Afterword

Where Are We Now?

Tiburon, California

September 14, 2011

It’s hard to believe that a decade has flown by since Travelers’ Tales published the paperback version of One Year Off; twelve years since Simon & Schuster published the hardcover version; fourteen years since we returned from our trip; fifteen years since we sold our house, cars, and possessions and precipitously took off on a year-long journey around the world.

When we left home, back in 1996, Kara was a bright, shy, inquisitive eight-year-old. Now she’s twenty-three with a philosophy degree from Berkeley and an artistic, hipster bent. Soon she will be leaving for New York City and a prospective career in copywriting. She had to delay her departure for the Big Apple because her very low-budget feature-length film, MLK, Jr. Blvd., was selected for the San Francisco Latino Film Festival. (Go figure!) Kara co-produced and directed, and the premiere is next week. We couldn’t be prouder.

Willie, who rebranded himself as “Will” during high school, graduated in June from Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California. We first took Will to see Cal Poly in 1996, when we drove down the California coast during the very first week of our round-the-world journey. At the time, when he was only seven, I told him that Cal Poly might someday be a good college for a technically-minded little chap such as himself. Turns out, it was. He walked out of his graduation ceremony with an employment agreement in hand—as an information systems analyst for a large business consultancy. But before he settled down to the nine-to-five, he asked his new employer if he could take three months off to wander around Europe. His employer agreed, and Will just spent the summer wending his way solo through France, Italy, Germany, Denmark, England, Scotland, and Ireland. You may remember that during our yearlong trip around the world, Will broke his ankle jumping down a staircase in Sydney. Near the end of his recent European tour, he dislocated his shoulder falling down a wet staircase on a ferry from Ireland to France. He’s fine now, but I guess some things never change.

Lucas is a senior in high school and is currently suffering through the college admissions process. He is smart and articulate—a calm, self-possessed kid, very comfortable in his own skin. We wonder whether this is due to the fact that we threw him into a revolving hodge-podge of worldwide cultures at the tender age of two … or whether he was just born that way. There’s really no way to tell. Kara and Will were nine and eight, respectively, by the end of the trip, but Lucas was only three. He remembers virtually nothing about his round-the-world journey—but it may have helped shape him even more than his siblings. Like Kara and Will, Lucas is a relaxed and intrepid traveler.

As I wrote in One Year Off, Betty, our nanny, left us shortly after we arrived in Sydney—a little more than halfway through the trip. Shortly thereafter she became an American citizen and a few years later gave birth to a son whom she named David (pronounced “Da-veed”). Then she had another son named Eric. Betty moved to San Antonio, Texas, to be near Eric’s father, so we don’t see her very often. But she did come to the Bay Area a few months ago and had dinner with Devi, the kids, and me. She was amazed at how grown up the kids were.

The very last words I wrote in One Year Off, twelve years ago, were: “Of course if you do manage to spend twenty-four hours a day with your spouse for a year and live to tell the tale, then I think you can assume that your marriage is on very solid ground.” I regret to report that I was wrong about that. In 2003—six years after we returned from the journey and almost exactly seventeen years to the day after we married—Devi and I divorced.

Was the trip responsible for this unfortunate outcome? I don’t know. Maybe, indirectly. When I returned from our journey, I did not feel particularly ambitious. I worked, of course—in the long run, I couldn’t afford not to—but not in the same high-profile capacity as before. If you peruse the list of twenty-seven books I published over the course of my career set forth at the beginning of this book you will notice a rather large gap between 1995 and 2002. In fact, my only book published during that entire seven-year period was One Year Off.

Why the lack of production? First of all, the whole One Year Off process took a really long time. Half a year to plan, a year for the trip itself, another year to write the book and promote it. But more importantly, I enjoyed the time I spent with my children on the road so much that I didn’t want that aspect of the trip to end. When I settled back into “real life,” I found a job as an artist’s representative (a very successful, very commercial artist) that paid me well enough but didn’t require much in the way of work—maybe four hours a day. I know that sounds like a dream come true, and in many ways it was. I was always home when the children returned from school. I went to every softball and basketball game, every recital and school play. In fact, my office was directly across the street from their school. But to my wife—and this is my interpretation, not hers—I was no longer that dashing young guy who traveled to exotic countries and pulled off large-scale projects. I wasn’t on The Today Show and Good Morning America anymore. I was a bit older, a bit fatter, and not as dynamic as I once was, and frankly, that’s not so attractive to some wives.

Devi may also have thought that it was finally her time to shine. The kids were older, and I seemed to be handling more of the childrearing than most husbands. So as I became more family-oriented, Devi became less so. She devoted more and more of her time and attention to her avocation: off-road triathlons. As I mentioned in the closing pages of One Year Off, Devi worked obsessively at this pursuit. She participated in races all over the country, in fact, all over the world, and from my point of view, she seemed to think about little else. Without revealing too much gory detail, relations broke down irretrievably and we parted ways. A “failed marriage” is called that for a reason, and while I mourn the failure of my marriage, I regret far more the pain I caused my children—particularly Kara. The divorce’s effect on them is, and likely will remain, the greatest regret of my life.

In the first chapter of this book, I wrote humorously (or so I thought) about eight-year-old Kara dramatically brandishing a newspaper at the breakfast table headlined, “Local Girl Mauled by Hyena.” A true story, of course, intended to illustrate Kara’s fears about our upcoming adventure. But unfortunately, when Devi and I divorced, our “mediator” turned out to be the mother of that mauled girl—a point she made clearly and at uncomfortable length at the outset of our mediation. (I withdrew from the process after the first session.)

That was, of course, awkward, and it points out an occupational hazard of memoir writing. Editors and publishers want you to tell all—as humorously or as dramatically as possible.³⁸ But the subjects of your “true story,” are sometimes hurt in the process. As I reread One Year Off in preparation for this ebook edition, I regret some of my “humorous characterizations”—particularly one or two where the subject has since passed away. Fortunately, my children—the likeliest candidates for this sort of mortification at the hands of their father—don’t really mind how they were characterized. They all read One Year Off as teenagers, and they seemed to enjoy the book immensely.

So, where are we now? The kids, at this point at least, are happy and successful, and all three are avid international travelers. Devi is now the director of a small nonprofit foundation and to date has not remarried.

And me? Well, after my fallow period—once the kids got a bit older—I returned to my Day in the Life roots and rusty as I was, managed to pull off a fairly massive project that put one hundred photographers all over Africa on a single day. The result, A Day in the Life of Africa, benefitted AIDS education in South Africa. Then, in 2003, I reunited with my old business partner, Rick Smolan, and together we created America 24/7—a New York Times bestseller (thanks, Oprah)—followed by fifty 24/7 state books (New York 24/7, Utah 24/7, etc.) that didn’t sell nearly as well. Still, the America 24/7 series remains one of the largest publishing projects in history and it was gratifying to have a New York Times bestseller after more than a decade when none of my titles graced that list.

After that, I spent eighteen months and entirely too much money on a book entitled What Matters—a passion project I concocted about the social power of photojournalism. (Relatively few people bought the book, but it received excellent reviews, and I’m still proud of it.) Now I find myself, almost by accident, creating a long series of photo-biographies (Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, the Bush and Clinton dynasties) and event books (Obama’s inauguration, William and Catherine’s royal wedding) for Sterling, the in-house publishing division of Barnes & Noble. Though not terribly challenging, I enjoy the work, particularly the historical research.

I am very happily remarried—for five years now—to a very private woman with two wonderful daughters, currently twelve and fourteen, that I am raising, or at least helping to raise, as my own. Kara, Will, Lucas, Angela, and Grace get along so well that in most family disagreements it usually comes down to the five of them firmly united against us.

About a year ago, I thought it might be a good idea to take Angela and Grace, and maybe Lucas, since he doesn’t remember the first trip, on a summer-long “Magical History Tour,” where we would trace the history of Western Civilization from Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge through Egypt and the Levant, then Greece, Rome, Turkey, Western Europe, the U.S. East Coast, along the Oregon Trail, and back to San Francisco. But, as usual, life’s vagaries interceded, and I couldn’t reconcile all of our schedules. That emphasized to me how unusual our One Year Off trip actually was, how lucky we were that all the cosmic tumblers fell into place when they did, and how unlikely that anything like it will ever be repeated in my lifetime.

So if you find yourself with both the inclination and the opportunity to take a very long family journey, I’d say grab it when you can. That golden moment may only roll around once in your life. Over the last twelve years, more than three hundred families have emailed me (davidelliotcohen@gmail.com), saying that they took—or would soon take—a One Year Off–type trip. And that’s just the folks who bothered to write. Adventures are perilous by definition, but twelve years later, even with everything that has happened since, we are all still very happy that we took this family journey. It was once-in-a-lifetime event that I will always remember and value. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

³⁸ I often tell the story of a well-respected New York editor who advised me during my One Year Off pitch that a nervous breakdown on my part would enhance the story—likely the only occupation where an on-the-job breakdown might be considered a good thing.