those as public transportation. Air travel is more like being chained to a wildly bucking bronco quarter-machine outside a dysfunctional department store in a 1970s strip mall. Nothing good happens there and you leave sore, feeling slightly less human, and 25 cents dumber.

I’m talking buses, trains, ferries. I’ve been using the bus lines to get around Seattle this summer and it always leaves me in a far better mood than were I to drive the same distance. Yes, it feels nice to be part of the “green” patrol of gas-free do-gooders, but the best part is seeing and hearing the people, even the ubiquitous bus-riding nutjobs.

On a train ride to Portland I had an entire four-seat booth with table to myself. I set up my laptop and plugged it in to a floorboard power outlet. The guy behind me agonized over math problems in preparation for the GRE test. The older gentleman across the way noticed and offered a friendly tutorial; he’d taught high school math for decades. I spent a half hour chatting with the diner car chief and met two talkative twelve-year-olds on their way back from a Justin Timberlake (JT) concert. So I learned about that, which was nice.

And my parents recently visited me in Seattle, where I relocated months ago. Out here water separates the mainland from dozens of islands and the Olympic Peninsula. We took a ferry to Orcas Island. Ferries are the grand marquee of public transportation – cruise-like in scenery and bus-like in rapid usefulness. Kids run from one side to the other looking for dolphins or sea birds, lovers drape over the rail planning adventures, friends sit inside at a booth playing cards. I listen to dad analyze the intricacies of ferry schedules. Vinyl booths and cloth seats might not have the allure of a sidewalk café in Paris and I might not spy an Olsen twin. But I'll keep an eye peeled for osprey, and ears tuned for juicy gossip. At the end of it all, at least I’ve gotten somewhere.