A book by Stephen Evans
“A road-tripping travel memoir that’s graced with humor, adventure, and wisdom.” —Clarion Reviews
In Prolegomena to Any Future Vacation by playwright and author Stephen Evans, a post-divorce road trip is transformed into a transcendental adventure through the wilds and wastelands of the American West.
Following US I-90 from Minneapolis to Yellowstone and beyond, the author chronicles his explorations of the spectacular sites along the way, including Pipestone, The Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone, and more.
Informed by five essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson (Self-Reliance, The Poet, Experience, Nature, and Circles), the author’s meandering yet synergistic outer and inner journeys explore his own (and our) capacity for understanding the world around us, and our place in it.
Author’s Note: With some revisions, the content of this book was previously published in A Transcendental Journey.
ISBN: 978-1953725196
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Reviews:
“Evans’s book, with its beautiful description, poignant moments, and interesting philosophy, will resonate with any reader who has set out for new places to find something “barely remembered, yet vaguely familiar: joy.”
—BlueInk Review“A Transcendental Journey is a road-tripping travel memoir that’s graced with humor, adventure, and wisdom.”
—Foreword Clarion Reviews“For almost everyone there is a call to adventure and, if heeded, small opportunities in the course of our lives to wiggle out of the tightly constructed worlds and obligations we have created for ourselves. Few of us heed the call, and of those who do, even fewer write about it in such a delightful way. Evans’ soulful and completely intuition-driven trip through a large swath of America is a great read.” —Amanda Larson, (Author of Healing from a Grandmother’s Heart)
“Stephen Evans’ A Transcendental Journey manages to be warm, wise, and humorous at the same time. Addictively readable.”
Izzy Ballard (Author of Fearless in Alaska)
Excerpt
“There are qualities that belong to a place, that inhabit its essence and mark it in the memory. The quality of this bluff was Blue.
Blue has many names: azure, sapphire, navy, even cornflower. I have never seen a cornflower, or any blue flower for that matter. But cornflower blue I can picture in my mind: draw a luster from the earth, blend in sunlight, sift in moonlight.
What I saw from the bluff was not any blue I could imagine: not azure nor sapphire nor navy nor cornflower. Even now, when I close my eyes, I can’t picture it. But I can remember how it felt, dodging my eyes and seeping unfiltered through the pores of my skin: Blueness, essence of Blue, narcotic Blue. Manifest Blue. True Blue. Transcendental Blue.
But there were two blues, not one.
We see the sky as blue because the blue electromagnetic waves of sunlight are shorter and are scattered more easily by the dust in the atmosphere. But nothing about this blue seemed scattered nor did sunlight seem required. Standing there, I realized that I had never truly seen a blue sky before. A stain had been washed from the stratosphere. Blue shone through.
Bodies of water are blue when they reflect the sky. But the Missouri had a different recipe that day, independent of the firmament above. Take a sea, fold it over and over and over like a translucent sheet, then glaze it in a tawny bed of grass. That is Missouri Blue.
Go to the Missouri River crossing.
Stand on the bluff on a cloudless day.
Blue lives there.”
