James A. Reeves has written the road trip memoir I wish I could write.
Bastard....
Reeves recently published The Road to Somewhere: An American Memoir, which is a "photo memoir of one man’s journey through America that is as sprawling and chaotic as the country itself. Contains 55,000 miles and 416 colorful pages with a map and an index," according to the book's back cover.
I can't wait to read, and look at, this book.
According to the publisher's description: "While working at a design studio and teaching, whenever he could find a few days he would buy a ticket to anywhere cheap, rent a car, and drive in the direction of whatever towns struck his fancy — Truth & Consequences, Delta, Dinosaur — racing blindly through the back roads of the country."
Reeves took his trips between 2004 and 2009, taking tons of pictures along the way.
Here's a promotional video:
Some have compared Reeves' book to Jack Kerouac's seminal novel On the Road. As I've mentioned here a few times (May 25, 2012, "Inspiration," and October 2, 2012, "The Struggle"), I'm working on a memoir about a road trip I took with three friends in 1988. I compare our trip and the dynamic of the four personalities to the ramblings of Kerouac and his buddy, Neal Cassady.
Obviously, my book is very different from The Road to Somewhere. I took my trip 16 years before Reeve, and the photos that I took didn't come out because I was using a crappy camera and didn't know what I was doing even with a crappy camera.
But like him, I learned a lot about this country -- the good, the bad and the ugly -- during the four months I traveled from Connecticut to New Mexico and back. I also learned about myself, although many of those lessons didn't come until I'd started working on the book nearly eight months ago.
I continue to make progress on my book. I have begun filling in holes in the timeline thanks to email and phone correspondence with friends and family. And I've recently begun hammering all of it together into what I believe is the right format and order. Of course, I've had those thoughts before and ended up making changes, but that's just part of the process.
