3 More for the Road: Action

This is the fifth 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 action. 

All three of these books describe road trips. Their central action is driving. In Along the Edge of the Forest, Bailey drives his 1973 Saab station wagon from Travemünde, on the Baltic Sea, along the border known as the Iron Curtain, separating Western Europe and the Soviet Union, to Trieste, on the Adriatic Sea. “I drove to Hamburg to spend the night and talk to some people who work there”; “I got an early start and drove along the southern bank of the Elbe on a road that wound sometimes near the river and sometimes up and down the forested slopes nearby”; “I drove a few kilometers south toward the next village of Zicherie to a roadhouse Hunting had recommended, where there was game on the menu and a herd of deer in an adjacent paddock”; “I had arranged to be in Helmstedt in the early afternoon, so with a morning free I drove first to Braunschweig, which is perhaps better known to English-speaking readers under its Anglicized name of Brunswick, to enjoy the simple pleasures of looking at old buildings and pictures” – the book brims with such sentences. I devour them. 

In Cross Country, Sullivan and his family drive their rental Impala across the United States, from Seattle, on the West Coast, to New York City, on the East Coast. Sullivan’s descriptions of driving are superb. For example:

Finished refueling at Kum & Go, I am on I-94 again, pulling out of Miles City on this sunny Day Three morning and immediately I get a chance to let a giant chemical truck pass – it is covered with so many large FLAMMABLE stickers that it seems like the right thing to do, yielding to a highway monster. 

I try to look back as we pass each rock formation but when it gets dark, it’s difficult to look back on the road. You are forced to face forward, to concentrate on the future, rather than the past. You are forced to gaze into the rows and rows of red taillights, which blink and pulse on what appear to be whims. 

I had rolled the window up but now I am rolling it down again, and getting my face near the cool summer wind – like a dog we don’t have because we travel – which is making it more necessary for me to shout, when and if I do speak. Suddenly, out of the blackness, I have just been hit by water, only it’s not raining. The water has come from an agricultural irrigator of some kind, a farmer’s oversized garden sprinkler, my face startled by the accidental blessing. A Wal-Mart tractor trailer passes us and its lights light up the Impala’s interior, and then on the horizon, I see another giant cheese sign. With the sight of the cheese sign, hope fills my tired heart. I can see in the night an exit sparkling, the glow of an interchange. I can see the motels that are not our motel. 

Notice Sullivan’s use of the present tense – an excellent way to convey immediacy. First-person-present-tense is my favorite literary combination. Sullivan deploys it beautifully.

Driving is one of the main actions in Travels in Siberia, too. In Part III – the core of the book – Frazier and his two guides drive their used Renault step van across Siberia, from St. Petersburg, on the Baltic Sea, to Vladivostok, on the Pacific Ocean. For example, here’s Frazier’s description of them leaving St. Petersburg:

Past the city we turned onto the Murmansk highway eastbound. Its four lanes soon became two. Trucks were speeding toward us in the downpour. I thought Sergei was driving too fast but I couldn’t tell for sure, because the speedometer needle, which had been fluttering spasmodically, suddenly lay down on the left side of the dial and never moved again for the rest of the journey. 

And here (one of my favorite scenes), they’re in Vladivostok, parked facing uphill on one of the city’s steepest streets, when, once again, the van fails to start:

Volodya took the wheel. Sergei and I went to the front of the van, ready to push. Volodya adjusted the outside rearview mirror, gauged the traffic, stepped on the clutch, put the van in reverse, and gave the signal. We pushed. The heavy van quickly picked up speed downhill. We kept pushing, and the oncoming cars swerved around us in a wailing of horns. Volodya popped the clutch. The van lurched, the engine started, the van accelerated faster into the honking, swerving cars. Volodya dodged through them by rearview mirror until he was able to scoot around a corner into a quieter street, where by exquisite footwork he kept the engine alive. Running and out of breath, Sergei and I finally caught up with him. I describe all this in detail because it was the most outstanding feat of driving I have ever seen.

Two of these books – Along the Edge of the Forest and Travels in Siberia – also contain a lot of walking. Bailey, when he arrives in a border town, often parks his car and explores the place on foot: “I parked the car on the edge of town and walked the quiet cobbled streets to the marketplace”; “Before dinner I walked along the riverfront road, by the little haven, to a point with seats and benches where one could look across the river”; “In the course of a stroll that evening around Brome I dropped into what appeared to be the most flourishing pub, the Gasthaus Schmidt”; “I walk along a little track beside the border at the foot of various back gardens”; “I walked from the cathedral and across a small park to the Herzog Anton-Ulrich Museum.” He walks West Berlin (“I walked the boulevards and streets, and felt that fully charged zip in the air which a few cities have and which brings one’s nerves and senses alive”), and, unforgettably, he passes through Checkpoint Charlie, and walks East Berlin:

Gartenstrasse was empty of people. It was bordered on one side by what looked like an old railway yard, and on the other side by shabby three- and four-story apartment houses. At the end of the street I saw a bumpy, unfinished-looking wall – the inner wall, on which no cosmetic decoration had been wasted. Barbed wire. And a watchtower, within which binoculars swiveled and fastened on me. I was about a hundred yards from the wall, alone in the empty street. I came to a halt. I had – I assumed – every right to walk on. I was a foreign tourist. How was I to know that you had to have special permission to come within one hundred meters of the wall? I saw no signs. But, in that moment I felt like someone who lived there, and the will to walk closer, drained out of me. I stood there for a little while, as if in prayer, then turned away. I could feel the binoculars at the back of my neck as I walked off.

Frazier does the same thing during his travels, nosing around Siberian cities and towns on foot, seeing what there is to see. Here he’s in Severobaikalsk:

On our first day in Severobaikalsk, Sergei took a bus to some slopes outside town and spent the afternoon skiing. The return bus broke down, so he didn’t get back until evening. Meanwhile, I geared up for the cold, put on my snow-tire boots, and explored the town. The day was sunny, clear, and calm. By taking occasional breaks inside warm public places, I had no difficulty staying outside for long strolls. Beyond the central administrative area, the town looked ramshackle, like a Western mining town. On some of the houses, sections of railroad cars had been used to add a room, or repairs had been improvised with sheets of corrugated iron. Most of the buildings in town were blocks of apartments, usually four stories high. I sat in front of one for a while and sketched the many kinds of antennae on its roof. In ninety minutes of sketching, I froze so I could no longer draw and had to start walking again. On a hill above town, I came upon the ruins of an amusement park with carnival-type rides lying around in pieces, and benches and walkways deep in snow. In a sort of cove of benches near one dismantled ride, a group of teenage girls and boys were smoking cigarettes and drinking from plastic liter-bottles of beer. The gust of alcohol breath and cigarette smoke and pheromones that came from them was more pungent for being concentrated by the cold.

I love that image of Frazier sitting in the Siberian cold, sketching rooftop antennae. The drawing is included in the book, along with several others he did during his travels. They’re all excellent. 

Illustration by Ian Frazier, from his Travels in Siberia (2010)

Action is a prime feature of all three of these great books. Another one is acute sense of place. That will be the focus of my next post in this series.