Travels by Michael Crichton Page A

had families they hardly knew, boats they had hardly sailed, and trips they had many times canceled. It seemed their patients took everything in their lives. And not enough came back.
    I had assumed the life of a doctor was, without doubt, devoted to helping people, but practicing physicians weren’t so sure. They saw many patients who apparently had nothing wrong with them. They saw terminal illnesses, which they could not cure. Again and again, they would say, “I’m not so sure I really help people.”
    At first I chalked it up to temporary fatigue, or to fashionable self-doubt. Eventually I began to believe it. They were serious. And a lot of them felt that way.
    * * *
    Of course, I wanted to quit to become something else. I wanted to be a writer.
    This had been my earliest life ambition. It went back almost to the beginning of my ability to read and write at all. When I was nine, my third-grade class was told to write a puppet show. Most of the students wrote brief skits; I wrote a nine-page epic involving so many characters that I had to get my father to retype it for me with multiple carbon copies before it could be performed. My father said he’d never read anything so cliché-ridden in his life (which probably was true); this hurt me and confirmed a pattern of conflict between us that persisted for many years. But my father unquestionably influenced my interest in writing; he was a born storyteller; at bedtime we insisted he tell us stories, which he would illustrate on the spot with little comic-strip drawings until we slowly drifted off to sleep.
    When I was growing up, my father was a journalist and an editor; at the dinner table there was always talk about writing, and correct word use, with frequent pauses to consult Fowler’s
Modern English Usage
when arguments arose. Many of his editorial dicta stayed with me. (“Be careful about ‘obviously.’ If it’s really obvious you don’t need to say it, and if it’s not obvious it’s insulting to say that it is.”)
    My father insisted on clarity and brevity, and he could be a harsh critic. But he was also full of good humor in those days. Journalists hear more jokes than anyone else, and each night he would come home with a new one, often risqué; my mother would say, “Now, John,” as he told it, to the glee of the children.
    My father considered the ability to type a necessary life skill, and all his children learned at an early age; I learned to type when I was twelve. And it is surely no accident that of his four children, three have published books, and the fourth is working on one.
    In any case, I wrote extensively from an early age. It was something I liked to do. I began submitting short stories to magazines when I was thirteen, and I sold a travel article to
The New York Times
when I was fourteen. What happened was that, on a summer trip, my family visited Sunset Crater National Monument, in Arizona. I found this place fascinating, but there was nobody else around that day, and I suspected most tourists bypassed it, not realizing how interesting it really was.
    “Why don’t you write about it?” my mother said.
    “For what?”
    “
The New York Times
publishes travel articles from different people.” My mother was a great clipper of articles.
    “
The New York Times
,” I said. “I’m just a kid.”
    “Nobody needs to know that.”
    I looked at my father.
    “Get all the published information they have at the ranger station,” he said, “and interview the ranger.”
    So my family waited in the hot sun while I interviewed the ranger, trying to think of things to ask him. But I was emboldened by the fact that my parents seemed to think I could do this, even though I was only thirteen.
    Back in the car, driving to the next place, my father said, “How many visitors do they have every year?”
    “I didn’t ask that,” I said.
    “Is it open all year round?”
    “I didn’t ask that, either.”
    “What was the ranger’s