In 1950, a young Truman Capote published his first long piece in The New Yorker. “A Ride Through Spain” chronicles a train journey that the writer took from Granada to the seaport town of Algeciras, near the Strait of Gibraltar. Capote ruminates on the lives of the other passengers as the train winds its way across the countryside. “In the next compartment,” he writes, “the lovely girls leaned against one another loosely, like six exhausted geraniums. Even the cat had ceased to prowl and lay dreaming in the corridor. We had climbed higher; the train moseyed across a plateau of rough yellow wheat, then between the granite walls of deep ravines, where strange, thorny trees quivered in the wind.” It’s a pensive essay, with a bit of a twist—and an ode to summer weather, languorous excursions, and the allure of the unforeseen encounters one experiences along the way.
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This week, we’re bringing you a selection of pieces about journeys of every shape and dimension. In “The Isle of God,” Ludwig Bemelmans visits a tiny island off the coast of France known for hosting an exclusive group of French families each summer. (“The coast of the Ile is a succession of small private beaches, each one like a room with three walls, with curtains of rock and greenery, and a cave to dress in.”) In “Quilts,” Andrea Lee travels to North Carolina to find the perfect bed coverlet and unearths some ancestral truths about race and family. (“I went to bed that night and dreamed that the countryside was stitched up in patches.”) In “Altered States,” Oliver Sacks chronicles his experimental journeys with psychedelics and other drugs while he was a resident in U.C.L.A.’s neurology department. Ariel Levy travels to Mongolia and experiences a profound loss, and the long-distance swimmer Lynne Cox recounts her formidable trek across the Northwest Passage. Finally, in “The Lost City of Z,” which was adapted into a feature film in 2016, David Grann delivers an account of an extraordinary expedition to discover an ancient civilization in the Amazon rain forest. There’s something deeply appealing about journeying into the unknown; we hope that these pieces inspire some adventure for this summer weekend.
—Erin Overbey, archive editor
