Under the Volcanic Ash

by Rachel Dickinson

I was offered a sweet little gig to come to Ireland for two weeks and blog about my travels. I was set up with fabulous rooms in fabulous hotels across the country and then my job was to wander about, find a story, take some photos, then come back and post once or twice a day.

You know, it’s not easy being alone for a couple of weeks. I mean, I found myself lingering when the maids came to clean the room just to get in a bit of conversation. And because I never stayed in one place longer than a night or two, those little relationships I formed were just small rafts in a sea of loneliness. The one bright spot was April 18th and the day I got to get on a plane and go back home to my husband and four kids. I couldn’t wait.

Then the volcano erupted.

At first I was amused and really interested because I got a degree in geology many years ago and hey,  I knew what made a volcano tick, especially one that sat over a hot spot in Iceland. But then as it spewed more and more ash into the atmosphere I began to get worried precisely because I knew what made a volcano tick. It didn’t help when I heard the Icelandic volcanologist say, in all seriousness, on the BBC that this could last for two years.

I spent the morning I was supposed to leave Belfast searching for any way back to the states. I looked up freighter schedules, I tried to book passage on the Queen Mary2, I thought about making a 36-hour journey to Rome by ferry and train in hopes that planes would be going to America from there. But then – once I tamped down my hysteria and desire to make my way across the ocean with the same kind of zeal those South American ants have as they march over everything in their path  – I decided to calm down a bit. 

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Walking in the Dark

words + photos by Rachel Dickinson

It was a yak trax morning. Well, lately every morning’s been a yak trax morning because the snow just keeps falling and if I don’t wear those metal coils on my feet, I’ll keep falling as well. I take a walk with my friend Heather at 6:00 a.m. every day. I like to walk with Heather because she owns a reflective vest and I feel like she will be the first to go when we get hit by the salt truck that comes barreling around the corner. Me, I dress in blacks and browns and blend in beautifully with the landscape and the darkness. And during deer hunting season, I don’t go anywhere without Heather because I know I look like a big deer just begging to be shot.

Before we began walking in the pitch black – the shift happened somewhere in December – I used to look for animal tracks in the snow on the sidewalk. One morning I saw deer tracks followed by two sets of kitty tracks, then skunk tracks, and finally rabbit tracks -- and this was all on my front sidewalk – leading me to conclude that I must stay awake one night to see if the animals actually meet in front of my house for a party or if they all have someplace to go. Now that it’s dark when I leave the house, I expect to actually run into some of these animals on the sidewalk but except for the long-haired black and white cat named Feisty they’ve all managed to avoid me – I suspect they’re lurking between the houses, waiting for me to pass before continuing with their early morning party scene.

The village is quiet in the morning. We head out on Johnson Road and take a left on to the old railroad bed that cuts across the back of the village. When I was a kid a couple of trains would come through the village every day and we would lay pennies on the tracks hoping they’d get flattened. We were also the nerdy kids who’d stand by the tracks and wave to the engineer. I ran into one of my nerdy childhood companions the other day – hadn’t seen him for decades – and he’s still a train geek, chasing them all over the Northeast. I think it ruined his marriage (although in true train geek fashion, he seemed clueless about that).

On either side of the old railroad bed is swampland. I think I’m supposed to call it wetlands but I know a swamp when I see it. Beavers have built a lodge near the path – a huge mound of chewed off sticks – and have constructed dams across sections of the swamp. It’s beautiful and if you squint and block out the snow it kind of looks like some place in Louisiana and not upstate New York.

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The Art of the Travel Journal

words + photos by Rachel Dickinson
 
When I travel I always carry a little black moleskin journal that flips open like a reporter’s notebook. I also buy a new pen before a journey that I slip through the elasticized band that encircles the journal. This is my traveling kit – one in which I make notes in longhand and draw sketches to illustrate what I’m seeing. I imagine what I record is like a kindergarten version of what Mark Twain or Robert Louis Stevenson – two great 19th century diarists – might have recorded.
 
Often, when I read through my notebook after a trip, I’m struck by how things going on in the outside world tend to creep into my observations; how my remarks are guided by events that may or may not be in the front of my brain at the time; how I can completely miss the story in front of me in favor of a description of something like a mountain ash tree.
 
I flew to Montreal recently and here’s what I wrote:
 
It was September 11th, the eighth anniversary of 9-11, and it felt like a strange day to fly. When walking through the Syracuse airport to my gate, I heard the beginning of the reading of the list of names of those killed in the twin towers. It was just after 9:00 a.m. – the first plane hit at 8:46 on that morning which seemed so long ago and yet like yesterday.

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The Night Train to Gaspe

words + photos by Rachel Dickinson

In September I took a trip to Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec. And although I was really looking forward to seeing where the St. Lawrence River leaves the confines of its banks and flows into the ocean, one of the biggest draws for me was the night train from Montreal to Gaspe. Trains have always held a fascination for me, drawing on some part deep inside that really wants to live in the 19th century (although I’m not so much of a sentimentalist that I don’t know that 19th century train travel also involved lots of soot and hard seats).

The Montreal train station has wonderful heroic bas relief friezes on either end of the large cavernous waiting room – the words of O Canada run along the bottom of the frieze with stylized art-deco figures doing Canadian things above.

Because we had an hour to kill, we walked over to the Hotel Elizabeth where John Lennon and Yoko Ono had their Bed-In forty years ago. The bed was displayed in the hotel window with a large peace sign painted on the window glass. Someone had scrawled – It was for Money not peace! – into the paint of the peace sign.

The train we were taking to Gaspe was actually two trains – the train to Gaspe was attached to the train to Halifax, which would split off at some point. I got all excited as we walked along the side of a sleek new train but the Gaspe train was the old one, like something out of the late 1960s with bad institutional drapes and stained upholstery. We had sleeping accommodations, which were teeny-tiny little compartments with Murphy-type beds that pulled down from the wall and completely filled the tiny room.

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Just Because You're Poor Doesn't Mean You Have to be Stupid

by Rachel Dickinson

My mother was always an intrepid traveler, which seemed odd because in other aspects of her life she is so passive. For her, I think getting in the car and heading out of our tiny village in Upstate New York was a way to escape poverty. With the windows open and the radio blaring and a cigarette propped between two fingers she'd begin the journey, which was often home to Washington, D.C.

We loved those trips. She'd buy us each a 25 cent comic book and we'd spend hours poring over each luridly-colored frame and then trade. With four kids, that meant a lot of BAM POW KAZAMM as we headed south.

"Keep your feet up," she'd say. This was after I lost a sneaker through a hole in the floor boards of the old Chevy. We had to turn back and find it because those were the only shoes I had.

In Washington she always made sure we went to the National Gallery and a couple of the Smithsonians. "Just because you're poor, doesn't mean you have to be stupid," she'd tell us.

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Stalking Karl Rove

by Rachel Dickinson

Last October I found myself in Rosemary Beach, Florida, and while I was there heard that this was Karl Rove's new hometown. Forget Texas and DC - one of the most influential political operatives of the last decade lived in a million dollar home in this upscale New Urbanist community on Florida's Emerald Coast.

I had a plan. I was going to find Karl Rove's house and stand outside it and do something - I didn’t know what - but I felt like I had to make a statement about my complete disgust with him and his cold Machiavellian ways. He left a trail of tanked elections and dirty tricks behind him when he abruptly left Washington in 2007 to spend more time with his family. Since then he's ignored a subpoena by Congress investigating the firing of U.S. attorneys by the Justice Department and was found in contempt of Congress when he failed to show up. I felt like Rove had no scruples, no ethics, was a two-faced hypocrite, and deserved to be found and at the very least, mocked.

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