Yes, that says “Preview”. The book does not yet exist. I don’t know exactly when it will exist or if Walking to Listen will even be its title. But I am confident that it will exist and that it will be worth reading.

In a recent blog post, I told how, when I travel, I quickly get behind on the RSS feeds I subscribe to. The same thing happens to the few podcasts that I follow. Heck, I even get behind on them when I don’t travel. So I am seriously behind on This American Life. So much behind that yesterday, October, 15, I listened to the program from May 3. My timing was perfect.

It was a three act program named “Hit the Road”. Act one was “The Slowest Distance Between Between Two Points” which was Andrew Forsthoefel’s story. Andrew had walked across the country, from Philadelphia to the San Francisco, covering 4000 miles in eleven months. He wore a sign bearing the phrase “Walking to Listen” and that is what he did. He met lots of people and he listened to them. He recorded lots of what he heard. From that he produced a one hour audio program that can be heard here. In some regards, the This American Life program is a trimmed down version. It can be heard here.

I was walking when I listened to the podcast and I suppose that might have had a tiny bit to do with my liking of the podcast but only a very tiny bit. The idea of seeing the USA through its people is always intriguing and that’s what Andrew was doing with his walk. He was twenty-three years old and he was asking people what advice they might give to a twenty-three year old version of themselves. Listening to some of the answers was intriguing to the extreme. So too was Andrew’s commentary recorded both during and after the walk.

Near the end of the program the host, Ira Glass, shared information about the one hour program and also mentioned that a book was in the works. When I got home, I listened to the longer audio program and I visited Andrew’s website at WalkingToListen.com. There are pictures there and more information about the walk and a blog. Andrew started the blog about two weeks into the walk. I haven’t read the entire thing but it looks as if he posted every few days during the walk and mentioned everyone he had recently talked to. Thanked them, actually. After the walk, the entries slowed, as they should, to a trickle. The most recent was posted on October 14; The day before I first heard the podcast and the second anniversary of the walk’s beginning. In addition to noting the anniversary, the post announced that Houghton Mifflin had picked up the book. As I said, my timing was perfect. I’ve subscribed to Andrew’s blog and will be anxiously watching for a publication date.

The picture at the top of this post was taken by Andrew’s mother as he set off to walk and listen. I hope neither she nor Andrew are too angry at me for snitching it.

Before I get around to actually talking about this book, I am going to tell how I learned of its existence. I first saw Theodora R, the boat whose mast the author was behind, in July of 2011. I was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when a friend tipped me off to a nearby museum called Tinkertown. The museum was different than anything I’d ever seen and the boat was different than anything else in the museum. There were similarities, of course, because the same man who created the museum of small items, many hand carved, had also created the signage and other details in the display of the thirty-five foot boat. Then another similarity occurred to me. The unique folk art museum created by Ross Ward represented his “Follow Your Heart” attitude and the boat that Fritz Damler sailed around the world represented that same attitude. Now the boat didn’t seem out of place at all.

I had chatted with Ross Ward’s widow, Carla, when I first arrived and learned just a bit about the man who passed away in 2002. I spoke with her again before leaving and learned that Fritz Damler was her brother and that he now lived in the Bahamas. I can’t recall why I didn’t buy this book on that first visit. Maybe I was really watching cash flow on the way home from a west coast road trip or maybe I wasn’t even aware that it existed. Carla is not much into high pressure sales. I bought it three months ago on my second visit.

Ten Years Behind the Mast was published seven years ago. Fritz Damler completed his circumnavigation fifteen years before that. Maybe taking fifteen years to finish a book about a ten year journey is a little higher than average but it makes me feel less guilty about coming to it seven years later. A friend and I once met a couple who were sailing south along the Americas’ east coast. Fritz’s publishing — and living — schedule reminds me of something they said often: “If we were in a hurry, we wouldn’t be on a sailboat.”

You also wouldn’t be living on a sailboat without wide ranging skills and the willingness to learn more — sometimes instantly. It isn’t too far fetched to believe that Fritz spent his first thirty-two years training for this journey. He was building guitars for a living immediately before acquiring the Theorora R and he was actually well into building his own wooden boat for the trip when he was betrayed by the epoxy he used and it fell apart. Some of his other jobs included paramedic, volunteer fireman, musician, and ski instructor. Each of those, and no doubt others, provided experience and training that served him well on his journey.

His wife was along when the trip started but it turned out she wasn’t as keen about living on a thirty-five foot boat as she initially thought and she was nowhere near as keen on sailing around the world as Fritz was. Before long, Fritz was without a wife which also meant he was without a permanent crew. Some of the sailing was done solo but most of it was done with an ever changing cast of characters which are all identified and described to some degree. So too are most, if not all, of the ports where Fritz and Theodora R dropped anchor and many of the people he met in those ports. It is a lot to pack into a couple hundred pages but Damler does a pretty good job of covering the ten years evenly.

There are visits from friends and family and Damler never really loses connection with the USA but he does get up close and sometimes personal with a lot of different cultures. He is able to report that fruit bat, the daily special of a Madagascar restaurant “tastes like sweet chicken”. He determined that a small village on New Guinea’s Sanaroa Island was the most remote he ever visited with the help of his guitar. It was the only place where not one person showed even a flicker of recognition when he played “House of the Rising Sun”. That is remote indeed.

Through lots of little glimpses, Damler provides something of a feel for what cruising through far off waters is like. Theodora R was far from alone in doing this. Apparently a sizable “cruisers” culture exists though not everyone is heading around the world or living aboard full time. It is ever so slightly like the RV culture with distances and degree of isolation cranked up to imagination challenging levels.

This is not a guide book or a how to sail book. It is a story book that tells a true and entertaining story. Damler’s writing style makes the reading easy without excess tension or artificial suspense. The final phrase of the back cover blurb sums it up pretty well. “…his story of a decade at sea has it all: Discovery. Heartbreak. Misadventure. Salt.”

Ten Years Behind the Mast, Fritz Damler, Jackson Harbor Press, 2006, paperback, 8.4 x 5.5 inches, 211 pages, ISBN 978-1890352202.
Available through Amazon.

On my first visit to Tinkertown, seeing and reading about Damler’s boat instantly reminded me of one of my favorite Michael McCloud songs, Chasin’ the Wind. I quoted from it in the journal entry for that 2011 visit. Here is a little longer quote:

The job got to feel just like an anchor
and that young wife started to roll just like the waves.
So he traded them both for a sturdy old boat
and the one dream that he’d always saved.

And another couple of lines:

Seen most of the world and a few lovely girls
who spent a short time working as the crew.

When I left Tinkertown after the 2013 visit, I had Damler’s book in my trunk and McCloud’s song in my head. The day after arriving home from that trip I listened to Chasin’ the Wind as I drove to meet friends. Before the song was even half over, I had decided where I would be going for Christmas. For several years now, I have made a “Christmas Escape Run” around the year end holidays. I have been to Key West and seen Michael McCloud just twice; Most recently on on my 2008 “Christmas Escape Run”. Sometime around Christmas 2013, I intend to be in Key West, Florida, where I can listen to Michael McCloud and at least look at some sailboats.

ADDENDUM 21-Aug-2015: It took a new comment to draw my attention to one I’d missed over a year before and, when that happened, I reread my announcement of firm intentions to head to Key West for Christmas. It didn’t happen. It wasn’t until Christmas of 2014 that I made it to Key West.

If you think this looks like it belongs here, you haven’t been paying attention. No, books about cosmology, quantum physics, and beyond aren’t what I typically read and I’m clearly not qualified to review them. I was given the book as a gift, I read and enjoyed it, and I intend to tell somebody about it.

Note that I said “read and enjoyed”, not “read and understood”. I suppose it is a sort of “Quantum Physics for Dummies” but quantum physics is not really a field for dummies. The way the book worked for me was as history and as a glossary. Bits of the history of mankind’s progress in understanding his world is scattered throughout with references to folks like Archimedes and Newton and Einstein. There is a real glossary at the back but I felt as if the body of the book gave me a glossary level understanding of things. As I read about string theory, multiverses, no-boundary conditions, and the like, I may have understood the definitions but fell a little short of fully comprehending the concepts. I don’t mean that I was constantly shaking my head and moving on in bewilderment. I simply mean there were no “ah-ha, of course the world needs quarks” moments.

There are frequent almost folksy attempts at humor or lightness. Some bring on a smile; Many don’t. But I think they all do their job as reminders of just who this is written for. I did not have a thorough understanding of quantum physics when I finished my reading but I did have confidence that others do. I guess that’s really what I got out of the book. I think there’s something of a tendency for us “civilians” to dismiss stuff like multiple universes as crazy talk but there really are people who can get their heads around the theory and I find that reassuring. Maybe some of the ideas really are half baked but the truly wrong ones will eventually be found out and the half right ones will be improved upon. That’s what science at this level is; Admiring and appreciating guys like Newton and Einstein while working as hard as you can to find their mistakes.

I started off admitting that this book was really out of place here. I do a lot of my reading over meals in restaurants and it was rather out of place in some of the joints where I eat, too. I quickly worked out a way to carry the book that cut down considerably on the funny looks aimed my way.

The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow,  Bantam, 2012, paperback, 6 x 9 inches, 208 pages, ISBN 978-0553384666
Available through Amazon.

Not long ago, a friend mentioned a couple of travel related books he had just read and, when I found one of them available at the local library, I decided to give it a read. It’s Bill Barich’s Long Way Home – On the Trail of Steinbeck’s America. The subtitle is a reference to Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie which Barich cites as an inspiration for his own road trip and book. The books’ basics are certainly similar. Each is the product of a successful American writer of a certain age undertaking a cross country road trip with hopes of learning something of a nation he’s been out of touch with for awhile. Steinbeck did it in 1960; Barich in 2008. Forty-eight years is not the only difference. Steinbeck did it in a custom built camper with unlimited time and, for all practical purposes, an unlimited budget. Barich did it in a rented Ford Focus, with a six week schedule, and a budget he calls “tight”. Steinbeck sort of circled the country, starting and ending at his home in Sag Harbor, New York. Barich makes one more or less straight pass through the center of the nation. But, for me, the biggest difference is that, while I’ve never really cared for Travels with Charlie, I ended up enjoying Long Way Home. Of course, Steinbeck didn’t seem to enjoy his own trip very much; Barich did. I think that rubbed off on me.

I probably also like the fact that Barich describes his route a little better than Steinbeck and that it goes through places much more familiar to me. He drives right through Ohio and tells of eating at a restaurant where I’d eaten just days before reading of his visit. It’s hard to ignore connections like that.

Long Way Home begins with Barich recounting how much he had enjoyed reading Travels with Charlie as a teenager. Stumbling across the book decades later in Dublin, Ireland, triggered plans for his own trip but re-reading it didn’t bring back the pleasure he remembered. I suspect the teenage Barich loved the idea of an unplanned journey across the USA enough to overlook shortcomings in its execution.

Both authors do their “learning” by observing the nation’s countryside, its small towns, and, less frequently, its cities. The story telling is most interesting when it involves some interaction with the locals and that usually happens, as you might expect, in the small towns. Both trips took place during election years and both authors sometimes attempt to get those locals to discuss their political feelings with mixed success. My impression is that Barich is more successful but I can’t back that up with hard facts. Both are pretty successful at getting folks to talk, in general terms, about their and the nation’s financial situation.

Of course, John Steinbeck wasn’t the first person to write a book about driving around the US and Bill Barich won’t be the last. As someone who enjoys writing trip journals, it stands to reason that I enjoy reading them. I enjoyed reading Long Way Home and even Travels with Charlie. Both are, as you would expect, very well written. Trip journals are snapshots. Like photographic snapshots, they record how something appeared to one person at one time. I have little desire to visit the country in Steinbeck’s snapshot while Barich’s is much more inviting. I suspect that On the Trail of Steinbeck’s America subtitle was more of an attention getting device than a description of Barich’s true intentions. I doubt he was really looking for Steinbeck’s America and I’m rather glad he didn’t find it.

Long Way Home: On the Trail of Steinbeck’s America, Bill Barich, Walker & Company, 2010, hardback, 9.4 x 6.4 inches, 256 pages, ISBN 978-0802717542
Available through Amazon.