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Shortly before I left for the Kansas City leg of my book tour, a second-hand email message landed in my inbox. It read: “Tell Rolf to be careful when he goes on the Walt Bodine Show. Walt is a crazy old blind man, and you never know what he’s going to do!”
Since Walt Bodine also happens to be the legendary host of Kansas City’s NPR morning talk show — a show I was scheduled to appear on — I wondered what the “crazy” appellation could possibly imply. I kept getting these images of old Walt challenging me to a leg-wrestling match, asking me to protect him from “the coyotes”, or chasing me around the studio with a broom.
I drove up to Kansas City through the soft curves of the Flint Hills, pondering the possibilities. In the trunk, I had a box full of new handouts: Vagabonding promotional stickers, which had just arrived (several weeks late) from the printer. Each sticker consists of the letters “VGB” in the center of a white oval (see the bottom right of the Vagabonding.net main page to see what I’m talking about), much in the manner of the international I.D. stickers you see on cars in Europe. “VGB”, of course, is an abbreviation for Vagabonding, much like “ES” represents Spain (Espana), “D” represents Germany (Deutschland), or “USA” represents the USA.
The VGB sticker was the result of an inadvertently complicated planning process that began when I decided to create Vagabonding stickers with the letters “VAG”. The implication was that the VAG sticker could be a little token for vagabonders — a visual promise to oneself to make time for travel. Simple enough, on the surface, but this concept ran into a snag when I passed the idea along to my editor and publicist at Random House. Initially, they both loved the idea: the international oval design implied travel, the “VAG” implied Vagabonding, and the Vagabonding.net web address could go in the white space underneath.
When they took the VAG sticker idea to a Random House promotions meeting, however, the idea was immediately shot down. This is because (in a detail that I had literally never considered until that point) Random House also publishes Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues — and “vagina” is the first thing everyone thought of when they saw the VAG sticker design. Not wanting to inadvertently promote Vagina-gabonding (though I’m sure such a book would attract lots of attention), we all mulled over alternative abbreviations before coming up with VGB. It’s a dandy little sticker, and my only regret is that I didn’t have them on-hand to give away at my first six readings.
Stickers in hand, I arrived in suburban Kansas City on Monday afternoon, stayed the night with family, and cruised to the Missouri side the next morning to meet Walt Bodine.
In a way, it was hardly fair to introduce Walt as a “crazy old blind man”, even if it was just a secondhand description. After all, the 83 year-old broadcaster is the Walter Cronkite of Kansas City — a man who interviewed John F. Kennedy before he was president, and Martin Luther King before he became a civil-rights icon. He has a huge following locally, and getting onto his hour-long NPR show was, in publicity terms, comparable to my West Coast TV appearances, or my USA Today profile. http://www.usatoday.com/travel/vacations/destinations/2003/2003-01-10-pitts.htm Thus, I was almost surprised to discover, upon entering his radio studio, that Walt really is blind.
Fortunately, Walt didn’t prove to be crazy, and we ended up having a splendid, meandering one-hour on-air conversation (to access this archived broadcast in streaming audio, click here http://www.kcur.org/asx/?showname=walt&showmonth=2&showday=11&showyear=2003&submit=Start+Listening ). Since he obviously can’t read (and Vagabonding is not, to my knowledge, available in Braille), Walt took cues from his producer via his headset, and asked me whatever came to mind. He asked me to name a place — any place — so we could start talking from there. India came to mind, so I mentioned Bombay. Walt asked me how I got there, and I told him I got there by hitching a ride from the Suez Canal on a container ship. Before long we were talking about all manner of travel issues, and calls started coming in on the switchboard. The hour went by quickly, the callers were very friendly, and — in spite of the warning email — Walt never once chased me around the studio with a broom.
The influence of the Walt Bodine Show was obvious that evening, when 100 or so people crammed into the tiny Fairway branch of Rainy Day Books to hear my Vagabonding presentation. I opened up with a travel story about getting drunk and splitting my head open many years ago in Kansas City. Ever since Portland’s fumbled Vonnegut anecdote, I’ve been doing this in each city: opening by telling a personal story about something that happened to me in that city on previous visits. The Kansas City story involved an incident when, at age 5, my cousin Clint dared me to drink a can of Coors, which led to a pillow-fight wherein I hit my head on a piano bench and had to get stitches. It really is a funny story — though I’ll have to practice telling it more, since the KC crowd seemed horrified as much as amused by the bloody, beery details.
The rest of the presentation and discussion went fine, however, and the small Rainy Day bookstore had the ambience of a cozy, bookish basement. Much of this ambience, no doubt, is owed to Vivien Jennings and Roger Doeren, who run the store with the cordial warmth of a family den. Even after the reading was over, lots of people stuck around to talk with one other. (Actually, in my presentation, I’ve been actively encouraging people to introduce themselves and talk to each other afterwards. I call this a “travel exercise”: overcoming your shyness and getting to know your neighbors, just as if you were on the road.)
Once the crowd had thinned a bit, Roger had me sign a book for his son, and told me stories from the times Jon Krakauer and Bill Bryson came to Rainy Day. I autographed a Vagabonding poster for the store, and told them I’d be thrilled if it was displayed anywhere near Krakauer or Bryson’s posters. Roger and Vivien asked me to stop by once I’ve written a second book — and I definitely will, since Rainy Day is such a comfortable and welcoming venue. The same thing could be said about Walt Bodine’s show.
I’ll be looking forward to coming back to Kansas City in the future.
“Youth — nothing else worth having in the world…and I had youth, the transitory, the fugitive, now, completely and abundantly. Yet what was I going to do with it? Certainly not squander its gold on the commonplace quest for riches and respectability, and then secretly lament the price that had to be paid for these futile ideals. Let those who wish have their respectability — I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous and the romantic.”
–Richard Halliburton, The Royal Road to Romance (1925)
Ever since I had a book tour schedule to worry about, I’d been worrying about Tulsa. Tulsa, to all appearances, was not a big book market. Nor was Tulsa much of a travel market. I’d never spent much time in Tulsa, and I didn’t know a soul who lived there.
Thus, I was a bit daunted by the fact that I had not one but two book events in Tulsa.
My friends had been trying to comfort me about Tulsa by making fun of my anxieties — and nobody did this more effectively than Diana, a British expat friend in Bangkok, who sent me the following in an email:
“I’ve been slightly concerned about your book events in Tulsa. In all likelihood, there’ll just be you, your slide show, two librarians wearing buttoned-up cardigans, a handful of holy-rollers ready to shout you down if you blaspheme the Lord, three acne-ridden teenagers who were guided to you via the Burmese transvestite page on your website (and who hope your book has pictures as well), and an aurally-challenged octogenarian who — having disrupted the first half of your talk with yells of ‘speak up boy!’ — will fall asleep and snore through the second half, projectile-spittling onto the projector.
“The practice of soulful travel is to discover the overlapping point between history and everyday life, the way to find the essence of every place, every day: in the markets, small chapels, out-of-the-way parks, craft shops. Curiosity about the extraordinary in the ordinary moves the heart of the traveler intent on seeing behind the veil of tourism.”
–Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage (1998)
Today, en route to a book reading in Dallas, I finally felt like I was traveling America in the pure, deliberate sense of the word.
Granted, I insist in my book that any moment can be considered travel if your attitude is right — and I had plenty such unorthodox “travel moments” last week on the West Coast. Nonetheless, there’s something to be said for the aesthetic experience of a long haul on the American Great Plains — the endless miles of flat grasslands, yellow corn stubble, red-tailed hawks atop fenceposts, mile-markers, road-kill coyotes, gusts of wind, and the broken yellow line of the highway. It’s a great time to let your mind wander, sing along to the radio, and soak in the subtle goodness of the landscape. Back in the mid-nineties, when road-tripping to see family or friends on the West Coast, I would drive for 16 hours at a stretch without ever getting tired. In this way, I feel like the wide-open highways of America are an integral part of who I am, and a vital part of why I started traveling in the first place. It was good to be back out there.
After a nice run of independent bookstore readings on the West Coast, my impending Dallas Borders event represented my first corporate venue — and I was uncertain about how things would play out under the fluorescent lights of a gigantic Texas outlet store. I hadn’t done any public readings since Berkeley the week before, but media interviews had been keeping me salty — including a surreal Sunday-morning TV interview the previous weekend in San Francisco.
“Travel by its very nature demands simplicity. If you don
I mentioned yesterday that I rented a car in Oakland, but I never included the humbling details of the automobile in question: It is a late-model gray Ford Taurus 4-door — probably the least sexy car one could imagine for one’s book tour. I’m not exactly sure what a budding young travel writer should drive in order to project a appropriately hip image (a Jeep? a VW microbus? a hitched-ride with a hot babe in a convertible?) — but I’m pretty sure this isn’t it. Somehow, I just can’t visualize Jack Kerouac cruising a Ford Taurus down Market Street with any degree of dignity (unless, say, Neil Cassady had stolen it on his behalf). Perhaps not noticing this severe hipster dissonance, however, the people at Payless Car Rental in Oakland acted like I should be happy to be driving it (they gave me special deal, since no compacts were available).
In the hopes of achieving the proper degree of irony, I’ve begun referring to this car as the “Bourgeois-mobile”. And, as it turned out, the Bourgeois-mobile was exactly what I need this afternoon.
“Most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place.”
–Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist (1988)
Today was the day when, at no real choice of my own, I was forced to break one of the most basic rules of vagabonding. It was also the day that I learned (or at least was reminded of) one of the most basic tools of travel: talk to everyone, even if you’re a bit shy by nature.
As for the bit about breaking the rules of vagabonding, this was something I saw coming long ago. As I mentioned in an earlier installment of this diary, part of the point of this book tour is to convince people to slow down, take their time, and travel deliberately — but of course my tour itinerary is packed so tightly that I’m often not able to put my own travel advice into practice. Today was one of those days.
The day started with a 6:30 a.m. wakeup, so I could have breakfast and get to the KATU-TV station in time to appear on Portland’s “AM Northwest” show. This was my first television appearance of the book tour, and — if I recall correctly — the first time I’ve appeared on air since a one-week stint on the children’s show “Romper Room” in 1976. I’d interned for various local television stations before, however — and this was enough to instill me with a sense of dread at how my interaction with the presumably chipper morning TV hosts (“Paul-n-Cathy”, according to my tour schedule) would pan out. Ushered into the KATU green room, I took a seat and settled in for the 40 minute wait until my turn in the studio came up.
“Travel spoils you for regular life. When you’re moving from country to country in blithe ignorance, you’re usually granted the safe passage of a holy idiot.”
–Bill Barich, Traveling Light (1984)
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