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In the Footsteps of Giants
If asked to name a travelogue that details, in intimate, insightful fashion, the author's experiences while traveling across the United States, you'd likely have no difficulty in reeling off several examples. After all, there are so many one might name: John Steinbeck's TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY, and William Least Heat Moon's BLUE HIGHWAYS, for instance, are classic examples of the genre. You might mention CHARLES KURALT'S AMERICA, Henry Miller's THE AIR-CONDITIONED NIGHTMARE, Andrei Codrescu's ROAD SCHOLAR, Jack Kerouac's thinly fictionalized ON THE ROAD, or any of a dozen others.
But if asked to name such a book that was written by a woman, you'd likely find yourself stumped. The sad truth is, there simply haven't been many such accounts written from the female point of view, and American travel literature is all the poorer for it.
A step in the right direction is ANTHEM, a brand new book by Shainee Gabel and Kristen Hahn, two multitalented women who dreamed of seeing the country, of talking to its people, and set out to make that dream happen. Gabel and Hahn sought out dozens of people, from Robert Redford to Studs Terkel to Michael Stipe, who they feel are shaping America today and spoke to them about the state of the American Dream.
I joined Gabel and Hahn for a bit of travel talk over lunch at a sushi restaurant in New York's Greenwich Village. I'd met them both for the first time a few days earlier, at a screening of their documentary film, also called "Anthem," to which the book is a companion piece. The film was the original impetus for their odyssey so I asked, just as the shrimp dumpling appetizer arrived, what inspired the film and how the project took shape during its planning stages.
"We were both living in Los Angeles, working on film crews, and reaching this place where we were ready to do something else," answered Hahn. "We were itching for the independence to create something of our own, because we'd helped other people create their visions. To be able to make a film, travel the country, and talk to Americans. And the fact that both of us were free agents: 26, not married, didn't have children. It was a time in our lives when we could take the time off to do this, to travel across America, talking to Americans about America."
"At first, we weren't going to include any kind of internal revealing," added Gabel, "but pretty early on, we figured out that we should do that. The travel was always intended to be the glue that bound the encounters with those we interviewed. We were just not necessarily going to focus on our own feelings; it wasn't going to be as personal as it ended up being. But the book would have been very different if we hadn't taken on that more personal approach."
A Grander Vision
It was only after the two were several weeks into the interview process that it occurred to them that they had the makings of more than just a film. "It was a while before we even realized there might be a book in this as well," Gabel admitted. "A lot of people, once they heard what we were doing, suggested it: 'Oh, God, that'd make a great book!' So we started to really think about it."
"You start getting depressed after these amazing interviews," said Hahn. "And these days and days that you spend with people and you think, 'Well, it can't all translate to film.' And things happened off-camera that were so important to the story. It's just so much material; it's a wealth of riches. So we finally realized it'd be great to write a book."
Travels with Jack, John, and Studs
I wondered if the pair didn't feel they had to make a choice: Were they following in Studs Terkel's footsteps and creating an oral history? Or following Jack Kerouac and John Steinbeck's lead, documenting a trip? Hahn and Gabel insisted they were doing both.
As Gabel put it, "In the book, there are the interviews, the chronicling, like Studs Terkel. There's the narrative and the people and the attempt to weave the two together, like John Steinbeck -- not that I'm comparing us to these people -- and there is a bit of Kerouac's more stream of consciousness, this-is-what's-happening-right-now approach. The Hunter S. Thompson chapter, for example, is very experiential. So we tried to include a bit of all those approaches, and the book, hopefully, reflects that. All those men are giants, and all three of them -- and certainly others, from Charles Kuralt to Lewis and Clark -- were people that we researched and were inspired by."
Did they read the great travelogues -- Kerouac, Steinbeck, Least Heat Moon, and the others -- before hitting the road? "Yeah, before and during the trip," replied Hahn. "We listened to TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY in the car on tape. We had a trunk full of books because we somehow thought it'd be a leisurely trip across America. We'd get to read and write and, oh, it'd be so lovely. That was not at all the reality, of course. We were just crazed. Our days were driving for ten hours to get to an interview, sleeping for four hours, and then getting up and doing it again. It was crazy. But we finally pulled the TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY tape out of the trunk and put it on, and it so happened that the town that book opens in is the town we'd just entered. For much of the next few days, we were following, with no prior planning, Steinbeck's itinerary."
This was no leisurely loop around the United States. The route was determined largely by who was willing to be interviewed and when they were available. "We'd be in Montana one day and we'd have two days to get to Washington, D.C.," recalled Hahn.
Forging a New Path
On being female pioneers in the travelogue genre, Gabel admitted that it was historian Doug Brinkley who first made them aware that they were breaking new ground. Hahn recalled, "He couldn't think of an American woman who'd done this, and his specialty is on-the-road pop culture, so he'd certainly know. Women have dealt with regions, local color. But doing reflections on America, oral history, cross-country, taking to the road and winging it -- that's not been done."
Gabel added, "Part of that is probably because up until recently, it wouldn't have seemed 'right' for a woman to travel by herself across the country in the same way that Steinbeck, Kerouac, and Studs Terkel have."
Hahn agreed. "Shainee and I were just on the cusp of women who were raised being told, 'It's dangerous out there. Don't travel without a man.' So, we're lucky."
"We have protective parents," she continued. "They were concerned for us, as any parent would be. But quietly so. I think our friends were kind of shocked that two people would do this: Just sever ties and leave your community of friends, your comfort zone, for an undetermined amount of time, going off on this adventure and talking to God knows who and doing God knows what, without much money. But while they thought it was crazy and they couldn't believe we were doing it, I think they also wished they were going with us. Everybody felt a tinge of envy, I think."
Not many people could just pull up stakes and go, I suggested.
"Or would do so," replied Hahn. "A lot of my friends said, 'I wish I could do it, I just never would. But I wish I would.' More people should, particularly women. For everybody, but especially for young women, 21 or 22 years old, I think there's nothing better than to actually go and search out America. I mean, it's such the fad to travel Europe when you graduate from college, but traveling America is just great. I've now talked to people from every region; I've been to their hometowns or the area they're from. And it's different. You gain an understanding, a sense off how people are living, what they're thinking, how they're feeling. You can't gain that solely from reading. You've got to feel it and see it and touch it and talk about it; you've got to talk to the people yourself, even if it's only chatting with people in diners as you go.
"You don't have to do what we did," Hahn continues. "Not everybody can do that. It's not like Robert Redford's going to sit down with everybody; he can't take three thousand phone calls a day: 'Hey, will you do an interview with us? We wanna, y'know, explore America.' But the interviews we did with the fisherman, the hay grinder, the gas-station attendant -- those people are everywhere and they're fascinating. There are millions of stories, all the faces of America."
This interview originally appeared at BarnesandNoble.com
