Editor’s note: from the forward to the new book, Travels with Puff
In the tradition of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, and his own bestseller Illusions, Richard Bach’s new book Travels with Puff recounts his journey from Florida to Washington state in a small seaplane he christened “Puff.” With the humor, wisdom and insight that could only come from one of the world’s favorite writers, Travels with Puff challenges our ideas of fate and our futures and asks us how can we prepare for the emergencies in our own lives? Can we ever really be safe? And…is being safe always what we want?
I didn’t know it as I wrote, but Travels with Puff turned out to be a story hummed about the theme song for my brief stay on this planet. Same song’s shared by I don’t know how many hundreds of millions: What is it to become free, and how do I express my freedom to choose my own life, every day?
The mavericks among us, our wanderers, our explorers, they hand us examples all the time. Willing to give up convention, willing to cast off from visible security for the invisible, or for no security at all? “Hi-ho, adventurers, fellow mavericks, steer this way!”
Not me. I’m no maverick. My only claim to mavericity is twofold: I do not own a tie; and I have never worn a tuxedo. Further, in stubborn defiance, I intend never to do either, for so long as I may live. Not claim enough to become an Alpha Maverick, I’m somewhere down the list among the Lambdas, or the Upsilons.
For this reason, some suspect that I may bend the truth, in my books, play fast with it, if not loose.
I have no smallest doubt that this story would be subject to those claims, as well; you’d think I made it up. I knew before ever I met Mister Toad, or even Puff herself, that others would doubt these meetings really happened, doubt that anything on these pages was more than the idle writer rising an inch from his feather-pillows to pen his imaginings.
Enter my humble cell-phone camera for the first sketchy evidence: photographs. Next enter Dan Nickens, his matching spirit, his own experimental seaplane, sister to Puff, and his unmatched one-of-a-kind Canon EOS 5D Series II Full Frame CMOS Digital Single Lens Reflex Compact Body Super-Camera, the better to fasten upon the truth of each word, every day’s adventure which you may very well be about to read.
Destiny brought us together for this flight, and for love of you, dear reader, to prove once and always that every event, every idea upon the following pages or upon your high-tech visi-screen pseudopage is every single one of them true, and here be the photographs to prove it!
Not wild adventure, through this volume, but gentle, of the sort that anyone can assay, with near certainty; no requests for dying along the way which can’t be declined.
A few years ago, someone asked me by way of their T-shirt, “Got Freedom?”
Here’s, a bit delayed and by way of two small seaplanes and a continent ten thousand horizons wide, my answer.
