The Reader Travels

It’s possible that no road trip book tour would be complete without a discussion of Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: in Search of America. He talked about the uniqueness of every journey, each like a snowflake with different patterns and idiosyncrasies. Thus, he said, every different person who traveled the same road he did would have a different impression of what America really is.

Surely there are commonalities, but even the roads and the landscape are colored by weather and traffic conditions and the unique state of mind of the driver. As humans we can connect on some level with common experiences and objects, but our unique perceptions create millions of images or versions that we can’t always reconcile. So many possibilities, so many Americas.

One thing I found interesting in Travels with Charley was Steinbeck’s comments about not wanting to draw us a map about exactly where he was in the trip. He said that some people like to have the geography lined out for them so they can better imagine where he was. I admit, I’m one of those people, but I completely understood what he was getting at. The exact geography was not relevant, just something superficial getting in the way of our connecting on the actual experiences.

And just because you might know exactly what road he was on and what restaurant, doesn’t mean you could ever experience his trip. It doesn’t mean you could ever run off sadly trying to recreate his journey for yourself to touch ever so superficially upon his celebrity.

So if you traveled the same roads and ate at the same restaurants and ordered the same things off the menu and stayed at the same hotels and decked out a truck with a camper, a shotgun, a fully stocked bar and a big black French poodle, you’d be totally missing the point. Read the memoir. Meet the man. It’s the only way to connect in any human way with his travels.

The first time I walked into my house, it was filled full with someone else’s stuff. The couple who lived here had remained childless and were nearing retirement age. The wife’s mother had lived here with them until she died, and they were alone again, ready to downsize, put everything into storage and move into a one-bedroom apartment.

They had two households full of stuff crammed under this roof, theirs and mother’s, rows of big gray filing cabinets junking up the space that would become my green room, and an unhealthy obsession with big framed mirrors that covered every wall, reflecting and magnifying the wretchedness of all the stuff. It was a house of great energy, choked in Feng Sh*t.

Back on the road with Anne Tyler, Earthly Possessions is a novel about a woman so burdened by all the stuff in her life, she doesn’t so much mind it when she gets kidnapped by a bank robber and heads out with him on a grand road trip to Florida. Like the people I bought my house from, Charlotte Emory lives in a house with two households worth of crap. She’s stifled, trying to climb over furniture and photographs, in search of some tiny space for her self.

I love Tyler’s description of the state of Charlotte Emory’s house and her life before she was freed at gunpoint. If I wanted to leave it all, I’m glad to say I wouldn’t have nearly as many possessions to weigh me down. Of course, it also means I’m not as desperate to get out.

So, even though Kerouac didn’t have the Interstates to drive on, he at least had a series of US and state highways to get him where he was going. Even when he was touring Mexico, there were well defined motor ways. And before Kerouac took his journeys, my Oklahoma neighbors to the north still had Route 66 to take them out of the dust bowl.

But in 1903, they didn’t have any of that. AND the cars were still pretty crappy. Leave it to Ken Burns to give us the very first cross-country road trip, which turned into the first cross-country automobile race. Kerouac and his buddies were all worried about having gas money to get them to the other side, taking money from hitchhikers and coasting the downhill mountain roads. But they had nothing on Horatio Nelson Jackson.

Check out Horatio’s Drive. It was a helluva trip.

I keep coming back to Roads by Larry McMurtry because driving the US interstates is a common journey that most Americans can relate to. Despite all our differences, these roads connect us to each other. They flow through us all, just as red blood flows through our arteries.

I could truly relate to McMurtry’s journey, because it was so familiar to me. There was comfort in that familiarity and the light-hearted way he shared his travels. But I got all confused when I read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. And do you want to know why? Because his road trips were all taken before the Interstates were even built. I mean, if there was no Interstate, how in the heck did he get there?

What Kerouac’s book needs is a good map. It’s on my long list of things to research, and the Internet hasn’t been much help, although I did find reference to a lecture by Alice Hudson at the New York Public Library on the history of the road map with a focus on Kerouac’s journeys. Alice, if you’re out there Googling yourself, you should take that lecture on tour, make a real road trip out of it. Either that or put it on YouTube. I’d totally watch.

I’ll admit it. Strange Brew is my favorite Hamlet tribute film of all time. It’s got a heroine (Pamela) instead of a hero, and instead of a prince, she’s an heiress to her father’s corporate empire. It has the ghost of her father communicating from the dead through an 80s video game machine, and a duplicitous uncle who pretends to be a father figure. But most of all, it’s got beer. And lots of it.

The clue that gave it away for me was the name of the brewery. They called it Elsinore after Hamlet’s own home in Denmark. And there were two Elsinores - the brewery and appropriately, the insane asylum. Who’s to know if Pamela’s visions are part of some insanity, or if she’s just plain drunk?

Hamlet aside, here are some of my favorite movie quotes from Strange Brew:

• Who horked our clothes, eh?
• I gotta take a leak so bad I can taste it.
• You’re so nice. If I didn’t have puke breath, I’d kiss you.

My earliest knowledge of Richard III was watching Richard Dreyfus play a flamboyantly gay hunchback in The Goodbye Girl. I didn’t know the story, I just knew Richard was a serious dude with a bad back, and he wasn’t meant to be a joke.

When we visited the Tower of London, we walked through the Bloody Tower which wasn’t always called the Bloody Tower. It was originally called the Garden Tower, a name associated with life and greenery instead of death and blood.  The bloody deed that started the tower’s new name was the murder of two young heirs to the throne.

The most popular theory of the murder was that it was commissioned by Richard of Gloucester, King Richard III.  This is the theory portrayed in Shakespeare’s play about this foul, deformed villain.  I really liked Ian McKellen’s 1995 movie version of Richard III with its surreal 1930s setting, but I gained an all new appreciation with Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard. Of course that was the whole purpose of the documentary, to make Shakespeare more accessible to American audiences, to give them a real appreciation for the stories, the language and the art of acting.

Pacino obviously loves his craft, and he has a passion for Shakespeare. We get to learn the background history of what was going on in politics when the play starts. He breaks down every scene to make us love it the way he does.  He even gives us a better understanding of the poetic language used, the rhythm of the iambic pentameter.  Love the language, ride the wave.

My fourth review for the The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge explores a book of poetry by Robinson Jeffers, poet of Big Sur. Rock and Hawk: A Selection of Shorter Poems gives us a nice look into the poet’s prolific but not always popular career, spanning his life along the California coast with images of Carmel, Point Lobos, seals, otters, hawks and cormorants.

This is a book to own, one to read at leisure and revisit again and again. It is not one to read as I did, crammed into a plane trip from Texas to California and back, trying to absorb as much imagery as I could on a weeklong trip filled with fast cars, family and frenzy.

The collection starts with a nice introduction by the editor, Robert Hass, who spoke of Jeffers’ appreciation for the beauty of wholeness, where wars and violence are but one part of the whole of creation that includes the majesty of nature. He also spoke of Jeffers’ Puritan upbringing, his lifelong guilt over an adulterous affair and his politics of isolationism in a time when US imperialism was in its infancy.

The book includes selections from a number of smaller volumes of poetry, and though there are similar themes that unite Jeffers’ entire body of work, you lose the concentration and power of a compact book of poetry by piling it all up together like this. It’s much like listening to a greatest hits album. You lose a little of the power of the art by ripping it apart. Regardless, it’s still pretty powerful stuff.

The Puritanism and the guilt made me want to hate Robinson Jeffers. I had also received warnings from other poetry enthusiasts that he was depressing, obsessed with death and way too political. So the first poem was read with a pretty strong bias.

I may not have liked Robinson Jeffers as a person, but he was an undeniable talent as a poet. I was amazed at how he could look out at the beauty of nature and see in it the wretchedness of mankind. When many isolationists would see themselves as looking inward, he saw himself as looking outward, to God.

And all that stuff about death… righteous.

We took our little dog for a walk in the park last weekend, and as we were leaving, I looked out the window and said, “Golly, are those men playing cricket?” And indeed, they were.

Cricket may have originated in England, but it comes to Dallas/Fort Worth by way of India. Certainly, imperialism has its evils, but a world of common language and common sports can be a beautiful thing.

It makes me think of the movie Lagaan, if only because it’s about British people teaching Indian people how to play cricket. The story itself is a classic sports tale of underdogs beating their oppressors, all with the color, music, energy and long-lasting entertainment of Bollywood.

It was a strange thing for me to see cricket in Texas, so I had to look it up to find out how widespread the sport is here. It seems that lots of people are playing cricket in the Big D. And suddenly, I’m having the urge to buy the world a Coke, but only the kind you can buy outside of the US in places where they don’t put high fructose corn syrup in everything.

What a world.

My second review for The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge took me on a canoe trip down a wild river in northern Georgia. Although the Cahulawassee River referenced in James Dickey’s Deliverance is fictional, the rapids and the cliffs, the forests and the kudzu are a very real and beautiful part of that country. Both the Coosawattee and Chattooga Rivers claim influence on Dickey’s Cahulawassee, sparkling blue water and white rapids flowing through deep green, hilly country.

The novel starts in the city of Atlanta with Ed Gentry wishing for something fresh and new to take him out of the meaningless rut and routine of his life. He goes to work every day and goes through the motions of making love with his wife, fantasizing about another woman, her “gold eye” looking back at him, “the promise of it that promised other things, another life, deliverance.”

Dickey’s language is poetic, his descriptions vibrant, his pace intense, and this book truly is a great American novel. At the beginning of it, I found myself comparing it to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the camaraderie of men traveling together on a new adventure, the narrator idolizing the strong, fearless, adventurous one. Ed’s son is even named Dean, perhaps as some kind of tribute to Dean Moriarty, perhaps a mere coincidence.

But unlike Kerouac’s somewhat pretentious and irresponsible characters, I actually liked Ed Gentry and Lewis Medlock and their buddies, perhaps because they were so real to me, like I knew them and the meaningless routines they were trying to break through.

The river does deliver them from their routine, safe existence into a world of uncertainty and danger, their lives changed forever. One thing that is masterful about Dickey’s language is his sparse use of dialogue, making every conversation count. Their language in the city is structured and citified, sometimes whiny. But once they have made it through the hardest part of their journey, the language changes to something more decisive but informal, like what you would hear in the country. It was as if they had become part of the river and the folk who live there.

And as Ed said in the end, the river would always be with him, no matter what the rest of his life would hold for him.

When I think back on it, I really don’t know what to believe about things my ex-boyfriend told me. His brother said to me after we broke up, “S- is the biggest liar I know.” Of course, at the time I was dating S-, I believed everything; I was under his spell. His youngest brother would look at us and say the word, “Svengali,” over and over. I had to look it up, and even then, I had no idea what he was talking about until the spell was broken many years later.

Regardless of truth, he lived in a haunted apartment in Dallas. Apparently there had been some sort of family murder suicide in the two story studio, and S- would see the father and the children’s ghosts in the upstairs rooms and along the stairs. It didn’t matter that the place was built in the 1970s. A violent act had taken place, and the former tenants were confused and sad, and somehow bound to this building.

Later, after we broke up, he moved to Colorado and returned for a visit to tell me of his further adventures with the spirit world. Colorado was a beautiful place, and he was getting in touch with nature. But he felt the spirits there too. He would be walking through the woods and suddenly pass through a spot, and just know he was in the presence of ghosts. Whether it was a chill or a tingle, a vision or a smell, I don’t remember. I just remember looking at him and believing it was true.

The beauty of these ancient spirits was that instead of being tied to a man-made structure, they were tied to the land, to nature. Perhaps they had died in battle or on the hunt. Or perhaps this was a place where the old and infirm were sent to sit and die, alone, but with…