Colorado College Bulletin

The Traveler's Bookshelf

Written and photographed by Stephen Trimble '72

Explorers in their sailing ships and dugout canoes carefully followed the journals of those who came before. When their journeys went bad, they switched genres -- to Holy Scripture. 

We have it easier on modern travels, and so we have broader choices for take-along reading. Books can relax and divert us when the intensity of traveling becomes overwhelming. They also can take us into the soul of a place, so that we become more than just collectors of starred entries from our guidebooks. Those historic trailblazing journals still form the bedrock literature for many destinations.

I’ve read to my family from the journals of Lewis and Clark as we canoed Montana’s Jefferson River, finding clouds of mosquitoes at the same campsites on the same July days as the good captains -- but with netted tents to protect us. I’ve listened to river guides lovingly read aloud from Major John Wesley Powell’s Exploration of the Colorado River when our Grand Canyon camps matched his.

These are moments when the gifts of traveling and reading come together perfectly, when the place and its literature provide the flint and steel that spark insight into a landscape and its people that we remember forever.

I remember the physical sensation, the connection, the intimacy, when I read that famous first line of Isak Dineson’s Out of Africa -- "I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills" -- and then looked up from the book to the horizon of the hills themselves outside Nairobi, Kenya. There was that afternoon in a sidewalk café in a medieval hill town beneath the Luberon Mountains in southern France, sipping a cloudy, anise-flavored pastis and smiling at the pleasures of Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence. And hours lost in Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi and Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek while basking in the warm Mediterranean sun on the deck of a ship steaming between the Greek Islands. 

Travelers and writers share the same passions: curiosity, a desire to understand more about the world and a sense of personal investment. For writers, traveling and reading and writing form a circle of experience and reaction. Travelers looking for the spirit of a place use the books that these writers create as tools.

Poet and anthologist Naomi Shihab Nye names two writers who "travel with her everywhere."  First, Peter Matthiessen’s novels and travel books -- which she calls "wisdom books, life books, as well as travel books." And William Stafford’s poems, because "he traveled deeply under the skin of every day and place he ever wandered."

Reading such place-based wisdom while traveling -- while separated from our normal concerns -- plunges us into musing and reverie. The book and the place give us rich imagery for our dreams -- shedding light on who we are, who these people that surround us are, and how our rough-edged days might make some sense.

Listen to Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, "Luggage," and you will see more the next time you sit in an airport waiting area:

“she carries her eyes from country to country
in Rome adding the crisp slant of sky . . .
rows of empty chairs    buckled cases
and the bags from India tied and tied with rope . . .
haggard smiles of waiting strangers
brief flash and falling back to separateness . . .
an Italian grandfather weeps on the shoulder
of his glorious departing girl. . .”

When traveling is hard, a book may help. Nye read Salman Rushdie’s kaleidoscopic book about India, Midnight’s Children, on a camel trip into the Thar Desert in Rajasthan. "I felt so grateful that I had the book to befriend me in that far-feeling place. I felt more at home inside the book than in the place."  

On another hard trip, Theodore Roosevelt read for 10 days when he and his two foremen steered a newly constructed scow between ice flows on the Little Missouri River in the spring thaw of 1886. They had vowed to chase down and bring to justice the outlaw Redhead Finnegan -- who had stolen TR’s boat, tied neatly in front of his North Dakota ranch, the Elkhorn.  

Surrounded by cold water and dreary mud, Roosevelt devoured Anna Karenina (and captured the renegades, as well). He thought his "surroundings were quite grey enough to harmonize with Tolstoy."  

Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry likens the modern interstates of America to those same nineteenth-century journeys on rivers -- driving through the countryside as if he were "floating down this one, struggling up that one." In Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways, McMurtry admits to traveling with his favorite downriver book as talisman, Eric Newby’s Slowly Down the Ganges. He likes its texture, the interacting stories of the journey and of Newby’s relationship with his wife, Wanda, creating "a quality very seldom found in travel books … wisdom."

McMurtry travels with a head full of books, a chorus of writers that speak to him in each place. For him, Baltimore is the city of Edgar Allen Poe and H.L. Mencken and Anne Tyler. He visits northernmost Montana, along the Milk River, because that is where Teddy Blue Abbott lived when he wrote "the single best memoir of the cattle era," We Pointed Them North. Visiting south Florida makes him want to go home and reread Henry Adams to try to understand just how "we wrested Florida from France, even though, at the time, it was still claimed by Spain."

In Trading with the Enemy, Tom Miller takes us on another writer’s journey accompanied by books, this time to Cuba. At Havana’s Inglaterra Hotel, he met a Belgian tourist reading Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. Miller produced his own copy, and, together, they hit the streets looking for landmarks from Greene.  

Miller had even more fun with this interplay between the real world and fiction -- imagination against imagination -- when he asked Pepín Martínez, an elderly musician in Santiago de Cuba, if he happened to know Nestor and Cesar Castillo, the fictional brothers in Oscar Hijuelos’ novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Miller thought they seemed so real, they just might be, but the real mambo king did not remember the imagined Castillos.  

While researching The Panama Hat Trail, Miller lived in Ecuador. "Everyone who has spent time in a South American country overrun with foreign missionaries thinks that land in particular was the setting for Peter Matthiessen’s At Play in the Fields of the Lord, he says. "Tom Miller, too, was convinced that the book took place in Ecuador. Even after meeting Matthiessen and asking him, and having him say no, I still continued to believe, yes, it must be Ecuador. I saw too many Amazon jungle camps there with missionaries prowling about to think otherwise."

Mary Morris, novelist and travel writer, tries to hone the books she takes on the road to those that seem "almost indigenous -- as if they had emerged from the landscape itself." She travels with a mini-library of four books for each journey: a guidebook (which she tries to use as little as possible), one classic work of literature from that country, one "colonial" novel set in that country and one travel narrative that captures the feel of the place.  

On a trip to Mexico, in addition to her underused guidebook, she might take Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, Malcolm Lowry’s drunken elegy, Under the Volcano, and the conquistador Bernal Diaz’s narrative of the Aztec Empire, The Conquest of New Spain. Other travelers might wish to take Morris’s own book, Nothing to Declare, an outsider’s narrative encounter with the heart of Mexican culture.  

Like Teddy Roosevelt, Morris has read Anna Karenina -- the "best novel ever written that captures the Russian soul, and all other souls as far as I can tell." She last read it during nine days on the Trans-Siberian Railroad.  

With books along, it is impossible to travel alone. If you follow the Oregon Trail across Wyoming, the wagon ruts rise over an innocuous hill that constitutes the Continental Divide. Today, the site is barely marked, down a dirt road a couple of miles from the paved state highway. I searched out South Pass after a lifetime of enthusiastic reading about the mountain men and the Donner Party -- all told in the rousing words of writers Bernard DeVoto and Wallace Stegner. That night, tucked into my sleeping bag in the back of my truck, I pulled out my copy of DeVoto’s Across the Wide Missouri and read his passage about South Pass, about the crossing of "the fundamental watershed and the frontier of fable."

DeVoto waxed especially eloquent about the American Fur Company pack train that hit South Pass on July 4, 1836, with a light wagon and two white women -- firsts for both. A few feet from me a hand-carved marker memorialized the passage of these women, Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding.  

Without the book, without any knowledge of where I was, the campsite was just another anonymous sagebrush-covered hillside. With the book, I was plunged into the stream of history with the overlanders. They were with me on that hill.  

We carry a lifetime of reading with us when we travel, from the first picture books our parents read to us, whose lilting rhymes lodge in our memories, to the classics that introduce us to literature. Those childhood favorites are among the most powerful. We visit Maine and eat our way across the blueberry barrens hearing the refrain from Robert McCloskey’s classic Blueberries for Sal, the "kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk" each time the small heroine drops berries in her tin pail. Down the road, on a bluff above the Downeast Coast, we melt into the colors of a field of lupine and imagine Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius scattering lupine seeds "to make the world more beautiful." 

As the explorers fell back on scripture in a pinch, we fall back on the books we know and love, our personal prayerbooks, from literary novel to mystery, from poem to essay. Every writer, every reader, has a shortlist of holy books that speak most clearly and powerfully. The list often matches our holy places, and the books that forge the links between landscape and emotion are our favorites. 

Mary Morris places the author in the center of this relationship: "Tolstoy could only have written his novels from the expansive Russian terrain; Jane Austen required England with its gentle enclosures. Willa Cather needed the prairie, just as I need the northern shores of Lake Michigan. The mountains will produce different stories than the flatlands. Islands will tell different tales than vast expanses. Swamps are full of mysteries; lakes produce possibilities."

With a satchelful of well-chosen books, travelers share in all of these stories and tales and mysteries and possibilities every time they turn the next joyful, wise, witty, extravagant, heartbreaking page.

Stephen Trimble reads and photographs while he travels and writes when he returns home to Salt Lake City. When you travel to the Desert Southwest, take his The People: Indians of the American Southwest. If you visit the Intermountain West, take along The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin.  

Copyright © 2001 by Stephen Trimble, 779 4th Avenue, Salt Lake City, Utah 84103
trimnik@qwest.net

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