Feb22

libraries are pretty great

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I went to the library a few weeks ago seeking something to read that was more autobiographical in nature than the sort of books I usually read.

Being an ever growing Mark Twain fan I decided to find A Tramp Abroad but, though I sought it with careful attention to the dewey decimal system, the book was not to be found and with the time ticking on my metered parking I started rushing through the aisles, hoping to find it, when the word “Tramp” caught my eye. I snatched it off the shelf and looked it over. It was not Twain’s account of his travels abroad but rather Charles Fletcher Lummis’ A Tramp Across the Continent.

The book contains the observations Lummis made on his pedestrian journey across the United States from Cincinnati Ohio to Los Angeles CA in 1884. He walked 3,500 miles on foot over 143 days and writes some very beautiful prose.

One of my favorite passages is as follows:

“But why tramp? – Railroads and pullmans were invented to help us hurry through life and miss most of the pleasure of it – and most of the profit, too, except of that jingling, only half-satisfying sort which can be footed up in the ledger. I was after neither time nor money, but life – not life in the pathetic meaning of the poor health-seeker, for I was perfectly well and a trained athlete; But life in the truer broader sweeter sense, the exhilarant joy of living outside the sorry fences of society, living with a perfect body and a wakened mind, a life where brain and brawn and leg and lung all rejoice and grow alert together” – p1-2

I really loved how he described what it was that he was hoping to get out of his journey, that he wanted to enjoy doing something because no body else was doing it, because he didn’t want to rush things and because he wanted to leave himself open to adventure and danger and excitement and wonder that comes from traveling without knowing what to expect from day to day.

Later on Lummis describes and incident that almost cost him his life and has this to say about near his brush with death was:

“I was a good deal older than the youth of the Grecian myth when I fell in love with my own shadow, and it was not, as in his case, because of its beauty, but for its usefulness. Had I been one of those people who are “so thin they have to walk twice to make a shadow,” I should not be writing now; for on that pretty November day, just out of Canon City, there was no time for a second walking. that event recurs oftenest to my mind as an instance of what very slender threads they sometimes are by which our lives hang. Had it been a cloudy day, or had it been just as bright and the sun an hour higher , or had a certain road run south instead of west, or had it been fringed with grass instead of level dust, my tramp and my life would have ended together very abruptly.”

I won’t claim that A Tramp Across the Continent is some work of literary genius but it does offer a perspective on life from an unusual and extraordinary young man from the late 1800’s – small details, like his wearing a money belt full of solid gold coins, really say a great deal about what was valued in that time period.

Feb4

Oh, hello there…

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I suppose this is where I greet you and welcome you to my blog so….

Hello!

My puppy agreed to greet you all in my stead

I’m not quite sure what this blog will have to offer you since I hardly know what it will offer me (other than an outlet for my many whirling thoughts) but I hope at the very least it proves entertaining.

I wanted to have a place to discuss the often odd things I’ve seen, queer conversations I’ve had with equally unusual people, and the bizarre questions that so typically spring unbidden to the forefront of my thoughts. I suppose what I’m hoping for in sharing these things with you, o general public (and more likely random stumbler!), is confirmation that I’m not going mad, nor am I so strange for seeing, doing and thinking the things that I do.

So welcome to the rabbit hole, thanks for stopping by and please feel free to visit again.

Cheers,

Kae