"Mortalis"

by R.A.Salvatore

Meaningful Quotes

I had to get back on the road north, to my home! A simpler place by far... The pressures of survival overrule many of the trappings of civilization. In the wild, where the domain of nature dominates that of mankind, the often too confusing concepts of right and wrong are replaced by the simpler concept of consequences. In the wilds, you choose your course, you act upon that trail and you accept - for what else might you do? - the consequences of those choices and actions.

Where is the balance, I wonder, between community and self? When does the assertion of one's personal needs become mere selfishness? The person who strives for peace of community instead of inner peace must find just the opposite, I fear. And unattainable goal. For there will always be trouble of one sort or another. There is no paradise in this existence for creatures as complex as human beings. There is no perfect human world, bereft of strife and battle of one sort or another.

How easy it is for a person to overwhelm herself merely by considering too big a picture. The world does not stop for the stars. The errors of mankind continue, and the dangers of nature are ever present. There is no end of turmoil. But far from a terrible thing, I have come to see that turmoil - change - is what adds meaning. I have not found some magical remedy, some honest hope of paradise within the swirl of chaos. No one can make the world perfect. For while perfection is not attainable, the glory and satisfaction lie along the road if all that I can accomplish is the betterment of a single day in the life of a single individual. Then so be it. It is the attempt to do what is right - the attempt to move myself and those around me toward a better place - that is worth the sacrifice. However great that sacrifice must be.

Mortalis available at Powells.com

Other books by R.A.Salvatore:
Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

"A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow"

An American
Hitchhiking Odyssey
by Tim Brookes

From Booklist

In 1973, Brookes, then a British student, spent three months hitchhiking across America, dazzled by a girl from Iowa he had met at Oxford. In 1998, Brookes, now a writer, teacher, and longtime Vermonter, decides to re-create that experience and hitchhike to the same places again. He's not crazy: he periodically takes trains or buses and carries a cell phone in his daughter's sock. He tracks a few of the people and most of the places he encountered the first time, but this is no self-referential wallowing. He's not interested in reliving the past but in illuminating the present, and he carries both a cheerful lack of anxiety and a disarming lack of pretense. In crisp, short chapters, he recounts conversations with the folks who pick him up and his responses to the places he goes: a gospel church in San Francisco; a previous wife in Seattle; a desolate reservation in South Dakota. He finds kindness and gratitude, and he clearly has those within himself as well. GraceAnne A. DeCandido

Meaningful Quotes:
To hell with the past, I thought. You can't get there from here.

The vagabond when rich is called a tourist.

"I went into the woods" Thoreau wrote, "because I wished to live deliberately. To front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach. And not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

"Agh," Tomas groaned from under his bedcovers. "You are one of those born with the propeller in the arse. You have to move all the time."

This is a European's America, glittery and bizarre, but also flamboyantly free of tradition, common sense, the tyranny of good taste.

Ah, America: girls in shorts and t-shirts, their muscular legs promising competence and go-anywhere adventurousness.

"What is the source of the world's suffering?" asked Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher-postman. "It lies," he decided, in the fact that "we hesitate to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us."

...that old-fashioned heartland calm, the evidence that sun, local food, and hard work in the open air might not be the secret of life, but they'd do until the right answer came along.

My grandfather's idea of a good day was waking up, having a cup of coffee, scratching his dog behind the ears, and being able to go out and see horses. And that's not bad. We get oversold on larger-than-life.

No wonder hitchhiking appeals so much to adolescents, or to the adolescent in me: It's full of decisions to make, at our own behest, and the discoveries that come with them.

Hitchhiking is starting to look like a spiritual exercise. It fosters patience interspersed with gratitude. It demands faith, hope, and other people's charity, and demands the Buddhist virtues of selflessness and an acceptance of 'not knowing.' It enforces St Benedict's principles of poverty, chastity, and obedience - to the rules of the road, and the rules of change.

You've got to make yourself vulnerable before you need something from someone else. And you've got to need something before you can feel gratitude. And unless you allow yourself to be vulnerable, you never have any chance encounters. All the most remarkable people I've met on this trip, I've met by chance.

Any spontaneous decision has about it not only joy and energy but a mysterious ring of truth. Any spontaneous act involves abandoning self-protection.

A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow
available at Powells and Amazon

"Yukon Alone"

The Worlds Toughest
Adventure Race
by John Balzar

Book Description

The International Yukon Quest Sled Dog Race is one of the most challenging sporting events in the world. Every February, a handful of hardy souls spends over two weeks racing sleds pulled by fourteen dogs over 1,023 miles of frozen rivers, icy mountain passes, and spruce forests as big as entire states, facing temperatures that drop to forty degrees below zero on nights that are seventeen hours long. Why would anyone want to enter this race? John Balzar-who moved to Alaska and lived on the trail-treats us to a vivid account of the grueling race itself, offering an insightful look at the men and women who have moved to this rugged and beautiful place. Readers will also be fascinated by Balzar's account of what goes into the training and care of the majestic dogs who pull the sleds and whose courage, strength, and devotion make them the true heroes of this story.

Meaningful Quotes:
"It's always been my thought that money would interfere with the fun I want to have in life." Joe May

Only some of us are nomads in each generation. There are those who are content to stay in one place and those with an itch under their feet.

America seemed to be largely a numbers game - the tally on the stock market for the well off, the daily lottery picks for the poor.

Sometimes we had a destination and other times not. Joy was derived from movement. Out there on the road, I learned no one bothered you. Yet you had not succumbed to idleness. You had in fact, done something. Forward motion almost always meets the test of worthwhile activity. When I am traveling I never feel I should be doing something else. I always feel I am on the verge.

Boredom is the precursor to despair. And I am not alone in believing that a chief source of boredom in our civilized, acquisitive, urban-crowded modern culture is that absence of unknown places and peoples to inflame our imaginations.

In summer, true enough, the Alaska-Canada Highway and it's tributaries are the scene of great migration of steel and pressed aluminum, the vacation herds.

In the end, all of us bus riders will be tired, stiff and hung-over on arrival, 'de rigeur' it seems. What fun would it be to begin this thing in tip-top shape anyway? Bring on the agonies.

Once in a while, it is even possible to reawaken ancient feelings that one might actually discover something, a sensation that sustained the curious mind through millions of years of evolutionary history.

Mistakes in this wilderness are dangerous, sometimes deadly so. But it was the Scottish poet and adventurer Alexander Smith who made sense of such endeavors as this. "Everything," he said, "is sweetened by risk."

Adventure isn't only when something goes wrong, it's when 'something' is sure to happen. The greater the intensity of that 'something' the more sublime the adventure. Risk and reward grow on the same stalk - isn't that what the proverb says?

So many of us have reduced the concept of adventure to just another recreation, a diversion from the otherwise ordinary ambitions of living. The 'New York Time Magazine' recently ran a story with a snide, but telling headline: "Going Where a Lot of Other Dudes with Really Great Equipment Have Gone Before - The Call of the Pseudo-Wild"

Nature had intensity, direction, confidence, an elegant sureness of procedure, a sensibility of life.

There is a reason why most of humankind's spiritual orthodoxy's require commitment of soul before the soul can be redeemed. It is the same reason why our satisfaction with our religions, for worse and for better, depends entirely on our ability to give ourselves over to them. This same maxim explains why authentic adventurers are such single-minded types whose experiences can be emulated but seldom duplicated.

Tonight, on the trail of the Yukon Quest, there is no guide or guidebook, no schedule, and no amount of money that could lead the casual adventurist to this circumstance where, just this moment, the heavens open and embrace a man for his devotion to the trail.

The two were frightened of bears. But don't make fun of them. That's exactly why they came, to experience nature, to feel what they could only read about back home. To flush the carbon monoxide from their spirits, recalibrate those internal gyroscopes by which we set the course of our lives, to exist. Momentarily, in the present, and no doubt to spice their lovemaking with the knowledge that honest predators worked outside their rope perimeter, ready to challenge them for the top rung of the food chain. ...we must travel in the direction of our fears.

Like some other bush rats scattered around up here, he does not see himself as retreating our running away. He lives on the far edge of civilization... less an escape from contemporary society than a determined pursuit of a more harmonious way of life.

Yukon Alone available at Powells and Amazon

"An Ocean to Cross"

Daring the Atlantic,
Claiming a New Life
by Liz Fordred

Here is a wonderful story of two young paraplegics from Africa, that built a boat and sailed it across the Atlantic Ocean. In an era of the ADA here in the US, this book will amaze and inspire you about two people who overcome the impossible in places that don't see wheelchairs, let alone active paraplegics asking just for a chance.

Book Description
It was an extraordinary dream fueled by hope and courage. Liz Fordred and her husband, Pete, both paralyzed and with no sailing experience, made the unlikely decision to build a boat, haul it 1,200 miles to the coast, and set sail alone to see the world.

Their plan seemed impossible, the obstacles insurmountable. They had only time, the gift of laughter, an unstoppable resolve, and each other. After years of labor, their struggle to reclaim lives of purpose and adventure--lives lived without limits--launched them into the vast Atlantic. They had the whole world before them--and somewhere in it a new home and a new life were waiting to be claimed . . .

Meaningful Quotes:
If you have to be in a wheelchair, you might as well have fun.

A crossing is more than a landfall, just as running a marathon is more than crossing the finish line. The endeavor is what's important - the sweat, the anguish, the push to keep going when your exhausted and discouraged. The thrill is in the pursuit, not the finish. And the achievement is personal, not public.

Life is about how you respond to not only the challenges you're dealt but the challenges you seek. To my way of thinking, success is measured not by the position you have reached in life but by the obstacles you've had to climb to reach that position. If you have no goals, no mountains to climb, your soul dies. That's the nature of who we are.

An Ocean to Cross available at Powells and Amazon