Kiss the Sunset Pig:
A Canadian's American Road Trip
(with Exotic Detours)
By Laurie Gough
Penguin Canada, 341 pages, $22
Kiss the Sunset Pig has all the hallmarks of a postmodern travel book. Irreverent title: check. A series of chaotic adventures involving one-name characters who meet in the backwaters of the world: check. A life-changing epiphany by book's end: check.
The premise of the book is this: Packing her possessions into a cranky Ford Bronco she named Marcia, Gough sets out on a road trip from Guelph, Ont., to Southern California -- a destination she hopes will be her new home.
Hating the idea she's been living out a life in the wrong place, Gough writes, "I sometimes wonder if this is my life quest -- finding the perfect place, where I belong."
It's an idyllic sentiment. The belief that down the road, the places you haven't been, the experiences you haven't had, the people you haven't met, are somehow more magical or exotic than what you currently have. It's the same reason why, if given three months on the road, most travellers opt to see as many places, cities, sites etc. as they can, as opposed to staying in one place the whole time.
Using the Guelph to California road trip as a thread, she weaves an exhaustive quilt of stories from her travels in over 30 countries. Those stories, the "exotic detours" of the book's title, are a sampling of numerous adventures and experiences she's had in places as hostile as Sumatra or as soul-sucking as trying to find a job in Korea.
"I seem to be drawn to places with too many agonies and too much passion, so different from Canada, which is clean, cold, efficient, well-mannered and lacking. In travel I often find myself looking for hardship, even danger, so that I might feel the life in me more deeply."
At times refreshingly naive, Gough's prose has a lyrical tone, the kind that can be found in good fiction writing. She has the ability to situate a reader in a foreign landscape with the kind of vivid description that makes it possible to feel the land under her feet and to smell the same air she is breathing.
But the first half of the book is full of endless navel-gazing, which gets exhausting at times, making it feel as if travel fatigue is setting in. As does hearing how unique she is compared to the rest of us, who for some reason haven't chosen to spend our lives lugging ourselves around an unfriendly planet.
"This is the kind of thing that happens when I travel: guys with high-riding baseball caps try to strike up conversations with me all the time. Or perhaps it's me, something about the way I look and act when I'm travelling alone like this. I talk to strangers more readily. I suppose I'm more open, more myself. That's the thing about travelling: it's like peeling away a layer of yourself, exposing yourself to the world so it can expose itself to you."
I'm not sure why so many travel writers feel that, because they've got a lot of stamps in their passport, they are separate and apart from the world. Speaking as if those who aren't being robbed on beaches or living on a dollar a day are somehow less than cool, trapped as we are in things called jobs, burned by pesky things like responsibilities. There's an underlying sense of Gough holding the rest of the world up to her mirror and what isn't reflected back, is called into question. Travellers are always so much freer and open than us folks who don't spend our lives on planes, trains and automobiles. That and her sweeping generalizations, particularly about the culture and mindset of Americans and their worldview, are shocking in their one-sidedness, particularly from someone who has travelled as much as Gough has.
The book gets better toward the end, helping to wash away some of the earlier sins, such as a tendency to embrace the clichéd dictums that anyone who has ever left home with limited funds and a rucksack strapped to her back tends to offer up. Some of this stuff would best be left between the pages of her personal travel journals. It's those platitudes coveted by the guesthouse circuit the world over that get in the way of Gough's true storytelling ability.
In writing about her trip to Korea, for instance, she dispenses with the navel-gazing platitudes and tells us a great story of desperation, loneliness and frustration.
"After a while, the stories aren't so funny. They're just a series of bad nights when snoring keeps you awake, or the bus breaks down. The months and years keep blowing along by the calendar-ripping wind from old movies. I sometimes wonder if going from one place to the next, free and easy, is all it's cracked up to be."
Toward the book's end, the interconnectedness of her many journeys and her search for a home come together when she finally arrives in California and goes in search of a cave she once spent six days living in when she was a young girl: ". . . somewhere on the other side of that water lies a sunset cove with a cave and footprints of a girl who believed that among all the struggle and beauty of the world, life would work out exactly how she dreamt it would be."
She finds an excerpt in her journal where years before, while living in that cave, she wrote a kind of life manifesto. "This is the place I dreamed up my life. It's so strange to look back across all these years and journeys to arrive at the edge of my own continent, back to the girl I once was."
Part memoir, part travelogue, Kiss the Sunset Pig is a lovely exploration into a person's search for a home, a place where they felt comfortable in their own skin, a place where they felt they belonged.
It wasn't a home in California she was looking for, it was the girl in the cave. The one who was carefree, the one who would actually live in a cave, something Gough acknowledges she wouldn't do again.
Speaking of "a profound world of discovery in the familiar," Gough doesn't find her home in California, and returns home, seeking a place that was for her, more "emotionally comfortable."
The oft-repeated phrase, "Wherever you go, there you are," could sum up this book. The quest for the place we belong, whether for a day or a life, is one many readers will identify with.
Kisha Ferguson is the co-founder and former editor-in-chief of Outpost Magazine. Her own home is currently in Toronto.