Off the Map

I've turned on the word identification feature to discourage blog spam. Don't know if it will work, but it's worth a try. It doesn't hinder any human beings who want to comment, but it's supposed to flummox automatic postings.

Note to ATA, the discount airline: on your web site, there’s a prominent page advertising assorted destinations, such as Albuquerque, Houston, Raleigh-Durham, St. Louis, and so on. Now might be the time to remove New Orleans and the accompanying stock image of Bourbon Street from that page, at least until flights are resumed.

Still warm and dry in metro Chicago, as it usually is in early September, but there are hints of the long slide into winter ahead. A few trees have touches of color other than green, which is a tired green anyway. In the park visible from our deck, peewee football practices have replaced amateur and pickup baseball games. Sunset comes just a little earlier than feels right, even though I’m familiar with the celestial mechanics of the decreasing daylight.

Lately been reading Off the Map, Tales of Endurance and Exploration by Fergus Fleming, which is structured for reading in bits and pieces -- about all I can do right now -- because it’s a chronological series of historical vignettes about travelers/explorers, beginning with Marco Polo and ending with Umberto Nobile’s unsuccessful crossing of the Arctic by airship in 1928.

Gripping reading. Fleming (British, but no relation to Ian or Peter that I can tell) writes vividly about very familiar expeditions (Polo, Columbus, Magellan, Cook, Lewis & Clark, Scott & Amundsen), half-remembered voyages (Vasco de Gama, Hudson, LaSalle, Humboldt, Burton & Speke, Burke & Wills), and some explorations I knew little or nothing about: “The conquest of the Mont Blanc: Horace-Benedict de Saussure,” “Across Canada’s Badlands: John Franklin,” “The quest for the Niger: Hugh Clapperton and Richard Lander,” “The discovery of Franz Josef Land: Carl Weyprecht and Julius von Payer,” among many others.

A common theme is extreme hardship and then death in faraway places, because of bad planning or bad luck or both. Reading some of these one-damn-thing-after-another stories makes you wonder how anyone came back alive sometimes, especially from the Arctic.