Tom Robbins - Wild Ducks Flying Backward

Eventually, it grew dark. Owls started hooting and unidentifiable things began to go bump in the night. Scared, cold, and no longer captivated by the gastronomic charms of berries, we lost heart and, circumventing the falls, sheepishly made our way toward home. All afternoon, the story of our “robbery” had been circulating in town and, to their good credit, everybody, including the bank tellers and our families, seemed more amused than outraged by it.

Hands uncuffed, legs unshackled, necks unnoosed, the robbers were given dinner, baths, a stern lecture, and sent to bed.

It may or may not be true that crime doesn’t pay, but our little caper had a happy ending, the best part of which was an introduction to life in the wilderness. From that day on, I spent as much time as possible in the outdoor world, finding there the kind of inner nourishment that others are said to find in the mosque, the synagogue, the church — or the bank.

Asked by Trips, 1989

Since liberation has always been a major theme of mine, I suppose there’s an undercurrent in my novels that could be interpreted as political. On the other hand, it doesn’t toe anybody’s party line and it’s rarely event-specific.

My approach has been to encourage readers to embrace life, on the assumption that anyone who’s saying “yes” to life is automatically going to say “no” to those forces and policies that destroy life, bridle it, dull it, or render it miserable. As an advocate, I’m more akin to Zorba the Greek than to Ralph Nader.

Elliott Bay Books Newsletter, 2003

Maybe what I admire most about John Steinbeck is that he never mortgaged his forty-acre heart for a suite in an ivory tower. Choosing to travel among downtrodden dreamers rather than the tuxedoed tiddly-poops of the establishment, he brought both a rawboned American romanticism and an elegant classical pathos to the stories he told about their undervalued lives. Any writer who can’t be inspired by that has put his or her own heart at risk.

Asked by the Center for Steinbeck Studies, San José State University, 2002

When I drove off the used-car lot in my first Cadillac, I felt like I’d finally grown up. I mean, that car had “adult” written all over it. Unfortunately, I only kept it ninety days.

This was no adolescent rite of passage. It was 1981 and I’d been legal for so many years I could do it in my sleep. But my previous car, a hand-painted old Mercury convertible, had an air of youthful frivolity perhaps not befitting a successful author.

That Caddy, however, was solid citizen. A maroon ’76 DeVille sedan, its plush interior was the color of the cranberry sauce at a Republican fund-raising dinner. Into it, I could fit my entire volleyball team, our equipment, a couple of girlfriends, and a case of beer. It was as quiet as a cathedral and so smooth it was like riding on Twinkie cream.

Problem was, it made me feel like a middle-aged Jewish dentist. Now, there’s nothing wrong with middle-aged Jewish dentists: they dig impeccable root canals and make, I’m sure, fine fathers, friends, and neighbors. Well and good, but the image fit me like a mouthful of metal braces — and I had no access to laughing gas.

When my embarrassment level reached the point where I was slumping down in the seat and shielding my face while driving, I took the Cadillac into a General Motors dealership and asked to have it tricked out: wire wheels, pinstripes, landau top. Naively, I suppose, I was determined to somehow make it cool. Since I had to leave it overnight, the dealer offered to provide me with a loaner. A diabolically clever fellow, he nonchalantly sent me home in a new gold-and-black Camaro Z-28. Wow! Good golly, Miss Molly! Flying chickens in a barnyard! I’d never piloted anything remotely like it. After no more than twenty zippy miles and eight tight corners, I’d fallen hopelessly in love. The next day I zoomed back and traded in the Caddy.

I’ve been happily Z-ing ever since. The Camaro holds only half a volleyball team and is like riding on peanut M&M’s. But it’s more responsive than three June brides and a dozen bribed congressmen— and nobody asks me to cap their teeth.

Asked by Road & Track, June 1987

Back before the earth became a couch potato, content to sit around and watch the action in other galaxies, it displayed a talent for energetic geophysical innovation. Among the lesser known products of our planet’s creative period is a scattering of landlocked “islands,” dramatic humps of preglacial sandstone (covered nowadays with fir and madrona) rising out of the alluvial plain on which I live in northwest Washington State.

Although rugged and almost rudely abrupt, there’s a feminine swell to these outcroppings that reminds me of Valkyrie breasts or, on those frequently drizzly days when they are kimonoed in mist, of scoops of Sung Dynasty puddings.

One of the larger outcroppings — called simply The Rock by its admirers — can be partially negotiated by a four-wheel-drive vehicle. I hike the last one hundred yards through tall, dark trees, and at the summit find that the hump goddesses, as usual, have rolled out the green carpet for me. There’s spongy moss underfoot, a variety of grasses and ferns and more wildflowers than Heidi’s goats could chew up in a fortnight.

In a few more yards, however, I find myself standing on virtually bare sandstone, and that sandstone is falling away away away in a plunge so steep it would be terrifying were it not so beautiful. Perched like Pan on a damp and dizzy precipice, I can look down on gliding eagles, into the privacy of osprey nests, across a verdant luminescence of leaf life and a hidden, lily-padded pond, where in spring a trillion frogs gossip about Kermit’s residuals.

To visit The Rock is to visit a natural frontier both dangerous and comforting, hard and soft, familiar and mysterious. And like Thoreau’s Walden, The Rock defines the boundary between civilization and wilderness, existing as it does twenty minutes via jeep from a bustling town, two seconds via daydream from the beginning of time.

Asked by LIFE magazine, 1987

Afew years ago, I was sitting at a battered desk in my room in the funky old wing of the Pioneer Inn, Lahaina, Maui, when I discovered the following rhapsody scratched with a ballpoint pen into the soft wooden bottom of the desk drawer.

Saxaphone

Saxiphone

Saxophone

Saxyphone

Saxephone

Saxafone

Obviously, some unknown traveler — drunk, stoned, or simply Spell-Check deprived — had been penning a postcard or letter when he or she ran headlong into Dr. Sax’s marvelous instrument. I have no idea how the problem was resolved, but the confused attempt struck me as a little poem, an ode to the challenges of our written language.

I collected the “poem,” and many times since, I’ve fantasized about how the word in question might have fit into the stranger’s communiqué. For example: “When I get back from Hawaii, I’m going to blow you like a saxophone.”

Or, “Not even a saxophone can help me now.”

Or, “Here the saxophone (saxaphone? saxofone?) is seldom confused with the ukulele (ukalele? ukilele? ukaleli?).”