Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while. Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire, to know nothing for certain. An inheritance of wonder and nothing more.
No yesterdays on the road.
Somewhere lives a bad Cajun cook, just as somewhere must live one last ivory-billed woodpecker. For me, I don’t expect ever to encounter either one.
Boredom lies only with the traveler’s limited perception and his failure to explore deeply enough. After a while, I found my perception limited.
The four horsemen of the prairie are tornado, locust, drought, and fire, and the greatest of these is fire, a rider with two faces because for everything taken, it makes a return in equal measure.
One of the sweet and expectable aspects of life afloat is the perpetual present moment one lives in and a perception that time is nothing more than the current, an eternal flowing back to the sea.
A true journey, no matter how long the travel takes, has no end.
Adventure is putting one’s ignorance into motion.
Without the errors, wrong turns and blind alleys, without the doubling back and misdirection and fumbling and chance discoveries, there was not one bit of joy in walking the labyrinth.
Spirit can go anywhere. In fact, it has to go places so it can change and emerge like in the migrations. That’s the whole idea.
There are two kinds of adventurers: those who go truly hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won’t.
Beware thoughts that come in the night.
I like the digressive kind of traveling, where there’s not a particular, set, goal.
The thing that overwhelms me when I go out now is the sprawlation of America.
I’ve read that a naked eye can see six thousand stars in the hundred billion galaxies, but I couldn’t believe it, what with the sky white with starlight. I saw a million stars with one eye and two million with both.
Franchises and chains have come to dominate small communities, but those same chains have eliminated a lot of the greasy spoons, places you didn’t want to eat in the first place.
Having made the trip from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean myself going up up up against twenty-five hundred miles of the Missouri River, I can testify that it’s one of the most arduous trips that anyone can make on this continent and yet I had a power boat to do it in.
I contend that in the kind of nonfiction I write, and that other people also pursue, anything is permissible provided the reader knows what you’re taking liberties with.
It’s difficult to write a book where a character is on virtually every page of the book but you cannot refer to his or her gender. It gets rid of every his, her, she and he.
The negative cost of Lewis and Clark entering the Garden of Eden is that later expeditions regardless of what they were intended to do, later expeditions did not deal with the native peoples with the intelligence with the almost kindly resolve that Lewis and Clark did.
I did learn what I didn’t know I wanted to know.