Weston takes road less traveled by rich

By Barbara Rich Daily Progress correspondent
Published: August 17, 2008

Kath Weston, who lives in Charlottesville and teaches anthropology at the University of Virginia, decided to write a different kind of road book — one taken by bus. “Traveling Light — On the Road with America’s Poor” is the fruit of her five-year “Buslandia” epic, and it’s an epic in more ways than one might expect.

The book is a pastiche of searing heat, freezing cold, awful junk food, unsanitary restrooms, erratic schedules and domineering drivers barking out rules of the road to their passengers.

But “Traveling” is more than the sum of the above parts. It is, in the deepest sense, about the women, men and children Weston makes contact with on her investigatory journey and the lessons she learns and the insights she gains by talking with, befriending and arguing with our nation’s working poor.

Those who travel by bus are also the visible poor, although many of us choose not to see the people Weston chronicles. She, herself, was one of the working poor, and the cover of the paperback copy I reviewed states, she “dreamed of becoming a writer.” That dream came true. Weston is an award-winning author with five published books under her belt. Yes, she’s come a long way, baby, but the trip was not an easy one.

There’s little doubt, however, that it was well worth whatever hardships she encountered along the way. “Traveling” is a thoroughly researched, intelligent, unsentimental and empathetic portrait of life as it is lived via the cheapest means of travel still remaining.

In her prologue, the author tells us, “I looked where I knew I would find poverty in motion … where hard-working people resigned to living poor ride beside hard-working people who claim they’re just having a run of bad luck. … ‘Poverty’ can’t begin to describe it.”

And yet Weston does describe it — all five years, 976 miles of it. I found myself humming that vintage tune “From Natchez to Mobile, from Memphis to St. Jo …” But that’s like comparing peanuts to a herd of elephants. She covers cities small and large, north and south, east and west.

Along the way, we meet individuals who display human kindness while being stigmatized by lack of cash or credit cards, to those few middle-class folk whose ride is brief and untouched by the woes of those in for long-haul experiences. Some of the human cargo simply ride the bus as a way of life — Weston herself traveled on an Ameripass “which lets me ride anywhere Greyhound and its affiliates go.”

The reader is informed of ads proclaiming we can master our fates — road signs that are disproved by those on the bus “who know different … life passes unexpectedly, in vignettes.” We are given a glimpse of two middle-class young girls who may be in school, or riding for adventure or temporarily short of money. Weston tells us they have little to fear because “[t]he ratio of privilege to vigilance is completely off.”

Want to know the difference between a bum and a tramp? Read this book.

Want to know how the privileged regard the lives of the rich and the poor in this country? Weston sums it up for us: “Two worlds.” She then goes on to amplify that twosome with “If the poor are always with you, it is mainly because they are made so. What enriches one tends to impoverish another in an economy that generates more and more inequality.”

It is clear that Weston approached her research with an open mind and a receptive heart. She is gifted in making real contact with the most unlikely people who are not unlikely to her.

I got a strong vibe that to the author, we are not only all in this together, but that the social and economic barriers that divide us into separate camps must dissolve before we can claim to be residents of the same country. Unlike her trip, however, she gives us no timetable to cling to.

Foodies will squirm reading the fare offered to those whose travel options are determined by a lack of bucks. Weston herself succumbs to a bout of food poisoning, but she has a friend along the way who offers her a place to lay her head and recover, a luxury denied to her fellow travelers.

This book is not a screed against the uncaring rich, but don’t pick it up for light reading.

Yes, Weston is good at self-deprecating humor and the wry aside, but this is a serious book, in the best sense of that word. For example, ponder the last paragraph in “Traveling.”

“How fitting that Lady Liberty should appear draped in capital to a generation raised on economic bubbles. Time is short. When people get arrested for giving sandwiches to the needy in a public park, there’s a famine in the land of a kind that can’t be solved with food. But what will it take to see it?”

A difficult question — one that resonates with more than a teaspoon of righteous anger. Especially a teaspoon made of silver, not the kind one finds in a bus station.

Note: The copy I reviewed is an uncorrected proof — the hardcover edition will be out in September. Experience has shown me that such copies differ little if at all from the final book. In any form — even if it were pages stapled together — “Traveling Light — On the Road with America’s Poor” is worth reading as an eye- and heart-opening book.