Yes, it has been a long time. And no, sadly, I haven’t made any real progress on The Argosy Adventure since posting the last chapters of the first draft here on May 31. In the interim, I’ve been holed up on an island off the coast of Maine, building a boat, rowing and sailing among the islands of Penobscot Bay, taking many hikes in the woods, and letting the draft lie fallow while I took a break. Hopefully, I’ll get back to it soon. In the meantime, I decided to return to a project I set aside earlier in my writing career. And also, to share it with you.

Fifteen years ago, I started a series of essays I posted to my “daytime job” blog. Over the next four years, that series grew to a total of forty-three essays, each with a nature focus, and usually with a separate message as well. I called that series, Not Here but There: A Wilderness Journal, because the subject matter diverged significantly from the technology focus of my other blog. During those years I took great pleasure in conceiving and then executing those essays. Here, I thought, lay my future as an avocational author.

Then, one day while walking our dog in a sleet storm, an idea came to me that turned into The Alexandria Project, and my writing focus was hijacked by a conflicted but increasingly endearing companion named Frank.

With a few exceptions, those early essays were inspired by my solo, back country roaming across the American West, and particularly the Southwest. I’ve spent two to four weeks hiking and camping there every year for the last several decades. In other words, experiencing the same terrain Frank Adversego explored in the first two books, and returned to again in The Turing Test.

But even as Frank continued to monopolize by writing attention, I always thought that one day I should return to these essays, polish them up, and release them as a book. Not because they’re likely to attract much of a following, but because in these natural snapshots I sought to capture a landscape that is both vivid and subtle, magical and harsh, essential and endangered. And above all, profoundly meaningful to me.

As usual, I’ll post a new chapter each week. Loyal Friends of Frank will recognize several scenes they’ve read about before, like the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, where Frank had the good sense to camp in the same place I did when I was writing the chapter in which he was observed by a California Condor.

Assuming I follow this project through to completion, perhaps a few readers will be inspired to visit, and be similarly enchanted by, some of the wondrous places I’ve tried to capture and share. I’d like that.

So let’s get started, shall we?

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Roots of Aimless Travel

August 16, 2005  This trip had its genesis four years ago, when I was flying home to Massachusetts from San Jose, California on a nearly empty flight in the wake of the collapse of the Internet bubble. Looking down half an hour into the flight, I saw the usual mountains and arid valleys of the southwest, but something was different: there were no jeep trails sketched across the vast landscape below. In most parts of the West, dusty, dirt tracks meander everywhere, snaking across deserts, zig-zagging up mountains and down. Braided scars that, once inscribed, persist for decades even in disuse.

For the next hundred miles, mountain range succeeded mountain range, like wind-blown waves angled southwest to northeast, almost unblemished by any evidence of human activity.

Wow, I thought, I’ve got to go there.

When I landed, I pulled out a map to trace the arc of the flight and saw I had transited Nevada: a state easy to forget because there is so little there most people experience beyond the city limits of Las Vegas. It’s one of the largest and emptiest places in the country, with an interior area larger than many Eastern states that is devoid of a single town. The great majority of the roads throughout the state are unpaved, and as often as not it’s a hundred miles or more between gas stations. Pro tip: whenever you see one, better fill up. Best to always keep at least ten gallons of water in your car as well in case you get stuck.

I’m a big fan of the West. I grew up in the camping, fishing and hiking back East, of necessity always following a path heading wherever the original bushwhacker thought I should want to go. Throughout most of the arid Southwest, that problem doesn’t exist. For as far as the eye can see in those parts, it’s treeless, and usually public land as well, although in some areas – like New Mexico – cattle ranching leaseholders don’t see it that way. In more enlightened areas, like Arizona, the more neighborly understanding is simply that you’ll remember to close the barbed wire fence gates behind you on your way through.

I distinctly remember when that revelation of limitless possibilities struck me during a month-long driving/camping trip I took with my brother in the summer of 1971, the year I graduated from high school. We flew to Denver, rented a car, and then roamed throughout Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and California, stopping to camp and hike wherever we pleased, one day following the next without plan or purpose other than to see what we could see.

Partway through the journey we crossed the panhandle of Idaho, driving West across the Sawtooth Mountains, following the path of the Lewis and Clark expedition and the Clearwater River on their joint path to the Pacific. I thought it was the most extravagantly beautiful place I’d ever seen: towering trees; cascading, impossibly clear water; and even more pristine air – a world in natural Technicolor. Of course, we stopped for the night to camp by the rollicking, crystalline river where it tumbled over boulders before gliding silently onward across honey-colored stones.

The next day we took a dirt road high up into the mountains the Clearwater divided, emerging at last above what we assumed was the altitude- induced tree line, but was instead the boundary of a vast, lethal fire some forty years before. When at last we reached the top, the mountains rose and fell in every direction, purpling as they marched off into the infinite distance, dotted with alpine lakes often fed by pocket glaciers surviving the short summer season.

Closer to hand, our surroundings resembled an endless Japanese garden: glacier-scoured, delicately lichened granite outcroppings contrasted pleasantly with the quilt of moss and wild flowers they interrupted; widely dispersed, spectral trunks of twisted trees rose up like the ghosts of lost Druids, sculpted across the decades by wind-driven snow and bleached to a clean, pure white by the harsh rays of the high-altitude sun, mute reminders of the forest fire that wiped the mountain tops clean.

That was when it struck me that from such a vantage point, I could take up my pack and walk for a week if I wished, anywhere I wanted to go, each direction as eligible and appealing as the next.

I promised myself there and then that one day I would return and do just that. Thirty years later I did come back. But by then the scene had vanished: the intervening years, perhaps accelerated by global warming, had been sufficient to permit the forest to reclaim the mountains. The endless alpine garden was gone.

By then, though, I had discovered the arid, trackless southwest, and already taken dozens of solitary journeys, short and long, each with no itinerary or destination to constrain me, and always with endless vistas of mountains, deserts, buttes and canyons to explore, making my own trails as I walked.

In this book I hope to share many of the wondrous places I have visited, together with some of the reflections they have inspired.

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