Sick me and sick baby were hanging out with the radio yesterday, listening to a call-in show with a variation on everyone’s favorite vox populi question, “Which living person would you most like to meet and what would you ask them?” Since this is a thinking, reading, liberal radio audience, answers ranged from Barack Obama (several) to Cormac McCarthy and Bill Bryson.

The first person who popped to my mind was my favorite travel writer, Colin Thubron. Of all the travel writers I’ve read, he’s the one with the most intelligence, insight, collection of fluent languages, and wide-ranging worldview. He also has this odd trick (to one used to American travel writers) of effacing himself almost entirely from his narratives. You see very little of Colin as he’s taking a five-mile hike to the Great Wall of China, or braving the 1980 Iron Curtain, or taking a solo camping trip through Lebanon to visit ancient temples of Adonis. There’s only a hint of him in his most recent book (reviewed on PT blog here), Shadows of the Silk Road. But I did meet a woman in a London bookstore who said he was “an awfully nice man,” so really I’d just like to have a long lunch and conversation with him, or perhaps a weekend hiking trip through the Yorkshire Dales.

But who else? Tons of travel writers out there. I’d ask the inestimable Jan Morris about the long arc of her love affair with New York City’s Manhattan Island, which blossomed and faded through the essays and life tracked in her book A Writer’s World (reviewed here back in June).

I’d like to ask Jeffrey Taylor why someone who seems to have such a passion for adventure and discovery almost always adds a sour note to his nearly perfect travel books by forcing situations where he gets either pissed off with his guide for going off-schedule; or passes up opportunities to throw a wrench in his plans by walking the unknown road unexpected invitations might take him.

I’ve already met and taken a travel writing class with Tom Swick, but he’s not only one of my favorite travel writers ever, he’s one of the coolest people I’ve ever come across. To get together over some nice wine and discuss Nabokov would go down nicely.

MFK Fisher is no longer alive, but it would have been fantastic to get a gastronomy tour of Marseilles from one of the pioneer writers of food-and-place. Nosy person that I am, I’d like to ask about the early married years referred to in her book Long Ago in France: The Years in Dijon. A writer is made of more than places visited and food eaten. She left tantalizing hints of frustration and fraught misunderstandings. What was it really like?

Wilfred Thesiger must have been packed with amazing stories of his years in Arabia, crossing desert sands and experiencing a tribal way of life now almost extinct. What about that life is inspiring and meaningful to the emancipated women of the world? Because the Arab nomadic life is attractive, no question — but it wasn’t long before I realized I never could have experienced it the way he did. Any chance he’d take a woman along and drop her off at a village to imbibe her own experiences?

So many authors, so much nonexistent time to eat, talk, and walk with them. I’d love to sit down with my own great-grandmother, who wrote delightful letters about her European travels back to the newspaper in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, and Boston, both of which she called home.

And Laura Ingalls Wilder, who may not be ranked among travel writers, but who has left a comprehensive and spellbinding chronicle of the life of American pioneers and frontierspeople like no other. She really ought to be considered a travel writer. Since I will never taste the life of a pioneer (none of us will), what did she love most about it? When a farmer asked her to marry him, what about the pioneering life versus the grounded farming life almost lured her away?

My favorite pilot columnist is taking on the U.S. presidential election this week. It’d take a new twist to get me reading any more thoughts about the effects and reverberations either Obama or McCain will have as president. I’m heartily sick of the entire show, and think it should be illegal to let sitting legislators spend 18 months to 2 years running for a different job. We’ve heard about their platform issues ad nauseum, and then ad nauseum again.

However. There are plenty of issues not being talked about, ones that will be crucial to the safety and comfort of Americans’ futures, but also the futures of people traveling through the country by plane. Patrick Smith, that pilot columnist, isn’t holding back on this, his last post before the election. America’s flight infrastructure is in dire need of upgrading. Airline schedules need consolidation and rethinking to get rid of rampant congestion and delays. Smith calls the current U.S. airport security checks a “charade,” but doesn’t see either presidential candidate changing it without serious public outcry. With the advent of the “registered traveler” bypasses, he points out that people can now pay to get around the security rules, rather than hope to see them enforced.

Smith doesn’t see much changing with either Obama or McCain, except negatively. With the weird tendency American citizens have to vote completely counter to their own interests, pilots, Smith says, will likely be voting Republican, which means McCain, which means someone who will work against trade unions and better wages for blue-collar workers — like pilots.

Smith also addresses the peculiar insularity of the American traveler, an insularity that, given the shortsighted worldview, self-interest, and lack of education about the world that most Americans show, I don’t see changing anytime soon, no matter who wins the election. But in less than a week, it’ll all be over, and maybe I’ll feel a little less opinionated about my countrymen. Or at least stop having their worst failings constantly touted on the evening news.

I must be one of the last book addicts in the world to heap praise on Suite Francaise. Originally published in French, this masterpiece by Irene Nemirovsky is not only an incredible piece of writing, the history of its publication is almost worthy of its own novel.

The manuscript escaped occupied France in a suitcase, rescued by Nemirovsky’s daughters after their parents were taken to Auschwitz, where they died. Thinking the notebooks were simply personal journals, too painful to peruse lightly, the girls left them unread for nearly 60 years. Although Suite Francaise was written in 1941-1942, as Nemirovsky was plastered with a yellow Jewish star and daily feared for her life, its language, characters, and immediacy feel completely modern.

Nemirovsky originally viewed the book as a “suite,” a collection of five novellas that investigated themes of nobility, cowardice, and plain human frailty as the character and resilience of France was tested to its limits during World War II and the occupation of France by the German army. Only two of the novellas were ever finished before she died, both included in Suite Francaise, along with notes from her diary and excerpts of letters from this period of her life.

In the first novella, Storm in June, Nemirovsky views her fellow citizens unflinchingly, exposing their flaws as they protect possessions over people while fleeing Paris; yet in Dolce, which chronicles the effect a battalion of friendly occupying soldiers has on a French village, she exposes her own sympathetic humanity and an understanding that real-life, day-to-day dramas are both complex and very simple. It would have been easy for her to boil down the plot into a basic “the enemy is evil and I must hate him” or “the enemy is simply another human being and I cannot avoid loving him.” Instead, she acknowledges the real situation, that a state of occupation involves a great deal of both emotions on both sides.

Irene Nemirovsky’s tumultuous early life seemed to prepare her to be one of France’s best novelists and war chroniclers. She was born in 1903 to a family of well-off Russian Jews living in St. Petersburg. Her father was a banker, and the whole family was forced to flee the Bolshevik revolution when Irene was about 14 years old. After some time in Finland, the family finally landed in France, where Irene finished school and started writing.

Nemirovsky has been criticized for being a “self-hating Jew” (a term I grow heartily sicker of the more I hear it), and some critics have wondered why she didn’t make the concentration camps of the Second World War a larger theme in Suite Francaise. However, being half Russian-Jewish myself, I sympathize with a writer who chooses to write about any stories that inspire her, rather than focusing on an identity she never chose. I, too, have been questioned by people wondering why my Jewish ancestry isn’t a larger theme in my writing, to which I can only answer, “Neither is my brown hair or inability to digest clams,” or my maternal grandfather’s pure Danish blood, or in fact any other accident of genetics.

What’s more important is that this book is an incredible feat of literature. The language is precise, and the imagery and metaphors works of pure genius. They augment the clear eye with which Nemirovsky viewed the world around her. I couldn’t put it down. It shows a side of war we rarely see, especially in writing about World War II. Every aspect of humanity deserves to be written about — its best, its very worst, and, as in this case, its most quintessentially human.

After the National Storytelling Festival, we headed over to Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, tagging along with our friend who’s been going there since he was a youth. Not being a beach lover, I can still say it was awfully nice — the beach, the incredible huge trees, the alligators, the Nature Preserve, and the lovely bike trails everywhere.

Hilton Head is a popular place — how popular, I couldn’t say, not wanting to quote PR material. But it’s got massive beaches, a whole ton of golf courses (including at least one world-class one), great scenery, congenial weather, etc. By rights, taking a vacation down there should be beyond relaxing. It should be restorative.

And yet. I’ve got a problem with the place. Not the island. It’s what’s been done with the island. Or to it. I’m talking about private resorts and gated communities. Driving to the island we passed ten — ten! — private gated residential golf communities. Do you have any idea what kind of space a gated golf community takes up? How about ten of them? And that’s before you get to the island itself. We stayed at a residential resort at the far tip, which you can hardly call a “tip,” since the 50-year-old gated community takes up 5000 acres. It’s got at least two insanely gorgeous beaches with firm sand and warm water. It’s got three golf courses. It’s got a 600-acre Nature Preserve and extensive biking trails absolutely everywhere. It’s ideal.

Ideal except that it crashes straight up against my deeply rooted egalitarian tendencies. I’m no communist, but “residents only” signs splattered all over beautiful places just pisses me off. It feels wrong, a response which, combating as it does the rights of private property owners, is practically un-American. I think the English have the right idea with traditional rights-of-way. Some firm sense in me says that it is absolutely wrong to deny access to natural beauty to anyone. Sure, you could argue that the beaches on Hilton Head are technically open to the public. But unless you pay an access fee (okay, it’s only five bucks, but it could easily be fifty) to enter the resort, you’d have to walk a darn long way along the coast to get to the beaches legally. That’s hardly open to the public.

And then there’s the feel of it. A gated community is a surreal enough thing, with its Brave New World ideas of what a safe, perfect life would entail. But pile miles upon miles of them together and you get the sur-surreal. I had to keep asking our friend, “Are there schools here? Where are the towns? Does anyone actually live here?” It wasn’t until the last day that we drove through a town with houses and trailers and shacks and broken-down cars and tricycles in the yard — a far cry from the over-landscaped, meticulously meticulous “community” we’d just come from. And even there, new private resorts were swallowing up land and hanging gates between overbearing pillars and guardhouses.

But heck, it was a nice place. I admire the way the resort founders kept all those old, massive trees around, and even the McMansions were painted in muted woodsy colors that kept you from realizing how ghastly they were. My son adored hanging out naked on the beach with the waves washing around him. And, despite the annoyance of being woken up every morning at 6 by landscapers and maintenance people doing god-knows-what incredibly noisy things to bushes and tennis courts, there’s a lot to be said for a place that has bike trails up the wazoo, even if they are “residents only.”

Being a good locavorian recently, I’ve been haunting several local farms. With the impending US economicpocalypse (say that 10 times fast), my neighbors and I have eagerly started constructing our commune (we’ll all live in my house, farm the 4 acres; we have an architect/carpenter/farmer, a barrister/physicist/electrician, 2 seamstresses, and 3 writers … but I’m definitely digressing), and I actually found myself the other day checking the mileage to each of the farms I frequent.

That’s when I realized I’ve gone a bit overboard in chuckling over our impending financial doom and thumbing my nose at the billionaire powers-that-be.

But I also realized that there are 3 excellent farms within less than 5 miles of my house, one of them completely organic. All of them have public farmstands, and one offers pick-your-own strawberries, tomatoes, pumpkins — depends on the season. One of them sells gorgeous pottery done by a local girl.

(Travel connection, you’re asking, drumming your fingers.)

Well, it’s often hard for all of us to remember that our homes are actually travel destinations for others, and not just for cutesy cafes and artsy shops. I live in a pretty rural area — it seems to disappear fast, but less than 5% of the actual land is developed. And a lot of New York City residents spend their autumn weekends up here, not just to peep at colorful leaves and get out of the city, but to, say, pick pumpkins and visit an apple orchard.

If you live in a city, there’s possibly few things more satisfying than getting out of it and touching actual dirt and growing things. This is especially true for families. I’m spoiled, having it right here, but if you live in the US there’s probably one near you, too.

For my adventures into the world of canning, preserving, and making jams, I’ve been addicted to a site called Pick Your Own. The directions for canning, freezing, etc., are detailed and meticulous (and there’s pictures! yay!), but the interest for weekenders out there is the listing of pick-your-own farms in every state of the union.

Getting cabin fever? Want to smell fresh air and fresh apples? Go to the site and find a U-pick apple orchard, or a tomato festival or a corn maze if that tickles your fancy.

Even if you’re not into picking your own produce, this site and others can get you in touch with our dirty roots. In my local area, Blooming Hill Farm (certified organic veggies and fruit) has a farm stand on the weekends, where a trained chef cooks amazing, simple brunches that we eat by a running creek. And over the Hudson, Sprout Creek Farm (a local producer of amazing cheese) rents out a cottage on-site and hosts summer and weekend educational programs for schoolkids.

By going rustic for the weekend, you might not learn a new language or eat eels for the first time, but you’ll still experience something new, give your soul-well a little earthy restoration, and support some of the US’s struggling family farms.

Now if someone would just give me heaps of cash I could buy an individual wind turbine, get that commune up and running, and romp around happily off-grid. Hey, happy fantasies never hurt anyone!