An acquaintance recently sent me to Millard Filmore’s Bathtub, a site about history, education, and ideas for meaningful teaching (as in, going beyond the pointless testing requirements). He thought I’d be interested (and I was), since my day job involves editing children’s textbooks. The part where I criticize their contents goes on only in my head, but it’s nice to know that there’s a teacher out there who’s trying to improve actual education standards — that is, actually teaching.

The first post I read was about the swelling caldera in Yellowstone National Park. For those who don’t know, a caldera is a sort of inverted, underground volcano (in simple terms). When a caldera blows, it doesn’t just scatter ash over hundreds of miles. Because of the magnified force of an underground volcano, and depending on its size, an eruption can completely destroy thousands of square miles. When the Yellowstone caldera goes again, as the Filmore post says, “That day will make Mt. St. Helens’ more recent eruption look like a quiet hiccough.”

Reading about it brought forcibly to mind my 7th-grade earth science teacher’s drilling into her students the fact that the massive forest fires burning in Yellowstone that year were not a problem for the environment (despite making us all a bit wheezy), which knew what it needed. The problem we needed to be concerned about, she said, were the roiling tons of lava hidden beneath Yellowstone Lake, which, when it blew, would pretty much take out the Western U.S. Of course, as she pointed out, there really wasn’t anything we could do about it.

Fun stuff. Okay, I find it fun. But then, I grew up in a place where both the current environment and geological history were an open, active part of everyday life. When I was eight, I scrambled with other kids to get on the Children’s Board of the Museum of the Rockies, where we got to mess around with dinosaur fossil casts and capture the stories of our mountains in learning about the forces that shaped tortured layers of rock.

Believe it or not, this stuff really interests kids. It’s real; it means something. They can touch it. Besides, kids like learning about anything in nature that explodes. Millard Filmore’s Bathtub, while focusing on the teaching opportunities related to news of the swelling caldera, points out some great travel opportunities, whether you’re eight or fifty-seven. Most important, of course, is to go to Yellowstone itself. As he points out, our national parks are woefully under-visited. And most people who visit Yellowstone don’t know or care that a massive underground volcano is what generates the sulfurous hot springs and makes Old Faithful spew.

Beyond that, you can get a sense of geological history by traveling to the outskirts of the devastation caused by the last time Yellowstone blew. Here’s two recommendations from Millard Filmore: “Nebraska, for example, has a state park, Ashfall Beds, containing fossils of animals burned and smothered by hot ash from a volcano in the Yellowstone Caldera (now it’s a National Natural Landmark).” And, “Check out the lava flows in southern Idaho, around Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho. Those flows, and their nearby cinder cones, used to be over the hot spot which now makes the Yellowstone Caldera dangerous. How far does lava flow? How much of the U.S. is moved from where it was? Did you know astronauts bound for the Moon actually trained at Craters of the Moon?”

Craters of the Moon used to be one of my favorite places as a kid. (Of course, I had ample time to explore it on my first visit, as the radiator hose blew in my family’s van and we were stuck for a few days, but that’s another story.) It’s so, well, moon-like, that only the biggest double-page magazine spread photo could ever begin to capture its eeriness. And Yellowstone National Park was the backyard of my childhood. The curiosity and interest from treading these places with some knowledge of their weighty millions of years has stuck with me long past youth.

Traveling to places like this sparks the imagination with an immediacy that any number of textbooks, lessons, or Discovery Channel documentaries can never attain.

If you flick through most travel magazines you would imagine that the world is made up of a series of luxury spas where compliantly servile locals will anoint you with unguents and stroke away the cares and woes of the modern world. It is a world where you can look from the luxury of a cruise liner upon quaint little natives, who are allowed on board long enough to dance for you, but where you never have to get your feet dirty or sleep in a bed without a choice of pillows no matter how remote the destination. It is a world of refinement where poor people are kept away from the best beaches, where the only locals you will encounter are making beds or serving cocktails, wearing mauve waistcoats or calling you “Bwana”.

This is ‘fluffy travel land’, a place inhabited by travel editors and low grade travel writers. It is a place that PRs for travel companies would like you to believe in. It is a place where everywhere is “the new Shangri-la” – like Narnia with palm trees.

Yet the real world as we know isn’t like that. Those quaint natives have their own lives to lead, and that sometimes involves the odd war, a few famines and the full gamut of human behaviour. Our governments warn us off visiting great swathes of the world, and the travel industry pretends that they just don’t exist.

There are good reasons for this – travelling to these sorts of places is in essence, pretty stupid! Yet there is a small hardcore of travellers who seek out the worlds dangerous places, not because they have any good reason to be there, they just like the buzz.

The patron saint of all disaster tourists has to be Robert Young Pelton. He is the man behind Fielding’s Guide to Dangerous Places – the bible for travel to the world’s more screwed up places. Pelton’s website is optimistically called combackalive.com and like Dangerous Places, it is packed with information to help you do just that – and to feel damn cool whilst you are there!

As well as facts and figures there are a number of stories about walking on the wild side of life. Getting Arrested gives you a few hints how to avoid spending a little more time in a country than you had intended, and has a salutary yarn about photographing planes in Mali.

The On The Ground section has stories from various frontlines around the world, including Derek Flood’s dispatches from a Maoist Insurgency in Assam in India in The Candlelight Rebellion

There is even a discsussion forum where scary sounding people with handles like mercenary1, whose signature is ”Come on you Sons of Bitches. No One Lives Forever” ask and answer badass questions.

Another site website that deals with some of the less salubrious parts of the world is Polo’s Bastards, whose strapline is “going where we ain’t supposed to!” They certainly do. This extensive collection of stories will take you from Colombia to Chechnya and from Peshawar to North Korea. The stories on this site go far deeper than travel yarns, but there is a real feeling of adventure and exploration. Spend some time here, and that package to Cancun just won’t seem so exciting!

Words & image ©stevedavey.com 2007

Some of the glossy mags’ more interesting stories (and some of the less interesting):

The Atlantic Monthly (May): Clive Crook has a piece about the inhospitable but eerily beautiful Skeleton Coast of Namibia. It’s unfortunate that the essay itself feels a little passive and bland, speckled with words like “breathtaking” and “awe-inspiring,” but when Crook sticks to the details, the geography of the sand dunes themselves succeed in making me want to see it for myself.

Conde Nast Traveler (May, US Edition): This month’s issues has depressing, “see-it-before-it’s-gone” coverage of 20 of the world’s most alluring places at risk due to over-development, deforestation, oil drilling, and other issues — including Baku, Borneo, and the Everglades. To balance it out is a report on the impact for good that some hotels around the world are making on social issues — a long overdue look at the not-so-small impact of tourism on communities and the planet.

Lawrence Osborne travels The Decan Odyssey, one of India’s old-world glamour trains, from Mumbai to Boa. And there’s a pretty bizarre fashion photo spread shot on location in the pristine, undeveloped parts of Brazil 100 miles (160km) southwest of Rio.

Budget Travel (May): The best section in this advertisement-heavy issue is a very funky photo essay by Sara Hart on the bridges that the wild and innovative edges of architecture has brought us this century. It’s worth looking at just for the photos.

Tiffany Sharples’s Rocky Mountain cycling trip unfortunately fails to get beyond her admitted New Englander’s “romanticized view of the Rockies,” but the tour itself is a nice itinerary. And Erik Torkells is surprised to find that Bermuda’s beaches are actually pretty nice, once he gave them a fair chance.

Town & Country Travel (Summer): Dorothy Kalins seeks out the best of Basque’s revolution in local cuisine. A piece about Sydney’s Byron Bay (how overwritten that place is!) escapes cliche only because the author admits in the first line, “I’m not the first person to wax poetical about Byron Bay.”

Kate Sekules has a very good piece about the effect of “a new generation homesick for a mythical former life” is having on her beloved Norfolk. And there’s a compilation section that creates a sweet, nostalgic look at San Francisco. I wish I could say it gives the insider’s view the article promised, but the piece’s strength is unfortunately in the nostalgia and memoir aspects rather than the — hem — perceptive travel.

It is too often the case that those interested in travel writing neglect fiction. Yet we all claim to uphold the definition that travel writing is about “character of place,” which fiction such as Wayne Johnston’s often fulfills more completely than any number of travel narratives. Fiction and memoirs by a native delve deeply into the nature of place; narrative by an outsider can only ever skim the surfaces. If you plan on traveling to Newfoundland, or are just curious, I can’t recommend Johnston’s books highly enough.

Johnston, who expanded onto the international literary map with his novel The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and memoir Baltimore’s Mansion, is a native of Newfoundland, and the island figures prominently as a character in his books. Baltimore’s Mansion was, hands down, one of the best memoirs I have ever read, one that drew the reader into breathing the very air of Newfoundland; The Colony of Unrequited Dreams set us in the rich, embattled history of the island’s struggles for survival and independence, and the influential people that shaped its character.

The Custodian of Paradise fills in another half of the story told in Colony. Main character Sheilagh Fielding is like Newfoundland itself: fiercely independent, lonely, a little introverted, proud, and made of the kind of beauty that is best left untamed. The novel opens with Fielding as an adult escaping not only society but her own haunted past. With trunks full of old notebooks and the booze that has nearly destroyed her health, she escapes to a solitary rock of an island long ago deserted by its inhabitants. From there, she reviews her past with narrative that is as riveting as it is strange, and waits for a stranger, a man who has tracked her steps for nearly twenty years.

A book like this can only be written well — here, even masterfully — by a person who is part and parcel of the land he or she comes from, an author who follows the Willa Cather precept that writers’ best works should come from the land beneath their feet, from the landscape that created them. Johnston has written other, lighter novels, but this one, like the rest of his best work, exudes the lonely, proud island on every page.

The Custodian of Paradise came out in Canada last fall, and is being released in the U.S. and U.K. this month.

This is why I like writing for this blog — three totally different posts, months apart, that finally have sort of a home.  The subject is efforts by people across the world to preserve their native languages. 

In Hawaii, the native Hawaiian language makes a strong comeback through an island school that is using language immersion to preserve island culture.  There is certainly a successful precedent in the revival of Hebrew as a living language.

In Ireland, a rather humorous article (because I’m not there as one of the befuddled tourists) about people who are getting hopelessly lost finding the Dingle (An Daingean) peninsula because many of the road signs are now all in Gaelic, in an effort to bring the language into more common usage. 

Great idea, guys, but when tourism is a major source of your income, you may want to make signs in Gaelic and English….

And in Texas, there is a push through the University of Texas to preserve the unique dialect of Texas German (for more detailed information see the Texas German Dialect Project.) 

I’ll bet you didn’t know that there are still strong communities of Germans, Czechs and Wendish peoples in Central Texas, descended from early 1800s immigrants to the state and still speaking an ancient dialect of their home country, rather like Cajun French is a unique dialect of French.  For more info, you can’t beat a visit to the UT San Antonio Institute of Texan Cultures.

Isn’t the world a fascinating place?  I think I was a linguist in another life….

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