Indigo Walk and Talk

E.L. Doctorow, who is a great writer, if also a know-it-all-smarty-pants, once said, "Thinking about your writing, researching your writing, and talking about your writing is not the same as writing." This snippy condescending hectoring can also be applied to epic journeys. If you're going to do it, do it. Think about your trip. Figure out where you're going and the real nuts and bolts about how to get there, from how you're goiing to rent a truck in Oaxaca when you're in Virginia and how much is it going to cost, to how you're going to contact the mayor of Quezaltepec in order to win safe passage through maybe the most fractious and remote swath of Mexico to keep from being macheted by desperately frustrated peasants whose goats are dying of thirst, and suspect that perhaps you are in cahoots with the neighboring town that, everyone knows, is diverting the streams and poisoning the wells, to figuring out how to keep your delightful/overly-cautious husband who would rather be having a coffee and sleeping in beds that clean, safe, and dry, on-board by knowing enough of the nuts and bolts to satisfy his "Rationality-of-Plan" Requirement, as well as paint for him the fantastic story of the whole grand 700-year old Pre-Hispanic Trade Route to fill his "Coolness-of-Plan" Requirement when he knows all of your story-telling, sales-pitch tricks and could at any moment choose to drag his feet and mope and refuse to participate on the quite tangible grounds that it will be too hard, too expensive, and we all be killed.

I am currently collecting nuts and bolts ammunition.