Pilgrims in a Sliding World, my first attempt at writing a travel book, was (and will always remain) never completed. Though I’d set out to write the account of an eight-month van journey that had meandered its way through 37 states, I gave up on the book a little over halfway – describing just four-and-a-half months of experiences across 20 states.
This half-finished book amounted to more than 70,000 words of narrative. The fact that many published books aren’t that long (Vagabonding weighed in at just 50,000 words) hints at the fact that I was never able to achieve a proper sense of narrative scope while trying to recount my North American adventures.
Nearly three decades since I abandoned it, Pilgrims in a Sliding World is fascinating for me to reread – but perhaps no more so than the daily journal entries I kept during the experience. The trip itself had transformed my way of being in the world, yet I never effectively captured this transformation in the pages of Pilgrims in a Sliding World.
This shortcoming need not be viewed as a bad thing. The fact that the journey had changed my life was a reward in and of itself – and this new way of seeing benefited my writing life in the years that followed.
Most moments from a journey will never appear in the book (and this is OK)
One reward of revisiting a long-forgotten work is its newfound ability to surprise you. Almost thirty years after having written it, my favorite moment in Pilgrims in a Sliding World may well be his meta flourish from Chapter Seven (“Walking my Corpse Through Texas”):
In the midst of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”—right on the page which describes a machine designed to carve the names of crimes into the flesh of criminals—I found a dried yellow speck of orange rind. As I scraped it from the page, it occurred to me that whoever once owned the book has probably long-since forgotten the details of eating that orange. Consequently, that orange hints of a more profound tale than anything Kafka ever dreamed up—a story so commonplace and forgettable and true that nobody ever bothers to tell it. It is the unadorned story of moment-by-moment life—an unstory that buoys the more interesting episodes of our lives.
I confess that I have betrayed and falsified the slings and arrows of my moment-by-moment experience. Despite fleeting encounters with punk-rock hipsters, gambling-casino idiosyncrasies, and 6.7-magnitude earthquakes, my true experience has been dominated by a long sequence of orange-rind moments that will never find a place in my journal. My journalistic oversights could go on forever: buying powdered milk in Coos Bay, Oregon; sharing a bag of peanuts while driving through Humboldt State Redwood Park in California; visiting a shopping mall in Sacramento; choking down bad-tasting water from a tap at a Santa Barbara beach; using the Treasure Island casino restroom to shave; stopping for gas and beef-jerky in Flagstaff; shooting baskets with a semi-deflated playground ball in Tempe; giving the time to a stranger in Alamogordo; showering in the athletic locker rooms at Texas Lutheran College in Seguin; going for a four-mile run this morning in Galveston. None of these instances are really worth writing about, but they are all just as real as Las Vegas lights and Big Sur sunsets.
This reflection on the inevitable reductiveness of storytelling underscores the fact that no piece of travel writing can come close to containing the rich, non-narrative scope of the travel experience itself.
Tip #9: In the end, taking the journey counts for more than writing it
To this day, I consider the events I attempted (and ultimately failed) to recount in Pilgrims in a Sliding World to be the best travel experience of my life – in part because nothing can compare to your first open-hearted, life-transforming vagabonding journey.
Moreover, no endeavor to write a travel narrative is ever lost, since it gives you a useful perspective on (and intensified attention to) the reality of the travel experience itself. And, when embraced mindfully, the real-time experience of a journey is invariably its truest reward.
Ten chapters into my never-finished first book, while observing teens interact in a Gainesville shopping mall, I posit that adolescence “is not training for some distant contest, but a revelation of training as the contest itself. …Youth—in time—is quarantined to memory, but adolescence remains. We are always growing up.”
My failure to publish (or even finish) Pilgrims in a Sliding World was not just a key step in my maturation as a writer – it was a reminder that, as writers, we are always “growing up,” always trying and failing and trying again, always reinventing how we might better endeavor to convey the experience of being alive.
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