Dispatch
Summer 2023
This is my Tour du Mont Blanc journal. The Tour du Mont Blanc (TMB) is a 100-mile loop hike around the Mont Blanc massif in the French, Italian and Swiss Alps. It is not a new hike that I am inventing; I am doing a hike that many others have done and which others named. So, I am stepping into someone else’s book, or story, but my reading of that story is unique.
How could it not be?
End of entry
Sitting in Terminal C at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam. I fly to Paris in an hour and I will stay there in the Marais for a few days before taking the train to Chamonix and the Alps.
A stream of travelers passes me at Schiphol, and each traveler is a story in progress. You can’t hear the clacking sounds of typewriters or the scratching sounds of pens and pencils, but stories are busy writing themselves upon the invisible fabric of the cosmos nevertheless. The stream ebbs and flows in accordance with arrival and departure times, and I daydream about how Paris’ story is about to shift in invisible ways once I get to her. Paris’ story is always shifting, and I will soon join the shifting.
The path taking me to the Tour du Mont Blanc started a long time ago. But the path below me has not always looked like a mountain path. The path did not have a name as grand as “Tour du Mont Blanc,” and so cannot evoke feelings of grandiosity the way TMB might. But it was a path just as real as TMB. It is a path that, so far, takes almost 36 years to hike. It is the Tour du Joel, and to do the TJ right you have to go over and through literal and figurative peaks and valleys. The TJ starts in a cloud of sun-warmed dust carrying the smell of horses from a ranch in California, and, right now, ends at Terminal C at Schiphol airport.
I feel moved to report on my TMB journey, but where is there a story in a hike? If my true path began long ago, arguably before I was born, then there’s nothing inherently more interesting about walking around Mont Blanc than other stretches of my path. I can say things like “TMB is 100 miles long,” or that it “offers sweeping views of snowy peaks.” But at the end of the day these are just details no more significant than the fun way my ink is glinting in the sun as it dries on my journal paper. The mountains are a backdrop. That is all. What matters is what happens on the stage, inside the actor.
I am looking for a spiritual awakening on my hike. This sounds nice and trite, like some kind of Weight Watchers ad, but it’s true. And I suspect the awakening is going to happen in the kind of way where I realize I already had the thing I think I’m looking for, like how I already know my TMB path began long before there was ever a TMB on my radar.
What drives one to look for a spiritual awakening? Deliverance from pain, I suspect. But can you go looking for a spiritual awakening, or do you have to let it come to you? I do not think it matters. There are a million ways to skin a cat, as we say in the U.S.A., and some ways are merely more fashionable than others depending on which spiritual era you were born into.
End of entry
It is a fine morning in Paris. It will be a hot day but it’s a clear morning and the sunlight reflects off of windows onto walls and paints the city in gold.
Paris on a morning right after the summer solstice is a splash of golds, greens, beiges and blues. Runners run on the Seine, and because I am only here shortly I am keenly aware of the firework nature of things; my three days in Paris are an explosion of sensations that have a clear expiration date. The firework ends at 6 a.m. on Wednesday when I board the train for Chamonix and Mont Blanc. One firework will dim and another will, seamlessly, ignite. When you view the world through firework goggles you can feel the rushing sound of all that is flowing around you faster than you could ever measure. Of course this is all one mind’s interpretation of one particular universe — the one in front of me. It is not necessarily this way, it is just how I am experiencing things through my limited senses and then expressing it through my limited abilities as a writer.
I had a mission today: find Ernest Hemingway’s old apartment. I crossed the Seine and entered the Latin quarter. The city became more hilly than in the Marais, and I climbed and climbed and then turned on the Rue du Cardinal Lemoine and climbed until I saw sunlight bathing a blue storefront.
Then I was there: Hemingway’s old place, where he lived with his first wife, Hadley.
People go to museums, concerts, books, coffee shops, gardens — or, in my case, Hemingway’s apartment — to tune their hearts. We can all of us be out of tune just like musical instruments, and we look for things to tune us like a miner looks for veins of gold in a mountain.
Not everything is about veins of gold or looking for veins of gold, but I love them for the tuning instruments that they are, and Hemingway fashioned more than a few out of the air around him and it was a love for that that drew me like gravity to look upon the invisible mountain where he mined. And I saw it and it was good and then that firework ended when I turned around and went to Jardin des Plantes to see the natural history museum, where ten years ago I spent a week studying dinosaur bones for my doctoral research.
Can I look back over my words written here and read them with the same reverence and respect that I do with Hemingway’s letters? I think so. After all, that’s the point of soul-tuning veins of gold. They help you see when you look in the mirror that you are also a wave in the ocean of existence.
Sitting now in the Place des Vosges in the Marais. It is a square park with grass, trees, fountains, and, today, people. Lots of people, all enjoying a park on a Sunday. There are the children playing soccer. There are the girls sunbathing. There is the man with a blue pen journaling and appreciating how the sights and sounds around him are moving him and, in a way, his pen.
End of entry
I am sitting outside a café and little croissant flakes are raining down on me. It is a steady drizzle of croissant flakes. I left the croissant rain and walked across the river past Notre Dame and to a famous bookstore called Shakespeare & Co. There was a long line of tourists at the bookstore, and it took time to get inside. Once inside and surrounded by books there was silence and the feeling that you only find in bookstores. It is a feeling defined by the awareness that more words than you could ever read and internalize in one lifetime are hovering right in front of you, and you can feel those living written words whispering at you in their quiet way.
Do we write things down because we cannot say what we need to express? Is writing a form of communicating with the world that works for some like a kind of sign language? I wrote that we are all of us “writing” upon the invisible canvas of space and time, even if we don’t have pens in our hands. We are human-shaped pens, and if you could write with your voice for others what you need to write, would we still need pen-shaped pens?
I walked across the river so I could see the bookstore and so I could go swing dancing. The night was cool and that was good for going dancing. A trumpet player I met near Notre Dame told me there was swing dancing at a café called Village Monge, and I walked there and I felt good knowing there would be dancing there as I walked up Rue Monge. I heard a trumpet playing and I walked faster. I crossed the street in a hurry and there it was: Village Monge. Then I saw the band, but I did not see any dancers. I went inside and asked the waiter where the dancing was. First I asked him in French.
“What?” He said.
“Dancing, is there dancing,” I said, this time in English.
“No, but you can dance if you want to.”
I sat down in front of the band, and they played covers of old songs. The band took a break and the guitarist got up and came and kissed the girl sitting right next to me. It surprised me because at first it seemed like they were two strangers who had just seen one other and kissed. And for all I know that is the case; I did not interview them to find out the truth. This made me think about the billions of little assumptions we have to make every day in order to just get through a day. “The sun will not go out today” being one of them. Or maybe you do believe it might just go out, and so you live with a subtle anxiety that gives you the energy to obey statements like “carpe diem” and go and kiss strangers.
I left Village Monge to find the dancing. A banjoist playing with the trumpeter had given me another lead: the Caveau de la Houchette, which is by Shakespeare & Co. I walked there, and the bookstore was closed, and an alleyway I had not noticed before caught my eye, bathed as it was in the sort of neon light that whispers tales of the night.
That’s where I found the caveau. The entrance to the caveau looked like the entrance to a cheap medieval dungeon spook house at a carnival you might find in the U.S.
I read the signs. One said “dancing,” and another advertised the band playing that night: “Rocket Swing.”
Yes.
End of entry
Caught the 6 a.m. train at Gare de Lyon. France was flat for hours with some rolling hills. A blonde girl named Anna Vuitton boarded the train and sat in the empty seat next to me. Her last name is not Vuitton but that is the name I gave her after she told me she had a classmate in school named Louis Vuitton who was related to the family of the actual Louis Vuitton brand, and she said she wanted to marry him, so on these pages I am granting Anna her wish. Anna had brown eyes and she was going home to Munich to attend her dad’s wedding. Anna, who lives in Berlin, does not like Munich. She said the people there are snobby and that they are not shy about it. She was bummed to be going to her dad’s wedding, not because he’s getting remarried, but because the dress she just bought is too big for her. Anna wore a black “Back to the Future” shirt and black Ralph Lauren pajama pants on the train, and she looked ready for her nine-hour trip to Munich.
End of entry
Chamonix! I had a daydream on the train. I dreamt about the little metal type pieces they use at printing presses to print letters onto paper. I dreamt about how that metal comes from mining metals and things from the planet, and then I dreamt about how thoughts are what summon the metal from the planet, and then thoughts make their existences known using the metal and ink and paper.
It’s raining hard in Chamonix, and there’s thunder and lightning. The planet is happening. The planet is always happening, but this is one of the ways it reminds you that it’s happening. I put my phone into airplane mode and I don’t intend to take it off airplane mode for the rest of the journey. Shall I write about how high up and snowy Mont Blanc is? Or shall I write about how low down and scruffy I am standing next to Mont Blanc?
I read something recently about pianos. The thing said that life is like learning to play the piano. You don’t sit down knowing how to play a song. But given time and patience something like harmony can emerge. And you’re never really done learning the piano, which is a lovely thought because it’s a freeing thought.
Where does the act of learning how to play the piano begin? When you sit down at it? When you play one note? Two notes? Or did the act of learning the piano begin somewhere far away from a piano, when you were smiling at a mountain and you weren’t thinking about pianos or music, but then the joy of the mountain finds its way out through your hands when you play one or two notes? But what if that joy is inside you when you’re just sitting at a piano — is that enough?
I feel the world playing my “soul piano” when I smell the air and I smell the rain smells and I hear the rushing creek below my balcony. Each letter I write here is a symbol representing sounds that I hear in my heart, when the world plays me with its creek sounds and rain smells. Others may read this and hear the sounds in their hearts, and just as nobody hears a piano sonata in the same way, so it is with writing. I am curious what kinds of notes you’re hearing when you read this.
The rain is over now and I am done showering ink on paper.
End of entry
If you close your eyes and listen you will hear that your heart sometimes sings. Your heart is always sounding notes and not all of the notes are beautiful. But sometimes they are, and that is one reason why they say you should keep your focus on the present moment, because the music is happening only now and you never know when the music your heart is singing to you will be beautiful.
Hearts are infinite pianos, made of keys that come in shapes and sizes that defy all imagining.
I don’t know how many people there are anymore who have the patience and inner quiet it takes to hear the music that happens inside when you read. It’s easier if someone sings to you, which is maybe why singers are more well-known.
Writing and speaking are infinite pianos. And invisible pianos. When you read or listen the writer or speaker is playing the keys of your piano heart, and maybe pulling out a song in you.
Just another way of describing the gold vein thing.
Today is the start of the TMB. The sky is grey and it may rain. But it’s not raining now and so the time to leave is now. Ahead is an ocean filled with unknown things. Shall I draw parallels between this trip and sailing, or is it OK to let the TMB be exactly what it is, a dusty trail that’s fine exactly as it is, no similes or metaphors required?
End of entry
I am sitting on a chair in the French Alps looking at a mountain covered in pine trees. You cannot see the higher-up mountains because there are clouds, and so my attention is on the wooded mountain instead, which is a slope on the western side of Pointe de Chaborgne. Today was the first real day of hiking. I went up and up and up, and then everything was there in front of me. Mont Blanc behind clouds, flowers, meadows, horses, cows and their cowbells. I came upon a small church on the trail in a small village. The church sounded its bell once when I arrived. I looked inside at the chairs and the altar, and at Christ hanging there. I wondered about the ways you can find god without ever hearing about religion. In cowbell songs drifting from somewhere in the mist. In the sight of a mountain just behind a cloud. (Joked that the mountain was doing a burlesque show, teasing me because it knew how long I’d waited to see her. Got a laugh.) In the infinite symphony that is all things harmonizing together to create a single universe. In how I’m noticing on the trail all things fading into and out of my experience, like passing rainbows or fireworks which after you see them are only real in memory, but which echo in you and create a rhythm as ancient as the stars. In my wondering about how these letters here are now a part of the fabric of this place, one story among an infinite number of stories that you can find in the endless stacks in the infinite library in the sky.
I’m wondering about a quote from my favorite photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson. He said something that’s in a book of mine that I have in storage in Irvine, something about how when medieval monks made sculptures for churches they did not care if their works went somewhere no-one would ever see them “except god.”
Now there’s a thought.
End of entry
Walked a long way today, maybe 17 miles, and I almost sank in quicksand and I almost broke my ankle slipping on cow shit. But the rest of it was good, especially the high mountain wildflowers and the cowbell songs. The forget-me-not flowers looked at me with their blue hue and it was good.
End of entry
Hiked through Italy this morning through alpine meadows bristling with wildflowers, in the shadow of Mont Blanc. I am at a hut now. There are hikers and there are trail runners all over sitting at picnic tables. Behind them all is Mont Blanc. There is a cloud atop Mont Blanc that looks like a pointy gnome hat. The cloud hat makes me grin because it’s like Mont Blanc isn’t taking itself too seriously.
The trail runners and most of the backpackers leave, and a swirl of dust blows in front of the refuge, underscoring the emptiness and the innkeeper with grey in her hair and a red dot on her forehead sits on steps and lights a cigarette. “Bonjourno,” I said to her. She nodded at me and said nothing as she took a long drag of her cigarette.
American accents like mine carry further here than they do in the States, for they are rare and they are framed by European accents. You hear other languages and are abruptly aware of the diversity of experience that exists inside each person. This diversity exists anyway even if everyone’s speaking the same language, but when you hear someone shout something like “Alore!” When you are not at all used to such a sound, the novelty of it hits you just like the novelty of wildflowers do — there is surprise and delight, followed, eventually, one day, not today, by apathy. When the apathy comes you do not hear or see things the same way anymore. You hear it but it’s now like the grass beneath the lovely little wildflowers — invisible. A rainbow that you no longer see.
The wildflowers. They merely exist and that is enough for them to draw the attention of my pen.
End of entry
Sitting at a picnic table overlooking Mont Blanc. I am listening to music from Mozart’s Magic Flute, and every atom in me and around me is smiling. I did not know atoms could smile, but here we all are. I am listening to Mozart and when I look around the music seems to be what the flowers, the wind and the mountains are saying. But then the Mozart comparison becomes just one thing it could all be among an infinite number of potential things. Every flower a potential Mozart — or just a happy flower dancing quietly in the wind, that being enough if you know one way of seeing things.
Is “like Mozart” enough of way of describing this place? It is the Fourth of July in the United States, and I can use fireworks as another comparison. Behind almost every turn on this trail a new firework made of wildflowers waits for me, only these flower fireworks (flowerworks!) are like fireworks frozen in time, and each little firework light dances in place in the wind.
I believe that the mere presence of things like mountains and flowers alters you like a sculptor alters marble or metal. And the sculpting goes both ways — the flowers sculpt you, but you also sculpt the flowers, often in indiscernible ways. You enter a place and you instantly alter it by becoming a part of it.
End of entry
What beautiful paper is the air. The sight of the flowers and the sounds of the birds write on the air tales of love and happy days that pop and then are gone forever.
Long climb today to the Grand Col Ferret. It was steep in places and after I got to the col I was in Switzerland. Now I’m at the Auberge des Glaciers in La Fouly, Switzerland, and I am remembering the Fourth of July. I am remembering Fourths I spent on my grandparent’s deck at their vineyard in the Livermore Valley in California. I remember how my grandmother, Elizabeth, would dress in reds, whites and blues, and how there was fresh corn on the cob and ice cream. Homemade vanilla ice cream.
Details like these have the same far-awayness as the cowbell sounds here in the Alps. They are far away in time and the feeling of them is sad like the bells.
There is an expectation in the air that the word flowers I find on the TMB will be somehow better than the word flowers I might find in, say, the memory of a bedroom I once lived in, like my room in Boulder, Colorado, where, one day, as I sat outside talking to my lady on the phone, a woman appeared from nowhere and pointed at my window and told me she had given birth in my room. See what I mean?
It was a good night of rest at the auberge. Hiked alongside a river and through a quiet Swiss town and climbed the side of a mountain up to a lake called Champex Lac.
Wind blowing on embers. That is what good art does to you. You hear this or that song, or see this or that thing, and it conjures something in you that was maybe always there, but which needed a breeze to glow into your awareness. For instance, for you to think to write, you would first need to know that good writing exists, and with that knowledge as your wind, away you go to heaven and to the end of the TMB with your pen a-scribblin’.
End of entry
Bus stop, St. Gervais. TMB is over.
I remember when I first started writing professionally. I was suspicious of myself. For one thing, it was a decision made during a time in my life when I felt a great need to prove myself, and so I had a tendency to make decisions based on how hard something seemed. The harder something seemed, the more glory awaited me if I could pull it off. So I thought, after the dinosaur thing didn’t work out, let’s do something easier, like make our living doing nothing but write. And I did. I wrote and wrote until I became a regular contributor to the science desk at the New York Times, and now I’m a staff science writer at the University of California, Irvine. These things all sound glittering, and I am proud of it all, but they are no different from someone, say, working hard for a long time to be able to arrange sand grains in a certain way on the kitchen table, in a way that means nothing to no-one except the creator. It just so happens that the sand grains I’m working with — letter symbols — are recognizable to others and so carry social value in the form of money and potential praise.
That last word is why I was suspicious of myself. Why did I feel like I had to go do something very hard for work? So I could wear my job titles like little pins on my lapel? So I could hallucinate that you will hear a pretty song in my prose and I could watch my social value go up?
Written letters appear static but they are not. You hear or read a story once at a certain time in your life, and though you close the book the words written therein continue flowing through time and space just like you, such that if you were to see the letters again one day they will not be as you left them. If you were the one who wrote them they may seem to you on that distant day to be child-like. You will spot the places where you didn’t quite know how to express things the way you wanted, as though you didn’t yet know how to write the letter “z” or the letter “w.”
My TMB is over. I stood at Bellegard train station in France on my way back to Paris, and I saw a public piano sitting there for anyone who wanted to play it. I saw the piano and I stood there staring at it. I thought about sitting down at it and playing a Mozart song I love. But then I thought in that moment that it was just fine whatever it was I decided to do. I could play Mozart if I wanted to, or I could stand there.
If the trail I just hiked, with its happy flowers and mountains and cowbell sounds, is alive with the sound of music, then so is each one of us. It is easy to see that the flowers, just standing there, are like Mozart when the Mozart songs are playing. But you realize that they are still Mozart, and so much more, when the Mozart stops.
Louis Armstrong, the great American jazzman, said that “what we play is life.” Just by existing we play a kind of inner piano song as old as the stars, and it does not matter if you know how to get it out through a trumpet or a piano or a pen.
Knowing that I stood before the piano and the universe and turned around and went to my Paris train.
You do not need to perform to be loved.