Brighton Beach-UK- Rocks!
Trials / Brighton, England
Brighton Beach No Noose Is Good News
Four seasons in one day, a beach made of pebbles, and the growing suspicion that the world had become too accessible to remain mysterious.
June is the start of summer, but looking into the cool waters of the English Channel, there is no way I am going swimming today.
It is four seasons in one day. You do not get climate here; you get weather. And there is no such thing as bad weather—only bad clothing.
A lot of places claim to be unique. Brighton really is. It reminds me of Coney Island and New York, New York, but Brighton Beach is nothing like its sandy counterpart.
The Asymmetric Equation
Weather + Pebbles + Attention = Place The landscape becomes memorable when it refuses to behave like the version you expected.When the Going Was Good
Leave No Stone Unturned
The beach was ordinary enough to reach—and strange enough to trigger a larger reckoning.
If you smell something burning, it is my future as a travel writer going up in smoke. The future of travel blogging just is not what it used to be.
Everything is edible somewhere—dogs, cats, and rats come to mind—and I certainly visited enough inhospitable and exotic places, from Angkor Wat to the Philippines.
But those places can become stunts when compared with the elevated sense of otherworldliness created by Melville, Hemingway, Conrad, Kipling, and Basho’s nomadic pursuits.
Archive Image
Brighton Beach Chairs
Summer furniture facing weather that has not yet committed to summer.
“The subject matter is just too pedestrian—just a round-trip ticket and a convenient twenty-four hours away.”Brighton Field Note / 2011
The Narrow Road
Faraway Up Close
Travel became less about distance and more about the mental and spiritual event behind arrival.
One Year Earlier
Norway · June 2, 2010
Same season, different edge of the map. Read The Persistence of Norway.
I tried to emulate Basho in my own Scandinavian version of The Narrow Road to the Interior.
Although I wrote about these places like news stories, I was often less surprised than I cared to admit when I finally saw “faraway” up close.
My touch-and-go, hit-it-and-quit-it ports of call were more spiritual and mental moments than physical events.
The Sailing Ledger
Three Things the Sea Keeps Teaching
The route changes. The doctrine does not.
Signal 01
Everything changes.The weather, the route, the ambition, and the person doing the looking.
Signal 02
Everything is connected.Brighton, Norway, Facebook, Blogger, Coney Island, and the same old hat.
Signal 03
Pay attention.The ordinary becomes material only when the observer is fully present.
The Mouse Potato
The Post-Mortem of Posting
The more the world became connected, the easier it became to disappear into the reporting of it.
Someday I will look back at posting to Facebook and Blogger, feel uncomfortable, and change the subject.
Like drunk-dialing friends, blogging often leaves me in a vegetative stupor—a mouse potato in suspended animation—because social media is always somewhere else: click and mortar in the cloud, worlds apart from bricks-and-mortar real life.
The obligation to return with something new—to report on landscapes, people, cultures, languages, and foods we had never heard of—gets harder each time.
Archive Image
Same Hat, Different Year
The traveler changes. The costume sometimes does not.
The world is flat. The difficulty is no longer reaching it. The difficulty is seeing it as though it still matters.Final Field Note
The Elixir
No Noose Is Good News
The travel life did not end when the map stopped feeling exotic. It became more demanding. The task was no longer to go farther. It was to look harder.