Well-Read Life™

A Wilderness Waterway to Reading

After recommending to you nine ways to get more books into your life in the coming year, yours truly is off to a poor start. In the first week of our new year I read not a paragraph with my eyes or my ears (six audiobooks are languishing on my iPod). Instead, from January 1st through 7th, I paddled the 100-mile Wilderness Waterway through Florida’s Everglades National Park, together with my 21-year-old son, Cal, my brother-in-law Bryan Granger, and my adventurer friend Robert Kennedy.

When does a well-read life call for fewer books but more action?

For a dozen years my buddy Rob and I had talked about paddling this waterway, which is renowned among paddle aficionados but unknown by almost everyone else, even by people living within 100 miles of it in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton. It’s almost funny trying to explain this to area people.

“The Wilderness Waterway?” they ask.

“Well, it starts in Flamingo…” Blank look.

“Flamingo is the southernmost town in Florida if you don’t count the Keys.”

“Oh…” followed by another blank look.

“Then you paddle northwest through this wilderness area, a National Park actually, also called the Ten Thousand Islands, until you get to Everglades City….”

Blank look.

“Everglades City is the southernmost town on the west coast of Florida—south of Naples and Marco Island.”

“Mmm…”

That the Ten Thousand Islands and Wilderness Waterway are terra incognito is perhaps one reason they're preserved. There may have been more visitors a hundred years ago. That’s when hunters shot unknown thousands of Everglades birds for their exotic feathers, destined to adorn the hats of fashionable ladies. (Chevelier Bay is named after one such hunter.)

While the desolate bays and rivers are quite close to millions of people, they are hard to get to. A few hours in a high-speed boat can get you there, as long as it’s the right kind of boat—like a 17-foot skiff with a special jack plate mount for the outboard that allows the prop to just brush the water, whose depth is often measured in inches.

Once there, you pretty much have to stay in the boat. Those thousands of islands are impenetrable mangroves. It would take you several minutes just to crawl onto the net of roots that serve as shoreline. I don’t know how you’d stand without risking a sprained ankle, or worse.

Anyhow, don’t feel left out if you’ve never heard of it. Few people other than avid paddlers and fishermen have. Plus a growing number of people in government who are being informed by a litany of environmental groups trying to repair its ecology. 

I blame books for getting me into this mess…and my buddies

Like other strange areas of the world, the Ten Thousand Islands serve as the setting for some fine literature. Randy Wayne White’s enormously enjoyable novels in the Doc Ford series, such as Mangrove Coast and Shark River, exhibit a detail of the area earned the hard way from White’s early career as a fishing guide. And Peter Matthiessen’s Watson trilogy was set in these murky waters. His penultimate Shadow Country won the 2008 National Book Award. 
Matthiessen’s Killing Mr. Watson was one of the tipping points that made me want to paddle this area. There’s even the Watson’s Place campsite where you can spend the night, if you don’t mind sleeping on a muddy beach once owned by a murderer.

What transformed a mere desire to paddle this area into the actual deed were my three partners. Cal, after six months of Mandarin immersion in Beijing, wanted the opposite of big-city pollution and people, and reminded me of the idea that had long been on my bucket list. Then there was my brother-in-law, Bryan, who is a genius at preparing for, and thriving in, the outdoors.

Finally, Rob Kennedy, mountain climber, triathlete and extreme sports enthusiast. Normally when Rob tells me his plans and asks me to go along I say, “That’s okay, you go ahead and I’ll stay here to dial 911.” On the trip, the four of us agreed we were the only four people we knew who would actually do this trip and—for the most part—enjoy it.

 

I also went to the Wilderness Waterway for the reason Thoreau went to the woods—to see what it had to teach. What did I learn?

I sure did learn to appreciate hot showers, and the comfortable mattress I sleep on (after six nights on a 1/2 –inch foam mat over wooden planks). I have a new appreciation just for being outside at nighttime without a constellation of mosquitoes orbiting my head and gators 18 inches below my feet.

And on the positive side, I also have memories of the three of us paddlers, tired and sore, facing yet another headwind and deciding to just power our way across Broad River Bay’s choppy waters with chants and whoops and hollering like crazed men. (Cal and I looked at each other through the spray, saying with our eyes: Remember this.)

Thoreau’s tonic of wilderness had some time to work on me: hour after hour of only the sound of water and wind and of mangroves, mangroves and more mangroves. I began to wonder whether wilderness, by definition, must be monotonous. Must you have mile after mile of something, like glaciers or desert or forest or mangroves, in order to qualify as wilderness?

I have this warm feeling that lingers now of just knowing this place exists. This place of distant green shores, of wide open water and unmolested sky—this place where you can go all day without seeing another human outside your party and not even a sign of humanity, save what you yourself brought. Could I be missing the place already?

I just downloaded Randy Wayne White’s Ten Thousand Islands onto my iPod. Now I can go back there at the hands of a master storyteller.

Sometimes we read, sometimes we do. Let me know what you think, dear reader, about your own reading and doing, and reading some more. I want to hear. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

What may be missing from the Beijing Olympics

According to reports, the Chinese government has for years now been working to clean up non-standard English translations on signs in anticipation of the attention soon to be focused on Beijing. My son Cal, who studies Chinese in college, is somewhat sad about this. He says he will miss the quaint, odd, and sometimes undecipherable English he used to encounter on his various trips around China.

Here are some of the Chinglish signs we photographed four years ago, when we traveled to Beijing and Shanghai. These may already be relics.

The translation Cal ponders on the window of this restaurant reads: “Dumpling stuffed with the ovary and digestive gland of a crad.” Yum!

Of course, what would be even funnier would be English attempts to write Chinese signs.

For more information, see the interesting entry in Wikipedia.

More on Bibliotheca Alexandrina

A few books that talk about the great Alexandria library then, now and in the future:

Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles

Much More Than a Building…Reclaiming the Legacy of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Ismail Serageldin

The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility by Stewart Brand

Levenger produced a replica of the time cam from this clock. Click here for more on its meaning.

Here’s a link to www.booksense.com, in case you’d like to buy any of these books from your favorite independent bookstore.

Bibliotheca Alexandrina—Library to the World

Click here for more photos  

 

We had been warned about the fog. Yet we left anyway at 8:00 am from a cloudy Cairo for our three-hour drive northwest to Alexandria.  It was our only day to visit the library.

And treacherous it would have been, had our driver not slowed our van to a crawl in the nearly impenetrable fog. But the six of us were all the more delighted when we emerged at seaside Alexandria into brilliant sunshine.

My family was there to have lunch with officials and then tour this shining jewel in Egypt’s crown—the new Bibliotheca Alexandria, which was born by Egyptian presidential decree to fully live up to the legend of its ancient namesake.  Mike Keller, head of the libraries at Stanford and one of the board members of the new library,  had arranged our visit. He had told me it was a spectacular place but no description could have prepared us for the scale and majesty of what we saw.

The buildings, perched on the shore of the Mediterranean, look as though  they were transported from a World of Tomorrow. The more we learned of what was inside the stunning architecture, the more awed we became.

Sohair F. Wastawy, Chief Librarian, and Noha Adly, Director of Technology, greeted us warmly. Being Friday, the library was closed for prayers until the afternoon, which gave us time to lunch at a Greek restaurant across the crescent bay, right next to the site of the famed Alexandria lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Yet it was the library of Alexandria, launched in 295 BCE by Ptolemy I, that left the grander legacy. It was part academy, part research center, and part library that drew scholars from around the ancient world. At its height it contained as many as 700,000 scrolls. 

The library disappeared gradually. One episode was an accidental fire in 48 BCE during the Alexandrian War of Julius Caesar. To make up for the loss, Marc Anthony gave Cleopatra 200,000 scrolls.

The arrival of Christianity and subsequent Roman persecutions and schisms in the church made Alexandria a dicey place for a universal library dedicated to science and learning. In 391 CE, Emperor Theodosius banned all religions other than Christianity. In 645 CE, the Muslim conqueror Caliph Omar effectively did the same in the name of Allah.

Beyond accidental and deliberate destruction, as Matthew Battles has written, “centuries happened” to the library. Gradually the ancient Greek scrolls became incomprehensible to readers. Five centuries was, and still is, a long time for a library to last.

The new Bibliotheca Alexandrina is a chance to begin again with a library “Born Digital,” as librarian Ismail Serageldin says. It is to be a library not only to Egypt, but to humanity. It’s hard to imagine a more noble cause..

The library’s original site is now submerged a few kilometers out to sea from the present shore, yielding up its treasures to underwater archeology. I’ll take you there, virtually, in future reports.

Egypt’s ancient and timely lesson

 

I remember learning in high school geography class of the peril faced by the ancient Egyptian temple of Abu Simbel, which had stood since the reign of the pharaohs. Rising water behind Egypt’s Aswan Dam threatened to submerge the four enormous seated figures and the tomb they protected, so UNESCO—the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization—had organized an international effort to dismantle and relocate the temple to high ground. My classmates and I tossed our quarters in milk cartons in faraway La Mesa, California, doing our part to save a part of the world’s history.

That memory added to my anticipation when I found myself journeying to see the temple 40 years later, on a brilliant January morning early in 2008.

The monument doesn’t disappoint. Even the busloads of other tourists don’t detract from its grandeur. I walked a few hundred yards away, where I could be alone to reflect and take a few whimsical photos.

What I hadn’t remembered was the plight of the people who lived in that valley with Abu Simbel. They too had to be relocated, leaving their villages behind. They were  the Nubians.

Dr. Hala Kh. Nassar, a professor of Arabic literature at Yale, and a guide on our tour, directed me to a slim volume by Haggag Hassan Oddoul, titled Nights of Musk: Stories from Old Nubia. I bought it at the Aswan airport and read it on the flight home. It brought tears to my eyes.

We told ourselves that we would have to be patient. The women too would have to be patient. The flood season was approaching, and as you may or may not know, the flood season is nothing more than the long, broad river’s manhood overflowing his banks with the water of life. It mounts the land, and plants are born and udders grow fat.

The progress of the Aswan dam and the subsequent loss of Nubian villages reminds us that monumental technological advance often comes with a high human price. The Suez Canal, opened in 1869, led to the bankruptcy of Egypt and British occupation (see Zachary Karabell's marvelous history, Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal. And one can only imagine the human cost, so many years ago, of building the Pyramids of Giza.

If there were poets of Giza who sang of the struggle to build those wonders, they are lost to us. Fortunately, we still have today not only the monumental Aswan Dam, but the poets of modern Arabic literature who tell the human story.