Beware the Traveling Ideologue

 Beware the Traveling Ideologue

I have on my desk a copy of Bill Bryson’s “The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America.” It was given to us by one of my sisters-in-law, a well-read individual who said she just couldn’t get through it.

First warning sign.

As with all travelogues, when I get one to read the first thing I do is read the bits that feature my home state or my home town – rare enough, I will admit. I do this for one primary reason: If the author has accurately depicted the place where I live, it’s more than likely he or she has done an accurate and adequate job with the rest of the travelogue.

Bryson had happened to visit Idaho, and my hometown of Idaho Falls on this trip. So I read that section.

And I will not be reading the rest of the book.

Because in that little section, warning signs abounded.

I realize it’s a Hurculean task to travel across a continent and find something to write about as you stop. But to manufacture falsehoods and to twist an innocent question into something far more jingoistic than it likely was intended, well, that’s sloppy reporting, sloppy writing, and sloppy living.

Yes, my town is home to the Idaho National Laboratory. Yes, it has been used as a nuclear waste dump. But no, Mr. Bryson, plutonium is not leaking into the aquifer. Oh, there’s a chance of it. But as I happen to work for the company working on the cleanup for the government and happen to know more about the situation, I can see where Bryson likely spent five minutes or less researching and opted to leave it at that. Reportage is probably not his goal in this book, but it’s inaccuracies or laziness like this that prompts me to question the author’s intent and to realize that the astounding facts he’s telling me about other areas he visited may be as lazily-reported and slipshod as the inaccurate description I can single out on my own.

The biggest pollutant fear where I work? Carbon tetrachloride, which has, in face, been leaking towards the Snake River Plain aquifer. But here’s something Bryon likely doesn’t know, nor care to know about because it isn’t NUCLEAR BOOGA BOOGA or demonstrative of the kind of crap he wants to see in small-town America: That problem is being effectively remediated. The bigger threat to water in Idaho is the cattle waste piling up in the Magic Valley area of Twin Falls, an area which make much noise about pollution coming downstream from the laboratory, but seems content to let the waste from their own dairy industry pile up. And here, I’m probably being inaccurate, or at least glossing things over. But if Bryson can do it, so can I.

Then there’s the tale of Happy’s Chinese restaurant, where he laments a jingoistic question asked of a Swedish exchange student: “What do you like better, Sweden or the United States?” Jingoistic? I guess on the surface. But also borne of wanting to start or continue a conversation, and not knowing, really, what to say. Naïve probably a lot more than jingoistic.

But let me tell you something: We’re used to it. We’re used to folks jetting in, or driving in, probably in a Subaru Outback, from the coasts or from Europe to tell us all about how nasty small-town America is. It’s a vocation that keeps many of the more urban elites employed and comfortable and damn glad they don’t live in a hellhole because they come into small-town America, the flyover country, with the predetermined notion that decent human beings couldn’t possibly live where you can’t get on-demand gluten-free cupcakes (which you can, but y’all are too busy bitching about Walmart and McDonalds to bother finding out).

And while I recognize Bryson does it with humor, it’s “humor” in quotation marks. Many of his reviewers compare him to Dave Barry. I think that’s a terrible comparison. Barry’s wit is considerably different than Bryson’s, in that Bryson comes off as a curmudgeon more than a comic.

The travelogue is an easy bit of writing to accomplish. Anyone can do it. But it takes a big name, with big chips on the shoulders, to get them published in the mainstream.

I read a lot of them. And invariably, they all fail. Even John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley” is less a deep look at America but way more a deep look at the hubris contained well within the flyover country of the author’s preconceived notions of what “America” is.

Side note: How much do I trust a book that references a review from a big-name big city review machine that cannot bother to check how Steinbeck spells the name Charley? I mean, it’s not like the book isn’t available everywhere to check, yanno? Just more slapdash.

Should it matter, I can hear you screaming. Sure, Steinbeck made things up about the people he supposedly met, but he was right that localism was dead in America and that the environment was in the toilet. And here’s the BIG SECRET that the coasties don’t seem to get: Localism is alive and well in small-town America if you get out of your vehicles and away from the interstates to find it. Actually get to know people in small-town America and they’ll show you. And yes, we know there are environmental problems. Spend more than five minutes on the Internet and you’ll see how we’re working to fix them. Now, remind me why New York always smells faintly of pee?

What concerns me is that people take Steinbeck’s travelogue, and likely Bryson’s as unadulterated truth. They are, as author Terry Pratchett put it on the similar subject of reading religious tracts, “not in on the joke.”

As writer Bill Steigerwald, following Steinbeck’s voyage and reporting on it for the Pittsburg Post-Gazette in 2010, says, “Some really smart people, not just high school kids with road fever in their blood, believe parts of the prevailing “Travels With Charley” myth without questioning.” No matter it’s poorly researched. Or made up out of whole cloth. To some, it’s gospel, particularly if it’s gospel that reinforces their notion that living in a small town makes you a Cletus Spuckler slack-jawed yokel.

It’s not literature, folks, it’s hubris.