Hello, Radio Readers. I’m author Julie A. Sellers, author of the novel Ann of Sunflower Lane. Welcome to this High Plains Public Radio Radio Readers Book Club BookByte of The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America by Bill Bryson.
Bryson’s travelogue is the story of discovery and identity, interwoven with humor and at times, laced with nostalgia and even sadness. As Bryson tells us, his journey of almost 14,000 miles begins with his father’s passing. “I became gripped with a curious urge to go back to the land of my youth,” Bryson tells us, “and make what the blurb writers like to call a journey of discovery […] I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.”
Bryson travels first to the east, returning to his hometown of Des Moines, Iowa, before embarking on a similar journey to the west. Across the miles, he returns to locations first visited on family vacations and travels to new places as well. His trip takes him through physical landscapes and those of memory and imagination.
Although some of Bryson’s comments are critical and at times off-putting, there are moments of poignant self-discovery. In Tuskegee, Alabama, where Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee Institute, Bryson comes face to face with what it feels like to be the Other. “I had never felt so self-conscious, so visible,” he reflects.
The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, likewise provides Bryson with a moment of reflection about the past. There, he sees many of the same baseball cards he had as a child before his parents disposed of them. The cards remind him of his youth and “it was a pleasure to see all the old cards again. It was like visiting an old friend in the hospital.”
On his trip west, Bryson visits the geographical center of the United States near Lebanon, Kansas. There, alone at the site, Bryson considers the sense of being centered. “It was a strange feeling to think that of all the 230 million people in the United States I was the most geographically distinctive,” he reflects. Perhaps it is this sense of centeredness that leads him to call Kansas “the most quintessential of American states.”
At the end of both trips, Bryson recognizes the pull that Des Moines and the Midwest have on him. He describes Midwesterners as “good people” whose lives and sense of community he envies, despite some of the fun he pokes at them. He recognizes that he doesn’t want the trip to end or “to be finished with looking at America, possibly forever.”
Thanks to Bryson’s book, his trip lives on, even these many decades later, and we as readers are encouraged to undertake similar journeys of self-discovery.
I’m Julie A. Sellers for HPPR Radio Reader’s Book Club.
