Travel is like that. You may have a pretty clear idea of what’s ahead when you head out the door in the morning. But by the time you get there — if you do, indeed, get there — the destination has morphed into something very different than it had been a few hours earlier.

I had an appointment last month with a man from the government: a Fed, as it were. My three-month Vietnam tourist visa was due to expire. International law required that I leave Vietnam for the nearest country, in this case Cambodia, and apply for a new visa to reenter. Enroute, I would take in a different part of Vietnam than I had seen in my previous seven years (and counting).

At the Pham Ngu Lao bus station in Ho Chi Minh (HCM) city, I paid 350 Vietnam dong (US$13.50) for a ticket to Cần Thơ, the economic heart of the central Mekong Delta region south and west of the metropolis. I departed late Friday morning. About three hours later, after two major river crossings, I disembarked in a city of about 1.4 million people — barely one-tenth the size of HCM.

Cần Thơ is a quietly thriving city of grace and style, somnolent but certainly not lethargic. Some flavor of the long-gone French colonial era remained in historic hotels near the banks of the Hau and Cần Thơ rivers. Unlike HCM, there are no cloud-scraping towers to distract attention from riverside gardens and night markets, no nonstop blitz of motorbike traffic to make boulevard crossings an adventure.

The major tourist attractions in Cần Thơ are the floating markets that serve its intricate network of canals. At Cai Rang and Phong Dien, both within a few kilometers of the main Ninh Kieu Wharf, farming families arise before dawn to sell fresh fruits and vegetables directly from fleets of flat-bottomed canal boats. Merchants also welcome visitors to their orchards, gardens and fish farms.

Despite spending 10 days in Cần Thơ, I never made it to the floating markets. It was the peak of the season of monsoonal rains, and neither the persistent showers nor the pernicious mosquitoes encouraged my usual spirit of adventure. Instead, I strolled through the verdant foliage along the wharf-side esplanade, chatted with fishermen who cast their bait into the estuary, and directed my footsteps over the modern Lotus Bridge.

Kusala at the temple

The Buddha House

I have spent far too little time in the Delta. My only two previous visits to the lower Mekong were in 2020, to celebrate the Tet holiday with friends in Tra Vinh, betting on cockfights (and indulging a previously unknown appetite for charcoal-broiled bullfrog); and in 2023. on an industrial tour of a large shrimp farming operation near Bac Lieu. Neither had taken me through the region’s economic wellspring.

In Cần Thơ, I had booked a private room ($10 a night) at a homestay called the Buddha House. It had sounded like exactly the sort of place I’d want to rest before continuing to languid Kampot, a river town I knew from previous visits to Cambodia.

When I arrived, an elderly woman with a severe limp strained to pull open the iron gate, assisted by her 10-year-old grandson. But she negotiated two flights of steep, narrow stairs far better than I. Having injured my left knee in HCM city two weeks earlier, when an uneven section of concrete had leapt up from a sidewalk to trip me, I struggled with the ascent. So the following morning when the grand dame offered to house me in a ground-floor room at her son’s residence, a short taxi ride away, I said thank you very much.

The son, as it turned out, was a Theravada Buddhist monk. Kusala, a youthful 47, had entered the Sangha, the brotherhood of monks, a decade earlier when his own child, Bep, was an infant. I did not learn what had precipitated Kusala’s life change, nor was it my business to ask. In any case, he and Bep’s mother had decided to pursue their own spiritual interests outside of marriage. Kusala became a monk, renouncing materialism, which included surrendering his share of ownership of a chain of local boutique hotels. Bep’s mother became a nun in Myanmar, the former Burma.

Bep stayed with dad on weekends, with grandma during the week, and frequently spoke to Mom on the phone. Come next year, Kusala told me, he will leave Cần Thơ and say an abrupt farewell to his childhood, beginning his own 10 years of Buddhist studies in Myanmar. Kusala assured me the boy had made the decision on his own. And he is very proud.

The Violet Femme

It was easy for me to make new friends in Cần Thơ, especially with locals who speak good English but who rarely have a chance to practice. On my second night, during a twilight stroll down a tamarind-shaded avenue near the night market, I lapsed into conversation with a stylish woman named Phương (pronounced Fung) and her college student daughter. Before I knew it, I had been introduced to brother Trung (Chung), who owned a coffee shop across the street, and sister Dung (Yung), whose modern vegan restaurant, Tinh Chay, was only a few steps away.

Dung and I, in particular, began to enjoy daily dialogs. I jokingly dubbed her “the Violet Femme,” both for her distinctive hair color and as an homage to the Violent Femmes, an American alt-rock band popular from the mid-1980s through the ‘90s. Of course, there was nothing violent about this 50-year-old femme, but Dung definitely challenged convention, unlike most Vietnamese. Our repartee took us across a mixed bag of subjects, all the way to metaphysics (fate? or destiny?), subjects that I’ve rarely had occasion to broach with native Asians. Should your travels ever take you through the Mekong Delta region, stop by and say hello.

I will never argue with the values of vegetarianism, even as a confirmed omnivore. Yet I did enjoy the soups and meatless platters (more tofu and mushrooms, please!) that I enjoyed at Tinh Chay. There may have been one particular herbal beverage that wasn’t to my liking, but as a former James Beard-certified food critic, I’ll give Tinh Chay a top rating in its particular genre.

Dung at her restaurant

Enlightenment awaits

Formal Buddhism is not widely practiced in Vietnam. Its mythology is not encouraged by the communist government. Temples serve those who pray for deceased ancestors on their birthdays or who ask special favors (prosperity, fertility, success in exams) from deities such as Quan Am, the Goddess of Mercy known to Chinese as Kuan Yin. Enormous images of the goddess, greater even than Gautama Buddha himself, are a widespread symbol of Mahayana Buddhism throughout most of Vietnam.

Followers of the Theravada practice — dominant in Cambodia and other countries west of Vietnam, including Thailand, Myanmar and Sri Lanka — don’t worship a deity. To them, the historical Buddha was simply an enlightened man who taught the dharma, a discipline that outlines steps for alleviating desire and, thus, life’s suffering.

Although I was raised by Lutheran parents as a non-evangelical Protestant, my personal beliefs have long been best represented by nontheistic Buddhism. For years, I have worn a good-luck charm presented to me by a Thai monk. Kusala was excited to take me, along with Bep, to a revered Theravada temple in the village of Chau Thanh, an hour’s drive from Cần Thơ.

Kusala was warmly greeted by his old friend, the abbot, a stocky man in his early 60s, and the monk’s master during the years he had trained for the Sangha. He encouraged me to wander the temple’s small campus. Slender Khmer stupas — for this was, indeed, a Cambodian-style sanctuary — rose high atop the half-dozen structures that comprised the Jitva Puranasama temple. Painted like Sahara sand, the temple’s focus was a central worship hall, a vihara, with multi-colored lights that flashed upon an image of the Buddha. Just outside, resident monks played percussion on a bronze bell and a huge hanging drum. Crimson veranda roofs stood above spirit houses and simplistic Buddhist statuary as the fumes of smoldering incense sticks wove through a lotus garden.

Diva in a red dress

The temple was a simple and uncomplicated place, as a spiritual sanctuary should be. So why should I have been surprised when the ladyboy dropped by?

After many years in Southeast Asia, I have come to understand that there is much wider acceptance of sexual deviation than in much of the West. A different spiritual leader might not have offered the time of day to the trans-gendered individual who wandered down through the temple’s gateway and down its cobbled driveway. But Kusala’s sophisticated master took at least 10 minutes to make the person feel welcome.

“Sashayed” would not be the right word, but the ladyboy made no attempt to disguise their arrival. Dressed in a bright red, knee-length sun dress, a shag haircut hanging over the ruffed collar, the new arrival carried a brass offering bowl and a decorative fan. The abbot, clad in a formal brown robe and porting his cell phone, went out to greet them.

Kusala didn’t speak a word. He merely smiled benignly as the ladyboy raised their hands in a prayer and departed. Perhaps they were seeking something that neither the abbot nor the Buddha could offer. But young Bep was fascinated.

As twilight approached, the sanctuary offered us something to eat. Kusala and his master did their daily dining before dawn, but Bep (for now) and I were not expected to bow to dietary restrictions. In retrospect, I wish I had. The simple and mostly flavorless meal of rice, soup and grilled vegetables, prepared on a gas burner by an elderly nun, seemed harmless at the time. Less than 24 hours later, my stomach disagreed.

The open-minded abbot

Gutting it out

I spent the next three days bedridden. Severe diarrhea can do that to a person. I forced myself to drink water. I couldn’t eat. My system quickly flushed everything else out. Fortunately, there was a good pharmacy nearby, well stocked in antibiotic remedies for gastrointestinal infections.

But I was entertained. Kusala was a fine ambassador for his faith as well as a marvelous communicator. The man liked to talk. He spoke Vietnamese, of course, and probably Khmer. He spoke fluent and rapid English, albeit with an accent that wasn’t always easy to interpret quickly. He spoke the ancient Pali language, an ancient Sanskrit derivative that is to Theravada Buddhism as Latin is to Roman Catholicism.

For millennia, at least 2,500 years, monks have chanted their daily sutras in Pali, raising and lowering their voices as they emphasize particular passages. Kusala’s steady tone and singsong inflections, along with the chime of a small bell that he rang at intervals I could never understand, became a part of the morning regimen at his house. And what was true for Kusala became true for me … and for Ivan.

The day after our temple visit, we had a new arrival. The large Theravada temple in the Central Highlands community of Da Lat hadn’t known quite what to do with Ivan, a 38-year-old Russian who had arrived a few months earlier to study Buddhism, having abandoned his previous career in computer tech. Ivan’s English was far better than his Vietnamese, which hampered his learning prospects in the mountains. Kusala invited him to study in Cần Thơ. Ivan boarded an overnight bus from Da Lat and showed up on our doorstep in the early hours of the day.

Russian roulette

Kusala had agreed to teach Ivan the basics of Buddhist practice before transferring him in the spring to a formal temple in Myanmar — perhaps the one where Bep would apprentice.

Ivan was a terrific guy, softspoken and highly intelligent, not full of the bluster I’d heard from many Russians traveling in Southeast Asia, in places from Nha Trang to Pattaya. In a couple of brief conversations, I realized he was truly inspired to learn the Buddhist way and to returning to his native Moscow to establish a Buddhist center after he became a pedigreed monk.

His first couple of days in Cần Thơ — which was all the time I knew him — Ivan busied himself with hours of silent meditation and with building a small Pali-language vocabulary for morning chants. He struggled with memorizing the intricate loops and folds of tying the traditional monk’s robes, garments in orange saffron or deep sepia, gray or rust red. But that will come with practice.

Of course, we had time to engage in a couple of philosophical talks, as I love to do. And Ivan was pleased to run errands to get my antidiarrheal medicine for me.

Feeling well enough to move, I slipped out one early morning as the men spoke their sutras. I left what I hope was an appropriate offering. I didn’t think it right to disturb their meditation.

I’ve been puzzling over how to begin a stream of essays that focus on contemporary life — thoughts and observations in present time, as opposed to memoirs from a half-century past.

I’m a journalist. I’ve been one, I suppose, since I was 8 years old, writing my first headlines and operating my first miniature printing press. I made it my profession in my most productive years. I edited my junior-high and high-school newspapers. My first university degree was in journalism. Even as I traveled the world in my 20s, performing a wide variety of jobs in the service and skilled-labor industries, I continued to honor an unwritten journalistic oath: Never stop learning.

Drop the blinders and keep an open mind. Believe nothing. Question everything. Gather information from conflicting sources. It’s called critical thinking, and it’s cost me friendships. But it is more important than ever in today’s geopolitical climate.

Never stop communicating the truth. There is truth everywhere. But falsehood may also be found everywhere, in misunderstandings, in outright lies.

I learned to hone my observational skills and to use all of my senses. Sometimes my eyes tell me one story when my other senses — hearing, smell, taste, touch — tell a different story. Sometimes it’s a sixth sense that challenges my understanding and causes me to look deeper. Do I believe in ghosts? Do I believe in flying saucers? Yes. No. Maybe.

I am personally offended by any individual who draws a conclusion without exploring alternatives. I have no time for any person who decides, independently, that there’s only one correct answer to any argument. This is why so many organized religions are misguided. You may say, “Jesus is the only way,” but that isn’t so for a majority of the world’s population. What’s right for you often is not at all right for them. Even the great spiritual teachers reminded us not to judge others “lest ye be judged.” The Buddha, asked by a follower if there is a God, responded that we could concern ourselves with that question in the afterlife — if there is, indeed, an afterlife.

I subscribe to the doctrine of curiosity. It’s what a journalist does. I explore multiple sides of an issue, weigh them one against another, and then, perhaps, I’ll tell you exactly what I think. It’s my opinion. It doesn’t have to be yours. My opinion is not gospel truth. Far from it. Use your mind, listen to your heart, be willing to extend your education. It’s often not comfortable. Welcome to my discomfort zone.

Shades of gray

I bring up this subject because of the action two days ago of the President of the United States. Famously intolerant of dissenting viewpoints, most especially when questioned by female journalists, he banned three of the leading American news networks — CNN, MS Now and Politico — from White House press briefings for disseminating what he calls “fake news.” He threatened to do the same to the two most prominent newspapers in the US, The New York Times and the Washington Post.

Now, every journalist with whom I’ve ever worked, from The Wall Street Journal to Al-Jazeera, from Reuters to The Los Angeles Times, has had a code of honor. It’s called telling the truth. What one person calls the truth may not be the same as another. And we may acknowledge different shades of gray. If you and I both witness a traffic accident, we may be inclined to assign fault to different drivers ... but the circumstances of the collision remain the same. How I interpret a direct quote might not be the same as what you thought you heard. But in my profession, we strive for objectivity.

POTUS doesn’t believe this. He has his own news outlet, Truth Social, on which he posts his own “truth” about news of the day. It’s often wildly different from the reports of other credible platforms. Indeed, it’s similar to what I see under the autocratic regimes of Southeast Asia, where I have lived for the past seven years.

Networks and news outlets are in professional competition, of course. But journalists are essentially one big family. We band together. When some of us are hurt, we all feel the pain. Thus it was tremendously gratifying to see today that the presidential press pool — which also includes NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox News — has responded to his action by declining to participate in presidential events. When POTUS today spoke at a ribbon-cutting for the new White House helipad, there was no audio feed. His comments were inaudible. How humiliating!

The President’s next stop is the United National General Assembly where he is scheduled to make an address on Tuesday to the leaders of world nations. Good luck on that, especially if the world can’t hear what you’re saying.

It’s damned hard to think critically when you’re presented only one side of a story. Citizens of the world, all of the world, must continue to demand what broadcaster Paul W. Harvey used to call “the rest of the story.”

My maternal grandmother arrived in the world on Christmas Eve 1886. She was the youngest of 10 children born to a carpenter and his hard-working wife in the forested bogs of central Sweden. To some, the idyllic village of Finnerödja was a perfect place to grow up, midway between Stockholm and Gothenburg, near to the great lakes of Vänern and Vättern. But it was no place for an inquisitive and headstrong young woman like Maria “Maja” Edla Elisabeth Fredberg to sink her roots.

What was a girl to do? Pick bright red jordgubbar until her fingers were raw, all for the opportunity to be named this summer’s Strawberry Queen? Wear a crown of candles on her yuletide birthday and parade through the churchyard as Santa Lucia? She didn’t particularly favor the smell of singed hair, especially when it was her own.

In 1906, only 19 years old, she set out to find her own way. Thank you, Grandma. Is it any wonder I turned out as I did? Proper young women didn’t travel alone in the Victorian era. (Many still don’t do it today.) But Maja loaded a single sturdy trunk with everything she imagined she’d need on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, booked passage to New York with the Scandinavian America Line from Copenhagen, and promised to write.

The folks in rural Skaraborg province didn’t have much faith she’d make it through a New York winter. Only her brother Manfred, five years her senior, acknowledged his little sister’s independent streak. He didn’t doubt that Maja could make it on her own in the “new world.”

Johan and Maja strike a pose on a Sunday stroll, perhaps in the 1920s

Liberty unleashed

She arrived at the Ellis Island immigration station on September 20, just in time to celebrate the 20th birthday of the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France. How long Maja remained in the Big City has been lost to the ages. Her disembarkation documents indicated she was on her way to Milwaukee to visit a “friend” named “J. Anderson.” It couldn’t have been me, as I wouldn’t be born for another 44 years (yes, in Wisconsin). If Manfred knew, he wasn’t saying.

When Maja turned up again in family lore three years later, she was back in New York, employed as a masseuse — again, highly inappropriate for a woman in the post-Victorian world. On the other hand, she was a Swedish immigrant and a specialist in deep-tissue Swedish massage. She also began attending gatherings at one of New York’s Scandinavian social clubs, which is where she met the equally adventurous Johan Aksel Gottberg in 1909.

Clearly, they charmed one another. Within two years they were engaged to be married. They set a date for the following spring of 1912. First, Maja wanted to make a visit home to celebrate her 25th birthday with the family in Finnerödja and to share the news of her betrothal. It must have been a glorious Jultid, with the entire Fredberg clan together for a final time. [Manfred in particular was doing well. A carpenter like his father, he was about to launch the furniture factory that remains in the family today. And he dipped his toes into politics, eventually becoming a member of the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament, where he made a name in the ‘30s as a conservative prohibitionist.]

A maiden’s voyage

As the first harbingers of spring began to poke their floral heads through the last of winter’s snows, Maja was thrilled to learn that she had won a lottery drawing. The prize was a steerage passage on the greatest ship to ever sail the Seven Seas, the White Star Line’s RMS Titanic. Her maiden voyage would depart from Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912, carrying more than 2,200 passengers and crew. She was sure that Johan, waiting for her at his job with American Telephone & Telegraph back in New York, would be as excited as she was.

But the maritime veteran was not remotely amused. No sooner had he received her letter, exulting over the lottery triumph, than he was sending her a frantic cable. “Please, Maja,” he wrote, or something to that end, “Do NOT travel on that ship! It is NOT safe!” He beseeched her. A man who had spent much of the previous decade tossing about on the briny sea, he did not trust unproven vessels, regardless of any claims their designers might make. What’s more, he had somewhat recently become interested in the writings of 18th-century scientist-theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, said to have a particularly robust psychic intuition. Johan had a bad feeling.

Heeding the advice of her beloved, a disappointed Maja returned to New York on a different vessel. Only then did she discover the Titanic had struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean four days out of Southampton, and about 1,500 people — close to two-thirds of all the passengers and crew aboard — had met a watery death in the cold seas in the early morning hours of April 15. It’s unlikely she would have survived.

Farragut Road

Johan invested and saved his money wisely, a talent that my brother inherited but I obviously did not. He bought a three-bedroom house on Farragut Road in Brooklyn’s East Flatbush neighborhood, then one of the borough’s more desirable middle-class communities, and looked forward to starting a family with Maja. His son — for a son it would be — would carry his own name, John. Everyone, or everyone who mattered, particularly Maja’s Swedish cousins. like Signe Bjorkman and young Eric Persson, who followed her back to America after her 1912 visit, would know Big John and Little John.

The Great War came and went. The Twenties roared in like a lion. Maja scoffed at her teetotaler brother, back in the old country, as she tried dancing the Charleston. Johan, now in his 40s, indulged her youthful zeal. But try as the Gottbergs might, Little John showed no sign of making an appearance.

When Maja finally conceived, she was 36 years old — not young in that era for a first-time mother. It wasn’t an easy pregnancy. Her doctor urged her to step lightly while suggesting that she probably should not plan siblings for the newborn. Big John never got the son he wanted. But he loved his wife and he adored his daughter, whom he duly named “Little John,” er, “Lilyan,” with the Scandinavian pronunciation.

Her parents spoiled Little Lil. Johan built her a garden swimming pool for muggy summer days, and got her a yappy puppy to keep her company. They played in the waves at Jones Beach, on Long Island, and took vacations to places where Johan could tiller a small boat, sometimes as far north as Canada, where he found a soulful escape after the great stock market crash of 1929. Lilyan attended Erasmus Hall High School, graduating in 1942, a generation before Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond, then enrolled in Barnard College at Columbia University, where she studied French and child psychology. Thanks to the subway system, it was near enough that she could continue to live with her parents while picking up part-time work as a telephone switchboard operator.

A daring teen-aged Lilyan with her dog at Jones Beach, early 1940s.

The Swedish connection

Lilyan was a freshman at Barnard when her beloved older cousin, Eric, told her he knew an American serviceman who, he was certain, would love to receive letters from a Swedish girl on the Home Front. Einar Anderson was a tech sergeant with the US Army Air Corps in East Anglia, England. Not coincidentally, Eric’s mother was the sister-in-law of Einar’s father in Wisconsin. What a small world!

After a correspondence of more than two years, the Second World War was over. Einar visited Lilyan in New York in late 1945. They married in September 1947. Einar went to Michigan Technological College, earned a degree in forestry on the GI Bill, and garnered a management position in Ashland, Wisconsin, on the southern shore of Lake Superior. (Cue Gordon Lightfoot ballad: “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”) Lilyan taught elementary school in the nearby town of Mellen.

And then little Johnny — what else could they have named him? — came along in 1950. Johan Gottberg, whose health had been failing since a bout with typhoid fever, had died of stroke the previous summer at 72. Buried in Einar’s Wisconsin hometown of Rhinelander, he must have smiled in his grave in October when his namesake (one generation removed) assumed his name.

Maja continued to live in the Farragut Road home through the ‘50s. By decade’s end, she was struggling to maintain the home alone. Einar’s new position in corporate sales had led his family to move from Wisconsin to Minnesota to Massachusetts, adding children to the family at each stop. When he was transferred to Oregon in 1960, Grandma Gottberg came along. She died just after her 78th birthday in 1964.

Some of us thoose a different course, and I believe we are the better because of it. We cherish our discomfort zones. Challenged by the unfamiliar, but curious by nature, we learn quickly and thoroughly. I’m not afraid to take measured risks, to tackle jobs for which I am totally unprepared, to attempt communication in foreign languages, to confidently confront whatever is waiting around the next blind corner.

Even before I was conceived, I was traveling in my discomfort zone. It was in my blood. My maternal grandfather and namesake, Johan Aksel Gottberg, was in his mid-teens when he left his family’s small farm near Brutuböle, Finland, for a naval academy in England. He never returned.

Brutuböle is in the southwest of Finland, 70 miles west of Helsinki, a watery wonderland where every dusty road dead-ends at a harbor facing the hundreds of islands of the Ekenäs Archipelago. I’m sure young Johan grew up with a tiller in his hand. He probably knew how to fill a small boat’s sail with wind, how to navigate rocky shorelines, and certainly how to fish for cod and whitefish, before he could ride a bicycle.

He could easily have island-hopped west across the Gulf of Bothnia to Stockholm: It’s no surprise that Swedish was spoken as widely here as Finnish. Had he felt particularly adventurous, be might have challenged the currents and sailed south, across the upper Baltic Sea, to Estonia. My god, he probably did.

‘Sacred Mountain’

Gottberg is Swedish for “sacred mountain.” It’s not a common name, and I’m sure my granddad’s Evangelical-Lutheran kin took pride in that name: strong and spiritual. Most of them, including his older brother Anton, with whom he maintained a long correspondence, were eventually buried in the parish churchyard.

Born in 1878, Johan may have once imagined himself entering the shipbuilding trade. It had been a major industry until the end of that century. Then the bottom fell out, economically speaking. So sometime in the mid-1890s, Johan sailed to England from the Finnish-Swedish port of Hangö.

I believe he had thought to return to Finland after completing his education. But Russia’s tsarist government was increasing pressure on citizens of the Grand Duchy of Finland, which was in essence an autonomous colony of Russia, to surrender many of their rights — including religious and press freedom — and to bow to military conscription. Executive declarations by Tsar Nicholas II confirmed their worst fears. (The Finns eventually regained their full independence in 1917.)

The Boer War

As it happened, Johan was just finishing his academy time when the tsar issued his first decree in February 1899. At the same time, tensions were rising in colonial South Africa between the expansionist United Kingdom and the nationalistic Boer (Afrikaner) population. They erupted into open warfare in October 1899 as the armed forces of the Transvaal republic and the Orange Free State scored early victories in a series of sieges on English outposts.

As a newly christened seaman, Johan was aboard the HMS Terrible as the Royal Navy steamed south and anchored off Durban. Initially, his ship and the HMS Powerful were tasked with protecting coastal ports and preventing weapons from adjacent Mozambique, a Portuguese colony, from reaching the Boers. A British garrison commander appealed for assistance from the Royal Navy’s warships and his request was met with a formidable response.

Sailors dismantled their heavy artillery and carried them inland to the battlefields. Sixty guns, operated by 1,400 sailors and marines, one of them a 22-year-old Swede-Finn, were deployed in a counteroffensive that recaptured several major cities, including Bloemfontein, Johannesburg and Pretoria. When the Treaty of Vereeniging was signed in 1902, the Boer republics were absorbed into the British Empire.

The pirate

Johan was perhaps not a stranger to stormy seas. Long before he was a glint in his father’s eye, the Gottberg name carried a certain notoriety in the Baltic realm. At the start of the 19th century, on a small sandy islet called Gotska Sandön, a caretaker with a wife and children was hired to steward a sheep ranch. His name: Petter Gottberg.

The isle has been a Swedish national park since 1909, but a century earlier it had been a navigation hazard in the seas north of the larger island of Gotland. In harsh weather, the barks of its seal colony would not have pierced the gales to warn sailors at night. There was no lighthouse until 1859. So Petter improvised, or so Swedish legend would have it. He had a family to support.

When the weather got nasty, Petter mounted his horse and trotted back and forth along the beach, waving a lantern as if to warn passing ships of the danger. In fact, his light show did quite the opposite, directing vessels laden with such goods as leather, beef and vodka to plant their prows directly into the rocks. Playing good samaritan, the grifter invited the stranded crew to shelter in a crude bunkhouse, whereupon he locked them inside and shot them dead, enabling him to freely plunder their ship.

That part may be fable. But we do know that Petter Gottberg was found guilty in a Swedish court of the plunder of an 1816 shipwreck. He was jailed for eight months before returning to Gotska Sandön, where he lived until his death in 1831. Petter may or may not have been related to my grandfather. But it would not be surprising to learn that one or more of his sons, as young adults, had escaped the calamity of their island exile and made an escape not back to the Swedish mainland, but across the Baltic to Finland, where they may well have started a family of their own.

Sailor man

Johan, meanwhile, left the navy life upon the conclusion of the Boer War. He returned to England and enlisted in the merchant marine as a communications officer. He was in his mid-20s now, and as much as he loved the briny, he was similarly enthralled with the English countryside. Apparently, so too were the young ladies of Hampshire and West Sussex, charmed by the soft Scandinavian accent of the handsome Baltic sailor on his frequent bicycle rides from Portsmouth.

Ultimately, though, he was back at sea, crossing the Atlantic for the first time. There was Gibraltar. Barbados. Antigua. Jamaica. Sounds like “Kokomo” lyrics. The crew made a stop in Nassau, but somewhere between there and the Bermuda Triangle, Johan disappeared. They were so close to America … and what a country! Its streets were paved with gold, or so he’d been told.

He probably thumbed his way up Highway A1A to New York, where he arrived in time for the America’s Cup race of 1903. His experience on the waves attracted the attention of the sponsoring New York Yacht Club, which promptly put him to work aboard the yacht Reliance, the largest race sloop every built. He was one of 64 crew that won all three of their events.

Now that he was in the big city, Johan needed an urban job. The American Telephone & Telegraph Company had an opening in their alarm division for an immigrant with his talents, especially one with the backing of the NYYC. He saved and invested wisely, and soon was a man about town.

Always a Swede-Finn, Johan (now better known simply as “John”) was accepted to membership in a popular Scandinavian social club in Manhattan. That’s where, some time around 1909, he met Maja Fredberg. And if you thought he was daring, just wait for the next installment, when I’ll introduce his soulmate.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved my family dearly, my parents and my brother and sister. And I might have stayed away ad infinitum. I had been offered a job as a civilian bartender at a U.S. military PX in Berlin, and I did like those northern European women, as we’ve already established.

But since I had been gone, my brother had graduated from university and taken a teaching job in Japan. Forty-nine years later he’s still there, an emeritus professor and a grandfather. My sister was attending nursing school in Portland. My dad, having survived cardiac surgery, was retired and enjoying a quieter life in the Cascade Mountains as a fly-fisherman and cross-country skier, far from the office. Mom and the dogs, of course, were there to provide support. I needed to check in.

From Sweden, I retraced my track through Denmark, Germany and The Netherlands, where I bid farewell to Nico. (My old friend lived the quiet life of a successful artist until he succumbed to cancer just last year.) I took the overnight ferry to England and returned to Alison’s doorstep in South Kensington. There she broke the news that she was now seeing another man. Although she generously shared her bed for a couple of nights, her thoughts were elsewhere. And Del, my lovely friend from Brisbane, offered a similar story. She was now working in an office job in London, but her Australian sometime-boyfriend had followed her to the U.K. So I quietly booked a flight from Heathrow Airport to New York Kennedy, where I would begin a 3,000-mile cross-America jaunt.

Best Friends

My mother’s Italian-American best childhood friend, Jean Lenaz Klaiss, still lived in the greater New York area. Jean and Lilyan (Mom) had been raised in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood — before Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand made their alma mater, Erasmus Hall High School, famous — and attended Columbia University together. Jean was there when Mom, as a fragile and impressionable 19-year-old. began a pen-pal relationship with the American serviceman then stationed in East Anglia, England, who would later become my father.

Jean and her husband, Rudy, were delighted to greet me when my flight arrived at Kennedy International. I stayed several nights at their home in suburban Pearl River where they ran an antiques business out of their garage. Rudy, a former rotary press operator for The New York Times, didn’t believe retirement meant being lazy. My best memories were of their playful young black labrador showing off his tremendous talent for carrying four yellow tennis balls in its mouth at once, and a weekday visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art at Central Park.

Ruth and Vinnie Razza were also childhood friends of Mom and Jean. It seems the Swedish girl hung with an Italian crowd. The Razzas made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: Come to the wedding of their eldest daughter at an upscale hotel in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. It was a fine celebration, with several hundred people in a massive ballroom, a live dance band, and a wedding singer to put Adam Sandler to shame. I was seated with several students who peppered me with questions about life on the road and whether my experiences were anything like those of Jack Kerouac in On the Road. Not exactly, no. Hitchhiking across Europe had few similiarities to stowing away on a boxcar in America.

Hop on the bus, Gus

Then I was on a Greyhound bus, heading west. I must have slept a good part of the first day, because I have no memory of crossing New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the stovepipe of West Virginia, Ohio or Indiana. I don’t recall endless farmland, unsolicited conversations, or greasy burger stops in Pittsburgh or Columbus or Indianapolis. I do recall being shocked by the size of everyday automobiles (think Lincolns vs. Renaults) and by the ubiquity of fast-food restaurants. Are you kidding me? I gave up Europe for this?

I disembarked in St. Louis, having been spirited there on the invitation of a pretty woman I had met in Grand Central Station. I think her name was Tina. She had written her address, but she wasn’t answering her phone, so I decided to surprise her: I hitchhiked to her upscale Chesterfield neighborhood from the Greyhound depot and rang the doorbell. Alas, no one was home. I waited. Twilight arrived. Not a single neighbor raised an eyebrow. I erected my tiny tent on the grassy lawn behind her garage, ate a granola bar, and eventually drifted off to sleep.

When I awoke after dawn, it was clear that someone had been there during the night. The message I had slipped into the front door crack had disappeared. There was an empty garbage container beside the front curb. But still no one answered the doorbell. My “friend” clearly did not want to be disturbed. Perhaps she had company. She must have been shocked to glimpse my tent in her yard.

My Eagle Scout mantra had always been to leave a campsite cleaner than I found it. So I scouted around for any trash to collect and recycle. Of course, it went into the empty garbage container. Then I shouldered my backpack, found my way to U.S. HIghway 40 West, and began hitchhiking to Kansas City. “They got some crazy little women there,” the old country-blues song spoke to me.

Spacious skies

But I shot straight through Kansas City (this time) to the University of Kansas in Lawrence. I had another European travel contact here, and Mike was glad to let me sleep on his sofa for a couple of days. It was late August and fall classes had not yet begun, so the campus was relatively quiet. We had a few beers and a lot of laughs. Mike’s friend, who went to Kansas State, gave me a ride to that school, in the town of Manhattan.

O beautiful for spacious skies / For amber waves of grain / For purple mountain majesties …”

The words of “America the Beautiful” could not have been more appropriate in my crossing of the Great Plains of western Kansas, heading into Colorado. I was back on a bus now, passing stalks of green corn and golden wheat that swayed in the breeze under clear cerulean skies, and occasional herds of hefty Herefords. The distinctive summits of the high Rocky Mountains got closer and nearer as I crossed first to Denver, then to Boulder.

One of my best high-school friends, a fellow ski racer, had gone to school at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He married a girl from Minnesota and moved back to her home state to join the family construction business — not coincidentially his own father’s profession. He understood the gig. Although Jim wasn’t around, I had always been curious about the city. I spent a couple of days exploring the trails beneath the iconic Flatirons, the distinctive peaks that rose behind the city, before continuing my trip west.

There was Grand Junction, Salt Lake City, Elko, Reno, and finally San Francisco. I love the city by the bay. In fact, in my further travels, I have returned to each of these communities. Even Elko. But now, I didn’t pause. I swapped contact information with my seat companions, a mother and daughter from Corona del Mar in greater Los Angeles. They invited me to visit, the mother with a wink and a nod toward her daughter. Tempting? Of course. But I was going home. Eugene was nine hours north by Greyhound.

Childhood dreams

And then I was back home again. I had seen the world. I had achieved my fondest childhood dream, the one carved from a stamp collection, from a fascination with maps, from family vacations, from young-adult adventure books borrowed from the public library, from the innocent (and not-so-innocent) curiosity of youth, from long-ago tales from the mouths of globetrotters like Bob Bone and Leonard Lueras.

And what had I learned? For one, there was so much more to see and do on this planet. In less than three years, I had barely scratched the surface. I knew beyond a doubt that this wasn’t a one-off. More than ever, I could envision my life as one very long journey.

As I write this, it’s the year 2026. I will turn 76 years old in October. I have been several times around the world. I have been gainfully employed in a dozen countries, and while I’m not a country-counter, I estimate I have traveled in somewhere between 60 and 70.

If you’ve read through my entire Hippie Trail Saga, you know I supported my travel habit by working along the way. More often than otherwise, the things I learned didn’t translate directly to a literary profession, but they led me to perceive the world from many different perspectives. I can never express enough gratitude for the knowledge I gained as a dishwasher and a musician in New Zealand, a salesman and a sous-chef in Australia, a ski instructor in France, a bartender in The Netherlands, an apprentice carpenter and translator in Sweden. A willingness to work and a desire to learn were often more important than having prerequisite skills, especially when coupled with a certain fearlessness about my ability to succeed.

In later years, my adaptability came in handy as I tango-danced my way through Buenos Aires, tuna-fished from a dugout canoe in the Solomon Islands of the South Pacific, rafted Arizona’s Grand Canyon and para-glided off Wyoming’s Tetons. I even worked briefly as an actor and a Greek chef in Vietnam.

Count me in

You don’t need a degree or a particular certificate to establish your abilities. The value of a university is to be a clearing house for knowledge, but there’s nothing you can learn in a classroom that isn’t free for the taking on the mean streets of the world. Often those lessons are more difficult but also more memorable.

Optimism and a positive attitude open far more doors than negativity. You don’t need to question whether the glass is half full or half empty if you request a bigger glass. Travel with a smile and a sense of humor — even when you’re staring down the barrel of an automatic weapon in Mexico or being stampeded by a rogue elephant in Sri Lanka. Yes, those things really happened.

I have always preferred to know fewer places well than to superficially visit scores of sites. I’ve never been to the Pyramids, to Machu Picchu, to the Great Wall of China. I don’t know that I ever will. That’s not important. I’d rather count the things I have done than count what I have not.

But counting was never my strong suit. And I’ve screwed up more times than I can count.

Discomfort zones

In September 1977, I moved to Seattle and took a part-time job at the morning newspaper, the Post-Intelligencer. It grew into a full-time position even as I began taking graduate classes at the University of Washington. By 1980, I was married. My wife and I moved back to Hawaii, then to Singapore, where our son was born in 1984. We returned to Seattle, but I couldn’t stop moving between places and jobs and people.

We divorced in 1990. I relocated to Los Angeles, then to Idaho and South Carolina, before I returned to Oregon in 2004 as a travel and food writer, a magazine editor and a university journalism instructor. In 2019, after the deaths of my parents and my son, I came back to Southeast Asia, which had a place in my heart ever since my original visit in 1976 as a naive backpacker on the old Hippie Trail.

I’m no longer a young man. But I still actively pursue my discomfort zone. It is where I am challenged to learn rapidly and completely. There may certainly be times when I’d rather be sprawled on a cushiony sofa, snacking on nachos as I watch my Seattle Seahawks punch another touchdown across the goal line; but 98 percent of the time I prefer to gnaw on skewers of some unidentifiable seafood as I meander through an Asian street market, or raise another chant of Mot, Hai, Ba, Yo! with the boys drinking Tiger beer in the makeshift pub on the corner of Here and There.

Ol’ Frankie Blue Eyes had it right. I did it my way. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. There’s a helluva lot to be said for that.