Rachel Dickinson

Freelance Writer

Rachel Dickinson, Freelance Writer
P.O. Box 341
Freeville, NY 13068
ph: 607.844.4475
rachel@racheldickinson.com

The Art of the Travel Journal

YourLifeIsATrip.com

When I travel I always carry a little black moleskin journal that flips open like a reporter’s notebook. I also buy a new pen before a journey that I slip through the elasticized band that encircles the journal. This is my traveling kit – one in which I make notes in longhand and draw sketches to illustrate what I’m seeing. I imagine what I record is like a kindergarten version of what Mark Twain or Robert Louis Stevenson – two great 19th century diarists – might have recorded.

Often, when I read through my notebook after a trip, I’m struck by how things going on in the outside world tend to creep into my observations; how my remarks are guided by events that may or may not be in the front of my brain at the time; how I can completely miss the story in front of me in favor of a description of something like a mountain ash tree. (click here to read more . . .)

Homemade Clothes for Hollywood

Smithsonian

Rabbit Goody has been the go-to weaver for historically accuarte fabric for the movie industry's biggest period dramas.

A modest low-slung metal building, set in the woods off a dirt road, is home to the world-famous Thistle Hill Weavers, workplace and studio of textile historian and weaver Rabbit Goody. Approaching the building a muffled thwack-thwack-thwack mechanical sound created by power looms can be heard. When the door is opened, the noise spills out along with the smell of fibers mixed with machine oil. (click here to read more . . . )

Night Train to

Gaspe

YourLifeIsATrip.com

In September I took a trip to Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec. And although I was really looking forward to seeing where the St. Lawrence River leaves the confines of its banks and flows into the ocean, one of the biggest draws for me was the night train from Montreal to Gaspe. Trains have always held a fascination for me, drawing on some part deep inside that really wants to live in the 19th century (although I’m not so much of a sentimentalist that I don’t know that 19th century train travel also involved lots of soot and hard seats). (Click here to read more . . .)

Roller Derby's Sisterhood

Smithsonian

Sitting on the floor of the ice-turned-roller-derby rink in Ithaca, New York, on a sweltering August night, I fanned myself with a cardboard fan on a stick. The young man beside me with a modified mohawk and earlobe plugs thanked me for pushing some hot air his way. “Hot night,” he said, then added, “It’s a bit like being in a crock pot.”

Before us, fluorescent tape marked the track on which Ithaca’s SufferJets and the Wilmington Ruff Rollers from Wilmington, Delaware, skated in a pitched battle. At that moment, the SufferJets were skating two players down because jammer Sarabellum and blocker S---- ‘N Gigglz sat in the penalty box (an area adjacent to the track with metal folding chairs surrounded by shower curtains). Wilmington’s lead jammer Leslie B. Gangsta was deftly skating through the pack, racking up points. (click here to read more . . .)

One Hundred Miles

on the Erie Canal

The Atlantic

Every time I steered my boat past a stone bridge abutment, I’d begin to whisper-sing, “Low bridge, everybody down / Low bridge, for we’re coming to a town.” Certainly that irrepressible song is what comes to most people’s minds when they hear mention of this historic waterway, even if they’ve never “navigated on the Erie Canal.” As a native upstate New Yorker, I had decided it was time to broaden my canal repertoire, and get on the water.

My boat, hired for a week, was steel, sleek, and low-slung, and painted maroon with yellow and green trim and a knotty-pine interior. Mid-Lakes Navigation built these self-skippered canal boats to be both rugged and comfortable. (click here to read more . . .)

Cliff Notes from Beyond

Perceptive Travel

I grew up in a tiny village in Upstate New York and although memory both exaggerates and dims the physical aspects of the village––like the heaves in the sidewalks and the sloping wooden floor in the Red and White grocery store––one feature of the village remains crystal clear: the Spiritualist camp with its small white cottages set among towering pines.

My family attended the Methodist Church in the center of the village. My grandmother was the church organist but my grandfather rarely attended church. He was an agricultural economist and a speechwriter for President Roosevelt during the Depression but by the time I knew him, he spent his days painting pictures and researching local history. He was a quiet man with strongly held opinions and although he died when I was very young, my aunts say I'm an awful lot like him.

When I was young, my sisters and I roamed the Spiritualist campgrounds on our Spyder bikes––sticking to the narrow gravel drive. During the summer, when the camp was full, there would be a message service in the auditorium on Thursday nights and we'd often sneak into the back of the hall to listen. But I didn't really think much about the psychics and mediums and healers and the messages they were giving to the believers on those humid summer evenings.

(click here to read more . . .)

Where Birds Rule the Earth

The Atlantic

The ship made its way toward the Russian port city of Provideniya, the water smooth as glass. On one side of the fjord, abandoned low-slung gray apartment buildings almost blended in with the low hills. On the other side, someone had painted many of the occupied buildings in blazing colors: pink, yellow, and minty green—a jarring sight in the washed-out landscape.

This is the part of Russia that Sarah Palin could see if she had super-binocular powers; it lies just across the Bering Strait from Alaska.

[Please go to The Atlantic's site to read the rest of the story --

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200907/russia-birds

Back to the Future

Executive Traveler

One afternoon on the hottest day of the hottest month in the hottest state south of the Mason Dixon Line, my husband Tim and I decided to try out Segway Personal Transporters. I was thinking two things when I agreed to this: first, that I could possibly stir up a little breeze while exerting no effort at all, and second, that riding on one of these things would be verification that the future was truly at hand and at my disposal.

When I was a kid I always imagined what the future would look like. I would be riding in either a hovercraft or have a jet pack strapped to my back as I made my way to the grocery store—wait, there would be no grocery stores because all of our food would be in the form of little pellets that expanded to glorious dinners when put in some kind of rehydrating device. Anyway, I’d return to my home in the bubble with whatever I had shopped for. I think that everything I imagined about the future I got from watching “The Jetsons.” (click here to read more . . . )

A Coral Farmer's Harvest
of Living Stones
The Christian Science Monitor

Steve Lowes is a coral farmer. He doesn’t live on an island in the Caribbean or even within spitting distance of an ocean. Rather, his farming takes place in 100-gallon saltwater tanks in the basement of his neat and tidy house the color of a warm Sargasso Sea in upstate New York. Mr. Lowes, a native of northeastern England, came to New York in the mid-1990s to work for a high-tech pharmaceutical company.
He’s a PhD biochemist with a penchant for lovely corals.
Lowes, who grew up landlocked, developed his fascination with corals by watching Jacques Cousteau documentaries as a kid. In college, he learned to scuba dive and began collecting corals from the temperate zones around the world. Since 2002, he’s farmed coral in his basement. (click here to read more . . . )
Seeking Higher Ground
Audubon Magazine

Jeremy Madeiros has to watch the swells carefully to time his leap from the boat onto a light-gray limestone shelf so jagged and sharp it would shred his skin if he happened to fall. Less than half an acre and only, at its highest point, about 30 feet above the crashing waves, the islet is a godforsaken bit of rock stuck in the Atlantic Ocean off the eastern edge of Bermuda and one of four secret nesting sites for one of the rarest seabirds on earth, the Bermuda petrel—known locally as the cahow because of its eerie cry.
Madeiros, Bermuda’s terrestrial conservation officer, is a small, soft-spoken 47-year-old with a mustache, tortoiseshell glasses, and a penchant for Australian army hats. Carefully working his way across the islet’s stony surface, he makes the rounds to specially designed artificial nest burrows built to protect petrel chicks from the danger of tides and rough seas. The burrows are marked by wooden baffles that guard the entrances and have a very precisely measured oval cut into them—big enough that an adult petrel can get in to feed its chick but a hair too small for a white-tailed tropicbird to squeeze through and take over. (click here to read more . . .)
Before the Train
Executive Traveler

The sweet, yet slightly rancid smell of yak butter mixed with burning juniper stayed with me for days after visiting the holy sites. I know if I ever smell yak butter again I’ll be back in Lhasa, Tibet, in the days before the first train was scheduled to arrive from China.
Last summer, my daughter, Railey, and I went on a journey, and although I wasn’t sure what we were looking for, somehow I thought we might find that indefinable thing in Tibet. My prior knowledge of Tibet—a beautiful, mysterious, and remote country—came from the movies and from my local grocery store. Ronald Colman from Lost Horizon and Brad Pitt from Seven Years in Tibet were my spiritual guides, and the monks—small, brown men in long maroon and yellow robes who I periodically ran into in the produce section—shaped my notion of Tibetan culture. I would steal glances at them as they smelled the cantaloupes and picked out oranges, and if they caught me looking, they’d flash wide smiles and their eyes would almost disappear, and I would get all embarrassed. Ithaca, New York, is home to the Namgyal Monastery, the Dalai Lama’s personal monastery in North America, so you get used to seeing the Tibetan monks around town. In winter, their maroon and yellow robes hang below puffy down jackets as they trudge through the snow and slush of upstate New York in hiking boots. (click here to read more . . .)
Shadowland
travelclassics.com

As we traveled down the Yangtze from Chongqing to Wuhan, I felt an overwhelming sense of melancholy. It might have been the weather--it was hot and rainy and foggy all at once creating a misty landscape that looked an awful lot like those painted scrolls of the humpbacked mountains you see hanging in Chinese restaurants. Or it might have been that I felt like I was looking at shadows, for much of what I saw was doomed and would soon disappear beneath the muddy river water.

In early summer, the Yangtze--the longest river in China and the third longest in the world--is a swift flowing muddy brown mess of a river. We were on a boat about 200 kilometers upstream of the Three Gorges Dam and the landscape we passed through was going to be flooded with sixty more feet of water in a couple of months. The Chinese are maniacs about their building projects and, true to form, were rushing to finish the dam and start generating electricity well ahead of schedule. As a result, the water level in the gorges was going to rise sooner rather than later. (click here to read more . . .)
Pictures from Alaska and Siberia
Some Images from Italy