Issue 61, Summer 2020

Literary Learnings

The Journey Is the Destination

Thanks to COVID-19, Carl Hoffman may have written the last great travel adventure book for the next few years. It will a long while before someone else dares to take six months out of their life to circle the world via South America, Africa, and Asia on the world’s most dangerous buses, trains, and airplanes.

He did not do it on a dare. Nor did he do it to see anything special, such as a long-lost city or a hidden site, or to tour an ancient cathedral or explore an out-of-the-way museum. He explicitly set out to traverse the world on the most dangerous transportation conveyances available to humans. The journey was the destination. Welcome to The Lunatic Express.

Carl Hoffman has made a career as an adventure journalist, writing for such magazines as National Geographic Traveler, Wired, Smithsonian, Outside, Men’s Journal, etc. Along the way, he became obsessed with news clips that told of packed ferry boats in the Philippines or Bangladesh that overturned and drowned hundreds of people, and crammed native buses in the Andes that plunged off narrow mountain roads into ravines so deep that the bodies will never be recovered, and commuter trains in Africa and Asia that average five to eight deaths per day.

Hoffman’s morbid fascination morphed into a plan to circle the globe in a nonstop pilgrimage to understand how and why this was happening. It led him into a world where hundreds of millions of people, all desperately poor, are on the move seeking their fortunes, commuting to their jobs, or traveling the cheapest way possible to visit their families. He discovered how the world’s destitute masses live, travel, and survive.

His start set the tone. He hopped on a cheap Chinese bus line out of New York City that took him to Canada to catch the perilous Cuban Airways flight to Havana to connect to another risky flight to Bogota. He then immediately caught an overloaded night bus through the steep mountains to Lima. The game was on.

I was swept into Carl Hoffman’s stories from my own memories as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa a long, long time ago. I remember sitting on the souk (market) buses as if it were yesterday, rumbling between villages with every row of seats holding four people (or more) while the central aisle was jammed with people, chickens, dogs, and small goats. Other folks were hanging from the open doors and riding on the roof. Let’s not even talk about the overwhelming odors. Or taking the train to Marrakech on the Marrakech Express (this was before the old song became popular) in third class; the crush of passengers bumping and banging together on wooden benches over the ragged rails. But Hoffman outdid me—he would continue to ride on such transportation twenty-four hours or more as he circled the rough half of this world!

Memories continued as I continued to read. I once took the jammed, pitching ferry boat from Manila (Philippines) to the island of Corregidor to visit the World War II monuments. The boat wallowed and rode the swells with its overcapacity load, and I wondered if I had made a bad choice. In his book, Hoffman searches these crafts out on rivers, lakes, and small seas as if daring to see if he would survive.

And then there is Victoria Terminus in Mumbai. It is in fact an exact duplicate of Victoria Station in London, built in the 1860s. Victoria Station in London has moved forward with the times. Victoria Terminus in Mumbai remains as built in 1878. The London station handles thousands per day. A good guess would be that the Mumbai station may handle a million a day. Or at least it feels like it. The overflowing crowd is pushed to the very edges of the train platforms. Six to eight deaths happen per weekday as people are pushed onto the tracks or as they scurry to cross the lines to the other side. Others get their heads whacked by telephone poles and rail signs as they cling to the open doorways on their commute, as there is no more room inside the train car. A couple of years ago, I went to look at the terminus as a sightseer, then left. The station was too crowded to push my way into. Carl Hoffman went in and out several times as a pretend commuter. Better him than me.

I have traveled to many of these out-of-the-way places both as a tourist and for work. Over time I have become inured to the Third World: its smells, crowds, inconvenience, noise, etc. I would (and will) eat in the streets carefully and selectively, and still get sick. In the book, Hoffman appears to eat whatever and whenever and never pays for his sins. God bless him.

Hoffman deepens his adventure with flashes of his personal troubles at home. He tells about his marriage coming apart, his estranged relationships with his three children due to his long absences, and reflects on a short romance that quickly dies while he is on the road. He was terrified that this voyage and this book were taking over his life.

In spite of our differences, my dipping in and out as time and finances allow, and his unending six-month slog through South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, we arrive at the same conclusions: Wealth buys space—with even the slightest wealth, you can upgrade your travel to second or first class and have a seat (maybe even a comfortable seat) to yourself, without rubbing haunch-to-haunch, or having someone’s butt in your face. You can also have a house or an apartment of your own, without sharing it with your grandparents, kids, brothers, sisters, and even cousins, all in one or two rooms. It also becomes apparent that the majority of people in the so-called Third World are nice. In crowded conditions and seemingly unending voyages, they will share their food with a stranger, take an interest in him/her, and want to know where he/she is from and what it is like back there. Finally, more people than not work very, very hard to make a living with very little return; peddling onions on the street, frying chicken in open markets, fixing bicycles or cars with only hammers or screwdrivers, or commuting for hours every day in uncomfortable conditions to lousy jobs that pay too little. It is called surviving.

Home again after his epic voyage, Carl Hoffman sat down with an actuary to determine what his risk had been to survive the world’s most dangerous buses, boats, trains, and planes. Good thing he didn’t ask before he left—50%. He might not have taken the trip had he known that.

In our current circumstances, such a trip is now impossible. COVID-19 would be out there waiting for you—90% probability. So it is an open question whether anyone will ever be able to chase after such an adventure in the near future. But as you are at home in quarantine, this is a book that will take you far in vicarious thrills, cultural insights, and deep reflections.

Issue 58, Fall 2019

Literary Learnings

The 'Fun' in a Dysfunctional Family

If, over the years, you read long enough and widely enough, you will fall into a singular book that is talking directly to you. You will not want to keep reading because it is too personal, too intense, too you—but you will not put it down for the same reasons.

That book (and the later movie starring Robert Duvall) for me was the 1976 novel The Great Santini by Pat Conroy. I had previously read his other books--The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides, Beach Music, South of Broad—to name a few. The man writes with style that seethes with the roots of the deep South, an area I know little about. But The Great Santini nailed me to the wall from page one, describing my young life in fictional format.

The plot is simple: The Great Santini is a legendary Marine fighter pilot who drags his wife and seven children across the country, from base to air base, city to city, state to state, as he is constantly transferred to new assignments. The children are “Marine brats,” without roots. But worse, he is a violently abusive husband and father that terrifies all eight members of his family.

This was my family, in its own way. My entire childhood could be summarized in two words: We moved. All eight of us. Mom and seven kids. My father was neither a Marine, nor a pilot, but we moved as he accepted transfers, new assignments, and new jobs. Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, Texas, multiple cities in each. And he, too, was an abusive husband and father that terrified us kids.

We had no friends. Nor did we try to make any. We would be gone in six months, or a year. Why get attached? Friends were throwaways. If you really liked them, it hurt. If you didn’t like them, screw it, let’s move on. Pat Conroy captured this exquisitely in The Great Santini. He knew. OMG, he knew.

The abuse was slightly different in the two households. In Conroy’s family, Dad abused everyone, Mom, and all seven kids. An equal opportunity abuser. Our old man just abused Mom, who abused him back. At 134 pounds, she could have stood up to Mohammed Ali for 10 rounds and come out smiling. The next day, both carried bruises, black eyes. and contusions. During the fights, we kids would huddle, hide, or run away, whatever. Take your choice. But we inherited a great vocabulary: the seven of us could out curse a drunken sailor in a cheap tavern.

Our Old Man abused his seven kids by ignoring us. We did not exist for him. We were pains in his ass that got in the way and cost money: schools, clothes, food, transportation. No hugs and kisses here. When you learned to walk, you were on your own. But do yourself a favor and keep out of the way. The good part—as a mob, we were great tax deductions.

Pat Conroy wrote a follow-up book, a nonfiction family biography in 2013, entitled The Death of Santini. It covers the same ground as the original novel but digs deeper into the siblings’ relationship with the mother and one another. Again, familiar territory: All of the siblings were estranged from their brutal father. But they also became estranged from one another, each reacting in individual ways to a hyper-hostile environment. All found ways to flee “home” as early as they could.

As we did.

Our oldest sister got a job as a telephone operator (back in the days when telephone operators still existed) and kept accepting assignments farther and farther away, From Davenport to Chicago to Florida, where she became a permanent resident long after the telephone operator career path died. The two older brothers went to college (athletic scholars) and never came back. The younger brother joined the Navy at the youngest legal age. The younger sisters found boyfriends or husbands as an escape from the nest.

As I finished my year as a junior in a new high school, the family moved again. I said NO. I wanted to graduate with friends (or at least with classmates that I knew). I lived in my car for the year, took showers in the gym, worked in the cafeteria for money and meals. I graduated at the end of year (nobody came) and drove to Dubuque, only to find that they had moved again—but forgot to tell me. Thank God for stable grandmothers.

As the poem says, the center did not hold. The family now meets only for weddings and funerals. But nobody stays too long. The seven siblings now live in, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Idaho, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Florida (on separate coasts). Conroy’s family biography confirms that story, too.

Our family voyages veer from each other at the end of The Death of Santini. Their father mellowed in old age. Some of the kids forgave (but did not forget). Our Old Man did not mellow. Family visits were always a burden, everyone walking on eggshells. As soon as the parent left, a collective sigh filled the rooms, until the siblings began arguing amongst themselves.

Dad died. I went to the funeral but did not mourn. It was in fact a relief. The burden was gone. I never regretted not making up. I had survived. Life moves on.

But I was happy that Pat Conroy reconciled with his father. I consider him my literary sibling. And you always want your brothers and sisters to have some happiness in their lives.

But I won’t tell you how he got there, how he reconciled with a savage father. You will just have to read the book.