A bicycle bell went off behind me on Prinsengracht before I’d finished reading the historical plaque. Distracted, I stepped out in front of a bike. My mistake caused the bike to swerve violently to prevent a collision that seemed inevitable.  But by the time I turned around the cyclist was…

The wind off the North Sea does not consult anyone before it changes direction, and at Cruden Bay it can shift three times over a single approach shot. A caddie there once told me, without much ceremony, that the course had been designed by Old Tom Morris and was being…

This is Sulphur Springs, in the town of Soufrière on Saint Lucia’s southwestern coast. It advertises itself, not inaccurately, as the world’s only drive-in volcano. You do not hike to it. You park next to it. The crater sits inside the Qualibou caldera, a volcanic system that formed tens of…

The September Alaskan air was cool but not cold. Nevertheless, I didn’t begrudge the coat I brought with me. I was too excited by what lay ahead to feel anything but anticipation in any event.. The guide’s name was Deacon, and he checked the crampons on my boots twice before…

The water drops fast at the Soo Locks, faster than most passengers expect the first time they feel it. A deckhand on the lower deck ties off against the wall of the MacArthur Lock in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and within about twenty minutes the ship settles twenty-one feet, the…

The woman at the Glühwein stall took my five euros. She pulled a mug from a rack of a hundred identical mugs, filled it from a pot that had been simmering since noon, and slid it across the counter with a smile. She already knew I wasn’t bringing the mug…

The engine goes quiet a little after six, and for a moment nobody in the vehicle says anything.  Thirty yards off are four female lions and a scatter of cubs. None are doing anything you would call dramatic. One lifts her head, considers the vehicle with an expression that isn’t…

The zodiac engine cuts, and for a moment the only sound in the Gerlache Strait is water lapping against inflatable pontoons and the wet exhale of a crabeater seal hauled out twenty feet away, unbothered, barely opening one eye to register the eight strangers in red parkas now drifting past.…

The rain started sideways somewhere around the second pint, which in Dingle seems to be less a weather event than a scheduling cue. Inside An Droichead Beag, a fiddle player and a woman with a bodhrán had been trading tunes for twenty minutes without announcing a single one, the way…

In the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, a group of University of California, Berkeley students calling themselves the Rolling Quads pressed the city to do something that sounds almost absurdly small now: cut ramps into the curbs along Telegraph Avenue, the four blocks between Bancroft Way and Dwight…

Mount Etna has been erupting since roughly August 6, when a new vent opened in the Valle del Bove and began sending ash south and east in whatever direction the wind chose. By August 13, Euronews was calling it the seventh consecutive day of activity, a stretch of sustained eruption…

A ranger at the Washington Monument ticket booth is busy.  It’s early October, the sky over the Mall is doing that flat, high-pressure blue that only shows up a few weeks a year, and the line of people rearranging their afternoon around a fifteen-minute window is short enough that you…