The Front Page

by Colleen Kaleda

I am alone, standing barefoot on the sandy surface of a one lane bridge, peering into the clear creek that gurgles below. It's almost midnight and I am in my underwear, and I'm feeling as out-of-control as I have ever felt in my life.

Enveloped by fog and the scent of pine, I am deep in the eastern Baltic's forests, just a few miles from the Belarussian border. This part of Lithuania is bracingly cold in winter. I have walked – run, really – from a smoke sauna tucked into the side of a nearby hill into the strangely reassuring vastness of a dark, cold forest.

And then I see her, about ten yards away: a lone grey wolf.

.....

While hundreds of saunas are scattered throughout Lithuania, most are hidden, private, and rarely open to foreigners. I thought myself lucky when the front desk manager at my hostel offered to take me to one. He knew someone who knew someone who could get us in.

But as our group of four – all men, except me – slips down a muddy hillside to get to the 200-year-old smoke sauna, I feel a surge of anxiety.

The sauna is the size of a tool shed, ...

by Michele Jin

It all started when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay, many years ago. Volunteers go through three months of training, and during that time we live with host families. My host mother took pride in her role as my surrogate nurturer, and as she saw it, the most important part of her job was to keep me well fed. Paraguayan cuisine consists of milanesa (breaded fried meat), empanadas (fried pastries filled with cheese or meat), chipa (greasy, cheesy cornmeal biscuits), and mandioca (a starchy root vegetable). None of it is particularly palatable, but I didn’t want to be rude to my lovely host mother, and in any case I’ve always had a hearty appetite. By the end of three months I had gained 20 pounds. If I was going to make it through the next two years with my health and physique reasonably intact, I needed to start working out.

In college in Seattle I had kept fit by rowing on a recreational crew team, and I had lifted weights and taken fitness classes at the gym. But there were no boat houses or gyms in rural Paraguay. I tried to work out in my room at home – calisthenics and what not – but it was boring and ineffective. Eventually, I started running.

By that time, ...

TERRA INCOGNITA
Travels in Antarctica
by Sara Wheeler
1998 Random House, 351 pages
reviewed by Kiersten Aschauer

Grab your climbing crampons, Gore-Tex parka and a cup of hot chocolate before reading Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, because journalist Sara Wheeler (Travels in a Thin Country: A Journey Through Chile and An Island Apart: Travels in Evia) is going to take you on a chilling journey both back in time and forward through the Antarctic.

British-born Wheeler is the first foreigner to join the American National Science Foundation’s Antarctic artists’ and Writers’ Program, an honor she doesn’t take lightly. In fact, she spent nearly two years researching and preparing for the icy trip, and remains a pupil of the polar region throughout the book.

In addition to the academic research, there was much psychological preparation that went into Wheeler’s pilgrimage. In the introduction, she writes of loneliness (and her lack of fear regarding it), and of being a woman entering “male territory.” Also pointed out in this poignant beginning is that the continent of Antarctica is one tenth the earth’s land surface, the Ross Shelf alone is the size ...