Travel and Adventure

Macfarlane is fascinated with things underground. First there is the concept of it – dark, hidden, burials – and the connection with our own subconscious. Most of the book, however, is not about ideas but about the places he has explored.  He writes about caving to find subterranean hideouts, old cities, and underground rivers. He climbs glaciers to understand the secrets they held deep in ice, but which are now surfacing. He travels to almost inaccessible coastal caves in Norway’s Arctic Circle to see the dancing red figures on their walls.

Macfarlane is a superb nature writer who can write pages about the colors and sounds of glaciers and make you want to continue reading. He is an artistic observer of what we think of as the non-animate world – rocks, water, dirt. He notices their shape, texture, sparkle, smell, color: “I will remember the days that followed mostly as metals. Silver of the pass.  Iron of the bay and its clouds.  Rare gold of the sky.  Zinc of the storm in its full fury.  Bronze and copper of the sea…” He is also a brave adventurer – or crazy person – depending on your view of dangerous travel and extreme sport.

Macfarlane explores the uses of caves in the past – as burial sites, or secret hideouts during wartime. In the present, underground facilities store nuclear waste – as deep and inaccessible as possible. There is a seed bank, back-up in case of global catastrophe.  Physicists study the universe’s dark matter. (Yes, underground.)

The book is very dense and best read with a break between chapters.  It is possible to pick and choose.  If getting stuck in passageways deep underground terrifies you, read about the network of fungi and how they connect the above ground trees.  There are provocative ideas, nail-biting adventure, an abundance of unknown (to me) facts.

The land is bleak and arid, alternately freezing and broiling, but the intrepid travelers see the best. They “travel through the stars” in the still hot desert night.  They navigate the washboard roads and bike up the passes in Tibet and Nepal.  Throughout the memoir, and again in the epilogue, Harris cites the kindness of strangers – people who fed them dinner and let them pitch their tent in the yard. One woman (a mother of four who was younger than they) washed their hair.

As Harris tells their story, she ruminates on many things.  What exactly is the use of a border?  How does wildlife conservation work in a poor country with a hungry population?  (This question after a police officer offered to share his lunch of lamb, made from the protected Marco Polo sheep he was hired to care for.) Why do we spend billions on space exploration when we don’t know what a rhino says when it snorts and sidles into the grass?  Harris’s far-flung philosophizing might be more interesting than the isolated places they visited.

Why do it?  Why go on a harrowing bicycle trip full of hardship and worry? A partial answer comes from Alfred Russell Wallace (co-discoverer of natural selection) who says that one of the essentials of life is “an adequate change of occupation.” Do something different! Or – some people just have adventure in their blood. 

The fields were honeyed with light as the sun set, and they gave off the warm smell of hay… another night on the Silk Road, with silence settling over the fields and the crickets resuming their own strange incantations, spells that conjured beads of dew from blades of grass and lulled us to sleep under a smoke of stars.

Qwill has taken a few days’ vacation, staying in a cabin on the river.  Koko, always mysteriously prescient, is suspicious of some of the neighbors.  What is really going on in the adjacent woods? are they taking photographs? panning for gold? or something more nefarious?  The plot moves at a leisurely pace with many diversions into the history of life “400 miles north of everywhere” and the quirky characters who live there.

In Jim Qwilleran, Braun has drawn a character that allows readers to indulge an almost universal fantasy.  What would it be like to suddenly inherit a fortune? (Billions in his case.) We can allow ourselves to identify with Qwill who has the energy, brains, and generosity to use it well, all while solving the latest murder.

It was occasionally the companion to amphifa, Portland’s now famous frog.  Then there is auntifa, seen next to photos of protesting old ladies.  And two favorites– Make America Read Again and MAGA: Make America Gracious Again.