The Horseman: A Travel Memoir

By Bart Reitter

Robert Louis Stevensonwho understood a thing or two about the selves we refuse to knowonce said I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. Surely it was the likelihood of an accident, the unparalleled joy of stumbling upon himself now and then, which Stevenson most cherished in the going. A bit like Stevenson, Bart Reitter is a man who revels in the great distance between here and there. His memoir The Horseman is a wonderful account of the selves forged and found during his travels across the first half of a lifetimea heartfelt testament to the wisdom of refusing to stand still.

--Professor Greg Coln Semenza, University of Connecticut

For those who have ever spent time on the road for a living this book will awaken memoriessome fond, some downright scary. Its the diary of a young man plying his trade as he jets around the world while climbing the corporate ladder. Bart Reitter writes in exacting detail. A delightful read.

--Thomas J. Gibbons Jr. Retired Staff Writer, Philadelphia Inquirer

The Horseman is an excellent story about one mans travels. The book drew me in and I found myself reading longer than I had allowed for. Reitters enthusiasm for travel has rekindled my own excitement for the many business trips I have planned for this year.

--Rich Dibernardo, President, Initech, LLC

Reading The Horseman brought back fond memories of my travels with Bart. I also have been infected with the travel bug and the cure is to get me on the next flight to anywhere.

--John Lin, Senior Territory Sales Manager

For author Bart Reitter, the journey is the destination. In this travelogue, he narrates his lifelong journey of discovery through travel. Written with stark clarity and emotional honesty, The Horseman begins with a six-year-old boys first joyful trip to Disney World and concludes with a 26,000-mile circumnavigation of the globe.

Compiled from journals kept while traveling the world and interwoven with personal reflection and unique historical perspective, The Horseman voyages through the joys and frustration of global travel as well as the introspection aimed at understanding lifes meaning. It presents an emotional, scientific, funny, and irreverent window into Reitters mind as he seeks to understand the insatiable wanderlust that drives him forward.

From the eastern United States to Singapore, and from the streets of Paris to the jungles of Thailand, Reitter communicates a unique point of view of life on the road that pictures rarely tell. From the euphoria of successful business deals to the loneliness of sterile hotel rooms, the story is never boring. In the end, with the help of his daughters, he discovers the best journey of all is the journey home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781450292320

Bart Reitter

Bart Reitter is director of global marketing for a US-based life sciences research company. His seventeen-year career in sales and marketing has been spent traveling for both business and pleasure; he has traveled to forty-three countries and five continents. Reitter lives in Skippack, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two daughters.

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Copyright © 2011 by Bart Reitter

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Cover Photo: Reiter Alpe

Back Cover Photo: The author in Budapest, 2000

Editorial support provided by Matt and Bambi Mroz.

ISBN: 978-1-4502-9231-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-9233-7 (dj)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-9232-0 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 02/17/2011

reiter, noun, m., origin, Middle High German

meaning knight or horseman

For my girls, Jeanine, Caroline, and Katherine

And dedicated to the memory of Joyce Walsh Zarsky

We’re only at home when we’re on the run.

— Neil Peart

Foreword

As a parent of young children you can only hope that with your guidance and direction they will grow up to be happy, healthy, successful and productive adults. After reading The Horseman I discovered that I had influenced my son’s future in ways that I had not intended.

While I was traveling the country, and at times the world for work, I didn’t realize that Bart felt my absence in a positive way. There were times when I was able to take him along on business trips to Connecticut, Florida, Texas, Colorado and Alaska. He had an interest in airplanes and flying but I didn’t realize that he was developing the love for travel that I had.

If I was a betting man I would wager that his daughters Caroline and Katherine are in the process of being bitten by the same travel bug that got Bart Jr. and I. Children tend to fantasize about things that are outside of their own little world but travel provides a real education, along with a sense of adventure and a firsthand look at humanity.

Bart Reitter Sr.

Contents

Prologue: The Road So Far

Rising in the East

Gotham

The Heartland

Rocky Mountain High

Setting in the West

The Last Frontier

The Great White North

South of the Border (and the Equator)

The City of Light

La Ville-Lumière

An Afternoon at the Louvre

The City of Darkness

Londinium

A Walk Through Westminster

Deutschland

Confoederatio Helvetica

The Big One

Another Big One

The Promised Land

The Old Kingdom

The Honeymooners

Around the World in 18 Days

Epilogue: The Road Ahead

Prologue: The Road So Far

I love to travel. I’m not sure why. It satisfies some fundamental need for me. It’s not as primal as eating or sleeping, but its close. At some point at a young age, the urge to be on the move seeped into my DNA and has yet to loosen its grip. Thirty-nine years on, that’s still the case. The prospect of moving from place to place is, for many people, annoying at the very least and inherently unsettling; others hate to travel altogether and avoid it at all cost. But I love it and have loved it for as long as I can remember. I can’t claim some innate attraction that draws me over the horizon, and I don’t have ambitions to scale Mount Everest or plumb the depths of the Amazon. It’s simpler than that for me. I just like to move.

My infatuation began around age six. Its source was my father. He was on the road a lot for work and spent significant time away from home. Despite his absence, there was an allure to the itinerant lifestyle that he led. Wanting to be like my dad, I wanted to travel. At that young and impressionable age, it was glamorous to me even though I had no delusions that he was in far-off exotic lands. I knew he was in prosaic towns like Buffalo or Wichita. However, the travel experience became the hook for me, and I still crave that experience today. Having traveled regularly now for nearly 15 years, the novelty has worn off but the yearning goes on. Despite the millions (literally) of miles flown, the countless nights in hotel rooms, and the immeasurable hours spent moving eight miles a minute (in the words of Bob Seger), I still enjoy it.

From an occupational point of view, travel is a byproduct of my pursuit of global responsibility. Ever since I started working, I sought positions in sales and then marketing that had global reach. I didn’t achieve them at first but always had those roles in mind. And despite my fondness for travel, it was always important for me to put my job first. I worked hard and tried to excel at the task at hand and never traveled for the sake of travel. If that were my only goal, I would have become a flight attendant. My work travel was always linked to a loftier vocational goal and aligned with higher ambition.

To be clear, the mundane and routine of work travel far outweigh the glorious. For every hour spent on a veranda watching a sunset over Lake Geneva (2007), there are twenty hours stuck in airports or sitting in traffic. For each visit to the Taj Mahal (2006), there are dozens of mind-numbing trade shows. And for each leisurely stroll along the beach in Rio de Janeiro (2007), there are dozens of client meetings in places like Newark, New Jersey. But the experience is still enjoyable to me. The journey is the destination.

Describing Ernest Hemingway’s exuberant pursuit of life, author James R. Mellow wrote that he was, A man with a voracious appetite for experience. I don’t share much congruity with Hemingway but I share his appetite for experience. When I first started traveling I even wanted to experience the negative side of travel. That desire has long since worn off, but as a hearty young road warrior I felt that the hassle of cancelled flights, overbooked hotels, and weather delays would expose me to the real side of life on the road. I wanted to experience it all and didn’t always want things to go perfectly.

My first travel memory was of a trip that my family took to Orlando in 1977. I was six. We took a vacation to Disney World, and I remember being euphoric about it. I was excited to see Disney World, but I was more energized by the journey and the travel experience and much of my excitement came from the idea of flying. Many people remember their first car, I remember my first plane. We flew from Philadelphia to Orlando on an Eastern Airlines Lockheed L-1011. I remember envisioning what flying must be like, and the anticipation was like waiting for Christmas morning to arrive. I have no good explanation for the origin of such excitement.

Throughout my formative years, the urge to move grew stronger. My father’s work situation changed in my early teens and he was home more frequently but he still traveled from time to time and I envied him when he did. While his time at home was a welcome change for me, he and I had already enjoyed a rare and special relationship. His increased time at home only allowed our relationship to flourish further. While his being home quelled some of the restlessness of youth, another development fueled my longing to depart.

In 1986 I lost my mother after a protracted battle with alcoholism. I was fifteen. Until two years prior to her death, I was unaware that anything was wrong. In retrospect, it seems incredibly naïve.

The long and arduous period leading up to her death caused me to retreat within myself to a degree. As an otherwise extroverted individual, part of my personality began to crave solitude. Paradoxically, travel complemented my introspection. By looking inward, I wanted to move outward. During that difficult stage, and for most of my life, we’d spent a lot of time away from home by going to the mountains, the beach, and on vacations. The time away allowed me to escape, and I unknowingly began to associate travel—even if that only meant a weekend in the mountains—with comfort. Travel novelist Paul Theroux once wrote that travel is equal parts flight and pursuit. Flight (the noun and the verb) offered a respite for what I was feeling, and travel equaled solace.

While we battled through the emotions and the hardships, I spent a lot of time alone reading and listening to music and that fed my desire to be elsewhere. I began to identify more with music and the Canadian progressive rock band Rush started to have a considerable impact on my life. Their drummer and lyricist, Neil Peart, wrote about teenage disillusion and longing. The lyrics to their song, The Analog Kid spoke directly to my loneliness, anxiety and disquiet:

A hot and windy August afternoon

Has the trees in constant motion

With a flash of silver leaves

As they’re rocking in the breeze

A boy lies in the grass with one blade

Stuck between his teeth

A vague sensation quickens

In his young and restless heart

And a bright and nameless vision

Has him longing to depart

The outro to the song crystallized the pain and angst that I was feeling and resolved into departure:

Too many hands on my time

Too many feelings

Too many things on my mind

When I leave I don’t know

What I’m hoping to find

When I leave I don’t know

What I’m leaving behind

The lyrics spoke to me in a profound way because they made the connection between disenchantment and departure, at least in my mind. The song brilliantly captured how I was feeling as well as my response to those emotions.

In August of 1986, my dad, my sister Christine, and I were on an annual vacation with the O’Leary’s, a family with whom we were very close while growing up. On a remote island in the Thousand Islands region of New York State, we received the message that my mom had died. She was thirty-six. The news was difficult, but it was also liberating and comforting.

The three of us drove back to Philadelphia to attend the funeral, and I remember thinking that I didn’t want to go. I knew that I owed my mother the respect of attending the funeral, but I didn’t want to deal with all of the emotions and faces filled with sorrow and pity. I didn’t feel like listening to a priest’s sermon and being showered with clichés like death is part of life. I just wanted to be away and to ignore it all.

The day after the service, we returned to New York for vacation. It seems strange that we did that, but the period leading up to my mom’s death had been so painful for us that I think it gave us relief to be away from it all. I could feel the stress receding with every mile that we put behind us.

While the time away on vacation was not festive, it was peaceful and soothing. The anguish was over. I remember walking on a quiet path on the island after we got back and wondered if I was supposed to cry or be upset or angry. I didn’t feel any of that though. I felt at peace. Being away from home equaled comfort and the seed that was planted years before began to germinate.

By the time I reached my late teens, I had an insatiable desire to see the world, or at least the United States. Looking back, I believe the admiration of my father, the time we’d spent vacationing as kids, and the death of my mother all conspired to fuel an unquenchable thirst for travel and experience that has stayed with me my whole life.

* * *

When I began the process of applying to colleges as a senior in high school, the urge to move was strong there as well. I was planning to major in marketing and had a number of good business schools to which I could apply. One of the criteria I had set for the schools was distance from home. I investigated schools in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and Connecticut as well as Pennsylvania. They were all good schools and differed in many ways, but the one thing that they all had in common was distance from home.

At the age of seventeen, I wanted to be away. The need for distance did not arise from normal teenage enmity and distrust of all figures authoritarian. It came from the need to be on the move. I enjoyed a good family life, a great relationship with my dad, and a solid network of friends. But I wanted to be away from it all.

In November of 1988, the fall of my senior year in high school, I received an early admission acceptance into Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. I was elated. I had placed my bet on Duquesne without investigating too many other schools and felt that I had a reasonably good chance of being accepted. The acceptance letter caused a rush of emotions that included relief, excitement, and a little bit of fear. Duquesne satisfied my criteria: it was a good business school, I was accepted for admission, and it was 314 miles from home.

My four years at Duquesne were imbued with experience of every kind, and I cherished my time there. In addition to my schooling, I took part in all of the activities that college had to offer. I was on the baseball team for two years and once faced an ex-Pirate pitcher in an exhibition game who embarrassed me (and most of us) on my first at-bat with a 12/6 curveball, a slider, and a fast ball, in that order. Strike three.

I played intramural football, softball, and hockey. I played drums in a rock band called Sourmash, and we played some incredible fraternity parties and university events. I got arrested one night after a huge party (the charges were dropped) and the TV show Cops filmed the bust, although I was not on camera. I saw the bright side of life and I saw the dark side of life, but I got a world of experience.

During my time at Duquesne, I continued to be driven to see more places and experience more things farther afield. Cleveland was just two hours away, so I made my first trips to that city while in college. At the end of my freshman year, my roommate Greg and I took a road trip to Buffalo and Toronto to see college friends; my first time in each of those cities. A fraternity conference took me to New Orleans (of all places!) during my senior year. And shortly before graduation, three buddies from home and I made the ultimate weekend road trip to see the several major sporting events: Mike Tyson/Riddick Bowe fight (on pay-per-view at a bar in Toledo, OH); Penn State/Notre Dame game in South Bend, IN; Eagles/Packers game at Milwaukee County Stadium (the Packers used to play two games a year in Milwaukee); and Denver Nuggets/Milwaukee Bucks game in a private suite at the Bradley Center. That was all done in the course of a weekend and was the road trip of a lifetime.

In May of 1993, I graduated from Duquesne with a Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing and a minor in English. In September of that year, I took an inside sales position at an industrial valve distributor in Philadelphia called Plectrum Automation. During my 18 months secured to an inside sales desk, my thoughts wandered but my ambition and goals were clear in my mind. In April of 1995, I received a promotion to an outside sales position covering Maryland, Washington D.C., and Virginia, and I enjoyed two years traversing those states from north to south and east to west.

By the spring of 1997, however, I felt that I had grown as much as I could grow with a regional company, and I longed for a bigger role. The company had been good to me and allowed to me to develop and gain experience. I, in turn, improved their financial position immensely. By that time, however, it was apparent to me that I wanted to work for a product manufacturer and hold a position in a national or global capacity. As my career progressed, I developed a greater longing for travel and experience and began to feel its irresistible pull. The position that I took in April of 1997 would alter things immeasurably for me.

* * *

Besides travel, I also love to read. I don’t have a good explanation for that passion either but it’s been with me for most of my life. My mom read a fair amount when I was a kid so maybe that’s an explanation. But she wasn’t the avid reader that I became. Even today, armed with the capability to carry dozens of movies and TV shows on my iPhone, I prefer to read. I have access to thousands of movies at home but I’d rather hold a book. And even with the advent of e-books and readers, nothing is better to me than holding a hardcover volume. And after years and years spent immersed in hundreds (and maybe thousands) of books, I eventually wanted to go beyond reading and start to write. And the travels on which I would eventually embark provided me with a wealth of writing material.

I recall having an illness and being bedridden for a week or so when I was nine. During that time I read and reread two books given to me for my ninth birthday. They were simple sports books and they chronicled the origins and auspicious moments in the history of football and basketball. Beyond the implausibility of Tom Dempsey’s kick and the misfortune of Jim Marshall, I don’t hold any real memory of those books. However, I found the love of reading.

Around the age of ten I read a book called A Day No Pigs Would Die. It was about a boy who lost his father at the age of thirteen. It told of the boy’s struggle with his relationship with his father and his coming of age. The book moved me emotionally but also physically. After reading that small and innocent piece of work, I discovered that I found simple pleasure in the act of holding a book and reading.

By the time I was a teenager I had gotten hooked on adventure novels. In particular I read books by Clive Cussler featuring his protagonist Dirk Pitt. Cussler’s books were action/adventure works of fiction and often told of ridiculous feats of accomplishment by Mr. Pitt. Regardless, they provided me entertainment and enjoyment.

Upon reaching Duquesne, I was sufficiently hooked on reading that I decided to minor in English, wanting to expand my purview of reading material. The courses I took as part of an English minor curriculum gave me solid coverage of American and English literature and broadened my horizons greatly. I began to read more and more diverse subject matter and, by my senior year of college, I had covered almost all American literature from Cotton Mather to Hemingway and English Literature from Beowulf to Wilde. The diversity of reading material ignited a fire in me and during that same year the first flame of writing passion came. No longer satisfied with simply reading, I wanted to write.

My original ambition was to write a work of fiction. I had started dabbling with writing a novel, but didn’t get far. I had some ideas for a story, but it was a large undertaking for a first attempt. The next logical step was to tackle something more manageable. However, the form that it would take hadn’t yet crystallized in my mind. Still, I knew it was a something that I wanted to pursue. I continued to attend literature courses as part of my minor and vainly sought writing projects while pursuing my marketing degree. Despite my efforts, I graduated from Duquesne in May of 1993 with my writing ambitions unfulfilled.

For the next several years, I dove headlong into work. Intent on conquering the business world and becoming CEO one day, I worked insane hours at my inside sales position and loved my job and the people with whom I worked. In 1995, with my promotion to outside sales, my work output increased even more and writing necessarily took a backseat.

On a fishing trip to Alaska with my dad in 1996, the tiny flame of writing passion began to grow larger. During our trip, I kept a travel journal of our exploration. The expanse of Alaska and its immense natural beauty provided useful fodder for a fledgling writer. After a few days and a several pages of text, I started to consider the idea of building a short story around the trip. However, my travel journal stayed in its narrative form and never evolved into a work of fiction.

In April of 1997, I made a job change that was significant in my nascent career. The change increased my travel greatly and provided me with a wealth of material around which I could form a writing project. So, at the age of 26, I left my first job post-college and took a position with a product manufacturer called Phrygian Technologies in Aurora, Illinois, just outside of Chicago. The switch to Phrygian altered my career dramatically, satisfied my desire to work for a manufacturing company, and provided me with my first real travel experiences.

When I took my new position with Phrygian, it was as a regional sales manager covering a territory that extended from Montréal to Miami, a significant increase over the territory that I had previously managed. That sizeable region meant frequent trips all along the east coast of the United States. Rarely home during that time, I was in places like Baltimore, Charlotte, Atlanta, Buffalo, Raleigh, Miami, Charleston, Boston, Montréal, Toronto, Richmond, and New York nearly every week. I was on the road constantly, and I loved it. The travel was new and exciting and my new position broadened my responsibility and experience immensely.

During that first year of heavy travel I used the opportunity of weekend stays to extend trips and see the cities that I rarely saw during the week while working. Without the obligations of family, I was free to explore and I took full advantage of it. One trip through North Carolina and Tennessee during the spring of 1998 illustrated just how far I was willing to go for the sake of travel and experience.

I had been traveling all week in North Carolina, spending most of the time in Raleigh and finishing in Charlotte. Upon completing my customer visits in Charlotte on Friday afternoon I began driving west on I-40 toward Knoxville, Tennessee for a weekend stay.

As I neared Knoxville around 6:00, my ever-racing mind was mulling over the possibilities and I quickly grabbed the map (pre-GPS days) and considered some other options for the weekend. As I looked at the map I decided to forgo Knoxville and keep driving to Nashville and arrived there late on Friday night.

On Saturday morning I pointed the car westward on I-40 toward Memphis, determined to tackle another town on my journey. When I arrived in Memphis, it was only around noon, so I needed to make a decision. Should I stay in Memphis for the day or continue on? I was already staying in Memphis that night. I pulled over to the side of the ride and looked at the map to see what still might be a reachable destination. I quickly found one and, forgoing logic and reason, decided to press on.

I continued on I-40 west onto the Hernando Desoto Bridge across the swollen and muddy Mississippi River and into Arkansas. My destination was Little Rock, another 130 miles down the road.

The drive to Little Rock left me with little to see because of heavy rain the entire way, but my internal weather was sunny. As I neared Little Rock, the sky began to clear and I pulled off the interstate. The first thing I noticed coming off of the exit ramp was the Excelsior Hotel, where Bill Clinton (allegedly) accosted Paula Jones while he was governor of Arkansas in 1988. It gave me a laugh. It was a nice day so I had lunch outside at a brew pub astride the Arkansas River and reveled in my freedom and determination.

Once back in Memphis, I took a taxi to Beale Street in the heart of town. The brick-facade buildings sent music wafting into the streets like incense from a censer and I wandered into B.B. King’s and enjoyed a great night of beers and blues.

On Sunday afternoon, when I returned the car at the airport in Knoxville, the girl behind the counter looked strangely at the printout and insisted that a mistake must have been made. But there was no mistake. I’d had the car for just over 72 hours and driven 1283 miles, averaging 427 miles a day. Along the way I covered three states and five cities.

The time on the road that weekend proved to me what I could accomplish (or how insane I was) and gave me a significant amount of time to let my mind wander. It was on that trip that I began to revisit ideas for a writing project. The experience of the weekend convinced me that a travel narrative would work as a writing project as it neatly combined two things that I loved, travel and writing. On future trips, I began taking better journal notes and working toward a coherent story that would be compelling and interesting. The travel seed that was planted began to blossom and it bore fruit in the form of writing.

When I left Phrygian in 1998, I went to work for a competitor, Rosewood Control Solutions, based in Schiller Park, Illinois, near O’Hare airport. As Regional Product Manager, my territory got a little bit smaller but my job function effectively stayed the same. Rosewood Control was a well-run organization with a solid network of distribution partners so I moved almost seamlessly into the new role. It also allowed me to pick up where I had left off and presented continued opportunities for me to write about my travels (and travails).

In late 1998, Rosewood Control Solutions was acquired by General Electric. It was November and I was conducting a seminar in Toronto when I heard the news. I was not happy, but the move to GE represented the best opportunity that I’d had thus far in my career. For the next six years, I learned everything I could at GE and climbed through positions of greater and greater responsibility.

In late 2004 things changed dramatically when I got a significant promotion to Global Marketing Manager for our pharmaceutical business. The promotion changed my role substantially in that I was moving from sales to marketing, but also because it made my reach completely global. During my travels at that time I began to amass enough material to start thinking seriously about a significant writing project to capture all that I had done and seen.

Early in 2008, I was struggling to organize all of the material I had written and tried to envision the form that a writing project would take. By that time, I had been traveling regularly throughout the United States and Europe and periodically to Asia. My first visit to Europe (Paris and Amsterdam) was in 1998 and I first visited Asia (Taipei and Hong Kong) in 1999. In the ten year period between 1998 and 2008, I had reached nearly every corner of the world and captured many of those excursions in journals that I kept along the way.

I considered doing a few short stories about some of the more exciting trips, but wanted any writing project that I pursued to be more comprehensive. I wasn’t satisfied with a simple travel chronicle of where I’d been, and I didn’t want an inexpressive retelling of boring itineraries. I had a wish to capture what I felt and thought during that time. I wanted it to be real. I wanted it to be alive and I wanted it to be felt. As I pondered more on what the story might be I thought about the origins of my feelings, my personality, and my emotions and I wondered how to tell that story.

* * *

While much of my desire for literal departure came from my father, much of my yearning for figurative departure came from my mother. Her final years were difficult, but she was a good woman, a good daughter, a good sister, a good wife, and a good mom and I don’t forget all of the good she left behind.

More than anyone, she bestowed upon me a love of reading. Ironically—or perhaps not so much—that love of reading helped sustain me during the most difficult time of my life. In the words of Poe, …I had sought to borrow, from my books surcease of sorrow… The love of reading that she imparted to me led to a love of writing. My love of writing has led to this book and the reason for writing it: my greatest loves.

This book is for my girls; there is no more meaningful reason to write this story. It is a real life story of the travel and experience that I have spent my lifetime seeking. I wrote it for them. But I also wrote it to them. It is a love letter. I wanted a memoir for posterity so that they would know who I was and what I did, but I also wanted them to know why I did it. I wanted them know where I succeeded and where I failed. I wanted them to know what I felt and what I thought while I was apart from them.

Since becoming a father in 2005 and again in 2007, I’ve seen my life reflected in my daughters and have sought to reflect something back to them. This book is that reflection.

To my first little girl, the image of the grandmother who adored her and whose spirit she assumed: never lose your happiness and your optimism. Caroline Joy: the embodiment of caring, empathy, trust, and love.

To my second little girl, the likeness of her mother with the personality of her father: never lose your fire or your will. Katherine Elizabeth: strong-willed, determined, emotional, logical, illogical, and vulnerable.

To my one and only girl: never forget how much I love you and that you are my entire universe. Jeanine Regina: the model of beauty, grace, compassion, and love.

This book is about almost half of the first 40 years of my life and of my life on the road. The origin of that time spent away is rooted in a longing to depart fueled by childhood experience. While I still crave the travel experience and probably always will, it is no longer about departure and getting away from something. In the end, the story has come full circle and is a celebration of my three biggest reasons for wanting to come home. This book is for my girls. I love you.

The Americas

Rising in the East

The 737 pushed back from the gate and began the slow taxi out to the runway. We took our place in line, fifteenth for takeoff. I looked out the window at the low clouds that hung over the airport. It was a busy Tuesday evening rush hour and hundreds of planes jockeyed for position. The pilot came on and informed us that we would be delayed approximately thirty minutes and a faint but palpable groan rose from the weary passengers. The conditioned response of exasperation would probably have been appropriate, but I was unable to summon that reaction. I was too energized to be annoyed.

It was May of 1997, I was on my first real business trip, and I was ecstatic. I was flying from Philadelphia to Greensboro, North Carolina and had a week’s worth of client visits and distributor meetings scheduled in both North and South Carolina. It was my first trip in my new role as Eastern Regional Manager with Phrygian Technologies and I was anxious to get off to a good start.

In April, I had resigned from Plectrum Automation after almost four years of employment. By 1997 I felt a longing for more responsibility and began to explore other opportunities. Phrygian offered me the job of Eastern Regional Manager, and I accepted the position.

The longing for more responsibility went hand-in-hand with the desire for more geography. Very early in my career I felt that, if I aspired for a position as a Vice President or CEO, I would need to have experience managing not only increasingly valuable regions, but also more physical territory. My theory was that it would be easier to move into a senior role someday if I’d had more experience with a bigger region, ideally global. Acumen in sales, marketing, and finance were important as well, but I felt that if I was learning those anyway, I may as well cover a large geographic area and remove another obstacle to a future promotion.

The territory for which I was responsible in my new role extended from Montréal to Miami and went as far west as Ohio. It encompassed the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Québec, as well as the Maritime provinces. That territory was a massive upgrade from what I had previously handled in both revenue and geography. I had gone from managing roughly $2 million in revenue at Plectrum to almost $15 million at Phrygian and went from covering two states to covering 17 along the entire eastern seaboard of the United States as well as the eastern half of Canada.

I also had the responsibility of managing 22 distribution partners. My new position moved me from direct sales, where I had owned the relationships with individual customers, to indirect sales, where I managed the distributors who in turn managed the customers. That type of regional position was very appealing to me and was also a role with which I was familiar. In my previous outside sales role I’d had many occasions to travel with individual company representatives who wanted to visit customers in my territory, and I had always liked that type of position.

When I accepted the job with Phrygian, I got my wish for a larger territory, more responsibility, and more travel. I could not have been happier, and I felt full of confidence and energy. In the end, I only worked for Phrygian for one year.

After my first trip to Greensboro, I got settled into the new role, did some internal training and had the opportunity to meet the other distribution partners who I would be managing. The first memorable trip I took was in June of 1997 when I went to visit a small distributor in Midlothian, Virginia. The purpose of the trip was to meet the owner of the business, discuss our plans for increasing sales in their territory, and to visit customers with two of their salespeople.

I elected to drive to Midlothian and not deal with the hassle of flying the short distance to Richmond. I drove down the night before and stayed at a Days Inn. I remember parking my car in the lot in the early evening and walking in the June heat to the lobby of the hotel with a big smile on my face. In my mind, I had made it.

I arrived early the next morning for my meeting and felt some of my excitement fade as I approached the small, non-descript white-brick office building off of Midlothian Turnpike. I had expected a larger business. They occupied one of the four offices in the small complex. I parked directly in front of the wooden door with the brass number three on it. Setting any judgment aside, I went to the door.

I knocked and almost immediately was greeted by Betty, the company’s administrative assistant. She was an affable woman in her early fifties and she welcomed me excitedly, inviting me inside. I was as unimpressed with the inside of the building as I’d been with the exterior. There were boxes strewn around the office and pieces of electronic equipment piled in corners. I decided not to judge too quickly, though, and Betty made it difficult to be too harsh.

The owner, Stan, arrived around 8:30. We greeted each other and exchanged pleasantries. He was in his early fifties and was slightly disheveled himself with uncombed hair and his tie askew. My first thought was that a business is a reflection of its owner. It had me slightly concerned and he may have felt that. If the owner and the office were that disorganized, I wondered, what was the state of the business? I sensed detachment in him, and he eyed me with some suspicion. I attributed that more to my being a representative of Phrygian than anything personal and he was very cordial and sincere. But he was keeping me at a distance.

After my meeting with Stan, I met his two salesmen, Brian and Jerry. Brian was in his late twenties and a nice person but a little goofy. We were roughly the same age and I thought we could find something in common. That proved to be difficult. Jerry was in his late forties and more stoic. He was friendly as well but furtive and aloof.

The three of us spent the afternoon together in the conference room discussing our products and their plans for their territories. The product training went well and I felt a quiet sense of relief after the first day of being the expert on our products. Just a few weeks before, I didn’t even know those products existed.

I met Brian the next morning at the office. He had booked meetings for the day in Williamsburg so we had about an hour drive. He was married with no children and he and his wife were heavily involved in their local church group. He wore a pair of sunglasses that he was overly excited about and kept telling me how cool they were (pronouncing cool as kewl). It wasn’t difficult to get him talking, and I was pleased to avoid a long, uncomfortably-silent drive.

We had barely pulled out of the lot and he started talking and talking and talking. He was energetic, animated, and sincere but he lacked substance. It was as if he slid across every subject about which he spoke and didn’t linger on any topic for too long. He liked to talk big ideas and not spend too much time on details.

He told me a story about a friend of his who had created a new way to market restaurants in Richmond. It was in the early days of the internet explosion and he claimed his friend had made a good deal of money from the idea. I listened to the story, expressed genuine interest, and asked if his friend planned to duplicate the idea in other nearby cities like Washington D.C. or Raleigh or Philadelphia. I suggested that applying the same formula would likely work in those cities as well. People had to eat no matter where they lived.

He gave me a slightly condescending smile and said no. His friend had shut down the operation and moved on to a bigger opportunity. I looked at him incredulous and asked why his friend would do that. What could be the bigger opportunity? He seemed to have hit on a winning initiative, and I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t stay with it. I questioned him more about it and, like the other subjects we had discussed, he didn’t have many answers.

The bigger opportunity his friend had pursued was multi-level marketing and he asked me if I knew anything about it. I lied and told him that I didn’t and, for a minute, I got the feeling that I was being played. It didn’t seem right, though. Brian wasn’t that calculating. I had trouble believing that I was the unsuspecting moth headed blissfully for the spider’s web.

Then it occurred to me: I wasn’t being played. I was being recruited. I gave myself a knowing smile and settled in for the sales pitch I knew was imminent.

I knew MLM well enough. During the months of interviewing after I graduated from college I had the opportunity to interview with a few MLM operations including a Saturday morning recruitment meeting. Even in 1997, I knew the fallacy of the MLM game and I asked many questions during the group meeting that Saturday. The conclusion I arrived at was that the only thing they were selling was managerial positions. That is, the goal of the managers was to recruit new managers and that’s a pyramid scheme.

Approached by a fellow church member, Brian and his wife were given the opportunity to own a business that sold health and beauty products. Owning the business meant that they were required to buy a specified amount of inventory every month. That was their investment. The business offered high quality products at competitive prices. According to Brian, it was also secretly known that those products were superior to the ones offered by Johnson and Johnson and Proctor and Gamble. He went on to say that those companies spent millions of dollars annually trying to combat the MLM style of marketing because it was so successful. I continued to ask questions and eventually said, Is this Amway? He avoided the question and continued on to how the operation worked and then went into full recruitment mode. He explained how much money could be made and about the other people up-line from him who had made a fortune. Thankfully, our meeting with the client intervened, and I was off the hook for a short time.

When we got back to the car he continued with his sales pitch until we reached the next meeting. Later, over lunch, he revisited the subject again and kept up his onslaught all the way back to Midlothian. By that time, I think he recognized that his pitch was falling on deaf ears and that he wouldn’t be successful with me. He dropped me at the office and I drove back to the hotel, relieved to be free from the recruitment.

My introduction to Brian was eye-opening. There was something about him that I didn’t get. He was a nice person superficially but he was arrogant when it came to the MLM discussions. His condescension was grating, and I remember thinking that I must be missing something. I couldn’t figure it out. He talked with the confidence and panache of a billionaire tycoon dispensing financial advice, but he was a marginally successful salesman driving a Dodge Colt.

In addition to the arrogance was the persistent nature of the MLM discussion. That was all he spoke about. Whenever I tried to move the subject along, it eventually returned to MLM. He didn’t want to talk about anything else and he spoke feverishly. He was cult-like in his zeal.

Traveling with Brian was a learning experience and an exercise in restraint. I wanted to drill into him a few times during his tirades, but I thought that would be unprofessional and counter to what I was trying to accomplish from a work point of view. I didn’t see it as a lesson at the time but it is one of the earliest travel memories I have of how people, no matter how strange, shaped my view of the world. I could not have disagreed with Brian more and I wanted to express that very clearly when I was with him. However, he, like many others, broadened my perspective and taught me a better way to approach the world.

On day two we headed west to Lynchburg, Virginia. I was spending the day with Jerry and we were visiting customers in the western part of the state. I had only met Jerry the day before, and despite the previous day’s adventure with Brian, I looked forward to having some time to get to know him and see some of his customers. The drive to Lynchburg was longer than the previous day’s ride so we had ample time to talk. Jerry was married with three children and I sensed immediately that he was a deeply religious man. Religion permeated all of his conversations, and he found every opportunity he could to bring the subject around to God.

I had the feeling early in our drive that I was about to undergo another round of recruitment and I wasn’t looking forward to it. As we spoke further, I got a little bit more comfortable because I didn’t feel that he was recruiting me, but it still made me uneasy. He was delving deeply into Biblical verses and New Testament passages. Even without the recruitment, I resisted any attempt at proselytizing, even in an indirect way.

During our drive back from the afternoon visits he spoke to me at length about his church and about all the things the Lord had blessed him with. He and his wife were deeply spiritual and tried to impart their faith to their children as well. They did not own a TV and they held daily Bible readings.

He explained all of the things that were wrong with the world and how religion was the solution. It was interesting that he made that particular point because as he rambled along with his sermon I was considering how much ill was caused by religious fervor and fanatics who are content in the knowledge that they are right and everyone outside of their belief system is wrong.

Despite my incongruity with Jerry’s beliefs, I let him continue and listened quietly. Like Brian the day before, he spoke with conviction but with less fever. He talked calmly and devotedly, but almost as if he was in a mechanical trance and he recited passages by rote.

He continued in that fashion for much of our drive, at some point making reference to the validity of the teachings of Bishop Ussher, and that took the conversation in an entirely different direction.

In 1650, Bishop James Ussher, the Archbishop of Armagh in the Church of Ireland, published a work titled The Annals of the Old Testament. In this work, he calculated the moment of creation to the night before October 23, 4004 BCE. I was familiar with Ussher’s famous chronology at that time and its unequivocal acceptance by many Christian fundamentalists. King James Bibles contained the chronology into the 1970s, and it was also admitted as evidence during the famous Scopes Monkey trial in 1925.

Jerry’s reference to Bishop Ussher signaled that he was a serious fundamentalist and I definitely proceeded in the conversation with caution. I did not want to offend him, but I also didn’t want to discuss religion any further. His belief in Bishop Ussher’s teachings meant he did not believe in evolution or the true age of the Earth and, instead, took scripture to be literal and immutable and I knew that Jerry was not alone.

A Gallup poll in 2009 (just in time for Darwin’s 200th birthday) found that only 39% of Americans believed in evolution, an alarming number compared with other industrialized nations—and a blatant refusal to hear any facts that contradicted faith.

In similar fashion, the Vatican famously banned Galileo’s Dialogue on the Two Great Systems of the World, published in 1632, until 1822 because it discussed the heliocentric model of the solar system. It took until 1992 for the Vatican to apologize to Galileo for imprisoning him for heresy until his death in 1642. After he was forced to recant his belief in the heliocentric model before the Inquisition in 1633, Galileo allegedly (although it is almost certainly apocryphal) whispered, "Eppur si muove (And yet it moves," referring to the Earth’s revolution around the Sun). And his response is an apt and a fitting rejoinder to the notion that faith supersedes scientific fact.

Even in the discussions surrounding the very origin of the universe, many scientists leave room for the presence of a divine entity. Recent scientific data have allowed physicists to see further back into the beginning of the universe than ever before, to just a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. But, as far back as scientists have gone, no one has yet answered the question of what started it all. So science often leaves room for God. But not so with religious fanatics who hold dogma as absolute and unassailable fact and claim the moral high ground, dismissing science and ostracizing people like Copernicus, Darwin, and Galileo.

Jerry and I were nearing my hotel so our drive was ending and, thankfully, so was our conversation. After hours of him reciting scripture, I didn’t think I was going to be able to withstand a serious discussion about the earth being 6000 years old. The Egyptian pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara alone is 4600 years old and I didn’t feel like hitting him with that, although I knew there would be a Biblical explanation.

As we neared the hotel, I saw an opportunity to extract myself from the conversation and I took it. Our customer visits had been productive, and I wanted to leave the trip on a positive note. We managed to briefly cover a few work subjects for 10 or 15 minutes and he dropped me back at my hotel.

I drove back to Philadelphia the next day and had a few uninterrupted hours in the car to think and I spent some time pondering the trip. My mind turned over all of the customer visits. I recalled the first meeting with Stan and considered the territory and how I could help them develop it. I was formulating a plan to grow the region and motivate the team. I knew that they would be a little bit of a challenge, but I welcomed the opportunity.

As I thought more deeply about the visit, my mind kept returning to my time with Brian and Jerry. I had a slightly unsettled feeling about it but I couldn’t put my finger on why. They were nice enough people and our time together was mostly productive. But something was unnerving to me. They were so different from me and held beliefs completely counter to my own. That’s not to say that I disliked them. I just didn’t understand them.

I considered Brian and his fervor over a pyramid scheme and Jerry’s fanatical pursuit of religion and neither sat well with me. I wondered to myself, how could they not see? I couldn’t resolve their points of view in my mind and it was troubling. I found myself arguing the counterpoints in my head.

Until that time, my life experience had been slightly circumscribed, at least with respect to the people I had met. I had traveled some, met different kinds of people in college, and worked with a few characters in my first job. People always have differing religious and political beliefs anyway so that wasn’t unsettling on its own. I just couldn’t remember meeting two people like Brian and Jerry who were so distinctive and unlike me. It wasn’t simply a matter of a different opinion or point of view. I was very different from them. My exposure had largely been to people like me or like my family and I had never met people like them who were so absorbed by things that I considered spurious. I continued arguing with myself and eventually the passion and conviction of youth took over and