A Book is a Tender Traveling Companion

A Book is a Tender Traveling Companion
by Danny Heitman

On a recent drive to Dallas for a two-day stay, I realized that in my rush to get on my way, I’d neglected to pack anything to read.

Flustered at the oversight, I slapped the steering wheel and immediately thought of Ronald Regan, who aptly identified the dilemma I now faced.

“They joy of reading has always been with me,” the president once remarked. “Indeed, I can’t think of greater torture than being isolated in a guest room or a hotel room without something to read.” Regan began his political ascendancy traveling the country as a motivational speaker for General Electric, so he likely knew a thing or two about loneliness on the road, along with the small comforts that keep you grounded.

Books—for Regan, for me and countless other readers—have been just such an antidote to the solitude sometimes imposed by travel. I still remember, after a cold, rainy day touring Seattle, returning to my hotel room and opening a volume of novelist R. K. Narayan’s collected journalism, feeling a familiar presence, extending its hand in friendship. On a gray winter Saturday in a largely empty hotel in Shreveport, La., I fetched Willard Spiegelman’s “Seven Pleasures” from my suitcase, his lively survey of human happiness like a hearth I could warm my hands around.

But reaching Dallas late in the evening after a daylong drive from Baton Rouge, La., I confronted Regan’s greatest fear: being a bookless traveler. There was a Gideon Bible in my assigned room, along with a copy of motel magnate Conrad Hilton’s corporate memoir, “Be My Guest.” Both books had their virtues, but they weren’t my books, the ones I might have carried from my nightstand back home to feel a little less displaced in a distant city.

A world of reading material was a few taps away on my smartphone, but that wasn’t what I was after, either. What I want when I travel is a traditional book to help me nod off, its open pages a form of embrace before bedtime.

I resigned myself to falling asleep with the television. Then, unpacking the last of the luggage from the SUV, I noticed a forgotten copy of “More Scenes from the Rural Life,” Verlyn Klinkenborg’s winning assortment of essays about his upstate New York farm, near the wheel well. That well-worn volume became my literary lifeboat, saving me from a bookless night in a hotel room.

Somewhere, I suspect, the Gipper was smiling.

Mr. Heitman, a columnist for the Advocate newspaper in Louisiana, is the author of “A Summer of Birds: John Hames Audubon at Oakley House.”

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