Introduction - Alaska Traveler - page 2

I knew this was not the case everywhere in the world, because by then I had made the
acquaintance of one Richard Halliburton, a young man who traveled and wrote about it
from the time he graduated from Princeton in 1922 until he vanished sailing a Chinese
junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco in 1939. He climbed the Matterhorn, ran from
Marathon to Athens, swam the Panama Canal and the Hellespont, visited Machu Picchu,
hiked up Kheops, faced down a cobra in India and was boarded by pirates in the South
China Sea. Among other adventures.
Three things about Mr. Halliburton I found intensely interesting: One, he wrote for a
living. People paid him money to put words down on paper. Two, he got to travel. Three,
when he traveled, he saw towns and cities where there were buildings older than me, older
than my state, older than my entire nation, where fire, famine, flood, war, disease and
earthquakes were not automatic cause for a wholesale leveling of everything in sight and
the erection of newer and not necessarily better replacements.
I found this comforting. I decided I would travel when I grew up. I had traveled invol-
untarily as a child, I went where my mother went (Anchorage, Cordova, Ketchican, Sel-
dovia) and for five years wherever the Celtic went (Kachemak Bay, Knight and Montague
Islands, Port Nellie Juan, Port Dick, Aialik Cape, the Barren Islands, Kamishak Bay, Tux-
edni Bay, Kalgin Island). This would be different. This would be my idea.
The September after I graduated from college, I took off on a backpacking trip across
Europe. My college roommate, Rhonda Sleighter and I landed in London and tore a strip
off the Continent that included England, Scotland, Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria,
(then) Yugoslavia and Greece. We walked to Stonehenge across the Salisbury Plain, we
saw Alan Bates play Petruchio in Stratford-upon-Avon, we sat in the Roman governor's
seat in the amphitheater in Trier and turned our thumbs down to the losing gladiators, we
sang Drink, Drink, Drink along the banks of the Neckar in Heidelburg, we visited the U-
boat in the basement of the Deutches Museum in Munich, we took the stairs to the top of
the Eiffel Tower in Paris (our only defense is that we were much younger then), and we
accidentally stayed overnight in a whorehouse in Athens (it's a long story). We had a good
time, and we learned a lot.
It wasn't all joy, the learning. I went through three IRA bomb scares in London Under-
ground stations (only one bomb actually exploded, I explained to my mother, which for