Three Fingered Press

From the author: fingerprints... is a memoir that began as a series of writing exercises while I was on a bicycle trip in Durango, Colorado, in 1994. During the ensuing years I accumulated over 160,000 words, all in pencil on yellow legal pads, and all of it written in coffeehouses in various parts of the country. My wife Kathleen encouraged me to edit the lot and put the best of the stories into book form. fingerprints... is the result, a mosaic of people and places and events in my life and is a reflection of the relationship I had with my father. Each of the forty-eight chapters is unique and in the telling of them I tried to leave the reader with some universal truths. I hope I have been successful.

From the cover: Snow flurries beyond the window of a Low Country gas station give way to images of an aging schooner motoring south on the Intracoastal Waterway. A dream sets in motion a lifelong search that weaves a path from the islands of the Caribbean to Bermuda and the Azores, from Europe and Newfoundland to Mexico, and from South Florida to Central America to Taiwan. Along the way there are shipwrecks and typhoons, catfish and whales, sunken Spanish treasure, open sewers and Hash House Harriers, and a 1959 Plymouth Fury awash to its tailfins in an outgoing tide. These stories help to form a mosaic of one man's journey toward the horizon and the fingerprints he left behind.

Excerpt from Chapter 37: I was alone that day so I walked through the tunnel and stepped out into the bright sea air in the cove where the iron rings rust away in the salt spray and the old crane stands mute in the shelter of the cliffs. I could hear the wind over the noise of the surf as it whistled along the heights, but it was calm in the cove. I sat on a wide rock shelf and looked out over the kelp that drifted in and out with the rhythm of the surge. The wind shadow trapped the heat even though a high fog lingered over the coast. I leaned back and shut my eyes. I liked being close to the sea again. I didn't mind being alone and I let the sounds and the heavy salt air settle over me. I could have fallen asleep but the images came flooding back and I couldn't stop them...