The Compleat Atlas of the Proprietor

— Pearl Harbor · O’ahu · United States —

The proprietor stood on the deck of the Missouri and considered the past. The Arizona still holds her crew, and an oil sheen that has been rising, slowly, since 1941.

— Yokosuka · Kanagawa · Japan —

Port of call. Headquarters of the U.S. Seventh Fleet since 1945, occupying basins first dredged for the Tokugawa shogunate.

— Tokyo · Japan —

Briefly, on the books. An unsanctioned twenty-four hours in Roppongi off them. Of which two, regrettably, were spent on a train heading the wrong direction — not, as intended, back to “the Honch.”

— Mount Fuji · Honshū · Japan —

3,776 meters of volcanic decorum, ascended on foot. OI-01 Division severely sunburned. Counted among the three holy mountains by the Shingon and Tendai schools. Andesitic ash over basaltic flows. The summit takes the sun before the rest of the country — including, that day, the Division.

— Saipan · Northern Mariana Islands —

Small. Historically loud. The cliffs at Marpi, in 1944, were the Japanese garrison’s last instruction. Sixty years on, the proprietor’s ship ran aground here in 30-foot seas with 30 feet of water beneath the sonar dome — and limped back to Japan at 7 knots for repairs. The proprietor was subsequently flown home to process out of active duty at SEPS San Diego. Last underway, in retrospect.

— Guam · United States —

Same. The Chamorro latte stones still standing — coral-limestone pillars and capstones, predating Magellan by some five centuries.

— Vladivostok · Primorsky Krai · Russia —

Terminus of the Trans-Siberian, viewed from the eastern shore of the Cold War’s long shadow. The Pacific Fleet still bases here. So does the fog.

— Sydney → Brisbane · Australia —

By coach. Three days along the eastern shelf, in a vehicle without distinction.

— Moreton Island · Queensland · Australia —

Where dolphins kept appointments. The third-largest sand island on the planet, comprised almost entirely of decomposed quartz.

— The Outback · Australia —

(Activities, unspecified. Memory, here, is a watercolor.) Ferruginous Pleistocene soils — the iron oxide gives the continent its color.

— Great Barrier Reef · Queensland · Australia —

Submerged. 2,300 kilometers of coral, the largest living structure on the planet, visible from low orbit.

— Auckland → Rotorua · New Zealand —

The latter smelling distinctly of the tria prima — sulfur, mercury, salt, the three primes of the alchemists. The town runs on geothermal heat to this day.

— Tijuana · Baja California · Mexico —

Tacos Fitos — best birria dorado in town. Francisco Javier Mina 1513, Zona Río, across from the Mercado Hidalgo. Two items on the menu (birria, tripa), one method — the corn tortilla crisped on the comal, dipped in the birria broth, the beef ladled in. Open at 5:30 AM, closed when the birria runs out (generally before 1:00 PM).

— Rosarito · Baja California · Mexico —

The proprietor’s grandmother kept a trailer at Rene’s, here, in his childhood — the bar, restaurant, motel, and twin trailer parks founded by the Ortiz family in 1923 and held in continuous operation for ninety-one years.

— Ensenada · Baja California · Mexico —

Where the cold California Current meets the warm Sea of Cortéz and the wine country begins.

— Valle de Guadalupe · Baja California · Mexico —

The proprietor, sommelier-credentialed, paying his respects to a wine country in adolescence. Soils: decomposed granite over volcanic clay, alluvial fans of the Sierra de Juárez. Mediterranean climate, cool maritime fog. The Misión Vines remain the oldest in the Americas.

— Cabo San Lucas · Baja California Sur · Mexico —

Land’s End. The Pacific meets the Sea of Cortéz at the granitic arches. Port call with the proprietor’s father, by yacht. A man with a peg leg, ashore — latitude 22, more or less.

— La Paz · Baja California Sur · Mexico —

The proprietor’s first port in Mexico — at two weeks of age, by yacht, his father at the helm. Then most summers thereafter, as a small child, by the same route. And once more, at fourteen, on a single descent: (a) permitted to ride a whale shark and (b) circled at depth by several hundred scalloped hammerheads, arranged in the unhurried geometry of fish that have nowhere particular to be.

— Puerto Vallarta · Jalisco · Mexico —

Navy port of call.

— Mazatlán · Sinaloa · Mexico —

Navy port of call.

— Nosara · Guanacaste · Costa Rica —

Pacific coast of the Nicoya Peninsula. Dry tropical forest, surf-break country, and one of five Blue Zones on the planet — regions of documented exceptional longevity. Soils: ophiolitic — accreted from ancient ocean crust, Costa Rica’s oldest geological province. Medicine work undertaken in ceremony, with a shaman, in a maloca in the forest.

— Sacred Valley · Cusco · Peru —

Where the stones remember things the stones are not telling. Andesite walls cut without mortar, joinery the Spanish could not replicate. Quechua still spoken. The apus — the mountain spirits — still observed. Medicine work undertaken with a curandero in the high valley.

— Dublin · Ireland —

Carboniferous limestone bedrock under the Liffey. The bog turf still rising as fuel.

— Amsterdam · North Holland · Netherlands —

Where the proprietor visited the Nautical Museum and consulted the archives for historic van Horns, finding several. The city itself stands on twenty-meter wooden piles driven into Pleistocene clay.

— Brussels · Belgium —

Crossroads of Latin and Germanic Europe. The frites are not French.

— Lyon · Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes · France —

Confluence of the Rhône and the Saône. Gastronomic capital by general agreement — the bouchon, the mère, the quenelle, the silk.

— Geneva · Switzerland —

On the lake, at the foot of the Jura. The watch trade, the Reformation, a certain banking discretion.

— Venice · Veneto · Italy —

Built on alder pilings driven into lagoon mud, settling at a measurable rate. The Adriatic is patient.

— Sicily · Italy —

Etna still erupting; the soil black with ash, the wine made on it darker still. Soils: volcanic tephra over Mesozoic limestone — the inheritance of the Greek colonists, the Phoenicians before them, the Sicels before them.

— Madrid · Spain —

On the Castilian meseta — 650 meters above the sea, a continental climate that is its own thesis.

— Costa Brava · Catalonia · Spain —

Scuba dived among the slow, dignified collapse of medieval fortifications into the Mediterranean. The coast is granitic, weathered into coves the Romans named.

— San Sebastián · Basque Country · Spain —

Bay of La Concha. Pintxos served on bread; the highest concentration of Michelin stars per capita in the world.

— Capbreton · Landes · France —

On the edge of the Landes pine forest — the largest planted forest in Europe, sown under Napoleon III to fix the dunes. Atlantic surf; sable fin beneath.

— Dax · Landes · France —

Oldest thermal spa town in Gaul. The Fontaine Chaude has run uninterrupted at 64°C since the Tarbelli Celts; Livia, the Emperor Augustus’s wife, took the waters here. Waystation on the Camino.

— Bordeaux · Nouvelle-Aquitaine · France —

Soils: Günzian gravels on the Left Bank, clay-limestone on the Right. The Gironde is the line that decides the wine.

— Paris · Île-de-France · France —

(the second time, which is always different from the first) Sat outside the Louvre. Sat outside Notre Dame. Looked for Jim Morrison’s grave at Père Lachaise.

— Hawaii · United States —

Five active volcanoes; the youngest island still being made, eastward of the chain, beneath the sea. Pele, by tradition, is in residence at Halema‘uma‘u.

— North American West Coast · United States & Canada —

Traversed top to bottom, in segments, over years. The Pacific Plate sliding north against the continent at three centimeters a year, give or take.

— Victoria · British Columbia · Canada —

A small, very polite city, arranged on a harbor. Quartz-rich Vancouver Island granite under the gardens.