Thinking about all this, I had to ask myself the question. How does a travel writer develop his reputation for his one virtue - his credibility?
By now, the waitress is taking the order of the man in the corner. The older man is still asleep.
She says, "You know, I didn't know you were married to Sue until Mandy told me!"
He says, "I know, it all happened so fast, I don't believe it myself."
She says, "So how are things going...between you two?"
He says, "Oh good, good." She offered to pour him some coffee. But soon, she pulled up a chair next to him, the coffee pot kind of dangling like a cigarette.
"I haven't seen her in three days."
Then he said, "Its the rat race. Klamath Falls sucks you in."
Klamath Falls is one of the larger cities in Southern Oregon, but its still a tiny city. I thought - this little cafe, it speaks for all of the Oregon Outback. So distant from the modern American coast, that even Klamath Falls is distant.
She knew something I didn't, and said, "things gonna be alright between you two?"
He said, "she doesn't like the mining guys. She doesn't trust them."
I leave out the creaky aluminum door, the old man on the bar stool still sleeping, a sun ray from the small ceiling window hitting his face. I drive north some more, and then I'm in some town called Paisley. They're about to celebrate a Mosquito Festival. In a few weeks, they'll crown a young pretty girl, 'Miss Quito. It's like a harvest festival, but rather praying for rain, the town pimps its young teens to help pay for mosquito control.
Driving all this time, I wonder about Jim's contention, and if maybe he is right. Travel writers are people who write about themselves. Alone, it's easy for us fabricate or enhance our experience. Travel writers have gotten away with exaggeraton throughout history; it is often only time that reveals a writer's guilty taking advantage of his reader's trust. Seamen in the age of exploration were often travel-writers; their accounts were popular works of their day, and for some it was their book, not the voyage itself, that paid their bills. What they wrote, we now know, were largely fabrications.
Bruce Chatwin, one of contemporary travel writing's most cherished writers, is now known to have fabricated details of his travel. When confronted, he explained to his critics that readers expected some level of exaggeration from their authors.
But, unlike a David Sedaris work, where readers pretty much know the stories are partly fictional, Chatwin's hero was himself, and people knew these were non-fictional accounts in which Chatwin himself was considered the hero.
