The Fool Knew
A midsummer dispatch on love, loss, and the book I’m afraid to write
We’re a third of the way through summer and I have yet to publish the first chapter of Sahara Dust.
A lot has happened. Thumb Out is finished — truly finished, after years of revision and restructuring and one more pass and one more pass after that. I came close to recording the entire book on camera for YouTube. Bought a teleprompter. Set up the shot. Then got distracted by the gear itself, a month went by, and the compulsion evaporated. That’s a pattern I’m starting to recognize. A pattern that runs through my whole life, actually, and straight through the center of the book I’m about to write.
Meanwhile, something shifted. I stopped caring whether the world notices this work. That sounds like defeat, but it isn’t. It’s clarity. I know how much I’ve gotten out of the writing process. I also know how little has come back from the outside. There’s a founding subscriber in Ohio who gets it. There’s a friend in Antigua, who read my piece about our dog Izzy dying and told me she was reduced to sobs. And there’s something inside me that keeps pushing, keeps saying the next book has to be written, regardless.
I’ve also been drifting. Away from politics, away from the daily outrage cycle, toward the things that have always mattered to me when I’m honest with myself — photography, music, spirituality, writing. The noise is still there, but I’m turning down the volume. Not because the world got better. Because I’m running out of time and I want to spend what’s left on work that lasts.
I’m 74 and a half years old. That’s not a complaint, it’s a fact. The clock is ticking. I can hear it now in ways I couldn’t at 50 or even 65. My energy isn’t what it was. Some days I’m taking two naps. The heat and the humidity and the allergies flatten me. Some mornings I sit down and the thought of beginning anything at all feels like trying to push a boulder uphill. But I’ve also come to understand that this might be exactly the right condition for writing this particular book. Because this book requires a narrator who is none of the things I used to be — young, fast, bulletproof, aloof. It requires a man at the other end of all that, looking back with clear eyes and a broken heart, telling you what happened and what it cost.
The book is Sahara Dust. Book Two of The Spaces Between. It covers 1980 to 1987 — the Antigua years. The windsurfing school. The Caribbean. The most vivid, exciting, complicated chapter of my life. And the woman at the center of all of it, Thea Ramsey, who always said the same thing whenever something outrageous or beautiful or terrible happened: “That’s one for the book.”
I know this book by heart. I know the beginning, the middle, and the end. I know what it meant and what it cost. I was in the prime of my life, on the greatest adventure of my life, with the most extraordinary person I’ve ever known. Everything was bright and loud and epic. And it was also tragic, inevitable, and obvious to everyone but me. Thea was living on borrowed time, and I was chasing wind.
That’s why the book is harder than the first one. Thumb Out was a road book. People came and went. I could describe the ride, the driver, the landscape, and move on before anyone got too close. The road gave me permission to stay on the surface of myself while going deep on everything around me.
Antigua won’t let me do that. I stayed for seven years. I stayed with Thea. I stayed on a small island where everyone knew everyone and nobody rotated out after a chapter. This time I have to be on the page — not just the adventure, but the man inside it. The aloofness. The self-deceptions. The things I couldn’t face while I was living them. The patterns and weaknesses I can only name now because I’ve had forty years and a lot of silence to sit with them.
My wife Veronica read Thumb Out and asked, “Where’s André?” She was right. He was mostly a silhouette.
So that’s what Book Two demands. The interior. And I’ll be honest with you — I’m afraid and embarrassed. Not about the external stuff, the people who might object to seeing themselves in these pages. I’ve thought that through. What scares me is sitting inside both the peak and the crash long enough to get it right. Showing you the guy who couldn’t see what was in front of him. Whose greatest adventure was also his greatest failure.
But my deepest intention isn’t confession. It’s tribute. I want to honor Thea. Celebrate what we built together on that island, however briefly, however doomed. And through that story, try to distill something true about what it means to be a human being — to love and to lose, to win and to fail, to have everything and not know it until it’s gone.
The sun is shining. The clock is running. It’s time to make hay.
When chapters of Sahara Dust start to drop, subscribers will receive them right in their inbox. No schedule. No promises. Just the work, when it’s ready.
“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now
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