Book Description

Superman Canyon Road is both travelogue, and personal journal. There are chapters on Sweden, Afghanistan, India, Alaska and the Yukon, and the 4 corners of the US - Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. I’ve included some recent travelogue that was written en route, and e-mailed from America’s Southwest, Scotland, and lastly from Spain. Stylistically, the recent material differs radically from the rest. My pace accelerates in reluctant homage to the inherent immediacy of electronic media. These stories describe dozens of random dramatic encounters on the journeys I made between ‘89 and 2000. Most of the essays are intended as geopolitical snap shots, to be read and considered within the historical context of the ‘90s. There are two exceptions. The stories about India and Afghanistan refer to my wanderings throughout 1974. There’s occasional wit (modesty demands understatement in that regard), too much honesty, plenty of honest irony, world commentary, and serious social statement about these times. I’ve noticed that people around my age empathize most easily with the tone of the narrative. In Superman Canyon Road my aim is to entertain and to inform. I’m speaking only for myself as a middle class Scotsman, one who became so delightfully lost in the primordial desert zone of western America that I’ve willingly forfeited any desire to ever be anything, anyone, or anywhere else. And of course, the names of all incidental characters have been changed in order to cause the genuinely guilty ones zero embarrassment. Writing this book saved me from dealing directly with most of what went on during the ‘90s. Now I’m 48. I still don’t own a kilt. And honestly, I’m browsing as fast as I can. As we now know, the nineties ended up looking like happy hour at a computer-geek pre-apocalypse rehearsal. We are living in an era of sociological anomalies. We have sensitive new age soldiers, and a generation of youth whose attention span sometimes stretches to 1/16 of a second. I simply took the nineties off. I traveled, wrote, played music, and became adept at having fun. Almost everything I found out went straight into this book. Because this book covers ten years, the entries do not appear in chronological order. The first half of Superman Canyon Road was completed during the early ‘90s. Those were serious times. Somewhere in the middle of the ‘90s, I lightened up to an alarming degree. After a five year break from writing, I produced the last half while in a state of near hysteria.