Speedy Boarding with Holly Starley

The Northern Lights, cloche hats and Chapstick on Holly Starley's Rolling Desk

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Sep 26, 2024

Holly showing her typical enthusiasm for meeting people on a square in Chiquiza, Colombia.

Welcome back to Speedy Boarding, a bi-weekly series on Tom Fish Is Away that is great news for those of you who are getting sick of me. That’s because it’s a series where I ask some of my favourite writers on Substack eight quick-ish questions about travel. So, the vast majority of the words you’re about to read weren’t written by me but by someone else.

This week the questions are being answered by

Holly Starley

. Holly writes

Holly Starley's Rolling Desk

, the travel zine from a nomad who takes you with her. She currently calls a van called Ruby home. And she’s had periods of roaming by foot or bus or bike.

She tells stories from those travels and from a new, recent “trek” through a medical diagnosis. She focuses on connections between creatures, human and otherwise, and the planet. She has a monthly Ask&Give feature, where she or other writers tell of times when people, often strangers, show up for each other. She is available for pitches if you have a story that might fit! As an editor for 20 years, she loves helping writers find the joy of revision and shaping their own work and will launch a new project focused on that next month.

Okay, let’s get to the questions.

Where is the best place you’ve ever been and why?

Is it just me or does this question (not to mention the delicious answers of fellow travellers) turn your mind into one of those old-fashioned viewfinders? What I mean is I don’t have a best. Or, rather, I have many. Today, flipping through stereoscopic images, I keep returning to two. Let me show you the first one.

Yes, you’ve clicked the shutter. Let your eyes adjust.

See that clutch of trees in the corner, bare branches just a shade darker than night stretching to the sky. Look closer. Do you see them now—the vans, two rectangles tucked down among the trunks, noses nearly brushing to form the tip of a triangle whose base is forest? One’s the colour of rubies, the taller one of silver pearls. Both are lit from within by a yolky glow so faint you marvel that you’ve seen it and then that you didn’t see it right away once you know it’s there.

Now back to the centre of the frame. It’s not just an empty slate road next to an obsidian field on a moonless night. What’s this? Two tiny clouds hang in the air. Breath transformed. Now you see the figures, bouncing foot to foot, gloved hands clutching each other’s arms, eyes wide.

What’s that next to the taller figure? Go ahead, swoop down closer. You’ll see a three-legged stick with a square head, its single eye pointing skyward. And those gossamer puffs, they’re not just breath but gasps of delight and awe.

We (the taller figure, his tripod and camera, and I) were there for sky. Or, rather, for sky become liquid—magenta rivers and turquoise brooks and waves of lime. Sky dancing for earth.

There, close enough to the Arctic Circle to have floated it as our next possible destination, fingers numb even clutching packets of iron powder and activated carbon, we stood, looking up. We’d found this spot following forecasts for the KP index (or planet index, from the German “Planetarische Kennziffer”). An hour past the 2 am forecast for peak geomagnetic activity in the atmosphere, we’d seen only hints of distant green as we passed a thermos of toddy between us. Still, our laughter had filled the night sky.

We were about to call it quits for the night when I saw it. I was facing it, and he was facing me. So when it passed me just over our heads, and I gasped and pointed, it lit his face just in time for him to do a full 360 and see it disappear behind me. We could only clutch each other’s arms and gape.

I would learn much later (editing a manuscript) that tiny bursts of Northern Lights viewed low in the atmosphere are rare but not unheard of. (According to the research of the author I was working with, these small displays are almost always seen only by sailors lost at sea.) In that moment, I felt anything but lost. All I knew was it was wild and right that all the paths that needed to had bent just so, so that I and this beautiful man from Tehran (a rare treat of a travel partner for me) had collided here—in this land of fat marmots and silver foxes and galumphing moose, of breaching whales and trumpeting sea lions, of roads like watercolour and fields of soft tundra like hiking across a patchwork quilt of lime, scarlet, and saffron, of massive ice fields like trekking an alien planet. All I knew was it made sense that a sprite made of Aurora Borealis would swoop down to see us.

Or maybe it was you.

(But what was the place? you want to know. A lonely road just north of Fairbanks, Alaska. And we did catch the lights in full display on two other occasions.)

The Northern Lights captured a few nights after this story. Photo by Abbas Hooshmand.

Where is the place you most want to visit?

Please don’t think me flippant if I say wherever I haven’t gone. It’s the truest answer. I have even more yes-please-I’ll-go-there spots than I do bests. Ah, the plight of a Libra who feels she was born to wander.

I long to listen to conversations passed on tongues like mine speaking tongues I know only a smattering of phrases in. I long to follow my nose through markets and bazaars at once like places everywhere we humans gather and entirely their own. I long to connect. I long to find out what I’m wrong about and what this world has to offer that I never knew existed. These longings have existed in me for as long as I’ve been longing.

For a friend’s passing last month, I wrote in his eulogy how the brain doesn’t know the difference when it comes to sand between the toes and ocean spray in your mind’s imagination. I’m grateful for that and for travel writing and posts like those in Speedy Boarding. For I certainly won’t make it in person to all the places I long to go.

Who's your dream travel companion?

In some ways, the obvious answer is me. A great deal of my traveling has been solo. And I’m quite a delight on the road—adaptable, curious, at ease with most people and situations, up for a spontaneous adventure, a bit of a foodie but also down for a hot dog roasted over a fire. The more annoying traits—can be ridiculously indecisive; often refuses to plan, like, anything; gets suddenly and unexpectedly shy from time to time, withdrawing and lost until a nap or a quiet, empty space can be found—could use a balancer at times.

Traveling solo wasn’t always the plan. In my late twenties, I had a marriage in my wake. Though we’d set each other free to pursue the very different lives we desired, mine one of seeing the world, I was still waiting to start. I’d moved from West Virginia to Seattle. And all while hawking pepper jelly at Pike’s Place Market and drinking with the fish throwers and jewellery slingers of an evening and jotting bad poetry in notebooks less often than I ought to have, I looked for a travel companion. I wanted a partner with a twin longing—someone to share the decision-making and course-changing-cuz-shit-went-sideways and oooing-and-aaaahing-cuz-wherever-topsy-turvy-sent-us-ended-up-spectacular-somehow-anyway.

And then, shortly after my thirtieth birthday, my housemate, tired of my longing, said, “You know you can go on your own.” I’d been raised in a “traditional” family. The women of my youth did not travel on their own. Still, the moment she said it, I realized it was absolutely true. After all, neither did the women of my youth leave their religion or their marriages. Thus began a seven-month trek up the US East Coast by foot (and bus and train) (I’m serializing a memoir about it here). Many a solo trek has followed.

I’ll add this. I’m nothing if not yes/and. So I’ve not written off that dream long-term traveling partner entirely. I’ve met couples who fit the mold. And there are moments when, watching them, my heart nearly breaks with desire for what they have. And I’m endlessly glad of the space I’ve had to learn how to fall in love with my own rhythms and meet my own needs and, slowly but surely, myself.

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Great news! I'm going to buy you a hat. The catch is that you have to wear this hat on every future travel trip at all times. What kind of hat would you like?

Oh my goodness, you must know by now I’ll have great difficulty deciding—that I want all the hats.

Just teasing. Thank you so much. Please get me a lightweight cloche hat in taupe, with a hint of 1920s, just enough of an asymmetrical brim to shade my eyes and tall enough to tuck my hair up inside, a wide flower that won’t be ruined by being folded into packs. Either that or a vintage cloche in slate with earflaps and a tiny felt petal.

Where is the place you never want to go back to?

My 20s.

You've been given a million pounds to live your best life in one destination for a year. The problem is - you're trapped there and can't leave for the year. Where would you go?

Remember how I told you two places were vying for best today? I want to take you to the second one now. It’s in the Ecuadorian Amazon outside a town called Baños de Agua Santa. How I got there, I couldn’t begin to tell you. So it’ll work well if we zoom down again. This time, the canopy is thick and green and humming; some half of all plant species and a quarter of insects call this canopy home, so eyes peeled on the way down.

See the two figures standing side by side in a chunk of partially cleared dense vegetation. The one with the machete in her hands is me. The older woman with dancing eyes is holding her arm out like that to demonstrate how, with one muscled sweep of the machete come scythe, I was to fell the next swath of thicket. Forming a half circle behind us, a younger woman, three young men, and an older man, tall and thin like a stick with a long, thin beard, are bent with glee and encouraging me to give it another go.

I do know that I arrived by truck. It’s just that each turn on the road—a thin line of black earth cutting through trees that reached more than a hundred feet into the sky—appeared as if summoned and looked the same to me. I’d come with the four young onlookers for a visit to I can’t remember whose mom. We’d met on the streets of Baños, where they were busking. Their music would go hauntingly mesmerizing to a joyful dance. Between them, they played a pan flute, a guitar, un clave (“the key,” two sticks played together to make this bright, resonant rhythm that seduces your hips want to swing), and a bomba drum. I’d spent the next few days moving from spot to spot with them, writing as they played and then going for drinks and a miniature version of billiards at quitting time.

You won’t see it, so well has it been built into the landscape, until we walk toward the sound of rushing water. But the home of the dancing eyes woman and her once-North American husband, built by hand, is not far away on a small hill overlooking the river. It’s wide and spacious, mostly covered deck with a high slanted roof held up by thick pillars. In one of these open rooms, half a dozen hammocks are strung beneath the pillars, perfect for listening to the fall of rain after sharing yucca, rice, and fresh fish wrapped in leaves we’d harvested along the way here, all cooked over a stone fire in the open-air kitchen

Why have I taken you here? I’ll live here for the year, splitting my time between rainforest and Baños. I’ll buy my own truck and come to know the turns through the jungle by heart. I’ll grow my arms into powerful tool, scything and helping to build the guest house the clearing’s meant for. In Baños, I’ll soak in the hot pools the town (Baths of Holy Water) is named for. I’ll write and research and meet people who come from all over the world for the baths. Even after the truck and building material, the food and cafecitos, and the hostel fees, I’ll still have a majority of the million pounds. At year’s end, I’ll take off on my world tour, exploring spots I’ve plotted out and visiting friends I’ve met in the cafés.

Either that, or I’ll take Adam Nathan’s foot trek (which I must mention, as it was probably part inspiration for this answer).

How do you decide where to visit next?

I tumbleweed. At least that’s how I’d have answered this question for a long time. When you want to go everywhere, isn’t it sort of lovely to go where the wind blows? To stick your nose into the air, have a sniff, and pursue whatever smell makes your belly hunger for more?

For the first three years of life in Ruby the van, I was still more or less following this rather romanticized view of roaming. Seasons had much to say about my directions. I’d find my way south when leaves started changing. Rising temps on the desert floor would nudge me north and to higher ground.

These days, I’m trying on a more deliberate way of being in many areas of my life, travel just one of them. How I decide where to visit, to nomad next, is very much evolving. That’s part of what I write about over on the Rolling Desk.

Holly feeling contemplative at Denali National Park, Alaska, USA. A moose appeared just across the way a few minutes later.

And finally, what's the one thing you never leave home without when travelling?

Is there one thing? I don’t think so. (A recent diagnosis means that’ll have to change, as a certain med will need to be with me. But that’s a story for a different space.)

Here, I’ll tell you two things. One, my brother calls Ruby the van my giant purse. So, I may have gotten a bit used to having everything with me.

Two, packing for a trip to the Bolivian Altiplano with a group doing volunteer dental work in a small village, I was told I had room for one “extra” personal item. I chose Chapstick, peppermint. I’ve switched to vanilla since. But Chapstick. That’s nearly always with me.

Speedy Boarding with Holly Starley

The Northern Lights, cloche hats and Chapstick on Holly Starley's Rolling Desk

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