Category: travel

Do I owe whatever success I have had in professional life to the unifying power and cultural relevancy of sport? Almost certainly, given that my essay for my college application covered my experience going to a football (soccer) game in Istanbul with my cousin when I was a child. And surely that essay was my golden ticket to a good university, which led to a good job, and onwards ad astra. My essay used a game, a tense 1-0 victory for Fenerbahce, the club team of my heart, over Trabzonspor in 1999, to discuss not only the joys of watching sport but also how my personality and worldview is the product of two cultures and traditions, American and Turkish, which has enriched my life to no end.

I have been to only two Fenerbahce games in my life as I usually visit Turkey during the off-season. The details of the games have started to fade and conflate with the passage of time but the experience, the emotion, the feelings I still remember well. The excitement of a large crowd, vibrating, excited, there for one purpose, to support a group of eleven people in contest against eleven others. The songs, both scripted and impromptu, roaring from the rafters, spliced by raucous and raw shouts of encouragement, gasps at near-misses, whistles of disdain at referees and opponents and any others that would dare stand in the way of triumph.

My team was always going to be Fenerbahce, despite my father rooting for Besiktas, one of the other great Istanbul clubs. Several of my cousins were – and to an extent still are though a bit more mellow now – near-fanatical supporters of the club and despite being born in a different country in a time before internet, when even phone calls across borders were difficult, I would inevitably fall under the gravity and the influence of their fandom. My box of keepsakes from my childhood include newspaper clippings of Fenerbahce victories and team mementos my cousins, all much older than me, sent by mail as I was growing up.

As it is for billions of people around the world, football is in my blood. While I only lightly follow Turkish football and Fenerbahce these days, and only so often watch football on the telly, I am still an avid fan, well-versed in players and trends across nations and continents. One of the biggest draws of the sport is how international it is, how a team could have players from a dozen different countries in its squad, how different nations embrace football in different ways, how the national playing style inevitable leads to anthropological discussions on how said style reflects the culture of the nation. Football is integrated into the quotidien nature of life in Turkey, as it is in so many countries. And so, despite being an American, my support of the Turkish national team was always inevitable as well.

The terminus of my trip out west was San Francisco, timed so that I could see Turkey play in the World Cup, a bucket list item if ever there was one. I had such anticipation and such hope for this game and this team, despite the disappointing loss in their first game. Spoiler alert: Turkey lost this game as well, crashing out of the tournament in ignominious circumstances, disappointing, especially given the expectations. But such is the world of sports. For every moment of joy is built on heaps of heartbreak and despair. As UVA’s former basketball coach aptly said, quoting from the Bible: “weeping may endure for the night but joy comes in the morning.” I consoled myself with watching highlights of Euro 2008, when my father and I jumped around in delirious joy after Turkey mounted an improbable comeback against the Czech Republic.

Despite the loss, it was an amazing experience. I sat by myself – a friend who also went was in a different section and the stadium was full, teeming to the brims, with Turkish fans so trying to co-locate was impossible – behind the goal designated as the Turkish supporters’ section. The atmosphere was electric, only momentarily deflated by a goal conceded far too early by a slow and tentative defense. The entire section watched the entire game standing, shouting, groaning and cursing at their players and the opponents and the referees in a uniquely Turkish way (football fandom, even more so than football playing style, distills and concentrates a nation’s ethos and personality perfectly). I ended the game hoarse and at one point near the end, after a near-miss, let loose a keening howl so despairing it likely woke up children in Santa Clara in a fright.

There is a dark side to sport fandom. Given that it is built on the shared purpose of a large group of people, the throngs of people who make up the singular and unpredictable entity of a crowd, it can turn angry and violent. A quick search of the shenanigans in Turkish club football over the past couple of years, with pitch invasions and attacks on referees, will reveal an ugliness to sport that has no place anywhere. Then there is the effort of plutocratic organizations to sanitize the match-going experience, to commoditize the passion of sports into a product, which leads to anodyne and ho-hum environments. This game, however, was the perfect throwback: an engaged, excited, vibrant group of people, always positive and passionate. Two people in my section were not Turkish (or Paraguayan) and after the game they were smiling ear-to-ear, amazed at what they had experienced, caught up in the emotion of the moment.

In total I spent two days in San Francisco, catching up with old friends and exploring the corners of the city I’d not seen before. I have mixed feelings on San Francisco. In many regards, it’s a lovely city, with diverse personalities and cultures and even microclimates across its different neighborhoods, its environment quite pretty as it abuts a bay to the east and the ocean to the west. In other ways that I find hard to explain, I’m not a fan. The tech-bro culture is not as obvious as one might think for a casual visitor given how significant the Silicon Valley world is to this city but still I have a feeling that San Francisco is a bit full of itself. It is an easy place to simultaneously like and dislike in equal measure.

And so this journey to the west comes to a close. Over 11 full days, 2000 miles of driving, 100 miles of walking and hiking, good times with good friends, experiencing both nature and urban life, several excellent meals, taking hundreds of photos and building memories that will last a lifetime, it was a great trip and a great start to my sabbatical. I am writing this final entry at home, back into a daily grind of sorts, though thankfully not of the corporate ilk, but still uplifted and grateful for the good fortune of living in this world.

My friend Carrie gave me two tarot readings on my trip and in both cases the Fool was the anchor card. Its appearance, accompanied by a rather cryptic declaration of “interesting” by Carrie, was at first a bit deflating, perhaps even more so than the dreaded Death card that inevitably appears in any depiction of tarot in film or television. Avid readers of the blog may be chuckling, perhaps even snortling, but I would remind them that while I may often act the fool, I certainly am nobody’s fool. In any case, my deflation was unwarranted, informed mostly by a complete lack of knowledge on tarot.

Despite what may come across in my writings, I am not a mystical or spiritual person. I have been doing yoga for years and years but I usually zone out during the philosophical and breathing parts of it. I am generally a rational and empirical person and therefore rather skeptical of practices like tarot and astrology and occultism. But I am so very fortunate that somehow I have bucked a trend and as I have gotten older I have become more open-minded and those two tarot readings evoked an intense curiosity in me.

And thus: the Fool. The Fool, it turns out, represents new beginnings and leaps of faith. In the Thoth tradition, which my reading drew from, it symbolizes pure potential, divine motion, and the spark of creation. The Fool, a youthful and vibrant figure, ignores fear and the subconscious ego, listening instead to his instincts and trusts the universe will catch up as he pursues life with creative ecstasy (as represented by the vine of Dionysus). Now that murmur of “interesting” makes sense, with the reading coming as it did at the beginning of my sabbatical. Was this mere coincidence, or truth in the cards? It is for each of us to decide that on our own but I will certainly be reading more about tarot in the future.

Back in the prosaic material world, I embarked on the final driving leg of my trip, choosing the more curious route of hitting the pacific coast highway for a bit instead of the straight shot down to San Francisco. The beginning of the drive went through more Redwood forests, where a brief stop at one last grove fortified the soul for the long drive, before I turned to the coast for a quick detour to Mendocino county. In my time, I have driven many roads of dubious provenance and endless twists and turns, from the wild peninsulas of Ireland to the mountainsides of Utah, and the closest I have come to experiencing dizziness was this stretch of Route 1 as it took me from the inland to the coast. There is nothing frightening about it as it goes through more forest with few sheer drops but it never stops twisting, for miles and miles, until finally it hits the coast.

Mendocino county’s coast is what I had hoped it would be: foggy, rugged, waves crashing, wild. At this point in my journey I was a bit tired so I didn’t linger for too long, except to have an excellent seafood meal in Fort Bragg (how this guy, a Confederate general, got a town named after him in this part of California I am uncertain). The PCH does not hug the coast as much here as it does in Big Sur but there were enough views of the Pacific to make it worthwhile and to see why this is a popular destination.

My return inland took me through Andersen Valley wine country, itself worthy of a stop for some tastings on a trip in the future, before connecting to the main highway for a boring, busy drive back to San Francisco to return my car. I did get a chance to drive the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time, which was gloriously foggy, before joining some lovely bumper-to-bumper traffic for the rest of the drive. And so I arrived in San Francisco, my final destination after 2000 miles of driving over nine days, and with one final adventure to come.

It has been well established that my soul age is 21. This to be clear is not my own judgment but the determination of others. A recent tarot reading also supports the idea of the youthfulness of my spirit – albeit in an abstruse and mystical manner. I don’t think it was always this way as in my actual youth I felt like I was less fun and adventurous. But as the years roll on, I find myself delighting more in the world around me, I find smiles come more readily to my heart even when plumbing the deepest and darkest valleys of my existential self, and a lightness is, I hope, now eternally part of my being. My YOLO is not the stuff of reckless hedonism but an almost childish joy and curiosity in life. I have always loved the feeling of wind through my hair (a fairly important input into past decisions for growing my hair out long) but have never reveled in it as much as I do now. 

I think some of this joy and wonder comes through in my writings in this series as I marvel at the ceaseless and at times improbable beauty of nature. But I have yet to write much on what may be my most immediate love: trees. For a tree is a being, not just a structure or a part of a landscape, an actual living organism that shapes the world around us and supports the environment (an oxygenated atmosphere) for our own continued existence. One of the reasons I chose my current home a few years ago is because it was surrounded by trees, not a lawn, which I think is silly human invention that makes mockery of the natural world, but trees, stretching tall and spreading wide. I have particular affection for the large birch tree in front of my townhouse despite its best efforts to be a nuisance. To wit:

• The birds that nest in the tree for some reason always wake before the sun rises and make an unholy racket (which of course in the daytime I consider melodious birdsong but before dawn… not so much)
• These same birds pelt my car, which sits in my driveway, incessantly with their shit
• And if it’s not the birds then it’s the pollen and the sap, coloring my car with ugly ochre yellow dust or this godawful syrup that acts as a particularly strong natural glue for all sorts of detritus and attracts bees
• It sheds branches in the way a dog sheds hair, strewing them not only across my front yard but my neighbors’ as well (honestly, this bit worries me about the health of the tree and I dread calling in an arborist to check on it)
• And this past winter its longest branch destroyed the screen in front of my bedroom window and now when the wind is blowing it enjoys scratching the window, making a sound not unlike a banshee’s shriek

And yet I love this tree and I worry that one day my neighbors will ask that I trim its branches. I will have a difficult decision to make: do I preserve a measure of affable cordiality or do I become the villain of the piece? Let us hope that day never comes.

If I have such strong feelings for a single birch tree, imagine how a forest full of Redwood trees, massive and majestic, affects me. Having had a few conversations about them it is evident that the Redwood evokes widely different emotions in different people, with one friend even implying that they are sinister. I do understand the thought as their forests are typically dark and cool, sunlight struggling to filter through their canopies far above, and their trunks often gnarled by age and circumstance. But that’s not how I think of them.

But what do I think of them? Perhaps I am writing this piece too soon as I still struggle to describe how they made me feel. They evoke a sense of awe and wonder, mostly because of their size, but there is nothing particularly striking or beautiful about them when compared to some other trees. In some ways they are archetypical – ask a child to draw a tree and it will look very similar to a Redwood. But they just feel ancient, they feel aloof, they feel like they experience time in a completely different scale and do not even notice us. I have used the word majesty but I don’t think they are even that regal. Instead they are like residents of a separate world, a spirit world, a world beyond our ken.

Over the course of a few days I had the privilege of experiencing these trees in many different ways: sharing the experience with larger crowds in kid-friendly trails, walking in solitude for hours, spending meditative moments in groves, and driving through highways and byways wending their way through forests.

The highlight was a ten-mile loop in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, where for the first four miles I encountered not a single other soul as I traipsed up and down valleys and through groves. The trail hit the sea at its halfway point, its brine noticeable in the air, hitting the senses well before even the sounds of the crashing waves, the water mostly invisible because of a heavy fog blanketing the shore. A short detour through a canyon of ferns was not as enjoyable, oddly enough not because of the hordes of children gleefully playing in small pools but instead clueless older humans who have no concept of trail etiquette. I returned to the forest for the final four miles, which, admittedly, was a major challenge for my aching legs. Exhausting as it was, it was a delight for the soul and for the senses, one of the best hikes I’ve ever done. 

This was my final adventure before heading to San Francisco for the rest of my trip and these trees inevitably led me to think of the tension we have with our natural world. We need its resources so we can survive but as any half-way discerning and intelligent person knows there is no balance. In my journeys, I traveled through many forests, dense and green, but also sources for logging and trucks heavily laden with felled trees slowly chugging along country highways, trees whose great heights will not return for many lifetimes yet. It makes me wonder about one of my favorite hobbies, woodworking (see my work here), and if I should be considering it at all in moral terms.

My experiences in these travels, as is ever the case whenever I have the good fortune of visiting the great parks and lands of our nation, have also given me great appreciation for the people and organizations that work to conserve and protect them. The job of a ranger is a noble one and that of a conservationist an important one, channeling the connection that indigenous peoples once had and still have to the land, reminding us that the earth is a mother and a father, a shelter and a home, who punishes with cruelty but also provides without prejudice.

In the 1850s, a gold prospector named John Wesley Hilton and others “discovered” Crater Lake while searching for a lost mine. Hilton said: “I knew when I gazed upon Crater Lake that even though the west was filled with undiscovered wonders, Crater Lake would hold its own.” What seems like in some ways nothing so special as it is after all just a lake is in reality an awe-inspiring wonder in both its geological history and its unique beauty. When trying to describe it to some fellow travelers later the same day in California, the first comparison that sprung to mind was the Grand Canyon. It is one of those places where pictures, no matter how beautiful they come out, cannot do it justice. I overheard a child provide the perfect description: “The water looks fake.” It does look fake because there is a sense of unreality, a can-it-really-be-this-blue that just hits differently in person.

First, a quick geological overview: Mount Mazama was originally a 12,000 foot peak in the Cascades before a massive eruption over 6000 years ago removed nearly four thousand feet from its height and created a caldera that would form the bed of Crater Lake. Over 20 square miles in surface area and with a maximum depth of nearly 2000 feet, Crater Lake is the deepest freshwater lake in North America. Oh, and it just happens to be on the top of a mountain that despite the eruption is still 8000 feet above sea level.

My drive there from Hood River was over three hours but hardly tiring because of how lovely it was. Much of the first hour was spent circumventing the slopes of Mount Hood as the highway wound through heavy forests and beautiful farms preparing for the first cull of cherries. I then emerged into the high desert of Oregon, driving south with the Cascades a constant companion to my right. The peaks were not as prominent as Rainier and Adams and Hood but still dominated the horizon, each distinct and separate from the range, a dream landscape for a painter.

The final stretch was billed as a “scenic” highway but the 20 miles were really nothing special compared to the rest of the drive as the surroundings were mostly barren and insects hovered incessantly about my windshield. Perhaps I am being overdramatic or even mystical, but on entering the park itself the atmosphere changed. It was still another ten miles but each minute my anticipation grew as I noticed I had unconsciously slowed down to extend the moment. Just a different feeling in the air.

It is difficult to describe the moment I saw the lake as I pulled over to the first overlook. Of course I had seen pictures but nothing prepares you for how blue the lake is. I have been fortunate to have seen so many beautiful shades of blue and green and turquoise across the world but the color of Crater Lake makes no sense. I will be shaking my head at its memory for years to come. I also discovered those hovering insects were actually lovely butterflies, less hovering and more fluttering, a wonderful complement to the serene and magical environment.

Unfortunately part of the rim drive was still closed due to the season, while the pathway down to the lake has been under rehabilitation for a couple of years so my experience was limited to views from the rim. Still, I spent more time there than expected, stopping at every overlook (which was the same thing I did at the Grand Canyon a few years ago – yes, it’s the same lake, and not nearly as massive as the canyon, but somehow a slightly different angle provided a completely different perspective), which meant I ran into the same people regularly and earned the moniker “Virginia,” which admittedly is not as striking as my actual nom de guerre “Hollywood,” but endearing nonetheless.

I was taken aback at one of the overlooks as a couple of Buddhist monks ignored the do not step off the path sign to step off the path for a better picture but I suppose all life is indeed suffering, including for fragile wildflower ecosystems. I did wonder where they came from and why, as there is something charmingly jarring about monks driving a rental car and angling for photo opportunities. I ended my time there contentedly noshing on a sandwich with smoked Chinook salmon from a fish market in Hood River, gazing at the lake for a final time and mentally adding a to-do to return one day so I could enter its waters. 

But the day was still young and much more driving was in the cards as my next destination was another of those you-must-see-them-to-believe-them wonders of the world: the majestic Redwoods of Northern California.