By Angus Stump

I woke this morning at a 2:38 am. My little travel alarm clock, which has been on my bedside table since the first Roosevelt administration, said this with great confidence. It was an uncivilized hour, but I was wide awake. So I arose, and made my way to the kitchen, where my more modern clocks informed me it was actually a quarter of six. My cat had unplugged my bedside alarm for me.

Time travel again. It’s everywhere. 

I’ve been a time traveler all day, driving around Kansas on two-lane blacktops. The two-lane blacktop in Kansas is a perfect real-world viewfinder for time travel: you’re at rest, sitting stock still in a vehicle, singing along with Little Feat while tearing through the same prairie our forebears struggled to clear a couple of centuries ago. 

After a bit more time travel, that magnificent prairie has somehow morphed into Highway 14 south of Hutchinson, a shining example of the Kansas two-lane blacktop. The beauty of the Kansas two-lane blacktop is how little it cares what year it is.

A bright, clear morning. Perfect for some book drops.

For the uninitiated: The Wandering Book Project is my half-baked, entirely sincere attempt to get copies of my book Turn Left into the hands of people who might actually love it, by bypassing the algorithm entirely and just handing the things to humans. Or leaving them with humans. Or leaving them near humans and hoping for the best. The idea is to build a loose network of people in various cities who feel the book’s energy, give them a small stack of paperbacks, and trust them to deploy those books with some combination of tribal knowledge and questionable judgment. It’s a faith-based initiative with paperback ammunition. It is unlikely to work in any measurable sense. C’est la freakin’ vie.

The plan, such as it is: leave Wichita, run north to Hutchinson, then to Pratt, cut over to Medicine Lodge, then back home. Gemini helped me figure out where the social density lives in towns that are not especially known for their social density. We’ll see how that pans out.

The books are somewhere between agitated and delirious about leaving the nest. I’m not sure I’m in a position to coach them. 

Daybreak Cafe — Hutchinson, Kansas

The Black Crowes sang me into the parking lot of the Daybreak Cafe. I showed up around 8 a.m. to a full dining room — 20, 30 people, two servers, everyone smiling. Including the big tatted dude clearing tables, who was smiling too, but there was a little extra in it. I think maybe it was the self-satisfied grin of an owner who is bussing his own tables at 8 in the morning. I don’t know. 

Single biscuit with gravy, crispy hash browns with one egg over medium. All cooked just right.

My server was Jennifer. I delivered my whole rap: “I want you to help me find a reader for this book.  It’s a funny sci-fi speculative buddy flick heist romance novella about a time-traveling gentleman of leisure and his one-eyed fifth-dimensional smartass handler saving the timeline they busted while pranking some Vikings. The overarching message is accidents matter, so please try to be one. I never know who to give this book to, but you’ve already thought of somebody, haven’t you?”

When I got to that silly, chaotic synopsis, she lit up. Said she loves books and made it plain that she came from a family of English Majors. I told her I’d give her two copies if she’d give one away. I showed her the QR code and told her an Amazon review is better than money, which is true.

She was delighted. She raced back to her workstation and passed the book to the very first person she saw – the other server. She too immediately took the book and started paging through it. They stood there talking. They looked at me. They stood there talking. They looked at me.

Jennifer came back with a Sharpie and asked me to sign it.

All in all: rousing reception at the Daybreak Cafe. Two copies left there. Books 13 and 14 seemed to settle down a little. I get it, though. Rehoming is hard.

Scuttlebutts — Clayworks Midtown Gallery, Hutchinson

Scuttlebutts is a coffee shop inside an art gallery, which is the kind of setup that sounds contrived until you’re standing in it and it’s just obviously right.

The long line was made up of patient, friendly people. I made friends with Peggy and Jerry while waiting. Peggy was slightly skeptical of the stranger talking to her, which is a reasonable position. Jerry was gregarious, took the whole thing on like a champ, was reading the back cover as I walked away.

So that’s book number 15, more or less. I think Peggy was just glad I finally stopped.

Metropolitan Coffee — Hutchinson

I’d actually tried Metropolitan earlier in the day, walked in, saw it was slammed with one guy working, and made an executive decision to come back. When I did, I got in line, and when I reached the counter I asked the same guy who knows your customers best.

He thought about it. I guess it’s me.

So I asked him to come sit down. He did, and he gave me every ounce of his full attention while I stepped through the pitch. I handed him Book 16, which he received reverentially. When I got to the end and asked if he knew who he’d give it to, he said he had a few people in mind. Then he said, actually, this sounds like my kind of thing. Then he darted away. Okay, whatever. 

Moments later he came back with an orange Post-It note. Said since we were trading art, he wanted to turn me on to some of his. His band is called Hearsay, and they just put out a CD. I pressed with that dreaded question all original artists hate: Who do you sound like? He took it like a champ. Maybe Nirvana, he answered. Didn’t even flinch.

He gave explicit permission to be mentioned here, went so far as to request it. So: check out Hearsay. That’s the deal I made.

Brick Road Coffee — Kingman, Kansas

I was on my way to Pratt and pulled over for a needed bio-break and saw a downtown that was, and I will not take this back, cute as a bug with a kitten. 

Emily was my Brick Road barista. She was early college age, full sleeve tats that were waiting for color. I did the thing where I asked if she already knew who she was going to give it to, and of course she did. She always does. They always do.

Emily is an interviewer at heart. I recognize the type. She wanted to know more. Like her tattoos, she needed more color. How many books have you done this with? (You’re holding book #17.) How many will you give away in all? (I guess I don’t know. 100?) That’s great. All around here? (No, I have friends around the country that I will pester for help.) Her curiosity was genuine, and I could tell she was assigning brain cells to the task. I’ll be interested to see what comes of Book 17.

Brick Road teaches me an important lesson here: a busy small-town coffeehouse hauls a ton of social freight. The place was full with people outside and active pockets inside. Mighty impressive for a very small room in a very, very small town.

That’s comfort and genuine social density. Brick Road Coffee had both by the bucketful.

Because these towns are time travelers, too. They survive and endure and change and grow and suffer and succeed and morph and somehow stay exactly the same. Grain bins downtown, no doubt put there for good reason years ago, now share the brick sidewalk with boba tea-serving salons strung up with TikTok-worthy Edison lights. These towns plod serenely at a pace built for hitching posts and mercantiles, though they’re now interspersed with co-working spaces and charging stations. Time does move on, but it remembers how to sit still, too.

The Audible: I had planned to hit Hutchinson, Pratt, Medicine Lodge. Those are small towns, certainly, but larger than the surrounding landscape. Slightly larger blue dots on the map. But this detour through Kingman taught me I was missing some important juice by skipping the smaller blue dots along the route. 

So right there in downtown Kingman, I called an audible. 

I turned left. 

Headed home through Garden Plain and Goddard instead, aiming to pick off the probably-singular social hubs of some much smaller places, hopefully to better effect. It was the right call. This has been a good trip, and I think I have a new sense of how to do this.

Evolution. It’s a thing.

Getaway Lounge — Garden Plain, Kansas

I was walking into a dark bar in the middle of the afternoon, and it took a bit for my eyes to adjust. The vibe wasn’t exactly we’ve been waiting for you, but it wasn’t hostile. It was just a bar being a bar at 2 in the afternoon.

I ate a really fine cheeseburger and fries and on my way out I took a shot with the bearded guy at the bar. He didn’t seem especially interested in talking, but that turned out to be his baseline, not a verdict. He was perfectly fine once I started. He just wasn’t the excitable sort.

I went through the whole pitch. He listened without expression, response or chorus. But when I wound down my spiel, he surprised me:

Huh. I was just thinking I haven’t read a book in a long time.

And then he turned away.

I’m not a hundred percent certain what happened there. But I think it was good. Book 18 might have been the most effective drop of the day for all I know.

Cofellow Coffee — Goddard, Kansas

Didn’t know this place existed until today. Really glad I found it.

Single attendant: Mikayla. Bright-eyed, perky, fully engaged. I told her I was absolutely over-caffeinated from six hours of coffee shops, and she brought me a Pellegrino without judgment and assured me that was a perfectly acceptable thing to order at a coffee house. I appreciated that more than I expected to.

I had a little more room to unpack the pitch here because she actually seemed to want it. It feels really good when my pitch is landing. 

I told her the book is a lot of fun but it’s not for everyone, so if you’re not loving it after a while, hand it off. If you are loving it, please buy a hundred copies and give them to all your friends. That made her giggle.

Very purposefully, she tucked Book 19 away, putting it in a pocket inside her backpack immediately after I handed it over. 

Coda

Six stops and seven books released into the wild. Kingman, Kansas is cute as a bucket of puppies. Jennifer is book people. The bearded guy in Garden Plain hasn’t read a book in a long time. Emily is going places, and Hearsay sounds a little like Nirvana.

Tomorrow the books will be wherever they’ll be, and basketball tournament season will have begun.

That’s the day.