Description
Russia is the hugest country on Earth. It is also the deepest-scar tissue thatched so thick over the land that no ordinary traveler can see underneath. On a bike, you slip quietly beneath the skin of a country.
They were seven, three Americans and four Soviets, four men and three women, setting off from the Sea of Japan in June. Within three weeks, just north of Manchuria, the one road that crosses the Soviet Union vanished. They spent a month in an eight-hundred-mile swamp riding game trails, village to lost village. Beyond the swamp was mysterious Lake Baikal, then rutted dirt roads for thousands of miles. They lived on potatoes, milk, and blocks of bread. They camped. Beyond the dirt roads, far across the West Siberian Plain, were the Ural Mountains, then Moscow. On a cold day at the end of October, after riding seven thousand miles, they slid into Leningrad.
Off the Map is a book about this astonishing journey through the landscape of ordinary Russians. A glimpse at the underbelly of Siberia.
There was the KGB agent who cornered the author in a bathroom with walls smeared with human excrement: “There is no road. You cannot go where there is no road:” And the Soviet boy-soldier screaming from the back of the truck: “Sir. Sir! It is not what we have that they do not want you to see. They do not want you to see what we do not have:”
There was the young schoolteacher, her face stricken, her voice falling: “Abortion. Abortion is the only form of birth control. And sterilization.” And the tour guide with too much makeup winking and saying: “You think you have been thinking but you have not. You should know this now: Communism is a religion, not a government.”
Mud villages and cabbage soup and lust. Rain and wind. Birch forests and brown rivers and existential horror. A Lithuanian searching for the concentration camp where his wife spent her childhood. The babushka who sings with the voice of a child. The widow who makes the author sleep in her dead son’s bed.
This book is a Matrioshka doll, stories inside stories. The bicycle a metaphor, the land a parable, hope hidden behind hurt faces.
jhm –
“A literary epic.”
–USA Today
“The ornery, observant Jenkins [is] good company on every page.”
–Newsweek
“Jenkins is a master of the fundamental writer’s talent: an ability to see things in new ways, as no one has ever seen them before.”
Robert Pirsig
Author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
jhm –
“What’s it like bicycling in a police state? In 1989, Jenkins found out by joining a team of three Americans and four Russians in the first expedition to cross Siberia by bicycle, via Vladivostok to Leningrad. Jenkins, the Rocky Mountain editor for Backpacker magazine and the field editor for Summit magazine, re-creates his excitement and trepidation over the sheer vastness of the task. The team slogs through an 800-mile swamp and climbs passes over the Ural mountains, enduring dirt roads, mud, and icy rain. While the Siberian journey is adventure reading par excellence, flashbacks celebrating the autonomy afforded kids on bikes are powerful stuff. Recommended for public libraries.”
–Library Journal
jhm –
“Feisty, sometimes brilliant first book about a journey across Siberia by bicycle. Jenkins, an editor for Backpacker and Summit, writes a leaping, impulsive prose that, for all its originality, should be whipped for its barbarisms: “He lived with his faraway eyes crumpled in a stickwood wheelchair holding him and his medals very still in his backyard with his rosebushes growing tall as trees.” In 1989, he tells us, he was invited to join three Americans (one a woman) and four Russians (two women) on “the last great ride” (Africa, South America, China, Europe, India, and Australia had already been done), 7,500 miles from Vladivostok to Leningrad–a journey to be filmed by Carl Jones, an American documentary filmmaker. Most of the team members were like Jenkins, born bikers obsessed with biking, often knocking off 90 miles a day through heavy weather. After the Americans met their Russian counterparts in Moscow, the team flew to Nekhoda, from where they would cross land twice the breadth of the US and go through seven time zones. At first the team was accompanied by a police car that tried to keep the Americans from observing the deprived lives of nearby Soviet citizens, but the bicyclists soon found themselves feted time and again by villagers following their progress on state-run TV. That Soviets live a hard life, with memories of Stalin hanging heavy, became clear to Jenkins; in fact, the Americans met Russians who had been jailed for five years for “capitalism” or for going into business on their own. Three of the fellow Russian bikers were not friendly and, tensions mounting, the team finally broke up on the last leg of its big ride. Mud, cabbages, sub-zero frigidity–altogether a super adventure that landed the team in the Guinness Book of World Records.”
–Kirkus Reviews