The Tao of Travel

FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1977, even thirty-odd years later this book about Alaska is still the best one ever written about that enormous piece of land and its tiny population. McPhee (b. 1931) was in the hinterland, paddling the rivers and streams, before trails were blazed and the road beside the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was open to the public. The book is part wilderness experience—McPhee traveling with a group of scientists and environmentalists—and part social experiment—his meeting new Alaskans and indigenous people, and examining the fantasies and contradictions. What is most impressive is how deeply McPhee penetrates to the heart of the country. Though he is always dour in manner, literal-minded, factual, resistant to any levity, allowing his narrative to sprawl, this is probably why the book has endured. McPhee's feet are always on the ground, even when faced by a grizzly bear (twelve pages of suspense and information).

Speaking of the provincialism of Alaska, he writes:

In Alaska, the conversation is Alaska. Alaskans, by and large, seem to know little and to say less about what is going on outside. They talk about their land, their bears, their fish, their rivers. They talk about subsistence hunting, forbidden hunting, and living in trespass. They have their own lexicon. A senior citizen is a pioneer, snow is termination dust, and the N.B.A. is the National Bank of Alaska. The names of Alaska are so beautiful they run like fountains all day in the mind. Mulchatna. Chilikadrotna. Unalaska. Unalak-leet. Kivalina. Kiska. Kodiak. Allakaket. The Aaniakchak Caldera. Nondalton. Anaktubvuk. Anchorage. Alaska is a foreign country significantly populated with Americans. Its languages extend to English. Its nature is its own.

Bad Land by Jonathan Raban

"WHAT I FELT all the way was like a scale model of immigrants to America," Raban once said, describing this book. "It was the story of America written in one particular landscape." In the beginning of Bad Land (1996) he describes himself as an emigrant, "trying to find my own place in the landscape and history of the West." He chose an unlikely and pretty much unwritten-about place, the dry, flat expanses of eastern Montana. This is a book about a part of America that no American could have written: we don't have Raban's objectivity, his passion, or his sense of alienation. He is also widely read and intensely curious—curious in the way of an intelligent foreigner in America: "Bred to looking at a landscape as if it were a picture, to the posted scenic viewpoint, I was responding to the prairie like a shut-in taking his first walk across a blinding city square. It was all periphery and no center."

Travel, history, biography, and autobiography, this highly original portrait of prairie America, published in 1996, is also about the people who traveled there and who learned to adapt to the rigors of the weather, the stubborn soil, the great oceanlike emptiness that inspires Raban to view the landscape as an inland sea, in which the emigrants are like solitary voyagers. Intensely observant, curious to the point of nosiness, Raban gets to know them, examines their family histories, their dreams, the images that have been painted of the land, the photographs, the guidebooks, and he describes the journey itself—the emigrant train, filled with distinct individuals, whom we come to know, confronted by a new climate.

Dreadful though the cold could be, it was not the most destructive element in Montana's repertoire of violent weather. In summer, the air over the northern plains is turbulent: it moves in swirls and gyres, with fierce rip currents and whirlpool-like tornadoes. Here the northwesterly air stream, blowing from Alaska and the Arctic Circle, collides with warm southeasterlies blowing from the Gulf of Mexico and the southern U.S. interior. The exposed, treeless prairie, baking in the sun by day and cooling rapidly during the afternoons, intensifies the aerial commotion.

This is magnificent thunderstorm territory. The only time in my life when I have been seriously afraid of lightning was in eastern Montana on a dirt road miles from anywhere ... The distant storm winked and winked again. Like photo-flashes going off in the face of some celebrity on the far side of a city square, these blips of white light seemed no business of mine, and I drove on ... Closer now, the lightning flashes were like the skeletal inverted leaves of ferns, and when the thunder came I took it for some gastro-enteritic flare-up in the car engine—a blown gasket or a fractured piston...