Tag Archives: Rolf Potts

Book Made for Wanderers

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Vagabonding by Rolf Potts
Vagabonding by Rolf Potts

Destination: The World

Book: Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf Potts

Every generation of wanderers has an author of travel literature that sounds the siren call.  Walt Whitman comes to mind and Lord Byron before him.  Then the famously wild days of Jack Kerouac and On the Road.

Authors today have a harder time breaking out of the morass of travel bloggers (OUCH!) and becoming the ONE voice to follow.  Rolf Potts has come close with  Vagabonding.  Ask any hardy young adventurer, or even a person just dreaming of adventures, and chances are, they have read Rolf Potts.

I picked up a copy at a used book store. (Sorry, Rolf) One of the things I love about a used book is finding pages marked up, notes in the margin, corners turned down. In other words–a book that is truly used.  This one turned out to be a treasure. In the first chapter, paragraphs defining vagabonding are bracketed and underlined.  A passage about the excuses that people make NOT to travel is bracketed AND starred.

A heavy line emphasizes “Rather, it has always been a private choice within a society that is constantly urging us to do otherwise.  This is a book about living that choice.”

She (the rounded handwriting must be a female, I think) underlines “They are spending plenty of time and money on the road, but they never spent enough of themselves to begin with,” and she writes in the margin “is this us?”

Used copy of Vagabonding by Rolf Potts
Used copy of Vagabonding by Rolf Potts

Potts uses many quotations throughout. And under a quote from Whitman’s Song of the Open Road, my predecessor in these pages, writes, “Song of open road on our wedding program.”  Ah-ha! The plot thickens.

Potts says that travelers should keep it simple, and one should not wait to accumulate wealth, or win the lottery.  Quadruple underline of “we were all born with winning tickets…”  On the next page, she writes “do the garage sale and put $ in ‘travel fund.'”

But suddenly the underlining and bracketing and margin notes stop. Just like that. Not even half way through. I’ll never know if the engagement fell apart, or if she just got too busy ordering bridesmaid’s dresses to finish the book. Did her fiancee take a look and pooh-pooh the whole idea? Did the book go into the yard sale for travel funds?

Feeling a little lonely, without the bride-to-be for company, I read on through philosophy of travel, short bios of famous travelers, a tip sheet for each idea introduced, Potts’ personal anecdotes from his own vagabonding, quotes from famous and not famous travelers.

Despite the fact that he states that there is no age limit on vagabonding, I am beyond the age that can follow his suggestions. Particularly his repeated mentions of fleeting romances along the road. For everyone that age limit will vary, and is self imposed, or imposed by responsibilities or arthritis. But for anyone who is open to the call of the open road, read carefully. Pay attention. Rolf Potts knows whereof he speaks.

His newest book, released in 2008, Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, not only covers travel adventures, but in it, he steps outside the narrative and talks about how he wrote the essays within the book. From how-to-travel to how-to-be-a-travel-writer.

Can you end my suspense?  Are you the person who owned the book before me? Did you get married? Did you use Walt Whitman in your ceremony? Did you travel?

Travel Writing Over The Volleyball Net

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Joseph Wood Krutch garden at U of A during Book Festival
Joseph Wood Krutch garden at U of A during Book Festival

[I wrote this after attending the 2009 Tucson Festival of Books, where I attended a session with two travel writers.]

Rolf Potts and Tom Miller talked about travel writing to a lecture theater packed with Tucsonans last weekend at the Tucson Festival of Books. The secret of success, they said, may be over a volleyball net.

When traveler and writer Rolf Potts describes his career arc, it is enough to make other travel writers at least roll their eyes, if not go somewhere quiet and lie down until the nausea passes. Talented, yes, but more boldly adventurous and self assured than the bookish crew writers usually are, he got his start by selling an article to Salon. For those of you who are principally readers rather than writers–let me explain. That’s a sale that most travel writers spend years aspiring to.

The secret to his success? After this auspicious beginning, he put himself in interesting places, practiced persistence, worked hard, and  persuaded Salon to assign him a regular column and from that point on major magazines like Esquire, New York Times Magazine and National Geographic Traveler came calling. Nowadays, it may not be unlawful to publish a “Best of” book about travel writing without Potts, but it is highly unlikely.

Potts teaches travel writing in Paris (more rolled eyes and murmurs of “tough life”) and says the main message is that it is what you throw out, more than what you decide to use, that makes a good story.  That, and developing the knack of selecting the telling detail of a culture, build a riveting tale. His first book, Vagabonding is a how-to book for taking off from “normal” life and traveling around the world wherever whim takes you. He describes his work as “postmodern” in the opening of his latest book, Marco Polo Didn’t Go There tacks meta endnotes–a postmodern term if there ever was one–on each chapter to tell us behind the scene information about what was left out and why or to further explain what was left in.

He  observes  that he looks for the intersection between the news (mostly bad stuff) and traditional travel writing (mostly romanticized stuff). He wants to describe the texture of life between these two polls. Being open to participating in the life around you helps. Once in Thailand, some villagers invited him to join a volleyball game–not out of diplomacy or , but because he was by far the tallest person in the region. His hosts quickly became disheartened when they learned that he could not play a good game of volleyball, despite being tall and blond.

Rolf Potts was speaking in a session along with Tucson resident Tom Miller, no slouch himself at landing good writing contracts.  But the irony is that Miller discussed the time in South America when his car was stopped and he was invited to join a volleyball game. At one point the game stopped, one of the team members pulled over a car on the highway, extracted a bribe, came back and resumed the game. We will talk about Miller and his Southwest and Mexico travels soon, focusing on  Jack Ruby’s Kitchen Sink, which I am currently reading.

Now I know why I am not a famous travel writer. I am not tall, and no one ever invited me to play volleyball in a third-world country.