Preface

When I was a boy, I found a book in my grandparent’s attic.  Its cover was dark, leathery, and it lay at the bottom of a box filled with many other books that didn’t attract me as this one did.  It was old.  It was about the exploration of Africa.

The pictures grabbed me of course: detailed drawings, some penned in color, others black and white, depictions of fierce predators, large lumbering elephants, and crafty alligators.  There was a picture of Henry Stanley extending his hand to Dr. Livingston.

But, near the beginning of this book, in the first chapter I think, there was a map showing the coast of the continent.  Harbors were marked in dark black ink and gray hatch marks followed the way of coastal hills, and blue ribbons traced the course of rivers.  But the thing with this map was that as you followed those rivers inland where they meandered around those mountains and through forests, the ink – black, grays and greens – dulled, faded into the page until the interior of Africa was only a blank page. 

And that thrilled me, that shell of a continent – its interior – unknown.

Of course I was old enough to know that that age of discovery was long past.  I only had to ride my bicycle through the heavy humid summer air, down North Second Street to the library and look at the globe on the table at the middle of the room and see Africa whole and known.

That book triggered within me a desire for adventure that persisted through all my childhood summers in Northern Illinois riding my bicycle to the other side of town.  That desire was further fed at summer camp in Atwood Park where I climbed out of the bus into Monday morning with hundreds of other children and we were divided into tribes that took Indian names, and we spent a week living in tents or camping under the open sky and learned the names of some of the trees, birds, and we canoed, hiked, and learned how fragile some of those things crawling and growing outside really were and that we needed to take care of them if we loved them.

And then we went home, went to school, moved away, and one day found ourselves in the middle of everything – without a map – alternating between euphoria and fear that we might fail.  Grasping and compromising we made our way into adulthood, jobs, families, and then one day we had children of our own.  And they grew too fast and left, sailing away with what little direction we could give all the while wishing, praying we could have given them better directions – a map.

One day as I sat alone in the living room, I happened to look down at my hands and caught myself wondering whose hands they were.  The flesh had lost suppleness, the skin hung around the knuckles, and when I flexed my fingers, valleys formed, like hills on the back of my hand their blue ridges marked by the veins that carried my own blood.  They were no longer the eager hands of that small boy in my memory who crouched in a dust mote sun streaked attic reaching into a forgotten box and who marveled at something as wonderful as an incomplete map. 

I realized then dreams sometimes die.  That made me sad.