Osito And A Frog Named Turtle, An Additive Adventure Entry

In Conjunction With OutsideTV.com and Osprey Packs

Baby Turtle, Phase 2. Photo By Peter DoucetteI grasped the hours-old turtle with her white underbelly between my thumb and forefinger. She put up with it. She tried out the cool air and wind-milled her flippers in opposite and unsynchronized directions. She bobbled her head in an effort to see through still unopened eye slits covered in sand. I was in charge of her until I slid her back into the two-foot-deep hole with her dozens of brothers and sisters. She was covered in sand, and left to grow up—hopefully strong enough to leave the hole and join the ocean.

Right about now, I could talk about ocean health and green turtles and all the amazing things they do. But this is not a story about a turtle; this is a story about a poodle. A poodle that I tried to convince to be like a turtle, via a frog....

Click to read more ...

Two Weeks In

There’s the retired schoolteacher who spent four years, or two stints, in the Peace Corps in southern Ethiopia. He remembers the people. The food. The peace.

The young woman who traveled overland from Kenya and to the Red Sea, across the contested boarder in the back of jeep, just to see if she could. She wants to know how to buy coffee directly from the source. She cannot seem to shake the taste of the thick Ethiopian brew.

The Ethiopian man from Wollo. He’s been here in the US longer than he was in Ethiopia. He says his children are American, he is not.

The 18-year old boy, a ski bum for the winter with hopes of African intrigue with a woman who called him from Egypt. They’re meeting in Addis.

The consummate traveler whose never tried to climb but grasps my book with both hands and asks if I know how she could start.

They all turn the pages of my book and stop on different images and stories so that the entire sea of my life and work for the past year is laid out before me. I had not understood how my extroversion could work as a writer. Maybe it’s like this.