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?

Read Me: Looking for Alaska by Peter Jenkins

For writing this book, Jenkins is almost my hero. He managed to turn his occupation into moving to Alaska and having as many adventures as possible in one year, then writing about it. Sign me up! But the book wasn’t really about moving to Alaska as much as it was about Peter Jenkins moving to Alaska. The popularity of his previous books, especially A Walk Across America (1979), enabled him to sell this book idea to his editor. (Side note to Tricia: Well, it looks like a smidgeon of fame isn’t all bad after all...) Granted, he does a good job of letting his interviewees do the speaking and inserting his own humble narrative voice only to give color and perspective. Still, I wouldn’t mind crossing the Lower 48 by foot if I got to write a successful book about it afterward, and then move to Alaska.

I say that Jenkins is almost my hero because the book that I would write after a year in the (original) frozen tundra would be radically different than Looking for Alaska. People fascinate Jenkins. He travels in order to collect relationships, to experience different ways people live, to learn how people cope with and thrive in so many situations. What he likes to remember about a place is that slower-than-necessary drive down that empty road, listening to a local granny recall a lifetime of stories. The very middle of nowhere, an extended snow machine ride off the vehicularly harsh Haul Road, is represented by a surprisingly civilized house and its quiet inhabitants. The far north, near Barrow, means Native whaling expeditions whose leaders read the ice as if it was a Shakespeare sonnet. Jenkins’ Alaska is less the stereotype unpeopled wilderness than a space dotted with villages, in a glass-half-full kind of way. Parts of his book go almost too far, becoming laundry lists of the admittedly interesting characters he meets, as if to prove that people do in fact live there: mountain-man backwoods bachelors dressed perpetually in flannel; strong, gun-toting women; knowledgeable children on whose chores rest the livelihood of their families.

All good reading... although an Alaskan tradition is for Outsiders to move there in order to avoid people, not to seek them out, which is the camp I would join. People like Jenkins can go anywhere on Earth and find interesting people just waiting for someone to ask them to tell their life stories. And when people like Jenkins do so, I’m quite willing to read the resulting books, because I’m unlikely myself to walk into some arctic fishing village and pretend to be interested in the details of someone’s broken marriage (even if it is a broken Alaskan marriage). Instead of experiencing people, I would visit Alaska to experience the land: midnight sun and noontime darkness, unimaginable cold, northern lights, suicidally obedient sled dogs, neighborhood herds of musk oxen, omnipresent bears, tundra, taiga, mountains, a thousand versions of ice, and hiking through as much of it as possible.

(But then, who would read a book whose theme is “isn’t that a pretty mountain?” No one wants to read a book devoid of people. That would be either a natural history textbook or a nature walk pamphlet. Some authors get around it through personification: talking pigs, haughty housecats, dragons that behave like flamboyantly-dressed circus fire-eaters. And why not? We can’t possibly know how a pig really thinks, so authors must necessarily imagine and project people-thoughts into the piggy heads. I barely know what my own self is thinking half the time. As we await scientific consensus regarding the inner lives of African grey parrots and apes using sign language, I’m stuck writing the book All the Neat Scenes Rachel Saw on her Summer Vacation until I learn to dull my distaste of small talk long enough to hone interviewing skills.)

Still, I give Looking for Alaska a thumbs up for accomplishing one of the goals of any book, allowing me as the reader to have vicarious experiences I would not otherwise have—with the added bonus that the interesting parts about bears and kayaking and the Iditarod and near-death experiences aboard various bush planes are all distilled from the dreary small talk and dead-end leads Jenkins had to wade through.

Surprisingly, the book dealt not only with Jenkins’ dealings with his new Alaskan neighbors, it also talked about his relationships with his own family. His wife lived with him in Seward between his frequent road trips. Various other family members made long visits or traveled with him. His college-age daughter, Rebekah, made regular appearances. Jenkins brims with pride for her as he watches her find her place in the world as a writer, just like Dad. He even gives her space in his book to write about her own Alaskan experiences (in prose as pleadingly flowery as the Teleflora delivery truck on Valentine’s Day morning, which is to be expected for a wannabe writer not far out of high school). He also brims with parental advice—not suggestions on helping your kid avoid teen angst or quieting an infant at 3 a.m., but rather advice on coping with your children’s successful coming of age. Jenkins notes Rebekah’s newfound self-confidence, developed during a recent NOLS outing and exercised during various Alaskan exploits. He is proud that she is growing up and becoming independent, but it is inevitably a bittersweet pride for giving up his “little girl” and relinquishing his role as protector. He struggles to tame his parental shielding instinct in order to send Rebekah to a tiny village above the Arctic Circle to live with two guys he knows only from emails and a handful of telephone calls. She can take care of herself now, even alone in the arctic with strange, lonely men.

While reading, I felt a bout of anti-homesickness coming on. Reading reminded me of what it feels like to move far away for a year, that excitement for constant newness and daily opportunities to explore. Everyday tasks become adventures. Planning a trip to the grocery store elicits eager anticipation. If you include navigating public transportation systems, the possibilities for epic expeditions become infinite. By the end, you can say with conviction that you have accomplished something that year. You’ve learned. You’ve been faced with daily challenges, many of them quite bizarre, and survived.

Sure, there’s lots to recommend staying put and becoming deeply familiar with one place, developing a history with a place. And there’s something to be said for the ability to work on long-term relationships instead of continually answering where you’re from and what brings you here. (Wouldn’t it be more efficient to print out that introductory speech on business cards to give out?) There are vast differences between talking to someone who’s known you since birth versus chatting with the insta-friend in the next hostel bunk.

But I’m greedy, I have to see every inch of the planet before I can decide where the ideal spot to settle down is. Or maybe that’s being thorough. All I know is that my brain feels good, as if it got a subcutaneous massage, when its exploration cortex gets exercise.

I had to wonder whether Alaska deserves the top spot on my Ideal Future Home list. I think I’d have to go find out for myself. Anyway, I’m now itching to go somewhere. And writing a best-seller about it wouldn’t be half bad, either.

Read Me: Tales of a Female Nomad, Rita Golden Gelman

An antsy bookstore gift card led me to the travel section one day, where Rita Goldman Gelman’s Tales of a Female Nomad (Three Rivers Press, 2001) caught my eye. It turns out to be a diary of Gelman’s life since her divorce at age 48, when she abandoned a glitzy life among the elite of LA in order to get to know the rest of the world. By smiling often, sampling every food she was offered, and asking everyone she met about their children in a genuinely interested tone, she inserted herself into communities in Mexico, Nicaragua, Israel, New Zealand, and Indonesia. Serendipity is her guide. She typically picks an intriguing country almost at random and flies there on the meager profits of her children’s books (which include such colorful titles as More Spaghetti, I Say! and Stop Those Painters!). She then places herself in the remotest backwater village she can reach and chats with locals until someone invites her to stay in their home. She absorbs the local culture and language from her hosts while helping out with chores (preferably in the kitchen) and giving English lessons. When her visa expires, she moves on.

Most of the people she called friends in her old life believe that her divorce severely traumatized her. They accuse her of running away from the situation, making up for her husband’s withdrawal by insisting on being accepted by everyone else she meets. Or of purposefully removing herself from any possibility of long-term relationships by refusing to settle in one place. Gelman responds that she is not running away from anything, and instead she is running toward something. (Funny, that’s the same response I once gave when someone asked me why in the world, as it were, I was going to spend a year in New Zealand. And I thought I was being so smart, turning around his accusation like that.) Is it so crazy to want to be liked and accepted by strangers? Or to be curious and crave challenges? There are worse ways to deal with curves in the road of life. Gelman chose to go off-roading. Her book’s purpose is to explain how positive a nontraditional lifestyle can be. She hopes to be an inspiration, especially to older, divorced women. They still have a lot of living to do, and they might as well spend it on adventures, new friends, and a renewed sense of helpfulness.

At times, though, Gelman makes her life sound impossibly idyllic. She marches into remote corners of the world, making devoted friends out of whole villages on nothing but a smile. Her determined optimism finds ways to tack happy endings onto even the most revolting bad luck. (She succeeds in turning an ugly bout with a whole-body skin infection into a beautiful snake-shedding-skin allegory.) Plus, to make her modest ends meet, she gets to be a writer. She conducts research simply by living. She rarely admits to a wistful thought. But there must be something undesirable about her life. How does she handle so many long-distance relationships, particularly with her parents and children? Does her bank account ever run threateningly low? Does she ever spend five minutes passionately hating children’s books before settling down to finish a story about an exuberantly grinning monkey dressed in a floppy red hat and a gold necklace? How does she plan on living when she’s 90? Does she ever get antsy at the keyboard like I do, itching to go out and collect more neat experiences instead of sequestering herself away to write about the past? Does she ever wish that her life was even a teeny bit different? Her book is an advertisement describing the absence of regret in her nomadic life, a kind of so-there letter to her baffled former friends. But it sometimes sounds as exaggerated as the second half of a drug commercial, after the actress has gulped down her pills and now is running for president. It’s a premeditated strategy for encouraging potential nomads, but if I were seriously considering selling my silverware for a ticket to Borneo, I might want to prepare for the tough parts as well as look forward to the wonderful ones. (Then again, mystery is part of the adventure... Still, the book remains unbalanced.)

If her own life is idyllic, the lives of the people she visits are less satisfying. She prefers the company of indigenous communities whose lives are entwined with tradition. Her hosts are often relatively poor and live in developing countries. Gelman struggles to balance two noble goals: on one hand, wanting to help improve her friends’ lives, and on the other, respecting traditions which are often wonderful but sometimes troublesome. She strives to accept new cultural frames and to see life through the eyes of the locals. When she sees one host family throw their food wrappers to the wind during a roadside picnic, she resists her urge to find a garbage can for her own litter, forcing herself not to judge their actions by the standards of the culture she grew up in. But what would you do if you watched your drunken host beat his wife, knowing that it was “culturally acceptable?” (Acceptable by whom, I wonder?) What would you do if you recognized a great artistic talent in a kid whose destiny it is to wash windows in the family woodcarving gallery? Gelman gave this kid a carving kit, with which he created inspired sculptures, but she stopped short of asking the family to give him time off to develop his talent, fearing that her request would be seen as meddlesome. “Interference” is a slippery concept whose definition slides into that of “helping” without obvious borders, made even more difficult to discern when surrounded by an unfamiliar code of manners and lurking local politics. Fearing that she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from “interfering,” she decided it was time to pack up and continue her journeys. She interprets her urge to interfere as a sign that she has been somewhere long enough, that she has settled into her surroundings enough to feel comfortable passing judgments and suggesting changes. (Then again, maybe she just needs an excuse to keep moving, to feed her addiction to newness.)

After a bit of internet research, I see that there is a small but growing community of older, typically divorced, women travelers. How exciting, and reassuring, to discover a new kind of freedom at an age that we whippersnappers associate with dentures and canes. I almost wish I were 60 right now, so that I could join that crowd, confident with the wisdom of years—and the bank account of years. Or at least a promising work-from-“home” business idea. Sigh, I just hope that a long and boring career from which to launch such a business isn’t a prerequisite for world travel. I wonder how Gelman would advise younger women who are making, instead of remaking, their lives?

Gelman does reach her goal of inspiring potential travelers and showing us how easy and rewarding it is to connect with people who seem, at first, so fundamentally different. Granted, near the middle, her narrative turns into a straight-from-the-diary list that could be entitled “Neat things that happened to me this month:” this is what I cooked on that day, then I flew there, here’s how I found a house, these are the people I went to that ceremony with. Passages that emphasize important events and tie them to Gelman’s life-philosophy become shorter and rarer. But despite my few critiques, I’m ready to hop on a one-way flight to the deepest jungle where no one’s ever heard of English. (Don’t worry, friends and parents, I wouldn’t thrive in Gelman’s shoes. First of all, she can have the tropics, give me a good snowfall. Besides, she repeats that her passion is people, whereas mine is landscapes. Her expertise in chit-chatting opens her doors, literally. I, on the other hand, would head for Nowheresville in order to leave it and go hiking nearby, so I guess I’m still searching for a role model. Still, writing books while hiking around Vatnajökull Glacier sounds sorely tempting.) There is, apparently, more than one way to live a successful and rewarding life.

More Info:
www.ritagoldengelman.com

Other Eye-Catching Titles:
Not So Funny When It Happened (ed. Tim Cahill, Travelers’ Tales 2006)
Madam, Have You Ever Really Been Happy? (Meg Noble Peterson, iUniverse 2005)

Currently on my coffee table:
Tales from Nowhere (ed. Don George, Lonely Planet 2006)

Two Thumbs Up:
Into the Wild (Jon Krakauer, Anchor Books 1996)
Southern Exposure (Chris Duff, Falcon 2003)
Rowing to Latitude: Journeys Along the Arctic’s Edge (Jill Fredston, North Point Press 2001)
A Walk in the Woods (Bill Bryson, Broadway Books 1998)