Zigs and Zags

THE ARC IS WIDE, the zigzags are many in John Dowd’s candid and compelling memoir of eight decades of ventures, adventures, and misadventures—from his youth in postwar New Zealand to grandfatherhood on a Canadian homestead. In between, Dowd threads back and forth around the world at speed, taking or making jobs for himself as he goes, his journal close at hand.

We are swept right along: with him we grub it out in the New Zealand bush, culling invasive deer. We cross an ocean and climb Andean peaks. We thumb our way around South America, scouting routes for a future photographic bus tour venture. In Caribbean waters we take the helm of a giant schooner. We get an instructor gig at an Outward Bound School in England. We ride a big Norton motorbike across Europe. We crew on a merchant ship plying the Mediterranean, then hitchhike from Syria to India with a broken heart. We kayak the Indonesian chain and end up running a wacky summer camp for rich kids from Jakarta. We kayak Patagonian Chile on assignment for National Geographic, then take on the entire Caribbean chain. We dive in turquoise waters and at times in pitch darkness: under North Sea oil rigs, among cofferdams on the Thames Barrier, and into an industrial sewer pipe full of drilling mud. We learn as we go.

The social and political ferment of the late 1960s and 1970s forms a backdrop to much of Dowd’s stories, as do his own candid thoughts around the mixed blessings of group travel and his quest for a soulmate—until a soulmate appears. A full-fledged writer by the late 1970s, Dowd gets distracted by a new set of ventures which culminate, most notably, in a retail business and a specialty magazine in Vancouver, Canada. But his adventures do not stop there—far from it.