Travelogues that stir our desire to trek

By Mary Schmich | Chicago Tribune Columnist

Other people's travels can be like other people's sex lives or digestive woes: Spare us the details.

Brian Bouldrey, who teaches writing at Northwestern University, understands the problem.

"Oh, let's face it: we hate travelers," he writes in "Honorable Bandit," his entertaining book on traipsing across the French island of Corsica.

"They slip out of all life's responsibilities. They send you postcards of the sandiest beach under the bluest sky, they bring home useless trinkets that will never fit around your wrists, they are gone, and have taken your heart with them, and if they come home, they are jetlagged and complain about how they are simply exhausted and what a drag it is to be here, back at work, back with responsibilities, back with you, you loser."

Let's do face it: We don't want to hear just any old tourist's travel tales.

But most of us yearn to travel, and we're drawn to the kind of storytelling wanderers who can make us feel we've been somewhere or who inspire us to go.

Bouldrey does that in "Honorable Bandit."

So does Erin Hogan in "Spiral Jetta" and Mary Morris in "The River Queen."

The typical tourist tries to minimize the pain of traveling, but trouble lies at the heart of the best travel tales, whether it's trouble encountered along the way, trouble packed in the emotional bags and lugged through the miles, or both. The best travel is also a head trip.

An early midlife crisis set Hogan, public relations director at the Art Institute of Chicago, on her trip through the American West.

"I have an urban haircut -- very short, trimmed every four weeks," she writes.

"I have an urban wardrobe -- mostly black and gray suits, accented by black and gray shirts, worn invariably with black high heels (a futile attempt to enhance my five-foot stature). I have urban eyewear -- titanium-framed glasses designed by a German. I enjoy the energy and movement of cities, the sense of being part of a larger whole of people and stories and sights and lights."

And yet, she sensed that there must be more to life than meetings, e-mails and cocktails after work, so she gassed up her VW Jetta and hit the road, alone, in search of "land art."

If you don't know what "land art" is, don't worry. I didn't. I loved finding out.

Before Mary Morris' parents raised their family on Chicago's North Shore, her father worked in Hannibal, Mo., and Morris grew up listening to his stories of life along the Mississippi.

In "The River Queen," she recounts how after her father's death she took to popping "Zoloft to make me happy, Ativan to calm me down, Ambien to make me sleep." She went to the river to recover.

On an old houseboat, piloted by guys named Tom and Jerry, she set off to float all the way from Wisconsin to New Orleans.

John Gardner, one of Morris' teachers, once told her that all plots could be boiled down to two: "You go on a journey or the stranger comes to town."

And all journeys start out as mystery stories.