Destination: Idaho

Book: Five Skies by Ron Carlson

As I read Five Skies, I realized I was learning something about my father, that I had never thought about before. That’s the way it is with novels that rise above the ordinary. Literature teaches us something about the people we know, as well as bringing to life  places and people we don’t know.

“Measure twice, cut once,” my father would say. His strict father, a tin smith who worked on furnaces and ductwork, insisted he do things right. “Live so that the world will be a little better when you leave.” Although my father never had formal training as an engineer, he had the soul of an engineer.  I remember him making diagrams for how to plant a vegetable and flower garden. I remember the care that went in to getting a home improvment project built well.

The main character in Five Skies, Arthur, is called an engineer, because that is the way he approaches his work.   Idaho Author Ron Carlson could have been describing my father when he wrote this passage:

“It cut across his grain to use a tool for the wrong purpose.  Arthur Key had never used a wrench as a hammer once in his life or a pliers as a hammer or a pliers where a fitted wrench was the right tool.”

Organized Tools

Any time I am tempted to hit a nail with the handle of a screw driver, I hear my father cautioning, “Always use the right tool for the right job.” And these similarities between Arthur Key and my father got me thinking about the “why” of this concern with doing things right, and I realized that like Arthur, things had gone terribly wrong at one point in my father’s life, and he felt compelled to keep things as orderly as possible, to keep life under control.

The novel Five Skies itself  is crafted like a careful workman’s project, using words instead of wood and metal. Nothing is wasted. It all fits perfectly. Just like the project they are working on, the life stories of the three men slowly take shape.  They talk plainly like working men would, but the speech is purely poetry.  A family grows as the three strangers fill their roles, the young man, the middle-aged man, and the older man. For all of them, work is the center of attention.  The work provides solace, it provides a sense of worth, and it provides something to fill empty spaces and shut down thinking about the unpleasant past. Arthur says, “I believe in work.”

Arthur’s profession before he took this pick-up job on the rim of a canyon in Idaho, involved creating illusions for movies. But even illusions take careful craftsmanship.

“He hated magic.  It made people careless and hopeful, and he had a low tolerance for anything that disregarded cause-effect.”

I remember my father’s disdain for jazz music. “How do they know when they are finished?” All three men are here working on this project in order to shut out something in their past, and Ron Carlson reveals the stories slowly. We learn about them as they learn about each other, and the young man, Ronnie, gains confidence as the others become father figures teaching him about work and life.

Idaho–with its mountains,  cliffs, rivers,  weather, and, yes, the skies– becomes a character in this novel. The men learn to read its story, too, and it alternately charms them and betrays them.

The go for a picnic in the canyon:

The river came through this park winding in a perfect S and the sand and willows and twenty gigantic cottonwoods were half in the shade. The air rode down the river fragrant with water and willows.

Idaho Mountain Pass

Ken and I have taken road trips through Idaho–from north to south through mountain passes and over lava fields, and from east to west across the bottom of the state through rich farmland and plains, and the pretty cities of Twin Falls and Idaho Falls. It is a beautiful state that beckons you to explore sparsely populated landscapes.

The top picture is from Flickr with Creative Commons license. (Click on the photo to see more of the photographer’s work). I shot the picture of the tools, and retain the rights. The mountain pass picture is furnished by the Idaho Tourism Office.

What is the first comes to mind when you hear “Idaho?” Well, okay, the second thing, after “potato”. Have you been there? What did you see?

If you leave a comment, you’ll be entered into the drawing to win the terrific little book A Week at the Airport, by Alain de Botton. You have until Friday morning at 6:00 a.m. MST for this book Giveaway.

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Running on the Map

The Great American Road Trip

Have you been enjoying Wednesdays on the road??  We’re not back on the road yet, but thought you might look back through the family album at the most popular stops on the road trip so far. Only ten more stops to go and we will have covered the country coast to coast and then some. It has been a great ride.

Kerry Dexter posted a short time ago about the favorite road trip stops among her readers. Kerry is our road trip D.J.–she picks the CDs to pop in the CD player to match each state. I’ve enjoyed discovering new music, new books and new movies every week, and hope you have, too. The readers at Music Road liked these (comments lifted from Music Road).

Michigan “Tops on the list, in terms of numbers of you reading, is Road Trip Music: Michigan, in which you learn about Irish American singer and songwriter Cathie Ryan.”

Beginnings “You’re also liking the story of the beginning of the road trip idea atGreat American Road Trip: Music begins.”

Ohio “Road Trip Music: Ohio, which features Wilderness Plots, an album about the history of the Ohio Valley from five contemporary songwriters…”

Indiana ..”and Road Trip Music: Indiana, a look at some fine songs from Indiana native Carrie Newcomer.”

Alabama “Road Trip Music in Alabama: bluegrass, faith, and architecturerounds out your top favorites. Claire Lynch and her album Whatcha Gonna Do was a choice for our soundtrack through the wiregrass and red clay hills of Alabam’.”

Let’s see how Music Road readers’ choices compare with the favorite posts at A Traveler’s Library. Here are your favorites.

1. West Virginia The movie October Sky with Jake Guyellenhaal (or maybe it was just Jake) continues to draw a lot of traffic to this beautiful, off the beaten track state.
2. Road Trip Kick-Off Post: Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon is a classic of American road trip books, and a favorite of mine. Glad you like it, too.
3. Northern New York State. The new-ish book City on the Edge by Mark Goldman introduces Buffalo, New York. I introduced it by talking about my Aunt Maude who lived there. Although the city has much to recommend it, I was not crazy about the book, and frankly not at all sure why this post has drawn so much attention.
4. North Dakota. Sam Loew, an Arizona writer who comes from North Dakota, wrote this guest post about the movie Fargo. He included descriptions and pictures of some of the odd attractions of North Dakota and persuaded a lot of people it is a good place to visit.
5. Maine I liked the little memoir, The Lobster Chronicles by Linda Greenlaw that tells about life on an island where most everyone catches lobsters. This is the post where I requested lobster ice cream. Ever helpful Kerry Dexter came up with a place that sells it, and I did a follow-up post.

(So far no matches with Music Road, except for the #2 slot–Kick Off post, so let’s dig a little deeper)

6. North Carolina A new book, winner of an Edgar for best mystery novel of the year, The Last Child by John Hart, also became one of my favorite books of the year.

7. Massachusetts Another excellent new book, Dogtown, by Elyssa East  captured my attention with its combination of mystery, supernatural hints, history and landscape. The book went on to win awards and intrigue many readers.

8. Florida.  Nature Girl by Carl Hiassen is a quick and frothy mystery read that captures some quirky characters, Hiasson’s usual humor and a picture of modern Florida beset by unscrupulous developers.

Isn’t that interesting, that the music lovers at Music Road picked entirely different states that the travel book and movie fans here at A Traveler’s Library?  I should add that road trips in general are very popular here. By far the most popular post over all in the past two years has been one about the Five Best American Road Trip books. Another popular post lists books about American road trips;  and one about Steinbeck and McMurtry books about road trips also ranks pretty high.

I’ll hope you’ll take a look at any of these that you missed the first time around, and let me know which state was YOUR favorite visit on the road trip so far. And come back next Wednesday, when we stop in Montana–Big Sky country.

The photo at the top is by Archibald Jude, and you can click on the picture to see more adorable pictures at Flickr of that little boy playing on the map.

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Hannibal MO

See where The Great American Road Trip 7-2010 has been in a larger map.

The Great American Road Trip

Destination: Missouri

Book: Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain, in The Library of America Edition

Mark Twain, who captured America like no other American writer, wandered the globe and lived abroad nearly as many years as he lived in the United States. As a matter of fact many of his most American books were penned while he luxuriated in villas in the Italian countryside.

He wrote follow-ups to his popular Tom Sawyer novel from a villa near Florence while fiddling with what was to become the final of the four masterworks of the Mississippi River, sometimes known as “The Tragedie” of Pudd’nhead Wilson. Of course I could have chosen to talk about his memoir of Life on the Mississippi or Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer, all memoirs to some extent of his years in Hannibal, Missouri, but being a contrarian, I wanted to read the lesser-known book as a salute to the state of Missouri.

Pudd’nhead Wilson made quite a journey itself, starting as a farce about conjoined twins, based on a pair of Italian sideshow noblemen that drew crowds in the nineteenth century Europe. However, by the time Twain finished his story, his interest had drawn elsewhere, the story had perhaps been influenced by his wife’s influence, and the twins, still noble, were no longer conjoined. The subsequent editing tends to rather sloppy and confusingly show glimpses of the previous “Siamese” twins.

As usual, Twain presents the accents and mores of his home town and the state of Missouri faithfully, although he was living in 1893 in a villa in Florence and had been for many years when he wrote this book. This is a book of memory. He is recalling the bad old days (1830) when a person like Roxy, the story’s main character, could be sold “down the river” because she is 1/16 black. “To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made her a negro.”

Even This long after the Civil War, such a strong condemnation of slavery sold more copies of Twain’s books in the north than in the South. He leaves no doubts of his feelings, not only about slavery but about the damage the aristocracy of the South wrought on the white population as well as the black.

Echoing his earlier story, The Prince and the Pauper, he switches two children but in this case, one is white and one is black (but in this case 1/32nd black, which serves just as well) and proving Twain is always up to date, he uses the latest science, in this case finger printing, to solve both a murder and the swapped-at-birth cases.

Despite the sloppiness in converting the Italian twins from conjoined to merely noble, this story deserves more attention than it generally gets.  For one thing, Twain has created a really interesting female character for a change in Roxy. And if his cynicism towards American’s racial attitudes began to emerge in Huck Finn, it came to full flame in Pudd’nhead Wilson. See how he weaves a detective story, social satire, Americana and vintage Twain into a story that makes a good addition to the traveler’s road trip history library.

What is your favorite Mark Twain novel? Why do you think this one never gained the popularity of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn?

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Sy Montgomery and the Good Good Pig

Destination: New Hampshire

Book: The Good, Good Pig:The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood, by Sy Montgomery.

Where would we be without librarians? While New England teems with good writing, going back to colonial days, I wanted something contemporary for our visit to New Hampshire.  Susan Reiner, a reader who lives in that state, contacted her local librarians and they suggested a book about a pig.

Should New Hampshirites be insulted? Heavens, no. Christopher Hogwood, star of this show, is a[amazonify]0345496094::text::::Good Good Pig[/amazonify]. While Montgomery educates us about the porcine life–

piglets gain as much as five pounds a day–

the book tells us about a lot of good, good people in the small town and among the community of people who cared about Christopher.

Pigs are generally turned into pork chops by the time they are six months, so she was not sure how long a well-cared for pig would live.

Sy Montgomery described in the Boston Globe as “part Indiana Jones and part Emily Dickinson” writes about animals and nature for magazines like National Geographic, crafts documentaries, and she writes books for children.  Her study of animals takes her to interesting places–far too interesting for the more timid traveler like me.  She travels to an area teeming with tigers in India, to the bug-ridden Amazon, and cavorts with elephants and emus in the wild.

Her training and her belief that she is more closely related to non-humans than to humans, makes her the perfect person to explain why we should love a pig–specifically the lovable Christopher. 

Much is made of the intelligence of pigs, but the author failed to convince me.

Pigs have roughly the same intelligence as dogs.

Yes, he is an escape artist. Montgomery and the girls next door catalogue the various sounds he makes and believe that he greets different people with different tones and types of communication.

Montgomery and her husband, both writers, live on a property with a barn, although it is not a full-fledged farm.  The have a flock of chickens, called the Ladies, and soon after Christopher arrives they adopt an injured border collie. That is the limit of their livestock.

A bunch of pigs is called a drift.

Although the book concentrates on describing animals,human and otherwise, rather than dwelling on the landscape, Montgomery’s way with words brings us poetic treats like this:

It was the last day of August–an achingly beautiful, golden day when the air throbbed with cricket song and buzzed with dragonfly wings and smelled like ripening apples.

She writes with a directness and charm that seem just perfect when talking about small town New Hampshire–whose name, after all, starts with ham. Christopher, like his owner, is a vegetarian–but for a different reason (Sorry, you’ll have to read the book!)

Thanks, Susan and New Hampshire librarians for a good, good read– and it DOES make me want to go to New Hampshire.

Take a look at Music Roads for some music by a New Hampshire native to slip into your CD as you travel to New Hampshire.

Is there a famous literary animal who hails from your state or country? Tell us the story.

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Grand Prize #3 AND

The Great American Road Trip

USA Book

Destination: The American Road

Book: The USA Book: A Journey Through America (2009) from Lonely Planet.

This book weighs a ton.  Well not QUITE a ton, but you know what I mean. It is a nice big coffee table book printed on fine, heavy paper to show off the hundreds of photographs.

But after all, it is portraying a great big country. The USA Book: A Journey Through America, published in 2009 by Lonely Planet briefly talks about some categories of interest, and sketches out the country by regions and then it gets down to business. Each state gets four big colorful pages.

For instance, take Ohio. The capsule description reads, “Pay Ohio some respect.  It’s the nation’s seventh-most populous state–stocked with roller coasters, rock and roll, Appalachian parks and party islands–and Ohio decides the nation’s fate with its political votes.” Take that, you snoothy northeasterners.

Pictures include the historic Union Terminal in Cincinnati. It is spectacular, by the way. I’ve wandered around gazing at the wonderful art-deco design and paintings. Other pictures show the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, an unidentified roller coaster. When my husband and I honeymooned in a cabin in one of Ohio’s state parks, we ventured out to go down to Cincinnati to write on their roller coaster. And of course there is a corn field.

Did you know that Ohio is home to eight Presidents? And here’s a myth from the book–Ohio births Presidents, but also kills them. “Tecumseh’s Curse” Tecumseh cursed William Henry Harrison who defeated the Indians at the Battle of Tippecanoe (surely you remember Tippecanoe and Tyler, too–the most memorable Presidential slogan until “It’s the economy, stupid”). The curse said Harrison would be elected but not serve. And if you remember your history, he caught pneumonia at his inaugural and died shortly afterward.  But Tecumseh’s curse went on to apply to every Great White Father elected in a year ending in “0″. And the curse claimed many victims, including Lincoln and Kennedy until Reagan broke the curse.

I think you can see from this tidbit that The USA book, besides being beautiful, will inform you and entertain you as you plan your Great American Road Trip. (But, where, Ken is asking, is the Buckeye tree and THE Ohio State University?)

This post is a triple whammy–my daily post about a book that inspires travel, the Wednesday Great American Road Trip post AND

The USA Book is the Third Giveaway Grand Prize.  By the way, that picture looks like the soft cover edition, but I’ll be sending you the HARD COVER edition. When I thought about how much the shipping costs would be, I almost pulled it out of the contest, but all of you who have faithfully posted and tweeted and signed up for subscriptions, deserve a chance at this book.  So go ahead, add another comment, tweet another tweet, and if you have not yet subscribed, go do it for 3 more chances. The Grand Prize Drawings will be after midnight MST Friday January 29  and the prizes will be announced next week. Good Luck. Oh, and if you don’t win, you can always click on that square in the sidebar that says Lonely Planet and go right to their site to buy a copy.

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