One Year Off: Leaving It All Behind for a Round-the-World Journey with Our Children

Prologue

Some people have resolute ideas about how their lives should unfold. As adolescents or young adults, they set goals and chart courses. When they encounter obstacles, they surmount them and move forward. If they stray from their preordained path, they always find their way back. For better or worse, I’ve never been one of those people. Maybe I’ve never found my true métier. More likely, I just have a short attention span. But whatever it is, life has always seemed far more interesting when there is a healthy element of serendipity involved.

My young adulthood was shaped by this instinct for adventure. An otherwise lackluster career at Yale was punctuated by two unusual summer jobs—one as an assistant to a member of the British Parliament and another as an intern at the American embassy in Freetown, Sierra Leone, West Africa. At the time, I didn’t consider these positions to be great career opportunities. I just thought that listening to constituents’ problems in a dreary Midlands housing project or touring an African bush town were great ways to sample the world.

When I graduated from college, I didn’t have the slightest idea what sort of career I wanted. If someone had handed me an open air ticket along with my diploma, I would have gladly jetted off to Tibet or Timbuktu. But that didn’t happen. Instead I ran into my father, who with the very best intention, gently prodded me into law school. (Even if you don’t become an attorney, it’s great mental training.) So with a vague sense of dread, I trundled off to law school. I still remember sitting in a huge classroom on the first day of school with 150 or so eager novitiates. The dean—a noted contracts scholar—strutted across the stage like a puffed-up peacock and boomed, We’re going to change everything about the way you think!

My first reaction to that was, Not if I can help it, buddy. And, of course, that set the stage for a truly gruesome year, where I proved two theories conclusively: 1) the first year of law school isn’t the preferred venue for contrarian thinking, and 2) you can’t learn torts and civil procedure through osmosis. No one was sorry to see me go.

After that, I served an undistinguished stint as a sales clerk in a Pittsburgh bookstore. I thought it was a great job because I got to spend most of my time browsing the inventory and chatting with customers. But eventually, my parents intervened again and prevailed upon me to try something more ambitious. So I bought a copy of The New York Times and scanned the want ads.¹ The very first notice that caught my eye called for a publicity director at a small Manhattan-based photography-book-publishing house called Aperture. Aperture published work by some of the world’s finest art photographers—giants such as Robert Frank, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Edward Steiglitz, and Minor White. I always admired Aperture’s lavish publications when they turned up at the bookstore, and more importantly, I thought it would be exciting to live in New York for a while. I applied for the position and got it.

Six months later, the talented martinet who ran the place fired me for unconscionable indolence and general insubordination. In retrospect, I’d have to say he was fully justified on both counts. I believe the breaking point came when he spent half an hour expounding his philosophy of life and art to me, and I replied, "But that’s just Plato’s Myth of the Cave repackaged." No one likes a smart-ass, and I quickly found myself living in the middle of Manhattan with no job, no income, no prospects, and roughly four weeks’ savings.

You might think this situation would have humiliated and frightened me. (It certainly would now.) But at the time, I wasn’t all that worried. I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t take full advantage of all the educational opportunities offered at Yale, but I did learn the most important thing they taught there—baseless self-confidence. It’s a lesson that can’t be underestimated. My classmates and I left our graduation ceremony on Yale’s Old Campus fully convinced that we were incapable of anything short of rousing success. In fact, the joke amongst the underachieving set was that if you did manage to graduate from Yale (which is almost a given), you could never become a bum—merely an eccentric. Over time, life’s vicissitudes eventually convinced nearly all of us that we could fail as well as the next guy. But at twenty-three, I was still pretty well inoculated with Ivy League bravado and roundly sure that if I got fired, it was only because the boss was a jerk, and something better would turn up the following week.

In this case, it did. When I had $200 left in my bank account and a $292 rent payment due, I received a call from Guy Cooper—a totally hip British picture editor who lived in Harlem and played the guitar like Mark Knopfler. Guy’s wife, Lela, hailed from my hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania, and I used to date her sister. Anyway, Guy said he was leaving his position at a small, prestigious photo news agency called Contact Press Images in order to become associate picture editor of Newsweek. Guy’s boss—a roguish, charismatic photo-guru named Robert Pledge—told Guy to find his own replacement before he left. So Guy ransacked his Rolodex looking for someone, anyone, vaguely qualified for the job. Fortunately, Cohen is near the beginning of the alphabet.

I hoped that Pledge (everyone called him just Pledge) wouldn’t hold my recent dismissal against me, but he couldn’t have cared less about the blots on my copybook. Pledge worked from the gut, and he figured that we would get along well and I’d work like a campesino if I liked what I was doing. In turn, I saw the blustering, bearded forty-year-old Frenchman as a kindred spirit, and I admired his panache. Pledge worked when he wanted to—which was often all night. He dressed like a slob. He turned down lucrative jobs because he didn’t like the people offering them. And without benefit of any discernible management skills, he commanded a ragtag band of ten highly talented, fiercely loyal photojournalists, who roamed the earth covering stories in the name of truth and justice.

For a twenty-three-year-old kid in search of excitement, Contact Press Images was the best possible place to land. I earned a subsistence wage, but I scarcely noticed because every day was a new adventure and every breaking news story seemed to concern me personally. I loved the little yellow boxes full of slides (we called them transparencies) that were couriered back to New York from Irian Jaya and El Salvador. I loved the adrenaline rush when we landed a scoop or made a magazine deadline by minutes (which, given Pledge’s management style, was fairly routine). And I secretly relished the late night phone calls when Pledge would growl in his throaty, accented English, The Shah of Iran’s been overthrown. Find David Burnett in Manila and get him to Teheran.

Most of all I liked hanging out with Contact’s photojournalists between assignments. They always knew where to find the best Ethiopian restaurant in New York, and they always had the best possible war stories. It was like having a big, slightly dysfunctional family of dashing, larger-than-life older brothers (and one older sister—the great portraitist, Annie Leibovitz). Our office was like a big boys’ clubhouse where the favored traits were muted bravado, savoir-faire, and cynicism.

Once in a while, the photographers even dragged me along when they went on assignment or covered a big celebrity. One of my favorite photographers, Douglas Kirkland—we’re still great friends—always brought me signed Polaroids² of the countless beautiful women he photographed. He convinced various stars and supermodels to write bogus inscriptions to me like, David, you’re the best lover I ever had, Morgan Fairchild or I’d leave Billy [Joel] for you in a minute, Christie [Brinkley]. I posted these ersatz testimonials on a big bulletin board in my apartment kitchen, where they rarely failed to impress my dates.

After I’d been at the agency for about two years, Contact’s youngest member, a gifted photojournalist and prodigiously charming con artist named Rick Smolan, asked me if I wanted to come to Melbourne, Australia, to work on a photo book project. Smolan’s grandiose scheme was to bring one hundred of the world’s best photojournalists to Australia, spread them across the country, and have them all snap pictures—100,000 of them—on a single day. This extravaganza modeled after a Life magazine special issue, published a decade earlier, was supposed to produce a lavish coffee table book entitled A Day in the Life of Australia.

Incredibly, Smolan had convinced a few major corporations to back his scheme, but now he needed some management help to actually pull it off. This turned out to be a massive understatement. After a grueling twenty-hour flight, I discovered that the Day in the Life of Australia project headquarters consisted of a bedroom and dining room in a run-down little house in a marginal Melbourne neighborhood. Smolan and his Australian partner at the time had no budget, no workable accounting system, no filing system, and they were practically broke. They did have a Tandy TRS-80 personal computer—which was pretty high-tech for 1981—but it lost the entire contents of its memory whenever someone switched on the vacuum cleaner—which, from the looks of things, wasn’t often.

Still, the project had a rare can-do spirit, and with Smolan in command, we bluffed, maneuvered, and equivocated our way to success. When Smolan and I arrived in the Western Australian city of Perth with no money for a hotel room, we traded the manager of the local Sheraton one hundred copies of our non-existent book for three weeks’ worth of free lodgings. When thirty-six publishers in Australia, America, and Britain rejected our can’t-miss book idea, Smolan convinced a bank to lend us $250,000 at 21 percent interest. We used the money to print the books ourselves. Then we sold them through newspaper ads.

Fortunately, A Day in the Life of Australia was a rousing success. One hundred top photojournalists from twenty countries all showed up in Sydney. Their photographs were inspired. The book won several awards and eventually became a number one bestseller in Australia. This enabled us to retire our debts—as opposed to going to jail for fraud. But when the dust settled, everyone involved swore up and down that they’d never, ever, do anything remotely similar again. (Our office manager actually ended up in the psych ward of a local hospital for two weeks.)

But a year later—after a brief ill-fated Internet venture with The Washington Post (unfortunately very few people had actually heard of the Internet in 1982)—the state of Hawaii called and offered Smolan and me a free trip to the islands if we would consider doing A Day in the Life of Hawaii. We ended up spending eight idyllic months there, and Smolan invited me to become his full partner in Day in the Life, Inc. From that point forward, our small Day in the Life crew adopted a nomadic lifestyle, traveling from country to country, producing a new book every year. By 1986, we had four fairly successful projects under our belt and were casting about for a fifth. I wanted to go for the brass ring—A Day in the Life of America. Smolan agreed, somewhat reluctantly, and a few months later we announced the project. The day our press release went out, the phone lines in our Denver office lit up like a Christmas tree. At one point, our publicist, Patti Richards, breathlessly announced that she had three major television networks on hold simultaneously.

It only got crazier from there. None of us believed that A Day in the Life of America was the best book we ever produced, but with Ronald Reagan in the White House, the stock market booming, and America feeling its oats, a book celebrating the good ole U.S. of A. was the right product at the right time. All the cosmic tumblers fell into place and A Day in the Life of America became the first coffee table book ever to hit number one on The New York Times bestseller list. It bivouacked there for fifty-six weeks, selling more than 1.4 million copies—one of the bestselling non-fiction books of the decade.

Shortly thereafter, the British publishing house, Collins Publishers, (soon to become HarperCollins) bought Day in the Life, Inc., and Smolan and I became young millionaires (barely) with profiles in The New York Times, pieces on various network news programs, and a feature story in People magazine. (People wanted to photograph us with dollar bills falling out of the sky, but we convinced that was in bad taste—even for the eighties.)

My long-suffering parents were both shocked and vastly relieved that their chronically underachieving son had staged what had to be characterized as a remarkable Prince Hal sort of turnaround. But my mother, upon seeing A Day in the Life of America at the top of the bestseller list, said something strangely prescient: I wonder what happens, she said, when the pinnacle of your career occurs when you’re only thirty-one years old.

As it turned out, her concerns were justified. I wouldn’t say that a huge, early success spoiled my career. But trends come and go, cut-rate competitors move onto your turf, and new corporate parents have a way of institutionalizing even the most entrepreneurial projects.

Smolan reacted by withdrawing to his computer screen and the conference circuit, where he was a remarkably good speaker, and I was left to tend the nuts and bolts of the nouveau regime. Over time, Smolan became increasingly alienated, and I started to feel as if I was doing all the heavy lifting. After a while, our very successful, symbiotic partnership faltered. Smolan left first, and a year later, I followed him out the door, pooh-poohing a generous equity offer to stick around.

As my career unraveled, my home life improved. Back when I was in Tokyo doing A Day in the Life of Japan, I met a beautiful American translator/model/actress named Devyani Kamdar. Devi (pronounced Davey) was a recent Stanford graduate who was using her fluent Japanese to earn enough money to backpack around Asia. Her father was Indian, her mother, Danish-American, and the first time I saw her, I experienced a hormonal frisson. We met at one of our famous Day in the Life group dinners. (We tended to graze in herds.) The bad news was that I got blazing drunk on shochu (Japanese potato vodka) and ended up in the back of a Shinjuku cab singing We Are the World at the top of my lungs. The good news was that one of our young interns, Torin Boyd, noted the chemistry and showed enough initiative to get Devi’s phone number for me. I believe he also offered up some plausible excuses for my boorish behavior.

After a first date at a very elegant Japanese restaurant where they served elaborate little seafood dishes on huge antique imari plates, we became a couple and spent most of our free time together. In fact, we were so compatible that I could often sense, telepathically, when she was nearby. I used to amaze Smolan by saying, Devi’s here, and a few minutes later she’d walk through the door. Unfortunately, Devi was in Tokyo only long enough to assemble her travel fund. But even if she could have stayed longer, I had to rush back to New York for post-production work on A Day in the Life of Japan. We left Tokyo about the same time, and I figured I’d never see her again.

But over the course of the next several months, I started to think about Devi more often, and eventually I decided to track her down. I called her mother in Eugene, Oregon. She didn’t know where Devi was, but she thought maybe she’d might show up in Bali sometime in the near future. I wrote a letter to Devi saying that I was desperately searching for her and addressed it to:

Devyani Kamdar

Post Restante

Denpasar, Bali

Theoretically, the Indonesian postal service would hold this letter and give it to her if she ever showed up asking for mail. I had my doubts about this scheme, but a few weeks later I received a crackly phone call from halfway across the globe. I told Devi to stay put, and I’d meet her in Bali within the week.

Before it was fully developed by the tourist trade, Bali was a magically romantic place to court. Devi and I holed up in a thatched cottage at the old Tanjung Sari Hotel overlooking Sanur Beach. We spent hot days exploring the island and turning brown on the sand. In the cool evenings we lay in bed listening to the exotic gamelan music that wafted through our hut on scented breezes. Eventually, I had to go home, but Devi promised to join me in New York when she finished her Asian tour.

We lived together in Manhattan for several months. Then, one day, Devi decided to take off on a tour of Europe with three of her girlfriends. She was gone only about three weeks, but given her proclivity to wander, I began to worry. The day she returned, I got down on one knee and proposed. We eloped to Hawaii and were married on a thirty-foot sloop off the beach at Waikiki.

Ten months later, our daughter, Kara, was born. Devi hated the freezing New York winters, and neither of us wanted to raise children in Manhattan, so I persuaded our corporate master, HarperCollins, to let us move its new Day in the Life division to San Francisco. Soon after we arrived, our second child, Willie, was born. When Lucas arrived five years later, we were comfortably settled into a big brown-shingled house in leafy, suburban Mill Valley.

By then, I’d more or less left HarperCollins (I was a consultant), but I still produced coffee table books from a small cottage next to our house. The books weren’t big bestsellers like A Day in the Life of America, but business was reasonably good and as long as I kept churning out titles, I could make a pretty good living. Devi paid the company bills and balanced the checkbook each month. She drove the children to their myriad activities, played tennis, and gardened. We had three wonderful children, two Labrador retrievers, a sport-utility vehicle, and a big-screen TV. And that should have been that—a reasonably smooth and successful transition from a wild and adventurous youth to a mature, content adulthood with all the suburban trappings.

Or so I thought. Shortly after my fortieth birthday party—Jefferson Starship played in our backyard—I began to experience the first twinges of spiritual uneasiness. I suppose you could call it a midlife crisis or nostalgia for the swashbuckling days of my youth. Whatever it was, slowly and inexorably, my old spirit of adventure reasserted itself. I quietly began to dislike the big house and the sport-utility vehicle and the coffee-table books I produced. I began to realize that it was pretty stupid to work all the time to make money to buy things we didn’t particularly need or necessarily want. I couldn’t put it into words at the time, but in retrospect, I think I began to mourn the loss of the free spirit that once roamed the world, worked for passion, and ran off to Bali on a moment’s notice.

Of course, I knew I couldn’t turn back the clock, so initially I tried to suppress these seditious sentiments. I said to myself, Grow up. Be sensible. This is a natural process. You get older. You have kids. You settle down and work for a living. Passions dim. People change. Life goes on.

But over the course of several months this very sane, very rational line of argument lost its fizzle, and I realized that I liked the old spirit better. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the only truly sensible thing to do was to embrace the old spirit and strike back out into the world in search of new adventures and fresh experience.

But then came the reality check. I mean how was I going to do this big adventure travel thing when I had a wife, an eight-year-old daughter, seven- and two-year-old sons, a mortgage, and a business to run? I couldn’t just close everything down and yank the kids out of school, could I?

But if I didn’t sell the house and close the business, would I really be cutting the ties? Wouldn’t that just be a long vacation? That wasn’t what I wanted to achieve. What I wanted was a clean break, a blank slate, a new beginning with no preconceived plans, no itinerary, no time limit. Somehow, in this agitated state, I decided that the only way to truly purify our life and reclaim my old spirit of adventure was to sell our house, close the business, liquidate our possessions, and take off around the world for an indeterminate length of time.

Now there was just the small matter of telling my wife of nine years that I wanted to stop working, sell everything we owned, and drag the whole family off on a rambling trip to God knows where for God knows how long. I thought it might be too great a shock to spring this on Devi all at once. So over the course of several weeks, I began to propose increasingly ambitious plans. First, I talked about a long trip to Australia. Then gradually, over time, I added countries to the itinerary.

This tactic turned out to be completely unnecessary, because when I finally worked my way up to the big casino—the part where we got rid of everything and became global vagabonds—Devi listened patiently to what most wives would consider a masterpiece of insanity and essentially said, Yea. That sounds like a pretty good idea.

Initially, I was amazed at her reaction, but then I remembered whom it was I married. Of course this sounded like a good idea to her. I mean why would Devi, the original free spirit, be any more enamored of suburban quotidia than I was? She missed her old life, too. She wanted to roam the world the way she did before we met. And she reminded me that her own formidable mother had taken her—and her three siblings—on a low-budget round-the-world trip when Devi was only six years old.

So I discovered that my wife actually liked this deranged concept. I also discovered that we could pay for the trip with proceeds from the sale of our house and cars, and that we could legally take the kids out of public school and homeschool them on the road. (And, of course the journey would be a great education in its own right.) Interrupting my career wouldn’t be a problem, because at that point I didn’t really care that much about my career anymore, and my work was on a project-by-project basis anyway. So other than a sudden illness in the family, there was only one possible stumbling block: losing our nerve. I mean it’s one thing to dream up a scheme like this and quite another to maintain your resolve. If there was ever a plan that lent itself to chickening out, this was it. I figured the best way around this pitfall was to boldly announce our plan to all our friends and family. That way we’d be too humiliated to call it off. So in December 1995, Devi and I dispatched a holiday e-mail that went like this:

Subject: Ready, Fire, Aim

Dear Friends:

Devi and I are writing to you for three reasons. First of all, we want to wish you a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Hanukkah, and a joyous dewali. (That last one’s for Devi’s Indian relatives.) Secondly, we want to tell you a little bit about the kids and how they’re doing this year. And finally, we want to tell you about a big decision we’ve made.

First the kids: We can’t believe it, but Lucas is nearly two already. He’s now a roly-poly little guy with a husky voice and an infectious laugh. He recently sprouted a riot of curls that make him look like a cross between Lyle Lovett and a