Minnesota
Suggested by: Mom
Traveled: March 5-11

I was so looking forward to my stop in Minnesota – a return home to the familiar. It was in Minnesota where all of my real-life road-trips began – decades of spring breaks and family vacations loaded in our minivan in search of our next historical stopping point. Finally reaching my home state on this literary journey was going to feel easy, right.

I read Spirit Car by Diane Wilson quickly, but it proved to be anything but easy. Confronted by the bloody history of my home state and country’s past, I traveled with Wilson as she retraced her Dakota ancestors’ cultural tragedies. The home I love so much was built on the oppression and marginalization of an entire people. It was difficult to imagine my trusty minivan driving alongside Wilson’s spirit car, a worthy vessel filled with earnest spirits with stories to tell.

Though I imagine the connections feel close and recognizable in her heart, Wilson’s explanations of the lengthy branches of her family tree became inscrutable at times. Still, the thread of a family’s story, and so often cradled and carried on by the women in the line, prevailed. It was tender homage to the struggle of her people. The drums that beat Wilson on into hearing that story clear and insistent, an unavoidable pull towards home.

It wasn’t the homecoming I imagined. And yet, glimpsing this story so rarely told was powerful. Like the moment when you first realize your parents were once children, I have a deeper understanding of where I come from. Perhaps there’s room in my minivan for some spirits yet.

North Dakota
Suggested by: SFPL
Traveled: December 21-26

I knew there was a reason I was so diligent in jotting down written mile markers just after I closed the books in the first half of this trip. I wanted to avoid the frustration I face now: the fading colors of a world I remember vividly enjoying, the snips of voices just out of my range of hearing. The people in Erdrich’s world were thoroughly charming; I wish I had taken the time just after meeting them to do them justice.

Here is the gift they have given me that has withstood a month or two of life getting in the way: the miraculous in the everyday. It struck me then and stays with me now. I don’t mean the miracle of the kindness of strangers or true love, I mean the mystical, almost circus-like events that were woven indistinguishably into these people’s ordinary stories. Spills on the ice create the likeness of Christ, a mother gets into a demonstration plane at a fair and never returns, a beautiful woman feels herself sinking beneath her lawn from her patio furniture is too pointy in the soft dirt.

It was a seemingly ordinary story with Alice-in-Wonderland rules. And yet Erdrich creates her characters with such honesty and compassion that their lives seem true and wholly realistic. The little tickles of the fantastic aren’t out of place in small-town North Dakota. They are necessary to capture the magic of being alive together for years. Of scrubbing a butcher-block clean for decades with your mean-spirited cousin and good-hearted friend in the next room. Of living in a small town when the world makes big changes. Of having children before you want them, of having a child nobody understands. Magic actually makes life more real. It does the wonder of it all justice.

Montana
Suggested by: SF Public Library
Traveled: Nov. 15-17

Here is the part where I apologize for the three month hiatus from my road trip. I know my adoring fans (read: mostly my mom) have missed me. I was on a pit stop, backlogging books through the holidays and focusing my reflective efforts on my own story unfolding back in California. But here I am, ready to share some brief thoughts on Norman McLean’s short story of fly-fishing and brotherly love.

The thought that has lingered with me since I met McLean last November is one of knowing how to help. The narrator of the story feels throughout his life a difficulty in reaching out to his brother in a way that he will hear. Norman knows his little brother needs some sort of help, but is thrown by the times when his younger sibling seems much more capable than Norman himself, a strange reversal in the guardian role he feels. More than just knowing how, the story asks us to reflect on who can offer help when those around us need it. Perhaps those who want to help the most are the ones too close to reach out.

Norman ends the story saying he is haunted by rivers. Was there an angle he missed under the rushing waters and above the calm surfaces? Was there a way he could have acted, words he could have said, to throw a life-saving line to his brother? Or was it enough to simply stand with him, focusing on a flick of the wrist that had bound them together since boyhood?

I think we are haunted by the idea of what we could have done. And that’s natural, and an understandable urge. But I think sometimes our idea of what we could have done was never possible in the first place. We cannot save just by wanting to save. We don’t always have what that takes. We aren’t always the person who that needs to come from. Haunting indeed.

Nebraska and Wyoming
Suggested by: Brooklyn Magazine
Traveled: November 2-8

This is different than the posts I usually write, and there are two reasons for that. The first is that they are both love stories, and the surprising parallels and juxtapositions between the two give me a fun game to play. The second reason, the real one, for which the first is a hasty justification, is that I put off writing about Eleanor & Park after the last page, and against my better judgement forged ahead. Now, I’m two posts behind and haven’t picked up Montana for over a week for fear of never returning, so there you go. These books get to be buddies.

In the nature of hand holding and neighboring states, let’s talk about what these two books share:

– These are stories of misfits, protagonists struggling with living on the fringe
– We are witnessing first loves
– Both take us through a sexual awakening
– The protagonists seem to tumble into one another, unexpectedly and equally passionate
– Both feature society and normalcy as the antagonists
– Urgency pervades both
– Smells are potent and evocative
– Neither love is allowed to last
– Both stories seem doomed to end from the beginning

The thematic similarities surprised me, as the styles were so different. Eleanor & Park is a spunky, contemporary young adult novel, while Brokeback Mountain is an artful, all-grown-up short story.

Brokeback gives us sentences like, “The tea-colored river ran fast with snowmelt, a scarf of bubbles at every high rock, pools and setbacks streaming.”

E&P counters with, “Eleanor hadn’t known there were houses like that in this crappy neighborhood — houses with wall-to-wall carpeting and little baskets of potpourri everywhere. She didn’t know there were families like that.”

But when the authors start sharing the excitement of stolen, overpowering encounters, their commonalities appear. “… and as easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers, their mouths came together, and hard, Jack’s big teeth bringing blood, his hat falling to the floor…” and “They weren’t moving in orderly steps like Mother May I. They weren’t even kissing each other square on the mouth. (Lining things up neatly would take too long.)”

And finally, when the currents of fate and the broken world threaten to be too much, they converge. “I don’t know how to say goodbye to you,” she said. “I wish I knew how to quit you.”

Love is love is love. And it’s awkward and too often impossible. But it makes the lights shine a little brighter, and has filled our libraries with shelves and shelves of beautiful stories.

Colorado
Suggested by: Jacob
Traveled: October 21-27

I have an old, claw-foot bathtub in my house, with a white curtain that pulls all the way around. The edges get tipped with mildew every three months or so. It’s my job to scrub it clean, and I enjoy the cocoon it creates when I am ensconced for my daily showers or rare, luxurious baths. There is a massive shower upstairs, renovated by the previous owner with two waterfall heads and a solid wall of frosted glass, letting the morning sunlight pour onto the dazzling, naked form inside. But I prefer my claw-foot tub and its high, porcelain edges.

That is, until Mr. King finally walked into my life. Now, I approach the tub with a tiny knot at the base of my neck, throwing back the curtains with one eye closed.

This is, I have decided, a fair price to pay for the thrilling story he has given me, providentially during the week where ghosts and ghouls roam the streets. I saw Kubrick’s The Shining two years ago, and while I remember liking it, had very little stick with me. Fortunately so, as it left me as a relatively blank slate to experience King’s writing for the first time. I couldn’t put The Shining down, and pushed my lunch “hours” five-ten-fifteen minutes longer to creep ahead through the satisfying mix of supernatural and human depravity that King has put down. Not sure what to expect from a household-name author with over fifty books in a genre I rarely touch, I started The Shining skeptically. But I quickly warmed as the Colorado winter grew colder, and hardly noticed my pages-to-go dwindling to the thin back cover.

The setting in the Colorado mountains, with the elements blocking any passage of escape, was a haunting mirror of the will of the supernatural forces of the hotel. The snow and wind were just as impassable as the ghostly spirits and evil wills, becoming the source of much of the steady panic that built through the book. To be reminded that human beings are just an illusion away from control is scary. A snowstorm, a hurricane, a tiny solar flare away from disaster. And then King took it one step further, weaving a history for his antagonist Jack that suggests he may have, in fact, had some choice in the matter. And he chose evil. And that is even scarier.

Kansas
Suggested by: Ben
Traveled: October 8-16

Capote took me to Kansas, but as I write this roadtrip reflection, my heart is in Virginia. I have been struck by how often murder and the psychology of killers has come up on my trip so far, Utah and Kansas being the most overt instances. And it has been admittedly enjoyable to sink into the lives and stories of those who commit the ultimate sin. It makes for rich, memorable literature. Death, it turns out, is the stuff of life. But it has been difficult to see that truth play out so closely to my own community. Today’s news of Hannah Graham’s possible remains being found on a farm in Virginia suddenly make the Clutter family’s bound wrists and wide eyed fear much more real. To know that Hannah’s last day was one so typical to my own while I was a student at UVA makes Nancy Clutter all of a sudden a close friend of mine, someone I could have chatted with, baked a pie with on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

The depth of Capote’s work lies within his willingness to see all characters of this story as people, human beings deserving of thought and careful consideration. He tells the killers’ story as thoughtfully as the victims’. And I respect him for it, and gratefully hold his masterful work in my hands. But today, it is hard to feel anything but a sick punch in the gut and a fiery anger at the twisted things we do to one another. I want to light a torch, grab a pitchfork and defend the community that I hold so dear and felt so safe within. I want to find the answer — who did it, why, how we make them pay enough to feel like vengeance and justice have been served.

And I am going to let myself feel that, at least for tonight. Feel it wholly, and give it room to breathe and burn. And then I am going to sit back with Capote and see if there is a better way. To see if there is something more useful to dwell upon, to find a different question to ask and answer. I want to find a way to choose life, even with all the death.

Oklahoma
Suggested by: Anne
Traveled: Oct 1-3

Oh, how deliciously dysfunctional! Part of why I enjoyed August: Osage County so much was simply a return to a dramatic genre that I hold dear. But undoubtedly much of my delight came from a juicy dose of Schadenfreude. It’s a dark comedy — the members of the Weston family harbor hurtful secrets and undeniable pain. But to see them tripping over themselves, hunting for pills and even managing an opportunity to hit a philanderer with a frying pan, brought a silliness to the tragedy of their familial relations.

The characters that Letts has written hardly need a staged production to properly introduce themselves (though I would jump at the opportunity to see this work mounted). They are tough yet broken, and almost all manage to retain a sliver of sympathy within the reader, even as the list of their collective sins grows longer with each passing scene.

I’m certainly glad they aren’t my family. All the same, I’d relish the opportunity to be a fly on their unstable walls. I’m grateful that Tracy Letts gave me just that.