When David Simmons went missing in a December 2020 landslide on Beach Road, friend and neighbor Joe Aultman-Moore was so devastated he was unable to bring himself to help in search efforts.

But a conversation with Simmons's father Randy Simmons afterward led to a way for Aultman-Moore to honor his friend. Before he died, David was working on a memoir of his travels to 77 nations around the globe.

Aultman-Moore assumed the manuscript was swept away with Simmons's other belongings, but he learned from Randy that David had sent off his laptop for repairs just days before the slide.

"When (Randy) got the computer, there (the manuscript) was. It was literally the last thing David was working on before the slide," Aultman-Moore said this week. A freelance writer, Aultman-Moore offered to edit David's 95,000-word rough draft.

Working during the COVID-19 lockdown, Aultman-Moore cut the draft down to 75,000 words, limiting his changes to improve story flow and grammar. The result, "50 Countries, 50 Stories," a 359-page, large-format book including 250 photos by David Simmons, is now available for order online.

A Fulbright scholar, Simmons spoke French, German and Russian and would travel to new countries sometimes with little preparation, quickly attaching himself to strangers, shooting photos and video and scribbling notes.

Editing the accounts of those travels posed a challenge for Aultman-Moore, as most books involve countless cuts and revisions and weeks or months of collaboration between an editor and a writer. Without Simmons to work with, Aultman-Moore treaded carefully, as strenuous editing would diminish Simmons's voice in the work.

"If I did that, it wouldn't be David's book. It would be my book about David's experiences," Aultman-Moore said this week. "I tried to amplify his voice and tighten his writing and not change the tone of it at all."

Simmons had boundless optimism and energy and Altman-Moore said he wanted the writing in the book to reflect that. "David took that attitude for granted. He was taking these travels with that attitude."

Ultimately, he and Randy Simmons decided to make the book "a document of David's" rather than a product they would try to market to a mass audience.

Ambiguities in the stories also posed problems, Altman-Moore said. Should he take out parts that were unclear, leave them ambiguous, or try to fix them with a best guess? For direction, Altman-Moore turned to Randy and another editor who was Simmons's third-grade teacher, Jodie Dillman.

Randy Simmons wrote an introduction and epilogue for the book, which ends with his son arriving in Haines.

In an interview this week, Simmons, a retired building contractor and college instructor, called the book his life's most important achievement. "David's life had to be immortalized, so this is the greatest gift I could give him and his friends."

Simmons said the decision to include so many photos in the book came after he spent nine weeks poring through hard drives of David's full of photos and videos. Photos are included to accompany text in each chapter. "It was like I was in his front pocket during those nine weeks, following his video trail"

He said his son's message was brotherhood among people. "David immersed himself with the people he was living with, which is how he determined people were all of one kind. They all had the same core values."

David Simmons had originally envisioned the telling of his story as a multi-media platform, with text, photos and video. The book is available on order as an e-book and a hardcover through Amazon.