Thursday, Aug 28, 2008
How Salon Travel's favorite writers plan to ring in the new year.
Dec 31, 1999 | Whether or not you think Dec. 31 represents the end of the millennium, it's an evening that has assumed a special significance this year. So I decided to ask the extended Salon Travel family -- our columnists, regular contributors and far-flung correspondents, plus my favorite world-wandering travel writers -- the inevitable question: What are you doing for New Year's Eve?
Here are their responses. Pieced together, they compose a grand global puzzle of New Year's celebration plans.
PICO IYER
Feeling myself more and more bombarded by the moment, and reeling from information overload as I find my choices and priorities made for me by the ever-proliferating media, I decided long ago to sit the millennium out -- to tell myself that in most of the countries where I spend time, no new century is starting at all, and that, in any case, a new century, or even a new year, has meaning only insofar as you are going about the hard work of fashioning a new self.
Better to spend it in a monastery, I thought, or any place where there would be no talk about the new millennium, and none of the self-consciousness that is the enemy of wonder and free feeling.
And so I find myself taking my mother to Easter Island for the millennium, and going to what, in certain respects, may seem among the trendiest and most popular of destinations!
In Japan, where I live, we seldom hear about Y2K problems, or the madness of taking a plane from Rapa Nui to Papeete around New Year's Eve; likewise, we seldom have occasion to think about the virtue of being relatively close to the international date line on this historic occasion (albeit on the wrong side, with the result that we will be among the last people to see the new century in).
So the new millennium will find me on a desolate, windswept island, hundreds of miles from the nearest sign I can recognize, overlooked by lowering and unexplained forms, and telling myself that being in so desirable a place is a way, completely inadvertently, of casting a vote for the century, the 10 centuries that are passing away. I'll be near the cusp of something, but I'm counting on the fact that it's the something that has no thought of millennium or change.
Salon Travel contributing editor Pico Iyer is the author of "Video Night in Kathmandu," "The Lady and the Monk," "Falling off the Map," "Cuba and the Night" and "Tropical Classical."
BARRY LOPEZ
My plan always when there is a big celebration like this is to get as far away from it as I can. It's almost a capitulation to the forces of commerce to do anything on New Year's, so traditionally, every New Year's I go off as far into the woods as I can get. It's a process of removing myself from the arena of disturbance. I prefer to celebrate the solstice rather than the New Year.
Culturally, the bright side of New Year's is that it is a time of renewal; it forms a kind of rest area on the interstate of daily life, where we can step aside and assess where we have been and where we want to go. I go up into the woods very far away from the highway on the west slope of Oregon's Cascade Mountains, off where there is snow and ice along the river. I make an effort to resensitize myself to what the great overarching questions are. For me these have to do with increasing the level of compassion in society for the ways others suffer, particularly as a result of trying to develop capitalistic inroads. I think of compassion and the errors in my own life and how to rectify them.
I grew up in a Roman Catholic tradition, and the life of St. Ignatius Loyola was one of the things that was most impressed on us. Loyola made examination of conscience a regular part of his spiritual practice -- and I think this examination is something I strive for at this time of year: a meditation on compassion and generosity. I don't think we can eliminate evil, but we certainly can go a long way toward eliminating thoughtless or unnecessary cruelty in the world.
Barry Lopez is the author of a dozen books, including "Of Wolves and Men," "About This Life," "Crossing Open Ground," "Field Notes" and "Crow and Weasel." He won the National Book Award for "Arctic Dreams."
SIMON WINCHESTER
Providing that the notoriously lumpy waters of the Drake Passage allow for an uneventful passage, and providing that the ice cover on the Scotia Sea allows navigation for a ship as fragile-hulled as the one I shall be aboard, I am hoping that early on the final afternoon of 1999 I will be passing through a slender rocky cleft known as Neptune's Bellows and into the flooded caldera of the sunken Antarctic volcano that is now known as Deception Island.
We will drop anchor in the lagoon at a point 61 degrees west of Greenwich, 63 degrees south of the equator, and close to where, 70 years back, there was a whaling station. Small boats will then take the few of us who have arrived over to the shore.
Later on, at midnight -- it will still be light on the island, with an approximation of a last dusk and a first dawn as the great fat buttery sun performs an elaborate curtsy about the north horizon -- I expect to be lying lazily in one of the thermal springs that feed Deception's tropic-warm lagoon. At the precise appointed moment -- Deception keeps sensibly to Greenwich Mean Time -- I will crack open a bottle of something suitably cold and bubbly, and say my considered welcomes to the new century in utter peace and serenity, in a country that is not a country at all, in a place that, like all Antarctica, belongs to no one, and where all the manifold cares of the world up north will be just the faintest echo, one swiftly borne away on the clean and eternal polar wind.
Salon Travel contributing editor Simon Winchester is the author of a dozen books, including "The Sun Never Sets," "Korea," "Pacific Rising," "The River at the Center of the World," "The Fracture Zone" and "The Professor and the Madman."
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