The way one approaches a wilderness story is to fashion a quest - find something that you are truly interested in finding or discovering.

It's often hilarious to me that I'm writing about Tonga or some tropical place and there's a blizzard outside and the cows are on their backs with their hooves in the air.

A lot of us first aspired to far-ranging travel and exotic adventure early in our teens; these ambitions are, in fact, adolescent in nature, which I find an inspiring idea...Thus, when we allow ourselves to imagine as we once did, we know, with a sudden jarring clarity, that if we don't go right now, we're never going to do it. And we'll be haunted by our unrealized dreams and know that we have sinned against ourselves gravely.

A constant ongoing joke among the people that I travel with is my absolutely hopeless sense of direction. I'm able to get lost a half an hour from camp. I don't know how I do this.

Healthier, perhaps, to find beauty in life and feel it expand inside of us.

Most of us abandoned the idea of a life full of adventure and travel sometime between puberty and our first job. Our dreams died under the dark weight of responsibility. Occasionally the old urge surfaces, and we label it with names that suggest psychological aberrations: the big chill, a midlife crisis.

Charlie Patton, who was born in 1891, recorded some of the very first blues. In 'Pony Blues' and 'Peavine Blues,' he manages to pile dense layers of rhythms one upon the other.