Travels with Douglas Coupland: Blogging Tales From the Road

Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 08.08.06 | 8:12 AM ET

It’s a shame the New York Times has posted Douglas Coupland’s Time Capsules blog in its pay-only section, TimesSelect. His documentation of, among other things, 15 years on the road as a Famous Author on Book Tour, deserves a much wider audience than I imagine it’s getting. It’s a highly-entertaining mix of photos, links, lists and Coupland’s insightful, pop-culture infused writing. And, as expected from the man who coined the term poverty jet set, he’s sharp and observant when it comes to travel, particularly the minutia of travel.

He writes in a post called Five Fun Secrets About Hotels:

Most hotels have an armoire-type thing where they stash the TV set. Next time you go into your hotel room, stand up on a chair and look on top of the armoire. When people are checking out of a room, it’s where they dump stuff they don’t want to take with them, but can’t throw away in case the maid finds it. Stuff that could get them arrested or cause them shame. Really harsh porn. Pot. Pills. Coins. Touristy things that people gave them that they don’t really want. It accumulates from one year to the next. In a Portland, Ore., hotel I once found a pile of Italian lire, three copies of Screw magazine and a $200 photography book inscribed, “To Dennis—without you I could never have conceived this book let alone have the courage to see it to its completion. I owe you everything, Diane.” The Dianes of this world usually get hosed, don’t they?

Coupland spells out his love for travel in the blog:

“It’s a cliché but it’s true—writing is a lonely, lonely job. Without readings I’d have no idea why I do what I do, and nor would I have seen the world. Readings have taken me everywhere and it’s been a treat, it really has.”

But that love isn’t really a surprise. The first pages of his first book Generation X introduced travel as a theme in his work. Like the best travel writers, he’s able to capture the tedium and moods and wonder of moving from place to place.

Generation X opens with this terrific passage:

Back in the late 1970s, when I was fifteen years old, I spent every penny I then had in the bank to fly across the continent in a 747 jet to Brandon, Manitoba, deep in the Canadian prairies, to witness a total eclipse of the sun. I must have made a strange sight at my young age, being pencil thin and practically albino, quietly checking into a TraveLodge motel to spend the night alone, happily watching snowy network television offerings and drinking glasses of water from glass tumblers that had been washed and rewrapped in paper sheaths so many times they looked like they had been sandpapered.

But the night soon ended, and come the morning of the eclipses, I eschewed tour buses and took civic bus transportation to the edge of town. Then I walked far down a dirt side road and into a farmer’s field—some sort of cereal that was chest high and corn green and rustled as its blades inflicted small paper burns on my skin as I walked through them. And in that field, when the appointed hour, minute, and second of the darkness came, I lay myself down on the ground, surrounded by the tall pithy grain stalks and the faint sound of insects, and held my breath, there experiencing a mood that I have never really been able to shake completely—a mood of darkness and inevitability and fascination—a mood that surely must have been held by most young people since the dawn of time as they have crooked their necks, stared at the heavens, and watched their sky go out.

I admit, I haven’t read all the later Coupland novels. Microserfs was my last. But I’ve become so enamored of his blog that over the weekend in Chicago I picked up his latest, JPod. I’m 70 pages in and so far there’s nothing explicitly about travel but he certainly can still capture a feeling. This one expresses exactly how it felt in the Windy City on a hot and sticky Saturday afternoon.

“I hate humidity,” says Ethan, the book’s main character. “Humidity feels like hundreds of strangers touching me.”

Exactly.

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