by Peter Chilson
University of Georgia Press,
195 pp., $24.95
Wanderlust is incurable. Or so it appears. Never mind the general human desire to see what's on the other side of the mountain. The really serious kind of wanderlust is the desire to hit the road and see where it goes. This particular kind of curiosity, in its many forms, has given shape to human curiosity from Odysseus and Jason to Jack Kerouac and Paul Theroux.
A couple of former Peace Corps volunteers have been on the road recently, fitted out with little more than curiosity, courage, and a supply of pens and notebooks. One took the high, cold road through Siberia and the wide expanse of Russia. The other traveled the low, hot roads of Niger in West Africa. The resulting books are as different as the landscapes traversed by their authors.
In a brief prologue to Siberian Dawn: A Journey Across the New Russia, Jeffrey Tayler confesses a lifelong interest in that large and contradictory country, its history and culture. He first went there while a graduate student in 1985, having already learned the language. In 1992, he got close, serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. That, alas, didn't last long, and by early 1993 he'd already had and quit a job that shielded him from the genuine grit and grime of Russian life. But it was the grit and grime he wanted.
In March of 1993, he set out alone to cross all of Russia, "an 8,325-mile route that would take me," he writes, "from the frozen reaches of the Russian Far East across Siberia, through the Urals, into the Black Earth zone and, finally, over the Ukrainian-Polish border to Warsaw by whatever means it took: hitchhiking with truckers, taking cars, buses, trains, and boats."
Despite the fact that his Russian visa restricted him to Moscow, Tayler "chose as a starting point Magadan, on the shores of the frozen Sea of Okhotsk, because it was the gulag capital of the former Soviet Union, a ground zero of despair that symbolized the prison hell of the Stalin decades; if I could escape it, and succeed in crossing the entire country, I would have, I believed, played my own small role in the drama of the land, whether I made it all the way to Poland or not." And off he goes, across an inhospitable land torn by confusion, corruption, and crime, and plagued by the most painful and dangerous sort of political corruption. And on a road that is often non-existent.
From the start, all is bleak. Tayler's Russian friends are horrified by his plan. "Take a gun, or at least a gas grenade," they tell him. And the line on a map that he thought was a road isn't a road; it's only a track, just passable by trucks, and only when frozen solid in winter. But Tayler writes well, making even this icy and unfriendly world vivid and immediate. Boarding the plane that will take him from Moscow to Magadan, presided over by a bullying flight attendant wearing a parka over her Aeroflot jacket, he tells us: "My breath puffed ahead of me as I forced my bag down the narrow aisle. Snow was blowing in through the door and settling on the carpet; it didn't melt."
Russia is a monochrome sweep of ice and mud, of stark landscapes, of gray-faced Russians, of tottering drunks and old women with steel teeth, and of "lines, endless lines," he writes of a train station in a town called Chita, "immobile formations of sour-faced Russians, some standing passive and baggy-eyed, others chiding violators of line etiquette in strident tones that grated on my ears like steel scraping on glass. The stale odor of these queues led me to think they had been there for days. I felt defeated before I'd even begun."
Many of those faces, however, emerge from the great gray blur of Russia and become lively individuals, warm and human, and they, together with the size and the look of Russia, become lasting and living memories. "These people," Tayler writes in a 1998 epilogue, "remain luminous in my memory and light up my inner life still."
Like all good journeys, Tayler's travels are interior as well as exterior, and he ends up convinced that "where I live has fundamentally little to do with my identity." Even so, the road still calls, as it has in the several accountants Tayler has written for WorldView magazine in the past two years. "The sense of movement," he writes at the conclusion, "of wedding time and space through travel, continues to excite me."
Despite his own admitted passion for the place and the people, Tayler's portrait of Russia comes complete with the bad breath, the reek of alcohol, and the rattle of tired machinery. With luck, the road will continue calling to Jeffrey Tayler and he'll write more travel books as good as Siberian Dawn.
Then there's Peter Chilson's Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa, which ought to be quite good. From 1985 to 1987, Chilson served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger and later returned to West Africa as a freelance writer. He reported on the region for the Associated Press and has also contributed to the London Daily Telegraph, Audubon, North American Review, and other journals. Currently, he is a professor of English at Washington State University. And Riding the Demon won the Associated Writing Programs Creative Nonfiction Award. So both author and book have impeccable credentials. But Riding the Demon, alas, is just plain dull.
Old Africa hands and young Peace Corps volunteers will both have vivid memories and images of the archetypal African road and of the bush taxis that travel on them. It's that experience of the road that Chilson set out to capture and explore.
"The road in Africa is more like a direction, a path to take," he writes at the start of the book. "After you've paid the passage and taken your seat, the road becomes the very concern, the center of life over every mile, a place where you realize, suddenly, that you have surrendered everything. Even the right to survive. The first time on the road in a bush taxi is like boarding a rickety plane or bus only to find you've been kidnapped, which places every experience that follows in a different, sobering light."
That paragraph pretty much tells the story. Chilson declares his attitude toward the road and what he sees in the image. But it also displays his vague and misdirected writing-
"the very concern," for example-set in shapeless paragraphs and tuneless sentences.
Certainly his raw material is lively and colorful enough. "On African roads," he tells us, "car wrecks are as common as mile markers," with "wrecks strewn about like the carnage of a vainglorious hunt: a mini-bus upended against a tree as if attempting escape, a blackened truck overturned in a ditch."
But the author's talks with officials are tiresome, his tales are repetitious, his background research undigested, and his pedantic prose is made even worse by a self-conscious effort at fine writing. Perhaps readers with a passionate interest in Niger or travel in Africa will find some useful documentary material here, but it's pretty deeply buried. Chilson's report of his explorations, unlike the wreckage along the roads, never catches fire.
Alan Ryan is a novelist and travel writer and the editor of the Reader's Companion travel writing anthologies on Mexico, Cuba, Alaska, Ireland, and South Africa.
