By Amy Wolf, Sunset travel editor
Quiz time. Question: A Sunset pig is a) a Sunset Magazine editor who eats too much food from the test kitchen, b) a lyric in a Joni Mitchell song, or c) a book about travel.
Answer: all of the above.
My point: Kiss the Sunset Pig (Penguin Canada, 2006), a travel memoir by Canadian author Laurie Gough, is worth reading—especially if you didn’t get to do any exotic trips this summer, thanks to gas and airline prices and the economy. It’ll make you feel like you have.
As a travel editor, I’m the first to admit that travel writing is dominated by a whole lot of garbage. Too many travel writers chronicle exactly what happened with painfully tedious detail, or use their writing as an excuse for self-indulgent navel gazing. Gough avoids both of these pitfalls by taking the reader on a virtual journey that has a distinct end point, and sharing a lifetime worth of travel memories along the way. She has a destination in mind (California), but, as is the case with every great trip, the journey is what counts.
Driving an old, beat up car named Marcia, Gough makes her way solo from Canada toward California, the place of her dreams, reflecting along all the while on her many past adventures—floating down the Yukon River, getting high as a kite in Sumatra, almost drowning in a boat off Indonesia, attempting to teach English in Seoul, Korea. As these memories intertwine with her road trip adventures of the moment—washing her hair in a casino bathroom in Vegas, almost breaking down in the middle of the Nevada desert—she keeps asking herself why she’s still such a drifter, why she can’t just settle down and find a home for herself.
The antidote to her problems, she thinks, will be California, a place that holds a magnetic draw on her, the one place where she can picture herself settling down and staying. The way she writes about California would be reason enough to pick up the book. In California, she writes, “One afternoon you could be driving through a grove of redwoods and the same day pass beneath a canopy of eucalyptus trees and their cool menthol scent permeates the air along the winding road for miles. When you exit the canopy you may find yourself facing the intimate shock of the ocean, aquamarine, eternal and crashing, and you think you’ve arrived at the edge of your senses because here, after all the magnificent sites of the West, is finally the place where nature’s combination of land, sky, water, weather, vegetation and space is perfect. Egrets, pelicans, monarchs, coyotes and bobcats grace the land and sky while far off somewhere is always the sound of a lone seabird. In California, you always feel as if you’re meandering through a canyon deep in secrets of another life that could be yours.”
With that kind of love of the West, Gough should be reading Sunset Magazine.
And you should read Kiss the Sunset Pig.
