My Unexpected Journey

By Paul Fyfe

The author involuntarily undertakes a journey that takes him through the American Southwest, San Francisco, Kathmandu, and parts beyond. The book is loosely based on travel the author has engaged in at various times in his life, but is set in the summer and autumn of 1988. The author has personally visited almost all of the locations described in the book. Some of the author's interactions with characters met during the journey are factually accurate, but most are fictions of the author's fertile imagination. Through these interactions, as well as the lyrics of many classic-rock songs, the book explores various aspects of our fragile existence on this planet. In addition, as a travelogue, the book provides snapshots of information about the locations visited by the author during his journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Fyfe
• Release date: Nov 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005635664

Paul Fyfe

Paul Fyfe is a retired attorney living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He spent his formative years in Iskenderun, Turkey, and the small town of Auburn, Iowa. He is a graduate of Luther College in Iowa as well as Harvard Law School, and has spent many years running, traveling, appreciating music, and pondering the mysteries of the universe. All of these aspects of his life play a role in his book, which is his first. He is happily married, with two adult children and two young grandsons who keep him active and young at heart.

Book preview

My Unexpected Journey

Semi-true Travel Tales and Idle Musings About the Meaning of Life

By

Paul Fyfe

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1 -The Southwest

Chapter 2 - San Francisco

Chapter 3 - Kathmandu

Chapter 4 - Karachi

Chapter 5 - Eastern Turkey

Chapter 6 - Fethiye

Chapter 7 - Rhodes

Chapter 8 - Athens

Chapter 9 - Island Hopping

Chapter 10 - Paris

Chapter 11 - London

Chapter 12 - Edinburgh

Chapter 13 - Boston

Foreword

This book is semi-true because it is very loosely based on actual travel that I have engaged in at various times in my life, as well as experiences I have had while traveling. I have been to every general location discussed in the book, with very few exceptions that I will let the reader attempt to identify. I have not, however, visited each specific place. For example, surprising as it might seem, I have not in fact spent any time at a training camp for Kurdish guerillas in Turkey’s far south-eastern provinces, although I have traveled in that area. The same is true of the people I meet in the book and the occurrences I witness. Some happened as described; many are made up of whole cloth; and some may have happened but have been moved to a different location and embellished as I saw fit. When it came to factual or historical information about a certain location, I made every effort to provide correct information, at least as of the 1980s, which is when the book is set. I hope you enjoy reading the book, or at least part of it, or at least looking at the pictures that follow every chapter, as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Paul Fyfe

Chapter 1 -The Southwest

In the summer of 1988 I was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a wonderfully idiosyncratic little city beloved by Texans, Californians, and of course New Mexicans, for its history, culture, art, and restaurants, not to mention the great weather and mountain scenery. Santa Fe’s official nickname is The City Different; one of its other nicknames, bestowed by some of the more prosaic residents of the near-by city of Albuquerque, is Fanta Se, due to the extraordinary interest of many Santa Fe residents in various forms of New Age mysticism and spirituality, including Sufism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Tai Chi, and any kind of holistic healing you could ever ask for. I was between jobs, between relationships, and about to be between homes, as my lease had expired the day these events began, and all of my worldly possessions were either stuffed into my 1981 Toyota Tercel or shipped off to my parents’ house waiting for me to decide what I was going to do with my life. I had no idea what I wanted to do next, where I wanted to live, what I wanted as a career or even just a job, or what exactly I wanted out of life. My theme song, in fact, was I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For by U2, and I listened to it at least five times a day just so I could spend a little more time wallowing in my aimlessness.

I did, however, have one thing going for me, one thing that always brought me joy and a sense of accomplishment–-running. I was young and strong and could run decently fast; not world-class but fast enough to finish near the top in most of the local races in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. I had qualified for, and run, the Boston Marathon while I was in law school, a proud achievement for any runner. On the day my adventure started I was just outside the city, running one of my favorite routes, an out-and-back on a rolling dirt trail that parallels the train tracks running east out of Santa Fe. It was early evening, the best time of the day in a Santa Fe summer. Golden sunlight, the kind beloved by Georgia O’Keeffe and so many other artists, bathed the pinon-and-juniper-speckled high desert, and puffy snow-white cumulus clouds provided a contrast to the deep blue sky. I was running back toward Santa Fe, which meant I had a view of the Jemez Mountains looming in the distance. The temperature was perfect for a hard run–-warm enough to keep my muscles loose, but cool enough to be comfortable even during a fairly intense workout. As I bounded down each hill and charged up the next, I was thinking about an extraordinary thing that had happened earlier that day. This thing concerned a recurring dream that I experienced fairly often in those days, a dream about running. In these dreams I would be running hard, feeling strong, and then I would notice that my stride was getting longer and longer. Soon I was moving fast along the ground, but barely touching it; I would skim along just above the surface, touching down once in awhile just to spring off and continue my skimming, as I called it. I would look ahead as I skimmed, thinking I might have to touch down just there but then skimming past the spot to one farther away, where I would finally poke my foot down to jab the ground and retain my forward momentum.

These dreams always made me happy, and I suffered a momentary letdown every time I awoke and realized I had only been dreaming. I had read somewhere that if you dream that you are flying, it means you are happy; these skimming dreams were my version of a normal person’s flying dreams. Just a few hours before my run, I had picked up a book I found at a bookstore in Santa Fe called Collected Works. The book was Indian Running, by Peter Nabokov. In the first few pages I read something that stopped me in my tracks, figuratively at least. Mr. Nabokov was describing various running cultures among Native American tribes, and mentioned a member of an ancient runners’ guild or runners’ cult to which some members of the Chemehuevi Tribe, from Southern California, belonged. According to Mr. Nabokov, one of the last surviving members of this guild or cult told some of his friends he was going to go off alone on a long run, and left his friends behind. They decided to follow his tracks and trailed him up and over a sand dune. On the other side of the dune, his stride changed; his footprints came further and further apart, until he was touching the ground at long, irregular intervals and leaving his prints at spaced farther and farther apart. The prints also became lighter and lighter in the sand, as if the runner was barely touching the ground before taking to the air again. This was my skimming dream brought to life! I was flabbergasted to come across this depiction of my recurring dream in a book written by someone else; either the author, or someone he had spoken to, had experienced the same recurring dreams, or something strange had indeed been witnessed and recounted to Mr. Nabokov.

As I ran through the high desert, I thought about my skimming dreams and the Chemehuevi runner who was apparently able to replicate the practice in real life. Imagining I could actually skim across the terrain, I began to lengthen my strides just as I did in my dreams. Suddenly I realized that tens of yards were passing beneath me before I had to touch down to push off lightly again. Sadly, I decided this must be just another one of my dreams, and I waited to wake up. Before that happened, however, I was determined to enjoy as much of the dream as possible, and I continued skimming, flashing past the sparse vegetation and through the glowing golden light of the approaching sunset, touching down every fifty or sixty yards now. Then, to my surprise, I realized I was rising above the ground, soaring higher into the sky, and still headed westward toward the Jemez Mountains. Since I knew I was still dreaming, I wasn’t surprised by this development but waited with interest to see what would happen next.

The daylight began to fade, and I continued to soar over the Jemez, looking down on the tall pines covering the tops of the mountains. I crossed the range fairly quickly and below me I recognized the town of Cuba, New Mexico, situated at the western base of the Jemez. I continued toward the setting sun, over the San Juan Basin. The San Juan Basin is a sagebrush-filled vast expanse of territory dotted with isolated Navajo encampments often consisting of a trailer home or two, or a ranch-style house, as well as a traditional eight-sided hogan facing east. A typical hogan had a dirt floor that had been swept so often it was as clean and hard as tile, and a grandmother or grandfather resident who refused to move into the newfangled trailer homes or houses that the younger generation preferred. By this time a full moon had risen, providing plenty of silvery light for me to see by as I soared about two hundred yards above the ground. Occasionally I considered the fact that this dream seemed to be lasting a really, really long time, but I was enjoying the experience too much to try to wake myself up.

I was now flying over familiar territory. In the early 1980s I had spent five years living on the edge of the San Juan Basin, in Crownpoint, New Mexico. Crownpoint is a small outpost that serves as the de facto capital of the Eastern Navajo Agency, a division set up by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to help govern the part of Navajo Indian Country that lies outside the official boundaries of the Navajo Nation (or, as it was usually called back then, the Navajo reservation). The population of Crownpoint was 90% or more Navajo; the only bilagaanas, or non-Navajos, living in the town were teachers, hospital workers at the Indian Health Services Hospital, a smattering of Legal Services lawyers like me, non-Navajos who had married into the tribe, or missionaries posted in the town to try to convert the heathens. Since I was young and fresh out of law school, and there was nothing to do in Crownpoint (besides go running of course), I spent many weekends exploring in the San Juan Basin and beyond, in all directions.

As I soared above the Basin I recognized below me the shallow valley of Chaco Canyon, filled with the ruins of ancient Anasazi (known by archaeologists and sociologists as Ancestral Puebloans) pueblos. During my five years in Crownpoint I had probably been to Chaco Canyon twenty times. Any visitor from the outside world was whisked out there immediately to check it out, although whisked is not the right word to use; from Crownpoint it was about an hour’s drive to the Canyon, mainly because twenty miles of the route was over a dirt-and-gravel road that often was not in the best of condition. From above I could see Pueblo Bonito, the largest of the ancient structures. It had 650 rooms and was four stories high; its size rivaled that of the Roman Colosseum. Other Great Houses in the Canyon included Casa Rinconada, Chetro Ketl, Kin Kletso, and Pueblo del Arroyo. In its heyday, which lasted possibly 200 or 300 years until around 1250 AD, Chaco Canyon was the locus of a wide-spread civilization scattered around the San Juan Basin and beyond, into southern Colorado and Utah, northern Arizona, and more southerly points in New Mexico. The remains of Chacoan outliers, or communities with or without great houses of their own, are everywhere in and around the Basin; some have been excavated and partially stabilized, others still lie under an accumulation of centuries of wind-blown dirt. The accepted wisdom is that the Anasazi abandoned Chaco Canyon and its outliers due to severe drought, and migrated to the present-day pueblos inhabited by the Hopi Tribe in Arizona, surrounded by Navajo Nation lands; the Zuni Pueblo in northwest New Mexico, just south of Gallup; the Acoma and Laguna Pueblos, farther to the east, between Grants and Albuquerque along Interstate 40; and 16 other pueblos mostly concentrated along the Rio Grande River, from the Isleta Pueblo, just south of Albuquerque, to Taos, the northernmost of the modern Pueblos.

Spiritual harmony is extremely important to modern-day Puebloans, as it was to the Anasazi. Perhaps because of this, when I had previously visited Chaco Canyon, I felt as if I could sense the ancient force emanating from the silent rooms and walls of the ruined pueblos. In fact, just the year before I flew over it, Chaco had been one of the major gathering points for the Harmonic Convergence, a two-day event in August 1987 during which hundreds of thousands of people around the world collected in various locations to peacefully meditate. The purpose of the Convergence, or one purpose anyway, was to prepare the world to meet the aliens who would be visiting us in the 21st century. In addition to Chaco Canyon, where the believers camped overnight and experienced the magnificent solitude of a high-desert night, prominent gatherings occurred at Mount Shasta in California; Harney Peak in the Black Hills; Serpent Mound, Ohio; the top of Haleakala volcano on the island of Maui, in Hawaii; the red-rock cathedrals of Sedona, Arizona; Niagara Falls; and the Grand Canyon. Overseas, people meditated together at places like Machu Picchu, Peru; the Pyramids of Egypt; Mt. Olympus in Greece; Mt. Fuji in Japan; and the banks of the Ganges River in India. Now a fifth of the 21st century has passed, and I am still waiting for the aliens to appear; I hope they are still on their way, lured by the participants in the Harmonic Convergence. At worst, however, if no aliens ever appear, the Convergence was still a serene and joyful gathering of like-minded individuals in beautiful locations around the world, and how can there be anything wrong with that?

After passing over Chaco Canyon I veered a little to the southwest and realized I was headed for my old stomping grounds, Crownpoint. The small town of Crownpoint is situated at the base of a long mesa, called Lobo Mesa (also known as Dutton Plateau) running east to west for thirty or forty miles or more, with a few breaks here and there, starting close to the town of Grants and ending very near the reservation-border-city of Gallup. In the bright moonlight I could make out the long shape of the mesa and a distinctive flat-topped hump on top, which I recognized as Hosta Butte. Hosta Butte is about seven miles south of Crownpoint as the crow flies, and its summit is 1700 feet higher than Crownpoint’s almost-7000-feet elevation. In my days in Navajo Country I often drove north to Colorado, usually Durango, to get in some skiing or backpacking or just to hang out in a picturesque western town that had a supermarket—the only source of groceries in Crownpoint was a Thriftway convenience store. On my way home I could see Hosta Butte from 75 miles away, across the San Juan Basin, and I always felt its draw. I had always assumed that, due to its prominence, it was a sacred place for the Navajos and most likely for their predecessors in the area, the Anasazi. But the few times I ran from Crownpoint on the mesa’s red-dirt roads to the base of the Butte, and scrambled up its steep sides (I never found an actual trail to the top), I did not see any signs of human activity up there. Nevertheless, it was sacred to me, and I still look south for it when I’m driving on U.S. Highway 550 across the northern part of the Basin.

As I soared closer to Hosta Butte I could see below me a Chacoan outlier, Kin Ya’a, a ruined tower that was part of a Chacoan great house built in the same manner as the pueblos in Chaco Canyon. Kin Ya’a is situated about three miles from the converted pigsty that I lived in on the western edge of Crownpoint and, therefore, was the destination for many, many runs during my time there. It was also the first place I ever got rattled at by a Western Diamondback rattlesnake, a big one with a very loud noisemaker that startled me to no end. Kin Ya’a, which appears to have been a fairly major Chacoan outlier, was connected to Chaco Canyon by the Great South Road, a major thoroughfare almost 10 feet wide that traveled in a virtually straight line from the Canyon to the outlier. Interestingly, the ancient road then continued on past Kin Ya’a and headed directly toward Hosta Butte, stopping about three miles short when the terrain became too rough. To many archaeologists this indicates that Hosta Butte was indeed very important to the Anasazi, and that perhaps one purpose of the Great South Road was to facilitate pilgrimages from Chaco Canyon to Hosta Butte.

From Kin Ya’a I flew straight toward Hosta Butte, apparently following the path of the Great South Road, and as I neared the Butte I started thinking this might be the end of my dream journey. I seemed to be heading for a landing on the top, which I remembered was not wooded, unlike the mesa below, except for some scrub oak trees scattered here and there. I came closer and closer to the ground, still moving at a decent clip, and reached out a foot to start my presumed landing process. Instead, as was par for the course in my skimming dreams, I lightly touched down but then pushed off into the sky again; Hosta Butte was just a trip back on memory lane, not my final destination.

Instead, I soared on to the west. After passing over U.S. Highway 666 (which had acquired the nickname The Devil’s Highway for obvious reasons, and has since been renumbered as Highway 491), I reached the Chuska Mountains, a nice little mountain range that runs north and south along the Arizona-New Mexico border. Years ago I several times ran the Washington Pass Classic (since renamed the Narbona Pass Classic to honor a Navajo hero instead of a bilagaana president), one of the toughest 10K races I have yet run. The first half of the race was on a trail and all uphill, including a stretch of deep sand that sucked the life out of runners’ legs. If you survived the uphill in decent shape, though, you could fly back down through the beautiful stands of Ponderosa pines and along the mountain highway to the picnic area that marked the start and finish of the race. Memories of my struggles with the sand flooded back as I soared overhead under the full moon. I was now entering the heart of the Navajo Nation.

Soon enough I found myself leaving the Chuskas behind and swooping down between high, steep canyon walls, probably 800 to 1000 feet high, and I realized I must be entering Canyon de Chelly. I call Canyon de Chelly a mini-Grand Canyon, just as spectacular in its own way. In my opinion it is one of the best-kept secrets in this country’s national monument system. It is actually three canyons, Monument Canyon, Canyon del Muerto, and Canyon de Chelly, which merge into one near the western end of the monument. The canyons sport miles of vertical red-sandstone walls, an ephemeral stream at the bottom, and cliff dwellings of the ancient Anasazi pre-Navajo occupants. As I soared past the moon-lit canyon walls I circled twice around Spider Rock, a 750-feet-high free-standing sandstone monolith. I wondered if I could land on top of the Rock, legendary home of Spider Woman, who was reputed to capture misbehaving Navajo children and carry them off to her home, never to be seen again. I thought about a television commercial for a pick-up truck of some brand or another, depicting the truck perched on the spire, and wondered how the company got permission to do that in a location sacred to the Navajo.

Then I was gone, flying toward the mouth of the canyon over orchards of trees that I knew must be peach trees, descendants of the trees that made Kit Carson as infamous among Navajos as he is famous among Americans who do not know his history with the Navajo. During fighting between the United States and the Navajo in 1863, Mr. Carson ordered the destruction of the treasured peach orchards located in the canyons, as well as other crops, knowing this would dispirit the Navajos who had retreated into the canyons for shelter. This led to the surrender of most, but not all, of the Navajos, who were sent off on the Long Walk to the flat lands of eastern New Mexico, leaving their sacred mountains and canyons behind. Four years later they were allowed to return to their ancestral homelands, rendering the entire operation an exercise in futility, needless death, and heartache.

As the sun peeked over the horizon behind me, I emerged from the canyon and flew over the dusty town of Chinle. Back when I worked in Crownpoint, Chinle was similar to Crownpoint in almost every way; there was an Indian Health Services hospital, a building housing the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) administrative offices for the Chinle Agency, a state-run (as opposed to BIA-run) school, many trailer homes scattered around the town and mixed with more permanent dwellings, a couple of gas stations, and an office for DNA-People’s Legal Services, the organization I worked for in Crownpoint. Chinle stood out in one way, though; in 1982 a supermarket came to town, a Bashas’ Market that was the wonder and envy of other reservation towns like Tuba City, Arizona; Shiprock, New Mexico; Crownpoint; and even Window Rock, Arizona, the administrative capital of the Navajo Nation. Window Rock did have a FedMart, where you could buy anything you wanted or thought you needed for life on the reservation–clothing, groceries, tools, cowboy boots, horse blankets–but the FedMart was cluttered and crowded, not light and airy like a modern supermarket. The other major population centers had only overpriced convenience stores like Thriftway selling small selections of groceries and almost no fresh produce, or similarly-overpriced trading posts offering similar goods. As a result, my major food shopping involved a one-hour drive one way to Gallup or two-and-a-half hours each way to Albuquerque. I was contemplating all this as I looked down on the silent streets of the still-sleeping town and saw the lights of Bashas’ parking lot starting to dim with the strengthening morning light.

I soon left Chinle behind and, judging from the angle of the rising sun behind me, headed in a northwesterly direction. After some time traveling above barren high desert, I suddenly began a gentle dive toward the earth and found myself gliding under a huge, 450-feet-high, half-dome-shaped alcove of pink sandstone. Looking down, I could see the ruins of an extensive ancient pueblo built under the overhanging stone and I instantly knew where I was, because I had been here before. I was flying over the Betatakin ruins in Navajo National Monument, another jewel of the national monument system. Just as Canyon de Chelly is a mini-version of the Grand Canyon, Navajo National Monument is a mini-version of Mesa Verde National Park, located in the southwestern corner of Colorado between Durango and Cortez. In Mesa Verde there are at least five or six large pueblo ruins sheltered by sandstone alcoves, and hundreds more smaller cliff dwellings dotting the canyon walls. Navajo National Monument, by contrast, is a smaller canyon containing three big ruins. It is also much harder to travel to, situated as it is deep in Navajo Country. A traveler could almost run across Mesa Verde by accident while driving toward Telluride for some skiing or a music or movie festival. To find Navajo National Monument, however, you must actually look for it and deliberately decide to get off the beaten path to find it. In any event, both places are beautiful, historically significant, and isolated enough to provide a sense of adventure to visitors.

As the Monument receded behind me I contemplated my belief that northern Arizona and southern Utah comprise one of the most spectacularly beautiful areas on planet Earth. Never mind the Grand Canyon, which would qualify on its own; the region contains several famous national parks filled with colorful canyons and impressive rock formations--Zion, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, and Arches. In addition, the locale features Monument Valley, famous for its Mittens formations and as the backdrop for innumerable Westerns, as well as various lesser-known sites like Petrified Forest National Park, the Painted Desert, Canyon de Chelly, Navajo National Monument, Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, and on and on. And I musn’t forget about the eastern part of the Four Corners area, where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado all meet. Southwestern Colorado boasts Mesa Verde as well as the rugged southern Rockies, home to old mining towns and current skiing meccas like Telluride, Silverton, and Durango. Northwestern New Mexico, for its part, offers