Silent, Upon a Peak In Darien

Currently working through a massive re-read of the 12-volume Swallows and Amazons series. For those not in the know, these are British children's books written in the '30's about two groups of kids who go off camping and sailing by themselves and becomes pirates and explorers and all sorts of good stuff. I finished The Picts and the Martyrs the other day, and am about 3/5 of the way through Coot Club (obviously expressing my inability to read in any particular order at all). You could almost learn how to sail from these books without ever having been in a boat, the detail is that painstaking. I'm glad that reading them at the age of 24 instead of at the age of 11, I still feel the same thrill of adventure. I would be disappointed if I didn't. It's the same thrill I felt even last summer when I was standing barefoot on the sun-warmed benches of a sloop-rigged camp dinghy, pant legs rolled up and face sunburned and hair blown back, splashily bailing brackish green water out of the boat and loving every single grimy second of it. There's something about sails and water and the smell of wet rope that just gets me. Being on the water is an adventure in itself. You can tell Arthur Ransome knew that.

I was obsessed with Swallows and Amazons when I was 10-13. We even drew maps of the land around my house and named everything. We also spent summer nights sleeping in a Native American tipi instead of in our house which had no A/C... sometimes I get the feeling my childhood was a lot cooler than other people's. Not that they thought so at the time; they just thought we were slightly weird. I guess I've always been weird. I think it certainly makes me a more interesting person than someone who grew up in the mall.

Reading these now, I think the part I love most is Arthur Ransome's Author's Note, which reads:

"I have often been asked how I came to write Swallows and Amazons. The answer is that it had its beginning long, long ago when, as children, my brother, my sisters and I spent most of our holidays on a farm at the south end of Coniston... No matter where I was, wandering about the world, I used at night to look for the North Star and, in my mind's eye, could see the beloved skyline of great hills beneath it. Swallows and Amazons grew out of those old memories. I could not help writing it. It almost wrote itself."

If I ever succeed in writing a book, I hope my foreword might look something like that.