The deep dark secret of my life is that through my support in the 1950’s of a principal known today as a “Right to Life,” I do not have the initials, BS, after my name. Sorry to disappoint you. I perhaps shall die with the stigma of being a high school dropout (Although I did finish high school while in the Air Force in Nebraska and graduated before my class at home.) in support of my personal feelings of a right-to-life for a son born when I was 17. But I am proud that my education has never been short stopped by thinking I already knew everything there was to learn.

I do have a few credentials, thanks to having learned in grade school, to read. These are highly focused credits in various academic institutions as Ealing Art School in London, specializing in Photography, to helping wife-II through a masters degree in education from the University of Victoria, Canada, where I learned enough playing around with a computer studying learning schemas, to have earned myself an “Apple Hero” award for educational programming.

Thanks to knowing how to read—which by definition includes discovering information by comprehending symbols, understanding characters, interpreting the nature of things—I have had a successful career in sharing travel information in LIFE, and Holiday Magazine, etc.; newspaper columns; and as a guest lecturer on cruise ships.

What I have not had the luxury of doing even in my hectic schedule of being semi-retired is spending months being able to study something as simple, or as complex, as a tidepool. How ironic that a noted traveler would actually even be interested in the emotional dramas that are enacted by some of the Earth's oddest animals—in tidepools. What a trip through the mind this recommended experience happens to be. Save some RV fossil fuel by getting a preview here of the velocity of an ocean current, then hit these books while enjoying a predatory smoked mussel.

I know this is an unusual reader’s reward, but these books come through Powells City of Books Bookstore in Portland, Oregon, which itself is a tourist attraction for academics. Our favorite place in Portland Oregon to spend HOURS wandering through the aisles. It is actually as big as some cities and would take a lifetime to explore it all.

Perhaps further down the road, in the British way of, “reading an academic subject for a degree,” I might even qualify for a BS—standing, of course, for— “Beautiful Stories.”

Barry Murray

P.S, If you too want to be sharing your travel experiences of someplace worth the gas to visit in our “preview” format, let us know. And know this, Powells City of Books also has a great selection of digital video manuals.

Click on the appropriate text link below to order your Tidepools resource books.