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...
Then the lightning shafts were stabbing, arbitrarily, at the bare ground, and much too close for comfort ... A slight but audible interval opened up between the lightning strikes and the rockslides of thunder, and in the lee of the storm came hail, crackling against the windshield and sugaring the road. It lasted just a minute or two. Then the lost sun returned, the prairie was rinsed and green, tendrils of steam rose from the grass, and the dark thundercloud rolled away eastward into North Dakota.
The Traveller's Tree by Patrick Leigh Fermor
WHAT is IMPRESSIVE about this book is its completeness, its humane assessment of the Caribbean islands and their people, and its elegance—an evocative as well as droll appreciation of a vast area. The book is now sixty years old, and so it is also an album of pretty pictures about places that are different, some of them much changed, many of them no longer pretty at all. Haiti comes to mind. In Leigh Fermor's view, Haiti is old-fashioned and proud, lovable, beauteous, cultured, a bit severe—a far cry from the hellishly poor and devastated country of today, the victim of dictatorships, hurricanes, famine, disease, and most recently one of the worst earthquakes in human history.
So The Traveller's Tree is dated ("Negroes," "aerodrome," "luncheon"), but all the more valuable for that, because it is in the nature of a travel book, especially an expansive one like this, to serve as a history of a region, noting manners and customs, language and cuisine. He traveled in Trinidad in 1947–48, when V. S. Naipaul was a high school student, before Graham Greene went to Haiti, and around the time Ian Fleming became resident in Jamaica. For many travel writers, Patrick Leigh Fermor is everything a travel writer ought to be—urbane, well read, witty, forgiving, well traveled, and a meticulous observer. His writing is magical, his eye is unerring, and so is his ear—for human speech, for music, for the sound of the sea and birdsong, for the feel of a place. And his barbs tend to be elegant: "Hotel cooking in the island [Trinidad] is so appalling that a stretcher may profitably be ordered at the same time as dinner."
Here, having just landed in a Haiti that is no more, Leigh Fermor is traveling up the main road toward Port-au-Prince in an old wagon. "These black and obsolete vehicles are drawn by horses on the point of death and driven by very old men." He goes on:
The cane-field and savannah turned into the outskirts of the capital. Thatched cabins straggled into the country under the palm trees, and multiplied into a suburb, through which the road ran in a straight, interminable line. For the first mile or so, the town consisted entirely of rum shops and barbers' saloons and harness makers. Hundreds of saddles were piled up in the sunlight. Bits and bridles and saddlebags hung in festoons. There were horses everywhere. Our equipage churned its way upstream through a current of horses and mules ridden by Negroes who straddled among bulky packages, all heading to their villages with their purchases for Christmas. One or two were singing Haitian
meringues,
and several were carrying game cocks under their arms, lovingly stroking their feathers as they trotted past. Old women, puffing their pipes, jogged along side-saddle. They had scarlet and blue kerchiefs tied round their heads in a fortuitous, rather piratical fashion, half covered by broad-brimmed straw hats against the sun. The sides of the road pullulated with country people chattering, drinking rum, playing cards and throwing dice under the trees. The air was thick with dust, and ringing with incomprehensible and deafening Creole. I felt I might like Haiti.
Italian Hours by Henry James
"VENICE WAS ONE of the greatest topographical love affairs of James's life," Leon Edel, his biographer, wrote. For Henry James, Venice was everything he wished for in a distant city—villas facing onto the canals, churches crammed with Renaissance masterpieces, great food, voluble people, and in his time not expensive. He called it "the repository of consolations." A number of his fictions are set in Venice, The Aspern Papers among them, and he wrote several of his novels there, notably The Portrait of a Lady, which is set in England and in Rome and Florence. Italian Hours (1909) sums up James's love of Italy, and particularly Venice, as in this dense and appreciative paragraph:
One may doubtless be very happy in Venice without reading at all—without criticizing or analyzing or thinking a strenuous thought. It is a city in which, I suspect, there is very little strenuous thinking, and yet it is a city in which there must be almost as much happiness as misery. The misery of Venice stands there for all the world to see; it is part of the spectacle—a thoroughgoing devotee of local colour might consistently say it is part of the pleasure. The Venetian people have little to call their own—little more than the bare privilege of leading their lives in the most beautiful of towns. Their habitations are decayed; their taxes heavy; their pockets light; their opportunities few. One receives an impression, however, that life presents itself to them with attractions not accounted for in this meager train of advantages, and that they are on better terms with it than many people who have made a better bargain. They lie in the sunshine; they dabble in the sea; they wear bright rags; they fall into attitudes and harmonies; they assist at an eternal
conversazione.