by Nancy Pearl
WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE
I was laughing pretty much all the time I was reading Terry Darlington’s delightful Narrow Dog to Indian River. Despite their ages (seventies) and the fact that it had never been done before, Terry and his wife, Monica, leave their home in Stone, England, to take their narrowboat, Phyllis May (named for Terry’s mother, who, though many years dead, sometimes reappears in odd places), on the 1,150-mile Intercoastal Waterway from Virginia down to the Gulf of Mexico, accompanied by their whippet, Jim. A narrowboat, as I learned, is also known as a canal boat; it’s six feet, ten inches wide (Jim, the whippet, is about six inches wide) and sixty feet long (just imagine what it looks like!), with a top speed of 6.2 miles per hour. It’s perfect for cruising the canals of Europe, but perhaps not so great for the open water that the Darlingtons need to contend with on their journey. Nonetheless the trio set out, encountering ice storms; high seas; piranhas; chiggers; the Southern phenomena of sweet tea, grits, and good ole boys and their families; and lots of that hospitality the region is known for. Terry relates all of the adventures in hilarious vignettes. While I don’t think I’m brave enough to ever duplicate the trip the Darlingtons made, reading this made me think about (a) getting a whippet and (b) taking a narrowboat trip through the canals in England. (If you enjoyed Darlington’s book as much as I did, check out his first, Narrow Dog to Carcassonne, which is equally fun to read.)
And if you find that reading humorous books about cruising is just your cup of tea, definitely try to find the pleasurable memoirs of Emily Kimbrough, mostly published between the 1950s and the early 1970s, including And a Right Good Crew (canals of England; interestingly enough, she and her travel companions begin their journey in the town where the Darlingtons live); Water, Water Everywhere (Greek Islands); Time Enough (Ireland); Floating Island; and Better Than Oceans. I spent many lovely hours rereading these—I do wish someone would republish them. They’re a delightful look back at a sort of travel best described, perhaps, as “comfortable,” when you dress for dinner and have cocktails when the sun is over the yardarm (whatever that means), written by someone who’s not afraid to laugh fondly at herself or her friends.
Because I have an abiding interest in anything about New Zealand, I just gobbled down Southern Exposure: A Solo Sea Kayaking Journey Around New Zealand’s South Island. I was glad to be along for the ride, and yet still remain dry enough to keep reading.
Other waterlogged books include Keith Bowden’s description of a potentially dangerous and always fascinating journey by canoe, bicycle, and raft in The Tecate Journals: Seventy Days on the Rio Grande. Bowden offers some nice words about the American Border Patrol agents whom he meets along the way. Here’s the first sentence of the book: “When I first glimpsed the Rio Grande, I mistook it for a sewer drain.”
And still more: In Rivergods: Exploring the World’s Great Wild Rivers, Richard Bangs and Christian Kallen detail their raft trips on rivers from the Apurimac (Peru) to the Zambezi (Zambia); Jonathan Raban describes his journey around England in his boat Gosfield Maid in Coasting: A Private Voyage, and a later trip down the Mississippi in Old Glory; Descending the Dragon: My Journey Down the Coast of Vietnam by Jon Bowermaster contains superb photographs by Rob Howard; and former NewYork Times Asia correspondent Edward A. Gargan tells his story in The River’s Tale: A Year on the Mekong. Here’s a quote from Gargan that I was especially taken with:Rivers are inherently interesting, both as geographical phenomena and as metaphors for larger questions. They mold landscapes, sunder them with gaping canyons, nurture inland fisheries, lavish the bounty of the lands they travel through into vast fertile deltas.
WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS
Let’s face it—foreigners will nearly always feel like outsiders in Paris. Still, this does not stop readers (and visitors) from wanting to experience the beauty of the City of Light. Whether one enters the world of Paris through the artistry of Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Ernest Hemingway, or through the stories and novels of contemporary authors, any reader can vicariously appreciate the magic of this city.
One way to best get a sense of Paris is to understand its (and France’s) history. If you want to meet the most interesting and charismatic woman of whom you’ve probably never heard, one whose life intersected with most of the famous people in a turbulent time in French history—everyone from Robespierre to Napoleon—read Dancing to the Precipice: The Life of Lucie de la Tour du Pin, Eyewitness to an Era by Caroline Moorehead.
Of course one siren song that brings people to Paris is French cuisine. Julia Child’s memoir My Life in France (co-written with her nephew,Alex Prud’homme) captures this dual fascination with the city and its gustatory delights. An even more recent entry in the Paris-equals-good-food experience is Kathleen Flinn’s The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry. The author attended Julia Child’s alma mater, Le Cordon Bleu, and while lovingly describing the markets and streets of Paris, invokes both the joy and terror of being a student at this famous school.
In A Corner in the Marais: Memoir of a Paris Neighborhood , Alex Karmel attempts something different. By following the historical record surrounding a centuries-old building in one of the most charming districts of the city, Karmel creates a window back in time for those of us who always wonder—who walked down these streets, and what happened here? Anyone planning to stay in this lovely quarter of Paris shouldn’t miss this book.
Adam Gopnik’s memoir Paris to the Moon provides what I believe is the best insight into the Paris that most people dream about. Gopnik spent five years living there with his wife and infant son, and he manages to make the city and its people seem at once both frustrating and captivating, bringing them as close to the truth that an outsider can most likely experience.
I’ve always believed that one of the best ways to find out about a place or a time period is through reading children’s fiction, and Gopnik’s The King in the Window made French history, and the city of Paris, so real to me. I highly recommend this fantasy novel aimed at young teens (but enjoyable for adult readers as well) to everyone I know who’s headed there.
Time Was Soft There is Jeremy Mercer’s memoir of living in an apartment above, and working for, the famed Paris bookstore Shakespeare & Co.
Gillian Tindall’s Footprints in Paris: A Few Streets, A Few Lives showcases her uncanny ability to make a place (and the past) live again through the evocation of the people who wandered its streets, stopped in its shops, and worshipped at its churches. In this book, she explores the life of a family—her family, in fact—over two centuries, living on the Left Bank of Paris.
By using the writer’s imagination to invoke a sense of place, a work of fiction presents a different view of Paris. In Suite Française Irène Némirovsky paints a portrait of the City of Light awaiting the darkness to come. Even though the novel quickly moves away from Paris, its stark portrayal of a world about to be lost remains powerful.
In Alan Furst’s The World at Night, darkness has indeed descended over Paris after its occupation by Hitler’s forces. Furst’s tale of a reluctant, unintentional secret agent trying to stay alive in the shifting sands of the occupied city mirrors the black and white tone of films from that era.
Dark images still can exist in the contemporary City of Light, especially in the novels of Cara Black. The author has written a number of mysteries set in the many different neighborhoods of Paris. In Murder in Belleville she creates a tension-filled portrait of the historic Arab district, as private investigator Aimée Leduc follows a case involving the deportation of illegal immigrants.
Graham Robb’s Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris conjures up events of the Parisian past in the lives of men and women from Marie Antoinette to Charles Baudelaire. Robb is also the author of The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography.
Finally, two recent novels by French authors show us that Parisian apartment buildings can be worlds in themselves. In Hunting and Gathering Anna Gavalda charms us with a story of disparate misfits
who share a barely furnished apartment in a grand old building.And Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog offers us the story of a young girl’s friendship with the elderly concierge in her apartment building and reminds us that even Parisians can feel like outsiders in their own city.
WHERE IN THE WORLD DO THESE BOOKS BELONG?
Quite often as I was doing all the reading in preparation for writing this book, I’d come across a book that I thought would be perfect, only to realize that there was no easy way to categorize it. It didn’t fit comfortably anywhere, but clearly belonged somewhere because I enjoyed it so much, wanted many others to read it, and it was at least minimally connected to travel. See what you think of these.
To read The Clumsiest People in Europe, Or: Mrs. Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World is to get a picture of a particular mid-nineteenth-century English mind—one that is didactic, horribly prejudiced, and a believer in the absolute correctness of the English way of life as well as the enormous benefits conferred by being a member of the British Empire. I must say that I winced even as I smiled at Mrs. Mortimer’s comparisons of the “uncivilized” peoples of the world with those “civilized” people fortunate enough to be residing in that sunniest (maybe not literally), most advanced, happiest, and most fortunate of locales: England. Todd Pruzan’s first-rate introduction puts Mrs. Mortimer’s beliefs into context.
George R. Stewart’s Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States is one of those rare biblio-animals: a pleasure to read that brings along with it a lot of interesting information to drop into conversational lulls at cocktail or dinner parties.Why is it Arkansas and not Arkansaw? What are the historical reasons for a Warsaw in Indiana, one in Virginia, and one in Georgia? Stewart tells us all this, and more.
I cannot adequately convey how much I absolutely adored Vivian Swift’s When Wanderers Cease to Roam: A Traveler’s Journal of Staying Put. For over two decades Swift traveled the world for work and fun, and then settled down with five cats in a house in a small village on Long Island Sound.This is a diary (highly illustrated with her watercolor drawings) of those years, as well as the events of her past. It’s totally enchanting.
It’s through Swift’s book that I learned about the mid-eighteenth-century writer Xavier de Maistre, who was under house arrest (for dueling) and decided to write about the items in his room as though they were important tourist attractions, in Voyage Around My Room. Swift says that he “invented a new mode of travel.” I love that description.
Other odd and rather wonderful more-or-less armchair travel books (or at least books about travel), include these:
Caroline Alexander writes winningly about all the places that influenced Coleridge’s famous poem, “Kubla Khan” in The Way to Xanadu.
Frederick Burnaby journeyed alone from London’s Victoria Station to Central Asia in 1875. His adventures are described in A Ride to Khiva—a classic book of armchair travel that was originally published in 1876 (and reprinted eleven times in the first year it came out). All authors should be so fortunate!
Like all of Alain de Botton’s books—whether his subject is Proust or, as here, musings and anecdotes on traveling—in The Art of Travel you’ll find both delightful writing and lots of observations to mull over.
Barbara Crossette’s The Great Hill Stations of Asia describes those towns—some built more than two centuries ago—that the Europeans constructed in foreign climes in order to relax, leave the heat of the cities on the plains, and escape what came to be known as “tropical fatigue.” As Crossette points out, many of these are still lovely places to visit.
From 1924 to 1939 (when he is to believed to have died in a typhoon while sailing a Chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco), Richard Halliburton traveled the world and wrote about his experiences in first-person, you-are-there prose. His books—filled with adventure and a wee bit dated now—include The Royal Road to Romance,The Glorious Adventure,New Worlds to Conquer, Seven League Boots, and The Flying Carpet.
Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s An African in Greenland tells the wondrous tale of a teenager whose imagination was captured by reading a book on Greenland, and who slowly worked his way north from his home in Africa’s tropical Togoland to fulfill his dream of one day living there.
Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places is set in Ireland and England; the places he describes include beaches, salt marshes, forests, and other locales not yet invaded and despoiled by people. Poetic, thoughtful, and sure to lead readers to a desire for silence and—perhaps—a solitary journey of their own.
In Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists , author Tony Perrottet had a splendid idea: to retrace the travels of ancient Romans as they ventured throughout their Empire from Pompeii to Egypt and beyond. As he follows in their footsteps two thousand years or so later, Perrottet makes apt comparisons between the ancient cities and their contemporary counterparts, all the while interspersing delightfully prophetic quotes from ancient travelers. (The book is sometimes found under the title Route 66 A.D.: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists.)
In 1926 Vita Sackville-West went out to visit her diplomat husband, who was stationed in Iran. In Passenger to Teheran she describes a leisurely journey—via boat, train, and automobiles. She’s scrupulous in her descriptions and honest in her appraisal of the places she visited. (She hated India and admired Isfahan, for example.)
Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad is essential reading if you need a laugh and want to get a feel for American attitudes in the years right after the Civil War. The travelers Twain describes are probably the first “ugly Americans,” so this is not the book to read if you’re particularly touchy about criticism or if political correctness is extremely important to you. Here’s one of my favorite lines: “When I think of how I have been swindled by books of Oriental travel, I want a tourist for breakfast.”
The title of Mo Willems’s book seems to say it all: You Can Never Find a Rickshaw When It Monsoons: The World on One Cartoon a Day.
Simon Winchester’s Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire was originally published as The Sun Never Sets: Travels to the Remaining Outposts of the British Empire; whatever its title, it is a pleasure to read.
In David Yeadon’s The Back of Beyond: Travels to the Wild Places of the Earth, he seeks out the places where tourists seldom go. He’s a wonderful companion—friendly and unflappable, and always eager to discover more. One thing to remember when you read this: it was published in 1991, and many of the places he writes about are no longer at the back of beyond—they’ve since been discovered by the rest of the world, like Nepal’s Kathmandu.
I know where Christopher Robbins’s Apples Are from Kazakhstan: The Land That Disappeared should go—in a section on the “’Stans,” those former Soviet appendages. But I couldn’t find enough other books that I enjoyed as much to make a section out of the topic, so I’ve put it here.
Both the sort of traveling (extensive) and writing (excellent) that Bruce Chatwin did are on fine display in What Am I Doing Here and Far Journeys.
WY EVER NOT?
I’m not sure why there’s so much good writing set in Wyoming, by Wyoming writers, or both. Maybe it’s the beauty of the Tetons and the Bighorns, the seventy-five-mile-per-hour speed limit on the lightly traveled interstates, or the seeming infinity of pure emptiness between towns. Or maybe it’s just something in the water. Why ever it is, readers are able to reap the benefits of these books.
In The Daily Coyote, Shreve Stockton describes how she gave up her successful, highly urban life after stopping for a night in Wyoming on a cross-country trip via her 150cc Vespa ET4. Soon thereafter she left New York, rented a house sight-unseen in Ten Sleep,Wyoming, and then was given a baby coyote. Here’s how she describes what captured her heart about the state:The landscape around the Bighorns is like an ocean on pause, rolling with the subtle colors of rust and sage and gold, stretching to every horizon. These mount
ains are unlike other mountain ranges. While the Tetons are fangs of stone and Rainier is an ice cream sundae, the Bighorns are sloped and subtle, built of some of the oldest exposed rock in the world; rock that has existed, in its current form, for over three billion years. There is exquisite power in their permanence.
Ron Carlson’s The Signal is a tale of love gone wrong, a good man who made a bad mistake, and the way real evil can show up in our lives. After I read this beautifully written novel, I wanted to see the place where it took place—the Wind River Mountains in western Wyoming—for myself. I have to add, though, that I wouldn’t like to go through the travails the characters did.
Margaret Coel’s series of mysteries all take place on theWind River Reservation, and all feature a priest named Father John O’Malley and a lawyer named Vicky Holden. As Tony Hillerman brings the history and traditions of the Navajos to readers, Coel does so for the Arapaho tribe. In one of my favorites, Eye of the Wolf, Father John and Vicky need to puzzle out whether a nineteenth-century massacre promulgated by the Shoshones on the Arapaho is at the heart of three present-day killings of three young Shoshones.
In fact, anyone looking for mysteries set in Wyoming is in for a real treat, because in addition to Coel there are also the books written by C. J. Box and Craig Johnson. Box’s main character is game warden Joe Pickett. My favorite of his is Free Fire, but they’re all filled with crisp dialogue, brisk pacing, and a main character who is satisfyingly complex. Johnson’s thrillers, all set near the Bighorn Mountains, feature sheriff Walt Longmire. As good as the first book in the series (The Cold Dish) was—and it was very good—Johnson just keeps getting better and better with each novel. As I write this, his newest is Junkyard Dogs, and it’s just terrific. Don’t miss The Dark Horse, either. (You can watch my interview with Johnson at www . seattlechannel. org/videos/video. asp?ID=3030910.)
