The Trail Beckons

 

Fall, like spring and summer, is more continuous change than steady state. Maples and birches demand that we monitor their changes with our attention, it seems, while other trees and plants surprise us later, every year: deep carmine osiers, yellow asparagus, scarlet Virginia creeper, golden tamarack, and the buttered-toast-dripping-honey leaves of beeches. 

Colors shout in the sunshine and gleam in the rain before fading almost imperceptibly against the darkening skies and winds that tear foliage from branches to leave them bare against the clouds.

Does autumn bring forth your wanderlust or tempt you indoors with cocoa and blankets and books? Perhaps it does both, and that’s when books of other people’s travels are so welcome. Armchair travel, vicarious adventure! Where would we be without it? 

 

…Two brothers uprooting themselves to seek adventure or a better life together was a pretty typical Oregon Trail pairing, and our resemblance to the nineteenth-century pioneers was significant. Nick was an injured, unemployed construction worker in the midst of a deep recession in home building in Maine. As a print journalist I typified an American character type that had been familiar since the industrial revolution – the worker with redundant, antiquated skills displaced by technological change. We were going to see the elephant because there wasn’t much else going on for us at home. 

 

-      Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

 

I’ll explain “seeing the elephant” in a minute.

First, though, I have to admit that when I picked this book up just after finishing Crazy Horse, by Mari Sandoz, I wasn’t sure I would find the story congenial. Not only does Buck open his story with some background on the Oregon Trail, but the map also showed me place names I’d encountered in the Sandoz book: Fort Kearney, Fort Laramie, Fort Fetterman. And reading of 400,000 pioneers, many of whom “would never have made it past Kansas” without the assistance of Native American guides, I thought of Crazy Horse and his friends, dismayed by disappearing game (disappearance that brought great hunger) but confident that the pioneers would keep moving, on their way to somewhere faraway. I also took exception to the author’s claim that this was the largest human migration in world history, having read so recently The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson, telling of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North, six million people migrating over the period 1916-1970.

 

Still, the story of two brothers setting out is a story of our time, not history, and such an unlikely and challenging modern journey that I set my doubts to one side and read on.

 

The phrase “seeing the elephant,” new to me, was apparently one 19^th-century pioneers used all the time. The “elephant” in letters and journals of the time seemed at first to refer to the hugeness of the plains, later to the dangers to life that crossing the plains involved, the great American adventure of its time captured and reduced poetically to its lowest terms in the malleable elephant cliché.

 

In the year 1958, while conventional suburban American children were gyrating with hula hoops in their backyards, Rinker Buck’s father took his family on an epic vacation. The author was only seven years old when the family set out on a 300-mile odyssey in a Mennonite wagon pulled by a team of draft horses, with a saddle horse tied on and following behind, traveling from an old New Jersey farm by way of old roads and historic sites of Pennsylvania and back home again, and that little seven-year-old boy was entrusted with the task of riding on ahead of the wagon in the late afternoon to locate a likely overnight campsite! What a dream! Who else but someone with this childhood memory would come up with a scheme to take a wagon and team of mules from Missouri to Oregon? And who else but a brother from that original trip would be so eager to sign on to such a crazy scheme?

 

So I know “where the story is going” geographically, but what may happen along the way I have no idea. Anyway, I’m hooked. Nothing like a wacky travel narrative for escape from the daily news cycle....

A busy bookstore is always gratifying to a bookseller, and my next-to-last Saturday in the bookstore was a busy one, but it’s a rare day that doesn’t allow dipping into some as-yet-unread book, and I’d had Michelle Obama’s Becoming set aside for several days. The very first pages of that book then hooked me, and a day later, having set aside the Oregon Trail for the First Lady, I was almost halfway through Michelle Obama’s story. What a refreshingly honest, down-to-earth, and yet thoughtful, absolutely elegant woman!

 

“They’re Chicago people,” the Artist reminded me (as if I might have forgotten). “They might very well walk into Dog Ears someday.” Wouldn’t that be something? 

 

But now it’s Sunday, and I’ve come to Dog Ears Books myself for a couple of afternoon hours, because next Saturday, Halloween, October 31, will be my last bookstore of the 2020 season! What a weird, strange year it has been, in the book business as in every other part of American life (as well as life beyond our own shores). Usually open on May 15, this year it was July 1 before the store was open to public browsing and buying for other than special order customers. We have all had to mask up for in-person meetings, with friends and strangers alike. Manufacturing and distribution chains for books were disrupted along with so many others; special summer events were cancelled; some authors had new book releases pushed off until 2021. And yet we persisted! We went forward with what we had, which was (as always) plenty of wonderful old books and lots of wonderful new ones, as well. Everyone behaved very well. It was a good season. 

 

Already I’ve had forward-thinking customers come in to stock up on winter reading, one man filling two whole grocery bags, others content with tall stacks of books. I welcome, wholeheartedly, all long-time and new customers this coming week! Many books here are calling out to go to new homes as holiday gifts (hint, hint). 

I will miss you all in my bookstore during my months of seasonal retirement, but I’ll remind you now that there are other bookstores here Up North, and while I’m gone I urge you to "shop my 'competition.'” Really? Yes, of course! One thing I have always absolutely loved about being an independent bookseller (one thing among many, of course) is that we booksellers – real indie types -- do not generally regard one another as competition. Customers sometimes make reference to “your competition down the road,” but in our small, fiercely independent shops -- shops that reflect our own personalities and interests as well as the region where we live and work – we see and treat each other as colleagues. It is a collegial line of work. If we don’t have something in stock, we send the customer for that book to someone else’s shop, sometimes even calling ahead to see if the book the customer wants is on hand – which I did only yesterday, in fact. We’re all on a cordial, first-name basis. We know each other, and we like each other. We are real people. And we all want all the others to succeed. 

 

So please buy new books from Leelanau Books in Leland, Bay Books in Suttons Bay, Cottage Book Shop in Glen Arbor, and Horizon Books in Traverse City. If you're a lover of old books, visit Landmark Books in Traverse City, and if Paul doesn’t have what you're looking for and you must shop online, here are some alternatives to the Online Behemoth.

 

Has the idea of an independent bookstore yet to become important to you? Take a look here. Community, curation, convenience. My place won’t be convenient while it's closed for the winter, but Dog Ears Books has always been about a curated collection, and our community commitment has only grown stronger over the years.

 

And we certainly expect to re-open Dog Ears Books in 2021 – I hope by May 15^th. One thing I can safely say, after over 27 years in business, is that I have lived up to the promise I made an earlier Northport landlord long ago: “I’m in it for the long haul.” And in retrospect 27 years have flown by. -- Someone the other day wished me another 27, which is rather more than I wish for myself, but I do hope and plan to be back in 2021. 

So come down to Waukazoo Street this week! We are here now! And really, isn’t that all that any of us can ever say with certainty?

“Wordsworth in Our Very Legs”

There’s so much I haven’t been able to show you lately – new sights in Northport and in the countryside – owing to technical difficulties. But then I thought, the natural world looks pretty much the same as it looked last year, so maybe I can find an old picture. It was old pictures I used recently to illustrate my post on Mary Russell’s book of Northport reminiscences. I’m still trying to work through the logjam preventing me from transferring photos from my camera to laptop and thence to blog, but for today, again, I have no new images.

What I do have is some wonderful writing to share, going back and forth as I have been doing in the evenings between J. B. Priestley’s English Journey, first published in 1934, and Bill Bryson’s Notes From a Small Island, first released in 1996. Two different worlds, in many ways, the intervening decades having wrought such changes to English cities, towns, and countrysides, but continuities and similarities, too, I find. Yesterday morning I finished the last couple pages of Bryson, so after my arduous evening of mowing I settled down on the porch once more with Priestly, at that part of his book when his travels took him near enough his home town of Bradford that he spent several days there, visiting old friends and old haunts and comparing 1930s Bradford to that of his boyhood. Here is a wonderful passage I will indulge myself by quoting at length:

...Bradford is a city entirely without charm, though not altogether ugly, and its industry is a black business; but it has the good fortune to be on the edge of some of the most enchanting country in England. A sharp walk of less than an hour from more than one tram terminus will bring you to the moors, wild virgin highland, and every mill and warehouse will be out of sight and the whole city forgotten. However poor you are in Bradford, you need never be walled in, bricked up, as a round million folk must be in London. Those great bare heights, with a purity of sky above and behind them, are always there, waiting for you. And not very far beyond them, the authentic dale country begins. There is no better country in England. There is everything a man can possibly want in these dales, from trout streams to high wild moorland walks, from deep woods to upland miles of heather and ling. I know no other countryside that offers you such entrancing variety. So if you can use your legs and have a day now and then to yourself, you need never be unhappy long in Bradford. The hills and moors and dales are there for you. Nor do they wait in vain. The Bradford folk have always gone streaming out to the moors.

Priestley’s paragraphs are long. The one from which I’m quoting does not stop where I stopped but goes on, so let’s go on with it, shall we?

In the old days, when I was a boy there, this enthusiasm for the neighboring country had bred a race of mighty pedestrians. Everybody went enormous walks. I have known men who thought nothing of tramping between thirty and forty miles every Sunday. In those days the farmhouses would give you a sevenpenny tea, and there was always more on the table than you could eat. Everybody was knowledgeable about the Dales and their walks, and would spend hours discussing the minutest details of them. You caught the fever when you were quite young, and it never left you. However small and dark your office or warehouse was, somewhere inside your head the high moors were glowing, the curlews were crying, and there blew a wind as salt as if it came from the middle of the Atlantic.

Is the paragraph finished here? It could end on that lofty note but doesn’t. It continues,

That is why we did not care very much if our city had no charm, for it was simply a place to go and work in, until it was time to set out for Warfedale or Wensleydale again. We were all, at heart, Wordsworthians to a man. We have to make an effort to appreciate a poet like Shelley, with his rather gassy enthusiasm and his bright Italian colouring; but we have Wordsworth in our very legs.

Well, there is every so much more in this wonderful old travel book of Depression-era England, but just for a lark let’s dip into our contemporary’s book and see what Bill Bryson has to say about Bradford, 60 years later.

Bradford’s role in life is to make every place else in the world look better in comparison, and it does this very well. Nowhere on this trip would I see a city more palpably forlorn. Nowhere would I pass more vacant shops, their windows soaped or covered with tattered posters for pop concerns... or more office buildings festooned with TO LET signs. ... Such life as there was had mostly moved indoors to a characterless compound called the Arndale Centre. ... But mostly Bradford seemed steeped in a perilous and irreversible decline.

Another Depression clearly hit Bradford since Priestley’s time, this more recent one doubtless brought on largely  (though this cause doesn’t seem to have occurred to Bryson) by the advent of synthetic fabrics. Old Bradford was a wool town, dominated throughout by the wool trade. Bryson does allow that “Bradford is not without its charms,” and he cites the old Alhambra Theatre, “built in 1914 in an excitingly effusive style with minarets and towers” and now “suptuously and skillfully renovated.” And he adored the film museum and the old travelogue being shown there, “This Is Cinerama.” The magic of movies!

And then it was over and we were shuffling out into the drizzly twilit bleakness of Bradford, which was something of a shock to the system, believe me. I stood by a bronze statue of J. B. Priestley, who was a Bradford lad, and stared at the bleak, hopeless city before me and thought, Yes, I am ready to go home.

What a pity Bryson did not escape to the moors!

Lest we end on a sour note, however, it’s worth following old Bill to the Lake District, where he joined friends in the Wordsworthian pursuit of a “walk” to the “fabled summit of Bow Fell, at 2,900 feet the sixth highest of the Lakeland hills.

Walkers ahead of us formed well-spaced dots of slow-moving color [wearing modern clothing made of bright, synthetic fabrics, I’m sure) leading to a majestically remote summit, lost in cloud. As ever, I was quietly astounded to find that so many people had been seized with a notion that struggling up a mountainside on a damp Saturday on the winter end of November was fun.

The weather gets worse and worse, the higher they climb, and once they lose the path and become briefly lost, but at last they reached the summit, where their party joined in a more general party:

I counted thirty-three people there ahead of us, huddled among the fog-whitened boulders with sandwiches, flasks, and wildly fluttering maps, and tried to imagine how I could explain this to a foreign onlooker – the idea of three dozen English people having a picnic on a mountaintop in an ice storm – and realized there was no way you could explain it. We trudged over to a rock, where a couple kindly moved their rucksacks and shrank their picnic space to make room for us. We sat and delved among our brown bags in the piercing wind, cracking open hard-boiled eggs with numbed fingers, sipping warm pop, eating floppy cheese-and-pickle sandwiches, and staring into an impenetrable murk that we had spent three hours climbing through to get here, and I thought, I seriously thought, God, I love this country.

Perhaps this shows that no matter how bleak the town or how wretched the weather, getting out in it energetically refreshes the human spirit. Do you think so?

Sarah and I did not have wretched weather this morning for our outdoor play time and woodland rambles, merely an overcast Michigan sky and a mild breeze. But then, we don’t need an ice storm to take refreshment in nature. Michigan is not England. But I do think my dog and I have Wordsworth in our legs.

In Which I Metaphorically Tread Water

A county hillside last week

"Treading water" can only be a metaphorical expression at this time of year. Treading snow would be more like it but doesn't make much sense. What I mean by "treading water" could also be expressed by the musical expression "vamping," in that I have a couple or three serious, substantive blog posts in process, but since, for different reasons, I'm not able to publish even one of those today, I'm improvising a shorter, lighter post. A place-holder, as it were....

Our household has been seriously challenged this year by weather and transportation issues, and we have spent many housebound days, some planned, some unplanned. In my last post, I mentioned darning socks. Catching up on laundry, cleaning out dresser drawers, writing letters, baking, and making soup are other good projects for such days, but reading always comes near the top of every day's list, so here's what I've been reading at home the last couple of days:

My "intrepid Ulysses group" is reading James Baldwin's Another Country this month, so I'm devouring that novel every morning, and it is just as I remembered --  beautifully written and with characters so true and so fully dimensional that if a reader didn't know the author, I maintain it would be impossible to ascertain if the writer had been male or female, black or white, gay or straight. As it happens, Another Country's author was male, black, and gay and wasn't hiding any aspects of his own identity. My point is not to deny who he was but to commend the imagination and genius that was able to get inside so many different characters different from himself in terms of gender, color, and sexual orientation. 

At bedtime, before falling asleep, I slow down with Sycamore Shores, by Clark B. Firestone, an American travel book from the 1930s (originally published in 1936) in which the author recounts various trips up and down the Ohio River and its tributaries at a time when steamships -- not as many as formerly but more than you might imagine -- were still taking passengers on Midwestern waters. Crew, roustabouts, fellow passengers, towns along the way, history (pioneer and Civil War) and natural history, and agriculture are all described in detail. Occasionally the author went further on foot or by road vehicle to reach upriver stretches not (or no longer) navigable. Hidden-away hamlets, bygone days -- very restful reading before falling asleep. Also, from the two years I lived in Cincinnati, childhood visits to Ohio relatives, and trips David and I took to and through Kentucky, much of the territory Firestone covers is somewhat familiar to me. What I love, however, is the time travel aspect of this book! Firestone explored rivers of the "Old West" before our beloved Harlan and Anna Hubbard built their shantyboat and floated down the Ohio and Mississippi, but much of the riverside life is similar to what the Hubbards experienced a decade or so later. 

Other places! What a siren song they sing to us in the middle of a brutally cold Up North winter! Cleaning out an old chest of drawers recently (re snowbound project list above), I unearthed a couple of little books of my own travel notes, trips made to the U.P. and up into Canada in 2005 and 2006. It was fun to re-read my sketchy pages and share them with David, almost (he said) like taking the trips together again. If winter lasts too long this year, maybe I'll share a few of these old notes. 

Who doesn't dream of carefree travel days when snowbound for days on end?

Who’s Ready to Hit the Road Again?

Sometimes flipping a coin isn’t necessary. Which would my readers rather see in a new blog post, philosophy or travel? Post-structuralism or American roads? No contest, is it? Add to those considerations that any new book from William Least Heat-Moon is worth attention -- which would doubtless even be true if he were to write about philosophy, but you can relax on that score.

Heat-Moon’s new book is Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories From the Road, and it’s a collection of short journalistic travel pieces the author wrote over the years. (“One advantage books have over a newspaper or magazine is that it’s harder to wrap yesterday’s fish with them.”) In it he travels to Japan, his assignment to investigate the postwar economy, his personal mission to purge himself of World War II hatred of the Japanese. He scours the U.S. for authentic, traditional beer and ale, back before microbreweries had popped up everywhere. He pilgrimages to Mississippi in search of William Faulkner when that famous author was still alive (but alas, teaching in another state at the time). And that is only the beginning.

These stories are a famous American writer’s early work. His love of travel, he tells us, goes back to boyhood and his realization that the highway outside the drugstore soda bar window stretched all the way to New Orleans and that U.S. 40 through Kansas City, Missouri, connected the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of America. “To me,” he writes, “a road map is the printed lyrics to a siren’s song....”  Heat-Moon also sees American roadways as the web holding Americans together:

It’s a commonplace to say that no one can interpret America without understanding our use of automobiles, but I think what we really mean is that one doesn’t comprehend the United States without taking into account our mobility, and preeminently that means roadways, perhaps the most American of symbols, one even more functionally representative than the Statue of Liberty or Mount Rushmore. We are a widely dispersed and numerous people bound together by three million miles of painted stripes atop concrete and asphalt.

He cites Albert Gallatin’s report to Congress in 1808 recommending more good roads through the country, “to strengthen and perpetuate the Union which secures independence, domestic peace, and internal liberty.” I find that idea worth pausing over. As Americans, we are free to travel anywhere in our own country. Some areas have higher crime rates than others, but nowhere do we find a region in the hands of armed insurgents. Should our system of highways get some of the credit for this happy state of affairs? William Least Heat-Moon thinks so.

Answering and amplifying the author’s love of maps, love of travel, and appreciation for the union of diverse regions and peoples, this new collection adds a special interest for writers.

Despite assertions to the contrary, exceptional is the magazine editor who truly trusts in the intelligence and creativity of his readership. How many times from an editorial desk have I heard, “Our audience won’t understand this.” “This” being an idea, a word, sentence construction, sentence length, literary allusion, historical reference, or a brief digression underpinning an idea. Too few editors grant American readers much capacity or willingness to think critically, just as they believe their audience will not tolerate a vocabulary beyond the basic five or six thousand words in common usage. If I formerly thought editors were wrong on those questions, now I believe my argument is weaker. Evidence of America getting “dumbed down” in self-fulfilling ways grows apace.

Heat-Moon had to suffer the editorial blue pencil when he originally turned in his assignments, but putting together this new collection gave him a chance “to restore elements one editor or another deemed too challenging for the audience he perceived.” He also gave himself license to rework or expand ideas where inspired to do so.

To my surprise, I’ve liked doing the restitution of the pieces here as I’ve liked returning details and sentence structures I dared not even try with an editorial practitioner of the hack-and-hew school....

What writer can fail to be sympathetic to these feelings? In light, then, of the time that has passed and the changes made to the originally published articles, as well as changes made by the author for the sake of the present collection, each piece is preceded by a brief explanatory note, with Heat-Moon telling us why that particular trip was important to him when he made it and why he thinks we will enjoy revisiting the old ground, perhaps reworked, with him today.

Aficionados of travel writing will open this book eagerly. Fans of William Least Heat-Moon will be grateful for it. Anyone who writes for a living – or simply from love – will be fascinated by this writer’s look at his own pages past.

And happily, Here, There, Elsewhere is already available in paper, and I have ordered it and will have it next week at Dog Ears Books! To my customer this morning who said her husband has Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways on his bookshelf but she hasn’t read it yet, I say, “Open that book today! You have denied yourself the pleasure far too long already!”

We have no travels planned for this winter, but we are happy to have plenty of travel books at hand.

Reading the Miles: U.S. by Highway by Books

Looking east Monday morning

Anyone who’s glanced at my Books Read list lately can see a lot of vicarious living going on -- compensation, no doubt, for the road time that is usually mine in September -- but I didn’t exactly plan a long, multiple travel book excursion. Like much of my reading, it just happened.

First came a new book by Phil Caputo, The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean.

Next I happened on an old Penguin paperback from 1979, Looking for America: A Writer’s Odyssey, by Richard Rhodes, pulled in by his descriptions of the Everglades in the first essay.

Then David and I both fell into Driving to Detroit: Memoirs of a Fast Woman, by Lesley Hazleton, so while he was having his turn...

... I picked up Bruce Stutz’s Chasing Spring: An American Journey Through a Changing Season.

That is, I read Caputo first, started Rhodes, put that aside to start Hazleton, began and raced through Stutz, and then went back to finish first Rhodes and then Hazleton. 

The book by Rhodes, oldest of the four, isn’t really a travel book at all but a collection of essays, many of which, however, involved trips to different regions of the United States, and since these places were often some of the same ones visited by the other writers – and some of the places each of them visited were visited also in by one or more of the others – I felt I was making multiple trips, stopping more than once in the same place, only to find it was not the “same” at all because of the writers' different perspectives. 

Finally, as you'll see if you stick with me through all this vicarious wandering, I came back to an old 30-year classic.

I have to begin by saying that the Rhodes, the not-really-a-travel book, was much more satisfying to me than Caputo’s road trip from Key West to Dead Horse, Alaska. Rhodes occasionally used the pronoun “we,” even mentioning his children a couple of times, but he didn’t bog down in mundane, trivial details of family travel but gave a wide-angle view with layers of historical depth of field. I could imagine myself there in the Everglades or wherever, which is what I most desire in reading of someone else’s travel. Any travel narrative, of course, is the story of the writer’s personal experiences, but too much I, I, I -- and especially too much trivial detail, as opposed to crucial detail of place and season and personal struggle or quest – comes between me and my vicarious, bookish experience, arousing my impatience. Escaping daily tedium is one of the joys of reading travel narrative, isn't it? 

While Caputo’s agenda was to drive from the southernmost point in the United States to the northernmost point, just because, Stutz set out to "chase spring" from south to north, his ultimate destination also Alaska. Hazleton’s more modest destination was the Detroit Auto Show, her route beginning in Seattle but circling widely and serendipitously south and east and north. The Rhodes essays explored first Florida and California and subsequently other regions and now-historical periods of the continental United States. Hazleton and Stutz paid more attention to American culture than Caputo and Stutz, but all four registered environmental awareness. His trip was singularly important to Stutz because it followed heart surgery. Hazleton was worried about her father's heart and made almost daily telephone calls to her parents in England (where she was born).

Early in his book, Caputo writes, “Without a design, a journey becomes aimless wandering.” Mentally I bookmarked that line with my skepticism as something to come back to later, and two questions were always hovering in the back of my mind: Does a journey need a design? Is aimless wandering pointless?

What do you look for in a travel book? Do you want a basically light-hearted road trip, complete with dogs? Go with Caputo. If it’s serious commentary on environmental, cultural, and historical issues you favor, let Rhodes be your guide. Amateur birders and geologists will probably want to hitch a ride with Stutz (and I learned a lot from him). 

In the end, after reading all four, I decided Hazleton was the guide for me, and anyone (this would not be me!) obsessed with the American automobile would be well advised to travel with her, too. Hers is a story to appeal to a much wider audience than “car guys,” but those guys will find plenty to love in the book. Hazleton wasn’t looking for the fastest, shortest way to get from Seattle to Detroit, and neither was she afraid to get out of her vehicle and hike trails or even to plunge into a cold mountain lake when one presented itself. There were arranged rendez-vous spots, a lot of serendipity, and one wrenching personal loss along the way, but the focus remained primarily on the road, on the countryside, and on the people she met.

One way Hazelton definitely has it all over Rhodes (whom in general I liked a whole lot) is that, with her imagination and her own experience, she can truly imagine the experiences of others, whereas Rhodes can only, as is true of far too many male writers, imagine male experience, writing therefore as if any human life experience, however far from a biological sex role or social norm, must come always in gendered form. This attitude is as tiresome as I, I, I, me, me, me. Here's how it goes: Men, men, men, women, women, women. Ugh, ugh, ugh.

Guys, I hate to break it to you, but that’s not how it is!  The experience of girls and women is not run through a filter reminding us at every moment of our existence that we are not men! That is, we do not see you men are the real experiencers and ourselves only spectators of you, you, you! So get a damn clue! Whenever as a young girl I saw a running horse or waved to a train engineer, there were no intervening daydreams in my head about boys coming between me and that beauty and power. (Rhodes imagines girls imagining the waving boys becoming the future engineers to whom they will wave. Seriously?) No, what I saw was my world. Experience is absolute, no matter whose it is.

Phew! Where was I? Oh, yes....

With four cross-country accounts newly added to my Books Read list, I felt it was time to re-read the American road classic of my lifetime, William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, brought to mind by this passage from Lesley Hazleton:

...The moment I joined [inadvertently] that interstate, with its huge semis and high speeds, I seemed to have left Arizona behind and entered another world that existed only in long, straight two-hundred-foot-wide swathes. I was driving at an enforced remove from the landscape, as though someone had placed a clear, plastic tunnel over the road. The world of the interstate forced out the real world. All I could hear was traffic. All I could smell was burned gasoline. And with ears and nose assaulted, even my eyes felt dimmed. 

 The interstate, I realized, is an exercise in sensory deprivation. 

Lesley Hazleton, DRIVING TO DETROIT: MEMOIRS OF A FAST WOMAN (1999)

The passage goes on, but anyone who knows me can hear the Yes! This was the vicarious road experience I wanted, and to prolong it I pulled out a battered paperback copy of Blue Highways.

Least Heat-Moon starts out. He doesn’t know where he’s going. He avoids expressways. He meets people. Here is a scene in a little Tennessee holler:

...He cranked up an old Edison phonograph, the kind with the big morning-glory blossom for a speaker, and put on a wax cylinder. This will be ‘My Mother’s Prayer,’” he said. While I ate buttermilk pie, Watts served as disc jockey of Nameless Tennessee. “Here’s ‘Mountain Rose.’” It was one of those moments that you know at the time will stay with you to the grave: the sweet pie, the gaunt man playing the old music, the coals in the stove glowing orange, the scent of kerosene and hot bread. “Here’s ‘Evening Rhapsody.’” 

 - William Least Heat-Moon, BLUE HIGHWAYS: A JOURNEY INTO AMERICA (1983)

Okay, he’s wandering aimlessly, yes indeed he is, and I would not trade this aimless wandering for the most carefully designed road trip in the world. Serendipity comes along with risks, and this is my kind of travel and my kind of travel reading.

Reading my notes of the trip – images, bits of conversations, ideas – I hunted a structure in the events, but randomness was the rule. ... [L]ater that afternoon, a tactic returned to me from night maneuver training in the Navy: to see in deep darkness you don’t look directly at an object – you look to the left; you look at something else to see what you really want to see. Skewed vision.

Aimless wandering and serendipity remind me of what David and I remember as "the scary place," a tiny mountain hamlet perched high at the end of a narrow, climbing road, a place we never would have gone had we known ahead of time how frightening would be the ascent -- and, even worse, the turnaround to descend -- or if we had stayed on major expressways while driving from Avignon north. But we didn't stay on the main roads, and we had no reservations anywhere, so we have a vivid memory of fear and of the conversation I had with two astonished women living there and could hardly believe that a couple from près de Chicago (my usual geographic explanation of where we were from) had ventured such a trek.

Closer to home, there was last fall's walk out through bracken and old pine stumps when I stumbled upon the bearing tree. 

Aimless wandering? What can be better?

There is an element of memoir in both Blue Highways and Driving to Detroit, but the personal details given, whether of divorce, melancholy, anxiety, grief, or just plain discomfort and impatience, always have to do with what is an important personal journey, and this lifts them above daily diary minutiae. 

Looking west Monday morning

As for my own life, at present the road is still unrolling without me, except for my beloved back roads near home, and today under blue sky and sunshine I have no complaints whatsoever. (Is it only coincidence that the conversations all around me this morning in the coffee house have to do with long-distance travel? We kid ourselves if we think we are not a migratory species.) Actually, even under grey, cloudy skies on Sunday, it was worthwhile being out on the county roads, observing young, feathered families. Some of them will stay the winter, and some will fly south. 

ZAMM Meditation, Part III: My Conclusions

This is my third and final post on an intense re-reading of an old book from decades past. Posts one and two will show you where I began and some of the country I traveled through. I must say that in some ways I feel as if I’ve been away from my present life for a while and am only now returning.

The one section of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that I thought I remembered from my first reading fourteen years ago did not come until so near the end of the story that I had started to wonder if I’d been confused, thinking of some other book. But then, at last, there I was in the “dreary room ... where the late-afternoon sun ... hardly penetrated the window dirt and polluted city air beyond,” the room with its close atmosphere, “[w]an and pale and depressing,” the round table cracked and allowed to remain unrepaired for years—and yes, most importantly, the professor’s attack on a student who had nothing at all to do with his, the professor’s, own unhappiness and fear. After the attack in the book, the faces of the other students become “carefully composed in defense against more of this sort of questioning.” Ah, yes, how well I remember!

The table in the seminar room I knew was not round, and the atmosphere in the room I knew varied from one professor to another (with some it was intellectually pleasurable even when philosophically frightening), but one day, with one professor, I knew the room in the way the narrator of ZAMM describes the room he knew. My experience is another story, not part of the book, but it explains why this brief literary episode engraved itself on my memory while all the rest slipped away.

In the next sessions the shamed student is no longer present. No surprise. The class is completely frozen, as is inevitable when an incident like that has taken place. Each session, just one person does all the talking, the Professor of Philosophy, and he talks and talks and talks to faces that have turned into masks of neutrality.

In my seminar, not the seminar in the book, I was the “shamed student,” but I did not disappear for the remainder of the class sessions. Immediately following “the Incident,” at the close of that particular class, I did retreat to my graduate student office and send concerned friends away from the closed, locked door while I sat alone in the darkness, in near-shock. Later, however, after one friend asked, “Why did he attack you like that?” I finally worked out the why of it and realized it had nothing to do with me. I even called the professor to arrange an appointment in his office, my purpose to give him an opportunity to apologize to me--but of course I could not say that outright. “What did you think of how our last class went?” I asked, making the question very general and open-ended, not wanting to begin by complaining. “I hope you didn’t take my response to your presentation as an attack,” he said. Clever move! If I had seen him as attacking me, he implied, I was misinterpreting the situation; if he hadn’t attacked me, he had no reason to apologize. I told him that other people in the class also had seen his response as an attack. Well, we were wrong, he said, and he was sorry we had gotten that false impression. For that, our error, he was sorry, in the sense that one is sorry to hear of any unfortunate event, such as the death of a friend’s cat, a death one had no part in bringing about. He hoped, he said, that I would continue to participate in the extracurricular study group that met at his apartment on Sunday afternoons, he said. No, I would not, I told him. And that was all. Case closed. Life went on, and so did the class. The one first-year student who had rashly come to my defense transferred to another school, but the rest of us soldiered on, battle-scarred and wary comrades-in-arms.

The experience of Phaedrus in the “dreary room” is a critical turning point in Pirsig's book. It was a crisis in the development and course of the character’s thought, and the course and development of his thought is part of what is allegorized in the road trip. The journey narrated in the book in ZAMM is geographical, intellectual and spiritual. That is my thesis.

Beginning my re-reading with a question about the narrator’s identity and veracity, the question of whether to see the book as memoir or fiction, I began very soon to recognize ghosts as a major theme. When I started realizing how many references there were to ghosts, I turned back to the beginning and found the first reference in the introduction, where the author harks back to a creative writing seminar he had with poet and literary critic Allen Tate and class discussions on The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James.

. . . I was completely convinced that this was just a straightforward ghost story, but Tate said no, Henry James is up to more than that. The governess is not the heroine of this story. She is the villain. It is not the ghost who kills the children but the governess’s hysterical belief that a ghost exists.

In Pirsig’s book, his son, Chris, asks one evening if his father believes in ghosts. His father, the narrator, says no, because ghosts are unscientific, but soon he takes a new position, saying “Modern man has his ghosts and spirits, too, you know.” The laws of science, he explains, are only in our minds, nowhere out in the world, and thus they are ghosts. This theme is developed later in the book.

Another ghost appears when the narrator recalls an old poem by Goethe, in which a father is riding [a horse?] along a beach, holding his son in his arms. The son cries out that he sees a ghost. The father reassures him that there is none. When asked how the poem ends, the narrator says that the boy dies. As he puts it, “The ghost wins.” The reader feels a chill.

When the narrator and his son revisit the college building where the father used to teach, both feel an alien, frightening presence, and the boy flees. The narrator goes on to find his old classroom but notes, “In this place he is the reality and I am the ghost.” He is not talking about his son. Here, as he does throughout the story, the narrator is referring to his former self in the third person. The implication is that normally the former self is the ghost. What would it mean for Chris if that ghost were to win?

We have ghosts in literature (the James story and the Goethe poem), scientific laws as ghosts, a former self as a ghost but that former ghost sometimes becoming reality, making the narrator himself the ghost, but we are not done yet. The former self, to whom the narrator gives the name Phaedrus, went back into the history of philosophy in search of ghosts, specifically, “in pursuit of the ghost of reason.” When and how, he wonders, did thought and truth become channeled into a narrowly logical, analytic path? And what happened along the way to what he calls Quality, something he sees as the source of all, prior to divisions and definitions? It is his relentless pursuit of the “ghost of reason” that leads Phaedrus to the “dreary room,” and it is only a short trip from there to the mental hospital.

Finally, near the end of the road trip the narrator describes himself as

. . . a heretic who’s recanted and thereby in everyone’s eyes saved his soul. Everyone’s eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.

I survive mainly by pleasing others. You do that to get out [of the mental hospital]. To get out you figure out what they want you to say and then you say it with as much skill and originality as possible and then, if they’re convinced, you get out. If I hadn’t turned on him [Phaedrus, the former self] I’d still be there, but he was true to what he believed right to the end. That’s the difference between us, and Chris knows it. And that’s the reason why sometimes I feel he’s the reality and I’m the ghost.

More than one reader has taken the passage above as the final truth of the book, the author’s avowal that the only way to survive in the world of other people is to become a hypocrite, to abandon one’s authentic self. This would be such an un-Zen conclusion that it cannot be correct. I believe the key to understanding the journey’s end, insofar as an “end” is contained in the book, is to look at the narrator and Phaedrus and all the ghosts one encounters through the lens of the father-son relationship.

Because Chris sees ghosts, too. He hears them in his father’s nightmare cries and sees them in his father’s eyes when they stare off into the distance. Which father frightens Chris more, Phaedrus or the narrator? The narrator remembers Chris as being very afraid in an episode from their life immediately prior to his hospitalization, but toward the end of the book Chris says that that episode was “fun.” This trip together, by contrast, is no fun at all. Why isn’t it?

Phaedrus, the narrator tells us, “was true to what he believed right to the end.” In pursuing the idea of Quality, however, he abandoned quality in his life. Obsessed with his truth, he was determined to vanquish his foes and “win," and his studies became the marshalling of an arsenal. He made the "dreary room" his personal battleground. Next to this philosophical war and what he felt was at stake in it, his family counted for nothing, and when he realized he could not win, Phaedrus disintegrated. Hospitalization and electroshock treatments followed. The patient released from the hospital is the narrator of the story of Phaedrus, someone who has cobbled together a new self at the expense of the man he was. His concern now is to hold things together, to be safe, in part by distancing himself from his past, including his own son. As much as a "mind divided against itself," what we see in the narrator is a heart in hiding.

The first destination in this book is geographical. It is the end of the journey for the four people who began the trip together. They arrive at the home of friends the narrator knew in his former life, and the couple returns from there to Minnesota, while the father and son continue their trip. The second destination is intellectual, symbolized by the mountain peak, the story of Phaedrus and his search for Quality, told along with the mountain climbing section of the father-son trip, a real part of a real trip but also serving as allegory for the father’s relentless and solitary intellectual search.

If Chris had agreed to be put on a bus for home when the two of them realize that the trip is not working, if the author had recounted only the geographical and intellectual journey, perhaps the “survive by pleasing others” passage would be his final words of wisdom and all he had to offer. But there is another trip and another destination. The surprise is that the third destination turns out not to be the Pacific Ocean, after all. I think this surprises even the narrator.

We round a sharp turn up an overhanging cliff. The ocean stretches forever, cold and blue out there, and produces a strange sense of despair. Coastal people never really know what the ocean symbolizes to land-locked inland people—what a great distant dream it is, present but unseen in the deepest levels of subconsciousness, and when they arrive at the ocean and the conscious images are compared with the subconscious dream there is a sense of defeat at having come so far to be so stopped by a mystery that can never be fathomed. The source of it all.

The narrator recognizes the ocean as the source of life, the allegorical equivalent to Quality as Phaedrus dreamed it, but he also realizes that this source is an unfathomable and cold mystery, with nothing more to give him than what he already has. To reach the spiritual destination the narrator must stop seeing himself as two different people, one real and one a ghost. He must stop referring to his “former self” in the third person and using the passive voice to recount that life. Can he do this? Finally, their trip apparently a failure, his son in tears of desperation, a cliff beckoning, with nothing left to lose, the father and son have a real conversation at last. The father’s recurring nightmare is explained by his son’s memory of a very real incident, and when he realizes that he has not been holding his son together all this time but that the boy has been holding him together the father finds himself and is at last able to be with his son.

I’m not going to give an excerpt from the book’s climactic scene. To do so would be to cheat you of your own arrival when you read the book, but following it the father and son ride without helmets for the first time. They can talk to each other without shouting. The boy stands up on the pedals and can see the road ahead, over his father’s shoulders, for the first time. As earlier they left the mountain peak behind, they now turn away from the cold, inhuman ocean and begin to travel together toward the warmth of a human relationship. This is the real spiritual destination, this reintegration of self and the father-son reunion it makes possible, although this destination could not even be glimpsed until it was reached. And it is “destination” without being an end of the journey.

Rich air and strange perfumes from the flowers of the trees and shrubs enshroud us. Inland now the chill is gone and the heat is upon us again. . . .It seems like I’ve been bone-chilled by the ocean damp for so long I’ve forgotten what heat is like.

The author says in his introduction that he has changed a few facts to shape his narrative, but it no longer matters to me how much is memoir and how much fiction. It matters very little to me (but a little bit, I admit) that Aristotle hardly receives fair treatment. The fact that the author mistranslated the name Phaedrus, as he admits in the introduction, troubles me not at all. It isn’t important. The most important story is the allegory.

In retrospect, I can see that in the seminar room I knew I was not the target. The flak just happened to hit me, although it looked as intentional to my fellow students as it felt to me. That kind of thing happens a lot between human beings. Thinking of that professor of ours and of the final pages of ZAMM while mowing the lawn later in the day, I wondered if there is any hate that is not at bottom a hurt or a fleeing from hurt or fear of being hurt. This was a very rich re-reading for me.

My Morning Train of Thought

The past cannot remember the past. The future can’t generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.
– Robert M. Pirsig, ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE

I’ve already posted about my re-reading of this book and how glad I am to be discovering it again. Three paragraphs before the one quoted above, I put down the book and wrote in my notes “362 – Bergson!” The parallel with my philosophical “main man” was striking, and it made me happy and excited.

Bergson’s thought is often misunderstood,. He did not oppose analysis and was not anti-intellectual. The function of the intellect, he argued, is to analyze and solve problems, not to reveal ultimate reality. What Bergson and the narrator of ZAMM say, then, is that an exclusively analytical focus will miss reality. The narrator goes further than Bergson in one respect and claims that problem-solving must go beyond analysis, too, because (and here is the core of Bergsonian thought) reality does not hold still. Life is fluid and creative and always moving forward, The narrator first gives us an analogy of knowledge as a train, with Classical Knowledge as the engine and boxcars and Romantic Knowledge in none of the parts—because

Romantic Quality ... isn’t any “part” of the train. It’s the leading edge of the engine, a two-dimensional surface of no real significance unless you understand that the train isn’t a static entity at all. A train really isn’t a train if it can’t go anywhere. In the process of examining the train and subdividing it into parts we’ve inadvertently stopped it, so that it really isn’t a train we’re examining. That’s why we get stuck.

The real train of knowledge isn’t a static entity that can be stopped and subdivided. It’s always going somewhere. On a track called Quality. And that engine and all those 120 boxcars are never gong anywhere except where the track of Quality takes them; and romantic Quality, the leading edge of the engine, takes them along that track.

Romantic reality is the cutting edge of experience. It’s the leading edge of the train of knowledge that keeps the whole train on the track. Traditional knowledge is only the collective memory of where that leading edge has been. At the leading edge there are no subjects, no objects, only the track of Quality ahead, and if you have no formal way of evaluating, no way of acknowledging this Quality, then the entire train has no way of knowing where to go. You don’t have pure reason—you have pure confusion. The leading edge is where absolutely all the action is. The leading edge contains all the infinite possibilities of the future. It contains all the history of the past. Where else could they be contained?

(Following what I've just quoted comes the short paragraph quoted at the top of this post.)

For Bergson, if you’ll permit me this little side trip, all of life (not only human) is in motion. He called the leading edge Creative Evolution, but he would object to ZAMM’s analogy because it posits a track already laid down ahead of the train, while that seemingly simple phrase “all the infinite possibilities of the future” should be our clue that the leading edge, as it moves forward, generates the very track on which it runs.

Literary questions that have been in my mind as I’ve been reading remain there as questions (roughly 130 pages from the end at present), but one thing that I’m realizing more and more as I go along is the allegorical nature of this story. The high and low places, the long, grueling stretches, the underbrush through which one must hack and chop one’s way, the loneliness, the promise of the sparkling sea at the end of the road—all these aspects of the physical road trip and the mountain climbing adventure mirror the narrator’s philosophical struggle. Yet the descriptions of natural beauty, of roads and towns, are so detailed that it’s easy to read ZAMM as a travel book and feel the philosophy as an add-on, which it is not at all, and right there is the richness of this book. In the course of a lifetime one can read and re-read it, appreciating it from the different perspectives that increasing age and experience allow until finally one reads it as several books at once, the story unfolding on multiple levels.

Pirsig's narrator talks about getting "stuck" and how good it is. I always told my students that confusion was a good sign: it meant they were really thinking. Mistakes are learning opportunities. I love this stuff!

By the end of the weekend I hope to have reached the end of the book and hope to be able to write something intelligent and intelligible about the nature of the narrator and about the recurring theme of ghosts. Will I have anything to say about bookselling or gardening or the holiday weekend or events around Northport? Who knows? I’m laying my track as my train moves forward.