The Education of A Wandering Man

The subject is a book penned by the late Louis L'Amour, the peerless writer of westerns, a smattering of colonial stories (the Sacketts) and a remarkable book about the Middle Ages called The Walking Drum.
I first found it in 1990. L'Amour died in 1988, and the volume I have was published in 1989, shortly after his death. L'Amour was a high school dropout who was largely self-educated by way of his love of books. But the focus of this book in particular was his wandering period in the 1930's. He read thousands of books as he traveled. Many of the stories he wrote over the years arose out of stories he heard as he traveled, some heard around campfires, others during long car trips and voyages around the world.

What it brings to mind for me is the connection between reading and travel. Why do we travel? Why do we read? Oh, I know much of my travel has been related to business, but I am not doing much business traveling these days. Some of my travel takes place on account of family celebrations, but we still relish the travel part of it. Whether I have headed for Edinburgh, Scotland; Saugatuck, Michigan or Sonoma, California, part of the celebration is the trip. We relish travel because of what we learn, in much the same way we read. As L'Amour puts it, "we are, finally, all wanderers in search of knowledge. Most of us hold the dream of becoming something better than we are."

Travel can mean acquisition of knowledge in an exterior sort of way. What we see, touch and taste is the path to knowing a new place. To say, "I've been there," is to claim some true knowledge of a place or thing. We can't know a thing or a place if we haven't. But what about reading? Sure, we read for entertainment, but not completely without bringing our heads along. The stories I remember are the ones that take me somewhere. Sounds like travel, doesn't it? We enrich our lives by travel, both exterior and interior.

All too often our pursuit of something larger, richer and more important turns toward having more. A shame, when it could be about becoming something more. I've decided to link my reading and my travelling. Finding authors and stories linked to the places I will visit. I have Michigan, but have to start working on San Francisco, Sonoma and (way off in the distance, maybe) Italia!