Excerpt: Strange Piece of Paradise
May 3, 2006 — -- Terri Jentz was 19 years old when she embarked on a cross-country bike trip in 1977 with her Yale roommate. Just a few days into their journey, the two women were brutally attacked, in a crime that made national headlines. Both women survived, but recovering from the attack wasn't so easy.
In an attempt to make sense of the attack, Jentz traveled back to the town where it happened 15 years later. She found a community still shell-shocked by those events, and a near consensus about the identity of the perpetrator -- a man still living freely in their midst.
In a new book, "Strange Piece of Paradise," Jentz combines elements of the memoir and the true-crime thriller to chronicle her journey toward understanding that terrible night and its implications.
You can read excerpts from the book below.
Chapter One -- A Dangerous Summer's Night
Poised on that twilight edge between life and death, I felt intimately the part of me that was flesh, and I knew also that I was something more.
I came to that insight early on. I was scarcely twenty.
* * *
IT WAS 1977, a drought year in the American West, the driest year in recorded history, although history in those parts went back only a hundred years.
Back then, all of America was in a drought. The fever dream of the sixties had simmered down and the country had lost its way. The national mood was dispirited, in recovery from shocks and traumas, pinched by stagnation and inflation. Fatalism shadowed sunny American optimism.
Gas prices had never been higher. But I didn't care. I was riding a bike.
America was hardly past its two hundredth birthday as I was nearing my twentieth. Its bicentennial year called for celebrations to restore a sense of the nation's magic and promise. Out of that came a bicycle trail, the BikeCentennial, forged from coast to coast through America's most spectacular countryside. My college roommate and I were riding the trail on our summer vacation. Encouraged by the 1970s culture to strive for self-discovery, we were hoping that the song of the open road would enlarge life's meaning.
In the Cascades of the Northwest, drought conditions were melting the glaciers left from the last ice age. The mountain passes cleared unusually early in the summer of '77 and allowed us to scale the highest pass. On the seventh day of our journey, we rode up through green rain forest.
