The email came this week, one of those wonderful moments when money drops from the sky. My former agency was writing to tell me that I would soon be receiving a royalty check for Into Africa. I wrote the book in 2001. Published in 2003. It was a sudden cash bonus for words I put on the page before my grown children were teenagers. So long ago that the first season of Survivor hadn't been aired. George W. Bush was barely president. 9/11 actually took place on the day I sat down to write the first chapter. I left my office to get a glass of water and the Today Show was projecting images of a plane flying into the first tower.
Yes, it's been awhile. Not a single runner on my cross country teams was five years away from being born. The "Tour de France 2005" messengers bag I carry to cross country meets was four years from being divined, let alone purchased at a merch stand on the Breton coast.
But Into Africa earned out — meaning it sold enough copies to pay back the hefty publisher's advance — a few years ago. Every six months someone in Manhattan wires a few bucks into my account, joining with Farther Than Any Man, the Captain Cook book from a few years earlier that also earned out. If you'd told me back then I would wait a quarter century for royalties I would have been confused. Why bother? But now the checks arrive and I am happy to use this bonus money with a sense of bemused satisfaction.
My heart has never left those two books. Once, a few years back, a prominent museum wanted to do an Into Africa exhibition. I flew to London to meet with curators at the Royal Geographical Society. I am a Fellow of the RGS and assumed they would give me latitude as they produced astonishing artifacts like I had only imagined still existed: the explorer's hats of Stanley and Livingstone, the plumb line Livingstone dangled over the payment edge of Zambezi Falls as it fell more than 100 feet into the pounding spray below. Livingstone's compass borrowed and later returned to the RGS.
I was shown them in a small enclosed room. I knew everything about their importance as I reached out to place my fingertips on these most incredible mementoes.
"Do NOT touch anything," the curator's voice boomed. A moment earlier we'd been friends. But I got it. That's the same reason you have to wear gloves when touching ancient documents in Parliament's archives.
I hold both books dear to my heart. I would have to write them differently now just because exploration isn't seen as swashbuckling anymore. But once you write about a topic, living inside the characters for a year, it means a more emotional connection than just words on the page.
Every six months when these royalties arrive, I recall how hard I worked and how I suffered to get it all just right. Struggled is now sweet. As I sit outside with a book, listening to the gurgle of my fountain whose timer is now fixed, all I can say is thanks for the chance to write those sagas and thanks to all of you who have read them.