Smoothing It

Last week, I travelled to Albuquerque New Mexico for a meeting. Flying in and out of North Dakota is an arduous process that involves at least one connection, a layover and often delays. On this flight, I waited for five hours for my return flight only to be told that it wasn't going to fly. I took it in stride and stayed an extra night in a hotel. Add on to this an additional fourteen hours of actual waiting time and flight time on in and out bound flights...a whopping total of twenty hours was spent waiting in airports and sitting on aircraft. Several years ago, I would have chosen a hefty paperback or sturdy hardback to make the trip. Often, this type of waiting would find me consuming one book and seeking out an expensive airport bookshop for another. On this trip, I brought an iPhone loaded with at least a dozen books and several audio books. I also purchased the requisite paperback at one of the small bookshops. The books that helped smoothly pass the twenty hours in good order are as follows:

Woodcraft by George Washington Sears: a public domain guide to wilderness skills from the 19th century that is still amazingly precient in the present day. Works in the public domain are seeing new light because of the widespread offering of free books in electronic form. From Project Gutenberg, Google Books, Internet Archive, Amazon and others, old obscure works are gaining a new audience they never had before.  The iPhone books app also has an easy way of highlighting text, allowing me to highlight passages I wanted to return to. It creates a very easy to use list of these.

The Backpackers Handbook: an interesting contrast to Woodcraft when juxtaposed together. Both writers recommend a backpack weight of 25 pounds for lightweight backpacking. This book is a compendium of wisdom and products for the modern backpacker. This book utilized the Amazon Kindle app. While not as easy for marking text, it still allowed me to mark pages and passages that I wanted to return to later.

Sanctus: a paperback thriller in the tradition of Dan Brown that was compelling if not disspointing. When reading thrillers with a historical bent, I like the background of places people and events and especially geography to mirror reality. The authors made up city of Ruin with its mysterious fictitious Citadel, lack of characters reflective of the culture of Southeast Turkey and general disconnection from any real history or place turned me off. I enjoy made up places in the realm of science fiction or fantasy, but not a quasi-historical Dan Brownwesque thriller. One of the great appeals of Dan Brown's fiction is that many of the sites are based in real geography, history and fun speculative pseudo-history.

During the trip, I also listened to two audiobooks.  Country Driving by Peter Hessler in audio while walking was fun. This is one of those quirky travelogues filled with personal vignettes and experiences that puts a very human face on fast changing China. Another juxtaposition lay here as well.  I also started When China Rules the World by Martin Jacques, a heavy handed, generalized look at what the author sees as the emerging realities of a future with China as the leading world power. Although interesting and thought provoking, the book elicits a knee jerk reaction to the "other". If humanity can ever free itself from the propensity for creating real and imagined dichotomies of "us" and "them" and forge an enduring "we", it will emerge from the primordial slime and transcend its earthly limitations. Listening to Country Driving helped to temper the tone of trepidation set by the Jacques book with real stories of people who could just as easily be in New York or Bismarck North Dakota. If we embrace our difference, we will discover how much alike we really are.

All in all, what for many might be an arduous process of travel was smoothed by viewing it through the lens of opportunity. To quote George Washington Sears, writing of the 19th century woods that could be shaped to fit modern air travel: "we do not go into the woods in order to rough it: we go to smooth it".