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Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover If a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences.
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2023
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Chapter 1 Let me begin with a parable. It comes from India. "The Blind Monks and the Elephant." It goes like this: There is a group of blind monks living on the edge of town. They have lived in their monastery for many years, passing the time in peace and prayer. Until one day, when a strange new animal is brought to the village. It is called an "elephant." Word of its arrival spreads to every house, and crowds form in the town square, day and night. The monks decide that they want to go experience this creature. They've never heard of such a thing, and they want to touch it. They hurry to the town square, where they hear the murmurs of a large crowd and a new sound, the grumble of an animal that must be very large. They make their way through the townspeople and now the monster's groans are very close. The first monk walks up and touches the left tusk, amazed at its size. Another feels the trunk, running his hands along the powerful snaking appendage. Another gently traces his fingers around the giant flapping ear. Another its leg. There are many people surrounding the elephant, touching it where they can. Before long, the monks' time is up. There is a line, of course, and a short man in uniform sends them on their way. The monks walk home stupefied, filled with the wonder of something bigger than their imagination. They are laughing and holding hands. They are electrified, talking fast and over each other. "What a wonder! A giant made entirely of bone!" "Bone? No, it was a leathery winged creature." "What are the two of you saying? It was a ten-foot-tall hairy snake!" To each monk's dismay, none of their stories align. "I know that it was bone, I touched it, and how can you say otherwise?" Something about the arguing makes the men double down on their memories, certain not only of their picture of the elephant, but that the others must be delusional. First they raise their voices, then they are shouting. "You're a liar!" "How dare you call me a liar!" And then fists are swinging. In many versions of the story, the community of monks falls apart and they go their separate ways. On January 1, 2003, I flipped my car. I was home from college, driving to my friend Adam's house on the morning of New Year's Day. You may guess that I was hungover. I was not. I was a good Christian boy who thought drinking was for losers. But I had stayed up late, drinking Martinelli's sparkling cider and playing Catch Phrase with my Christian friends. When I left my mom's house, it was perhaps 10 a.m., and it had just begun to rain. I heard somewhere that the road is slickest just as the rain begins, because the water lifts the accumulated soot and dirt off the asphalt, making it slippery. I was driving my mom's extra car, a Ford Explorer from the early nineties. The seat belts didn't latch. The tires were bald, as smooth as marble. But I didn't think about any of that. I was young, and I got in the car with no seat belts and bald tires because I wanted to hang out with my friends and play Nintendo 64. The drive was only a few miles, but it snaked through the hills south of Nashville. S-curved rivers of pavement connecting neighborhoods hidden in maple, buckeye, and oak. That morning, I was playing Tori Amos's "A Sorta Fairytale" loud and full in the doomed car. I remember being thrilled when she sang about driving "up on the 101," as I finally knew what that was, going to college in Los Angeles. On Granny White Pike, while navigating a curve that is now forever burned into my limbic system, I felt my car detach from the normal rules of physics. My stomach knew before my mind. I was floating, disconnected from the road, and rotating. Adrenaline tingled across my rib cage. The car spun counterclockwise, turning perpendicular to the lane I'd been driving in, at which point the tires found just enough purchase to launch the vehicle off the road. On both sides of the road were steep, upward sloping hills. My car jammed itself up the incline, crunching bushes like paper lanterns, and then barrel-rolled back down into the ditch. Remember, my seat belt didn't buckle, so as the vehicle began rolling, I was ripped from the driver's seat, my legs dragging across the gearshift like noodles. My head slammed into the passenger window, breaking it, then the car rolled again and I was flung to the driver's seat, breaking that window too. I remember the airbag coming out of the glove compartment very slowly, white powder everywhere as if a balloon of flour had popped. Then the car came to a stop in the muddy ditch, passenger window to the ground, and me somehow back on that side, crumpled like spilled spaghetti and my head in the mud. In the strange new stillness, Tori Amos was singing. "I'm so sad, like a good book I can't put this day back, it's a sorta fairytale . . ." I would've expected her voice to be crackly or distorted, like in a movie crash scene, but she sounded perfect. A win for Ford's stereo department. With my body scrunched in the passenger seat, my mind came back online. Wow. I think I'm OK. Am I in shock? I feel fine. Get up. I pushed a hand into the mud, folded my legs underneath me, and contorted myself upright. As I stood all the way up and popped my head out the driver's side window, I heard a man's voice yelling. "Don't move! Stay there!" He was walking my way from a station wagon with a woman and three kids inside. "I'm fine, I feel fine," I said. "OK, well, lie down!" he said as he reached me. As I finished crawling out the driver's window, I caught myself in the side-view mirror. I had blood all over my face. I guess enough adrenaline was running through me that I didn't feel shock at the sight of it. Just disconnected curiosity. I put my hand to my jaw and it felt fine, but then I touched my scalp and felt a hundred little bits of glass. When a windshield shatters, it's designed to break into tiny pieces so the shards don't stab us dead. The glass had made its home in my scalp, sending blood down my face like a Carrie reference. I remember thinking, No wonder this man is worried about me, I'm a horror movie. I assured him I was fine, and then I heard the sirens. That was fast, I thought. It may not have been fast, I'm not sure. Danger collapses time into soup. The man and the station wagon disappear from my memory here. I was surprised when a fire truck showed up. Why not an ambulance? But four or five firemen jumped out and ran over to me. They instructed me to lie on my back. "I'm fine," I said. "OK, let me check you," one of them said. I remember thinking he was tall and his arms were big, the muscles filling his sleeve to remove all creases. He took my foot and began squeezing me, every few inches, to see if I'd wince or if he could find a broken something. Even in my shock, I noticed how good it felt for this man to touch me. This little massage. Then I thought how pathetic it was to be thinking that, covered in blood next to a flipped, broken car. "Am I Wolverine? Am I invincible?" I joked as the firefighter felt my neck and head. "You must be," he said. He wasn't tender, just thorough. Which felt very masculine. Which made it more attractive. Just then my friend Kyle's face appeared over me like a terrorstruck angel. I hadn't realized we were sitting right in front of his house. Kyle had been driving home when he saw the overturned car, a car he knew to be mine. No one had ever looked at me with such horror and desperation, and I thought how nice it was that he cared that much about me. "Everything looks fine," the firefighter said. "Do you have someone you can call to come pick you up?" Kyle grabbed my shoulder. "How can I help? Do you want me to take you home?" "Oh I'm OK," I said. "I'll just call my mom, she'll come get me. She'll love saving the day." Kyle handed me his phone. It was hard to see the numbers. My vision was blurry. I dialed slowly. While the phone rang, I prepared myself to sound normal. I looked around at the scene, the Explorer on its side, the huge fire truck. I thought, Who called for this fire truck? "Hi, honey," she said, chipper and surprised that I'd called. "Mom, everything's OK, but--" Something shut off my words. That horrible effect of trying to speak with tears flooding your eyes. I floated above myself, embarrassed. You're fine. What are you losing it for? You're twenty-two years old. "Mom, I got in an accident," I said, my voice squeezed into the highest falsetto. "Can you come get me? I'm right by Kyle's house." "Oh honey, I'm getting in the car. Be right there." Her voice was sturdy and ready to problem-solve. Excerpted from Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover If a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences by Jedidiah Jenkins All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
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Trade Reviews
Library Journal Review
In the 1970s, Jenkins's parents walked from New Orleans to Oregon on foot; it became a famous story that was captured in various magazines, including National Geographic, and eventually in a book that sold more than 12 million copies. In 2020, Wilderness magazine executive editor Jenkins (Like Streams to the Ocean) endeavored to retrace his parents' steps on a road trip with his mother as a way to strengthen their relationship and to bridge a divide so commonly seen in modern America: the polar opposition on views of sexuality, contextualized against the backdrop of religion and politics. During the journey, Jenkins, a liberal gay man, and his mother, a conservative Christian woman, are able to find what many people struggle to achieve: a way to peacefully coexist. VERDICT Their path is not always easy, and some of their conversations are painfully raw, but through it all, their love and respect for each other shine brightly.--Katy Duperry
Publishers Weekly Review
Wilderness magazine editor Jenkins (To Shake the Sleeping Self) tackles his fraught relationship with his conservative mother in this affecting memoir. In the 1970s, Jenkins's parents, Peter and Barbara, who later divorced, became famous for walking across America and coauthoring a book about it. Clashes with Barbara over religion and politics impelled Jenkins, who is gay, to move from Nashville to L.A. in 2002 when he was 19; in his 30s, he came to fear that, if he continued seeing his mother just twice a year, he might only see her 12 more times before she died. After several planned vacations (including a Glenn Beck--led history cruise from Italy to Israel) were thwarted by the pandemic, Jenkins and his mother decided to retrace Barbara's cross-country walk in 2021. Along the way, they argued about homosexuality ("I think homosexuality... is a spiritual deception"), discussed Barbara and Peter's divorce, and confirmed that one thing mother and son did share is a fierce mutual love. Jenkins's vivid, admiring depiction of Barbara--a woman who loves God, her son, and true crime podcasts with near-equal passion--is wonderfully multidimensional, and his acceptance of their differences lends the memoir an air of maturity. The result is a moving ode to a complicated mother-son bond. Agent: Bryan Norman, Alive Literary. (Nov.)This review has been updated with further information.
Booklist Review
Before Jenkins was born, his parents became famous for walking 2,600 miles from New Orleans to Florence, Oregon, and writing a best-selling trilogy about the journey. Now, 40 years later, Jenkins, himself a writer (Like Streams to the Ocean, 2020), decides to take a trip with his mother to retrace her journey (by car). The result is this combination travel book and memoir of the author's metaphorical journey to understanding with his conservative, deeply religious mother about his sexual identity. While acknowledging her son is gay, she cannot approve of it due to her beliefs. This dramatic tension drives the narrative, leading Jenkins to finally ask THE question: if he were to marry (a man), would she come to the ceremony? Meanwhile, their physical journey unfolds, from the French Quarter in New Orleans to the Oregon shore of the Pacific. This trip is pleasant and quiet; the drama here is interior. The well-written result--two trips for the price of onet--is altogether thought-provoking.
Kirkus Review
A gay author tells the story of an unforgettable cross-country road trip with his conservative Christian mother. As he neared 40, Jenkins, the author of To Shake the Sleeping Self and Like Streams to the Ocean, came to a sobering realization: His devoutly Baptist mother, a "timeless force of nature," would one day die. Wanting to spend as much time as possible with her, he overrode the "claustrophobia" of her narrow-mindedness by bringing a friend along on a trip to Europe. Later, his mother proposed a Glenn Beck cruise which Jenkins accepted only because the trip would allow him to become "a voyeur [and] social anthropologist" among the conservatives he imagined would be his fellow travelers. When the pandemic cancelled the cruise, the pair decided on a road trip that would retrace his mother and father's "walk across America" during the late 1970s. "From 1976 to 1979," writes Jenkins, "my mom and dad walked 2,600 miles from Louisiana to the Oregon Coast." Navigating roads that would take them through the South, the Rockies and on to the West Coast, mother and son also navigated the complexities of a deeply affectionate relationship fractured by their respective belief systems. The author had left Nashville for Los Angeles to explore the sexuality that his conservative Christian mother--a woman who also believed colloidal silver, rather than medical science, cured all ills, including Covid-19--could not accept. In 20 years away from her, his fondest wish to be married had not manifested because of "decades of unpacking," and his mother's prayers for sexual "healing" had intervened. Though the author and his mother never managed to reconcile their differences, what makes this heartfelt, often funny book so rewarding is the portrait Jenkins offers of two people still willing to accept the challenge of loving each other despite clashing beliefs. Engaging reading for divided times. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Summary
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * From the author of To Shake the Sleeping Self . . .

"Exquisitely written and completely compelling . . . As Jedidiah Jenkins traces a 5,000-mile route with his wildly entertaining mother, Barb, he begins to untangle the live wires of a parent-child bond and to wrestle with a love that hurts."--Suleika Jaouad, author of Between Two Kingdoms

LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST

When his mother, Barbara, turns seventy, Jedidiah Jenkins is reminded of a sobering truth: Our parents won't live forever. For years, he and Barbara have talked about taking a trip together, just the two of them. They disagree about politics, about God, about the project of society--disagreements that hurt. But they love thrift stores, they love eating at diners, they love true crime, and they love each other. Jedidiah wants to step into Barbara's world and get to know her in a way that occasional visits haven't allowed.

They land on an idea: to retrace the thousands of miles Barbara trekked with Jedidiah's father, travel writer Peter Jenkins, as part of the Walk Across America book trilogy that became a sensation in the 1970s. Beginning in New Orleans, they set off for the Oregon coast, listening to podcasts about outlaws and cult leaders--the only media they can agree on--while reliving the journey that changed Barbara's life. Jedidiah discovers who Barbara was as a thirty-year-old writer walking across America and who she is now, as a parent who loves her son yet holds on to a version of faith that sees his sexuality as a sin.

Along the way, he peels back the layers of questions millions are asking today: How do we stay in relationship when it hurts? When do boundaries turn into separation? When do we stand up for ourselves, and when do we let it go?

Tender, smart, and profound, Mother, Nature is a story of a remarkable mother-son bond and a moving meditation on the complexities of love.
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