David Reynolds - Slow Road to Brownsville

One day, while in Swan River, Manitoba, Canada, David Reynolds learns that road 83, "goes to Mexico". On enquiring further he learns that this is actually true, the road eventually leaves Canada and becomes Route 83, which makes its way south through North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, the Oklahoma panhandle, and Texas, before arriving in Mexico at the US town of Brownsville on the Rio Grande. Reynolds is in Swan River because his grandfather ended up there - an immigrant from the UK looking for work, and he has written an autobiography about the man he never knew.

But Route 83 gives him another idea. How about driving the whole length of it and writing about what he sees and who he meets. He isn't the first. It turns out that lots of people have made the journey, and indeed many Canadians made a habit of travelling south for holidays, and the people they befriended down in Texas used to come north for meet ups. Along the route he finds plenty of people who have travelled some of 83. But he also meets many people who haven't, and sometimes they haven't really left the immediate area they were born in.

North-South roads in the US are not quite the same as the East-West ones. Those, Reynolds points out, are routes to carry lots of travellers long distance. The vertical routes don't have the same need, and thus aren't quite as well supplied in terms of rest stops. Much of 83 is actually two lane road, and it makes for a quiet, if slightly cliched, road trip. For this is small town America, but it is a trip through a small town rural coutnryside filled with history. Reynolds muses on the colonial expansion of the US, racism and the treatment of indigenous people and the nature of rural America itself.

Reynolds is a classic English liberal. He shys away from confrontational politics, but he does meet plenty of people prepared to talk about the things you might expect. Racism, Indians, Guns, Democrats and liberal themselves. Everyone who has been to middle America, or its adjacent states will know that they are friendly and welcoming. Interested and suprised to receive visitors from far away, and proud of their areas. Reynolds however was travelling in what feels like a different time - Obama was just into his second term - and to Reynolds at least, the right feels isolated and on the retreat. Reynolds finds plenty to shock and worry him - not least the open racism he experiences in several places. But his diary of the trip feels a very different place to the United States in the first year of Trump's second presidency.

Like all road trip books, readers will find themselves wishing that the author didnt have to move on quite so fast. There's plenty of stories that we only scratch the surface of, and it feeds this readers on desire to return to this part of the world. But Reynolds is an honest enough writer and observer of people to give his readers a real feeling of the places he travels through. The book is also filled with references and quotes to the books that Reynolds reads about the places - a goldmine for future travellers. One this did irk though. Reynolds is unnevering in his physical descriptions of the people he meets. I'm not sure there is any real need, even when discussing the obesity epidemic, to talk quite so much about how people (and if we're honest it's mostly the women) look.

That said, this is an enjoyable read that has a lot to say about America before Trump.

Related Reads

Estes - Our History is the Future
Zinn - A People's History of the United States: 1492 - Present