Tales of Two Road Trips: "The Places In Between" and "The Road"

My daily schedule has become hectic, but each morning presents a solid half hour of blessed public transportation. This allows me a half hour to read and relax on the train before a day of trying to cram information into my head. My recent selections have presented stories of two drastically different road trips, each devastating in its own way.

The Places In Between, by Rory Stewart

I began The Places In Between with a large number of preconceived notions about the author. I knew the story detailed the author's walk across Afghanistan in 2002. Based on that detail alone, I expected the author to be a macho risk-taker. I expected the story to be interesting but full of boastful anecdotes. I formed these opinions by pondering the type of person willing to take such a risky trip.

Fortunately, I could not have been more incorrect. The author comes across as introspective and knowledgeable, resourceful and kind. He weaves threads of his own story along with Afghanistan's history--both recent and ancient. The result is a beautiful tale of danger and discovery. His narrative is a welcome contrast to the way Afghanistan tends to be presented in the mainstream media. Instead of discussing a monolithic culture, Stewart reveals an Afghanistan marked by diversity. While reading, I realized that much of what I have read about the country had been littered with overgeneralizations, and the lack of subtlety in our conception of the nation will likely be the downfall of the US project.

As a travel story, the book was one of the best I've read. He faces difficult conditions throughout his trip, and his survival depends on the hospitality of strangers. He encounters dangers that seem alien and absurd, but the dangers make the journey so remarkable.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

I assume most folks who come to this blog have heard of The Road by now, so I will keep my comments short. It's a story of the love between father and son, the end of civilization, and being. The writing transports me, and each time I set the book down I have to shake off the world McCarthy creates so deftly. The story is scary and beautiful, and it unmasks existence to its core, finding a perverse clash of good and evil. I call it "perverse" because I'm forced to decide where I would fit in this world. I'd like to think that I'd be "carrying the fire," but I can't be sure.

I now face the first time that I have been afraid to finish a book. I lack only fourteen pages, but I don't know if I can face what they may hold. When you read the book, pause at the bottom of page 272, and I imagine you will feel the same way.

Book Review: The Worst Hard Time, by Timothy Egan

One of my new favorite movies has to be The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, starring Tommy Lee Jones. The story revolves largely around a young Border Patrol officer who committed a terrible crime. While his crime is appalling, the bulk of the film traces his punishment--part human inflicted and part seemingly inflicted by nature itself. The story of this officer is one of karma . . . with teeth. By the end of the movie, the viewer wonders whether the officer's sins are worth the repeated punishments: the beatings, the snakebite, the grueling journey, and the corpse companion.

Timothy Egan's book, The Worst Hard Time, reflected a similar theme, this time rooted in history. Set in the Texas Panhandle, Oklahoma Panhandle, Baca County Colorado, and parts of Kansas and Nebraska, Egan traces the broad history of the Dust Bowl from cause to windy conclusion. Just like a viewer watching Three Burials, the reader becomes very well aware of the farmers' fault in contributing to the Dust Bowl but later concludes that no one deserves the hell that followed.

Hubris. It's a word that appears frequently in Egan's work--probably because it's the perfect choice to explain the growth of that part of the country. The entire region was founded on hubris. The grasslands had been home to millions of very well-adapted plains buffalo who fed on equally well-adapted grass in a region of high wind and low rain. In an effort to settle the central portions of the US, railroad marketing programs and US government incentives led farmers into this arid region with promises of limitless fertile croplands. An area that had been home to the Native Americans became the home of cowboys until the farmers appeared and plowed millions of acres.

At this point, the history began to remind me of Collapse by Jared Diamond. Diamond studied societies defined by their hubris (or at least ignorance) in good times, hubris which became their downfall in times of environmental or economic change. The good times were really good on the plains. World War I left grain prices soaring, and the early part of the 20th century saw unusually high amounts of rain. Towns exploded, and banks responded with risky lending practices, allowing farmers to acquire new cars, homes, and farm equipment--which created more plowed land. That part of the world was built in a guarantee of continued good conditions, environmentally and financially, and, when the world began to change, it all came crashing down. With the grass gone and crop prices plummeting, that world of hubris vanished in a massive cloud of dust. The plains had a collapse rivaling any detailed in Diamond's book, leaving the population propped up, and barely, on pure grit and government subsidy.

Egan paints the story of the impending struggle clearly and beautifully. His language carries the feel of an old time Panhandle slang, and he leaves the reader almost tasting dirt in her teeth at times (then again, this reader grew up in the Panhandle and is very familiar with that particular flavor of dirt). While the farmer obviously carries the blame for plowing up land fit only for grass, Egan makes it clear that the punishment for that sin outweighed any normal sense of justice. Egan quotes a diary entry from the time: "Those who coined the phrase 'There's no place like Nebraska' wrote better than they thought. In Nebraska, you don't have to die to go to hell."

The people who survived that time period are a tough lot, and I wondered, while reading, whether I could have weathered that decade. More importantly, I wondered whether I would have to survive conditions like that and then look back on another period of hubris. Let's hope not.

Thoughts on Wine . . . and Resource Depletion

Well, we really weren't kidding when we extolled the beauties of the Cape Town area wineries. Apparently the New York Times has caught on as well.

But this only reminds me of our latest wine problem. Cape Town made us South African wine converts. In fact, Megan and I normally avoided white wines altogether until we were introduced to the sauvignon blancs of the Western Cape. While we were greatly restricted in the amount of wine we could bring back with us, we soon began the quest for the perfect Cape Town-area sauvignon blanc at our local wine store.

And after arduous testing and tasting, we encountered the Southern Right, a wine named for the whale that thrives in the waters of the South Atlantic. This encounter left us hooked.

The first bottle went fast, and we restocked. Those bottles complemented grilled fish, pork, salads, air, water, etc., and they were soon gone. We returned to our store to find at least a dozen bottles left, so we acquired three more.

Those passed quickly as well, and when we returned to the store, we found just three bottles stashed away in the back of a wine refrigerator. Our resources, it seemed, had been depleted at an unsustainable rate. As a result, our attitude toward the wine changed drastically.

The first bottle in the new stash went relatively quickly--after all, we had two more, and maybe we could find another supplier in the meantime? Despite my best efforts, no new supply was forthcoming. Monday night, we consumed bottle two. This leaves just one bottle of the precious elixir. This last bottle now has an elevated status: it has transformed from a nice complement to sauteed fish to a "special occasion" wine. We will likely hold onto the bottle until some point of celebration, preserving that resource as best we can.

Meanwhile, we have begun the hunt for a sauvignon blanc that reaches the quality of the Southern Right and at about the same price (around $12 a bottle). If any reader has a suggestion, please, please, let us know. And Golden Kaan doesn't cut it. Neither does Arabella.

I suppose we should feel fortunate that our only depleted resource, at this point, is wine. After all, it's hardly necessary to our continued existence, and we can safely stash this bottle away without any economic penalty. I just wonder what happens when the rest of our resources start vanishing. For example, if instead of sauvignon blanc, we were stashing away our last bottle of clean water, I think we would be in a drastically different situation.

That situation, however, is not entirely unimaginable. Perhaps I am paranoid having just finished Collapse, the terrific book by Jared Diamond, but, unless folks across the globe make some big changes, we might be savoring each drop someday in the not-too-distant future.

For now, though, we are blessed to simply need a good white wine. Suggestions?

Preliminary Thoughts: Jared Diamond's "Collapse"

Normally I would wait until the end of a book to review it, but I can't resist sharing some preliminary thoughts at the half-way point of Jared Diamond's book Collapse. By telling the fascinating histories of the environmental collapses of many great civilizations, Diamond hopes to reveal the fragility of our own society, and his analysis proves as thorough as it is terrifying. I basically find myself constantly thinking about this book. For the traveler, the book provides stunning descriptions of amazing and remote places. As a human in the world today, it provides valuable lessons in our own fallibility and will hopefully force people to change the way they live.

So far, I have read Diamond's analysis of the Maya, Anasazi, Easter Island, and other Pacific Island civilizations. Each of these societies reached a peak of greatness and complexity noted by construction of monuments honoring an elite class. These booms in architectural sophistication and population came at the expense of the natural environment, and many of these societies soon encountered a lack of building materials due to deforestation and a deterioration in food quality due to high population and soil depletion. With such human-caused devastation of the natural environment, small outside factors like drought or other temporary climate changes could exacerbate the situation and lead to societal collapse. The ruling elite in the societies often relied on supply chains that suddenly stopped functioning, and the populations dwindled to non-existence in some cases.

When I first started reading the book, I assumed that the parallels between these past societies and our own would be too tenuous for me to believe that a collapse would be possible. I had visions of Mad Max movies and laughed those off as fiction. Obviously we use our environment to support an enormous population, and obviously we reveal the magnitude of our resources through monumental architecture and countless luxuries. It is quite difficult to imagine centuries of modern society being brought to its knees by environmental destruction . . . until, of course, you consider that the Mayan civilization developed for over 800 prosperous years before collapsing over the period of roughly a century. Our modern history is a blip on time line, and we are cocky to assume we are invincible.

Environmental skeptic? Let's talk flu

But my readers are thinking that I'm a paranoid environmentalist anyway. Yesterday, I started thinking about Collapse in a much different and much shorter term context, pandemic flu.

Megan and I spent yesterday morning at a fascinating conference called the "Conference of the Professions," an event designed to unite lawyers, physicians and clergy to discuss ethical issues facing all three professions. The topic of this particular conference was pandemic flu planning. I was surprised by the number of unknowns in the process. Some epidemiological evidence suggests that we are already in some sort of influenza pandemic based on the historically high number of annual deaths from influenza in recent years; however, I was presented no evidence as to whether these numbers are just tied to the fact that the population is so much larger.

What really interested me were the descriptions of food supply. In the societies Diamond talks about, the elimination of the food supply is often the trigger for widespread chaos and even cannibalism. Apparently the city of Dallas has roughly 48 hours of food on the shelves at any given moment. If influenza disrupted the supply chain (as it likely would), one can quickly imagine the repercussions. Arguably most homes will have longer stockpiles, but perhaps not much more. In a society that loves to refrigerate and eat at restaurants, the end of the grocery store would create severe problems. Moreover, relief would likely not come from other locations since most models of a flu pandemic show a national and global impact. During Hurricane Katrina, other areas could provide support (however slowly)--a pandemic flu would preclude such relief.

This Stuff is Scary

Diamond says he concludes his book with some examples of societies addressing environmental problems to save their societies from collapse. I'm ready to get to those chapters. I'm assuming the solution is not to depopulate and live in isolated farming communities with individuals self-sufficient on their own agricultural production. We have to remember that life on the earth is actually life from the earth, and I think Diamond's book will provoke individuals to discover that principal more fully.

Book Review: "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier" by Ishmael Beah

I wandered into Starbucks late last week and noticed a stack of books near the pastries. The cover featured a disturbing photo of a thoughtful young boy walking with an AK-47 across his back and some sort of grenade launcher across his shoulders. Curious, I picked up the book, A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, and decided to use it to break to the law school monotony. Instead, the book broke my heart.

Beah writes a beautiful memoir with succinct and devastating language. The narrative begins with a description of his childhood in a small village in Sierra Leone where he had a reputation as being "troublesome." As a child, Beah developed a passion for rap music and enjoyed dance and memorizing the lyrics.

Eventually, rebel forces attack the village and separate Beah from the bulk of his family. He becomes a refugee fleeing violence and horror only to find the conflict chasing him across the country. Eventually, as the title suggests, Beah becomes a soldier for a government army unit and watches his childhood vanish in a haze of drugs and killing.

The story follows him through the conflict and into rehabilitation, where life outside the war zone casts a spotlight on the transformation from child to soldier as Beah struggles to reclaim his former identity from a cloud of guilt and anger.

My description above seems dark, but the story is a continual roller coaster of hope and brief periods of elation interrupted with violence and sorrow. It reads quickly and beautifully, and I highly recommend it--after all, Beah's reality is echoed in conflicts across the world every day.

The Role of Nature

From a literary standpoint, I particularly savored Beah's invocation of nature. He grew up in a village surrounded by lush foliage. The bushes become a hiding place, the trees offer a food source and shelter from hog attacks, the streams provide relief from the heat, and the ocean heals Beah's torn feet.

But his use of nature goes beyond providing a setting and fuses two of three story-telling traditions Beah acknowledges as influential in his narrative (the third being rap music). He grew up in a culture of vivid nature stories, several of which are repeated in the memoir. For example, he tells the story of a hunter who could transform himself into a wild hog. Then, by eating a certain plant, he could change back into a hunter and kill the hogs. Eventually, the hogs discovered the hunter's secret and attacked, which is why hogs are distrustful of all humans. Later, Beah finds that the cycles of violence also make humans distrustful of each other.

Beyond the parables of his youth, Beah grew up on Shakespeare and loved reciting the great speeches from Julius Caesar and MacBeth. Suddenly, Beah's descriptions of nature took on a different meaning. I remember reading in awe at the way Shakespeare wrapped the natural environment into his works. When evil is afoot in Julius Caesar, the shutters begin flapping around in some sort of phantom wind. Throughout his works, good and evil in humanity is reflected in benevolent or menacing signs in the natural world.

Beah invokes his natural world in similar ways except, while Shakespeare's use of nature probably derived from Elizabethan-era theology and superstitions, Beah suggests a horror so brutal that nature itself cannot remain passive. The crickets, moon and trees are not immune from the violence.

After an attack on his home town, Beah notes, "With the absence of so many people, the town became scary, the night darker, and the silence unbearably agitating. Normally, the crickets and birds sang in the evening before the sun went down. But this time they didn't, and darkness set in very fast. The moon wasn't in the sky; the air was stiff, as if nature itself was afraid of what was happening."

Whether this reaction from nature existed in reality or only in Beah's mind, the effect is just as powerful. After an attack, "the moon disappeared and took the stars with it, making the sky weep. Its tears saved us from the red bullets." Here, nature responds to human sadness and, in doing so, provides protection to the scared children.

Eventually, Beah makes the transition from child refugee to soldier-barbarian, addicted to cocaine and methamphetamines. After his initiation into the world of bloodshed, Beah loses many good friends in an ambush in a forest and "left them there in the forest, which had taken on a life of its own, as if it had trapped the souls that had departed from the dead. The branches of the trees looked as if they were holding hands and bowing their heads in prayer." At this point in the story, I began to get the idea that the trees were the last creatures with the will to keep praying.

In the midst of conflict, nature offers shelter while disguising threats, offers food along with predators, and reacts as it watches the horror unfold. The description of nature enriches the reading experience and helps explain the magnitude of the evil involved.

Pick up Beah's book. It is a well-written story that, at minimum, will transform the way you think about the headlines. At best, his story will leave you with a burning question: how can I help? That's exactly what I intend to ask the author when he appears for a book signing here in Dallas on March 6.

Long Way Round: Vicarious Travels Across Asia

Frequently, a traveler finds herself jaunting between a series of transportation hubs. The backpacker headed to Europe normally explores larger cities connected by the rail system. Travelers to Asia tend to stop in only major cities accessible by large aircraft. But these sort of travels cut out the amazing opportunities available by road . . . opportunities exploited to the max by Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman in "The Long Way 'Round." I'll just call them "Ewan and Charley" from here on out because, after watching the documentary, they are starting to feel like old friends (they even note this phenomenon when they meet the folks at Orange County Chopper).

This weekend, Megan and I indulged in some vicarious travel by enjoying the DVD of the Long Way Round, a documentary of Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman's trip around the world . . . by motorcycle. While neither Megan nor I ride motorcycles, we found ourselves drooling at the thought of setting off across these vast territories by road.

The trip began with what seemed like Ewan and Charley's insane dream to travel from London to New York by motorcycle. After months of intense preparation (self-defense classes, first aid classes, the desperate search for motorcycle sponsorship--KTM lost a great opportunity as this film could be the greatest advertisement for BMW motorcycles of all time), the duo heads out on a pair of BMW's with a camera man and two support vehicles ("support" is a bit of a stretch: for most of the trip, the vehicles merely allow the bikers to restock on food and film before setting out on their own again).

The route was daunting. From London they would take the Chunnel train to Paris. After crossing Western Europe, the pair traveled to Prague and through Slovakia into Russia. From Russia the team entered Kazakhstan (finding a very different country than Borat describes). After Kazakhstan, they reenter Russia before crossing Mongolia. From Mongolia, they make a third entry into Russia and travel Siberia's "Road of Bones" to Magadan. From there they fly to Anchorage, Alaska. Then, they enjoy pavement toward Fairbanks and into Calgary before dropping down to the US and crossing the plains toward Chicago and, finally, New York City.

The route meant 20,000 miles through often absurd obstacles. The joy of the adventure often comes through the experience of random fortune. Kazakhstan finds them at the center of bizarre media frenzies. They end up spending the night in the home of a random, underworld character who entertains with machine gun and guitar. The "roads" in Mongolia leave the group at the mercies of random passersby who can perform instant repairs. Finally, they try to navigate the Road of Bones shortly after the winter thaw, so the roads often vanished into raging rivers, leaving the travelers to hitch rides in the backs of passing trucks. Needless to say, this trip wasn't easy.

To avoid spoiling the film, I'll cut the description short. Megan and I watched it with hopes of changing the way we travel in the future. While I doubt we'll cross Asia by motorcycle (and my mother and grandmother just breathed a huge sigh of relief), we would like to start hitting the road more often . . . probably even starting in Mongolia. Traveling by road, the duo encountered the joys of empty space and open highway, often finding themselves in nearly inaccessible hamlets in Far Eastern Russia. These sort of places offer rich experiences and fascinating interactions unavailable in major cities. I watched the DVD and found myself growing both jealous and bolder by the minute. And I'm guessing Ewan and Charley wanted their viewer feeling those exact emotions.

We finished the series aching for more, and, as if reading our mind, Ewan and Charley plan to deliver with the "Long Way Down," a journey from the tip-top of Scotland to Cape Town. While I do not know the exact route (and imagine that will depend largely on political conditions), the journey is bound to be as harrowing and fascinating as the first. Megan and I, after crossing part of Tanzania, assumed that navigating large parts of Africa by road would be prohibited by peril . . . we're hoping that Ewan and Charley prove us wrong.

Adventures of Livingstone--The Glory Days of Travel Writing

I decided to check out the aforementioned chronicle of the Herald-Stanley expedition into Africa to find David Livingstone. Not twenty pages into the book, Adventures and Discoveries of Dr. David Livingstone and the Herald-Stanley Expedition, I found the following passage:

"Starting, and looking half round, I saw the lion just in the act of springing upon me. I was upon a little height; he caught my shoulder as he sprang, and we both came to the ground below together. Growling horribly close to my ear, he shook me as a terrier dog does a rat. The shock produced a stupor similar to that which seems to be felt by a mouse after the first shake of the cat. It caused a sort of dreaminess, in which there was no sense of pain nor feeling of terror, though quite conscious of all that was happening. It was like what patients partially under the influence of chloroform describe, who see all the operation, but feel not the knife. This singular condition was not the result of any mental process. The shake annihilated fear, and allowed no sense of horror in looking round at the beast. This peculiar state is probably produced in all animals killed by the carnivora, and if so, is a merciful provision by our benevolent Creator for lessening the pain of death. Turning round to relieve myself of the weight, as he had one paw on the back of my head, I saw his eyes directed to Mebalwe, who was trying to shoot him at a distance of ten or fifteen yards. His gun, a flint one, missed fire in both barrels; the lion immediately left me, and, attacking Mebalwe, bit his thigh. Another man, whose life I had saved before, after he had been tossed by a buffalo, attempted to spear the lion while he was biting Mebalwe. He left Mebalwe and caught this man by the shoulder, but at that moment the bullets he had received took effect, and he fell down dead. The whole was the work of a few moments . . . [the carcass] was declared to be that of the largest lion they had ever seen."

The story goes on, almost without transition, into Livingstone's missionary activity, which faced a number of obstacles. Initially, conversion required male converts to separate from their multitude of wives. While this might not seem problematic, the author discusses the problems of having hoards of furious ex-wives opposing Livingstone's efforts. Secondly, someone spread a nasty rumor that Baptism involved drinking the brains of dead men. Despite these obstaces, "we had sown the good seed, and have no doubt but it will yet spring up, though we may not live to see the fruits."

This account of the lion attack struck me on a number of levels. First, modern writing tends to restrict description to a sentence or two: this author spends six sentences loaded with analogy to explain the mental state alone. I was even more interested by the fact that, out of that small group that encountered the lion, Livingstone had already saved the life of another person. But that event is mentioned in one clause within one sentence. Saving that person's life after an encounter with a buffalo barely deserved mention: the mental state of being assaulted carried the story.

Had I written the passage, I probably would have gloated at saving the life of another person, but to Livingstone, that's just what happens in Africa. The interesting thing to him is surviving the attack and the odd euphoria induced by the moment. And, at this point, the missionary context helps explain the author's choice. Livingstone goes to Africa motivated by his religion. The strange peace during his attack supports his faith in a "benevolent Creator." His saving another life remains less important than his sowing of "good seed" against the various cultural barriers.

One last observation. Within the first pages, Livingstone reduces another potentially long story to a brief mention: "I performed a distance of some hundred miles on ox-back." That's another beautiful time capsule. While I have previously written of the pain and torment of taking a ferry from Zanzibar to Dar es Salaam without air-conditioning, Livingstone hardly mentions what would inevitably be a brutal and terrifying journey. In the past I've mentioned wanting to travel like Livingstone--now, I'm not sure I would have survived.

Choosing Books

People taking long trips have serious decisions to make on their book choice. Most of the world lacks options like Barnes & Noble and Borders, and you will find people trading books in hostels and cafes as though the books are worth their weight in gold (I remember negotiations in Shigatse, Tibet, in which a Grisham novel was considered worth two of any other novel . . . it is a strange market). More importantly, weight itself can be a bit issue when traveling, so a bad book is a tremendous burden. Even a great book is a burden if it is too thick (which is why one might find a copy of Joyce's Ulysses in a youth hostel in Rome . . . just couldn't carry it anymore).

You can get a feel for these decisions through Andy Hobotraveler.com, a remarkable website. He recently commented on "Crichton travel" a term coined by Clayton and I after reading about Michael Crichton's physical (and metaphysical) travels. I, personally, found the metaphysical discussions annoying, but the physical travels documented in the book were riveting. Anyway, Andy plans to put the term "Crichton travel" to the test. With plans to soon travel through the Congo, he'll do exactly that--hopefully proving to the rest of us that intense travel through relatively untrod territory is still possible.