HOW I MET MARK (OR, "WHY WE ARE LIVING THIS LIFE") (Cheri)

It all started when I was about 14.

I'm going to tell this the way remembered it, then give you a little edit at the end, because it turns out memory failed me.

Mark and I both grew up Seventh-Day Adventist and at the time, that generally meant that you would go to a boarding school for part of high school.  How early depended upon whether your local church had an 8-, 10-, or 12-grade school.

My church had a 10-grade school, and I was young for my grade, so I started thinking about where to "go away" when I was 14.  Most of my classmates were going to a school in the Napa Valley, but I had wanderlust.

I looked at schools as far away as New York State, but then I visited a school on the Monterey Bay.  Literally on the Monterey Bay, as the church had a 99-year lease on some property that had once been Camp McQuaide, an army base.  It was only four hours from home, but wow . . . on the ocean!

I had also met a boy who was planning on attending Monterey Bay Academy. 
This boy was from Redding, which was another two hours further away from MBA.  Not Mark, but a classmate of his, who attended Bible Camp when I did (think a weekend of Summer Camp for the devoted).

When I arrived at MBA, that boy wasn't there, but his friends, whom I'd also met at Bible Camp, were the only people I knew.  We hung around, and I met Mark, who also lived near Redding.

Mark was just a little older than me, funny, sometimes goofy, and read a lot.  When we talked books, we found that we had read three of the same books, all about leaving home to see new places.

Blue Highways: A Journey into America, by William Least Heat-Moon, is the first book that I think of when I remember our conversations about books, usually in the cafeteria.  The title comes from the two-lane highways that the author drove, marked in blue on his Rand McNally atlases, while circling America.

The book was much more than simply a tour of America.  The emphasis on small towns and little-seen byways was what endeared the book to both Mark and me.  The Amazon summary says:

William Least Heat-Moon set out with little more than the need to
put home behind him and a sense of curiosity about
"those little towns that get on the map -- if they get on at all -- only because
some cartographer has a blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia;
New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee;
Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi."

Forbes magazine listed Blue Highways as one of 15 books that "will change the way you see the world," and we've adopted its approach for most of our travels.

All these years later, Blue Highways is still #1 in Amazon's Auto & RV Travel category. (I must say, though, this category is a very weird conglomeration of memoir, how-to, cozy mysteries, etc.  One of these days I'm going to do a post devoted to unusual Amazon categories.)

I've got to re-read Blue Highways.  I've mentioned that one reason I like to blog is that I read related information on the topic.  Looking at the Wikipedia entry on this book, I see that one of the people Least Heat-Moon ran into was a Seventh-Day-Adventist evangelist hitchhiker . . . what a coincidence!

My Side of the Mountain, by Jean Craighead George, was a logical book for us each to have read at that age.  Again, the central character left home for places unknown, but in this instance, it was a pre-teen boy, who ran away to the Catskills Mountains, and survived for a year with only what was in his pockets.  Memorable fiction that has been reprinted about 35 times.

Peter Jenkins wrote A Walk Across America and The Walk West: A Walk Across America 2.  These books cover some of the same material as Blue Highways, but while I remember Blue Highways more for the small towns and extended interactions with people along the way, I remember Jenkins' books mostly for the grueling physicality of the experience.  It all sounds fun until you read 650+ pages of daily effort.

Both Jenkins and Least Heat-Moon spent large portion of their trips focusing on the South, so visiting the books again, as a new Southerner, is on my list.

Anyway, these were the books I remember discussing with Mark when we were 15 and 17, realizing that we both wanted to meander, enjoying unexpected discoveries as much as - possibly more than - the sights we anticipated.  "Blue highways" became a standard of our conversations.

I've told the story of these three books several times in the intervening years.  The thing is, it's not true in the details.  When I went to get pictures for this post, I discovered that Blue Highways wasn't even published until four years after I met Mark.  What a surprise, as I've always remembered it as an element of my earliest bonds with him!