I recently stumbled across a letter I’d written in 1984 to a girlfriend who was overseas. What struck me more than the manual typewriter I used or the content of the letter – it was pretty silly in places – was the paper itself, which measured 11 inches wide by almost 2 feet long. I remembered why I had cut it out of a larger sheet at the print shop where I worked: Once I rolled it into the typewriter, a blue Smith Corona, I didn’t want to stop to change paper.
Maybe, at the time, I was mimicking the Beat writer, Jack Kerouac, and the 120-foot roll of paper he used to type his novel “On the Road.” I can picture him hunkered over a typewriter, cigarette burning at the corner of his mouth, jabbing his fingers faster to keep up with all the cool stuff he had to say.
I know what that’s like. Sitting in front of my marvelously simple device, I rarely paused from the moment the first key rose up on its long, thin stem and hit the paper with a satisfying thwack. Even though my stuff never was as cool as Jack’s, we at least shared the same work habit to go full bore until you feel like a squeezed sponge.
Now, having rearranged the previous paragraph six times on my computer, I realize how much I miss those days. The letter to my girlfriend all those years ago was an embarrassing mess, but still it has a freefalling lunacy and drama that I now struggle to capture every time I boot up.
And that’s the problem: I boot up to write stuff. Instead of silence, I listen to the computer humming in a binary language I’ll never completely understand. Or it freezes and I sit there in a frothing panic, wondering if I’ll ever get back all those carefully chiseled words.
Maybe I’m being too nostalgic about the late, great past. Still, it’s such a kick remembering those days of pure, unplugged freedom. I’d cart my typewriter – almost as mobile as a laptop – into the foothills outside Fort Collins and sit under a pine, beating the keys while crows played in the wind. My girlfriend was in the Peace Corps in a small Filipino mountain town, and I’d have her latest letter beside me, handwritten on weightless onion skin, bent and grubby from thousands of miles of travel. She wrote about cultures and people unimaginable to me, and she kept telling me to write back, to write about anything. She needed to hear about all she missed in the States.
So I wrote, throughout the two years she was gone. Perched on a bluff or sitting at home with the typewriter wobbling on a cheap card table, I’d fill long pages describing granite spires I climbed near the Continental Divide, complete with cold water sluicing down chimneys, insanely loose scree, hail storms chasing me out of the mountains.
Even with 2 feet of paper, I was never sure I could fit everything in. I had no idea what the future held with her, but I wanted her to know every detail of the present. She was someone I cared about, someone thousands of miles from home and longing for contact with a once-familiar life.
I doubt I could ever capture that same mood with the instant communication we have today. Those old letters have a tenor and depth not often seen in e-mails. The value of such handcrafted work can be surprising, too. That 120-foot scroll of Kerouac’s, coffee-stained and yellow with age, sold a few years ago for $2.43 million.
My own work, though, is even more valuable. Partly because of the raft of letters I sent, my girlfriend decided to marry me. She figured anybody who could throw lifelines like that across the water was worth keeping around. We’ll celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary next year.
