The Glimpse Traveler
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A stunning, poetic memoir "that will transport readers to a time when a nation's youth searched for meaning against the backdrop of the Vietnam War" (Publishers Weekly).
When she joins a pair of hitchhikers on a trip to California, a young Midwestern woman embarks on a journey of memory, beauty, and realization. This true story, set in 1971, recounts a fateful, nine-day trip into the American counterculture that begins on a whim and quickly becomes a mission to unravel a tragic mystery.
The narrator's path leads her to Berkeley, San Francisco, Mill Valley, Big Sur, and finally to an abandoned resort motel that has become a down-on-its-luck commune in the desert of southern Colorado. The Glimpse Traveler describes with wry humor and deep feeling what it was like to witness a peculiar and impossibly rich time.
"A perceptive, engaging, intimate chronicle of the early 1970s, the road-weary hippie hitchhikers, the anti-war sentiment, the dope-induced haze. Boruch . . . captures this very specific, significant time and place with exquisite clarity and lyric detail and description." —Dinty Moore, author of Between Panic and Desire
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This slender volume by poet and essayist Boruch (The Book of Hours) will transport readers to a time when a nation's youth searched for meaning against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. During spring break in 1971, an off-hand invitation from an acquaintance became a hitch-hiking adventure out west for then 20-year-old Boruch. There is the kind insurance salesman who picks them up in Illinois, feeds and houses them for a night, and shows them a photo of his three teenage sons, all serving in Vietnam. After a four-hour mind-numbing wait for a ride in Nebraska, a van spray painted in DayGlo colors arrives, drives them across country in a cloud of marijuana smoke and deposits them in California. Boruch uses iconic symbols and terms to capture an era when peace signs signaled goodbye, and "straight" was not a comment about sexuality, but the antithesis of hippie. Perhaps nothing is more illustrative than Boruch's recollection that she returned to the Midwest with the same $10 in her pocket that she started with; 37 years later, she found herself still startled at "the world's generosity to us."
