For all of the shortcomings I’ve identified in Pilgrims in a Sliding World (my never-published first attempt at writing a travel book), it’s worth pointing out that it contained some of the earliest seeds of what later did become my first book, Vagabonding.
At a certain level that makes perfect sense, as Pilgrims in a Sliding World was an attempt to recount my first-ever vagabonding trip (eight months by Volkswagen Vanagon across North America), and I had already begun to accrue the lessons and form the philosophies that underpinned my eventual authorial debut.
Some of the prose from Pilgrims in a Sliding World quite literally mirrors what I would later write in Vagabonding. For example, when I observe in its introduction chapter that “we allow ourselves to be unwittingly dragged into adulthood behind monthly payments on matte-grey home entertainment systems” – I’m literally remixing a Laurel Lee line (“cities are full of those who have been caught in monthly payments for avocado green furniture sets”) that would later appear in Vagabonding.
The “monthly payments” line was in fact a nod to Laurel (who was my teacher back in college), but as the subsequent chapters of Pilgrims in a Sliding World played out, many contained my own observations about work, simplicity, and adventure that would ultimately be echoed in Vagabonding.
Early examples of my vagabonding approach to work
For instance, the second chapter of Vagabonding (entitled “Earn Your Freedom”) focuses on the merits of working up to save travel funds. “The best litmus test for measuring your vagabonding gumption is not found in travel,” I wrote, “but in the process of earning your freedom to travel. …Work is not just an activity that generates funds and creates desire. It’s the vagabonding gestation period, wherein you earn your integrity, start making plans, and get your proverbial act together.”
I go on to assert that working-class jobs (carpenters, waiters, truck drivers) are as viable for seeding travel budgets as office jobs – and no doubt this conviction is tied to the fact that I’d earned my earliest vagabonding money working with my hands. As I wrote in the first chapter (entitled “Face the Muzak”) of Pilgrims in a Sliding World:
Most of [my travel budget] has been gleaned from the small contributions to society that I have made over the last three years. If you happened to buy canned tuna from the Dillon’s supermarket at 13th and West street in Wichita three summers ago—I was the one who put it on the shelf. If you happened to move into a vacant apartment unit at the Villa Felicia in Portland two summers ago—I was the one who repainted the walls. If you happened to admire the landscaping at the Costco wholesale outlet in Kirkland, Washington at any time in the last eight months—well, that was Jeff and me both. Our trip depends on these countless blank moments—which smelled of gasoline, floor wax, compost, white latex paint, sawdust, and hope.
Early examples of my vagabonding approach to simplicity
Regarding the importance of simplicity to long-term travel, I stated in the preface to Vagabonding that “this book views long-term travel not as an escape, but an adventure and a passion — a way of overcoming your fears and living life to the fullest. In reading it, you will find out how to gain an impressive wealth (of travel time) through simplicity.”
This sentiment owes a lot to this line from the first chapter of Pilgrims in a Sliding World:
Modest resources used cleverly can go a long way when you live in a country where even poor people have things they don’t need. To realize that you are separate from what you own is to find buried treasure in your own simplicity.
Early examples of my vagabonding approach to adventure
I’m similarly declarative — and evocative of Vagabonding — in my Pilgrims in a Sliding World perspective on adventure, which appears in Chapter Seven (entitled “Walking My Corpse Through Texas”):
Adventure is not cinematic explosions and high-speed chases; adventure is merely doing things that most people wouldn’t. Adventure is taking on a lifestyle of extroversion, asceticism, diplomacy, and vagrancy. Adventure is striking up conversations with people whom we wouldn’t normally talk to, as well as people who wouldn’t normally talk to us. Adventure is embracing the random: exploration of unfamiliar places, contact with unfamiliar people, attempts at unfamiliar experiences.
If that feels familiar, note that, years later, Chapter Seven of Vagabonding (“Get into Adventures”) declared:
The secret of adventure is not to carefully seek it out, but to travel in such a way that it finds you. To do this, you first need to overcome the protective habits of home and open yourself up to unpredictability. …More often than not, you’ll discover that “adventure” is a decision after the fact — a way of deciphering an event or an experience that you can’t quite explain. In this way, adventure becomes a part of your daily life on the vagabonding road.
Lesson #8: Over time, we write our way into what we have to say
The strength of Vagabonding is that is struck an effective balance of philosophy and anecdote, whereas Pilgrims in a Sliding World fixated on random details and (sometimes half-baked) observations at the expense of an overarching narrative. Yet, in a certain sense, my failed attempt at writing Pilgrims was a way of working through the issues and themes that later (with the help of more life- and travel-experience) came through in Vagabonding.
It also put my travel life into conversation with my writing life, which is something I’ll address in the final installment of this series.
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