Meet Your New Best Buddy, Pal, Chum, or Mate—Travels with Bill Bryson

When I began my recovery from heart surgery, all too recently, a woman friend gave me a book, figuring I would be immobile, with time on my hands. Actually, that is a misapprehension because everyone on your health care “team” is urging you to walk, walk, and walk if you hope to recover. When you aren’t walking, as often as not you are overcome with almost painful drowsiness like someone being tortured with sleep deprivation.

Three weeks after I received At Home, I have read all five of these Bryson books (average 350 pages) like a man who can’t stop gobbling fried pork-fat chips. Now, I have an urge to tell someone about Bryson and his books.

But yes, you do need something to do while sitting at home all day, trying to keep track of when to take your dozen or so medications. And you need a buddy to cheer you up. After all, as my cardiologist warned me, “For six weeks, you will feel as though you were hit by a truck.”

Even so, I generally don’t do well with gift books. I read constantly, even when not lying beside the road as the truck roars away, and I have strong feelings, almost cravings, for what comes next. Oh, a book on Bolivia. Well, thank you so much. A book by Hillary Clinton. Well, how thoughtful.

But in my hands was a book by Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life (Anchor Books, 2010). “You’ve got to read a chapter,” said my wife. “She’s [this visitor] the only one who gave you anything.”

It took less than a chapter. At Home is not the typical book for which Bryson has become famous. Most of his books are about travel—all epic journeys—as when he travels some 10,000 miles around Australia by public transportation, car, and on foot (In A Sunburnt Country) or about the same across America in his mother’s old Chevette (The Lost Continent) or by bus, train, and foot from Dover on the English Channel to the far north of Scotland (Notes from A Small Island) or walks some 900 miles—about half—of the Appalachian Trail (A Walk in the Woods).

You see, by now, three weeks after I received At Home, I have read all five of these Bryson books (average 350 pages) like a man who can’t stop gobbling fried pork-fat chips. Now, I have an urge to tell someone about Bryson and his books but find myself as blocked as a student about to write his first term paper on Atlas Shrugged or Remembrance of Things Past. It seems impossible to do justice to one Bryson book. You don’t want to leave out any of the good stuff, but the whole book is good stuff. And now I have five Bryson books.

In chapter one of At Home, I began to call out to my wife, “Did you know that…” and could not stop it. Did you know that rats and mice still devour some five to 10 percent of the human food supply?

In chapter one of At Home, I began to call out to my wife, “Did you know that…” and could not stop it. Did you know that rats and mice still devour some five to 10 percent of the human food supply and that rats, although they sleep about 20 hours a day, also have sex on average 20 times a day and can have a litter every three weeks? That comes up when Bryson discusses, in a horrifying and mesmerizing section, the pests with which we all live in kitchen, bathroom, and bed.

Did you know that the Great Exhibition of 1851, held in what became known at the Crystal Palace, was housed in the largest building on Earth? And that after rejecting 245 designs for the structure, when the committee had given up and faced disaster, Joseph Paxton, a wholly self-taught boy from a farming family, who became a prodigy in horticulture at age 19, heard of the committee’s plight, thought that a sort of greenhouse might work, and proposed a “standard component” plan of interlocking cast-iron trusses and one million square feet of glass? The finished building was precisely 1,851 feet long, in honor of the year, and Paxton brought it in under budget at 80,000 pounds, and did so in just 35 weeks. St. Patrick’s Cathedral had taken 35 years.

Now multiply this story, here greatly shortened, by about 1,500 as Bryson goes through room after room of his own home, an 18th century British rectory—the hall, kitchen, fuse box, garden, stairs, and a dozen other spaces—and explains how it all came to pass.

One of the glories of At Home is Bryson’s discussion of the men and women whose incredible—and I use the word in its precise sense—achievements drove the Industrial Revolution. I had no idea, except on the most superficial level—you know, the cotton gin and blast furnace—of the genius of literally thousands of individuals in Britain alone during the 19th century who invented—and, as important, figured out how to manufacture—what we now know as “home.”

One of Bryson’s themes, which I don’t believe I have seen anywhere else, is that for the first time in history the mass of people was becoming “comfortable.” Before the tidal wave of invention and mass production that was 19th century capitalism, people—except for royalty and aristocracy—did not expect to be comfortable. Frankly, they had no way of imagining it. Hundreds, then thousands, of products people had not “needed,” because to live was to “make do,” became available just as incomes were rising—rising generally, for the first time—so they could hope to buy them. Cotton clothes, steel pans and tools, canned food, refrigeration, trains, commonly available glass for windows, new plants discovered around the world, a shelf of new spices, a treatment for scurvy, heating stoves that did not fill rooms with smoke, gas and then electric lights, anesthesia, newspapers, beds with inner springs and not sawdust or grass, coal for heating, cleaner water and so less typhus, sewers and so less cholera—the Industrial Revolution made possible by capitalism for the first time focused on what people—the mass of people—wanted.

The whole life of 19th century Britain comes into focus, often in shocking comparison to earlier times, as Bryson takes us through life as it came to be lived “at home.” Admittedly, he does not always stay close to home; his intellect roams everywhere. A discussion of bats takes us around the world. Did you know that one quarter of mammal species, some 1,100 in all, are bats? They range in size from bumblebee bats, the smallest of all mammals, to the Australian flying foxes, with a six-foot wing spread. They are vital to the balance of nature; one bat may easily eat—“vacuum up,” as Bryson puts it—some 3,000 mosquitoes a night. Nice to prevent itchy bites, of course, but a matter of life and death where mosquitoes carry malaria and other diseases. Today, bats are the most endangered of all mammals, not least because of a vengeful hysteria about less than a dozen cases of rabies that resulted in extermination of millions of bats. But American bats, destroyed by poison and fire bombs, are insectivores and never have been known to bite a human. I thought you would want to know.

Did you know that Australia’s population, at just over 23 million, is smaller than China’s annual population growth? Or that of the world’s 10 most poisonous snakes all are Australian? Bryson has a magpie’s eye for spotting and beak for spearing the telling fact.

I hope that by extrapolation from these pitifully few coins from Bryson’s treasure trove you will sense what a remarkable travel companion you have in him. Did you know that Australia’s population, at just over 23 million, is smaller than China’s annual population growth? Or that of the world’s 10 most poisonous snakes all are Australian? Bryson has a magpie’s eye for spotting and beak for spearing the telling fact; I doubt that in that regard he has an equal. Certainly none I have encountered in decades of reading.

Yet, Bryson is less a travel guide than a travel buddy—or mate, perhaps, in Australia—because even as he describes what he is seeing or has learned—let’s not kid ourselves, the man prepares for these seemingly spontaneously carefree jaunts—he is letting us share every sensation, every weary step and hunger pang, every ice-cold beer after a 20-mile slog in Australia’s 100-degree-plus summer. And every mattress, it sometimes seems, in every hotel room, and ever quiver of fear as he encounters, but more often conjures up, the dangers he loves to anticipate.

“What about sharks?” I asked uneasily.

“Oh, there’s hardly any sharks here. Glenn, how long has it been since someone was killed by a shark?”

“Oh ages,” Glenn said, considering.  “Couple months, at least.”

“Couple of months?” I squeaked.

“At least. Sharks are way overrated as a danger,” Glenn added. “Way overrated. It’s the rips that’ll most likely get yer.” He returned to taking pictures.

“Rips?”

“Undercurrents that run at any angle to the shore and sometimes carry people out to sea,” Deidre explained. “But don’t worry. That won’t happen to you.”

Snakes in Australia, black bears and moose on the Appalachian trail, harrowing roads in the high Rockies, car troubles in the murderous Australian “outback,” and muggers in the back allies of Liverpool—Bryson evokes them all, plays on them, and we believe—or at least I do—that he is sincere. Who, with his imagination, would not find something about which worry?

“If you’re caught in a rip,” Deidre was saying, “the trick is not to panic.”

I looked at her. “You’re telling me to drown calmly?”

As a real-life travel buddy, Bryson must be like a sergeant in the French Foreign Legion. Day after day, he rises at dawn to explore the new city or town or trail or neighborhood. And he walks. Walks where any sane traveler would take a car or a bus. And, of course, he sees things, encounters things, and makes decisions and judgments that the motorist never faces or considers. As when on a truly epic walk through the outskirts of Sydney, he takes a shortcut through a wooded park and suddenly hears the approaching baying of hounds. What ensues is funnier than the Marx Brothers.

I at risk of misleading you, here. Yes, Bryson jollies along the reader with wit, anecdotes, and reports on his emotional weather, but these books are notably substantive. Through Bryson’s eyes, everything comes into three-megapixel focus; he misses very little and so does the reader. Whatever he sees, whether it is the shockingly modest churchyard grave of Winston Churchill and his wife or a Civil War battlefield along the Appalachian Trail, you get the story—and often a thrusting Bryson critique, as when he takes the City of Oxford to task for obtuseness to its architectural heritage.

In the end, Bryson is an adventurer, a spellbinding teacher, but perhaps most of all a humorist. You see—and this is why a Bryson book was perfect to take my mind off my atrial fibrillation—everything is interesting to him. He compulsively pokes into every museum, gift shop, park, pub, alleyway, and tourist attraction. If it is there, he cannot resist it. If he has to walk another four miles at the end of the day, he walks.

If what he sees is not interesting, then what he thinks of it—in his classically critical, crotchety intellectual pose—most certainly is. Or what it brings to mind—in the attic, it was bats. And if that doesn’t do the trick, there is wit. In fact, there is wit on every page. Bryson may take us almost every night into a pub, but it never gets dull because of the satiric Bryson commentary.

In any Bryson book, the reader suddenly can find himself in a Bryson joke.

“The articles in my mother’s and sister’s magazines were always about sex and personal gratification. They had titles like “Eat Your Way to Multiple Orgasms,” “Office Sex—How to Get it,” “Tahiti: The New Hot Place for Sex,” and “Those Shrinking Rain Forests—Are They Any Good for Sex?”

A Bryson classic, found in every book if not quite every chapter, is suddenly to be making up place names, some laugh-out-loud funny:

“You see a grove of trees and you stroke your chin and think, Well, now, let’s see, that must be Hanging Snot Wood, which means that that odd-looking hillock is almost certainly Jumping Dwarf Long Barrow, in which case that place on the far hill must be Desperation Farm.”

For me, it never grows old. The Bryson wit is often physicalistic, not to say scatological. I can’t wait to read his latest British travel book, The Road to Little Dribbling.

I see that I have gone on for quite awhile about Bryson without getting to his books on America. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, Bryson quit college to wander Europe, ended up working on newspapers in the U.K., where he met his future wife in a mental institution—he loved her spirited caring for the patients—and, after a brief return to America, moved to Yorkshire for two decades. When he decided to return to America, he first revisited all the places in England, Wales, and Scotland he had visited—and a slew more. When he returned to America, settling in a small New Hampshire town, he got reacquainted by means of a drive through some 25 or so states.

If you are sensitive to political correctness, Bryson may not be your choice.To me, he is a matchless companion for vicarious adventure, with the startling vista just around the corner.

If you are sensitive to political correctness, Bryson may not be your choice. His wit and abiding cantankerousness slashes at old people, young people, parents, Westerners as contrasted with Midwesterners, Southerners, even Mexicans, ever and always at the dull, slow-witted, incompetent, and dense—and unfailingly, of course, at himself. He is merciless in mocking accents from Liverpool to Selma to Edinburgh to Perth.

To me, he is a matchless companion for vicarious adventure, with the startling vista just around the corner or the reaction of histrionic annoyance at the old farts— “Bye,” I waved. “Die soon.” It is almost uncanny how he detects in himself our most subtle reactions and feelings, and articulates them to perfection. A Bryson encounter with a clerk at a hotel desk is not to be missed. He hastens into one hotel to escape a downpour, water literally running off his hat, and presents himself at the desk. The bored young woman comments, without looking up:

“It’s raining?”

“No, my ship sank and I had to swim the last seven miles.”

“Oh, no kidding…”

I have a yen for travel and adventure, even when not constrained by recovery from mitral valve repair, and Bryson scratches that itch so well that I hurried from book to book, feeling the wind on my face, listening in panic to what sounded like a bear sniffing at my tent, and having a good think about how that first inventor staring down at a pile of sand imagined glass.

To love not the world, which only sometimes merits our love, but to cherish our ability to see it, understand it—that is the great gift.

Thank you, Bill Bryson, I am recovering nicely.

About the Author: Walter Donway

Walter Donway contributes to Savvy Street on political economy, science, and trends in fiction, film, and culture. Walter Donway’s most recent book is Donald Trump and His Enemies: How the Media Put Trump in Office (Romantic Revolution Books: New York, September 2017). His Amazon profile can be found here