KINGDOMS IN THE AIR:
Dispatches from Far Away
By Bob Shacochis
Grove, 383 pp., $26
Horse treks on 18-inch-wide trails carved into Himalayan cliffsides; casual jaunts into Kamchatkan grizzly-bear country; flights on rickety air transport to far corners of the Caribbean — they all repeatedly put author Bob Shacochis (and sometimes his wife) in harm’s way.
But that just comes with his chosen territory.
“[F]or those of high spirit,’’ he acknowledges in his new book of travel essays, “a life wish can at times bear a terrifying resemblance to a death wish.’’
In “Kingdoms in the Air: Dispatches from Far Away,’’ Shacochis is intent on nailing down what it means to be an American on the global stage of the late-20th and early-21st centuries. He first began his quest in 1973 when his intended brief stay on Old Providence Island (150 miles east of Nicaragua) turned into a year-long cultural immersion.
That experience gave rise to the stories in “Easy in the Islands,’’ winner of the National Book Award for first work of fiction in 1985. It also set Shacochis on a lifelong wandering course chronicled in his later novels (National Book Award finalist “Swimming in the Volcano’’ and Pulitzer finalist “The Woman Who Lost Her Soul’’) and nonfiction (“The Immaculate Invasion,’’ about the US intervention in Haiti in 1994).
Serious travel, he says in the new book, helps you find out, “to your everlasting surprise, how American you are.’’
To drive that point home, Shacochis uses every weapon in his writer’s arsenal. Comic hyperbole and copious high dudgeon lead the way. Capsule national histories and sharp contemporary observations fill out the picture. Whether he’s in Cuba, Mozambique, or attempting to climb Mount Ararat, he vividly places you in both the past and present of his destinations.
The book’s novella-length title piece echoes the churning, cascading, time-scrambling prose of “The Woman Who Lost Her Soul.’’ It recounts a 2001 journey Shacochis made with photographer-author Tom Laird, their wives, and multiple Sherpas to the Nepalese walled town of Lo Manthang on the Chinese border. The trip is alternately ecstasy-inducing and terrifying, a blend of cosmic reverie, physical peril, and bitter culture clash.
Nepal was in mid-civil war. The hostilities hadn’t reached the area where Shacochis and company were traveling, but the “steadily unsteady’’ character of the country was evident.
“When you enter the second half of the twentieth century as a medieval and in many ways prefeudal kingdom,’’ he writes, “and make a conscious decision to modernize, you probably ought to expect some whiplash.’’
For Laird, the 2001 trip was a sequel to a 1991 expedition he made to Lo Manthang where he became passionate about preserving the place’s 500-year-old temple sculptures and frescos. He wanted, of course, to improve living conditions for the locals, too.
“Still, it’s tricky, this not-always-sincere experiment called development,’’ Shacochis notes. “Every great achievement comes packaged in some variety of hurt and nightmare.’’
“Kingdoms,’’ in the course of its nearly 150 pages, examines why that’s the case.
“Something Wild in the Blood’’ is a loving remembrance of two footloose friends who, early on, encouraged Shacochis’s wanderings. Two Kamchatka-set pieces place him in a tight spot between those grizzly bears and a local gangster who gets ominously upset by the author’s cussing. (“ ‘Real men,’ he admonished in his lullaby voice, ‘don’t need to talk to each other this way.’ ’’)
“Gorongosa’’ recounts the time Shacochis was marooned among the wildlife-filled wonders of Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park after a helicopter-engine breakdown, triggering some gallows humor: “There we stood, spellbound and revering, allowed by the moment to believe in an Edenic world so harmoniously, benevolently perfect, one forgets to remember that the most readily available dish on the menu might very well be you.’’
In a few pieces, Shacochis exposes his personal life to an unusual degree. He touches mournfully on his and his wife’s inability to have children. In the book’s finest entry, “What I Did with the Gold,’’ he taps piercingly into the pleasures and sorrows of returning to Old Providence Island 20 years after he left it.
Not everything works. “Wartime Interlude: America’s Marriage to the Far Away’’ — about the US entanglement in former Yugoslavia — feels like a dated and overlong op-ed piece. An introduction to the book, to let readers know how these pieces were selected, would be a big help.
Still, Shacochis’s restlessness and recklessness, all couched in a headlong maximalist prose, are impossible to resist.
KINGDOMS IN THE AIR:
Dispatches from Far Away
By Bob Shacochis
Grove, 383 pp., $26
Novelist Michael Upchurch (“Passive Intruder’’) is the former Seattle Times staff book critic.
