Traveling Man

Rick Steves leans back in his chair and settles into a phone call with an executive at American Public Television, which distributes Rick Steves’ Europe. We’re in the corner office at his Edmonds tour company, Europe Through the Back Door (ETBD). We’ve been talking politics, and things are winding down when the phone rings. He asks me to stick around while he pitches a program idea that sounds like parody—Rick Steves in Iran.

That’s right. The Everyman guide to the Old World is proposing a fun, light, non-political, touristic, high-def look at Axis-of-Evil, State-Sponsor-of-Terrorism Iran. “Before we bomb it,” Steves says in his distinctive voice that sounds like a Midwest accent sifted through Northwest cheesecloth. “It’s the ethical, moral, beautiful, cultural thing to do.”

With sandy blond hair, wire-framed glasses and sensible shoes, he looks just like the Rick Steves I’ve watched stroll towpaths along the River Avon and trek ridges in the Alps. But, in person, on this day, he looks a bit older (he’s 52), thinner and is more subdued than I expect.

Still, I can picture him in a turban noshing a chelow kebab and haggling with Persian carpet traders. The voice on the other end of the phone appears less than enthusiastic. As well as I can make out, the other party is concerned about schedule, logistics, costs and the fact that not only is it not Europe, it’s Iran! Steves is good-humored but seems a little annoyed.

“I just think it’s exciting, and if nobody gives me any money, I own it and I can have fun with it,” he says. It sounds like a veiled threat from a guy in a position to make one.

In the small pond of public TV, Steves is a big salmon. His travelogues air regularly on more than 300 stations (about 90 percent of the public television audience). And he’s a pledge-drive rainmaker. “He’s a major piece of the public television landscape,” says Chris Funkhouser, vice president for exchange programming and digital services at American Public Television in Boston. With legions of devoted fans called Rickniks, he can pretty much go his own way.

Although Steves says his Iran program won’t be political, he is aware of the potential impact of showing anything other than Islamo-Fascist mullahs calling for the destruction of Israel. That knowledge is the crux of his worldview. Steves promotes political enlightenment through authentic, affordable travel in close contact with real people and real culture. He encourages an extroverted approach with lots of interaction, avoiding tourist traps (despite his inadvertent role in creating some), and keeping an open mind.

“Globetrotting destroys ethnocentricity,” he’s fond of saying. He’s also fond of saying citizens should have to see the world before voting. It’s not a novel or earth-shattering gospel, but this preacher has a megaphone and no fear of using it.

He has the ability to turn political missions into promotional opportunities, but you can’t say he’s disingenuous. While Steves makes no bones about being a capitalist, he’s a capitalist with a conscience. A millionaire TV personality who helped fund housing for single mothers in Lynnwood. A Europhile who marches with the disenfranchised in El Salvador. It’s all part of being an aware global citizen.  

Legend in his own time

Steves’ rise from piano teacher to millionaire tour guide is the stuff of Northwest legend, perhaps second only to the story of Bill Gates, with whom he shares a certain nerdy charm. The Edmonds native took his first trip to Europe in 1969, visiting piano factories with his piano-importer father. At 18, he started traveling to Europe on his own, financing trips by giving piano lessons. Giving his first official tour, he drove seven women around the continent in a van.

In 1976, he started ETBD, which now runs tour programs with more than 300 departures and around 13,000 travelers annually. He is the author of more than 30 travel guides, including a guide to Italy, which is the top-selling international guidebook in the country. Plus he designed and sells a line of eponymous travel gear, including roller luggage, daypacks and security pouches. Surprisingly, no fanny packs.

From his earliest tours, Steves indulged a penchant for a different style of travel and for challenging the very people who paid his way. On his tours, he wouldn’t make advance hotel reservations, which caused anxiety among his guests. Plus, he deliberately opted for sub-par accommodations. “All I had in my first-aid kit was Valium,” he says. “I was a tour operator who gave people Valium so they could survive the rooms we inflicted on them.”

The itineraries are still not entirely breezy. No Germany without at least one concentration camp; no Ireland without Northern Ireland. He spliced an optional Sunday  ecumenical fellowship into his secular tours. “You can really piss people off by having a church service on a tour,” he says with a smile.

In online travel discussion groups, there is some debate about Steves’ methods, style and impact on travel—although these voices are routinely drowned out by fans. On a Fodor’s thread, a few posters complain about rushed itineraries, a tendency to overexpose restaurants and hokey jokes. On a Flyertalk forum, he’s called a dweeb by detractors—but gets a hefty share of compliments, too. The dweebness provides “regular guy” cover for a man who enjoys being provocative.

Lately, Steves has no longer been content to challenge individual travelers by wandering red light districts or sneaking politics into guidebooks. He’s been rolling out his political views in newspaper columns and through speaking engagements. The Rick Steves behind the podium for his stump speech—“Travel as a Political Act”—is not the affable, bemused wanderer, but an outraged liberal willing to raise hackles.

Among other things, he decries what he calls the United States’ overreaction to 9/11 as harmful to national security, the isolation of the U.S. within the United Nations, government underwriting of corporate greed, and the growing gap between rich and poor. He complains that American ambassadors now rarely speak the host country’s language or even seem to much like being abroad.

Some people are surprised when they pull back the gee-whiz veil and see this Steves,  the same Steves who said, “Screw George W. Bush” in front of Evening Magazine’s camera when 43’s approval ratings were still high. (According to friend Gene Openshaw, Steves didn’t expect it to air and wasn’t pleased when it did.)

“He always has been political,” Openshaw says, but the higher profile of television has changed the game. “Rick’s persona on TV is really a very approachable, normal, average guy.  And I think that’s given him the credibility, the approachability to be outspoken about what otherwise are really controversial issues. He’s also a pretty ballsy guy. If he believes something, he’ll say it.”

Openshaw is a longtime friend, former tour leader, and a co-author with Steves on several books. He traveled with Steves to Europe in 1973; they dubbed the no-frills journey “Europe through the gutter.”

Steves likes to talk about his early political days. He voted for Ronald Reagan and used to dream about Alexander Haig becoming president. “It was clear to me: Peace through strength, baby!” he told a crowd at Seattle’s Town Hall last fall. But that was then. His pro-Reagan sticker soon shared bumper space with another proclaiming: “You can’t hug a baby with nuclear arms.” In the 1980s, he produced a newsletter called Future in Our Hands, dedicated to peaceful revolution.

“We were doing our best to promote the notions of peace and less consumption, a more green lifestyle—hippie values, as it were, during the maw of the Reagan era,” Openshaw says. These ideals are seeds for his speeches and the fuel for his charity.

Some viewers and commentators are dismayed by what they call his “anti-American” politics and his “angry, wrathful” attitude, including Dan Gonsiorowski, an editor for Seattlest Web site. He reviewed Steves’ Town Hall presentation, and complained about his dismissive attitude toward Americans who travel on cruise ships and love Hawaii.

Steves’ op-eds about terrorism and Islamo-Facism have been thoroughly critiqued by conservative bloggers including Brian Crouch at Sound Politics. A newspaper calendar notice for a Steves presentation, “Travel as a Political Act,” in Edmonds elicited a raft of anonymous postings, calling Steves an elitist pothead and a leftist wacko.

Back home in Edmonds, few locals are surprised that the town’s most prominent citizen inspires strong opinions. In 2003, Steves wound up at the center of a small-town kerfuffle when he requested the Edmonds Lions Club remove 230 American flags volunteers had posted in the business district at the start of the Iraq War.

Steves argued that the gesture appeared to be support for President Bush’s foreign policy and that the flag was being hijacked as “a logo” for a particular viewpoint. (He flies the E.U. flag outside his office.)
The flags soon came down. Citizens grumbled and wrote letters to the editor, including former Republican Mayor Laura Hall, who challenged Steves’ patriotism and implied that he removed the flags without permission.

At the time, he says, he received letters from loyal readers who said they would no longer buy his books because he was “pro peace.” One coffee shop in town wouldn’t serve him for a while.

“Most people know we’d already decided we don’t want to get in the middle of a political battle here,” says Tom Snyder, who was the Lions Club president at the time. He said Steves was not the only individual, business or club member who wanted the flags down, and that the club had its own reasons for removing them. But when you run the largest downtown business, with 70 employees and annual revenues of more than $30 million, you are a lightning rod.

Steves spoke to the Lions Club about a year later. “I had no idea how much philanthropy he does. It’s humbling,” says Snyder, who learned enough about Steves’ good works to write an introduction for his visit. “Some of the people were really mad at him in town, but if they only knew the great things he does.”

These great things include a purchasing and renovating a 24-unit apartment building in Lynnwood, which he donated to Pathways for Women YMCA. Single mothers in transition can live with their kids for free at the complex, known as the Trinity Project. He gives $30,000 per year to Bread for the World, a lobbying organization in Washington, D.C., that advocates for hungry and poor people. He also supports Mercy Corps, an international development agency in Portland.

Getting personal
As Steves’ phone call winds down, he makes business small talk, so I read the tea leaves of his office. Programming awards line one window and the blue-and-yellow spines of his guidebooks line the other. There’s an enormous Europe map (of course), a rainbow peace flag, a framed Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover, with the faces of Steves’ employees Photoshopped over the originals. In solidarity with the poor in Central America, he has two FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front) banners. On one shelf is a small, crude, hand-painted ceramic sculpture of two soldiers standing over the body of a peasant with red paint slashes across his torso and face. Steves says it’s a common tableau in homes in El Salvador. You’ll find it under the Christmas tree next to the crèche.

It’s a reminder that Steves’ politics weren’t forged entirely in the crucible of Europe. For Steves, an active member of Trinity Lutheran Church in Lynnwood, the ideals of social justice are woven into the fabric of his faith. He was further radicalized—or empowered, depending on your point of view—when he traveled to Nicaragua and El Salvador with Augsburg College’s Center for Global Education in 1988 and 1991, and to El Salvador in 2005 to mark the 25th anniversary of the assassination of archbishop Oscar Romero.

He has become such an exemplar of Lutheran values that, in 2006, he received the Wittenberg Award from The Luther Institute in Washington, D.C., in recognition of his distinguished service to church and society.
His screen saver is a photo of Steves addressing a large, probably seriously baked, crowd at Hempfest in Myrtle Edwards Park last August. And, at last, we come to the weed.

Sometime in 2000, a radio host asked Steves, “‘What is your favorite gelato?’ He replied, ‘ganja.’ And the host was incredulous,” says Allen St. Pierre, executive director of NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws). “I’ve heard a tape. The host was blown away.” It was a toe in the water for Steves, who would become very public in his support for reforming drug policy and decriminalizing the private use of marijuana.

For Steves, the prohibition on pot is parallel to the 1930s prohibition on alcohol, with government money going to police and prisons, driving up crime and incarceration rates without making a dent in recreational use. He says, “The measure of a society’s successful drug policy is harm-reduction rather than the number of people locked up.” As in many things, Europe is Steves’ model for a rational drug policy. In Amsterdam, for example, where coffee shops sell pot and provide “loaner bongs,” he says, the priority is on reducing the abuse of drugs such as heroin and cocaine, and the per capita number of dope smokers is lower than in the U.S.

But his support is about more than what he considers good policy; it’s about the civil right to smoke. He first smoked pot while traveling in his early 20s. He told one crowd about smoking in a Moroccan market and then narrating the experience of being stoned for his sober guests.

After years of negotiations with his wife and his colleagues at ETBD, he took a position on the advisory board of NORML, joining mostly judges and lawyers in the emeritus stage of life, plus celebrities Tommy Chong and Woody Harrelson.

“Open advocacy of cannabis consumption usually brings disaster,” says Jeffrey Steinborn, a Seattle criminal defense attorney who serves on NORML’s board of directors. “That’s why you’ll observe that the ‘movement’ is mostly made up of folks who are self-employed, unemployed, or have the rare fortune to have an open-minded employer.”

Steves is on his “short list of heroes.”

St. Pierre says the Euro guru lends gravitas, credibility and energy to the movement. One more step in Steves’ public campaign commenced this February and March, when he hosted a half-hour American Civil Liberties Union infomercial about marijuana laws.

Not everybody is thrilled. “There are certainly people in this company that wish Rick would tone down his politics,” Openshaw says. They field critical feedback and emails and worry about the negative impact.

Beyond the company, Steves has other masters. “If stations are pissed because I’m smoking pot with Willie Nelson or something like that … then nobody wants to take my show and I become a pariah. That would be bad news for me.”

What if they asked him to stop advocating for decriminalizing pot-smoking? “I wouldn’t,” he says. Steves makes no bones about his value. He produces a high-performing, low-maintenance product off which a lot of people are profiting.

One sign of how far out of the marijuana closet Steves has stepped can be found on the contribution-perks page at NORML.com. For a $100 donation, you can take home a Rick Steves Travel Gear Civita hemp daypack embroidered with the message: “Pack NORML (with the little marijuana leaf in the O) with Rick Steves.” Once again, the line between Steves’ commercial goals and his political mission are blurred. Even as he declaims ideas you’d think would marginalize him, his business thrives.

Before I leave, I ask about climate change. Here’s a thoroughly progressive guy dedicated to mindful, low-impact tourism, yet encouraging people to fly in carbon-puking jets poses a direct challenge to his values.
Last year, ETBT donated $80,000 to American Forests, a citizens conservation organization that, among other initiatives, aims to plant 100 million carbon-absorbing trees by 2020.

Steves’ donation funds the planting of 80,000 trees, which over their lifetimes can absorb the CO2 generated by 13,000 ETBD tour participants flying round-trip from the U.S. to Europe this year—“making the people that take our tours every year carbon-neutral.”

Of course, trees planted today don’t offset the immediate carbon hit.

“I’m grappling with this right now,” he says. “I’m not proud of the $80,000 we spent. It’s not a fix. It’s a feel-good measure.”

He supports a “carbon tax” and says  “big government” is needed to find solutions, precisely the sort of talk that makes conservatives howl. But this European-style solution is not on the table, so Steves is faced with an unhappy reality.

“I could see myself getting to a point where I would stop teaching travel if I came to the conclusion that it was more of a negative than it was a positive,” he says.

“If I determine that the negative environmental impact was not negated by the value of Americans’ broader perspective through travel, then yes, I’d stop.

“There’s a value to traveling: to broaden our perspective, to better understand the world. But if travel is going to bring the world down, I’ve got to start fishing.”  L&P