About a week after we returned from Texas, UPS delivered a box to me containing a few hundred postcards. Amanda Castleman, a friend of Ed Henderson’s, had arranged to send them to me. They represented his bequest to me. The last time I saw him, he told me I would get his collection of postcards after he died, and so I have.

The other day I took them out of the box and put them under the noonday sun.
The beads were a lagniappe. Yuriko recognized them at once as beads that a pilgrim would wear to do the 88 temples on Shikoku associated with Kōbō Daishi.

That image wasn’t impressive enough, so I stacked them up, and added a ruler for perspective. About 8 inches of postcards. Some of the bequest cards are blank ones that Ed acquired during his many travels, with their numbers a kind of rough guide to how highly he esteemed a place. A fair number are thus of Alaska and Venice. But there are also cards from (noted here at random) the UK, Norway, Iceland, France, Germany, South Georgia, Hawaii, Yap, Canada, French Polynesia, the Caribbean, Mexico, the Balkans, Turkey, Mali, South Africa, and more. The dude got around.

Then there are the cards other people sent him. Many of them are from me. It’s odd looking at a bit of paper you focused on one, two, or five years ago and then put out of your mind. Or sent more recently. In the box is the last card I sent to him, obtained at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, which pictures Bockscar. On it I wrote, “We already dropped the big one to see what would happen.”

A bit cryptic, unless you know that I was answering an email Ed sent to me on May 1 of this year, which had this subject line: Hmm. The entirety of the message was: “Had a very odd dream last night, most of which is lost, but not you singing randy newman’s political science.” (Ed typically didn’t bother with capitalization in nonprofessional writing.)

Ed also collected hotel and motel postcards. Many of them are in the box, too — some of which I’d sent to him over the years, used or blank, that I’d picked up at resale shops. Increasingly that’s the only place to find hotel or motel cards, since hotels and motels rarely offer them any more, with the recent exception of the Munger Moss Motel in Missouri, which still has cards of itself for a small fee.

All of these add considerably to my agglomeration of postcards, “collection” not being the right word. The blank ones are in drawers and boxes, and those I’ve received over the years (many from Ed) are tucked away in files and other boxes, their value almost entirely sentimental.

How many all together? I don’t know. Might be better not to count.

It’s been about a month since I learned that my old friend Ed Henderson died. In our hurry-up-post-it world, that might seem like a long time to wait to write about him, but the delay is apt. The long-term basis of our friendship was unusual for the late 20th century and especially the early 21st: letters that took days to reach their destinations. Paper letters and postcards, with a smaller component of email beginning only around 2000. Both of us liked to write, and liked receiving mail.

That meant that any correspondence we traded usually involved a delay. A letter detailing last month’s news. A postcard from a trip he took a while ago. Recollections of places I went some time back. Delay was part of the foundation of our friendship, maintained by an easy-going, when-you-get-around-to-it correspondence.

We did get around to it. Back in the 1990s, the pace was maybe a letter once a month for each of us. More recently, as middle age kicked in for me, and Ed’s health declined, we traded fewer letters, but always some. He sent me his last letter in March, and I sent him my last one without realizing it during the first week of June, when (as I found out later) he was very near the end. I don’t know if he ever saw it.

A number of times since I heard about his death, I’ve thought, that’s something I could put in a letter to Ed. Something remarkable seen on the road, some recollection about Japan, some example of mankind’s folly — all persistent themes in our letters, besides notes on what it’s like to be a professional writer, or recommendations about books to read, or music to enjoy, or destinations to consider. He had a lot of those for me; I had some for him. Then I catch myself and realize there will be no more letters to Ed. Such is the finality of death.

If I were half as observant or curious about the world as Ed, I’d be doing well. He’d say the same thing about me — he did so in article more than a decade ago — but he was being modest. He had an extraordinary gift for taking in his surroundings with an eye for detail and a deep appreciation of a place’s natural beauty, or the creatures that call it home, or how it fit into the tapestry of human history. His appetite for the world not only took him many, many places, it sustained him as illness ravaged him — and he continued to go many, many places.

Got a postcard from Ed today, I’d tell my family. Where is he now? Alaska. Germany. Italy. Bora-Bora. Yap. South Africa. Timbuktu.

Not only that, he had a facility with words. So he could translate his experiences into text, the better for the rest of us to glimpse what he saw. As such, he was a noted travel writer, under the professional name Edward Readicker-Henderson, a rare thing indeed, though his career unfolded slowly. He was a student, teacher, bookstore worker, and more before taking up writing full time. Early in his writing career, he and his wife at the time, Lynn, did travel guide books, including one that involved them riding a motorcycle all the way up the Alaska Highway. He never had much good to say about writing guide books, but that sounded like a corker of a trip to me.

Our actual time together was fairly limited over the years. We both had places to go and things to do. Having met because we worked at the same conversation school at the same time in Osaka, we hung out some in Japan in 1990 and ’91, and then he and Lynn left the country. He came back to visit Japan in ’92 and stayed with me a week or so while working on a book about Japanese pilgrimage sites (the concept of pilgrimage was of particular fascination for Ed; so were bears and bees and seeking the quietest place on Earth). Yuriko and I visited Ed and Lynn in ’97 in Phoenix, where they put us up for a few days. After that, I didn’t see Ed again until last August, at his home in the woods near Bellingham, Wash.

I don’t have many pictures of Ed. Here he is during our ’97 visit. The four of us had gone to the Boyce Thompson Arboretum outside Phoenix.

Here’s one of him doing what was clearly one of his favorite things to do: kayaking in Alaska, in this case in Glacier Bay NP, probably sometime in the 2000s.

One more, published years ago at BTST: Ed in Antarctica in 2007, being pecked at by a penguin.

Ed was a good-natured person, and his fate cruel. He was tinged with melancholy, and for good reason. Health is one of the main ways life can be unfair, and Ed was dealt a crappy hand, ultimately dying at 53 after years of misery. Had his health been normal, or at least somewhat better, he could have been with us another 20 or 30 years, wandering the Earth and distilling his experience into his characteristically thoughtful dispatches.

Years ago he told me that the overarching diagnosis was Crohn’s disease, but I never knew whether that was a doctor’s opinion early in his chronic illness later superseded by other diagnoses, or exactly how such a condition would progress. He never mentioned it again. All I knew was that he suffered a series of awful, debilitating conditions. Yet he soldiered on, as perhaps best explained by Ed himself at his TEDx talk in late 2014.

He was fully aware that his time was short. RIP, Ed.