The Book I Said I Was Reading....

I said a while back I was reading a book called One More Day Everywhere, by Glen Heggstad, but Sherlock Holmes got in the way. Well, I finally finished the Heggstad book and unfortunately I was a tad disappointed. I'm so horrible. I just can't seem to get interested in a book that isn't a story. Yes, of course it was a story, the author rode his motorcycle through many, many countries to meet with people to prove that one-on-one most people are fair and giving. He had to narrate the details in a storylike manner.

But it seems like half the book is about technically getting from border to border, and less than a fourth of it is actual scenes of humanity. Most of the descriptions of cities are accompanied by political riffing or philosophizing and while that's cool it's just more my bag to be shown rather than told. If the pictures in the torture house in Phnom Penh are being described, I don't need any further explanation of what message I'm supposed to get out of them. The horrors of the past need not be forgotten nor repeated. People fearing for their lives if they don't conform to their government are capable of terrible acts against their fellow human beings. Some people in general are capable of horrible acts. I didn't need pages of pontification about it. The pictures (there were actual pictures in the book from this place) speak for themselves.

There was a scene in particular that I remember vividly - one where Heggstad is invited to stay with a Russian farming couple for a few days in order to rest and take a bath. He's just tired, dirty, hungry, and standing in the middle of the road and they happily invite him in, and he just tells the story without all of the hoopla of needing to explain how we should feel about this couple.

I just wish there had been more of these scenes. They were powerful. His scene in an alley with the street mafia of the Gaza Strip was powerful. His Thai lover asking him, Thai-English dictionary in hand, to "Plees no foget me Gaan," was powerful. The teenage Muslim women stripping off their headscarves and robes in a tent and revealing jeans and t-shirts while giggling and doing his (temporary) (pretend) wife's hair was powerful.

I suppose it's my own fault for not have the knowledge to understand his problems with the motorcycle. I think he focused on that too much. Maybe if this was a book just about riding his motorcycle and reporting back the conditions one would find in, say, the backroads of Borneo it would have been okay to focus so much on the details of the motorcycle. But in doing so, he had to leave out a lot of the human stories and the human scenes, and that's what I thought the postscript in the title was all about, Crossing 50 Borders on the Road to Global Understanding.