Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
luncheons. “They used to be dinner banquets, but then some of our members heard about
freeway shootings in L.A. Most of them don't really like to drive at night.”
So let me get this straight: these intrepid explorers have been to Kamchatka and the
Galápagos, but they won't brave the 405 after dusk? That's when I first realized who has
the time and money to visit one hundred countries: the very rich and/or (usually “and”) the
very old. Looking around the restaurant, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the “Century”
part of the club's name might refer to its members' ages. There are plenty of the Orange
County furs, pearls, and face-lifts that you'd expect.
*
And yet . . . most of these senior citizens have probably been to more cool places in the
last year than I have in my whole life. Sixty-something Louise McGregor just drove across
Ethiopia on a twelve-hour bus trip and apparently caused a bit of a ruckus on a Mogadishu
runway. You can't say they're not adventurers.
“How many countries have
you
been to?” she asks me, having ascertained that I'm
merely a curious interloper and not a club member.
Uh-oh. I'd been doing a mental count in the car on the way here. I feel like a reasonably
well-traveledguy,havinglivedonthreecontinents.Andyetmytotalisadispiritingtwenty-
four—andthat'scountinganinety-minutelayoverintheTaipeiairport,aswellasthetimeI
stuck my foot across into the North Korean side of a conference room during a high school
field trip to the DMZ.
“Twenty-nine,” I lie, rounding up to the nearest, uh, prime.
Louise is taken aback. “What are you doing writing a topic about geography if you've
only been to twenty-nine countries?”
Touché.Inthisroom,atleast,I'mfreakishlyprovincial.ButIwonderifLouiseisn'tonto
something: could America's infamous lack of map savvy have something to do with our
reluctance to travel overseas? After all, it's hard to care much about a place you've never
visited and know you probably never will, and a shockingly small slice of America even
she needed one to visit U.S. troops in Kuwait and Germany. When Katie Couric asked her
why not, she boasted that she wasn't one of those idle, privileged college students who got
whisked off to Europe with a backpack. “
I've worked all my life
,” she said. “I was not a
part of, I guess, that culture.” Is this what we've become, a country where an interest in
occasional travel is a
culture—
and a suspiciously un-American trust-fund kind of culture
at that—rather than a familiar part of middle-class life?
At lunch I'm the youngest person at my table, by an easy forty-year margin. Eighty-
seven-year-old Bill Crawford, buttering a roll to my left, just got back from Greenland.
(“How was it?” “It was cold!”) He's a dapper fellow in tweeds, a turtleneck, and a trim
white beard. His interest in faraway places was born at age fifteen, when he saw Clark
