The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean Paperback – May 13, 2014

ON THE ROAD AGAINI could not read Philip Caputo's new book The Longest Road: Overland from Key West to the Arctic Ocean without reflecting on his extraordinary life. The man has had a hell of a wild ride all over the world, sometimes in extreme danger. Few have lived such a life and few can write as well as he does. His great Vietnam War memoir, A Rumor of War, is considered a classic. He led men in combat in the treacherous jungles of Vietnam. He fought beside them and watched them bleed and die. And then he wrote a great book about it. He became a combat correspondent and covered the insanity of Lebanon's civil war. He was captured and held prisoner by Palestinian fedayeen in war torn Beirut. He was also shot in Beirut. He crossed into Eritrea on camelback with other reporters and he covered the Yom Kippur War between the Arabs and Israelis. He trekked into wild and primitive Afghanistan to cover the Mujahedeen fighting the Russians. He was there for the fall of Saigon. Philip Caputo is familiar with war and the darkness in men's souls. He has also traveled the desolate, unforgiving wild places in this world, and always, he writes with eloquence, brilliance and a deep understanding of the human condition.Time passes, as it does for all of us, and now after the death of his father and turning 70, he has taken us on a long and fascinating road trip across America in his latest book, The Longest Road. It is time to see America. This 5,500 mile journey begins in the sub-tropical southernmost part of America in infamous, colorful, bawdy Key West, Florida which is only 90 miles across the Florida Straits from Cuba. Mr. Caputo knows it well and although it has changed over the decades, it still retains a glimmer of that old end-of-the-line, anything-goes, funky, bohemian, tropical island. He and his wife Leslie met some of Key West's interesting characters at the start of their long road trip and he asked them the question he would ask many others along the way. What is it that binds us together as Americans? What unites Cuban kids reciting The Pledge of Allegiance in their Key West classroom with Inupiat kids reciting it near the Arctic Ocean in Alaska? A new citizen, a man from Cuba, snapped their picture at the Southernmost Point and told Mr. Caputo and his wife that he had traveled the world but he wanted to live here in the US because of our freedom and even though there is an economic crisis, he still believes the US is the best country in the world.Caputo once went by camel caravan into the wilderness of the Sinai desert with bedouin tribesmen that wore daggers in their belts. One of them made sure Cuputo understood that He, Muhammed, was the Sheikh el Kara, the Sheikh of the Caravan. (From Means of Escape) He, Caputo, was the Sheikh el Kara of this almost 6,000 mile caravan from Key West to Deadhorse, Alaska. And the Sheikh el Kara would settle for nothing less than a shiny, rounded, silver Globetrotter Airstream which has an almost cult like status among the cognoscenti of recreational vehicles. The Sheikh knows his camels! He named the Airstream Ethel and she was hauled behind his truck named Fred. He and Leslie also brought along their two lovable, playful English setter dogs named Sage and Sky. I really got a kick out of those dogs and enjoyed all their antics.His one rule was to avoid the interstate highways in order to see and experience the real America. His descriptions of the people they met and the gorgeous, breathtaking scenery of America made me want to immediately start planning my own road trip across America. He calls The Natchez Trace "the most enchanting road in America" and says "there's amazing food in the most out-of-the-way places." He talked to people that had lost everything in the collapse of the housing market that went to live in the woods but kept their generous spirits. He and Leslie helped volunteers that had come from all over the country to help rebuild and clean up Tuscaloosa, Alabama after the tornado. Blacks and whites worked together and displayed a deep generosity towards others. They met people that had little but still believed it was hope and optimism and belief in a better tomorrow that holds us together. They listened to the regional dialects and ate the regional food. They visited The Farm which started as an old hippie commune decades ago in the forests and highlands of Tennessee. Farmers along the way lamented that we aren't rooted in the soil anymore. Leslie fell in love with the green, lush beauty of the Ozarks. Soon "The Midwestern Woodlands and Savannahs surrendered grudgingly to the Central Great Plains," and the boarded up shrinking small towns where Big Agriculture has bought out the small family farms and the noon day siren still sounds. In Kansas they enjoyed a small town rodeo and Caputo put on his cowboy hat. They stopped at the writer Willa Cather's hometown in Red Cloud, Nebraska and recalled her wise words that "men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things." In Grand Island, Nebraska there are Mexicans, Sudanese and Somalis working in the meat packing plant. What a combination. Only in America! Their children, no doubt, recite The Pledge of Allegiance in school each morning also. However, "The unintended consequence was to turn the city of some forty-eight thousand into a melting pot where little was melting and much was on high simmer." There were problems between the Mexican workers and the Somalis at the plant and some of the locals didn't like all the changes to their town but knew that Americans wouldn't accept those jobs anymore. One old man "believed that Americans had become too soft, leaving immigrants to take on the tough, dirty jobs." Mr. Caputo remembered growing up in multi-ethnic Chicago and he recalled talking to Mike Royko, "the great Chicago Daily News columnist" who told him about the time he took his kids to California and they reported back the disturbing news. "Dad, they aren't anything." "What do you mean they aren't anything?" Royko asked them. "We asked them what nationality they were, and they said they were American!"Mr. Caputo tried to follow the historic trail of Lewis and Clark across the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains and then down to the Washington coast. In the Great Plains states they started to notice all the Indian names and they looked for the site of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre. They visited poverty stricken Indian reservations where the people suffer high rates of alcoholism and suicide. He felt connected to the history of America as they followed the Lincoln road up the Platt River valley with it's "plentiful water and lush grass." The early pioneers traveled this route in their wagon trains headed west. This road was originally the Great Medicine Road for the Indians, "a web of paths beaten along the riversides by migrating buffalo and the plains tribes that tracked them." Mr. Caputo explains how the old trail begat the Platt River Trace which begat the Oregon and Mormon Trails that begat the Pony Express and then the Union Pacific, the first transcontinental railway, and this of course, begat the Lincoln road of today.Wild buffalo roam the Badlands National Park and Bighorn sheep can be seen jumping from ledge to ledge in the mountains. There is weird, spectacular scenery with "buttes that resembled Mayan temples" and "gigantic rock mushrooms," and the wind and isolated beauty in the eerie quiet and stillness of the wilderness. They ran into Ansel Woodenknife at their campground. He made his famous Indian fry bread tacos at his cafe that was once featured on the Food Network. Alas, he got too busy and had to close down, a "victim of his own success." He is also a Lakota shaman and "a teacher of the way" to his tribe that said, "You want to talk about the fabric of this country, that's it." "So rather than a melting pot, it would be a..." "A blanket of color, all sewn in the shape of the U.S."He soon added the beautiful Spearfish Canyon Scenic Byway to his list of favorite roads. "Granite cliffs shot up a hundred feet or more, pine and spruce clutching the crags above." Gold was discovered there in the Black Hills back in the 1800's and the Sioux Nation of Indians still want their land back. They went hiking. "The dogs were in their glory. Dashing unfettered through rough country is in a setter's blood. Sage seemed to recapture some of her youth, sprinting off into the woods not to be seen for five or ten minutes, and when she returned to check in, she would look back at us and--we swear--smile." North Dakota is in the middle of an oil boom and before they moved on to the Custer Battlefield, he and Leslie had a little fight over...you guessed it....which direction to go! Sound familiar? Near a campsite on the Yellowstone, in Paradise Valley, he felt he was almost coming home. It was in a rented cabin near there thirty six years ago, on a tributary called Pine Creek, that Mr. Caputo finished his first book, A Rumor of War. On Fourth of July weekend they stayed at a dude ranch. They still had 4,000 miles to go. Two young women that worked on the ranch had their own perspective. "We don't blend in very well with our generation...they get so far away from, you know, what built them...there's a disconnect, it's more about things than about places and people. It's Ooo, I lost my iPod, my life is over." They went on to say...that "the country definitely is in disarray. At the same time, to grow as a country, we need to have conflict, and conflict is healthy, conflict is good. But the media has this awesome way of blowing it out of proportion. It would be nice not to have this skewed perspective on the television. Yes, there are extremely left wing and extremely right wing, but the middle ground very rarely gets reported on. And you know, there is a huge disconnect between urban life and rural life. There's nooo sense of community in that respect." Leslie observed that they had hardly run into any angry people on this trip.I thought of my Dad as I read these chapters. I used to watch his beloved cowboy movies with him when I was a kid and Mr. Caputo's lyrical descriptions of the majestic scenery, wild weather and animals, and the dramatic history of the frontier days of America's West actually brought me to tears more than once. My Dad would have loved this book.The weather turned chilly when they got up into Montana. They crossed the Continental Divide and drove on to Washington where they saw wind farms and developed a "newfound toleration of them." Seagulls soon appeared and they knew the Pacific coast was near. They drank coffee up the beautiful, misty coast of Washington and took the ferry to the San Juans in a deep fog and saw old growth forests where fir trees, western hemlock and red cedar "rose higher than radio towers." One cedar had a circumference greater than twenty feet and was just a sapling when Columbus sailed. In relaxed Anacortes there were demonstrations. On one side of the intersection were silver haired people carrying signs that said "Thank You US Military and Let Freedom Ring." On the other corner others carried signs that said "Unite for Peace and War is Not The Answer." "Well, we finally found them," Leslie said as we drove on. "Angry Americans. And right here in little Anacortes. Who would have thought?"They crossed the border into Canada and after a two-and-a-half day drive from the border they reached Dawson Creek and the start of the famous ALCAN, The Alaska-Canada Highway. They had passed through the Fraser River Canyon, "a region that called for a thesaurus of breathless adjectives. Stupendous. Spectacular. Magnificent. Majestic. Awesome..Mountains like half a dozen Gibraltars stacked one on top of the other, ribboned with rock veins,rose almost sheer on both sides of the canyon, through which the swollen Fraser surged with incalculable power." The Alaska Highway is considered to be a great adventure to many travelers. It is remote and can be dangerous. Black bears ambled along the roadside. Moose and Stone sheep grazed in the distance. There were woods bison, cousins to America's bison. The huge males weigh more than a ton. When they reached the icy peaks of Mount Logan they knew they had arrived in the legendary Yukon Territory. It was foggy and a cold rain fell. "We were glutted on scenery, dazed by it. Our senses could no longer respond to it." It was a hell of a long way from Key West! Alaska is immense, half the size of India. Crossing into Alaska, back into the United States, they figured out they had come 7,257 miles with 800 still to go up to Prudhoe Bay, more than half of it on the very rugged Dalton Highway. And "the scenic orgy continued." It was August and cold. They pressed on. The road is rough and the scenery wonderful. There is fifty or a hundred miles between gas stations. This is it. The real thing. The Alaskan wilderness. They climbed a pass on a rough and slippery road and saw Dall sheep clinging to ledges on the side of the mountain. The temperature was falling and it was snowing. The wind howled. Down the mountain men hunted caribou. The road descended down to the desolation of the coastal plain called the North Slope. The tundra. And there it was, the end of the line. Deadhorse, Alaska, "the strangest and ugliest town in the country." It was cold and dismal and they went to see the Arctic Ocean. There were geese, snowy owls, caribou, and tundra swans. Two polar bears and a grizzly were in the vicinity. They had made it. From Key West to the Arctic Ocean, no small feat. "But it wasn't getting there that mattered;" Caputo mused... "it was THE getting there, what Kerouac called the purity of movement,"....and "in the end, though, the journey had been the destination. It had never been anything else."Thank you, Mr. Caputo, for this beautiful, riveting journey through America on The Longest Road. It is another one of your wonderful books. Everyone that has some wanderlust in them will surely enjoy this book, but if you can't hit the road now...relax....mix up a margarita or two...put your feet up...listen to Willie Nelson sing On The Road Again...and start reading The Longest Road, Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean.

So I bought this book because of two Amazon reviews. The first panned the book because the reviewer wrote the author was "too liberal;" the second was certain the author was a Republican, which I took to mean "conservative." When two people reading the same material disagree so basically, the only possible conclusion is that the author is a good writer and about as objective as you can get when it comes to interviewing others and describing them to the reader. In short, a good journalist.I'm guessing those who expected a book about RVing might be disappointed, and perhaps those who looked to read a travelogue might also find this book wanting. It's actually a bit of both, but more than both, it's a book about the people who live in our wonderful country, how they think and behave, and perhaps surprisingly, all get along.Finally, I'd have given it five stars except the author is clearly an Airstream snob.

Even for an author accomplished as Philip Caputo, the challenge in writing The Longest Road was bound to be daunting: Find a story that mattered knit through personal travels covering 12,000 miles over four months, stretching from Key West, FL to the Arctic Ocean and back.The story, of course, is every author's job whether they're crossing the street to the neighbor's house or cutting a huge diagonal over the continent in search of something, which is what Caputo, his wife and their two dogs did from behind the wheel of pickup truck hauling a 19-foot Airstream trailer.Caputo knows all there is about storytelling; he's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of 15 books, including A Rumor of War, an international best seller which many believe to be the finest story ever told about soldiers and the Vietnam conflict. Caputo's signature style in works such as DelCorso's Gallery, Horn of Africa and, Crossers, among others, is writing that conveys tremendous emotion without clobbering the reader over the head with it. His ability is such that the reader suddenly finds themselves immersed in the heart and soul of the central character without the slightest memory (confusion or objection) of how they got there. That sort of writing, which seems effortless, but of course is not; is what discerning readers come to expect, even demand anytime Caputo's name is on the title page.You get that in The Longest Road, Caputo's 16th book, plus a bonus that cuts both ways. TLR's voice is the first person; the main character is the author himself which can make the reader less likely to surrender to feelings, thoughts, emotions and the like simply because there is no buffer of a character, fictional or otherwise. Caputo might've had some angst over the story as well, making sure that we understand practically from page one that the whole purpose of this undertaking is to find out `what held the nation together and...would it continue to hold together' as well as it had in the past; the answers to be gleaned from people he'd ask along the way and by keeping his own eyes and ears open.The questions bothered me, laid out as they were up front; I would've preferred to be seduced in the known Caputo style by a more casual intermingling of those queries along the way. But while it takes a minute more than usual to get there, the writing rocks; the patience worth it.For me, the expected, wanted and familiar Caputo prose first came when they were on the Great Plains and came to Lebanon, Nebraska."On both sides of one street boarded windows stared from derelict houses, porches sagging, paint peeling like skin from a sunburned back. `No Trespassing' signs tilting in neglected yards. The siding on one place appeared to have been sandblasted by someone who'd quit with the job half done."What happened to Lebanon may be the obvious ills of economics, although Leslie Ware, Caputo's wife and travelling companion, wonders if "it was hit by a tornado." Caputo wants answers from a local with the chops to back up an opinion through a life lived right there. He finds Duane Ream, the mayor."Ream's thick, dark hair took a decade off his eighty-six years. The only sign of advanced age was the quivering in his hands. Dressed in a maroon shirt and jeans held up by blue suspenders, his accent pure country, he looked and sounded like a son of the prairies, but he was no provincial with a narrow view of life....He gave the impression that he was resigned to Lebanon's plight; it was a natural process, and he couldn't do anything more about it than he could about the weather. He'd lived a long time, and some of it had been tough, and maybe that's what made him so placid. He remembers how, during the Depression, farmers never went hungry but they never made a nickel, either, bartering surplus eggs for groceries, a bushel of wheat for flour. He remembered the Dust Bowl, when clouds of dirt blackened the sky."And finally, Caputo's take on what they've seen and experienced at this particular stop along the way, a formula that works throughout the book:"A town spirit wasn't dead yet, and if everyone wasn't happy, most were. I might have been the most melancholy person in Lebanon, aware that I'd been talking to people who were the last of their kind. The adagio of Dvorak's New World Symphony, wistful, solemn, played in my mind and I felt as I imagined Edward Curtis did when he photographed Sioux and Apache and Hopi early in the previous century."There is a bit of travelogue to this work, principally descriptions of where they are and what they see while tooling along roads that best follow the mapping quest of Lewis and Clark in 1804. And there's a small element of what Caputo did on his summer vacation, which I didn't find objectionable, in fact it added humor and a humanizing quality to the mission at hand.This book isn't about some older rich guy's bucket list, but it might be a ribbon placed around a life of observation that by his own admission--maybe even regret--had some loose ends. What makes The Longest Road terrific is that roles here are reversed; the book is about the observer, the reader becomes the eyewitness to a real life observer and what he sees; making the reader the penultimate observer in world where they are normally a mere audience; that turns out to be a great gift precisely because it is so real.Caputo gets the answer to what binds us together and whether that will hold into the future. But where that answer came from is the genuine--maybe even unexpected--pleasure of The Longest Road.