The autumn before my boys were born, Krishna and I rented a small cabin in the Sierras for a few days. It was the first time in a relationship that was then 13 years old in which we had actually taken some form of an “ordinary” vacation that was not also part of a reading tour or a flight home to visit the in-laws, or some combination thereof – I’d even used a reading to finance part of our honeymoon. The other alternatives had been literally to hitchhike up to Point Reyes, hiking in perhaps after a night at a bed &breakfast in Olema, camping the next night, then spending the third in a motel in Stinson Beach after hiking out the south end of the park.

The arrangement always made taking a significant number of books along problematic. Hitchhiking with a backpack & camping equipment pretty much limited me to three – two books of poetry (I remember one time it was Wendell Berry & John Keats) – plus whatever novel I was reading, and of course my notebook in which to write. Reading tours and trips to the in-laws weren’t much better, tho in fact I might take along as six or eight books of poetry along.

But that trip to the Sierras in 1991 was different in that, for the first time, we were driving somewhere in our brand new two-door Mazda 323, which meant that our storage felt limitless.¹ I must have brought along a dozen books & quickly found that the timeless quality of days away from work made for a perfect reading environment. Since then, we have gone on any number of car trips, but have learned always took along a lot of books & to try to build in as many days with little or nothing to do as possible.²

Yet each time, especially on two-week trips, I’ve largely run out of reading material, or at least run painfully short. I really hate having just one or two books of poetry to read at a time – it feels unnatural to me, I’m often in the middle of dozens at any given moment. Finding worthy volumes of poetry on holiday has meant buying a copy of Evangeline in the gift shop of the Digby Ferry as it crossed the Bay of Fundy, or being ecstatic at coming across a George Bowering title in a quaint little tourist shop in Victoria, BC. And I’m sure I’ve bought more School of Quietude volumes on vacation under just such circumstances than at any other time.

This year, however, I’ve tried something different, bringing along not one but two large backpacks filled with books, 37 in all, ranging from chapbooks to Shakespeare’s sonnets to a recent (but not the latest) Anselm Hollo “selected” & the big Lee Harwood collected that I’m still working my way through. A few books I’ve read before – Rae Armantrout’s Up to Speed, David Melnick’s Eclogs. And two have prerequisites, one a novel by Roberto Bolaño I won’t begin until I complete Marjorie Perloff’s memoir of coming to America, the other being the second big volume of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts, an incentive to completing the final sections of the first.

By the trip’s end I will have finished some 17 books, gotten more than halfway through Bolaño’s Distant Star, and read major portions of all the others. I’ll make note of some – not necessarily all – of my reading over the next couple of weeks.

 

¹ That sense of infinite space within a two-door hatchback disappeared quickly enough once we had twins to wrestle into car seats in back. This Mazda is still the car I’m driving most of the time, having gotten over 120,000 miles on the original clutch.

² Save for four travel days, that was our modus operandi this year as well. Our only other busy days consisted of one spent at Antietam followed by watching the recording of a show of Moutain Stage, and another spent partly birdwatching, partly being on the beach & finally watching The Brothers Grimm at an Ocean City cinema.