Tim Cahill - Pass the Butterworms: Remote Journeys Oddly Rendered

ACCLAIM FOR Tim Cahills
Pass the Butterworms

Adventures that make you smile. Read Cahill at home, otherwise you might think he has more fun traveling than you do.

Outside

Hilarious and informative. Cahill shows himself worthy of his solid reputation and devoted fans.

Sunday Oregonian

Transcendent inventively shaped and rich with lyricism.

San Francisco Chronicle

Irresistible exciting narratives of doing thrilling things in interesting places.

Booklist

Interesting, entertaining and well-written. Cahill is an experienced travel writer whose observations are funny and poignant.

Library Journal

High entertainment. Cahill delivers all the goodsvibrancy, wit, and intelligenceanyone could hope for.

Kirkus Reviews

Cahill reports with wit and sensitivity.

Publishers Weekly

By turns funny and poignant, quirky and insightful, Cahill leads us on adventures to the back of beyond.

Bookpage

Hilarious these essays are rollicking reads perfect for the armchair traveler.

The Herald (Florida)

Cahill is an adventure traveler who writes engagingly in an unpretentiously literate way.

Sunday Post-Crescent (Wisconsin)

Rife with insider travel tips. Cahill has a gift for observation.

News and Observer (Charlotte, N.C.)

Cahill is an enabler for the armchair traveler. He is clearly having too much fun.

The Fresno Bee

Tim Cahill
Pass the Butterworms

Tim Cahill is the author of five previous books, including A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg, Buried Dreams, and Pecked to Death by Ducks. Cahill is currently Outside magazines editor at large and a contributing editor to Rolling Stone and Sports Afield. He lives in Livingston, Montana.

ALSO BY Tim Cahill

Buried Dreams

Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg

Road Fever

Pecked to Death by Ducks

FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, APRIL 1998

Copyright 1997 by Tim Cahill

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Villard Books, a division of Random House Inc., New York, in 1997.

Portions of this work were originally published in Mens Journal, Modern Maturity and Outside.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Villard Books edition as follows:

Cahill, Tim.
Pass the butterworms: remote journeys oddly rendered / Tim Cahill.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-77840-6
1. Adventure stories, American. I. Title
PS3553. A365R4 1997
813.54dc20 96-33142

Author photograph Marion Ettlinger

Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com

v3.1

To those Arizona miscreants,
my very nearly saintly brothers, Rick and David Cahill

Most of these stories appeared in Outside magazine, generally in a somewhat abridged and/or edited form. Many thanks to Mark Bryant, Larry Burke, and everyone at Outside for providing a forum and making me look good. The magazine just gets better.

Bufords Revenge appeared in Modern Maturity and Misty Crossings appeared in Mens Journal, where John Rasmus and Jann Wenner provided counsel and encouragement.

And once again, as always: Thanks to my literary agent, Barbara Lowenstein, and to my patient and enduring editor, David Rosenthal.

Out where I live, in Montana, wed call it a mild cussing.

I could do that for this nice lady writer who lives out west somewhere and makes a living as a contrarian. She recently wrote an article in a New York literary magazine that said, in essence, that the current crop of travel writers sucked real bad and just bored her spitless. She manages to slag me in the same paragraph as Redmond OHalon, Jan Morris, and Paul Theroux, which I regard as a compliment. Thats distinguished company.

The woman, as I say, is a contrarian: Her last bookIm forced to admit that I thought it was rather goodwas titled Talk Dirty to Me and generally took the view that pornography was sorta spiffy and enriched her fantasy and sex life. This, of course, is a position at odds with the conventional wisdom. Everyone knows that women, without exception, hate and despise smut of all varieties. Simply not true, she said. Not in her case.

Apparently on the prowl for other instances in which the conventional wisdom is mistaken or wrongheaded, she fastened on travel writers, who, she felt, had become darlings of the literary scene and were unjustifiably celebrated by reviewers in influential journals both here and abroad. She seemed to feel the conventional wisdom is that, over the past twenty years, a kind of golden age of literate travelogues has developed.

Poppycock, she said, or words to that effect. The woman complained of feeling that she herself might not be welcome on a journey undertaken by any of these writers, which, I think, is not an unreasonable assumption.

I was also taken to task for the manner in which I titled my three previous collections of travel-related writing, all of which remain in print and continue to sell. The first, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, was a joke, meant to rile colleagues with whom Id worked closely.

Over twenty years ago, in 1975, I was among a group of editors assigned to develop a new magazine about nonmotorized outdoor sports. It was to be a literary effort, and I suggested that we might include articles about remote travel in difficult situations. The other editors objected vociferously. Such articles were then found in magazines with titles like Mans Adventure and were directed, apparently, at semiliterate, semi-sad bachelors interested primarily in the nymphos who, in this genre, seemed to populate the jungles and mountains at the various ends of the earth. The events reported in these stories were generally of dubious veracity and the authors were not darlings of the literary scene. If in 1996 we are living in a golden era of literary travel writing, 1975 was pretty much the stone age.

The articles in Mans Adventure, my colleagues said, were subliterate and always had imbecilic titles like Jaguars Ripped My Flesh. I argued that it was possible to write well about travel and the outdoors, that writing about wilderness of all varieties was a staple of American literature, and that, goddamnit, Id just bought a good backpack and a stout pair of hiking boots.