Book Report: A Walk Across America,Peter Jenkins

 
Peter Jenkins has reaffirmed his place as my almost-hero with his book A Walk Across America (1979).

It is quite obviously his first literary effort. The reader has to wade through gratuitous exclamation points and corny, unnecessary dialogue. His metaphors are either trite and empty or over-elaborate and clunky, rarely adding to the meaning or mood of his descriptions. He uses a new adjective before his dog’s name every time the dog is mentioned: “brave Cooper,” “powerful Cooper,” “playful Coops.” I wondered whether Jenkins had been studying Beowulf and its poetic epithets. The book reads like an unabridged adolescent’s diary.

If you manage to ignore the style, though, the underlying story is redeemingly amazing. Jenkins had just graduated from a small college in Upstate New York and was recovering from a dizzying marriage and divorce. He felt like he needed to go somewhere and considered traveling abroad because, along with the rest of his generation, he saw too many faults in America. A wise, old friend suggested that he see for himself whether America was worthless or worthwhile, and Jenkins decided to do just that. He would walk across the country with his dog, getting to know its people and places for himself, before passing final judgment.

This book follows him from Alfred, NY to New Orleans. (A sequel takes him the rest of the way west.) At first, he simply enjoys the act of walking through the peaceful autumn countryside. He becomes comfortable sleeping amidst the Halloween-sounds of the nighttime woods and builds the stamina to walk 20 to 30 miles per day. Once snow begins to fall, Cooper’s puppyish enthusiasm with jumping through snow banks energizes them both. He spends a few days on the Appalachian Trail but turns off when he remembers that his goal is to understand local people.

When he runs out of money, Jenkins stops in friendly towns to find work. He lives with a black family in their trailer in the Appalachian foothills. He spends a few weeks in an old-fashioned Southern plantation and on a commune. He wins the trust of a notoriously crotchety hermit, surprising nearby villagers, who placed bets on whether Jenkins would return alive. He shakes hands with Governor George Wallace. He ends up in a seminary in New Orleans to write a memoir for National Geographic. He is honest about his stereotypes of people and places, cultivated in a buffered, Eastern upper-crust suburbia, but he is willing to march through his phobic preconceptions and discover what life is really like at a Christian revival and on an Appalachian farm. Again and again, he is surprised by the friendliness and generosity of the people.

Jenkins’ epic story wraps itself up as nicely and magically as a fairy tale. By the time he reaches Louisiana, he has found not only faith in America but also a career as a writer, religion, and a fiancé. He has lived through a tornado, drunken brawls, small-town suspicion, a deadly strain of influenza in a backwoods cave, and even the death of his beloved dog. Having read his 2001 Looking for Alaska, I am reassured that both this second marriage and his writing career flourish (and that he learns to conserve exclamation points and euthanize strained metaphors). The moral of the story: if you trust your instincts and trust other people, the rest of life will fall into place.

How perfect: the hero journeys away from home into the unknown wild-lands in order to have many adventures and find his place in life. Joseph Campbell would be proud.

That’s the kind of heroic challenge I’d sign up for. Even though I’ve fallen in love with Ithaca--wacky, liberal, smug Ithaca--I feel like I’m waiting for something. Maybe that’s a consequence of perennial unemployment, or maybe I’m getting anxious after living in one place for so long. I spend my days fencing, hiking, biking, journaling, and daydreaming. I have no epic project to work on, no heroic goal to aim for. Earning a degree would fit into that category. For some people, performing on Broadway or competing in the Olympics also fits. Maybe raising children does, too. I’m ready--desperate--for something to dedicate myself to, even something as senseless as walking across a continent.

Any suggestions?

Logbook Wisdom

 
Leave a blank book in the middle of the woods for a year, and what happens? It becomes a Rorschach test for hikers, except the hikers leave the inkblots. The books are part community message board, part graffiti canvas, part group diary, and part rainy day diversion. Most entries record little more than names, dates, and destinations, with occasional musings on the beauty of the surroundings, but here are a few other uses that hikers thought up:

• Thank-you card: “Dear lean-to adopters and trail maintenance crews...”
  
• Autograph collection: What would your trail name be? I followed the exploits of the likes of the Rondackers and Bachelor Bob. A string of letters and numbers followed some names: NTP 2004, LT 99, AT, GA-->ME 06-07. This code is the hikers’ version of adding Ph.D. or F.R.S. to their names, like medals of honor, or brief resumes of the trails they’ve walked. Bachelor Bob followed his name with alphabet soup, which lent weight to his frustrated criticisms of signage and trail maintenance issues. Since I was walking in his footsteps for a few days, I could only commiserate in my own entries.
  
• Travel guide: Most NTP hikers walk northward, so the rare southbound hiker reaps a harvest of cautions and recommendations about the trail ahead.
  
• Opinion forum: Hot topics include the necessity of fire bans and the tension between historical preservation, public accessibility, and the wilderness aesthetic. Also popular are impassioned essays against the inevitable lean-to litter.
  
• Breadcrumbs: A rescue party can play connect-the-dots until they find where a missing person’s entries leave off.
  
• Directory: Entries noted the best firewood-gathering grounds and the most productive fishing spots.
  
• Confessional: A gay couple confessed to accidentally “showing off” while skinny dipping to a Boy Scout Troop. Unsurprisingly, such incidents happen on an apparently regular basis.
  
• Religious testament: Spiritual moments strike people often in the wilderness, but I was confused by the praises to God’s aesthetic sense at Duck Hole, a reservoir.
  
• Sketchbook: A few disturbingly practiced adolescent drawings wait patiently among entries, hoping to shock unsuspecting browsers. Elsewhere, innocent illustrations retell hikers’ adventures in graphic-novel style.
  
• Backwoods girl talk: “When Aunt Flo comes calling a few days early, sphagnum moss offers a comfy and absorbent solution.”
  
• Weather monitoring station: Dripping wet hikers need somewhere to vent their weather-related frustrations.
  
• Wilderness survival guide: “Remember the computer game Oregon Trail: meager rations and a grueling pace means everyone dies!”

 

The Pantry According to Rachel

To be recited prior to the ceremony of the Ingestion of the Animal Crackers.

1 Praise Thee, O Circus Animal Crackers!

2 Never before this Day have You been so anticipated through such Tribulations and through so many mud Puddles.

3 For you are the perfect Union of refined Sugars, enriched bleached Flour, red Dye #2, partially hydrogenated palm kernel, soybean, cottonseed, and/or canola Oil, and traces of Peanuts.

4 No multitudes of pestilential Blackflies nor host of bloodthirsty Mosquitoes can dissuade me from partaking of Your pink and white Frosting.

5 Your cookie Center imparts Strength unto weary Muscles, and your multicolored Sprinkles bring joy to heavy Hearts.

6 This Day the very Weather turned against me, but through this Flood, You have remained at my Back (specifically, in the confines of my Pack).

7 May you be forevermore my Source of Sustenance in the Wilderness!

 

Food Poetry

 
Oatmeal, oatmeal, perfect food,
Breakfast, cookies, lifts my mood.
Gorp, granola, raw or stewed,
Fills me up with fortitude!
 

Sing Along

To the tune of the Scout camp "Swimming Hole" song,
composed during a rather wet day over a mountain pass.

Hiking, hiking, on the mountaintop,
Wet's the day, but stay and play
In the muddy glop!
Uphill, downhill, tramping 'til you drop,
Don't you say this mountain day
Should never, ever stop!
 

Musings from Blackfly Season

• When I squish blackflies on my face, is their cause of death blunt trauma or drowning in saltwater?
  
• How many calories are in a blackfly? There’s not much meat on one, but think of them like grains of sand on a beach. With as many as I caught in my tent each night, I could have had a hearty meal. They already flavored my oatmeal and pasta. I’m surprised I didn’t choke by breathing them in.
  
• Do blackfly guts count as hair-care products? After a few days, I had more of that on my scalp than shampoo.
  
• If humans are 80% water, how much water is in a blackfly? It sounded like it was raining when I sat in my tent, but it was the ticking of many dozen blackflies throwing themselves against the tent wall. I put on my raincoat to go outside, with the hood up and the sleeves cinched tight around my wrists. I used my scarf more for insect protection than for its intended purpose.
  
• Do insects make inter-species alliances? I could usually escape blackflies by jumping into a river. At the Cedar River Flow near Wakely Dam, however, I was nibbled above by flies and below by fish. That was not fair.

Blackflies Versus Customers

I quit my retail job to go hiking in the thick of blackfly season. This is why.

Why Blackflies are Preferable to Customers

• The police don't have to get involved when you squish the life out of a blackfly.
  
• Customers are there all year round.
  
• Blackflies are supposed to have the IQ of an insect.
  
• They both carry diseases, but the bite of a customer is more painful.
  
• I've never had a blackfly become belligerent when it sees through my attempts to fake a full working knowledge of hedge trimmers.
  
• Blackflies don't care whether the surrounding plants are perennials or annuals.
  
• In polite conversation, it is acceptable to refer to blackflies as part of the local wildlife.
  
• Blackflies prefer to stay downwind.
  
• There's a spray for blackflies.