Dorothy, Alberta,
Canada

It was the landscape that finally drew the tears from me, the slow grey river, the sleeping hills. I imagined him in the canoe with a T-shirt wrapped around his head, his thin and sunbaked body, his acne nearly cleared. I almost stopped at East Coulee - what difference would it make, same water. But I followed the river downstream, let the current carry my thoughts, the hills all round contain them.

I once had a little brother young enough to be my son. He guarded our secrets with his pain. How could we do this or that? What kind of family was he born to? He was killed crossing the street in front of my home, hit by a kid driving a racy Trans Am. My brother was already bruised and sore from some beating the night before, outside a pizza place, for reasons we never learned. I remember him all gangly like a loose and matted rag doll, struck one last time to land arms and legs at odd angles. Every bone broken. My sister kept him in her freezer for a year, cremated, triple-bagged, ash and flecks of bone.

I unwrapped the twist-ties one by one and remembered how he looked paddling that red canoe under the yellow bridge. He never stopped talking about the trip - and said, I want to come here when I die. So I dumped his ashes over the guard rail and he trailed a slow grey plume down to the river, became a dark stain that spread on the current, dark as the storm clouds curling up the valley.

I walked slowly to the car, crinkling each bag tight to fit in my pocket. But the final bag contained a bit of him trapped inside the plastic. I stopped at the side of the road and poured him in my hand, squeezed him tight, then flung him in the air. Still, there remained some left, a grey smudge on my palm, a tiny chip of bone. I rolled the bone between my fingers and placed it on my tongue. I raised my face to the gathering sky and swallowed my little brother down.

Colchester, England

He sat on a wooden bench below the Roman fortress and I sat facing him, across the rectangular pond. He appeared a sad man: with a nest of dirty grey hair, dressed in a dark blue sports jacket and tan coloured pants. Twenty or so pounds overweight, yet still his clothes hung like unmade bedding. He was reading a tourist guide of some sort, theatres or museums.

It was an uncommonly warm October day, trees and shrubs were bright with colour. Squirrels and swallows picked at crevices between the stone slabs set all around the pool. One swallow landed on a lily pad and jabbed quick at the water. I wondered what view the goldfish had. A magpie goose stepped past.

I watched a squirrel climb the leg of the man's bench. It scooted suddenly across the seat and stood up close beside him. He held out an empty hand, but the squirrel scampered down from the bench.

A clutch of tourists paraded through our quiet space: a mother with two small children, accompanied by a tall, blonde young man. The family posed on the empty bench at the head of the pond while the young man took the photograph, holding the camera vertically, to include a view of the fortress. It was an awkward shot. They left like hens clucking in a guttural tongue.

The crumpled man on the bench had watched their every move, he seemed very nervous and never once looked my way. He went away suddenly, hugging his travel bag tight - and left me alone with the goldfish at that pond below the Roman fortress. In that instant, shorter than two breaths, I really did feel like a traveller in some faraway land.

Wivenhoe, England

He arrived in Wivenhoe one day chugging up the River Colne on his tramp barge, a mass of steel somehow held together. When the tide receded and left his hull lopsided in the mud, it seemed a wonder the thing would ever float again. Yet smoke and the smell of food cooking, laundry hung on a rope strung from one piece of junk to another, his weather-browned face and lean body moving lively across the deck - all this, and the mysterious quarters imagined below, made me realize one lifetime would never be enough.

Istanbul, Turkiye

A horn sounded from the sea as another cargo ship entered the Bosphorus. There was the phutt-phutts of a hundred trawlers and the chatter of men casting lines along the sea wall, an argument down in the street and someone hawking sesame rolls. Car horns bleated like sheep and the police ordered make way, make way. Then came the call to prayer - just another noise at first, another insistence.

No one in sight dropped to their knees, carpet dealers still intercepted the tramp of tourists. In the shoe district leather laden dollies were still hauled up and down crumbling streets. Traffic snaked along like some creature broke apart. The call to prayer continued through the heavy diesel air, thick with grime and the barking of vendors.

The call echoed through narrow streets where Ottoman houses huddled in ruins, windows gaping darker than the soot blackened walls. Stone battlements wound down to the sea where gypsies lit pots of fire and danced with their children. Sidewalks recently repaired with thin granite slabs lay already broken over the ancient mud. Istanbul barely withstands the weight of it's centuries. Nothing new matters long.

The call to prayer ended. While the faithful streamed into bath houses next to the Grand Bazaar - washed their hands and arms, feet and ankles, head and neck - a few shopkeepers shuffled their feet, a curtain closed, and one man out of a hundred along the sea wall took the time to kneel on a prayer rug.

Pamukkale, Turkiye

A flock of sheep graze through the ruined necropolis, followed by a shepherd boy who stops every so often to stand atop some tumbled chunk of marble, then continues down the hillside. Their slow pace to the treeless plain seems a solemn procession, as if the ancient stones themselves are moving.

I climb the hill to the temple, numbered arches rebuilt by lovers of history. The tombs all round were cast open long ago, looted by robbers. And who can blame them? After a thousand years, an earthquake or two, who else should claim the riches? There are always hungry mouths to feed. A steady stream of tourists tramp to and from the amphitheatre. People lounge in the warm waters of the pool at the Pamukkale Motel, their feet picking carefully over submerged marble ruins. This was Hierapolis, where Romans came for cures in the cascading limestone pools.

I don't see anyone else in the necropolis, its curative powers are reserved for the odd few. Open-faced tombs heave at awkward angles, the carved Roman letters obscured by lichen. Lizards cling to the sun-hot rocks, darting into crevices as I pass. Small birds flit in and out of black doorways, like tiny souls. I enter a tomb and lay on a thick stone slab, close my eyes and imagine the past, but after a few moments feel foolish.

I emerge and the bright sun startles me. I stand half-blind and try to focus on the flock of sheep among the broken stones below. But there is no movement. He picks that moment to speak: a short man with shabby brown clothes and a scraggy beard, a crooked smile and stained-yellow teeth. "Merhaba," he says, thrusting a palm full of coins at my face for inspection. "Caesar," he continues, points to one. "Cleopatra, Alexander," he picks through his collection. "Egypt," he persists.

Although I've been warned about fake coins, I am still very tempted, but say, "Non, merci," and turn to go. Stumbling on a loose stone, I grab at a bush for balance and come away with a handful of thorns. I stand sucking blood from my finger, feeling about as fake as the shabby man's coins.

Kas, Turkiye

I've come out on the balcony to dry in the sun, to sit alone with my feet up on the railing. I see the blue Mediterranean reach around the Greek island either side to the sky. There's phantom ships on the horizon, silhouettes, and three small boats in the bay. This is Kas, a town on the south coast of Turkey.

The hotel terrace has a canopy of grape vines and an unobstructed view of the sea. I sit there most nights sipping wine and watching bats flash under the stars. Every morning Gennet serves breakfast on the terrace, olives, cheese and bread, de-skinned cucumbers and sliced tomatoes. "Cay?" she asks. "Nescafe?" Her husband wants her to return to the old ways, but she's been a maid for a couple of years. She wants to learn English and work at reception. One night last week she stayed up late talking to a guest.

It's a short hike from the hotel into town. I go everyday to fetch groceries and red wine. The route leads past the barracks where, for a week now, some Iraqi refugees have huddled in the courtyard, baggage piled high against the barrack's wall, laundry flung over the barbed wire fence. Children, with no place to play, peer with moon faces through the bars of the gate.

It's snowing at home and cold. A voice inside says I should be there, that it's all wrong here: the blue sea, the sun, my hair turning blonde in November. It's the same tiny voice that never lets me be, the one that won't let me sell cars or insurance. The small voice that counsels me to look for cracks in paradise -- and there's a fault line under this hotel.

There's an American psychologist who broke her leg in Budapest, still managing an affair with the married man in room 210. She spent this morning writing in her journal about some bug with a broken wing, drowned in her coffee cup. There's a coal miner from Zongulak who tossed his engagement ring in the Black Sea and set out for three weeks of fishing. He's Gennet's moonlight friend. And let's not forget the couple from Ottawa. They spent twenty bucks sailing to the sunken city, then returned to complain about the value of our dollar. I'm not alone watching the crack widen. It should make me feel more at home.

Kas, Turkiye

Joshua watches the waves as they curl into the narrow cove below. Yesterday it was a quiet place for swimming, but last night the moon raised a storm and now the sea hurls white breakers at the pebble beach. Joshua imagines he can ride them, like a California surfer.

Down the stairs he goes and without a care wades into the water, out to his waist before the first big wave sends him spinning like a leaf. Fear clearly marks his face. He stands spitting salt water, rubbing his eyes with his fists, but doesn't cry.

The sea rolls in and out of the small cove until another big wave piles up. But Joshua sees it in time and splashes to a boulder, clings like a shipwrecked sailor. Still, the wave crests over and drags him from the rock. Afterwards, he stands at a safe distance and hollers, "bring me more, come and get me." He throws stones at the breakers and sings part of a surfing song.

I can hear the stony beach being dragged by the undercurrent, and imagine the long ages it took to pound this shoreline into shape. This is the sea of far horizons that eats the sun in the blink of an eye, the sea of a hundred sunken cities, the sea that delivered Bellerophon to tame the dread Chimaera. But Joshua doesn't know all this. He knows only that the water will embrace him, but doesn't care for him, so he pretends to be bigger and louder than the sea.

Finally, he stands shivering, a towel wrapped around his small body, and casts one last rock at the waves. He will remember it was fun, that the sea was his plaything. But he has already forgotten his one instant of fear, and will be caught by that first big wave again and again. I worry for him, already pounded into my shape.

Kas, Turkiye

Resident philosopher, dirt poor Kurd from Eastern Turkey, Olga is easy to recognize. You can spot him at a distance, long frizzy hair like a helmet gone to seed, head up and chest out, short legs propelling him as if engaged in some magnificent purpose.

He works carpet shops in season, and acts as a translator and guide. But come winter Olga drinks raki and spends his days fishing. When some notion loosens his inertia he repairs someone's boat and has a place to sleep.

I saw him one afternoon battling a wind into harbour and thought: how small he seems on the sea, how valiant his efforts to set that small rowboat right. I couldn't help but compare: his considerable struggle, to our everyday existence.