Hold the Enlightenment

Acclaim for Tim Cahill’s
Hold the Enlightenment

Tim Cahill
Hold the Enlightenment

Tim Cahill is the author of six previous books, including
A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh
, and
Pass the Butterworms
. He is an editor at large for
Outside
magazine, and his work appears in
National Geographic Adventure, The New York Times Book Review
, and other national publications. He lives in Montana.

ALSO BY TIM CAHILL

Buried Dreams

Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg

Road Fever

Pecked to Death by Ducks

Pass the Butterworms

Thanks to Larry Burke and everyone at
Outside
, both past and present. I am always proud to appear in the magazine and to work with editors like Hal Espen.

Todd Jones at
Yoga Journal
let me have an awful lot of fun, and the readers didn’t cancel their subscriptions in droves, or so he said. Maybe he’s just being nice.

Mark Cohen at
Men’s Journal
could get it done even when the volume got a little high. Sid Evans edited a prizewinning story under great pressure. Thanks also to John Wood at
Modern Maturity
.

And an all-embracing thank you to Mark Bryant, who edited stories of mine at both
Outside
and
Men’s Journal
. The finest compliment any writer can give to any editor is the one I offer you here: Mark, I’d work for you again in a heartbeat.

I
ntroductions, I feel, in my mean-spirited way, are an appropriate forum to even the score, settle old debts, avenge insults, spew a lot of invective, and basically have fun decimating the wicked or the undiscriminating. Unfortunately, I am currently living in a hell of insufficient aggravation. Critics have generally been kind, or if not precisely kind, then at least fair. In fact, two of the stories in this collection were selected to be included in the
Best American Travel Writing
books: “This Teeming Ark,” in 2000, and “Powder Keg,” which appeared under the title “Volcano Alley Is Ticking,” in 2001.

The truth is, I actually had to look for someone to kick around here. Happily, after a quick root through my files, I found Hal Clifford, a columnist for the
Aspen Times
. Hal published his interview with me and, in what I suspect was meant to be a humorous aside, he suggested that I was “unattractive to the opposite sex.” Somehow I had not been aware of this previously. I wondered how Hal knew.

Another fellow, a newspaper critic, noted that in a previous collection, I had included a piece written for
Modern Maturity
, the magazine of the American Association of Retired Persons, and from that concluded that I was “getting tired.” It is probably for that reason I’ve included the only piece I’ve written for
Modern Maturity
of late. I’m not so tired that I mind drawing fire from imbeciles. On the other hand, the article in question is very short indeed, and its very brevity may supply munitions to the moron.

Similarly, I haven’t been vigorous or virtuous enough to thank the hundreds of people who have written me letters over the years, and I’ll do it here, all in a lump. Thank you. Really. I’m glad you liked the books, your letters truly do brighten my day, and I’m sincerely sorry that I haven’t written back. It’s not you. I never write back. I do, however, spend a lot of time feeling guilty about not responding to all the well-written missives. Somebody writing to a writer works on the letter and that is obvious. To do even half as well as you in reply, I’d have to work on it too, and, hey, that’s what I do for a living. I’m not a guy who writes letters, as my mother reminds me from time to time.

This doesn’t mean I don’t think about what people say. A perceptive reader noted that the conclusion of the story “Castle and More Castles” echoed a thought expressed by the late poet and scientist Loren Eiseley, in his collection
Star Thrower
. Eiseley is a favorite of mine and I’ve quoted him twice in this book, once in “Evilfish” and once in “Professor Cahill’s Travel 101.” I can’t very well argue that I am unfamiliar with the work, and the idea expressed at the end of the castle story is indeed very similar to one penned by Eiseley. Well, okay, it’s almost identical.

So I spent days reading Eisely then rereading my own work, and wondering whether I unconsciously swiped the idea or whether such concepts might occur to folks of parallel sentiments contemplating a similar set of conditions.

What I mean to say here is that the letters do not fall on deaf ears, or, more appropriately I suppose, on blind eyes. I read them. I think about them. Some, like the Eiseley letter, challenge me for days.

And I really do intend to answer them. Really. I put them in a large file box that is placed on a prominent shelf in my office. The box is labeled “Correspondence 2002,” or whatever the year happens to be. Every time I see the file, which is every day that I work in my office, I feel exceedingly guilty and know that I am not a good person. Generally, almost always in early January, I seal up the box, add the word “Unanswered” to the label, and carry it out to my garage. I have yearly file boxes—“Unanswered
Correspondence”—from almost three decades out there. There is no room for my truck anymore, only for the rows upon rows of boxes, mute accusations, piled high over my head. Sometimes I have nightmares about them: angry boxes on a mission of vengeance.

So, to decades’ worth of letter writers, many thanks and my sincere apologies.

And as long as I’m thanking folks, I would like to mention those anonymous people who have brightened the darkest portion of my life: the time spent on airplanes. Occasionally, I walk down the aisle and someone is actually reading one of my books. Sometimes, that person will laugh aloud, and I want to glance over her shoulder and see what it was that got her. Which piece, what part? I enter the rest room knowing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I am the God of Humor.

But that’s not so. I’m reminded of that every time I do a vanity search on the Internet and discover a site where ordinary folks—as opposed to big-deal journalists—review books. Most people say nice things, but sometimes there are warnings, and quite appropriate ones at that: this guy, the reviewers say of me, is certainly worth reading but he is not as funny as Dave Barry. True, but nobody is as funny as Dave Barry. Except for P. J. O’Rourke. Nobody is as funny as P.J. Or Bill Bryson, for that matter. Or, well, there are a lot of writers who are funnier than I am. The sad fact is that I seldom set out to be funny at all. It just happens and it always surprises me when it does.