By C.S. Thompson

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Staring out a Greyhound window in the middle of the night, looking out at the lights as they float by. Glowing creatures at the bottom of an ocean trench; passing cars. The music on my headphones is the sound of outer space- vast emptiness and coldness, a sense of distance. I feel like I’m a thousand miles away from everything, and yet I’ve only just begun. I left home several hours ago, and I’ll be out here for six more weeks. This tiny seat is my home now. I’m not going anywhere; I live here.

The backpack underneath my seat contains my laptop, from which I’ll be doing my day job while I’m on the road. It also has my cell phone and a change of clothes, my toothpaste and toothbrush, my deodorant. The long bag underneath the bus has all my training equipment- my fencing mask and gambeson, my fencing gloves. Two basket-hilted singlesticks for teaching the broadsword. A few books for the road, including The Master of Go and Shibumi.

Somewhere on the far side of Hartford, Connecticut, we fly past a wide flat river with a thin row of dark trees along the bank. The sky and the water are an identical shade of metallic bluish gray, like two mirrored halves of the same sky, meeting at the edge of the horizon. It’s as if we’re flying through empty space toward a line of bare, black trees that hang suspended in mid-air. Nothing is real out here, but that doesn’t matter. You just take it the way it is.

Take me, for example. The reason I’m out here is to travel all over the country teaching swordsmanship. Technically, there is no such thing as a Wandering Swordsman, but don’t tell me that. I’m not the sort to be overly hampered by mere reality.

I’ve lived my whole life this way- not wandering, I mean, but doing things a bit differently. I’ve been doing it for such a long time that nothing else makes sense to me. People act like I’m doing something absurd, but I don’t feel like Don Quixote. It’s just that there’s no other way to get the job done.

I’m a historical fencing instructor. The style of historical fencing I practice is that of the basket-hilted Highland broadsword, or claymore. The claymore is a broad bladed cut and thrust sword of between 38-40" in length, with a cage or ‘basket’ of bars to enclose and protect the hand.

Now, you might be wondering why I do such a thing in the first place. There is no practical use for swords, after all, and the style of swordsmanship I practice died out long ago and was revived only recently. But if you’re thinking in terms of practical benefits, then I don’t have an answer for you. I do what I do because I love doing it, because it makes the act of getting up in the morning feel exciting and meaningful. I do what I do because it makes me feel more alive.

Is there a better reason to do anything?

I’m writing this sentence in a coffee shop in the strip mall next to my hotel, along a stretch of highway which has every chain store they could find a way to cram in, along with not one but two McDojos. The McDojo is what martial artists call those pseudo-karate and taekwondo places with all the trophies in the window and a new colored belt guaranteed every few months or your money back. However, it also has a place that offers Civil War relics, so I went in to have a look. They had some Confederate money, some old cavalry sabers and Knights of Columbus dress swords- and an old basket-hilted dueling schlager, the type of sword German fraternity members fight Mensur duels with.

"Is that really a Mensur schlager?" I asked the old guy behind the counter. "No," he said, "It’s a German student’s dueling sword."

Well, six of one, half a dozen of the other. I picked it up and held it in the hanging guard, trying to picture how the Germans use it in the Mensur. The goal is to cut your opponent in the cheek or forehead, because everything else is covered up by armor. You can’t flinch or try to evade your opponent’s blade or you’ll be disqualified for cowardice. One of my colleagues in the Western Martial Arts community still has the scars across his face from one of these weapons, earned during his student days in Germany. The weapon was very light and perfectly balanced, about a hundred years old if I had to guess. The old guy was glaring at me suspiciously the whole time. I put the schlager down and turned around, and found myself face-to-face with a 17^th century suit of Samurai armor, right here a stone’s throw away from a Starbucks. You can find amazing things in the most unexpected places.

Yesterday I read The Master of Go by Yasunari Kawabata. Go is the only game I really enjoy, so I’ve been meaning to read this novel for a while. It’s about the last of the old-school Go masters, and his defeat in his final game by a young player who doesn’t seem to care about the game as an art, but only about winning. The book is written in a peculiarly Japanese style, giving precise dates and times for everything that happens, along with tiny details about the weather and the environment, building up a complex psychological portrait through a series of seemingly insignificant facts. The style of the prose is simple and classical, obscuring the fact that the characterization is deeply romanticized. The Go master of the title is not portrayed as a real person, but as a Platonic Form of the ideal Go master, a stand-in for the classical Japan that was about to be destroyed by WWII. The feeling of the novel is of a subtly elegaic poem, melancholy but quietly dignified. It put me in the mood to write a haiku- strictly for the hell of it, because haiku is a very difficult art and I don’t really have the mindset for it. I’m not sure any Westerner ever has. Your personality is supposed to be just barely visible in the haiku, unlike Western poetry where the author’s personal psychology is usually on display. The haiku is basically a moment frozen in time, and any personal emotion or symbolism is just hinted at in the imagery. Like I said, I’m not really used to writing this way, so I find it hard to do well.

On Saturday I was practicing with a student of mine, in the garage at his family’s farm. As you approach the farm up a winding driveway, the white walls of the house just peek out from between the trees like one of the old Southern plantations. Then you come around the corner and see that it’s just an ordinary middle-class house. The trees in Virginia are a mix of muted greens and browns, giving the impression that they’ve all been lightly cooked somehow. We got the garage cleared out and started training, as the rain outside poured down on the gravel driveway, making a sound that was a lot like a bowl of Rice Krispies in milk. So here’s what I came up with:

Not much, perhaps. But there it is.

We trained for about four hours yesterday, going through all of the basics over and over. I taught my student the fourth broadsword form, which gave him a little trouble as there’s a strange timing right in the middle. One swordsman cuts at his opponent’s legs, which would ordinarily be answered by a counterattack to the head. In this case, however, the counter is also to the legs. The swordsmen avoid each other’s attacks by shifting the lead leg back, causing the weapons to swoop past each other through the air without clashing. He couldn’t quite get the timing right for a while, pausing for just a fraction of a second about halfway through the cut instead of pressing the timing advantage the technique is supposed to give him. By the time I was satisfied that he more or less understood the correct timing, there were fat beads of sweat standing out all over his face. We went until he could no longer think clearly enough to continue, then called it a day. (He had reached the point where he would suddenly stop in the middle of his attack with a confused expression on his face. I figured that was about enough!)

My student is willing to train hard, but he isn’t very social. After we’re done for the day he just drops me off at my hotel, to spend time by myself until we begin training again the next day. As unusual as this is, it suits my mood somehow on this trip. No doubt I’ll feel differently after I’ve been on the road for a while, but right now I feel as if this trip is inherently solitary. I spend a lot of time just staring up at the ceiling in my hotel room, but I feel as peaceful and relaxed as I ever have. Fiction, poetry, training, a few Go games on the computer, and a little room with almost nothing in it. I’ve reduced my life down to almost nothing, and I feel calm and awake.

The Master of Go was a very short novel, and I finished it yesterday. I am now reading a book called Shibumi by Trevanian; it’s the other famous novel about Go. It’s basically a Cold War espionage potboiler, filled with charming 70s sexism and racial stereotypes, but it does have some interesting passages. The main character is a freelance hit man who was raised in the house of an eminent Go master. Bizarrely enough, this Go master has the exact same name, "Otake of the Seventh Rank," as the challenger in The Master of Go, along with the same lifestyle and even the same stomach problems. I can only assume the character in this book was taken directly from the other book. He has this to say about the game: "Well, of course one must have concentration. Courage. Self-control. That goes without saying. But more important than these, one must have… I don’t know how to say it. One must be both a mathematician and a poet. As though poetry were a science; or mathematics an art."

The title (Shibumi) is a Japanese word, defined in the book as follows: "great refinement underlying commonplace appearances. It is a statement so correct that it does not have to be bold, so poignant it does not have to be pretty, so true it does not have to be real. Shibumi is understanding, rather than knowledge. Eloquent silence… it is elegant simplicity, articulate brevity… it is spiritual tranquility that is not passive; it is being without the angst of becoming. And in the personality of a man, it is… how does one say it? Authority without domination? Something like that."

Trevanian is a writer with an aristocratic attitude. This is a little ironic because what he writes is basically pulp, but his perspective on America is amusing. This is what a pulp writer with pretensions thinks of Americans:

"They are very skillful merchants, and they have a great respect for fiscal achievement. These may seem thin and tawdry virtues to you, but they are consonant with the patterns of the industrial world… They are not a race. They are not even a culture. At best, they are a mannered technology. In place of ethics, they have rules. Size functions for them as quality functions for us. What for us is honor and dishonor, for them is winning and losing."

While I don’t imagine this will win Trevanian a lot of friends, it does seem to be pretty much true. And it clarifies to a certain extent why I feel so out-of-place in mainstream American society despite my love for this country. (Although I am definitely American and wouldn’t try to claim otherwise- loud, brash, opinionated, energetic- there is nothing "Old World" about me.) I have no esteem for "skillful merchants" and see no value in fiscal achievement. I think this explains my lifelong aversion for the middle-class lifestyle. I grew up in a very poor family, but one that valued art and music and literature more than anything else. We worked hard all day to keep our homestead going, and when we had free time we talked into the wee hours of the morning about books and history. That is what seems normal to me, and that’s why the "normal" American home and lifestyle seems so utterly bizarre and alien to me. I can understand the poor, because they’re focused on survival and I’ve lived that life. And I can understand a certain conception of aristocracy, the old kind that was focused on culture. But to be focused on acquisition for it’s own sake- just the thought of that makes my skin crawl.

Trevanian goes on to say: "But we live in the age of the mediocre man. He is dull, colorless, boring- but inevitably victorious. The amoeba outlives the tiger because it divides and continues in its immortal monotony."

That’s a very good line. But the logical extension of that attitude would be the silly elitism of Ayn Rand, and I reject that as nonsense. The world doesn’t exist for the brilliant few; it exists for everyone. Yamaoka Tesshu said, "Surely it is the Way of Heaven for the strong to protect the weak." What a noble conception that is, and far more balanced than Rand or Nietzche. Not everyone can be a great artist or a great poet, of course, but everyone can touch the magic of the world and have their eyes opened by its brilliance. Mediocrity is not an inborn condition or a genetic flaw as Trevanian implies; it’s a failure of courage. All it takes to overcome it is will, the will to jump into the abyss deliberately.

In my Noctiviganti novels, Jim Rankin is always saying, "If you want knowledge, seek out darkness and silence." That line was originally a reference to a particular method of bardic meditation, in which the poet composes with the lights out and his face covered, in a locked room and in total silence. I’ve been using this method now and then for about half my life, but I’ve become particularly fond of it lately. The 17^th century writer Martin Martin was one of those who described this method, concluding that the poets who used it "furnish such a style from this dark cell as is understood by very few"- which would be a fair criticism of much of my own verse.

Be that as it may, I decided to use my hotel room as the dark cell last night, and here is the result:

You could say that all of my mystical poetry- including the poem I wrote last night, of which I am reasonably proud as a poem- amounts to little more than wishful thinking. It isn’t the poetry of mystical union, of which I have had at most just passing glimpses. It is like the poetry of someone who has seen a beautiful woman a few times in passing and had the misfortune to fall in love with her. He can write all the poems about her he wants, and they might be very moving as poems- but he neither knows her nor possesses her. That is the type of mystic I am capable of being. The only merit I can really claim for these poems is that I never allow myself to pretend to be something I’m not. I don’t pretend to mystical union when I don’t possess it. I write only unrequited love poems to God.

Most of my friends act a little confused if I mention God; some act openly uncomfortable; some debate me. A few are actually Catholic, but we don’t discuss such things, and that’s fine. I don’t consider myself a Christian. Of those who do consider themselves Christians, not one in a thousand is. For me to pretend to Christianity would be a retreat, a falling-away from the state of wrestling with these questions into a placid and pretended acceptance. I've always been an admirer of Blake rather than the more orthodox mystics:

I used to be distrustful of philosophy, seeing it as an ignoble cousin of poetry, or even its opposite. The writings of the Stoics convinced me otherwise, but a great deal of philosophical writing still strikes me that way. I’m inclined to think we shouldn’t read any philosophy unless our natural reaction to is, "That’s magnificent!"

If it can stir us so deeply and move us to become a little bit larger inside than it must be worth something. If all it does is make us think a little- how petty! If it paralyzes and keeps us from living, it would be better if it had never been written. For that reason I have no sympathy for the Atheist Existentialists, but the Christian Existentialists do move me. Soren Kierkegaard wrote Fear and Trembling in a spirit of struggle, of wrestling with God instead of blithely presuming that he was a Christian. This book treats the story of Abraham and Isaac as a kind of Christian Koan, an impossible paradox with which he wrestled for years:

"No! No one shall be forgotten who was great in this world; but everyone was great in his own way, and everyone in proportion to the greatness of what he loved… One became great by expecting the possible, another by expecting the eternal; but he who expected the impossible became greater than all…"

The bus trip from DC to my next stop was scheduled to be 34 hours, although it turned out to be 35. I got on in DC and we went to Richmond, then a few hours later transferred to another bus, which was going through Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas to Dallas. I managed to get the seat at the far back of the bus, which is the best to try to sleep on if you can get it to yourself, as it’s three seats. There was a tiny red-haired street urchin on the bus, dressed in filthy rags and a white bandana. She looked just like Raggedy Anne or perhaps a skinnier version of Little Orphan Annie, and oddly enough her name was actually Annie. She had the words TEST MEAT tattooed across her knuckles, which was apparently some sort of band reference. She was also packing a knife, clipped semi-discreetly into one of her jeans pockets. She was 18 years old, and I overheard her telling someone that she had been living on the road for four years. She still had the face of a child, but you could see the shadow of the hard woman she would be in about ten years if she stays on the road. She seems to survive by being obviously helpless and keeping her knife in reserve if that façade doesn’t work. Most people who met her on the bus seemed to eat up the Little Orphan Annie routine, though. Everyone wanted to look out for her and help her. She claimed to be an artist, but had no drawings with her. When asked by one of the other passengers to do a portrait, she said she couldn’t do portraits.

At one point, two guys who were chatting her up noticed her knife. Now, you can go to prison if they catch you with a weapon on a Greyhound, but she seemed unconcerned. When questioned by her two admirers, she gladly demonstrated various street-level knife-fighting grips, including one of the assassin grips in which the knife is kept concealed right up until the moment of attack.

"Sometimes they come at you this way," she told them, tucking the blade up tight under her arm, "That way you can’t see it till it’s right on you, see what I mean?"

They proceeded to give her a lot of stupid knife-fighting advice. I don't think she needed any of it.

On such a long bus ride, sometimes you don’t know if you’re asleep or awake. At one point we stopped and took on passengers, and I had to make room for someone to share my coveted back seat- only to wake up suddenly and find there was no such person.

Most people find long bus journeys to be very difficult, but there’s a secret to getting through them, and it’s a simple one. I think of it as "I live here now." What I mean is that you don’t think ahead; you don’t count down the hours. You have to get the idea of your destination out of your mind, because that’s what can really drive you crazy on a stretch like this one: "I only have to put up with this for sixteen more hours..."

From the moment you get on the bus, you simply think of it as your new home. There’s no better or more comfortable destination at the end of it- the bus is where you live. By refusing to indulge in anticipation, you get rid of all the boredom and anxiety. You get rid of the undercurrent of resentment, the feeling that life is supposed to be more comfortable. And as a result it all becomes easy.

You can actually apply this to a lot of other things too, but it’s not for everyone. A few years ago, for instance, I had a tooth infection. Now I don’t generally take any pain-killers, but this was a level of pain I had not even imagined existed, so I got up out of bed at 2 AM and went out to find some Excedrin. But as soon as I had done what I could to address the problem, my next step was to try to reorganize what I expected from life, so that I could accept this as my reality if it never got better. (Not having dental insurance or any money at that time, weird stoic mental tricks were sometimes the only option remaining to me.) I try to apply the same type of thinking to mental depression- not telling myself that it will get better but figuring out how to get by if it never does. My assumption is never that things will get better, but always that I can adapt somehow to the current situation. That feels like a type of optimism to me, but I’ve had people tell me they would kill themselves if they thought like I did. Anyway, back to the Greyhound and my thirty-five hour trip to Dallas.

At one point, I heard a few truckers talking. The older one was giving the younger one some advice, much of which was fairly obnoxious and had to do with trying to be as selfish as possible, but then he said something interesting. When faced with a difficult piece of driving, he said the important point was, "Don’t anticipate, don’t think." Any martial artist will recognize this advice. It’s what the Japanese martial artists call Mushin or No Mind. Zen in the art of long-haul trucking.

Every several hours we had to get off somewhere so they could clean the bus, and this was my downfall. I was sitting in the station in Memphis, Tennessee, eating a few cookies- the only dinner I could afford that day without going over my budget, as I had spent too much getting a cab to the station in DC- when Raggedy Anne sat down next to me with a box of French Fries. I suddenly realized I hadn’t seen her eating anything up until then, so I asked her about it. She told me she was totally broke and had no money for food until one of the guys on the bus had given her a few bucks to get some fries. I offered her a few of my cookies, because I am just basically soft that way. A few of the other passengers to Dallas joined us, including a preacher and a roofer from Tennessee. As soon as Raggedy Anne left to go to the restroom, the roofer said, "Somebody has to look out for that girl. All alone on the road like that. She’s had it hard." The preacher handed me five dollars, and said he was getting off in Little Rock but could I please make sure she got something to eat in the morning, and just generally keep an eye on her. I agreed, again because I’m soft that way.

We went back outside to re-board, and I took out my re-boarding pass from my wallet. The driver suddenly told us she wasn’t ready to re-board us yet, and told us to go back inside. So I put my wallet back in my pocket and went to the door, but once I got to the door everyone suddenly tried to shove through all at once, and I was caught by the press of the crowd. For a couple of seconds I was just trying to keep my feet in the crush of people, and by the time I managed to get through the door without falling over, I realized my wallet was gone. It was all a set-up. Someone must have been watching to see where I put my wallet when we went back in, then the other members of the team created the stampede effect to distract me while they lifted my wallet. The last of my cash was gone, my old state ID was gone, all my keys were gone- but none of that was a big deal. The real problem was my ATM card, without which I couldn’t access my money at all.

After a pointless conversation with Security I got back on the bus, where I immediately called my bank on my cell phone in order to cancel the card. I then called my folks to arrange for a Western Union transfer to the Greyhound station in Dallas, amounting to an advance on my paycheck that would allow me to get by for the next two weeks before I would need to come up with another solution. A soldier going home on leave quietly slipped me a ten-dollar bill in case I had trouble picking up the money. He said he’d been in the same situation in Spain, and he wanted to help. I was so impressed I didn’t know what to say, so I just thanked him warmly. Then I went to sleep.

On this final stage on the journey I did have to share the back seat, with a Mexican man named Filipe Mendez. Late that night I was woken up by a very loud crashing sound, opening my eyes to see rain pouring down outside and lighting bursting over and over again. The folks on the bus were either screaming or laughing, and I wondered if lightning had hit the bus. Filipe turned to me and said, "I just called my wife. She said there are tornadoes in Hopkins County."

I said, "Yes?" and he said, "This is Hopkins County."

It turned out we had collided with a freight truck on the highway. We pulled off at a rest stop and there were State Troopers waiting for us. A young guy in the seat in front of me got very anxious when he saw them. "Are there any lights out the left window?" he asked me. "Do you see how many are out there? I only see three cars…"

There were in fact three police cars. They came on and questioned everyone on the bus, letting us go an hour later. We finally got into Dallas at about 7:30 AM. Before the bus stopped I managed to pass on the preacher’s five-dollar bill to Raggedy Anne. (Some people questioned me about this afterwards, on the grounds that she might very well have been the person who pickpocketed me. My response to this is simply that it wasn’t my five-dollar bill, so it wasn’t up to me whether I gave it to her or not.) The people I was supposed to meet were waiting for me at the door.

On this stage of my journey I was to assume the role of student rather than teacher. I was in Dallas to study the basics of an extremely obscure form of swordsmanship- the saber method of the Hussar cavalry warriors, as preserved in a rural area of Transylvania. The person I had traveled there to study with was taught this art while in college in Hungary, by a professor whose grandfather or great-grandfather had been a Hussar drill sergeant. Unlike the Highland broadsword method I teach, this art is not reconstructed but a living tradition. This is the sort of thing I live for.

The original hussars were cavalry warriors of Eastern Europe, dressed in colorful and elaborate uniforms decorated with thick braids, and armed with a variety of weapons including the classic curved saber. Hussars had the reputation of being ladies’ men, rogues and adventurers, the swashbucklers of the army.

Once we reached the saber instructor’s house I had approximately one hour to take a nap, then he got me up to begin training. At first he had me practicing cutting patterns with a stick to which a large flap of cardboard had been attached. The idea is that if you cut without proper edge alignment the stick will flap in the air because the cardboard acts as a sail. The Highland method of edge control is to align your thumb with the back of the blade, but this method was totally different so I had to start again from the beginning and it was several hours before I could cut semi-effectively with the new method. Cuts in the Regimental Highland broadsword method are made with a rotation of the elbow and wrist, but in this method the cut comes from a huge rotation of the entire shoulder and the hip. The Highland stance and footwork are similar to classical fencing, but this system requires you to stand bolt upright and use ordinary walking footwork. The parries work on a different principle too. In short, every single thing was completely new to me, and I had to go right back to square one as if I’d never picked up a sword before, all under the witheringly critical eye of my new teacher. To add to the complexity, this method requires you to be able to fence with either hand indifferently.

There are only two people that could be termed lineage-holders or full instructors in this art, but they do have a handful of students. Another new student arrived that afternoon. His name was Yuriy, and he was a Ukrainian who studied both the Bujinkan system of Japanese martial arts and a native Ukrainian method with connections to the Cossacks.

I trained for a total of ten hours that first day, and by the end of the day we had progressed to parries, and a few of the tricky false-edge attacks and odd uses of the blade curvature which are the signatures of this style. We finished with some saber bouting, which predictably was rather awkward. If we fell back into fencing-style or Bujinkan-style footwork, the teacher would simply walk us straight into obstacles- those types of footwork just don’t work with this system. However, it is very difficult to undo footwork habits that you have trained for years in order to develop. I spent about half the day training with a handful of pebbles in the heel of each shoe in order to keep from leaning my weight back as we do in broadsword fencing.

We went out for dinner and then watched a beautiful Ukrainian movie about three Cossack brothers fleeing across the steppe from pursuing Tartars. The movie was presented with an eerie, rather slow pacing that made it feel as if we were actually listening to a folk tale being told by a tribal minstrel. Very strange, but very good. We also watched a video of a Ukrainian martial art called Bovayy Hopak, parts of which are reminiscent of Brazilian Capoiera, others of the French art of Savate.

I collapsed into bed that night with a feeling of total exhaustion mixed with, to be honest, dread at the thought of having to do it all again the next day. And sure enough, when we started the next morning, the warm-up was to do 2000 cuts in a row! After that we were able to move on to study some interesting drills using the curve of the blade and/or the false edge. Some of these techniques involved having an actual blunt saber slammed into your fingers, or poked into your stomach, or sliced across your throat. We went for five hours the second day, finishing when the instructor decided the afternoon heat was too dangerous to work in considering our exhausted condition. By that time I had earned some occasional grudging praise mixed in with the withering comments.

Yuriy, the Ukrainian martial artist, demonstrated some of the folk dances in which the Ukrainian martial arts techniques are disguised. These involved sitting down practically all the way to the floor (but without a chair!) and then dropping one hand to the ground for support and advancing across the floor rapidly with amazingly vigorous kicks from that position. He also demonstrated how it was possible to drop to the ground (say, in response to a street-fighting takedown attack) and turn the fall into a leg sweep from underneath, or a kick to the face with both feet. Our host demonstrated some French straight razor methods, which are a lot more fluid and sophisticated than anything else I’ve seen with that weapon.

The saber instructor asked me to return for more instruction once I have completed 120,000 practice cuts at home. That’s right, 120,000. I am still not able to close my right hand all the way after my weekend of saber training, although I can close it more than I could yesterday. On Sunday night it was basically stuck in a saber grip position. I was reading a little about the history of the region this method comes from, and the origin of those cultures was in the wandering hordes of the steppes. By the time this system was formalized they had been settled down for a long time, but the Hussar warriors who used this method were still flamboyant raiders on horseback, with a reputation for being hard-drinking, hard-fighting swashbucklers and adventurers.

Last night was a little rough, as I had stomach pain and nausea all night and couldn’t sleep at all on the bus. Now I have to finish my work for the day, then get on another bus after midnight, and hopefully I can finally sleep then. I called a few friends from home, and didn’t get through to all of them, but it was great to talk to anyone from home. Although, oddly enough, I am not terribly homesick. I love my city and my friends but this is such an incredible adventure I have little reason to brood and feel lonely.

I am now sitting in a café along the 16^th St pedestrian mall in Denver, Colorado. Bus travel can be a little like teleportation if you are lucky enough to sleep. You close your eyes in the desert and you open them again in the Rockies. The mountain air is a welcome and bracing change.

Yesterday was not very easy, as I had gone without sleep all night and had to manage to stay awake until my bus left at 12:30. After I was done with work I spent most of the day at the library. That may not seem so tough, but as the day went by I became more and more exhausted. By the afternoon I was so tired I felt like throwing up. I just kept looking for books that would keep my mind occupied enough to keep me awake. I read some Chinese poetry (the poetry collection at the Albuquerque library was fantastic) including some verses by my favorite Chinese poet, Li Ho. He was a T’ang Dynasty poet known as the "Demonic Genius" because of his bizarre imagery. Here are a few lines of his that I can remember:

And my personal favorite:

I also read from various cyclopedias, including one about philosophy, one about fantasy and another about science fiction. What interests me about philosophy is mostly its role as wisdom literature- insights that can help us expand our internal resources and live our lives more completely. That is not primarily what it means to modern professional Western philosophers, who mostly prefer to debate extremely esoteric questions at interminable length.

Emotionally speaking, your inner resources are your only resources when you’re on the road. There is an interesting tactical lesson for me here. When I’m at home, if I start to brood or fall into a melancholy train of thought, I can almost always go hang out with a friend or at least call one on the phone. Out here, that is usually not an option. So I simply can’t afford to indulge any dangerous thought patterns- I have to police my own moods a lot more vigorously. If I let myself get depressed out here, there’s no one who can cheer me up. Most days I’m a thousand miles from anyone I’d call a friend. I have to deliberately keep my attitude light-hearted and open. It reminds me of a scene in the novel Silverlock, where the main character (an American businessman who has shipwrecked in a fantasy land) says he’s suffering from a case of the nerves. His new companion looks at him strangely and says, "You won’t have time for any sham battles like that out here."

Now, you might be thinking that this should be easy, as I’m on a great adventure doing exactly what I love. But there are a thousand factors that could turn it another way. For example, the Albuquerque Greyhound station. The place is almost indescribably filthy, to the extent that a few hours there will start to give you morbid fantasies that you’re developing some previously unknown disease. Exactly one of the stalls in the restroom is working, and it has no door. Most of the sinks don’t work at all and all of them are crusted with a mix of rust and some sort of scaly white build-up. The broken toilets are all wrapped in layers of plastic wrap, yet people have tried to use them anyway. The clocks that hang from the ceiling tell wildly different times, so there’s no way to know how much longer you have to wait for your bus unless you have your own watch. The food in the restaurant is just barely enough to satisfy your hunger, but you start to feel nauseated almost as soon as you’ve swallowed it down. In the lobby area, cockroaches crawl openly across the floor. Armed guards patrol the station all night long, with batons at their left hips and guns at their right, and yet you never feel safe. The guards are constantly making people pull their shirts up to demonstrate that they don’t have a weapon tucked away.

You develop something of the mentality of an animal when on the road- which is to say, you’re constantly aware of the risk of predators. Unfortunately for my wallet, I’m biased to look for outright physical threats more than for cons and scams, so I fell victim to that pickpocket in Memphis. But the risk of a physical threat is a real one. Carrying two large bags, I look a lot more vulnerable than I otherwise would. What happens is that you become constantly hyper-alert to who’s around you. You habitually look in windows to discreetly check the space behind you. You pause before going around a corner to try to feel if someone’s on the other side. In the Albuquerque bus station this reaches a level I have never experienced before. Everything’s filthy, and there are armed men watching everything we do. There’s a grizzled old biker with the patch of a Hell’s Angels associate member on his rag, and another one that says Viet Cong Hunter on his leather vest. There’s a crew of swaggering homies lurking around and making constant phone calls, despite the signs on the walls that actually say: No phone, No restroom except by ticketed passengers- this means no homies!!

So not only am I struggling to stay awake until 12:30, but I’m doing so in an environment where I have to be hyper-vigilant all the time. And how do I feel?

The truth is, I feel wonderful. You see, I’m self-regulating. Out here you have no other choice.

Miyamoto Musashi, the Japanese "sword saint," wrote a document toward the end of his life called the Dokkodo, which translates as "The Way of Walking Alone," or "The Way I Go By Myself." This was his rather extreme set of rules for life, intended as a guide for his disciples in swordsmanship. One of the rules in the Dokkodo says, "Whatever my dwelling-place might be, I take no objection to it."

I’ve been repeating that line a lot to myself over the past few days.

Last night I was in the Greyhound station in Denver, waiting near the gate for the Salt Lake City bus. There was a pair of redneck buddies at the same gate. Both of them were wearing baseball caps. One of them had a slyly intelligent look about him, almost a scheming look, with a flat sort of viciousness underneath. The other one was perpetually grinning. Sly guy was entertaining the people in the line by posing logic puzzles. The most popular one was about a fox, a goose and a bag of feed. They were all on the same side of a river, and you had to figure out how to get them to the other side of the river without any of them getting eaten. In the puzzle you have a boat, but it’s only big enough to fit one at a time. This puzzle was driving everyone crazy, and they were posing a variety of useless solutions, such as trying to sail the boat across really fast so they wouldn’t have time to eat each other. I said you should take the goose across first, leaving the fox with the bag of feed- assuming that the fox, as a meat-eating animal, wouldn’t eat the feed. Then you go back and get the fox, but after that you bring the goose back with you so the fox can’t eat it. Then you bring the bag of feed over and leave it with the fox again on the other side. Then you go back and get the goose.

No, says Sly Guy, foxes eat feed too. So you can only take one across at a time, which means you absolutely have to leave two behind, and in each case one will eat the other- so as far as I can tell it just doesn’t work. I think he was either full of it or not remembering how it really worked.

Every time someone proposed an incorrect solution, Sly Guy would shake his head mournfully and say, "Small little human minds," and Grinning Guy would grin. Occasionally Sly Guy would say something Deep and Philosophical, such as, "If you’re the river and your problems are a rock, and you throw that big ol’ rock in the river, that river will just keep on flowing, no matter how many rocks."

Grinning Guy would nod solemnly and grin. Sly Guy would then pat himself on the back for his profundity, saying, "Now that’s Spoken Metaphorically," in response to which Grinning Guy would nod solemnly and grin some more.

The line for Salt Lake City was so huge that about half of the people in the line had to wait for the next bus, which was due in about twelve hours. I was lucky enough to get a seat. However, a moment after I had taken my place on the bus, a pair of Indian guys came in and sat down behind me. One was in camouflage and seemed to go by the nickname Chief. The other one was called Moses. Both had very long black braided hair. Chief was directly behind me and Moses was two rows back, although for a while I thought it might be the other way around. They didn’t seem to really know each other, but they became allies immediately because they were Indians- or, as Moses put it, "Homies."

Moses had a gravelly voice with the most sinister undertone you can imagine, and he was very fond of laughing. It sounded like, "A-hehh, a-hehhh, a-hehhhhhh!" and was delivered in the same tone of voice in which a person might cheer on a brutal beating. He was not fond of sharing his seat, particularly not with a European, by which he meant a white guy. The poor fellow sitting next to him had to listen to a constant stream-of-consciousness rant, ranging from the history of the Indian Wars, to his extensive criminal history, to his prowess as a warrior ("I’m a warrior, dog. I could kill everyone on this bus- you know, eventually.") to more personal threats against the European who had dared to sit next to him. At one point he just leaned back with a contented sigh and said, "Ahhh, killers!" as if no other thought could possibly please him more.

The tension at the back of the bus got so high that I took my glasses off and put them in my bag, so if the situation turned violent they might not get broken. A few minutes later, and it was even worse- Moses was still going on about killing everyone on the bus, about his fondness for knives and his skill at using them. I couldn’t tell exactly where he was behind me- two seats back, or only one? Sometimes it sounded like he was right behind me, and sometimes it didn’t. Even when I looked back, it was too dark to be sure. What if Moses decided to start the killing with the guy in front of him? I didn’t want to get my throat cut without even having a chance to fight back.

I took an old shirt out of my backpack, draping it around my neck as makeshift armor. It might buy me just a moment or two. It might not. A shirt is obviously not much protection, but it’s better than nothing, and it’s certainly harder to cut through thick fabric than bare skin.

I don’t like bullies. At the same time I wasn’t exactly eager to get into it with a lunatic like Moses, and I was on the window seat with a large elderly gentleman blocking my route to the aisle. There was also the fact that if I did get into a brawl I would probably get kicked off along with Moses. So my intention was simply to jump in and pull the guy out of the situation if Moses started mauling him. Well, sure enough, it did turn violent- Moses suddenly started slugging the guy sitting next to him. Before I could so much as get out of my seat, the guy had jumped free and run for the driver, who promptly pulled the bus over and returned to admonish Moses. Moses was now the picture of contrition, putting his arm around his would-be victim’s shoulders in order to demonstrate the sincerity of his love for all mankind. The driver neglected to kick him off, but warned him that he would call 911 if there was any more trouble. "And if they don’t put you down, I will. I ain’t always been a bus driver." Despite the tough talk, he should have kicked Moses off right then. But I’m sure he was no more happy about his chances with Moses than anyone else was.

As soon as the bus was going again, Moses began to sing Indian songs loudly in his native language, interspersed occasionally with his creepy laughter.

Eventually he switched seats to sit next to Chief, so now both of them were directly behind me. Chief was a Pueblo Indian, and Moses professed to admire the Pueblos. "You guys never danced to the white man’s flag," he said, "You never played the government’s game."

"Yeah, we went to war with them a couple of times. Plenty of times," said Chief. He was telling Moses about how he would sometimes kill wild mustangs and sell them to another band on his reservation, because they ate horse meat at certain ceremonies and would pay up to $500 for a good horse. Moses expressed the opinion that the horses didn’t belong there anyway, that they had been introduced artificially by the Spaniards and caused all the wars between the tribes. "When you were just out there on foot, no big deal. You run into a guy from another tribe maybe once in a year, you let it go. But if you’ve got a horse, it ain’t like that. You’re like- Hey! I just saw those motherfuckers last week, and I didn’t like ‘em then either!"

But Chief was actually a lot less creepy than Moses, and he contrived to get Moses to go to sleep.

I woke up at six in the morning in the middle of a snowstorm in the Wyoming Rockies. White blasts of snow and wind swirled violently outside the windows, as we rocketed down a mountain pass between huge peaks that looked like broken teeth. Moses was waking up too. He asked me my name and shook my hand, apparently having no memory of the night before. Chief had to tell him all about it, and he laughed and laughed. For the rest of the ride he was friendly and respectful to everyone, and he even went into a store on one of our rest breaks to buy some candy for the kids on the bus.

So now I’m sitting in my room at the Marriott Residence Inn, provided by my new student in Utah for the duration of this seminar. This hotel room is actually a little apartment- and by little I mean really huge. It is literally the size of a full apartment in the city. There’s a gift basket with coffee and tea provided, a table, a desk, free wireless internet.

"Whatever my dwelling-place might be, I take no objection to it."

Well, I sure as hell take no objection to this. Especially not after a night spent with Sly Guy and Grinning Guy, Moses and Chief.

I had a very brief training session (about an hour) with Isaac yesterday afternoon. It was pouring rain outside so all I could really do was work with him on the guards and footwork in my hotel room. He’s been studying solo from my book for a few years now, so it was a rare opportunity to see how much it is possible to learn in that context. The conventional wisdom is that it isn’t possible to learn from a book, but of course everyone in the first generation of the Western Martial Arts revival has had to do exactly that.

However, there’s learning from a book and then there’s learning from a book…

When trying to revive a dead art from a manual centuries old, you spend hundreds of hours on the interpretation of the text alone. You know the risk of getting it wrong is very high, so you check every little detail again and again, comparing what you’re physically doing with the text and the pictures. As one instructor has said, if it matches the text perfectly and it matches the picture perfectly and it works in bouting, then you might be doing it right.

Even a very sincere student using a ready-made how-to book like my own is unlikely to apply that level of focus, or even to realize that they need to. In the great majority of serious martial arts, every tiny detail matters. If the manual shows your left foot at a perfect right angle, it has to always be at a perfect right angle. If it shows your sword arm straight, it has to be straight. If it shows the blade angled to point at the opponent’s right eye, you have to do precisely that. And that’s only a few of the many, many details involved. Why is it necessary to be so exacting? Because every system has a logic of its own, and taking out one of the little details without understanding the underlying logic is just like removing a beam in a house without knowing if it’s a load-bearing beam.

Let’s say the system tells you that you have to hold your St. George’s guard about a foot in front of your head, not directly over it. Only you decide that’s a little pedantic and you don’t really need to be that specific. As long as it covers your head it’s basically right, right?

Wrong. A strong opponent will be able to batter straight through your parry, driving your own sword down into your skull- which is exactly what happened to one Highland chief who didn’t listen to his fencing master. When he held his St. George guard the wrong way in a duel, his enemy smashed it straight down into his head, killing him with his own weapon.

So, the moral of the story is that the details matter. There is no inessential detail, and in the case of my book they’re all right there in the manual. (Which is actually a bit unusual.) Yet most people who try to study from a book don’t really understand this, applying themselves to solo practice with more enthusiasm than attention to detail. The result is that their interpretation of the system is- well, impressionistic would be the kind way to put it.

So it was with my new student. His footwork and his guards were both vaguely correct yet wrong in a dozen little ways. So that’s what we started with. Fix the footwork, fix the guards, then on to the rest of the system this afternoon.

On a more positive note, he is extremely enthusiastic about Gaelic culture, involved in his local Gaelic community, and a better Gaelic speaker than I am- all because of his love for the art of Highland broadsword. When he realized he wouldn’t be able to study the broadsword properly right away, he threw himself into Gaelic learning in preparation. I only wish all the Cateran Society members were the same. We actually sat down over dinner and had a conversation about whether 18^th century Gaelic poet Alasdair MacMhaighistir Alasdair was more or less entertaining to read than 20^th century Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean- a conversation I have never had with any other broadsword student, that’s for sure. (It might surprise those who know how curmudgeonly I can be, but I actually prefer MacLean’s modern Gaelic poetry to the old bardic clan warfare verse, although they’re both wonderful.)

So, can you learn swordsmanship from a book? Not really. Not unless you do it the way I described above, and not many people are able to pull that off. But that’s exactly why I’m doing this trip. My goal is to leave a handful of little study groups around the country, practicing broadsword under my direct supervision and passing it on. That way, in a generation or two, it will be a living art once again.

We trained in Lincoln Park for about three hours today. This is a spacious and beautiful park filled with trees. Like everywhere else in Salt Lake City, you can see the snow-covered peaks of the Rocky Mountains looming over you.

My student is a big guy, a former boxer and wrestler, but he’s let himself get out of shape. As a result, he reached the willpower point at only the two-hour mark today. That’s the point at which you no longer have any physical reserves of energy worth speaking of; you’re going on willpower alone. It’s like running on fumes.

I probably reached that point around the sixth or eighth hour of my training session in Dallas, but I finished out the ten-hour day and then did five hours the next day. When your willpower is disciplined from a lot of training you can get a lot of extra hours out of it. So he needs to develop his physical stamina, and he needs to discipline his will. I’m asking him to train for an hour a day once I’m gone, which should get him up to where he needs to be within a few months or maybe a year. I told him he had to learn to "drink bitterness," which is a kung fu saying. It means you have to be willing to be really hard on yourself to make progress.

On the plus side, his self-training experience is actually helping. He was doing everything in a sloppy way, but he hadn’t built up any really bad habits. So now he already has the basics memorized, and it’s just a question of tightening everything up. He’s learning fast, and I think we’ll make decent progress while I’m here.

Like most beginning students, he has a tendency to beat up on himself when he does something wrong. I don’t allow this at all, because it’s a display of emotion, and any display of emotion in a bout can give your opponent a window into your strengths and weaknesses. I teach every student to control their emotions, and reveal nothing.

"No one can know what you’re thinking or feeling," I said. "The real you is an utter blank to them."

As we were practicing, I noticed a couple of shinai guys lurking about. This is an odd little urban subculture. They spar around with shinai for fun, usually without any formal training. The shinai is the bamboo sword they use in Kendo, as a result of which a lot of the shinai guys actually believe they are practicing Kendo. Nothing could be further from the truth. They’re really just messing around and having fun, based on what they’ve seen in Anime movies featuring a fantasy version of Japanese swordsmanship. This would all be well and good, except for two factors. One is that a lot of them sincerely believe they are practicing martial arts, so there’s a delusional aspect to what they’re doing. (This bunch actually told me they practiced Kenjutsu, which is the older, classical style of Japanese swordsmanship.) Two is that they don’t wear any safety gear. Now, shinai are not terribly dangerous, especially when swung by people who don’t know how to generate power. But they can be dangerous enough. My hand was broken by a shinai just a few months ago. Kendo people wear masks and padded gloves and breastplates when using shinai. So you have a combination of delusional incompetence and inadequate safety gear. See the potential for trouble?

Anyway, they saw what we were doing and asked me if I wanted to bout with them during a break. It was actually a tradition in British swordsmanship to occasionally face off with an untrained swordsman, in order to get used to dealing with wild and unpredictable play. So I picked up a shinai and went at it.

My first opponent was an extremely overweight fellow in a sort of ninja uniform, complete with the Japanese pleated skirts called hakama, which he pronounced so as to rhyme with Kokomo. He took up a version of Hasso no Kamae, a stance where the sword is held up beside your head to the right. His friend, a tall and wiry Polynesian fellow (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) warned me that the ninja was "a professional." I took an inside guard to close the line, and they both gasped. The ninja launched a cut at my high inside, and I shifted back and cut him in the arm as he went by.

We fought for about ten minutes, but it was more of the same. After he’d had enough, the ninja handed me off to the Polynesian guy. This fellow liked to use an extremely fast series of cuts and flourishes that were somehow both wild and flowery, if you can imagine the combination. Half the time he would fall down when I hit him, landing on his ass or just folding up like an accordion. After we were done, he got a cheeky look on his face and said, "Nice match. But I won, though."

To this, I dryly replied, "We can go again if you’d like some more bruises."

He turned around and walked off in a hurry.

My hope was that if I could show them what a person with training can do, they would want to train with my student and he could really get something going. But it doesn’t seem likely. I pointed over to him when we were finished, and said, "If you want to learn how to do that, go talk to him. He’ll be starting a study group up when I’m gone."

The reply to this was, "I like my own style."

Whether it works or not, apparently.

If I went to train at Lincoln Park every day, there would be someone there every day who wanted to fight me. This is my conclusion.

I was training with my student today on Lesson 2, one of the ten two-person forms of the Highland broadsword exercise. These are choreographed forms for the purpose of training, exactly like the kata of Japanese martial arts. A wiry little hard-bitten sort of fellow showed up, dressed all in black and sporting a wispy red beard.

Now, anyone with the slightest experience of martial etiquette knows that it’s usually okay to watch, but that you simply do not interrupt a lesson in the middle. Nevertheless, this fellow strolled right over and stuck his hand out for me to shake, introducing himself as, "Lord Wolfsbane Moonshadow" or some such thing.

I have dealt with an actual lord once before. Specifically, the late Duke of Argyll in Scotland, who held the copyright to certain Gaelic manuscripts I wanted to quote from. Not only was he the Duke of Argyll but the hereditary chief of the infamous Clan Campbell, MacChailein Mor or "Great Son of Colin" as his traditional Gaelic title would have it. His ancestors could call three thousand broadswords into battle. They were murderers and conquerors, warlords if you will. They still own vast estates in the Highlands, and live behind the stone walls of Inverary Castle. I had to address the Duke as "Your Grace" when I wrote my letter to him- and he replied by graciously granting me the copyright permission I had requested. That, for better or for worse, is what a lord is. You can no more make yourself a lord than you can make yourself the Pope. At best, you’re pretending to be something that should never have existed in the first place. (That’s the radical in me talking.) At worst, you’re stealing a title to which you have no right or claim, a title that implies you are the hereditary head of an ancient family of historical significance. (That’s the conservative in me talking.) Either way it’s a very silly thing to go around calling yourself.

Not being a lord of any sort, but simply a guy who teaches historical fencing, I introduced myself as Christopher Thompson. M’lord had no idea what to make of this. A sword instructor using the name on his birth certificate? What was this?

Then he sighed contemptuously.

"Oh, I get it," he said. "Fencing."

"That’s right," I said, "It’s an 18^th century historical fencing style." And I went back to teaching my student.

M’lord watched us for a moment, then offered to fight.

"If you want to do a little more than this choreographed stuff, and get some actual combat training, we could spar."

My student told me afterward that he was a little worried about how I would take that. But I don’t rise to insults easily anymore.

"I’d be happy to bout with you in a little while," I said. "Right now I have to drill."

He watched us for another minute and then did a foppish curtsy and wandered off. Isaac asked me about my lack of reaction to the man’s rude demeanor. "It’s the same thing as not showing frustration when you’re training," I said. "The swordsman is self-controlled. No one knows what he’s thinking until he attacks."

But our ersatz aristocrat caught up with us again a few hours later. We were just sitting down to take a break, when he appeared out of nowhere with two sparring weapons in his hand.

"Take your pick," he said.

I took the one closest to my hand. It’s a good idea to be able to fight with any weapon that happens to come to you, not just the one that feels perfect. Then we came on guard and started to fence.

"That guard of yours is just like the Iron Chicken," he said. Now God alone knows what fencing style has a stance called the Iron Chicken, but he was referring to the hanging guard.

"I’m a nine-time SCA tournament winner," he said.

"Congratulations," I said, and hit him on the shoulder. So it went for the rest of the bout. There was an occasional mutual hit, but every single clean touch was against him.

"I’ve got to admit," he said, "You’ve got skills."

Damn straight, M’Lord.

Then I went back to teaching again.

Last night at the restaurant, a little girl came up to me and said, "Have you seen my Grandma?"

I guess everyone knows her grandma. I passed her off to the hostesses. This morning at breakfast, another little girl came up to me.

"My sister is stealing our breakfast," she said.

"Really," I replied.

"Really," she said, "And we have no hot chocolate."

"Well, that is a problem," I replied. "What are you going to do about it?"

She shrugged. "I’m just trying to get someone to notice me," she said with considerable candor.

"This is what you should do," I told her. "Learn to stand on your head. That way when you say something everyone will wonder where the voice is coming from, and when they look down at the ground, your head will be there. Everyone will notice you then."

She smiled.

I'm back in Denver again, with a friend who not only owns a huge collection of antique broadswords, he also has an extensive collection of old books in my areas of interest. Whenever I'm staying with him, I spend many hours doing research and taking notes. A lot of this material will eventually find its way into my books. For instance, I found an anecdote from the battle of Prestonpans, where a Highlander went to cut an English grenadier in the head. The grenadier threw his arm up in desperation at the last moment, but the broadsword went clean through his arm and an inch deep into his skull, killing him instantly. For all I know, the weapon that did this could be sitting right next to me in my friend's collection.

On a less gruesome note, I found another anecdote about the famous outlaw swordsman Rob Roy. Apparently he brought his MacGregor followers to a negotiation with the Stewarts of Appin over a land dispute. Both sides showed up heavily armed, but the situation was resolved peacefully. Regardless, Rob Roy announced that, "where so many gallant men were met in arms, it would be shameful to part without a trial of skill, and therefore he took the freedom to invite any gentleman of the Stewarts present to exchange a few blows with him."

So he ended up fighting Allastar Stewart of Invernahyle with sharp swords, purely for love of fighting even though they bore each other no malice. The duel was ended when Stewart inflicted a slight cut on Rob Roy's arm- duels of skill usually were to first blood or submission, not death. That story would make a great addition to my article on Gaelic duels in my book Highland Martial Culture, so I'll probably add it in when the publisher sends it back to me for the final edit.

Among the many old books my friend has collected, there was one called The Reign of Law by the Duke of Argyll. This would be a great-grandfather or maybe a great-great-grandfather of the Duke I had to get the copyright permission from. It turned out to be a work of philosophy- the Duke's answer to Darwinism, essentially, which was at that time a new theory.

I read far enough to grasp his basic argument. He was saying that when educated people have trouble accepting the Supernatural, it's because they haven't taken the trouble to define their terms. He examines various proposed definitions for the word Supernatural, and rejects most of them on various grounds. Eventually he concludes that an event can only really be termed supernatural if it involves a suspension of natural laws- not only the natural laws of which we are aware, but also those we haven't discovered yet. In other words, it would have to be in violation of all law, and therefore outside the chain of cause and effect- it would involve no "means," but would simply happen arbitrarily. He then argues that even the miracles of the Bible could have been achieved by God through "means"- in other words, through the use by God as a higher intelligence of natural laws unknown to us and beyond our control, but no less natural. Thus, nothing is genuinely supernatural because nothing that really happens, not even the miraculous, is outside the "Reign of Law." He was reasonably interesting up to that point. But after that the rest of the book became a detailed argument for Intelligent Design as a guiding force behind Darwinian natural selection, which is an argument of little interest to me. So I went back to looking for anecdotes about people getting chopped up by broadswords.

I gave a lesson to my friend's reenactment group yesterday, but my friend was away on business so he wasn't able to join us. This is rather different from my usual lessons and my usual teaching method, because they aren't really students of mine and they aren't going to learn my system in its entirety. They are reenactors who perform as a Highland clan at Rennaissance fairs and Highland Games, so their background is in theatrical swordplay as much as anything else. The goal is not to teach them the Highland broadsword system as such, but to improve their form, balance and technique in a general sense. But that wasn't what I was thinking about on the way there. Instead I was thinking about the probability that I was about to get injured.

You see, these boys fight hard. Much harder than most other groups. They've been training since they were kids, they hit with enough force to practically cut you in half, and they combine a high tolerance for pain with what seems like a total lack of fear.

Not only do they use basket-hilted shinai as their training weapons, they do so without any safety gear other than a fencing mask. It's not unusual for them to fight with T-shirts on. The first time I fought them, I had my thumbnail knocked off. I actually got the parry, but the force of the strike was such that it vibrated through the hilt and tore off my thumbnail. The second time I fought them, I had my hand broken. The guy hit me so hard it broke the top of one of my knuckles off, and I was out of action for three months as far as my right hand was concerned. It was the same guy both times, and I knew for a fact he'd be eager to fight me again. As a result, I was experiencing a not-very-familiar emotion on my way to the seminar- an undercurrent of fear.

Oddly enough, this is not really a bad thing for training purposes. In daily life, we can use our reasoning powers to solve most problems. But there are times when we can't do that. Our minds access a different part of the brain in a crisis situation- a primitive part that operates on emotion rather than reason. Basically, this part of the brain experiences a particular traumatic emotion and responds by looking for a file it can run that is associated with that emotion. If it finds such a file, it runs it immediately- much, much faster than the rational mind is capable of doing. If it doesn't find such a file, it crashes just like a computer- which is why so many people freeze up and do nothing during a crisis.

You can do all the repetitions you want in the safety of your fencing studio, but if they aren't associated with a traumatic emotion in your brain you probably won't be able to program yourself to do the same thing immediately in a crisis. Your rational mind might know how to do it, but your primitive mind won't. That's one reason traditional martial arts training was so brutal. They knew through trial and error that if you want to become competent under conditions of violent trauma, you have to train under conditions of violent trauma. In the modern world, not everyone is willing to train that way. But these fellows certainly are.

When I got to the meeting place in Colorado Springs, Danny came out and shook my hand. He's the guy who broke my hand and knocked my thumbnail off. He offered to fight me first. I accepted. The first time he managed to land a touch against me, it was a horizontal cut to my waist. The explosion of pain I felt was almost shocking. I actually thought, "Oh my God, oh my God that hurts, what the hell am I doing..." But then I cleared that out of my mind. I returned the favor a moment later with a clean cut straight down the center of his head. And so it went.

Danny and his training partner Ryan have fantastic reflexes and command of distance. They have a lot of experience fighting at high intensity. What they don't always have is an understanding of fencing theory. And this is where the rational mind comes back into the game. Ryan stepped to my far outside to try to open the line, but he neglected to cover his inside at the same time. I cleaned his clock with a cut that caught him in mid-step, before he could even land his foot. Danny did the same thing in our next bout and took the same punishment for the error. But they gave as good as they got. After a fierce exchange of high cuts to the inside and outside, Ryan suddenly changed the angle of attack and lashed his shinai across my upper leg. I launched a cut with opposition into one of his cuts a few minutes later, causing his shinai to bounce off my basket hilt while mine slammed into his chest.

He backed me up until I was right in front of a pool of grease (we were training in a car repair garage), so I had nowhere else to go. Then he cut over and through my guard and left a huge purple mark on my right shoulder. I parried his next attack and hit him with a cut 7 to the head. It was the same with Danny- a high-speed tit-for-tat. He's faster and more agile than I am; but I'm more controlled and balanced and have a better understanding of fencing theory. He'd avoid my cuts with incredible speed and acrobatic contortions, then he'd clip me before I could get out. I'd exploit weaknesses in his game plan and hit him where he had failed to cover himself. I used one of my favorite tricks on him- a cut 1 to the inside high line to draw the parry, turning into a cut 3 to the wrist as the opponent goes for the bait. A few minutes later he pulled off the same trick against me. Back in November, I had taught him the spadroon guard, a more aggressive version of the half-circle guard. He suddenly used it against me to perform the same invitation and counterattack I had shown him six months before.

We fought all-out for about two hours, and then we held the formal lesson. I explained what their weaknesses were and how to correct them- exactly why I could hit them whenever they attacked to my far outside and how to do the same attack without exposing themselves, how they could attack with opposition into the opponent's attack, how they could counter in single time if their opponent went for the legs, and so forth and so on. Then we all went out for burgers and beers, soothing the aches and welts that now covered us from head to toe. This was the hardest and most brutal fighting I've done on this trip so far, as I knew it would be. It was also the most fun. Call me crazy, but I love it.

I arrived in Pennsylvania this morning, after a fairly uneventful 34-hour Greyhound trip from Denver. For the first 12 hours of the journey I had what was probably the worst seat on the entire bus- directly over the emergency exit mechanism so I couldn't put my backpack on the floor and had to carry it on my lap. What with the person sitting next to me and the lack of room for my legs, those first 12 hours went from "uncomfortable" to "painful" to "excruciating" in short order. But such is the nature of bus travel.

I'm staying for the next few days in rural western Pennsylvania, in the area where the Whiskey Rebellion occurred. My hosts are a couple of French and Indian War reenactors. I spent the afternoon talking to the lady of the house over coffee. She's quite the character. She does herbal healing and laying-on of hands, and her preferred method of groundhog control is to get them with a tomahawk from 30 paces. She claims to have disposed of 24 groundhogs via tomahawk. She told me an interesting story about her successful attempts to track down a secretive family of country herbalists in West Virginia. It seems she had to ask around at the local diner, where they initially claimed to know nothing about any herbalists- after which a member of the family sought her out. When they decided they could trust her, they took her out in the woods and taught her as much of their lore as she could absorb in the time she had. Who knows how many secrets like that are still out there?

When I got here yesterday, I was exhausted and out of it from 34 hours of bus travel, so I had two large cups of coffee, decided I couldn't stay awake despite the coffee, and went to bed. I didn't exactly fall asleep though. Instead I started drifting back and forth between looking out the window into their back yard (in which everything seemed to be glowing with a light as bright as the sunlight) and an amazingly vivid landscape of mountain-sized black clouds, stacked up on top of each other in a dark green sky as the storm winds swirled around and around, building up strength to become a tornado. This changed after a while and became a range of mountains, high narrow peaks with mist between them like you sometimes see in Chinese art. In both cases, looking at the landscape didn't feel anything like a dream. It felt as if I was super-awake, almost drunk on how vibrant and alive the landscape looked. After that it became something else, something I can't easily describe in words and would prefer not to try.

And they say there's no such thing as magic in this world...

Sitting here in Pennsylvania waiting for the next seminar to start in the evening, I’ve been taking the time to think about my interaction with Moses on the bus ride to Salt Lake. A lot of people don’t believe this, (especially people who favor simple solutions) but convincing people that you’re really scary is just about the least effective thing you can do for self-defense. The more it works, the less it works. I’ll explain.

Taking the example of the Scottish Highlanders (since I practice their swordsmanship style), they relied on psychological terror as a battlefield tactic. The whole purpose of the Highland Charge was to induce panic. They really had little choice but to pursue this method, because they didn’t have a "modern" army trained to exchange disciplined volleys of musket fire. What they had was a relatively small number of elite swordsmen, backed up by a mob of more-or-less untrained common clansmen. They couldn’t hope to win against the government forces if they tried to form up in lines and trade musket fire with disciplined soldiers. So they turned their disadvantage into an advantage. Your average redcoat of the 17^th and 18^th centuries was trained to hold firm in a line with his fellow soldiers, firing and reloading against an enemy who was doing the same. But a Highlander running straight at him as fast as possible, shrieking at the top of his lungs while swinging a broadsword to take his head off… that is something he was not prepared to deal with. Most of the time he simply panicked, throwing his musket down and running for his life. Consider the example I gave a few days ago. The broadsword was a weapon that could literally shear right through a man’s arm, come out the other side, and still bury itself in his head. Is it any wonder that so many of the soldiers weren’t willing to face that?

While it worked, the Highland Charge worked beautifully. In a number of battles, the Highlanders inflicted thousands of casualties while suffering only a few dozen. It’s hard to express what an extraordinary historical anomaly this was. For a brief time, men armed with swords and shields were able to inflict crushing defeats on armies of soldiers armed with guns. But it didn’t last forever. When the government finally fielded an army that would stand its ground against the Highland Charge, the result was a massacre. Most of the Highlanders at the battle of Culloden never even reached the government lines, dying from artillery and musket fire before they even got close. And when they broke and ran, the government took its revenge. The long decline of the Gaelic culture entered its terminal phase as a direct result of the aftermath of Culloden. The government went out of its way to destroy Gaelic culture as an independent entity. Why did they do that? To anyone who loves Gaelic poetry and Gaelic music, anyone who knows how amazing this culture actually is, what happened is heartbreaking. One of the oldest and richest cultural traditions in Europe was nearly wiped out. This happened for reasons that are far too complex to pin on just a single factor. But one of the factors was certainly that English-speaking society (both in Scotland and England) was scared of the Highlanders.

Eyewitness accounts from the time period show that Highland soldiers were often extraordinarily well-behaved toward civilians, unlike most armies in most time periods. But the general public believed in their reputation for unbridled ferocity. Some of the Lowlanders actually believed the Highlanders were cannibals. Their image as terrifying warriors helped them win battles. But after the battles were over, their enemies made them pay for it. Of course, the soldiers on both sides were just doing their duty, and the Highlanders’ use of panic as a weapon was largely forced on them by circumstances. But that doesn’t change the end result. The fear we inflict on others will eventually be given back to us with interest- a historical fact with some relevance for the "War on Terrorism." But I’m thinking about a more personal example.

That night on the bus to Salt Lake City, Moses had me convinced. His "Crazy Indian" act was frankly terrifying. The tone of malevolence in his voice didn’t sound like a put-on. It sounded like someone was going to die. And that changed the whole equation as far as I was concerned. If I have to fight to defend myself or someone else, I will. But if the situation doesn’t warrant it, I won’t do anything too extreme. I’ll do the bare minimum that will resolve the situation and leave it at that. If I think it’s kill or be killed, on the other hand…

Well, it didn’t come to that. But imagine it had. Imagine I had actually been forced to defend myself against Moses, after he had already convinced me he was a mad dog killer. Can you see any way that could possibly have ended except tragically?

Whatever he may have done in this life, I’m sure Moses initially developed this persona because he was scared. He wanted to be such a tough guy that no one would ever try to victimize him. But look where it’s brought him. Every time he does his crazy act, people are scared. People believe he’s really capable of killing them. And each time there’s at least one person there who’s thinking, "If it comes down to it, if it’s him or me, I’m going to take him out." So did it work really? Is Moses any safer for being so scary?

We are whatever we pretend to be, whatever we convince ourselves we are. But there’s a price to be paid for everything, and the price of terror is terror. If you manage to convince people that you’re really dangerous, they’ll destroy you to save themselves. If either our leaders or our enemies had figured that out, we wouldn’t be fighting a war right now. But that’s taking me a little too far afield, and it’s almost time for me to go train.

I just spent a truly incredible weekend in Ohio, training for twenty hours in two days, in twelve different styles of Western Martial Arts. I was scheduled to teach for the second time at the Cumann Bhata seminar (our motto: "Honor, Tradition, Recreational Violence"), hosted by Ken Pfrenger, who also happens to be one of the founding members of my Cateran Society. I arrived in Youngstown, Ohio on Thursday afternoon, at a Greyhound station dominated by a surreal mix of gangsters and Amish. This is the only Greyhound I've ever been to where the thugs flash their gang signs openly, in full view of the security guard. Sitting in the waiting room, I saw a hand snake out from around the corner, flashing a Crip sign. It was followed a moment later by a young gangmember, scanning the room anxiously for any signs of trouble. Elsewhere in the station, inmates streamed out from the county jail across the street, to be met by their fellow Crips, flashing signs and beaming happily to see each other. Meanwhile, Amish families huddled together in silence, interacting only with the other Amish. The Amish babies were wrapped entirely in black clothing, only their faces showing. Looking at one of them, I thought, "You don't know it yet, but you're going to grow up to be Amish."

I was picked up by Ken's training partner, and taken to Ken's apartment and training studio in the country. We went straight up to the studio to have an informal knife-fighting bout, using some rubber training knives they had on hand. Ken's friend was using a Spanish method, while I fought with my reconstructed Highland dirk-fighting system. He tried to swipe at my hands and arms, while I went for stabs to the body. At one point he rushed in and got his point in my left shoulder, while I reached over his head and planted my weapon several times in his back in quick succession. But this was really just goofing around. Knife vs knife fights are extremely rare- as the knifer's saying has it, "the knife is felt before it is seen."

Ken returned with a Venezuelan named Bruno in tow. Actually, Bruno is not Venezuelan by birth, although he does have citizenship there. He was originally born in Cairo, Egypt to Italian and Greek-Armenian parents. Bruno has been training in the martial arts for 35 years- longer than I've been alive- and he's studied just about every system I've ever heard of, including obscure arts like Hawaiian Lua. He's trained and been friends with some of the most legendary names in the martial arts world. Nevertheless, he refuses to call himself a master, and there are other people he refers to as "the old masters." Be that as it may, he's probably the closest thing to an old master I've ever had the good fortune to meet.

Almost as soon as he arrived, he began teaching us some Garrote. Garrote is the Venezuelan art of machete fighting. It is fought entirely at extreme close distance, and the opponent's cuts are avoided not by stepping back but by diving toward the machete and under it, twisting the body simultaneously to avoid the blade, and pivoting so that you end up on a right-angle to your opponent, standing in his blind spot and ready to cut him. Garrote matches involve a continuous diving and pivoting by both fighters. He showed us a video of one of the "old masters," a man in his 90s. He was sparring at full speed with one of his students, using the Garrote or training stick in place of an actual machete, unleashing whipping strikes at the student's ankles. "You have to be very quick to avoid the machete," said Bruno, "But it's like the old masters say: pain is the best teacher."

We stayed up late into the night, talking about martial arts and sharing training anecdotes. I expressed an interest in having a Garrote and broadsword bout, but Bruno was leery. "Playing" with someone outside of your own group still carries the connotation of a potential duel in Venezuela, where Garroteros will march into a strange bar, slam their machete into a table and challenge anyone present to fight a duel with them. "You open that door," said Bruno, "You don't know what's behind it." Despite his wariness, Bruno was one of the warmest and most engaging people you could want to meet. He had a way of drawing you in, making you feel like a peer and a comrade rather than a relative beginner. (Remember, he's been training for five times as many years as I have.)

On Friday, we trained in Garrote for an hour and a half, learning the "quadro" or footwork pattern, and the first two strikes with their counters. Then we trained in Highland broadsword for an hour and a half, followed by an hour and a half of bare-knuckle boxing as taught by Ken. But the weekend didn't officially begin till the following day: ten hours of training in a variety of arts, including German longsword and (my personal favorite) the art of the tomahawk. The early American Ranger units fought with the tomahawk and longknife, using methods derived from the broadsword and dirk, so it all felt totally natural to me. I could have swung that tomahawk around all day, loving every minute of it.

My own class came at the end of the day, and here I was in for quite a surprise. Last year when I fought an open challenge against all comers to earn the rank of Provost of the Broadsword, one of my opponents was a man who seemed to have studied every obscure martial art known to man. He knew everything from modern Hungarian saber to Tai Chi to Maori spear-fighting. When he took my Highland broadsword class, he decided it interested him, so he went back to the old manuals I had used as my original sources and taught himself how to do it. He had brought everyone else in his dojo into it too, including his sensei- the son of the current hereditary headmaster of a centuries-old samurai sword tradition from Japan. This is a Ryu where they do full-speed bouting with bokken, and practice some of their kata with sharp katana, stopping their cuts just as they come in contact with bare skin.

So here I am this weekend giving my class, and these four guys from his dojo already know how to do it perfectly, exactly as if I'd been teaching them myself for six months or so- including the Japanese guy who everyone called "Ken Sensei." I was blown away. After class, they came up to me and asked me to "play". In other words, they'd been practicing for a while and wanted to test their skills. We went back to the campsite and took up singlesticks.

The singlestick is the traditional training weapon for the broadsword- forty inches of inch-thick rattan, with a leather basket to protect the hand. The man I had fought at my prize playing came up first. He's an absolutely incredible martial artist- single-minded to the point that the rest of us consider him obsessed, which should tell you something- so I wasn't surprised that our bout ended up about even. I was a little vulnerable to his thrusts, as we haven't been thrusting with the singlesticks- a weakness I'll have to remedy. But he was vulnerable to my inside high attack, which I could consistently blast right through his parry to hit him on the mask. Next was Raj, an Indian man who studies at his dojo. We fenced while my friend played a bout with Ken Sensei, and the match went well. My last bout was with Michael, another of Ken Sensei's students. We fought for about twenty minutes or half an hour, at the end of which I launched a successful attack to his leg. I had been timing him repeatedly before that, hitting him in the face and arm. When I hit his leg that final time he abruptly tore his mask off, stepping forward with his hand extended and a huge smile on his face.

"You are clearly better than I am," he said. What a gentleman, and what a warrior. We all stayed up talking around a campfire and then went to bed.

I was woken up by the sound of raindrops hitting the tent, the prelude to a rather grim morning for all of us. I stood outside for two hours in the pouring rain, with a blanket wrapped around myself to try to stay as dry and warm as possible while we waited for our ride. Then the rain turned to sleet, and finally hail. By the time Ken's wife Shannon picked us up, she said I was blue. On to my second ten-hour session of training!

The opening class was in Russian martial arts, whose lineage goes back from the modern Spetsnaz special forces units to Stalin's bodyguards, and ultimately to the folk arts of the Cossacks and other Russian ethnic groups. There was a Ukrainian fellow at the seminar, and when he saw what was being taught, his face turned dark. He muttered something about the KGB and then stalked off to sit by himself, shaking his head and muttering for the rest of the class.

The Russian arts are- well, weird. They involve the notion of trying to move every joint of your body in various figure eight patterns in different planes simultaneously. It looks like a wave is actually passing through your body, and it basically makes you immune to restraint because you just do the wave and slip right out of it. It is anything but intuitive for me, and they deliberately practice on concrete or mud, and in foul weather. In this case we were working on concrete in a pavilion, starting with something called the "froggy hop." This is where you get down on the concrete on your hands and feet like a frog, then jump up and down in that position (in theory, silently). In case you were wondering, this hurts a lot. From there we progressed to breakfalls, or as the Russians call them, "ground engagements." These seem to consist of contorting yourself like a pretzel and then throwing yourself headfirst at the concrete and emerging unharmed. Bizarrely enough, it seems to work. The night before, Ken actually tripped over a metal fire pit in the dark, flipped completely over in the air and landed on his feet, more or less unhurt- apparently because he's been doing the Russian exercises for several months. We finished with restraints and counter-restraints using the figure eight wave principle. By the end of this class I was dead on my feet, but I still had eight more hours to go. Renaissance English rapier, medieval German dagger-fighting, Italian spearmanship. By the end of the day I was blanking out for minutes at a time, just barely able to stay on my feet. But every time we had to practice another technique, I somehow did it. The German dagger stuff was particularly heinous- you use the huge German dagger as a leverage tool, catching the opponent's arm as he attacks and wrenching him into a bone-break. The final class was Bruno's Garrote, so I had to save a small reserve of energy for that. And then we were done.

The next day, on the bus to New York, a wave of ecstatic joy welled up from deep inside me. It was as if a burst of intense light had exploded from the world's core, bathing everything in a glow of life and energy. Everything was illuminated and awake. Everything was holy. I just sat there on the Greyhound grinning from pure happiness.

But somehow I knew- it wouldn't be like this when I got home. I wouldn't be able to keep this sense of freedom.

The final seminar of this trip was scheduled to be held in an out-of-the-way town in upstate New York. The plan was to take a Greyhound to Corning, where I would be picked up by a friend of mine who is a swordsman of the Yagyu Shinkage Ryu. I had just spent three nights in Brooklyn, sleeping on the floor in a tiny, ant-infested apartment, so the idea of a cozy Greyhound seat to sleep on was actually looking pretty good by that point. But it was not to be quite as easy as anticipated. First, I came down with some kind of stomach problem, so moving at all was enough to make me nauseous. Second, it was the holiday weekend and Port Authority was in a state of utter chaos. There were no lines down there, only mobs of increasingly confused and irate travelers, milling around with their luggage in a vain attempt to find out what line they were supposed to be in. There was an information booth, but of course (this being Greyhound) it was unstaffed. I was planning to take the 1:15 AM bus upstate, as the 11:45 would have gotten in too early in the morning for me to get picked up. So I had the brilliant idea of sitting nearby until the 11:45 came and went, then swooping in and claiming the front of the line for the 1:15. The only problem with this plan was that the 11:45 never showed up at all, and by the time I realized it was never going to show up, it was already 12:30 and the mob in that section of the bus station was milling in the direction of my gate. I ended up so far back in the line that I had little hope of getting on the 1:15. At this point I realized that, as I was using a Discovery pass and not a paper ticket, I had best try to find out where to transfer ahead of time. Someone was finally working at the information booth, but when I waved him over and asked him where to transfer he said he had no idea and no way to look it up because his computer was down. When the 1:15 showed up (at 1:30) I was actually the last person who would have fit on the bus. I asked the driver about my transfers, but he had no idea either and thought maybe it was the wrong bus for me anyway. He said he would check for me, then disappeared for a long time. When he returned, he walked briskly to the bus, shut the door, and drove off.

Now somewhat irked, I went back to the information guy and expressed my opinion that someone at the Greyhound terminal must be able to tell me where I needed to transfer before I got on the next bus. He denied this suggestion with some vehemence, as if the very notion of an information booth providing information was some sort of opium dream. When I said, "But if you don't know where I'm supposed to transfer, and the driver doesn't know where I'm supposed to transfer, then how do I figure out when and where to get off the bus?"

"You got trouble," he said complacently. I asked for a complaint form and returned to the line. A new bus arrived at 2 AM, and the driver of that bus expressed the opinion that I should transfer in Syracuse, based on his general experience that many people seemed to transfer there. When we arrived in Syracuse a few hours later, I ran inside and asked them. They told me to get back outside before my bus drove away, get back on it, and transfer in Rochester. This actually worked. As a result, I ended up in Corning only 25 minutes late, despite all of Greyhound's attempts to mislead me. We had lunch and then drove up to meet our hosts.

This seminar was held entirely for the members of a small Celtic Christian church, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. It turned out that they owned a beautiful farm with two houses- one of them a stone house built by hand, the other a big old farm house. They raised a herd of Highland cattle on their own land. The inside of the farm house was filled with breathtaking Celtic carvings, featuring the early saints of Ireland and various scenes from Celtic legend. These carvings were all done by hand by either the Abbot of the church or his grandson Alec, and they were of a level of quality where I could easily see them selling for a $1000 apiece or more. They were literally startling in their sheer intricacy and beauty.

After a few hours of training with the younger church members, I was invited to attend one of their worship services. I was so exhausted I could barely manage to stay awake, but I asked for a cup of coffee and made myself go. I'm very glad I did. It was a simple and moving service for about twenty people, held in the living room of the stone house. It began with a New Testament reading selected randomly by David, following which the Abbot spoke at some length off the top of his head- a warm and quiet sermon based on the reading. The Abbot gave me the impression that he was a genuine man of God, speaking to his family and friends from his heart- everyone from David, who is about 50, to a little toddler of 1 year. They all listened attentively, and then one of them was selected to read from the Psalms. Once again, the Abbot spoke for a while. Even though I had been barely able to keep my eyes open, he was such a good preacher that I paid close attention to everything he said. None of it was at all New Agey- it was just the same sort of advice a Buddhist or a Catholic monk might give. When he was done, they read a traditional Gaelic prayer from the Carmina Gadelica, then broke out the single-malt Scotch whisky for "a dram." Here, I was amazed to find that the Abbot actually used Gaelic in the house with his family to some extent, that he could recite the Gaelic prayers in their original language from his memory, and that he could sing Gaelic songs with perfect pronunciation in a deep and resonant voice. His knowledge of Gaelic history was profound, and untainted by sentimentalism or tartan mania. (At one point he told me that he had asked the older people in his Scottish-descended community in Canada about cattle raiding and clan feuding. He said they all answered the same way: "Oh, they didn't mean anything by that.")

As my friend and I left to walk back to the big house, I shook the Abbot's hand and said, "Oidhche mhath, agus beannachd Dia dhuit," (Goodnight and God bless you, though I should have used the more formal "dhuibh") to which he replied, "Beannachd Dia dhuit gu dearbh," (God bless you indeed).

The next day, I did five hours of training with his congregation, including his son and grandson and several others. It wasn't long enough, but I worked them hard, skipping lunch so we could get as much done as possible in the time allotted. They made decent progress considering the time restraints, and with that I wrapped up my seminar trip and prepared to go home.

When I was in Ohio with Ken and Bruno, we spent many hours late at night, sitting up talking about the martial arts. We talked about the Highland broadsword and the Venezuelan Garrote, the Irish shillelagh and every other art we had ever had a taste of- everything from Chinese Ba Gua to Russian Systema. The fighting arts are a deep field of study, and none of us will ever do more than scratch the surface. But Bruno said something I'll always remember.

"You know, when I was younger I set all my extra money aside for travel. And I've been all over the world. But there's a Spanish proverb:

"Let them try to take what I have danced."

That could be the best saying I've ever heard.