Meaning through mileage

Spying on America
by Bill Gaston

Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2026
$26  /  9781773104652 

Reviewed by Brian Harvey

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What is a road trip?

My definition involves roads (paved or not) a loose plan from getting from A to B (which may even be the same place), a vehicle of some sort and, if you’re a writer, a notebook. Road trips are tailor-made for writers because they guarantee a steady supply of places and characters, there’s plenty of room for opinion and there’s no need for a plot.

Good writers write good road trip books. For driving across America, the gold standard is surely John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. In 1960, the sixty-year-old Steinbeck drove from his home in Sag Harbor, New York straight across the country to Seattle, down through California (where he was born and where so much of his fiction was set) across the neighbouring western states, south to New Orleans and then back to Long Island. His vehicle was a custom-built camper perched on the back of his pickup truck, so there’s not much in his book about motels but a lot on all the places you could park a camper for the night in sixties America. My copy of Travels is disintegrating and decorated with embarrassing Post-it notes and it’s time to buy a new one and read it again, because Steinbeck’s observations on America a decade and a half from the end of World War II are engaging and profound, and because that America is gone.  

You could even argue that Travels was Steinbeck’s second road trip book, if you removed the requirement for roads. Twenty years earlier, in 1940, Steinbeck accompanied his inimitable biologist-friend Ed Ricketts on a scientific collection trip in Baja California that he wrote up as The Log from the Sea of Cortez. Steinbeck was writer, amateur biologist, and drinker, a good combination for a road book, and Sea of Cortez reflects the travels of a very knowledgeable man. It contains, for example, an indictment of overfishing in the sardine industry that would still stand today as an impassioned and well-informed argument for sane fisheries management.

If Steinbeck is the gold standard, for close observation of the roadside attractions of small-town America he may still take a back seat to an immigrant, Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov never wrote up his observations as a road trip, but he visited many roadside stops in the west and Midwest as a respected lepidopterist, a less-known aspect of his life detailed in Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius, by Kurt Johnson and Steven L. Coates. In search of his beloved butterflies and accompanied by his wife Vera, he must have taken copious notes on all those little motels they stayed in, because they reappeared later in Lolita as settings for Humbert Humbert’s desperate, doomed odyssey with the love of his life. Fictionalized, but still a road trip.

A sub-genre of the road trip is mostly seen in movie form – the buddy movie – in which two people of wildly different personalities find common ground and friendship in the course of being stuck with each other between A and B. The observations of a loner can pale quickly, but companions are trusty foils and extra eyes for whatever unfolds along the way. Steinbeck’s cronies on his voyage through the Sea of Cortez are as motley and entertaining as any reader could hope for, and the star is always Ed Ricketts, who was the model for the character Doc in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. But by the time Steinbeck did his cross-country road trip in 1960 Ricketts had been dead for more than a decade. Instead, the passenger seat in Steinbeck’s truck was taken up by Charley, a large poodle who was probably smarter and better company that a lot of humans.

Neither of my two examples would qualify as material for a buddy movie, whose conclusion is always foregone. I suppose Humbert loved Lolita, in his awful way, and Steinbeck certainly loved Charley from the outset. So too with the Canadian writer Bill Gaston, who was closing in on seventy when he made the road trip described in his latest book, Spying on America. Along for the ride were his two sons, Connor and Vaughn, both writers, and the three men did their trip not in a camper truck but in a rented Dodge Charger, a vehicle that appears frequently in the story and reminded me of a similar vehicle foisted on me by a rental agency in Hawaii (Gaston is right – you can’t see out of those things). His choice of companions says much about the flavour of his book, because while it’s a story of travel and encounters and ruminations on North America’s two dominant cultures, it’s fundamentally about family. However entertaining and insightful Gaston may be about American food and accents and gun laws and beer (especially beer), you are in no doubt about where his heart is, and what the book is really about, because the answer to both those questions is the same.

I had reservations about reading and reviewing Spying on America (a title that, we’re told, refers to their American muscle car making them look less Canadian, more able to blend in). The book comes at a time when the America that Steinbeck wrote about, slightly tarnished but still the land of opportunity and, for the most part, decency, has vanished. Like Gaston, I was born in America, but I left it even earlier than he did (I was three, and my parents were Canadian). The last thing I wanted to do was read an account of the rural America whose “good folks” had played such a big role in re-electing the charlatan who has single-handedly turned his country into a rogue state and set the world on its head. But, like Gaston, I too have two grown sons, and that was enough of a hook.

I needn’t have worried. The reader quickly learns where Gaston stands on the latest, twisted, and dangerous iteration of America, and is easily pulled into a story whose road trip rationale is as solid as any: the genealogical quest. Gaston’s great, great, great-grandparents were abolitionists who founded the village of Tabor, Iowa, the western hub for the Underground Railroad and the home, for a time, of the famous abolitionist John Brown. That’s a weighty anchor for any family, and it’s understood as the focus of a road trip that starts in Port Angeles, Washington and meanders, always on side roads and always at the dictates of the three Gastons’ mantra “Ya gotta stop,” through Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Montana, all of them red states, with the easterly turnaround a nip into Iowa to meet the legacy of their ancestors. It’s a long, seven-day drive but an easy read. There are thin-walled motels straight out of Nabokov with managers, gimlet-eyed or big-hearted, that would fit right into any movie about the American west; there are pot-bellied, crewcut, and vaguely menacing highway cops in reflective shades; and there are waitresses who, Gaston keeps pointing out, are not called servers here. Those waitresses, in fact play a big role in the book, because Gaston and his two sons are hungry travellers willing to try anything, including painfully-sugary Thai food in a restaurant in Nebraska with no Thai staff. Their favourite new beer turns out to be Dog Slobber, and there is a lot of beer consumed in order to come to that conclusion. Gaston captures the local speech patterns, and the dialogue in the book is effortless. Details do what details should in a book involving so much travel, and they do it beautifully. We see a woman, observed through the window of a motel, endlessly throwing a pocket knife at a propped-up dartboard that keeps falling down. In a more upscale motel, Gaston lays his head on the “cool, expensive pillow” on his “violent American bed.” Foreshadowing is deftly used to keep up the reader’s interest in what’s around the corner.

Like Steinbeck and Nabokov, Gaston had published many works of fiction before writing up his road trip. When readers already know a writer’s name they’re more likely to want to learn something personal about him, and the gradual revealing of the author in Spying on America feels natural. References to age, mortality, and family pile up. Religion too; among the many personal details we hear about is Gaston’s Buddhism. He is not afraid to talk about tears and broken hearts. When he relates the number of birthplaces he’s claimed over the years to deflect attention from having been born in Tacoma, Washington, I had to laugh, because I’ve done the same myself. His feelings about America permeate the book, from his descriptions of “its divisiveness, its certainties, its anger,” to images like “capitalism scratching harder and harder at its itch.” Always, we hear about America’s confidence. America is by no means the only country that’s unshakeably convinced it’s the best. The Japanese, for example, feel the same about their homeland. The difference is that a visitor to Japan would never know it. In America, though, there’s no doubt. The confidence is everywhere.

One look at the map at the beginning of the book tells you that, geographically, the climax of the trip comes not at the end, but near the halfway point, at Tabor, Iowa. Or does it? Tabor is a satisfying stop, and we learn something about Gaston’s remarkable ancestors, whose achievements are memorialized in the town’s Gaston Square. The three travellers are given the royal treatment at the town’s museum, which inhabits a space around the entry point to the Underground Railway. But Gaston’s writing becomes more emotionally engaged after they leave Tabor and head back west toward Montana to see the writer Thomas McGuane, who lives in Missoula and was eighty-three at the time of their visit. Gaston and McGuane had bonded decades earlier, over writing and fly fishing and probably beer, and his delight in bringing two creative sons into McGuane’s orbit lights up the book. Admirers of McGuane’s books and screenplays will think this only right, and the pages about the encounter, in which Gaston indulges in a little namedropping of the sort he has already called himself out for earlier in the book, ring loud and true. So true that this scene, not the reverential visit to Tabor, seems to me the heart of Spying on America.

Spying on America is a struggle to understand what has gone wrong with the country of Gaston’s birth, and to do that you can’t just list the negatives that so many people know already. America was “great,” long before Trump saw his chance and seized it. In the arts especially, America was dazzling. It was where you went to make it. A person like Thomas McGuane is a pretty good stand-in for that much-lamented country. That night, in their motel in Missoula, Gaston reviews what was, for him, his favourite day of the trip, and how it outshone the visit to pay respect to his ancestors. He reaches a conclusion about the direction that love most naturally takes: not to the old and dead, but to one’s own children. It’s a statement that would bring a tear to the eye of any parent and with which I’m sure John Steinbeck would have agreed. His companion might have been canine, but dogs are always part of the family.

But Gaston, like all good writers, knows better than to end on that high note; the book needs to hammer home its message. For that, he provides us with the Fourth of July celebrations in Wenatchee, Washington, the day before returning home to Canada. Wenatchee bills itself as “America’s playground” and in a tacky karaoke bar, Gaston finds his villains.

Spying on America was published in 2026 but the trip itself was made several years earlier, in the time of Covid and the interregnum between the two Trump terms. Enough has happened in that  gap that the book contains an epilogue, “From the Rearview,” which is partly a “where are they now?” update on the main characters in the story, but more importantly an attempt to answer the question that I keep asking myself and anybody else who will listen. The question isn’t about Trump at all, because the whole world already knows what he is, and what America has become. Instead, it’s “Who in God’s name voted for this person, and why would they do it twice?” That, I think, is what Gaston’s book is about, but only part of it. His book speaks so strongly of his feelings for his family, especially as age catches up to him, that maybe the revelations about American misguidedness and the mission to understand what’s happening now in America are secondary.

I’d like to think so. Because dictators and demagogues come and go, and the world is being forced to breathe the foul emanations of one now, but their hold over us can never outlast the power of love.

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Brian Harvey grew up on the West Coast of Canada and trained as a marine biologist. He began writing newspaper columns and science-travel articles for magazines in 1997. His first book for a general audience, The End of the River, was a Globe and Mail “Best 100” book for 2008. His latest book, Sea Trial: Sailing After My Father, reviewed here by Theo Dombrowski, was a 2019 Governor General’s Award finalist for nonfiction and an Independent Publishers Book Awards medalist in the memoir category. He lives in Nanaimo. [Editor’s note: Brian Harvey has also reviewed books by Gregor Craigie, J.B. MacKinnon, Craig Taylor, Trevor Carolan, Robert Amos, and Sam McKinney for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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