In the beginning, the idea of taking a year off for a restorative, reflective type of extended trip seemed like a dream, which might never come to fruition. The concept was based upon my original Grand Tour in a much less than grand scale, taken after graduation from college and before being drafted at the end of the Korean War. Then, traveling with a college friend for six months throughout Europe with a B-4 bag and a Gladstone cost two of us $900 each. I can still recall two weeks in Majorca for $28 including meals.
That, however, was 1954, and I was twenty-one. Now I’m fifty-five, married for the third time, with grown children. The nagging thought has remained with me that in midlife, I should take a year off from a hectic law practice and ruminate about what to do in the future. Return to practice in Montana. Change the venue to California. Or completely change and open a restaurant where could I cook in the morning and play golf and tennis in the afternoon.
I was practicing law in Bozeman, Montana, and my wife Suzanne was a certified public accountant in Helena, the state capital, some two hundred miles round trip from our home. This necessitated a sometimes daily trip over roads with black ice, and darting deer sometimes in the headlights. She was only too happy to give this up for a while.
In preparing for the trip, Suze and I got shots from our local internist, who volunteered that everyone he talked to of our approximate age wanted to do something different with their lives. From the planning to the doing has taken several years, but finally the right combination of the law practice getting on an even keel and major cases settling allowed me to say to everyone, “I’m going around the world for a year.” Actually, even without these favorable factors, I promised myself I would do it, but the best-laid plans have a way of not working out.
But it was worth the result, which allowed freedom to meditate on the human condition and room to grow personally and as married partners who were going to be joined at the hip 24/7, day after day, week after week, month after month. We went through sickness and health and the inevitable daily travail, all of which turned out to be a strengthening of our bond and our now successful marriage.
I felt what once had been a noble profession was now turning into a dog-eat-dog, money-grubbing business lacking the civility which a true profession requires. This led me to ponder the comment of a well-known lawyer in a copper-mining town where I worked for a time, that “true justice is when the fix is in on both sides.” I wanted to rethink my decision to practice law and do trial work where, often, the result was, in my estimation, unjust. So maybe to be a traveling mendicant for a year would be the solution.
So I am now sitting at my writing desk in Hotel Tahiti in 1988, drinking a bottle of Hinano lager on the patio and reflecting on the past months and years which led to my present hiatus in the midlife non-crisis. Today, finally in Tahiti, I told myself I would spend two hours each day setting down these thoughts with the hope that the account of my trip might be enlightening to others entertaining the same sense of mild or major discomfort in their own lives. This book, then, is a first-person account of a midlife trip, originally conceptualized as an “elixir of life.”
