3 for the Road: Conclusion

This is the last in a series of twelve monthly posts on my three favourite travelogues – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989). Today, I’ll try to sum up my reading experience.

When I started this project, I said I wanted to get to know these books better. I feel I’ve accomplished that. But I also feel I’ve failed to do them justice. In my concentration on their formal properties – structure, action, imagery, detail – I neglected their meaning. What do these books mean? What is their message? To one degree or another, they’re all concerned with loss. In Notes from the Century Before, it’s loss of wilderness (“It’s as though the last bit of ocean were about to become more dry land, planted and paved … The loss is to people unborn”) and loss of the pioneers who hiked the wilderness trails (“These walks were just about the last go-round – the last exploration of the continent by foot that we’ll ever have”). In Coming into the Country, it’s about preservation versus development (“With the pipeline, however, Alaska suddenly had more development than it could absorb. It suddenly had manifold inflation and a glut of trailer parks. It had traffic jams”; “To be sure, I would preserve plenty of land as well. My own margin of tolerance would not include some faceless corporation ‘responsible’ to a hundred thousand stockholders, making a crater you could see from the moon”). In Great Plains, the underlying theme is massive loss and destruction:

This, finally, is the punch line of our two hundred years on the Great Plains: we trap out the beaver, subtract the Mandan, infect the Blackfeet and the Hidatsa and the Assiniboin, overdose the Arikara; call the land a desert and hurry across it to get to California and Oregon; suck up the buffalo, bones and all; kill off nations of elk and wolves and cranes and prairie chickens and prairie dogs; dig up the gold and rebury it in vaults someplace else; ruin the Sioux and Cheyenne and Arapaho and Crow and Kiowa and Comanche; kill Crazy Horse, kill Sitting bull; harvest wave after wave of immigrants’ dreams and send the wised-up dreamers on their way; plow the topsoil until it blows to the ocean, ship out the wheat, ship out the cattle; dig up the earth itself and burn it in power plants and send the power down the line; dismiss the small farmers, empty the little towns; drill the oil and natural gas and pipe it away; dry up the rivers and springs, deep-drill for irrigation water as the aquifer retreats.

So each of these books delivers a serious message. They aren’t just description for description’s sake, detail for detail’s sake. But you know what? I love description for description’s sake, detail for detail’s sake. That’s why I read them. I love them for their writing as pure writing, for the sheer pleasure of their sentences. Three examples:

The scow up front is fun to ride because it slides vibrationlessly, but so is the galley of the Judith Ann, where the floor jangles in frenzy and the glasses and plates deafen the floor. [Notes from the Century Before]

To the palate of a travelling Martian – which would be the more acceptable, a pink-icinged Pop-Tart with raspberry filling (cold) or the fat gob from behind a caribou’s eye? [Coming into the Country]

I slept beneath the mercury lights of highway rest areas where my lone car was visible for six miles in any direction and the inside of the men’s room looked as if it had been sandblasted with tiny insects, and on the streets of small towns where the lawn sprinklers ran all night, and next to damned-up waters of the Missouri River where the white top branches of drowned trees rose above the waters. [Great Plains]

I’d give my left testicle to have written any one of those three inspired lines. And there are plenty more where they came from. 

Now, to conclude, I want to imagine a collage that captures the essence of these three great books. I picture it like this: a bright, multi-hued totem pole topped with a hatted ruling raven; a silver-and-purple tube of Wet ’n Wild lipstick; a grizzly whirling a salmon around his head; a moose head roasting over a campfire; a de Havilland Twin Otter; a tumble weed; a D9 Caterpillar; a pink-icinged Pop-Tart with raspberry filling; Crazy Horse; a blue mountain slung with white snow; a bleached caribou antler; a double Klepper kayak; a white canvas tipi; a Grumman Goose; a rusty red fifty-five-gallon steel drum. Overlap these images; paste them at crazy angles to each other; and across the whole assemblage paint three wide wavy stripes – a gray-green one for the Yukon, a blue-green one for the Stikine, and a tan one for the Missouri. I call my collage “McHoagzier.”