3 More for the Road: Structure

This is the fourth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three more of my favourite travel books – Anthony Bailey's Along the Edge of the Forest (1983), Robert Sullivan's Cross Country (2006), and Ian Frazier's Travels in Siberia (2010) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their structure.

One of the pleasures of reading Along the Edge of the Forest is watching the masterful way Bailey uses his Iron Curtain journey to generate his themes. The book is divided into twenty-eight chapters – each a stage in Bailey’s road trip. The chapters roll out sequentially. Chapter 1 begins in Travemünde, West Germany, where the trip began; Chapter 28 ends in Trieste, Italy, where the trip ended. I relish this journal-like structure. As Bailey travels, he visits places and meets people. Certain themes emerge. For example, Chapter 3, titled “Absent Friends,” tells about Bailey’s stop in Hamburg, where he talks with several West Germans who make it a point to visit their East German relatives and friends as much as possible. The theme of the chapter is the difficulty of cross-border travel. One of the persons that Bailey speaks with is Bernhardt Fisher, a senior officer in the Hamburg city government. Bailey writes,

What worries East Germans most, said Bernhardt, is the simple fact that they can’t get out if they want to. They might not want to live permanently in West Germany, but they resent not having the choice. Some would like the chance of experiencing for a little while at first hand the high standard of living in West Germany, which, in the abstract, they feel bound to despise. Bernhardt thinks that the majority of East Germans – if the Soviet army left – would demand a change of government the next day. They don’t want to imitate the West, but they want to have a system and government of their own, not imposed by the Russians.

Each of Bailey’s chapters develops a theme. Chapter 4 is about the dangerousness of the border fence; Chapter 8 is about the island-like nature of West Berlin; Chapter 12 is about exile. The themes grow organically from the material – from the border towns that Bailey visits and the people and circumstances he encounters. For example, in Chapter 17, called “A Busy Day,” Bailey is in Bavaria, touring several villages in the company of two officers of the Bavarian Frontier Police, Hans Jacob and Alfred Eiber. Jacob mentions that they’re in an area where two families, the Strelzyks and the Wetzels, escaped East Germany in a homemade hot-air balloon. This piques Bailey’s interest. He seeks out the Wetzels (they live in Schauenstein, not far from where their balloon landed) to hear their story. His account of their escape is superb. Here’s an excerpt:

They had been on their way for twenty-three minutes when the burner flame began to die down; the gas was running out. They dropped slowly to 2,000 meters, the balloon revolving. The flame spluttered on the last of the propane. Their descent became rapid. They didn’t know whether or not they were still over the DDR. Looking down, Petra saw many lights, red and amber, which didn’t seem to her like the DDR. The earth was rushing to meet them: hills, woods, fields, roofs of houses came into view. They were coming down over a pine wood. It slipped past – here was the ground – and they landed with a sharp jolt in a thicket of blackberry bushes. Another 150 meters would have taken them into a high-tension power line. The flight had lasted twenty-eight minutes. Where were they?

Like Along the Edge of the Forest, Robert Sullivan’s Cross Country tells the story of a single journey – the six-day road trip that he and his family take from Portland, Oregon, to New York City. But Cross Country is structured more intricately. For one thing, Sullivan punctuates his present-day narrative (written in the present tense) with memories of previous cross-country trips he’s taken (he’s driven across the U.S. “close to thirty times”). For another, as he drives, he talks about interstate history, cued by historical markers, highway signs, physical features of the land, and just about anything else that catches his omnivorous attention. As he says, he’s “like a tour director nobody paid for, like a tour guide nobody can stop, like a human roadside plaque.” 

The book is divided into seven Parts, each Part describing a leg of the journey: Part I – “Setting Out”; Part II – “Portland, Oregon, to Missoula, Montana”; Part III – “Missoula, Montana, to Miles City, Montana”; Part IV – “Miles City, Montana, to Minneapolis, Minnesota”; Part V – “Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Beloit, Wisconsin”; Part VI – “Beloit, Wisconsin, to Bellafonte, Pennsylvania”; and Part VII – “Getting There.” 

Each Part is packed with an amazing variety of cross-country-specific material, generated by Sullivan’s voracious interstate consciousness. Lewis and Clark (“Backtracking along the Lewis and Clark Trail, you begin to realize that America has always wanted to remember the Lewis and Clark expedition one way – as heading west”), travel plazas, road signs, rest stops, rivers (Willamette, Colombia, Snake, Clearwater, Lochsa, Yellowstone, to name a few), gas stations, motels (“In the little Super 8 lobby, people are filling their coolers with ice from the ice machine that has a sign on it asking that people not fill their coolers with ice from the ice machine, people who look bright and cheery, as well as people who look as if they slept on the interstate last night”), mountains (“Into the Bitterroots, the 175-mile crossing of this 300-mile-long, 11,000-foot-high range of hills that Jefferson never dreamed of, that Lewis and Clark did not expect, that Patrick Gass, a member of the Corps of Discovery, called ‘the most terrible mountains I ever beheld’ ”), convenience stores, hot springs, Evel Knievel, tumbleweed, coffee, Emily Post, squeegees … Squeegees? Yep, even squeegees. Here’s the passage – one of my favorites:

At Town Pump, when our daughter was a toddler, I lifted her to the windshield and to the back window of the car, watched her enjoy the thrill of walking on the dust-covered hood, the excitement of the brownish squeegee water, the joy of the squeegee itself, the kick that one can derive from the squeegeeing process, especially as it applies to the removal of the remains of splotched bugs, gross, disgusting bugs. In the old days, I applauded her work (while holding her steady), as did her mother, as did her older brother, and thus, she returned to her car seat proud. I waited until she fell asleep or retired to the women’s room with her mother, or was otherwise distracted so that I might repeat the squeegee process and actually be able to see out the windows, toddlers not yet having developed the most refined squeegee skills, of course.

How does Sullivan do it? How does he make all this stuff cohere? I’m not sure I can explain it. Part of it has to do with the interstate-obsessed world he’s describing, and part of it has to do with his wide-open receptivity to it, the adhesiveness (Whitman’s great word) that draws him to it, and part of it has to do with his acute awareness of the historical underlay (“Even though I’ve been back and forth to Oregon numerous times, I have never bought a wooden wagon, taken it apart to be put on a boat in Saint Louis, and then put it back together, sometimes using it as a boat to cross a river”). However he did it, there’s no doubt that the structure he created to contain it all – first-person-present-tense chronological narrative punctuated with flashbacks and memory sightings and mini-histories – works beautifully.

Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia differs from the other two books. It describes not one, but five journeys. Actually, it chronicles Frazier’s five Siberian journeys, plus several related trips to St. Petersburg, and to Anchorage, Nome, and Little Diomede Island, Alaska. The book is divided into five chronological Parts. Part I covers the earliest trips (the 1993 trip to Moscow, Omsk, and Lake Baikal; the 1999 trip to Nome, Chukotka, and the Chukchi fish camp at the mouth of the Hot Springs River, Siberia). Part II tells about two trips Frazier took to St. Petersburg, one in 2000, and another in 2001. It also covers his 2001 trip to Little Diomede Island, in the middle of the Bering Strait, between Alaska and Siberia. Part III chronicles his epic nine-thousand-mile road trip across Siberia, from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, starting in St. Petersburg, August 5, 2001, and ending five weeks, two days later on the shore of Olga Bay, September 11, 2001. Part IV tells about Frazier’s first winter trip in Siberia, which he took in March, 2005. And Part V covers his fifth and shortest Siberian journey – his trip to Novosibirsk in the fall of 2009. 

Each Part is divided into numbered chapters. Most of the chapters are organized chronologically, that is, they form a narrative timeline enacting the sequence of the journeys they describe. But there are exceptions. Now and then, Frazier inserts a chapter that is purely historical. For example, Chapter 8 tells about Genghis Khan and the Mongol empire; Chapter 14 chronicles Siberia’s history as a place of punishment; Chapter 18 tells about the Decembrist movement – an attempt to overthrow Tsar Nicholas I in 1825. Also, there’s a wonderful thematic chapter – Chapter 17 – in which Frazier pauses his narrative to show a verbal montage of Siberian images, including trash, ravens and crows, prisons, and pigs. Here’s the section on pigs: 

Although roaming herds of pigs were occasional in villages in western Siberia, east of Novosibirsk they became more common. Now every village we went through seemed to have big gangs of them. Because the weather was so hot, the pigs had generally been wallowing in a mudhole just before they got up to amble wherever we happened to see them ambling. Evidently, the wallowing technique of some pigs involved lying with just one side of themselves in the mud. This produced two-tone animals—pigs that were half wet, shiny brown mud, and half pink, relatively unsoiled original pig. The effect was striking—sort of harlequin. The other animals that roamed the villages in groups were geese. When a herd of pigs came face to face with a flock of geese, an unholy racket of grunting and gabbling would ensue. I wondered if the villagers ever got tired of the noise. Whether challenging pigs or not, the village geese seemed to gabble and yak and hiss non-stop. The pigs grunted and oinked almost as much, but always at some point the whole herd of pigs would suddenly fall silent, and their megaphone-shaped ears would go up, and for half a minute every pig would listen.

That last line is inspired!

To sum up: all three of these books are structured chronologically, but each in a different way. In Along the Edge of the Forest, the journey is a narrative through-line on which Bailey drapes certain themes – the challenge of cross-border travel, Berlin as an island, the constant menacing presence of the border fence, etc.. Cross Country’s sequential narrative is punctuated with flashbacks and historical commentary on a multiplicity of interstate-related matters, including gas stations, motels, convenience stores, and coffee lids. Travels in Siberia chronicles five Siberian journeys, with chapters on historical subjects, e.g., Genghis Kahn, the Decembrists, and Stalin, interspersed throughout. 

All three books contain an immense amount of action. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.