I was camping with a friend in the Canadian Rockies, back in 1995, beside Berg Lake, at the foot of Mount Robson. One day, we decided to hike from base camp up to the spot where Robson Glacier reaches it lowest point and melts into the snow field. As we walked up the valley toward the foot of the glacier, the rock walls on either side of us seemed to become more and more imposing, growing higher, looming bigger and bigger, the subtle color in the rock coming into sharper focus, the quiet becoming ever more quiet with every step we took. We could hear the hum of the glacier moving all the time, maybe we even felt the rumbling through the soles of our boots, and there was the constant, though intermittent, thunder of avalanches on the higher slopes of Mount Robson. It was a generally clear day, with blue sky and strong sun, although big fluffy white clouds were floating through the sky, but with enough space between them so as not to obscure the sunshine for more than several moments at a time.
   We were probably within 500 yards of the glacier when I had to stop and sit down beside the trail. My friend kept on, his goal being to reach the top of the narrow valley and touch the glacier itself, as though it was a trophy to be collected upon completing the hike. I simply could not continue. I was in awe, in shock, actually. My senses, indeed, my soul, could not take in any more of such beauty. I felt that I might burst if I continued to collect any more of this wild landscape without taking the time to absorb it, to respect it, really. I sat there on the rock, shaking, nearly in tears, knowing that I was seeing god and understanding, not intellectually but viscerally, what wilderness is. I knew, not in a metaphoric way but with certainty, that this place was real, and that the city, and the life, I'd left behind were not.

    When the Blizzard of 2010 shut down London’s Heathrow Airport during the Christmas rush, the resulting criticism caused the executive who runs the place to forego his annual bonus. But that storm has passed, and for frequent fliers who want to learn more about what goes on behind the scenes at Terminal 5, one of Europe’s biggest passenger terminals, a recent paperback from Vintage Books is just the ticket.
   The arrival any book by Alain de Botton is welcome in my library, so I was pleased to find A Week at the Airport shortly after the holidays. De Botton, the bestselling author of How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Architecture of Happiness, was an inspired choice as Heathrow's writer-in-residence. He’s an elegant stylist and an original thinker, with a particular knack for interpreting the mundane predicaments of modern life in ways that illuminate their underlying meanings and their importance to the individual. One suspects, in fact, that he’s describing his own works when he tells a bookseller at the airport, “I was looking for the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never before really understood; those that convey the secret, everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange.”
   A Week at the Airport is illustrated with a series of subtle, yet revealing, color photos by Richard Baker. Together, the writer and photographer expose both the public face of T5, which cost $7.6 billion and took nearly six years to build, and it’s backstage geography.

     In the north of Scotland in June there is enough light to play golf until 10:30 at night. One evening at about that time I was walking off the course at Forres Golf Club with two good friends, looking for the path through the woods that would take us back to Newbold House, when I noticed a ball on the edge of the fairway. “Wait a minute,” I said, “let me hit this ball.” I teed it up and pulled out my driver. Now driving, as my friends know well, is my nemesis, the glaring weakness in an otherwise respectable game. But I took a free swing at the ball and it shot off the clubface like a rocket, rising gradually into the gathering darkness, holding an impossibly straight line before disappearing over a hilltop about 230 yards away. Here I had been playing with Vin and Jerry every night for a week and they’d never seen me hit a driver remotely as well. I heard one of them say “Wow,” and I couldn’t help but laugh at the irony of the driver finally working now that our week was over. 
    “Let me hit one,” said Vin, as he bent to put a tee into the turf. Vin’s a good player, so it was no surprise to see him hit a good shot, but it stunned the three of us to watch his ball follow precisely the same flight pattern as mine. Now Jerry had to hit a ball, not due to any macho, competitive impulse, but to satisfy our shared curiosity, unspoken yet unmistakable, as to where his ball might go. Moments later, as we watched Jerry’s ball somehow mimic the exact direction, trajectory and distance of those Vin and I had hit, the three of us exchanged high-fives and shared a deep laugh. It was a moment of pure joy, of reveling in the beauty of a perfect golf shot executed in triplicate, and of wonder at the mystery of coincidence.
     Mystery is, in fact, what brought the three of us to Scotland, and it’s what keeps bringing me back. I have known players who think the magic of golf is external, to be found hidden somewhere on the links, like a leprechaun under a rock. But I learned at Fairway To Heaven that the magic is internal. A player with an open mind and an open heart will gain innumerable insights into his true nature through golf, and in that way he is given the opportunity to change. That is the magic, the mystery, and the beauty of the game. 

    I was about halfway up the cliff when the fear stopped me cold. I had been doing just fine until I reached this overhang. My right foot was on the edge of a wide crack in the rock; my left foot was lower, resting on a tiny nodule of stone; my hands were flat against the granite wall. Up to this point handholds and footholds had been plentiful and I’d been climbing fairly quickly, thinking fast, letting momentum take me from one move into the next. But now, about 50 feet up from the base of the cliff, I was stuck. I stood there looking for my next move and saw nothing within reach.
     Craig, the Outward Bound instructor down there on the ground, couldn’t know precisely what I was seeing; he couldn’t know on which small bumps in the rock my eyes fell, but he was familiar with the shelf that was blocking my path and the routes across it. He also knew something I didn’t: he knew the nature of the decision I was going to have to make to finish this climb.
     The shelf was several feet above my head; it stuck out of the rock like a skewed mantelpiece, wider on the left, protruding further from the cliff-face on that side. I’d have to cover less distance to get over the top if I chose the right side, but I saw nothing above the shelf except smooth rock, nothing to grab hold of, nothing to keep me up there. I might be able to push myself over the right side from where I stood, but then I’d be scratching frantically for handholds before falling backward into space. (I could see myself falling when I looked up there.) If I went to the left, the initial effort would have to be greater, but I could see potential handholds above the shelf on that side; if I could get onto the top of it, I might be able to stand there for a moment and grab something.