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.”