Hi there.
My name is Dan Davis, and I live outside of a little town called Suquamish. It's a remote, eclectic place in Washington state; a forested village on the Kitsap Peninsula. It's far removed from the big city, and I don't get out much. I spent 18 years in the same suburban neighborhood on the shores of the San Francisco East bay area. Except for an extended break horsing around on Maui, and living the nomadic lifestyle of a college student in Northern California, it's been a pretty static existence.
I was lucky growing up; the stereotypical family vacations were very much a part of my childhood. We traveled to wonderful places, and I spent countless hours with my kid nose pressed against the side windows of our 1966 Volkswagen Squareback. I think we sold it with my snot marks still smearing those magic glass portholes. I'm lucky for those experiences. They were such a very long time ago however, and I recently realized I needed to get out of town.
Modern air travel gets us where we want to go in extreme comfort and speed. I've been to countless places courtesy of my post-college life as an engineer; spending an awful lot of time traveling from point to point without seeing what was in between. The dots on a map; stick pins indicating past destinations were merely that--destinations. It's hard to get a bead on the land, or its inhabitants from a passenger window at Flight Level 410 on some Jet Route. Like the old story of the blind men trying to describe an elephant, I could describe discreet places; points on a map. I couldn't however, say what the world was like in between. I couldn't say what the elephant really looked like.
This website is a chronicle of a trip I took during the spring of 2003. I bailed out of work for a month and drove. I had no real agenda, and no particular destination. The only requirement I maintained was that I traveled on back roads whenever possible. I wanted to see the smallest towns and meet the people who lived in them. I wanted to stop into country stores and hear the ringing of an old metal bell; not the beep of an electronic eye when I opened the screen door and walked inside. I wanted to talk for a bit with the people behind the worn, wooden counters; to ask them how their day was, and try to understand what color the sky was in their world. The elephant was begging me to see its true form and I wanted to accommodate it.
I filled a backpack with essentials; threw in a sleeping bag, a propane stove, and a GPS moving map. I brought the backpack stuff because I needed them. I brought the GPS because I'm a geek and love toys. I loaded them into the back of my Jeep and closed the tailgate. I shut down my house; unplugged all of my household appliances, the television, the alarm clock, the lights, and locked the front door. I drove down my gravel driveway and didn't look back.
I don't have any real desire to cast my adventures out into the Internet world. I expect that no one really cares. The notion of creating a website has interested me for some time however, and this seemed like a perfect vehicle to make that happen. With that in mind, and having nothing else of substance to send to the website folks, I started bashing away on the keyboard, setting "to paper" my thoughts and experiences on the road. It's meaningless as text and fuzzy pictures, but has value in the exercise. I think it does, anyway.
When I was a little kid, I used to take a transistor radio I'd lifted from my cousin to bed with me at night. I'd hear the voice of the dee-jay and wonder who else was listening. I wondered what would happen if I was the only one listening and decided to shut off the radio. Would the announcer cease to exist? Was I responsible for his/her immediate future? Did I have a responsibility to listen to them and thereby ensure their survival? Those were deep thoughts for a little kid breaking parental law and staying awake past my bedtime courtesy of old man Marconi. This website is an extension of those childhood thoughts. Will I cease to exist if no one ever sees this website? Is someone lying in bed; sheets pulled over their laptop reading this? It's unlikely I'll ever know, but it really doesn't matter. This is my digital message in a bottle, cast out on the Internet sea.
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