David Knight has been a Silicon Valley executive, commercial fisherman, boatbuilder, coffee entrepreneur and bus-dweller — a life so varied that his memoir, “Journeys Over Water,” took shape not as a traditional chronology, but as a collection of self-contained stories.
“The book is compartmentalized in the way (my life has been) lived,” Knight, a Washougal resident, said. “I never had a plan in life at all, ever. The question of ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ never came up for me, so everything was just like, ‘OK, well, let’s try that. It’s a new adventure.’ That’s kind of the theme that runs through the book — a life unplanned.”
Knight describes himself in the book as “an accidental Silicon Valley insider, philosophical wanderer, and Valentine Michael Smith” — the protagonist of Robert Heinlein’s classic novel “Stranger in a Strange Land,” a human raised by Martians who returns to Earth and finds its customs baffling…