RUSH Drummer: 'You Can Never Read The Same Book Twice'

RUSH drummer Neil Peart has posted a lengthy update on his official web site. An excerpt follows:

"Early in the tour, a fan in Florida sent me a hardcover edition of Ernest Hemingway's stories he had purchased at the Hemingway museum in Key West, including a nice laminated bookmark (the giver signed his note, with reference to my comments about Florida in 'Roadshow', 'from one of the 'friendly' Floridians'). Late at night while the bus roared down the interstate, or finally came to rest in a truck stop (I love that moment when the main engine dies into the hum of the generator, and I know my bed is not going to move anymore),I started to read a few of those wonderful stories, fresh again after so many readings. With writing of such depth and craft, it is true that you can never read the same book twice.

"And as so often happens, by accident or design, art and life intersected. After a show in Indianapolis, with a day off before Detroit, Dave parked us in northern Indiana. In the morning Michael and I unloaded the bikes and headed as far north into Michigan as we could get (on the very smallest roads, of course, shunpikin' it old school).

"I had always presumed such Hemingway stories as 'Up in Michigan', 'Three Day Blow', and 'Big Two-Hearted River' were set in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Because I didn't recognize the towns he named from my travels in that area, I thought they were fictionalized. But when Michael and I got to the northern tip of Lake Michigan, up near Mackinaw City, I recognized signs for Hortons Bay, Boyne City, and Charlevoix (where Michael and I spent the night. They pronounce it 'sharlevoy,' not 'sharlevwah,' like we Canadians would) — and realized that this was Hemingway's Michigan.

"The other two books I read this tour were both by Wallace Stegner, bought at the national park visitor center (always great book shopping) at Great Basin National Park, in Nevada, near the Utah border. One was 'The Gathering of Zion', about the Mormon trek from Illinois to the Great Salt Lake (about which more later),and the other was 'Marking the Sparrow's Fall: The Making of the American West'.

"Again, art and life synchronized. I was reading that book at the same time Michael and I were riding the rural routes of the heartland, the corn and soybean country of Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. (After a few thousand miles of that, I said to Michael one day, 'Corn and soybean fields are pretty and everything, but I really don't mind if I never see another one.') Apparently all of those crops are destined for animal feed, which would tend to support a theory I heard recently that the greatest cause of global warming is actually the meat industry."

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