The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [4]
I mused over the details on extended lunch breaks that summer, sitting on the lawns beneath the glistening central dome of MIT. With my route already roughly mapped, I turned to temporal questions: when to go, and for how long. I’d first envisioned an odyssey of six months, but that’d be pricey and exhausting—three months would do fine. I could hold on to my apartment while I was gone and tailor the route to the seasons. I had a horrific vision of driving through the northern states fighting blizzards and treacherous ice the whole way. I also wouldn’t want to head through the South and Southwest anytime after April, lest I and my car melt into a blasphemous puddle of man-machine on the highway. Come March, I’d head south and then west. By April 1, I’d hit the bottom of the West Coast and work my way up. Late April through May would carry me homeward, east through the northern states.
In August I made the strategic purchases of a laptop and a GPS. The former would help me to keep in touch with those back home and assure them on a regular basis that I had not been garroted by a disagreeable shopkeeper. The latter would compensate for my dismal sense of direction. They would be my constant electronic companions, boons of our dawning technological age. Yet, what about companions of the actual human variety? Would Frodo ever have reached the heart of Mordor without the devoted companionship of Sam? Where would White be without Strunk? I needed somebody to stride with me into stores or restaurants or municipal buildings, our two pairs of eyes simultaneously scanning the walls and aisles for rank lexical foes. Someone to cause a diversion in front while I snuck around back, someone to mop the dew from my dampened brow as I raised my marker for the glory of all humankind. Someone who could take the wheel once in a while, and pay for half of the hotel rooms.
It was time to go public with my intentions. I hoped my trip idea had grown a sufficiently leathery shell.
To recruit allies, I’d have to somehow thwart the considerable barricades thrown up by practical, responsible life. Most of my friends were gainfully employed and thus not likely to accompany me on the road for a dozen weeks. I could try for a rotating lineup of roadmates, but taking off work for even a third or a quarter of that time would be out of the question for normal folks. The standard clauses of the American dream only included two weeks of vacation a year. Still, I knew at least one person who would risk it all for a stab at true adventure and righteous action.
“Dude!” Benjamin hollered into the phone without preamble. “I’m so done.”
“Hi?”
“That’s it; I’ve had enough. I’m quitting my job.”
Benjamin D. Herson had skipped our reunion, but I already knew what he’d been up to the last five years. Back in D.C., we’d been roommates, holding down jobs while we co-wrote an epic novel about two ordinary guys beating up evil frat boys. He would come home from his night shift at the bookstore as I was heading off to edit Rocks & Minerals, and slip me the day’s bus transfer, which I would dutifully return that evening before he left the apartment for more overnight shelving. My only regret about moving back to New England had been leaving my old friend behind.
“You’re leaving the bookstore?” This shocked me to the core. When asked once why, if he loved