Roads From the Ashes. Megan Edwards

      Foreword to the 20th Anniversary Edition

      What a difference twenty years makes. When an intuitive, resourceful, creative couple lost everything in a fire, they didn’t wallow. They hit the road. Along the way, a literal journey became a metaphorical journey. They found freedom devoid of material items. They found themselves. Their motorhome became their chariot and the then-new Internet became their connection to finding their future.

      Today, twenty years later, I think Megan Edwards’ on-the-road memoir resonates just as powerfully, if not more so than it did when first released. The technological world has changed so much that we marvel even more at how she and her husband Mark managed to utilize new technology in the old world. In that respect, it’s nostalgic to look back at what the world was like that, but it also helps us make sense of how far we’ve come.

      While the world may be different now, some things never change, like the survival trigger when faced with catastrophic loss. These are brave, practical people, and it took more than a devastating fire to stop them. Megan’s engaging storytelling is powerful not just from the humor and honesty, but from the vivid details that bring this journey to life. The coast-to-coast trek is what many will do for a vacation, but this time it’s about survival, rebirth, and renewal.

      But it’s also a travelogue and like any good travel tome, this one places you right in the front seat, squeezed between the two of them as you visit majestic places far and wide, ocean to desert to forest to the Big Apple. As the world becomes aware of them and the media start taking notice, we are there as their lives change.

      The timelessness of a book like Roads from the Ashes is obvious from page to page, because the challenges and hurdles encountered have a universality to them. I’ve no doubt that in the next twenty years, regardless of how technology may morph at some light-speed pace, this book will remain relatable and relevant. In the end, as Edwards clearly understands, it’s not about technology, it’s about the characters and conflicts. That said, she gives technology its own personality throughout this adventure, because that is how they experienced it.

      I’m glad I took the journey with them years ago. I’m even happier I took it again, now, twenty years wiser, and more in tune with beauty of her many on-the-road revelations.

      Chris Epting

      Author of James Dean Died Here, Roadside Baseball, and so many more books that have inspired untold numbers of road trips

      Introduction to the 20th Anniversary Edition

      As I write this, twenty-five years have passed since an early morning firestorm roared across the hills above Pasadena, California, and left a smoldering swath where hundreds of houses had stood. It’s difficult to believe it’s been a quarter of a century since I stood in the rubble of my former home and gazed out over the valley below from a spot that didn’t have a view the day before. Two dozen trees had gone up in smoke, and in their place was an unobstructed vista over Los Angeles and all the way out to Catalina Island. The winds had carried all the smoke east, leaving no evidence in the air of all the fire had destroyed. It was a crystal clear view, a view long enough to reveal the curve of the earth.

      I wish I could say that my own vision was as clear and as long as the view that day from our smoldering citadel. I know it felt that way at the time. Perhaps the promise of freedom always feels that way. It’s what makes horizons so appealing, and open roads so alluring. They stretch perfectly into the distance, uncluttered by the mundane and unblemished by mishap. On a road untraveled, nothing shows except adventure and independence.

      Hitting the road was the only idea that occurred to me that day. I was immediately convinced that there would never be a better time, and that if I didn’t seize the moment while it was fresh, my feet would soon sprout new roots, and my “stuffless” status would rapidly disappear in new accumulations of humdrum possessions. I had nothing left to lose, and it would be a fleeting gift if I didn’t accept it on the spot.

      That day was October 28, 1993. Bill Clinton was winding up his first year as president, and people were still talking about the amazing effects in the first Jurassic Park movie. I remember those things well. What I did not know was that 1993 was the year that Mosaic, the first real Web browser, was released. For that matter, I didn’t know what the Web was, and “browser” was still just another word for window shopper. Some people were using email, and just as many were hoping they’d never have to. We all knew change was in the air, but few of us realized we were already in a state of revolution. While I had no idea that a virtual firestorm was gaining strength the day a real fire burned my house down, I look back and marvel at the synchronicity. The fire that tore through the hills above Pasadena in October, 1993, just happened to wreak its havoc when the virtual world was igniting, too.

      While I was on the road, I enjoyed reading books by and about travelers. Kerouac’s On the Road led the list, but also at the top was Mark Twain’s Roughing It. In his descriptions of traveling in the Wild West in the years after the Gold Rush, Twain captured the energy and entrepreneurialism that defined that other era of discovery and rapid change. I found it to be the perfect analogy for the vortex I found myself in as I traveled in the 1990s. No chapter illustrated this more perfectly than Twain’s account of riding