Travels with Ernie is a story about a newly retired newspaper reporter, Robert Samuels, who is involved in a violent car crash. Regaining consciousness, he finds himself in a strange room with peculiar properties. It is able to read his thoughts, as does the unfamiliar man before him for whom time and place can be manipulated in compliance with Samuels’s most hidden desires. The stranger, who refers to himself as a case manager, provides a guide, a long-dead journalist, Ernie Pyle, for the adventure awaiting Samuels.
The story is a kaleidoscope of many themes all tied to Samuels’s desire to find redemption and, if possible, salvation before he dies for the choices of “inaction” that he made in his life. Together, the three travel to unusual places, each locale a heartbeat in Samuels’s ethical struggle to advocate for social justice, where he, by his own failure to act, compromised the moral life he wanted to live—Okinawa in the Pacific; Gila River Indian Reservation in the Southwest; Seligman, Arizona; Lone Pine, California; Bly, Oregon; and Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Along the way, Samuels encounters forgotten figures in American history, each related to his redemptive struggle to live an ethical life—Ralph Lazo, Fred Korematsu, Iva Toguri, Charles W. David Jr., Captain Henry T. Waskow, Rabbi Alexander Goode, Angel Delgadillo, Ben Epstein, and Professor Peter Irons. All have a story to tell, which possibly will exonerate Samuels from his self-imposed sense of historical guilt.
Samuels’s religious faith, such as it is, will be challenged by events, past and present. In the end, he is trying to make sense out of the chaos of life and the absurdness of human affairs. As such, it is a story that embraces us all.
