There are certain inevitabilities on the the road to one’s destination. Inevitabilities that travelers would often rather skip, but whose existence is the barrier between the Things that Everyone Does and the The Things a Few of Us Do. They’re the tiny little inconveniences that add up to a whole that stop so many in their tracks. These discomforts that stand in the way of our destinations - the long, endless flights, the dry recycled air, the dragging of suitcases, the crying baby on a 15 hour flight, the pat downs, and the endless days - they are the rite of passage into life on the road. They exhaust the traveler. They frighten the vacationer. And, eventually, like all rites of passage, they bring us to a new place at the end. It’s in the midst of this in-between place, the place between who we are and who we will become, that, if we’re lucky enough and we’re passing through with our eyes open, we can find perfect little infinities.  

On this trip, at the end of a crooked, dry sleep, I awoke to this one: a perfect soundless bed of clouds, lying over an endless sea, somewhere between the old continent that we’d left behind and the new one we were approaching. An endless ripple of perfect violets and blues melting into an endless horizon. ​

This is the reward for the traveler: an effortless, impossible beauty in the midst of a series of inevitabilities; that little infinity that appears out of nowhere that reminds us of the spectacular beauty that surrounds us. And the ability of every place, even the old and familiar, to feel new again. 

I spent much of yesterday in a haze.  

By 6am, I was up and had heard the news of the loss of Anthony Bourdain to suicide.  I was immediately heartbroken and continue to be so.  

I recently wrote about the untimely death of Kate Spade, the way it was making me feel and the way the loss seemed to penetrate the popular culture.  The way losing Kate Spade felt, at least to me, was like a loss of Someone Who Meant Something to Society.  She was a representation of a generation and a kind of icon for a woman in a certain time and a certain place. 

But losing Anthony Bourdain has felt like losing a friend. 

It's hard to put into words the way I felt about Anthony Bourdain.  I should probably say from the start, that I called him Tony, as all of his friends did.  I'm not the sort to have illusions about celebrities; I've seen the business and know that they are really just people, and no, they in fact, do not have any clue who you are.  But somehow, Tony seemed to seep into my personal culture in a way that I have trouble even describing now.  

Maybe it was because it felt like he was one of us.  

The epitaphs of the past days have often focused on Tony the Chef, but I first knew him as Tony the Traveler. He once said that when he achieved fame unexpectedly, that he had a lot of choices about what to do next. He figured that the best job would be to travel the world, so he began making a travel television series, called "Cooks Tour".  Later, he would move to travel channel and begin work on "No Reservations" - a period that I believe was his best work. Most recently, it was "Parts Unknown".

Now a food show, the beginning years were all travel.  Travel in a way that was so tangibly different than anything else that was on television.  Television created by a Traveler (he would hate that description), and told in a way that felt real and honest and true.  Tony was one of us.  He was one of those people who was going out into the world and not giving a f@ck about what hotel he was staying at, or how luxurious the pool was, or how he could blow his money shopping all day at the souvenir shops. He went to the places that were hard, to know how people really lived, and what's more, to understand them.  Food was always there, and later it would become the center of his show.  But in the beginning it was just telling people's stories.  

That's really who Tony was.  A storyteller.  A writer.

A lover of underground rock music and Irish poets, of filmaking and food. He showed us how to love life, and how to hate it.  He showed us that the ugly, harsh and disgusting parts of the human experience could be valuable, meaningful and, often, delicious. He wasn't afraid of reality. He wasn't afraid of pain. 

I've had so many thoughts in the last day about Tony.  I first thought about his daughter, Ariane, and his ex-wife Ottavia who he married after being caught in the middle of a war in Lebanon.  I thought about Eric Ripert, his best friend and the one who he cheekily nicknamed "The Ripper". I thought about his girlfriend, Asia Argento, and how they had seemed so in love, but also so off-balance in a recent episode of the show.