So I’ve taken your borrowed advice from Pico Iyer and scrawled some of my reactions to a place before I got too used to it. In doing so I finally discovered what’s over those mountains over there in the distance, but had to travel over 7,000 miles and then board a helicopter loaded with fuel to get over them. The answer: a mongrel dog chewing on a stick, a boy with a bloated stomach playing with an Amrat Cola bottle filled with dirt, an incredibly pristine purplish flower growing between two rocks, some comfortable looking sheep, an old man with a very large rifle–nineteenth-century British I thought. Monsoor said the old man would have already shot at us if it actually worked. Not the guru I had hoped to stumble upon to proffer up some transcendent meaning to my presence. And then more mountains. The fauna is remarkable for such a cold, dry place. I ponder a passage from M. Somerset Maugham’s The Razors Edge, and then pick up my pack and rifle and follow Monsoor down to a small creek with deep blue water to see what I could find. Winter’s coming. You can feel it in the air.

Anyway, I thought I would close the conversation after over a quarter-of-a-century’s pause. I’ll check back in at the half-century mark.

Somewhere in the Hindu Kush mountain range, Afghanistan

Ooh, character sketches on a trip sound like such a good idea! Pico Iyer says that upon arriving at a place, you should scrawl down your immediate reactions right away, while the place still seems foreign. Because it isn’t too long before you start getting used to it.

I guess we have people like Fisher to thank for the fact that nowadays we don’t expect 6 or 8 courses when we visit someone for dinner…

As They Were is a collection of essays that appeared elsewhere first. It’s a nice collection, but I’ll bet there are lots of other good collections too. I just think Fisher got better as she went–don’t we all–and Gastronomical Me wasn’t as good as what came later.

And by the way, I don’t have a hillside full of lavender–just a few beloved plants–but it sounds wonderful to me. I can just imagine rolling around and getting a good noseful. Call me sentimental.