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REVIEWS
BICYCLING BEYOND THE DIVIDE: TWO JOURNEYS INTO THE WEST
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by Daryl Farmer
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| University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2008. Maps. 331 pages. $26.95 cloth. |
KAYAKING ALONE: NINE HUNDRED MILES FROM IDAHO'S MOUNTAINS TO THE PACIFIC OCEAN
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by Mike Barenti
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| University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2008. Maps, bibliography. 244 pages. $24.95 cloth. |
| Travel narratives have been a literary mainstay of the American West from at least the eighteenth century, when traveler accounts told colonials about terrain west of the tidewater. By the nineteenth century, journalistic travel accounts had become literary gateways to western landscapes, which travelers often described as exotic and alluring places, stimulating the desire, as Huck Finn put it, "to light out for the territories ahead of the rest." During the twentieth century, the genre tilted toward interpretive or "inside" accounts of by then familiar places; John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley (1962), William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways (1982), Robin Cody's Voyage of a Summer Sun (1995), and Jonathan Raban's Bad Land (1996) come to mind. By turn, recently published travel literature set in the American West has become a mixture of self-reflective discussion and experiential description, mixed with keen analysis about life in a fast-changing region. Some read like pieces that could appear in Outside magazine as easily as High Country News, which is the case with Daryl Farmer's Bicycling Beyond the Divide and Mike Barenti's Kayaking Alone, inaugural books in a University of Nebraska Press "Outdoor Lives" series. Both are first-rate examples of modern travel literature that take readers graphically and experientially to locales of dynamic change in the West, one probing social landscapes in small communities, the other asking questions about environmental conditions on our rivers. |
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In 1985, Farmer jumped on a bicycle at age twenty and pedaled from his home in Colorado Springs in a great circuit that took him north along the Continental Divide to Glacier National Park, then west to Vancouver, British Columbia, south down the Pacific Coast, and finally east from San Francisco, through Zion and Grand Canyon national parks back to Colorado. Two decades later, by then a graduate student at University of Nebraska – Lincoln and someone with a self-described "weight problem," Farmer dug out his 1984 Trek bicycle to retrace his earlier journey to see what had changed, "to see its geography in terms not of pockets of beauty but of a continuous and changing landscape" (p. 3). He successfully retraces most of his 1985 route, commenting on what a twenty-year lay-off did to his endurance, the changes he sees in communities he wrote about in his journal in 1985, and people he encounters in the "New West" of 2005. A particularly graphic sequence from his 1985 journal that describes a herd of pronghorn antelope matching his bicycle speed along Wyoming Highway 191 north of Rock Springs sets up a conversation on the same highway in 2005, when he encounters a couple who wonder, "How can you ride out here in this ugly place? God, aren't you lonely? There's nothing out here." Farmer replied: "Well there's antelope." "Antelope, sure," the man interjected, "but I mean, they're not even deer. And they're always so far away" (p. 48–49). |
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In Montana, Idaho, and across northern Washington State, Farmer takes readers through an impressionistic tour of dying towns that have lost their strength as natural resource economies waned and of places, such as Kalispell, Montana, that have found prosperity in the so-called amenity economics of a tourist- and recreation-oriented West. Most of Farmer's evaluations of the communities and people he encountered hinged on their friendliness, which he often found wanting, as if the New West had left behind some nostalgically remembered era of better human relations. His occasional references to western history, generally a comment on a historic location or famous event, are breezy, clipped, and mostly accurate, but this book is not about history. It is a travelogue about bicycle travel, encountering the West at twelve miles per hour, suffering busted equipment and lousy camping spots, and above all interesting people. The best chapter details Farmer's re-connection with a woman he encountered on his first trip — Winnefred. She lives in Grayland, Washington, on the coast, not far from Aberdeen, which he describes as a somewhat downtrodden lumber town. Farmer had stayed with Winnefred and her husband in 1985, so he looked her up in 2005, to find her and rediscover her upbeat view on life, a tonic of sorts for Farmer, who seemed to catalog western miseries in his journal. |
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Mike Barenti's journey took him far away from the scenic roadways. Barenti plunged into the Salmon River on May 17 in 2002, intent on kayaking to the mouth of the Columbia River, more than nine hundred miles away, but unsure his body and courage were up to the task. He intentionally made the trip alone, believing that he would learn more about the fate of sockeye salmon and himself if he shot the rapids and floated the reservoirs on his own. His ambition was to paddle to the sea, but also to find answers about what policies might solve the salmon conundrum: how can the Pacific Northwest embrace salmon recovery without sacrificing too much in economic growth? This question is decades old, as Barenti acknowledges, so history is an important quotient in any suggested answers. The author relies on a short shelf of books about the political conflicts in the region over dams and fish runs, but the history is fairly thin and he glosses over the most difficult questions, such as the role of the Endangered Species Act requirements or near defiance of court rulings by successive federal administrations. Barenti finds more information and insight in his recorded discussions with people he encounters on his journey. In short, Barenti's journalistic approach — he is a professional journalist — provides most of the substance he includes on the salmon crisis in the Pacific Northwest. He is unconvinced by anyone he meets, leaving readers wondering if any position on the salmon issue is salient. "A former girlfriend who had spent her career working for various public advocacy groups," Barenti writes, "once called me a consensus seeker. It wasn't a compliment.... I lack the convictions of a true believer. I am, instead skeptical about almost everything. Maybe working as a reporter has made me this way; maybe my skepticism made me a reporter" (p. 143). His skepticism may be well placed, but it renders his account fairly shallow. For deeper treatment of the issue by another journalist, readers should consult the dated, but still insightful, Common Fate: Endangered Salmon and the People of the Northwest (1995) by Joseph Cone. |
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Barenti's book excels in adventure travel and environmental description, its primary contributions to literature on the Pacific Northwest. He beautifully delivers an intimate portrait, from the water's edge, of Idaho's wilderness, the dammed Lower Snake River, and the Columbia River main stem that transports readers to real places and genuine engagement with the environment. He describes river conditions and the origins of changes that contribute to the decline of anadromous fish, such as the South Fork of the Salmon River, where fishers regularly caught thousands of migrating Chinook until the 1960s, when "the forest service allowed timber cutting in the watershed [where] ... silt from the cleared mountainsides smothered clean gravels where salmon had spawned and filled pools where the young salmon lived before migrating to the ocean" (p. 67). On the lower Columbia, where industrialism and urban growth might seem to eliminate natural conditions, Barenti finds a riverscape that contradicts the image of an altered river. "The river broke into a maze of channels braided through with islands big and small as it broadened itself into an estuary.... the Columbia in its last miles looks more like a patch of Pacific Ocean squeezed inland than a part of some great river system flowing down from high mountains in the continent's far interior" (p. 216). |
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Mike Barenti takes the measure of the Salmon, Snake, and Columbia rivers by kayak and gives readers an up-close portrait of today's river conditions. Mike Farmer carries us along his western road trip, providing snapshot images of today's changing American West. Both end abruptly, as do most travel narratives, with clear affirmations of the journeys' worth and benefits to the travelers. Like other travelogues about the West, these two take us to the territories, while they also offer smart portraits of a dynamically changing region. |
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| William L. Lang
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| Portland State University |
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