'A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow': An American Hitchhiking Odyssey [Hardcover]

Tim Brookes (Author)

Book Description

Series: Adventure Press | Publication Date: July 1, 2000

Tim Brookes was a 20-year-old Oxford student when he first succumbed to the lure of America's open road. Equipped with a change of clothes, a cheap guitar, and the youthful wanderlust of the "Easy Rider" era, he spent the summer of '73 hitchhiking from the East Coast to the West Coast and back again, an exhilarating experience that ultimately led him to leave old England to settle in New England. He's been here ever since.

Twenty-five years later, he hit the road again, traveling light and following his thumb in a free-form re-creation of his first cross-country trip. His friends told him that times had changed, that fear stalked America's highways now, and that the only drivers who'd pick him up were bound to be as crazy as he was to undertake such an odyssey. But his friends were wrong, as this vivid and eventful book makes colorfully clear. Highlighted by wonderful photographs, ""A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow"" revisits old stomping grounds and discovers new ones, tracks down old friends and makes new ones, remembers old impressions of America and deftly sketches new vignettes of a country at once very different and surprisingly the same.

In Manhattan, a rendezvous with an old girlfriend evokes all the changes wrought by a quarter-century of passing time, but it's not long before the seventies spring back to life in Sausalito when a hippie couple in a classic VW microbus pull over to offer Brookes a ride. He barrels across Nebraska with a gay trucker whose semi is linked by satellite to his home base a dozen states away, and blasts through the switchbacks of a mountain pass on a hair-raising ride in an ex-con's battered pickup. In Las Vegas he finds a neon-lit 24/7 timewarp, while only a few miles away a high-desert ghost town summons up another kind of timelessness. On a back road in Ohio, we meet a beautiful Amish girl driving a horse-drawn buggy to a birthday party; half a continent away, a leather-jacketed Harley chick, is one of 300,000 bikers who roar into a little South Dakota town every year for a week-long blast. And these are only a few of the American originals who populate a book that captures all the spontaneous serendipity of the hitchhiker's vagabond life.

Keenly observed, entertaining, and eloquent, ""A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow"" weaves past and present into a unique, ever-changing tapestry of intertwined roads and lives.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

The somewhat offputting title refers to the three-month journey Brookes made across America in 1973 at the age of 20. Describing how he traveled from east to west, touching into Canada and then returning home, the author offers a valid perspective on what has changed over 25 years. A professor, essayist on National Public Radio, and author (e.g., Catching My Breath: An Asthmatic Explores His Illness), Brookes is more than qualified to write an account of this sort. However, he lacks the vital art of sharing his emotions and capturing and entertaining the reader so skillfully demonstrated by the likes of Dervla Murphy, Tim Cahill, and Bill Bryson. Since this is a National Geographic title, one expects high-caliber, exciting, and engaging writing. What one gets instead is rather disappointing; there is an underlying sense that this book is the completion of an assignment rather than a work of passion. An optional purchase.AJo-Anne Mary Benson, Osgoode, Ont.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

In 1973, Brookes, then a British student, spent three months hitchhiking across America, dazzled by a girl from Iowa he had met at Oxford. In 1998, Brookes, now a writer, teacher, and longtime Vermonter, decides to re-create that experience and hitchhike to the same places again. He's not crazy: he periodically takes trains or buses and carries a cell phone in his daughter's sock. He tracks a few of the people and most of the places he encountered the first time, but this is no self-referential wallowing. He's not interested in reliving the past but in illuminating the present, and he carries both a cheerful lack of anxiety and a disarming lack of pretense. In crisp, short chapters, he recounts conversations with the folks who pick him up and his responses to the places he goes: a gospel church in San Francisco; a previous wife in Seattle; a desolate reservation in South Dakota. He finds kindness and gratitude, and he clearly has those within himself as well. GraceAnne A. DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: National Geographic (July 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0792276833
• ISBN-13: 978-0792276838
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,749,931 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born in London, England, to poor but honest parents who loved going for long walks, preferably in the rain. After discovering at college that I liked not only pickled onions but even Marmite, I knew it was time to leave while I still could. I have lived in Vermont since 1980, though to be honest I did start a cricket club.
I'm the director of the Professional Writing Program at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, a longtime essayist for National Public Radio and the author of all kinds of things, some of which show up elsewhere on Amazon.
The serious part of me founded Writers Without Borders, a non-profit dedicated to teaching writing skills to public health workers in the developing world. The ambitious part of me created the Champlain College Publishing Initiative, a project to engage undergraduates in the process of publishing in the twenty-first century. The active part of me plays a lot of soccer, though nowadays this involves standing in goal and letting the ball bounce off me. I have a wife I love and admire, and two wonderful children. Can't ask for more than that, really.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Quite entertaining!, August 4, 2000

By 

sally barry - See all my reviews

This review is from: 'A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow': An American Hitchhiking Odyssey (Hardcover)

I brought this book with me on a long car trip and found it ideal reading, and very interesting and well-written. The author hitchhikes (mostly) across the U.S.A. after doing same some 20 years ago in his hippie days. He has some anxiety but finds his fears overblown. (Truthfully, this kind of book really, really, really makes one want to chuck everything, the house, the mate, the kids, the job, and just hit the open road. I mean this.) He meets kind and interesting people, too. I would compare this book to the writings of Bill Bryson, though without Bryson's humor. I only wish the book was longer!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Affectionately scratches America's seedy underbelly, September 8, 2005

By 

Matt Hetling "Matt" (Bethel, ME USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 'A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow': An American Hitchhiking Odyssey (Hardcover)

Tim Brookes embarks on a hitchiking odyssey across the United States, and his varied and colorful experiences result in much introspection on himself and America.

There are some elements to the circumstances that limit our ability to immerse ourselves in his experience, but it stands as an interesting portrait of the US.

Brookes is at his best when he is introducing us to some random Samaritan; we meet dozens of characters and they are all interesting without embellishment. For this, I credit Brookes' ability to find the human story that makes each individual someone who merits out feelings and car. The quirky jobs, personalities, and circumstances of each teach us about the odd tapestry that makes up our country.

We also get to see some interesting places through a drifter's eyes, and Brookes displays a capacity to find the interesting details about a place and relate them to us in an entertaining manner.

That credit being given, this isn't one of my favorite books of this type, for several reasons. For one, Brookes is too self-aware to give us information about himself without it being wrapped in layers of filtration. He attempts to give us an honest picture of himself, but his overthought self-analysis just makes that impossible. And unfortunately ,he engages in self-analysis fairly often, and every time he does the book lags.

There's also the fact that Brookes embarked on this adventure specifically for the purpose of chronicling it, and this takes away from the authentic experience that Brookes is trying to have. Most hitchhikers have a purpose-- they are going somewhere, or they are running away from something, or both. They have limited resources that prevent them from taking a more conventional means of travel. They tend to lack the sophistication that Brookes does.

For Brookes, the purpose is the journey itself. At any time, he can pull the plug or access financial resources to solve an emergency. He also has colleagues, a clean rap sheet, and people skills that empower him in a way that the average drifter could only dream of. In short, Brookes is performing with a net, and it does take away from the thrill of the experience.

As a result, some of the sequences have a flavor reminiscent of a reality television show.

These critcisms aside, this is a book worth reading. It's nice to see that, once again, the idea of hitchiking as a necessarily dangerous activity has been debunked.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Slow to Start - Difficult to Finish, January 3, 2003

By 

"wheelerjc" (Northeast Ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 'A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow': An American Hitchhiking Odyssey (Paperback)

I thought this book was about a hitchhiking experience, but was suprised to find the author taking buses or riding with his photographer from New York City into PA, then from Ohio well into Wyoming. I found his writing style to be rambling and uninteresting, and was unable to keep reading after 100 pages or so. Had he truly hitchhiked, and kept to stories about hitchhiking, he probably would have written a great book.