3 More for the Road: Anthony Bailey's "Along the Edge of the Forest"

This is the first 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 begin with a review of Along the Edge of the Forest.

The time is 1981. Europe is split in two – East and West. East is totalitarian; West is democratic. The boundary between them is called the Iron Curtain, consisting of concrete walls, barbed wire fences, watchtowers, guards, land mines, machine guns, and guard dogs. Anthony Bailey decides to travel it from one end to the other, to “look as closely as I could at what is still the dividing line between two power blocks and two states formed out of one people, the Germans.” He says, “I meant to look at the ground and at the people living along the border. I was curious about the effects of living close to what might almost seem to be a geological fault line – certainly a geographical and perhaps a metaphysical one.”  

Starting in early autumn, Bailey drives his 1973 Saab station wagon from the Baltic to the Adriatic, over 1,400 kilometres, along the edge of the Curtain, exploring the border country, staying in border towns, walking, hiking, talking to people – always noticing, noticing, noticing. 

Here, for example, he’s hiking along the border near Braunlage, West Germany:

In the next hour I saw a small shed in the woods with chalked graffiti: BRITS RUSKIS AMS OUT; a young couple, sitting on a log, hands interlocked, with their feet just inside the border, oblivious – so it seemed – to a DDR [East German] watchtower a hundred yards away; a little brook, the Bremke, running south; and a road, the former Elenderstrasse, intersected by the border. There were the remains of a bridge that had once carried the road across the Bremke and on to Elend, now in the DDR. Over there, drüben, the road was narrow and deserted. On the West German side it was wider but equally without traffic; it had become a lane on which people could take a Sunday-afternoon stroll out from Braunlage without the exertion of climbing the Wurmberg. Naturally, there were watchtowers here, too – an older type, apparently empty; a newer one, apparently manned. Beyond the fences, outer and inner, two German shepherds were attached by leashes to long wire runs. A man and a woman came walking from Braunlage, guiding a toddler who was pushing his own carriage. They arrived at the striped barrier that ended the road and stood looking at the ruins of the bridge. I had recovered by nerve and felt annoyed that this small family couldn’t keep walking. Hier ist Deutschland nicht zu Ende! Here, however, was a dividing line between two views of the state – on one side, where the state was still seen as a creation of and servant of the people; and on the other, where people were considered to exist for the benefit of the state. And these concepts could be, as I’d seen, a mere quick and sudden jump apart.

Here he’s still in West Germany, driving along the border near the village of Furth-am-Berg: 

Mist hid the border the next morning. Monday morning sounds included blackbirds singing and a cement mixer at the new Gasthof across the way. School buses picked children waiting at the border markers. I drove east for a few kilometres and then followed the border north along a minor road called the Frankenwald Hochstrasse. The road was high in its fashion; the hills, not lofty, were steep and forested. I stopped in one hamlet, which had a Scottish or Vermont feeling, and watched an old man digging a garden plot that abutted the border. The DDR watchtowers were generally of the old type. A Zoll hut had for its sole piece of furniture the back seat from a car. In one lonely area, without watchtowers, it took me several minutes with the binoculars to find a bunker under distant trees, buried almost up to its eye slits in the East German ground.

And here he’s on the Austro-Hungarian border, in the province of Burgenland:

On the gentle slopes leading down to the marshes are the vine fields. In the villages many houses advertise their own wine for sale. I followed the road south from one such village. Morbisch, 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. 

Along the Edge of the Forest is essentially a journal – a wonderful day-by-day account of Bailey’s border travels in West Germany, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Italy. It brims with a certain kind of journalistic sentence – specific, active, first-person, experiential, exotic – that I savor. Consider this beauty:

I was on the public jetty next to Travemünde yacht club the following morning to join the West German patrol boat Uelzen for a short voyage in Lübeck Bay.

And this:

The 29 took me to the junction of the Kochstrasse and Friedrichstrasse, and I walked up to Checkpoint Charlie to join a U.S. military patrol for a trip along the wall.

And this:

It was a lovely afternoon as I drove eastward, munching on a Kölnprinz apple that Gabrielle Neugebauer had plucked for me from the Traiskirchen commissariat. 

That “munching on a Kölnprinz apple” is inspired! Bailey’s prose isn’t flashy. He rarely uses figures of speech. But his clarity and particularity are impeccable.

In future posts, I’ll discuss a number of aspects of Along the Edge of the Forest, including its action, structure, description, point of view, sense of place, and sense of people. But first I want to introduce the other two books in my trio. Next month, I’ll review Robert Sullivan’s great Cross Country. 

Postscript: Portions of Along the Edge of the Forest originally appeared in The New Yorker: “The Edge of the Forest – I” (June 27, 1983) and “The Edge of the Forest – II” (July 4, 1983).