In the early 1990s, I associated the Adirondacks with freedom almost indiscriminately. Upstate New York was my stomping ground, and when I tired of the Fingerlakes, real wilderness awaited just a few hundred miles to the northeast. In the Adirondacks you could truly get away from the raging masses, classwork, and society. You could get yourself off the map. Hell, you could even get hurt. That was its beauty, and I loved it. Amazing, then, that it took me another sixteen years to return. The lesson here is that there is absolutely no telling where life will take you.
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The brightly dressed men on horseback caught my attention first, but then I saw the man leading a camel to the front of the stage.
I was in dusty Ndioum, in northern Senegal, for work-related matters. The sun was high overhead the Sahel, and there was dust in the air. I've spent a lot of time here, and I find it fascinating, because it's so different from anything I've ever experienced, and I wonder how people make their living here. We were getting ready to break ground on a new bridge.
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We raised Saint Thomas on the Caribbean horizon before dawn, and by the time the sun was rising, the air was full of bird calls and we were docked in the magnificent harbor of Charlotte Amalie. The Caribbean, the deep Caribbean! And one of the splendid Antilles Islands, to boot!
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If Dogs save no
Yesterdays
and
expect no
Tomorrows,
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One day, the taps simply ran dry. No water. The only way to truly understand what that means is to live through it, to experience it, to suffer through it. Only then do you realize that all the other problems about which you complain are nothing in comparison, that your squatter neighbors live some version of this tragedy every day of their lives. And then you recognize how precarious human existence truly is on this earth.
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