We were driving slowly from Arnes to Reykjanfjörður, the SUV pulling a trailer loaded with sheep and lambs, each of their ears notched in a code understood only by the few, marking them as Reykjanfjörður sheep. We’d just rounded them up on the cold and windy June day, a thin line of us running downhill with the wind at our backs, arms flailing wildly as we danced back and forth to appear larger and more threatening than we were. They were packed like sheep in the trailer, no room to move or fall over as we bumped along the rutted dirt roads.
As we slowly drove south from Arnes towards...
Read more...
There is a camaraderie amongst those driving long distances. Cut off from interaction for long hours, we reach out in those places we find one another. Twelve hours after I left Indianapolis, I stretched my legs and settled into a seat at the counter of Bosselmann’s in Salina, Kansas. It was a tradition of mine, leftover from the years of St. Louis-Colorado blitzes, a convenient landmark in the flat parts of Kansas that promised hot coffee and large pancakes, halfway between beginning and end.Uncounted times I’d rolled off the interstate, coasting down the ramps and side roads into the parking...
Read more...
It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle. ~Ernest Hemingway
I may not like Hemingway, but he got this right at least. On the bike in the last month I’ve seen the weeping rocks of spring hiding off a dirt road, ridden through a narrow elevation band where the morning fog froze...
Read more...
All this is true.
For one of my early experiences in DC, I ventured downtown for the first time since my eastern migration to the 2008 Public Service Town Hall and Career Fair, which I had gotten notice of the day earlier via the imminently useful job list of Tom Manatos (yes, I’m already name-dropping out here). As I was new to the East and looking at all possibilities of new career directions, the opportunity to talk to a multitude of government agencies was too good to pass. It only took one Metro line change, which I, of course, chose the wrong direction but discovered within...
Read more...
