Vagabond Memoirs

Vagabond Memoirs combines travel and memoir-the linear, horizontal travels to another geographic space and the vertical one of Karber's coming of age interior life. The book begins with a road trip to his ancestral home in the piney woods of Arkansas, pauses to take account of the world of baby boomers and the Jim Crow South in the '50s, and takes off in the mid-60s with his teenage delinquency and a judge giving him a choice of several months in jail or the army. Having just turned 17 years old, Karber chose the army amidst the Vietnam War and served twenty-one months at a radio reconnaissance post on the Laotian border in northern Thailand. Upon his return to the States and civilian life he chased the gnosis of the '60s into the '70s, dropping in and out of college, deep diving into drugs, and road tripping, busing, training and hitchhiking around the country-Washington D.C., Tampa, Key West, Santa Barbara, Fort Collins, and Red Lodge. In spite of the adage that the army makes men out of boys, Karber resists adulthood, confident that the best part of a man is the boy that lingers within.