Notes (and a tangent) from Tim Cahill’s Hold the Enlightenment

I just finished Tim Cahill’s newest book Hold the Enlightenment, which is tough to evaluate thematically, since (as is always the case with Cahill’s books) his stories bounce us all over the world: Montana, Turkey, the Congo, Argentina, South Africa, Mexico, Mali, and back to Montana again. As usual, Cahill shows his colors as a sharp humorist, an observant journalist, and a person who does not want to hear about anyone else’s gastro-intestinal problems. As he says in the eponymous essay that opens the book:

“I am not a yoga kinda guy. Yoga people are sensitive, aware, largely sober, slender, double-jointed, humorless vegans who are concerned with their own spiritual welfare and don’t hesitate to tell you about it. They are spiritually intense and consequently enormously boring in the manner of folks who, in their own self-absorption, feel you ought be alerted as to the quantity and texture of their last bowel movement.”

From his misadventure at a Jamaican yoga camp, Cahill goes on to track platypus in Australia, visit Columbian rebels with Dangerous Places author Robert Pelton (who quips that “journalists are mostly pompous pussies”), and explain how the cottonwoods of a certain Montana valley once came to be filled with dead deer. “An adventure is never an adventure…

…when it