Clothes can wait. Toothpaste and hair gel (hope springs eternal…) can wait. Tourist brochures and travel materials can wait. Books cannot.
As I prep for my days exploring three national parks in California — Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon — for sure, I want to have the right shoes and the right outerwear, but more importantly, I also want to have sufficient books to last me through this sojourn.
So, packing books on Friday. Packing clothes and essentials on Saturday. Departing Tampa early Sunday, arriving San Francisco Sunday mid-afternoon. Exploring Yosemite on Monday. Though Oscar Wilde commented that he never traveled without his diary to be sure of having something sensational to read on the train, I’m not packing a diary, only 10 novels for my 11 days.
Yeah, yeah, I know all the benefits of e-readers. You can have a thousand books at your convenient disposal at the flick of a thumb, but I’ve not yet gone over to the dark side, still preferring the heft and presence of a physical book. If one purpose of such a trip is to remove oneself from the grid as much as possible, then e-reading (with hyperlinked audio, video, dictionary, translation, and other such digital distractions) seems to defeat the purpose, don’t you think?
So I calculate the likely reading time and space over the days ahead: extended airport waits, long transcontinental flights, shuttle riding, hotel sitting, morning up-before-everybody-else time, evening winding-down time, even those designated photo-ops of reading in the shadow of El Capitan or while sitting at the base of a towering redwood.
Don’t get me wrong, I intend to engage fully with this marvelous wilderness environment — the powerful mountains, the rushing rivers, the massive trees, the mesmerizing canyons. And there will be plenty of time when I just sit and stare and meditate on Thoreau's notion that in wildness is the preservation of the earth. John Muir, that great guru of the High Sierras, wrote "Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality." I intend to dissolve and absorb and pulse all over myself while in the great outdoors.
Likewise, I intend to engage fully with other travelers met along the way as we share our stories. But when there’s a momentary respite from people and places, then I return to the succor of a book. Seeing someone reading a familiar book or author is a perfect invite to strike up a conversation, an instant camaraderie, if not conspiracy, between readers who are no longer strangers. If on a summer’s night, a traveller also has a book — to mangle Italo Calvino’s famous title just a bit — then what better way to connect?
The load is lightened along the way as each book is finished and left behind, like an unexpected treasure, for another traveler to find and take to heart. I had a friend who similarly traveled with an excess of books, and as he read one after the other, he decreased the book's weight by simply tearing out the pages, scattering nuggets of Tolstoy from train to train. But I prefer leaving the book whole, adding it to the Leave One/Take One shelf. And granted, it’s entirely possible that I might add to my reading arsenal a book with a local focus. I'll bet there will be many opportunities to acquire a copy of John Muir’s own My First Summer in the Sierra. Reading that as the moon glances off Half Dome should add a distinct frisson to being right there, right then.
Emily Dickinson, who essentially stayed at home, wrote that a book is tantamount to travel for “there is no frigate like a book to take us lands away.” But when you add a suitcase full of books to the actual travel experience, then you have covered many miles indeed.
So, my choice for the upcoming trip consists of paperback editions of the following 10 books, all novels, though already I’m sweating that that might not be enough: Naguib Mahfouz’s The Thief and the Dogs, Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn, Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, Elizabeth Strout’s Anything Is Possible, Celeste Ng’s Everything I Ever Told You, Jess Walters’ Beautiful Ruins, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories and Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky.
California, here I come!
Ben Wiley, a Creative Loafing Tampa film reviewer, also advocates for paper and print. Dead trees, if you will. He volunteers at a local library bookstore and enjoys engaging with readers and their books. This BookStories feature highlights some of these Ben, Book & Beyond encounters. Contact him here.
This article appears in May 31 – Jun 7, 2018.
