It’s the soundtrack that drives this father-son journey
Four characters stand at the center of this story, beginning with author McKeen, a journalism professor and divorced father from Florida who’s eager to make up some lost time before he remarries and his son fully reaches adulthood. Graham, already a guitar-playing, mediocre-grade-getting freshman at Indiana University, is still willing to hang with Dad for a few weeks if there isn’t too much hugging or discussion of feelings.
The third character is the highway, which father and son follow together, driving alongside the Mississippi River from Canada to New Orleans.
The final character here, which serves to bind the three others in a way that little else could, is music. Especially the blues and soul whose originators lived and died along the southern stretches of the river road.
“I’m bringing him on this trip not because of some father-son bonding thing, but because I think he’s the child that needs me most right now,” the author writes early on. “My daughters are fine, but Graham doesn’t have a clue what he wants to do with his life and so I figured he might as well drive my car.”
McKeen adds that there’s something in it for him too: “I’m 46 and he’s 18, and this may be my last chance to look at him and see the little boy.”
The music looms steadily larger as they make their way south, soaking up history, local color and a fair portion of mutual understanding.
This story isn’t really about any grand emotional catharsis; nobody ends up crying in the rain or getting shot at or hugging in a cemetery, although there are tender moments in a few churchyards where bluesman Robert Johnson’s remains may lie. Nor is there much in-depth history.
Instead we get a happy snapshot of two related males at delicate junctures in life, males who together have managed two feats that most fathers and sons should envy: They made time for a road trip that took most of a summer, and they completed the journey in good humor and growing mutual regard, without a seriously cross word.
The music is probably the key to this. It strikes both guys as reasonable to spend days exploring Bob Dylan’s hometown of Hibbing, Minn., and half a dozen impoverished, blues-cradling neighborhoods near the legendary crossroads of highways 61 and 49 in Mississippi.
Other high points include a Dick Dale concert, the younger McKeen’s discovery of Kurt Vonnegut (“Slaughterhouse Five”) in a Memphis used-book shop and, hour upon hour, racing past fields of corn and cotton with Led Zeppelin on the car stereo.
The role of pop music as a bridge between generations instead of a barrier (“You call that music?”) is a pleasant twist -- and a clue that young McKeen is an apple who hasn’t fallen far from the tree.
The book will not be made -- as written, anyway -- into a Hallmark television special. Now and again McKeen treats his boy, three years shy of legal drinking age, to a beer. The theft of a souvenir highway sign gets tacit fatherly approval. Whether you agree with these indulgences, they’re not hard to understand. As an absentee dad, McKeen is looking to build connections with a child who lives several states away.
The prose is clean and unassuming, and the author’s enthusiasms come through clearly. (His previous books were about Dylan, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe.) His reflexive scorn for yuppies, however, is a little strong for a middle-aged white guy with tenure and a Ford Explorer.
But with this book, McKeen has done good, honest work, giving a fair picture of the hugely diverse social landscape along the country’s most mythologized river and, in the bargain, sketching a son as he edges into manhood.
*
Seeing the beauty of the big picture
Here’s another book to inspire a road trip, a coffee-table volume that looks down from on high upon cities, farms, junkyards, suburbs, pit mines, overpasses, waterfronts and forests.
The verbal information accompanying the images is scant: Each caption gives a location and perhaps a single sentence of explanation (“Western Ohio. Two tractors tilling a field in opposite directions”). But the patterns that turn up amid these 420 color photos are mesmerizing -- some abstractly beautiful, others sociologically or ecologically pointed.
Look long enough and the obsession of photographer-pilot MacLean begins to resemble genius. The photographer and publisher might not even consider this a travel book, but its reverence for landscape and its ability to reveal it are something special.
*
A continent, the condensed version
This is a dangerous mission, to attempt an introduction to all of Latin America -- Mexico to Argentina, Cuba to Chile, 21 countries in fewer than 400 pages. But in this first edition, Rough Guides has done many things well.
Keeping the broad picture in mind, the authors focus on geography and cultural context, giving newcomers the word on such reliable attractions as Semana Santa in Antigua, Guatemala, and Day of the Dead in Patzcuaro, Mexico. Good maps too.
Some of its minimum daily-budget recommendations: Bolivia, Colombia and Guatemala, $15 a day; Argentina, Mexico and Panama, $25 a day.
But don’t expect much specificity when it comes to hotels and restaurants. Amid the 14 pages it spends on lodgings, the book describes types of places to stay and likely price ranges but names only 15 specific options from Mexico to Bolivia, and it leaves out contact information. Also, the book includes no Spanish-language glossary, so a true first-timer is likely to need help from another source.
Christopher Reynolds’ book column runs twice a month.
