Book Review: Conversations Across America

Title: Conversations Across America 

Author: Kari Loya

Date: 2022

Publisher: XK Productions

ISBN: 979-8-9861258-2-4

Length: 276 pages

Quote: "To families facing Alzheimer's. Find moments of joy."

In his seventies, Merv Loya (the name is Finnish) was in better physical condition than many teenagers. But his mind--which had been a good one--was starting to go. The family reached that terrible, traumatic decision, which so many families seem to be buying into these days, that it was necessary to sell his house, throw away most of his belonging, and put him in a nice private instritution, where he'd be able to stay only a short time before deteriorating enough to be moved to a differen institution.

I don't understand why people make this decision, though Mr. Loya seemed to be part of it. I can understand blind people selling their pictures and mobility-impaired people moving to smaller quarters without stairs, but if I were losing my memory I'd want to stay as close to as many memory triggers as possible; don't start "downsizing" my belongings, don't even dare to move them, if I'm going to remember them I'm going to remember them where I put them. 

But we as a society tell people that they "need to" be packed into barracks with a lot of strangers, and apparently some older people think there is some rational reason for this. 

 Anyway, before the move, Merv Loya and his son Kari did the Last Great Road Trip together. By bicycle. They trained and tested themselves for fitness and started pedaling their way across the continent, from Virginia to Oregon, along the Trans-American bike route. Of this trip Kari Loya made a book.

The format and content of the book may surprise, perhaps disappoint, readers. I do not recommend the e-book version. The publisher opted for two-column formatting, which is a pain to read on a screen. I sighed, I started typing a samizdat copy, I told myself (on page six of the samizdat version) that this review was overdue already. Nobody likes a reviewer who doesn't take the time to read a book properly, properly; a reviewer who takes more than a month may be even worse. Scroll up, scroll down. Read half a paragraph, scroll up, realize you needed to scroll down first. See half a picture. If you buy this book, it's worth buying a printed copy. Columns and pictures can actually work on a printed page.

But then another decision was made, apparently by Kari Loya, that the best way to capture the memory of a road trip with Merv Loya was not with literary essays, maps, reviews, or pictures of scenery, but mainly with snapshots of random people the Loyas met on the trip. Each state through which they rode gets a chapter; the longer part of each chapter is the pages with one, two, or three snapshots of faces and quotes from what people said during their conversations.

At his father's memorial service, Loya tells us, he pictured his father approaching the gates of Heaven. While others introduced themselves with their achievements and what they thought they had to offer to Heaven, Merv Loya would say, "Before I tell you what I've done, let me tell you about these fifteen other people I met on the stairs here, and why each of them will be a great addition to Heaven..."

Most of the people who contributed a face picture and a paragraph of conversation to this book aren't making the case for their admission to Heaven. Most don't even tell real stories, beyond where they came from and how they came to be on the route. They're making casual conversation with people they've met on the road. Some are fellow long-distance cyclists; some are hikers; some are local people or even motorists. Apart from a couple of aggressive drivers, Loya says, the people they met were friendly; cyclists are perceived as non-threatening, eccentric but not violent, not competing for jobs, likely to spend money freely, in the towns along the route. One man talked freely about his involvement in vice and crime. One woman talked about her experience in ministerial school. People provided abundant evidence of the current craze for travel-for-its-own-sake, even nomadism; in each state the Loyas met someone from a different state along their route. 

Though Finnish and Norwegian rather than Irish, Mr. Loya had been diagnosed as having celiac disease. Historically the celiac gene was spread through continental Europe, but it was extremely rare in the coastal countries and almost unknown as far inland as Finland. The diagnosis of celiac disease is often made by a simpler blood test rather than a DNA study. With so many non-Irish people showing celiac reactions on blood tests, it would be interesting to know how many of these people do have the celiac gene (via Norway, it's possible) and how many are having pseudo-celiac reactions to glyphosate residues in grain. The level of general understanding of either condition, along the trail, seems to be pathetic. One restaurant employee was able to assure the Loyas that everything on the menu was gluten-free; most of them didn't know what that meant. 

Mercifully, the Loyas, whose home base was near Tillamook, were lactose-tolerant and able to enjoy Tillamook ice cream. Burning off calories on their bikes, they apparently enjoyed a lot of it, though in one town they found only Ben and Jerry's and, apparently reacting to its novelty appeal, managed to consume two pints each. 

Trans Am cyclists, we are told, like to sleep cheap. One of the first things every cyclist learns is how to drape rain capes across bicycles to make a sort of tent, but after one miserable night in the open the Loyas discover phone apps that connect them to people who offer roofs and floors, even warm showers.  

And there's a mercifully terse vignette of another way a Last Great Road Trip can end, with the younger woman pleading for "an obese man" to stay with her, meaning alive...People do plan these things, cruel though it is to the younger women, who may not realize that the sugar-daddy type singing "I want to die in your arms tonight" just might mean it literally. Women at least seem to want to spare younger men that experience. 

Apart from those, the book gives few details about the actual trip. Mileage is charted in the appendix. I enjoyed Loya's vew of Wytheville, Virginia--not sure why a gluten-free diner would go to the Mexican restaurant when there used to be such a good Chinese one--and was disappointed that he found so little to say about Berea, Kentucky, or almost any other place between Virginia and Oregon. This book really is about what other people told the Loyas. 

Despite its shortcomings as a travel book (there are so many travel books already), this is a heartwarming story of family love. It will remind all readers who have parents who like road trips to share a good one now, while they can.