In One Year Off, you can join the family on a trek up a Costa Rican volcano, cruise the canals of Burgundy by houseboat, and ride ferries through the Greek Islands. Later, as the Cohens wander further off the tourist trail, you can drive through the villages of Rajasthan, traverse the vast Australian Nullarbor, and discover the charms of Cambodia's Angkor Wat and the hidden shangri-las of northern Laos.
Over the course of these adventures, the Cohens learn to live as a family twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week and enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend time together without the distractions of modern life. The author rediscovers the world through his children's eyes and gains new perspective of his own life. This humorous, heartfelt story is the next best thing to taking the trip yourself
In One Year Off, you can join the family on a trek up a Costa Rican volcano, cruise the canals of Burgundy by houseboat, and ride ferries through the Greek Islands. Later, as the Cohens wander further off the tourist trail, you can drive through the villages of Rajasthan, traverse the vast Australian Nullarbor, and discover the charms of Cambodia's Angkor Wat and the hidden shangri-las of northern Laos.
Over the course of these adventures, the Cohens learn to live as a family twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week and enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend time together without the distractions of modern life. The author rediscovers the world through his children's eyes and gains new perspective of his own life. This humorous, heartfelt story is the next best thing to taking the trip yourself
One Year Off: Leaving It All Behind for a Round-the-World Journey with Our Children
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One Year Off: Leaving It All Behind for a Round-the-World Journey with Our Children
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Overview
In One Year Off, you can join the family on a trek up a Costa Rican volcano, cruise the canals of Burgundy by houseboat, and ride ferries through the Greek Islands. Later, as the Cohens wander further off the tourist trail, you can drive through the villages of Rajasthan, traverse the vast Australian Nullarbor, and discover the charms of Cambodia's Angkor Wat and the hidden shangri-las of northern Laos.
Over the course of these adventures, the Cohens learn to live as a family twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week and enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend time together without the distractions of modern life. The author rediscovers the world through his children's eyes and gains new perspective of his own life. This humorous, heartfelt story is the next best thing to taking the trip yourself
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504014007 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Distribution |
| Publication date: | 06/16/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 262 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
One Year Off
Leaving It All Behind for A Round-the-World Journey With Our Children
By David Elliot Cohen
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2011 David Elliot CohenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1400-7
CHAPTER 1
What Have We Done?
Tiburon, California June 15
In December, Devi and I announced that we were trading in our quiet suburban life for a long rambling trip round the world. Well, I'm sorry to report that this transition has taken much longer than we expected. I thought we'd be sipping vin rouge on the rive gauche by now — but we haven't managed to leave town yet. Put it this way: Disengaging from your normal routine and establishing an entirely new way of life is a full-time job for months on end.
That being said, I think we're nearing the end of the process. We closed the business, sold our house and cars, and the rest of our possessions have been given away, put in storage, or thrown in the trash. Our telephones, televisions, and stereo are all gone — ditto, the mortgage, the water bill, and the property tax notices. In fact, our lives have now been simplified to the point where each of us is left with only one suitcase, a backpack, an economy-class round-the-world ticket, and a passport.
I thought we might have second thoughts about shedding our possessions, but it has turned out to be a very liberating act. I'm not saying that we're all going to become Buddhist monks or move to Walden Pond when we get back. But I now realize how much time, money, and mental energy we've invested in acquiring and maintaining material goods. When we finally emptied our closets, drawers, and storage spaces, I was frankly shocked to see how much pure crap we have accumulated over the years. In fact, my favorite part of this whole disengagement process was filling a dumpster the size of a swimming pool with all the flotsam and jetsam of our lives, then dispatching it into the sunset.
Planning this trip has been far more complex than I anticipated. When I first came up with this mad scheme, I thought we could just buy some open, round-the-world tickets and make up the trip up as we went along. But then Devi — the voice of reason here — convinced me that showing up in a foreign country in the middle of the night with three small children and no fixed place to sleep might be too footloose. Devi said we should have a basic plan — as a fallback position — even if we eventually changed things along the way.
That made sense, so we consulted a travel agency. Again, I thought we could just stroll up, tell the agent our plans and two weeks later, she would send us a fat envelope full of tickets, itineraries, and colorful brochures. Not even close. Our usual travel agency was okay for cheap business travel, but a year-long trip around the world put them completely out of their depth. A month after we first called, they still hadn't organized our air tickets. We finally fired them and called the airline ourselves. It took three or four hours on the phone, but we eventually got some cheapish round-the-world tickets — and enough frequent flyer miles for a free trip on the space shuttle.
After striking out with the low-end travel agency, we bounced to the other extreme, and engaged a very tony adventure travel boutique. We met with some of their expert travel planners over a pot of Earl Grey in a well-appointed conference room. They all seemed competent and knowledgeable, so we asked them to organize one of the most logistically difficult portions of our trip — a month-long passage through southern Africa. At that first meeting — and at least three times afterwards — I asked for an estimate, even a ballpark estimate of what something like this might cost us. But the woman in charge kept saying that she couldn't possibly quote any prices until all the arrangements were tied down.
Three weeks later, she got back to us with a very exciting, beautifully crafted itinerary. We'd be met at every airport and escorted to each hotel. We'd never have to drive a car, confirm a flight, or carry our own luggage. And, of course, we'd only visit the best possible game-viewing sites. That was the good news. The bad news was that this extravaganza was going to set us back somewhere in the neighborhood of $40,000. Once I regained consciousness, I sheepishly asked her to scale back the expedition. She got back to me the following week cheerfully announcing that she'd sharpened her pencil and worked up a modest $31,000 program. These folks were obviously used to working with the carriage trade — and it was with some degree of embarrassment that I was compelled to inform them that their ends were well beyond our means.
So at that point we'd pretty well struck out with a cheap, not-so-competent travel agency on the one hand, and a very competent, wildly expensive one on the other. But just when things looked bad, Devi stepped into the breach and just started making the bookings herself. She found out rather quickly that she could put together a very good African itinerary for a small fraction of what the travel boutique would charge us. From that point forward, we steered clear of the professionals, and Devi became our in-house travel agent. For a few esoteric bookings — like a canal boat in Burgundy or a villa apartment in Tuscany — she used a service, Hideaways International, that specializes in international vacation rentals. But other than that, Devi usually found it quicker, cheaper, and easier to make reservations herself.
Devi's indispensable tools in this effort were a three-foot shelf of good, up-to-date guidebooks and a fax machine. With these, she was able to book rooms at a Botswana game lodge, a cheap pensione in Rome, and even a tent at the Pushkar camel festival in Rajasthan. Every night, after the kids went to bed, Devi pored over her Fodor's and Lonely Planet guides and cast faxes into the ether. Each morning at the crack of dawn, she leapt out of bed to see what she caught. On good days, Devi rushed back into the bedroom clutching a sheath of faxes from around the globe. On bad days, when no one wrote back, she fretted. But slowly over the course of several months, Devi cobbled together an itinerary with a workable balance of cost, convenience, and adventure.
So here's our plan — at least the one we're heading out the door with: We're going to visit fourteen countries on five continents. These include — in chronological order — Costa Rica, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Switzerland, Botswana, Zimbabwe, South Africa, India, Thailand, Australia, Hong Kong, and China (whew!). We've booked accommodations in advance for about half the trip. Almost all of these bookings can be changed on twenty-four-hours' notice. When we don't have bookings, it's usually because we have insufficient information or we're doing something unusual — like taking local ferries from Venice across the Aegean Sea to the coast of Turkey. This will inevitably cause the journey to unfold in unexpected ways. But that's fine with us, because the whole purpose of this journey is to leave ourselves open to new experiences and genuine adventures.
That being so bravely said, do we still have concerns about this expedition? In a word, yes. As we get closer to the departure date, each member of the family has an updated list of fears and phobias. Devi is very well traveled, but she has almost always roamed around by herself. So she has genuine concerns about too much family togetherness. She's spoken to, or heard of, six other families that have attempted this sort of journey. Four of them had a marvelous time, and the trip brought them closer together. The other two couples got divorced — though it's not clear whether this was a direct result of their travels.
Devi is also concerned that she and I won't find any private time away from the kids. Apparently, there are very few reasonably priced "family suites"-type hotels outside North America and Australia, and few European hotels of any kind allow five people to stay in a single room. The kids are too young to sleep by themselves. So that means that Devi and I would usually have to sleep in different rooms for most of the trip. That's okay for a few weeks — but not for a year or more — so in a bow to realism, we've asked our regular baby-sitter, Beatriz Oliva, a.k.a. Betty, to join us for at least the first part of the trip. Betty, who's single and in her mid-thirties, loves to travel, and she's thrilled by the prospect of a round-the-world journey. Fortunately, she's willing to work for room, board, air tickets, and pocket money, so that makes it practical for us to bring her along. It does feel a bit like cheating, but we've decided not to be doctrinaire about this — especially if it means giving up intimate relations for a year.
Devi's other major fear is that two-year-old Lucas will fall off something — like an Italian balcony or a French canal boat. To mitigate this hazard, she bought a toddler leash and forty feet of nylon netting. Devi honestly believes that she can childproof our shifting environment as we travel around the world. I have my doubts, and I'm only glad that Lucas isn't old enough to be humiliated by the leash.
Eight-year-old Kara's two main concerns are losing contact with her friends and being devoured by a wild animal. The other day she greeted me at the breakfast table with a stern expression and a copy of The San Francisco Chronicle. The headline read "Marin Girl Mauled by Hyena," and it described a local eleven-year-old who was attacked while camping in Kenya. Kara pointed at the story, and said accusingly, "And you still want to go to Africa?" I assured her that we'd do everything in our power to protect her, but Kara remained stubbornly skeptical until Devi found a place in Western Australia where we could swim with wild dolphins. In Kara's mind, that made up for a multitude of sins.
Willie, as usual, is gung ho for any adventure that might come his way. Being seven years old and male, his social life is less developed than Kara's, and he's genuinely delighted to miss a year of school. If anything, Willie helps reassure Kara that this madness will all end well. I think at this point, if we told Willie that we were all going to the backwoods of Borneo for the rest of our lives, he'd say, "Okay, let's do it." Lucas, who is now speaking in full sentences, also seems comfortable with the trip — at least to the extent he understands it. He'll have his mommy, his daddy, his siblings, and his blankie with him twenty-four hours a day. So for him, this may be the best of worlds.
As for me, I do have this strange fear that the kids will contract some vile disease in India. It may be coincidence, but almost everyone I know who has traveled there has come down with some sort of illness, from dysentery to malaria. To avert this, Devi faxed the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. They sent back some advisories saying if we went to India — or Botswana, for that matter — we should be inoculated against polio, tetanus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and typhoid. Plus we should take the anti-malarial drug Larium. According to the CDC, Larium's side effects can include psychotic behavior. That sounded worrisome, so when we went to get our shots, I mentioned it to the doctor. He said not to worry, that full-blown psychosis occurs only in a tiny minority of cases.
As you might expect, Willie took the vaccinations like a trooper. No tears — just a stoic grin and an immediate demand for compensation from Dr. Joe's treasure chest of ten-cent toys. Lucas, on the other hand, was stunned and offended that we would just stand by and allow him to be violated. Then he burst into tears. As for our eldest, I'm chagrined to say that she threw herself into a full-scale panic. She started crying even before the doctor came into the examination room. Then she bolted from the office and ran screaming down the hallway. I actually had to drag her back into the examination room and hold her down while she got her shots. Other children in the waiting room looked concerned.
Aside from my disease phobia, I also have to admit that being homeless and out of work — even by choice — is somewhat disorienting. It's odd to realize that from now on, wherever we happen to be on a given day will be our home, and that there's no single safe haven to which we can return. It's also strange to suddenly relinquish all your structures and schedules — all the chores, routines, and rituals that define and organize your life. When you follow these routines, it's possible to live most of your life on autopilot. It's like driving to work without even thinking about the route. But when your routines are disrupted — especially this radically — you become very conscious of your actions, your surroundings, and your relationships. Everything seems new and unsettled. But again, that's one of the goals of our trip — to disrupt our usual patterns so thoroughly that we'll be receptive to new options and possibilities.
In order to do that fully, we have to let this transformation from conventional to nomadic life take place on its own terms. We have to observe the changes and be conscious of them, but we can't limit the outcome or cling to old routines and old ways of thinking. Sometimes that's difficult, because all of our friends and acquaintances constantly ask us about the future. They ask, "How long will you be gone? Where will you live when you get back? Will you go back to the same job?"
I try tell them that the purpose of this journey is to see new possibilities, and if we predetermine the outcome of this journey at its beginning, that goal will be defeated. But most people are uncomfortable with that answer. They seem to crave certainty in their own lives, and they consider it imprudent to place one's family in such an ambiguous position. To that I can only reply that any sense of certainty we have in life is ephemeral at best. That was revealed to us this month with savage clarity.
Devi and I have two friends, Curt and Alma. They don't know each other. Curt was my roommate at Yale, and Alma was Devi's friend at Stanford. Curt has been HIV-positive for nearly twelve years, and two of his former lovers have died from AIDS. His doctors, his friends, his parents, and everyone else have always assumed that it was only a matter of time, and probably a short time at that. Alma, on the other hand, was a happy, healthy, vibrant woman who participated in two very successful Silicon Valley startups. She recently married the man she loved. They were in the process of building their dream house, and she was eight months pregnant with twins.
Curt and Alma were each on their own fast tracks, moving in opposite directions. Then, all of a sudden, Curt starts responding to a new cocktail of AIDS drugs and his "virus-load" drops off the chart. For all intents and purposes, after waiting twelve years to die, Curt is "cured." Alma, on the other hand, is riding home from work with her husband, seat belt stretched over her big belly when a guy in a pickup truck falls asleep at the wheel, crashes across the median strip, and hits their Mercedes head-on. Alma is killed instantly. The emergency room doctors try to deliver the twins, but they die too. Alma's husband was sitting behind an air bag, and he walked away without a scratch.
Here's another twist. Alma's funeral, which should have been the saddest event on the face of the earth, was attended by more than a thousand people, and it was one of the warmest, sweetest, most life-affirming events Devi and I have ever attended. Her husband, her father, and her brother all delivered eulogies that made us realize that this woman, cut down in the fullness of life, was actually blessed. Her life was important to so many people. Curt, on the other hand, has gone into therapy. He didn't think he would live very long, so for the last twelve years, he's led his life accordingly. Now that he's "cured," he's not sure what to do.
So if you ask me about certainty, I'd have to say it's a cruel illusion. And if you ask us how this trip is going to turn out, and what we're going to do when we get back, I'd say the purpose of this journey is to open ourselves individually, and as a family, to a world of possibilities, because tomorrow ... well, who knows about tomorrow.
P.S. About the only thing we did more quickly than anticipated was sell our house. We still have about a month before we leave the country, so we're driving down to L.A. to visit friends, then over to Arizona to see Devi's mom. We'll come back via the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, and Yosemite. It'll be sort of a trial run for the big trip. Besides, I hear that the weather in Arizona is lovely in July.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from One Year Off by David Elliot Cohen. Copyright © 2011 David Elliot Cohen. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Prologue,Chapter 1. What Have We Done? Tiburon, California,
Chapter 2. We Never Get to Go Anywhere. Stinson Beach, California,
Chapter 3. The Sex Life of Butterflies. Arenal, Costa Rica,
Chapter 4. Pura Vida. San Jose, Costa Rica,
Chapter 5. Those Lovable French. Paris, France,
Chapter 6. Awkward Moments. Dole, France,
Chapter 7. Speak French or Die. Saint-Jean-de-Losne, France,
Chapter 8. Finding Our Stride. Nice, France,
Chapter 9. Gluttony Without Tears. San Teodoro, Sardinia,
Chapter 10. A Tough Day on the Road. Rome, Italy,
Chapter 11. Next Time We Take the Bus. Panzano-in-Chianti, Italy,
Chapter 12. The Museum of Torture. Patras, Greece,
Chapter 13. Autumn of the Gods. Kusadasi, Turkey,
Chapter 14. Your Wife Doesn't Love You Anymore. Istanbul, Turkey,
Chapter 15. Kara's Shangri-La. Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe,
Chapter 16. "In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle ..." Johannesburg, South Africa,
Chapter 17. Flight of the Damned. Cape Town, South Africa,
Chapter 18. The Most Beautiful Place on Earth. Mumbai, India,
Chapter 19. Another Planet. Bangkok, Thailand,
Chapter 20. The Middle of Nowhere. Ceduna, South Australia,
Chapter 21. Heads or Tails. Sydney, Australia,
Chapter 22. Temples and Land Mines. Phnom Penh, Cambodia,
Chapter 23. The Lesson of the Buddha Cave. Luang Prabang, Laos,
Chapter 24. Was It All Worthwhile? Ross, California (1999),
Four Frequently Asked (and Unasked) Questions,
Afterword: Where Are We Now? Tiburon, California (2011),
Bibliography,
Acknowledgments,
Image Gallery,
Introduction
Prologue
Some people have resolute ideas about how their lives should unfold. As adolescents or young adults, they set goals and chart courses. When they encounter obstacles, they surmount them and move forward. If they stray from the preordained path, they always find their way back again. For better or worse, I've never been one of those people. Maybe I've never found my true métier. More likely, I just have a short attention span. But whatever it is, life has always seemed far more interesting when there is a healthy element of serendipity involved.
My young adulthood was shaped by this instinct for adventure. An otherwise lackluster career at Yale College was punctuated by two fairly unusual summer jobs -- one as an assistant to a member of the British Parliament and another as an intern at the American embassy in Freetown, Sierra Leone. At the time, I didn't consider these positions great career opportunities. I just thought that listening to constituents' problems in a dreary Midlands housing project or touring an African bush town were great ways to sample the world.
In fact, when I graduated from college, I didn't have the slightest idea what sort of career I wanted. If someone had handed me an open air ticket along with my diploma, I would have gladly jetted off to Tibet or Timbuktu. But that didn't happen. Instead I ran into my father, and with the best intentions, he gently prodded me into law school. ("Even if you don't become an attorney, it's great mental training.") So with a vague sense of dread, I trundled off to law school with the rest of the living dead. I still remember sitting in a huge classroom on the first day of school with 150 or so eager novitiates. The dean -- a noted contracts scholar -- strutted across the stage like a puffed-up peacock and boomed, "We're going to change everything about the way you think!"
My first reaction to that was, "Not if I can help it, buddy." And of course that set the stage for a truly gruesome year, where I proved two theories fairly conclusively: 1) the first year of law school isn't the preferred venue for contrarian thinking, and 2) you can't learn torts and civil procedure through osmosis. No one was sorry to see me go.
After that, I served an undistinguished stint as a salesclerk in a Pittsburgh bookstore. I thought it was a great job, since I got to spend most of my time browsing the inventory and chatting with customers. But eventually, my parents prevailed upon me to try something more ambitious, so I bought a copy of The New York Times and scanned the want ads. The very first notice that caught my eye called for publicity director at a small photography book publishing house called Aperture.
Aperture published some of the world's finest art photographers -- giants like Robert Frank, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Edward Stieglitz, and Minor White. I always admired Aperture's lavish publications when they turned up at the bookstore, and more important, I thought it would be exciting to live in New York for a while. I applied for the position and got it.
Six months later, the talented martinet who ran the place fired me for unconscionable indolence and general insubordination. In retrospect, I'd have to say he was justified on both counts. I believe the breaking point came when he spent half an hour expounding his philosophy of life and art to me, and I replied, "But Michael, that's just Plato's Myth of the Cave repackaged." No one likes a smart-ass, and I quickly found myself living in Manhattan with no job, no income, no prospects, and roughly four weeks' savings.
You might think this condition would have humiliated and frightened me. (It certainly would now.) But at the time, I wasn't all that worried. I'll be the first to admit that I didn't take full advantage of the educational opportunities offered at Yale, but I did learn the most important thing they taught there -- baseless self-confidence.
It's a lesson that can't be underestimated. Most of my classmates and I departed our graduation ceremony on the Old Campus fully convinced that we were incapable of anything short of rousing success. In fact, the joke among the underachieving set was that if you did manage to graduate from Yale (which is almost a given), you could never become a bum -- merely an eccentric. Over time, life's vicissitudes have convinced nearly all of us that we can fail as well as the next guy. But at twenty-three, I was still well inoculated with Ivy League bravado and roundly sure that if I got fired, it was only because the boss was a cretinous jerk, and something better would turn up the following week.
In this case, it actually did. When I had about $200 left in my bank account and a $292 rent payment due, I got a call from Guy Cooper -- a totally hip British picture editor who lived in Harlem and played the guitar like Mark Knopfler. Guy's wife, Lela, was from my hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania, and I used to date her sister. Anyway, Guy said he was leaving his position at a small, prestigious photo news agency called Contact Press Images in order to become associate picture editor of Newsweek. Guy's boss -- a roguish, charismatic photo guru named Robert Pledge -- told Guy to find a replacement before he left. So Guy ransacked his Rolodex looking for someone, anyone, who might be vaguely qualified for the job. Fortunately, Cohen is near the beginning of the alphabet.
I hoped that Pledge (everyone called him just "Pledge") wouldn't hold my recent dismissal against me, but he couldn't have cared less about the blots on my copybook. Pledge worked from the gut, and he figured that we would get along well and I'd work like a campesino if I liked what I was doing. In turn, I saw the blustering, bearded forty-year-old Frenchman as a kindred spirit, and I admired his panache. Pledge worked when he wanted to -- which was often all night. He dressed like a slob. He turned down lucrative jobs because he didn't like the people offering them. And without benefit of any discernible management skills, he commanded a ragtag band of ten highly talented, fiercely loyal photojournalists, who roamed the earth covering stories in the name of truth and justice.
For a twenty-three-year-old kid in search of excitement, Contact Press Images was the best possible place to land. I earned a subsistence wage, but I scarcely noticed because every day was a new adventure and every breaking news story seemed to concern me personally. I loved the little yellow boxes full of slides that were rushed back to New York from Irian Jaya and El Salvador. I loved the adrenaline rush when we landed a scoop or made a magazine deadline by minutes (which, because of Pledge's management style, was fairly routine). And I secretly relished the late-night phone calls when Pledge would growl in his throaty, accented English, "The Shah of Iran's been overthrown. Find David Burnett in Manila and get him to Teheran."
Most of all I liked hanging out with the photographers between assignments. They always knew where to find the best Ethiopian restaurant in New York, and they always had the best possible war stories. It was like having a big dysfunctional family of dashing, larger-than-life older brothers (and one older sister -- Annie Liebovitz). Our office was like a clubhouse where the favored traits were quiet bravado, savoir faire, and cynicism.
Once in a while, the photographers even dragged me along when they went on assignment or covered a big celebrity. One of my favorite photographers, Douglas Kirkland, always brought me signed Polaroids of the countless beautiful women he photographed. He convinced various stars and supermodels to write bogus inscriptions to me like, "David, you're the best lover I ever had, Morgan Fairchild" or "I'd leave Billy for you in a minute, Christie." I posted these ersatz testimonials on a big bulletin board in my kitchen where they rarely failed to impress my dates.
After I'd been at the agency for about two years, Contact's youngest photojournalist, a gifted and prodigiously charming con artist named Rick Smolan, asked me if I wanted to come to Melbourne, Australia, to work on a photo book project. Smolan's grandiose scheme was to bring one hundred of the world's best photojournalists to Australia, spread them across the country, and have them all snap pictures on a single day. This extravaganza, modeled after a Life magazine special issue, was supposed to produce a lavish coffee-table book called A Day in the Life of Australia.
Incredibly, Smolan had convinced several major corporations to back his scheme, but he said he needed "some management help" to actually pull it off. This turned out to be an understatement. After a grueling twenty-hour flight, I discovered that the Day in the Life of Australia project headquarters consisted of a bedroom and dining room in a run-down little house in a marginal Melbourne neighborhood. Smolan and his Australian partner had no budget, no workable accounting system, no filing system, and they were practically broke. They did have a Tandy personal computer -- which was pretty high-tech for 1981 -- but it lost the entire contents of its memory whenever someone switched on the vacuum cleaner -- which from the looks of things, wasn't often.
Still, the project had a rare can-do spirit, and with Smolan in command, we bluffed, maneuvered, and equivocated our way to success. When Smolan and I arrived in the Western Australian city of Perth with no money for a hotel room, we traded the manager of the local Sheraton one hundred copies of our nonexistent book for three weeks' worth of free lodgings. When thirty-six publishers in Australia and America rejected our can't-miss book idea, Smolan convinced a bank to lend us $250,000 at 21 percent interest. We used the money to print the books ourselves. Then we sold them through newspaper ads.
Fortunately, A Day in the Life of Australia was a great success. One hundred top photojournalists from twenty countries all showed up in Sydney. Their photographs were inspired. The book won several awards and eventually became a number one best-seller in Australia. This enabled us to retire our debts -- as opposed to going to jail for fraud. But when the dust settled, everyone involved swore up and down that they'd never, ever do anything remotely similar again. (Our office manager actually ended up in the psych ward of a Sydney hospital for two weeks.)
But a year later, in 1982, the state of Hawaii called and offered Smolan and me a free trip to the islands if we would consider doing A Day in the Life of Hawaii. We ended up spending eight idyllic months there, and Smolan invited me to become his partner in Day in the Life, Inc. From that point forward, our small Day in the Life crew adopted a nomadic lifestyle, traveling from country to country, producing a new book every year. By 1986, we had four moderately successful projects under our belt and were casting about for a fifth. I wanted to go for the brass ring -- A Day in the Life of America. Smolan agreed, somewhat reluctantly, and a few months later we announced the project. The day our press release went out, the phone lines in our Denver office lit up like a Christmas tree. At one point, our publicist, Patti Richards, breathlessly announced that she had all three major television networks on hold simultaneously.
It only got crazier from there. None of us believed that A Day in the Life of America was the best book we ever did, but with Reagan in the White House, the stock market booming, and America feeling its oats, a book celebrating the U.S. of A. was the right product at the right time. All the cosmic tumblers fell into place and A Day in the Life of America became the first coffee-table book ever to hit number one on The New York Times best-seller list. It settled on the list for fifty-six weeks, selling more than 1.4 million copies -- one of the best-selling nonfiction books of the decade. Shortly thereafter Collins Publishers bought Day in the Life, Inc., and Smolan and I became young millionaires (barely) with profiles in The New York Times, a piece on 20/20, and a feature story in People magazine. (People wanted to photograph us with dollar bills falling out of the sky, but we managed to convince them that was bad taste -- even for the eighties.)
My long-suffering parents were shocked and vastly relieved that their chronically underachieving son had staged what had to be characterized as a remarkable, Prince Hal sort of turnaround. But my mother, upon seeing A Day in the Life of America at the top of the best-seller list, said something strangely prescient. "I wonder what happens," she said, "when the pinnacle of your career occurs when you're only thirty-one years old."
As things turned out, her concerns were justified. I wouldn't say that a huge early success ruined my career. But trends come and go, cut-rate competitors move onto your turf, and new corporate parents have a way of institutionalizing and dumbing-down even the most entrepreneurial of projects. Smolan reacted by withdrawing to his computer screen and the conference circuit, where he was a stunningly good speaker, and I was left to tend the nuts and bolts of the nouveau régime. Over time, Smolan became increasingly alienated, and I felt as if I were doing all the heavy lifting. After a while our very successful, symbiotic partnership faltered. Smolan left first, and a year later, I followed him out the door.
As my career unraveled, my home life improved. Back when I was in Tokyo doing A Day in the Life of Japan, I met a beautiful American translator named Devyani Kamdar. Devi (pronounced "Davey") was a recent Stanford graduate who was using her fluent Japanese to earn enough money to backpack around Asia. Her father was Indian, her mother American, and the first time I saw her, I experienced a hormonal frisson. We met at one of our famous Day in the Life group dinners. (At the time, we tended to graze in herds.) The bad news was that I got blazing drunk on Japanese potato vodka and ended up in the back of a Shinjuku taxicab singing "We Are the World" at the top of my lungs. The good news was that one of our young interns, Torin Boyd, noticed the chemistry and showed enough initiative to get Devi's phone number for me. (I believe he also offered up some plausible excuses for my boorish behavior.)
After a first date at a very elegant Japanese restaurant where they served elaborate little seafood dishes on huge antique imari plates, we became a couple and spent most of our free time together. In fact, we were so compatible that I could often sense, telepathically, when she was near. I used to amaze Smolan by saying, "Devi's here," and a few minutes later she'd walk through the door. Unfortunately, Devi was in Tokyo only long enough to assemble her travel fund. And even if she could have stayed longer, I had to rush back to New York for post-production work on A Day in the Life of Japan. We left Tokyo about the same time, and I figured I'd never see her again.
But over the course of the next several months, I started to think about Devi more and more, and eventually I decided to track her down. I called her mother in Eugene, Oregon. She didn't know where Devi was, but she thought maybe she'd show up in Bali sometime in the near future. I wrote a letter to Devi saying that I was desperately searching for her and addressed it to:
Devyani Kamdar
Poste Restante
Denpaser, Bali
Theoretically, the Balinese post office would hold this letter and give it to her if she ever showed up asking for mail. I had my doubts about this scheme, but a few weeks later I got a crackly phone call from halfway across the globe. I told Devi to stay put, and I'd meet her in Bali within a week.
Before it was fully developed by the tourist trade, Bali was a magically romantic place to court. Devi and I holed up in a thatched cottage at the old Tanjung Sari Hotel overlooking Sanur Beach. We spent hot days exploring the island and turning brown on the sand. In the cool evenings we lay in bed listening to the exotic gamelan music that wafted through our hut on scented breezes. Eventually, I had to go home, but Devi promised to join me in New York when she finished her Asian tour.
We lived together in Manhattan for several months. Then, one day, Devi decided to take off on a tour of Europe with three of her girlfriends. She was gone only about three weeks, but given her proclivity to wander, I began to worry. The day she returned I got down on one knee and proposed. We eloped to Hawaii and were married on a thirty-foot sloop off the beach at Waikiki.
Ten months later, our daughter, Kara, was born. Devi hated the freezing New York winters, and neither of us wanted to raise ch