Catherine Watson: “Roads Less Traveled”

Travel Interviews: Michael Yessis talks with the pioneering editor and writer about serendipity, travel as education and why travelers should talk to everyone they can, especially the quiet people

12.15.05 | 10:17 PM ET

imagePhoto of Catherine Watson courtesy of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

When the publishers of Minneapolis Star Tribune decided to launch a stand-alone travel section in 1978, they chose Catherine Watson to be its editor. Her bosses, she recalls, were “kind and tolerant,” and they gave Watson breathing room to develop one of the stronger newspaper travel sections in the U.S. Her own writing was a big part of the section’s success. She has won the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalist of the Year award, writing first-person narratives that transcended the usual I-went-there-and-saw-this conventions of most newspaper travel stories. 

She retired from the paper in 2004 to write a book-length travel narrative, but put it on hold last year to work on a different book, the recently published Roads Less Traveled: Dispatches from the Ends of The Earth. “Roads” collects stories she wrote for the Star Tribune, a compelling mix that spans all seven continents. Watson and I recently traded e-mails. 

World Hum: You wrote more than 1,000 columns for the Star Tribune and 40 made the cut for “Roads Less Traveled.” What were you looking for in the selections?
I chose them for several reasons, which all came out of my belief that travel—and therefore travel writing—can help connect people. 
When I was an exchange student in Germany in high school, I lived in a boarding school called the Odenwaldschule, near Heidelberg. Thankfully, I never forgot the program’s founding premise: that you can’t make war on friends, and travel is the best way to make international friends. So the likelihood of peace goes up when people connect across cultures.
Ever after, I have tried to go beneath the surface of a place or experience—to the culture, the people and the personal emotions they inspire, to serendipities and, sometimes, to epiphanies of personal or spiritual growth.
All that is travel for me, and I wanted to give as much of this as I could to my readers. I wanted them to feel that they had gone along with me—had shared the experience—had felt as if they were there, too.
Readers will follow a personal tale. Without that, you’ve got guidebook writing, and we all know how dry that usually is. So I wrote in first-person, to make the experience more vivid—while trying not to write “about me.” I have always felt that I was just the guide, not the hero. That I was traveling not for myself, but as the readers’ eyes and ears. On their behalf, in other words.
For the book, I chose pieces I thought best did that—about 150 of them, actually—and cut that number down to 40 based on variety of length, tone, type of experience and place. It felt the way I imagine playing 3-D chess would. 

How would you characterize your own travel philosophy?
Go everywhere you can.

Be passionately curious. 

Talk to everyone who’ll let you, especially the quiet people.

Stay till the bitter end. If the ceremonial lasts all day, so do you—you never know what’ll happen at the end.

Be able to turn on a dime. Throw out your itinerary if something better comes along, and it always will.
Don’t sweat the small stuff—or the bad beds, or the bed bugs, or the wet shoes or whatever. The discomforts will pass, the shoes will dry, and the memories will last.
And maybe more than anything: Commit to the trip. Commit to the moment. Really be there.

You write in the book’s introduction that your parents “believed in travel.” What did they believe it could do?
They believed more than anything in education. And travel was a kind of education. They also tried to support any intellectual interest my four younger siblings and I had, and that showed in how we traveled as a family.
We made long camping trips every summer for about 15 years, ranging all over North America—from the Arctic Circle to the Guatemalan border. These were classic American car trips—but they all had some deeper angle, especially historical.
My brother Steve was interested in the Civil War, for example, so one summer we went to every major Civil War battlefield from Manassas to Gettysburg. I’d always wanted to be an archaeologist, and one year we went to the Yucatan, on a pilgrimage to Mayan ruins.
We kids were required—I mean that literally—to be interested in whatever we were seeing or doing. We were allowed to read our own books in the car—it reduced the number of slug-fests about who got to sit where—and my folks brought guidebooks and history books along. At key points, one kid was always designated the reader, sitting in the middle of the station wagon and reading aloud to the rest of us about the place we were heading.

Sounds tough on a kid.
My family wasn’t idyllic, by any means—that’s one of the reasons I wanted to travel and from a very early age. But I give my parents huge credit for lugging us around the continent and insisting that we get out of the car and really look.
They modeled good travel preparation too: Before we drove to Mexico the first time, they both took two years of Spanish in night school, so they could take us off the beaten track and stay in what were then pretty remote places. They’d send us out into the markets to buy groceries, two or three of us together, like teams. And the Mexican people we met were wonderful to us.
So you’ve been traveling consistently for more than four decades now. Does travel still excite you?

I was 16 when I went to Germany—first time out of the country—and everything I saw was new to me and therefore wonderful. Since then, I’ve been in more than 100 countries (107, so far), but I still get an “oh wow!” feeling when I’m someplace I haven’t been. The world remains a big place, with infinite possibilities for first-time views and experiences, and I am infinitely grateful for that.
Back to “Roads Less Traveled.” Are there any stories in the book that are particularly special to you?
image“Epiphany in Sun and Smoke” (Dubrovnik) because that was where I worked through my worst demon: fear. I wrote about it because I thought it would benefit readers, who might be struggling with their own demons at home.
“To the Top of Africa” (Kilimanjaro) because that was where I learned to be satisfied. 
“The Taj Mahal” because that was my first truly “travel” story—written five years before we had a travel section. I wrote it for Picture magazine, the Star Tribune’s own Sunday supplement, when I was the magazine’s editor.
My favorite, though, is Incident in a Spanish Church. That’s partly because I loved the context—I loved the Camino de Santiago and hope to get back and walk all of that pilgrim’s road some day. But mostly it’s because that moment was as sweet and pure and strangely intimate as any encounter I’ve ever had. It was two years before I saw it as something to write publicly about.

Why did you feel you couldn’t write about it immediately?
It just didn’t occur to me. I’d already written a long piece about the whole Camino de Santiago pilgrimage for the Star Tribune—a big spread with lots of pictures that was picked up by papers around the country. The few moments in the church seemed too small and fragile—and personal—for a newspaper story. I didn’t write it until I was on a summer’s leave of absence and the memory floated into my mind again.
The stories in the book are filled with people and, as you mention above, the destination is secondary to your personal journey. I don’t see much of this kind of writing in newspaper travel sections these days. How were you consistently able to write stories in your section that get beyond service information?
I had good and tolerant bosses when I was figuring out how to do this kind of writing. I designed the section and its content, when my newspaper decided to start it in 1978, and there weren’t any models in newspapers for the kind of writing I ended up doing.

At first I wrote third-person—I was trained as a journalist and had by then been one for 12 years. At best, I dared to write second-person—“you go around a corner and you see…” It wasn’t much better than guidebook writing.
I began to write more personally because of questions from readers. Like this one, from my first year as editor: “You know that story yesterday? Were you there?” The guy who asked that actually wanted more information—he sincerely couldn’t tell if I had been there. So I changed. I thought I was inventing a new form of journalism, and it felt incredibly risky at first. Then it got comfortable.
I also realized, early on, that I couldn’t possibly generalize even about a small town, let alone a city or a country. But I could be completely honest, factual and credible if I stuck to my own small path and wrote about what happened on it. 
What do you think of the state of newspaper travel sections today? Do you think they have a future in the age of the Internet? 
The real issue, of course, is whether newspapers themselves have a future and what kind it will be. I think that they will continue for a long while, for the simple reason that it’s easier to walk around the house carrying a newspaper room to room than carrying a laptop.
But that doesn’t mean newspapers aren’t in turmoil now (near panic, in some cases), trying to figure out how to get from here to there when more and more people get their news online—this nice future where we have all kinds of information delivery systems coexisting. It’s usually talked about as “attracting younger readers,” but nobody’s sure how to do it.
Newspapers are being redesigned all over the country—the Star Tribune just went through a massive change that debuted in mid-October and is still controversial in the community and in the newsroom. The goal, of course, was a good one: to make the paper more readable and useful to readers. The final word isn’t in on that.
But the result, and this is true at many papers, is that there just isn’t as much room for long, literary narratives as there used to be. So while travel sections everywhere continue to try to serve readers, their space is tight, and that means shorter stories. It kind of precludes the armchair travel that I think a lot of readers like.

We like to think readers like that, too.

Another fact of life is that top editors are usually people whose main interest is managing. Travel editors and travel writers are—or ought to be—people whose main interest is traveling.
None of my managers were big travelers. Even the ones that liked traveling didn’t have time to do it. The good ones trusted me to decide on destinations that would interest our traveling readers. The bad ones wanted to dictate travel-section content without being able to identify with the people it was for. One manager actually said that we were a regional paper, so why would our readers want to read about places outside the region? Only a non-traveler could say something like that.
I think this has been a very long way to say newspaper travel sections across the country would be incredibly better if they got even a fraction of the staff and money that now go to sports sections. Trying to put out a good travel section with insufficient funds, staff, time and news hole is an exhausting and frustrating exercise. I think it’s amazing that they are as good as they are.

Who are some of your favorite travel writers?
I have a six-page booklist that I use when I teach travel-writing workshops. I’ll spare you the whole thing. Among my favorites:
For youthful inspiration: Richard Halliburton, who began his career in the 1920s with “The Royal Road to Romance” and basically popularized travel for average Americans. Up till then, it had really been the province of the rich. My folks loved him and gave me a copy of that book when I was 16, so I loved him too.
For the quintessential train journey: Paul Theroux’s “Great Railway Bazaar,” a true classic.
imageFor writing style: Bruce Chatwin, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Ernest Hemingway (“A Moveable Feast” is, I think, one of the best Paris memoirs ever), among many.
For incredibly interesting rides: Tony Horwitz for “Blue Latitudes” and especially “Confederates in the Attic”; Gretel Ehrlich in “This Cold Heaven” about Greenland; Ian Frazier, especially in “The Great Plains”; Alexandra Fuller, for “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight”; anything by Pico Iyer.
And in a new, weird, hybrid category that blends travel/memoir/history/anthropology—“Theatre of Fish,” by John Gimlette, an exquisitely written book about Newfoundland and Labrador. I like Newfoundland and want to go to Labrador, but even if they turn you off, the book is worth reading just for the magnificent way it’s written.
Two more odd but compelling ones—Julia Blackburn’s “The Emperor’s Last Island,” which interweaves Napoleon’s last years on St. Helena with the author’s own trip there; and “Sea Change” by Peter Nichols, which interweaves his estranged wife’s journals from past sailing trips with his breathless, present-tense account of sailing their boat back to England as it gradually sinks into the Atlantic.

What’s next for you? Any plans to write that long travel narrative?

Yes. The Other Book, as I now think of it, still hangs over my head. I know I have to rewrite it, and last winter, with no trips planned, the task was depressingly heavy. This winter, I’ve scheduled a month in Central America so I won’t go nuts on the Minnesota tundra, and the rewriting seems more do-able.
It’s going to be a historical travel memoir—if there is such a thing—about 18th century England. I originally approached it as a history or a piece of straight journalism, but it turned out dull. So I have to rewrite it as what it is: a personal journey. Nobody but me was interested in the subject, but if I write it as a travel memoir—I mean, in my own voice—I hope they will be.

Tags: Journalism, Lowell Thomas Award, Travel Writing, North America, United States, Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul


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