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…

Proctor’s Ledge sits at the bottom of a residential street in Salem, a low stone outcrop behind a chain-link fence, wedged between a Walgreens parking lot and a row of houses with above-ground pools. There’s a granite memorial wall now, dedicated in 2017 after a team from the University of…

The Globe Museum in Vienna keeps its lights low, the better to protect four centuries of hand-painted spheres from fading, and on a Tuesday afternoon I had the entire second floor to myself. A 17th-century Coronelli globe sat under glass, the oceans still tinted the pale green cartographers used before…

The fog does the introducing in Sintra. You climb the switchbacks out of town in a tuk-tuk that smells faintly of diesel and eucalyptus, the driver working the horn at every blind corner, and for most of the ride there is nothing above you but gray. Then, without warning, a…

The ferry captain running the Isla Mujeres route makes the crossing roughly 14 times a day, and on each he continues to announce the dolphins, cutting through the wake with the kind of casual indifference only a wild animal that has seen fourteen ferries a day for years can manage.…

At Mountain Crossings, the outfitter built into the trail itself at Neel Gap, Georgia, there’s a rhododendron tree strung with boots. Thru-hikers who quit within the first thirty miles — and a startling number do, somewhere around fifteen to twenty percent by most counts kept at the shop — sometimes…

The prayer cloths get you first. Long before you’re close enough to Devils Tower to feel small under it, the ponderosa pines ringing its base are hung with small bundles of cloth and tobacco pouches, faded pastel, blue, and red, tied by Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Crow visitors who came…

At the Devil’s Throat, on the Argentine side of Iguazu Falls, the mist arrives before the sound, and the sound arrives before the sight. You walk a kilometer of steel catwalk over a river so flat and unbothered it seems to be lying to you, and then the walkway simply…

The woman across the farmhouse table in the Val d’Orcia had flour to her elbows and no patience for my ravioli. “Too thick,” she said, pinching the dough between two fingers like she was checking a fever, then rolling it back into the machine without further comment. It was day…

A woman in a blue plastic poncho is screaming with delight eleven feet from a curtain of water falling fifty-seven meters onto rock, and nobody around her finds this strange. This is Table Rock, on the Canadian side, where the mist comes up off Horseshoe Falls in cold gusts strong…

The drums start before the light is fully gone. On Kauai’s north shore, dusk does not so much fall as get absorbed; the sky over Kilauea falls dark while a line of torches gets lit along a gravel path. Somewhere behind the stage, dark and enormous against what’s left of…

On the last night of October, on a low green hill outside the County Meath town of Athboy, several thousand people stand in the dark waiting for a fire to be lit. There is nothing spontaneous about it. A production team has rehearsed the lighting for weeks, a schedule lists…