Electrifying

Tree exploded in Arboretum by
lightning bolt.
Photo:  Seattle Times

Lightning is rare in the Northwest Corner.

We get it several times a year, but generally it's what we call "heat lightning" -- where the sky lights up from some storm beyond the horizon, often so far away we can't even hear the thunder.  As kids, with closer strikes, we would count the seconds until we heard the thunder, and divide by five to calculate how far away (in miles) the electrical discharge occurred.  Six or seven miles was fairly common.

But sometimes we see real, honest bolts of lightning, up close, zig-zagging down from the sky,  just like we see in movies (or like I've seen flying into cities like Miami).  Not often, but sometimes.  Just like sometimes we have a heavy snow during the winter.

A little over an hour ago, as I sat at this very same computer, with no warning at all, the room lit up with lightning.  Before I could begin counting "one one thousand, two one thousand," a bomb seemingly exploded.  The entire house shook.  The roar of thunder -- after the first sharp explosion -- rolled on for five or ten seconds.

I wasn't terrified.  It wasn't like being hit with an earthquake.  But it was startling, and it was close. Very close. The Seattle Times reports that about 500 houses are without power because of lightning strikes.  Not me.  The lights didn't even dim, as they frequently do during tree-downing wind storms.

But it reminds me once again -- an obsession of mine -- of how tenuous is our hold on life.  That was one loud blast, and it was close.  I don't know what it struck, but something -- a tree, a chimney, someone holding an umbrella -- served as a conduit between ground and sky for a fierce discharge of amperage.  It could have been my roof.  It could have been me out in the yard.

Nature's amazing, and -- as the cliché has it -- capricious.  I mentioned in a recent post that a meteorite could strike us at any time -- but we learn to disregard that fact.  A meteorite, an asteroid, a killer earthquake -- or a simple lightning bolt.

Both my cats have been under my bed upstairs ever since the bolt hit.  They may not share our human ruminations on mortality and fatalism.  But they know something damn scary when they hear it.

I'll go calm them down, uttering soothing platitudes that I don't really believe myself.  "Come on you guys -- it was just a little thunder.  Nothing to worry about!"

Nothing at all.

---------------------------------------

8:30 p.m. -- "Lightning struck a large tree at the Washington State Arboretum, causing it to shatter." --Seattle Times
The Arboretum is across the street from my house. No wonder it sounded close.

"I got in!"

In the movie Billy Elliot, young Billy's dance teacher has persuaded him to apply to the school of the Royal Ballet in London.  Following an apparently disastrous audition, he waits nervously to hear the verdict, pretending to everyone that he couldn't care less.

One day he walks into the house and sees "the letter" waiting for him on the table, surrounded by his father, brother and grandmother.  He picks it up, looks around with a look of panic, and retreats to his bedroom behind a closed door.  Finally, his family can stand the suspense no longer.  They burst into his room.  He's sitting on the bed, holding the opened letter on his lap. He has tears in his eyes.  His family stare at each other.

"I got in!" he croaks.

This is the time of year when college admission decisions are being mailed out, and scenes similar to Billy's are being re-enacted around the country.  When I saw Billy Elliot, I recalled my similar response when I received "the letter" from the only university to which I'd applied (the University of Washington, my safe "back-up," then had a much later deadline).  My brother was standing beside me as I retrieved the letter from the mailbox. 

I couldn't do it.  I couldn't open it in front of my brother, letting him (or anyone else) watch me at that moment of extreme vulnerability.  I walked into another room and closed the door.  I, too, "got in."  My joy was explosive.

This all comes to mind because, yesterday, Maya -- my great niece -- received notice that her application to the University of California, Berkeley ("Cal" to most of us) had been accepted.  Maya is probably better mentally balanced and certainly more self-confident than either Billy or I were, so she may well have received her letter with total composure.  But when she relayed the news to her relatives, there was no denying her excitement and happiness.

She now has to decide between Berkeley and another UC school.  I'm lobbying strongly for Berkeley, a university experience that I think will be helpful to her in many ways -- in ways beyond mere preparation for her chosen field of environmental studies.

But however she decides, I'm confident that she is a young woman who will make the most of her time in college.

Congratulations, Maya!

Trust

I drive for hours in the dark on a two-lane highway, squinting to avoid being blinded by on-coming headlights. 

I stand near the tracks of the New York subway, watching my train roar into the station.  Having a headache, I borrow some ibuprofen from a friend's medicine cabinet.  I trek in remote areas of foreign lands, whose language I don't know and about whose dangers I know little, relying on the expertise and good will of guides whose poverty and beliefs contrast sharply with my own Western lifestyle.

These kinds of conduct may seem a bit risky, but for the most part we take our response to risk for granted.

We assume that the guy standing next to us on the subway platform won't -- on sudden impulse -- shove us onto the track as the train approaches.  But we know it's happened.

We assume the ibuprofen is pure and has not been tampered with.  But we know of cases where unknown persons for unknown reasons have contaminated ibuprofen with deadly amounts of cyanide.

We trust our trekking guides. But we know of cases where guides have, at best, been thieves, or, worse, have betrayed hikers to terrorists. 

These thoughts are prompted, of course, by what now appears to be the suicidal crash of the Germanwings flight in southern France.  The co-pilot apparently had no reservations about taking 150 passengers' lives with him when he died, anymore than the suicidal automobile driver cares about the lives of those in the on-coming vehicle.

We know that these criminal acts occur, and that they are largely unpreventable.  We can sometimes minimize the risks slightly -- stand away from the subway platform edge, choose guides carefully, examine pills for signs of tampering -- but we can't guarantee our own safety.

And so we base our lives on trust.  We know rationally that bad things can happen; but we also know that these bad things happen relatively rarely.  And so we choose to assume they will not happen, and act accordingly.

Some people cannot trust.  They cannot trust other people; they cannot trust the law of averages; they cannot trust themselves.  In extreme cases, they lock themselves in their homes and rarely venture out.  They don't enjoy travel, it goes without saying.  Their inability to trust often extends to other areas of life; in effect, they spend their lives merely existing.  They don't live, for fear of dying.

I suspect that there will be a drop in the number of people flying in the next few months.  I suspect that Germanwings, especially, will suffer from cancellations.  But most of us will shudder at the fate of all the passengers, young and old, who died; then we'll shrug it off, push the incident from our minds, and continue to fly.  We will continue to trust that our pilots and crew value their own lives, as well as the lives of their passengers.

A meteor (or piece of a satellite, or a falling safe) dropping from the sky and hitting us would be every bit as fatal as an airline crash or a head-on collision.  We don't live from day to day in terror of meteors or other falling objects. 

That's the way our minds work.  That's the psychological defense mechanism that allows us to live interesting and productive lives.   It works for me, and I'm glad it does.

Skydiving

A year ago, I reprinted a travel article I had written in my youth, one that had been published in my home town newspaper.  Readership of that post was high, somewhat to my surprise.

I'll tempt fate and now offer another product of my younger years, written the same summer for the same newspaper -- a summer when I was contemplating what to do with the rest of my life.  Newsprint yellows and crumbles with age.  If nothing else, adding these two articles to my blog may ensure their survival for a few more decades.

Anyone who has been skydiving for the first time recently will recognize that techniques have changed over the past 45 years.  Landings today are gentler.  First dives are made in tandem with an instructor, and are made from much higher altitudes -- providing a much longer experience of free-fall.

As with my prior "blast from the past," I reprint this story exactly as it appeared in the newspaper.  Outdated slang and unfortunately chauvinistic attitudes or language have been left intact.  The article was published in the Longview Daily News on July 4, 1970.

-----------------------------------------

"Once you're in that plane, you're going to make the jump.  No one comes back down with the plane."

You sit crouched on the floor of a stripped-down Cessna 170 and recall your instructor's warning earlier in the day.  Your decision is irrevocable.  You go to your first sky dive.

Early on this fair Saturday, after months of thought and conversation, you and a friend walked bravely into the office of Seattle Sky Sports, a non-profit outfit in Issaquah.  You forked over $35 each, signed liability waivers with some trepidation, and were enrolled in a 10:30 a.m ground school class.

Although students from 16 to 60 are welcome, your classmates, 11 men and two girls, all appeared to be in their twenties.  The instructor, a lithe, sharp-looking blonde named Gloria, was personable, articulate ("I teach high school when I can spare the time from jumping") and possessed of a subtle, ironical sense of humor.

After a couple of movies illustrating the beauties of the art, Gloria did her classroom bit.  She painstakingly outlined steps for each procedure, the essential theoretical background, and courses of action to be taken in any emergency.  She reassuringly detailed her company's safety record.  She stiffened your determination.  "None of my pupils has ever backed out of his jump after going through ground school."  ("There are many paths to distinction," your companion muttered.)  A final slap on the back before lunch.  "Even if you screw up everything, you'll live to tell about it, but the idea is to do it right."

In the afternoon, she put you through a series of physical exercises designed to simulate different aspects of the jump.  For example, you repeatedly did a jump and roll from a four-foot platform, an impact equivalent to that of the actual landing.

You completed a short written test on the morning's lecture (grades are strictly pass-fail, and everyone passed).  Dressed in white coveralls and helmets, you and your classmates were grouped by threes into planeloads.

You stumbled aboard the plane, encumbered by the heavy parachute pack on your back and the reserve chute and ground-to-air radio on your chest.  The static line, which on a first jump will automatically open your chute, was fastened with care to the pilot's seat. 

Why are you doing this?  Maybe you fear heights and want to face that fear.  Maybe you fear death and want to cheat it   Maybe you fear a purely mental and abstract life, devoid of physical challenges and dangers.  Or maybe you simply seek a groovy feeling.  Whatever your motivation,you find yourself now aboard a tiny plane which taxis across the field and lurches into the sky. 

For some reason, you are strangely calm.  Mt. Rainier towers reassuringly familiar to the south, and you note with interest how Interstate 90 blazes through the center of the green Snoqualmie valley.

The plane climbs.  At 2,000 feet the door is opened, and your new instructor hurls out a yellow streamer to check wind patterns.  He watches intently as it falls to earth.

Far below you see the air field and the small circle which you know is your gravel landing target.

At 2,800 feet, the door again is opened.  Your buddy goes first.  He creeps out and suddenly, alarmingly, is gone.  The plane circles while the instructor watches.

"Real good," he says.

You look down and see his chute far below.

Your instructor searches your face.

"Scared?"

"Yeah."

"Good.  Then you'll make a good jump."

The door is still open.  The air rushes by.

"Okeh.  Sit in the door."  You throw your legs over the edge, eyeing the ground between them.  Although far below, it looks like an aerial photo stretched out at your feet.  The illusion is too compelling to permit fear.  You've actually felt more panic standing on a 10-foot stepladder.

"Okeh.  Get out there."  Your feet rest on a rod jutting out from the cockpit.  You stand up, grabbing the wing strut.  You edge out to the very end of the rod, standing on one leg, raise the other into the air.  You await the order.

"Go."

He slaps your leg.  At some mental level below that of rational thought, you respond by pushing off from your only link with the rest of the world.

Rush of air.  No spatial orientation.   Train of thought impossible.  "Man's not made for this."  A two dimensional creature thrust suddenly into a 3-D world.  "Forgot ... suppose to arch back ... gotta try to do it."

Within five seconds, your chute is open.  Utter confusion is transformed into utter joy.  You forgot to count, forgot to hold your arms and legs correctly, forgot to check that your chute was opening.  And yet you are overwhelmingly happy.

You are scared of heights, but you feel not the slightest fear.  A world of serene beauty surrounds you, your great orange and white canopy shelters you.  You  are enveloped by a soft silence, a feeling of great peace.

Suggestions for steering your way down crackle over the radio.  You obey almost automatically, almost annoyed at the intrusion.  Not even apprehension about the landing can disturb your euphoria.

But the ground nears and rushes up, and you see figures moving about as you zero in on the target circle.  You press your legs together and remember to look away to the horizon, avoiding an otherwise inevitable misjudgment of the impact time.

You hit and roll instinctively, and easily to the ground, then stand to help the ground crew fold the parachute.  You are, perhaps, suffering rather pleasantly from mild mental shock.

"Hey, this is a first-timer.  Landed right on the target.  What's this world coming to?"

You know that you should give full credit to the expert radio guidance, but you just stand there with a big, silly, happy grin on your face.

You've been sky-diving, and the world is yours.

Thanks to NBC

I was just a skinny kid.  A skinny kid who knew all about the planets, who liked thinking about rocket ships and outer space.  Who knew the future was bound to be far more exciting, even bizarre, than the dull life of his small, peaceful town in the Northwest Corner.

I was just a skinny kid with my ear pressed to the speaker of our radio console, a large combination radio-phonograph, disguised as mahogany furniture, that sat in the place where -- a few years later -- one would expect to find a television set.

Because I was a skinny kid back in the days before -- well, not the days before television existed, but the days before my family owned one.  Before TV signals could actually be received in my home town's remote corner of the then very remote Northwest Corner.

I was scrunched up on the floor, ear to the speaker, listening to a strange story.  A story of men who traveled to Mars in a rocket ship, and who discovered not the sandy desert revealed by today's unmanned Mars landers, but something far more wonderful.  They discovered their own small towns, just as those small  towns had appeared when they were children, in about 1926.  And they discovered their long-deceased relatives -- mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandparents -- welcoming them with love and joy, just as the men recalled them from the past.

They had found Heaven, and Heaven was apparently only a few months distant by rocket ship from Earth.

But things are never as they seem, apparently.  Especially on Mars.  Martians, it appears, are skilled at telepathy and at mass hypnosis.  They could read the fondest dreams and wishes of the crew members of the expedition.  They could create the world the Earthlings dreamed of.  They could make them extraordinarily happy -- and unsuspecting.  Then, while they were all asleep ...

But one crew member lay in bed and began to have doubts --

Carefully he lifted the covers, rolled them back.  He slipped from bed and was walking softly across the room when his brother's voice said, 'Where are you going?'
'What?'
His brother's voice was quite cold.  "I said, where do you think you're going?'
'For a drink of water.'
'But you're not thirsty.'
'Yes, yes, I am.'
'No, you're not.'
Captain John Black broke and ran across the room.  He screamed.  He screamed twice.
He never reached the door.

Heady stuff, for a small town, skinny kid.  I've never forgotten the story.
A decade later, while idle on a rainy day in San Sebastian, Spain, poking around a bookstore, I found an American paperback of science fiction stories.  The cover read:  The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury.  I read for the first time the name of one of the great, if idiosyncratic, writers of science fiction.  And spent that rainy day reading one of the landmark books in sci fi literature -- a collection of short stories, published in 1950, describing the exploration and settlement of Mars from 1999 to 2026 (we were more optimistic, in those days!).  

The stories, unlike much sci fi literature, used Mars as a vehicle to focus on our own problems as human beings, and on the devastation and ruin we bring with us like a plague, wherever we venture. 

The radio program I remembered so well was an adaptation of the sixth chapter in the book -- entitled "The Third Expedition," but had been republished from a sci fi magazine where it had appeared in 1948 as "Mars is Heaven!"

Nowadays, I belong to a British book club that releases classics from all ages in carefully printed and bound volumes.  Today I received my bound copy of The Martian Chronicles.  On thumbing through the book, I immediately recalled the radio program, and wondered if there was any present record of that early broadcast.  Thanks to the internet, I learn that there is indeed, and moreover  that I can now date the program to which I listened with wide-eyed excitement as a child.

From April 1950 to September 1951, NBC radio carried a science fiction series called "Dimension X."  The program presented 50 dramatizations of science fiction stories during that period, including stories by such masters as Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut, and George Lefferts; numerous stories by Bradbury -- and even one by L. Ron Hubbard. 

Dimension X broadcast its adaptation of "Mars is Heaven!" on July 7, 1950, and rebroadcast it on January 7, 1951.  For either broadcast, I would have been ten years old -- just about the age I would have estimated.  I'm delighted to discover what literate programing NBC was able to offer in the mid-twentieth century, and I'm happy to recognize how lucky I was -- as a small, skinny, ten-year-old kid, living in Podunk, WA -- to be introduced to one of the most enjoyable of science fiction authors.

Octennial

And thus ends my eighth year of churning out posts for this blog.

The churning has been more subdued this year.  But, of course, quantity isn't everything.  How has my quality been?

A difficult question to answer, since "quality" is so subjective.  As far as popularity goes, my most read posts have been book reviews.  In fact, the most popular review of the year discussed only a small portion of a book -- something from India about a fakir's "Indian rope trip."  The second most popular was a review of The Maltese Falcon. 

My third most popular post, oddly enough, was a reprint of a newspaper article I had written 44 years earlier, recounting an eventful visit to Damascus.

Other popular topics were my visit to southern Africa, my terror of bears in Glacier National Park, and my satisfaction at reading studies that seemed to show that -- as we suspected all along -- more brawn means fewer brains.

But these statistics merely show which topics lured readers to the page.   They say nothing about the degree of satisfaction those readers experienced, having completed their reading.

We can't know everything, and sometimes ignorance is a good thing.  If we knew how everyone we met really saw us, we might well be paralyzed into inaction.  I might find myself walking around with a bag over my head.  Similarly, a writer -- especially a novice writer -- may be better off ignoring hostile reviews. 

So I will continue writing posts for another year, hoping they are readable, hoping they are worth reading, hoping they somehow, in some small way, improve a tiny corner of the universe.  Hearing nothing to the contrary, I'll blithely take my writing's quality for granted.

But certainly focus on improving quantity.

I once was lost

... but now am found.  Not once, but twice!  Twice lost.  Twice found.

I refer, of course, to my wallet. 

On Thursday, while running my four-mile loop -- part of it through the UW campus -- my wallet somehow took leave of me.  I didn't discover its disappearance until I walked in the front door.  Although, until that moment, I thought I'd exhausted every ounce of energy, I immediately began retracing my steps on foot.  Walking, of course, not running. 

About half way through this patently hopeless task, a guy called telling me he had found my wallet.  He wanted to get it back to me.  He didn't live around here -- in fact, he was visiting from Boston.  He suggested we meet in front of a Wells Fargo bank near the University at 6 p.m.  I agreed.  After some concerns -- which I mulled over publicly on Facebook -- that a scoundrel was setting me up to drain my Wells Fargo account, I met him as planned.  He cheerfully handed me the wallet, and resolutely refused to accept my offer of a "finder's fee."

Well, I certainly had learned my lesson, right?  Apparently not.  This morning, I discovered -- again on campus -- that my wallet had again taken flight.  Déjà vu all over again!  I retraced all my steps -- magical thinking -- including a mile walk back to the café where I'd had breakfast.  Nada.  As a last resort, I tried the library lost and found.  My wallet! There it was!  I suspect it slipped out of my pocket while I was using the rest room facilities.

So what's the deal?  Is my rear end changing its configuration, allowing my wallet to make a break for it more easily?  I really have no idea.  I have to take some action to keep this from happening again -- tie the damn thing around my neck?

(I'm not even talking about how I lost my wallet last October in Laos -- while bouncing along, my back to the open air, in a tuk-tuk.  Never heard from that wallet again -- it's probably now a prize icon of the Mysterious West, displayed in some rice farmer's front room.  You'd be surprised at how many items you carry in your wallet that need to be canceled and replaced.  I certainly was.)

I want to publicly thank Oleg of Boston, Massachusetts, the lost and found department at the UW's Allen Library, and the unknown student who turned in my wallet this morning.  You've saved me a vast amount of difficulty over the past week.

When I was a kid, my mom told me -- on many, many occasions -- "Honey, you'd leave your head somewhere if it wasn't attached to your neck."  But we both felt that losing stuff was something I would grow out of.  Sorry, Mother -- it just didn't work out that way. 

As Wordsworth noted, the child is father of the man. But I think he meant it as an expression of optimism.

Crossing the hollow land on foot

It's strictly a coincidence.  Really.  The book didn't make that big an impression on me.  But in late May, I'll be hiking over the fells and through the dales of Westmorland, the locale of  the young adult novel, The Hollow Land, which I praised a couple of months ago.

My hike will actually be the western half of the celebrated "Coast-to-Coast" route, beginning on the beach of the Irish Sea at St. Bees, and ending up at Kirkby Stephen, just before the pathway crosses into Yorkshire.  I will thus be crossing the Lake District from west to east, before passing into Westmorland on the third day..  At some point a bit south of Keswick, I will cross the route my niece and I followed three years ago, as we hiked from south to north.

The hike will cross the historic counties of Cumberland and Westmorland, counties that were combined for bureaucratic purposes into the new county of "Cumbria" in 1972 under Mrs. Thatcher.

I will be hiking for seven days, at a leisurely average of 12 miles per day.  But the hiking will be through mountainous areas for most of the route.

I'm doing this hike not only because I loved the Lake District when we hiked there in 2012, but in order to help prepare for my trek in the Pamirs in July.  I'll have about six weeks between the end of the England hike and the beginning of the trek in China, which should allow plenty of time for my body to recover from any wear and tear it may have sustained, without significantly losing its improved conditioning.

The month of May is rumored to be the least rainy month of the year in the area I'll be visiting.  Based on life in the Northwest Corner, that's hard to believe.  But we shall see. 

And maybe I'll meet one of the ancient ghosts -- Roman or Celt or Viking or Saxon -- that haunted the imaginations of the two boys in The Hollow Land.  Now, that would be an adventure.

Through China on the iron rooster

Paul Theroux never much likes what he sees -- especially the people he runs into, or places crowded with such people.  But, given that limitation, if indeed it's a limitation, he writes wonderfully illuminating, factually detailed, and often very funny books about his travels.

My nephew Denny, his step-daughter Maya, and I are heading for "China" in July.  I throw the quotation marks around "China," because we will be trekking on the far western edge of Xinjiang province -- a large province that is de jure Chinese, but geographically and ethnically Central Asian, a province whose population is Muslim and that was historically considered part of the vague geographic area called "Turkestan."

In his 1988 book, Riding the Iron Rooster, Theroux writes about his train travels from London to China, and then throughout China, just about everywhere he could reach by rail.  Our trekking in July will be west of Kashgar, in the portion of the Pamir mountains that separate China from Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.  Theroux did visit Xinjiang, but ventured no farther than Urumchi, the capital of the province, about 830 miles by highway to the northeast.  The railroad connecting Xinjiang to the rest of China halts at Urumchi -- or at least it did when Theroux visited.  

Although Theroux didn't reach Kashgar, all of Xinjiang is dominated by the culture and language of the Muslim Uighurs -- a Turkic people in constant conflict with China's dominant Han majority.  Therefore,  I was interested in his impressions of that portion of Xinjiang he was able to observe.

Theroux points out throughout his book that -- for the vast majority of Chinese -- the "real" China never reaches all that far beyond the east coast, the area of high population density and intense cultivation that we in the West mentally picture as "Chinese."  Those Chinese regard Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang as barbaric regions, historically serving to buffer the civilized Middle Kingdom from hostile tribes and peoples beyond.   Just west of Lanzhou -- which on the map appears to lie in the middle of the country, Theroux found his train

passing a point the Chinese had once called The Gate of Demons because beyond it was the howling wind and wasteland of which they had an acute terror.

The rails led westward into a region of desert, often surrounded by snow-capped mountains.

At Wuwei, the desert is broken briefly by a pleasant region well-watered by mountain run-off.  Theroux found himself -- not to the reader's surprise -- delighted by the sparse population of this attractive area. 

I was beginning to understand that the empty parts of China are the most beautiful, and some of them -- like these valleys -- very fertile.  ...  Its utter emptiness was so rare in China that it seemed startling to me, and where there were gardens and trees it was almost lush.  Large herds of sheep grazed along the stonier stretches, nibbling at hanks of grass; and there were mules and crows and mud-walled towns.  In one place I saw six camels, big and small, placidly watching the train go by.

He liked the Uighurs, many of whom he met aboard his train. 

They were a Turkic-speaking people, the remote descendants of nomads whose kingdom existed here 1200 years ago, and many of them looked like Italian peasants.  It was no wonder that Marco Polo found them a friendly and fun-loving people.

The Chinese Hans have not found the  Uighurs so congenial, and they have resisted assimilation.

Their world was entirely separate: it was Allah, and the Central Asian steppes, a culture of donkey carts and dancing girls.  They ate mutton and bread.  They were people of the bazaar, who -- familiar with outlandish travelers -- were travelers themselves.

In the town of Turfan, approaching Urumchi by train, he observed that

it was straight out of the Bible, with donkeys and grape arbors and mosques, and people who looked Lebanese, with brown faces and gray eyes.

Theroux hinted at his feelings toward most of China:

I liked the town [Turfan].  It was the least Chinese place I had seen so far, and it was one of the smallest and prettiest.

Theroux confirms that Denny, Maya and I will be visiting not China -- the "real" China -- but Central Asia, just as I visited Central Asia two years ago when I trekked in Tajikistan.  In fact, except when visiting Kashgar, we will be spending our days and nights with nomadic Tajiks and Kyrgyz, far more than we will with even Uighurs, let alone Han Chinese.

And Kashgar -- our home base -- is even more remote from Beijing than Urumchi.  Although not as irascible as Paul Theroux, I perhaps share (if to a lesser degree) his nervousness with being surrounded day after day by strangers physically crowding up next to me.  I'm looking forward to trekking in a part of China where one finds relative solitude, and hospitality from the people one does meet. 

Theroux finishes his book with a visit to Tibet -- a non-Han region at least as remote as Xinjiang.  He loves Tibet -- its people and its mountains and its religion.

I thought I liked railways until I saw Tibet, and then I realized that I liked wilderness much more.

He loved its supposed inaccessibility.

But the main reason Tibet is so undeveloped and un-Chinese -- and so thoroughly old-fangled and pleasant -- is that it is the one great place in China that the railway has not reached.  The Kunlun Range is a guarantee that the railway will never get to Lhasa. 

Theroux wrote that prediction in 1988.  He was mistaken.  Eighteen years later, in 2006, the determined Chinese connected Lhasa to the rest of China by rail.

I hoped Kashgar had escaped this fate (although I knew we would be arriving by air).  Travel articles, however, reveal that Kashgar is now a 23½ hour train ride from Urumchi.  The world is fast running out of "inaccessible places".