1. Candace Dempsey, Chile, Torres De Paine

    Candace Dempsey is an award-winning, Italian-American journalist/adventure travel writer and author of Murder In Italy, the true story of Amanda Knox (Penguin/Berkley Books). See her clips on Pressfolio. She specializes in Italy, India, and the Americas. She's appeared on CNN, BBC World News, MSBNC, CBC and Italian TV. Check her out on Wikipedia. Email Candace Dempsey

    Candace mixes adventure with culture, history, food and wildlife. She loves meeting locals. Find her in The New York Times, Slate, Quora.com, Luxury Latin America.com, Chicago Tribune, AAA Journey, BBC Travel and MSN She also appears in these anthologies: Travelers' Tales Women in the Wild, Gifts of the Wild (Seal Press), Solo: On Her Own Adventure (Seal Press), and Travelers' Tales Turkey.

    Seattle-based, Candace loves to ski, kayak, trek, hike, snorkel, rock scramble and rappel.
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  2. What really happened in Perugia, Italy, on Nov. 1, 2007? MURDER IN ITALY is the true story of Amanda Knox, the U.S. college student accused of murdering her British roommate in a storybook hilltop Italian hilltop town?

    Douglas Preston, New York Times bestselling author (with Mario Spezi) of The Monster of Florence says, "MURDER IN ITALY is "Beautifully researched, well-written, and clearly organized. Dempsey was the first journalist in the United States to raise questions about the Amanda Knox case, and the first to look deeply into the facts and begin to uncover the shocking truth. If you want to know the real story, you must read this book, reprinted after the overturning of Knox's acquittal with a new ending."


    Winner of Best True Crime Book Awards and a Library Journal Bestseller. Author Candace Dempsey is an Italian-American journalist who covered the trial in Perugia. She is based in Seattle, hometown of Amanda Knox. She has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, BBC World News, CBC and Italian television.

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  3. When my son, Jacob, was five years old, I dropped him off at a Seattle day care center, not knowing it was closed for Good Friday. He knocked and knocked on the front door. Nobody answered.

    This disaster predated the cellphone. Jacob — blond, blue-eyed, impish — had nothing but my business card. He had asked for it several days before. He was proud that I had one, like the other moms. He had zipped it into the pocket of his red jacket, the one he wore when I dropped him off that day. I was a magazine editor on deadline, young, stressed.

    Jacob eventually stopped knocking. He sat on the concrete steps. He did not know what to do next. My child on the milk bottle, my child on the evening news. Those images haunt me. Yet this story has a surprising twist.

    Recently, I asked Jacob what that first moment was like. Was he terrified? Twenty-six years have sped by. He’s a lawyer in Seattle. He laughed and said:

    “Mom, stop beating yourself up. I have vivid memories of that day. It was an adventure.”

    In my shame I had forgotten that children long for new things. They love to explore. In fact, we were experimenting that day. Jacob’s day care provider lived in a rhododendron-draped house in fancy Laurelhurst, at the bottom of a green hill near Lake Washington. Jacob wanted to run into the house by himself that morning. He wanted to know what that felt like. He had been complaining of being babied.

    So I watched him go to the door, pull back the screen and knock. I could swear the front door opened. He looked back and waved me off. “Go, go.”

     An hour later, a man called my office. “You have a very intelligent little boy,” he said in a cheery voice.

     “Yes, I know.” I waited for him to explain himself. He identified himself as a store manager. He said Jacob was with him at the market on Sandpoint Way, a four-lane arterial several blocks uphill from the day care.

     “That can’t be my son,” I said.

     “Well, he’s got your business card.”

    At first I thought Jacob had run away from day care. When he was 3, he had figured out how to burrow under our backyard fence. I caught up with him at the neighbor’s house across the street, minutes later.

    Once I grasped this latest horror, I shoved manuscripts into a bag and told the manager I’d come right away.

    “He must be so frightened,” I said.

     “Nope, he hasn’t shown a bit of worry. He marched right in here this morning. He asked, ‘Where is the phone? I need to call my mother.’ He’s very self-confident.”

     Jacob sat on my lap the rest of the day. We watched TV. He held the channel changer and ate Popsicles. He is my only child. We learned, and are still learning, how to do this job together.

     “I wasn’t scared,” he now insists. “I wondered, could this really be true. Nobody’s here? At first I thought I should wait. But I was afraid of being bored. I didn’t see how I could wait around all day.”

     “Why did you go to the store?”

     “I knew you had to find a public place to phone.” “What’s the main thing you remember?”

     “I ate so much fried chicken,” he said. “They said I could eat anything I wanted. And I did.”

     “You weren’t scared a single second?”

     “You have to remember I had wanderlust,” he said. “I always did. I had already been thinking about riding a bike up and down those hills, down to the lake, everywhere. I couldn’t wait to do that.”

     Jacob can still recite my office number. He knew he could call me anytime.

     “You have to let kids do things,” an Italian aunt used to tell me, when Jacob broke his arm snowboarding or nagged me for skydiving lessons. “If they live, they’ll be strong.”

     She meant we can teach courage as well as carefulness. When we stress safety above all else, we forget our trapped childhoods, how we longed to climb boulders, ride ocean waves or float like Huck Finn on a river raft.

     We forget how young we were, when we first longed for freedom.

    Candace Dempsey is an award-winning journalist, travel writer, and the author of Murder In Italy, the true story of Amanda Knox. "Lost Child Rescues Himself" appeared in the New York Times. 
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  4. If I were in Juneau right now, I'd be taking a nap. Naps are a very Juneau thing to do. Jane, a self-styled "girl guide," told me that while we were feasting on smoked salmon and reindeer sausage at Eagle Beach not far from downtown Juneau, Alaska's tiny capital.

    We had paddled our sea kayak — a long narrow boat swift and silent as a shark — to a beautiful outlook where humpback whales rode the chilly waters and eagles huddled in black trees. Way off on the horizon, mysterious peaks pierced the clouds that hover perpetually over the steel blue Gulf of Alaska.
    A lanky girl with bright brown eyes, Jane stood on the shoreline and scanned the channel for squalls. Then she scanned the black sand beach, which gave way to lush meadows of fireweed and rye grass. She listened to the squawking of ravens, flying up to stands of Sitka spruce. She sniffed the air, which smelled of kelp and wildflowers. Finally, she yawned.
    "Boy, I wish I could take a nap right now," she said. "We're real nap-oriented here. My boyfriend has what he calls a safety nap. He'll spot something dangerous. And he's like, 'Whoa! — time to take a nap!'"
    What a revelation. Where I live near Seattle, the lights at Microsoft burn all night. I never nap without feeling that I've taken a sad and possibly fatal turn toward sloth. Now here was Jane, an adventurer, promoting naps as a safety tip. And here was I, a failed kayaker, hanging on her every word. The truth was that before I met Jane, I was thinking about giving up sea kayaking, because I simply wasn't strong enough to stay out of trouble on saltwater.
    Just a month before, I had gotten myself in a nasty mess on Puget Sound — the wildcat waterway on which Seattle perches, some 900 miles of icy water south of Juneau. I crossed a shipping lane with a group of kayakers on a glorious summer day. Suddenly, a current caught my boat and tossed it to the right. Everybody else went left. I kept trying to turn the kayak, but it was like trying to turn the head of a rebellious horse. Next thing I knew, I was headed out to sea. I couldn't see a single member of my group, not even their white paddles going up and down — a sight that, from a distance, looks like a flock of tiny, elusive white birds.
    Then the wind rose. I had to fight both the current and the chop. I panicked. I knew that kayakers, even experts, died on the Sound every year. My biggest fear was that I would flip the kayak and either get trapped underneath or fall into the icy water and be unable to struggle back into the boat. "There is no lonelier, more desperate maneuver when you are far from shore and help," my kayak manual says.
    "Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, made worse by cold, fumbling hands."
    I knew I should conserve my strength, in case the kayak capsized. But I kept thrashing around, because I couldn't think of anything else to do. Luckily, a woman from our group finally spotted my uplifted paddle — which she said looked no bigger than a handkerchief in the wind. She doubled back and towed me, humiliated, to shore.
    How I longed to be courageous like Jane, who soothes angry bears with compliments: "I see you, bear. I respect you, bear. Brave, brave bear." Jane, who can tell a storm is coming by the smell of the wind. Like the Tlingits who settled this lovely, rain-drenched land, Jane makes tea from a prickly plant called devil's club. She can out-paddle a squall and survive by her wits. 
    "My first year in Juneau I lived in a cabin, without heat or running water," she confided, as we climbed into our double kayak to paddle back to our starting point. "The cabin was on an avalanche chute. Every night I had to think, 'Now, where am I going to sleep tonight?' I had seven escape routes." 
    She laughed. "But, hey, it was cheap and available. And avalanches bring trees down with them. If an avalanche comes down the hill without hitting the house, you can get your firewood for free." 
    Juneau draws many women like Jane — adventurers from the Lower 48 who climb the near-vertical streets in drab raincoats and yellow, knee-high neoprene boots rolled partway down. It is a tilted town of brightly painted gingerbread houses pressed up against a muddy mountainside, with water everywhere. You can't drive from Juneau to any other town, because the longest road fades into wilderness after 40 miles. You step outside your front door into a maze of wild rivers and crumbling glaciers and slippery peaks.
    On my wildest days, I like to pretend I have what it takes to be a girl guide. Strength, courage, know-how and patience. How thrilling to rate a chapter in Jane's memoirs, which she plans to call Girl Guides of Juneau. At Alaska Discovery, where she works, girl guides tend to be tall, cool, powerful blondes of few words. But Jane was like a younger version of me — small-boned, dark-haired and talkative. She made me feel that, given the time and inclination, I too could be a guide. I could give up my desk job and survive a winter in Southeast Alaska without running water or electricity.  
    All the way back to Juneau, I did the paddling. Jane sat behind me, steering the boat and critiquing my technique. "If you keep jerking back like that, you're going to flip the kayak," she warned, as we skirted the edges of a forlorn island, its tumbled-down buildings covered with moss. Even though it was a balmy day in mid-July, she had insisted that we don life vests, plus waterproof jackets, pants and boots.
    "You wouldn't want to fall into that water," she said. "It's 45 degrees. We become animals at that temperature. We thrash around. We go insane."
    I loved Jane's stories about careless sailors sent to the deep, hapless tourists who choked on poisonous mushrooms, reckless tenderfoots who thought they could conquer Alaska without studying it first. She taught me that what I lacked wasn't strength but know-how, not courage but cunning. She showed me how to paddle with the power of my entire body, not just my arms. She made me pay attention to the currents and read the wind — a kayaker's greatest enemy.
    "You have to look," she kept saying. "You have to be aware."
    Suddenly, I got it. The kayak skimmed the water like a sailboat blown by the wind. Chum salmon leapt all around us. An eagle soared overhead. My heart soared too. I remembered why I had started kayaking in the first place. Because I love sea kayaks — boats as gaily painted as kites, so sleek and light that they feel like part of your skin. Because I longed to explore the wily, hard-hearted gorgeous Sound — every island, sea cave, twisted channel and river mouth. Because I was tired of standing on the shore while other people set off on adventures.
    Back here in Seattle, 900 miles down the Inside Passage, rain falls all winter. When a Yukon Express blows down from Alaska, rain pounds so hard on the roof of my house that it wakes me up at night. So I read trashy novels. I lift weights to prepare myself for kayaking. I remember the mantra of the girl guides of Juneau.
    "Always be prepared," Jane told me. "That's what the wilderness has taught me. I never leave my house without my raincoat — even when the sun is out."
    Always be prepared. That's good advice for venturing anywhere. Have seven escape routes. A compass, map and whistle.
    When in doubt, take a safety nap.


    *This story appeared orignally appeared on UnderWire.msn.com. Illustration by Steven Salerno
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  5. In my grandfather's orchard in Italy
    I never went anywhere when I was a child, all because of a pig house my mother had burned down. She'd grown up on an Idaho homestead without running water or electricity. Her Italian immigrant mother was too busy grinding pork for homemade sausages, plucking chickens, and performing the million other tasks of the pioneer to keep an eye on her nine children.
    One day while playing with matches in a fit of boredom, my mother and her cousins accidentally burned down the pig house. This could have been a tragedy, fire spreading rapidly over the dry fields and wooden buildings of the farm. That didn't happen. Still, that red pig house, its long troughs filled with rotting table scraps, shaped my whole childhood.
    "We ran wild," my mother recalls with horror. "I made sure you kids were watched."

    To     this day she claims her greatest mistake was allowing me, third oldest of seven children, to escape to Yellowstone Park for a summer job. When I boarded that dusty Greyhound bus I was seventeen, a skinny girl with a high school diploma and blue plastic suitcase. Never had I been more than 30 miles from the border towns in Eastern Washington and Idaho.

    "You'd be a different person today if you hadn't gone to Yellowstone," my mother claims. She means I'd be a household saint, not a travel writer. But I believe wanderlust is in the blood, as natural to certain people as water cascading over cliffs, the tumbling of tumbleweeds across desert sand.
    Until this escape, my life had been like a toy train stuck on a single track. I grew up with three brothers and three sisters in a pretty pink ranch house in Spokane, Washington, a landlocked city of stone and pine on the edge of a vast wilderness. After Sunday Mass, we piled the family into two cars and drove across the state line to the Idaho farm where my mother was raised. Down the road on a small lake stood the log cabin where we lived every summer.

    We never went anywhere else, because my mother saw no need. Our life was a closed circle of family, family, family.
    "You can go, but don't go too far," Italians tell their offspring, whether they are toddlers or grownups with kids of their own. "Stay near your folks. They're the only people you can trust." 
    In Italy these rules confine children to the range of the village bell. In America we stayed within range of my mother's police whistle. In summer, that gave us the run of the farm where the pig house burned down; the nearby lake and the meadows above it; woods with makeshift teepees and wild strawberry patches; fields of clover and wild peas. Not to mention the joyful company of countless cousins.
    In Spokane we felt our chains. The pine woods above our new housing development offered mysterious caves and tantalizing boulders to climb. Kim Momb, later to stand atop Mount Everest, trained on the black lava cliffs that rise from the Spokane River Valley. But this paradise was forbidden to me.
    "Those are city woods," my parents warned. City woods were overrun with perverts and hermits and vandals who pushed stolen cars off cliffs.The fact that nobody ever spotted these desperados did not bother my folks one bit.
    So we braked our bikes at the edge of the woods, trembling with fear and desire. The price of disobedience was high -- what my parents called "a good licking." Convinced they had radar that could track our every move, we still defied them with mad dashes into the woods.
    The odd thing was the neighborhood kids, who found our old-fashioned clothes and countless rules bizarre, allowed us to follow them into the forbidden realms. Forging ahead through the brush they must have felt like bold adventurers, leading pilgrims through  untamed lands. What they took for granted, we found magical: fields of yellow bells and violets, breathless games of hide-and-seek, the mesmerizing scents of syringa and wild rose. We hunted blue-tail lizards, fled porcupines, waded barefoot across murky ponds floating with water lilies. We shot our Flexible Flyer sleds down snowy slopes called "Suicide" and "Danger." 

    "Where have you been?"     my mother asked whenever we failed to respond speedily to the police whistle. "I've been calling and calling." 
    "Just riding our bikes."
    Somehow she managed not to see the pine needles in our hair. Once, I convinced her that the wood tick she had to remove from my scalp had fallen from a maple tree at school. My best excuse, although I was afraid to use it often, was I had to go into the woods to retrieve our Brittany spaniel -- a spotted rebel named Penny who hated girls and wouldn't come when I called.    The few lickings we got for our forest explorations made us philosophical about crime. "Damn it, it was fun," we said, once the pain wore off. We vowed to do it again and again.
    While my mother kept us home, Dad fed our wanderlust. I'd always suspected he would have been a rolling stone if he hadn't gotten hitched. At bedtime he dazzled us with stories about his days in the Merchant Marines. He knew how rain fell in the South Seas, what Shanghai looked like before "the Commies" took over. He filled our house with adventure books, detective stories, sci-fi thrillers. He read us everything from The Illiad andThe Odyssey to Tom Sawyer, The Arabian Nights and The Jungle Tales of Tarzan.
    He taught us to believe, boys and girls alike, that we could stride the world in seven-league boots, ride magic carpets, and climb beanstalks to castles in the sky.
    These dreams eventually took me places my father did not wish me to go. Anger came between us. Yet he himself came from a restless clan, German and Irish. His German grandmother had a pass on the Chicago-Milwaukee Railroad -- courtesy of her husband, who worked there -- and she rode the rails all her life. 

    Sometimes she took her kids; other times she boarded them out with family members. Although based in Spokane, she spoke casually of St. Lous, Minneapolis, and Chicago -- golden cities glittering out of my reach like names on a movie marqee. I never saw a jet rise over Tower Mountain nor heard the whistle of a west-bound freight, hell-bent for the coast, without imagining myself on board. 

    "How could she?" my mother says of that vagabond grandma. "How could she dump her children on her relatives and gallivant around the country that way?" 

    How could she not? Alone, my great-grandmother could reinvent herself. I like to think she went by a different name on the train (something daring like Carlotta Delmonico), changed her clothes and hair color and said she'd gone to finishing school in Paris. 

    How I long to possess that train pass, that life -- as beguiling to me as the silver passenger trains that still roll across the dusty flatlands, high deserts, and blue mountains of the west.
    Like that mad German grandmother, I am famous for mad dashes, for suddenly deciding I must breathe the air in another state or country. I believe in following these impulses even when they're dangerous. When I was in my twenties and two weeks shy of getting married, I boarded a dented Chevy Nova and hightailed it from my parents' home in Spokane all the way to Eugene, Oregon. About 1,000 miles roundtrip. 
    My excuse for fleeing was I'd left belongings in Eugene, where I'd just wrapped up graduate school. But the truth was I feared that brief journey down the aisle, that sudden loss of freedom. 
    After marriage my new husband and I would live on the East Coast for several years. I wanted to be alone when I said goodbye to the West, which I had loved longer than any lover.

    Listening to my mother's travel advice for the first and last time ("You must get an early start"), I left Spokane hideously early that spring morning and shot south. Plowing across wheat fields and deserts and lava outpourings for many hours, I finally caught I-84 and turned west. This road, which follows the Columbia River along the Washington-Oregon border, is famed for its high cliffs, deep gorge, and bold blue water. It unfolds like a series of beautiful postcards, but the same postcard mile after mile.
    Quickly, I got bored. I thought about stopping to drink coffee from the thermos my mother had provided, but I'm not the kind of person who likes to stop. I didn't know I was in trouble, not even when I found myself simultaneously driving and reading a road map. What a sensible way, I thought, to pass the time.
    Then sunlight drifted into the car, wrapping around me like a soft blanket. I blinked a few times and then slipped luxuriously into sleep.
    Sometime later I felt a jolt. I opened my eyes. The Nova was on the gravel shoulder. I could see a ditch. I slammed on the brakes. That threw the car into a tailspin. Round and round it spun on that broad highway. The spinning took forever. 
    I had time to think: This is it. This is how I'm going to die. Scenes from my recent life flickered before me. There I was, cramming for finals, pulling my wedding together, packing up my things. I saw that life was nothing but struggle. It was a relief to give in. 
    Then something inside me said no. I grabbed the wheel and held onto it until the car stopped spinning. Then  I steered the car, like a runaway sled, to the side of the road. Finally, it stopped. 
    When a highway patrolman knocked on the car window, I jumped. I thought I was hallucinating. He told me he'd been parked at a rest stop and seen the whole thing. 

    "I was sure you were going to flip," he said, as though that would have grieved him. "Do you know how lucky you are that nobody else was on the road?"
    I shook my head. I felt so lost. I couldn't look that patrolman in the eye. I waited until he left and then tried to pour black  coffee from my plaid thermos into a plastic cup. My hands were shaking so badly that I gave up the attempt.
    Then I remembered what wranglers did in movies. I told myself to get back on the horse. 

    I rode that Nova all the way to Eugene,     a lovely red-brick college town of geenery and mist. For two blissful years I had studied journalism there while carrying on a long-distance romance with Mark Rosenblum, a law student in Spokane. 

    I'd kept my two lives so separate thant nobody in Eugene knew I was about to get married.  But that night I bunked with a grad-school friend named Jill. Over a bottle of wine, I managed to spill my secret. 

    She said she understood. "Sometimes it's hard to talk about the things that mean the most to us." 

    The next afternoon, I followed the McKenzie River east out of Eugene and cut across Three Sisters Wilderness and its haunting stretch of snow-draped volcanoes. Then I swept into the high desert of central Oregon, a land of lava spires, dry washes, and fossil beds. 

    Shying away from I-84, the highway of my near death, I drove the back roads all day and far into the night. I was determined not to think. I had no one to talk to and a busted radio. There was nothing tbut the wind blowing across the desert and the occasional clatter of a passing truck. Nothing but the grip of the steering wheel, the earth rushing by, the sweet scent of the Oregon blueberries I'd bought for my mother at a roadside stand and stashed in the back seat.
    Over the next ridge I saw another trackless flatland. But something glowed on the far horizon. I followed that glow for maybe 20 miles until the lights of a town sparkled ahead. Ritzville, about 60 miles from Spokane. "A pit stop off the interestate," I would have called it a few days earlier. But that windy night it was enchanting. Brightly lit gas stations and burger stands, curtained houses, and boxy tavens with flashing beer signs.
    Pulling into a Chevron station, I filled up the tank. Then I stopped at a painted shack for a double burger and French fries. Dipping into the greasy paper sack, which gave off an intoxicating fragrance, I hungered for the road. Even though I'd been gone only a few days, i felt wiser and more joyful than before. I knew now that I was capable of getting myself into terrible jams, but also of wangling my own way out of them.
    Nothing could stop me from roaming, not even a gold wedding band. 
    All these years later I     still love to climb into a car for no reason and drive hundreds of miles.
    "What are you looking for?" asks my husband. He gew up in New York, where nobody calls driving 30 miles for Marlboros "just a hop, skip and jump." Like many vagabonds, I married a person who never wants to leave town.
    "I'm not looking for anything," I tell him. "I just want to go." 
    Trusting in the kindness of strangers, I've been everywhere I dreamed of going when I was a landlocked little girl--and I've only begun to wander. I've seen the sunset on Mount Kilimanjaro in Afirca, hopped a plane to Jordan after the Gulf War, watched the moon rise over the olive grovers of Calabria, where my grandfather once herded sheep across the rocky land. 
    Like my father, I've seen Asia. Tokyo, Bangkok, Hong Kong. I've seen how rain falls like the wrath of God on the South Seas and  then stops as suddenly as it began. Blue skies appear over the coral lagoons of Bora Bora, coloring the water, and white boats ride the waves once more.
    Even though I'm a grown woman with a child of my own, my mother still frets every time I step out the door.
    "Something might happen," she says."That's the whole idea.""Can't you go with someone else?""No.""Not even your husband?""No."
    I'd rather set off on my own, even when I feel scared and lonely. Something might happen: I might meet a stranger, jump ship, climb an unnamed mountain or lose myself on a winding trail. 
    I might forget who I am and where I came from.
    Who knows? I might even run away from home.
    by Candace Dempsey

    From Solo: On Her Own Adventure and Gifts of the Wild, the best of the stories published in Seal Press's Aventura series
    ***
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  6. By Candace Dempsey

    "Sister, there is nothing I would not do."-- Louise Erdrich

    We were in deep need of divine intervention the day we climbed the dirt road to the house of the Virgin Mary, but we didn’t know it yet. 

    After three days of hard driving from Istanbul, we'd reached the cool green spot in southern Turkey where legend says Mary, mother of Jesus, spent her final days. The Virgin's house floats on a green hill above the white stone ruins of Ephesus, a magnificent pagan city devoted to Artemis. 

    High on a mountaintop, where the wind carries the scent of wild herbs and hidden springs, we imagined the Queen of Heaven praying at her gilt-edged altar. We had come to worship this glorious Mary, resplendent in silk robes, golden crown and jeweled halo. She is famous the world over as a curer of broken hearts and cruel diseases, mesmerizing even to fallen-away Catholics like me.

    We made up a merry crew that day. My 73-year-old mother, a devoted Catholic seeing the world for the first time. My sister Carmela and I, the two religious skeptics. Eshber, a Turkish friend who'd offered to show us around his country for a week.  It was sweltering that day in Ephesus, where tourists perch on broken-off marble columns and faded signs point to whorehouses older than Christianity.  We felt miraculously cool, driving up the winding road to the mountaintop where Mary's house once stood. From the parking lot, it's a short dusty climb to that spot, marked by a pocket-size Byzantine church.
    Giant leafy trees lined the path, an amazing sight in that part of Turkey, where gnarled olive trees crouch on brown hillsides like bent-over old ladies.
    Picture us rolling south along the Turquoise Coast in an elegant old black BMW, stopping on a whim to see the Virgin's house. 
    For ease of conversation, Eshber had concocted a handle for each of us. He called my mother "Mama." Carmela and I were Electric #2 and Electric #3, because of our Italian blood, rapid speech and quick tempers. We had two electric sisters, Sherry and Carole, back in the United States.
    Eshber had assigned each sister an electrical rating that reflected dramatic flair, not birth order. 
    "Electricity has nothing to do with age," he said. "It's a state of mind."
    Carole, aka Electric #1, lived near me in Seattle. Before we left for Turkey, she kept calling to say she loved me. That did seem odd. We were not so demonstrative. But as is my habit, I brushed aside misgivings and hopped aboard a plane.

    Like Mary she is a goddess of childbirth and fertility, but with a lusty image. Artists often show her with multiple breasts and eggs dangling from her upper body. Greek scholars called her temple in Ephesus, destroyed long ago, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
    In this mystical place one might expect a premonition, but the power lines connecting us to Electric #1 had snapped. We didn't know she had hidden a terrible secret from us, a secret that would darken our world for the next two years. Believers say Mary arrived here about six years after Christ's death in the company of St. John, who found her a simple house. It fell into ruin after her death, its location disputed until the 1960s. 

     "Olive trees have such a desperate look," my mother said, attributing this miracle of greenness to Mary. "We're getting closer to her now," she added, lowering her voice in respect. At the door of the tiny domed church, two blue-robed, buck-toothed nuns sang "Ave Maria" in soft tones. Smiling and nodding, they motioned to us to cover our heads. Soothed by the familiar rituals, we  entered the vestibule and dipped our hands in holy water

    In the next room, we saw Muslim women praying under framed excerpts from the Koran. Instead of spotlighting Mary as goddess or mother,these tracts emphasized her meekness&before the Lord.

    Then Pope John XXIII declared the mountaintop a place of pilgrimage, the only one in Turkey.We joined a slow-moving line of pilgrims waiting to get into the church. Mostly gray-haired women in neatly ironed cotton dresses and sensible shoes. The Muslims among them wore longer dresses, their black hair poking out from white scarves. We learned that Virgin is "Meryemana" in their faith and honored as the mother of the prophet Jesus.
    "O, Mary, be obedient to him, kneeling, bowing and prostrating before him." 
    We hurried out, feeling like intruders. In the churchyard, amid souvenir stands offering holy cards and plastic statues of the Virgin, we stopped to drink little glasses of hot sweetened tea. From that vantage point, I noticed something startling about the surrounding trees. White dots covered their bark like little stars, high as hands could reach.

    "Bits of paper," Eshber said. "People write prayers to the Virgin on tissue paper and stick them into the bark."
    "They believe Mary comes here every day to read them."
    "Prayers for what?"
    He shrugged. "What if a woman can't have a baby? What if somebody is ill? It could be lots of things."
    Tree after tree was covered this way. So many scraps, so many sorrows.
    Many times I've remembered that conversation.
    I was a stranger to grief, a believer in my own good luck. But I got a jolt when I returned to Seattle two weeks later. 
    My husband, who doesn't drink coffee, insisted on taking me to my favorite coffeehouse.

    "Why?" I asked.
    "I have something terrible to tell you," he said. It turned out that soon after I left for Turkey, my sister Carole had called him from a hospital to inform him that she'd just had a mastectomy. Worse, she was in Stage 4 of breast cancer -- Stage 5 being death.
    I told myself this was just some horrible joke. That it would all go away the second I talked to Carole. So I picked up the phone and called her. She confirmed every detail.
    "Why didn't you tell us?" I asked.
    She sighed. "You wouldn't have gone to Europe. Mom wouldn't have gone. It wasn't fair."
    As time went on, I continued to be in denial, even when Carole emerged from  chemotherapy with a bald head, which she refused to hide under a wig.
    None of us could imagine her dying from anything. Wasn't she Electric #1? She could start a firestorm on any topic, from how to pronounce gnocchi to whether the nurses on the TV show "E.R." follow proper medical procedure. 
    "I'm a nurse," she'd say. "I think I would know." 
    She died, a little more than two years after the mastectomy. I could not accept this rude unnatural event. Not only did my parents end up burying their daughter, but Carole never got to finish raising her six-year-old son. 
    Both of us had wanderlust. We used to compete to see who could cross the most destinations off the world map. On her deathbed she pointed out that she'd been to Egypt and Israel -- and I had not. 
    She was my younger sister. I was impatient with her. When we were little, I called her "the tagalong," because she insisted on doing whatever I did, even though I was four years older.  If I went to bed at 10 o'clock, then she would fight with our parents to get the same bedtime. If I got to ride the bus downtown with my girlfriends to go shopping, then she would lobby for that too. 
    Now she'd cut in front of me. She'd raced ahead.

    I handled her death in a typical way. I insisted on going somewhere I had never been before.

     "Pack your bags," I told my husband and son. I reminded them I had a cousin down in New Mexico. "And she's been asking us to visit."

    In Albuquerque we stayed with my cousin and then we started driving. We got all the way up to Taos in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains before we turned around. I stared into Taos' famous indigo skies, mesmerized by the blue mountains that hover over steep canyons and dry washes.  
    How could you die? I asked Carole. You said you weren't going to. You were a nurse. I thought you'd know.
    We took the long way back to Albuquerque, descending along a narrow black-top studded with white crosses  that mark sites where people have died in car crashes. We saw elaborate altars decked out with red plastic flowers, Teddy bears, tricycles, dolls, bright paper and snapshots of the departed protected with plastic wrap.
    I bought a holy card in a shop along that spiraling road. It shows Mary as Our Lady of Sorrows, Nuestra Senora de los Dolores. Six shiny swords pierce her heart. Blood drips from her wounds.

     I insisted we pull into Chimayo, the "Lourdes of America." Graced by a little adobe church amid baked red hills, this sanctuary had the same scraggly lawns and humble intentions of the  Virgin's house in Turkey. Hidden in cottonwood and piñon trees, it's cheaply built yet mesmerizing. 

    We arrived a week after Easter, the most popular time, and yet the parking lot was packed with pilgrims. They come here from all over the world, the most devout lugging giant crucifixes down the road at Lent.

    We crossed a patch of crooked gravestones to get into the church, which has twin bell towers and high ceilings. We weaved past pilgrims who leaned on crutches, rode in wheelchairs and coughed into Kleenexes. Then at last we entered the little chapel, a small square room with stiff-pews and 12 luridly painted Stations of the Cross depicting the death of Jesus. 
    I bowed before the altar, taking in the gnarled crosses and paintings of bleeding hearts. But I skipped the rest of the rituals, since both my husband and son are Jewish. They were ready to get back on the road. To go home.
    To the left of the altar, we found the narrow prayer room that calls pilgrims to Chimayo from around the globe. In this unadorned sanctuary, priests cut a rectangular hole into the wooden floor. This allows pilgrims to stick their fingers into the dirt, which is believed to have a healing power. The lame rub it on their legs; the blind, on their eyelids.  
    What a scene it was. Amid cast-off crutches and canes, pilgrims of all ages and nationalities were kneeling on the floor. Japanese tourist scooped dirt into white business-sized envelopes to take home. 
    Snapshots of the unfortunate lined the walls. Baby after baby. Police officers with black mustaches. Teenagers leaning against motorcycles. Shawl-wrapped old ladies.
    What had happened to all these people? I wondered. Were any of them still above the ground? 
    Suddenly, I couldn't breathe. Dizziness overcame me. 
    My husband helped me push against the crowd until we got outside. There, to our surprise, we found a charming open air cafe. Leona's Restaurante, shaded under a big green catalpa tree. Soon we were sitting at a rickety table, dipping handmade tortillas into a succulent, mood-altering posolo. The first food that had tasted good since my sister died.
    Then I remembered a comical conversation about Chimayo I'd had with my journalist friend Eric, another Italian-American and fallen-away Catholic. Yes, he had fallen under its spell. He had even scooped up a bit of the healing earth.
    Afterward he couldn't help feeling a bit skeptical.

    "Think how many people go there each year," he said. "They have to run out of dirt. I bet they truck it in new dirt in the middle of the night, so there's always a great  big pile."  
    Even in that sorrow-drenched place, I found that remark funny. 
    Before I left, I forced myself back into the church. I needed to do one final thing without my husband and son.
    I had learned that love, like electricity, is a powerful but unreliable force. Lines can be cut at any moment. We can't repair them by ourselves.  
    In the sweaty cramped room with the wooden floor, I knelt with the other pilgrims. I scooped up a handful of earth. It was reddish, with a pungent smell. I couldn't decide what I should do with it. 
    Finally I rubbed the dirt on my forehead and on the back of my neck, where the pain seemed to be coming from.
    Please, I prayed. Let everybody in my family be all right.
    Top illustration used by permission, Ellen Chavez de Leitner. Gracias per la mia hermana. 

    This story appeared in Passionfruit and Travelers' Tales Turkey, in memory of my beloved little sister Carole Dempsey.


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  7. I hadn't planned to wear hiking shorts and a hot pink T-shirt that said, "Ciao, America" the first time I stepped into a bar alone. 

    But I brushed the dirt from my hair, comforting myself with the knowledge that nobody would mistake me for a desperate woman looking to get laid. 

    I didn't know I'd be the only woman in the bar. Or that off-duty Marines, with thighs bigger than Texas, would be my only companions.
    I'd come off the Mojave Desert at dusk near Indian Creek. I braked my tin can of a rental car where a dusty road meets the highway in a swirl of sand. In the rear-view mirror was Joshua Tree National Park. A parched wilderness of pockmarked boulders, fan palm oases and kangaroo rats. Straight ahead was the world's largest Marine base, concealed behind immense stretches of sand, dry washes and jumping cholla cactus.
    I pictured bare-chested Rambos cruising the dunes, blasting laser weapons at rabid dogs. 
    I was supposed to be in Palm Springs that night, 50 miles away, where I had a private villa with its own swimming pool. But I'd finished the magazine story I'd come to write. I headed straight for beautiful Joshua Tree and spent the day trying to teach myself how to climb the red rocks. 
    Afterward I felt empty as the sky. Saturday night came crashing down and suddenly it felt sad to be a woman traveling alone. I missed my husband. I missed my little boy.  
    If I'd been a man, I would have taken that restlessness straight to a bar, but I'd never strolled into a bar alone. Where I grew up, in the border towns of Idaho and Eastern Washington, nice women simply didn't do that sort of thing.
    When we get restless in the West, we drive and drive until we wear out the night.  A friend of mine once left an Idaho dance hall at closing time and drove west more than 300 miles across the Columbia plateau and the Cascade mountain range. She reached Seattle at daybreak. It really cheered her up.  
    I wanted to keep moving, but where? I fiddled with the road map. Nothing but desert all around. Even I understood it would be crazy to explore a Marine firing range at night.Then I saw a sign stuck to a wooden stake by the highway: 

     "Used Books. Store For Sale." 
    A bookstore in the middle of nowhere? I had to see that. I followed the road and pulled up to a tiny plywood building. It brought to mind Raymond Chandler's Poodle Springs, a detective tale set in the seedy parts of Palm Springs. Maybe it was a hideout for gangsters on the lam.
    Nothing inside the joint which smelled of dust, brittle paper and cheap cigarettes, dispelled that notion. Books tumbled over desks and chairs and cluttered the floor. It took me a while to spot the owner, a tall man with spiked salt-and-pepper hair. He was shuffling papers at a chipped wooden desk.
    Cliff Raven. The name sounded about as authentic as a Palm Springs waterfall. 
    "That ‘For Sale’ sign has been up five years," he confided, revealing a set of tobacco-stained teeth. "It ain't going nowhere. Come back in another five years and I'll still be sitting in the same old spot."
    I asked what it was like to have a Marine base in your front yard.
    "Spooky. My whole building shakes when the boys get rocking. Don’t know what weapons they're testing, but they sure have a good time!"
    He laughed, lighting a generic cigarette. "I also get lots of hikers coming off Joshua Tree -- women like you."
    “Meaning what?”
    He waved his hand, as if it were obvious. I told him I'd spent an hour watching a climber work a single cleft of rock in Joshua Tree. "I don't get out there much,” he said. “It's not my thing." 
    "You should have seen this guy," I went on. "He had chalk, special boots, metal gadgets. A total yuppie. Then I noticed he had 'Operation Desert Storm' tattooed on both arms. Talk about gross."
    Raven frowned and squashed the cigarette. Just when I thought he was going to reach for a .38, he pushed back the sleeve of his flannel shirt.
    "You shouldn't be judgmental about people who wear tattoos." He showed me a series of snakes writhing along his arm, a veritable Garden of Eden. He let me know that under the flannel he rivaled Ray Bradbury's Illustrated Man.
    "I used to be in the tattoo business," he said. He bought the bookstore after selling a tattoo parlor in Hollywood -- not that he'd discuss his clients. "That's kind of a bush-league thing to do.”
    He lit another cigarette, smiling shrewdly as if he knew something about me. I probably wasn't the first person to wander off the desert and into his shop, feeling jumpy and lost without knowing why.
    "Where you headed?" he asked.
    "Beats me. Maybe I’ll just keep driving."
    "Say, I know a place you'd like." He chuckled. "I'm not going to tell you anything about it. You have to see it to believe it."
    He tore up an empty cigarette carton and scrawled me a map. He said it led to the 29 Palms Inn, a short drive down the road on the Oasis of Mara.
    I zipped through the town of Twentynine Palms, a major pit stop that cluttered the highway for several miles with liquor stores, tattoo parlors, delis and saloons. A rhinestone Stars and Stripes waved over the Little Church of the Desert and a billboard offered "Joshua Bail Bonds 24 Hours." 
    The streets were full of the "few and the brave" -- handsome guys with forearms like Popeye’s. I hung a right and turned into the 29 Palms Inn.
    "Bees! Stay Away! Watched by time-lapse photography!" read a cardboard sign planted in a grassy field. Pretty adobe bungalows and framed cottages, with fanciful names like Apache Plum and Tidy Tips, dotted a patchy oasis. I parked in front of a low white building labeled a "mock office." It was deserted. I thumbed through a brochure. It boasted that Bette Davis, Jimmy Durante and gangster incarnate James Cagney once hung out at the Inn. Film noir, my favorite.
    A sign directed me to the bar. I crossed a strip of lawn and came to a swimming pool surrounded by tall lava lamps with dangling price tags. Off to one side was the door to the bar. I put my hand on the doorknob. I lost my nerve.
    "Excuse me," a woman said. I turned to see a bride. Yes, a bride in a white veil and long wedding dress.  She was like a vision out of Woman in Whiteby Wilkie Collins. I waited a moment and then I followed her. I could not resist.
    Everyone turned to stare at me. Men, all men. Gigantic men, pounding down cheap beers. They smiled, as if to say, Hmm, what's this?

    Somehow I managed to keep moving forward. I grabbed a barstool and sat down.     My face was flushed from the desert heat, my hair sweaty on my back.  Not only was I the only woman, but the only customer not licensed to carry special weapons. I called for a Heineken to steady my nerves. 
    The bartender, a New Age hippie type with long curly hair, smiled at me as shrewdly as Raven had. He handed me a beer. It was cool and soothing in my hands.
    Stay or go, stay or go? I fiddled with my car keys.
    "You know," the bartender said in a casual voice, "people get real caught up in the desert. Think they can drive forever. Maybe you ought to stay out of your car for a while. Have something to eat."
    He brought me tasty grilled shrimp and wild rice, and I started to chow down. I noticed for the first time that it was a pretty bar, with a parachute hanging from the ceiling, a million knickknacks and a view of the swimming pool. 
    Then a tall Marine with bristly blond hair and a bionic build started strutting around in a muscle shirt and jeans. Jean-Claude Van Damme in "State of Siege" had nothing on him.
    Finally, he pointed at my Heineken and said, “Expensive beer." 
    I studied the tattoos that ran like runaway trains across his arms. I remembered what Raven had said about not judging people who had tattoos.
    “Did you get those locally?" I asked, pointing to the artwork on his arms.
    "Sure did." He grabbed the barstool next to me. It turned out his name was Dwayne and he was a Texan. He told me how much each tattoo cost ("Paid $140 for this here eagle. It's a cover-up job. Used to be a heart, but I got sick of that."). He also had a bulldog, a dragon and a rose. He dreamed of “sleeving” both arms with solid bands of ink.
    “Have you seen a bride anywhere?” I asked, just for a sanity check.
    “Hey, that’s what we’re all here for!” A Marine wedding had just wrapped up, Dwayne said, not a typical affair because the groom didn’t drink. "Ordinarily we'd be in full dress uniforms with swords and all," he added with a sigh. "Things would get pretty damn wild."
    Soon Marines surrounded me. They told me where to get the best ribs in Twentynine Palms, the best pastrami sandwiches. But when it came to trade secrets they were reticent as Raven. Being a Marine was a job, they were real proud, every day was a challenge. That's all they wanted to say.
    I asked Dwayne if the desert made them stir-crazy.
    “That’s true for lots of guys, but not for me.” He said he liked to explore the desert, because it reminded him of Texas. He knew where to find the wreckage of a B-52, a rusty tank left over from General Patton's era, Indian petroglyphs and an oasis with a stream and four palm trees. “You got to keep moving on your days off. That’s the trick.”
    I nodded. I wondered if I’d gotten lonely not because it was Saturday night, but because weariness and the approaching darkness had forced me to stop moving across Joshua Tree. There was a word for people like me. Nomad.
    Next I met Ralph, a dark-haired and furtive Marine who told me he was in "Special Services." I took him for a spy. “I go into a place before the other guys do," he said.
    It was Ralph who escorted me to the parking lot when I finally got ready to leave. A half moon hung in the big dark sky. Cool desert air poured over us, soothing as tonic water.
    My car waited for me like a long-distance love affair. I told Ralph that I might ditch the highway and drive back to my Palm Springs hotel through Joshua Tree -- even though the narrow, unlit road was treacherous in the dark.
    "Shouldn't take you more than, oh, three or four hours," said Ralph, too smart to tell me not to try. "That's a real challenge you've set for yourself."
    Then I saw something that spooked me.
    "That your car?" Ralph asked.
    There it was, gleaming in the dark like a white spaceship. Not only had I left the trunk lid straight up, but I had just left my camera and other valuables scattered inside of it for anybody to steal.
    "I must've been crazed," I said.
    Ralph smiled, as if he had known that all along. He said if I was too tired to drive, I could always stay with him.
    I smiled and shook my head. I remembered a Joan Didion story about people "whose instincts tell them that if they do not keep moving at night on the desert they will lose all reason.” I decided I was one of those people.
    I jumped into my car. I stepped on the gas and turned up the radio high. I headed straight for Palm Springs, chasing the moon all the way back under a  dome of black sky. I'd had my adventure. I had worn out the night.
    by Candace Dempsey

    From Passionfruit and Travelers' Tales Women in the Wild 
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  8. Hold onto your forks. We're about to stroll with famed writer Peter Mayle through the Pike Place Market in Seattle, where he'll put together a delectable Provencal lunch. The dapper Englishman will squeeze crusty loaves of bread, sniff goat cheeses and pluck fresh thyme from stalls.

    Even for a man accustomed to truffles and foie gras, the Market offers an embarrassment of riches. But at midday, Mayle seeks the simple foods described in luscious detail in his novel Chasing Cezanne, just one of his delightful books. "Fat shiny black olives, radishes with white butter, country bread that stood up to chewing, a jug of red wine."

     The feast we'll assemble begins with olive bread and goat cheese, proceeds to a warm fava bean salad, followed by ratatouille, grilled lamb chops and tiny new potatoes. For dessert, an apple tart. "That's a very good, achievable meal -- something I might serve to friends," says Mayle, who sees himself as "a great audience for food,' not a chef." For that I would have to call upon my wife. She is a great cook. "

    The famous author is easy to spot amid the casually dressed tourists in the Market on a Monday morning. He's the snappy dresser in the tweed jacket, cream-colored shirt and yellow tie. He pauses on the threshold of Le Panier, a tres French bakery, to sniff the warm air. It smells deliciously of France, a scent he describes in his latest book as "part strong black coffee, part tobacco, a soupcon of diesel fuel, a waft of eau de cologne, and the golden scent of pastry made with butter."

     Without further adieu, Mayle plunges into Le Panier, where shelves of golden bread, herb-scented rolls and pastries rise halfway to the ceiling. Amid the bustle, he calls for a loaf of dense, lightly browned olive bread. "That's a nice way to start a meal," he says, squeezing the center of the loaf to determine its freshness. He sniffs the bread, breaks off a piece and pops it into his mouth. He smiles with approval. "It's wonderful," he says, noting that olive bread is "really as big a thing in Provence as it is in Italy."


    "We may be back," Mayle calls out over his shoulder as we leave Le Panier. He confides that his shopping expeditions often take two hours. "If I weren't on a book tour, I would spend many happy hours here, tasting this and tasting that. I'd go back and forth, change my mind and probably have a drink midway. But today I'm on American time."

     He displays admirable efficiency at the nearby Pike & Western Wine Shop. "I've suggested lamb for lunch, and this goes very well with it," he says, brandishing a $31 bottle of Clape Cornas red wine. He turns to the proprietor and promises, "We'll do our best not to drink it through a straw." 

    Off we go to Quality Cheese, where Mayle rubs his chin in the French manner while eyeing the choice slabs. After taking a whiff, he chooses a perfectly plain goat cheese. "I don't like it mucked with up herbs," he says. "You want it very fresh, so the natural flavors come through."

     Laden with packages, we select vegetables from Frank's Quality Produce in the Market. "I'm looking for little fava beans," he tells the vendor, "those little devils."

     He breaks open a few beans, eats them raw and buys a bag. Then he gathers the ingredients for ratatouille, a Provencal dish of eggplant, tomatoes, onion, bell pepper, zucchini, garlic and herbs -- all simmered in olive oil. Somewhere we acquire a pricey bottle of Badia a Coltibuono olive oil. It's Italian, not French, but Mayle knows the owners and can vouch for the quality.

     Seeking only the freshest vegetables (he's not above giving a pinch or sniff), Mayle selects red, yellow and green peppers, plus garlic, Walla Walla Sweet Onions and tiny red potatoes. Lusty, chocolate-colored Portobello mushrooms distract him, even though they're not on our menu.

     "I love those," he says, advising me to remove the stems and cook them gently in a saute pan with olive oil and parsley.

     "Now for the meats," he says, clapping his hands with delight. But soon he's distracted by the fresh fish stalls, where red-shelled crabs and fat pink prawns rest on ice. "We don't have anything like that in Provence. We're so far from the sea. A fish truck comes by every Tuesday. That's it."

    At Don & Joe's Meats, where cuts of meat are displayed like ruby necklaces under glass, Mayle says, "What a wonderful shop. A man could go blind with pleasure here. They've got such unusual things. Such a nice selection. Louisiana sausages, slab bacon. It's very fresh. Very clean."
    We choose loin lamb chops ("You want them thin for grilling."). Then we buy slab bacon for the fava bean salad -- a typical Mayle dish, requiring few pots and no measuring. All too soon, we part, but not before he gives me the recipes for my Provencal lunch, which you see below. "Start the meal with soup, minestrone or beef stew," he advises. "It depends on what's available that season. You could have pate with pickles and gherkins. Or radishes and white unsalted butter. You add sea salt to the butter because it's crunchy ... Or you could start with salad and oysters." 

    I promise I'll go home and cook a Peter meal.

    Here are Peter Mayle's recipes: 

    *Warm Fava Bean Salad Buy a handful of fresh fava beans for each guest. Shell the beans and put them into a pot of cold water on the stove. Turn up the heat. Cut about a quarter pound of slab bacon into cubes and cook in a saute pan. By the time the bacon is cooked, the water for the beans is boiling. Drain the water and pour the bacon fat and bacon over the beans. Serve immediately. 

    *New Potatoes ala Peter Choose tiny new potatoes with red skins. Wash them, but do not peel. Put the potatoes on a sheet of aluminum foil. Add olive oil, salt, pepper, and sprigs of fresh thyme and rosemary. Seal the potatoes in the foil and bake until tender. Peter Mayle's Risotto In his own words: "Take one big onion for each guest. Chop it up. Cover the bottom of a saute pan with olive oil and a big gob of butter. Melt the butter, add the chopped onions and simmer for an hour until caramelized. It's slow cooking. You want it soft and sweet. Meanwhile, prepare the stock. You put bouillon cubes, two cubes for four people, into a small saucepan. Add water and boil. "Now you've got your onions. You've got your chicken stock on the stove. Chop up prosciutto and put it in with the onions. Put in fresh or frozen peas. Start adding the chicken stock and Arborio rice, a handful for each person. Keep stirring and adding stock. You don't have to stand over it. Just make sure it doesn't scorch.

     "Between stirrings, grate some fresh Parmesan cheese. When the risotto is tender, serve it in bowls and top it with the cheese." How successful is this risotto? "It's very good. I've never had it sent back. There are only two pans and no dishes. Once you've got the basic recipe, you can do millions of varieties. You can add mushrooms, chicken, mussels, shrimp. The secret is the onions, cooked until they caramelize. You can't go wrong with that."

    By Candace Dempsey, from MSN

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  9. Earl Emerson, one of the Northwest's most popular mystery writers, is an expert on gumshoe cuisine. Like his alter ego, Thomas Black, he knows how to track down a swell pizza, a mean chocolate chip cookie and a nice juicy slab of Chinese barbecued pork in Seattle.

    "Thomas Black eats where I eat," says the tall, soft-spoken writer, a fulltime firefighter who works at the Yesler Way and 23rd Avenue station in Seattle. "We have exactly the same taste in food."

    As befits a local sleuth, Black is a clean-living guy. He's one of the few paperback detectives who's never had a drinking problem.
    "That's because of my religion," says Emerson, a Christian Scientist. "I don't drink coffee or alcohol, so Thomas Black doesn't either."

    Like Black, Emerson is also a long-distance bicyclist who doesn't have to watch his weight. "I'm a huge eater," he says. "I'm always burning off calories."

    He traces his fondness for simple foods back to his hardscrabble boyhood in nearby Tacoma. His parents divorced when he was young, sending Emerson and his three siblings to live with a succession of elderly women paid to provide room and board.

    "One of them was from the country," he says. "She cooked cheese on toast. Stuff like that. The next lady was from Texas. She made black-eyed peas and things I couldn't eat. I was really skinny back then. At some point, I started cooking for myself."

    Emerson and his wife, Sandy, live just outside Seattle in North Bend. She likes Vietnamese and Thai food, but he prefers to eat where his characters eat, near Black's fictitious law office in the Mutual Life Building on First Avenue. That's why the first stop on our gumshoe gourmet tour is in Pioneer Square. Down on Yesler Way, where the scent of saltwater clings to the air.

    "This is Thomas Black's favorite haunt," says Emerson says in Trattoria Michelli, with its dark wood walls and tables covered in flowered oilcloth. "He comes here in my latest book. He orders, but doesn't have time to eat." Why does Black favor this Italian joint?

    "It's close to his office and it used to serve great meat ravioli. That's the only kind of ravioli he'll eat. They've taken it off the menu, but he still likes to come here." Unrecognized, Emerson takes a seat in the bar, where big windows reflect the neon lights of the Pioneer Square Hotel, featured in many of his works. Tucking a paper napkin into the collar of his shirt, he calls for a Thomas Kemper root beer. Then he orders a thin crust pizza he finds tasty, topped with roasted chicken, tomatoes, red onions, mozzarella cheese and barbecue sauce. His only regret? The restaurant no longer features Skid Road chicken, a dish he planned to work into a detective novel. "It sounds like road kill. I like the idea of that."

    Next stop, Cow Chip Cookies on Yesler Way, a tiny bakery near Black's law office on First Avenue. Instead of reaching for a cigarette in time of crisis, like Sam Spade, Black reaches for a cookie. We arrive at Cow Chip at twilight. "I'm addicted to chocolate chip cookies," Emerson admits, sadly eying the closed sign. "My wife won't make them anymore. I eat every single one."

    We head uphill to Fourth Avenue. Our destination, McCormick's Fish House & Bar, is a clubby, dimly lit hangout, where many a business deal is consummated over oysters and beer. It's a steep climb, in more ways than one, from Black's Pioneer Square digs. "Thomas Black feels more comfortable in this place than I do," admits Emerson, sliding into a wooden booth. "It's really upscale. Lots of rich people. I feel most comfortable at the firehouse. I've been there 19 years. I know what I'm doing. Plus, I'm a lieutenant. I'm the boss."

     Still, McCormick's appears in Deception Pass, a Thomas Black mystery. And Emerson couldn't be happier with the nightly special: succulent Hoh River steelhead topped with a horseradish crust and served with garlic mash potatoes and a side of broccoli.

     " I could get used to this place," he says. "But I could do without the broccoli. It's too tough. I like it really well steamed." Our final stop is also the most important. It's hard to think of a Thomas Black mystery that doesn't feature the Kau Kau Restaurant on South King Street in the International District.

    As Thomas Black says in Deviant Behavior, "Though it was an unpretentious as a bowl of rice, the Kau Kau had some of the best food in town." Before Emerson dips into a bowl of fried rice, he calls for a fork. Wait, does this mean Thomas Black, his alter-ego, has never mastered chopsticks? "I don't know." Emerson laughs. "I haven't said."

    Another mystery: Why doesn't Black ever bump off a thug in a restaurant? The Mafia does it all the time. Has Emerson never seen "The Godfather"? "Most of my murders happen in the home," he says, motioning to the waiter for a to-go bag, which he will haul home in his Subaru wagon. "Didn't you know? Home is the most dangerous place to be."

    By Candace Dempsey, from MSN.sidewalk.com
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  10.  In Africa the air smelled of dust and dry weeds and wild flowers. I slept in a white tent on the Masai Mara, an endless stand of waving yellow grass. Guards brandishing black rifles patrolled the circular camp to ward off prowling lions.

    Every morning the big flat sky turned pink over the Mara. Kenya was lovely until, one by one, every member of our safari came down with a mysterious illness. Chills, stomach pains, fever. I didn't succumb until the very end of the trip, after we got to Nairobi and boarded a jet.

    By the time we reached London, I was too wretched to fly on to the U.S. Not knowing anybody in London, I phoned a booking agent from the airport — asking for a room, any room. I didn't care where, as long as I could get there fast.

     Then I rode the Underground to Earl's Court, that infamous stretch of red brick on London's flyspecked fringe. A place where, as Jonathan Raban writes, "The streets swarm with Europe's new arrivals: refugees, the hopeful, the new rich, the new poor, people in transit between an old life and a problematic future."

     Coming from hardy immigrant stock myself, I might have found this raffish neighborhood intriguing in other circumstances. But a moonless dark had already descended, and all I felt was weariness. I trudged through neon streets jammed with betting parlors, disreputable pubs and cafés that served chipped beef and other horrors.

     The only thing that kept me going was a vision I had of the room awaiting me. Neat and clean, with a Miss Marple type in starched cotton and permed gray hair to nurse me back to health. A few blocks from the station I found my grim hotel and pushed open the heavy metal door. What foreign land was this? Reeking of bacon and fried bread, the lobby was a tower of babble, unbearable in my feverish state. Only the desk clerk spoke English. She was a plump, pitiless young woman with masses of bleached hair skewered into a bun.

     "Your key," she said, holding up a large metal object. "If you lose it, you'll pay for it. Breakfast from 8 to 10 in the morning. No breakfast after those hours."

     "Where's my room?" I managed to ask. She pointed to the stairs. "Two floors straight up. I've put you in a bedsitter."

     I shuddered. I knew all about bedsitters from reading Barbara Pym novels. They were tiny, mean rooms — rest stops for the desperate. People drank themselves to death in bedsitters or turned on the gas. In one English mystery novel, a little blonde typist named Lyla dies when an axe murderer breaks into her bedsitter, The room in Earl's Court was clean enough — and efficient as the clerk. Just a fold-up bed, a scrap of blue carpet, a TV and toilet. I unfolded the bed and crawled under the blankets.

    Soon I started to sweat. I pried open the narrow window. Diesel fumes flooded the room. I threw the covers over me. Too hot. I threw off the covers. Too cold. This went on and on. Shortly after midnight, I heard a scratching at the window. I threw off the covers in fright. A young girl floated through the half-open window like Cathy in Wuthering Heights. She had long straight black hair and the look of a waif. She sat on the bed. She could not be ignored. To my horror, I recognized this ghost. She was a younger, braver version of myself.

     "So you've been to Africa …" She lit an unfiltered cigarette. French, of course. "And you only stayed two weeks? Weren't you going to live there someday — not just go on safari with a bunch of rich people?" "Go away."

    I yanked the covers over my head. "I can't be traveling all the time."

     It was useless to argue with this waif — so proud of her backpack, her tattered blue jeans and leather bracelets. She was 22. The age I was when I fled my hick hometown and escaped to Europe. At first, I couldn't have been more scared. I couldn't get the hang of foreign money or maps or phrases. I cried when desk clerks gave me a bad time. But eventually I learned how to get by with sign language and bits of French and help from strangers. The important thing then was to keep traveling. I loved to chuck it all and climb aboard a train.

     Now that I was in my thirties, I knew London. I could have showed that waif where to find William Blake's grave and oil paintings of the Bronte sisters. "I've been lots more places than you have," I told her. "I've got a husband now. And a baby. I can't just move to Africa on a whim." "You sound just like your mother." She laughed. Then she floated out the window, as free as the swallows that will circle Earl's Court until the end of time.

     The next morning, I still felt wretched, but I decided that (as soon as I felt better), I would get back at that smug little ghost by going somewhere she'd never been. Flipping through a tattered guidebook, I settled on Keats House — the last home of John Keats, the doomed young poet who fled to Italy and died of tuberculosis. I had loved a poem of his ever since my stranded childhood. I had a dove, and the sweet dove died; And I have thought it died of grieving; O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied With a single thread of my own hand's weaving Late that afternoon I finally found the strength to ride the Underground from the soot of Earl's Court to the posh ivy-draped village of Hampstead. T

    here I found Keats House, a beautiful white Regency building with gardens all around. The front door opened to a sitting room so serene that I could imagine Keats lying on that couch scrawling "Ode to a Nightingale." "How charming," I thought, realizing in the same instant that I was about to throw up. I swayed down the stairs to the basement. There I found a guard, a nice old man in a neatly pressed blue uniform.

     "I got this stomach thing in Africa," I said. "You crazy Yanks." He chuckled as he unlocked the bathroom door. Afterwards I tiptoed upstairs. I was mesmerized by Keats' short, soft-looking bed, draped in white linen. I pictured the fevers he'd endured, the aches and pains. I felt that, in a small way, we were kindred spirits. Then the guard showed me out. It was good to walk the cobblestone streets of Hampstead. It had been hot in Africa, but here it was cool and pleasant. Red leaves crumbled under my feet.

     The more I moved, the more cheerful I became. By the time I got back to Earl's Court, it was starting to get dark. Dirty papers blew across my feet. Taxis nearly ran me down. But twilight had softened the muddy brick buildings. In a pool of yellow light, a bearded Arab man sold gyros from a stand. He sliced a slab of lamb with a big knife and folded juicy bits into pita bread. I strolled back to my hotel. Now that my fever was lifting, the guests appeared raffish and adventuresome, instead of merely foreign. I wondered what their stories were.

    My room felt like a sanctuary — clean and quiet. I was glad that I knew nobody in London. For that one night, I didn't want to be anybody's friend, wife or mother. I wanted to remember Africa — the night air, the rumbling of big cats, the famous snows of Kilimanjaro. I also wanted to remember that spooky night in London and the freakish fever that had forced me to wrestle with my own ghost.

     Now, what did I promise myself when I was a young girl? Always to wander. Never to be owned. Would that bold girl be proud of me? I didn't know. Nobody has freedom all the time. Love itself is a ball and chain. Yet beyond the seediness of Earl's Court lay the glitter of London. New cities, night trains, borders I had yet to cross. There is no end to wanderlust.
    by Candace Dempsey
    From Underwire.msn.com
    Posted by
    Labels: culture
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