Topographies by Stephen Benz: book review

Note: I received a free advanced copy of this book to independently review.

The title of Stephen Benz’s 2019 book, Topographies, comes from the American Corps of Topographical Engineers and Howard Stansbury’s 1849 exploratory journey of the American West, in which he transforms the ‘most magnificent and awesome terrains into precise and exacting prose.’

Written in two parts, the first is predominantly tied to the America West and the second is about Eastern Europe, Cuba, and Central America.

Benz begins his travelogue by recalling words from Jack Kerouac’s ‘On The Road’ – an American land journey. It’s fitting that he begins on the land, on the open road, in his home country. Not quite – he is actually in a canoe, down south, in the Everglades, and writing about pollution, environmental damage, species extinction, and exotic fauna-trimmed fashion. It’s a depressing start to jolt readers into recognizing their part in nature’s destruction.

But now he is in Ash Hollow State Park on the Oregon Trail in Nebraska – ‘the quintessential Western landscape’ two thousand miles from the west coast – looking at the irrigated land that has replaced the desert, re-imagining the sights of its pioneers. It’s June in the year of who knows when. From his modern car, Benz goes back to the 1800s, to the time of the wagon and teams of oxen, when ten percent of emigrants died in search of the promised land. Their elation at reaching the west coast is described in terms of water, plants, animals, and birds – before Benz crushes the idyll with a reminder that migration exploited the land and its indigenous peoples, and changed the landscape forever, while Hollywood glamorized and fancified Western history. He takes readers further back; back to the Pliocene days, which is as far back as he can get in history, to the formation of the blue limestone cliffs. 

Benz continues across his homeland and stops to read road signs, historical markers, and the headstones of long-forgotten graves. He contemplates whether anyone interrupts their high-speed journey in this current high-speed life to learn about obscure episodes in history. But, some are not so obscure, such as the lost Donner Party that resort to cannibalism to survive. Benz, bedazzled too by the 1846 story, retraces their fateful westward journey from Springfield, Illinois. Their mistake was in taking the short cut, and so this is a cautionary tale, and one of the most interesting in this book. Benz doesn’t quite take the shortcut; he takes an ‘approximated’ car journey of the Donner Party’s perilous ‘serpentine’ wagon route.

Road weary readers are nearly at the end of Part One as Benz writes about the Trinity Site of the 1945 explosion in New Mexico, the first successful test of an atomic bomb. The site is open to the public twice a year and Benz is there. His account is another of my favourite chapters in this book, with, at least, some humour – a festive air amid the radioactive apocalyptic landscape and ‘the destroyer of worlds.’ 

The intense heaviness of Part One disappears as Part Two changes tone to sadness. Benz begins in 1999 with his visit, for several months, to the newly-independent country of Moldova, where the locals are ‘paragons of obdurate patience and Sisyphean stoicism.’ There was little hope, and much frustration, with the slow pace of progress. 

In Cuba, the author is researching the Spanish-American War and Colonel Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders – the U.S. volunteer cavalry. The sadness of this chapter makes way for the light-hearted (at last) unpredictable fluidity of Cuban hospitality. In Mexico, Benz discusses the ironies of Diego de Landa’s book of his journey to Yucatan from 1549. 

And now for something completely different – Benz writes of his two years in Guatemala, taking driving lessons and debating poetry. What two years? Apart from Moldova, readers don’t know when these travels, in Part One or Part Two, take place. 

The concluding chapter, Coda: The Longest Road, is the author’s fantastic finale as he returns to his childhood influences, the places and the people. 

After Part One, readers may feel burdened by the tragedies, carnage, and ravaged landscapes of previous travellers – which Benz indirectly labels ‘the eve of destruction’ of the American West. Fortunately for readers, Part Two will reinvigorate their cultural curiosity and feelings of wanderlust, without the guilt, largely due to the author’s humour, wit, and wisdom. 

Using evocative language and beautifully descriptive phrases, Benz combines a range of writing techniques, from personal essays to travelogue to researched reflections and storytelling. 

How would I describe Topographies? For me, it’s a retrospective historical highway journal of remote routes recounted in two parts: one dark and one light.  I’m taking the light road.

MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).