It's been four years since Gary Paulsen's last book tour, and last month, fans eagerly awaited his arrival at the six stops he made from Maryland to California to promote his new book, How Angel Petersen Got His Name (Random House/Lamb, Jan.). Paulsen spoke about his life to the children who braved torrential rain and a blizzard to see him. Here is his account of the tour.

The lady at the airline ticket counter smiled. Not unkindly.

"Due to a plague of locusts descending on the Eastern seaboard, you have to take a helium balloon from Louisville to Pittsburgh, where you can make connection with an oxen-drawn wagon for the relatively short hop down to Washington D.C...."

So far the tour had gone very well. Starting with a literature festival in Columbus [Ohio] where I had been in a hotel room next to either a four-year-old with a new set of drums or a rap group or a cannon manufacturing plant, the tour had gone from there to Cincinnati and then by car down to Louisville [Ky.] in an absolutely roaring wind and rainstorm. If a writing career is a kind of vehicle, bookstores are the grand engine that makes it run, and the stores had pulled all the stops for this tour.

The crowds had been wonderfully large—-I think in Cincinnati there were over 700 people and in Louisville more than that, and I felt very grateful and was well into my research on the different types of turkey club sandwiches brought to hotel rooms at midnight (the time I usually got back to the room).

After Louisville it was to be a simple run to D.C., then New York City, then Boston, Seattle and San Francisco. Just a short hop from Louisville over to D.C.; a shuttle kind of thing, open seating. No problem.

"I beg your pardon?" I asked, only hallucinating slightly due to sleep deprivation.

"I said," she repeated, again, not unkindly, although I noticed a bit of an edge, "That due to weather and a mechanical difficulty, your flight to D.C. has been canceled, but I can reroute you up to Pittsburgh, where you'll have an easy connection back down to D.C. Is that all right?"

"Sure."

"The only problem might be the blizzard."

"What blizzard?"

"The one in Pittsburgh, D.C., New York, Boston—-the whole Eastern seaboard, like I said in the first place. But I'm sure you'll be all right."

"Of course. No problem."

And she seemed so sure, so complacent, that I actually believed that. I mean come on, I had run two Iditarod sled dog races—-how bad could it be? A little snow, we're in, we're out, it all goes smoothly.

Of course that was before D.C., and my fight to the death with a coffee table in room 401 of the Watergate Hotel.

The trip to D.C. was just as she said, or almost. Because I was flying with one-way tickets and doing a last-minute connection, I was searched in detail (just short of cavity) before boarding either plane, with the end result that I had loped across both airports. I am now old and fat and do not lope well—indeed, have trouble getting above a canter—so I arrived in D.C. not only still working on sleep deprivation but exhaustion as well. I was given a wonderful room at the Watergate Hotel and had almost four and a half hours to rest before the signing, and was going to take a nap when I decided to order my turkey club, without cheese or bacon or mayo. I was on the phone when room service brought it, sitting there barefoot, and I jumped up and ran for the door to open it but did not see the wily coffee table leap in front of me, and my left big toe came into violent contact with the leg of the coffee table (I swear it moved to trip me) and tore the toenail, completely, off.

I do not, in detail, remember the rest of the tour.

There are snatches of warm memories of literally thousands of children and adults getting books signed (I think 1,600 showed up in Seattle alone), and wonderful lunches and dinners in New York with old friends and new.

I remember Kathy Dunn, the publicist from Random House who accompanied me from D.C. up to Boston, walking ahead of me with a cell phone grafted to the side of her head as she masterfully juggled me, bookstores, television and radio appearances, luncheons, dinners, signings and a full-on blizzard with closed airports, delayed trains and snow drifts so that not one appearance was missed, not one signing diminished. She was truly wonderful, and calm, although I think I saw a slight twitch developing in her left eye towards the end.

I remember a little boy asking me if I was wounded running the Iditarod and that was why I dragged my left foot and now and then made whimpering sounds.

I remember stubbing my toe, THE TOE (as I think of it now) and having another little boy who happened to be nearby tell me his father had used a word just like that when the toilet backed up because he (the boy) had jammed one of his sister's dolls down it, back when he was much younger. Last year.

I remember book upon book upon boxes of books and tireless work by bookstore owners and employees, and enough readers to bring joy to any author's heart and finally, back at my shack in the mountains in New Mexico, I sat in a chair with my foot propped up, the new nail coming in nicely, the memory of the pain little more than a searing blank spot in my brain, and the phone ringing and Kathy from Random House telling me that How Angel Petersen Got His Name had just made the New York Times bestseller list and I thought, right, it couldn't have gone better.

The perfect tour.