The Traveling Feast: On the Road and at the Table with My Heroes by Rick Bass

I met Rick Bass once, at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. I was in town for a writers' conference, and he was in town to promote his most recent book, The Wild Marsh (2009), which aroused my interest because I frequently walk around in marshes. He actually lives IN a marsh, and this book told the story of making the decision to move into the remote Yaak Valley in Montana, and what it is like to live there. I remember having a lovely conversation with this man who I hadn't read yet, and vowed to look into his other books and essays. He encouraged me to write my book about the seashore marsh I know well. It turns out he has a long bibliography, and since that meeting his name pops up frequently as a model of nonfiction writing. He writes fiction, too.

As my recent summers have been somewhat on the hectic side, I vowed that this year would be the summer of calm, relaxing reading. I was not so misguided as to think I'd work through my to-be-read piles, but at least I could read some books I've been meaning to get to. As of today, August 1, I have read or listened to twelve books, some from the to-be-read pile and some that I recently became aware of.

Rick Bass's The Traveling Feast: On the Road and at the Table with My Heroes is brand new and got my attention because there's a chapter on Rick Bass having dinner with Joyce Carol Oates. I read three of her books this summer, so far.

Each chapter of Bass's book chronicles a meeting between him and an author he admires in which Bass prepares a meal for the writer in their own kitchen. Bass is accompanied by one of two students that he mentors on each of these journeys, or his daughter, Lowry. "I just want my mentees to see what greatness looks like," he writes on pages 119-120. He got in just under the wire with Peter Matthiessen, the double National Book Award Winner (for fiction AND nonfiction) who died soon after. Barry Lopez, David Sedaris (in England), and John Berger (in Switzerland) are three of the nonfiction authors I've enjoyed reading, and I found the descriptions of their meals with Bass hilarious. Something always goes wrong, and it is fun to see how these gifted authors cope with culinary adversity. Bass doesn't profess to be a gifted chef, but he knows what he is doing in the kitchen and even serves many of his "guests" elk meat that he killed and butchered himself. This is what one does in the Yaak Valley wilderness. One of his students, Erin,

often brings dried morel mushrooms from her home in Oregon.

There are sixteen such chapters which include Amy Hempel, Russell Chatham, Lorrie Moore, and Terry Tempest Williams among others. Some of the authors were new to me, but after reading about their meals with Bass I feel like I know them and I've noticed their names in my general reading about writing and books. these are all writers' writers, if you know what I mean.

The chapter on Joyce Carol Oates was a fun one. Bass and his entourage did not cook for her. Instead they met at a local restaurant and had their mishaps there. I'm not going to tell the story here, but I will warn you that if ever you find yourself at dinner with JCO, do not take her picture while she is eating.

The Best American Travel Writing 2016

Bill Bryson and Jason Wilson, editors. The Best American Travel Writing 2016. NY: Mariner, 2016.

Do you know about the "Best American" serieses? There's an annual Best American Essays, a Best American Science and  Nature Writing, Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Writing, and my favorite, Best American Travel Writing. Reading these collections is a great way to sample authors (if you like the essay, investigate the books they've written or look for more essays), and keep up on current writing in your favorite literary genre. I have a stack of Best American Travels (and the occasional other genre) at home, and while I can't claim to have read them all, I've read parts of some

and all of others. Part of the beauty of anthologies for me is that I feel no reader's guilt for not reading the whole book cover-to-cover. I preorder BATW  every year because I love reading travel essays, I write travel essays, and the series editor, Jason Wilson, was my writing mentor while I studied for my MFA in writing. His introduction to the collection is always fun to read, and without a doubt the guest editor's introduction or foreword will be quality writing as well. This year's guest editor is the hilarious Bill Bryson. And then I savor each and every essay. Even if I wasn't travel writing myself, I would be enamored with these essays. Who doesn't want to learn about places they haven't been?

Just before I began reading Best American Travel Writing 2016, I read a writing craft essay by Ann Hood about literary first lines in Tin House’s Writer’s Notebook II. She describes a first line as a hand extended by the writer to the reader. That’s a genteel way of thinking about a hook! I picked up Best American Travel Writing 2016 and studied the first lines in that collection. I chose my favorites, not necessarily by my favorite authors:

Dave Eggers: “The year I turned 43, I woke up one morning and thought it would be a good day to go to Hollister.”

Pico Iyer: “The foreign has long been my stomping ground, my sanctuary, as one who grew up a foreigner wherever I happened to be.”

Helen MacDonald: “I’m walking beside a hedge of tangled dog roses in a nature preserve in eastern England, toward a hide, a building whose purpose it is to make me disappear.”

Jeffrey Tayler: “Tens of thousands of dragooned serfs perished while draining the swamps to lay the foundation of St. Petersburg, and residents like to remind visitors that their city, enchanting though it may be, ‘rests on bones’.”

Eggers and Tayler’s lines simply intrigued me, Tayler with fanciful language and Eggers with a familiar (but not really) place name. Iyer’s idea of the foreigner connected with my own self-diagnosed outlier status. MacDonald’s hide reminded me of the hides on my favorite birdwatching trails and how tempting they are to stand in and not be seen. All four authors put out a hand and drew me in.

Reviewing the lines after reading the essays, I noticed that my list of favorites had altered slightly, influenced by the stories they evoked in my mind. For example, Thomas Chatterton Williams’s line, “My father, a bookish black man old enough to be my grandfather, grew up in Texas while it was still a segregated state.” On the surface, this line gives us information about the essay: they are black, from Texas, and his father is much older (like mine) and remembers that state when it was much different. That’s a lot of information for one sentence. After I read the essay and realized that his ‘expert’ was Jake Lamar who I know (another writing mentor), I was very interested in the story. I’m not black, or a man, or living in Paris, but I feel like I have a good idea of what it must be like from reading this essay.

Here’s my assessment from this informal first-line study: before reading the essays, I liked best the first-lines that pulled me in with imagery, fanciful or familiar. After reading the essays, I still liked those, but appreciated the first-lines that signaled the content of the essay to follow. Some did both. I want my first lines to do both.

My other takeaway from this collection is a broadening definition of ‘travel’ writing. I think of a travel story as the recounting of a trip with a beginning and an end. Perhaps the writer includes the ‘getting there’ and the ‘going home’ or perhaps not. The protagonist in William Finnegan’s “Off Diamond Head” moves to Hawaii with his family as a child. I enjoyed the surf talk, related to the ocean’s moods, and appreciated the use of TV show titles to set the time. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we had gone to a place and were going to be left there. It was more of a story of a sense of place than a travel story. This is not a bad thing as it made for a contrast to the essays about a finite trip. I’m intrigued—can I do this? Can I write about a place that I don’t actually leave at the end and call it travel? 

Pico Iyer’s “The Foreign Spell” is the most perfect essay in the collection. I bestow this honor based on his elegant writing and the piece’s satisfying form, but most of all because of his thorough explanation of his concept of being foreign. I get it and I can relate. Helen McDonald’s “Hiding from Animals” is my first-runner-up. I wrote this in the margin: “I wish I wrote this.” She thoroughly described the joys and frustrations of watching animals that I feel out in nature with my camera and binoculars. She transported me to my favorite spots. 

As a person who is known to do a bit of research and inflict it upon my readers, I appreciated the researched meat that D.T. Max added to “A Cave with a View” as he balanced the old and new in Matera. Tony Perrottet amplified his story “Darwin’s Forgotten World” with research throughout. One of these days I’ll read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, but until I do I’ll be needing some explanation. Perrottet supplied that and more. Related to research is authenticity which seems to be Patrick Symmes’s concern in “Peak Havana.” He made it clear that what we see in the travel literature is not exactly an accurate portrayal of the real Cuba. I would like to see for myself.

Since I spent time with first lines, I made sure to note the best last lines and conclusions. Alice Gregory gave us a personal revelation in “Climb Every Mountain,” and David Rowell admitted that actually playing the hang was not all he imagined it would be in “Swiss Dream.” Helen McDonald’s nature-watching ending finished off that piece nicely for me, encouraging the reader to slow down and spend the time to appreciate nature. The most powerful ending for me is Justin Nobel’s in “Growing Old with the Inuit.” After a deft synthesis of his journey, the unfamiliar culture of Inuit aged, and his quotidian experience with his grandfather he ends with:

We are holding hands on the couch. I want to carry him up a holy mountain, abandon him on an ice floe, stab him in the heart, but I don’t have the guts. Those days are indeed over. There will be no ring of rocks, and everyone has forgotten their favorite tool. These days, the world over, we die on our couches.

The Great Railway Bazaar

Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar. Mariner, 1975.

“Speed puts some people to sleep; others it makes breathless. It doesn’t enliven conversation. I missed the slower trains with the lounge cars and the rackety wheels.” (p. 291)

Paul Theroux wrote those lines on the Hikari Super Express to Kyoto, Japan, towards the end of his four months on the rails in Europe and Asia. At this point, the reader is beginning to notice that

Theroux is travel-weary. Four months is a long time to be on a train, and that he had to arrange each leg of the journey as he arrived at each new destination have made the trip an adventure. He chats with people on the train, at the stations, and in the places he visits. The variety of people and places is truly a ‘bazaar,’ (a Railway bazaar), and this reader feels as if she’s simultaneously taken the trip with Theroux and time-traveled 40 years back in time. The journey is described in detail in The Great Railway Bazaar from 1975.

The quote above caught my eye and caused me to reflect on some train trips I’ve taken. Madrid to Granada, Spain: similar to Theroux’s descriptions in that the changing views out the window (weather, local clothing, city vs. country) contrast the train’s interior situations (characters, conversations, behavior, ambient light). My exterior view changed from urban to rural (with windmills and olive trees), and the scruffy interior of the train was populated by an assortment of travelers. There was a movie to entertain us (Theroux didn’t have movies!), and a dining car from which my companion brought me a surprisingly delicious ham sandwich. Most of Theroux’s rides were more colorful and exotic than this, but my experience helped me understand him. Towards the end of his adventure when he had become weary, he described the Japanese Super Express which blasted through dull suburbs populated by silent passengers. This train reminded me of the German bullet train on which I traveled from Cologne to Berlin, Germany, also through blah suburbs with travelers and commuters wrapped-up in their own work or reading. It was cool to speed through the country on such a fast train, but the ride did not supply much in the way of travel adventure. The Spain train had character.

In Spain, the train approaches the plain.

Theroux had ample time to come up with astute observations during his four-month trek. I copied six pages of interesting sentences that might be quotable in future train-themed essays. He’s quotable even when he gets cranky on the Trans-Siberian Express and has to walk through below-freezing temperatures in-between cars in order to get to the dining car three cars away. He has bad dreams and feels guilty about leaving his family so long: “Once I had thought of a train window as allowing me freedom to gape at the world; now it seemed and imprisoning thing and at times took on the opacity of a cell wall,” (p. 323).

On the last page he reveals what he has learned from the trip: “…the difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows,” (p. 342). I thought that sentence was particularly interesting because Theroux writes both travel and fiction, and I wonder how he thinks differently when creating each.

I would not have been disappointed by his ending if he had left it at that, but the crafty Theroux then worked in the book’s first sentence as its last, about how he “seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.” That’s true for me, too, and I would add that I have never heard a train song and not wished I was on it (with the possible exception of the Grateful Dead’s).