Robert Sullivan's "Double Exposure"

I see Robert Sullivan has a new book out. It’s called Double Exposure. This, for me, is a major literary event. Sullivan is one of my favorite writers. His great Cross Country (2006) was one of the books featured in my series “3 More for the Road.” I avidly look forward to reading his new one. 

3 More for the Road: Conclusion

This is the last in a series of twelve monthly posts on three of my favourite travelogues – 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 try to sum up my reading experience.

Reading these three great books, I felt I was actually making the journeys they describe. That’s the highest compliment I can pay a piece of writing. Reading them was an immersive experience. Bailey put me right there with him as he drove along the Iron Curtain from Travemünde, on the Baltic Sea, to Trieste, on the Adriatic. Same with Sullivan, as he and his family traveled across the U.S. from Portland, Oregon, to New York City. Same with Frazier, as he and his two Russian guides traversed Siberia from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok. 

The books are similar in several ways. For one, they’re all epic road trips. For another, all three are chronologically structured. They read like journals, which is really what they are – wonderful day-by-day journals that tell us what their authors saw, felt, and experienced in detail after vivid detail. It’s my favorite form of writing. A third similarity is that all three exude a deep love of geography. Cities, towns, rivers, lakes, valleys, mountains – everything is noted, named, and particularized. I love rivers; these books brim with them: in Along the Edge of the Forest, the Trave, the Elbe, the Havel, the Spree, the Ecker, the Werra, the Saale, the Regen, the Danube, the Vltava, the Inn; in Cross Country, the Willamette, the Columbia, the Snake, the Clark Fork, the Yellowstone, the Missouri, the Red, the Mississippi, the Fawn, the Maumee, the Black, the Cuyahoga, the Musconetcong, the Passaic, the Hudson; in Travels in Siberia, the Neva, the Barguzin, the Maksimikha, the Severnaya Dvina, the Irtysh, the Ob, the Chulym, the Yenisei, the Mana, the Esaulovka, the Angara, the Ingoda, the Zeya, the Amur, the Bureya, the Khor, the Arseneveka, the Avvakumovo, the Lena, the Aldan, the Olchan. 

Another similarity is that all three books are about incredible man-made phenomena: the Iron Curtain (Along the Edge of the Forest), the interstate highway system (Cross Country), the Toplinskaya Highway (Travels in Siberia: “If most Russian construction looks handmade, this r0ad appeared to have been beaten into the earth by hands, feet, and bodies”). 

The brutality of the Soviet Union figures in two of them. In Along the Edge of the Forest, Bailey writes about the Iron Curtain – not as history, but as a real, existing, visible fact of life (barbed wire, land mines, watch towers, machine guns, guard dogs) that many border people he talked with considered an ineradicable fixture forever dividing East and West. In Travels in Siberia, Frazier visits an abandoned Soviet prison camp, which he describes in unforgettable detail right down to the nails, boards, logs, and barbed wire. 

 

But these books differ substantially from each other, too. For instance, Along the Edge of the Forest is about one journey. Cross Country is also about a single journey, but it includes flashbacks of other trips, most memorably “The Worst Cross-Country Trip Ever.” Travels in Siberia consists of five separate Siberian trips, plus several Alaskan ones. Also, Along the Edge of the Forest is a solo trip. Cross Country is a family trip. Travels in Siberia features a trio of travelers – Frazier and his two Russian guides.

Another difference between these books is their writing styles. The prose in Along the Edge of the Forest is sparer and plainer than it is in Cross Country and Travels in Siberia. This isn’t a criticism. I relish this form of writing. It’s the equivalent of using a great point-and-shoot camera. Sullivan and Frazier are more descriptive than Bailey is. Sullivan creates fascinating compound adjectives, e.g., “in that decent-but-not-great, stereo-in-a-rental car kind of way,” “a smile breaks out across my sunburned-even-through-the-windshield face,” “the more-expensive-than-a-motel-but-not-outrageously-priced Saint Paul Hotel.” Frazier is a master metaphorist (“To me St. Petersburg seems more like a hole in the corner of a sealed-tight packing crate that Peter crowbarred open violently from inside. Once the breach was made the light flowed in, and it continues to flow”). All three writers are great company, where "great" means curious, observant, humorous, perceptive. This, in the end, is what counts most for me. I love spending time with them. 

Now, to conclude, I want to imagine a collage that captures the essence of these three splendid books. I picture it like this: a 1981 map of Europe, showing Bailey’s route along the Iron Curtain from Travemünde to Trieste; East German watchtower; 1973 Saab station wagon; concrete post painted in chevron stripes of black, red, and gold; metal fence with SM-70 automatic sentry guns mounted on it; a makeshift balloon basket and hot-air heating burner; barbed wire; Soviet radar station (antennae, towers, domes); glass of beer; apple; nylon knapsack; a 2004 map of the U.S. showing Sullivan’s route from Portland, Oregon, to New York City; 2004 Impala sedan with rooftop pack; Lewis and Clark signpost; take-out cup of Kum & Go coffee with plastic lid; squeegee; parrot; Holiday Inn Express sign; tumbleweed; enMotion towel dispenser; a 2001 map showing Frazier’s route across Siberia from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok; Renault step van; mosquitos; satellite phone; fishing rod; crows; birch trees; watermelon; abandoned Soviet prison camp. Overlap these maps and images; paste them at crazy angles to each other; and randomly across the surface paint three black stripes representing the Iron Curtain, Interstate-90, and the Sibirskii Trakt. I call my collage “Sulbaizier.”   

3 More for the Road: Details

This is the eleventh in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three more of my favorite 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 artful use of detail.  

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. 

3 More for the Road: Figuration

This is the tenth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three more of my favorite 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 use of figuration.

In Cross Country, Sullivan writes, “Saw a ribbon of sunshine-sparkled cassette tape flutter across the road like the spine of an invisible snake.” It’s part of a passage so good, I can’t resist quoting it in full:

The next morning, I woke in the dark, took my one small bag (clothes, a tooth brush, my journal) to the trunk of the cab, pulled away; made the gradual turn onto the interstate; convinced a Texaco gas station owner a few exits away to allow me to park on the side of his lot for a second while I jogged into downtown Hood River for pancakes to go; ran back to the truck; thought, What was I thinking getting pancakes?; got maple syrup all over the truck’s steering wheel; drove into the high desert of eastern Oregon and then the high desert of eastern Washington; saw a ribbon of sunshine-sparkled cassette tape flutter across the road like the spine of an invisible snake; drove up into the Bitterroots via Idaho and Interstate 90; drove through winding steep-edged turns that gave views of darkening valleys full of pine trees; and then, late in the day, approached Fourth of July Pass, a summit. I was three thousand feet up, on the road built by Captain John Mullan, the great western road builder, the road later followed by interstate builders. 

God, I wish I’d written that. It’s got everything I relish – action, specificity, detail, humor, and, at its heart, that brilliant creative simile: “saw a ribbon of sunshine-sparkled cassette tape flutter across the road like the spine of an invisible snake.”

Figurative speech doesn’t get much better than that. Can Frazier top it? Yes! In one of Travels in Siberia’s most sublime passages, he describes leaving the Marinsky Theatre after watching a ballet:

Afterward, Luda and I jostled through the remarkably long and slow line of people returning their rented opera glasses, and the equally full line at the coat check, and then we were outside in the cold among the dissipating perfumes and faint cigarette smoke, and snow was falling steadily straight down. It was billowing in the streetlights overhead and making cones of the lights of the waiting taxicabs, and as we stood deciding whether to walk or take a cab, snowflakes came to rest among the fibres of fur in her hat. Each flake was small but unbroken, and detailed as a cutout snowflake made in school.

That passage gets to me every time I read it. It conjoins such a variety of delectable, fascinating elements: the “slow line of people returning their rented opera glasses”; the “equally full line at the coat check”; the “outside in the cold among the dissipating perfumes and faint cigarette smoke”; the “snow was falling steadily straight down,” “billowing in the streetlights overhead and making cones of the lights of the waiting taxicabs”; the snowflakes coming to rest “among the fibres of fur in her hat,” and then that exquisite, finely observed, clinching detail: “Each flake was small but unbroken, and detailed as a cutout snowflake made in school.” That’s pretty damn heady stuff. What more can I say? I love it. 

Bailey isn’t in this contest. Or is he? In one of Along the Edge of the Forest’s most memorable uses of figuration, he compares the border fence (die Grenze) between East and West Germany to a chemistry experiment:

In one way, the border was something that made everything artificially clear: it divided everything into one side or another, between us and them, right and wrong, with no middle ground. Die Grenze was an emblem of institutionalized conflict – the visible manifestation of the entire apparatus of political, industrial, scientific and military machinery on both sides, confronting one another. In another way, the division was like that of substances in a chemistry experiment – substances that should not mix, that create a barrier between one another so as to avoid combustion or explosion – or was this to look at it from a peace-and-quiet-at-all-cost point of view?

Bailey’s chemistry analogy is an example of figuration as meaning-making. It helps make sense of a seemingly irrational, grotesque phenomenon. 

In my next post in this series, I’ll consider another literary tool, of which all three of these writers are masters – use of detail. 

3 More for the Road: Nature

This is the ninth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three more of my favorite 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 nature descriptions. 

By “nature” I mean both first nature (original, prehuman nature) and second nature (the artificial nature that people erect atop first nature). Frazier’s Travels in Siberia abounds with first nature, especially mosquitoes:

With such astronomical numbers, Siberian mosquitoes have learned to diversify. There are the majority, of course, who just bite you anywhere. There are your general practitioner mosquitoes, or GPs. Then you have your specialists – your eyes, ear, nose, and throat mosquitoes. Eye mosquitoes fly directly at the eyeball and crash-land there. The reason for this tactic is a mystery. The ear mosquito goes into the ear canal and then slams itself deafeningly back and forth – part of a larger psyops strategy, maybe. Nose and throat mosquitoes wait for their moment, then surf into those passages as far as they can go on the indrawn breath of air. Even deep inside they keep flying as long as possible and emitting a desperate buzzing, as if radioing for backup.

Also, there are tundra berries, wild mushrooms, seals, salmon, hawks, whales, rivers, trout, pines, birches, swamp-maples, ravens and crows. Of the hooded crow, Frazier writes,

For weeks as we drove, the flocks of ravens and crows remained constant – ubiquitous in western Siberia no less than in St. Petersburg. On the Barabinsk Steppe, collections of all these birds sometimes wheeled in great numbers that vivified the blank sky above the wide-open horizon. Past Novosibirsk, however, it suddenly occurred to me that although I was still seeing black crows and ravens, I hadn’t seen any hooded crows for a while. I began keeping a special watch for hooded crows and did see a few stragglers. But after another hundred miles or so, no more of them appeared. Beyond the city of Krasnoyarsk there were none, though the ravens and other crows continued all the way to the Pacific. As an observer of Siberian fauna I have nothing to add to the tradition of Müller, Pallas, Steller, and others beyond verifying or reverifying the fact that the hooded crow is not to be found in Siberia east of the Yenisei. 

Bailey and Sullivan’s descriptions of first nature aren’t as specific as Frazier’s. Their focus is on second nature – the Iron Curtain that the Russians built, artificially dividing East and West Germany (Bailey); the road-related life of the American interstate highway system (Sullivan). When they describe their surroundings, it’s often a mixture of first and second nature. For example, here’s Bailey’s description of the Elbe River:

Just before noon I reached the Elbe River near Lauenburg, crossed it and traveled along its southern bank to the village of Bleckede. The border for some eighty kilometers along here follows the river – though having said that, one has to add that the facts of the matter are a little less precise, this being the last section of the intra-German border that remains in dispute between the Federal Republic and the DDR. The West Germans claim that the border should run along the northeastern bank of the river – where in fact the East Germans have built their fence system – while the East Germans claim, seemingly with greater modesty, that the border should be taken as running down the center line of the river, which here flows from the southeast toward the northwest. The Elbe is broad, the country flat on either side, with extensive water meadows, great areas of marsh, and plump grassy riverbanks to keep floodwaters out of the fields behind. But the deepwater channel of the Elbe does not necessarily run along the middle of the river, and the big barges moving by (mostly West German, East German, Polish and Czech) have to follow a course that winds first near one bank, then the other – and is always changing. Even the shallow-draft East German patrol boats are sometimes forced to come over to where the water is deeper on the West German side to avoid running aground on their own.

And here’s Sullivan’s description of the landscape outside a motel in Cloverdale, Indiana:

I walked through a gravel parking lot where trucks were parked overnight, their engines rumbling, keeping their cabins air-conditioned; walked for a few yards along a drive-through path for a fast-food restaurant (noting all the rat poison dispensers behind the restaurant); crossed a one-way, two-lane street that was carrying traffic off the interstates; crossed another one-way, two-lane street with traffic heading onto the interstate; proceeded up the service road, which took me back toward another fast-food restaurant; headed into the convenience store attached to the gas station, watched people getting in and out of their cars for a minute; then returned following a similar route, avoiding one fast-food restaurant because I couldn’t stomach its smell so early in the morning. At each road crossing, I would pause, waiting for the speeding traffic to pass, to endure the quickly increasing and then decreasing wail of wind and engine sounds. At each road crossing, I would experience the sensation in my knees that marks the presence of fear. The walk was completely car-friendly.

Actually, that’s undiluted second nature. There’s not a shred of first nature in sight. I don’t mind it. In fact, I relish it. In his “Notes,” at the back of the book, Sullivan calls it “the vernacular landscape,” quoting J. B. Jackson. Sullivan is a superb describer of it.

I want to return to Travels in Siberia. Of the three books, it contains the most vivid evocations of first nature. On the Avvakumovo River, Frazier catches a trout. He writes,

I held the fish just above the water on my wet palm. I had never seen such a fish. Its sides were burnished silvery-gold and had big, almost oblong patches of a pale camouflage-olive color, with little black dots along the back. The dots all leaned toward the tail, as if they’d been tilted in that direction by hydrodynamics. The fish’s sides changed color depending on how you looked at them – they appeared platinum-silvery when viewed from above, but greenish-silver when you saw them from below. The forel reminded me of the little optical-square toys that used to come in cereal boxes, those whatnots that showed one picture from one angle and a different picture when turned the other way. With this fish in my hand I felt as if I’d captured an imaginary creature, a living distillation of Siberian forest light. I unhooked it without damage and set it back in the Avvakumovo.

That “living distillation of Siberian forest light” is sublime. The whole passage is sublime – one of my favorites in the book. 

Postscript: My next post in this series will be on the use of figuration in these three great books. 

3 More for the Road: First Person

This is the eighth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three more of my favorite 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 use of the first person.

All three of these books are written in the first person major. That, for me, is a compelling aspect of their style. They aren’t second-hand reports (except when they're recounting other people's stories or telling about historical events). Bailey, Sullivan, and Frazier were actually there – driving along the Iron Curtain (Bailey), driving across the U.S. (Sullivan), driving across Siberia (Frazier). They’re writing from personal experience, which, for me, is the most concrete form of reality. 

But each of them has a distinctive way of “being there.” Their “I”s differ from each other. Sullivan and Frazier are more self-revealing than Bailey. Sullivan writes about his “worst cross-country trip ever,” in which, at his lowest point, he “broke down, as in wept.” He writes, “I would say I wept openly except that no one seemed too concerned with me: I wept in the vacuum of the landscape that is the side of the road.” Frazier also has a moment in his journey when, due to deteriorating relations with his two Russian guides, he nearly abandons his road trip. He says, “Following this incident [Sergei yelling at him for taking pictures of a “supposed prison”], I became deeply uncertain of everything around me and briefly considered asking Sergei to drop me off at a train station so I could continue on my own.”

There’s more personal context in Sullivan and Frazier’s narratives than there is in Bailey’s. We see Sullivan and Frazier preparing for their trips. Sullivan describes a visit that he and his family make to an AAA office in Manhattan to get a personalized TripTik (“We described our route, and as we did, his yellow highlighting pen made its way across the map”). Frazier tells about his Russian language lessons (“Now might be as good a moment as any to talk about what it was like learning Russian or attempting to”). 

Sullivan and Frazier show more emotion than Bailey does. Sullivan constantly rages at his “shredded, moan-making” rooftop pack (“the pack on top of the Impala begins to freak out again and I have to pull over and rearrange the straps, and as I pull the straps tighter, I swear under my breath, repeatedly”). Frazier rages at his constantly malfunctioning Renault step van (“Multiple tries produced the same result. The van would not start. A red film of rage crossed my eyes”).

Sullivan and Frazier seem more prone to mishaps than Bailey. Sullivan experiences that nightmarish Minnesota journey – “the worst cross-country trip I have ever taken.” He also locks his car keys in the Impala’s trunk (“And then, when I finished packing the bags in the trunk, when I was feeling organized and purposeful, I locked the keys in the trunk. I realized that they were in the trunk during the half a second or so that it took for the trunk to slam down”). Frazier suffers food poisoning and laryngitis. He goes for a swim in the Severnaya Dvina River and is bit by leeches (“The water was warm and the bottom muddy to the point of inextricability. As I came out I found several ink-black leeches dangling from my legs. When I brushed them off, the holes they left bled impressively”). In one of my favorite scenes, he loses his laundry in the wind:

In the early afternoon, still with no sign of the guys, I decided to wash some laundry in the sink in the communal bathroom. After rinsing and wringing out the clothes, I draped them on the railing of the porch outside the TV room to dry. But I had forgotten the wind, which in just a few minutes had blown the clothes off the rail, whence they had fallen six stories onto the roof of the building’s entryway.

I ran to the elevator and went down to the first floor and outside. My clothes were in the middle of the entryway roof where I couldn’t possibly get them. I rode the elevator back upstairs depressed about the shirts, socks, and underwear I would be leaving permanently in Novosibirsk. But when I looked half an hour later, I saw that the wind had swept them away yet again, and they were now scattered on the sidewalk and across the lawn. People were walking around them. I hurried down and collected them. 

In comparison, Bailey’s trip is smooth. The only rage he experiences is at the Russians for building the Iron Curtain. The only jarring incident is his encounter with a strange witchlike hitchhiker:

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. All in all, she was an absolute shock – there in my relatively clean and tidy car on the well-maintained road running through prosperous West German countryside; for a few minutes her presence drove all thoughts of the border and the modern world out of my head. Possibly it was a test. If she wasn’t Howard Hughes reincarnated as a witch, she was perhaps one of the old gods or goddesses in disguise, checking up to see how friendly people might be to a distressed wayfarer of no obvious charm – rather the opposite. Maybe she had been sent to tell me something I ought to know. But if it was a test, I failed it. I had mentioned Wolfsburg as she got in, and this had produced no sign of disapproval, but now, passing through the small town of Rühen, gallantry and respect for the gods faded before the overpowering smell. I was afraid that I would have to discard or at least steam-clean the front passenger seat if she stayed aboard another minute. I pulled up, said that I was going to the post office and showed her how to open her door. She clambered out, bits of plastic hanging. When I came back from Rühen post office, having made a token purchase of a few stamps, she had walked on, still well out in the road. As I drove past I didn’t look at her for fear of meeting those strange vacant eyes. If it was you, Pallas Athene, my apologies. 

All three of these books feature the kind of active first-person sentence I devour. Examples:

I turn inland from the beach and follow the border for its first kilometer or so south – first across the thin neck of the Priwall peninsula, summer cottages on one side, border markers and thick East German scrub on the other. [Along the Edge of the Forest]

Driving through Celilo, we see abandoned houses, and then a few houses that seem as if they might be abandoned but probably aren’t, and then a few houses that are well kept. We see trucks parked on the grass beneath the dry cliffs, trucks that appear to still work, and then fields of cars that probably do not. We see no people, but we do see a large longhouse, where, I have read, seasonal celebrations still take place. And we hear the soft rush of the interstate, acting like an echo of the long-silenced rush of the falls. [Cross Country]

I walked and climbed around the village for a couple of hours, stepping into a store or office now and then to get warm. I saw a frozen seal on the floor of the vestibule of the tribal health building, and a polar bear skin hanging on a wooden frame, and two boys shooting a small black dog out by the village dump, and a guy carrying cans of soda pop on his shoulders into the general store when the cans exploded in the cold and sent soda cascading all over him and down the back of his neck. I spent a good while examining a walrus-skin boat on a rack near a launching ramp at the bottom of town. [Travels in Siberia]

Early one morning I took a #29 bus from the Kurfürstendamm, off which, in a quiet side street, I had rooms in a small turn-of-the-century hotel of great charm. 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. [Along the Edge of the Forest]

We cross the Maumee River, the river of Toledo, and we look left and see Toledo’s downtown bristle, and after a stretch of pretty much flat but sometimes rolling Ohio of the turnpike, we pass several men dressed in black T-shirts with cutoff sleeves, black pants, and silver belts, all surrounding a broken-down van, inspecting the engine that had broken down on the Sandusky County line. [Cross Country]

Soon after Bikin we suddenly entered a weird all-watermelon area. Watermelon sellers crowded both sides of the road under big umbrellas in beach-ball colors among wildly painted wooden signs. Sergei pulled over and bought a watermelon for a ruble, but as we went along, the heaps of them kept growing until melons were spilling into the road and the sellers were giving them away. A man with teeth like a crazy fence hailed us and in high hilarity thrust two watermelons through the passenger-side window. By the time we had emerged on the other side of the watermelon gauntlet, we had a dozen or more in the van. The watermelons were almost spherical, antifreeze green, and slightly smaller than soccer balls. We cut one open – delicious. This was not a part of the world I had previously thought of as a great place for watermelons. [Travels in Siberia]

An active verb, a line of specific description, and the indispensable “I”/“we” – these are the ingredients of my favourite kind of sentence. These three books abound with them.

Postscript: Another aspect of these great books that I relish is their nature description. That will be the subject of my next post in this series. 

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. 

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.

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. 

3 More for the Road: Structure

This is the fourth 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 structure.

One of the pleasures of reading Along the Edge of the Forest is watching the masterful way Bailey uses his Iron Curtain journey to generate his themes. The book is divided into twenty-eight chapters – each a stage in Bailey’s road trip. The chapters roll out sequentially. Chapter 1 begins in Travemünde, West Germany, where the trip began; Chapter 28 ends in Trieste, Italy, where the trip ended. I relish this journal-like structure. As Bailey travels, he visits places and meets people. Certain themes emerge. For example, Chapter 3, titled “Absent Friends,” tells about Bailey’s stop in Hamburg, where he talks with several West Germans who make it a point to visit their East German relatives and friends as much as possible. The theme of the chapter is the difficulty of cross-border travel. One of the persons that Bailey speaks with is Bernhardt Fisher, a senior officer in the Hamburg city government. Bailey writes,

What worries East Germans most, said Bernhardt, is the simple fact that they can’t get out if they want to. They might not want to live permanently in West Germany, but they resent not having the choice. Some would like the chance of experiencing for a little while at first hand the high standard of living in West Germany, which, in the abstract, they feel bound to despise. Bernhardt thinks that the majority of East Germans – if the Soviet army left – would demand a change of government the next day. They don’t want to imitate the West, but they want to have a system and government of their own, not imposed by the Russians.

Each of Bailey’s chapters develops a theme. Chapter 4 is about the dangerousness of the border fence; Chapter 8 is about the island-like nature of West Berlin; Chapter 12 is about exile. The themes grow organically from the material – from the border towns that Bailey visits and the people and circumstances he encounters. For example, in Chapter 17, called “A Busy Day,” Bailey is in Bavaria, touring several villages in the company of two officers of the Bavarian Frontier Police, Hans Jacob and Alfred Eiber. Jacob mentions that they’re in an area where two families, the Strelzyks and the Wetzels, escaped East Germany in a homemade hot-air balloon. This piques Bailey’s interest. He seeks out the Wetzels (they live in Schauenstein, not far from where their balloon landed) to hear their story. His account of their escape is superb. Here’s an excerpt:

They had been on their way for twenty-three minutes when the burner flame began to die down; the gas was running out. They dropped slowly to 2,000 meters, the balloon revolving. The flame spluttered on the last of the propane. Their descent became rapid. They didn’t know whether or not they were still over the DDR. Looking down, Petra saw many lights, red and amber, which didn’t seem to her like the DDR. The earth was rushing to meet them: hills, woods, fields, roofs of houses came into view. They were coming down over a pine wood. It slipped past – here was the ground – and they landed with a sharp jolt in a thicket of blackberry bushes. Another 150 meters would have taken them into a high-tension power line. The flight had lasted twenty-eight minutes. Where were they?

Like Along the Edge of the Forest, Robert Sullivan’s Cross Country tells the story of a single journey – the six-day road trip that he and his family take from Portland, Oregon, to New York City. But Cross Country is structured more intricately. For one thing, Sullivan punctuates his present-day narrative (written in the present tense) with memories of previous cross-country trips he’s taken (he’s driven across the U.S. “close to thirty times”). For another, as he drives, he talks about interstate history, cued by historical markers, highway signs, physical features of the land, and just about anything else that catches his omnivorous attention. As he says, he’s “like a tour director nobody paid for, like a tour guide nobody can stop, like a human roadside plaque.” 

The book is divided into seven Parts, each Part describing a leg of the journey: Part I – “Setting Out”; Part II – “Portland, Oregon, to Missoula, Montana”; Part III – “Missoula, Montana, to Miles City, Montana”; Part IV – “Miles City, Montana, to Minneapolis, Minnesota”; Part V – “Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Beloit, Wisconsin”; Part VI – “Beloit, Wisconsin, to Bellafonte, Pennsylvania”; and Part VII – “Getting There.” 

Each Part is packed with an amazing variety of cross-country-specific material, generated by Sullivan’s voracious interstate consciousness. Lewis and Clark (“Backtracking along the Lewis and Clark Trail, you begin to realize that America has always wanted to remember the Lewis and Clark expedition one way – as heading west”), travel plazas, road signs, rest stops, rivers (Willamette, Colombia, Snake, Clearwater, Lochsa, Yellowstone, to name a few), gas stations, motels (“In the little Super 8 lobby, people are filling their coolers with ice from the ice machine that has a sign on it asking that people not fill their coolers with ice from the ice machine, people who look bright and cheery, as well as people who look as if they slept on the interstate last night”), mountains (“Into the Bitterroots, the 175-mile crossing of this 300-mile-long, 11,000-foot-high range of hills that Jefferson never dreamed of, that Lewis and Clark did not expect, that Patrick Gass, a member of the Corps of Discovery, called ‘the most terrible mountains I ever beheld’ ”), convenience stores, hot springs, Evel Knievel, tumbleweed, coffee, Emily Post, squeegees … Squeegees? Yep, even squeegees. Here’s the passage – one of my favorites:

At Town Pump, when our daughter was a toddler, I lifted her to the windshield and to the back window of the car, watched her enjoy the thrill of walking on the dust-covered hood, the excitement of the brownish squeegee water, the joy of the squeegee itself, the kick that one can derive from the squeegeeing process, especially as it applies to the removal of the remains of splotched bugs, gross, disgusting bugs. In the old days, I applauded her work (while holding her steady), as did her mother, as did her older brother, and thus, she returned to her car seat proud. I waited until she fell asleep or retired to the women’s room with her mother, or was otherwise distracted so that I might repeat the squeegee process and actually be able to see out the windows, toddlers not yet having developed the most refined squeegee skills, of course.

How does Sullivan do it? How does he make all this stuff cohere? I’m not sure I can explain it. Part of it has to do with the interstate-obsessed world he’s describing, and part of it has to do with his wide-open receptivity to it, the adhesiveness (Whitman’s great word) that draws him to it, and part of it has to do with his acute awareness of the historical underlay (“Even though I’ve been back and forth to Oregon numerous times, I have never bought a wooden wagon, taken it apart to be put on a boat in Saint Louis, and then put it back together, sometimes using it as a boat to cross a river”). However he did it, there’s no doubt that the structure he created to contain it all – first-person-present-tense chronological narrative punctuated with flashbacks and memory sightings and mini-histories – works beautifully.

Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia differs from the other two books. It describes not one, but five journeys. Actually, it chronicles Frazier’s five Siberian journeys, plus several related trips to St. Petersburg, and to Anchorage, Nome, and Little Diomede Island, Alaska. The book is divided into five chronological Parts. Part I covers the earliest trips (the 1993 trip to Moscow, Omsk, and Lake Baikal; the 1999 trip to Nome, Chukotka, and the Chukchi fish camp at the mouth of the Hot Springs River, Siberia). Part II tells about two trips Frazier took to St. Petersburg, one in 2000, and another in 2001. It also covers his 2001 trip to Little Diomede Island, in the middle of the Bering Strait, between Alaska and Siberia. Part III chronicles his epic nine-thousand-mile road trip across Siberia, from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, starting in St. Petersburg, August 5, 2001, and ending five weeks, two days later on the shore of Olga Bay, September 11, 2001. Part IV tells about Frazier’s first winter trip in Siberia, which he took in March, 2005. And Part V covers his fifth and shortest Siberian journey – his trip to Novosibirsk in the fall of 2009. 

Each Part is divided into numbered chapters. Most of the chapters are organized chronologically, that is, they form a narrative timeline enacting the sequence of the journeys they describe. But there are exceptions. Now and then, Frazier inserts a chapter that is purely historical. For example, Chapter 8 tells about Genghis Khan and the Mongol empire; Chapter 14 chronicles Siberia’s history as a place of punishment; Chapter 18 tells about the Decembrist movement – an attempt to overthrow Tsar Nicholas I in 1825. Also, there’s a wonderful thematic chapter – Chapter 17 – in which Frazier pauses his narrative to show a verbal montage of Siberian images, including trash, ravens and crows, prisons, and pigs. Here’s the section on pigs: 

Although roaming herds of pigs were occasional in villages in western Siberia, east of Novosibirsk they became more common. Now every village we went through seemed to have big gangs of them. Because the weather was so hot, the pigs had generally been wallowing in a mudhole just before they got up to amble wherever we happened to see them ambling. Evidently, the wallowing technique of some pigs involved lying with just one side of themselves in the mud. This produced two-tone animals—pigs that were half wet, shiny brown mud, and half pink, relatively unsoiled original pig. The effect was striking—sort of harlequin. The other animals that roamed the villages in groups were geese. When a herd of pigs came face to face with a flock of geese, an unholy racket of grunting and gabbling would ensue. I wondered if the villagers ever got tired of the noise. Whether challenging pigs or not, the village geese seemed to gabble and yak and hiss non-stop. The pigs grunted and oinked almost as much, but always at some point the whole herd of pigs would suddenly fall silent, and their megaphone-shaped ears would go up, and for half a minute every pig would listen.

That last line is inspired!

To sum up: all three of these books are structured chronologically, but each in a different way. In Along the Edge of the Forest, the journey is a narrative through-line on which Bailey drapes certain themes – the challenge of cross-border travel, Berlin as an island, the constant menacing presence of the border fence, etc.. Cross Country’s sequential narrative is punctuated with flashbacks and historical commentary on a multiplicity of interstate-related matters, including gas stations, motels, convenience stores, and coffee lids. Travels in Siberia chronicles five Siberian journeys, with chapters on historical subjects, e.g., Genghis Kahn, the Decembrists, and Stalin, interspersed throughout. 

All three books contain an immense amount of action. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.