Travel Books That Fire the Imagination

I love travel and I love books about travel. Both obsessions began very early in life when I read John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley.  Now, after many years of traveling and reading, I can understand why this particular book influenced my own journeys and reading: the best combine story and travel. I consider a trip successful if I come home with stories of interesting people I met or unusual events from along the way.  Steinbeck did just that; so do all the books mentioned here.

I still recall the introduction to Travels With Charley:

" When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.  When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet…brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye….I don’t improve…once a bum always a bum."

Steinbeck led me to seek out the not-so-famous, not-so-grand scenery. He wondered in the book about our fascination with “the tallest” or “the oldest” or whatever superlative travelers often seek.  In the small things and out of the way places travelers find the real wonder.

My “ship’s whistle” thus became the books that were set in exquisite locations, though not on the top ten slick travel brochures.  For example, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News renewed an interest in Newfoundland that began years before with Farley Mowat’s The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float.  Both books give the reader a glimpse into the generous, quirky and sometime irascible nature of Newfoundlanders.

When Proulx describes moving a house across the water and establishing a new home on a rocky shoreline, well, one just has to see and know the people who would attempt such a feat.  When Farley Mowat describes the misadventures of restoring a boat, using local tradesmen to make it seaworthy, the stories that unfold are more important than the eventual voyage he takes.  

My own two trips to Newfoundland provided opportunities to meet these people and they indeed lived up to the images established by Proulx and Mowat.  They are generous, kind, people with a twinkle in the eye that shows the humor and cheer they still find in life even through decades of hardship. (Anyone familiar with the hospitality they showed travelers forced to land in Newfoundland after 9-11 will already know something of their character.) Meeting our hosts along the way, talking with people we met at information centers, bars, and grocery stores, people we met on the ferry or taking day trips to whale watch - each encounter offered a more personal experience with the land and people than I had ever been privileged to know before or since.

The land is magical and, especially along the deserted southwestern coast east of Port-aux-Basques one can momentarily believe in fairies, gnomes and trolls; the landscape is that enchanted.  The same feeling overcame me at St. Bride’s on the southeastern tip. In the foggy walk through the meadow and along the cliffs, I would not have been the least surprised to have an elf or sprite pop out and chuckle softly before disappearing back into the fog. 

Another great travel book is Delaney’s Ireland.  I wish I had found this book before I made a trip to that country; it would have proved a great itinerary for a journey.  As I read, I could imagine stopping at the places where the stories unfold.  Delaney very cleverly uses a surprising plot to interweave descriptions of place with the old legends of that ancient and troubled land into a story set in more modern times. Rather than just recounting a sequence of Irish folk tales, the mysterious Storyteller appears from time to time, telling the fabled stories simultaneously to the young boy and to the reader. The young boy becomes more and more fascinated with the strange, wandering man, whose history and whereabouts remain obscure for most of the book.  It all comes together at the end.  But again, it is story and travel interwoven in a unique way and provides glimpses of a thousand years of Irish history.  It would, indeed, be a fine guide for travels in that country.

Walking to Vermont by Christopher Wren also combines physical and psychological journey in an engaging manner.  When Wren finishes his last day at The New York Times before retiring, he simply picks up his backpack, leaves the office, and begins walking from New York City to Vermont, his goal being to walk a portion of the Appalachian Trail, arriving finally at his new life at home in Vermont. He literally walks away from his old life and into his new one. He takes the reader along both through the arduous trek and his own transition into the next phase of his life. I am not likely to walk the Trail but reading the book was certainly a fine vicarious trip!  

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Anne Barrows is a current and notable book for travelers.  I had never thought much about the Guernsey Islands as a destination.  In fact, I had never really thought about them much at all.  Half way through this fine book, I was ready to move there for the spectacular scenery and the colorful personalities that live in the book.  I wanted to join the Society!  Written as a series of letters, it took a few pages to get into the story, but once I got the rhythm and voices established, the technique worked well.  All the characters reveal their personal journeys and a growing attachment to each other through the “letters” they write. All of them are changed by their relationships with each other.  The sophisticated, urbane woman who sets it all in motion finds a growing interest in the inhabitants of the little town and, like good books and good travels, she is changed profoundly by these encounters with people and place.

When visiting places for the first time especially, I try to find local or regional authors and books - the ones that rarely show up nationally - and these become my treasured souvenirs. I lost my “treasure” from Ireland in the chaos of the Atlanta airport.  That was almost a decade ago and I still miss that book!

Sometimes the journey finds the book; more often the book determines the journey.  Some travelers stop with Frommers or Lonely Planet and those are, indeed, useful for the  necessary details of planning a trip. They serve a traveler well. But the literary works are the ones that set my feet to tapping and bring on the ancient shudder.