What an astonishing density of detail there is in these three books! Everything is noted, named, and particularized, even coffee lids:
The least successful design and most rarely seen, in my cross-country experience, is the puncture style, such as David Herbst’s Push and Drink Lid, patented in 1990. This features a raised lid piece, often a kind of plastic sewer grate, that is depressed, thus puncturing the lid and allowing a flow of coffee. In the case of the Dart model, the grate is depressed anew each time the upper lip of the coffee imbiber seeks to gain access to the so-called coffee. I find them to be confusing, causing me to ask myself questions such as “Have I punctured sufficiently”? and “Is the coffee coming through, because I really, really need it to come through?” Often I will take the entire lid off and just admire it on the dashboard. This happened the last time I picked one up in Missoula, Montana, at Finnegan’s, the restaurant over the creek where Lewis and Clark supposedly camped. The coffee, by the way, was very good.
That’s from Sullivan's Cross Country. It's just one paragraph from an analysis that goes on for three pages, and includes a picture of a complicated reclosable lid called the Optima. Sullivan says of it, “I kind of like it, and I am certainly fascinated by it, but I also feel as if it is like the interstate itself – i.e., too much – and so I often take it off, and pour the coffee, for instance, into my porcelain Lewis and Clark mug.” That porcelain Lewis and Clark mug is, in itself, an interesting detail.
Frazier’s Travels in Siberia brims with memorable details. Here, for example, is his description of some of the Cold War relics he saw on display at the Museum of Siberian Communications in Novosibirsk:
The humorous blond woman with Nefertiti eyes who showed me around laughed about the huge old radios, the suitcase-size adding machines, the bulbous green telephone that had come from East Germany, the almost-primitive Yenisei TV set made in Krasnoyarsk, the Brezhnev-era TV that was the size of a desk and that everybody in the 1970s dreamed of owning, and the 1950s TV that many older Russians remember because it had a tiny screen over which was superimposed a large magnifying lens that had to be filled with special distilled water.
Bailey, in his Along the Edge of the Forest, also has a keen eye for detail. Recall, for example, his vivid description of the hitchhiking bag lady he encounters on the road to Wolfsburg:
Just outside the next village of Croya a lumpy human shape was standing rather perilously out in the road, and as I swerved the car around it, it – an elderly woman – waved a hand up and down. I stopped. She approached the car. Then having worked out that she could not get in what she thought was the passenger door, she came around to the other side of my Saab (which has right-hand steering for British roads) and got in. Clearly, I was giving her a lift. She was wearing a sheet of clear plastic over the shoulders of an ancient black dress. (Although the morning was gray, it wasn’t raining.) She began to talk and I didn’t understand a word. I think that even if my knowledge of German had been magnificent, I would not have understood her. She was speaking or rather barking a country dialect, and it may have been that even in that she wasn’t making much sense. Now that she was seated next to me I noticed that she had in her lap an apparently empty shopping bag and wore plastic bags on her hands as if she had been brought up to wear gloves when going out. Bristly black hairs sprouted from her chin and upper lip. Her eyes didn’t seem to focussed on anything external. She was visibly filthy and gave off a strong smell of urine.
That pungent last detail has stayed with me ever since I first read it, almost forty years ago. The same goes for Frazier’s description of the men’s washroom at the Omsk airport, in Travels in Siberia:
The men’s room at the Omsk airport was unbelievably disgusting. Stepping through the door, or even near the door, was like receiving a blow to the face from the flat of the hand. No surface inside the men’s room, including the ceiling, was clean. There were troughs and stools, but no partitions, stalls, or doors. Everything done was done in full view. The floor was strewn with filth of a wide and eye-catching variety. At the urinal raised cement footprints offered the possibility of keeping your feet out of the flooding mire, but as the footprints themselves were hardly filth-free, the intention failed. Certain of this place’s images that I won’t describe remain inexpungible from my mind. I got out of there as fast as was practical and reeled away into the terminal’s dim lobby.
Once read, never forgotten.
In next month’s post, the last in this series, I’ll try to sum up my experience rereading these three great books.
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