Two Places, One Frigid, One Balmy
Aurora Borealis and Rainforest in an Excerpt from Speedy Boarding with Tom Fish
This week, I was featured in a column called “Speedy Boarding” on Tom Fish Is Away by London-based travel writer . Read the whole piece here.
Today, a reading of two of the answers to Tom’s fabulous questions for writers who travel.
Where is the best place you’ve ever been and why?
Is it just me or does this question turn your mind into one of those old-fashioned viewfinders? Today, flipping through stereoscopic images, I keep returning to two. Let me show you the first one.
Yes, you’ve clicked the shutter. Let your eyes adjust.
See that clutch of trees in the corner, bare branches just a shade darker than night stretching to the sky. Look closer. Do you see them now—the vans, two rectangles tucked down among the trunks, noses nearly brushing to form the tip of a triangle whose base is forest? One’s the colour of rubies, the taller one of silver pearls. Both are lit from within by a yolky glow so faint you marvel that you’ve seen it and then that you didn’t see it right away once you know it’s there.
Now back to the centre of the frame. It’s not just an empty slate road next to an obsidian field on a moonless night. What’s this? Two tiny clouds hang in the air. Breath transformed. Now you see the figures, bouncing foot to foot, gloved hands clutching each other’s arms, eyes wide.
What’s that next to the taller figure? Go ahead, swoop down closer. You’ll see a three-legged stick with a square head, its single eye pointing skyward. And those gossamer puffs, they’re not just breath but gasps of delight and awe.
We (the taller figure, his tripod and camera, and I) were there for sky. Or, rather, for sky become liquid—magenta rivers and turquoise brooks and waves of lime. Sky dancing for earth.
There, close enough to the Arctic Circle to have floated it as our next possible destination, fingers numb even clutching packets of iron powder and activated carbon, we stood, looking up. We’d found this spot following forecasts for the KP index (or planet index, from the German “Planetarische Kennziffer”). An hour past the 2 am forecast for peak geomagnetic activity in the atmosphere, we’d seen only hints of distant green as we passed a thermos of toddy between us. Still, our laughter had filled the night sky.
We were about to call it quits for the night when I saw it. I was facing it, and he was facing me. So when it passed me just over our heads, and I gasped and pointed, it lit his face just in time for him to do a full 360 and see it disappear behind me. We could only clutch each other’s arms and gape.
I would learn much later (editing a manuscript) that tiny bursts of Northern Lights viewed low in the atmosphere are rare but not unheard of. (According to the research of the author I was working with, these small displays are almost always seen only by sailors lost at sea.) In that moment, I felt anything but lost. All I knew was it was wild and right that all the paths that needed to had bent just so, so that I and this beautiful man from Tehran (a rare treat of a travel partner for me) had collided here—in this land of fat marmots and silver foxes and galumphing moose, of breaching whales and trumpeting sea lions, of roads like watercolour and fields of soft tundra like hiking across a patchwork quilt of lime, scarlet, and saffron, of massive ice fields like trekking an alien planet. All I knew was it made sense that a sprite made of Aurora Borealis would swoop down to see us.
Or maybe it was you.
(But what was the place? you want to know. A lonely road just north of Fairbanks, Alaska. And we did catch the lights in full display on two other occasions.)
You've been given a million pounds to live your best life in one destination for a year. The problem is - you're trapped there and can't leave for the year. Where would you go?
Now I want to take you to the second place vying for best today. It’s in the Ecuadorian Amazon outside a town called Baños de Agua Santa. How I got there, I couldn’t begin to tell you. So it’ll work well if we zoom down again. This time, the canopy is thick and green and humming; some half of all plant species and a quarter of insects call this canopy home, so eyes peeled on the way down.
See the two figures standing side by side in a chunk of partially cleared dense vegetation. The one with the machete in her hands is me. The older woman with dancing eyes is holding her arm out like that to demonstrate how, with one muscled sweep of the machete come scythe, I was to fell the next swath of thicket. Forming a half circle behind us, a younger woman, three young men, and an older man, tall and thin like a stick with a long, thin beard, are bent with glee and encouraging me to give it another go.
I do know that I arrived by truck. It’s just that each turn on the road—a thin line of black earth cutting through trees that reached more than a hundred feet into the sky—appeared as if summoned and looked the same to me. I’d come with the four young onlookers for a visit to I can’t remember whose mom. We’d met on the streets of Baños, where they were busking. Their music would go from hauntingly mesmerizing to a joyful dance. Between them, they played a pan flute, a guitar, un clave (“the key,” two sticks played together to make this bright, resonant rhythm that seduces your hips to swing), and a bomba drum. I’d spent the next few days moving from spot to spot with them, writing as they played and then going for drinks and a miniature version of billiards at quitting time.
You won’t see it, so well has it been built into the landscape, until we walk toward the sound of rushing water. But the home of the dancing eyes woman and her once-North American husband, built by hand, isn’t far away. It sits on a small hill overlooking the river. It’s wide and spacious, mostly covered deck with a high slanted roof held up by thick pillars. In one of these open rooms, half a dozen hammocks are strung between them, perfect for listening to the fall of rain after sharing yucca, rice, and fresh fish wrapped in leaves we’d harvested along the way here, all cooked over a stone fire in the open-air kitchen
Why have I taken you here? I’ll live here for the year, splitting my time between rainforest and Baños. I’ll buy my own truck and come to know the turns through the jungle by heart. I’ll grow my arms into powerful tools, scything and helping to build the guest house the clearing’s meant for. In Baños, I’ll soak in the hot pools the town (Baths of Holy Water) is named for. I’ll write and research and meet people who come from all over the world for the baths. Even after the truck and building material, the food and cafecitos, and the hostel fees, I’ll still have a majority of the million pounds. At year’s end, I’ll take off on my world tour, exploring spots I’ve plotted out and visiting friends I’ve met in the cafés.
For more, including my dream travel partner and hat, please read the whole interview. And don’t miss the rest of Tom’s wonderful writing from Morocco, Paris, Venice, and beyond at Tom Fish Is Away.
It was so great having you on Speedy Boarding Holly!
"this land of fat marmots and silver foxes and galumphing moose, of breaching whales and trumpeting sea lions, of roads like watercolour and fields of soft tundra like hiking across a patchwork quilt of lime, scarlet, and saffron, of massive ice fields like trekking an alien planet." Holly, you're Alaska's John of Gaunt! (https://www.prosepoetry.uk/poetry/poets/william-shakespeare/this-england-by-william-shakespeare-and-the-sting-in-its-tail/) Beautiful writing!