TRAVELING IN STYLE : INTO THE GREAT WIDE OPEN

Situationally speaking, there are really only two places you can be: indoors or outdoors. Some people try

to blur the line between the two. Solariums, canopied terraces, screened-in porches--such spaces aim

to encompass both halves of the world, the in and the out. The trend today, though, seems to be to keep the two

apart--and not just that but to shrink the great wide open, to render it superfluous. The new Mall of

America near Minneapolis, for instance, is a hermetic city--the Biosphere as marketplace--with

about 350 stores, 40-something restaurants and an artificial ski slope. All it lacks are natural horizons. All over

the country, meanwhile, people now build houses right up to the property line--houses without

lawns, without even a bit of pavement underneath a basketball hoop. Are we losing our exterior

motivation? This issue is dedicated to the premise that we damned well shouldn’t be--especially not

we Southern Californians, who do the outdoors so well. You can have fun indoors, of course.

You can get plenty of exercise walking around malls, for instance--but you’ll never learn the difference

between a dale and a fell, as you might if you hike across England. You can paddle around an indoor

pool until your fingers look like prunes--but you’ll miss the swells (of water and of pride) you’d get from

kayaking off the California coast. Great rivers don’t spring from indoor plumbing. A 25th-floor penthouse

ain’t the Himalayas. Stay inside and you’ll never get anywhere. The indoors has its limits.