Volume One In My Hand
What it took to get here — and why it was worth every twist and turn
The box arrived this morning. I knew what was in it. I’d been waiting for it for weeks — longer than that, really. I’d been waiting for it for fifty three years.
I opened it and there it was. Thumb Out. Volume One of The Spaces Between. 330 pages. Hardcover. As thick as a slab of 5 quarter inch pine. I picked it up and just held it.
That’s the word that came first. Heft. The thing has weight. Real weight. After years of staring at screens — at PDFs and ePubs and cover files and margin settings — here was something I could actually hold in my hand.
What I felt was a sense of accomplishment and finality. Pride in persistence, in effort, in determination finally paying off. And I’ll admit — pride that I opened it to a dozen random pages and didn’t find a single mistake.
Let me try to explain what went into it.
I’m 74. Learning Kindle Direct Publishing’s cover designer. Learning via Claude what recto and verso mean. Learning about gutters and bleeds and leading and why a chapter should always start on a recto page. Watching Claude build Python build scripts to typeset a 330-page interior with the right proportions that suited my style and preferences. Learning ePub structure. Learning all of it, in my seventies, because the book demanded it.
Three years. From the first draft of what was then called Surfing the Interstates to the book I’m holding today. It wasn’t a straight line. The book started as one thing, became another, got published, got unpublished, got expanded, got combined with a companion volume, got rebuilt from the ground up.
Surfing the Interstates turned out to be Act Two of the final book — the road itself, 7,000 miles hitchhiking in the summer of 1973. Then I wrote Boomerang — four chapters of backstory before the road, eight chapters of aftermath after it. Then I realized they weren’t two books. They were one. Thumb Out is the sandwich: Boomerang as the bread, Surfing the Interstates as the meat. Twenty-eight chapters. Three acts. The complete story of a young man in motion — what launched him, what the road gave him, and what it finally cost him to stop.
Now about that cover.
The image is a DALL-E generation, shaped over many iterations with Claude’s help. What I wanted was something that felt like a memory — and somehow we got there.
Look at the compositional line: it runs diagonally from the guitar hanging at the hitchhiker’s side, up through the outstretched thumb, right into the oncoming headlights. Your eye follows that line before you know you’re following it. And off to the left, almost hidden in the warm haze — the old farmhouse, and beside it a weeping willow.
There was a giant weeping willow over a pond in front of our house at Ledge Acres. My mother loved that tree. There’s something bittersweet about a willow that weeps. I didn’t ask for it specifically. It arrived in the image via AI magic and I recognized it immediately.
The road itself carries the quality of Byram Lake Road — the paved road at the foot of the dirt road we lived on — the one I crossed when I stuck out my thumb in the summer of 1973. The mountains in the background blend the Rockies, the Sierras, and the coastal ranges of California, all at once. The whole trip in one frame.
And the colors. That warm golden amber against the deep blue of the sky. The thumb right in the headlights, dead center. I’ve stared at this cover for weeks and it still pleases me every time.
The main thing I feel, holding this book, is a sense of having come full circle.
At twenty-one I stuck out my thumb with eighty borrowed dollars and no plan. Scared but certain that if I just kept moving, something would open up. It did.
At seventy-four I sat down to relive it, wrestle with it, understand it — and discovered I had to learn an entirely new set of skills just to get the book into print. Different road. Same principle. Keep moving. Something will open up. It did.
Even if I never sell a single copy, opening that box this morning was my payoff.
The point was never the destination. The point was the journey. The road teaches you that at twenty-one and you spend the rest of your life remembering it.
Thumb Out (Vol. 1 of The Spaces Between) is available to read in its entirety for paid subscribers ($5 per month) here on Substack (with embedded author readings) — with new chapters from Volume 2, Sahara Dust, dropping as they’re written. Volume 3, Green Mountain Flash, will follow.
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