by Paul Theroux
Wendell widened his oyster eyes and said softly, as though to reassure me, “Ah know that there man.”
The man was red-eyed and unshaven and looked menacing, but seeing Wendell, he saluted clumsily and showed the gaps in his teeth.
“What’s going on?” the man said, but kept walking.
“How y’all doin’?” Wendell said, and went silent.
“It’s all good, brother.”
“I hear ya.”
We waited, the noise from the car washing over us, echoing in the night-black trees around the parking lot, and waited more until the man in the twisted cap left the minimart with a six-pack of beer, heaved himself into his car, reversed into the darkness, and took the howling with him.
“You were saying, Wendell?”
“Ah’ll tell you,” he said, “’bout the South.” He leaned toward me, speaking close to my face and very slowly. “We good people. We not educated people like you people up north. But we good people. We God-fearing people.” He squinted and seemed to search his memory for an example, then said, “It takes some education to ask questions like, Do God really exist?”
“I suppose so.” And I thought, He did not say edjumacation.
“Nemmine! We don’t ask no questions like that in the South. But we good people.” He braced himself and stood a bit taller to deliver another thought, which he did with deliberation. “Not one person in the South, black or white, will allow y’all to leave they home without offering y’all something to eat—a meal, or a sandwich, or peanuts, or anything.” In a slow and certain voice he said, “They will feed you, sir.”
“Tell me why.”
“’Cause it’s the only right thing to do.”
“That’s hospitality,” I said.
“That’s hospitality! And when y’all come back to Gadsden, you stop on over and see me and Sandy, and we’ll eat something.” He put his free hand on my shoulder. “Ah only just met you, but Ah can tell y’all an educated man. You are good folks. Ah mo head on home right now and tell Sandy.”
And then he warned me against staying the night in Gadsden, but to drive on to Fort Payne, where I’d find a better-quality motel, but that when I came back, he and Sandy would be happy to host me.
“Which direction is Fort Payne?”
Wendell raised his head, faced the darkness and the obscured on-ramp, and pointed with his lips.
“Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.”
What Wendell had said, and even the way he had clamped his hand on my shoulder, had made an impression, put me in mind of the much-quoted lines (it’s a Canadian, Shreve, who’s speaking) from Faulkner’s Absolom, Absolom!—to which Faulkner, the master of decorous obliquity in a whole long shelf of books, attempts various replies. But I felt Wendell had an answer, and I drove into the night happier.
The poor, having little else, keep their culture intact as part of their vitality, long after the well-off have dumped it. This was one of the many encounters that showed me how a traveler may arrive and slip into the rhythm of life in the South, the immersive power of its simple welcome amounting to a spell.
Road Candy: Traveling in America
Most travel narratives, perhaps all of them, even the classics, describe the miseries and splendors of going from one remote place to another. The quest, the getting there, the difficulty of the road, is the story; the journey not the arrival matters, and most of the time the traveler—the traveler’s mood, especially—is the subject of the whole business. I have made a career out of this sort of slogging and self-portraiture, and so have many others in the old laborious look-at-me way that informs travel writing. As V. S. Naipaul shrewdly explained in A Turn in the South, the traveler is “a man defining himself against a foreign background.”
But traveling in America is unlike traveling anywhere else on earth. Early on in my trip to the Deep South I stopped at a convenience store in a small Alabama town, aiming to buy a soft drink. But I had really stopped because the store sat on its own small slab of cement, on a side road, and was made of weathered boards, a rusted Coca-Cola sign nailed to the wall. On the front porch—a roof over it—was a bench where I could sit and drink and make notes. A store with a homely, enduring look like that had to be run by someone who’d talk.
A man of sixty or so, standing behind the counter wearing a baseball hat, greeted me when I entered. I took a bottle of soda from the cooler, and paying for it, I saw that the counter was crowded with glass bowls—like goldfish bowls—filled with small loose pieces of wrapped candy. It was a glimpse of my youth: Sam’s Store, on the corner of Webster and Fountain streets in Medford (circa 1949), the countertop of jars brimming with penny candy.
“When I was a boy . . . ,” I said, and the man listened politely to my memory. I finished saying, “We used to call it penny candy.”
“Road candy,” he said. “Eat it while you’re driving.”
Road candy seemed to me a perfect summing up of the pleasures of driving through the Deep South. What I saw, what I experienced, the freedom of the trip, the people I met, the things I learned: my days were filled with road candy.
Breezing from place to place on wonderful roads seemed so sweet, so simple. Such travel is full of deceptions, though—especially that one, that the great roads are proof of prosperity and make America easily knowable. The paradox is that many roads in America lead to dead ends. The arrival is the object and the challenge, often in unexpected ways, in a country with an improvisational culture that makes a fetish of despising regulation. I was to discover that America is accessible, but Americans in general are not; they are harder to know than any people I’ve traveled among.
The ease of travel in America is so complete that any conventional narrative cannot be about the journey at all, not about locomotion, the ordeal of getting from one place to another, which is often the heart of the travel narrative. The American road is so well made and lacking in obstacles that it disappears from the traveler’s tale, except when it is thanked as a benefit, with the same gratitude as that of Prince Husayn, of his magic carpet: “mean to look at, but such are its properties that should any sit thereon and wish in mind to visit country or city, he will at once be carried thither in ease and safety” (Richard Burton, Supplemental Nights).
A dangerous or difficult road can be the subject of a journey; the magic carpet isn’t. The classic travel story is a tale of risk, often a quest, a retelling in trekker’s gear of the Odyssey, and concerned with enduring the vicissitudes of a quest, and then getting home safely. Such a book becomes a mimicry of many legends, but particularly of the traveler beset by obstacles—demons, witches, bandits, whirlpools, the temptations of sirens, a chronicle of delays. “We walk through ourselves,” Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses, summing up the travel experience, “meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.” The torments of the road are the tale, and the getting there is the subject of most travel books, from the seventeenth-century Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North and Parkman’s The Oregon Trail (1849) to the great travel books of our own day: the vomiting camels of Thesiger’s Arabian Sands, the muddy Congo paths of Redmond O’Hanlon’s No Mercy, the flitting and plodding of Bruce Chatwin in Patagonia—and, I should add, to a lesser degree, nearly everything in travel that I have written. The travel book is, typically, about struggling to a destination.
But in America the journey is a picnic: traveling anywhere, particularly in the empire of the open road, is so easy as to be superfluous to write about. The challenging fact is that, because of our superior connectedness, one cannot write about the United States in the way one does any other country—certainly it is cheating to pretend that it is any sort of logistical ordeal.
“The land was big and varied, in parts wild. But it had nearly everywhere been made uniform and easy for the traveler,” V. S. Naipaul writes in his book of South
ern travels. “One result was that no travel book (unless the writer were writing about himself) could be only about the roads and the hotels.” He goes on to say that America is not alien enough, which is questionable: in his trip through the South Naipaul concentrated on the larger cities, and his stated theme was the lingering effects of slavery (Slave States was a provisional title for his book). In a helpful insight he adds, “[America] is too well known, too photographed, too written about; and, being more organized and less informal, it is not so open to casual inspection.”
That is, unless you’re deliberately creating obstacles or indulging in mock heroics, in a narrative based on a Victorian model of what travel writers are supposed to do—suffer, be afraid, overcome hardships, endure privations and bizarre rituals, find the Heart of Darkness, meet the Jumblies, converse with God-botherers and Mudmen, observe the Anthropophagi and the Men Whose Heads Do Grow Beneath Their Shoulders, be heroic, and survive to tell the tale. Many do, even in this happy land. I think of their books as mock ordeals.
The Mock Ordeal
Some narratives of travel in America succeed in a small way because they purport to be frightening, dangerous, risky, life-or-death adventures—a domestic version of the struggle against the odds that is a commonplace in books of foreign travel. This posturing, Walter Mittyish tendency might have begun with Henry David Thoreau, who, literary genius though he proved to be, lived a jostling existence with his parents, like many so-called cellar dwellers today, after he graduated from Harvard, rarely venturing far from the family home. He suffered from ill health for most of his short life (he died at the age of forty-four). He was not attempting hyperbole when he wrote in his journal, “I am a diseased bundle of nerves standing between time and eternity like a withered leaf.”
He was twenty-six at the time, plagued by chronic bronchitis, mood swings, and recurrent narcolepsy. He celebrated the outdoors, he extolled hiking, yet he was anything but robust. In his experiment with independence at the age of twenty-eight, building a small cabin on the shore of Walden Pond, he is often depicted as a lone witness, living a hermit-like existence in the wild. Yet he was a mere mile and a half from his mother, who baked him pies and washed his clothes. Huckleberry parties occupied his Walden summers when he wasn’t writing or reading.
One of the books Thoreau read at Walden was Melville’s just-published Typee, subtitled A Peep at Polynesian Life. This highly colored account of Hawaii and a Pacific whaling voyage describes Melville’s jumping ship with another crew member at the remote Marquesas Islands and his idyllic romance with the sylph-like island beauty Fayaway: “Fayaway and I reclined in the stern of the canoe, on the very best terms possible with one another; the gentle nymph occasionally placing her pipe to her lip, and exhaling the mild fumes of the tobacco, to which her rosy breath added a fresh perfume.”
Henry, who was two years older than Herman, could not have known that Melville prettified his island experience and exaggerated his time in the Marquesas, where he’d spent one month—he claimed it was four months. He made his reputation with this book, and its notoriety and its exuberant adventures in this distant, unspoiled, and unknown portion of the world (cannibals, water nymphs, nakedness) made a powerful impression on the celibate, bronchitic man at Walden (rejected some years before by the only woman he’d ever loved), who, after a year on his own, felt the pressing intimations of cabin fever.
Partly as a response to Typee, and out of an ardent desire to achieve a wilderness adventure of his own, something original to write about and lecture upon, Thoreau went on a shuttling journey to Maine: took a train to Boston, another train to Portland, a steamboat up the Penobscot River to Bangor, and there he met his cousin and two lumber dealers. The four went by jolting stagecoach to inland Mattawamkeag. From there, by canoe for about twenty-five miles, where they arrived at North Twin Lake. The abounding forest thrilled Thoreau, who found it “savage and impassable,” the way it must have looked to “the first adventurers.” The region had “a smack of wildness about it as I had never tasted before.”
Overwhelmed in authentic wilderness, he had at last discovered something wild, primitive, and dangerous to rival Melville’s Marquesas. The group hiked through the woods to the lower slopes of Mount Katahdin. Thoreau climbed the mountain alone, feeling (he said) like Prometheus. The Katahdin climb inspired him to brilliant description: “Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandselled [unpenetrated] globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever.”
This was a jolly two-week jaunt, four men on a mere woodland walk. Thoreau made it into an epic journey, a voyage of discovery. Later he claimed that the wilderness he had found in Maine was more primitive, more difficult of access, than anything Melville had experienced in the remote Marquesas, and he went on deludedly believing that it had been an ordeal.
THIS OCCURRENCE OF the mock ordeal became a feature of travel narratives in America that has persisted to our own time. To his credit, Henry James, who wrote about taking lengthy train journeys from Boston to San Diego, never complained of hardship but only of New York’s “pin-cushion profile,” the “visual ugliness” of some cities, and the “confined & cooped-up continuity” of the Pullman car. He was glad to return to London.
“I think it impossible, utterly impossible, for any Englishman to live here, and be happy,” Charles Dickens wrote after the trip he recalled in American Notes (1842). As proof of Dickens’s judgment, here are four English travelers who took bus rides in America:
“New York City’s vast Port Authority Terminal is a terrifying place in which suddenly to find oneself coping on one’s own,” the prolific and otherwise imperturbable Ethel Mannin laments in American Journey (1967), about the start of her bus ride. She goes on, “It is important to resist the temptation to sit down and weep.”
Mary Day Winn, in The Macadam Trail: Ten Thousand Miles by Motor Coach (1931), describes her suffering the ordeal in Arizona of an armed man stopping her luxury coach. “At the first sight of the drawn pistol the girl behind the driver—she of the over-worked make-up—screamed shrilly.” Instead of robbing them, the gunman turns this holdup into farce, insists on kissing six of the women on the bus and, before he takes leave of the anxious twenty-seven passengers, says, “I couldn’t go another day without I kissed a pretty gal.”
A hardship for the English writer Ernest Young, in San Antonio, Texas, is having to wake up early to catch a bus, for his North American Excursion (1947): “My first day’s journey, of 430 miles, about the distance from Berwick to Land’s End, necessitated another of those early risings, which I always make with reluctance. A hasty breakfast in a roadside hut, with rain and foggy gloom outside, was not the best beginning to a lengthy bus ride.”
“People of a score of races who came to America to be rich . . . have stayed on to live like unpampered animals,” James Morris writes in Coast to Coast (1956). He goes on, “In such a climate of existence, racial prejudices thrive, and you can often catch a faint menacing rumble in a bus or on a street corner—a drunken Negro cursing the white people as he slumps in his seat, a white man arrogantly pushing his way through a group of Negro women.”
Though Morris’s book is otherwise good-hearted and generous, it is also a chronicle of timid reflection. “Violence is an ever-present element in American life,” he writes. And later, recounting storms, floods, the Rio Grande in spate, and a high wind (he calls it a “typhoon”) in Vicksburg, Mississippi, “You are never far from brutality.”
“You can sense the underlying savagery, restrained of course, but present, at many gatherings of respectable business people, [even] among the Elks or the Kiwani
s” is another of Morris’s assessments. His trip itself is dainty; certainly no savagery is visited upon him, though he remarks, “At other times, gentlemen would buttonhole me with dark questions.” A sex change a dozen years later turned James into Jan, and she bought an apartment in New York, a city she came to praise. “British journalists named Clive, Colin, or Fiona,” Charles Portis comments, “scribbling notes and getting things wrong for their journey books about the real America, that old and elusive theme.”
It must be said that none of these travelers is climbing a mountain or bushwhacking through a forest or crossing a desert on foot. They are fiddle-faddling on good roads in comfy buses or cars. But they are not alone in their dramatic exaggerations. Many American writers have succumbed to the mock ordeal, re-creating the struggle of traveling on American roads. “The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one,” John Steinbeck writes in Travels with Charley (1962). And here is an example of this danger: “About fifty yards away two coyotes stood watching me . . . ‘Kill them,’ my training said.” An investigative journalist, Bill Steigerwald, followed Steinbeck’s journey and proved, in Dogging Steinbeck (2012), that the soon-to-be Nobel Prize winner did not actually travel to half the places he described, that much of the time he was swanking with his wife in excellent hotels, and that a great deal of what he wrote was flapdoodle, fudged and fictionalized, and perhaps there was no coyote.
In The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1944) Henry Miller writes about his road trip (late 1940 into 1941) from New York to Los Angeles. “I felt the need to affect a reconciliation with my native land,” he writes at the start, but later calls it “this lugubrious trip across America.” His book is filled with complaints, the tedium of driving, the terrible food (an entire indignant chapter is devoted to the poor quality of American bread), and the dreadful cities.