Common Sense and Whiskey, the blog, was born less than two years ago to compliment the photo site EarthPhotos.com. From time to time since, we've published stories from the eventual book, also to be titled Common Sense and Whiskey. It's a compilation of short stories about the photos that found their way to EarthPhotos.com.
We're happy to say that finally, we think, Common Sense and Whiskey is only a couple of months away. Here's a mock-up of the cover, which will immortalize a gaucho and his sheep on the very desolate road to the Torres del Paine in Chilean Patagonia. Below is a short bit of the Patagonia story from the book. Watch this blog for the publication date.
The Alps are massive and majestic. The Torres del Paine only reach three thousand something meters versus Mont Blanc’s 4260. But the Alps have been domesticated, everywhere you go, all the way up onto the slopes. Cowbells tinkle so farmers can keep track of their livestock in every prim village.
It’s the vastness around the Torres, the silence. There are no houses, no farms. Land isn’t delineated by perpendiculars. No fences to keep anything in or out. Nothing, except for the snow and the big rocks, and the water and the animals and the silence. That’s just what you’re after when you come to a place like this, but too often you find yourself in the common room with strangers, hearing about Kurt’s blister.
“It’s out to here,” Kurt said several times, showing a distance between his finger and thumb. Each time the wife of Kurt would chirp something like “He’s not very athletic,” the more galling because she clearly never auditioned for Buns of Steel.
There’s always people like that, though, and Kurt was a good enough old guy, running a party of five, some of them sullen kids.
Maps was what Kurt liked and he’d sink his head farther into his maps to ignore his wife. The wife of Kurt liked showing people things. She’d go back to the room (“Wait right here,” she’d command) to get some page that she’d printed off the internet. Or she’d inflict her sack of trail mix on a very dubious little boy.
Each time Kurt would move his face closer to his map and trace lines on it with his finger.
The wife of Kurt had a running disagreement with Kurt over the price of gas, or benzine as they called it here. Kurt had heard they were getting six dollars a litre out of jerrycans back at Posada Serrano and the wife of Kurt wouldn’t hear of it.
She worked herself up to high dudgeon (although high is pretty much the only way dudgeon comes) as she asked the dubious little boy’s father if he knew the price of benzine, and he allowed that he’d got some and it was close to the normal price.
“See Kurt! Six dollars a litre is impossible! I thought six dollars a litre was impossible. Did you hear that Kurt? I told you six dollars a litre was impossible. Kurt, this man says it’s not any six dollars a litre. Kurt thought gas cost six dollars a litre!”
And Kurt pulled the edge of the map nearest his wife nearly to his ear and the little boy’s father, who had a naturally puzzled, disheveled look, tried to find somebody else to talk to.•••••
From Common Sense and Whiskey: Modest Adventures Far from Home, available soon.
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