One last blog about my trip out West and then I shut up about it forever:

I had a chance to see some marvelous things. I saw American Stonehenge, a full-size replica of the famous ruins in England, perched high above the Columbia River in Washington State. I saw a pack of Hell’s Angels speed by. I went to a wine tasting in Napa Valley and watched my friends get seduced by the free samples and endless blather. You could spend an entire week at a Motel 6 with what they ended up spending on a few bottles of the stuff.

In North Dakota, I saw the world’s largest cow statue. In Wisconsin, the world’s largest bluegill statue. While in Wisconsin, I made a pilgrimage to the little campground where my father used to take our family forty-five years ago.

The best things I saw were a couple of famous bookstores.

On our way up Route One in California, we were planning on camping for the night in Big Sur. But all of the campgrounds were full. So we continued on to San Francisco. There we visited the City Lights Bookstore, made famous by Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg and the other beats. It was small but very cool. Every book in the place had something to do with leftist politics, avante garde poetry or various alternative lifestyles. I bought a copy of Kerouac’s On the Road. It’s a book I’ve read many times. It has one of my favorite writing quotes in it. Kerouac’s antihero, Dean Moriarity, explodes with excitement at the thought of being a writer: “Man, wow, there’s so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears . . . . “ From there we went to a restaurant in Chinatown where I had to use chopsticks in front of a hundred or so of the locals. The waitress finally brought me a fork.

The next day we drove up to Portland, Oregon. And of course I forced my friends to go to Powell’s.

Powell’s is unbelievable. It’s three stories high. It takes up an entire city block. It sells both new and used books, side-by-side on the same shelves. It was nine o’clock on a Sunday night and the place was packed. Every chair in the huge first-floor coffee house was filled. Powell’s has always listed my books but there weren’t any on the shelves that night. Which was either a good thing or a bad thing. I did see a couple Casey Daniels books, however. Which was either a good thing or a bad thing as well.

Bookselling these days may be dominated by the big chains and Amazon, but to me, independent bookstores like City Lights and Powell’s remain the soul of this crazy “writing business” we’re in. I get all goose-pimply when I go into bookstores like that. Here in the greater Cleveland area we’re down to just a precious few: The Learned Owl in Hudson, The Blue Heron in Peninsula (inside the Cuyahoga Valley National Park), Mac’s Backs in Cleveland Heights, the big Joseph-Beth store on Cleveland’s ritzy east side, and that’s just about it.

So the independents that survive are very special places. The folks who run these shops love books, love the writers who write them, and love the people who read them. And that love always shows the minute you walk in.