Opinion: What am I doing in a Catskills zoo? Mike Reiss 1of5 The Catskill Mountains are seen across Basic Creek Reservoir on Monday, Sept. 30, 2019, in Westerlo, N.Y.Will Waldron / Albany Times UnionShow MoreShow Less 2of5 3of5 4of5 5of5 I do a weekly podcast called “What Am I Doing Here?” It’s a tremendous amount of work and pays zilch, just like writing this article. The show should be called “Why Am I Doing This?” It’s just crazy, funny, true stories about my visits to weird and dangerous places: Iran, Easter Island, North Korea, the North Pole. My wife has dragged me like a piece of battered luggage to more than 130 countries, most recently the -stans: Paki-, Kazakh- and Uzbeki-. She was planning a trip to Afghani-, for reasons I don’t quite under-, when the pandemic hit. Suddenly we were stranded, unable to leave the tiny island home we call Manhattan. Since we had no car and were leery of using public transit, we were limited by how far we could walk in a day. Like medieval villagers, we never went more than five miles from home.