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EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is an abridged version of Chapter 69 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:

Center Ossipee, New Hampshire. April 15, 1991.

It was at least 25 years before I moved onto wheels that I read John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, but I’ve never forgotten a brief comparison he made between the highways of his mature years and the seaways of his youth. Where he once had joined men going down to the sea in their boats, he now joined men going down the highways in their trucks – inland sailors who carried cargo from one landlocked port to another, pitching and rolling through the urban eddies of the East and West Coasts, drifting toward the rural vanishing points of the Midwest and Plains States, ever plying an endless channel of asphalt through an endless slipstream of guard rails, greenbelts, blue-and-white signs. And so on.

I love Steinbeck’s writing and admire his imagery, and I too have found many similarities between trucks and boats. For all I know, living on a boat is as romantic and heroic as Steinbeck’s comparison makes it seem. I do know living in a truck isn’t.

To those who live there, the American highway generally is not a poetic place to be. And after some years of blending into the roadside, I can assure you there are those who live there – people who regard the highway not as a passage to adventure, a lane for shipping, a canal between house and job or in any other sense a conduit from one place to another. To its residents, the highway is itself a place, sometimes the place, the only place, to be.

This shouldn’t be surprising in a nation descended from itinerants. Most of us know about ancestors who came here across the Atlantic in the last few hundred years, but many of us also have ancestors we don’t know much about – my straight-haired, coppery-skinned, high-cheeked, blue-and-hazel-eyed great-grandmother, for one – and these little-known ancestors were themselves descended from even more obscure people who, according to respectable anthropological theory, became America’s first natives many thousands of years ago by walking here across the Aleutians.

Some of those who live on the road are still on foot. Others of us, perhaps not yet ready or able to strip off our trappings and plunge naked into the sea of life, are drifting on wheels.

We live in an unlikely collection of vehicles – the old family station wagon, the converted van, the pickup with camper, even the beat-up beetle or, in my case, the second-hand recreational vehicle I prefer to call simply a truck. There’s not a tractor-trailer rig in the bunch. In fact, I’d say my 17-foot truck is about as big as you could use for a life on the road.

That’s because as incongruous a group of vehicles as this may seem, what they must deal with in common is a physical equation that – here, a tip of the captain’s hat to Steinbeck – also makes them very much like boats. These vehicles must carry enough gear to sustain themselves as dwellings on the road but at the same time must be small enough and light enough to move easily and efficiently. Just like boats.

Living in these on-road vehicles . . . ‘on-road’ strikes me as a fitting adjective for these vehicles because they are exactly the antithesis of off-road vehicles that turn the world into their highway instead of the other way around . . . living in these on-road vehicles is a decidedly unromantic routine of maintaining, repairing or patching them together, continually inoculating yourself on sharp things covered with dirt or rust, incessantly shifting stuff around, always looking for a level place to park for the night, keeping an eye out for police who will try to move you somewhere else, not to mention vandals who will try to move everything but you somewhere else.

No, it isn’t poetry that keeps me on the road. I’m on the road for the most prosaic of reasons: I was looking for the cheapest way to live – the least expensive way to keep me and my basic necessities out of the weather, debt and jail – and that turned out to be a truck.

And that’s how I came to join the motley fleet of the minimalist mariners.

– Sid Leavitt

And now from the guy I hated to write about to more guys I hate to write about — principally, the one at God of the Machine, a weblog whose title alone has, by my count, at least a triple historical and etymological entendre.

And that gives you just an inkling of what goes on in the text.

For example, in the four most recent entries I could find, blogger Aaron Haspel (1) writes about a visit to Seaworld in the style of the nation’s new poet laureate, Charles Simic, (2) critiques the objectivist view of economic interventionism, arguing with the late libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises and author Leonard Peikoff, (3) differs with Canadian blogger Colby Cosh’s review of television’s “The Sopranos” and (4) writes four haikus on movie offerings of the Netflix online DVD rental service.

In the blog’s center column, Haspel posts snippets from a wide range of news, literature and pop culture, all of them interesting.

If that’s not enough, I found a 2001 Google item in which Haspel is giving advice to one Suu Quan on how to “jar a package,” a computer programming concept I do not pretend to understand, but Haspel does: “Your basedir should be the parent directory of utils, not ‘utils’ itself. If you try jarring from the command line, you will see the same result,” Haspel advises.

His stuff is, in a word, magnificent. Reading it will jar your mind — and make you much more fluent with Google, Wikipedia and whatever online dictionary and thesaurus you prefer.

I should say something about the blog’s title: As those of us old Latin students know, deus ex machina means ‘God from the machine,’ but Haspel gives it a double entendre twist in his title. The third twist, however, is not so obvious and comes from the old Romans themselves. Because they borrowed the phrase from the Greeks, in whose language the word mechane means not so much ‘machine’ as ‘crane’ — as in ápo mechanes theós — the device on which the old Greek theater producers used to crank a god from the sky onto the stage to save the day.

I found God of the Machine in the blogroll of our Sept. 20 feature, Outer Life, the product of another excellent writer. And I should have opened this entry with the phrase ‘guys and gals’ because Mr. Outer Life’s blogroll, listed as ‘Better Sites,’ includes weblogs written by women.

Frankly, these guys — and gals — are out of my league. I mean, I’m pretty well read — not so much fiction because I’ve seen enough of it in nonfiction — but Mr. Outer Life and his colleagues leave me at the first-grade alphabet chart.

But not to worry. They’re all good writers, and that means they communicate very well indeed. Some of their references can be, well, a bit arcane, but that’s OK because their writing will explain the obscurities to a reader willing to go along for the ride, including the side trips to reference sources.

So in conclusion, I might just as well phone the rest of this one in and give you some of the links:

• The American Fez, written by Stephen Baldwin, an author you’d never find on Google because of the born-again actor of the same name.

• Topic Drift, a weirdly irreverent site written by one Esther Wilberforce-Packard.

• Quiet Bubble, which promises “a refuge from the brisk pace of on-the-spot blogging and the desperate need to be Relevant” and lives up to it.

• A Girl Just Like You, a thoughtful and truthful site that definitely is not ‘girly.’

• Barbellionblog, whose entries range from 1903 to 1916 — yes, because it is a blog made up entirely of the complete works of English diarist W.N.P. Barbellion, a pseudonym used by Bruce Frederick Cummings because he felt his Kafkaesque writings would damage his family’s reputation. He died at age 30 of multiple sclerosis.

• Zen and the Art of Speedskating, which is strangely appealing, despite a lot of content about, yes, speedskating.

As for God of the Machine, he gets craned into our blogroll of well-written sites. But please look up the rest on Mr. O.L.’s blogroll. I hope you enjoy all of them as much as I do, although you may end up as I have — very tired.

Because you too may be looking up stuff all night.

– Sid Leavitt

You get the idea from the name of the weblog itself — Fragile Industries — that its writer knows how to put words together. No smokestack, not even a cottage, this is a fragile business.

And indeed, Lisa Lorea Bailes knows how to use words, everything from a bon mot to blunt hyperbole, which is why hers is the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.

I mean, where are you going to find a blogger who uses the word ‘rictus’? Or even knows what it means? I’ve read millions of words for a living, and I looked up at least three words as I read Bailes’s blog. What’s more, she uses them all just so.

Rictus? In her March 12 entry, Bailes describes the tribulations of a wedding she helps run. As the bride enters the aisle, one of the church planners, an elderly woman, drops the bridal train, which promptly . . .

. . . folds up on itself and looks terrible. I am too far away to throw myself on this grenade. One biddy notices the crumpled hem and, being less than nimble, makes a futile grab for it. The bride is moving on and the hem is out of reach. The biddy then decides to kick at the flawless white satin with her shoe. Not only does she step on it, leaving a mark, the bride abruptly comes to a halt with a sickening backward sway and nearly tumbles. As the congregation snickers . . . the bride finally proceeds up the aisle, a rictus of tension replacing her smile.

A rictus is a rigidly open mouth, like a bird gaping.

One of Bailes’s more gentle passages is an open letter to a reader who had taken offense at her June 2006 entry about the Collyer Brothers, a pair of Manhattan recluses who died in 1947 amid tons of trash choking their house and thus became symbols of obsessive-compulsive hoarding. The reader’s father was suffering similarly:

My heart breaks for you. My post made light of a serious, terrifying condition. I did so because I saw its seeds in myself . . . I reveal this to you to try to speak for your dad. I am at a midpoint between sanity and not, between you and him. I don’t have any answers . . . But if it would help to correspond, if I can be a midpoint, a medium, please write back. Your post was a plea, and I hope I can offer some insight. You are being such a good son — even if your father doesn’t recognize it, is incapable of that recognition, I can see it and I admire you greatly . . . I would be honored to talk to you again.

Not to mention her Nov. 7 entry about her cat, Rupert Pupkin, as he was dying of lymphoma and she decided that forcing four doses of medication down his throat every day wasn’t right:

I want to at least calm the stomach and spare him pain, but if one dose a day still makes him unhappy, it’s out the window . . . When I first held him, I vowed to give him a life of love and comfort. It’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

And now the bluntness: In an entry Sept. 6 subtitled ‘Pen!s! C!alis! V!agr@!,’ Bailes complains of getting 300 email messages, not to mention 5,000 in her bulk folder, in less than two days:

Obviously, some enterprising spammer used the mail linked to my domain name as a launch pad for a major campaign to capitalize on little, limp penises.

Talk about pricks.

What does it say about our society that the biggest bane of online communication is almost entirely driven by male sexual anxiety? When was the last time you received spam related to female sexual dysfunction? We have a lot to complain about, but there’s no magic pill to teach men about foreplay.

She’s equally blunt about herself, noting in the same entry that someone was Google-searching her name along with the terms ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian.’ Rest assured, she tells the individual:

I’m queer as a 3 score on the Kinsey scale. That means I’m bisexual. That means I fall in love and in bed with men and women . . . In the meantime, I could forward some of my recent spam if you have any personal anxiety on sexual topics.

An artist who specializes in ‘altered art’ — a mixed media of paper and other common materials — Bailes, 50, is a former lawyer, twice married and divorced, and lives in midcoast California with her terminally ill mother. Her father died with Alzheimer’s disease.

Her weblog goes back to April 2005. Be sure to click on the ‘ARCHIVES’ heading at the bottom of the righthand sidebar to get the full list.

– Sid Leavitt

Thinking about contradictions I’ve found in a most excellent weblog called Outer Life has gotten me to thinking about a contradiction in my own life:

In 38 years as a print journalist, I hated to write about writers. Oh sure, we wrote for the readers, not the subject, but think about it: Writing about a writer is like cooking for a chef. Intimidating. And the better the writer, the more I hated it.

That’s how I feel about the guy who writes Outer Life.

Consider this, the conclusion of his Dec. 14 entry about how to write a eulogy:

So, you see, it isn’t easy to write a eulogy. And the hardest part is, if you’ve done it right, your words will slice through you as you read them, your eyes will water, your throat will constrict until you can no longer resist the tears. Consumed by sorrow, no longer capable of reading or speaking, you’ll just stand there wracked with sobs as the audience looks up, no longer hearing your words but instead experiencing the depths of your pain, pain that is, after all, the most eloquent eulogy.

Or, in his June 14 entry, walking with his 9-year-old daughter on the beach at twilight, pondering the stars overhead, the grains of sand under foot, comparing the vast numbers of each:

At the time, I was going to drive the point home to her with the stars-as-grains-of-sand-analogy, but I thought better of it. Let her try to process the solar system first. Her 9-year-old mind has been stretched quite enough for one day . . . I feel her cold little hand find mine, and I squeeze it, gently but firmly, not wanting to let it go.

‘Your hands are always so warm,’ she says, then, before I can say anything, she asks: ‘Daddy, are there more stars in the sky or grains of sand on the beach?’

And it’s not just heartbreaking truth or warm-and-fuzzy gloaming. This guy can write in any tone about any subject — like a children’s birthday party he describes in his Jan. 18, 2005, entry:

The invitation arrived on Tuesday for a birthday party on Sunday. At 10 a.m. Bowling at Buddy’s Bowl-O-Rama. For a 4-year-old . . . Late invitation — strike one. Bowling for 4-year-olds — strike two. 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning — strike three. So I threw the invitation out.

Big mistake. You see, the mom who sent the late invitation called the next day to harvest RSVPs. My wife answered the phone and, not having seen the invitation and unable to invent an excuse in time, she cracked under the pressure. We were stuck. Or, I should say, I was stuck for, according to the strict laws of my people, I must clean up my own messes.

And if you think you’ve been dumped by a significant other, I commend to you his March 17, 2005, entry entitled ‘Five Words.’ I will tell you only that the five words are “I need to see you.”

By the way, don’t make the same mistake I initially did in thinking that his archives go back only until September 2006. Actually, his entries date back to November 2003, but the site’s format limits the archives list on the main page to the most recent 10 months. You have to click on the heading ‘ARCHIVES’ itself to get the full list — a fact that isn’t immediately apparent because all the other similar headings in the sidebar are not links.

So who is this guy? He doesn’t tell us. We do know from his writing that he is about 40, married, with two children, lives in the suburbs and has a pretty good job in an office that he’s not too happy about. And we know he is a man of contradictions:

I have this contrarian streak. Unlike most contrarians, who say that proudly, I say it as a confession because my contrarianism is a sign of weakness, not strength. When everyone zigs, I instinctively zag, not so much because I pride myself on walking my own path, but because I’m afflicted with the ability to feel both insecure and too secure at the same time. My insecure side assumes I’m already too late to get in on the action . . . while my over-secure side assumes I know better than the masses. (May 17)

There’s also the contradiction of the blog’s name. Because if anything, this man’s introspective reflections should be called Inner Life.

And finally, there’s the picture on the blog (see above), which made me expect an older man until I realized that the lively octogenarian in the photo is one of our mystery blogger’s favorite authors, P.G. Wodehouse. I should have known, since Wodehouse is using a manual typewriter, not the usual equipment for a blogger.

But Mr. Outer Life isn’t the usual blogger. Which is why his is the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.

– Sid Leavitt

EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is Chapter 22 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:

Slocomb, Alabama. February 22, 1989.

“You livin’ in this ve-hicle, are ya, Mistuh Lea-vitt?”

James Tew, assistant police chief of Slocomb, is reaching a conclusion that other people have a hard time accepting, too.

“Well, actually, I’m just sort of traveling through,” I tell him. “I’m a retired newspaper editor, and I’m . . . well, seeing the country.”

It isn’t a lie as much as it is a convenient synthesis of truths. I did that work for a couple of years when I couldn’t think of anything better to do, and my employer decided I shouldn’t do even that any more, and that is like being retired. And while I have been moving the truck only enough each day to stay out of trouble, I have been seeing the country in the process. I don’t want to have to tell Assistant Police Chief Tew that I am an unemployed itinerant because people in small towns have another word for that: bum.

He sits in his cruiser with the rear of my truck in his headlights, and he is trying to make out the lettering across the back of the truck in the glare cast back by the white fiberglass truck body and the mylar-and-velcro skirting I have put around it for the night. He remarks about my television antenna, an airfoil V of aluminum that cranks up and down and rotates by hand from the inside, a pretty impressive device for $125 and you-install-it.

“When I saw you parked here by the tower, I thought maybe you were working on it,” he says, stressing the last word so it sounds like “ee-it.”

“No, I just pulled up here because it was off the main road and there wasn’t anybody around,” I say.

He asks me for “some documents I could look at,” and I have to go into the truck for them. My cat, Bonzo, is standing with his front paws on the back of the couch, peeking through a curtain at the blinding light outside.

When I return to the cruiser, Assistant Police Chief Tew still hasn’t gotten out. He reaches over and unlocks the passenger door to the front seat.

“You wanna sit in here for a minute, Sidney,” he says. I wince. Nobody has called me Sidney since I was in elementary school 40 years ago, but that’s what my driver’s license says, and I’m not going to argue with an armed, heavy-set law enforcement officer on a rural road in a small town in Alabama in the middle of the night.

He lights a cigarette, and I can see that his reddish wavy hair is streaked with white across the right temple. The police radio blares. I guess he already has called in my registration plate numbers. Wind in the high wiregrass is making waves that spread away from the road through a chainlink fence and, about a hundred yards beyond, lap against the base of a tall metal tower that holds several satellite receiver dishes to the sky.

Does Assistant Police Chief Tew figure me for a foreign agent who is planning to sabotage the tower – a single incendiary device at the base of one of the legs would do the job – and thus deprive a significant section of southeastern Alabama of its cable TV service?

“What kinda power you use in that rig?” he asks. I tell him 12-volt batteries. Do I have an isolator between the engine and cabin batteries, he asks. I do, I say.

I’ll be damned, he wants to talk batteries. Besides being Slocomb’s second most prominent police officer, James Tew also is a knowledgeable hobbyist in radio and electronics, and he wants to tell me how I can install a second auxiliary battery with a toggle switch that will allow me to take cabin power from either source.

Ten minutes later, he lets me out of the cruiser.

“Nice talkin’ to ya, Sidney. Now if somebody else notices you out here, I’ll be able to tell ‘em who y’are.”

It is comforting to know that even if the Russians knock out all our satellites, the oldest network in the world – the good old boys – is still working fine in Slocomb, Alabama.

With his thumb and forefinger, he flips the cigarette out into the wiregrass and points to the truck.

“That’s what I wanna do someday,” he says and drives off.

I search the grass for a long time in the area where I last saw the red glow of that cigarette. I never do find it, but there is no fire.

– Sid Leavitt

There are other worlds out there, friends, and sometimes they come visiting us, even though we’re often not very hospitable. So let’s be more neighborly and repay a visit to those folks who call with gifts, prizes, products, services or appeals to our political or charitable instincts.

The telemarketers.

You know, we at Readersandwritersblog.com really would like to visit the world of the telemarketers, but we can’t find a weblog written by a telemarketer who reveals his or her personal experiences — the triumphs, defeats, hopes, fears and general motivations for being in a field only slightly less popular than, and perhaps a latter-day incarnation of, door-to-door missionaries.

The best blog we could find about telemarketing is Phone for Profits, and we’ve put it up on our blogroll as a temporary measure, hoping someone out there can suggest a better one.

Please, please do.

We think telemarketing would be a great subject for a personal blog, judging from the few snippets we’ve gathered from the Internet about telemarketers and their personal thoughts. For example, a blogger identified only as Giggley 15 joined a discussion on the website Pioneer Thinking last summer with her thoughts about the ways people try to trick telemarketers, including a popular routine from the Seinfeld TV show (see below):

I was a telemarketer for a few years. People (tried to fool us) all the time. The telemarketers find it just as entertaining as you do. Except the ones that are overused. The one from Seinfeld is so unoriginal. You hear it at least 10 times a day. Do you seriously think that these people are stupid enough not to realize that you’re playing with them? If you come up with something original, it will simply give them something to talk about on their break. If you say the same thing they’ve heard 10 times or pretend to be the babysitter . . . it just makes the person doing it sound foolish and immature.

And Brian Miller, a real estate broker in Charlotte, N.C., who runs the website Real Estate Entropy, describes a touching exchange he had in July with a telemarketer trying to raise money for the Multiple Sclerosis Society: His patience and willingness to make a small donation prompted her to thank him profusely for “pulling her back up.”

She said on the call before me when she had stated her name, the guy on the line said, ‘Well, Ms. ___ ___, you can just kiss my ***,’ and then slammed down the phone. She asked me why did he have to say that . . .. Why couldn’t he just say he is not interested and hang up. She told me she ran to the restroom to pray for this person.

Getting back to Phone for Profits, the writing is fairly good, but the telemarketing content is about how to do it rather than what it is like, not to mention that the archive links are dead. What appeals to us about the site is the man who writes it — Kamau Austin, a prosperous- and optimistic-looking gentleman in an expensive-looking suit, a trimmed beard and dreadlocks gathered in a ponytail. His blog is a spinoff from Telemarketing Call Center Info, an ultra-busy site offering everything from telemarketing advice and sales services to automobile ads in Atlanta and a blog for disc jockey services for parties.

Oh yes, the Seinfeld routine. Check out the video here. We think it’s pretty funny, even the 10th time through.

And there’s one more telemarketing foil — really, a telemarketer’s nightmare — that we should include here. It’s an audio cut of 3 minutes, 25 seconds, from the Indianapolis-based Bob and Tom radio show that was posted on the Internet by blogger Joshua Lowry. A couple of caveats: The volume is loud, so you may have to tone it down quickly. Also, some of the dialogue near the end is crude. If you wish to listen, it’s here.

Frankly, it made us feel a little sorry for the telemarketer. Which is why we’re looking — seriously — for a good telemarketer blog.

– Sid Leavitt

I never imagined there could be a lighter side to caring for someone with Alzheimer’s disease, and then Kathy Hatfield and her weblog, KnowItAlz, proved me uninformed.

Not that it’s all fun and games being primary caregiver for a 79-year-old man with severe memory loss, but what Hatfield’s blog demonstrates is that a tender and loving humor can considerably lighten the burden.

Truth be told, Hatfield is something of a smart aleck. And reading her blog makes it pretty clear where she inherited this trait:

On a road trip in April, she and her longtime boyfriend, David, are discussing with her father where to stop for lunch. Noting that her father always has fun at Hooters, she asks him, “How about some chicken wings at Hooters?” His reply: “I don’t really like the wings at Hooters, but I do like the breasts.”

And then there’s the trip May 14 when the three of them are driving to David’s first-ever colonoscopy:

There were a number of jokes made on the trip to the proctologist, but I will keep them to myself as they are not politically correct. Although, as we pulled into the medical plaza, there was a big sign that read ‘EXIT ONLY.’

My Dad looked at David and with a chuckle said, ‘Not today.’

As witty and sharp as her father is at times — for example, he remembers the exact amount of his first paycheck, $39.10 — he clearly has short-term memory loss and often is confused about the activities and realities of the present day, including all the correspondence she gets about Alzheimer’s disease. He wonders if he has Alzheimer’s, but she assures him it is just a random charity she raises money for, and in fact she enlists him to help stuff envelopes seeking donations:

Now we are getting the RSVPs back in the mail and the question came up again last night. He said, ‘I guess these checks are for me since I have Alzheimer’s.’ ‘Ha, ha,’ I laughed, ‘if you did have Alzheimer’s, the checks would be for me, the caregiver.’

‘Good point,’ he said. ‘Maybe we should have a party for people like you — that care for old people without Alzheimer’s.’

‘That sounds great, Dad. Who shall we invite?’

‘I’ll come,’ he said with a smile.

Hatfield, 36, lives with her father and David in suburban North Carolina where she has a well-paying job as well as a home office where she can work if caring for her father makes it too difficult for her to travel to her regular office. She is an active fund-raiser, and her blog passes on helpful information to others in similar or worse situations.

Her advice to others acknowledges the seriousness of full-time caregiving:

I have come across lots of sites that have a ‘caregiver stress’ or ‘caring for the caregiver’ section. I always just rolled my eyes and thought, ‘Not going to happen . . .’ It’s the whole ‘if the plane is crashing, give yourself oxygen first and then save the person you are caring for’ theory . . . Well, David and I are back from five days of real vacation (no internet and no phone) and all of those corny anecdotes are true!

So here is another corny anecdote: Take some time for yourself, and enjoy. You are not nearly as important as you think you are. (June 25)

Most times, the humor bubbles through the darkness. In her June 16 entry, Hatfield quotes an article she is reading: “While aging is still the greatest risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, a number of studies have pointed to stress as a contributing factor.”

Her conclusion: “I am so screwed.”

And then there is a joke a friend sent her in July:

At a Friday night dance at a senior center, a very elderly gentleman (90s), very well dressed, flower in his lapel, smelling slightly of aftershave, walks into the ‘cocktail lounge’ section of the center.

Seated at the bar is an attractive elderly looking lady (mid-80s). The gentleman walks over, sits alongside her, orders a drink, takes a sip, turns to her and says, ‘So tell me, do I come here often?’

We’re sure that others love their Alzheimer’s seniors as much as Hatfield does, but she is able to express that love so well that she speaks to us for all of them. And that’s why KnowItAlz is the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.

– Sid Leavitt

EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is an abridged version of Chapter 32 of “Adrift in America,” a work found in the nonfiction section:

El Dorado, Arkansas. April 15, 1989.

El Dorado, Arkansas, is going to be different from Eldorado, Oklahoma, and I hope my legs are up to it. I step carefully out of the truck into the parking lot beside Howard’s News Stand. The weather is sunny and dry, but the mid-morning temperature still hasn’t gotten out of the 50s, and I am a little stiff as I start negotiating the potholes, curbs and inclines of downtown El Dorado.

When I was in my teens and 20s, exercise was mostly contact sports and strength training. Power and speed. By the time I was in my 30s, it was running and eventually jogging. Stamina. By my 40s, I was tired of being chased by dogs and honked at by motorists, so I shifted to walking, which you can do in street clothes and not even be suspected of exercising. And now that I’m near 50, I’m not as interested in speed, power or even stamina. I’ll settle every day for just plain movement.

Eldorado, Oklahoma, was an easy walk. The town is flat and regular, and its one highway, Route 6, has level shoulders that are kind to the feet and ankles. In three or four miles, you can walk around Eldorado literally – all four sides – and then pass through it a few times with distance to spare. It is a quiet little town of brick and sandstone storefronts and a wide main street where people leave their pickups right in the middle, straddling the yellow line, if they feel like it. The architecture is a mixture of Hispanic and Indian, as were many of the people I saw wandering the streets or riding the Southwest Transit shuttle buses, although those who own and run things seemed to be of northern European heritage. It was the local postmaster, B.W. “Bo” Boaldin, a tanned man in his mid-40s with a Jimmy Carter smile, who told me about the dozen Eldorados and El Dorados in the United States. He looked in his ZIP code book. Yep, about a dozen, he said.

Ah, middle age. No matter how much I have stretched in the truck, it will still take me at least a quarter mile to get into the rhythm of walking. I listen to my breath – inhale one step, exhale one step, inhale more deeply through three steps, exhale slowly through five steps, then begin again, inhale one, exhale one, inhale three, exhale five. When the cadence becomes regular, I lengthen my stride.

What a pleasure it can be to walk. As the body becomes accustomed to daily walks, the muscles of the legs, torso and arms learn to do a counterbalanced ballet that has each side of the body alternating between reaching and pushing as the head moves steadily forward without bobbing. It’s a wonderful dance – the original human dance – and a wonderful way to travel. The mind soon forgets about the body and drifts into other observations. Roadside objects a mile away are in view for 15 minutes as they grow to full size and pass behind your field of vision. To a car at highway speed, the same mile of objects would be grown and gone in only a minute.

Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in three, breathe out five. I think of da Vinci’s drawing of the man in the circle. One of the man’s legs, turned sideways and extended, is intersected by the circle at the bottom of the foot. Another part of the circle intersects the hands on extended arms. The radiuses are the same, and the drawing makes it clear not only that a stride is physically similar to a reach, but also that both are the same length and that each is just about half the man’s height. Every two strides (a pace), a person travels his or her height, a ratio I have found to be strikingly accurate. The other half of this ratio – that a person’s height equals the distance he or she can reach with both arms extended sideways – has been used for centuries by sailors. When the ancient mariner wanted to know if the water was over his head, he threw a full reach of rope on a weight over the side. Eventually, a six-foot reach of rope became a fathom.

Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in three, breathe out five. As my legs and arms reach, they are measuring fathoms.

Walk to fathom. Walk to fathom, fathom.

– Sid Leavitt

Don Croner, a travel writer and author of the weblog Don Croner’s World Wide Wanders, has taken what once was a synonym for the middle of nowhere, Outer Mongolia, and made it a center of his universe.

And a center of ours, thanks to writing that, while often voluminous and detail-laden, is invariably excellent. Which is why his is the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.

Inner Mongolia, as you may know, is a province in northeastern China, and Outer Mongolia has been an archaic term for nearly a century since most of it became simply Mongolia, a separate nation, on the northern border of that Chinese province. Croner has a residence in Mongolia’s capital, Ulaan Baatar, when he isn’t flitting around the rest of the region.

Some of his travels may be short ones, but with their hazards, as he describes in his Aug. 4 entry:

I have moved from my penthouse apartment in the exclusive Sansar District of Ulaan Baatar to a hovel in the howling wilderness beyond Zaisan Tolgoi, on the wrong side of the Tuul River (and the railroad tracks) from the city. This area is not yet on the phone grid so I cannot get dial-up internet service. (Getting to that service) entails walking from my hovel into town and thus risking attack by the packs of ravening wolves that periodically pick off the unwary pedestrian around Zaisan Tolgoi. Until I get regular internet service, I have therefore decided to go into occultation.

This passage illustrates several features of Croner’s writing that we find fascinating: For one thing, he never explains why he is moving from his penthouse to a hovel. For another, his use of ‘occultation’ is just the right word for being blocked from the Internet — not really hidden but out of sight as one celestial body would shield another from view. And finally, we’re not really sure about all those wolves.

There’s a mystery — no, an exoticism — in Croner’s writing that applies equally to himself. Despite the extensiveness of his writing, he discloses very little about himself. And despite the numerous photographs on his weblog, he’s always behind the camera. We know he’s an American, and the only two photos we can find on the Internet, both fuzzy, show a tall, slender man, 40- to 50-ish, once in a Central Asian blouse and fedora, the other time in a greatcoat, same hat, standing beside a camel.

His writing has a British cast to it, but we don’t know where he was educated. What we do know from his intelligent discourse about the history and culture of a large part of the world unknown to most Westerners is that he is profoundly studious. Besides English, he speaks Chinese (not sure which dialect) and probably French (most of his May 13 entry is in French) and has a separate blog in Mongolian, a language written in Cyrillic but definitely not Russian.

What better person to be telling us about exotic peoples and places, even those that, like the mystical kingdom of Shambhala, one of Croner’s favorite subjects, exist only in spirit? Even his everyday observations are flavored by this mystery and exoticism, as in his April 22 entry from Gansu Province in China:

The day up till now had been warm with a solid dome of cobalt-blue sky overhead. No sooner did we arrive at the river than it very suddenly clouded over and a ferocious wind starting howling out of the north. Then it started snowing, huge snowflakes the size of half dollars driven almost horizontally by the wind . . . Ms. Chan (his guide and driver) laughed uproariously, as if this blizzard in the middle of what had been a warm spring day was the funniest thing she had ever seen in her life. As soon as the snow slowed down a bit, we headed back to my hotel . . . Despite my protestations, she insisted on carrying my bag into the train station and then waited with me until I boarded the train . . . It was a bit of a mystery to me why she was being so solicitous. I am almost tempted to think that she was an emanation of White Tara, the Protectress of Travelers. I even felt a pang of guilt about not giving her a tip, but I reasoned that Tara would not expect one.

We find that kind of writing irresistible. We hope you do, too.

– Sid Leavitt