Old Glory (Jonathan Raban, 1981)

ISBN 0-00-654015-5

This book, one of Raban's first and certainly the finest I have read to date, documents his epic, courageous – one might say foolhardy – cruise down the Mississippi River, from Minneapolis to the sea, the majority of the trip undertaken in a tiny, 16 foot launch.

Although Raban tries hard to make the river itself into the central character of the book, in fact he fails: in retrospect, all that remains of the river in my mind is a series of navigation hazards and a few pretty sunsets. Instead, my lasting impressions are of the rich series of living snapshots, both first-hand and borrowed, which populate Raban's journey and brought the book alive for me. These vignettes are brilliant with the ring of honesty; too sad or too irrational or too mundane to be anything other than the gospel truth.

Speaking of the gospels, one of Raban's endearing idiosyncrasies is this: Unlike any other travel writer I have read, and despite being a self-proclaimed agnostic, he visits and describes a great number of church services. One of these expeditions had me gagging:

'"Now you take me and my family," said the pastor. "We went on summer vacation. To the A-zores. By TAP airlines. In a Boeing 747. Okay?"
It sounded fine to me. He looked as if such a holiday was well within his means.
"Why, just by simple faith, here you are – thousands of feet up in the air! That's exercising Faith!"

Eh? What the hell's faith got to do with it? But, the mad preacher goes on ...

'"You go to a doctor. You go to a drugstore. You go buy yourself a cold cure. That's Faith!"'
– p. 244

Exactly the opposite, I'd have said! No wonder these hicks have a tough time coming to terms with evolution.

As I have previously found with Raban's work, most of the pages I marked as I read are clustered into just one chapter. The touchstone chapter for me in Old Glory was Where do the Grapes of Eshcol Grow? Among other fascinating tales, here he tells the story of a school teacher he meets, named Judith, who had broken the shackles of her parents and peers expectations (Dutch Reformed Church, minister's son, marriage, children) in some shit-hole little town in Iowa and driven 200 miles across state ... to a different little shit-hole town in Iowa.

'Judith's story was a classic American autobiography in miniature. She had travelled two hundred miles; people little older than her own grandparents had travelled five thousand. I had met a man whose grandfather had come from Luxembourg, sailing in steerage to New York, from where he had walked across six states, taking odd jobs along the way, to reach the farmlands of Iowa. Yet Judith, a third generation American, found even Chicago too remote and alien to believe in as quite real.' – p. 260

A few pages on, a similarly sad tale of limited horizons and chances gone by...

'Tonight, he had an old railway timetable to show me.
"I worked it all out," he said. "I got all the connections."
The timetable was for 1956.
...
"That's right. Gonna spend all winter down in the valley of the Rio Grande. Know a girl there. ... She wrote me this letter. I had to send word to my mother, back in Idaho, and this girl, she wrote it out for me real nice. She wrote beautiful. Just like a schoolteacher. ... I had a kind of busted hand, then. Busted it on the railroad. Then I was someplace else, and, I dunno, we all out of goddam touch. Shit. But I'm going to get down to Eagle Pass, later in the Fall, and I'm going to see that girl ... if she ain't dead yet."
"When were you there last?"
"Nineteen and ... Hell, must've been eighteen ... nineteen. Can't remember."' – pp. 267-268

It seems to be a trait of some travel authors to be irrationally afraid of animals: Paul Theroux more than once describes his terror of dogs (e.g. in Riding the Iron Rooster and in Sir Vidia's Shadow), Bill Bryson experiences rather too many heart-stopping moments in A Walk in the Woods, and, in Passage to Juneau, Jonathan Raban recounts a humorous anecdote in which he employs a ships bell to ward off bears. But travel writers' nature-phobia surely reaches its absurd, weak-kneed nadir in Old Glory when Raban flees in disarray from ... a flock of birds:

'On the Illinois side there was a dead tree which seemed to function as a skid-row hotel for a gang of ne'er-do-well birds. As I came close, they lumbered off from their posts, assembled above the treetops in a ragged battle formation, and came out over the river to see whether this floating yellow thing was meat. When I started my motor, I thought the birds would scatter in fright, but they kept on coming, in lower and lower circles, until they were perhaps twenty or thirty feet over my head. Their wings creaked. They made bronchial kark-kark noises in their throats. They looked scarred, moth-eaten and hungry, and reminded me unpleasantly of the Buffalo chapter of Hell's Angels. ... I dug my dark glasses out of my grip, possessed by the thought that the first thing they'd try to peck out would be my eyes. ... For a long half mile they kept pace with me, croaking nastily as I blasted at them with the foghorn; then, abruptly, they wheeled back to their dead tree.' – pp. 269-270

Finally, we arrive in the deep south. I have been that way, myself, a couple of times. On one of those occasions, twenty-odd years ago now, I joined with my fellow conference attendees in a tour which included some famous old cotton plantation. I was unimpressed, though I could not have expressed my feelings nearly as eloquently as Raban:

'Up in Illinois and Iowa, I had been delighted by the late Victorian imitations of ... Southern planters' houses. ... I found it much harder to like the real thing. This was seigneurial fatcat architecture, and whatever pretty twiddles and curlicues were incorporated into the fringes of the design it was brutally straightforward about its main intention, which was to boast and belittle. ... The planters of Natchez had behaved more like Pharaohs than Medicis. Their palaces weren't furnished with masterpieces commissioned from individual artists; they were straightforward monuments to the power of the great fortune when it went hand in hand with a more or less unlimited supply of cheap labour.' – p.485

Or, I guess you could just say they're obscene.

Old Glory is quite a long book, befitting a long journey on a long river, and stacked solid with astute insights and interesting observations. This rates as one of the best travel books I have read despite, or perhaps because, the journey itself takes second place to the characters.

Recommendation: Highly recommended.

Look and Feel: My edition is the usual matt-finish paperback.

Peripatus Home Page

Books >> Travel >> Old Glory

Contact me.