The Glimpse Traveler

Book excerpt: A stunning, poetic memoir “that will transport readers to a time when a nation’s youth searched for meaning against the backdrop of the Vietnam War” (Publishers Weekly). When she joins a pair of hitchhikers on a trip to California, a young Midwestern woman embarks on a journey of memory, beauty, and realization. This true story, set in 1971, recounts a fateful, nine-day trip into the American counterculture that begins on a whim and quickly becomes a mission to unravel a tragic mystery. The narrator’s path leads her to Berkeley, San Francisco, Mill Valley, Big Sur, and finally to an abandoned resort motel that has become a down-on-its-luck commune in the desert of southern Colorado. The Glimpse Traveler describes with wry humor and deep feeling what it was like to witness a peculiar and impossibly rich time. “A perceptive, engaging, intimate chronicle of the early 1970s, the road-weary hippie hitchhikers, the anti-war sentiment, the dope-induced haze. Boruch . . . captures this very specific, significant time and place with exquisite clarity and lyric detail and description.” —Dinty Moore, author of Between Panic and Desire