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BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE The Great Railway Bazaar Blue Highways, A Journey Into America Blue Latitudes Stranger on a Train, Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with
Interruptions A Walk in the Woods, Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail The worst thing about the best travel writing is forcing yourself to sit in one place long enough to read it. Yet even if it fuels restlessness, there’s a lot to learn about narrative from the genre’s impressive pedigree. It’s possible that roots of narrative nonfiction can be traced to the travelogues of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, or even as far back Homer’s Odyssey, a fictitious work, but a travel narrative nonetheless. Literary travel writing explores far more than the best mai-tai on Kauai, or Venice on ten bucks a day. True literary travel writing weaves cultural realities and historical context into a contemporary account. The Great Railway Bazaar is one of the first examples of a modern first-person travel narrative. In it, Paul Theroux circumnavigates Europe and Asia, mostly by rail. Across Europe and most of Asia, Theroux reflects on the misery of travel, of annoying bunk mates and bad food. His account takes on more significance when he arrives in Vietnam in late 1973. He writes of Vietnam not as a solider, not as war correspondent but as a human being in a war zone. He arrives during a cease fire. The American war effort is flagging in a country devastated by generations of war. Theroux finds mutilated people living an amputated way of life. American and Vietnamese officials attempt to isolate the writer from such horrors by giving him passage in train carriages fit for royalty. Theroux, however, refuses to find comfort in privacy and padded luxury of the cars. He instead walks through the train to witness for himself the country’s suffering. Moments later, an elderly woman tries to give him a half-American toddler. Instead of war medals, men wear rounded bloody stumps where limbs used to be. From the train, Theroux fights off the stench of sewage, worse than any he has smelled before. Through it all, the Vietnamese struggle to find regularity in the chaos of war. Children go to school, mothers to the market, and men to work. They scrape out a life amid the crumbled buildings and bridges of their country. The American occupation, writes Theroux, does little for the Vietnamese but fuel constant fear. They live knowing that gunfire or explosions could erupt at any moment. Tony Horwitz also explores the ugliness of foreign domination, albeit a couple centuries after the fact in Blue Latitudes. Horwitz follows the journals of eighteenth century British sea captain James Cook through the Pacific and into the Arctic. Horwitz builds a narrative around the past, recreated with the journals of Cook and others on his ship. He constructs another narrative around first-person observations as he explores some of the same spots as Cook, more than two hundred years later. Cook, much-maligned by historians for sparking waves of colonization, actually seems to Horwitz to have held a genuine respect and concern for the people he encountered. But history shows that his ships carried disease, disharmony and in many cases presaged two centuries of slaughter. Not surprisingly, Horwitz finds hatred of European colonization, from boys defacing a Cook monument in Hawaii to a Maori woman in New Zealand who sees Cook as symbol of oppression. As Horwitz confronts the horrors wrought on the world by the west, he questions his cultural foundation. Although the American comes to no clear conclusion, his exploration guides the narrative to a contemporary reality that is, at times, just as ugly as the past. In Blue Highways, a travel classic, William Least Heat-Moon loses his marriage and teaching job the day before he sets off on a journey around lower 48. He strays from four-lane interstates and instead wedges himself into nooks and crannies of the country, which, even thirty years ago, were slowly giving way to superstore and asphalt. A knock on the door here or handshake there open up worlds of insight to Heat Moon, who never hesitates to pull off the road for good conversation. Heat-Moon’s artful prose carries the narrative from one encounter to the next, always artfully placing experience in context. For example, he writes on his way to Selma, Alabama that, “The truck license plates said ‘Heart of Dixie,’ and I was going into the middle of the heart. West of the bouldery Coosa River, I saw an old man plowing an old field, with an old horse, and once more I wasn’t sure whether I was seeing the end or beginning.” The line between end and beginning blurs even more when Heat Moon arrives in Selma, a city known across the country because Martin Luther King Jr. once marched there. In a bar, Heat-Moon finds a white man on a racist diatribe who seems to hold “more sorrow and regret than hatred.” The man was “more empty than malicious.” Racism, it seems to Heat-Moon, might be dying. A few blocks away, on Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, Heat-Moon finds a black man who tells him that since King’s march, “Ain’t nothin’ changed.” Another tells Heat-Moon, “It’s been almost ten years since King got shot and the dream’s been dead that long.” Is King’s dream really dead? Is racism rising again? Or is it dying, as it seemed to be in the white man’s diatribe? Heat-Moon leaves such heavy questions to the future, driving from Selma to continue on his loop around the country – a loop seemingly without a beginning or an end. Stranger on a Train straddles a line between travelogue and memoir. In a sense, Diski does with personal history what Horwitz did with Cook’s history. She pulls memories from her life and places them in unique context – the lives of those she meets on trains. As Diski rides trains around the U.S., she takes ample time to remember a childhood of boarding schools and a stint in a mental hospital. A novelist by trade, Diski openly acknowledges her desire to ride the rails anonymously, meeting few except those she encounters in the smoking cars along the way. She finds the narratives of those she meets to be depressingly similar, marked with alcoholism, drugs, divorce, poverty, tragedy, birth and death. Yet their tales are important because they are personal. Diski finds that the stories of others help put her own life story in context. And rather than an irrelevant, stereotypical tale, her story is unique because it happened to her and not to someone else. Diski’s travel allows her to reflect on the past to find a contemporary truth. While Diski’s dark introspection powered her narrative, Bill Bryson’s humorous candor drives A Walk in the Woods. After years of writing and living in London, Bryson returns to America with a British wife and their children. To better understand the country of his youth, Bryson decides to hike the Appalachian Trail, which runs from Georgia to Maine. Along the way, he delivers statistical gems. The average American walks less than 1.5 miles a week. The fragile ecology of the trail, with hemlocks, firs, spruces and ashes could turn to savanna with a four-degree increase in global temperature. Bryson’s self-effacing tone builds loyalty with readers. He isn’t a prototypical hiker, with a svelte body and pricy gear. Bryson, potbelly and all, describes how the trail and the landscape around it survive under the constant threat of logging and development. He is able to contrast the giant healthy forests of the past with the present’s second- and third-growth stands. In drawing on the past, Bryson delivers an environmental warning. It isn’t righteous at all. In fact, his appeal is all the more relevant because it centers on how the wilderness brings him back in touch with a country he left decades before. In Blue Latitudes, Horwitz introduces an archeologist who speculates about research on a genetic cause for a “novelty seeking personality.” Novelty seekers of other eras may have jumped in canoes to travel across great distances. Today’s novelty seekers are well-suited to travel writing. But there’s an important difference. Modern-day travel writers, at least ones writing narratives, seek more than novelty. Rather they strive to put their stories in historical and cultural context. Only then does travel writing ascend to the literary level. ZACK BARNETT, who knows his way around the Ukraine, among other places, is a student in the literary nonfiction graduate program at the University of Oregon. |
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