Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are “deleted scenes” from my book. Think of them as a “Special Features” disc of outtakes and curios… I had finally come to grips with my task. I pondered the question of how to turn living into something more than just existing. Time is our worst enemy. Youth seldom considers time; it seems so endless. But youth is characterized by...
A Postcard from Celeryhenge Deep in the forests of a rainy northern isle, far beyond the cities and the moss-choked walls, lies one of our most enduring mysteries: the world’s largest primitive megavegetal site. Who or what piled these stalks in such deliberate patterns, and why? Was it an observatory to track the movements of the bowels? Was it an ancient site of worship? Was it just a...
Enormous trees with wide buttressed roots propped up the canopy: giants draped with vines, mosses and epiphytes which hung in tangled green confusion. All the way down to the impenetrable jungle floor, life grew upon life in one symbiotic Gordian Knot. The forest floor absorbed our footfalls: mine and two Embera hunters from a tiny village deep in Panama’s Darién Gap. The jungle crouched...
In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century In 1999, as the 20th century came to a close, beloved Dutch journalist Geert Mak crisscrossed Europe to retrace the history of its last hundred years and to take the pulse of the great European experiment on the cusp of a new century. Along the way he spoke to the survivors of some of the most significant events of our times, allowing them to tell...
Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are “deleted scenes” from my book. Think of them as a “Special Features” disc of outtakes and curios… From The Philosophy of Zachary Peoples: Page 12: “I dunno, man. Philosophy’s interestin’, but I think that what you believe has to come from inside yourself, ya know? No one can teach you how to examine and make sense of...
No matter where I am in the world, I feel immediately at home in a library. Oriented in space by the catalog system and the temple-like, almost ritual regularity of checkout desk, reference section, fiction and nonfiction. I also feel oriented in Time — through the mathematical chronology of the history section, and in terms of the linear development of human thought through the eras of...
To me, a library has always been a sacred place. I went there as a child in search of silence and reflection, just as others seek the dim solace of a church. I went there to find answers to my questions, just as others might seek a priest in times of distress. Sometimes I went there simply for the atmosphere — the smell of the books, the soft tread of shoes on worn green carpet, the weight of the...
In the Black Hills of South Dakota, not far from the patriotic visage of Mount Rushmore, the curious traveler can find the growing realization of one man’s dream. In 1939 Chief Henry Standing Bear of the Sioux asked Bostonian Korczak Ziolkowski, already a well-known sculptor, to come west to carve a mountain. Standing Bear wanted him to tell the story of his people, “So that the white...
The tortured sounds of the alphabet song drifted across the lobby for the fifth time that day. From the next room, rising above the muffled voices, I heard, “Teacher, what does it mean, ‘feces’?” I sighed and rubbed my eyes, fighting sleep. “What is…. what is surprise?” Tomio, the pudgy bald Japanese salaryman sitting across from me, jiggled a leg beneath...
The endless steaming ribbon of road unrolls before you like a film. Heat haze shimmers and distorts the horizon, breaking the asphalt into tiny lakes which dissolve into nothingness as you rocket on through. A lanky saguaro cactus seems to nod at your passing; but maybe that’s just the red shift. Your hair whips and flutters in the slipstream, bleached blond by the desert sun. The land...
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