On the Road Again

The starting point of all my road trips.

BLUE HIGHWAYS 
by William Least Heat Moon
          ©1982 This is a classic road-trip book, the first of several written by Least Heat Moon. After losing his job, and his wife to another man in 1978, the author sets out on a 3-month-long, 13,000 mile trek around America in a green van, trying to avoid interstates and big cities by taking the secondary highways and backroads that were once marked in blue on old highway maps.
          As Steinbeck named his truck/camper “Rocinante,” in his book TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY, LHM christens his van “Ghost Dancing.” In it, he searches out small towns with strange names to learn how they came to be called what they were. He rates wayside diners and cafes by the number of calendars they have on their walls (the food is best in cafes with 3 or more, he claims). He stubbornly avoids campgrounds and tourists traps, sleeping in his van most nights wherever he finds himself when he wearies of the road for the day.
          As an author, LHM is superbly observant and sweetly gifted at putting those observations down on paper for the reader to experience with him. I suffered when he suffered (from heat, cold, bugs, loneliness, unfriendly locals, suspicious lawmen, highway hypnosis) and celebrated when he celebrated (the beauty of nature, the friendly folks along the way, the freedom of the open-road).
I read this book slowly, over a whole month, not my usual reading speed. By reading a few sections of chapters at a time, it was as close to a real road-trip as you can get in a book. I’m always amazed at LHM’s gift for details and descriptions, for deep insights and the vivid recreation of his adventure. The book is full of American history, changing culture, and fascinating stories. It also gives a look at what America was like 30 years ago.

DAKOTA: A SPIRITUAL GEOGRAPHY 
by Kathleen Norris
          I chose this book back in the spring of 2010 because I was making plans for what I consider will be the trip of a lifetime that summer. (So far, it hasn't happened, but stay tuned!) An open-ended trip across the northern tier of states to Seattle, then down the Pacific Coast.
          To me, the Great Plains have always been a sort of boring no-man's land to whiz through on auto-pilot on my way to and from the mountains. This time, I want to appreciate the essence of a land that's sometimes called America's Outback, a place both wide open and very sparsely populated.
          On a smaller scale, Norris has done for the Dakotas what William Least-Heat Moon did for the flat plains of one county in Kansas in his book PRAIRY ERTH. Both of them have shown that in the Great Plains, there's more than meets the eye of the traveler hurrying through these "empty" states on his or her way to more picturesque locales.
          But Norris's book is more than just a description of the land and people. As the subtitle states, hers is also a "spiritual" geography. Twenty years ago, this successful writer and her husband left their lives in New York City behind and moved to Norris' native South Dakota where she had inherited her grandparents' home. Out on the prairie she befriends a community of Benedictine monks, and so begins her journey back to her religious roots, which, curiously, happen to be Protestant. She frequently contrasts the welcoming monastic community with the community life she finds in the small towns of the Dakotas.
          I found the best writing to be in the final third of the book. In the first part , she seems hung up on how unwelcoming small towns are to newcomers. I enjoyed her stories of the retreats she made at the monastery and her beautiful descriptions of a part of America that's alien to most of us.

THE LOST CONTINENT 
by Bill Bryson
          As a big Billy Bryson fan, I found this book disappointing because of the author's overpowering negativity towards just about everything he experienced on his two road trips around the small towns of America. Bryson had been living and working in England for years, so on his return to the U.S., he set out to revisit some of the places his family had been to on their vacations when he was a kid.
          What I enjoyed about the book was the fact that I've been to many of the places Bryson visited, and I always enjoy reading travel books anyway. But Bryson's whining about just about every experience he had really grated on my nerves. I almost threw in the towel halfway through the book. The second half, though, didn't seem nearly as bad as the beginning.
          Bryson has this clever and cutting sarcasm that I like, but in this book, it was downright ugly. He came off as way too judgmental and almost impossible to please. I'm not sorry I read it. I did enjoy the travel aspect of it, but this is one book I won't be recommending.