3 More for the Road: People

This is the seventh 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 people. 

Anthony Bailey, in his Along the Edge of the Forest, meets and talks with an extraordinary variety of people – border guards, border officials, border residents, friends, refugees, escapees, professors, students, journalists, hitch-hikers – as he wends his way along the Iron Curtain, trying “to fit together his impressions of land and people and what had happened in recent history.” For example, in Lübeck, at the start of his trip, he meets Johannes Kühne, captain of the West German patrol boat Uelzen, who takes him on a patrol of Lübeck Bay. Bailey describes Captain Kühne as “an old sea dog with a modern look; out of uniform, he might have been taken for a lawyer or banker. There were no sea wrinkles, no weathered skin.” During their short voyage, Kühne tells Bailey about recent border escapes that have occurred in the area:

Two years ago, an East German swam from the Mecklenberg coast near the village of Klutzhoved a distance of twenty-five kilometers at night to the Schleswig-Holstein coast, taking his course from the lighthouse. Captain Kuhne told me that several swimmers have been found hanging on to buoys, at the end of their strength. A few years ago a sailmaker from the East German port fled with his wife and child in a small yacht. As they approached the five-kilometer limit and East German patrol boat came in hot pursuit, but fortunately a message had been sent to the West Germany alerting the authorities to their plans, and the patrol boat Duderstadt was waiting for them. It took the yacht in tow just outside the limit; sailmaker, wife and child were hurriedly welcomed on the patrol boat, and a BGS crewman put at the helm of the yacht – a dangerous position, so it seemed for a while, as the East Germans appeared to want a battle or collision. The sailmaker now makes sails and lives with his family in the Uelzen’s homeport of Neustadt-Holstein; he sails his yacht on the western, unrestricted side of Lübeck Bay.

Bailey’s description of his patrol of Lübeck Bay with Captain Kühne is fairly typical of the way he weaves people and dialogue into his narrative – a quick sketch of the person’s personal background and physical features, followed by a paragraph or two (sometimes more) on what he or she tells him. 

The number of people that Bailey meets is impressive. I count at least sixty, including Peter Lemke (officer in the Bundesgrenzschutz, stationed near Lübeck), Theo Gruner (lawyer living in Aumühle, about twenty kilometres from the border), Dr. Hansjürgen Schierbaum (former member of the Grenzkommission), Rainer Leonhardt (officer of the Bundesgrenzschutz, who takes Bailey on a boat patrol of the Elbe River at Bleckede), Hans Schönecke (chief executive officer of district council in Brome), Karl-Heinz Shüling (Volkswagon public relations officer, who takes Bailey on a tour of the VW plant in Wolfsburg), Lothar Nass (Berlin journalist, who takes Bailey on a tour of West Berlin), Sergeant John Kiene, (leader of the U.S. military patrol that takes Bailey for a trip along the Berlin wall), Thomas Brasch (writer, formerly of East Germany), Polizei Hauptkommissar Günter Sonnenschein (takes Bailey on patrol with him along the border near Goslar), Vincenz Gerlach (tourist director of the border town of Duderstadt and editor of the monthly journal Eichsfelder Heimatstimmen), Dieter (an escapee from East Germany, who is now a successful West German industrialist), Sergeant Albert Tatrai (takes Bailey on a day patrol of the border near Bad Kissingen), Günter and Petra Wetzel (escaped East Germany, in 1979, in a homemade balloon), Eberhart Pilz (Bavarian Frontier Police officer, who takes Bailey on a tour of the border near Furth-im-Wald), Suzanne Kurz and Gunter Lugert (take Bailey on a walking tour of the border town of Regensburg), Andre Krzeczunowicz (editor on the Polish desk at Radio Free Europe), Karl Radek (director of the reception camp for refugees at Traiskirchen, Austria, who gives Bailey a tour of the camp), George (Bailey’s Hungarian friend, who invites him to his family’s house near Lake Balaton), Ferenc Karinthy (Hungarian writer, who takes Bailey to the thermal bath at the Gellert Hotel in Budapest), Herman Steinwender (owner of a pharmacy and general store in Arnfels, Austria, who takes Bailey on a wine-tasting excursion in the Austria-Yugoslavia countryside, near the border), Horst Ogris (cultural editor of the Carinthian daily paper, Kleine Zeitung), and many more. 

Let’s look at some of the people in Robert Sullivan’s Cross Country. There’s Harry the car mechanic, who Sullivan consults on whether his old Volvo is reliable enough to make it across the country. Harry advises, “Look, you drive it cross country, and if the thing dies on you, then walk away from it. What do you have to lose?” There’s the AAA travel counsellor who puts together the Sullivan family’s TripTik (“We described our route, and as we did, his yellow highlighting pen made its way across the map. As he came to cities and towns, he looked up once in a while to make little jokes and sing snippets of song; he was getting into it”). There’s the “tall guy dressed all in denim and wearing a cowboy hat,” in the Nez Perce II gas station and convenience store, who “strides dramatically to the counter and, through all his time in the store, says only two words”: “Six frappucinos.” There’s the ranger at the public information center for the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho, who tells the Sullivan family that “the hot springs where Lewis and Clark relaxed are great to visit but that they are still a few hours away.” There’s the guy behind the Lolo Hot Springs counter (“He’s a nice guy, probably in his early twenties, reading Hemingway, standing ready to chat – the gatekeeper of the springs. ‘We don’t close until nine,’ he says. We express relief, which he notices. ‘You’re OK,’ he says”). There’s the greenskeeper at the Old Works Golf Course in Anaconda, Montana (“And then I chat with the greenskeeper, a nice guy tending to native fescues, a guy whose grandfather worked in the Anaconda smelter before it was in ruins, a guy who asks where we are headed and, when I say east, mentions he went to school in New Jersey to study plants”). There’s The Man Who Was Having Trouble with His Key (“Then, as the kids take their seats, my wife hands me a coffee, and I turn to place the coffee in the car cup holder and, in doing so, notice a man coming out of Kum & Go and realize that he is the man who was having trouble with his motel room key. Highway recognition!”). There’s the tour guide at the On-a-Slant Indian Village, Fort Lincoln, North Dakota (“She is also a bit of a comedian, her trademark line being ‘So that worked out pretty nicely.’ Examples: ‘The Mandan herded bison off of a cliff, so that worked out pretty nicely’ and ‘I hear the big advantage is you only have one mother-in-law, so that worked out pretty nicely’ ”). There’s Tom Peters, owner of the Beat Bookstore in Boulder, Colorado (“ ‘Do I have any books by Jack Kerouac?’ he repeated, amazed, I think, that he would be asked such a question. ‘I have every book Jack Kerouac ever wrote!’ ”). There’s Jim, Sullivan’s faithful friend in St. Paul, who helps Sullivan get through his worst-cross-country-trip-ever experience. There’s The Man in the Breakfast Area at the Travelodge in Rawlins, Wyoming (“ ‘So then, when we were paying,” he said, ‘I asked the lady at McDonald’s if she had any half-price vouchers, and she said, “I sure do!” And she handed me these half-price vouchers for the Six Flag Amusement Park in Denver. So we’re on our way to Denver now with these vouchers’ ”). There’s the attendant at the front desk of the Commodore Perry Service Area on Ohio I-80 (“I love being here”). There’s the attendant at a rest area on Pennsylvania I-80 (“The building is small and brown and clean; I compliment an attendant on the faucet fixtures, which he explains, are new”). And there’s the desk clerk at the Holiday Inn, Bellefonte, Pennsylvania (“ ‘Well, I’ve had a very bad day,’ he says. ‘A very bad day. Not that it matters’ ”).

Of course, the people who figure most centrally in Cross Country are the four members of Sullivan’s “expeditionary team” – Sullivan, his wife, son, and daughter. Sullivan does the driving. His wife is the navigator. He calls her “my all-knowing guide.” The kids ride in the backseat. The interaction between the four is, for me, one of the trip’s highlights. For example, here’s an excerpt from a delightful roadside scene (wittily written like a play) on the Forgotten Trail in Washington State. The family has pulled up in front of a large Lewis and Clark historical marker “nearly as big as a pool table, the car blinker blinking, ticking, timing us”:

Daughter [reading the historical marker]: “They had scant –”

Wife: Scant. That means “a little.”

Daughter: “They had scant rations of dried meat and dog.”

Wife: I’d only want scant rations.

Daughter: “A hospital – ”

Wife: Hospitable.

Daughter [assuredly now]: “A hospitable Nez Percé Chief Bighorn had come to meet with them with the assurance they would find provisions at the Nez Percé camp near the Snake River the next day. The next day the explorers followed ‘the road by over the plains,’ a branch of the Indian trail that followed by the creek. This east branch can still be seen today across the highway …”

Me [after having sat through the reading of the marker and wanting my daughter to read the sign but also wanting to keep moving, and now reacting with a kind of visible shock to the words can be seen today: this is the point I had been hoping for; even if I did not know it – a place where I could in fact see a trace of the footsteps of the old trail of the first round-trip across the North American continent by a white guy associated with the federal government. Regretfully, I wanted to see something more “authentic,” something more like what I thought the trail should look like, something where I wasn’t being passed by trucks]: Can be seen today?

Wife: [pointing]: It’s over there!

Me [vigorously pointing]: That would be there!

Wife [reading the marker]: “The southern branch, which went through the Blue Mountains, is visible on the hillside.”

Me [more excited]: Oh, right there! Everybody see it?

Son [in back seat, being patient]: Yes.

Daughter: No.

Wife [pointing]: There.

Daughter: Oh, yeah.

Me [after I set the blinker to road re-entry, and just as I speed off, too hastily, having glimpsed that centuries-old footpath worn into the side of the dry green hill first by animals, no doubt, then by humans – in other words, that was the substance of trips past, ancient and actual, a transcontinental relic, even if it wasn’t precisely what I was looking for]: OK, let’s go!

The main figures in Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia, besides Frazier himself, are his two Russian guides, Sergei Mikhailovich Lunev and Vladimir “Volodya” Chumak. Sergei is “a muscular and youthfully fit man in his midsixties. He looks like a gymnast, or a coach of gymnasts. He has a long, ectomorphic head whose most expressive feature is its brow, which furrows this way and that in thought, emphasizing his canny, mobile, and china-blue eyes. The neatly trimmed hair around his balding crown adds a professional dignity – appropriately, because he is the head of the robotics lab at the St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University.” Volodya is “a slim, broad-shouldered man who usually wears neat work shirts and pants in shades of gray. He was fifty at the time, with a full head of graying black hair, blue eyes, and the thin nose and chiselled features of his Ukrainian ancestry. For our trip, Sergei had learned some English, but Volodya spoke none. His everyday Russian hung up now and then on a slight stammer, though after a few beers the words flowed out swiftly and copiously, as if a handbrake had been released.”

Frazier’s relationship with his two guides is sometimes rocky. At times, he fumes at their failure to follow his instructions. Other times, he admires their resourcefulness enormously. For example, on the occasion of yet another van breakdown, Frazier writes,

Of course the van’s ills were not cured – not then, nor were they ever, really. As we continued our journey, and new problems arose, I sometimes raged inwardly at Sergei for attempting to cross the continent in such a lemon. In time, though, I quit worrying. I noticed that whatever glitch there might be, Sergei and Volodya did always manage to get the thing running again somehow. When the ignition balked, Sergei found a method of helping it along by opening the hood and leaning in with a big screwdriver from our gear. Soon his pokings with the screwdriver would produce a large, sparking pop, the engine would start, and Sergei would extricate himself from the machinery, eyebrows a bit singed.

Travels in Siberia abounds with people: Alex Melamid and his wife, Katya Arnold; Katya’s older brother, Mitya Arnold; Mitya’s driver, Stas (“as big and slope-shouldered and patient and jowly and put-upon as any Russian coachman I’d ever read about, differing from them only in the light-green Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt he had on”); Katya’s best friend, Chuda; Chuda’s younger son, Tisha; Mitya’s wife, Irina; the American guy in front of Frazier, in the line at the Aeroflot ticket counter (“ ‘My God! What are you talking about? This country is a total disaster! Nothing fucking works. The people treat each other horribly – oh, how they love to abuse each other! They’re schemers, liars, bribe takers. If you don’t know how to bribe people you won’t ever get anywhere here. Everybody is working some stupid fucking angle. The place is filthy, trash all over …’ ”); Sasha Khamarkhanov and his brother Kolya (“Sasha was a thin, shy, bespectacled man with the attentive manner of someone who always expects to hear something great”); Sasha’s wife, Tania; Sasha and Tania’s teenage daughter, Arjeena, and their eight-year-old son, Tioshi; Sasha’s colleagues from the Ministry of Culture, Zoya and Alyosha (“Alyosha was not a Buryat but a very pale Russian-Russian, with three gold teeth and short red hair”); the curators of Barguzin’s museum, Lizaveta and Vladimir (“Lizaveta wore her hair up, nineteenth-century-style, above a long dress of dark red velvet with lace at the hem and collar”); Dr. Fred Brodin; Robert Sheldon; Vic Goldsworthy; Jim Stimpfle (“He looks a lot like the German film director Erich von Stroheim. He has a thick neck, a mostly bald head, and pale blue eyes that dart around in his glasses’ steel frames”); Stimpfle’s wife, Bernadette, “an Inupiat from King Island”; the group of people that Frazier travelled with on his trip to Provideniya (“Karen, fifty-six, a high school counsellor; Bill, forty-eight, her husband, a telephone lineman; Briggie, a former high school English and journalism teacher, in her early sixties; and Micky, Briggie’s husband and Karen’s brother, also in his sixties”); Larry, pilot of the twin engine Beechcraft that flew the group to Provideniya; Vladimir Bychkov, the group’s guide (“Vladimir Bychkov has brown eyes and a well-trimmed dark beard and he looks maybe Persian. He is the son of a former Soviet army officer and was born in 1963 at the military base at Ureliki. A geography teacher during the school year, he is a mild, sensible, and intelligent man”). Nina, owner of the apartment where the group stayed while they were in Provideniya (“Nina, a large, blonde, motherly woman with mournful dark eyes, had been the head chef at Provideniya’s only hotel until it closed a few years before”); Nina’s daughter, Ira (“Ira resembled a beautiful young woman in a children’s story – rosy cheeks, perfect skin, chestnut hair to her shoulders, dark eyes. She wore a V-neck aqua-colored fuzzy sweater, slacks, and high heels that made neat circular indentations in the black and oily ground”; Heidi Bradner, an American photographer; three Chukchis: Gennady, Ivan, and Valentina (“Gennady was a whaling captain and had the build of a middleweight boxer. He wore rubber boots, a black-and-bright-orange waterproof insulated jumpsuit, a blue Hollofil coat, and a blue denim porkpie hat with the front of the brim turned up”; “Ivan had served as Gennady’s first mate and harpooner on whale hunts. He displayed the qualities of competent chief assistant and wisecracking sidekick combined…. He wore blue jeans with the back pockets removed and then sewn over the knees for reinforcement, a short wool jacket under a heavy rubber rain cape, and a blue knit cap. He spoke in a low, hollow, hoarse voice, and he laughed hoarsely, too”; Valentina was the wife of Gennady. She was short and solid, but not heavy, with long hair and a round, pretty face. Whenever she noticed something in need of correction, she made a quiet comment about it in Chukchi to Gennady or in Russian to Vladimir”); Vladimir-the-Yupik (“owner or presiding occupant of the fish camp cabin”); Frazier’s friend, Boris Zeldin; Victor Boyarsky, director of St. Petersburg’s Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic; Victor Serov, the Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic’s director of publicity; Luda Sokolova, owner of the apartment where Frazier stayed during his January, 2001, visit to St. Petersburg; Katya, who taught Frazier Russian; the tour guide at the Cottage Palace who suggested to Frazier he should “walk down the meadow and look at the house from there”; Roy Toruk, who sat beside Frazier on his flight to Nome; Eric Penttila, Evergreen Helicopter pilot; Little Sister Mary Jo, Catholic nun who was a passenger on Frazier’s flight to Little Diomede; Avdotia Fedorovna, Volodya’s mother-in-law (“a short, wide, fiercely smiling old woman who swayed from side to side when she walked”); Lena, Avdotia’s daughter, who takes Frazier on a tour of the village of Pestovo; Vyacheslav, “the brother of a friend of Sergei’s wife,” who helps get Frazier’s van repaired in Vologda, shows Frazier his dacha and his bottling plant, and mocks Frazier’s “not-good Russian”; the “man wearing two sweaters” on the old Trakt in the tiny village of Maltsevo; Sergei’s friend, Sergei Prigarin, in Akademgorodok (“A professor at Novosibersk State University, Sergei Prigarin looked the total scientist with short curly hair and metal-rimmed spectacles and features as distinct as if rendered by a very sharp pencil”); Galina, a guide at a historical park outside Novosibirsk (“She seemed not to have guided anyone in a while. Her hair was long and gray and unrestrained, but her prim blue blouse with white lace at the collar and down the front offset this rather wild look, as did her matching blue skirt and brogan-style walking shoes”); the station master at Chernyshevsk train yard (“a blocky woman with dyed red hair, a dalmation-spotted blouse, and orange workman’s vest”); the scuba diver sealed in the vagan with Frazier, Sergei, and Volodya on their way to Magdagachi (“The scuba diver woke at the exact same moment and got out of his vehicle rubbing his eyes. He saw me, broke into a huge grin, and made the do-you-want-a-shot-of-vodka? gesture, tapping his throat below the jaw with a flip of his fingers. From his car he pulled a half-bottle of vodka to show me. I shook my head politely; it was about eight in the morning”); the saleslady in a store in Bikin who wanted to see an American (“She and I talked for awhile. She asked me where I was from and I said New Jersey, and she asked if that was a city. I said it was a state, not a city, but it was very near New York City. She had heard of that. She told me she had seen many Americans in the cinema and on television but I was the first American she had ever seen zhivoi – living in the flesh. She thanked Sergei for bringing me in. Then she asked us to wait and went into the back room and brought out a kielbasa too special to be put on general display, and we bought it from her”); the two “attractive widows,” Sveta and Natalia, who lived in Olga, not far from Frazier’s campsite on Olga Bay (“With groceries we contributed, the widows made us dinners of red caviar, blini, cabbage soup, borscht with beef, pelmeni with sour cream, carrot salad, beet salad, cake, and the unavoidable endless cups of tea”); Lutsia, director of the museum in Olga; Boris Shekhtman, a “virtuoso language instructor” (“Boris is a hypersmart guy with ears that listen so attentively they’re almost prehensile, and features as vivid as the masks of comedy and tragedy combined. To anything you say, the high drama of his expression in response works as a powerful mnemonic”); Volodya’s friends Genia and Roman; Sveta and Tolya Belov, whose home Frazier and Sergei stayed in when they were in Ust-Barguzin; Aleksandr, the driver of the four-wheel-drive Niva in which Frazier and Sergei crossed ice-covered Lake Baikal; Marina Tabakova, gardener at Severobaikalsk’s winter garden (“She had a broad face, blue eyes, and brown-and-gray hair. She wore a blue blouse with white stitching and carried a pair of yellow gardening gloves”); the “thin old woman with dark eyes and beaklike nose who rides with Frazier and Sergei to Yakutsk and who, at one point, calls Frazier “the fat American”; Dr. Sergei V. Shibaev, director of the Siberian Geophysical Survey at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Yakutsk (“a dark-haired, young-looking guy with a high forehead and a quick untrammeled laugh”); Anatoly Firsovich Petrov, geologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Yakutsk; Galina Gotovtseva – Frazier’s guide on the “prison highway” leg of his journey; Aleksandr Gavrilovich Sleptsov – driver of the Russian van, called an RAF, in which Frazier travelled the prison highway; the other passengers in the RAF (Gavriil Dmitrievich Sleptsov, Andrei Petrovich Struchkov, Rosa Dmitrievna Struchkova, Varvara Andreyevna, Varvara’s daughter, Regina, and a small boy “of maybe nine or ten who was related to the driver and did not feel well”); Valentina Gerdun, curator of the Troplyi Kliuch Museum of the Magadan Highway; Kristina Mikhailovna Zakarova, a Even poet; the driver of the Uazik that took Frazier and Sergei back to Yakutsk (“a skittish, skinny kid who drove fast, kept to no particular lane, and often hit potholes dead-on”); Luda Stiler, travel agent at Margo Travel in Manhattan; Anatoly, the “bright-eyed, long-nosed, pixie-haired taxi driver” who drove Frazier from the Novosibirsk airport into the city; Ivan “Vanya” Logoshenko, a friend of Frazier’s brother-in-law, whom Frazier meets in Akademgorodok (“As Vanya and I sat and talked, I felt normal. I had never felt just that – normal – in Russia before”); Sergei Prigarin’s daughter, Sveta, whom Frazier also meets in Akademgorodok (“When I left, Sveta gave me an origami globe of pink and orange paper flowers she made, and a cardboard candy box to carry it in”).

Such a wild, fascinating assortment of people! And this isn’t counting the many historical figures ghosting through Frazier's narrative, e.g., George F. Kennan, Genghis Khan, the Decembrists, Stalin. 

The most significant people in these three great books are the authors themselves. In my next post, I’ll consider their compelling first-person perspectives.