Swept Away

Whenever I travel, be it across the state or around the world, I bring a book along. It’s a comfort to know that I have something to read when I need it most. With good fiction in my carry-on luggage, an unforeseen weather delay or mechanical issue is an opportunity for a deep dive. I love getting swept away by words. Hours pass in minutes when I’m reading a captivating story. 

In March, thunderstorms thrashed Nadi International Airport in Fiji, shutting down the airport for five hours as I tried to fly home. Instead of getting upset about something I had no control over, I plowed through a refreshing debut novel, Shark Heart: A Love Story by Emily Habeck. It’s a delicious book about a stage manager who is diagnosed with a genetic mutation that over nine months turns him into a great white shark. His wife, Wren, struggles to cope with having to let the love of her life go wild. 

After my success with Shark Heart, I failed miserably on the next international trip. In April, I took Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls all the way to Spain, only to leave it on a bookshelf in a hotel lobby. I couldn’t get past page forty, even though we were visiting Guernica, and I wanted to read a book that revolved around the Spanish Civil War. It seemed like such a good idea, but what a disaster. I was bookless in Spain, so I downloaded Amor Towles’ new book, Table For Two, a series of short stories that revolve around love in New York. Towles is the  author of A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway, so I knew I could count on him. 

I like to start reading a work of fiction at the beginning of a big trip then consume a chapter a night throughout my travels. Years ago, Rodeo and I headed to Argentina where we drove from Mendoza to Bariloche on Route Forty into the heart of cowboy country. I brought along a copy of Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. When I think of my favorite characters from that book, especially Lorena and Gus, I imagine them in the Argentinian countryside.

I once met Rodeo in Patagonia when he was determined to ride his dirt bike from Santiago to the tip of South America. I read one of my mother’s old favorites, The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough. While Rodeo rode to the town where we were meeting in fierce winds and bad weather, I traveled in a huge bus, the only passenger, feeling safe and secure tucked in the back by a big window. My only distractions were the windswept landscape and Meggie’s dilemma of loving an ambitious priest, who, in a weak moment, loved her back. I was hooked on the book and the place. Both have wedged themselves firmly in my memory. 

My Mom, a book-obsessed reader herself, is currently a member of three book clubs, and she was with me as this travel technique first developed. On a trip to pick my sister up from college in Japan, my Mom bought me a Sidney Sheldon book in Los Angeles. At the age of fifteen, I was into page turners and Sheldon was squarely in that camp.  When I finished it, Mom bought me another one at the next airport, pleased that I could entertain myself so easily. She never questioned my reading choice. I had found an author I connected with, so I stuck with Sheldon through Hawaii, Guam, and several Micronesian Islands. By the time we landed in Tokyo, I’d read three of his books. 

All these years later, I realize that reading three books in three days is a complete luxury. In our busy lives, we have so little time to read fiction or nonfiction that travel can offer the perfect excuse. I do it as much as I can, shedding the nitty gritty of daily chores and my day job, but I try to be discerning because there are so many good choices out there these days. It’s like picking my friends, I take care to choose wisely. Sometimes it doesn’t work out, but when it comes together, I never forget the book or the place.