January 24, 2018
Stealing from a Deep Place
The Decluttering and Archival projects continue apace. It has been another day of significant progress, impelled by the fact that our realtor is showing up again tomorrow for a white glove inspection. Not being the tidiest of souls, we're not living in a place that encourages such rigor. We're trying to make enough progress by then so that we at least won't be completely mortified.
One of my tasks today was to take a third pass through the library, looking for yet more books that we can bear to part with. We've probably shed 70 percent of our library by now (essentially all ones I have collected over the last fifty odd years), and we're beginning to get down to the kernel that I care most about - ones holding personal meaning for me or that trigger memories. Today, I decide to shed all of my chess and go manuals; if I ever take up either game in late retirement, I'll just start from scratch.
And then I come across this title, and progress stops for the moment. Coincidentally, I had just mentioned this book to a friend who is considering a bike tour in the Balkans. He and his partner are not particularly enamored of mountainous landscapes, and I suggested they might want to consider the lay of the land in Romania and Montenegro before committing themselves. I also recommended Brian Hall's Stealing from a Deep Place, as both a compelling tale of bike travel and for its background on the region. He was unable to lay his hands on a copy though, so when I came across this again I wondered whether I should just give him mine.
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Before deciding whether to keep it though I opened it up again andread a few pages to remind myself why I had so valued it when I first read it about twenty years ago. There went the Decluttering Project, off the rails for the moment. Within a few pages I was reminded of why it's one of my top three or four bicycle travel journals I've ever read. I forget when I picked this book up originally, but I think it was not long before our own tour through western Hungary two decades back, and that it partly inspired that journey of ours. It is delightful to reread his tale of two menacing Romanians rescuing Brian by stomping a pair of vipers on the road, and above all his experience trying to repair a broken cotterless crank in Bulgaria.
So, Decluttering can wait another day or two. I'm not a speedy reader any more, but I think I need to see this through before parting with it for a spell. It's been sitting on my shelf for about twenty years now; and since I won't have shelves any more, it might as well sit on one at the home of a friend. I think I’m not giving it away though - it will be due for a third read some day, perhaps after we make it to Bulgaria or Romania ourselves.
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