Braving Home: Dispatches from the Underwater Town, the Lava-Side Inn, and Other Extreme Locales [Unknown Binding]

Jake Halpern (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2003

Funny, moving, and utterly unique, Braving Home introduces us to five unforgettable modern American pioneers. When Jake Halpern was a cub reporter, he became obsessed with stories about "some outlandish and often hellish place inhabited by a handful of stalwarts who refused to leave." His fellow reporters joked with him and nicknamed him the Bad Homes Correspondent. But the more he learned about these people, the more he was drawn to them.
Determined to understand their fierce devotion to home, Halpern set off on a journey to five of the most punishing towns in America. Braving Home is his irresistible portrait of these hometowns and his friendships with their most loyal residents. In North Carolina, he meets a retired mill worker who single-handedly manned his hometown in the wake of a devastating flood. In Alaska, Halpern works for a spunky woman who runs a video store/tanning salon and delivers newspapers to an "indoor town" – a lone snowbound high-rise at the foot of a glacier. At the base of a Hawaiian volcano, he stays with a hermit whose house, formally an inn, was surrounded by molten lava. In Malibu, nestled among the glitterati, a longtime "hillbilly" teaches him the traditions of firefighting. Finally, on a barrier island off the coast of Louisiana, a legendary storm rider tells of surviving hurricanes – even if it means tying one's hair to a tree.
Throughout his journey, Halpern explores the value of rootedness in an age when American society is more mobile than ever. Along the way, he discovers why no amount of floods, lava, wind, fire, or hurricanes can tug these unforgettable people from their roots.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

As a cub reporter at The New Republic, Jake Halpern earned the unofficial job title of Bad Homes Correspondent. Braving Home tells his stories of places where people really ought not live and the people who live there anyway. Halpern traveled to such inadvisable destinations as a bed and breakfast at the foot of an active Hawaiian volcano, a North Carolina town trying to recover from being completely submerged, an indoor Alaskan city, and an island in the Gulf of Mexico located directly in the cross hairs of numerous hurricanes. And while the places themselves make for interesting historical lore, the people who choose to stay and make their homes there form the real heart of the story. The doomed, it seems, get few visitors but have plenty of time on their hands. So Halpern goes out to meet them, crashes on their couches or guest beds and hangs out for a few days forming a one-man tourist industry. Far from being the kooks one might expect, Halpern's subjects come across as normal folks, though significantly more resilient than most, who stay in their homes simply because, well, those are their homes. Halpern himself figures prominently in most of the stories and at times it seems like the young man is spending too much time navel gazing. But on each of the book's five adventures, Halpern goes from wide-eyed visitor to welcome member of the community and in so doing demonstrates how, once you get used to it, any place can feel like home. Even if that it's surrounded by molten lava. --John Moe

From Publishers Weekly

Halpern tours America's highways to report on stubborn stalwarts who defy eviction notices and cling to home despite floods, lava, fire and hurricanes. "Most of my destinations were afflicted by seasonal disasters, and I figured... I could hit each place in its fiercest, most defining hour." In Halpern's first week as a New Republic fact-checker, he pitched a story about "a burning town that nobody wanted to leave" and visited Centralia, Pa., where coal mines had been on fire for 40 years. Looking for similar leads, the peripatetic 20-something assembled article ideas and maps into a massive binder and left his job to embark on a journey to "the nation's most punishing landscapes." After a week with 72-year-old Thad Knight, the only inhabitant of a ruined town in the middle of a North Carolina floodplain, Halpern headed for Whittier, Alaska (pop. 182), a 14-story "indoor city" accessible via North America's longest vehicular tunnel. Running a Hawaiian bed and breakfast surrounded by molten lava is healthy hermit Jack Thompson: "I never imagined I was going to end up like this-I mean, living on an erupting volcano." The roll call of rugged individualists includes "the last of the Malibu hillbillies" and a Louisiana hurricane survivor. Halpern's flair for description enables readers to easily visualize the environs of these hardscrabble homekeepers, making the 12 b&w photos almost superfluous. Halpern has carved a creative niche for himself as the New Millennium's skewed answer to the late Charles Kuralt. This is perceptive writing that illuminates the human condition.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Unknown Binding: 256 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (July 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618155481
• ISBN-13: 978-0618155484
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,563,412 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

When I was twenty years old, I took some time off from college and moved to Prague. It was the sort of inspired, half-baked decision that you can only make when you are twenty and clueless. A few weeks into my stay in Prague, I found an apartment and settled into a routine of doing very little ' wandering around the city, reading, and living off the money I'd saved. Almost immediately I sensed that it was a special time to be living there. This was back in 1995, and the city was teaming with artists, expatriates and lingering tourists, living in two-dollar-a-night hostels. Everyone there was writing a novel, or a play, or at least some essays. The apartment that I took over ' a drafty subterranean vault beneath a neighborhood pub ' had been the home of a long string of expatriated Americans before me, and the closets were filled with an array of dusty, discarded and abandoned manuscripts, most of them uncompleted.

Eventually, I got swept up in the bohemian spirit of it all and set to work on piece of writing of my own, a screenplay to be precise. The screenplay, which was called the Papaya Trap, was about a con artist who falls in love with a beautiful one-armed girl.

The truly transformative event of my time in Prague, however, was my decision to investigate my family's roots in this part of the world. I knew that some of my ancestors had once lived in Prague, and on a whim I telephoned my great-uncle (Joe Garray) in America, and asked him if we had any relatives who were still here. "No they all perished in the holocaust," he said. But I kept pushing him and eventually he told me that the man who saved him from the Germans still lived in a farm house in Slovakia at the edge of the Tatra Mountains. A week later I took a commuter plane to Bratislava and then a train to the small town where this man lived.

I showed up at his door after sundown and he came to the gate cautiously, leaning heavily on a wooden cane, face trembling and bald except for a few long loops of white hairs, his feet engulfed in a swarm of mutts who guarded his every step. After trying to explain who I was for almost five minutes, he led me through the back door and into his kitchen. It was bare room, illuminated in dingy fluorescent light, occupied only by a few stools, a couch covered in dog hairs, and a hissing radiator. Here he told me about hiding my uncle and their numerous close calls with the Slovak Gestapo. When the situation at the farmhouse became too heated, they fled to the mountains in the cold of winter and lived like hermits for six months. More than anything else this story convinced me that I wanted to dedicate my life to becoming a professional storyteller.

After college, I landed an internship at The New Republic. My chief responsibility at the magazine was researching and fact-checking. I spent hours, days, and weeks looking for correct spellings and exact dates. Being a quick fact-checker was always a point of pride among the office grunts like myself, and though it was an obscure and largely useless skill, I found it quite helpful in tracking down information on dangerous and outlandish towns. On my lunch breaks and in between assignments I searched for clues, and gradually I found them ' reports of holdouts living on lava fields, windswept sandbars, and desolate arctic glaciers. I spent Sunday afternoons combing the web with a smattering of search terms like 'squatter,' 'won't leave home,' and 'people call him crazy.' I became friendly with the press office at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and I pumped them for ideas. It turned into something of a hobby.

Eventually, the short magazine pieces that I wrote on people and their homes attracted the interest of a literary agent who convinced me to write a book, which I then did. This book ' Braving Home (Houghton Mifflin, 2003) ' allowed me to quit my job and become a fulltime, self-employed writer.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Home, Dangerous Home, August 18, 2003

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Braving Home: Dispatches from the Underwater Town, the Lava-Side Inn, and Other Extreme Locales

There is no place like home. And you can be thankful that you have no place like the homes Jake Halpern has visited. He somehow became the "Bad Homes Correspondent" at the _New Republic_. He kept writing stories about towns being eaten by sinkholes, homes built over burning coal mines, homes where "Welcome Home" would have had a touch of sarcasm to it. In _Braving Home: Dispatches from the Underwater Town, the Lava-Side Inn, and Other Extreme Locales_ (Houghton Mifflin), the intrepid Halpern goes to live in five unpromising homes. He is in quest of the answer to why people would voluntarily take and keep homes in hellish or threatening areas. He does not find profound answers; they like their homes because these are their homes. He does, however, introduce us to some funny and strange characters, and shows us how they make themselves improbably at home.

Princeville, North Carolina is a town inundated by Hurricane Floyd, but Thad Knight came back to his ruined home, and other citizens returned. Whittier, Alaska, is a peculiar town that consists essentially of one 14-story high rise, and about 200 people live there. They stay inside a lot of the time, because the temperatures are frigid and the winds are killers. To get to it, you have to drive through a tunnel over two miles long. Millie Decker is 82 years old, a former rodeo rider, and has an address that would be coveted by Hollywood hopefuls, in Malibu. She has not abandoned it for any of the infamous fires that regularly come her way, fighting each one by wet gunnysacks. Ambrose Besson is a Storm Rider on Grand Isle, Louisiana. Others take the bridge to the mainland, but he stays home and cooks with his fellow storm riders. Jack Thompson will book you a spell in his bed and breakfast in Hawaii. Of course, you have to trek across a live lava field to get to Jack's; "... there is always the possibility of taking a bad step and falling downward into an active lava tube." The lava is all around and may well take Jack's house someday.

There isn't much they can really do by staying. It does not make much sense, to others, but of course it doesn't have to. In the epilogue of the book, Halpern goes back to these strange friends he has made, and tells them about each other, and finds that they easily sympathize with their fellows in the book. Jack, for instance, upon being told about Thad Knight, says, "It just sounds like another person who really likes his home and is willing to put up with whatever might come along with it." Most people are interested in conventionally making home life bigger and easier and inevitably more expensive and complicated. Read this amusing book about these mild kooks and realize that not all of them live in dangerous homes.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Life on the Edge, September 30, 2003

By 

J. Charles Hansen (San Jose, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Braving Home: Dispatches from the Underwater Town, the Lava-Side Inn, and Other Extreme Locales

I heard Jake Halpern interviewed on NPR and had to buy the book. He's fascinated with far away places, and the people who live there. He answers the question I think we've all had when traveling "who lives here, why, and what are they like?"

Halpern takes on his journey from one edge of America to the other visiting small communities at the edge of civilization. We get to know the people who live in relative danger and seclusion.

What I found interesting was that many of the folks he brings us along to meet are more afraid of living in cities than staying in the extreme locations where they've been for years. Their feeling of stability living in an outwardly unstable environment tells us something about the power of home, the power of place in our lives.

Halpern has an easy, flowing writing style that doesn't get in the way of the story and is very readable.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and read it quickly. It's been a couple of months now since I finished, and I've found myself thinking back often to the people I met through Halpern, unique people living in unique locations.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Splendid, June 19, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Braving Home: Dispatches from the Underwater Town, the Lava-Side Inn, and Other Extreme Locales

This book is a great combination of local history, folklore, and tales of individuals who fight and win daily battles against mother nature. The strength of the book lies in the character development that takes place in each chapter. Halpern's first person narrative allows you to participate in the struggle's of the protagonists.