Every journey has a secret destination of which the traveler is unaware.
—Martin Buber
WATERVILLE, Wash. —What I love about travel—not that I’m the guy with 57 countries stamped on his passport—is the unknown. The unexpected. The unplanned connections.
That’s what makes a trip an adventure: the not knowing what you will discover along the way.
“We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip,” wrote author John Steinbeck, “a trip takes us.”
So it was for me on my eight-day, four-state 2,133-mile journey around the Northwest, Part One of which I wrote about last week.
Much was predictable—and pleasantly so. I went places I expected to go and saw people I expected to see. It all played out nearly perfectly as I relinked with longtime friends and found places where one of my favorite movies, A River Runs Through It, were filmed.
I marveled at rivers, mountains and a sky so wide it was as if you saw it through a fish-eye lens. I shook my head in wonder at the upscale feel of Bozeman—Boz Angeles, some call a place whose median house price is $847,000—and the down-home feel of Livingston, whose main street businesses are as friendly as the street is wide.
But it was a stop in this small Eastern Washington, town (pop. 1,134) that touched me deepest—and I’ll share about that in good time. But only after visiting the main reason I’d headed north—to honor and say goodbye to a former combat nurse in Vietnam whose book, Healing Wounds, I’d helped write. Diane Carlson Evans, 77, told me in January doctors were out of solutions for the cancer she’d been battling.
Only after my trip was scheduled did she tell me that plans had been finalized for her and novelist Kristin Hannah, 63, to do an event at the Helena Civic Center the same week I’d be there. I was thrilled at this serendipitous touch; Hannah is among my favorite novelists and, after reading our book, Healing Wounds, she’d enlisted Diane to make sure her Vietnam-War-based novel, The Women, was accurate and authentic.
Whether or not readers think so, they are buying it like ’60s kids bought skateboards. The book, which released in February, spent eight consecutive weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list and this week is No. 1 on Amazon. A movie adaptation is already in the works.
I was honored to get to meet with Diane and her husband, Mike—just the three of us—at their hilltop house in Helena where in February 2018 I first began interviewing her for what became Healing Wounds. Diane and Mike looked great, sounded great and talked little of her health.
Prior to the Civic Center event, I was also honored to be part of a small gathering of friends and family at the Evans home.
“This book (The Women) wouldn’t be a book without Diane,” said Kristin as she and Diane held court on an outside deck.