I reached Kyoto in rough shape.

A desperate drive to the northern tip of Hokkaido had left me depleted and with a persistant numbness in a few fingers. I’d driven twelve hours to stare at some Russian islands on the horizon and then waited out a blizzard in a sulfurous pond, submerged to my nose beside a toad-like man who sat up serenely, half-covered by snow. When I stumbled into her jazz bar in Sapporo a few days later, Ryo Fukui’s widow served me a dish of warm cod semen and told me to take better care of myself.

By contrast, Kyoto was like a commercial for the good life: warm and bright, split by the hale median of the Kamogawa into a grid of riverside parks and delicate wood houses. Long thin skerries dotted the river, covered with tall grass and patrolled by egrets and herons.

Upstream, at the dramatic confluence of the Kamo and Takano, rows of broad stepping stones carved into turtles led out to a triangular delta, where the banks sloped sharply up to a tree-lined park. Students lounged everywhere, playing music and baseball, making short films, laughing as they ate convenience store desserts. I recovered quickly.

I’d come to Kyoto to find Yoshida, an old student dormitory that had loomed in my imagination since college, when a show set there had seemed the key metaphor to my remaining months as a student. Treehaven, the faded Victorian hotel where we’d lived in Berkeley, seemed in many ways Yoshida’s Western twin: the same long dark-panelled hallways, the same aura of lively neglect.

When I arrived in Japan, I hadn’t even known that Yoshida was real until a man in a Tokyo bar scrawled an address onto the back of his business card, shoved it into my wallet, and told me not to be too disappointed.

Then he gave me the story. Since being built in 1913, Yoshida had been locked in a conflict with the university over its unusual self-governing and non-affiliated status: adjectives that seemed entirely out of place in my brief experience of Japan. After decades of neglected maintenance, it was now collapsing, which the university had used as a pretext to formally evict all the students four years earlier. Only a few remained.

As I stepped onto the long entry path, I got an immediate sense that the battle was going poorly. I had arrived in the middle of the student activity fair to a campus packed with booths and talent shows. Just one block over, Yoshida sulked in silence: the wood walls beautiful but visibly weathered, the roof coming down in places.

I’d watched an old documentary on the conflict in Tokyo and knew the faces of the key players, but I was surprised to find that many were still there. I even saw the ringleader pacing between the buildings with a mane of black curls and a little entourage of Beatniks. He looked embattled, Churchill stalking between the war rooms, and the place had an overriding sense of being years into a conflict that it had already lost.

By the entrance, piles of papers spilled off a folding table. As I loitered by the door trying to decipher a sign, a resident very methodically gathered each of the pamphlets into a neat little pile and handed it to me, explaining in considerate Japanese that he didn’t have time to show me around just now but that these would help me find my way.

I took my reading material and walked inside. Yoshida’s floorplan described a vast U, with two long parallel wings and an overgrown courtyard in the center. Distinctions between interior and exterior were limited, with doors that had clearly not been closed in decades leading out to thickets of bamboo or small untended vegetable gardens.

A few students sprawled on the floor chatting, sitting amidst the collected debris of a century of the collegiate lifestyle. The corridors were long and dark, with paper trinkets dangling so low that you had to duck around them.

Back down one of the corridors, some French girls cooked dinner in a blast zone of grease, the surfaces all plated with blackened tin foil. I asked if they lived there but only one bothered to look up, offering silence and a rusty little grimace. The pamphlet explained that Yoshida took in the occasional international students, and I wondered how they’d found this place and what they made of it.

Upstairs it felt like I’d fall through the floorboards with each step. Yoshida used to be so packed that it was two to a room, but whole corridors were in darkness now. I put on my headlamp and ventured into one of the empty rooms, which had a little balcony looking over the courtyard.

I read one of the pamphlets while I walked around. I was drawn to it because it was big and floppy like a newspaper, stapled at the top and illustrated with a washed out photo of Yoshida’s entrance. Each page was a different scene from the ongoing trial: statements from academics, diagrams from seismic experts, long passages of legal debate.

I stopped on a speech given by a local business owner. Even in translation, it was a good speech: nostalgic and kind, with a clear sense of loyalty to Kyoto instead of the specific zeal for Yoshida that animated all the others. I pictured an older man reading it to a room of people that had to lean in to hear him - someone who had spent their life in the city and watched it change. He spoke about the magnetism and atmosphere of Yoshida, “a place where time accumulates”, and the dizzying pace of the economy that it resisted, the forces trying to turn Kyoto into just another city - “an empty, boring, and suffocating world of efficiency and profit, devoid of thought and aesthetics.” When the speaker pointed out the university’s inconsistencies, he did so with an empathy that the other speeches had lacked, like he had expected better of them; it gave his criticism a moral authority. At the end, he even turned to lightly chastize the students, warning that getting entrenched in the conflict and turning inward wouldn’t do them any favors. If they wanted their own space, they needed to show pride in it and share it with others. I found the whole thing moving and more than a bit sorrowful. It reminded me of the tone that Ishiguro often strikes - sentimental, mature, but a bit playful with the resulting melancholy.

At the top of the page, they listed the man’s name, Go Matsumura, and the name of his business, Midnight Cafe ShinShinShin. I liked the name because of how it danced around and because I could actually read it. I stopped the next resident coming down the corridor and managed to ask him if ShinShinShin was nearby. He said it was 15 minutes away and that it usually opened late.

It was just shy of 9 when I found the place: an upstairs unit, perched above a little row of shops at the outer edge of a student neighborhood. Across the street, a forested hill loomed under a sliver of moon. The sidewalks were empty but a few of the shops had their lights on.

I climbed a narrow staircase of pink and white tiles and knocked hesitantly on the door. A few seconds later, a young man’s narrow face slid out horizontally. He wore round wire frame glasses that made him look a bit like a cartoon character, with a few strands of hair standing straight up from a shaggy black bowl cut. He asked in a delicate voice if I would wait just a minute and then slipped back inside. When he reappeared, he introduced himself as Go and showed me through the door.

ShinShinShin was a jazz kissa, a category that had been new to me a few weeks earlier but was now dear and familiar. Kissas are like dive bars, but smaller and without the aura of expectant violence. They play loud vinyl while people smoke and speak little or not at all, except when something in the room shifts and suddenly everyone is roaring together at the bar. ShinShinShin took this outline and gave it a literary bent. There were novels piled everywhere, a little loft for storage and a narrow alcove where one person could sit at a low table and read. The moonlit hill was framed in a bank of windows that opened over the street, making the space feel more like a treehouse than a business.

Bottles of scotch were arranged lovingly over the bar, which managed to fit a turntable, hundreds of foreign cigarette boxes arrayed like a curtain wall, and neatly tended piles of local memorobilia onto a work surface maybe three foot by two. Everything fell under the low, dazzling light of a stained glass lamp, slightly angled to cast the greatest illumination on Go’s hands as he worked.

On the only couch, two older men spoke gracefully. One wore a cowboy hat and a luxuriously sequinned shirt. For them, evidently, the opening time had been earlier.

As I sat down at the bar, I could immediately tell that it was the young man’s domain: a place he had built and loved, a bar that he stood behind deep into each night and again in his dreams each following morning. Suddenly I realized that this was the same Go whose speech I had read at Yoshida - only 40 years younger than I had imagined.

Go had a habit of whispering the second halves of his sentences, which made me lean out over the bar and whisper my own. In this way, between orders and with considerable strain on both of our languages, I heard his story.

Go had never lived in Yoshida himself, but he served coffee at their events, followed their fledgling garage bands. Raised in Osaka, he studied Spinoza at Kyoto and then opened ShinShinShin after graduating. There was a natural affinity between the two places: some shared commitment that seemed to relate Yoshida to ShinShinShin, but I couldn’t quite work out the relationship. There was a political flavor to it, but none of it mapped onto the sort of culture you find on a Western college campus. There was too much maturity at play - the easy confidence of people building their own dreams, people able to both run a pleasant business and talk compellingly about literature.

As we spoke, a close friend of Go’s joined us at the bar with a pile of new paperbacks. Soon he was talking about his job at a nearby hotel and explaining how he’d built the bar from scrap wood himself.

Despite the hour, everyone ordered coffee, which Go made with a flannel drip and his full attention: setting up his little apparatus, warming the cup, taking the temperature of the water, and then pouring in fluid wristy circles. Whenever you said anything complimentary about ShinShinShin, which I did free and often, Go got a sweet little smile and looked down at his pouring. He reminded me of a child that knew a secret. I enjoyed the contrast between his young mannerisms and old presence, that mature voice that had come through in the speech. He manned the counter with the same authority, something that I hadn’t seen in many Japanese cafes, where the staff bowed stiffly and seemed embarassed by delays. Go got to people when he had time, and they waited happily for their drinks.

As if by explanation, the friend revealed Go’s tenure as president of a famous high school’s student finance committee, joking that he carried that shrewdness into each decision he made at ShinShinShin: that behind the quiet mop of hair were devilish machinations of cost efficiency.

At some point the old cowboys got up to leave, prompting Go and his friend to fly from their seats and begin bowing frantically, folding up nose to knee like pocket knives. The older men laughed and nodded back before slipping out into the night, silver spurs clattering down the tile stairway as the boys leaned out over the bar to listen after them, eyes closed.

Go’s friend turned and whispered: “That was Japan’s best lyricist. This place is named after his song.”

Go smiled. “I’ve been playing it tonight for them.”

A few hours later Go’s girlfriend Yuzu showed up: tall and dyed blonde in a Berkeley sweater, energetic and confident in conversation. She was working on a novel and had a habit of interspering long fluid thoughts in English with little bursts of Japanese adjectives. They were easy words, the sort of language that made a learner feel at home, but I couldn’t tell if they were for my benefit or a natural mixing, some flavor that her English would always retain. We all talked deep into the night about Ishiguro and Mishima, about why public life could feel so alienating in Japan, about what made places like Kyoto and Berkeley feel old and powerful. I wondered if Go had summoned her covertly when he realized that we had memories in common.

Yuzu asked me if I believed in ghosts, and we all laughed at how obvious the answer was.

Who wouldn’t have that night? There was such a ghostly symmetry to it all: finding a place that you’ve dreamed about for years and being handed a flyer there that leads to new friends with their own memories of your college town. Or opening a midnight cafe named after your favorite singer who then shows up and becomes a regular. If you believe that these connections are real and purposeful - that the contours of your life are traced rather than improvised - then things like this happen all the time. It would be stranger to imagine that they wouldn’t.

I can’t say how many cups of coffee I watched Go pour through his little square of flannel in my week in Kyoto. I made myself a regular, always taking the same seat at the bar and learning about the small group who came in every night. There was a single mother restoring a traditional house west of the river, a Chinese lawyer who’d settled in Kyoto 17 years back after coming for law school, a local English teacher who graded essays late into the night. They all carried novels in their back pockets and traded jabs about their writing. I attended their open mic one afternoon, where the Kyoto chapter of the Dead Poets Society gathered to read bits of verse. Go puttered around in the kitchen, laughing at how intently Yuzu translated the fierce discussions of language.

Spending too long on shore leave can trigger delusions. The world starts to feel emptier. There are fewer interesting people walking around than you would hope: even fewer eager to have conversations with strangers. You start to suspect that a meaningful chunk of humanity has strapped itself into the digital content vats and exited the social sphere entirely.

In any city on earth, the traveler always has at their disposal that last port of call: the slick expat coffee shop, where English conversation (on varied topics like New York or even Brooklyn) is available daily at the perverse opening hour of 11am. Don’t be fooled; these places are a mirage, dazzling but completely dry.

After a few years of traveling, I finally found something that I’d been looking for at ShinShinShin. It was a place that I’d been promised would play a much larger role in my life: a tavern at the edge of things, an outpost where a certain type of person gathers to discuss the cryptic fantasies that quicken their world. ShinShinShin proved not only the existence but the potential of this sort of place: that if you build one correctly, the right people will find it.

I’d long claimed that no American abroad would ever be left alone on Thanksgiving, but come Thursday, Kyoto was starting to look like the exception. I’d had a near miss with two guys from Georgia, willing but Tokyo-bound and unsentimental about the holiday. By dusk I was looking pleadingly at every American accent I passed on the street. After a few conversations sunk in the river (“We’re a long ways out here, aren’t we?"), I ate alone in Kyoto’s ShakeShack while the Fleet Foxes played on repeat. Later, while sulking on the banks of the Kamogawa, I realized that ShinShinShin was the closest place I had to a home this far from California and walked back out there for another night of quiet revelry.

By the time I headed back to my hostel, all the buses had stopped running. I walked along the Kamogawa for an hour or so, watching the students stumbling home across the stepping stones. Eventually I got tired and found a little bush that was open to the stars, laid down, and slept for a few hours until just before dawn. When I woke, the river was full of a pearly red light that was peaking over the mountains - and it was time to leave Kyoto.

Stunned by heat, light, and cold medicine in the Cimetière de Montmartre, Ortiz and I decided to follow a lead to the 12th arrondissement where we’d heard there was an abandoned railway.

The Villa Du Bel-Air was silent and leafy, lined on one side with a delicate iron railing. After poking around the embankments for a few blocks, we found a small section of open track and from there, an easy climb onto the railway itself.

The track quickly took on a dreamlike aspect, curving between old factories and rows of colorful tenements. I had a sudden memory of walking down the center of the 80 at night, northbound over SoMa.

There was so much life on the tracks. The usual tent camps, enhanced by delicate little shrines of French artifacts: rusted rail equipment, scraps of fabric, a storm lamp of dazzling multicolored glass. We saw a sculptor’s studio in the sunken entrance of an old rail station. Traces of cooking fires on a grassy stretch that would camp a few dozen. Shacks painted with circus stripes and French teens despondently lighting small fires.

Our first tunnel loomed like a tropical ruin. A small hole had been cut in the bars, outlined in thick blue paint.

As the entrance receded into a coin of light behind us, we lost all sense of time. Neither of us had ever been in an environment so consistently on the edge of visibility - a sort of darkness that always seemed to be touched by some distant source of light.

There were arched alcoves every few feet. Most were curtained off with blankets or occasionally linked to tents to form larger compounds. Pans and camp stoves scattered around the tracks seemed to indicate periods of manic culinary interest followed by week-long naps. Graffiti referenced rituals (“NVH dismemberment”) illustrated with large red figures and little gold heiroglyphs. It all smelled much better than you would imagine.

Some of the later alcoves opened to the sky, with metal rungs leading up to locked grates.

It couldn’t have been much more than a mile, but we both felt that a full, healthy phase of our life was ending as we reached the tunnel’s end. Just as we’d joked would happen, it was blocked: a solid, unbroken row of bars with spikes on the top. A thick blanket had been laid over the spikes on one side, but there wasn’t enough clearance from the wall to swing over. Staring dumbly at the gate, we had just begun to consider ways of tunneling under when a sound behind us broke free from the general echo of the tunnel.

It was a steady trudging through the stones. I turned and watched as the shadows swirled, slowly resolving into a figure. He walked directly at us, staring blankly, saying nothing. Ortiz skittered up the railing. I hefted my hydroflask defensively, somewhat heartened that we were so sharply backlit.

As he came into the light, I saw that the man had a classically handsome, leathery face: no teeth, a mustache as dark and wet as if blackened with engine grease. He wore a set of faded grey clothes like something from a Victorian factory.

When he got within twenty feet he stopped, and finally, briefly acknowledged us:

“Regardez moi.”

With a quick, loping approach, he ran at us, turning at the last moment toward the fence and leaping lightly onto it, pulling himself up with arms loose like a gibbon’s. As he reached the top, he vaulted one leg over, paused in a straddle, and smiled down at us.

“Voilà!”

He dropped to the other side.

The implication was clear: our turn. We were reticent, but our cavedweller proved a patient, sensitive tutor. It wasn’t difficult with his tricks. There were a series of anti-climbing additions that required precise navigation: long, slick panels of metal that you had to slide down, tensioning yourself against a few inches of adjacent brickwork. Ortiz went first, and our new friend climbed back up to force his limbs into the right position, pausing again on the ground to encourage me as I followed.

We said all we could in French. The tunnel acrobat smiled and walked out into the sunlight, smoothing his hair under it like he was in the shower. He made straight for a woman sitting by the tracks, got a light, and then retreated, shaking our hands and bowing deeply before repeating his manouvre and skittering off into the darkness.

Most of the day was spent in the overgrown, fenced off stretches, but we started to pass a few public parks - even the occasional restaurant or cafe that backed up onto the tracks, eco-sleek like a Californian preschool. We walked into one and asked for water, but the staff seemed confused where we’d come from and would only give us that sickly French drink that stands in for iced coffee.

When the next tunnel came, we were cocky with the vicarious athleticism of our brief companion. It was shorter than the last, and halfway in, we goaded each other into turning off the flashlight. Within seconds I fell into a deep pit, rotating on the axis of my back foot like someone in a cartoon. A metal grate saved me but at the cost of my thigh, which a week on still feels like something very deep and specific inside it has been turned into carbonated water. Ortiz pulled me out and we staggered on through a long inhabited stretch, knee-deep in trash.

Half a mile on, a sleepy woman in a decaying barn sold us bright blue jackets and made soft mewing noises at my limp. We came out somewhere near a canal, out of time and too sore to continue.

In total we covered 1/4 of the loop, which I’m told continues essentially unbroken around the city’s center. As a place to build a life, La Petit Ceinture struck me as livelier, freer, and more engaging than most contemporary cities. We both hope to return soon.

After a frantic stop in Morningside, we arrived in Aviemore after 6pm, cutting out into the Cairngorms with less than two hours of light.

We pitched up in Allt Druidh and soon had our first taste of the midges. At dawn, a low fog clung to the heather and ferns: the younger pines all veiled in webs and frost that caught the first light.

By mid-morning we were past the dogleg and out on the plateau. Braeriach’s peak was broader than I expected, rolling gently along the cirque’s ridge and then down toward the Pools of Dee. To our left, immense blocky shadows slid around on the floor of the corrie.

From the Pools of Dee, the ridgeline starts to feel like an obstacle course, with a series of saddles and boulder fields connecting the three remaining munros and each of the minor peaks between. Even in high summer, the plateau is stark. As my phone died, a herd of reindeer appeared on the shoulder of Sgòr an Lochan Uaine and then flowed around us, meandering down toward Glen Feshie.

After finishing on Bod an Deamhain, we cut down to Corrour, where a funny little Czech was sunning himself outside the bothy. While methodically ruining each bottle of his delicious mountain water with iodine, he warned us about ‘ze midgies’—a crisis we failed to appreciate until the next morning, when we woke to a low humming and skies black with bugs.

They hung on the tent like a liquid: their strategy less to sting than to suffocate, pouring down our throats and into our ears. In a misguided attempt to shield my face, I emerged wrapped in bandanas with a pair of sunglasses on, but within seconds they had found their way behind the lenses, bouncing around back there like pinballs and leaving a halo of red bites around each eye. I couldn’t even roll up the tent; we just ran down Lairigh Ghu, hobbled by the climb and dragging everything behind us.

The rest was fragmentary: spam and eggs on a boulder field in the Chalamaine Gap, an endless trudge through the growing scar of logging fields around Morlich, and then that old favorite, the Pine Marten Bar.

When Wheaton and I are together, there are an almost unsustainable number of conversations with strangers. One stands out—a Lithuanian cabbie who drove us back to Aviemore. When asked how he’d ended up in the Highlands, he first said “People leave you alone up here.” Then he got a distant look, reconsidered, and explained that he was running from a life he had built off the coast of Cornwall.

He was young: a recent arrival to London but already fed up with it. In the kitchens where he worked, a line cook mentioned an opening in a hotel on the Isles of Scilly. They offered him a job over the phone, but all they would say was to turn up at Newquay Harbour that night with a rain jacket and a torch.

He started on St. Martin’s the next day, quickly learning how the islands fit together and how to navigate the dense little world they contained. Tresco was his favorite. He had fond memories of his accommodation on the beach there, where he could swim in the sea while running his evening bath. When another cook retired, our cabbie claimed the small boat he left behind, teaching himself to sail after shifts in the forgiving shallows of the archipelago. He’d take the boat as far as he could, often dragged more by the currents than the wind, and then rely on a dinky outboard motor to return home. He never mentioned what it was that he left there, but it seemed better not to ask.

Kate Bush played very quietly on the radio. We were sharing the cab with a young boy and his mother who had sat next to us in the Pine Marten. After staring intently at his hands for most of the ride, the boy said, “You know, I have ten fingers and six of my fingers have chocolate on them. That’s not bad!” Wheaton and I agreed: that wasn’t bad at all. A diffuse yellow light fell over Scotland all the way home, making even the fields of dead grass look decadent and natural.

The first walk in a new country is always the most intense. Within a few hours, Seoul confirmed all of my suspicions about dreary, oppressive Manhattan. It soared in scale and color, Thiebaud slopes interspersed with little parks and engineered streams lined with trees. My students had mentioned the prevalence of Baskin Robbins, but who could’ve known they’d be six stories of glass? That Pokémon-themed flavors would draw 7am crowds ferocious with desire?

I’d also been told that Seoul was a city of campuses. Students enjoyed how effusive I was on this point, showing me around on Google Maps for hours: proud, but useless when it came to potential points of roof access.

Two hours after landing, I was at Ewha Womans University, where the first sight of the glass ravine had me in hysterics.

It’s deeper than it looks online, and the paths on either side are planted with funny little topiary. As you walk down, there’s a moment where the campus reappears through two layers of glass over your left shoulder, and you realize that the thing is both carved into and built on top of the natural grade, transparent in some dimensions and fully submerged in others.

Like all good campuses, Ewha is on a sharp slope. As you climb north, the trees gather in incredible varieties; paths fork off to department buildings and small glades. After half an hour, I was at the foot of Ansan. Though nobody could tell me why, Korean universities are always built around mountains, with one peak serving as many as three campuses, each with their own set of trails. The conceit of a good athletic chant, I was assured, often rested on a lewd comparison of mountain height.

That’s how it was with Ansan, too: another trail leading down into trad, ivy-bound Yonsei, distant outpost of the UCEAP federation. Outside the media studies building, two Americans discussed their PhD applications in tidy east coast accents.

I found my way back to Ewha and the trench as the sun set. The two girls in green cloaks were still there, holding hands and singing.

As the light changed, the catacomb libraries appeared through the glass.

I came upon tropical Hongik a few nights after: moonlight and brutal halogen, more trees than buildings. Unfinished ponds trailed off into thickets of bamboo.

A week later, stoic, martial Sogang made me late for dinner. I stopped to watch the young Jesuits practicing football and cheerleading under a red sky. Then I ran up a path to Nogosan, all 106 meters of it slashed with rose.

.JPG)

I did my next four campuses in one long day. August, mirthless Kyung Hee was empty in the morning except for its uniformed security guards, regal landscaping, and high Corinthians. The roads all wound up to the Grand Peace Hall with its stained glass in pastels and chrome-clad children proclaiming the dawn of Neo-Renaissance, the fusion of tradition and innovation, even the “end of identity”.

I walked up a path that faded into forest and found an old man sitting between massive stone urns.

The College of Music was something out of an Inigo Jones set. I linger on Kyung Hee because something was wrong with it. I think about it often but would be hesitant to return.

Minutes away was breezy Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, enlivened by a student activity fair but still in gloomy Kyung Hee’s shadow. The people manning the Outdoors Club table saw my Los Padres National Forest hat and stopped me. We talked about Hallasan and Seoraksan and the Korean fixation with building colleges around mountains. I couldn’t convince them that I wasn’t another American exchange student named Nick that they’d met earlier that day. “You so funny, Nick. New haircut. Pretend you don’t know me.” Groups of students in colorful clothing milled around, laughing and speaking in English. I could tell that the one student I saw up at Kyung Hee (double-breasted suit and a center-part) wouldn’t have tolerated them.

Entering through the back, K-Arts felt like someone else’s memory of a summer camp. There were sandy lots and whitewashed buildings and students practicing traditional drum music in the studios above; everything smelled like pine needles and cinnamon. These last three campuses all clung to the base of Cheonjangsan and the Uireung burial mounds, which I climbed for a better view of the Grand Peace Hall.

Taking another path down, I found the real center of K-Arts: a sleek campus with a mesmerizing interior of long hallways and yellow doors. I stopped to watch an acting lesson where a girl sobbed on stage and pounded on her “boyfriend’s” chest. As soon as the teacher called ‘cut!’ (or something equally abrupt in Korean), the girl shook her head to send the fake tears flying, laughing brightly at her performance.

I made it to Korea University around sunset (a big dog: the K in SKY). The wind was warm and there were thousands of students gathered to watch an idol perform in the central quad. Many were from other universities, revealed by the letterman jackets (a Korean favorite, like anything from 1950s Michigan) floating through the crowd on those broad Yonsei shoulders.

Some professors played tennis in a vast gym under the parking structure, immune to it all. Upwind, a sign offered the bright promise of the “Campus Ice Rink” (the first such delight I’ve encountered), but I had to get to a fish market before it closed.

The next day, a bus stopped on a mountain pass to deposit me at Sungkyukwan: a campus that fell perilously into Jongno along a series of switchbacks. I have a few friends who studied here, but I never pictured them as alpinists. Nearby, a breakfast cafe called “The Second Best in Seoul” served a sweet, cold cinnamon soup and red bean porridge.

I’ve had a lot of time lately to think about why walking around college campuses in foreign countries takes up so much of my time at 26. How many of us are out here doing this? I’ve thought about calling a convention: serving plates of sandwiches and asking everyone to please close their eyes and imagine a campus that could hold their youthful attention forever. Most of my friends describe dreams set in campuses like these, places assembled from the schools we’ve all loved and the schools we’ve yet to find. Is this a common fixation? Did men born between 1994 and 1997 have something corrosive on sleeping eyelids laid? Whenever someone wants to tell me about their major instead of their campus, we rarely have much in common. College should wound you—and leaving it should cast you into disarray and half a decade of Shore Leave. You have to leave all your papers on the Ticonderoga and shoot billiards with the midget. Using four of your most vital years as an “opportunity for growth” is disrespectful.

Americans live for their campuses, but Korea puts us to shame. And there are still so many names left that will retain for me that shimmer of fantasy: Konkuk and Kookmin, Sookmyung and Hanyang. Even Seoul National University itself, crown jewel of Gwanaksan. I hope to see them all soon.

A week in steep, airy Neuchâtel, where Edwards is teaching and writing his PhD on Byron. We climbed the Creux du Van early (warm sun, patchy snow) and toasted cervelas on the grassy plane high over Noiraigue.

A few days later we returned to Champ Du Moulin, a valley where I had gotten off the train on a whim earlier in the week and found a perfect campsite. Edwards had just finished teaching his Swiss undergrads about sonnets, so we were as unprepared as ever: two hours of daylight, no water, some useless groceries, and a Trader Joe’s bag full of electronics.

We found my spot again easily—a narrow, mossy flat ten minutes off the trail, up a steep peak and shielded by beech and pine.

I was tempted by a long spine of golden stone on the horizon. It seemed to continue along a narrow ridge from our spot and then run up steeply, almost to the level of Le Soliat.

Soon, however, the spine ended abruptly, and we were faced with sheer drops on all sides, carpeted with thick leaves and scattered rocks. Below, we could see the path and the river.

As we hovered at the edge, Edwards’ phone slid out from his bag and started down the slope—shyly at first as we snatched at it and then erratically, bouncing against the loam and spinning high and bright like a knife until it disappeared from view at the bottom of the hill.

After some discussion, I decided to go after it first while Edwards waited to avoid dislodging rocks from above. There were a few false starts before the momentum took over—then it was an uncontrolled slide, grabbing at mossy rocks and rotten branches as the Trader Joe’s bag swung pendulously from my neck, stuffed with the fetid Swiss groceries.

At one point I reached for a tree—but all I got was a slip of paper buried beneath the leaves, which turned out to be Edwards’ train ticket. I stared at this in disbelief as I slid, eventually sinking to a stop in the thicker loam near the bottom.

My descent scared Edwards off, so he circled back up to the spine to rejoin me on the path. I found the phone propped gracefully against a rock, somehow unharmed, and then took a dip in a gemlike pool while I waited for Edwards, who appeared triumphantly a few minutes later.

We walked back to a deserted train station and returned home to hot chocolate and omelets.

There had been another London interlude, 3 months of despair on the Central Line, so I quit and went to Edinburgh.

It was pure elation to cross the border: bleak weather, Wheaton’s friend Forsyth up for COP26 with a pair of Chacos and a bag of apples he found on the street, Wheaton himself nursing a blown eardrum in his Morningside bedroom.

We rented a car and took the long way up to Skye, passing through Glencoe. A storm was kicking up, so we called off the camping at Portree and raced up a narrow farm road instead, hugging the northwest coast toward Rubha Hunish where the OS map promised a bothy. As the sun set, we left the car by the road and walked out onto the peninsula.

An Israeli couple already inside gave us some cheap whisky and told us about their art. The woman snored while the man laughed in his sleep. We woke to an ethereal sunrise – all the Scottish purples shining out of heath-bound puddles.

Morning was spent hiking around the Old Man of Storr.

Then up to the Quiraing where we passed a miserable 13-hour night beneath the black slabs, which groaned under the volume of water flowing down from the plateau above.

We dried off in a diner the next morning before striking out for the Black Cuillin. The approach we’d chosen started where Glen Brittle hit the coast, up through sloping moorland and past scattered cairns.

It was mid afternoon by the time we reached Coire Lagan, a cirque formed by the Cuillin Ridge with a glassy green lochan in its center.

Over the water was something I’d wanted to see for years: the Great Stone Chute, a thousand foot fan of scree that steepens and tapers into a narrow canyon. A jagged streak of pale sediment marks the popular route, which eventually hits a col before doglegging to the tallest peak on Skye.

The slope neared 45 degrees at points. With every step, you’d sink knee deep into scree or, worse, dislodge a pocket of stones, which tumbled down and picked up speed until they hit the floor of the corrie below. There was a constant howl at our backs that echoed across the walls of the chute and carried a thick fog up around us.

Halfway up, a troupe of European climbers passed us on their descent. They had white helmets, two long poles each, beautiful gear—but one of them kept eating it on the scree, sliding out for 30 feet at a time and sending waves of the stuff down onto his companions. Forsyth (no backpack or poles, feet bloodied in his sandals) called across the chute with pure Midwestern earnestness: “It helps to place your feet more delicately!”

After the bend, a face of mossy basalt along the left wall was a welcome change.

Then the chute tightened to 30 feet and everything was lost in the milkiness of the general illumination. Forsyth was gone but I could hear rocks shifting somewhere below.

The saddle appeared suddenly, splitting open the sky between Sgùrr MhicChoinnich and Sgùrr Alasdair. I will always remember the half hour that followed. As soon as I crested, everything was silent—the fog rolling over the col and dropping into the abyss beyond.

Forsyth and I scrambled to a shelf overlooking Loch Coir' a' Ghrunnda, Soay, and Rùm. There was a sickly yellow light at world’s end.

The final spine was slick and narrow and fully exposed, with wind so strong that we had to crawl. We only lasted a few minutes on the peak, staring down into 992 meters of endless grey.

Then it was back down the chute—the fog moving slow and heavy over the mithril streaks across the corrie.

I reached the car before Forsyth and swam in Glen Brittle, which gapes out into the Outer Hebrides. We hit Portree after dark, ate a huge meal in a warm pub, and slept in a parking lot until dawn.

I’ve spent four weeks piecing together the slopes of Massarelos, but the basic shape of the place is still elusive. This morning, under the sycamores that line the Rua de Dom Pedro V, I found a stone ramp that led somewhere completely new.

The region below was surprisingly large and completely untended: a canyon cutting through the old core of the city, surrounded by walls of pale river-stone on three sides and filled with a thick, continuous mass of ivy that swarmed south toward the Douro. Two nicely preserved farmhouses stayed afloat above the green, but there didn’t seem to be a path to either. A humid wind echoed off the glass above.

At the base of the ramp, a large vault opened back into the stone, where a few basins, a streetlight, and large iron gates marked the entrance to the city’s cisterns. Someone was living on a narrow stone slab over the water.

Back on the path, the beginnings of roads and steps started to appear, always trailing off toward the trench’s center where they were lost in flowering vines and firework clusters of Lily of the Nile. It all seemed to suggest another level of the forgotten neighborhood, farther down still and fully covered by the green. The foundation of a tenement poked out, likely leveled decades ago.

What was left of the buildings’ walls stood out as a faint, raised outline in the mass of the ivy. I made my way out along the grid, the thicket compressing lightly until it touched down on the crumbling, jagged remnants of whatever lay beneath. Here and there, part of a window emerged, opening down into preserved layers of the vanished tenements—now stuffed with waterlogged sacks and home appliances. I peered into the first only long enough to see the dim traces of a hallway overflowing with miniature electric radiators.

Through a larger hole in the ivy, I could make out more tarp structures—though these were farther down than seemed possible, suggesting that this was a higher story than I’d imagined. I couldn’t stop thinking about the first scene from Spirited Away. A better version of me would have done a pencil dive into the ivy-clad abyss.

Farther south, I rejoined the path as it sank back into the colorful houses and narrow squares.

The dawn train to Aviemore, then out past Loch an Eilein to the boggy trails northwest of Ben Macdui and the Caingorm plateau.

After a night on the moors, we walked through the Ryvoan Pass in light rain, the hills thick with fog—everything heavy and silent and serene. We took shelter in a bothy at the edge of Abernethy Forest and listened as the trails were washed away, driving us back to the Pine Marten Bar and an early return to Marchmont the following morning.

We concluded a week on the west coast with one night on Arran—a shakedown cruise for Wheaton’s new pack before plunging into the Cairngorms the following weekend. After missing the first ferry to Brodick, we made a late start into the palms and rhododendrons of the landscaped estates.

We came easily to Goatfell along the northern ridgeline, joined briefly at the peak by two seagulls that wheeled and played above the surrounding glens.

There was a vague plan of following the arete north, dropping onto The Saddle, and then summiting two smaller peaks to make camp by a series of waterfalls in North Sannox. With each tor that we faced past North Goatfell, however, we realized the difficulty of the narrow path we’d chosen.

At some point, we found ourselves hauling Luxi up sheer granite by a length of cheap rope tied around her waist. We’d take turns as sherpas, carrying the packs ahead and then falling back to guide her down channels of scree and along half-visible paths over the 800-meter drop to the glen’s floor of ice and heather. At the worst moments, you’d look down despairingly only to be mocked by the footprints of sneakers and small dogs—traces of the light, old Scots skittering along the same arete that morning with ease.

Scouting farther down the ridge, I startled a Glaswegian photographer balanced on an outcropping beneath the next peak, Cìr Mhòr. James and his girlfriend had been stuck there for two days and hadn’t yet found a path up. Their own first attempt of The Saddle had been cut short a year prior when ice and a named storm forced them to ground on the shoulder of Goatfell. He directed us down past his tent, where his girlfriend pored over an OS map for routes to the large cave visible on the Corbett’s side, and then right at the crossroads, dropping into Glen Sannox to make camp.

Despite the Scots’ assurances, the descent seemed more treacherous than the ridge. After a false start onto scree, we doubled back and lowered ourselves into the Whin Dyke, an eroded channel coated in snowmelt, which formed thin sheets of moss as it trickled down into the glen.

At 8:45, we stepped onto flat ground in Glen Sannox and plunged our heads into a broad, ardent stream that ran down from Cìr Mhòr to the sea. Wheaton urged us on, promising a treeline two miles ahead where he could string up his new ENO hammock system. When we reached the trees, however, they proved useless: scrubby and misshapen, emerging haphazardly from black pools set down amidst the ruins of some early agrarian lifestyle.

It was past ten now but the light went slowly. Wheaton’s new paraffin hurricane lamp, a Feurhand “Baby Special” in fire-truck red, warmed the camp as the peaks that had bested us fell into deeper blues on the horizon. We cooked an immensely satisfying meal on the Svea: mugs of stream water, a rich beef stew, and spiced Irish Brambrack with slices of røgbrød and smoked cheddar.

At dawn, it became evident that we had slept just beside a golf course. I removed a shard of granite lodged deep in my palm and broke camp, walking down to the coast and Brodick’s ferry station, where the long journey to Edinburgh would begin.

We walked three miles up the coast to Seamill, passing through a series of miniaturized pastel developments beneath the gorse-covered hills.

We found Chinese food in West Kilbride and carried it out into the suburbs, looking for access to the hill that had loomed above us all afternoon. A low stretch of razor wire and a stile let out onto a pasture and then up into a narrow path through the gorse.

We emerged on a high plain of untouched grass, largely flat and entirely silent, with a gentle dell looking out over the sea.