Each month, Perceptive Travel, the webzine, brings you compelling travel narratives by some of the best writers in the business. But what’s the story behind that story? I wanted to know, and so starting with the June 2010 issue, I decided to ask. Look for a new edition of PT Writers at Work every week or so.

I’m kicking it off with a writer who’s also an old friend, Rachel Dickinson.  She’s written for a variety of magazines, from The Atlantic to Yankee; her most recent book is Falconer on the Edge (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2009).  In her latest for Perceptive Travel, Trapped Beneath the Volcanic Ash Cloud, she tells the story of a recent trip to Ireland that became infamously prolonged.

Alison Stein Wellner: In your story, you mentioned that you were in Ireland to blog about it. When did you know that you were going to write this particular story?

Rachel Dickinson: The minute I got stuck there and found myself sobbing in front of the hotel manager, I thought here’s something I really could write about. Lord knows, like most people I like to write about myself. Oddly enough, I tend to use myself as the lens through which to see everything.

ASW: Did you start writing right then?

RD: I started taking notes. I am really compulsive about taking notes, I should buy stock  in Moleskine — I don’t even buy the fake-o ones, I buy the real ones.

Anyway, I know that if I force myself at the end of every day to sit and take notes, draw pictures and whatever, I can always call back on it. The more details I can get right then the more details I can use later on.

“This is the day I hit rock–bottom and the concierge found me crying in the hall. “I just need to get home,” I sobbed. I tried to book passage on the Queen Mary 2. Looked for rides on freighters. Do you know how few choices there are for a transatlantic crossing? Got pissed off because the British press didn’t give a rat’s ass about Americans trapped in their country. That government made plans to send British war ships to France to pick up stranded travelers. I emailed the American consulate in Belfast and asked when I could expect an American war ship to pick me up. I didn’t hear back and am probably on the kind of list you don’t want to be on when you travel for a living.” – From Trapped Beneath the Volcanic Ash Cloud

ASW: Wait, you draw?

RD: Yeah, I’ve taken to drawing stupid pictures, that’s what I call them, stupid pictures. I draw just like a ten year old, a stick-figure bird, or whatever — it’s like looking at really bad elementary school drawings. But there’s something about them…if I try to draw what I’m seeing, it  pulls on some extra sensory “stuff”, so when I get home, I have my notes, I have my photographs, and I have my stupid pictures to refer to. I loved the architecture in Belfast,  so I was glad I had to spend some more time there, drawing some rough sketches of buildings and The Giant’s Causeway. I was  just trying to draw what was outside my window. Obviously since I was looking at it for six days, I was able to refine those drawings several times! (Read more about Rachel’s note taking and stupid picture drawing here.)

ASW: Did you write a first draft when you were still in Ireland?

RD: I actually don’t do drafts of stories…or maybe my notes are my drafts? Anyway, I ruminate on things. I was spending time driving around, and in between being petrified of being killed by oncoming cattle truck, or of driving off a cliff, I was thinking: what’s the story, turning that over in my head. When I sit down to write it, it’s in one draft –  that is, it’s already fully crafted.

[Pause while I hate RD for a few moments as my process is way more tortured.]

[And we're back.]

ASW: So where did you actually write the story?

At home. I have my laptop in front of me, I boot everyone off to school, and then the dog bugs me. The  dog and I have a thing, he nips at my feet, I yell at him and then we both get back to what we were doing.

I sit in my living room at a little table at a bay window.  Last year, I had to turn the table away from the window.  I was looking out and there was robin making a nest at eye level. I couldn’t get a flipping thing done for months! So  I had to turn my back on my nature.

ASW: Any advice for aspiring travel writers?

This is what I always say: I never know what the story is when I go someplace, I’m always looking and always open to anything being the story.  I always do take a lot of notes, and I don’t discount anything as being stupid or frivolous. You just don’t know what’s going to be the story.

In this heat, the air holds everything. It contains sewage and sweat and metal shavings and gray fine dust. It forgets nothing, not the garbage that rots in the can, not the dogs and (or the men) that ever took a pee on the sidewalk.  Nothing can hide from the heat of this air, and the people who walk in it try not to fight it, they expose themselves to it, roll their sleeves to turn t-shirts into tank tops — but no amount of flesh will reveal relief.

The fire-tongue air has weight, it has heft and it is against you. It wants to push you down.

And down they go. Construction workers, in t-shirts with sweat semicircles in the front and the back, take a break in the shade, legs splayed out, cradling purple bottles of Gatorade. A young woman collapses, EMTs kneel beside her, and a doorman runs to get her some water. The water drips drips drips down from countless air conditioners.

This is New York City in heat, in the wave that’s grasping the Northeast. The heat index will top 103 today, and it will break records, they say.

We travel in the summer because summer has historically been a season for dying.

Heat still kills more people than other natural disasters. Those that die mostly won’t succumb to hyperthermia, which is, when you get right down to it, death by cooking.

Mostly, heat kills by stressing the heart and other vital organs, especially those weakened by other conditions. In the past, summer heat held other dangers, for instance, in late 19^th century New York City, tenement dwellers seeking relief from the night heat often rolled off of roofs and window sills to their deaths. Around that time, too, were the many illnesses that worsened in summer, from malaria to cholera.  They were once thought to be cause by miasma – bad air poisoned by decay in the summer’s heat. In reality, it was insects that were the culprit, although are of course more active in the summer too.

The heat is worse in the city than in the country. The “heat island effect” — when permeable vegetation is replaced by impermeable development –  was observed as early as 1776.  When Thomas Jefferson was president, he argued that cities should have alternating squares of greenery to relieve the heat and its evil effects.  But local governments didn’t like the idea of wasting space that could be put towards more economically productive use.  Also, the idea that the heat affected people equally was politically and economically fraught in other ways.  Heat provided one of the favorite arguments justifying slavery: blacks could withstand heat better than whites due to their tropical ancestry, the theory went, so without conscripting black labor, there would be no wealth in the form of cotton or rice. Of course, points out William B. Meyer in his book Americans and Their Weather, “Summer in fact was as deadly for slaves as it was for their masters.”

It’s not the fact of heat that’s a problem, it’s the way we relate to it. The weather is morally neutral, reminds Meyer, it’s people who get ideas about forcing people to work in the sun, or to live in unventilated tenements, or in this day, the physically compromised in unairconditioned apartments.

The heat does feel like an entity, but it’s neither malevolent or benevolent. It’s a circumstance, and one that requires wise reaction — lest it break us before it finally breaks itself.

The feature articles in this month’s edition of Perceptive Travel magazine focus on the Americas  -  North and South.

In his article Two Wheels, Two Drinks: Biking through America’s Heartland about a 225 mile biking trail across the state of Missouri that passes through wine country and river towns, Perceptive Travel editor Tim Leffel asks “Do we see more of a place when we pass through it using only our muscles for movement? Do we feel its essence more when we travel slowly, moving at a human pace instead of a petroleum–powered one?”

Down in Central America, Richard Arghiris, author of Footprints Nicaragua,  experiences the effects of tropical decay, complete with giant rats, roaches, fleas, flies and an array of creeping multi–coloured moulds, while staying in Bluefields in Nicaragua.

And further south, in Uruguay, Darrin DuFord examines Montevideo’s street culture and attempts to understand the allure of the city’s street drumming groups, first by finding them and then by attempting to learn how to play the barrel–shaped candombe drums.

The travel book review section, this month written by Susan Griffith, author of Work Your Way Around the World, covers three books that tackle foreign encounters and culture clashes around the world.

And as usual, this month’s world music review section looks at some fascinating musical selections – a desert blues remix,  Lo’Jo’s placeless internationalism, Mali’s Salif Keita, and music from Kinshasa.

And don’t forget, there’s a chance to win some great travel gear – this month two winners will receive their choice of any Perceptive Travel short-sleeve shirt from our Cafe Press Traveltease store, shipped to their home.

This is open to anyone living in a place where Cafe Press will ship. Newsletter subscribers will get instructions on how to enter. If you weren’t on that list already, you can still get in on it by following Perceptive Travel on Facebook. There you’ll find the contest details in one of the postings.

Happy reading!

The flabby mess of a man trudged out of the sparkling lagoon like a lazy yeti loping through thick forest undergrowth. His head was cleanly shaved, his back was carpeted in a fine layer of fuzzy black moss. Sagging love handles drooped indifferently over his tiny swimsuit, a flesh-colored piece of fabric that stopped mid-thigh and clung tightly—much, much too tightly—to a paunchy buttocks defined in horrific detail.

His dimure Russian princess watched expectedly from the bathwater-warm water as he shook himself dry, like a dog, and reached for his camera. He attached the wide-angle lens. A glorious spectacle, shot on location at the Sheraton Maldives Full Moon Resort & Spa, was about to begin for a captive audience comprised of two gawking couples and me, an unassuming voyeur poorly disguising his delight and disgust behind a pair of aviators and a copy of Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar.

With pixie-sized steps she slowly, wistfully, drags her feet across the coral-strewn sand, a beauty slowing marching towards the beast, eyes glazed and empty as if in trance. Her bleached-blond hair is pulled back into a bun, her sunglasses hang low on the crown of her nose. She hikes her black-and-white, leopard-print bikini bottom higher up over the curves of her bony hips, then stares down at her chest and shakes her shoulders from side to side until she’s satisfied that the shimmering gold sequins that hang from her necklace are sitting just right.

The stage is set. Everything is in its right place. Lights, camera, action!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Twenty minutes before the show began the star performers were swimming about 50 feet from the lagoon’s shore. The water was about shoulder-level high when she stopped floating and stood up. Like a walrus in heat, he snorkeled in her direction until his forehead was suggestively pressed again her stomach. He stayed there for a few minutes; she giggled, then laughed, as his hands, hidden below the surface, groped… the sandy bottom in search of colorful sea shells.

Ten minutes to go. The snorkeling gear has been abandoned as they wade towards the thatched-roof bungalows that stand in rows atop stilts of cement. A tall, lean Japanese man walks out onto his deck in a white bathrobe and white slippers, slowly sipping a cup of coffee as he pensively looks out on the spectacular horizon. All around him, around me, around the other couples, is the hypnotic natural beauty of the Maldives.

If he looks down and peers through the cracks of the bungalow’s wooden floorboards, however, he’ll see another sight: a burly man and a dimunitive woman, wrapped atop one another like a pig in a blanket, lips locked in sloppy soft-porn passion.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

She lays down on the shore, undoes her bun, and flips her hair back once, twice, a third time before tying it back up again. (Snap, snap, snap) Back precisely arched and hands firmly planted in the sand, as if she’s practiced for this moment for months, she bends her knees and throws her head back as he quickly circles and crouches like a photographer shooting the cover girl of next year’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.

Snap, snap, snap. Click, click, click.

He motions; she arches her back even further. He motions again, this time towards the water, so she stands up and slowly picks her way back into the lagoon. Suddenly, dramatically, she stops and pirouettes (snap snap snap) to face his camera, neck craned, chin up, arms raised like a triumphant ice dancer bowing to the crowd at the end of a gold-medal routine.

The bizarre water routine goes on for about 5 minutes (or, roughly, 100 photos) before she makes her way back onto the shore for the dramatic curtain call: on all fours now, she’s vamping her way through the sand like Tawny Kitaen crawling across the hood of David Coverdale’s Jaguar in “Here I Go Again”. Here’s a picture set to show the grandkids one day!

Snap, snap, snap, click, click, click, snap, snap, snap.

He hands the camera over and dutifully marches into the water himself, chest puffed out like a 1920s strongman and that teensy-tiny, flesh-colored swimsuit of his further disappearing into the nebulous void of his crack. He poses for a few shots before clamboring out onto a 30-foot long cement platform that juts out into the water. She assumes the position on the sand, he carefully adjusts the lens, then starts the timer and jumps down next to her for a couple’s session.

Here they are casually laying side by side on the beach, gazing back up at their camera without a trace of ironic self-awareness creeping across their stoic expressions. There they are sitting back to back, elbows on knees like Rodin’s Thinker. Here now they’re standing, his meaty slabs of arm draped over and squeezing her like an infant suffocating its favorite teddy bear.

Finally, the grand finale: laying shoulder to shoulder on their stomachs, they turn their heads to face one another, lean in, and hold an extended kiss, one which starts innocently enough but quickly devolves into a full-blown makeout session. I’d be appalled if I wasn’t so mesmerized by the absurdity of it all.

Bravo, guys, bravo. Encore! Encore!

And we got one.

Later that night, as we headed back to our room after a few mugs of Tiger beer at the resort bar, we spot our two friends near the pool, which is fed by a man-made waterfall and illuminated at night by a few pairs of underwater lights. She’s traded her leopard-print bikini for a tightly fitted hot-pink dress, but is posing and preening and arching and vamping just as she was on the beach.

He casts a nearly imperceptible, mostly indifferent glance our way as we walk by, then gets back to the business of the photo shoot. It looks like he’s waiting on his camera flash to recharge; I don’t have my camera with me this time.

I look down at my watch.

It’s 11:24pm.

You have to stop walking, breathe deeply and let the moment ooze into your brain.

A building or monument that had previously been part of your travel dreams is now right in front of you. It actually exists. Real people work in it, stroll past every day, purse their lips in annoyance at the tourists who are so excited to touch it.

“I’m really here!” you think, a bit sheepishly because it is certainly stating the obvious.

Or maybe, like me, your whole brain is vibrating with “Squeeeee!”

It’s discombobulating to realize that yes, that really IS the Leaning Tower of Pisa (and wow, it leans! The picture on the pizza box is true!) or the Eiffel Tower, or the Forbidden City in Beijing, or the Golden Gate Bridge.

That’s how it was for me last weekend, in New York for the TBEX travel blogger’s conference, when I specifically laid out my walking directions in such a way that my path would take me past the Flatiron Building.

Built in 1902 by Daniel Burnham (yes, of Chicago architecture fame) it is one of the most recognizable, most distinctive buildings in the world.

Read this for more Flatiron history, but pause right now and think about a building or structure that you’ve always wanted to see in person and were finally able to stand in front of, ogle it like a doofus, almost get run over as you try to photograph it….not that this happened to me at the Flatiron, mind you….

Please tell us about it, down in the comments.

I want to share my Flatiron squeee! brain ooze feeling with everyone who travels partly for the joy of saying, “I’m really here!”