Continental Drifter

Bruce Grainger is head of the Public Services Department, Macdonald
Library, McGill University.

The author’s stated goal was to travel across North America by bus
from Dawson City to Key West, keeping a journal as he went. As it turns
out, the least interesting part of this book is when he describes his
experiences with the people he meets on buses or in bus stations along
the way. His descriptions of these brief encounters tend to be trivial
and uninteresting, partly because the author doesn’t care much for his
fellow travellers. His indifference is typified by his dismissive
comments about one elderly woman: “In our portion of an hour together,
the woman next to me couldn’t become more than a caricature, an old
person, alone, remembering.” He declines to ask a man just released
from prison what his crime was on the grounds that “Hell, I was off
duty.” Elsewhere, he describes himself as a “lazy digger” and
confesses that he’s a writer because it’s what he least dislikes.
Although he does visit his grandfather’s grave in Saskatoon, he is
unwilling to literally go the extra mile to find the house in Columbia,
Missouri, in which his mother was born.

When he gets off the bus and stays a while, his narrative acquires more
depth, regardless of whether his subjects are relatives, an old friend,
or new contacts. He also shows a fondness for drinking, often with
drunken street people. On one occasion, his boozy pal attempts to beg
for money in Key West. When his buddy is mocked, the author describes
the woman who laughs at him as having “bleached blonde hair and
breasts like bowling balls in a sack.” Given his stated aim, the
reader might well expect the author to evoke some sense of the majestic
sweep of the continent, but he doesn’t. Were it not for one sentence
describing the garden on the Hemingway property in Key West and the
mention of a single palm tree in Miami Beach, the reader would not
otherwise know that anything grows in Florida.

Cameron is a competent writer and capable of detailed observations, but
he does not express empathy for the people he meets or show much
interest in the natural landscape the further south he goes. Nor is he
willing to provide interesting background information on the cities he
visits. The result is that the book has a flat, monotonous quality. In
his own mind the author may feel justified in this minimalist approach,
but I suspect his indifference is likely to be reciprocated by his
readers.