Palais Royale

I actually said it to someone this evening, but I truly believe it. I don’t think of paradise as a place, because everywhere I’d seen that I considered paradise wasn’t enough in the end. A door opened, it was an experience of paradise, then I wanted to go through another door to see what was on the other side.

For some people one door is enough, for the rest of us there are other doors. Call it restlessness, call it curiosity, call it whatever you like. I don’t think paradise can be found, it’s a creation.

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Childhood living is easy to do
The things you wanted I bought them for you
Graceless lady, you know HOW I am
You know I can’t let you slide through my hands

Wild horses couldn’t drag me away
Wild, wild horses, we’ll ride them some day

October 1, 2007: In Memory of Greg Leborgne

Greg recorded/posted this video to YouTube on September 4, 2007, just a few weeks before he died in a motorcycle accident in Lisbon at the age of 28. I moved mountains trying to get to his funeral, but in the end my passport renewal timing worked against me (it didn’t arrive in time to catch my flight), and instead of attending a funeral in France my car broke down in Bath, New York.

For two years, since before the time David entered cancer treatment, Greg was a consistent presence in our online lives: email, Skype, messages, doing whatever he could to stay in touch. He was in the same online community (Orkut) where David and I had met, but we hadn’t met him yet. We’d been planning a honeymoon in Europe that included a stop in Lisbon, where he was living at the time with his Estonian wife.

Greg was an exceptionally talented guy, an artist: musician (guitar, piano), photographer, designer, an expert in post-production just like David, and would communicate with us in these ways. In the second half of 2005 he sent us messages of encouragement, prank Photoshopped photos, music files, and kept reaching out to us. After David died, he tried to Skype with me all through 2006, but I was depressed and didn’t feel like talking. In 2007 Greg was still living the good life in Lisbon — surfing, always going out, busy. But he hadn’t given up trying to get me to visit Portugal. Greg loved it there, and he thought I’d love it, too, but I don’t think I was in the right headspace to enjoy it properly yet.

By Summer 2007, after my trip to Iceland, I was beginning to live outside of my head again and Greg was finally able to persuade me to Skype with him. I don’t have a webcam on the PowerBook G4, so it was just me viewing him and me on a microphone. He played a Damien Rice song on his guitar and we talked for at least an hour, maybe even two. I lost track — there was a lot to say. There is no archive of that Skype session, but what I would give to live it again… by coincidence, it was exactly four years ago now and all I remember is the good feeling afterward, that we could talk about David and me and finally make some plans for me to visit him in Portugal and get a taste of his life.

And then, in the early hours of September 29, Greg lost his life. I later realized exactly where I was at the same time when the accident happened in Lisbon, five time zones away. I was also driving around, but in Pennsylvania, in the pitch dark rural roads of Lake Wallenpaupack, searching for the way to my friends’ house. I was overtired, driving after work from Toronto like I always do, and nothing looked familiar. I was running out of fuel and I couldn’t find a station that was open. It was the middle of the night. I’d been lost for over an hour but I didn’t want to call and wake anyone up. I was in the danger zone for being able to drive. For the first time ever, I made the decision to find a place to pull over in the blackness and sleep by the side of the road. Meanwhile, Greg was in Lisbon after a night out with friends and faced the same decision — stop or go — but he chose to go, to ride his motorcycle home. From what his friend told me, Greg likely fell asleep at the wheel and was killed on impact.

That was a huge wake-up call for me. Pun intended. Since 2007, I have pulled over and slept in my car many times on the long distance trips I’ve taken since. Most of them have been 8-10 hours of driving in a single stretch, more than most people attempt. I used to push through the sleep barrier, but I don’t anymore. Last December, when it turned out I had pneumonia, I slept in the car at a service plaza along the New York Thruway for four hours with the engine running until the snowplows woke me up.

I think about Greg from time to time, especially when people search for him online and find my website, which shows in my stats. I also think of him in random moments: whenever I see Sony Alpha DSLRs, guys playing guitars, motorcycles, maps of Estonia, surfing, and other disconnected things. When I think of Greg I can’t help but think of Portugal. He was from France, but he really loved Portugal. I’m sure my subconscious (and Greg) has been prodding me to go ever since, and this year I finally listened.

I kept my promise, Greg. Wild horses couldn’t drag keep me away.

Icelandic horses

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drawing out my last sunset in Portugal as long as possible

If I could have a dollar for every time someone said “You should travel for a living” I’d be a rich person. Or, at least have enough to travel more

In 1995, when I repatriated myself back to Canada after some years abroad, I enrolled in a six-month course at a travel college to get a job in the travel industry in my own country. I was 22. I figured it was the natural next step. After all, I’d worked in the hospitality industry on and off, I had travel experience, I’d be good at it, and it seemed like a good fit. After I completed the course, I did a three-month internship at a small international tour operator and was hired on afterwards, then promptly laid off just before the end of my three-month probationary period (a tactic not uncommon to this company, I later discovered). I worked a grand total of six months in the travel industry, and learned from observing tour guides, agents, hotel reps, cruise reps, and other industry people that this is probably not the ideal working environment for me. It’s not that I disliked customer service, it’s that the type of jobs with travel perks (discounts) which paid enough were with companies I would never use, anyway. It seemed to defeat the purpose of working within the travel industry in the first place.

In retrospect, getting laid off paid off, because I moved on to work in marketing research for a couple of years, originally a part-time job that I had to put myself through the travel college. Then, thanks to some savvy Vancouver headhunters who had faith in my abilities, I took a big unexpected leap into another domain — equity research — where I learned a great deal more. Fast forward a move across the country, cross-border to the USA, then repatriation again following tragedy, this time to Ontario, where I discovered after working for the provincial government in finance for about a year and half that I missed the research environment. I wasn’t expecting that at all. I returned to it in 2009, part-time, to support my freelance photography.

Where did this leave travel? Where it should be: purely for fun. I know quite a lot of people who have moved for work but I have yet to be one of those people, and likely won’t (although, never say never). People ask me if I would like to shoot destination weddings, and I have my reasons not to pursue those. This latest trip to Portugal confirmed for me what I have always thought about travel, and how I’ve felt about its place in my life: it is the one area where I absolutely need to be free.

In 2007 when I was in flight school I had to make a decision about ranking my (main) interests in order to afford to do them all. I can’t travel, photograph, and learn to fly at the same time — something had to give. It was then I came to the conclusion I must rank travel as something I had to do no matter what, photography would come second, and aviation would be third.

In the past couple of years the business of photography has taken over much of my life and I travel less internationally than I used to (I was abroad at least 2-3x per year), but it hasn’t stopped me from taking my average 12-14 leisure trips per year, trips that re-energize me and make me a better person. If I travelled for work I’d be frazzled and stressed with deadlines and pressure and clients — I already have those in photography — but more importantly, I wouldn’t be able to travel the way I want to and the work travel would certainly NOT make me a better person. I’d eventually come to resent it, I’m sure. The full-time photographers I know barely have any time or energy to take personal photos anymore. Commerce has a way of killing passion.

You might be surprised that on Day 2 of my Portugal trip I only took 12 photos total. Seriously! I was in Lisbon staying with my first couchsurfing host, Antonio, and all I wanted to do was talk with him. Taking photos was purely secondary. In the morning he was having trouble with his computer and I tried the usual various ways to diagnose/fix it, but the problem was more serious than a simple repair so we spent the rest of the day by the waterfront, just walking and talking until I met up with Berit and Justine. If I didn’t take any photos at all on Day 2 it wouldn’t have been a huge disappointment because I had other opportunities to photograph, while Antonio had very little spare time. I wasn’t going to waste it by making him stop every 10 metres so I could frame and shoot. If I were a travel photographer I wouldn’t have nearly as much time to spend with the locals as I’d like, I’d be too busy fulfilling assignments.

Freedom comes at a price, and I gladly pay it in exchange for being able to travel the way I want. I book my own flights, I arrange my own accommodation, I do my own research. I stay where I like and do what I like. I learned at a young age the mechanics of the travel industry which, apart from airlines, is largely unregulated and subject to uncontrollable and wildly fluctuating market conditions, not to mention suspect business and labour practices. I know most (if not all) people who suggest that I work in travel have never worked in this industry or scrutinized it from an employee’s point of view. For me, I know from what I’ve seen even as a traveller that I function better working elsewhere, leaving the travel for the imagination rather than the employment contract.

free as a bird

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I’ve been writing on the internet for a relatively long time. I still have my first (Yahoo Geocities) web pages archived from 10+ years ago, before I started writing my Blogspot website in 2002. Many people started blogs at some point or another and have since abandoned them, either because they lost interest and/or time for writing, or they do all their writing in Facebook. Not many people maintain personal blogs anymore, and those who write regularly (and well) are even more rare. Derek Miller was one of those rare gems who wrote both regularly and well on a broad number of topics. He was a self-admitted Geeky Guy, and being of the geeky persuasion myself, those are my favourite kind. Surely you’ve heard: the meek geek shall inherit the earth.

I don’t remember when I started reading Derek Miller‘s blog. I think it may have been while I was still living in Vancouver, since I have mutual acquaintances and the blogging/tech community in Vancouver is pretty close-knit. Everyone either knows each other, or knows of each other — at least by name. I also discovered at some point that we had an unusual connection: I met a friend and bandmate of Derek’s in the ’90s when I was living in Edinburgh, Scotland. I shared a flat on Morningside Road with four others, one of whom was Kirsten. Kirsten’s cousin Alistair was visiting from Vancouver, and he was the first Canadian I’d hung out with in a very long time. I remember him talking about being in a band, so you can imagine my surprise when from a series of links in Derek’s blog I found the connection to Alistair a good decade later.

I remember reading Derek’s website via links from other people’s websites, too. Like many blogs, including my own, it’s evolved over the years. I remember when it looked different, before it was on Movable Type. Derek’s writing reminded me of David‘s: clear and concise. I always wished writing could come as easily to me. I appreciate a well-crafted phrase probably more than the next person, and in this digital age of hyper-speed journalism a la HuffPo (where even the syllables in Huffington Post are shrunk down to two), I do appreciate words that are written out properly and articles that are well-researched, with depth and clarity. I linked to Derek’s photography posts because he broke down the technical jargon for non-technical people, and — let’s face it — he saved ME from writing it all out.

Writing isn’t my forte, but it’s something that is important to me so I continue to do it, as often as I can. I admire people who can write, and Derek was one of those people.

Derek was also one of those people who got cancer. It shocked me because he was diagnosed in 2007 at the same age as David, but with colorectal cancer. Suddenly I was reading his blog from a different perspective, and I was pulling for him with the awareness of a reader who is familiar with cancer treatment and its various side-effects and outcomes. I was hoping Derek would beat the odds.

The YouTube video above is Derek speaking at Gnomedex 2007 from his bed at home via video linkup, sidelined by the effects of treatment. He speaks about living with cancer, then fields questions from the conference attendees. 50 minutes may seem pretty long, but even across a video link, bedridden Derek is funny and upbeat, very open about sharing his cancer experience. I may be a captive audience already given the subject matter, but it was an informative and quick 50 minutes. Despite being a Geeky Guy who used technology in an advanced way, it’s clear from the video he wasn’t a hide-behind-the-screen type of personality — Derek was obviously easygoing, friendly, and enjoyed live human interactions. Cancer didn’t seem to get him down in the video, although the dark days were not shied away from in his blog. When things turned worse he didn’t make light of the impending situation, nor did he ever sink into maudlin territory. Derek faced his illness head-on.

For us, David’s cancer was so aggressive it left him with little time or energy to share much of his experience. The intensity of treatment robbed David of much chance to share anything. That’s probably why I was so drawn to Derek’s blog when he started writing about cancer: he was already accustomed to blogging and had more time to write about what he was going through. I imagine if David were in treatment for as long, that he would’ve had more opportunity to write about what he was thinking and feeling at the time, too. Derek addressed questions that I wished David’s friends could have had answers for back then, questions specific to his treatment. Derek also addressed the practical question of how much to share with the internet public and even his own family and friends.

Two months ago, Derek’s wife threw him a Living Wake, something I had (half-jokingly) planned with my friend Eliza all the way back in 1999, when everyone thought it was morbid. I’m glad Derek had a Living Wake, and proved our point: a wake is a party you wouldn’t otherwise be able to participate in, but shouldn’t miss!

Derek passed away on Tuesday, May 3, at home. Right now my thoughts turn to his wife and children and the rest of his family. (Like David, he was an only child.) I would read his wife Airdrie’s blog from time to time. I know what it’s like to be a caregiver. His father, who also has a blog, posted about his son’s passing and included an article written about Derek in the Vancouver Sun yesterday. There’s a huge outpouring of sadness from the various communities Derek was a part of, and there are articles all over the internet about his last post. There were so many hits to his website that it was shut down for a while, but it’s back up and will remain an archive.

Salon: “A blogger chronicles his own death” – May 5, 2011
Gawker – “A Writer’s Astounding Self-Obituary” – May 4, 2011
Daily Mail – May 6, 2011
CNN: Blogger announces own death after battle with cancer – May 8, 2011

Another reason why I had read Derek’s blog with such interest is that his last days ring very familiar with my own experience with David (especially when he lost his voice). I knew from Derek’s posts when the time was drawing near and it left me with a very strange feeling of dreaded certainty when the end would be. I knew that he would write his own last post, published posthumously.

Derek’s writing reflected our beliefs: neither David nor I were religious or believed in the afterlife. We were surrounded by people constantly quoting God and scriptures, but it fell on deaf ears — we didn’t believe any of it. David was a romantic at heart but ultimately he was an intellectual, a man of science; he wasn’t expecting to meet me on the “other side” or be my guardian angel, nor was I expecting him to appear to me in some other form to guide me. When I sat in the hospice room with David’s body after he took his final breaths and I watched his physical form change, I knew it wasn’t him anymore but neither did I think the David I knew in life was anywhere else.

Reading Derek’s ideas about life and his own death were much more relevant to my own thoughts and experiences and discussions with David than anything I’d read in a very long time. I thanked Derek for writing while he was alive, and now that he’s gone I thought I would thank him again, publicly, here. His blog has been an inspiration to me to write well, and keep writing, and I will continue to do so until I can’t anymore.

Rest in peace, Derek. You were a blogging luminary, and you made a big difference to many people.

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Marge Champion is over 90 years old and moves far more gracefully than I do!

Via Claude of Photo Blogging in Paris via Ronni Bennett of Times Go By

My photos and story of the shoe shiner in Detroit coming soon! (I’m making him a website, too, I registered a domain for him the other day.)

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Do you remember training wheels? Yeah, that was a reallllly long time ago, wasn’t it!

When was in California the other weekend I saw this boy on his bike trailing his mother, pushing hard at the pedals to get the whole thing moving faster to keep up with her. It was a charming scene and I hung back, waiting for them to be far enough ahead that I could sneak in some shots backlit by the sun.

I don’t really remember the training wheels phase, but I’ve had some of the most painful accidents in my life (even up to now) on small bicycles. One where I fell off the bike and my face scraped the pavement, an epidermal catastrophe that left me applying Polysporin for weeks under tragic-looking bandages. I was pretty young so there are no scars, but I remember an extended healing process that made me even more self-conscious than I already was. I must’ve looked like a mummy from the head up! The second accident was when I was on a boy’s bike and ran into a pile of gravel in a parking lot (if my memory serves me correctly), landing with all my weight crotch-first on the bar. There are simply no words for that sort of pain.

Don’t ask me what made me think of those stories. It probably wasn’t so much the training wheels for the boy in Oakland but the idea of wishing I could tell him, “It won’t always be this hard, there are better times ahead!”

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At its most pure, travel is an effort to explain life, not just from the familiar perspective, but from every perspective. To understand it fully, you must look to its extremes and taste them side by side.
– Andrew Bill

I’m touched by the response from my last post. I always write in the middle of the night while I’m working on other things, which makes for abbreviated meandering posts rather than the cohesive paragraphs I wish for. Sometimes I get carried away by the stream-of-consciousness writing, and I have to reread it in the morning to see if I made any sense. This may be one of those times, we’ll see.

I have one thought I wanted to express in this short time frame before my brain shuts down completely for the night. It was something I said during my research study interview for the University of Toronto a couple of weeks ago, exploring “joyful body experiences in women” and discussing what brings about these feelings. For me, travel brings out the side of me that is the most “me”. While many people cite a familiar place as the situation where they feel most themselves, such as a family home or a home city, I am the opposite. Maybe it’s because I have lived in many places from childhood to adulthood and I don’t really have a home city, nor is there a family home where I grew up, but I feel most myself when I’m plonked down amongst strangers in a place completely foreign to me. In unfamiliar territory, I feel totally free.

I don’t speak the language of my parents, thus I have become very accustomed to hearing without understanding, and it doesn’t bother me when I don’t know what people are saying — I don’t panic or become stressed. The idea of not knowing is not only fine by me, but it brings out the best part of me: the resourceful side. I operate very much by instinct and intuition when I don’t have a direct experience to draw from, and over the years this has served me quite well. I can only get better at it, over time. This lack of fear for the unknown is a quality I take great pride in, because it means I am in a constant state of learning rather than anxiety. Paradoxically, it is when I travel that I feel most at home.

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Why yes, I am. Life is good, productive, and fulfilling. Time is spent in a meaningful way, with people whose company I enjoy. There are new experiences, new places, and brain space devoted to creativity. It’s an exciting time.

But my ultimate goal isn’t excitement or happiness, per se. Being happy is like having fun — it comes and goes and is a temporary state of being. If I were happy ALL the time, i.e., every waking hour, I’d probably be delusional and institutionalized, or declared simple-minded. I can think of plenty of instances where I wasn’t having fun, exactly, but still feeling motivated and positive. If we’re talking of a sustained feeling that endures a temporary state of being, maybe contentment isn’t the right word, either. It makes me think of Buddhism, and I don’t make claims to having a Buddhist philosophy.

I think of a couple weeks back when I was discussing world travel with the Italian who motorbiked his way from Europe through Asia to South America and North America. Within five minutes of meeting, we were talking about the logistics of his journey. I asked him about the motorcycle breaking down, whether he was able to repair it himself, and if it was easy to get parts. Were the locals helpful? Would he have done the same journey using the same bike, or another? Did he have trouble storing it? How did he choose his route? Was that route a good choice in terms of securing visas along the way? I had so many questions. I didn’t ask him if it was fun, but apparently other people had, because he brought it up.

“It’s not always FUN,” he said. “Things happen along the way that are definitely NOT fun! But it’s always an adventure.”

Of that we were in agreement: adventure encompasses more than fun. It means taking the bad with the good, dealing with unknown quantities of risk and reward. There are no guarantees. Adventures often come with their fair share of hardship and setbacks and stages of discouragement, yet the adventurer presses on because he or she feels it is worth it — and everyone has a different concept of reward. I don’t ask the question, “Are you having fun?” because I don’t think of fun as the reward for a large-scale undertaking such as this. There has to be more to it than mere fun. I’ve done plenty of things purely for fun, but they were relatively minor and not of any great consequence. I think if I asked a triathlete if Iron Man was a fun race I would feel sheepish. Or how about: “Sir Edmund Hillary, did you have fun climbing Mount Everest?”

So to me the question written in this Boston subway station should be changed from “Are you happy?” to something a little broader, something that people would think about longer than a subway stop. That’s the part I’m a bit stuck with…

However, I would like to ask people, “When’s the last time you had an adventure?”

If someone asked you “Are you happy?” would you say “yes” and move on? Would you say “no” if the case were true? Would you speak only about right now, today, or generally? Would you choose not to answer the question?

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I’m posting this on the fly (yes, another photo from Fire Island, there are plenty!), after showering in my neighbour’s suite (yes, still no hot water!), off to pick up the rental lenses from Vistek (yes, broken filter is still stuck on the 17-55mm!), after a flurry of computer activity this morning (post-wedding client meeting follow-up from last night), a small Photoshop project this morning (I can’t show you yet!), and trying to figure out what to throw in my bag to wear to the charity boxing match after work…

I’m posting this photo from Fire Island because it looks a little unreal. It’s processed that way, too, but it matches how I feel this week: that my life is a little unreal, but in a positive way. I’m doing what I love, I feel challenged but not overwhelmed, I’ve met some truly wonderful people through photography, my website, The Firm, and being out and about. Life is good.

And I’m looking forward to see what’s over Yonder.

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Because when you drop your mobile phone in his car, he will (hopefully) make an extra special effort to get it back to you. True story, it happened to me today. He got it back to me in about half an hour!

I didn’t know if he’d find it because I had it on vibrate, so he wasn’t able to hear me phone it, anyway. My last dialled call was to Vancouver and that’s what he dialled, too, so when my cousin Tosca called and asked, “Did you get your phone back?” it took me a couple of seconds to figure out how on earth she knew it was missing in the first place!

Photo: Meknes, Morocco — a petits taxi interior, where many a prayer is sent up with white knuckles

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