Rolf Potts - Vagabonding

INTRODUCTION

All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,

Else it were time lost listening to me.

WALT WHITMAN, SONG OF MYSELF

How to Win and Influence Yourself

N ot so long ago, as I was taking a slow, decrepit old mail steamer down Burmas Irrawaddy River, I ran out of things to read. When the riverboat called at a small town called Pyay, I dashed ashore and bought the only English-language book I could find for sale: a beat-up copy of Dale Carnegies How to Win Friends and Influence People, which I proceeded to read as we slowly steamed toward Rangoon.

Somehow, Id gone through my entire life without ever having read a self-help book. Carnegies advice, as it turned out, was a charming mix of common sense (be a good listener), good advice (show respect for the other mans opinions), and antique notions (dont forget how profoundly women are interested in clothes). Having enjoyed the book on the river, I gave it away in Rangoon and temporarily forgot about it.

About a month later, I was approached to write a book about the art and attitude of long-term travel. Since Id primarily been endorsing this vagabonding ethic through the narrative stories Id written for Salon.com, I figured I should probably do some research into the structure and format of advice books. Thus, in the process of trying to relocate a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People, I discovered that the advice and self-help book market has changed a lot since Carnegies day. Nearly every human activity, desire, and demographic, it seems, is now catered to by some kind of inspirational book. The Chicken Soup for the Soul and Dont Sweat the Small Stuff series by themselves nearly required their own section of the bookstore.

Standing there amid the shelves and bewildered at the variety I began to imagine a vagabonding publishing empire: not just Vagabonding, but Vagabonding for Teens. Vagabonding for Singles. Vagabonding for Golfers. Vagabonding Your Wardrobe. The Ten-Week Vagabonding Diet. A Vagabonding Christmas. A Babys First Vagabonding. 101 Zesty Vagabonding Recipes. All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned While Vagabonding. And so on.

In the end, I left the bookstore without picking up a single book. I decided that I would write the book the only way I knew how: from experience, from passion, and from common sense.

If at times this book seems unorthodox, well, good. Vagabonding itself is unorthodox.

As for the word vagabonding, I used to think it was my own invention. This was back in 1998, when I was first pitching an adventure travel column to Salon.com. At the time, I wanted a succinct word to describe what I was doing: leaving the ordered world to travel on the cheap for an extended period of time. Backpacking seemed too vague a description, globe-trotting sounded too pretentious, and touring rang a bit lame. Consequently, I put a playful spin on the word vagabond the old, Latin-derived term that refers to a wanderer with no fixed home and came up with vagabonding.

Id almost convinced myself that Id given hip new phrasing to a certain attitude of travel when I discovered a dog-eared paperback entitled Vagabonding in Europe and North Africa on the shelf of a used bookstore in Tel Aviv. Written by an American named Ed Buryn, the book had not only been published before my travel column hit the Internet but had been written before I was born. And in spite of its occasional hippie-era phrasing (avoid your travel agent like he was the cops and go out to find out about the world by yourself), I found Vagabonding in Europe and North Africa to be a fine collection of advice, a levelheaded and insightful preLonely Planet take on the nuts, bolts, and philosophy of independent travel. Consequently, discovering Ed Buryns book was not discouraging so much as it was liberating: It made me realize that, whatever name you give it, the act of vagabonding is not an isolated trend so much as it is (to crib a Greil Marcus phrase) a spectral connection between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language.