On the Road Again: Travel Narrative as Comic Relief

Karen Heise
M.A. Student, University of Northern Colorado
E-mail: Kheise2000@Yahoo.com

Perhaps more than any other human endeavor, traveling--widely, freely, and leisurely--best encapsulates and yet enables the human spirit. We cannot fly as birds, swim as fish, swing through vined jungles like monkeys, and dig underground like moles, but we're determined to try, and laugh at ourselves in the process. Our failures are not fatal enough (usually) to daunt our wanderlust; neither are treacherous roads, lost-ness, nearly rotten food, and disappointments at the end of the journey's goal. We still press on, looking for that "Holy Grail," usually unaware until the last possible minute whether its origin is inside worth the pursuit we religiously give it.
      "Real" travel writing has been the domain of "real" men, women, and bona-fide adventurers for nearly the history of man; "explorers" secured ships, sleds, and supplies, mapped uncharted coasts, and planted flags of their homelands in foreign terra firma, This practice seems to be fairly consistent (at least in American travel journals) until the 1980s, thanks in large part to Outside magazine.[1] It's founders, at adventure-writer Tim Cahill's urging, wanted to make the then-new magazine a showcase of outdoor adventure for the common man and woman. Cahill wrote in his book, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, of the magazine's birth,

The tough assignments would go to writers, not adventurers. 'We don't want supermen and -women. We want physically ordinary folks. The reader should think, Hey, if this clown can do it, so can I. If the writer [is] sort of incompetent and easily frightened, all the better (5).

Cahill, along with humorist and travel writer Bill Bryson, takes great relish in debunking the "real men" mentality of travel writing (although some have argued that Cahill still acts like a "real" man). I believe this refusal to take oneself too seriously is the single most important factor in the humor of the travel narrative. When the writer can admit his or her shortcomings, mistakes, and fears--irrational or not--and can take the inevitable traveling setbacks as opportunities for comic relief and even self-deprecation, so can we. In fact, I submit that we see ourselves in them; their self-deprecating humor gives us permission to also poke fun at the writer, the landscape, and ourselves. Even though Cahill's book is globe-spanning, this "new" travel mentality permeates his writing; in fact, it is common to many travel writers and their writings at one point or another. The unified message for Cahill, Bryson, and Twain in particular is simply "don't take yourself too seriously!"
      Perhaps the most interesting thing about the travel narrative and its foibles is it seems to transcend time. Mark Twain's adventures in his fictional cross-country mail wagon journey (c. late 1860s) in Roughing It bear incredible resemblance to Bill Bryson's continent-spanning Chevette odyssey, taken up approximately 120 years later in his book The Lost Continent. Both men had a mandate to "Go West"; Twain made a continuous east-west trek, while Bryson did two separate "loops"--both starting in Des Moines, Iowa--one east and one west, the latter of which I will examine.
      But "Going West" is an anomaly; where, exactly, is The West?
      According to Bryson, it is a magical and invisible area where the Midwesterner's ubiquitous baseball cap gives way to the cowboy hat. Men in The West don't walk, they "lope," and have a habit of "looking vaguely suspicious and squinty, as if they might have to shoot you in a minute" (214). Where better to be shot than Dodge City, which in its glory days was "the biggest cow town and semen sink in the West"? (215). Bryson also adds that in its heyday, the city was really only the world's biggest cattle market for ten years and nothing more, despite the Hollywood version of television westerns (216).
      For Twain, the alluring West was almost too much to bear. He gushed that his brother would "see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs, and antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures, and may be get hanged or scalped, and have ever such a fine time, and write home and tell us all about it, and be a hero" (49). But as soon as the journey was underway, disillusionment crept in; the land between Missouri and Nevada became "a confusing jumble of savage-looking snags, which we deliberately walked over with one wheel or the other" (49).
      One of the first landscapes Twain and Bryson described was the plains area of the continent: western Missouri, Nebraska, and Kansas. Twain called the South Platte River a "melancholy stream straggling through the center of the enormous flat plain" (86) and Bryson characterized the Platte herself as "impressive, until you realize that it is only about four inches deep. You could cross it in a wheelchair" (207). To Bryson, the river and the landscape resembled "a drink spilled across a tabletop" (207) and Twain characterized the gateway to the plains as "deep, still, almost lifeless and houseless solitude!" (86).
      The favorite pastime in The West is shooting--anything. Bryson matter-of-factly condenses the entire sad history of the demise of the buffalo and Indians into a few pithy sentences, and concludes with " ... both have made a recovery ... and of course, you aren't allowed to shoot either, so all the Westerners have left to shoot at are road signs and each other, both of which they do rather a lot" (214). Twain's hilarious account of the various firearms brought along on the wagon seems to bear this out; all of the weapons were as untrustworthy as the marksmen who bore them. They practiced on cows, coyotes, rabbits, and almost inadvertently, each other (53).
      What would a traveler's account be without the obligatory reporting of gastronomical disaster? Twain's occurred as they were changing drivers outside of St. Joseph, and it featured, among other things, a "fly-specked cruet," complete with a few floating insects inside (70), "a disk of last week's bread, the shape and size of old-time cheese ... as good as Nicholson pavement, and tenderer," "condemned army bacon," and a drink called Slumgullion, flavored with "too much dish-rag, sand, and old bacon rind" (71). Bryson's mishap happened in Wells, Nevada, "the sorriest, seediest, most raggedy-assed town I've ever seen" (264), at the 4-Way Cafe. The food--"bristly fried chicken, lettuce with blackened veins, french fries with the appearance and appeal of albino slugs"--was so bad Bryson refused a doggy bag, telling the waitress through a forced grin, "No, thank you. I don't believe I could find a dog that would eat it" (265).
      The landscape itself seemed to wreak havoc on the traveler's nerves and his vehicle. One of the several of Twain's wagons, which suffered at least two documented breakdowns earlier in the journey, was finally relegated to wandering aimlessly across the desert in a blizzard. The men tried in vain to light a fire and then lay down to die in their dramatic frustration. Hours later, after the snowstorm cleared to reveal three snow-covered lumps in the desert (the men), Twain awoke and sheepishly realized they had been within a few feet of their destination (240-251).
      Bryson fared no better. In his ignorance or hard-headedness, he decided to take the scenic route over Colorado's Phantom Canyon in his Chevette in April. As he inched his way up "the most desolate and bone-shaking road I had ever been on (221), he realized he had lost his opportunity to turn around. As the road narrowed and the snow began to fly, he jumped out to clean the bug guts off his windshield, "certain that at any minute a bobcat, seeing the chance of a lifetime, would drop onto my shoulder and rip off my scalp like the sound of two strips of Velcro being parted." Then, he made the disheartening discovery that his car, starved for oxygen in the thin mountain air, wouldn't start (222). But Bryson obviously finished his journey, and Twain didn't die from the blizzard, else we would likely have no journals.
      But what we read in their pages is much more than just a simple travel log. It is also the inner journey. Hamlin Hill, in the introduction to the Penguin 1985 edition of Roughing It, suggested that Twain's book, while humorous, is also a "rejection of the myth of the frontier West," an "autopsy of the American dream," (19) and an "initiation into homelessness, poverty, and emotional dislocation" (20). It is easy enough to sense those things near the end of Roughing It. Bryson complained throughout the pages of The Lost Continent that the American landscape was becoming hopelessly and boring homogenized--and sadly, he is right. Cahill, whose stories are "conceived in fun and are meant to be read for pleasure," has been haunted by "egregious ecological rape" and he has never seen a jaguar in the wild (7).
      Luckily for the armchair traveler, the traveling life's inherent disappointments usually are balanced by humor; otherwise, no one would be motivated to go anywhere (or even read about it) for any reason. It is humor above all else that allows us to go the extra mile and turn the next page in the travel narrative. Perhaps that's why laughter is still the best medicine--and a long road trip is still our favorite summer pastime.

Works Cited

Bryson, Bill.

The Lost Continent. New York: Harper and Row, 1989.

 

Cahill, Tim.

Jaguars Ripped My Flesh. New York: Bantam, 1987.

 

Twain, Mark.

Roughing It. New York: Viking/Penguin, 1985.

[1] For an extended discussion of Outside's early editorial philosophy as it relates to the change in travel writing and the "common" adventurer, see the Introduction to Cahill's book.

Academic Exchange Extra invites reader responses to any writings in this issue--especially articles advancing the scholarly debate of issues raised.

Page Viewed:   / Created: 25 June 2003 / Updated: --