“Stonewall Jackson ate pancakes on this griddle.”

This was a fitting end to a museum tour that for me was getting a bit too syrupy about the Confederacy; a bit too positive about the revered, upstanding, famously Presbyterian Stonewall.

No one seemed ready to ever acknowledge that, hey, this was a rebellion that failed, and more importantly, the rebels were wrong with regard to a state’s right, or anyone’s right, to allow people to be held as slaves.

But why bother saying anything….we were in the rose-hued Church of Stonewall and there was nothing to do but smile and move on to the next room. Our diminutive 70-something tour guide was not going to change, so I stewed to myself.

The pancake griddle comes in near the end of the standard walk-through of artifacts in the Winchester, Virginia home where Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson lived in 1861-62, as he planned military operations against the Union that ranged up and down the surrounding Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War.

The house was offered to Jackson by Lewis T. Moore, a Lieutenant Colonel in the Fourth Virginia Volunteers and a distant ancestor of actress Mary Tyler Moore. The rooms today contain exhibit cases, period furnishings and memorabilia that belonged to Jackson, his staff or his family members.

In the United States, it is the Civil War’s sesquicentennial (150th anniversary) for the next four years, beginning with the first shots fired on April 12, 1861 at Fort Sumter and grinding on for four years of agony.

Like many history enthusiasts, I take a great personal interest in the war. I couldn’t put down Michael Shaara’s mesmerizing Gettysburg novel Killer Angels – one late night my exasperated husband got fed up with the light still being on and said, “Look, we need to get some sleep. I’ll tell you how it ends: the North wins!” Further, we both studied the Civil War extensively at the US Naval War College.

It’s magical to feel history come alive, but that day in Winchester when we stood in front of a washstand in the General’s bedroom and the guide said, “Jackson washed his face and combed his hair every morning in front of this mirror,” I started wondering if a shrine with lighted candles was around the next corner, awaiting genuflection.

Wouldn’t it have been great if the Underground Railroad’s Harriet Tubman had somehow materialized amongst the Stonewall ghosts that day, to bring a jolt of reality to the proceedings?  The woman they called Moses didn’t get to spend much time eating pancakes and combing her hair as she shepherded terrified slaves north to freedom from the Confederacy that Jackson represented.

I appreciate Stonewall Jackson’s brilliant military campaign that confounded the Union in the Shenandoah Valley, but I never forget what he was fighting for, and that remains a fatal flaw to me that should be admitted and clearly acknowledged, even in historic houses full of his memories.

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The best way to ruin a lovely Spring afternoon in Manhattan is to take a stroll down Broadway.

It’s a particular part of Broadway that I’m referring to, from Columbus Circle to Times Square. This was my path the other day, a day that had started out t with the promise of being more than fine. It had been a sunny day, the kind where people like to eat ice cream bars outside while exposing winter-pale feet in new sandals. I walked through Madison Square Park on my way to the subway, which was a sparkle of fountains and waving blossomy trees, a landscape of peach and violet tulips waving in the Shake Shack burger-scented air. My trains arrived just as I reached the platform, and on the transfer I snagged my favorite spot: first car, at the front window, so I could watch the tracks over the operator’s slightly balding head. I got the book I needed at the Lincoln Center branch of the New York Public Library, and then arranged to meet my husband at his office in Times Square – it’s so nice out and I’m not far, let’s get a snack and then walk the rest of the way home together!

A plan that also started well enough, but began to crumble soon after I crossed Columbus Circle. My walking pace slowed dramatically, owing in part to the marked increase in the number of people confused about where they were going and in no particular rush to figure it out, but mostly to the enormous amount of photography being executed in my path. Families in coordinating stretch jeans, sneakers and laminated folding street maps posed for photos in front of cut-rate electronics stores. Young couples in backpacks with bottles of water and complicated leather camera cases around their necks snapped cell photos of the gaudy lit signs advertising the latest movie to be made into a musical. A guy in a Spider Man costume scooped up young children while their parents smiled, and so the children smiled, and all stayed as still as possible in the middle of the street to allow the camera lens its focus.

Photo by Francisco Diaz, via Wikimedia Commons.

At the crosswalks, less photography, but more confusion, as some people crossed without glancing at the lights or looking around for cars, others stopping on the curb suddenly insensible to the international symbol for “walk”.

My internal sighs became external, although I’m sure they couldn’t be heard above the din from which I made out questions like “do you ladies like comedy” and something impolite whispered to a group of men, who eagerly accepted a brochure for a sushi-themed strip club called Cheetahs. I myself declined the offer of bible literature from a woman in a yellow sandwich board painted red with warnings of eternal damnation.

I spotted a group of young ladies, sitting on the sidewalk, leaning on each other, surrounded by piles of shopping bags. I thought of all the shopping bags I’d just been able to observe closely as they’d been banging into me— whole armfuls of Aeropostale bags, and M&M store bags with a brown Hard Rock Café shopping bag nested inside its bright yellow maw.

This is not my city, not my Manhattan, I thought irritably, those shopping bags could have been in obtained in countless other places around the world. What could anything in those bags possibly have to do with the real New York City?

Nothing!

That was the verdict I reached as I crossed 45^th street. But then I looked around, and had to concede a few points.

First, I had shopped at that Swatch store and that giant Toys R’ Us, and what’s more, attended my high school prom at the Marriott Marquis now just across the street.

Second, the stretch I’d been suffering through could be described with many adjectives but “unreal” was not one of them. It’s inarguably corporeal, and part of this city. Not the best part, certainly, but not imaginary, not even a hallucinatory.

And besides, I thought, feeling more generous since I’d just spotted my husband waiting for me outside his office, I myself have tourist-shuffled down many a well-known street in a foreign city, wearing that slightly glazed, what-the-hell-is-happening-here look on my face, haplessly violating traffic law and custom, and often with no idea where I was going. And what’s more, I’ve enjoyed it.

So I resolved that I would mentally apologize to all the people that I’d been silently condemning in the strongest possible terms throughout that little stroll through the middle of Manhattan, on such a lovely Spring day.

But only after I’d gotten well past Times Square.

Sometimes, things don’t work out.

My trip to Jordan had to be canceled.  I was really looking forward to it, but some family issues have cropped up and my head is really not in the right place now for such a journey.

Still, one of the main reasons that I was going still stands; it was an amazing opportunity to visit a region that is currently in turbulence but offers the traveler unmatched experiences. I’m not foolhardy, but sometimes destinations are unfairly painted as unsafe, and visitors shun them based on false perceptions and emotion.

Where would I go right now (besides Jordan) if I could?

Let’s consider a couple of other “dangerous places for travel….”

Egypt.  Tourism is a lifeblood business for the country and they are struggling mightily. The post-revolution update on Frommer’s convinced me that although there may be a few more frustrations than usual, it’s safe to visit and I’d have a lot of the antiquities to myself.

Japan.  This is a tougher proposition. The radiation situation really seems to be getting dicier as time goes on, not calmer.  The reports are conflicting, critical problems have not been stabilized and I’m not always quite sure who to believe. Since I don’t happen to have radiation detectors and Geiger counters laying about in my suitcase so that I can judge conditions for myself, I would probably head south of Tokyo. There is plenty to see and enjoy in Japan that is nowhere near the zone of concern, including onsen/hot springs in Kyushu, Shikoku, the Fukuoka area and ironically, Nagasaki and its Atomic Bomb Museum.

Mexico. Border towns? Uh, no. Figure out a way to drop in on Perceptive Travel editor Tim Leffel in his current Mexpat home in lovely Guanajuato? Yes, please.

New Zealand. Post-earthquake, Christchurch is struggling but I’d still go in an instant to visit our PT Blog author Liz Lewis. After all, she found 21 reasons to visit New Zealand this year.

So, farewell for now to the Jordan idea, but there are certainly other places to keep on my travel radar.

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I used to be afraid of flying.

Not just a little nervous when the plane hit turbulence, but terrified for a couple of days before the flight, days during which my stomach would churn, my heart would pound, and I’d make arrangements with friends to look after my cats when I was gone.

At the airport, I could never understand how people could look so calm at the gate. I’d scan their faces and wonder if their photos would be shown with mine on the news when flight-whatever-I-was-on gained the same grim resonance as TWA 800, Pan Am 103, Valu Jet…

On the plane, I’d sit stiffly with every muscle in my body straining the plane up. I’d keep an eye on the flight attendants faces for signs of horror and despair. I’d wince when the pilot would say “we’ll have you on the ground in just about 30 minutes.” In just how many pieces, captain? I prefer one. I would be exhausted upon landing.

Many people tried to talk me out of this fear. I turned their reassurances into mental mantras. Safer than driving, safer than driving, safer than driving, I’d think, as I clutched the armrest. I would reason with myself that I was in more danger on the way to the airport than I was at the moment I was airborne, which is an indisputable fact. But I also unhelpfully envisioned myself, sitting in my seat, simply dangling in the air, out at 30,000 feet.

I really didn’t understand what kept such a giant machine in the sky. I was told it was the air itself, but when I held a pen over my tray table and let go, it just dropped. In my experience, air wasn’t a good antidote to gravity. (Physics was never my strongest subject.)

***

Although I remember feeling that fear, it’s hard for me to re-embody that fear now, since I am now utterly unafraid of flying. I don’t think about it at all, ever. I’m not even afraid during severe turbulence. I’m not afraid when reading about aircraft skin fatigue, or pieces of planes and passenger’s remains recovered in the deep ocean. In fact, it’s hard for me to keep my eyes open on a plane, somnolence that would have utterly mystified me in my anxiety-ridden mid-twenties.

I never did discover a single magic cure for my flying fear; rather, it was a combination of factors that banished it forever.

First, exposure: I had to fly a lot for my work, and every time the plane took off and landed was evidence that planes did that routinely—took off, landed.

Second, distraction: I realized that sitting in the chair thinking about death wasn’t helping. I brought work to do with me and I’d close the window shade to block out the peril of the clouds, and get lost in something I was writing.

Third, analogy: right about this time, my husband and I bought a cruiser, which we’d take out on the Northern Chesapeake Bay on the weekends. It was often choppy up there and the boat would bang around. I realized that turbulence was just like that in an airplane; choppy air was like choppy water. And I wasn’t afraid of plummeting through the water to the bottom.

Fourth, statistics: I finally looked them up.  They were so low, it was really ridiculous. How ridiculous? The death rate in recent years has been at the most 0.4 per 100 million passenger kilometers performed, which is the number of passengers multiplied by the number of kilometers traveled. (PDF) Worldwide. It’s far less for commercial carriers inside the United States. To put this in perspective, in the US you are way more likely to kill yourself than you are to die in an air accident. (PDF)

Even with all that, the fear left me gradually. First I realized I wasn’t worried days before the flight. Then I realized I could read a magazine on the plane instead of working furiously. Then a book. Then, on one flight, I fell asleep.

* * *

I still had other anxieties when traveling. Like, for instance, the first time I went to Honduras. Prior to the trip, I spent a lot of time reading the State Department’s warnings about the country, as I recall, a collection of grim anecdotes about robbery-murders in pizza places. I mulled these anecdotes as my plane flew low over folded green mountains to land in Tegucigalpa.

As the plane taxied, I took note of old burnt out planes, piles of industrial trash, and buildings without windows. My notes from the city include scrawls about machine guns, a woman resolutely climbing up stairs to a barbed wire laced apartments, broken glass windows in the Cathedral, horses foaming at the mouth, skinny mangy dogs. Although I was treated with nothing but kindness, and even though there were moments of tranquility, like the one I recorded at left, at the city’s cathedral at dusk,  the details amounted to an overall sense of menace.  I was happier when I left the city for the coast.

And yet, I ended up loving Honduras, and returned the next year. In the months between my two trips, a commercial plane crashed spectacularly at Tegucigalpa’s airport, overshooting the runway, killing four passengers.

It was then that I learned that the airport was considered quite perilous—the History Channel named it the second most dangerous in the world, for its mountainous approach, its short runway, its “stop and drop” landing. International carriers stopped flying there for a while. I don’t remember feeling especially alarmed by any of it, either at the time or when I read about it, although it occurred to me that for once, I might have been in more danger in the air than on the ground.

Maybe. But probably not.

_{This is my response to Paul Theroux’s piece in the New York Times this weekend, about assessing danger and traveling in turbulent times. “For the modern traveler there are recent and sharp reversals — the overthrow of longstanding governments, earthquakes, a volcano, the release of radioactivity into a blue sky and cows’ milk — all in the span of a few months.” He points out that two countries considered to be utterly safe by travelers—Japan, New Zealand—very suddenly were not.}

_{My first thought was that travelers tend to do a bad job of assessing danger—as evidence above, I have tended to worry about things that were not really problematic, perhaps while overlooking actual danger. But then I realized that we don’t have to be traveling to fall prey to this thought pattern: human beings tend to worry about the dramatic than the commonplace. Most of us worry more about a homicide at the hand of a stranger than a motor vehicle accident, for instance, or even more likely, death from heart disease. So I’m with Theroux, you might as well travel. You might feel like you’re less safe than you are at home, but feelings aren’t facts.}

_{Photos by Alison Stein Wellner.}

“Who ever ended up washing that pan?”

We’d been driving along through Virginia horse country, watching blonde hills rising and falling beyond black wood fences.

Phil looked at me, and for a moment I thought he might be puzzled by my question — we’d been in Charlottesville for the past few days, far from home and our kitchen sink. “You know, when we were camping and the pan was covered in the black flies.” But he knew what I was talking about before the clarification. We’ve been married for 15 years next week, together for 19 years in June, well over half of our lives.

We were about to drive through Front Royal, at the northern entrance to Shenandoah National Park.  We’d spent two nights there on either side of a backpacking trip, the summer after our freshman year of college, when we’d been together for just about one year.  We knew a lot less about everything than we thought we did — about life, traveling, each other, and most especially about backpacking. It was one of the first trips we ever took together, and it was not a success.

***

In 1993, we arrived in Front Royal past dark, and with the confidence of two Manhattan-raised kids who were sure they could find a place open late for dinner anywhere. (A nice restaurant owner held her kitchen open for us past closing time.) We were also later than we should have been when we arrived at the ranger station at Shenandoah the next day, because I had never seen a Wal-Mart before.

The shadows were growing long when we set out into the woods, packs on back. I promptly sprained an ankle. We encountered a black bear on a portion of the trail that looped back on itself, and then we didn’t know where the bear went, or if it was female, if she had cubs and where we were in relation to them. We didn’t know what to do, so we just stopped for a while.  We didn’t make it to where we intended to camp that night. In the gathering dark, we pitched our tent on what I’m sure was the rockiest patch of land in the entire park. Bugs swarmed our plastic lantern, so we doused it with bug spray — which softened the plastic and left it permanently encrusted with the bodies of moths and mosquitoes.

We knew we were supposed to hang our food from a tree because of the bears, but all the branches were way too high for us to reach. We propped our food against a tree some distance from our tent and went to sleep hoping for the best.  We woke in the middle of the night to the sounds of an animal snorting and rubbing against the tent.  We lay there scared stiff for hours until day break — there was no part of me that did not believe it was that bear that we’d seen — when Phil gingerly pulled down the tent zipper and saw we were surrounded by deer.

That was just the first night.

***

The next day, I sprained the other ankle. And then I fell constantly, and once I was down, I was unable to pry myself off the ground without assistance, due to the weight of the pack. So I’d just lie there, looking at the wavy line of blue sky between the leaves until Phil noticed I wasn’t behind him and came back to help me back to my feet.  After a while, we got to a narrow river with a log slung across it. Phil easily walked across, and waited on me to follow. I pointed out, shouting,  that I hadn’t demonstrated any particular ability to keep my balance on a trail without falling over, much less some fucking log. Well, you have to cross, he said, what do you want to do? I thought about crawling across the log, but eventually decided to wade through the river. There are photos somewhere that Phil took of my river crossing. The expression on my face was sour. He thought it was really funny. I did not.

Soon after the stream, my ankles abloom with swell, I decided that I’d had enough. I demanded that we cut the trip short by a night, and hike out of the park the next day. Phil was disappointed, and probably worried about spending money on a motel which neither of us had budgeted for, but could plainly see that this was not the country idyll we’d been envisioning. We set up our last camp, and cut open the brown plastic bag that contained our evening meal — MREs, military field rations.

***

The next morning, Phil made us some powdered eggs.  While we ate, the silver pan turned a writhing black, beset with flies. “So just wash up the dishes in the stream and then we’ll go,” he said. “I’ll clean the dishes, but I’m not touching that thing,” I said, pointing at the pan. “I cooked,  you clean,” he said. “But there are BUGS!” I shrieked.  This was our first domestic squabble.

We eventually packed out and got a room at the first cheap motel we saw. As I recall, the shower head came up to my shoulders, and the wavy carpet was a sooty peach.  We went for Chinese food, with the blithe assurance of a couple of Manhattan kids,  and it was terrible. We didn’t speak to each other once on the seven hour drive home the next day. I don’t remember how or when we made up.

***

We remembered all of this as we drove through Front Royal again, back for the first time since we’d left as teenagers in stony silence. It’s all pretty funny, now that it’s nearly twenty years later. We pulled into a Starbucks for a coffee, which definitely was not there in 1993.  I thought about how the differences between urban life and non-urban life have flattened out over the years: Manhattan now has almost all the chain stores you’ll find anywhere else, restaurants tend to stay open later than they once did, and bagels are everywhere. Of course, that’s an oversimplification: there are major differences between Front Royal, Virginia and Manhattan. But for better or worse, over the years, the boundaries have softened.

And much for the better, the boundaries between my interests and Phil’s interests have also melted  — a lot like plastic doused with bug spray. I’m happy to say that of the many, many trips we’ve taken together since, that Shenandoah trip was by far the worst.  (Helped, I’m sure, by the fact that we’ve never once gone camping together again.)

“I probably ended up washing that pan,” Phil said, as he pulled back onto the highway. And I think he’s probably right.