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Summer 2008 Issue
$3.95 [ buy ] |
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Eighteen hundred miles east from where I sit, shivering at my cluttered plywood desk, and eight thousand feet below down the long continental slope, I believe I have a home, though I have not set foot in it for 11 months. And I am fairly certain I have a wife, residing in that home, who goes about her business without me, at least until the Florida legislative session ends in June,when she will head my wayagain. It will of course be lovelyto see her, thoughnot so wonderful to watch her eye-brows rase as she asks, Well?–meaning, Is the book I've been working on since 2002 finished?– and sort through my menu of responses–Leave me alone. Quit nagging. What do you want from me? Can't you see I'm losing my mind? How are your fixed for cash?–until I sigh and answer simply, No. |
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Above: Bob's writing cabin in northern New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo mountains.
Right: Neither sleep nor stimulants have any effect on the speed at which he writesthese days, which is glacial.
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The iconography on the walls of my one-room writing cabin here in the still snowbound Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico reflects the richness of a once-and-future lifestyle woefully out of sync with the poverty of my present-day habits. There are the mementos and residue of images from various magazine assignments: a Kosovo Liberation Army battle flag; a group portrait taken in Haiti of me with a Special Forces A-team; the opening layout for a profile I wrote of Kathmandu, the Himalaya towering over the skyline of the city; a glossy photograph of an exploding volcano in Kamchatka, where I was investigating the Russian mafia’s theft of entire salmon-packed rivers on the Siberian peninsula. A working author’s miscellany also competes for space: artwork prototypes and proofs of book covers, a Patagonian fishing license, a tango poster I purchased on the streets of Buenos Aires, where the middle book in the trilogy I’ve been working on since 1989 will be set. And piled everywhere, mockingly, is the gear I have no time for at this endless present moment: dusty, cobwebbed and unattended fly rods, spinning rods, backpacks, tents, downhill skis, snowshoes, kayak paddles, an outboard motor and a 150-million-year-old saligram (an ammonite fossil) I plucked out of the Kali Gandaki Gorge on an expedition to the ancient kingdom of Mustang on the Tibetan Plateau. I use it now to keep the door of the cabin cracked open to allow my dogs in and out, their free passage synonymous with my sanity (and ice-cold feet from the draft). |
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