"Why is everybody dressed up like witches and wizards?" I ask the guy in the bookstore's coffee shop. "Today is the biggest book sales day in history." He says, "Harry Potter six."

It's a hundred and five degrees in Bishop, California, and all the witches and wizards of Spellbinder Books are sweating. Gilderoy Lockhart is a local magician hired for the Harry Potter party. He's dripping beads down his forehead. The girl behind the counter in the black top hat says, "I'm so sticky." The lady stacking books, she says, "I can't believe I'm wearing polyester."

Bishop is the largest town in the Owens Valley of Eastern California, and while isolated, it feeds a steady stream of fishermen and backpackers. In such a still heat, this normally ordinary town feels enchanted. Most of all, Spellbinder Books, more literature and less self-help, is always an enchanted place.

Fiction writing fascinates me, because the process confounds me. While a fiction writer's incentive is to be creative and to make things up, the travel writer's incentive is the opposite - to not only report the truth but to report his own reaction to that truth. While the worst insult you can offer a fiction writer is to tell her she plagiarized, the worst thing you can tell a travel writer is that he was creative.