Special to the Washington Post

LAS CRUCES, N.M. — Green chili strips, chili soup, chili lasagna, chili margaritas and chili-tinis pepper the menus. Chili ristras, chili wreaths, chili earrings, chili trail mix, chili brittle and chili chocolate spice up the markets. There’s even the Chile Pepper Institute, where I learn which pepper recently snatched the “world’s hottest” title from the 1,001,304 SHU (Scoville heat unit) Bhut Jolokia.

Cravings for something spicy are amply satisfied in Las Cruces.

Chili peppers, the fruits of plants from the genus Capsicum, were brought to this part of southern New Mexico in the late 1500s by Spanish colonial expeditions. In Spain, chilies had become a culinary hit after explorers carried them back from the Caribbean. It’s understandable, given their addictive qualities.

Well after nightfall on a recent Friday, I steered my sedan through a barren patch of desert in southeastern Utah. Outside the windows, juniper, pinon and sage jerked in the wind. No headlights lit the road except for my tenuous beams, a feeble match for the sea of darkness.

I’d just inched up a mess of nerve-fraying switchbacks on Highway 261, where I’d peered past an unguarded edge into a vertiginous gulf of night below. Now the frozen mud ruts of a county road scraped the bottom of my car, and quite honestly, I didn’t know precisely where I was. At that moment, I questioned the wisdom of my weekend mission: camping and finding ruins on Utah’s Cedar Mesa. It was 11 p.m., about 20 degrees and very windy — hardly ideal weather for camping.

In the early 1980s, when I was a fifth-grader at Jefferson Elementary School, in a small town in Minnesota, our teacher, Mr. Odegaard, took us down a little-used stairway, through a door and into a tunnel beneath our school. He flicked on the lights. The sound of our shuffling feet echoed down a long, dark corridor.

“The walls down here are solid concrete,” I remember him telling us, “and you need three feet to stop gamma rays. When the Russians launch their missiles, this is where I’m coming!”

Another day around that same time, I was sitting outside with my best friend Jon discussing this when he told me that after the missiles were launched, his dad was going to drive them to ground zero, because he didn’t want them to die slow, painful deaths. I had no idea what my family’s plans were.

Such were the dilemmas of the Cold War, which seems so strange and distant now. I was thinking about this recently when I stumbled across the mention of an abandoned missile facility south of Minneapolis, where I live. So I drove for an hour and finally turned down a dirt road that rolled through cornfields until it came up onto a high, wide hill, where I could see for miles in either direction. There, sequestered behind a high barbed-wire fence, was a series of low concrete buildings, with doors hanging off their hinges.

WASHINGTON — In the fall of 1799, George Washington wrote to his nephew: “Two hundred gallons of Whiskey will be ready this day for your call, and the sooner it is taken the better, as the demand for this article (in these parts) is brisk.”

The whiskey Washington spoke of was produced in his own distillery, at Mount Vernon, Va., and the popularity of the spirit (in these parts) remains. Mount Vernon historians-turned-distillers have been busy making Washington’s unaged rye whiskey, following his recipe and manual methods, since early this month and will put 1,100 bottles up for sale in April.

I was outnumbered. Ten Alaskan huskies yelped, jumped and trembled with excitement on a snowy hill 10 miles outside Fairbanks, Alaska. My dog-sled instructor, Leslie Goodwin, sat in the basket of my sled as I poured all my weight onto the foot brake. I couldn’t believe that she trusted me to drive this thing.

“Let’s go!” she said and smiled up at me, amused by my unease. I gingerly slid my foot off the brake. With a jerk, the dogs sprang into a gallop, and I shrieked. But they quickly settled into a rhythmic trot, and the stab of adrenaline soon melted into calm.

We floated through spruce forests and meadows topped by a pale sky. I eased my grip on the handle and watched an unbroken tableau of woods and fields unfurl below us. It was hard to believe that we were just outside Alaska’s second-largest city.

What could Gen. Douglas MacArthur, perhaps the country’s most-decorated war hero, and poet Joyce Kilmer have in common?

I found the answer at the Douglas MacArthur Memorial in downtown Norfolk, Va., a three-building complex in a lovely tree-lined square, consisting of a gleaming new visitors center; the MacArthur Memorial, where the general and his second wife, Jean, are buried; and the Jean MacArthur Research Center. MacArthur chose to be buried here in his mother’s home town, gratefully accepting the city’s offer to create a memorial in the old city hall and courthouse.

Turns out that MacArthur and Kilmer were brothers in arms, serving together in the 42nd Division in World War I. I learned this at the visitors center’s current exhibit — “Under the Rainbow: the 42nd Division and the Great War” — which it’s showing in anticipation of next year’s 100-year anniversary of the start of World War I.

If you are one of the millions of Americans who skip breakfast, you could be sabotaging your health goals.

Breakfast kick-starts your metabolism and gives your body energy to think more clearly while preventing overeating later in the day. Plus, it provides an excellent opportunity to consume foods high in vitamins, minerals, disease-fighting antioxidants and heart-healthy fiber.