The Pocketbook Guide to Adventure
By John Luthens
Pocketbook1
Before the pandemic ship arrived and unfurled its black-skulled flag, I never paid any mind to the crowded waters standing between me and outdoor adventure. I just sailed hard and fast out the front door when the sun came up and refused to return to harbor till the golden orb set on the far side of the horizon.
During the onslaught, I was urged like everyone else to bar the doors till the invisible pirates got tired of pillaging the countryside. Instead of feasting on endless horizons and guzzling down acres of sparkling water, I was forced to sip at the boundless world through an ever-tightening straw as the hordes patrolled the exit with cannons booming.
Hunkered down and hiding, staring morosely out the window until my eyes bugged out of my head, I was reduced to sorting through mounds of books that I had been fooling myself for years I would get around to reading. And that’s when it happened. The Pocketbook Guide to Adventure steamed into port and swept me away with the force of a high-caliber hurricane
The pocketbook wasn’t hiding with the other collected junk on my bookshelf. It was much too sly for that. The beast leapt out at me from a dusty drawer in my basement that I had also been lying to myself for years about getting around to cleaning. It was dressed like a gypsy, jangling with blue and green earrings around the edges and its title dancing on the front cover in swashbuckling yellow. Small though it seemed, its cover was boisterously singing out the tune of The Pocket Book of Adventure Stories.
Its publishing date was gray and faded, as if the book preferred to sulk in the shadows rather than reveal its true character, but it seemed to be a collection of short stories by long-departed authors who hearkened back to the days of churning paddlewheels, cracking muskets and billowing sails. It reminded me of a treasure map, its pages breathing with the aged perfume of salted decks and creaking holds.
Where it came from? How the pocketbook ended up in a forgotten drawer in my basement? I was sequestered in my house with ample time to muse it over but could not for the life of me remember it following me home nor conceive a logical answer as to its origin.
Had I but known, it was far too late for questions. The pocket book guide to adventure had washed into my world like a message in a bottle and the miniature genie inside was hell-bent on kidnapping my imagination. As for my safer-at-home days, they were about to be ripped from my sequestered soul faster than I could turn the pages.
Drawing the curtains to the outside world, I flipped to the first story and floated headlong into the islands of the South Pacific with John Russell’s The Fourth Man, a psychotic struggle between a hardened trio of penal-colony inmates and the native guide who’d been hired to sail them to freedom on a topsy-turvy boat that was lashed together with palm trees and coconuts. Sweating beneath the brilliance of the ocean sun, I paddled for freedom right alongside of them.
It was a tale of confinement in the expanses of the sea, exploring the emotional waterspout that rises when plans of escape begin to gush into despair. I swear that I set the book aside like a sea-sick sailor and opened the window for a breath of fresh air, but I could still smell the salt breeze as it slowly dehydrated the convicts’ bodies and drove them to madness. It was easy for me to relate to the sun-faded words. Matter of fact, it was too easy.
Figuring that it had done enough work on my psyche for one day, I folded my pocketbook back in its drawer and went to refrigerator for a cold drink. I tried to write it off as a jittery, home-bound imagination. I tried to pretend that I wasn’t thirsty for more.
It was somewhere around week three of the pirate-induced quarantine. I’d become uncertain of the date, not to mention the day of the week, but I heard the pocketbook chirping from its drawer like a siren’s song and bouncing off the walls of the house. And I was promptly thrown into the most unescapable of prisons for heeding its call.
Walter D. Edmonds Escape from the Mine transported me back in time to the American Revolution, where a 70-foot deep mineshaft held prisoners of war who were shackled and shivering in darkness. Water flooded through shadowed grottos, and a chronic drip from the walls echoed into the recesses of the mind with nonstop, waterboard torture.
I hunkered down with the prisoners around smudge fires in the damp sand with only a sliver of daylight showing through the grate high atop the cavern. When the guards were feeling generous, they tossed down scraps of food. Usually, they just got drunk on rum and fired their muskets down for sport. Musket balls ricocheted endlessly off the damp walls and usually ended up lodged in one of the prisoner’s skulls. The optimists among us decided that it simply meant one less mouth to feed and more food scraps for those of us remaining.
Only two of us made it out, paddling through a bone-chilling labyrinth of dead ends in the flooded section of the mine – no easy feat when 20 pounds of rusted iron are shackled to your hands and the boat that you’re using for an escape craft consists of a rotted board. The final squeeze to freedom was no bigger than the sump-pump cistern in my basement, which I firmly believe my Pocket Book of Adventure would have talked me into wriggling down in real life if my wife hadn’t come downstairs in the nick of time to talk me off of the ledge.
Reality flipped back and forth into fiction as fast as I could turn the pages. I may have been mired in a holding pattern when it came to exploring the world that I had been accustomed to, but the Pocket Book of Adventure Stories smuggled me across borders that were sealed by nothing more than the boundless imagination of storytellers. It was like binge-watching dramas on Netflix. I lost all concept of where the hell I’d been or where I was going next.
Rudyard Kipling’s, The Man Who Would King, had me riding camels, dodging highwaymen, and running rifles across the mountainous deserts of India, where to my surprise I bribed some heathen tribes into thinking that I was a god. The locals eventually got wise to my political charade and cut off my golden crown, along with my head, but I must say it was powerfully intoxicating to be the boss for a few pages.
I got into a financial crisis off the Cuban coast and bobbed around in shark-infested waters waiting to be rescued in Stephen Crane’s, The Open Boat, and I became an essential worker when I was hired to chase through the jungles and savannahs of Africa on the trail of a missionary gone wild in Wilbur Daniel Steele’s, The Man Who Saw through Heaven.
The boat wreck in Cuba was just bad luck, but the missionary screwed up royally when he went and looked at the stars through a telescope before starting his African pilgrimage. I’ve stared up at the heavens on many a night and wondered myself about the philosophy of existence myself, so I can understand how the preacher I was sent to find went a little cuckoo and started riling up the natives by questioning the essence of The Almighty.
I’m not sure what the adventurous, outside world will have in store when I once again sally forth. I imagine the aftermath of the pirate’s viral rampage will cause me to tread with caution for quite some time. For now, I’m content to hide in the weeds of a secret island and remain silent as a mouse. A lunatic is hunting me down to add me to his macabre trophy chamber, and I’m watching a leaf-covered pit with sharpened bamboo in the bottom that I’ve dug in efforts to derail him.
If you don’t know the plot of The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell, I’d strongly urge you to panic-buy every weapon you can find. The nefarious Pocketbook of Adventure Stories is still on the prowl, and if it takes a mind to sail into your own safe harbor and steal you away – don’t say that I didn’t warn you!
John Luthens is a freelance writer and outdoor journalist from Grafton, Wisconsin. The selected stories and authors in his piece are taken from The Pocket Book of Adventure Stories, Copyright 1945, by Pocket Books, INC.