Pilgrimage on a Steel Ride

Ilene Cooper

Paulsen is best known for his young adult fiction, survival stories mainly. Now he tells one of his own. A young boy during World War II, Paulsen was seven before he met his father, who was off fighting. The intervening years were spent with his mother--a kind, good, but lonely woman who frequently sought the company of men, much to Paulsen's unease. Life changed radically for the boy when he and his mother joined his father in the Philippines. Everything was new: the surroundings, his family, even the air felt different. But the change was not necessarily for the better. Alcohol ran his parents' lives, and young Gary was left in the hands of servants. The male servant led him into danger, and the female servant introduced him to sex. Paulsen's writing style is elemental and matter-of-fact, and its simplicity draws readers in. The ingenuous tone is probably a necessity considering the horrors being described: a plane crashing into the ocean, its passengers providing a feast for the sharks; Paulsen's visit to a cave where "body rats" as big as dogs scurry over what used to be people. We take the author at his word as he chronicles this cavalcade of horrors, yet one aspect of his approach gives pause: he seems to remember every single thing that happened to him between the ages of four and nine. All writers, particularly autobiographers, must be allowed license where the nuances of memory are concerned, but Paulsen's seeming ability to recall even the smallest of details eventually becomes an intrusion, making us question where memory stops and imagination begins. Still, this is powerful stuff, a life story so vividly told that you feel like you've watched it happen, rather than just read about it.

Kirkus Reviews

Lyrical and pleasing reflections on machinery, midlife crisis, and sundry other matters. Not long ago Paulsen, a Newbury Honor author of books for children, as well as books for adults (Eastern Sun, Western Moon, 1993, etc.), turned 57 and discovered he had a heart ailment. He also discovered, he writes, that he is a man, in a time when it has become anachronistic to be masculine. To avert the horror of growing old, cuddly, and debilitated, Paulsen went out and bought a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, shopping for which turned out to be a challenge—for a new bike, he learned, he'd have to pay a small fortune and then wait three years for delivery. Arming himself with a used machine, he took to the road, making his way from New Mexico to Alaska and back again, celebrating the freedom afforded him by the Harley-as-extension-of-self. The book that resulted from his trip is really a series of loosely connected essays. One treats the curious career of George Armstrong Custer, whom Paulsen seems intent on rehabilitating. Writing in a Hemingwayesque turn, he takes the line that, while it is politically incorrect to express respect for the doomed general, it is difficult not to admire his courage, and in the end it could be said that he was given his measure of fame—which is more than most men are given. Another essay explores the American worship of know-how, the almost religious aspect of being a mechanic that does not seem to exist in other countries. Still another deals with the myriad ways there are to meet one's maker on the back of a motorcycle, crushed by an errant piece of livestock or splattered by a road-hogging RV. These meditations don't quite add up to a full-tilt memoir, butthey make a nice entertainment all the same.