Book excerpt: Homespun humor about the way we live, from the pleasant futility of salmon fishing and the joys of Halloween, to quiet afternoons with soap opera families and endless nights in pursuit of trivia Tom Bodett, humorist, radio star, and pitchman for Motel 6, lives and writes in Homer, Alaska, the little town in the blue Northwest where America stops, carwise. "If you got into your car in New York," he says, "and wanted to take a nice long drive, I mean the longest drive you could without turning around or running into a foreign language, this is where you'd wind up." It's a place of moose and salmon and spectacular sunsets, but, Bodett insists, it's also small-town America, a place not all that different from the Michigan town of his youth. That's why he's made it his home: it perfectly suits his contrary appetites for the extreme and the everyday, for the rigors of the outdoor life and the mundane joys of the family circle. As Far As You Can Go Without a Passport, Bodett's first collection of casual essays, contains pieces on everything from trapping, tree cutting, and halibut fishing, to soap operas, lost socks, and sleeping in. It's guaranteed to please both the renegade and the homebody in every reader.