A friend just died and so of course I’m very sad.

A little girl cries over her scoop of pistachio ice cream melting on the sidewalk.

How sad is that empty cone? And look at those tears. She hasn’t learned that gravity works against us till our dying day.

A gull with straw in its beak perches on the peak of my roof. Two hours ago I watched it mount its mate to fertilize the egg that would hatch in the nest that no longer sits on my roof because there’s no way a gull family is going to turn my roof into a guano factory this summer as it did last. No way!

Still, it’s sad.

Life never seems to work out, however well we arrange the pieces or play the game. According to most wisdom traditions, that’s good news.

My friend’s passing is sad and yet his absence leaves me with memories of his participation in our writing group over many years. In the empty space he leaves behind I find myself more determined than ever to write well and fast and publish again without delay.

That little girl, is she not the picture of sadness? But aren’t our saddest moments those that loom largest in memory? We look back at them as stepping stones toward our growing up. This ice cream failure can serve her in this way. I hope I’m right.

And a gull with no nest, how sad is that?

I don’t mind being sad. I don’t disparage sadness as a state of being.

I’ve often been told I look sad, and yet I often fall asleep at night feeling showered by gifts.

Sadness!—if I were a poet I would write an ode to sadness.

Such as the time I received the “Dear John” letter in the mail.

I don’t expect you to believe this but as I laid eyes on the envelope thunder mumbled overhead. As I opened the letter the room fell dark and as I read the deadly words the door slammed shut with a gust of wind that delivered such a deluge of tropical rain hammering on the tin roof that sadness seemed to bury me alive.

How long was I a ghost? You’ll have to ask my then-roommate because it wasn’t long before he couldn’t take it anymore and he tossed me a book, saying, “Read this.” Just tossed it and turned away without bothering to see if I caught it, as if I were a beggar in the gutter.

The scene is vivid in my mind, the trajectory of that book flying towards me, a second in time that became the hinge around which my life turned forever.

To this day, the radical attitude I encountered in that rare little book underpins my understanding of the human condition. It laid the groundwork for my existential experiments in India. It underpins my theory of Story as I present it in my two eBooks, Story Structure to Die For, and Story Structure Expedition—Journey to the Heart of a Story.

And all because sadness turned me into an empty begging bowl, I guess. And because gifts would seem to seek the empty place. Is that true?

If so, is that a paradox? Or does that make eminent sense?

I don’t quite know how to end this. I want to return to my writer friend, Rick (may he rest in peace), and to the girl and the gull and to all lovers who fly the coop. It seems I’m surrounded by events that make me sad, but what I want to say is that I’m sorrow’s willing victim.

I could even say that sorrow likes me. It pounds on my roof. It keeps trying to build a nest up there, for goodness sake.

The mystics say that’s good news.

And that little book that changed my life explains why that might be so. It’s called Positive Disintegration, by Kazimierz Dabrowski. He was no mystic, but he had all the reason in the world to be sad.

Perhaps that’s why he and I became such good friends.

I’m going to write about that next.

From Africa I flew to India.

I would return home through Asia, circumnavigate the globe, prove the world was round, see it with my own two eyes.

Bombay. Wow! The smells. The crush of humanity! A beggar with no arms or legs.

My god, he had no face, either.

His begging bowl—if you can picture this—he nudged it along the street with his forehead. I couldn’t look, I couldn’t not look.

For a second I couldn’t breathe.

Have you ever been so far from home that your brain wouldn’t compute?

I don’t know how many rupees I dropped in his bowl, probably a lot, because suddenly and inexplicably I felt more alive. I swore to never again bitch about anything, and isn’t that what travel is about?

Travel puts distance between us and our tired old way of seeing things.

What if you could travel twice as far from home?

What if someone approached you in the lobby of your Bombay hotel with a promise to take you twice as far from home? Would you listen to his pitch?

He is tall and impeccable and impossibly smooth-talking as he invites you to sit down so he can make his case. You’re all ears. Where is this place? How do I get there?

“Very easy, my friend,” he says. “Firstly, you allow me to con you out of all your money.” He is joking, of course, this Mr. Patel. “You have traveler’s cheques, yes? Very good. May I see them? No? All right, later perhaps.”

He hails a waiter and orders wine. “In any case, once you have been fleeced, my goodness, you look in the mirror—are you sick?”

“Depressed, I would think, for sure.”

“No, no, I mean sick, sick. You most certainly need a doctor. Here, I can give you his phone number. He confirms that a parasite infects your blood stream. Perhaps you have been exposed to stagnant water. In Africa? That explains everything. I’m afraid it can be fatal. You must be treated soon. But without money you are going nowhere.”

The wine arrives, a Bordeaux, for goodness sake. Who is this Mr. Patel?

“You cannot escape the heatwave we are having here in Bombay. The humidity in advance of the monsoon is unspeakable. But a cheap hostel is all you can afford, a bare mattress upon which you are lying spread-eagle. You are clinging to it for dear life. Otherwise you would run to the window and hurl yourself onto the street below. Such is your despair. Such is your remorse. You have been such a fool! You no longer trust the thoughts that arise to resolve this calamity. I’m afraid to say, sir, that you thoroughly hate yourself.”

Patel raises a glass in a toast. “You cannot travel farther from home than that, my friend.”

I take what must look like an unsophisticated glub of wine.

“But I can see you are not sold on this expedition. And I understand perfectly. It is not part and parcel of the human condition to collude with one’s own demise. We must go unwittingly. Kicking and screaming as it were. Ha, ha! So be it.”

I have no memory of Patel saying any such things, although I do recall the Bordeaux and that he was a businessman in need of foreign currency for an overseas trip, more than bank regulations allow. He offered me a handsome premium on the face value of my traveler’s cheques, leaving me with cash to convert to currencies for my onward journey.

“We will transact this business over a meal at the Taj Mahal Hotel, yes?”

How to travel too far—be gullible, be greedy, be an idiot!

The Bombay Taj, like most 5-star hotels, smells of money. Money having been spent and money being squandered everywhere you look.

Patel threw a heap of rupees at martinis there in the posh mezzanine lounge—and at various kebabs and little lamb chops and chicken tikka—so it didn’t seem inappropriate for me to hand over my traveler’s cheques for his inspection. It seemed appropriate that his uncle, the hotel’s comptroller, should want to verify the cheques. That Patel should confer with his uncle alone sounded suspicious, so I tagged along as far as the elevator where I lost him!

He slipped into an elevator behind doors that closed in my face.

I bolted down the grand marble staircase of the Taj Mahal Hotel to Reception where I learned that no such money manager existed. Three Patels were registered at the Taj and I hammered on each of their doors in vain.

Deep travel—are we there yet?

I applied for a refund at the American Express Office and was told to check back in a week, by which time I would have examined the mug shots of every criminal known to the Bombay Police. By then I could no longer ignore strange fluids leaking from my body. A doctor prescribed antibiotics and a flight home.

Broke but for the cash in my pocket, I downgraded to a hotel without air-conditioning. I remember lying on my bed naked and sweating under a feeble fan and gripping the mattress in mortal fear of having traveled far too far.

I decided to escape Bombay—to Delhi by train.

If Bombay was a sauna, the Rajasthan desert was a furnace. You opened a window at the very real risk of burning yourself. Every whistle stop along the way provided an opportunity to rehydrate, but instead I gorged on ice cream thinking it would cool me down, and I was right. I began to shiver feverishly. And vomit and retch until my muscles seized and I lay on the wooden floor of the 3^rd-class carriage as hopeless as a leper.

A leper without arms or legs!

How far from home was I? I had passed self-loathing hours ago. I was going to die and the sooner the better. I was Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. “Go ahead and shoot me,” he tells Ingrid Bergman. “You’ll be doing me a favor.”

This is where the fictional hero bottoms out. If only! If I were a fictional character, my writer would save me here at the heart of my story. But this is a true story and I have no one to blame but myself. What do they call this in India—karma? How much more was I supposed to suffer? How much more could I take?

What was I supposed to do—push my begging bowl with my forehead?

If that’s what it takes, okay!

I heard someone mention the Taj. We were passing through Agra, home of the real fucking Taj Mahal, one of the so-called Wonders of the World. I didn’t have the wherewithal to throw up. There was nothing left. There wasn’t much left of me. I didn’t think I would survive till Delhi.

I had never felt—and I have never felt since—so far gone.

To be continued…

Have you ever gone too far? WRITE A STORY ABOUT IT!

We are all starving for stories about people who are greedy for life.

[NOTE: If you don’t want to miss any posts in this travel series, please SUBSCRIBE at the top of the page.]

It’s a mega-watt moon shining down on western Tanzania.

That ragged ribbon of moonlight you see is a rough-and-tumble highway known in south-central Africa as the Hell Run. From Dar es Salaam on the Indian Ocean, this 1500-mile lifeline serves the heart of the continent.

A 5-ton truck speeds westward with its load of car tires in a metal cage. At the wheel, a hungry-looking Tanzanian, and beside him an over-stuffed Sikh bending a tire iron just for the hell of it.

Ten miles ahead, beyond a sleeping village, three youths are running along the road. What are children doing up at midnight? The boys stop where the road descends into a wooded valley and shout to someone on the verge of the gloom. That someone is a mzungu, a white boy. Me.

“Habari gani?” I say. I have no idea what they want.

I’m returning to Zambia after traveling north to Uganda, then hitchhiking south-eastward through Kenya and into Tanzania. Now it’s westward as quickly as possible to resume my duties as a hydrologist in Zambezi country. I’ve been gone too long, six weeks, so I choose to keep moving by the light of this impossible moon. I don’t get far. Those boys are waving excitedly.

“What’s up?” I shout. “Unitaka nini?”

“Simba!”

Everybody talks about simba but how many have seen a lion with their own two eyes? Exactly. But I appreciate their concern.

“You saw the simba?” I ask.

“Simba eat man!” the oldest kid shouts.

“Yeah? Where?” I ask, skeptically.

“Just here!” He jogs down the hill to join me and points loosely, vaguely, into the near distance.

“When?” I ask.

“Yesterday, Bwana.”

While still not convinced, neither am I a fool.

The boys are brothers, children of the farmer who dropped me roughly in the middle of nowhere. As we approach the village I hear someone calling “Tobias!” The boys bound toward the village like jackrabbits. A vehicle is approaching. They’re waving it down, bless their hearts. The truck is stopping.

The older kid leaps onto the running board to negotiate the terms of this hijacking. The truckers step down to examine Tobias’ bribe, a tire, which the Sikh inspects in the light of the headlamps. He kicks it and growls and spits on it and tells me to climb aboard, not in the cab but in the cage, which he locks once I’m in, and I wonder if my odds of survival weren’t better with Simba.

Tobias and I shake hands through the bars as the truck moves ahead. It’s a mental snapshot that hasn’t faded all these years later—those boys as my guardian angels. It’s a romantic notion, isn’t it—angels. I don’t honestly do angels, and it’s just as well, or my life story would soon become tedious for its endless interventions of a divine nature.

Down into the valley we go. That laughing hyena at the wheel is targeting every pothole in the road. I’m safer the higher I clamber within that jungle of tires where I hang on like a monkey in a cage. Why do I get myself into these situations? Seriously, what is wrong with me? Let it never be said that I’m too smart for my own good. I’m just that little bit stupid, blessed with the essential naiveté that marks a fictional protagonist. Otherwise those angels I don’t quite believe in would have no cause to show up in my life. Not that I’m looking for trouble—who looks for trouble?—but if you were to accuse me of harbouring an urge to escape the gravity field of the known world, I would plead guilty without hesitation.

By the time we rise out of the valley I’ve made peace with the tires. They cradle me now. Peace is open savannah country by night, moonlit mile after magical mile. The earth is unearthly. I doubt heaven compares with this. Giant leafless baobab trees resemble elephants, mute herds standing guard on the grasslands, benign and protective. I have never felt so far from home.

The truck slows then stops for no apparent reason. The Sikh unlocks the cage and I reckon this for the scene where I’m murdered and robbed. Instead, he crosses the road to exercise his tire iron on a Mercedes abandoned in the ditch, stripping it of its tires in minutes. Welcome to the Hell Run. The African heaves each Michelin into the cage and off they go unaware that I’ve slipped away without a word of thanks.

The back seat of the Mercedes makes a perfect bed for the night.

I’m woken by the sound of a motorcycle, not the guttural rumble of a Harley but the unforgivable racket of a two-stroke Kawasaki. The sun is up and so is the hood of the Mercedes behind which someone is having a go at the engine. Someone dressed from head to toe in black. Father Manon, he calls himself.

“God helps those who help themselves,” he says, as he stashes a handful of electrical leads his saddle bags. He sets his goggles in place and says, “Allons-y! Let’s go, my son!” Saved again! This time by a priest from Chicoutimi, Quebec.

Father Manon drives as if he were immortal. He drives that Kawasaki with one hand so he can bless passers-by without slowing down. He blesses the chickens and the cows and the baobab trees. He blesses the ant hills! We speed along roads cluttered with people who lack the road-wise flow of urban traffic. Cyclists packing enormous sacks of charcoal waver and wobble within a spoke of death, and women balancing colourful bundles half again as large as themselves lead children-in-tow aside to allow us through.

I’m not sure if I’m being saved or not. Or if I want to be saved. I mean, why do I leave home in the first place if not to become lost? Think about it—doesn’t the human condition seem to demand our own undoing? The sages have been telling us since forever to risk everything, to leave everything behind.

I know, I know, easier said than done.

You’re reading this, you tell me—isn’t there something compelling about this picture of a young mzungu hanging onto the robes of a fake priest as he vanishes over the horizon deeper into the heart of Africa? To what end we can only imagine.

Maybe the real angels save us by leading us deeper and deeper into the heart of our own story. I don’t know, I don’t do angels.

But I seem to run into a hell of a lot of them.

(An earlier version of this story appeared here almost two years ago. In response to readers who have asked for more of these road stories, this will be an ongoing series. It’s time I got them all written down. But I don’t want to waste your time, so, please let me know if they speak to you.)