As they make their way down the Pacific coast of the great country, each stop into port represents a sampling of Indian/indigenous life almost unspoiled by the sullying hand of European culture. Revealing indeed is this portrait of a Mexico largely unsettled and a nation only in name. It is of special interest to Southern Californians of the surfing variety for its early chapters dealing with the Baja California peninsula, which today (and thanks to its ruggedness and inhospitality) remains a kind of last frontier for those seeking raw territory to discover and roam. The sojourn took three years and it is a tale most engrossing, especially for those who hunger to know of an earlier world before crowding, pollution, modernization, and the mass endangerment of nature’s many species of plants and animals. Having little to lose, they set out from San Diego in a canoe/sailboat of their own engineering, for the Panama Canal. Friends from childhood in then-agricultural Orange County (Southern California) Ginger and Dana had dreams of adventure. “Enchanted Vagabonds,” a 414-page opus of dense reading and no plot to speak of, involves a journey made by Lamb and his wife Ginger in the thick of the great depression. These are books that have fallen from mass distribution with the passing of time, but which the publishers feel “remain of global interest and importance.' “Enchanted Vagabonds” written by Dana Lamb is published by the Long Riders’ Guild Press, which has dedicated itself to reproducing books from something called the Equestrian Travel Classics.

Enchanted Vagabonds by Dana Lamb