The Best Travel Writing

by James O'Reilly

  Week after week, newspapers carried stories about people who had lost hope and jumped to their deaths from rooftops or spent their last nickel on razor blades to kill themselves. Despair hung over the land.

  Yet, with seeming paradox, Depression-era travel writing flourished. In the maelstrom of economic collapse, escape provided a certain kind of economic, philosophic, and psychological analgesic for what ailed writers and their readers.

  For readers, escape through travel literature assumed an almost spiritual urgency: flight from the shattered American dream. To read about unfettered excursions and intrepid adventures was to vicariously escape the despair of their Depression struggles. Tramp-steaming through the Panama Canal, freighter traveling to Europe, luxury lining to the Orient, sailing around the Caribbean, hiking through the Alps, busing across America, visiting Russia for firsthand accounts of “ideal” Soviet life, dodging headhunters in the equatorial Amazon (no, not the Internet one), spellbound and despair-bound Americans eagerly escaped to other places, if only aboard paper and ink.

  To imagine a world where on ocean liners, “The blankets were soft, wooly white, bound with red satin and pleated into marvelous shapes,” and where writers “stopped here and there, sometimes to watch indolent Mexicans dozing upon their doorsteps, and, when turning the knob of the radio, to listen to a Chopin polonaise,” was to dreamily flee, for a little while at least, real-life hardships.

  A different kind of escape was when readers sometimes discovered there were others even worse off than they: “Our bunks were so thick with bedbugs that if you shook out your mattress they would drop off in chunks. For the first time in my life I knew what it was to envy the lot of another man.”

  Indeed, for writers escape was not a luxury born of boredom, wanderlust, or avocation. It was, in fact, actually cheaper and more secure to live on the road than in the city. One recalls that “In my part of the country, the physical network collapsed. To leave the city was to survive.” Another writes, “In New York not possibly did we seem to be able to afford to marry and live together. On the evening we decided to find an island, there must have been at least a million other young couples talking of precisely the same thing. We chose St. John because it was forgotten by everyone and therefore cheap.” Still another: “Can you spare four dollars a day for a tour of the globe? It’s as cheap to go traveling now as it is to stay at home.” And: “Anyone could see from the patches on our tent and the model of our car, that the Depression had not gone very far around the corner from us.”

  It was true that—in the last half of the 1930s anyway—the government’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) did support more than 6000 otherwise jobless men and women who had some claim to expertise in putting pen to paper. Unlike today’s dilettante blogs and magazine freelance contributions, though, those were not ego-driven, hobbyish enterprises but matters of putting bread on table. What’s more, whereas today’s travel-book writers have a fighting chance to make a few bucks from royalties, back then Americans seldom bought books, but, rather, borrowed them from libraries (indeed, did so in astonishing numbers).

  Not all travel writing took their readers to foreign shores. Car travel through the Old South offered an appealing kind of time-travel escape—to a simpler, kinder America that managed to find apparent pleasantness under every rock: “We sometimes found little picture-book jumbles of decayed wooden dwellings, their courtyards full of washtubs, carts, and pickaninnies, their piazzas loaded with flowers in tin cans and alive with the sounds and guffaws of merry Negro women.” And, without the slightest hint of irony (take note, my egalitarian blogger friend): “I liked colored people, of almost every race. [Before the crash] I had had them for my servants in many countries.”

  America’s rugged West, too, found an enthusiastic Depression-era readership. Tales of gunslingers, outlaws, and lawmen were common subjects, often as their writers were themselves hightailing to Mexico in order to outrun Prohibition (which my blogger pard should keep in mind the next time she’s slurping a margarita at her keyboard). No GPS then, naturally. Writes one intrepid car-traveler: “We stuck the compass to the dashboard by its little suction cup and watched the small disk, floating in oil, turn and turn again, its spinning needle bearing absolutely no relationship to our direction.”

  Bus travel offered substantial savings over train fares and the cost of car ownership (the Depression had, by the mid-1930s, put the few national rental car companies out of business, and even the new concept of installment buying could not revive auto sales). The popular Gable-Colbert movie It Happened One Night (1934) romanticized overland bus journeying. The number of bus passengers rose threefold in the ’30s, and those who could not themselves get away experienced vicarious escape in travel books that glamorized what one author called “luxury inland ocean liners”: “My reasons for taking such a journey by motor bus,” she wrote, “was to go Marco-Poloing …it was my spice of escape.” Indeed, by 1931 cross-country motor coaching had evolved into a safe and comfortable way to see the country and write about it: “[My bus] contained sleeping accommodations for twenty-six people, with two dressing rooms and a kitchen and four levels of berths, a shelf in each room to hold toilet articles, reading lights, thermos bottles of cracked ice, even—final miracle—basins with hot and cold running water.” But before my blogger bud waxes too nostalgic, that Depression-era writer also lists among her bus amenities “ashtrays for each and every berth.”

  With the perfection of the diesel engine and the introduction of other technological innovations, the 1930s also saw a leap in rail travel. In 1934 the Union Pacific pioneered a completely diesel-powered train constructed of duralumin, and its competitor, the Burlington, quickly followed with the first of its flashy stainless-steel Pioneer Zephyrs. Those Art Deco beauties, running at speeds up to 100 miles an hour, brought the East Coast and Rocky Mountains within overnight range of Chicago—whose World’s Fair was the great escape destination of 1933-34. The benefits of these vintage bullet trains, though, was also their (sometimes tragic) downfall: rail curves had not yet been built to accommodate their kind of speed—with consequences, after a moment’s reflection, you might have expected. What’s more, the lightweight bodies of these dashers folded like tissue in even minor collisions with other trains and even with terminally stupid (not much has changed there) car and truck drivers. As profit sources, they weren’t successful. Zephyrs were truncated trains with only one and a half coach cars each. To be profitable, their fares would have to have been prohibitive in any age, let alone during those hardscrabble times. So those rolling works of art, designed principally to reignite the public’s interest in rail travel, worked much better on paper than in real life.

  Ditto aviation. Yes, the late 1920s saw the invention of stressed-skinned aircraft construction and air-cooled engines that allowed for bigger and lighter planes, and improvements in aerodynamics were enhanced by the use of alloys like magnesium and aluminum. New high-octane fuels were developed, as was, in 1937, the pressurized cabin, allowing higher-altitude, more comfortable flights. Coast-to-coast travel in (relatively) large, 200-mile-per-hour planes with overnight sleepers and navigation by radio beacon (a recent innovation), serviced by a proliferation of airports and improved weather service, all helped to make aviation no longer just an amusing novelty. But air transportation was enjoyed only by a relatively few wealthy businessmen and politicians (First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt crisscrossed the country by air, checking out poverty). To suffering families like my dad’s, whose own father had died penniless, hopeless, and miserable in 1936, reading about recreational sky travel wasn’t so much vicarious escape as it was a cruel joke.

  And the next time my blogger pal whines in print about getting “groped” by horny TSA agents and the cost of onboard snacks, I hope she also notes that in 1936, with stops, the fastest planes took as long to fly from New York to Los Angeles as it now takes to fly around the world, and with a lot more bumps. The 1930s saw an aviation fatality rate of one p
erson per each million miles flown, as opposed to today’s one in two billion. (The ’30s rate extrapolated would today mean 7,000 fatalities a year.) No surprise, then, that in those days a $5,000 insurance policy for a plane trip cost $2, compared to an insurance premium of twenty-five cents for the same trip by train. Also for good reason, the first airline stewardesses, introduced in 1930, were required to be registered nurses.

  Those Depression-age readers and writers who had a more practical (and safety-minded) side to escape, vicarious and literal, found refuge in freighter travel, a common topic of Depression travel adventure. One writer notes, “Five years ago only one or two freight-boat lines had anything even remotely approaching a travel folder. But now [1937] Americans are discovering freighter travel as offering something different from cruise-liner journeying …Most of the newer ships are diesel-motored, practically all of them burn oil instead of coal, making them faster and more efficient.” Here, then, was at least a theoretically attainable means of escape for young men and women—and had my dad not accepted the responsibility of working to help his widowed mother, he might have run away on one of these oil-burning clunkers to whatever exotic life waited for him at distant ports, instead of merely turning oily library book pages.

  My blogger friend yaks ad nauseam about the shallowness of American commercialism—the blight of suburban strip centers, Viagra ads, the constant “You’ll like the way you look …I guarantee it” reminders of our capitalist depravity—and, conversely, the superiority of slower, less acquisitive lifestyles: Caribbean beachcombing, Left Bank wine-sipping, Medieval-history-Rhine River barge-cruising. There’s a certain charming and harmless hypocrisy about her lecturing the rest of us about the evils of avarice, considering her growing list of sponsors (more power to her, I say). But during the Depression, ideological escape could be a perilous thing indeed, hardly victimless. Beleaguered Americans, sick of feeling useless, enthralled by stories about the glories of communism, queued up on the dream of Soviet utopianism. Said one travel writer: “Our world is a mess. The only thing to do is escape. Escape from a fake society, from the antics of the maggots on a decaying [capitalist] corpse.” And many, to their later (and sometimes inescapable) sorrow, did just that. A disillusioned expat in Russia wrote: “The elevator operator was tired, unhappy, hopeless, dissatisfied, and hungry. He mentioned casually that he had been riding up and down in that airless contraption, going nowhere, for fourteen unbroken hours and had no idea when he would be relieved. But surely he must have been mistaken. For I had been told, and came to believe, that the seven-hour, or less, day is now universal in the Soviet Union.”

  My blogger friend means well. She just wants to be read, like the rest of us. Someday the best of our blogs will be rediscovered, as I rediscovered some brilliant, elegant, poignant Depression-era writing. Maybe hers will be among the archival travel-writing treasures of future scholars. Fifty, a hundred years from now, someone will know she existed. A future history student will write a term paper comparing and contrasting travel writing of the early-twenty-first century’s economic downturn with that of the 1930s. And in one of those Great Depression travelogs the student might come across this observation: “In Heidelberg I registered my first presentiments that something was rotten in this picture of perfection. Behind the light and shadow I felt and shared a nameless disquiet.” And, a little later, “I have never known a shipboard journey as melancholy as this. When I left England, we were still suffering a stink in our nostrils over refreshed attacks on the German Jews.” And the student might scratch his head wondering what, exactly, about our times was in “worse shape.”

  So I have to go with Dad on this one. No “Ha!” in my immediate future. I’m not saying we baby boomers wouldn’t have survived those terrible days, and I’m not saying our own mini-version hasn’t taken its toll. We staycation; we walk away from our mortgages; we go bankrupt. We download at $3.99 instead of hardcopy $14.95; we rediscover libraries; we fly standby; we read blogs; we blog.

  Dad doesn’t read blogs. He doesn’t even own a computer. My brother and I offered to buy him one and teach him how to use it. We thought it might take his mind off being alone. He’s eighty-seven and refuses to live in assisted living. He can’t see very well and is as deaf as a potato, but he still creaks around, accepts lifts to Walmart and PetSmart—although he hasn’t had a pet in thirty years. He used to love the Fremont Township library, but his eyes have gotten too bad to read much. Although he lives in an adult community, it is not an old-people’s home. Most of the residents are younger than Dad. They all live in maintenance-free, single-family ranch houses, small but adequate, with little front lawns, stubby, white fences, one-car garages, and inviting rear decks. Very American dream.

  Dad doesn’t want to be a burden on anyone, and that’s his American dream, too. He’s a child of the Depression. He doesn’t want to be on the dole. He was on charity once, and he won’t do it again, ever, financially or otherwise. “If you were poor once, you’re always poor,” he likes to say. He’s been talking about his childhood more and more lately. So my brother and I thought introducing him to the Internet might be a good way to take his mind off whatever seems to be drawing him backwards. But after pretending to think about our offer, Dad politely declined. Instead, he goes to Walmart and PetSmart and comes home to sit by himself and think.

  When he was a young man, Dad wanted to be a writer, but that never happened. He dropped out of school to work and later went to war. After that he began a family, found one sales job after another, and before he knew it, writing was just a distant dream. We thought he would be amazed and delighted with the world of the Internet. We thought it would give him a new lease on life, make him feel young again, that with a big screen, he’d be able to read well enough. We thought he would want to visit the exciting worlds of Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and the thousands of interesting sites to which people surf to escape their otherwise humdrum lives. We thought he might like to see how the modern world talks to one another. We thought he might like to read some travel blogs.

  But we were wrong.

  What he mostly does is, he sits in his old Naugahyde chair and thinks. He’s so deaf now that ringing his doorbell does no good, so my brother and I just walk in and usually find him sitting, thinking. His Rolodex file has very few cards on it anymore, his friends having mostly died. There isn’t anyone to call. So he sits and thinks. We know he’s thinking about the old days because he talks more and more about his boyhood during the Depression. But something has changed. Now when he mentions those days, there’s a hint of nostalgia in his voice. This never happened before. Before, he was always bitter.

  There are different kinds of travel, different ways to escape. Going places is one, reading and writing about it another. “Writing books is the only real immortality,” said a (now forgotten) sage. Spending endless hours online, we forget dirty dishes and snoring spouses and overdue bills. Blogging may be the best some of us can do to escape oblivion. Wandering Walmart and PetSmart, searching for something, you forgot what, may be running away, too—from what, though, might escape you.

  Sitting alone in the dark, you might remember.

  Gary Buslik writes essays, short stories, and novels. He teaches literature, creative writing, and travel writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His work appears often in Travelers’ Tales anthologies. He is the author of A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean, and Akhmed and the Atomic Matzo Balls. Visit him at www.garybuslik.com.

  MARDITH J. LOUISELL

  Mahnmal

  As a resident of many camps, I can say that Guzen was the worst. This is not to say that the conditions at the other camps were not dreadful. Compared to Guzen, however, one might almost say that those camps were paradises.

  —Rabbi Rav Yechezkel Harfenes, Slingshot of Hell

  I had never wanted to go to Austria because of its Holocaust history but when my partner had to go to Linz for business, I went. If I had to go to Austria, maybe I
could gain a small understanding of how ethnic cleansings occur. When I saw an audio tour of a concentration camp offered as part of the Linz Arts Electronica Festival, I signed up.

  When the bus arrived at the site of the Gusen concentration camp, instead of concrete walls and barbed wire, I saw a yellow church steeple on a hill and beige houses with geraniums in window boxes—this concentration camp was now a middle-class housing development dotted with parks, newly built houses, and remodeled camp buildings on roads like Gartenstrasse where I would soon walk—as nondescript as the small town in which I grew up.

  Fifteen kilometers from Linz, the Gusen complex is the only extermination camp of significant size not memorialized as a site. Administratively the Gusen complex was categorized as a satellite of Mauthausen, but the three Gusen camps covered an area large enough to include four towns and in 1945 held 25,000 inmates, double the number of Mauthausen.

  Audiowalk Gusen, The Invisible Camp, is an art project by Christopher Mayer who grew up in St. Georgen an der Gusen, which adjoined Gusen II; Mayer’s grandfather had joined the National Socialist Party and his parents still live in St. Georgen. Mayer hadn’t known about Gusen until he was fourteen years old when a neighbor asked him if he knew the town had been a labor extermination camp. In not knowing, Mayer wasn’t unusual—Austrians didn’t speak of Gusen for decades. The interwoven voices on the audio belong to Gusen camp survivors, past and current residents, former air force soldiers, and SS camp guards, all of whom Mayer interviewed.

  Mayer sets me up with my iPod. Two blocks separate each audiotourist so I walk alone. I press the iPod button and hear a narrator provide directions.

  Walk in time to the footsteps on the tape. Turn left at the end of the road. Keep walking.