LETTERS TO ZERKY

A buoyant, bittersweet and often plaintively gorgeous travel memoir by Raney, writer and founder of the famous Nickelodeon Theatre in Santa Cruz, Calif.

Raney’s debut book follows the arc of a yearlong expedition around the world, launched in 1967, at the height of “the summer of love in a summer of death.” In San Francisco, where the author lived with his wife JoAnne, hippies and beatniks flooded the streets, and new reports arrived every day from the bloody conflict in Vietnam. The couple decided to decamp for Europe, where the dollar was strong and the possibilities seemed endless. Along for the ride is Tarzan, a fiery dachshund, and a baby boy named Eric Xerxes Raney, known as Zerky. For a while, this quirky little family made its way across the Continent, camping in open fields, cavorting on beaches and scrambling through the Swiss Alps. The narrative is built on letters Raney wrote to Zerky–who would presumably be too young to remember the breadth of these adventures–and diary entries by JoAnne, a fastidious chronicler of the far-flung. “That there might be a world beyond Europe, a world you could drive to, was something that never occurred to us until six months later,” the author remembers, near the beginning of the book. Soon enough, the Raneys caterwauled through Turkey, Pakistan, India and Iran–a journey that would prove difficult, if not impossible, to duplicate in these pitched political times. In Kabul, Afghanistan, they vividly pick their “way through random passageways and alleyways that were left between buildings at the time of their construction.” In Eastern Turkey, they face down a gaggle of armed and angry soldiers. The adventure quotient here is high, but the main ballast of the book is emotional. Shortly after returning from the expedition, JoAnne, pregnant with her second child, died of an aneurism, and within a year, Zerky was killed while playing near his family’s home. The book remains as a testament to the power of the human spirit–to wander, endure and remember.

A chronicle of travels through a bygone world.