When I was 16 I read 'Tombs, Travel, and Trouble", by Lawrence
Griswold, and it changed my life forever ...
Griswold and it changed my life forever, Some aspects of the 1929
non-fiction swashbuckler by a Harvard Archaeology professor might
seem familiar, like when he is menaced by a machete weilding bandit,
he suddenly remebers he has a pistol, and shoots him. Harrison Ford
claims he ad-libbed that same scen in "Raiders of The Lost Ark", but I have
a feeling that someone else involved in the making of that movie had
read Lawrence Griswold too, and borrowed liberally.
Later that year I read The Voyage of the Mir-El La, Lorenzo Riccardi
writes and his wife photographs a voyage through the Arabian Seas.
Mirella Riccardi's work called "Vanishing Africa" is still one of my
most favorite. I fell hard for their daughter Amina, and vowed to
become an adventurer like her father to impress her.
And then I discovered the work of sailor and mystic Bernard
Moitessier, namely The Long Way and credit him for another aspect of my
early formation. He abandoned Fame, fortune, and Brigitte Bardot for a
cold, lonely sail to paradise, communed with the sea, and wrote
beautifully about it.
So there you have it, My top 3. A sailor, an adventurer, and an
archaeologist had steered me on to my present lifes course by the time I was 17.
But where is the diver? I Don't remember today if I read something
that made me want to visit the bottom of the sea.
Does anybody out there have a suggestion?