3 More for the Road: Place

This is the sixth 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). Today, I’ll focus on their sense of place.

In Along the Edge of the Forest, Bailey explores the border country that Germans call Grenzland, where people live in the presence of a three-meter-high metal fence (die Grenze), commonly known as the Iron Curtain, bristling with barbed wire, watchtowers, and armed guards, a grotesque barrier, built by the Soviet Union, that splits Europe into West and East – freedom on one side; totalitarianism on the other. To evoke such a place, he drives it from one end to the other, from Travemünde, on the Baltic Sea, to Trieste, on the Adriatic Sea, keeping as close to the fence as possible, visiting border towns, talking with border people, all the while logging his impressions in detail after vivid detail. For example, here’s his description of his visit to the West German town of Braunlage, “a bare kilometre from the border”:

With sweater, plastic raincoat and map stuffed into my nylon knapsack I walked through Bruanlage, which had something of New England about its houses – vertical siding, wooden shingles, even asbestos shingles. I walked past other hotels and big sanatoriums in parklike grounds and out of town, northward in the direction of the Wurmberg. In the woods, the wind in the pines sounded like the sea; occasionally there was a little shower of pine needles, and the smell of pine was strong. The ascent was steady and not oversteep. I was about two thirds of the way up before I saw the border – a watchtower to the east and an expanse of grass before the pine forest in the DDR [East Germany] began. Birds and butterflies flew across my line of sight.

Bailey has a keen eye for watchtowers. They appear frequently throughout his journey, marking the location of the border, emblems of Soviet oppression and the Cold War. Every time Bailey sees one, he notes it. Here’s another example:

I followed the road south from one such village, Mörbisch, a pretty place of white-washed houses with outside stairs, bright-painted shutters, and hanging pots of flowers or bunches of dried corn. The road ended in a small parking lot, with a vineyard on the long slope toward the lake, the long hedges of vines hanging from wires suspended between low posts, and the southern edge of the vineyard formed by a rusty barbed-wire fence about two meters tall. This was the Staatsgrenze, the Hungarian border. Here stood several Hungarian watchtowers, more like the Czech than the East German variety, small cabins on tall, outspread legs; one was built on a marshy peninsula by the lake. In a giant field on the Hungarian side two large red-painted combine harvesters were working down the slope toward the lake, which was gray, under low gray clouds. The grapes growing in this Austrian vineyard were small and green, hanging in secretive clusters under the vine leaves.

“Place” in Cross Country is the system of interstate highways that Sullivan and his family travel from Portland, Oregon, to New York City. It’s the “interstate-obsessed terrain” of gas stations, convenience stores, motels, and service areas. It’s the landscape they see through the windshield of their Impala. It’s the history of that landscape, indicated by place names, road signs, and historical markers. Sullivan evokes this world by describing it in fond, immersive detail, right down to the plastic lids on the many coffees he buys en route. Speaking of coffee, here’s his description of the bank of coffee dispensers at the Kwik Trip in Hudson, Wisconsin:

Today, except for that hour this morning in which I was chugging the fancy hotel’s delicious complimentary coffee, I have been coffee-free; I have been waiting all day to call upon the power of coffee and now I am calling. Thus, I am pleased to see an excellent selection of the magical dark liquid at Kwik Trip; it is a bank of coffee, in tall pump-on-the-top, self-service receptacles: nonflavored and flavored coffees, caffeinated and noncaffeinated, “Cinnful Cinnamon” flavored coffee, “Irish Crème Swirl” flavored coffee, “Hawaiian Chocolate” flavored coffee – it’s a flavored and not-flavored highway coffee oasis. The coffee norm on cross-country trips is well known: a clear glass coffeepot with a brown top or orange top, with a pool of blackness, simmering since hours before you arrived and in the hours after you leave, coffee that might be run through your car engine for lubrication, if your car engine were not so particular.

Unlike Bailey, in Along the Edge of the Forest, Sullivan doesn’t do much flâneurial walking around. Except for brief intervals, when he and his family stop for gas or snacks or to use the restroom or to view a roadside monument or, in one instance, to play a round of golf, they spend most of the trip in their rental car. Each night, they pull over and stay in a motel. It’s amazing how much fresh interstate detail Sullivan is able to glean from each of these stops. Here, for example, he scopes the Commodore Perry Service Area, I-80, Ohio: 

For what feels simultaneously like the millionth time and the first time, we enter the Commodore Perry Service Area – we decelerate past an artificial hill, and while in the gradual turn, we see farms. We see a farm on the left and a farm on the right, and the service area itself seems like a farm of sorts, or maybe a trough – a brand-new food-producing, trash-making, gasoline-pumping, state-of-the-art service area bounded by a green corn-growing green. As we pull into the angled parking spot, we see it straight on. There are touches of Frank Lloyd Wright in the Prairie-style design, and it looks a lot like an airport terminal without runways, an obelisk making it feel like something picked up off the Mall in Washington, D.C., and put on the road in Ohio. There is the Ohio state flag, the American flag, the six fast-food logos. Entering the service area via a walkway, I feel as if I am entering a town hall in a suburb. We pass a mailbox, look over to see pets frolicking in the pet area, hold the door for travelers exiting the plaza, and then, as we enter its grand foyer, the Commodore Perry Service Area speaks to us.

And here’s the meaning he draws from that experience:

What the Commodore Perry Service Area speaks to me about is the nature of the road at the dawn of the twenty-first century, which pushes us on, which continues to express an optimism that may or may not be rooted in reality: the optimism that comes from the America that bows to the god that it sometimes believes has suggested it press on, the god that is sometimes substituted with the god of technology, the motion that finite can be reengineered into the infinite, that stresses, no matter what, that there is more than enough space, more than enough room, that there is more.

How do you evoke a place as massive as Siberia? Frazier, in his Travels in Siberia, starts with smell:

We came down some stairs into a hall leading to Passport Control [in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport]. On the floor at the foot of the stairs was a large, vividly red spill of liquid – possibly raspberry syrup, possibly transmission fluid. I tried without success to pick up its smell. Instead I was hit by the smell of Russia, one I’ve encountered often since, all over that country. The components of the smell are still a mystery. There’s a lot of diesel fuel in it, and cucumber peels, and old tea bags, and sour milk, and a sweetness – currant jam, or mulberries crushed into the waffle treads of heavy boots – and fresh wet mud, and a lot of wet cement. Every once in a while, in just the right damp basement in America, I find a cousin of the Russia-smell unexpectedly there. 

That “or mulberries crushed into the waffle treads of heavy boots” is inspired! Frazier is a great nose writer. Later on, he encounters the “Russia-smell” again (this time at the airport in Provideniya, Chukotka):

When I entered the cold terra-cotta-tiled room where we were to fill out our customs declaration forms, I encountered an old friend: the smell of Russia. How do they do it? Here on the edge of the Bering Strait, five thousand miles from Moscow, almost within wafting distance of the U.S.A., the Russia-smell is exactly the same. I breathed it deeply. Yes, it was all there – the tea bags, the cucumber peels, the wet cement, the chilly air, the currant jam. About the only point of similarity between the smell and the one I’d just left in Nome was the overtone of diesel exhaust. But still fresh from America, I understood that America’s essential smell is nothing at all like Russia’s. America smells like gift shop candles, fried food, new cars. America’s is the smell of commerce. The smell of Alaska that stays with me the strongest is that of the Cinnabon sweet rolls shop in the Anchorage airport; I’m sure the scent of Cinnabon is set adrift everywhere in that space intentionally, in order to ensnare passersby. The smell of America says, “Come in and buy.” The smell of Russia says, “Ladies and gentleman: Russia!”

Reading Frazier’s pungent descriptions of the smell of Russia, I recall something Barry Lopez wrote: “It is through the power of observation, the gifts of eye and ear, of tongue and nose and finger, that a place first rises up in our minds” (“The American Geographies,” included in Lopez’s 1998 essay collection About This Life). I think this is true. These three excellent books are prime examples of it. 

Description of landscape is one way to evoke place. Another is description of people. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.